I’ve spent most of my life in relatively forested areas, and took forestry courses in secondary school (which is why I can still distinguish doug fir from spruce by looking at the needles). In my youth I even had friends who were loggers during the summer. But I haven’t taken a deep scientific interest in forests for a long time. So I decided to look at the Google public data set to get a sense of long term trends.

As you can see, there hasn’t been much of an aggregate decline in forests. How about the nations with a lot of forest cover?

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Glenn Beck Wrong on Darwin: How Evolution Affirms the Oneness of Humankind. I can see where the individual is coming from, but I think more people should just come out say that evolution is just science, and has no deeper moral implications besides those which humans impute to it. No one cares about the ethical implications of physics, and fundamentally biology is no different. I realize that since it’s closer to the phenomenon of humanity than physics it won’t play out that way, and philosophers and theologians can do with it what they will. But really, if you look at a specific question like cross-racial mating among humans in 1910 and 2010 you learn a lot more about human values of scientists than about the science of human evolution and genetics.

Did Ancient Coffee Houses Lay the Groundwork for Modern Consumerism? ‘Coffee house discourse often challenged the authority of the state and religion and led to changes in the society. “Simultaneously, a new Ottoman consumer, resisting the prescriptions of the state and religion, actively constructing self ethics, and taking part in the formation of the coffeehouse culture, was forming as well.’ OK.

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Jonah Lehrer has a post up on why it might be that top-level athletes seem to come from smaller urban areas rather than larger ones. The possible reason is interesting. But I was reminded of the “10,000 hour rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. You know, how Tiger Woods’ dad “turned him” into a world class athlete from scratch? Even setting aside the elementary question of necessary and sufficient conditions, what about all those kids who invest thousands of hours and don’t “make it” big? I once knew a girl from a large Mormon family, and noticed offhand that she was far shorter than any of her siblings. I inquired as to this fact, wondering if perhaps she was adopted. Her explanation for her small stature (~2 standard deviations below the female norm) was that she was involved in competitive gymnastics up to early adolescence, and that stunted her growth.

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I began blogging in April 2002 (I once had a graduate student approach me and tell me that she was a big fan of my blog back in high school!). Derek Lowe is the only science blogger I can think of off the top of my head who was around before I was, is still around, and has been around continuously across all those years. The mildly unbalanced Dave Appell left the scene to clear his head for a few years. In those early days a term like ‘science blogger’ would have seemed kind of quaint and strange, but I do recall being approached by others to rebut the naive Creationism of some parts of the blogosphere. It was early days, and the big division was between the older cohort of techbloggers who had emerged organically before 9/11, and the political blogosphere which rapidly crystallized in the months after that event.

But in any case, Chad Orzel’s asking straight up, who’s the oldest science blogger? My money is on Derek, but I’m no Bora Zivkovic, so I could be wrong.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Mike the Mad Biologist, whose bailiwick is the domain of the small, asks in the comments:

I don’t mean to bring up a tangential point to the post, but why does the field of human genetics use PCA to visualize relationships? When I see plots like those shown here that have a ‘geometric pattern’ to them (the sharp right angles; another common pattern is a Y-shape), that tells me that there are lots of samples with zeros for many of the Y-variables (i.e., alleles that are unique to certain populations). Thus, the spatial arrangement of the points is largely an artifact of an inappropriate method: how does one calculate a correlation matrix when many of things one is correlating have values of zero?

If one really was keen on using PCA, one could calculate a pairwise distance matrix and then use that instead of the correlation matrix (Principal Coordinates Analysis).

Since I know some human geneticists do read this weblog, I thought it was worth throwing the question out there.

Last time we discussed the discovery of “evolutionary strata” on the human X chromosome – there are distinct blocks on the X that stopped recombining with their Y-homologs at different times causing the Y chromosome’s genes to appear scrambled in order. How can this happen?

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I’ve decided to add a “user generated content” component to this weblog. The links submitted by users will now be at the top left. If you read this weblog, you know the stuff that readers (you) might find of interest. The main issue is getting to where you can submit the links.  First, initially I’ve limited the submission ability to those who have registered an account (that’s ~90 people right now). Because of the way the cookies work in WordPress you can see the user submit option only if you’re in the /wp directory, so http://www.gnxp.com/wp/. I’ve changed the link on the header so that it sends you to this directory. You’re also in the directory when viewing an individual post (I know that I can fix this by changing default WordPress settings, but it seems to break the permlinks to individual entries). I’m especially interested in papers, data sources, etc. I will be deleting crap or inappropriate content as well. The image to the right shows where the user submit form will be, underneath the authors list. But remember you’ll only see it if 1) you’re logged in, 2) you’re in /wp/.

