razib | January 9, 2008In my previous post I contended that biology is an important causal factor to keep in mind when we model the behavioral ecology (a.k.a., history) of H. sapiens. A separate, but complementary, tack is to use genetic data to supplement what we know from other historical sciences (history, archeology, economic history, etc.) to obtain a better picture of the dynamics which were operative in the past and the sequence of events which result in the shape of the present. The Etruscan genetics story is a perfect case study; genetic data pretty much sealed the deal in allowing us to distinguish…
razib | January 8, 2008When I was a teenager I read William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, an attempt to sketch out a brief history of the world shaped by the parameter of disease (I also recommend The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History, where the same author takes a broader view of events). Though I enjoyed it, I was a different person then, and since I know quite a bit more evolution, history and basic biology now, I thought I'd check it out again. And I am glad for it, Plagues and Peoples was published in the 1970s, but it prefigures many of the points brought up in recent works such as 1491 and…
razib | January 8, 2008Can I get a "What, what?!?!" You can check out the results real time. Here are the exit polls. I'm not going to do the final tally yet since it won't come in at 100% for a few hours, but it looks like I really messed up with Obama vs. Clinton. But I'm in plenty of company. I doubt Paul is going to catch Giuliani either, though I wanted to pick a surprise there instead of just going with the safe bet (it isn't like there was as much uncertainty in New Hampshire as there was in Iowa where we had months of talking and a few straw polls and national surveys to go on). No more predictions…
razib | January 7, 2008It's been confirmed, Nicole Kidman is no longer innocent! How the mighty have fallen. Chastity is a value which we no longer aspire to in this age of license & worldly delights....
razib | January 7, 2008Ross Douthat has a quick comment on a Noah Feldman piece on Mormonism. Feldman is really, really smart; but his argument is a bit more extended than it needs to be. This interest in the religion is basically sparked by the Romney candidacy. A few quick points:
First, the evangelical Protestant (and to a lesser extent other Christians) hostility toward Mormonism is I think pretty comprehensible and requires little analytic decomposition: they think Mormons are liars. Specifically, Mormon theology is so different from the range of ideas in circulation among "orthodox" Christians that most…
razib | January 7, 2008The primary happens tomorrow, and I'm ready with my predictions (see my Iowa outcome).
Republicans:
McCain - 33%
Romney - 30%
Huckabee - 14%
Paul - 12%
Giuliani - 7%
Thompson - 3%
Hunter - 1%
Keyes - 0%
Democrats:
Obama - 45%
Clinton - 30%
Edwards - 19%
Richardson - 4%
Kucinich - 2%
Gravel - 0%
Pretty obvious, the main thing is that I think that we haven't seen the Obama crest in the polls, and I suspect that Paul will do better than Giuliani because of the dynamics of the New Hampshire electorate.
razib | January 6, 2008p-ter has the details. For me one of the most confusing aspects of the Hobbits were the concomitant phenomena of extremely small cranial capacities (inference: low intelligence) with relatively advanced toolkits. If it the Hobbits exhibited the pathology reported in the paper which p-ter discusses that might be the solution.
razib | January 6, 2008K-Fed's call to cops: 'Britney's got a gun':
Our source said: "Jamie's new-found publicity enraged jealous Britney. And after calling Kevin that night she rang Jamie and told her, 'You're not going to be the only f***ing Spears on the front cover of a magazine next week!' and then hung up." Meanwhile Britney lost it when Kevin's lawyer Mark Kaplan showed up at the house and tried to talk her round.
razib | January 6, 2008Sign Up, Subscribe to the Feed and Learn More!
We've got 20 people signed up so far. I know more will come on board, so I'm looking forward to getting drowned in pure science in 4 weeks.
razib | January 6, 2008
A few days ago I posted about selection and population structure. The basic idea is to imagine demes, breeding populations, and consider how variation in the standard parameters such as selection coefficient and migration might affect the overall frequencies of the alleles. The paper, Fixation Probability and Time in Subdivided Populations, was rather "old school" despite the recourse to simulation. It emerged out of the theoretical population genetic tradition of R.A. Fisher & Haldane, and their successors starting with Kimura. It utilized diffusion equations and rested upon standard…
razib | January 5, 2008The Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece highlighting the role of forensic anthropologists in exploring the question of the fate of the Norse of Greenland:
"You don't find bodies in and around the ruins," says William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "People are being properly buried in church graveyards right up into the 15th century, so it doesn't look like they were wiped out by marauding Inuit or other big disruptions."
