Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution
Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…
On Christmas
A few years ago I stopped saying “Happy Holidays” as my default and switched to “Merry Christmas.” The main issue for me is that I didn’t want to get hung up on a name. As someone who doesn’t accept that Jesus Christ was the Son of God I don’t celebrate the season for that particular […]
Merry Xmas
& a happy New Year.
The old old time religion
Ross Douthat, Into The Mystic:But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to chu…
The diversity of the east
Just a weird random thought. In the early 20th century the Ainu of Japan were considered by many physical anthropologists a branch of the white race. This fit in nicely with the historical fantasy of the period which often featured “Lost Races,” with a…
Transhuman Goodness
Most of the readers of this weblog probably have as much use for the Singularity as John Derbyshire, but for those of you who dig Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, you might check out Transhuman Goodness. The author, Roko Mijic, is so normal he could alm…
Why are Mormons the American success story?
I was skimming through a book on Scandinavian migration to Utah the other day, these Scandinavians being converts to Mormonism. The author noted that while most Scandinavian Americans settled in areas where farming was relatively easy, these converts w…
Selection & African Americans
I already posted on the new paper on African American Genetics. I noticed that Frank Sweet says:It is interesting that the 18 percent mean of Euro DNA markers in A-As has been holding steady for about 8 years now, having replaced the prior estimate of …
The Trouble With Forgetting Your Own History
The Trouble With Standing Athwart History:
But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South. At […]
NPR has a science blog
Cosmos and Culture.
Reminder on comments, enter a handle
Please remember to enter a name when you put in a comment. Can be fake and such. Just something distinctive. I’m deleting comments from “Guests.”
Canada & North American theocracy
In the comments Europeans often point out that nations we Americans consider very secular, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, actually provide state subsidy to religious schools. Part of the issue here is that Americans have a caricature o…
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
Crime way down. Who exactly knows stuff?
Despite recession, crime keeps falling:In times of recession, property crimes, in particular, are expected to rise.They haven’t.Overall, property crimes fell by 6.1 percent, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected b…
How many Senators don’t have a university degree?
Only one out of 100! If you don’t know, this is the one.
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Coincidence or adaptation?
Different Evolutionary Histories of the Coagulation Factor VII Gene in Human Populations?:Immoderate blood clotting constitutes a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in modern industrialised societies, but is believed to have conferred a survival ad…
Cultures of constraint; Islam, India and Marxism
Pew has a new report, Global Restrictions on Religion (HT JohnPI). It illustrates rather clearly some general trends which I’ve been mulling over for several years looking at cross-cultural data. Here’s a 2-dimensional chart which plots the 50 most pop…
Wikipedia Article on Group Differences in IQ
As penance for my sins, I have been involved in a lengthy mediation process at Wikipedia concerning the Race and Intelligence article. Check the links and the history for examples of how the (controversial) sausages are made.As a result of this process…