Two thousand years of philosophy on the margin
A little less than two years ago I began to read Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. It’s a big book, on the order of ~1000 pages. But that’s not the reason I’m just now finishing it. The book is divided by chronologically and thematically. I read about the ancients in about a […]
People believe in evolution, just not for humans
The term “liberal Creationism” refers to the fact that on the cultural Left there is a strong belief in the concept of evolution on the whole, but in the case of human beings biological evolutionary processes are seen as marginal in comparison to culture. In other words, natural selection and adaptation explain the diversity around […]
Heraclius was a great man, but a dirty old man
The Emperor Heraclius is someone who more people should know. He saved the Byzantine Empire before it truly became the Byzantine Empire in a mature form. When he took power the Persians were on the march, and ruled vast swaths of the Asian and African possessions of the East Roman Empire. Theodore of Tarsus, one […]
Genetics books for the masses!
Since I’ve become professionally immersed in genetics I haven’t read many books on the topics. I read papers. And I do genetics. But back in the day I did enjoy a good book. The standard recommendation would be to read Matt Ridley’s Genome. It’s a bit dated now (it was published around when the Human […]
Why do percentage estimates of “ancestry” vary so much?
When looking at the results in Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA my “East Asian” percentage is: – 19% – 13% – 6% What’s going on here? In science we often make a distinction between precision and accuracy. Precision is how much your results vary when you re-run an experiment or measurement. Basically, can […]
When journalists get out of their depth on genetic genealogy
For some reason The New York Times tasked Gina Kolata to cover genetic genealogy and its societal ramifications, With a Simple DNA Test, Family Histories Are Rewritten. The problem here is that to my knowledge Kolata doesn’t cover this as part of her beat, and so isn’t well equipped to write an accurate and in […]
The Ghosts of the European Pleistocene
2011’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams was a strange film. I went to watch it in the theaters mostly to see the paintings of Pleistocene peoples in an immersive manner, but the director and narrator, Werner Herzog, used the film as an instrument to forward his thesis that humanity as we understand it emerged during this […]
Open Thread, 08/27/2017
I showed my daughter a photo of my maternal grandfather yesterday. He was holding me in his lap. It’s probably about 1981, so he would have been about 85 years old then. I was his first grandchild, as he had a family late in life. He saw a lot of changes in his life. Born […]
The population genetic structure of Northeast Africa
The major frontier in the understanding of human population genetic structure in the next five years is going to be Africa. There are several reasons for this. The ‘standard model’ of late has been that a group of humans left eastern Africa ~50,000 years ago, and swept across the world in one go. Though Africa […]
The less intelligent and uneducated really don’t tolerate unpopular views
When looking at the General Social Survey one of the most striking things is how much more the more educated and intelligent are in terms of accepting unpopular views. Since 2008 and the SPKMSLM variable has asked about anti-American hatred preached by Muslim clerics in the United States: … consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches […]
Most liberals and smart people want racists to be allowed to speak
Over the past year or so there have been many worries that liberals are backing off from their support for free speech. Even mainstream figures such as Howard Dean have started to chant the mantra “hate speech is not free speech”. And then you have op-eds from professors such as When ‘free speech’ becomes a […]
Pain 100% hot sauce; 1000% pain!
While I was up in Missouri chasing the eclipse I met up with a long-time reader of this weblog. He was kind enough to gift me with several hot sauces. So I took the Pain 100% Hot Sauce into the office, and the verdict is that this is a very spicy sauce indeed (grown men […]
Give us your huddled scientists, yearning to innovate free
In regards to immigration policy I generally favor a shift toward the Anglo-Canadian solution: a points based system. From what I am to understand the immigration reforms proposed by Tom Cotton are dead on arrival in the Senate, but I think they are a step in the right direction. Representative democratic nation-states can adapt and […]
Android vs. iPhone
I’m thinking of updating the Samsung S8. But I’m getting some pressure at work to wait for an iPhone 8. In general I’m skeptical of the whole Apple ecosystem, but it isn’t as if good Android phones are cheap. Any thoughts from readers who have switched back and forth?
Arab Islamic science was not Arab Islamic
Someone stupid who follows me on Twitter said “It seems @razibkhan forgot the Arabs gave us algebra and many other scientific/mathematical advances.” The history of algebra is actually somewhat more antique than the Arabs, as outlined in Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra. But the origin of the word is Arabic. From […]
Bringing back street kids
Just spent some time with a friend. He lives in a safe neighborhood, so I asked if there were any kids for his kids (they’re young) to play with. Apparently not really. In this country today we have problems with racial and wealth inequality. There are huge debates about how we address these issues. And […]
Totality, 2017
We saw totality in Independence, Missouri. It was a pretty long car trip with the kids, all of whom are under school age (though just barely in the case of the eldest). We had a big fright because there was a massive thunderstorm in the morning…but it cleared out for a few hours. And that […]
Open Thread, 08/20/27
I’ve been off the map for a bit because I’m eclipse chasing. #TotalityOrBust as they say. The whole family has been converging on zone of totality, and now we’re there. Obviously I’m excited. There are lots of things going on in the world. One thing though that I’m beginning to think is that people would […]
Blogging on an island as opposed to an archipelago
On a Twitter conversation it came up yesterday that a lot of people know each other from blogging in the 2000s. It was a different world back then, and the pond was much smaller. To my knowledge Derek Lowe is the only continuously active science blogger who has been at this longer than me (there […]