{"id":100815,"date":"2017-11-26T17:59:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T01:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/?p=190196"},"modified":"2017-11-26T17:59:31","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T01:59:31","slug":"open-thread-11-26-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2017\/11\/26\/open-thread-11-26-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread, 11\/26\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0878933085\/geneexpressio-20\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-190197\" src=\"http:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/principlesofpopgen-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"255\" \/><\/a>A few days ago there was a Twitter thing about top five books that have influenced you. It&#8217;s hard for me to name five, but I put three books down for three different reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0878933085\/geneexpressio-20\">Principles of Population Genetics<\/a>, because it gives you a model for how to analyze and understand evolutionary processes. There are other books out there besides\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0878933085\/geneexpressio-20\">Principles of Population Genetics<\/a>. But if you buy this book you don&#8217;t need to buy another (at SMBE this year I confused Andy Clark with Mike Lynch for a second when introducing myself. #awkward)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0192807285\/geneexpressio-20\">The Fall of Rome<\/a>. A lot of historical writing can be tendentious. I&#8217;ve also noticed an unfortunate tendency of historians dropping into contemporary arguments and pretty much lying through omission or elision to support their political side (it usually goes &#8220;actually, I&#8217;m a specialist in this topic and my side is 100% correct because of obscure-stuff where I&#8217;m shading the facts&#8221;).\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0192807285\/geneexpressio-20\">The Fall of Rome<\/a>\u00a0illustrates the solidity that an archaeological and materialist take can give the field. This sort of materialism isn&#8217;t the final word, but it needs to be the start of the conversation.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0060928832\/geneexpressio-20\">From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life<\/a>. To know things is important in and of itself. My own personal experience is that the returns to knowing things in a particular domain or area do not exhibit a linear return. Rather, it exhibits a logistic curve. Initially, it&#8217;s hard to make sense of anything\u00a0from the facts, but at some point comprehension and insight increase rapidly, until you reach the plateau of diminishing marginal returns.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t, I recommend you subscribe to <a href=\"http:\/\/wondery.com\/wondery\/shows\/tidesofhistory\/\">Patrick Wyman&#8217;s Tides of History podcast<\/a>. I pretty much wait now for every new episode.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2017\/11\/26\/food-lobby-consumer-tastes-washington-190528\">The big Washington food fight<\/a>. GMO labeling is coming.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b006qykl\/episodes\/player\">In Our Time<\/a> has two very good episodes recently I recommend on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b09cvx7b\">Picts<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b006qykl\/episodes\/player\">Thebes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0395877431\/geneexpressio-20\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-190198\" src=\"http:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/demonicmales.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"278\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/11\/25\/opinion\/sunday\/harassment-men-libido-masculinity.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur\">The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido<\/a>. When I read the title I assumed that the piece was somehow informed by evolutionary psychology. No. It&#8217;s larded with Freudianism.<\/p>\n<p>Evolutionary psychology has taken its hits over the last 15 years, and rightly so when it&#8217;s basically re-warmed social psychology, but the stuff informed by primatology <em>is<\/em> 21st century science (you can agree to disagree, but there&#8217;s something to grab onto there). Freudianism sometimes gets a bad rap even though its origins were not nearly as woolly as we might think, but cutting-edge early 20th century psychology is really beyond its sell-by date today.<\/p>\n<p>This is the stuff that makes me pessimistic that the &#8220;replication crisis&#8221; is going to have any impact on the media or the public. For example, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/inspired-life\/wp\/2017\/11\/22\/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions\/\">At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions<\/a>. The author of the op-ed is a major person in the center of the controversy around replication. In particular, &#8220;ego depletion.&#8221; This op-ed is based on studies with p-values of 0.034 and such.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.biorxiv.org\/content\/early\/2017\/11\/23\/223081\">Detecting past and ongoing natural selection among ethnically Tibetan women at high altitude in Nepal<\/a>. It&#8217;s polygenic and we don&#8217;t understand the architecture of the trait that well it seems. Basically, early selection sweeps detected some major loci, but it&#8217;s not the whole story. Reminds me of pigmentation.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2017\/11\/20\/1714590114\">An endogenous retroviral envelope syncytin and its cognate receptor identified in the viviparous placental Mabuya lizard<\/a>. This is pretty cool, the same process seems to be occurring over and over.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.biorxiv.org\/content\/early\/2017\/11\/21\/222729.1\">Rethinking phylogenetic comparative methods<\/a>. I think this is will be an impactful paper once it gets published.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, this looks interesting: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biorxiv.org\/content\/early\/2017\/11\/24\/211771\">The role of chromosomal inversions in speciation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/razibkhan\/status\/934531987959894016\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-190199\" src=\"http:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/DPgf4ZUVoAEL1mf.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"223\" \/><\/a>I posted some Taylor Swift memes to Twitter as a joke. They seem quote popular, especially the ones related to string theory and evolution, though the one related to Arminian and orthodox Calvinist soteriology took off in a different sector of Twitter.<\/p>\n<p>The funny thing is several people were angry <b>because they thought I was putting down Taylor Swift.<\/b><\/p>\n<p><a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F11%2F26%2Fopen-thread-11-26-2017%2F&amp;linkname=Open%20Thread%2C%2011%2F26%2F2017\" title=\"Facebook\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F11%2F26%2Fopen-thread-11-26-2017%2F&amp;linkname=Open%20Thread%2C%2011%2F26%2F2017\" title=\"Twitter\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_google_plus\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/google_plus?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F11%2F26%2Fopen-thread-11-26-2017%2F&amp;linkname=Open%20Thread%2C%2011%2F26%2F2017\" title=\"Google+\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_dd addtoany_share_save\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F11%2F26%2Fopen-thread-11-26-2017%2F&amp;title=Open%20Thread%2C%2011%2F26%2F2017\" data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/2017\/11\/26\/open-thread-11-26-2017\/\" data-a2a-title=\"Open Thread, 11\/26\/2017\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few days ago there was a Twitter thing about top five books that have influenced you. It&rsquo;s hard for me to name five, but I put three books down for three different reasons: Principles of Population Genetics, because it gives you a model for how to analyze and understand evolutionary processes. There are other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[189],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100820,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100815\/revisions\/100820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}