Month: May 2012
-
Thanks for the memories
I’m not big into music, being of the aesthetically retarded set, but as I age memory becomes more important, and that is strongly colored by music. The 80s anthems of the Beastie Boys were part of the cultural firmament for me, but at that stage …
-
The great pruning, and the great synthesis
Sahul 10,000 years ago John Hawks has a very long rumination on the story of blonde Melanesians which came out last week. If I can read between the lines I think some of the implications dovetail with John’s thesis in his 2007 paper on adaptive …
-
Reification is alright by me!
Long time readers know that I’m generally OK with reification as long as we don’t take it too seriously. And we do that all the time. An “object” is really only an “object” in a human-sense. Reduced down to particle…
-
It all started with talk.origins (and Usenet)
Chatting with Dan MacArthur on twitter about the old days of Usenet, and arguing with Creationists in the days of yore (MacArthur actually flipped a Creationist!). Here’s a toast to the innocence of that bygone age around the turn-of-the-century&…
-
Finding fake roots
I haven’t watched much of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots series. It seems like Gates has kind of created a mini-empire in genealogical series on PBS. More power to him, but it hit diminishing returns for me a long time ago. But …
-
Genetics and genomics projects galore!
Thought I would pass these on. A graduate student at Rice is trying to raise some funds for research, Genopolitics: Your Genes Affect How You Vote!. The methodology is a twin study: To test this, I’ll track how genes affect attitudes during the 2…
-
Every tribune a Rick Santorum!
After the power of Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt made itself felt, and current domination of Iraq by Shia political parties, and the likely strength of Islamists in Libya, the media finally has become more cautious about pushing any narrative which ma…
-
Bell Beakers and R1b
Over at Dienekes blog he has a post up about the extraction of R1b from a male who lived in Germany 4-5,000 in the past. This is important because R1b is one of the two most common male lineages (on the Y chromosome, passed from father to son) in Euro…
-
Richard Dawkins accepts the usefulness of race
There have been a variety of responses to my column in The Crux on race. To be fair, because the audience for The Crux does not consist of genome nerds I engaged in some first approximations which some readers have taken objection to. For example, the …
-
Case closed: blonde Melanesians understood
As a small child perusing old physical anthropology books I would occasionally stumble upon images of people of Oceanian stock with light hair color. I would wonder: is this a biological or cultural feature? In other words, were people bleaching their …
-
Intelligent squid are our brothers & sisters too!
Nature has a Peopling the planet issue out that is worth reading. Lots of the features are free to the public, but Chris Stringer’s comment is not. Though there is some science in the comment, a lot of it is about normative concerns. Not what is,…
-
Unz Historical Research Competition
For your consideration: As a means of publicizing the vast quantity of high-quality content material uniquely available on its recently released website, UNZ.org is announcing a historical research competition. A First Prize of $10,000 and several …
-
The “Shaggy assertion” – just pretend you’re right
As most long time readers know I generally screen to at least a cursory level comments by people who have not posted before. Except for purposes of entertainment only I won’t publish Creationist comments. Naturally some comments are offensive, bu…
-
The two audiences of a science weblog
When I first started blogging in 2002 the aim, as much as there was one, was to cultivate a particular following. But almost immediately Randall Parker noticed that traffic to his weblogs were driven not just by conventional blog readers who became …
-
The oracle of personal genomics
The Awl had a rather unoriginal piece up recently, Everything I Didn’t Learn From Taking A Personal Genome Test (this is part of a genre which will probably crest in the next few years, before widespread genotyping becomes common, demystifying t…