Do people in those fields have a reasonable agreement about the boundaries of their fields?

Thanks for putting this survey out there. Though its intent is for you to better understand your readers, it helps this reader to better understand some of the fundamental concepts she needs to become familiar with (if only in passing.)

I visit one of the Discovery blogs on average a few times a week. I always visit Bad Astronomy, Cosmic Variance, and The Loom every week. I usually get to yours and Ed Yong’s and The Crux at least once every couple of weeks.

Those of us who haven’t taken a decent science course in years, let alone studied genetics, can still get a lot out of your blog. Thank you for doing so much, both in the blog and the comments, to take your readers into consideration!

Oh my, how little I actually know of the details, concepts and terms here – compared what I “thought” I knew. I read “alleles” somewhere and think I know what it means and what concept it represents, but I guess my mind just makes me think “Yeah, I know that one”…

Reading Dan Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” may have helped me getting a handle on some basic concepts, but it only gets you so far with regards to knowing the concepts (and terms) of evolution in general and genetics in particular…

And some things like “homo- and heterozygosity” one has to sit down and simply learn the terms, I’d reckon. Though I look forward if you could write from time to time a introduction of terms made for scientifically-inclined lay-persons. Imagine you want to explain a genetics term to an non-genetics scientist, or engineer, or teacher, who has read a book or two from Dawkins or Dennett.

I thought about that as well. This survey made me feel really stupid. That does not happen often. I feel like adding a textbook on genetics and population genetics (from the reading list!) on my to read list. Perhaps just some relatively short ones. I mean genetics is interesting all right, but other things are more interesting, to me.

I did read The Blank Slate recently, though. I should have done that years ago! It was a great read, though I already agreed with Pinker about the three foes.

Now, I feel like going back and reading something cool so that I can feel smart again: “Truth is a One-Player Game: A Defense of Monaletheism and Classical Logic”, Benjamin Burgis.

Keep up the good work, Razib. One note about the survey. It does not appear if one has blocked javascript from the survey site. I had but didn’t know so I couldn’t find the survey on the screen and couldn’t see any links. Perhaps you can put a note about one having to enable scripts?

I did expect to see more ‘maybes’ than negatives for Hardy-Weinberg though.

I suspected I knew Chet the first time he posted, and the second time I definitely knew that I knew him…

However, one area that probably deserves more public interest than it currents gets is developmental biology. Evo-devo tends to dominate discussions of dev bio, but the story of how a zygote forms a vertebrate is both amazing and comprehensible to non-experts. A documentary would probably be the best format for that.