Culture
razib | March 30, 2009A few years ago a paper came out, How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity?:
Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Crossâculturally, paternity confidence (a man's assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) is positively associated with men's involvement with children and with investment or inheritance from paternal kin. A survey of 67 studies reporting nonpaternity suggests that for men with high paternity confidence rates of nonpaternity…
razib | March 30, 2009Single Gene Shapes the Toil of Ants' Fighter and Forager Castes:
Researchers studying the social behavior of ants have found that a single gene underlies both the aggressive behavior of the ant colony's soldiers and the food gathering behavior of its foraging caste.
The gene is active in soldier ants, particularly in five neurons in the front of their brain, where it generates large amounts of its product, a protein known as PKG. The exact amount of the protein in the ants' brains is critical to their behavior.
The article goes on talk to about correlates of PKG variation in humans....
razib | March 30, 2009The paper is pretty straightforward, Copy number variation in African Americans:
Employing a SNP platform with greater than 500,000 SNPs, a first-generation CNV map of the African American genome was generated using DNA from 385 healthy African American individuals, and compared to a sample of 435 healthy White individuals. A total of 1362 CNVs were identified within African Americans, which included two CNV regions that were significantly different in frequency between African Americans and Whites (17q21 and 15q11). In addition, a duplication was identified in 74% of DNAs derived from cell…
razib | March 28, 2009Faith in science and social conservatism:
Except for crime and gun control, faith in science is associated with socially liberal positions. For guns and crime, the direction of the relationship is liberal, but the relationships are not statistically significant.
I've dug through the GSS on this and this seems about right. Even on topics where many would assume that conservatives trump liberals, there isn't a strong difference. For example, Genetically Modified Foods:
The main exception seems nuclear energy. But the key is social liberalism; there's a lot of sympathy for economic…
razib | March 26, 2009New York has a very long piece, Monster Mensch, which profiles Bernie & J. Ezra Merkin. Psychoanalysis can get kind of old, the profile is more interesting in terms of the light it sheds on other figures in Bernie's world.
razib | March 25, 2009There's a critique up of Michael Lewis' entertaining if somewhat less than illuminating (compared to the piece in The New Yorker) profile of the Icelandic financial meltdown. No surprise that Lewis spun here and there to extract more entertainment out of the straight story, but I have to take objection to a few points:
5. "Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth -- geneticists often use them for research."
Now this is insulting. Icelanders' DNA shows their roots to be a healthy mix between Nordic Y chromosomes and X chromosomes from the British Isles. The reason genetic-…
razib | March 24, 2009Black Girls Are 50 Percent More Likely To Be Bulimic Than White Girls:
Rather, girls who are African American are 50 percent more likely than girls who are white to be bulimic, the researchers found, and girls from families in the lowest income bracket studied are 153 percent more likely to be bulimic than girls from the highest income bracket.
"As it turns out, we learned something surprising from our data about who bulimia actually affects, not just who is diagnosed," says USC economist Michelle Goeree.
Surprised me. Then again, whenever when I watched Law & Order on the airplane I'm…
razib | March 24, 2009John Hawks & Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to a new paper in Genome Research, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. As Dan notes, it's Open Access, so you can read the PDF yourself. That being said, "Just read it!" might be somewhat a tall order if you don't have some background, so make sure to read the papers at this link. In particular the paper refers to two tests for detecting natural selection which utilize haplotype structure, integrated haplotype score (iHS) and cross population extended haplotype homozygosity (XP-EHH).
One of…
razib | March 23, 2009Sweden Says No to Saving Saab:
Which makes it all the more wrenching that the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
Such a view might seem jarring, coming as it does from a country with a reputation for a paternalistic view of workers and companies. The "Swedish model" for dealing with a banking crisis -- nationalizing the banks, recapitalizing them and selling them -- has been much debated lately in…
razib | March 23, 2009Just a heads up, they're had Discover Blogs now. Just want to note, I welcomed Tapped (which Chris Mooney was instrumental in setting up) to the blogosphere in April of 2002. Chris' acknowledgment of welcome, and my own pre-blogspot weblog, have been vaporized by the digital dustbin, but I wanted to put it into the oral record of blog history.
sheril | March 23, 2009Today, we move to our new home at Discover Blogs: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection
While we have immensely enjoyed being a part of Scienceblogs, we've decided together that it is time to move on. Our tremendous thanks go out to Seed for hosting The Intersection since 2006 where we've been honored to share the network with such an esteemed community of bloggers--many of whom have become good friends.
