Open Thread, 6/24/2018
I recently read John Keay’s Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition. No particular reason. But I’ve read earlier books on the history of India and China and I sort of wanted to fill a hole in my knowledge. I would recommend if you don’t know much about this period and place. It’s probably […]
Open Thread, 6/20/2018
I try to limit the shilling, but since readers of this weblog know what this means: Helix has a sale on kits until the end of the month. The three Insitome products can be purchased for app-only cost ($29.99) as an entrance into the ecosystem. In other words, for $29.99 you can get millions of markers […]
Open Thread
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 06/11/2018
A few years ago a reader sent me a copy of Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Though I haven’t read that book, I did read a substantial proportion of Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide on a plane trip recently. I’m not a big believer in whole-hog Thomism, but I’ve read some […]
Open Thread, 06/05/2018
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, underlies sociality, and alters life history. I keep suggesting to everyone that they need to read more cultural evolution! But to be honest it’s hard for me to keep up. So much earlier reading evolutionary genomics, since I know the literature and the models far better. […]
Open Thread, 05/28/2018
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is now available. The interview with Carl Zimmer will be live on The Insight Wednesday night (EDT). If you haven’t, please consider leaving a 5-star review on iTunes or Stitcher. I’ve told that you can already read The University We Need on Google Books. I can’t vouch for this, but […]
Open Thread, 5/20/2018
Warren Treadgold’s The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is going to come out in early July, but I’ve written my review. Don’t know when NRO will post it. In general, I’m positive. Though Treadgold has some ideological issues with Leftism in the academy, much of the book is apolitical and shines the light […]
Open Thread, 05/13/2018
The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is a funny book. The author, Warren Treadgold, is someone I know from his magisterial A History of the Byzantine State and Society. One of the complaints about A History of the Byzantine State and Society is that it’s too dry and academic. The University We Need […]
Open Thread, 5/07/2018
Longtime readers are well aware that A History of the Byzantine State and Society is one of my favorite books. To understand the Middle East right before the arrival of the Mongols and the emergence of the Crusader states, one has to understand the expansion of Byzantium in the early 11th century, and it’s subsequent […]
Open Thread, 04/29/2018
One of the strange things about getting old is that your friends start to become kind of a big deal. Matthew Hahn has a new book out, Molecular Population Genetics. If there is one single reason I keep blogging, it’s to get awareness of the field of population genetics to spread beyond the small circle […]
Open Thread, 4/24/2018
Finished She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised that the narrative wasn’t overly fixated on the ‘perversions.’ Sometimes it’s hard to move past that. I think different people will benefit from reading the book differently. If you are a layperson a serial reading […]
Open Thread, 4/17/2018
Almost done with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. To be honest I’m a little relieved that there wasn’t that much focus on the “perversions” of heredity. Lots of interesting stuff. This is definitely a book that scientists and lay people could benefit from. Carl is a great writer […]
Open Thread, 04/10/2018
About ~2/3 of the way through She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. It’s what you’d expect from a Carl Zimmer book, threading history with rock-solid attention to science. So far he’s actually been a really good, if popular, history of science. I say popular not pejoratively, but because the […]
Open Thread, 4/2/2018
DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one. I talked to Antonio about this piece a few times. I didn’t have much to say with any insight. These tests aren’t ready for primetime because the prediction is pretty weak/worthless. With a lot of this stuff realized phenotype is […]
Open Thread, 3/26/2018
Does anyone have a galley or review copy of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity? The book is long, and review copies are in short supply. Would be nice if I could see it before it’s released at the end of May. Just use my contact email if you […]
Open Thread, 3/19/2018
Some people have asked me what I think about Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. I haven’t finished it, but now I understand why it is one of the most assigned books for undergraduates: it’s concise yet facile superficiality would appeal to a know-it-all twenty year old. What’s more disturbing, though […]
Open Thread, 3/14/2018
I finally met my old friend Ramez Naam in the flesh. Ramez’s publisher sent me his book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement in 2005. One thing led to another, and somehow he’s guest blogging on Gene Expression! CRISPR as we know it did not exist in 2005. Things have really changed […]
Open Thread, 4/6/2018
Eden in the East is a weird book. Written in the late 1990s before modern-day genomics, its central thesis about the origin of Southeast Asian people in Pleistocene Sundaland seems likely to be wrong (at least most of their ancestry). But the author, a polymath medical doctor, marshals an enormous amount of archaeological and textual […]
Open Thread, 02/25/2018
Reading Enlightenment Now. Seems fine enough. Will say more when I get done. I will say it’s strange to see how many people really hate the book (presumably without reading it?) and hate Steven Pinker. And curiously, it’s a pretty broad and ecumenical hate, from the respectable Left to the respectable Right. There is also […]