GNXP commenter Mencius has a blog. As you might expect, more think than link! Labels: Blog

The new Showtime version of This American Life has a segment featuring Todd Sacktor and Andre Fenton. They published a remarkable paper (discussed on gnxp) last year showing that specific inhibition of PKM Zeta (a consitutively active version of protein kinase C) can erase memories. This is all in rats of course. So if you […]

Final Update: Victory Day! In response to Shelley’s request I’ve removed the text of the original email. A fellow ScienceBlogger has been threatened with legal action for reproduction of figures. Obviously we post figures here on this weblog pretty frequently. It isn’t to screw over the companies doing the publishing from making profits, we just […]

Heredity has a summary of a study on the genetics of gene expression differences between European and Asian populations (which I summarized here). The opening lines are a striking glimpse into the academic world: It has often been observed that people are different. Indeed, some observers have gone further to suggest that this diversity exists […]

Check out these two posts on the extrasolar planet. I remember reading as a kid a short Poul Anderson essay on “how to design a habitable planet” (for a science fiction story). Labels: science

Of late I have been leaving my laptop behind and taking my books to coffee shops to get my reading done. The reason is simple, I have a compulsive tendency to look up data on references made within the text of any book. For example, if there is an offhand reference to the Dual Monarchy […]

When we talk about genetic variation between populations, most of the time we’re referring to SNPs or other “simple” polymorphisms, mostly because that’s what we have data on. Detailed population genetics studies of copy number variants are just starting to appear; this paper is one of them. It’s an anlysis of the frequency of a […]

A new paper in Evolution, THE LOCUS OF EVOLUTION: EVO DEVO AND THE GENETICS OF ADAPTATION. An important tenet of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo devo”) is that adaptive mutations affecting morphology are more likely to occur in the cis-regulatory regions than in the protein-coding regions of genes…Neither the theoretical arguments nor the data from nature, […]

I have a long post on my other blog about the reality that in I believe religion must be analyzed at different levels of organization. On the one hand, religious beliefs must be “fit” in the context of what representations our minds can accept, find plausible and memorable. But higher up the chain of organization […]

I have said many times that phrases like “moderate Muslim” must be normed to the distribution of attitudes amongst Muslims. To be in the moderate/median central region of the distribution of Islamic beliefs is not the same as being in the moderate/median central region of the distribution of Christian beliefs. I have made it pretty […]

An AEI event, Darwinism & Conservatism, May 3rd in Washington DC. John Derbyshire will be there. Labels: Blog

Speaking of human brain evolution, PLoS Genetics gives us this, “Conservation of Regional Gene Expression in Mouse and Human Brain”: Here we compare gene expression profiles of human motor cortex, caudate nucleus, and cerebellum to one another and identify genes that are more highly expressed in one region relative to another. We separately perform identical […]

For anyone around Bloomington, there’s a symposium Human Brain Evolving, this Friday and Saturday. You can see the abstracts online. Looks like Bruce Lahn will be there. If anyone wants to send me a “report” after attending just use the contact drop down to the right and I might post it. Labels: Evolution, Genetics

PNAS has a paper titled Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, which notes that a majority of humans now live in cities. I know that historically cities were a population sink (and only a small minority ever did live in cities), but, I have to wonder what evolutionary implications the normativeness […]

To all those with some familiarity with psycholinguistics, what do you think about The New Yorker by John Colapinto, The puzzling language of an Amazon tribe? What are the best commentaries on this thesis? My interest has been piqued, but I’d like to know more (here’s an article on the tribe in question, and check […]

We previously reported that a measure of school achievement built from national test scores has a nearly perfect correlation with national IQ (at least in the range of scores tested). Subsequently, Lynn et al. (in press) published a very similar analysis: This paper examines the relationship of the national IQs reported by Lynn & Vanhanen […]

Recently I stumbled upon this story, Speeding HIV’s Deadly Spread: Multiple, Concurrent Partners Drive Disease in Southern Africa, via Radio Open Source. The important point is that one of the major variables in the spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa is the nature of sexual networks (it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine that social […]

Doing dissections is boring. Learning about international politics while doing dissections is less boring. Hence, I recommend checking about the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs podcast. Here’s a list of more educational podcasts from Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, including a conference on Neural Correlates of Consciousness. On a less nerdy tip, these mixes […]

John Hawks has a long interesting post on the possible phylogeographic impact of Ice Ages and Interglacials upon Neandertal demographics. I believe John had earlier posited that worldwide variations in long effective population size might generate the differences in genetic diversity across modern human populations. Labels: Evolution, Genetics

If I were to add 5 cognitive science journals and 5 history journals to my RSS/reading list, which ones would they be? The only cognitive science journal I’m familiar with is Cognition. Labels: Blog