…so what does equal causation?

A long article in The New York Times Magazine comes out the same week as a Pew Global Attitudes survey which suggests that British Muslims are by and large nuts. The interesting point is that continental European Muslims are less nuts than British Muslims. Too bad American Muslims weren’t included in this survey, as my […]

Ruminations on the relationship between religion and evolution at the Conservatives Against Intelligent Design website.

Aspm specifically maintains symmetric proliferative divisions of neuroepithelial cells: …Our results demonstrate that Aspm is crucial for maintaining a cleavage plane orientation that allows symmetric, proliferative divisions of NE cells during brain development. These data provide a cell biological explanation of the primary microcephaly observed in humans with mutations in ASPM, which also has implications […]

The Trivers-Willard Hypothesis was proposed a generation ago, and there has been some empirical support for it. Now, Anna at Sepia Mutiny pointed me to this story who goes toward suggesting that different nutritional regimes can effect sex ratios. How would this work? Well, some assumptions…. 1) Among mammals the conception rate of male zygotes […]

Steve Sailer has been on a rampage about the Donme recently. There are two overall lessons that the Donme can teach us. 1) The truths of human psychology. The Donme make the Millerites seem as credulous as Pyrrhonian skeptics. To say the Donme illustrate the depth of human credulity and irrationalism is trivial, but, that […]

Adam K. Webb is the author of Beyond the Global Culture War and a lecturer at Harvard College. His specialization is world political thought, liberalism and antiliberalisms. Below are 10 questions…. Update: Adam K. Webb responds to criticisms and questions on the message board. 1) Dr. Webb, I have read your book, Beyond the Global […]

I really want to celebrate my main man Shaq Diesel’s fourth championship, but I’m not sure that I feel right about it. Like everyone else, my first thought upon the whistle at the close of Game 5 was, “Who touched him?” See here for Sports Guy’s take on the mind-boggling fact that a 2-guard could […]

Darth Quixote recently pointed out (below, June 15) that Francis Galton’s celebrated book Hereditary Genius has recently been reprinted in a cheap paperback edition. This welcome news prompted me to check, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, what other books by Galton are currently in print. I was pleased to find that most of them are, though […]

Bloggers Half Sigma and Inductivist are having ongoing fun with the General Social Survey data set: ethnic, gender, and religious comparisons galore! Half Sigma looks at the relationship between the GSS mini-IQ test and religious belief, and finds what we already knew. Labels: IQ

John Derbyshire reviews Before the Dawn. Something is rotten in science when National Review publishes a piece about a book which deals in human evolution that is more positive than what Nature produces. Of course, Derb likes the book, while the physical anthropologists who reviewed Before the Dawn didn’t, but, the important point is that […]

Right on the heels of Razib’s ten questions for David Haig comes this (free) paper proposing an extreme imprinted brain theory of autism. The theory is based off the fact that paternally and maternally inherited alleles are expressed in different parts of the brain. Given a species where the father contributes less parental investment than […]

David Haig is the editor of Genomic Imprinting and Kinship. You may find many of his publications on his website. Below are 10 questions…. 1) Reviewing your work on genomic imprinting I detect some frustration with those who suggest that monandrous mating systems imply symmetrical expression of “madumnal” and “padumnal” (for readers, inherited from mother […]

I imagine regular readers of GNXP are pretty familiar with Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE): if a population is in HWE and we have a two allele locus with allele frequencies p and q, then the frequencies of the two homozygote genotypes and the heterozygote genotype are p*p, q*q, and 2*p*q, respectively. To maintain HWE over time, […]

Jerry Coyne gives his tribute to The Selfish Gene.

John Derbyshire, the firestarter extraordinaire of National Review is at it again. This time, it’s a pretty conventional rerun of the good ol’ genetics vs. environment parenting cagematch. What is less conventional is the candidness of the Derb’s opponent: Jonah Goldberg. Derbyshire states: To take your last point first: Are you suggesting that if I […]

As most of you know I’m involved in the Donors Choose program over at Science Blogs to raise some $benjamins$ for various public school projects. Here is the tally so far: Pharyngula $4257.80 Good Math, Bad Math $878.23 stranger fruit $663.19 A Blog Around The Clock $582.52 Terra Sigillata $579.45 Afarensis $578.91 Sed Sic Sic […]

I just discovered a news service called Brightsurf that collects science press releases. At the same time, I was irritated to discover that my RSS feeds for Cell and Neuron don’t update immediately when the new issues come out. So the new Neuron has been out for 4 days, and I was in the dark. […]

I take a guilty pleasure in reading the work of creationists and intelligent design proponents. I can’t really get worked up over them, even if I try – I just find it a relaxing pastime. Perverted, I know. (Make no mistake, I use Darwinism as one of my litmus tests for reasonableness, but I can’t […]

Shelley Batts has some interesting commnets about the new finding which suggests that blacks and women have better hearing than whites and men, respectively. Shelley goes on to support the idea that melanin might have a protective effect on hair cells because of physiological factors by drawing from her own research. It seems that there […]