razib | January 22, 2008In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted:
Blogs written by fat people -- and it's fine to use the word, they say -- have multiplied in recent months, filling a virtual soapbox known as the fatosphere, where bloggers calling for fat acceptance challenge just about everything conventional medical wisdom has to say about obesity.
...
Ultimately, these bloggers argue, being skinny may have far more to do with the luck of the genetic draw than with lifestyle choices.
When I was visiting Bangladesh in 2004 I noticed that peasants in the rural areas were shorter, wirier and "tighter" in…
razib | January 21, 2008Genes, Culture, and Human Evolution: A Synthesis, Linda Stone, Paul F. Lurquin and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza.
razib | January 21, 2008Why elephants are not so long in the tusk:
The average tusk size of African elephants has halved since the mid-19th century. A similar effect has been spotted in the Asian elephant population in India.
Researchers say it is an example of Darwinism in action, caused by the mass slaughter of dominant male elephants - but whereas evolution normally takes place over thousands of years, these changes have occurred within 150 years.
Zoologists at Oxford University fear that poaching and hunting of the largest male elephants, which also have the largest tusks, has changed the natural breeding…
razib | January 20, 2008Seriously, what's up with Robert Wright recruiting a terrorist-looking-dude to chat with the Elf? Is there any way this is good for the financial bottom line? Is this the face of D.C. punditry you want to present to a terrified country? Perhaps someone should look into Wright's bank transaction records and see if some Gulf money has started to flow in.... I mean, there's always a clean cut guy like Will Wllkinson, do we really have such a pundit shortage that we've got to yank a mullah off the bench? I mean, the split screen is a little too reminiscent of the partitions between men &…
razib | January 20, 2008Look who's perusing the men seeking men adverts on Craigslist. But you're not surprised, are you?
razib | January 20, 2008
I've placed the list of current sign ups for Just Science 2008 below the fold.
Just Science blogs
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Discovering Biology in a Digital World
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Memoirs of a Postgrad
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My Biotech Life
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Science Surf…
razib | January 20, 2008Yesterday I pointed out that in the South Carolina Republican primaries this year where Huckabee did well Romney did badly, and vice versa, on a county by county basis. The tendency also seemed in line with the proportion of evangelicals within a county. I did the same analysis with Michigan....
Correlation between candidate proportion and evangelical proportion by county
Huck
McCain
Romney
Evanglical proportion
0.12
-0.20
0.05
Correlation between candidate proportions by county
McCain
Huck
Romney
McCain
-
0.05
-0.58
Huck
-
-
-0.01
Romney
-
-
-
As you see the…
razib | January 19, 2008Not that interested in politics myself, but I was curious about the South Carolina primary. You can see the exit polls here; seems like Mike Huckabee won evangelicals while McCain won non-conservatives. Nothing too surprising. As someone who has generally been of the opinion that evangelical prejudice against Mormomism will prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination, I was curious how evangelicalism tracked the primary results by county. I took these data and ran some correlations with the primary results by candidate. What I did was simply calculate the proportion of evangelicals…
razib | January 17, 2008I've been blogging a fair bit on the relationship between history & genetics (see here, here and here), both as a parameter in shaping the course of events (e.g., immunological profiles, or through gene-culture coevolution), and as a tool in tracing out phylogenetic relationships between peoples and fleshing out demographic details. It so happens that an excellent paper which focuses upon the latter came out this week, The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders, in PLoS Genetics. It is so good and I'm so busy that I'll simply encourage you to read the paper in the original, and then read…
razib | January 16, 2008You probably know about B. Spears' new boy-toy, Adnan Ghalib. Judging from this photo published in The Daily Mail I am starting to wonder if he is a mole bent on corrupting Hollywood so that even the kuffar will become outraged and revolt against the haram that our entertainment industry produces....
On the other hand, one must wonder if Adnan Ghalib has become an irtidad, an apostate to Islam, judging from his ostentatious wearing of a cross in public places (wearing jewelry for a man is haram in any case). Since Ghalib and B. Spears have also engaged in extra-marital sexual relations in…
razib | January 16, 2008Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion:
Sun Microsystems, the large American seller of open-source software, said Wednesday that it would spend $1 billion to buy MySQL, a Swedish company that is the world leader in open-source database software used by Internet powers like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube.
I remember the sneering jibes about MySQL on /. back in 2000. Good for them. If you are doing mission critical work DBAs that recommend MySQL should get fired. Not ready for primetime. But in a world of blue-screens and Microsoft there's a lot of space out there for "good…
razib | January 16, 2008Why men and women find longer legs more attractive:
While all of the people were the same height, the length of their legs was altered to make them equal to the Polish average or longer by 5%, 10% or 15%.
The team found that regardless of the volunteers' own body shape and leg length, people whose legs were 5% longer than average were rated as the most attractive. The next most appealing was an average leg length, or those that were 10% longer than normal.
There's plenty of research on leg-length and its correlates to attractiveness. But the more important insight here is the rank order, and…
razib | January 16, 2008Kambiz has a post over at Anthropology.net, On Human Genetic Variation and Human Identity, where he riffs on the discussion that Martin & I just had about the intersection of genes and culture. More broadly it is a rumination upon the methods and paradigms which might be brought to bear on the study of humanity, broadly interpreted. In the comments I have also had some harsh things to say about cultural anthropology. In short: I think most cultural anthropology is crap. But I should put it in context and be clear about my sentiment: I prefer fiction to literary criticism. In other…
razib | January 16, 2008Some of you may know that Christina Aguilera and music industry executive Jordan Bratman are now the parents of a son. In contrast, Britney Spears has two children by her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. Years ago I used to prognosticate about the future of the young Ms. Aguilera and Spears; my own prediction was that Britney's career and life track would be rockier and less intelligently decided than Christina's. The main rationale I had at the time was that Christina has a greater quotient of native singing talent, while Britney relied on less durable strengths, so to speak.
I think my…
razib | January 15, 2008Just a question for readers. Let's exclude Cosmic Variance, what else out there is good? Any diamonds in the rough?
razib | January 15, 2008Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt:
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride's family, a kind of reverse dowry.
Bill Cosby may be right about African-Americans spending a lot on expensive sneakers--but he's wrong about why:
Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, "Conspicuous Consumption and Race." Using data from…
razib | January 14, 2008Over the past few weeks I've talked about the relationship of genes & biology to culture. First I noted the likely impact of the evolutionary arms race between our adaptive immune system and plagues & endemic infectious diseases upon the course of human history. Second, I pointed to the utility of phylogenetics in giving us another tool through which we have a window onto the past. But what about culture's affect upon our genes? The canonical example is probably lactose tolerance, or more precisely lactase persistence. In this case the adoption of dairy culture has resulted in…
razib | January 14, 2008Anyone who has worked in IT knows about some shady practices here and there...and when it comes to databases many companies don't engage in much oversight. I suspect part of the problem is that the higher managers are distanced from the technological day-to-day and just assume that the nerds on the ground are taking care of things. I bring this up because today I had to resolve a problem with my cell phone provider. Apparently all my online administrative information was deleted when Sprint merged its databases with Nextel. This is a rather large corporation; you can imagine the sort of…
razib | January 14, 2008Ron Bailey at Reason has a long piece where he surveys what the various presidential candidates in regards to their attitudes and beliefs about evolution. He also makes a case for why their beliefs on this topic are important.