Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 04/01/2019

The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. An interesting book, especially paired with The Rise of Western Christendom.

A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota. This paper is the basis for the article in The New Yorker, The Day the Dinosaurs Died. This paper and the piece in The New Yorker has gotten serious blowback on Twitter.

A likelihood method for estimating present-day human contamination in ancient DNA samples using low-depth haploid chromosome data.

A three-sample test for introgression.

This week on The Insight I’m going to talk to Cosimo Posth about the genetics of Ice Age Europe. I also recorded a podcast on evolutionary psychology, and will be recording one on the “missing heritability.”

Recovery of trait heritability from whole genome sequence data.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in the case of asserted mtDNA biparental inheritance.

I will be devoting some time to improving the subscription option….

7 thoughts on “Open Thread, 04/01/2019

  1. From the story: “Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space.”

    Life in the modern academy.

  2. Razib, I’m currently reading the Shagan book. I’ve read a great deal of the literature on the Reformation, the emergence of early modern thought, and the Enlightenment but this book upends just about everything previously written. The heart of his argument is that “the Reformation did not inaugurate new habits of mind that led to the Enlightenment, but rather the Enlightenment emerged in reaction against habits of mind that began with the Reformation.”

  3. Just read the put-down in Nature’s April 10 2019 editorial “Why we can’t get over the death of the dinosaurs”:
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01096-8

    This sentence:
    “Viewed in this broader context, the North Dakota find is just one of
    many pieces of evidence showing the power of the Chicxulub impact.”
    made me laugh out aloud. Those palaentologists must indeed be an envious bunch of people!

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