razib | December 10, 2007This google news query should get you to popular press articles. I'll start putting links to blogs when more come in.
Blogs: One of the lead authors, John Hawks, promises lots of commentary this week. Greg Laden has some questions regarding the demographic assumptions. Steve Sailer with a round-up and Linda Seebach offers the bigger picture. p-ter offers some pointed criticisms. John Hawks does some rapid response. Eric Wang and Henry Harpending offer specific comments. John Hawks' summary for lay people (long). Shoshin goes over the theory too. Popgen Ramblings says simulation is…
razib | December 10, 2007Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate…
razib | December 9, 2007A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the distribution of the psychological trait) can map onto to enormous between society variation in macroeconomic indices which one might adduce derive from the minor individual differences. I was struck by this because it formally and clearly elucidated a major issue I've noted across many domains of the…
razib | December 7, 2007Thought I'd pass on two links. Greg Laden has posted a video of Robert Wright's interview with the late John Maynard Smith. I've watched it before, it's a great interview (or, at least Smith's responses are really interesting & meaty quite often). Also, this week's In Our Time covers Genetic Mutation. If names like Hugo de Vries are unfamiliar to you, probably worth listening to.
razib | December 7, 2007I noticed that Laelaps liked The Golden Compass movie, and is defending it from negative ratings over at Rotten Tomatoes. I went and saw it yesterday, and read the trilogy about seven years ago. Like most movies the plot and character development really pales in comparison to the more detailed exposition which text allows. But, I would have to say that in the case of this film the nature of characters actually were less distorted by translation to screenplay than the plot, which seemed a confused mishmash which stretched plausibility in several places. Of course I have the point of…
razib | December 7, 2007Check out Popgen Ramblings. There isn't really much up yet, but it looks like it's going to be good. Something new for the RSS!
razib | December 6, 2007Most ancient case of tuberculosis found in 500,000-year-old human; points to modern health issues:
Although most scientists believe tuberculosis emerged only several thousand years ago, new research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals the most ancient evidence of the disease has been found in a 500,000-year-old human fossil from Turkey.
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The research team identified two shared characteristics in the communities: a path of migration from low, tropical latitudes to northern temperate regions and darker skin color.
People with dark skin produce less vitamin D because the skin…
razib | December 6, 2007Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA:
Since variation in the length of a repetitive element in the vole AVPR1a promoter region is associated with differences in social behavior we examined the relationship between RS1 and RS3 repeat length (base pairs) and allocation sums. Participants with short versions...of the AVPR1a RS3 repeat allocated significantly...fewer shekels to the 'other' than participants with long versions....…
razib | December 5, 2007Watching Beyond Belief 2 I was interested in Jonathan Haidt's contention that liberals and conservatives exhibit alternative valences on five different "Moral Foundations." In short, liberals tend to emphasize "Harm" and "Fairness," and manifest little interest in the values of "Loyalty," "Authority" and "Purity." In contrast, conservatives tended to have a more balanced weighting of values across all five dimensions, as well as deemphasizing the first two components in relation to liberals. My own immediate thought was, "Where do I fit in?" I assumed I would be closer to liberals here…
razib | December 4, 2007Neanderthal Children Grew Up Fast:
Scientists found differences in the duration of tooth growth in the Neanderthal when compared to modern humans, with the former showing shorter times in most cases. This faster growth resulted in a more advanced pattern of dental development than in fossil and living members of our own species (Homo sapiens).
Tanya M. Smith, Michel Toussaint, Donald J. Reid, Anthony J. Olejniczak, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Rapid Dental Development in a Middle Paleolithic Belgian Neanderthal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA December 2007
razib | November 26, 2007Several years ago Oprah Winfrey asked Tiger Woods what he would say to people who say that when they look him they see a black man. The issue was that some African Americans objected to Woods' contention that he was multiracial, Cablinasian, which reflected the fact that he was ancestrally 1/2 Asian, 1/4 African, 1/8 European and 1/8 Native American. Woods is also a Therevada Buddhist by religion, taking after his Thai nationality (though mixed-race) mother, so one can argue he is quite Asian culturally. I know many people who frankly disagree with Winfrey's assessment, that is, that Woods…
razib | November 25, 2007Ali Eteraz has an article titled Mistaken identity in The Guardian which is a long rambling reflection on Islamic identity, and specifically his Islamic identity. He is somewhat confused by the conflation of Islam with a quasi-ethnic identity.
There are a few distinct issues here; though in the modern era we deemphasize terms such as "Christendom" or the "Dar-al-Islam," it would be disingenuous to deny that religious affinity is a powerful cross-cultural current. After all, one reason that American evangelicals are focused on the oppression of black Christians in Sudan and Chinese…
razib | November 25, 2007Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock:
. To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. "We don't subscribe to this idea of the 'God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. "Instead, we think: 'Here's what the Bible says. Now let's go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.' "
The whole story is a sad tale of a few credentialed geologists making their stand with their perception of a literal Bible against the consensus of their field. In Evolution…
razib | November 25, 2007Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters is an expansive new book authored by vertebrate paleontologist Donald Prothero and lushly illustrated by Carl Buell. The quality of the plates and illustrations, the binding as well as the texture of the pages, screams out "Coffee Table Book." That's not an insult, but it just reinforces that this isn't a monograph aimed at specialists, rather, it is in large part a manifesto aimed toward the general public. And its high production quality testifies to the fact that it wants to be taken seriously by marrying style with substance.
Though…
razib | November 23, 2007The Future of Reading:
All these ideas are anathema to traditionalists. In May 2006, novelist John Updike, appalled at reading Kelly's article ("a pretty grisly scenario"), decided to speak for them. Addressing a convention of booksellers, he cited "the printed, bound and paid-for book" as an ideal, and worried that book readers and writers were "approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electric sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." (Actually, studies show that heavy Internet users read many more books than do those not on the Net.) He…