Most of you probably know about the “species problem.” The short of it is that even though the level of the species is probably the most justifiable one within the hierarchy of taxonomic systems (as opposed to say genus or order), it is not a cut & dried category. I tend to agree with evolgen […]

My history posts often leave me unsatisfied. I don’t know much about the topics I’m blogging about, but most readers know even less, and a substantial subset are pretty self-satisfied with their ignorance (and some are just stupid, so they have weak analytic capacities anyhow). The science posts are easier since being wrong or right […]

I, Cringely has a nice column today analogizing the social network fad with that over CB radios in the 1970s. I tend to agree. History is bound to repeat; observers of the rise & fall of MUDs in the early-mid 90s noted that the same trend in the buzz around Second Life (a buzz which […]

Last summer I read When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise And Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, and this week I finished The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, from the same author. In a strange twist the first book focuses on the Abbasid Caliphate, which […]

The usual suspects, recognizing Kosovo….

So says a review (thanks evolgen). I’ve read most of Origins of Genome Architecture and Mike Lynch doesn’t have a “two-handed economist” problem; but I think the style of presentation makes it clear that he’s not being even-handed or fair & balanced.

I’m almost done with Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. So I found this press release of interest: Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries – during the time of the Crusades –ceramic vessels reached Acre from: Mediterranean regions, the Levant, Europe, North Africa, and even China — reveals […]

Hsien-Hsien Lei has a post up, deCODE CEO Predicts Downswing in Personal Genomics Market. 1) In 1998 search was a dead business model, a “hook” to create a portal. 10 years on how are things looking? 2) Sometimes businesses are run badly. The market opportunity which the business is attempting to capitalize upon does not […]

Apropos of pathogens and collectivism, Heritability of cooperative behavior in the trust game (Open Access): Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans, little is known about the extent to which individual differences in cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this article, we report the results of two independently conceived and executed studies […]

One of the most fascinating questions in biology is how a single cell becomes an entire organism–that is, how an amalgamation of largely genetically identical cells manages to act as a complex of vastly different tissues and organs. It’s a simple question, but obviously not one with a simple answer, nor is there an experimental […]

Brett Favre is retiring. Unless they were playing against the Steelers I always rooted for the Packers because of him. Why? Montana and Marino were better quarterbacks over their whole career, though I only followed football during the tail of their playing years, but it seemed like Favre’s personality was more amenable to sympathy and […]

Despite my long-standing interest in Celts and Anglo-Saxons, it took me a long time to get round to reading Stephen Oppenheimer’s The origins of the British: a genetic detective story (2006). It is an alarmingly big book, and I had other stuff to do. When I finally read it, I found that appearances were deceptive. […]

My old cyber-friend, “Georg Kantor”, has a new English-language blog (his native language is Spanish): Social Equilibrium, which might be of interest to GNXP readers. In particular, check out his demographics tool, introduced on this post, “designed to produce transparent and easy population projections for non-professional users”. Labels: Demographics, Modeling

A cousin of mine in Bangladesh just had a baby. She’s 34, and this is her first and last child due to various issues with infertility. Obviously she is very happy to have a child, but I’m told she’s a bit disappointed with the sex; you see, it’s a boy. My cousin and her husband […]

Evolgen points me to a new blog, Computational Biology and Evolution. Only quibble, http://bioinf.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ isn’t a memorable domain…. Labels: Genetics

A comment on my recent post on Group Selection and the Wrinkly Spreader has drawn my attention to the work of S. A. West, A. S. Griffin and A. Gardner. In recent years this team and their various associates have done a great deal of theoretical and empirical work on kin selection, group selection, co-operation, […]

Razib mentioned this research before; the relevant paper has now been published: Hair morphology is one of the most differentiated traits among human populations. However, genetic backgrounds of hair morphological differences among populations have not been clarified yet. In addition, little is known about the evolutionary forces that have acted on hair morphology. To identify […]