While we're excited to join Carl, Phil, and Sean, it is a bittersweet decision as we will miss the Sb 'family' tremendously. Of course, we will never be far--the blogosphere has no…
sheril | March 23, 2009As promised, photos* from last Friday with 'the Bloggerati'. Here I'm in terrific company with Misha, Bora, and Abel over lunch in Durham:
Bora and I chat with students about why we blog:
* Special thanks to Abel for sharing the images! For a terrific detailed description of the day, visit Terra Sigillata...
razib | March 21, 2009Needed for AIG and the TARP: Silicon Valley Compensation Schemes:
The engineers of Silicon Valley startups are significantly smarter and work a lot harder than do the traders of Wall Street. Some of the engineers of Silicon Valley make fortunes: they are compensated with relatively low salaries and large restricted equity stakes in the startup businesses they work for, and so if the businesses do well they do very well indeed--in the long run, in the five to ten years it takes to assess whether the business is in fact going to be a viable and profitable going concern. And the engineers of…
razib | March 21, 2009Genetic Future has a post which mulls over the idea that not screening for particular diseases is similar to child abuse. I was interested in this last comment:
Naturally there are objections to embryo screening among religious conservatives who believe that inflicting severe disease on children is the will of God - but why does the prospect raise such unease among even the secular community? I share Le Page's puzzlement on this question, and would invite opponents to lay out any well-reasoned arguments against routine screening in the comments below.
Religious conservatives, particularly…
sheril | March 20, 2009Several readers have emailed me to comment on Michael Steele's ummmm...imaginative explanations of both global 'cooling' and Greenland:
"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long."
You want me to respond to that gibberish? Seriously? The…
sheril | March 20, 2009Today Bora, Abel, and I visited Duke's Sanford Institute on Public Policy for the second year in a row to discuss the coverage of science, health, and policy. We chatted with a group of undergraduates about the evolution of science blogs, the emergence of blogging networks, the role of science blogs vs the MSM, and where open-access fits in. Our beloved scibling Isis even made a guest appearance via gchat!
We had a lot of fun and special thanks to GenomeBoy for inviting us to explore ideas with his terrific class! The other 'Beacons of the Bloggerati' had cameras, so photo to come.
After…
amillikan | March 20, 2009With print publications in crisis, the issue of how scientific information will be disseminated in the future has become a recurrent topic of discussion here on ScienceBlogs and all over the web. Recently, Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars criticized National Geographic and the "sorry state of popular science writing" because of an error in a story, to which Chris Mooney from The Intersection responded, pointing out that the economic situation print publications are forced to operate under should be considered in criticisms of the field. For Mooney, it's not errors he finds…
cmooney | March 20, 2009
Nothing else matters today. Nothing except what is going to happen in the very last episode of Battlestar, which has been running since 2004 and now culminates in a two hour extravaganza. We know the Battlestar is about to jump into the Cylon colony to rescue Hera, the human-Cylon hybrid child, and to make a last stand with guns blazing...what the frak is going to happen?
This thread is for you, nerds of the universe....
cmooney | March 19, 2009Ed Brayton, who I admire greatly, has a post that runs afoul of my "death of science journalism" sensitivity meter. You see, Ed came across a National Geographic story that says something dumb about "carbon dating." Ed is surely right on the point of substance, and National Geographic should not have made the error. I certainly don't mind him pointing that out; but when you also get something like this--"I've bitched and complained about the sorry state of popular science writing for years. Here's another textbook example..."--I get uppity.
The sorry state of popular science writing is not a…