Diplomacy among the aliens
One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity […]
How Lost Should Have Ended
So I’ve never watched an episode of Lost. And I probably never will as people keep saying that the finale made following all those seasons kind of pointless. But could someone interpret the following video? I don’t get what’s so amusi…
Sometimes it just tastes good Felix
The more you know, the better it tastes:
People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world….
I agree that the “story” or our […]
The Human Edge (on NPR)
NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered).
As a constructive criticism, I wonder if […]
Authenticity and the Fermi paradox
I know that the simplest explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we’re the first intelligent technological life form in the universe. But thinking about Paul Bloom’s thesis that a sense of “authenticity” is necessary for pleasure made me wonder a bit more about the possibility that once intelligent life forms get to the point […]
7/5/2010 Open Thread
I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which […]
Who are you….
Edmund Yong has rebooted the “Who are you?” meme. I’ll quote him:
So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Noting rejection rates for journals across disciplines (from 1967). A review of an old paper which shows that the natural sciences have higher acceptance rates of papers than softer fields. How does this align with the finding that softer fields have more “positive” results? I think part of the issue is that in more ideological […]
British multiculturalism in action
Family of ‘Harry Potter’ actress charged with threatening to kill her over boyfriend:
The strict Muslim father and brother of “Harry Potter” actress Afshan Azad have been charged with threatening to kill her because she has a boyfriend.
Azad, 22, fled the suburban English home she shared with her father, Abdul, 54, mother, Nilofar, and three brothers […]
This time it’s different
I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good 4th for those who live in the States.
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast? I’m not surprised that John Hawks has serious reservations about the population history of the model in the paper I reviewed below.
Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society. I don’t mind the normatively directed focus on […]
Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high
I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude:
Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced […]
More markers, or more populations?
Here’s a letter to The American Journal of Human Genetics worth reading, Genetic Landscape of Eurasia and “Admixture” in Uyghurs:
…In the papers…by Xu and Jin, the genetic structure of Uyghurs was described by 8150 ancestry-informative markers (AIMs). These markers estimated the admixture rate of the Uyghur population to be around 50% East Asian ancestry by […]
Very recent altitude adaptation in Tibet
Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that […]
Hamilton’s Rule vs. Increasing returns to cooperation
If you have even a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will probably have heard of Hamilton’s Rule, a simple formal representation of the logic whereby a gene which favors altruism may spread through a population: rB > C, where r = coefficient of relatedness on the gene in question, B = benefit to those […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Psychological Research Conducted in ‘WEIRD’ Nations May Not Apply to Global Populations. This is the standard objection to psychological studies in terms of the representativeness of their samples; middle class university students. But more broadly they’re Western middle class university students.
The grandmother factor: Why do only humans and whales live long past menopause? Interestingly […]
Porn and moral panic
Social conservative blogger Rod Dreher points me to this interview of a Left-wing sociologist on the malevolent influence of pornography on modern relationships. She has a book out, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Her conclusion:
To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand […]
Nazis in space
Really interesting trailer for a movie which is premised on a “secret history” where a group of Nazis flee to the far side of the moon at the end of World War II, and are returning imminently in the near future from their exile.
Wired has the back story of how this group of film […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
North America’s First Peoples More Genetically Diverse Than Thought, Mitochondrial Genome Analysis Reveals. The paper is free to all. Remember that this is just mtDNA, the maternal lineage. This area seems a bit confused now. The standard simple model, which is barely even a ’stylized fact’ at this point, is that a group of […]