Chris of Mixing Memory points me to Beyond Belief 2006, which is about “Science, Religion, Reason and Survival” (videos viewable online!) As Chris notes the list is heavily weighted toward scientists who don’t study religion and seem to be offering their own personal opinions. Ann Dryan seems to be aging gracefully.

A few items of interest from today’s British newspapers:

The lead story in the Sunday Telegraph reports that a majority of people in both England and Scotland want independence from each other. But I don’t think it will happen, because it is against the vested interests of politicians and bureaucrats.

Also in the Telegraph, an article on the future of the Jewish community in Britain.

In the Sunday Times, a sensible article by Simon Jenkins on drugs policy. Of course, he is not quite right to say that the end of alcohol prohibition put Al Capone out of business: apart from the detail of whether Capone had already been busted for tax evasion, the end of Prohibition just meant that the crime organisations it had created turned to other sources of income, notably from drugs. But the principle is sound: legal prohibition of widely popular activities such as drugs, prostitution, or gambling is the raison d’etre of organised crime.

Added: The lead story in The Observer is a report that Tony Blair intends to make a sort-of-apology – expressing ‘deep sorrow’ – for Britain’s involvement in the slave trade before abolishing it 200 years ago.

Enough with the apologies, already. Apart from the usual selectivity of such gestures – when are the French going to apologise for the Norman Conquest, I’d like to know – and the way they reinforce the tendency to victimology, the fundamental objection is to the idea of vicarious guilt for the actions of others. And I don’t want that creeping Jesus Blair apologising on my behalf, let alone my distant ancestors’.

Also in the Observer, Jasper Gerard has some nice comments on the difficulty of finding ‘moderate’ Muslim spokespersons:

Like a famous Belgian, a moderate Muslim is devilishly elusive… Every time we anoint some cove the ‘voice of moderation’ he turns out quietly to favour female genital mutilation or a spot of light bombing.

Gerard also has a comment on Kate Moss’s comedy turn for charity with Matt Lucas last week. But there seems to be a conflict of reports on the wording of Kate’s best line. Some say it was ‘I’ll do anything for a bag of Quavers’ (a popular snack), and others ‘I’m anybody’s for a bag of Quavers’. But Gerard has it as ‘I’ll give you a gob job for a bag of Quavers’. This has the ring of authenticity, but does anyone know the truth? Anyway, expect the sales of Quavers to rocket.

PS: in case anyone is wondering if I’ll ever write anything about genes again, I have a series of posts about Sewall Wright in gestation, but these things take time.

Below I made a reference to the heritability of religiosity. In a chat with Christer Chris that the heritability for religiosity was 0.5, and he was surprised at the result. I decided to double-check, and here is the latest paper:

Estimates of the degree of genetic and environmental influences on religiousness have varied widely. This variation may, in part, be due to age differences in the samples under study. To investigate the heritability of religiousness and possible age changes in this estimate, both current and retrospective religiousness were assessed by self-report in a sample of adult male twins (169 MZ pairs and 104 DZ pairs, mean age of 33 years). Retrospective reports of religiousness showed little correlation difference between MZ (r=.69) and DZ (r=.59) twins. Reports of current religiousness, however, did show larger MZ (r=.62) than DZ (r=.42) similarity. Biometric analysis of the two religiousness ratings revealed that genetic factors were significantly weaker (12% vs. 44%) and shared environmental factors were significantly stronger (56% vs. 18%) in adolescence compared to adulthood. Analysis of internal and external religiousness subscales of the total score revealed similar results. These findings support the hypothesis that the heritability of religiousness increases from adolescence to adulthood.

In Bouchard’s “twins raised apart” studies he found about a 0.5 heritability. In any case, remember what heritability is: The proportion of population level variance attributable to genetic variance. Why does environmental variance become so much less important once you leave adolescence? Take a guess….
Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Samuel 17:36 – Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath defied the armies of the living God.

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I’ve been trying to come up with some clever way of framing the latest RNAi work in a mythological context, but I’m afraid it isn’t lending itself all that well. You see, the family of final effector proteins for RNA-induced silencing are called Argonautes. Why did they name them Argonautes and then fall off on their Apollonisian naming scheme? Beats me, but they are really going haywire now. They named one of the argonaute proteins Caesar!

In this report from Yigit et al., they knocked out every Argonaute family member in C. elegans, the lovely translucent worm genetic model system. You’d think there would be a tie-in there. The preview about the report is titled “Knocking out the Argonautes,” but alas, the only knocking out I can discover involves Circe and the Odyssey cats. The worm has a rather different system for RNAi than we do. The focus of this paper was a whole class of Argonautes that worms have that there isn’t a human or even drosophila homologue for. They are called SAGOs (say-go) for Synthetic secondary-siRNA ArGOnautes.

One of the purposes of RNAi is to defend against viral infection by using chopped up viral genomes as templates for small RNAs to load into RNA chomping or sequestering machines. In worms, this system is referred to as the exo-RNAi system. In the model proposed by Yigit et al., Worms differ from many other organisms in that they carry out their defensive mission in two steps. In step one, a primary the viral dsRNA is chopped up to produce template a fewsmall RNAs from both strands. These are loaded into a Primary Argonaute-containing silencing complex. When this complex chops up its targets it also happens to trigger an production of new small RNAs based off of the sequence upstream of its target sequence in the viral RNA. These are the secondary siRNAs. In step 2, a Secondary Argonaute (SAGO) complex is loaded with these secondary siRNAs. The SAGOs don’t have the ability to cleave RNAs. They can only bind them and perhaps drag them to some RNA degradation center or other.

