Monthly Archives: April 2013

We may have yet another story of long-distance prehistoric contact.  A new paper in PLOS genetics  suggests that people from the Jomon culture in Japan  may have reached northwestern  South America.  They found an unusual Y-chromosome lineage in Ecuador that … Continue reading →

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS [1890-1962] was the founder of modern statistics and the most important geneticist of the 20th century. He has been called the greatest of Darwin’s successors. He was born in London to George and Katie Fisher, … Continue reading →

The development of penicillin is one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine.  People realized that chemotherapy really was practical after the advent of the sulfa drugs – but they had limitations. Penicillin hit a much wider spectrum of organisms … Continue reading →

Definitely the case for E. O. Wilson.  In a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal,  he says that many of the most successful scientists are no more than semiliterate in mathematics, and if anything he’s worse than that.  But, … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking about facts that are true and yet not true – true for the usual reason that someone would like it to be true, yet false because the fact strongly (and of course obviously) implies something else that … Continue reading →

Picture the destiny of some rats that stumble into a grain silo full of wheat.  It’s an unbalanced diet, but there sure is a lot of it, and the rat population explodes, even though they’re not particularly healthy. Their population … Continue reading →

Still thinking about domestication. Mostly,  the wild ancestors of domesticate animals were social: presumably, such behavioral tendencies were preadaptations that helped the domesticates come to bond with or at least tolerate people.   Social animals can have adaptive personality variation – … Continue reading →

  A few years ago, I  was thinking about genetic male morphs. Turns out that you find qualitatively different forms of males in many species:   Barry Sinervos’s lizards,  Shuster’s isopods, Lank’s ruffs, jack salmon, etc.  Logically, the Y chromosome would … Continue reading →

It seems that the talking classes in this country think that human biology mostly doesn’t matter.  The sexes have exactly equal mean abilities and interests – more than that, even the standard deviation must be the same in men and … Continue reading →

Readers, this is your day.