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It's really frustrating when you can't find information via google, but, it just reminds you how shallow the the data mining of search engine crawlers can be. On this weblog people have mentioned blondeness among Australian Aboriginals multiple times, and ultimately we really haven't gotten anywhere (no one has brought up novel data) because no...
The Journal of Neuroscience dumped a collection of mini-reviews on us this week concerned with mRNA trafficking and dendritic protein synthesis. Most of them covered fairly familiar ground, but one struck me as containing some really novel and interesting perspectives. Schuman, Dynes, and Steward discussed the limitations of protein synthesis at synapses. For instance, there...
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is very busy around the nervous system affecting things like cell survival, synaptic transmission, immune responses, and plasticity. It's been discussed around here before in a number of contexts. New articles come out fairly frequently concerning the effects of the Val66Met polymorphism in human BDNF on risk for various psychiatric conditions...
Over a week ago I alluded to the mid-20th century debate between the Classical and Balance Schools of evolutionary genetics. I used this example specifically because I suspect many readers have an interest in evolutionary genetics and so would find the example extremely illustrative of my general point. But, in hindsight it was perhaps a...
Justin L. Barrett is the author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Below are his resposes to 10 questions.1) Most people tend to view religion as a set of rules, points of belief or a particular range of practices. Researchers who work from a cognitive prespective seem to take a broader and narrower view...
Every once in a while I realize something with my conscious mind that I've understood implicitly for a long time. Such a thing happened to me yesterday, while reading a post on Stalin, by Amritas. It is this: S = P + E Social Status equals Political Capital plus Economic Capital Now, if someone were...
I'm finally shutting down the old website, but I thought it might be nice to have some of these older posts to link to. Plus I'm moving to NYC and writing up a thing for my actual work, so not as much time for original writing for a month or so. This was my first...
Today's London Sunday Times (January 29) has an article in the Education section on new research which claims that British children's 'intelligence' has declined dramatically in the last 30 years. If the link works, the article is here. The research is by Profs. Adey and Shayer of King's College London. Adey claims, based on a...
The 10 questions for Adam K. Webb stimulated a lot of discussion. I asked Adam if he wanted to pass along a succinct summation of the overall body of his argument, and he agreed. You'll find it below the fold....[Character encoding as "Unicode" for best viewing] Adam K. Webb on Beyond the Global Culture War...
Uhh.. No time to sleep cos if ya sleep ya don't eat... Gotta hold heat just to make ends meet.. - T3I got to thinking about flies again, partially because Ron Davis came and gave a talk at our department and partially because I saw a couple papers in Nature showing sleep regulation is mediated...
From Melvin Konner's Unsettled - An Anthropology of the Jews:The passages highlighted by Konner express the peculiarities of the Jew in Han China, and is remiscient of the way the Muslims of China attempted to reconcile their practice and beliefs with the norms of their nation. Legalistic Monotheism + Confucian China = predictable verbal gymnastics....
Steve Sailer has been on a rampage about the Donme recently. There are two overall lessons that the Donme can teach us.1) The truths of human psychology. The Donme make the Millerites seem as credulous as Pyrrhonian skeptics. To say the Donme illustrate the depth of human credulity and irrationalism is trivial, but, that is...
A paper in Nature Genetics describes a mutation in a tomato gene that leads to fruits that don't ripen. This would be an important discovery in itself--the ripening of fruits is certainly an economically interesting trait--but a further twist makes it even more interesting. The twist: the mutation is actually an epimutation. That is, the...
A fascinating paper just came out in Science, SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans. Heather L. Norton is one of the authors listed, so she knew very well what she was talking about when she suggested that there was far more to skin color variation than MC1R. Here is the...
For a long time now I have been meaning to post my thoughts on what I see as overhyping the avian flu situation. Luckily, a reader of Instapundit beat me to it and summed up nicely a lot of my thoughts.This MD hit almost all of the doubts I had: much better (and more sanitary)...
Amartya Sen has an interesting piece in The New Republic titled Chili and liberty: the uses and abuses of multiculturalism. Sen's piece addresses the paradox in the interpretation of "multiculturalism" in some quarters where it implies separation of distinct cultures into a "plural monoculturalism." That is, a nation where separate ethnic and religious groups live...
As many of you know the Hui are the people of China who look and speak like the Han (Chinese proper) of their local region, but happen to be Muslim. But, the People's Republic defines them as a nationality, not a religion, so their identity is a bit confused because what separates them from the...
The route of neurotransmission that you learn about in an introductory neuroscience class is action potential driven neurotransmitter release. A wave of depolarization travels down the axon to the bouton and activates voltage-sensitive calcium channels allowing calcium in to trigger vesicle exocytosis. Synapses get bored though, sitting around waiting for an action potential, so they...
Update: More comments here, here and here. End updateDesidancer and Diana both pointed me to this story about a mixed race couple who gave birth to daughters of very different phenotypes. The explanation in the story is about right, the loci which give you a gestalt impression of racial identity are a tiny sample of...
Darth Quixote recently pointed out (below, June 15) that Francis Galton's celebrated book Hereditary Genius has recently been reprinted in a cheap paperback edition. This welcome news prompted me to check, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, what other books by Galton are currently in print. I was pleased to find that most of them are, though...