Razib Khan

Category: Evolutionary Biology

  • Razib Khan Answers My Most Controversial Questions About Genetics: Quillette Cetera Episode 30

    A conversation with geneticist and writer Razib Khan.

  • Cultural innovation leads to small populations being successful; small populations just lead to extinction

    In a pretty informative piece in Gizmodo, Scientists Say New Research Tracing the Origin of Modern Humans to Botswana Is Deeply Flawed, there is an interesting quote that I would like to follow-up on: That said, Curtis Marean, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved with the new research, is not…

  • Evolutionary biology in the 21st-century: from big theories to big facts

    A few years ago I reflected that genomics has not really “revolutionized” evolutionary biology. In contrast, it arguably has revolutionary the science of medical genetics. The reason I said this is that because the big questions in the field were formulated in the 19th and 20th-centuries. To a great extent, we’re recapitulating theoretical arguments of…

  • On the genealogy of “Social Darwinism”

    In my review of David Sloan Wilson’s This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution I observe that one of the author’s projects seems to be to educate a more general audience on a revisionist understanding of the history of evolutionary biology as applied to society: …He notes that the opprobrium hurled at evolution’s application…

  • Why There Will Not Be a Beige Future: Skin Color, Genetics, Race and Racism

    There is more in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in any human philosophy. This is why science is not philosophy. Those who map the skies, observe the…View Post

  • Sequence the thousands and your eyes shall be open

    Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species as an audacious work that birthed a whole discipline. But it had its failings. In particular, Darwin famously lacked the Mendelian model of genetic inheritance which easily maintained variation from generation to generation. The reason that variation is important is that it is one of the major raw materials…

  • Endless Tigers Most Beautiful

    The Thylacine, or the Tasmanian Tiger, is a tragic story that we all know (or should know!). Too late did humans realize how precious it was, a large(ish) marsupial carnivore endemic to Tasmania. Hunted to extinction, the last one died because it was not properly taken care of. The Tasmanian Tiger is an example of…

  • Endless Tigers Most Beautiful

    The Thylacine, or the Tasmanian Tiger, is a tragic story that we all know (or should know!). Too late did humans realize how precious it was, a large(ish) marsupial carnivore endemic to Tasmania. Hunted to extinction, the last one died because it was not properly taken care of. The Tasmanian Tiger is an example of…

  • Our time in the sun

    The New York Times has a story up, After the Dinosaurs’ Demise, Many Mammals Seized the Day. It’s a write-up of a new paper that is open access, Temporal niche expansion in mammals from a nocturnal ancestor after dinosaur extinction. This research illustrates how computational power has changed evolutionary biology. There has long been an…

  • We, Robot & Hamilton’s Rule

    The original robots We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after h…

  • The inevitable social brain

    One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]

Razib Khan