Singularity Institute Research Challenge
Ends today. Last Chance to Contribute to 2010 Singularity Research Challenge!:
Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions […]
Graphs lack mass appeal?
Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State sales are a factor of 2^100 lower than they should’ve been:
In his forthcoming book, Albert-László Barabási writes, “There is a theorem in publishing that each graph halves a book’s audience.” If only someone had told me this two years ago!
More seriously, this tongue-in-cheek theorem, if true, defines an upsetting […]
The Hobbits Six Years On
The Guardian has a long piece about the hobbits of Flores, and how they may have split from from the lineage which led to H. sapiens further back in time than had previously been assumed. In other words, where the hobbits had been theorized to have been a local adaptation of H. erectus, now the […]
Methodists are still Baptists who can read
Income by Religions:
Good has a rather unwieldy graph showing religion by income. No surprises, with Jews first and Hindus second in percent with six figure incomes, and Jehovah’s Witnesses and black Protestant churches last. It would be interesting to know whether there are still affluence distinctions mainline white Protestants, such as Episcopalian v. Methodist.
On a […]
Why What Darwin Got Wrong is wrong
Misunderstanding Darwin: Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong:
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people’s business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a […]
Gene Expression moves to WP
For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run this website on Blogger. So I’ve switched over to WP. So please update your RSS feeds:
http://www.gnxp.com/wp/feed
Update: If you’re subscribed via the Feedburner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpression, you don’t need to change anything. Just changed its feed address
Historical contingencies of civilizational ideologies
Reading An Introduction to Confucianism, which is not the typical historically linear treatment (i.e., Confucius → Han dynasty State Confucianism → Song dynasty Neo-Confucianism, etc.), and is also more comprehensive than most introductions (it’s over 350 pages). In case, the author notes that before the Han dynasty Confucianism was simply one of many contesting schools. […]
Armenian genetics
Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, l…
Armenian genetics
Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, like Greek and Albanian, is a singleton in the Indo-European family tree. Additionally, […]
10 questions for Peter Turchin
Peter Turchin has appointments in ecology & evolution and mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of five books, three of which, Historical Dynamics, Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, outline tests of models derived f…
Christopher Beckwith against modernism
A few months ago I reviewed Empire’s of the Silk. I focused on the historical scholarship, but Lorenzo Warby puts the spotlight on the more normatively charge jeremiad against “modernism” interlaced throughout the book.
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10 questions for Peter Turchin
Peter Turchin has appointments in ecology & evolution and mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of five books, three of which, Historical Dynamics, Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, outline tests of models derived from the new field of cliodynamics. I have reviewed Historical Dynamics and War Peace and […]
Small genetic effects do not preclude drug development
Daniel MacArthur points me to a Newsweek article on the bankruptcy of Decode Genetics. The author describes (one of) Decode’s problems like this:The genetics of illness turned out to be more complex than researchers expected. At deCODE and elsewhere, t…
Social cycles
An addendum to my comments on the posts on natalism. As I suggest below I think as a whole it is appropriate to model humans before 1800 as a conventional animal subject to Malthusian constraints. When a new crop (e.g., Champa rice, the potato) was introduced there would be a population increase, but that increase […]
You need to know history to talk about history
The New York Times Magazine has a long piece, How Christian Were the Founders?, which outlines the efforts of school board members of fundamentalist inclinations to shift the narrative about the founding of the American republic. In short, these activists would like children to understand that the United States was founded as a Christian nation […]
Homo erectus and EDAR?
In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has the following parenthetical aside about population variation in morphology in H. erectus:(H. erectus from China…had shovel-shaped incisor teeth not found in other populations) This stopped me dead in my track…
Low IQ correlated with cardiovascular disease?
Second Only to Cigarette Smoking in Large Population Study:While lower intelligence scores — as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ — have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared …
Jersey Shore nickname
What’s your Jersey Shore nickname? I like “The Prediction” for myself.
Books & guidance
Read More Books!:If you really want to understand any issue more complex than Brad and Angelina’s marital status, there’s really no substitute for a book. Not instead of blogs and newspapers and Twitter, but in addition to them. So: read more books! Th…
Gene Expression Survey
That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I’ll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don’t need to a…