I have read a quite a few commentaries around the web, and in the MSM, comparing Katrina to 9/11. One thing I haven’t seen commented on: On 9/11, the enemy was them, with Katrina, it is us. There is a world of difference between the two, even when the objective danger is comparable. Living in […]

There are reports that over in England they are going to be extracting and analyzing the DNA of great race horses. My first thought is that I am skeptical that Gulf Arabs have not been funding this line of research in secret for years. And of course, being American, I wonder when someone will get […]

From Steve: Big genetic news coming this week — This is just a teaser about a paper that will be out by Friday. A certain evolutionary theorist has been chewing my ear off about it for weeks. I’ll try to get you all the details when it’s officially released, although it’s usually hard to scoop […]

The New York Times has an interesting article that addresses the theory of mind, this part was very interesting to me: …Earlier this year, Brian Hare of Harvard, Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and their colleagues showed that ordinary domestic dogs understand what is meant when a human […]

John has an enormous blog paper up titled Selection, nuclear genetic variation, and mtDNA. It’s 37 K of text (I cut and pasted into notepad).

Yesterday I posted on the work of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd on cultural evolution. In short, they take George Price’s rather expansive ideas on selection as a transdisciplinary force rather seriously, and extend them to create the field of evolutionary cultural anthropology. As David has noted before much of their argument hinges upon group […]

Miksi te suomalaiset tykätte meistä näin paljon??? Reply Englanniksi please.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a little over a year, which the obligations of the physical world have kept me from, but Razib’s recent series on the Hui has finally given me an excuse. Many of the Muslim immigrants to China were Central Asian mercenaries who settled in China rather […]

Wen-Hsiung Li, author of Molecular Evolution (from 1997, so somewhat dated, but I still like it), has a new paper out titled Expression divergence between duplicate genes. Related: Expression and sequence.

My post below where I refer to the distinction between evoked and epidemiological aspects of culture prompted me to do some reading on the topic of group selection because of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s work on evolutionary anthropology where they appeal to it in the context of humans (as hinted at by David). Though […]

There has been widespread debate about the reasons behind the rapid breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. One factor, however, is consistently overlooked in this discussion: IQ. Katrina did not merely devastate New Orleans physically – she also most likely caused a catastrophic drop in average population IQ of more […]

I have talked a fair amount about the MHC loci on this blog. The MHC are essential cogs in our adaptive immune system. Part of the reason is the relevance to organ transplantation (self vs. non-self recognition), but another big picture evolutionary factor is that the MHC loci are extremely polymorphmic. When you calculate coalescence, […]

Dienekes has extensive commentary on a paper that seems to end by leaning toward a predominant Out-of-Africa replacement model for the emergence of modern humans and the transition between Neandertals and our species in Europe. Their method was to use simulations where they tweaked the parameters of the period of transition between the two groups […]

From an anti-ID editorial in The Guardian comes a very good list of true controversies within evolution. I was a little shocked to see mention of the controversies relating to race. The “Cambrian Explosion“ Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low […]

Flower choice copying in bumblebees in The Royal Society: Biology Letters. Here is a popular article on the topic. Related: The wisdom of Seinfeld.

Salon has a long piece up about “alternative archaeology” (ie; Atlantis nuts) and its intersection with Creationism. It is basically an elaboration of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend principle. Nevertheless, there is on point that I think deserves to be noted, the various skeptics of traditional archeology seem to be a reflection of “evoked culture” in conjunction with a […]

It seems that South Africa is becoming a hotbed for inventors. Perhaps the changing social mileau has something to do with the innovative inventions springing forth from the minds of the assaulted. Case #1: To combat the rise of car-jackings, Charles Fourie invented a flame-thrower to roast the car-jackers. Case #2: To combat an epidemic […]

Contributions of Heterosis and Epistasis to Hybrid Fitness in The American Naturalist1: …Hybrid survival surpassed that of inbred lines and was equal to or greater than outbred lines’ survival, and more F1 than parental plants reproduced. Reductions in hybrid fitness due to Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities) (epistasis among divergent genetic elements) were expressed as differences in vegetative […]