Culture
razib | June 11, 2009
There is currently a presidential election going on in Iran. The buffoon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against a "reformist," Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There is some controversy because Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has been active in the campaign, and held hands with him in public! (and I thought that the principal banned PDA?) It is a quirk, though not too significant, that both candidates are from ethnic minorities. Mousavi is an ethnic Azeri Turk (as is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) while the buffoon is Talysh (the Talysh language is mutually intelligible with standard Persian). But…
razib | June 11, 2009FuturePundit points to a New Scientist piece on a new study profiling older virgins. Who is the 40-Year-Old Virgin and Where Did He/She Come From? Data from the National Survey of Family Growth:
A total of 122 (13.9%) men aged 25-45 reported never having had sex, representing approximately 1.1 million American men in this age cohort. Among female participants, a total of 104 (8.9%) women aged 25-45 reported never having sex, representing approximately 800,000 American women in this age cohort. Both men and women who reported that they attend religious services one or more times per week were…
razib | June 8, 2009Back before the Iraq War invasion there was some talk about the human and cultural capital of the nation. That it was the Germany of the Middle East. That it was in a good position to benefit from liberation. There was some theorizing that Iraq could be a linchpin of a new geopolitical axis which was friendly to the United States and Israel. Much of this was pushed by Ahmad Chalabi, but there were a host of others who made such arguments because they wanted the invasion for their own reason.
In any case, it didn't work out. That's obvious. But looking at the World Values Survey the past few…
razib | June 6, 2009There are particular correlations about attitudes toward abortion rights within nations. For example, in the United States thereis no sex difference but more educated people tend to be pro-choice. But what are the international trends? In this post I look at attitudes toward abortion by Catholics and non-Catholics within various nations. Though Catholics tend to be slightly more pro-life, it turns out that the vast majority of the variance is between nations, not between religions. In other words, a Catholic in Germany tends to have the same attitudes as a Protestant in Germany, while a…
razib | June 4, 2009Classic case of "no free lunch," a new paper in Science, Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?, gives rise to popular press pieces with titles such as Blood and treasure and Altruism's Bloody Roots. If for most of human existence our species has been trapped by the reality of Malthusian conditions, boxed in by fixed resources, then it stands to reason that ingroup altruism and cohesion must be balanced by more vicious between group competition. This sort of process is not necessarily most obvious biologically. Rather, consider the…
razib | June 4, 2009In the 19th & 20th centuries with the emergence of nationalism and its various scholarly subsidiaries in archaeology, philology and ethnography quite a few pan-ethnic movements rooted in language were born. Pan-Slavism, the Greater German idea (Grossdeutsch) and Pan-Arabism come to mind. As evident in their names these ideas shadowed relationships of language, but they often veered into racialist territory. In The History and Geography of Human Genes L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported a substantial overlap between phylogenies generated from classical autosomal markers, and those of linguistic…
razib | June 3, 2009Dan MacArthur of Genetics Future is at the center of a minor controversy because of his blogging The Biology of Genomes conference. Realistically it seems updating pre-internet protocols is just a band-aid solution. And the issues aren't particular to blogging conferences, they're general to the ease and fluidity with which information can flow today.
razib | June 2, 2009I've been meaning to recommend Epiphenom for a while. As its subheading, "at the intersection of science, atheism and humanism" indicates, it has a perspective. But the analysis of new papers suggests a rather light touch. Remember, this isn't a blog which just opines about religion; rather, he analyzes data or analyzes the analysis of data. What's not to like?
razib | June 2, 2009On a recent diavlog between Dayo Olopade and Reihan Salam the role of minorities as integrators and catalysts for cultural ferment & change was brought up. Minorities being minorities naturally by definition would, one assumes, be the ones assimilating and integrating into the majority matrix. 70% of the American population is non-Hispanic white, so assuming a random mixing situation this segment will be preponderant. But there's a problem I have with this narrative: it ignores population structure. Integration and assimilation are real dynamics of American society, but obviously so is…
razib | June 1, 2009G.M. to Seek Bankruptcy and a New Start:
It also places the government in uncharted territory as a business owner, as it takes a 60 percent ownership stake in the company during its restructuring.
