The Price of Altruism
A week ago I reviewed The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. As I noted in the review, many individuals who are of interest to the core readership of this weblog make significant appearances in The Price of Altruism, John Maynard Smith and W. D. Hamilton most prominently. […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Patrimony and the Evolution of Risk-Taking. Possible reason that organisms “mix it up” in behavioral morphs.
John Zogby’s Cri de Coeur. Creative destruction in the polling business. What is bad for producers is often good for consumers.
‘More poor’ in India than Africa. Concentrated in the “Deep North”. The social underdevelopment of the subcontinent as a whole […]
Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something.
I think knowledge of many languages […]
ScienceBlogs has good blogs
I don’t have real value to add on the ScienceBlogs controversy. The only thing I want to mention is that there are some nascent superstar weblogs on that network which aren’t big names, yet, but perhaps will be. You can miss them coming in via the front page because they don’t crank out 10-15 posts […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem. Bora Zivkovic is leaving ScienceBlogs, and has a very long retrospective. The only portion I would take some issue with is the ambivalence toward the introduction of bloggers who focused mostly on science and less on politics. Bora says: “In this effort to dilute politico-religious content […]
Genome-wide association for newbies
It looks like Genomes Unzipped has their own Mortimer Adler, with an excellent posting, How to read a genome-wide association study. For those outside the biz I suspect that #4, replication, is going to be the easiest. In the early 2000s a biologist who’d been in the business for a while cautioned about reading too […]
Social and individual behavior genetics
I believe it was Bryan Caplan who introduced me to the analogy of a child’s personality being like a rubber band; parents, in particular adoptive parents, can twist and pull a child in particular directions so long as the child is under their direction, but once the child leaves the home the rubber band “snaps […]
More Jews, fewer markers
At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a […]
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Brain Size Associated With Longevity in Mammals. Doesn’t necessarily entail causation in one particular direction.
A Model for Transgenerational Imprinting Variation in Complex Traits. Easy to conceive of how these sorts of scientific models could be leveraged in public policy discussions.
The Evolutionary Case For Monogamy? Ctd One issue with eliding the distinction between the is and […]
Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe
A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
In Defense of Difference. If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn’t the article written in Eyak? I find the paeans to linguistic and cultural diversity tiresome and knee-jerk. In 1820 there was a relatively wide range of diversity of views in regards to slavery. No longer today. Today the diversity in attitudes toward legal […]
“The Inheritors”
I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it […]
The girls are all right, they accept human evolution
One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of […]
Genomes Unzipped
If you haven’t, checked out the new weblog Genomes Unzipped. Familiar names & faces. The first posts are already must-reads, Testing for traces of Neanderthal in your own genome, and Personal genomics: the importance of sequencing.
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Old Males Rule the Roost Even as Sex Drive Fades. Seems like older roosters, whose sperm are more likely to carry deleterious mutations, can still be more reproductively fit because they can expend capital earned through their life history of social dominance. This is the revenge of the vehicle against the replicator.
Personal genomics: the importance […]
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]
Genomic liftoff
The firm GenomeQuest has a blog, and on that blog they have a post, Implications of exponential growth of global whole genome sequencing capacity. In that post there are some bullet points with numbers. Here they are:
* 2001-2009: A Human Genome
* 2010: 1,000 Genomes – Learning the Ropes
* 2011: 50,000 Genomes – Clinical Flirtation
* 2012: […]
Do liberals and conservatives know what they are?
Matthew Yglesias says:
I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out by […]