razib | January 14, 2008A nice post over at evolgen about the evolution of pathogens in response to antiobiotics.
razib | January 14, 2008Martin has responded at length to my posts where I argue for an inclusion of genetic data in a synthetic model of human history and development. There are multiple issues here where we disagree, or differ in our interpretations. First, as Martin admits at one point, "Those are all my words put into Razib's mouth." Much of the post is a misunderstanding. Because I would rather devote my time to discussing positively my ideas, as opposed to misunderstandings or misconceptions of what I believe, I'm not going to deconstruct every single point which Martin attributes to my own sense of the…
razib | January 14, 2008A few weeks ago I watched a Bloggingheads diavlog between Carl Zimmer and Peter Ward, the latter a paleontologist at the University of Washington. I had been developing a deeper interest in the broader patterns of evolution across Deep Time, so I really enjoyed the discussion and learned quite a bit. When I saw Ward's book Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere at the library, I had to pick it up! Overall it's a quick and breezy read; but nevertheless he manages to pack a pretty big scientific punch from what I can tell, the occasional interruptions of the…
razib | January 13, 2008The internet is a great thing. I've posted this link before, but if you haven't checked it out you really should poke through The Collected Papers of R.A. Fisher. There is so much archived genius on the internet; sometimes I wonder what a Ramanujan would have done with all the access to great thought.... (let's hope he wouldn't have spent his time on YouTube!). The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance is probably one of the most important little known papers in the scientific firmament; it definitively fused Mendelianism with a Darwinian view of…
razib | January 13, 2008I really love shrimp & hot sauce. A lot. Over Christmas I purchased some Mezzeta California Habañero Hot Sauce. I checked out the label, no carrot juice to ruin the flavor of the pepper, but likely no pure capsaicin to render the aftertaste chemical. I finished it up pretty quickly, definitely a keeper, I give it a 7 out of 10. The non-hot flavors are closer to 8 or 9, but it could have been somewhat spicier....
Related: 7 days of hot sauce.
razib | January 13, 2008Nature on PBS has a two-part special about dogs. Part I is on tonight, and Part II is next week. I'm sure both will be showing as reruns.....
razib | January 13, 2008Sign Up, Subscribe to the Feed and Learn More!
We've got 30 people signed up so far. I know more will come on board, so I'm looking forward to getting drowned in pure science in ~3 weeks.
Also, if you have a science themed blog post the link in the comments. Thinking about refurbishing the blogroll....
razib | January 12, 2008I purchased a new computer because I had to send my old laptop to a repair center and I didn't want to wait for it to get back. It's a Toshiba Satellite A215 7422 with Windows Vista Home Premier Edition installed. My immediate question is this: every now and then the screen goes blank and I'm faced with a blue-black nothing. No error or blue-screen-of-death, nothing. I reboot and everything is fine. I haven't had to deal with these problems in XP for a long time (don't remember which service pack fixed any issues), so I'm not really happy about this. Anyone know what's wrong?
Second, more…
razib | January 12, 2008Just noticed that Nature's Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton is finally out. I haven't read it yet, but will have soon once my copy arrives. If you don't know who W. D. Hamilton is, you know his work. Hamilton's early theoretical papers on the evolution of sociality (e.g., kin selection) were the root of many of the ideas presented by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, while his later ideas about the origins of sex figured in the background of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen. If you wish to familiarize yourself more directly with Hamilton's science and life, I highly recommend his collections…
razib | January 12, 2008Several other ScienceBloggers have posted their Electoral Compass results. Jake, Josh, Bora and Greg (sort of) have posted there results. Here are mine....
razib | January 11, 2008Over the past two days I've been arguing that multiple avenues of insight are critical in historical scholarship. That's a general assertion; check out this bloggingheads.tv exchange between Carl Zimmer and paleontologist Niel Shubin. Carl points out that though Neil is a paleontologist focused on Deep Time, his laboratory is a conventional wet environment where a fair amount of developmental genetic research occurs. Uniformitarianism strikes again! The present is a window onto the past....
razib | January 11, 2008Steven Pinker has a new essay in The New York Times Magazine, The Moral Instinct. Chris of Mixing Memory is critical of Pinker when he goes outside of his specialization in the psychology of language...but I did enjoy the ending:
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like."
Knowledge is power.
razib | January 11, 2008Martin had a comment below:
You equate language groups with ethnic, even political, groups. That's quite a stretch. Western archaeologists abandoned that idea in the 1970s.
I think I should expand a bit on my comment where I address Martin's assertion. I think I made it pretty clear that when it comes to burial styles or pottery motifs I render unto archaeologists their expertise, on the other hand, there's the old joke that archaeologists reduce the entirety of the past to material artifacts. Obviously such remains loom large because we unfortunately have no access to time travel machines…
razib | January 11, 2008My post which sketched out the model of Slavic expansion northeast into the lands of the Finnic peoples generated a fair number of comments. I tend to agree with those who suggest that Slavic access to more efficient or superior agricultural traditions is probably the explanation for why they absorbed the Finns, and not the reverse. But while thinking about these topics, I thought it might be useful to make explicit an idea which I think we're all using implicitly as a background assumption: location matters. The Slavs were more likely to have access to innovations because they were…
razib | January 11, 2008There have been a spate of articles about E. O. Wilson'sdrive to put group selection back into mainstream conversation among evolutionary biologists over the past year. Wilson has kept the torch alive for this particular paradigm since the 1970s, when it was prominently featured in his famous book Sociobiology. At the same time as Wilson was making waves in the United States Richard Dawkins debuted with The Selfish Gene, a book where he explored the new ideas of theoretical biologists W. D. Hamilton and J. M. Smith. Hamilton's model of kin selection, which he debuted in the mid-1960s,…
razib | January 10, 2008Science Friday will have a show about ScienceDebate2008 this week. It will likely be on the NPR website tomorrow afternoon....
razib | January 10, 2008Turns out that Jamie Lynn Spears' baby daddy is expressing paternity skepticism. He might check out the paper How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity? Evidence from Worldwide Nonpaternity Rates:
This survey of published estimates of nonpaternity suggests that for men with high paternity confidence, nonpaternity rates are typically 1.7% (if we exclude studies of unknown methodology) to 3.3% (if we include such studies). These figures are substantially lower than the "typical" nonpaternity rate of 10% or higher cited by many researchers, often without substantiation...or the…
razib | January 9, 2008Apropos of Mike Huckabee & Ron Paul's evolution skepticism and its relevance to their political runs Andrew Sullivan has been posting a series of comments from readers about whether evolution and gravity are laws or theories. I am generally somewhat averse to these semantical debates, and more interested in the fundamental question as to whether one can be rational & informed and reject evolutionary theory. But what do readers and others ScienceBloggers think? I was taught that laws are empirically validated truths and rest upon induction. Theories are basically systems of highly…