The long-awaited “acceleration paper” from John Hawks and others has finally been published in PNAS. The claim is that humans are experiencing a burst of adaptive evolution, and the basic argument is deceptively simple: the recent increase in human population size has led, through an increased number of beneficial new mutations and an increased probability […]

Reading The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, and I was struck by passages extracted from The Book of Lord Shang, a work which supposedly encapsulates the thought of the Legalist philosopher & statesmen Shang Yang. In short, Shang Yang extols the virtues of the Malthusian Trap in perpetuating a stable & well ordered state! […]

A few recent evolution/genetics-related posts worth reading: 1. Jonathan Eisen on the fascinating story of the metabolic symbiosis going on in the cells of the glassy-winged sharpshooter. 2. Evolgen on the evolution of sexually antagonistic genes. 3. Popgen Ramblings on the genetics of the sex ratio. Labels: Evolution, Genetics

From Science: Genetically Determined Differences in Learning from Errors: The role of dopamine in monitoring negative action outcomes and feedback-based learning was tested in a neuroimaging study in humans grouped according to the dopamine D2 receptor gene polymorphism DRD2-TAQ-IA. In a probabilistic learning task, A1-allele carriers with reduced dopamine D2 receptor densities learned to avoid […]

Language tensions mount in bilingual Finland: “Finland tries to teach everyone a lesson about morality but minorities in China are treated better,” blasted Juhan Janhunen, an expert on Asian languages, comparing one of the most egalitarian countries in the world to the Communist regime. Rebuttal? Heikki Tala, the head of the Association for Finnish Culture […]

James R. Flynn is a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, as well as Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University. His best-known paper, “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations,” (Psych. Bulletin, 1987), documented what Herrnstein and Murray later called the “Flynn Effect”: A long term increase in […]

In economics, a rule of thumb is that an academic article that largely agrees with Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve must start off by attacking The Bell Curve–maybe it’s just a way to get past peer review, maybe it’s a way of keeping your status in the academic community, maybe it’s because they didn’t […]

A few days ago (see a few posts down) I reported on recent education statistics in Britain, which, as usual, purport to show that educational achievement has risen. Not surprisingly, some comments were sceptical about the reality of such claims. Their scepticism seems to be vindicated by the latest international comparisons from an OECD study, […]

The videos are up.

Jonathan Eisen points out that the Personal Genome Project is looking for volunteers. If you read this website, you’re probably well-enough informed about genetics to know the risks and benefits of having your genome sequence publicly available (ie. both are pretty minimal at this point). Apparently the initial goal is to sequence the “exome” (ie. […]