Also, I’ve created a twitter account just for this weblog. My personal twitter account has only my content, but this new one will have content from everyone who posts on this weblog (nothing there currently since I set it up after the last post). Finally, I added a retweet widget. You can retweet with the current sharing widget at the bottom of posts, but  I figure this is more convenient and obvious for most people.

Note: Links are not going to be associated with a user, so they’re anonymous submissions. If particular users are purposely submitted crap I may have to revise that policy!

Addendum: I get a fair number of emails with links. I don’t have the time to respond to all the submissions, or even blog about them, so I figured this would be a useful outlet.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Why is Israel So Poor? Israel is a nation with a high level of human capital and moderate wealth. The author points out that Israel is a “low trust” society. It is not often remembered that Israel is arguably the most ethnically diverse developed society in the world, because “Jews” get lumped together into one category by outsiders. Additionally, I think Israel’s geopolitical situation is probably an economic drain. Long term uncertainty is probably does not encourage investment. Why not put your capital to use somewhere safer?

Genes May Overpower Diet in Battle of the Bulge. The title is kind of deceptive, the article is much more nuanced, and puts the focus on gene-environment interaction. Precisely, not everyone has the same effect from the same change in diet. This is why I’ve started to get annoyed by my “paleo fundamentalist” friends (I lean paleo myself, but I’m not a purist). Humans vary, including in their response to diets, and what may work for most may not work for all.

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Last week I took an intellectual road trip back nearly a century and explored the historical context and scientific logic by which R. A. Fisher definitively fused Mendelian genetics with quantitative evolutionary biology. In the process he helped birth the field of population genetics. While the genetics which we today are more familiar with begins at the biophysical substrate, the DNA molecule, and the phenomena which emerge from its concrete structure, population genetics starts with the abstract concept of the gene. This abstraction and its variants are construed as algebraic quantities from which one can infer a host of dynamics. These are the processes which are the foundations of evolutionary change, as population genetics flows into evolutionary genetics, and ultimately the raw material of natural history.

Fisher’s accomplishments were a function of both his abilities and his passions. He was a mathematical prodigy, with the ability to distill natural processes down to highly general abstractions. And like many English gentlemen of his age he had a passion for evolutionary biology, and cherished his copy of The Origin Of Species. His ultimate aim was to transform evolutionary biology into a discipline with the same analytical rigor as physical chemistry. But he wasn’t the only major figure on the scene in his era.

Sewall Wright was an American physiological geneticist with a background in animal breeding. While Fisher was a mathematician who sought to apply his skills to evolutionary biology, Wright was a biologist who taught himself mathematics to further his own understanding of evolutionary processes. The two were in many ways the Yin and the Yang of early population genetics, with their conflicts and disagreements being termed the Wright-Fisher controversies, and the common formal framework which they converged upon becoming the ubiquitous Wright-Fisher model. Wright’s life spanned 99 years, from 1889 to 1988. His biography, both personal and scientific, are explored in rich detail in Will Provine’s Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. Because of the length and breadth of his influence in evolution it’s worth reading just to get a sense of how Wright shaped the Modern Neo-Darwinian Synthesis behind the scenes. Provine seems to indicate that Wright was the primary theoretical influence on Theodosius Dobzhansky,* who mentored a whole generation of evolutionary biologists to come (e.g., Dobzhansky → Lewontin → Coyne).

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File this one under the list of “infrequently-asked questions.” This is an issue I’ve discussed extensively over at TGGP’s blog. Basically, here is the puzzle: Jews are among the most wealthy groups in America, with a median income close to $100,000 a year.

Naively, you might expect Israel to be about as wealthy. Isreal is, after all, a country filled with Jews. Yet Israel is far poorer than a hypothetical “Jewish-America,” and is also poorer than America in general. Israel’s wealth is a little difficult to parcel out due to the presence of a large Arab minority. Yet even if you assign an income of non-Jews of 0, you arrive at an Israeli per capita GDP of $36,000. By comparison, both Ireland and America are in excess of $45,000 per capita. Corrections for Purchase Price Parity correct for some, but not all, of this difference.

This is part of a general phenomenon. As Tino has calculated, virtually all hyphenated-Americans do better in America than their home country.

With respect to European countries, this makes sense. As has been argued elsewhere, America/Europe income differences are due in no small part to different taxation policies. Lower marginal tax rates do have long-term effects on standards of living, even if they don’t “pay for themselves.”

Figuring out what’s going on in Israel is a bit trickier. This country looks more free-market than European standards. There are two crucial issues here:

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