Is Christine O’Donnell a kook because she’s a Creationist?
Christine O’Donnell has said a lot of kooky things. Right now people are focusing on her Creationism. Though I’m obviously not a Creationist I think mocking someone for this belief in a political context is somewhat strange: the survey literature is pretty robust that Americans are split down the middle on opinions about evolution. […]
Open Thread, September 25th, 2010
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is in my “stack,” though I don’t know when I’ll get to it. A few things I’ve been wrong about in the last 10 years:
– I was more optimistic about reproducible I.Q. QTLs in 2000 than I should have been. Here’s a 1998 article on Robert Plomin’s […]
Friday Fluff – September 24th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion
2. Weird search query of the week: “porn makes you straight.”
3. Comment of the week, in response to Swedes are not sexist or nativist:
I’ve been living in Sweden for somewhat more than a year now. I previously lived in Canada, the […]
Elmo!
I didn’t realize that Elmo is almost 40 years old. Not only that, apparently some “Sesame Street Traditionalists” refer to him as the “Little Red Menace”. Since I haven’t watched the show regularly since the 1980s I don’t have a strong opinion about his influence, malevolent or not, but generally I’m pro-Elmo. He’s not quite […]
Cities of plague
I noticed this entry on Time‘s Healthland blog, Study: City Life Spreads Disease, But If It Doesn’t Kill You…. The author ends kind of strangely: The authors of the study expressed excitement about the merging of scientific analysis and historical records, but this is also a potential limitation. Scientific and historical conclusions are different in […]
The city that kills you makes you strong!
Over the past day I’ve seen reports in the media of a new paper which claims that long-term urbanization in a region is strongly correlated with genetic variants for disease resistance. I managed to find the paper on Evolution’s website as an accepted manuscript, ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSIS:
A link between urban living […]
Simple rules for inclusive fitness
With the recent huge furor over the utility of kin selection I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the literature on inclusive fitness. The reason W. D. Hamilton’s original papers in The Journal of Theoretical Biology are highly cited is not some conspiracy, rather, they’re a powerful framework in which one can understand the evolution […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Nobel-winning brain researcher retracts two papers. Looks like there’s the typical blame-it-on-the-Asian going on here, so perhaps this won’t blow up.
In Our Time is back. This week: Imaginary Numbers.
“200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren”. Most genes of small effect. We’ll see. Don’t get too excited yet, you might be disappointed.
Through the […]
What’s the matter with Finland?
I was browsing The European Journal of Human Genetics and I saw this short article from last summer which I missed, NordicDB: a Nordic pool and portal for genome-wide control data. The portal is at http://www.nordicdb.org/database/Home.html. The data itself is for Very Special People, instead of having a simple web form you actually have to […]
The Social Darwinist and the Priests
I was going through my stack of podcasts today and I decided to listen to a discussion between the linguist John McWhorter and the linguist Ben Zimmer, and at one point McWhorter addresses the issue of linguistic diversity, and wonders aloud if perhaps we wouldn’t be better off with one world language, though more as […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Freshman Weight Gain: Women With Heavy Roommates Gain Less, Study Finds. I guess the model makes sense, but it really makes one wonder about the power of prior expectations about these sorts of things. There just so many plausible stories for any given set of data.
Why Does Spicy Food Taste Hot? The feeling of “heat” […]
Toward human phylogenetic intuitions
100 years ago a science based physical anthropology offered up very little as to a systematics of mankind beyond what you could intuit from visual assessments of phenotypic similarity alone. Instead, there were fantastical taxonomies which had little basis in the true pattern of variation and more in the nationalistic debates of that period. The […]
The illusions of intuition
Sometimes books advertise themselves very well with their title. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us is one of those books. Alternatively it could have been titled: “Giving thinking a second chance.” Or, with an eye toward pushing copies: “Why everything Malcolm Gladwell tells you is crap.” And finally, a more highbrow […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Price’s Second Equation. David B continues his technical review of the Price Equation.
Selective pressures for accurate altruism targeting: evidence from digital evolution for difficult-to-test aspects of inclusive fitness theory. “Our investigations also revealed that evolution did not increase the altruism level when all green beard altruists used the same phenotypic marker.” Read a university press […]
Swedes are not sexist or nativist
A party, the Sweden Democrats, is about to enter the Swedish parliamanent which is described in this way in Wikipedia:
The party has its origins in the nationalist movement Bevara Sverige Svenskt (”Keep Sweden Swedish”)…During the mid 1990s, the party leader Mikael Jansson strove to make the party more respectable, modelling it after other “euronationalist” parties, […]
Pakistanis are just like Indians (not that there’s anything wrong with it)
In the comments below a strange conversation grew out of the politicized nature of Pakistani identity, and its relationship to India the nation-state, and India the civilization. I assume that a typical reader, or more accurately commenter, on this weblog would be sanguine if they found out they were 10% chimpanzee. After all, it’s what’s […]
Raging against the population genetics machine
An interesting readable review in PLoS Genetics taking on population genetics, Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology:
In conclusion, I return to Michael Lynch’s challenging questions about blind spots and bad wheels in evolutionary biology which motivated this review…Concerning blind spots I have pointed out some limitations of current population genetics. There is too much emphasis on […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Summer is almost over.
What was malt liquor? The history of malt liquor, and also Pabst Blue Ribbon. No idea that malt liquor used to have an upscale association.
The Genetics & Linguistics Of Central Asia. Excellent overview from a somewhat different angle from my own. Excellent map.
Cousin marriage in the UK and genetic testing. John Hawks […]
Gypsies on a genetic island
If you live in the States one of the things you hear a lot about Europe in regards to its relationship to its ethno-religious minorities are the problems with Muslims. This is probably an Americo-centric perspective shaped by 9/11, when many of the hijackers had turned out to have spent time in Germany. Additionally, […]