Reason has a long interview with the head of a libertarian Islamic think tank-Minaret of Freedom. He has some interesting opinions, though he repeats the old canard that the West would never have had any knowledge of Aristotle without the Muslims, neglecting the influx of Greek scholars into Italy in the mid-15th century with the fall of Byzantium.

This is an FAQ entry to address complaints about the posting material that shows up on GNXP. The title of the blog is GENE EXPRESSION, and its general mantra is to inject biological science, especially evolutionary theory, into public & social policy in as frank, direct and honest way possible (ergo, we break taboos, especially in areas like race). We like to hover around topics like evolutionary psychology, behavorial genetics & population genetics. Neverthelss, sometimes we post on things that aren’t quite related to these topics. Why?

This is a vanity site-and though we promote some general viewpoints (as espoused by almost everyone I give an account to)-the importance of biology, the primacy of reason & evidence above faith and political expedience, and so on, the major thrust is to encourage debate and enjoy ourselves. We don’t get paid or compensated for our time in any way aside from the enjoyment we take in exchanging ideas with others and establishing a forum for intelligent and often light-hearted conversation. The personal interest of bloggers will show up many times-for instance, I tend to post a lot on religion, history and the like, as well as having an unnatural fixation on what I feel are the distortions and political usages of the AIDS epidemic. Most of these posts fall under the category of “benign neglect” from most GNXP readers who humor my more esoteric inclinations.

On the other hands, posts that deal in “hotties” and the like tended to be objectionable and irritable to some readers, while political topics that are polarizing (church/state separation, immigration, israel, etc.) tend to turn-off many. But again, the site is in large part about the interests of the posters on GNXP. Most of us (not all, but most) are libertarianish males in our 20s or in nearby political & chronological neighborhoods, so our interest in the ladies and politics slips through-though we are centrally tied by our fascination with biology & our species. If you were given a forum to post your thoughts to a non-trivial number of individuals on a whim, you’d probably go “off message” on occasion now and then. To those who find it irritating, you can skip those entries, or leave the site, it’s up to you, after all, no one is forcing to click & browse. Most of the other entries you find interesting though in my opinion are not diminished by the lighter fare that we top off this site with.

New UN Human Development Index Rankings are out. Norwary is #1. Browse the site for more statistics that you’ll ever need….

This article in Beliefnet strikes me as rather strange. The author is a Muslim who is a medical doctor-not someone who has specialized knowledge in Islam-and his rendering of the faith (all the stuff about God’s forgiveness and ability to redeem humans, etc.) strikes me as very Protestant, in the American context, almost Evangelical. The author also asserts a place for Free Will in the Islamic conception of the God-human relationship, and yet my understanding is that the orthodox Islamic position rejects Free Will in favor of predestination. I’m not going to snipe about how the author is not schooled in the religion of his profession, many lay Presbyterians do not delve deeply into the denial of Free Will that serves as a point of separation for their Calvinist tradition from that of many other Protestants, nor do many Lutherans contemplate much over the muddle that is their doctrine on this issue. Rather, most American Protestants, even the Evangelicals, as well as Catholics and to some extent Jews, have become participants in a vague form of theism that rejects excessive formulation of doctrine and rigorous scripture study in favor of emotional devotion and personal redefinition of “what it means to be Fill-in-the-blank.” The Protestantization of American Islam is surely a good thing, a move away from Islam’s current standing as a cult-sect that is shifted far from the American mainstream and to some extent religiously at odds with it, to one denomination among many that partakes of the standard public pieties without excessive self-reflection on the axioms of the faith.

Related note: See this ParaPundit article on the various attempts to bring the Koran into the umbrella of textual analysis that the Bible has been subjected to since the 19th century. Note that modernist criticism of the Bible lead to the emergence of Fundamentalism in the early 20th century in the form of pamphlets like The Five Fundamentals. Unfortunately most of the scholars that work in this new field have to go under pseudonyms because of the nature of their endeavour. And just like the investigation into the Bible, the inquiry seems to be driven by German scholars….

Update 2: Zack comments (a lot).

Update 3: Bill Allison weights in.

There are many discussions on this site about a variety of phenotypes. Most of these phenotypes are “quantitative traits.” There seems to be a common conflation in the minds of many about how these traits work, and an attempt to apply the simpler mendelian genetics that applies to discrete traits (a small number of expressions of the trait, for instance, blue, green or brown eyes, etc.). Here is a short & simple primer on Quantitative Traits and another on Mendelian Genetics. Of course, Mendelian genetics is the bedrock from which quantitative traits, or continuous traits (height, IQ, etc.), emerge, but one must use different methods to analyze these traits because they are polygenic (multiple genes influence their expression) & often environmentally sensitive (the environment has a strong influence on their expression). The normal distribution, regression to the mean and narrow-sense heritability are all terms associated with quantitative traits [1] (though note that since many of these terms, for instance, the first two, come out of the world of statistics, they are often found outside of genetics).

