There are few issues in Farewell to Alms that I’m still chewing on. One of them is Greg Clark’s dismissal of institutional and cultural barriers to development. In particular, Clark shows how practices such as usury, initially banned by the Church, were mainstreamed through work-arounds. I find this line of thought pretty persuasive, for example, […]

Well, not really. But here’s a feature about a small town in northeastern Argentina which has had several centuries of self-imposed endogamy, resulting in a sharp increase in the incidence of albinism. This sort of thing isn’t always a function of conscious custom or tradition, in Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy L.L. Cavalli-Sforza […]

The UK Office for National Statistics has just released its population projections for the next 25 years. The central projections are for UK population to rise to 65 million by 2016, and to 71 million by 2031. The ONS is careful to say that these are not forecasts, since the outcome will depend in part […]

Paul asked for recent comments. Look to the right. Just one note: that’s a Haloscan widget, I can’t fiddle around with the parameters or anything. Also, there are apparently Greasemonkey extensions which can give you a lot more control over Haloscan if you want. Just google it. Labels: Blog

I just read The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800, and the main thought I came away with was that the more intelligence and status are decoupled in a society, the greater the likelihood of revolution. I assume here that the wealthy bourgeois who were marginalized in the ancien regime […]

Are Some Men Predisposed To Pedophilia?: A difference in average height is a trait found in other illnesses with biological links. The average difference in height was two centimeters, which is similar to the shorter height associated with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s disease. Further research is necessary, but this finding re-enforces evidence that pedophilia has a […]

I’m trying to raise money for Donors Choose again this year. The yield has been a little lower this year than last, so if you are inclined check out the projects below the fold or click icon: Man-Monkeys: Genetic Technology in Literature During our studies of genetics, students expressed interest in some controversial applications of […]

Carl Zimmer interviews Craig Venter (video). They’re talking most genomics and creating life from “scratch.” Also, Esther Dyson talks about the personal genome. Labels: Genetics

Greg Mankiw on why he closed comments. What do people think of /.’s moderation system? I don’t comment there much, but I remember people would complain that unpopular views would be moded down too much. Of course, a forced registration would probably filter out the drive-by-tards who can’t be bothered…. Labels: Blog

Some readers may recall something of a discussion on these pages between myself and Larry Moran regarding the relative importance of natural selection and drift in phenotypic evolution. My refrain was “it’s an empirical question”, so I’ll point to two recent reviews that touch on the growing body of data that can be used to […]

A great deal of confused and unreliable reporting is flying around concerning James Watson’s comments on race and intelligence. In the interests of public information, here is an article from today’s London Independent which is signed by Watson and therefore, unless he disavows it, may be taken as accurately reflecting his current views. Added: And […]

Evolgen is publishing original research on blogs. Definitely more than a 15 minute rant, really worth checking out and appreciationg. He’s got 6 posts up so far. Labels: Genetics

TC Boyle, perhaps my favorite modern short story writer, has a decent little piece in this week’s New Yorker. The subject: a child who can’t feel pain, performs tortuous tricks for money, and end up killing himself by jumping off a building. It was kind of fun to recognize that this wasn’t just something he […]

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a report out (available here) entitled, “Synthetic Genomics: Options for Governance.” I haven’t read the whole thing, but it looks to be a consideration of the options for minimizing risks associated with widespread use of this technology. They are concerned first and foremost with malicious uses followed […]

In Genome-wide detection and characterization of positive selection in human populations there’s an interesting part which intrigues me: The EDAR polymorphism is notable because it is highly differentiated between the Asian and other continental populations…and also within Asian populations (in the top 1% of SNPs differentiated between the Japanese and Chinese HapMap samples). Genotyping of […]

There’s an article up about Samaritans. The community is small, down to 350, and traditionally endogamous. That’s a problem: To explain his decision, he points to his own family. When he was a young man, High Priest Elazar’s father decreed that he should marry his cousin. It was a mistake, he says now. Two of […]

Beyond Belief II, October 31st to November 2nd.

Nice little article in Nature. Here’s the conclusion: “This is a very delicate time, and a dangerous time, as people start to come up with things that the general public, or the media, or various groups might misinterpret,” Sabeti says. “I like the fact that, so far, the evidence we find for natural selection in […]

Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer: The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He […]

Jonathan Eisen points to a Newsweek article interviewing 10 high-profile scientists about the future of biology. I think it’s fair to presume that the title (the Einsteins of the 21st century) is a bit hyperbolic, but if you’re a genomics neophyte, you might glean something from it. I really only mention it because of Dr. […]