Category: Blogs by Michael

This morning, armchair scientist and noted fan of this blog, Razib Khan, decided it would be prudent to write about race. It comes by way of Khan issuing a corrective, of sorts, to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Coates article is wonderful. He takes a historical look at how race has been deployed over the last 150 years. Along the way, he makes all the good points that can be made with the census, and some others as well.…

Steve Hsu has been on a tear lately. Giving talks about IQ, here and here, and partnering with BGI to sequence the genomes of “high cognition” individuals in a quest to solve the giant “problem” of IQ. This effort has hit Vice magazine, Slate, and, more recently, NPR. To give you the CliffsNotes version of Hsu’s argument: IQ is a quantitative trait, just like height and can therefore be selected for improvement.…

In this installment of the seriocomic series Incidental Anthropology, I bring you three more media stories which incidentally illustrate anthropological points. Given the recent back and forth on this blog over genetics, I highly recommend the first link.

1) Why are Americans so focused on how “cognitively advanced” their children are?

2) Some thoughts on Elsevier’s purchase of Mendeley and what this might mean for Open Access and academic publishing.

3) The complex career and photography of Hiroshi Hamaya with a view towards the relation of snow and spirit.…

As Tony pointed out, the back and forth on this blog over population genetics has produced some smoke, some heat and some insights into what a gene might be and how much it can say about the everyday lives of human beings. 

Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. At stake are some the same questions we have been debating at ethnography.com…

In this long overdue installment of Incidental Anthropology I bring you a few examples of anthropology interest incidentally found in the media.

First, the vexing question of how to handle to infant waste and some ingenious responses: here

Second, how have tourists in American National Parks changed over the last 30 years? Not much: here

Third, how do you test a method of building phylogenic trees without using actual organisms? With invented organisms called Caminalcules: here

Finally, Jeff Bezos has pulled an F-1 rocket engine from the sea floor.…

– Thomas Carlyle, genetic Historian

Raymond Williams begins his introduction to Keywords by telling of his return to Cambridge following the end of World War II. He recounts meeting a friend he had known through various radical groups in the 1930’s. As they discussed their efforts to establish some continuity between the Cambridge they had known before the war and the Cambridge they were entering after the war, both Williams and his friend realized that much of the language they had had relied upon had shifted, and this shift had rendered much of their pre-war intellectual life unfamiliar.…

The reason I post about cultural anthropology now and then isn’t that I want to argue or discuss with cultural anthropologists. Rather, I want to aid in spreading the message the discipline should be extirpated from the academy, just as Creationists have been extirpated from biology – Razib Khan

There is a long history of work claiming the mantle of science, which seeks to push forward essentialist theories of racial disposition and intelligence.…

In the Star Trek episode “Space Seed”, Khan was a genetically engineered human who, in the wake of the eugenic wars, was exiled to a distant planet. This Khan is a sensitive observer of the human condition, who at one point, asks Kirk if he has ever read Milton. Kirk, in turn, laments, “Yes, I understand.” Khan, of course, was a sensitive and wise commentator on the perils and potential of genetics.…

Like clockwork (or a comet, perhaps), the noisiest problem in anthropology makes its return every few years. And this year we are blessed with the two noisiest comets in anthropology returning together. Both Diamond and Chagnon have new books and, more importantly, new book campaigns with money for appearances and exposure to media outlets. Even better, they both have stone axes to grind.

The worst slur slung by both Chagnon and Diamond is that cultural anthropology is an unrepentantly anti-scientific activity that has intentionally turned away from the dominate paradigm in the biological and behavioral sciences in favor of navel gazing.…

A few months back I wrote a post about tooling up for research That post lives here. A few months on I have discovered a few more tools to share.

I should note here, that Kerim at Savage Minds has recently written about his use of Markdown. Further, Savage Minds has a wonderful collection of how-to posts on various matters related to tooling, broadly speaking. But, onto the new tools.…

This is the second in a series of posts about my work on DIYBio. The initial post has some background and can be found here.

A popular (and sexy) comparison for DIYBio is with the Homebrew Computer Club. One often reads that DIYBio is at the same point in its development as the HCC was just prior to the IBM PC i.e. it is 1978 in the lab and a bright new industry is developing among hobbyists.…

Three things on this holiday week:

1) In Slate there was a wonderful photo essay on sworn virgins in the Balkans. Also, here is a BBC interview with Antonia Young, the author of Women Who Become Men.

2) What would a holiday week be without a minor donnybrook over race and genes? This week brings us a useful discussion at the NYRB between Richard C. Lewontin and Nadia Abu El-Haj on the topic “Is There a Jewish Gene?”…