razib | October 12, 2008Image credit
A clarification (always needed!) of some issues in regards to Sewall Wright's conception of an adaptive landscape....
razib | October 11, 2008John Hawks succinctly responds to Steve Jones' argument that evolution is ending. Nothing surprising, but a very tight and accessible exposition.
Related: Evolution, why it still happens (in pictures) and No Virginia, evolution isn't ending.
razib | October 11, 2008Follow up to The executive class supports John McCain, see What your work is and how you vote:
Professionals (doctors, lawyers, and so forth) and routine white collar workers (clerks, etc.) used to support the Republicans more than the national average, but over the past half-century they have gradually moved through the center and now strongly support the Democrats. Business owners have moved in the opposite direction, from close to the national average to being staunch Republicans; and skilled and unskilled workers have moved from strong Democratic support to near the middle.
Please see the…
razib | October 11, 2008A survey of 751 CEOs shows that 80% support John McCain while 20% support Barack Obama. Remember, wealthier white people still tilt Republican. That being said, I think there is something to the dichotomy between professional class vs. business class. The former are affluent and educated, but may be on career tracks where regulatory constraints on labor mitigate capitalist competition (e.g., lawyers, doctors and other licensed and certified professionals). In other words, their affluence is not tied to market conditions in a 1:1 manner, and a non-trivial proportion of their income might be…
razib | October 10, 2008Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I rarely post anything on space because I really don't know much more than the average reader of this weblog; no value-add from me. But yesterday I ran across an article which reported the financial overruns in the Mars Science Laboratory project. Today NASA said that the project will launch on schedule. It seems that to make this work they'll have to ax some other missions, though they're putting a happy-face on their claims today (as if the money will magically appear in these strained financial times!).
I'm very happy that the is all-go. Space exploration…
razib | October 9, 2008How Fatty Foods Curb Hunger:
Fatty foods may not be the healthiest diet choice, but those rich in unsaturated fats - such as avocados, nuts and olive oil - have been found to play a pivotal role in sending this important message to your brain: stop eating, you're full.
The broad point is probably known to you, but read the whole press release, as there's more biochemical detail....
razib | October 9, 2008There's a new paper out which models human behavioral ecology, Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. Anthropology.net has a good review, so I'll just point you there. I was going to read this paper, and a few others on models of human group dynamics...but lately, I've been wondering, aren't there enough models now??? It seems like there is a large sample space of models which can generate a set of testable predictions. Perhaps it is time to catch up on data and experiment and hold off on more model generation? I'll probably keep reading these papers...but of late I…
razib | October 8, 2008The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality:
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers.…
razib | October 7, 2008Yesterday I attempted to rebut Steve Jones' ridiculous contention that evolution is going to stop in the modern West. Sometimes it is difficult to really know when to start, especially when your interlocutor seems to be in "incoherent spray arguments mode." Some of the commenters also noticed the internal lack of consistency in the model which Jones was putting forward. But saying it is a model is being overly generous. In short, Jones' most solid (that is, least vague) claim is that reduction in the number new mutations being added to the population every generation is decreasing because…
razib | October 6, 2008Updated: Follow up post End Update
I've already the covered Steven-Jones-evolution-is-ending story at my other weblog. I notice that John Wilkins has also objected to Jones' exaggerations. When I initially read the quotes from Jones in The Times I was alarmed, but wondered if his position was being taken out of context or misinterpreted. I emailed a prominent evolutionary biologist who I suspected would know Jones well enough to clarify this issue. My correspondent responded that Jones really does believe this, and he finds Jones' ideas as ludicrous as I do (adding for good measure he doesn'…
razib | October 6, 2008Dawn of Low-Price Mapping Could Broaden DNA Uses in The New York Times. So of course I checked in on Genetic Future:
There's an important message here between the lines: as technology drives the price of sequencing down, massive competition between platforms and service providers will almost certainly drive down the profit margins of sequencing providers. The real money will then be in providing sophisticated, up-to-date and easily understandable genome interpretation services. The best interpretations will come from the companies with the largest databases of genetic information, and with…
razib | October 6, 2008Yann commented on a new paper, Association of the SLC45A2 gene with physiological human hair colour variation:
Pigmentation is a complex physical trait with multiple genes involved. Several genes have already been associated with natural differences in human pigmentation. The SLC45A2 gene encoding a transporter protein involved in melanin synthesis is considered to be one of the most important genes affecting human pigmentation. Here we present results of an association study conducted on a population of European origin, where the relationship between two non-synonymous polymorphisms in the…
razib | October 6, 2008In response to my post below, Are the elites more polarized? Yes!, a comment:
The high "moderation" of low-income voters tends to make me think that what's measured is low-information voters instead, people don't take an active interest and who answer in harmless generalities. And maybe people who feel totally helpless, as though their input cannot make any difference.
This seems plausible. How to figure this out? First, one thing to remember is that there is a correlation between measures of intelligence/knowledge and socioeconomic status. Here is number correct on the vocab test out of…
razib | October 5, 2008Since I flog the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do incessantly, I thought I should point to the companion weblog. Why do I bring this book up so much? Well, I think the posts will tell you why. For example, look at this map which shows where the rich voted more than 50% Kerry. Or this post which illustrates the fact that religion polarizes the elite much more than the lower classes. Of course, Andrew Gelman is not a god, but the quantitative and relatively explicit methods he uses means that critiques, extensions or refutations are much…
razib | October 5, 2008I was checking out videos on NBC's Saturday Night Live website, and I got this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Db_Adapter_Exception' with message 'SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections' in /var/www/common/classes/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Abstract.php:131 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/common/classes/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(271): Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Abstract->_connect() #1 /var/www/common/classes/Nbcu/Asset.php(15): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->getConnection() #2 /var/www/common/classes/Nbcu/Controller/Scet/Video.php(11): Nbcu_Asset->__construct() #3 /var/www/www.nbc.com/…
razib | October 5, 2008Think Gene has a new digg-like site up, news.thinkgene.com. Worth checking out.
razib | October 4, 2008Read all about it, When Open Access Fails. Reminds me of what happened to Hotmail.
razib | October 4, 2008One of the argument from Andrew Gelman's Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State which has percolated into the punditocracy is that the Culture Wars are to a large extent a feature of the upper socioeconomic brackets. Gelman presents data which strongly contradicts Thomas Frank's argument that the less wealthy are voting based on cultural issues as opposed to their economic self-interest. Rather, it seems that the wealthier are voting on social issues because at a particular level of affluence economic concerns have less salience. Mainstream pundits such as Matt Yglesias and Matt…
razib | October 3, 2008Photo credit: AP
I listened to the VP debate on the radio last night. Then afterwards I saw my RSS getting saturated with assessments. The Corner reverberated with agreement that Sarah Palin wiped the floor with Joe Biden. Over at Daily Kos the assessment was curiously inverted. No surprise. But then listening to the NPR and seeing Howard Fineman's column show up my RSS I had to wonder: who cares what these people think? I mean, this is kind of like watching a basketball match, and then getting the sports reporters together 5 minutes after the game ends and having them decide who won!…
razib | October 3, 2008Photo credit: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
It is the norm today to discuss race as a social construct. Less fashionable is it to explore race as a biological concept. When there's no up or downside and the discussion is abstract I think most people can get away with benign neglect in regards to the second; but when your health is at issue people's ears perk up. The HapMap. Here's the first paragraph in Wikipedia on the HapMap:
The International HapMap Project is an organization whose goal is to develop a haplotype map of the human genome (the HapMap), which will describe the common…