A few days ago there was a Twitter thing about top five books that have influenced you. It’s hard for me to name five, but I put three books down for three different reasons:
- Principles of Population Genetics, because it gives you a model for how to analyze and understand evolutionary processes. There are other books out there besides Principles of Population Genetics. But if you buy this book you don’t need to buy another (at SMBE this year I confused Andy Clark with Mike Lynch for a second when introducing myself. #awkward)
- The Fall of Rome. A lot of historical writing can be tendentious. I’ve also noticed an unfortunate tendency of historians dropping into contemporary arguments and pretty much lying through omission or elision to support their political side (it usually goes “actually, I’m a specialist in this topic and my side is 100% correct because of obscure-stuff where I’m shading the facts”). The Fall of Rome illustrates the solidity that an archaeological and materialist take can give the field. This sort of materialism isn’t the final word, but it needs to be the start of the conversation.
- From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. To know things is important in and of itself. My own personal experience is that the returns to knowing things in a particular domain or area do not exhibit a linear return. Rather, it exhibits a logistic curve. Initially, it’s hard to make sense of anything from the facts, but at some point comprehension and insight increase rapidly, until you reach the plateau of diminishing marginal returns.
If you haven’t, I recommend you subscribe to Patrick Wyman’s Tides of History podcast. I pretty much wait now for every new episode.
The big Washington food fight. GMO labeling is coming.
In Our Time has two very good episodes recently I recommend on the Picts and Thebes.
The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido. When I read the title I assumed that the piece was somehow informed by evolutionary psychology. No. It’s larded with Freudianism.
Evolutionary psychology has taken its hits over the last 15 years, and rightly so when it’s basically re-warmed social psychology, but the stuff informed by primatology is 21st century science (you can agree to disagree, but there’s something to grab onto there). Freudianism sometimes gets a bad rap even though its origins were not nearly as woolly as we might think, but cutting-edge early 20th century psychology is really beyond its sell-by date today.
This is the stuff that makes me pessimistic that the “replication crisis” is going to have any impact on the media or the public. For example, At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions. The author of the op-ed is a major person in the center of the controversy around replication. In particular, “ego depletion.” This op-ed is based on studies with p-values of 0.034 and such.
Detecting past and ongoing natural selection among ethnically Tibetan women at high altitude in Nepal. It’s polygenic and we don’t understand the architecture of the trait that well it seems. Basically, early selection sweeps detected some major loci, but it’s not the whole story. Reminds me of pigmentation.
An endogenous retroviral envelope syncytin and its cognate receptor identified in the viviparous placental Mabuya lizard. This is pretty cool, the same process seems to be occurring over and over.
Rethinking phylogenetic comparative methods. I think this is will be an impactful paper once it gets published.
Meanwhile, this looks interesting: The role of chromosomal inversions in speciation.
I posted some Taylor Swift memes to Twitter as a joke. They seem quote popular, especially the ones related to string theory and evolution, though the one related to Arminian and orthodox Calvinist soteriology took off in a different sector of Twitter.
The funny thing is several people were angry because they thought I was putting down Taylor Swift.