John Hawks is now a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin, he's announced in the inaugural post of a four-part series on academic blogging. The entire thing is well worth a read for anyone who hopes to end up in a similar situation....

In my recent note on R. A. Fisher and epistasis, I mentioned that Fisher's theory of the evolution of dominance relied on the epistatic effect of 'modifier' genes. On looking again at the chapter in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection dealing with the evolution of dominance, I see that there is a more general statement of the principle that the effect of a gene depends in part on the genetic...

The recent report that the Duffy null allele is associated with increased risk of HIV infection recieved a lot of press (see Razib's comments on it here), mostly positive. In Nick Wade's New York Times article on the paper, however, some smart people publicly express some doubts. It's a tribute to Wade that he actually tries to summarize those doubts in the limited space allotted to him:Dr. Goldste...

Gintis and Bowles have done great work cleaning up a lot of the discussion about cooperation, evolution, and economic outcomes. A Google Scholaring of their names turns up 14 items with over 100 citations, most of which would be well worth reading for GNXP regulars.But that said, in their 2002 Journal of Economic Perspectives piece "The Inheritance of Inequality," they appear to make a small error....

Truism of the day: Introverted nerds don't get laid much. Or, in more scientific terms, extroversion in men is linked to a higher number of sex partners.[1] Men and women have similar levels of extroversion, though-- in fact, women have slightly higher levels of it.[2] This begs for explanation; after all, extroversion is significantly heritable (~50%)[3], so why shouldn't it have been positively s...