The survey suggests that 14% of my readers (or at least 14% of the 425 people who responded to the survey) consider themselves geneticists in some fashion. Above you see all the types of geneticists read this weblog. Remember that people can, and did, check more than one box. Not surprisingly, 75% of people who said they are “genomicists” also stated they were “computational biologists.”
In terms of knowledge, only 50% of geneticists who read this weblog could recall Hamilton’s Rule or the rate of substitution in a neutral model. Somewhat surprising to me, but only one out of three geneticists reading consider themselves a population geneticist so it is not entirely unreasonable.
If you have read me for a long time you know I’m a fan of alternative history, and alternative history fiction (some of you have followed me from USENET from those groups).
Though I think Harry Turtldove has gotten a little hackish recently (too much quantity, not enough quality), his older stuff is good. Agent of Byzantium in particular is good, not taking the easy way out of later books, which basically dress up events from our timeline in somewhat different garb. For the mainstream science fiction reader Years of Rice and Salt is probably what they are most familiar with, though I think it’s a little overrated. The Uchronia website has a good list of books and works, but I thought I’d pass something else along I found on Twitter, Clash of Eagles, which is volume 1 of a trilogy. Too bad I don’t have much time to read fiction…it looks like there’s some really good work being produced today.
A question in the comments below, isn’t 2007’s Principles of Population Genetics a bit on the old side? I don’t think this is a big issue. But if you want a more recent book, 2013’s An Introduction to Population Genetics: Theory and Applications is more what you are looking for I guess. Here is the publisher introduction:
“A text for a one-semester course in population genetics. It introduces students to classical population genetics (in terms of allele and haplotype frequencies) and modern population genetics (in terms of coalescent theory). It presents numerous applications of population genetic methods to practical problems, including testing for natural selection, detecting genetic hitchhiking and inferring the history of populations.
Basically the reason this book exists, in my opinion, is that older works don’t explore in much detail genomic applications of population genetic theory. And that’s the main reason you would be unsatisfied with an older work, because it doesn’t grapple with genome-wide data, because that was not a major concern when population genetics was being developed as a field. Even a book that was published in 2007 just isn’t really going to be up to date when it comes to genomics, because 2017 is so much further along.
But ultimately genomics isn’t really necessary to understand population genetics. Kimura and Crow’s Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, written in the late 1960s, would be more than sufficient I would think (though I do have to say that An Introduction to Population Genetics is very good about integrating a coalescent framework into one’s thinking, which is obviously not the case with older texts).
I think I figured out the way to resolve the 503 error problem (more precisely, I figured out how to set up the script that checks for 503 errors and restarts varnish if it’s giving 503 errors). I’m also working on restoring the full archives of my content (have to get the MySQL tables working in my database for this weblog).
Lee Alan Dugatkin’s How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution is out. I’ve enjoyed three of the author’s books, The Imitation Factor: Evolution Beyond The Gene, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness, and Game Theory and Animal Behavior. He’s a great writer, and an accomplished scientist, so I’m sure How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) will be good.
King James asserted “No bishop, no king.” I would say, “no science, no liberal democracy.” Not that I think science is the root cause of liberal democracy, I think the two emerge from a particular view of the world and how to engage it and talk about it. The decline in scientific discourse then won’t cause the decline of liberal democracy, but will signal the diminishing of the fuel which fires both. More on that later.
I said this on Twitter because I think this might be a serious idea:
strategy for dealing with hostile strong AI: clone von neumann and create an army of mentats
— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) May 1, 2017
People are saying I should read something “out of the norm.” I used to do that more often in the past. For example, I read The World Beyond the Hill – Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence. Though I guess it was literary analysis and history of a genre which I found interesting. But what specific books should I read? I’ll pick one and get back to you with my opinions….
The Evolution Of Covert Signaling. Rule-of-thumb, if it has Richard McElreath on the author list, it’s worth reading.
My request for readers to buy things from Amazon through the links on this website has been modestly successful. I didn’t make a “record” amount of money, but I did notice more “random” things than usual, which suggests to me that I pushed more revenue through that avenue than would be otherwise expected.
If winning is all that matters, then there are no rules in the game.
Now and then I wonder why I’m still blogging all these years later. I don’t make much income off it. If I wanted to be “famous” I would have been much more careful about what I said over the years. Part of it is that I get some interesting comments from readers who aren’t stupid, unlike most humans, who are basically the literal definition of vacuous. But part of it is that I don’t quite see anyone else saying some of the things I say or occupying the same space. So here I am. For now. If someone else is occupying the same space…, tell me and I’ll perhaps retire.