There are nearly 500 complete responses to the survey from last week. Here’s a CSV file of the results. Below the fold are the frequencies as well as N’s. I might report some trends in the data, but a lot of it is predictable. People who only read ScienceBlogs GNXP are way more liberal than those who do not.

Full results below the fold.

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There are nearly 500 complete responses to the survey from last week. Here’s a CSV file of the results. Below the fold are the frequencies as well as N’s. I might report some trends in the data, but a lot of it is predictable. People who only read ScienceBlogs GNXP are way more liberal than those who do not.

Full results below the fold.

You can watch me talk to Greg Cochran about his book The 10,000 Year Explosion on bloggingheads.tv this weekend….

There’s something interesting about the front page of bloggingheads.tv right now.

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OK, it’s more just Greg talking. Here. The density of brown dudes on bloggingheads.tv is rather high this week.

The surnames of the criminal and the poor, of course. Greg Clark provides new evidence for the “survival of the richest” here (and he thanks Nick Wade for the idea). From the abstract:

[E]vidence from…surnames…again shows the takeover of English society by the economically successful between 1600 and 1851, and the disappearance of the criminal and the poor. A man’s economic success in pre-industrial England predicted a permanent increase of his surname frequency, and hence his gene frequency, by 1851.

Confession: I, for one, had no idea that Elvis was a surname.

Clark’s papers have familiarized economists with the basics of genetics. It seems to be paying off: At the American Economic Association meetings this year, there was a session on brain evolution in the very long run, another on genetics and microeconomic behavior, and a third GNXP-friendly session where Clark presented the above-quoted paper.

Haloscan is upgrading to JS-Kit. Until I update this post, you might want to not comment (I can’t approve comments right now, and don’t know whether it will be saved in the database).
Update: Looks like comments are back.

Matt Yglesias says:

There’s no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they’re called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness.

No surprise that Matt is being ahistorical, and relying on analysis of terminology, instead of relying on the facts (his background is in philosophy). As it happens, in the cartoon the Transformers are shown as humanoids on Cybertron, with their transformed state being different! In other words, the constant and essential aspect of Transformers was their humanoid, not their mechanical, form. Additionally naive human psychology does not generally attribute theory of mind to machines, but obviously Transformers were active agents.
Matt’s argument makes sense with Voltron. This was a mechanical entity whose humanoid form was entirely incidental and cosmetic, and the constituent lions were themselves mechanical objects under human control.

Polish Genetics & Anthropology points out that the Estonian Genetics Project is reporting:

The more than 25,000 blood samples collected already make it possible to conduct various background studies. For example, comparing the genetic data of Estonians with other European nations has revealed that Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and some Russians are genetically much more similar to Estonians than the Finns with whom Estonians share a similar language.

The genetic maps I post on now and then are real popular (invariably they are the ones that sites like reddit pick up), but the sample sizes aren’t that big. Often “France” means some patients in a study from Bordeaux and Paris. The goal with the Estonian Genetics Project is to collect 100,000 samples. As it is, there are only 1.25 million speakers of Estonian, so if the project is limited to ethnic Estonians we’re talking about ~10% of all Estonians. For most questions on historical-population size scales I doubt that there is any difference in power between a sample size of 100,000 and 1 million, assuming that it is modestly representative.

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Following up on this previous post on epigentics, I thought I’d point to a couple nice examples of using epigenetic information to obtain insight into basic biology.

The first is, I think it’s fair to say, a landmark paper identifying a set of over a thousand likely functional non-coding RNAs in mouse cell lines. The approach used here was epigenetic: the authors generated genome-wide maps of chromatin modifications known to mark promoters and transcribed regions, and screened out all the regions of the genome already known to be transcriptionally active. This left them with a set of putatively functional transcripts, which tended to be highly evolutionarily conserved (indicating function), and many of which they confirmed via other means to be novel long non-coding RNAs.

The second is a nice paper demonstrating that one of the same epigentic marks used above to identify transcribed regions is present, in humans, mice, and nemotodes, preferentially on exons (rather than on the entirety of the transcribed region). As this mark is present only in genes that are being transcribed, the authors conclude that it is placed in conjunction with transcription, and likely in conjunction with splicing. They speculate about the role that this mark could play in gene regulation, but in general, this paper raises many more interesting questions than can currently be answered.

I just got pointed to Confronting Evolution’s Racists Roots via my RSS. This is a common tactic. And it might work for unsophisticated people on the margins. Just like a tract like “Christianity’s racist past” would also sell. Or, “Socialism’s white supremacist heritage.” But intellectually it’s a rather low-brow tactic. The real question is: Is It True? The racism of European intellectuals and the racialist inferences made from evolutionary theory are of historical interest, but not of scientific ones. It isn’t as if a tract with the title “Jesus Christ, Semitic Supremacist,” would disabuse most Christians of the truth of their faith.
This really doesn’t matter except in a meta sense. Many Intelligent Design proponents want to recast their movement as something separate & distinct from the crass lowbrow methods of Young Earth Creationism. John West, who is flogging Darwin’s racism in the article (and has done so elsewhere) is a fellow at the Discovery Institute. Of course it doesn’t surprise me that they’re going this route, but it confirms.