razib | November 10, 2007Just a note, as I've read most of it now I'm starting to think that Alan Templeton's Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory is an excellent complement to R.A. Fisher's classic The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Fisher's prose is dense, and sometimes it is a bit much to extract clarity from his somewhat turgid early 20th century style. The wordiness which I complained about earlier serves Templeton well in clarifying concepts Fisher introduced such as average excess, a, and average effect, α, but did not elaborate upon in great detail.1 Where Fisher might define a concept…
razib | November 10, 2007I'm curious about the readers of this weblog as we've been queried by the higher ups, but I don't know much aside from readers whose handles I am familiar with. I've set up a small survey with two questions, the first which asks which other science weblogs you read and the second on political orientation. Both are optional, and in the first case you can answer as many as you wish (the list is long, but mostly alphabetical). Just click here and enter survey number 56717 in the "Take A Survey" box (to the right side of the screen) to take the survey. You can leave comments about yourself if…
razib | November 9, 2007So, check out this retarded post at the Huntington Post, Goodbye Selfish-Gene: A New Upheaval in the Science of Human Behavior:
Plain talk: The Darwinian prop of the lone cowboy rugged conservative bundle of selfish genes has now been pulled out from under the cowboy and the lone cowboy has suddenly collapsed into a mumbling baffled cartoon.
Humans are pack animals. We live and die in herds. The group provides the individual with the means of physical and psychological survival. We need the group as much as the group needs us. It's a fair trade that's been evolving for millions of years.
The…
razib | November 9, 2007Due to positive mentions from readers and friends I finally got Alan Templeton's Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory. I've read a few chapters and skimmed through much of the book, and my current take is that it's a bit too wordy in the exposition. I'd have preferred that there be more technical boxes and a more thorough scattering of compact formalisms. That being said, Templeton is a clear writer and the text is pretty penetrable (I enjoyed the coverage of quantitative genetics especially). Also, he didn't seem to take a kitchen-sink approach, a few themes came in for…
razib | November 9, 2007Picked up a book, Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, a nice little survey spun off into a short book. The authors primarily used a sample of respondents (N ~ 350) from some atheist clubs in the San Francisco area. The respondents were older (median ~ 60), well educated (median ~ college completed) and politically liberal (only 3 percent were Republicans). They also drew upon a smaller sample from Idaho and Alabama, as well as previous surveys give to thousands of college students in Manitoba (the authors are Canadian). Not only did they do an analysis of the…
razib | November 8, 2007A few weeks ago I posted about Neandertal red-hair, and offered a note of caution:
Red hair emerges because of a lack of balance between the production of dark eumelanin and red-yellow pheomelanin. When both are down regulated in terms of production one obtains ash blonde hair. I am not totally clear as to why the authors above assume that pheomelanin production would also not be effected....
John Hawks has a massive post up, The "flame-haired" Neandertals where he says:
This is, of course, speculative. Still, if Neandertals were strongly selected for pigmentation variants, we ought to expect…
razib | November 8, 2007Genetics Has A Role In Determining Sexual Orientation In Men, Further Evidence:
In other research, Witelson and research associate Debra Kigar, had found that left-handers have a larger region of the posterior corpus callosum -- the thick band of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres of the brain -- than right handers.
This raised the hypothesis for the current study -- whether the anatomy of the brain of the sub-group of right-handed homosexual men is similar to that of left-handers.
They found that the posterior part of the corpus callosum is larger in homosexual than heterosexual men…
razib | November 7, 2007The title says it all; my first thought when I saw the picture & the caption on The Washington Post's website was to wonder how bad the drought in the American South was! Ah, but it's the other Georgia....
razib | November 6, 2007Over at the Sepia Mutiny blog there has been seem dispute over whether Pervez Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan. Some contributors are appalled, while others are urging caution. One of the posts was titled In defense of a dictator, and it understandably drew a lot of fire from those who make a vociferous case for democracy over the dictator.
But I think there are some problems here. Too much of our discourse is defined by a bipolar framing of the issues between democracy and dicatorship, as if these two states are binary opposites inverted on all characters. When…
razib | November 5, 2007Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism:
...Breastfed children attain higher IQ scores than children not fed breast milk, presumably because of the fatty acids uniquely available in breast milk. Here we show that the association between breastfeeding and IQ is moderated by a genetic variant in FADS2, a gene involved in the genetic control of fatty acid pathways. We confirmed this gene-environment interaction in two birth cohorts, and we ruled out alternative explanations of the finding involving gene-exposure correlation, intrauterine growth…
razib | November 4, 2007Just a note to all the nerds, Beyond Belief II is complete. Here is a list of speakers. Many familiar faces, but some new ones too. It will be posted at The Science Network when editing is completed.
Update: PZ has a summary.
razib | November 4, 2007Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science has an interesting post up, Income, religious attendance, and voting:
Church attendance is a strong predictor of how high-income people vote, not such a good predictor for low-income voters.
Why? I think the most likely explanation is that cultural considerations become more salient as one increases up the income ladder. Check out their chart.
razib | November 4, 2007In my post below I wanted to emphasize that religion has several distinct and independent dimensions. Too often in our modern era religion is reduced purely to the dimension of confession or belief because of its relative accessibility to outsiders. Here is some of that complexity on display, from page 371 of The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815:
Less comical but more dangerous was a prelate like Etienne-Charles Lomenie de Brienne, whose composition of a materialist treatise at the Sorbonne in 1751 did not prevent him entering the priesthood and becoming Vicar-General of Rouen the…
razib | November 3, 2007I've gotten tired of Firefox freezing when Newsweek.com (and other sites) loads. Recently Firefox started freezing in gmail when I tried to use the search. But the UI for Safari, Opera and IE are inferior in my opinion. Any recs for something similar to Firefox that doesn't freeze all the time?
razib | November 3, 2007From a New York Times Magazine piece about Antony Flew. Here is the most shocking part:
When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort -- slightly more, anyway. "There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this," Varghese said. "There is stuff he'd written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views…
razib | November 1, 2007Thank you to everyone who donated! To me the most gratifying thing is to know that so many students are being affected. Let's do this again next year!
razib | November 1, 2007William Saletan has a piece up over at Slate, Jewgenics, which covers his reactions to a talk (you can view it online) sponsored by AEI around Jon Entine's book Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. I've read the book, though I don't have time to listen to the talk right now. But I wanted to offer a quick perspective on one point in Saletan's piece:
According to Entine, the rate of Jewish "outbreeding"--procreating with non-Jews--is half a percent. That's the lowest rate of any population in the world today....
First, I don't know if that is the lowest rate…
razib | November 1, 2007Here is another write up of Genetic determinants of hair, eye and skin pigmentation in Europeans. Generally echoes my own impressions, though I offer the link in the hope it is more readable! The paper was hard to reduce because of the contingency and polymorphism across the many genes affecting the many traits.
Update: Links fixed!