Another indication of an orderly reÂtreat: no valuables such as crucifixes, chalices, or chandeliers at…
razib | January 4, 2008I note that Slate is congratulating a reader who guessed the top 3 finishers for both Repubs and Dems. Well, I got everything right except flipping Biden and Richardson (heard some guy on the radio say he was going for Biden, so I did it for the hell of it!). OK, this is a bit easier I think...but here I go....
Republicans:
McCain
Romney
Huckabee
Paul
Giuliani
Thompson
Hunter
Keyes
Democrats:
Obama
Clinton
Edwards
Richardson
Kucinich
Gravell
Most of these are "gimmes" now and I've followed "conventional wisdom" (e.g., Obama up, Clinton down), with the main exception being that I think Paul…
razib | January 3, 2008How did I do? First, I got the rank order pretty much down! The only mistake was swapping Richardson and Biden. Second, I didn't know how the Iowa Democratic Caucus was set up...otherwise, I would have been retarded to not assume it would have taken a "Winner Take All" outcome due to the 15% threshold. Below the fold, with 100% and 96% of precincts for Dems and Repubs respectively. New Hampshire predictions forthcoming!
Candidate
Real Results
My Prediction
Difference
Barack Obama
37.6
30
7.6
John Edwards
29.7
28
1.7
Hillary Clinton
29.5
27
2.5
Bill Richardson
2.1
4
-1.9…
razib | January 3, 2008Evolutionary genetics is subject to parameters; forces which pull and push and shape the nature of dynamic processes over time and space. Population size, mtuation rate, migration, selection. etc., these are all parameters we have to keep in mind when attempting to analyze the nature of evolutionary dynamics. The acceleration paper was predicated on consequences of changing on parameter, population size, upon other parameters such as selection, drift and the number of mutations. Of course I have wondered about the nature of population substructure and what it means for our species. My…
razib | January 2, 2008Again, based on knowing almost jack-shit about politics compared to the pundits, here are the percentages I'm predicting after reading websites for a few hours....
Republican:
Huckabee - 29%
Romney - 27%
Thompson - 15%
McCain - 13%
Paul - 10%
Giuliani - 5%
Hunter - 2%
Keyes - 1%
Democrat:
Obama- 30%
Edwards - 28%
Clinton - 27%
Biden - 5%
Richardson - 4%
Dodd - 3%
Kucinich - 2%
Gravell - 1%
Update: Everyone seems to think that Romney will pull it off. If I'm wrong, then I know jack shit (which I admit). If I'm right...well, I'm prescient, and I know something that others don't (nothing can…
razib | January 2, 2008I don't really know much about politics...but that never stops people from blogging about politics, so here are my Iowa predictions ranked ordered from first to last.
Republican:
Huckabee
Romney
Thompson
Mccain
Paul
Giuliani
Hunter
Keyes
Democrat:
Obama
Edwards
Clinton
Biden
Richardson
Dodd
Kucinich
Gravell
razib | January 2, 2008My views apparently match Dennis Kucinich & Ron Paul:
# 1 Dennis Kucinich 75% similarity
# 2 Ron Paul 75% similarity
# 3 Christopher Dodd 73% similarity
# 4 Bill Richardson 73% similarity
# 5 Mike Gravell 71% similarity
# 6 John Edwards 69% similarity
# 7 Barack Obama 68% similarity
# 8 Hillary Clinton 67% similarity
# 9 Joe Biden 63% similarity
# 10 Mitt Romney 53% similarity
# 11 Fred Thompson 51% similarity
# 12 Mike Huckabee 49% similarity
# 13 Duncan Hunter 49% similarity
# 14 John Mccain 48% similarity
# 15 Rudy Guliani 43% similarity
Via Omnibrain.