The commanding heights are back. We're socializing the means of production. Meanwhile, California is going back to the 19th century:
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
There wasn't even a mention of bankruptcy, but many American states did go into default in…
razib | June 1, 2009Family axes wedding plans, Egyptian cuts off organ:
A 25-year-old Egyptian man cut off his own penis to spite his family after he was refused permission to marry a girl from a lower class family, police reported Sunday.
This kind of reminds me of self-castration for religious reasons. It is a reality that in many parts of the world children are property a very tangible way. Their marriages are arranged for the benefit of the lineage, as determined by the pater familias. Honor killings in fact show a face of this reality which comports with the most grisly functions of the classical Roman…
razib | May 29, 2009The AP, 13-year-old Kansas girl wins National Spelling Bee:
Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to "Laodicean" to become the nation's spelling champion.
Here are the next 10 runner ups....
Tim A. Ruiter of Centreville, Va.
Aishwarya Eshwar Pastapur of Springfield, Ill.
Kyle Mou of Peoria, Ill.
Anamika Veeramani of North Royalton, Ohio
Kennyi Kwaku Aouad of Terre Haute, Ind.
Ramya Auroprem of San Jose, Calif.
Neetu Chandak of Seneca…
razib | May 29, 2009Felix Salmon pointed me to The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street today. There really is a boom in these sorts of books recently! Are we overdoing the "irrationality" bit? Probably. Mike offers up some skepticism about the creeping of irrationality as an explanation for everything.
razib | May 28, 2009BusinessWeek, The Tough Road Ahead for GM and Chrysler:
The upshot is that some 30 significant players worldwide are fighting over a pie that has shrunk by more than 30% in the past 12 months. The industry can make about 90 million cars worldwide, but it's selling only about 55 million. Not exactly a forgiving environment for a pair of wounded car companies. That, partly, is why Chrysler's rescue has struck some as misguided. Speaking of the government's decision to save the weakest and smallest Detroit player, industry consultant Michael Robinet says: "We needed to take a patsy out, and we…
razib | May 27, 2009
I was at the supermarket today and saw some some before and after pictures of Kate Gosselin on the cover of Us Weekly. Pretty crazy, though not as extreme as some of the "pre" and "post" makeup photos of celebrities you always see in Star. I don't know much about the show but I get really interested in the couple's story whenever I'm at at the supermarket (Us Weekly should be renamed The Gosselin Weekly). Now whenever I randomly run across a story about the Gosselins on the internet Fuji apples come to mind.
On a somewhat genetically related note some people have commented that it's…
razib | May 27, 2009The first is for science weblog posts. Nominations end the 1st of June. Steven Pinker is picking the winner out of 6 finalists.
razib | May 26, 2009In light of my post on politics and personal perspective yesterday, I thought this "exchange" between Mark Levin and Conor Friedersdorf would be of note. Also see Rod Dreher on the controversy. In any case, here you have a case where the principals agree on the broad political issues at stake, and many of the specifics as well, but disagreemants over style lead Levin to takfir his critics. In fact, if you read the comments at the first link it's clear that Friedersdorf's point is basically unintelligible to many fans of Levin.
razib | May 25, 2009Brian Switek of Laelaps has an op-ed in on Ida. Here's the conclusion:
What could have been a unique opportunity to communicate science has quickly developed into a fiasco. Science proceeds through discovery and debate, and hypotheses do not become accepted by flooding the media with press releases. Scientific scrutiny of Ida has only just begun, and regardless of who her closest living relatives are, I hope the debate surrounding her will not sink away from sight. She truly is an amazing find, but for now I think that she has taught us more about science communication than our ancestry.
It…
razib | May 25, 2009Andrew Gelman has a post up titled Difficulties in trying to understand the views of others, responding to a Robin Hanson taxonomy outline the motivations of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Gelman is skeptical of Hanson's glosses of each group.
The human ability to engage in Meta-Representation is one of the hallmarks of our species. We can analyze abstract ideas, take the positions of others, examine counter-factuals and what-if's. In terms of core competencies our Theory of Mind is a sharp knife, we are unparalleled at modeling social relations contingent upon the mental states of…