George C. Williams, (1926-2010)
Jerry Coyne notes that George C. Williams died a few days ago. I’d heard he was ill. Michael Ruse has an obituary up. Williams’ book Adaptation and Natural Selection prefigured Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.
Update: Please see Car…
Leaping to a bigger brain
Years ago an evolutionary biologist mentioned to me almost offhand that with the emergence of genomics and the necessity to master computational techniques a lot of the labor hours which may have gone into a more thorough understanding of specific organisms had gone by the wayside. He believed that his Ph.D. advisor was going to […]
Offense in a globalized world
In my post “The naked years” I used this image to illustrate the transition from furry Australopithecus, to hairless H. erectus, to the sartorially elaborated H. sapiens sapiens:
Do you find the image offensive? I obviously didn’t, I’m not an artist and was trying to visually communicate a scientific concept, not “provoke.” My usual procedure when […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
More on The Social Sensitivity Hypothesis. At A Replicated Typo a post which explores a model whereby different morphs emerge which migrate and flourish based on genotype. The “sensitive” and “non-sensitive” tendency is optimized for different ecologies, whereby in high resource zones the sensitives do better. The author expresses a lot of caution, but the […]
The naked years
When I talk about sexual selection I usually make sure to have an accompanying visual of a peacock to go with the post. But really I could have used a dandy as an illustration, or perhaps in our day & age “The Situation”. Unlike the peacock much of what passes for human “plumage” is not […]
Fundamentalists are not as “intelligent”
Yesterday I pointed to an OKCupid study on personals ads on their network. I didn’t highlight the fact that the analysis of the ads seem to suggest that secular people have more sophisticated prose, and that of those who claim a religious affiliation the less strongly committed tend to be more sophisticated. The blog Political […]
After the codex
Today we’re seeing a transition in the medium of literacy. I’m alluding to the emergence of digital formats, which will transform the physical experience of reading. You’re part of the process right now, unless you’ve printed this out. Of course we have books around, and we will for quite some time. I assume for the […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Human Meat Just Another Meal for Early Europeans? The argument about cannibalism always goes back and forth. It seems entirely plausible that at some point in our lineage’s history the consumption of conspecifics may not have been shocking, as the human cognitive toolkit had not evolved to the level of sophistication which makes cannibalism cross-culturally […]
Sexual selection: lowered expectations edition
Sexual selection is, for lack of a better term, a sexy concept. Charles Darwin elaborated on the specific phenomenon of sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond endorsed Darwin’s thesis that sexual selection could explain the origin of human races, as each isolated […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Big brains attributed to mother’s care. Interesting that the correlation between various characteristics and brain size is highly sensitive to the taxa you include in your scatter plot. Marsupials seem to be substantially different from placental mammals, while primates are different from placentals as a whole. Throwing all the mammalian taxa into the analysis results […]
How much more racist are white conservatives than white liberals?
A few weeks ago there were a bunch of stories on how white the audience was at Glenn Beck’s rally. That’s empirically true, and the Tea Party movement as a whole is overwhelmingly white. So is the American conservative movement. This in a nation which is ~65% white in a colloquial sense (i.e., white Hispanics […]
Genetic differences within European populations
One of the more popular posts on this weblog (going by StumbleUpon and search engine referrers) focuses on genetic variation in Europe as a function of geography. In some ways the results are common sense; populations closer to each other are more genetically related. Why not? Historically people have married their neighbors and so gene […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Happy Labor Day!
Price’s First Equation. An in-depth review of the Price Equation. First installment of several.
DNA fingerprinting pioneer discovers role of key genetic catalyst for human diversity. The strange behavior of PRDM9 could be thought of as a factor in the second term of the Price Equation.
Resentment Simmers in Western Chinese Region. “It used […]
In the lands of the living God
On the face of it Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam is a book whose content is summed up accurately by the title. The author recounts her experiences in various African and Asian lands which straddle the tenth parallel north of the equator: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, […]
More school, more work
Tomorrow is Labor Day in the USA. I was actually shocked to realize last week that the USA has a higher unemployment rate than many European nations. I grew up in the 1990s when we were conditioned to assume that Europe would always have higher structural unemployment for a variety of reasons. In any case, […]
Open Thread, September 4th, 2010
If you’re American, you should be at a barbecue or something! So what podcasts do you listen to? The main talk show I listen to is Tom Ashbrook’s.
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good Labor Day weekend!
Catholics and the Evolving Cosmos. And yet 35% of American Roman Catholics are Creationists according to the GSS.
23andMe kits at some discount, with a subscription to the “personal genome service” for at least 3 months. Normal complete edition is about $500, with the discount it’s about $300 + 3 X […]
European man, Y chromosomes & tea leaves
Sometimes in applied fields artistic license is constrained by the necessity of function to particular creative channels. Architecture comes to mind, at least before innovative technologies produced lighter and stronger materials, freeing up form from its straitjacket (whether this was a positive development is a matter of taste). But there’s only so much you can […]
Fertility by non-Hispanic white ethnic group, etc.
In my post on American fertility rates by racial group Mike Keesey asks: ‘It’d also be interesting to see what’s going on within “non-Hispanic whites”.’ One can explore this question in the GSS. Let’s look at ancestry group (e.g., German, French, etc.), religion, belief in God, political ideology, intelligence and education, for non-Hispanic whites. The […]