razib | February 17, 2008'I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam,' says Holland's rising political star:
A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an ideology,' says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, 'the ideology of a retarded culture.
...
He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hiding, or the…
razib | February 16, 2008When the adaptive acceleration story hit the wires I started wondering if population size wasn't the only parameter that might have changed in the past 10,000 years. To make it short, perhaps a small-world network model is more much accurate now with the rise of complex societies (the complexity being contingent upon the parasitism of elites upon the marginal surplus productivity of the larger population sizes due to agriculture). I assume that in the hunter-gatherer world occurrences such as the burial of a Swiss man at Stonehenge in the British Isles 4,300 years ago were not unheard of;…
razib | February 16, 2008If you enjoyed William D. Hamilton week, I highly recommend Lee Alan Dugtakin's books. The Imitation Factor is a book length exposition on research which shows how many organisms use socially embedded information in making their decisions; if you want to understand the utility of conformity it's enlightening. The Altruism Equation consists of seven biographical sketches of prominent thinkers in social biology; worth checking out just for the chapter on J. B. S. Haldane. That being said, the prose is definitely workmanlike as opposed to masterful, A Reason for Everything and The Darwin Wars…
razib | February 15, 2008Very cool paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders (Open Access):
The human species inhabits a wide geographical range encompassing a diversity of climates, and adaptation to these climates likely played an important role in shaping genetic and phenotypic variation among populations. We hypothesized that spatially varying selective pressures related to climate shaped the frequencies of genetic variants in the energy metabolic pathway. To test this hypothesis, we examined patterns of genetic variation in 82 candidate genes for common metabolic disorders…
razib | February 14, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And so with the completion of the 7th chapter the first half, book I of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, ends. From this point on we shift from history of science to science proper. At over 1,300 pages of narrative prose (add index, bibliography, etc., and it weighs in at nearly 1,450 pages) this is a multi-course meal. But judging from the initial comments when I began my trek through this undiscovered Gouldian land the author started with some rather unappetizing starters which suppressed rather than whetted the eagerness of many for future…
razib | February 14, 2008I did the Project Implicit Presidential Candidate IAT. Results below the fold....
razib | February 13, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Chapter 6 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was short. Yes, you read that right, this was a short chapter! It was only 38 pages, but it was also one of the most readable and fast paced. Additionally, Stephen Jay Gould told me things I didn't know beforehand. Partly this has to be a function of the fact that because he focused on geology I was just ignorant, though his revisionism of 19th century Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism seemed well done to me. But, as I said, this is the chapter where my own knowledge has been the thinnest so far,…
razib | February 13, 2008I stumbled upon Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity at the bookstore. I don't have time to read it right now, but I thought I'd point to it since I'm sure some readers would be interested. Accuse me of being excessively Whiggish if you must, but it just reiterates that Creationism doesn't belong in a science class; the basic disputes are a rehash of philosophical & religious clashes which are timeless, or at least date from the rise of philosophy in the ancient world. Creationism is ahistorical; I believe it is rooted in psychological intuitions about ontology which rebel against…
razib | February 12, 2008Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My review of the papers I selected from Narrow Roads of Gene Land I allowed me to reacquaint myself with his prose style after a few years away, and as it came on the heals of my reviews of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory I could not help but note contrasts.
On occasion Hamilton veers into such…
razib | February 11, 2008Dienekes points me to a provisional open access paper, Analysis of genetic variation in Ashkenazi Jews by high density SNP genotyping. Here's the conclusion:
There were small but significant differences in measures of genetic diversity between
AJ [Ashkenazi Jewish] and CEU [Utah whites from the HapMap sample]. Analysis of genome-wide LD structure revealed a greater number of haplotype blocks which tended to be smaller in AJ. There was essentially no difference in global LD decay between AJ and CEU, although there was a tendency for faster decay of nearby SNPs and slower decay of intermediate…
razib | February 11, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And now there have been 5. Through 5 chapters of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Stupidly I only realized that Stephen Jay Gould wrote two books which he had insisted be bound together. The table of contents which I was familiar with turned out to be the "Expanded Contents." The Contents proper give a better lay of the land:
Chapter 1:
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 1
Part I, Chapters 2-7
The history of Darwinian Logic and Debate 91
Segue to Part II 585
Part II, Chapters 8-12
Towards a Revised and…
razib | February 11, 2008Got an email from Sheril today:
Well it's finally happened! It's official. Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama have been invited to ScienceDebate2008.
The location? Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, named after one of our nation's greatest scientists (and greatest patriots). The date? April 18, days before the Pennsylvania Primary.
We're so close to seeing this through and now more than ever, we need you're help! This is our biggest news yet and the first tangible Call to Action for the blogger coalition beyond the announcement. The time has come to mobilize…
razib | February 10, 2008I've finished the 5th chapter of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, but I don't have time to put up a review right now. But I do want to comment on a funny passage:
I ran into Ernst Mayr as I was completing this chapter and asked if he had ever met de Vries. "No," he said, "botanists and zoologists didn't talk to each other very much in those days, and anyway, I was a Lamarckian then."
Ernst Mayr lived from 1904 to 2005. Hugo de Vries didn't die until 1935. So a meeting is certainly plausible; and it reiterates just how long Mayr lived that it is plausible he knew one of the founders…
razib | February 10, 2008An Association Between the Kinship and Fertility of Human Couples:
Previous studies have reported that related human couples tend to produce more children than unrelated couples but have been unable to determine whether this difference is biological or stems from socioeconomic variables. Our results, drawn from all known couples of the Icelandic population born between 1800 and 1965, show a significant positive association between kinship and fertility, with the greatest reproductive success observed for couples related at the level of third and fourth cousins. Owing to the relative…
razib | February 8, 2008Thanks to everyone who participated in Just Science 2008! And thanks to everyone who subscribed to the feed! Speaking of which, if you are reading this you should unsubscribe now since I'm pulling the plug on all the feeds for this year.
razib | February 7, 2008Innate social aptitudes of man is a controversial paper. As noted in the biographical introduction to it William D. Hamilton states that his friend Robert Trivers referred to it as the "fascist paper" (see Natural Selection and Social Theory for Trivers' perspective on his relationship with Hamilton). Not because Trivers himself thought it was fascist, rather, that was simply the perception of most who read and criticized the paper. The most vociferous critic was the biological anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn (see Defenders of the Truth for a detailed exposition of Washburn's many…