razib | January 1, 2008Richard Dawkins on his acceptance of The Handicap Principle:
Verbal arguments of this kind can take us only so far. Mathematical models are needed, and various people supplied them, notably John Maynard Smith who concluded that Zahavi's idea, though interesting, just wouldn't work. Or, to be more precise, Maynard Smith couldn't find a mathematical model that led to the conclusion that Zahavi's theory might work. He left open the possibility that somebody else might come along later with a better model. That is exactly what Alan Grafen did, and now we all have to change our minds.
I translated…
razib | January 1, 2008Heads up, Just Science 2008 is on. You can sign up to contribute now! Here are those who have signed on so far. The dates are February 4th-8th, 2008. More notifications soon!
razib | December 31, 2007So, I just found out that Sayyed Qaboos bin Sa'id Al 'Bu Sa'id, the Sultan and autocrat of Oman, is a homosexual. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But that got me thinking, are there any other homosexual heads of state* out there? Please post a reference if you submit a candidate.
* Prime Ministers count in a parliamentary democracy.
razib | December 31, 2007Rich Lawler has an insightful comment:
It's interesting to note that a few of the most insightful observations about the evolutionary process were first promulgated verbally, then later proven mathematically (unlike H-W equilibrium). These include runaway sexual selection (first adumbrated by Fisher, then shown mathematically possible by Lande and Kirkpatrick), the handicap principle (first adumbrated by Zahavi, then--finally--shown to be mathematically possible by Grafen), and, of course, natural selection (first adumbrated by what's-his-face, then formalized by Wright, Fisher, and later…
razib | December 31, 2007Looking for Nm* values for humans I stumbled across an interesting paper, Estimating sex-specific processes in human populations: Are XY-homologous markers an effective tool?:
...To test this idea, we analyzed XY-homologous microsatellite diversity in 33 human populations from Africa, Asia and Europe. Interpopulation comparisons suggest that the generally discordant pattern of genetic variation observed for X- and Y-linked markers could be an outcome of sex-specific migration processes (mfemales/mmales ~ 3) or sex-specific demographic processes (Nfemales/Nmales ~ 11) or a combination of both…
razib | December 30, 2007Evolgen and Popgen Ramblings have put up posts where they criticize a parameter of the acceleration paper. John Hawks responds in the comments. But I thought this line was priceless:
Nah, you're not a dirty anti-adaptationist! All these labels are nonsense; all that is important is understanding the math involved -- something Gould never really seemed very interested in. The problem with purely verbal arguments is that there is no scorekeeper.: it's like Olympic ice dancing, or something.
A lot of the formalism in population genetics isn't that mentally taxing (although the derivations may…
razib | December 30, 2007Laelaps has an excellent post up, Evolution's Arrow, which you should read. Set some time aside, it is long. I don't know enough about paleontology to comment with great insight on the many of the topics which Laelaps alludes to, and some of them get a bit philosophical for my own taste (that is, issues turn on the interpretation of words), but there is one point which I might assert is somewhat muddy:
...Looking at the hominid evolutionary bush pictured below [see here, it's clear that we are but a single surviving twig of a group that once had a much greater diversity, australopithecines (…
razib | December 27, 2007Genome Wide Association (GWA) Study for Early Onset Extreme Obesity Supports the Role of Fat Mass and Obesity Associated Gene (FTO) Variants. Even if this is true, these correlations between particular alleles and obesity hold for the modern German lifestyle. I guarantee you that population level diversity in weight correcting for height was sharply attenuated when all Germans were basically farmers and laborers. It seems possible to me that in pre-modern times "obesity alleles" might have been selected for something different in an environment where gaining a lot of weight and becoming…
razib | December 27, 2007Mark of Denialism left a comment below re: Vitamin D deficiency:
I wouldn't call that evidence thin biff. The role of vitamin D in tuberculosis was actually pretty well nailed by studies of immigrants in the UK which demonstrate that latent TB infections will reactivate in the sunless climate. The demonstration of the role of Vit D in making defensins seems the likely physiological explanation.