Things I learned from this paper and the associated preview include: You can predict whether an Argonaute protein will have RNA cleavage activity based on the conservation of three amino acid residues (two aspartic acids and a hisitidine); in an uncommon twist, humans actually have less of a protein class than other organisms, 8 AGOs as opposed to 27 in worms and 10 in mustard plants (flies have 5, so we are still superior to flies), ~50 in the Argonautika; multiple RNAi (endo- and exo-) pathways feed into the second (SAGO) step in the worm such that the availability of SAGOs can be a limiting factor, and increasing or decreasing the activity of one of the competing pathways can affect the efficiency of the other; worms have an endo-RNAi pathway that is somehow distinguishable from their miRNA pathway, though I’m not sure what the distinction is just yet. My understanding was that I could call endogenously produced small interfering RNAs microRNAs. From their model, it looks like the endo-RNAi pathway is involved in transcription-level silencing (i.e. heterochromatin formation). Probably endo-siRNAs don’t go through the stereotyped pri-, pre-, mature steps that miRNAs do.

Jason and the Argonauts is on in an hour on Turner Classic Movies. The only correspondence I can think of is maybe to refer to the primary Argonaute as Heracles, since he was only there for the first part of the adventure, after which he just hung out on an island cos he was all sad that the nymphs stole his boy-toy. I dunno if that’s in the movie or not. Something tells me no.

How has your post-T-day been if you are a citizen of the Greatest Nation in the World?^TM Wow, I woke up this morning to a flare up in the Ed vs. PZ battle here on SB and elsewhere. Bora has the most most thorough round up of links, which can be reduced to theistic-evolutionists-are-sell-outs vs. theistic-evolutionists-are-OK-by-me. In many ways I do probably agree with Bora’s perspective on this issue, there are a multiplicity of strategies, and different groups need to approach them from different angles. Of course, being a pragmatic libertarian conservative, I don’t feel that Creationism is necessarily a symptom of “Conservative Pathology.” I’ve already noted that the link between being an anti-evolutionist and on the Right are weak in Europe, and men like William Jennings Bryan were certainly not conservatives in their day. In regards to the “root causes” of Creationism I think there is a mix of innate psychology and historical contingency. I am averse to accepting a Dawkins-style model which reduces Creationism to a subset of the religion “problem.”
At the end of the day, this all a bunch of words. Yes, it can cause some temporary ill-feeling, but the fight goes on, and there is science to be done. On a personal level my own atheism has minimal affect on my relationships with Christians, like Christer Chris. Let a thousand flowers bloom, from PZ level anti-theism to Brayton style respect for theism to Ken Miller out & out theism.
PS: Though the nastiness is pretty regrettable, at the end of the day we’re all worm-food.
Zechariah 13:7 – Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the LORD of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.

Does Islam Forbid Befriending Non-Muslims?.

It is obvious that Jews patronize the Jews and Christians patronize the Christians, so why not Muslims patronize Muslims and support their own people. This verse is not telling us to be against Jews or Christians, but it is telling us that we should take care of our own people and we must support each other.

Num 31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

Via Kambiz I found this post which argues that the high-protein diet of the Mongols was important in allowing them to defeat their enemies, who were relatively nutritionally deficient. Perhaps. But history isn’t that simple, after all, if “more meat = more ass-kicking,” you wouldn’t have predicated that the grain-fed Roman soldiers would be able to cut a scythe through meat & milk gorging Celts and Germans, would you? How did those ancient Italians defeat the northerners? If you read about the suppression of the rebellion of Boudicca and how outnumbered Roman infantry formed a testudo simply turned into a Celtic meat grinder you’ll see that man can fight and win by bread and water alone!
Judges 9:45 And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.

Shelley Batts has a post, Whites-Only Scholarship as “Reverse Affirmative Action”. Shelley sayeth:

…In order to ensure that universities, and students, benefit from a diverse education, often pro-active techniques are utilized to recruit minorities.

When the race war comes all of us colored folk will be marked by our skin or our countenance as The Enemy. But, today the reality is that various People of Color have rather different interests in some areas, and that within each group there are schisms of interest due to class (e.g., what does the Indian doctor have to do with the Indian cabbie? Not very much let me tell you).

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A new paper in Nature, Global variation in copy number in the human genome, suggests that it isn’t just SNPs that matter in regards to human variation. Those of you who are “in the know” aren’t surprised, so this press release is a bit much. Along with a focus on gene regulation, this is a fascinating new area which expands our understanding of how we are how we are beyond the raw sequence. p-etr at my other blog has a lot more. RPM has a post scheduled on this topic, I saw a preview when he published it to make sure it looked right. The press is making a big deal out of this, so we’ll see where it goes….
Addendum: Why does gene copy number matter? The most obvious way is that more gene is proportional to more transcription which results in more translation which results in more final protein end product. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is not so good, and sometimes it doesn’t matter. Genetics and Health has much more. And here’s an article in The New Scientist and another in The TImes.
Exod 23:13 And in all things that I have said unto you be circumspect: and make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth.