razib | October 31, 2007Statistical evaluation of alternative models of human evolution:
An appropriate model of recent human evolution is not only important to understand our own history, but it is necessary to disentangle the effects of demography and selection on genome diversity. Although most genetic data support the view that our species originated recently in Africa, it is still unclear if it completely replaced former members of the Homo genus, or if some interbreeding occurred during its range expansion. Several scenarios of modern human evolution have been proposed on the basis of molecular and…
razib | October 31, 2007OK, last update on this obviously because it is the last day of the month. A few readers really went wild in the last few days (in a good way) and from only 5 donors 508 students were impacted! (check the Leaderboard for the breakdown) Thank you very much! So if you have any spare cash and inclination, please check out the projects I'm sponsoring, this is your last day.
razib | October 29, 2007Until recently archeologists held to a model called Clovis First which posited that the Amerindians were descended from Siberian hunters who swept down from Beringia 13,000 years ago and spread rapidly north to south. Findings such as Monte Verde have thrown a cloud over the cleanliness of this hypothesis and there doesn't seem to be any claimant to the throne at this point.
Geneticists have been weighing in on this topic now and then. Roughly, one line of results seems to suggest that the Amerindians have been resident on the New World for far longer than 10,000 years. Another finding has…
razib | October 28, 2007Over at Ross Douthat's blog, a giggle-inducing comment:
It seems to me that Mormonism is indeed a lot more illogical than mainstream Christianity. It suffers from logical contradictions that Christianity does not- for example, how can someone be retroactively baptized? Why would God say that polygamy was OK for Brigham Young but then not OK anymore after Utah became a state? How do the Gods of multiple universes interact? Most importantly, how is it even logically possible for man to become God? This last bit, about man becoming God, is not just highly offensive to me, it's also logically…
razib | October 27, 2007Just listened to an interview on NPR with the author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. She mentions how she had a reflexive prejudice against nuclear energy and generally opposed its use because of her environmentalist impulses. That's not surprising of course, people are terrified of nuclear energy because of its associations.
For me an easy way to dispel this sort of terror in most of my friends is simply to point out that the two nations with the highest per capita consumption of nuclear energy (by far) are France and Sweden (Finland is #3, though there is a…
razib | October 26, 2007Interesting piece which chronicles the decline in the DVD driven profits of porn companies due to "user generated porn." Porn is in some ways sui generis, so this is an interesting trend. Check out the traffic of YouPorn vs. Facebook.
razib | October 25, 2007Sometimes science is just too cool! A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals:
The melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) regulates pigmentation in humans and other vertebrates. Variants of MC1R with reduced function are associated with pale skin color and red hair in humans primarily of European origin. We amplified and sequenced a fragment of the MC1R gene (mc1r) from two Neanderthal remains. Both specimens have a mutation not found in ~3700 modern humans. Functional analyses show that this variant reduces MC1R activity to a level that alters hair and/or…
razib | October 23, 2007If you like the science on this weblog, I highly recommend Laelaps, Brian Switek's contribution to the ScienceBlogs network. Where I am more micro and anthro oriented he is more macro and spans the whole tree of life. I'm really glad he's on ScienceBlogs; Laelaps adds to the diversity in an interesting way.
In any case, I wanted to point to this long post, Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the "Dinosauroid", it mulls over many concepts and evolutionary processes. Brian highlights the alternative views of the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. While Gould emphasized…
razib | October 23, 2007The death of an Indian politician due to a monkey mob is getting a lot of attention. But Ruchira Paul points me to an older story which I think is even more interesting:
They have invaded the prime minister's office and the Defence Ministry, helping themselves to top secret military files.
...
Some 250 monkeys have already been relocated by a court order to forests in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
But many people there are now objecting, saying the animals are bringing with them their hooligan habits learnt in the city and are terrorising rural villages.
Slate has more about…
razib | October 23, 2007Another day, and another genome-wide association study. Genetic determinants of hair, eye and skin pigmentation in Europeans:
...We carried out a genome-wide association scan for variants associated with hair and eye pigmentation, skin sensitivity to sun and freckling among 2,986 Icelanders. We then tested the most closely associated SNPs from six regions--four not previously implicated in the normal variation of human pigmentation--and replicated their association in a second sample of 2,718 Icelanders and a sample of 1,214 Dutch. The SNPs from all six regions met the criteria for genome-…
razib | October 22, 2007Some of you know that Bobby Jindal was just elected as the governor of Louisiana. Jindal has an interesting story, he's the son of Indian immigrants, received degrees in biology and public bolicy from Brown, passed on Harvard Medical School for a Rhodes Scholarship, and took over the Louisiana Public Health System at the age of 24.
He is also a convert to Catholicism, and extremely politically conservative. Conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini had a political orgasm a few days ago in response to Jindal's victory; and it was typical on the Right blogosphere. I really don't think that Bobby…
razib | October 22, 2007An Empirical Examination of Adaptationists' Attitudes Toward Politics and Science. You can find a full preprint at Geoffrey Miller's site. The abstract:
Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others…
razib | October 20, 2007Carl Zimmer interviews Craig Venter (video). They're talking most genomics and creating life from "scratch." Also, Esther Dyson talks about the personal genome.
razib | October 18, 2007About a year ago Tim Lambert asked ScienceBloggers to check out a political quiz and collected the responses. 29 of us responded, and below the fold I've placed two graphs which display a smoothed out frequency distribution across the two axes generated by the survey. As noted by the author of the quiz the two axes were extrapolated from the empirical variation of responses (their the first two principle components of eigenvectors). They are Left/Right and pragmatism. A more positive value represent Right and and "atheist" or "utilitarian" tendencies on each axis respectively. Remember…