[1] To illustrate the differences between discrete and continuous traits, compare height & eye color. Imagine trying to graph the distribution of blue, brown and mixed color eyes, since there are only three points, it is very discrete. On the other hand, height is a continuous trait, and displays the common “Bell Curve” distribution. Regression to the mean occurs with height because of environment, but obviously the same does not occur with eye color, as there is a deterministic relationship genotype and phenotype (in other words, the color of one’s eyes is determined solely by genetics).

Natural way to reduce cholesterol over at Future Pundit. Pretty weird wild stuff (there is a HBD angle that Randall throws in)….

Posted by razib at 04:34 PM

Dienekes has a prety provocative post on attractiveness (everyone has an opinion on this topic….).

I’ve gotten two recent emails forwarding me this old Slate piece by Nick Lemann, When Asian-Americans become the “new Jews,” what happens to the Jews?, so I decided to link it…. (flavor of the month I suppose-thanks Ikram & zizka)

The headline shouts Date limit set on first Americans, as in no earlier than 18,000 years ago according to genetic evidence. But read more closely and note the qualifications….

Are senses a zero-sum game? The Economist implies it in this article that indicates that the focus on vision diminished the primate, and especially human, sense of smell. I’ve copied the full article below….

Note: Read The Emperor of Scent for an alternative account of the physiology of smell….

MORE COLOUR, LESS ODOUR
JULY 24TH 2003

Gaining colour vision, it seems, cost people much of their sense of
smell

THERE is a theory that the human sense of smell began to atrophy when
people learned to cook. Since cooking neutralised the worst toxins in
food, it became less important to be able to sniff out evil-smelling
ingredients. But at the International Congress of Genetics, held
earlier this month in Melbourne, Australia, a group of researchers
presented evidence that it was actually the evolution of colour vision
that caused creeping desensitisation to odours.

People detect smells when particular molecules lock on to receptor
proteins embedded in the lining of the nose. The interaction between a
molecule and a receptor triggers a pulse of electrical activity that is
transmitted to the brain.

Most odoriferous molecules activate more than one type of receptor. The
brain recognises an odour by the pattern of receptors activated. Humans
have about 1,000 different sorts of odour receptor (OR), so the number
of patterns that can be generated and recognised is impressive. Even
so, the range and subtlety of the human sense of smell is poor compared
with that of other mammals, and it has been found over the past few
years that this poverty is a reflection of genetics. The genes that
encode ORs form the largest of the mammalian gene families. Yet in
humans 60% of them are actually so-called pseudo-genes. In other words
they have been rendered inactive by mutations.

To find out if humans are unusual among primates in having lost such a
high proportion of their ORs, a team of researchers led by Yoav Gilad
of the Weizmann Institute, in Israel, picked 50 human OR genes at
random. The team then found their counterparts in several species of
primate, and also in the mouse, and compared the ratio of pseudogenes
with intact, functional genes across the species.

In the mouse, around 20% turned out to be pseudogenes, whereas in
chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans the level was closer to 30%.
Old-world monkeys had lost more genes than new-world monkeys, which in
turn had lost substantially more than the mouse. And humans were way
out in front with a massive 60% erosion of ORs. According to Dr Gilad,
humans have accumulated disruptive mutations in OR genes four times
faster than any of the other species tested.

Moreover, the distinction between new world and old world was so clear
that, as Dr Gilad says, “It’s almost as if we can map the beginning of
the accelerated rate of accumulating OR pseudogenes from their
divergence.” But there was an anomaly. When the researchers plotted
their findings on a graph, they found that the howler monkey, a
new-world species, fell in with its old-world cousins.

Why would this sudden increase in OR loss have occurred both in the
old-world and in one lineage of new-world primates? The researchers
were struck by the fact that howler monkeys, alone among new-world
species, share with old-world primates the capacity for full colour, or
“trichromatic” vision.

Trichromatic vision involves three pigments, called opsins, that are
sensitive to different wavelengths of light. In humans and their
old-world relatives the medium- and long-wave opsins are controlled by
separate genes on the X chromosome. But in most new-world monkeys there
is only one opsin gene on the X chromosome.

Confusingly, this gene can exist in two forms, which produce opsins
sensitive to different wavelengths. So trichromacy can occur in these
animals. But it can only happen in females, who have two X chromosomes,
one inherited from each parent. If these carry different forms of the
gene, a female’s eyes will be equipped with all three pigments. Males,
who have only one X chromosome, always lack a third pigment. So do
those females whose X chromosomes carry identical opsin genes.

The researchers believe that the emergence of separate opsin genes on
the X chromosome–and hence full colour vision–is probably connected
with the shrinkage of the OR family. The better you can see, the less
you need to smell. Since senses are costly to maintain, natural
selection will eliminate redundant ones. Most mammals communicate by
scent. Old-world primates, though, are big on visual communication,
with coloured faces and (in the case of females) coloured sexual
swellings. And people have gone a step further, creating a range of
colourful signals with the clothes they wear. Whether the additional
communication provided by language is another such selective pressure
remains to be seen.