I made a GNXP Frappr site.

A while ago I posted on the old GNXP Politics board on the subject of nuclear waste. Among other things I said: the trump card of the objectors is that plutonium will still be dangerous for millennia… Extraordinary (and costly) measures are therefore needed to ensure that it cannot in any conceivable circumstances leak out, […]

From time to time I look through my old posts to see if any of them are still worth reading. The last update was in April 2005 here. Since then I haven’t posted very often, but a few items may still be of interest. [Added: I find that for some reason the more recent archive […]

By now all of you have probably heard about the Niall of the Nine Hostages study in The American Journal of Human Genetics. The short of it is that it seems a Genghis Khan dynamic has been operative in Ireland, descendents of this mighty king have spread their seed far and wide. Now, I take […]

A refreshingly honest discussion about the impact of distributional gender differences on science in PLoS Biology Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were […]

A new world record was set last Saturday, when Leyan Lo unscrambled a Rubik’s Cube in 11.13 seconds. Yahoo!News brings us the details. Here are the scoring details on this competition, and if you’d like to see videos of Cubes being solved you can find them on this site. Most startling, mainly to the anti-Summers […]

I’ve made a few comments about inclusive fitness/kin selection that have expressed caution recently, but this paper in Molecular Ecology points in the other direction and reaffirms the power of W.D. Hamilton’s theoretical framework. But one must remember that some of the review literature suggests that kin selection might have been a sufficient condition for […]

Excuse a moment of blog navel gazing, but a few minutes ago I was curious how high the “10 questions” I’ve been asking have made it up on google. I was surprised, 10 for John Derbyshire, 9 for Armand Leroi, 8 for Dan Sperber, and 3 for Warren Treadgold. That is, all interviews are on […]

Lisa Loeb has a new show, # 1 single, on the E! network. Anyway, she was at the Angelika Film Center on a date with some dude having coffee, and I wandered into the shot while checking out some cupcakes at the counter. Later, she walked toward the screens and cameras were pointed straight at […]

Over the past several days I have been asked by more than a few people as to where they could find raw statistics and information to give them an idea of what is happening in Iraq. As a result, I have decided to take just a few minutes and write up this short post describing […]

The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event: Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can […]

As I have previously written about the family connections of the Darwins, I was interested to see (via Steve) that Skandar Keynes, one of the child stars of that Narnia film, is a great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and a great-great-nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes. Skandar’s ancestry can be traced as follows. His father […]

An announcement, just wanted to tell people that I’ll be blogging a lot over at Science Blogs, sponsored by Seed Magazine, soon. There is now an iteration of gnxp that will be hosted over there. After a few last minute technical details, there will be two streams of gnxp on the web for you to […]

Fellow language evolution enthusiasts may be interested in the latest review by Simon Fisher and Gary Marcus in Nature Reviews Genetics now available in gnxpforum (PDF). Carl Zimmer’s earlier discussion of Pinker vs. Chomsky, here and here, is also related and worthwhile.

I’m sure by now everyone has heard about the fluorescent green pigs produced by Taiwanese scientists. It’s a relatively simple technique, all one has to do is: transfect a plasmid containing the GFP and (maybe) am antibiotic resistance selector into very early embryonic stem cells, select using the antibiotic1 and the GFP, (That’s the easy […]

John Derbyshire has a small exchange over at NR relating to ID. Might be of interest to readers.

Ken Miller is author of Finding Darwin’s God. My questions are in bold. 1) Looking at the opinions of the more sophisticated proponents of the new Creationism (i.e., Intelligent Design), like William Dembski, they clearly aren’t the Biblical Fundamentalists of the days of yore. Ultimately it seems that what they have in their sights is […]

A while ago I posted about a gossip column ‘blind item’ which asked: “which Oscar-winning Hollywood superstar’s doctor claims she was born a hermaphrodite, with undescended testes where her ovaries should have been? (and no, it’s not Jamie Lee Curtis)”. It appears now to be officially confirmed that Angelina Jolie is pregnant, so unless there […]

Interesting paper in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology caught my attention today, here is the abstract: The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) constitutes a widely used metaphor to investigate problems related to the evolution of cooperation…Recently, compelling evidence has been accumulated on the strong heterogeneous nature of the network of contacts between individuals in populations. Here we […]

Victor Davis Hanson has a very good “Letter to the Europeans” up which captures the feelings that many on the right have towards The Continent. As he says in the piece, we cons don’t hate Europe, we are frustrated at their suicidal course. And this is not a racial thing, but a frustration over watching […]