I am wary though of some of the more hyperbolic claims I've seen about vitamin D lately. It's fascinating stuff, sure. But until replicated in RCT rather than epidemiologically I think it's too early…
razib | December 26, 2007Ed and Mark are asking what's up with Ron Paul and the Neo-Nazis? I think...it's complicated. Colugo sketches out the general lay of the land pretty well, Ron Paul is a "paleo," specifically a paleolibertarian. He derives his ideology from the Old Right, and promotes a personal bourgeoise ethic. Three points:
* Ron Paul's intellectual mentor was a Jew, Murray Rothbard, and the greatest intellectual in his firmament was a Jew, Ludwig von Mises. If Ron Paul is a closet Neo-Nazi he is a strange sort indeed. I think we can dismiss the idea that Ron Paul is a closet white nationalist. In…
razib | December 25, 2007On this Sunday's Weekend Edition on NPR there was a piece titled Removing Religion from the Holidays a Tall Order. Much of the story focuses upon Greg Epstein, a Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, and his attempt to forge a new more humane secular cultural sensibility which does not reject all that that is religious because it is religious. On the other side there are others who say that the trends Epstein is promoting "sounds like religion and smells like religion." As I noted in earlier, these sorts of issues are not so cut & dried, and common sense is often a better guide to the "right…
razib | December 23, 2007Found out something interesting today. In the Russian republic of Mari El there exists an indigenous pagan tradition which is not a reconstruction. That is, the pagans of Mari El trace their practice in an unbroken line back to their ancestors, as the Christianization during the period of Ivan the Terrible (the 16th century) was only partial. Other European pagans are by necessity neo- and must reconstruct their system of beliefs and rituals from extant records and folk traditions. The Saami were pagan until the 18th century, and with that I had assumed that all pre-Christian traditions…
razib | December 23, 2007M. Yglesias seems to be dissing Rihanna's "Umbrella." Well, I'll raise him "Pon de Replay"....
razib | December 23, 2007Hometown Reacts: Residents Respond To Pregnancy News in relation to Jamie Lynn Spears & Casey Aldridge's impending parenthood:
But we did manage to talk to a few locals, who, quite honestly, weren't too shocked to learn that Britney's little sister was pregnant, either because teen pregnancies aren't all that uncommon in Kentwood, or because, after all, she is Britney's little sister.
"They tried to keep it secret, I don't know why. In Kentwood, everything gets out. You got kids who are 13 or 14 and pregnant in Kentwood, we're about used to it around here," Donald Church said. "But it…
razib | December 23, 2007From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China:
Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present in Uygur (42.6%) and Uzbek (41.4%) samples, followed by Kazak (30.2%), Mongolian (14.3%), and Hui (6.7%).
The paper supports the idea that Uyghurs are an admixed population from Western and Eastern sources. But is this just an ancient cline of allele frequencies? In other words, are Uyghur lineage…
razib | December 22, 2007Are you getting enough vitamin D?:
The research, which is awaiting publication in a medical journal, found that 100 per cent of those of African origin were short of vitamin D, as were 93 per cent of South Asians (those of Indian or Pakistani origin), and 85 per cent of East Asians (those of Chinese, Indochinese or Filipino origin, among other countries).
...
Insufficient vitamin D amounts were also found among those of European ancestry, but were less widespread, at 34 per cent of those surveyed.
This is in Canada, very far north. That being said, if 93 percent of South Asians in Canada have…
razib | December 22, 2007No, this should not be in the "Physical Science" category. By hypersphere I'm thinking of the model that R.A. Fisher popularized as opposed to Sewall Wright's conception of the adaptive landscape, a multidimensional sphere within which was located a position which was the adaptive optimum. While Wright's landscapes were rugged, and so opened up the possibility that gene-gene interactions and some level of stochasticity and meta-population dynamics were critical factors in evolution over the long term, Fisher's more symmetrical model focuses on the power of selection operating on loci of…
razib | December 21, 2007Specifically, as evolgen points out the acceleration paper was focused on adaptive evolution, the subset of allele frequency changes driven predominantly by the force of natural selection. What's the rest? Read the post.
Why does this matter? Evolution is a science, and in science this sort of pedantic precision in definition, terminology and meaning matters a great deal because it is embedded in a contingent system. One of the most frustrating things about the necessity of the rearguard action against Creationists is that the "controversy" swamps this reality, that evolution is a science…