Comments for Gene Expression

Comment on An Orientalist fantasy by Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Sat, 26 May 2012 00:28:05 +0000

To the original question of how throne of the crescent moon might be received if the author was white I can only offer under heaven as a potentially insightful example without any of the actual insight.

it seems that genuinely far eastern contexts are not so uncommon, and not objectionable. the ‘near orient’ is the major issue….

Comment on An Orientalist fantasy by Wulf Kurtoglu

Wulf Kurtoglu — Fri, 25 May 2012 23:07:29 +0000

Might I be permitted to put in a word for my own novel, *Broken Fences* (in Lowland Scots, *Braken Fences*)? The setting is Central Asia in a near future, with a variety of ethnic groups in play, and I’ve tried to give the major characters inner lives that reflect their upbringing within particular cultures – sometimes more than one. The heroine is half Scottish, half Indian, and is also well educated in Chinese, by then one of the main languages of educated people worldwide. I don’t actually know more than a few words of Chinese, but it’s easy enough to find nursery rhymes, proverbs, quotations from Confucius, etc. (in English translation) to flesh out the cultural background. I should probably confess that Wulf is a nom de plume (taken from a character in the novel who would have known the story), and that I myself am Scottish. I’m imagining a future when many of the educated elite will have hyphenated identities, and in any case China and India will be at least equally powerful and influential with the West. I like to imagine cultures interacting through the medium of individuals, so of necessity my fiction runs outside the tramlines of my own western upbringing. As for what critics might think … I should be so lucky as to attract their attention!
More information at my blog (mainly in Lowland Scots, but it’s not hard to read) http://wulfkurtoglu.blogspot.co.uk/

Comment on Vaccination as heterodoxy by Larry, San Francisco

Larry, San Francisco — Fri, 25 May 2012 22:59:26 +0000

I just lost a 35 year old friend who died horribly from oral cancer probably caused by the HPV virus. This scared me so much that I immediately had my teenage daughters vaccinated. Some friends of mine have a daughter who is the same age as mine and is likely to be sexually active. I told them to get their daughter vaccinated but they are too deep into the organic mysticism to listen to me. I just don’t get it.

Comment on The utility and reality of species by Onur

Onur — Fri, 25 May 2012 21:15:39 +0000

“Atom” or “Element” is NOT an abstract concept. They really do exists in nature.

Do they? Maybe they are just abstractions of an as-yet-unknown reality. Many things that were perceived to be very real in the past are known to be just abstract concepts today. Why not atom and element too in the future?

Comment on The utility and reality of species by DK

DK — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:52:53 +0000

When there’s a real discontinuity the dividing line isn’t arbitrary, e.g. the periodic table of elements.

“Atom” or “Element” is NOT an abstract concept. They really do exists in nature. But “planets”, “color green” and “beauty” do not exist – they are our abstractions of the real world.

Comment on An Orientalist fantasy by RafeK

RafeK — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:47:14 +0000

Razib, yes I agree, I was just qualifying my perception of it as nuanced with my lack of background knowledge off of which to judge it. To the original question of how throne of the crescent moon might be received if the author was white I can only offer under heaven as a potentially insightful example without any of the actual insight.

Comment on Vaccination as heterodoxy by Archwright

Archwright — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:15:44 +0000

I have a needle phobia, and I still get my vaccinations and my boosters on time. I mean, I get sick when I see an injection, I’ve thrown a 300lb nurse off of me because of a fight-or-flight reaction a needle.

I STILL get vaccinations.

Comment on Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry by Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:01:37 +0000

but not necessarily to the degree that the most enthusiastic proponents of a thriving crypto-Judaic subculture in the Southwest propose. yes. the key here is that how you weight the probabilities of the various hypotheses is strongly contingent on evidence of large scale demographic impact of conversos vs. not such impact. in the late 1990s there wasn't much real evidence for this in concrete and quantitative terms. today one can argue that there is evidence for substantial quantitative impact. these means that we assessing cultural phylogenies one has to take this particular demographic history into account as a prior. i actually found the atlantic article quite persuasive when it came out. it presented a novel and plausible model which didn't rely on the somewhat fantastical scenario of crypto-judaism on the american frontier. but the fantastical aspect of the alternative hypothesis is now less fantastical when you note that a fair amount of genetic data does point to isolated groups of conversos across latin america, in particular in frontier zones away from the inquisition.

Comment on Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry by Bill B

Bill B — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:50:45 +0000

Yes it is possible, even likely that some customs were passed on, but not necessarily to the degree that the most enthusiastic proponents of a thriving crypto-Judaic subculture in the Southwest propose. One example cited in the Atlantic article is the assumption that the wooden tops with which many Hispanic children in the Southwest played were actually dreidels and therefore part of the secret Jewish subculture passed on through the centuries. But according to cultural anthropologists, dreidels are an Ashkenazi tradition and not part of Sephardic culture. Presumably the Jewish ancestors came from Spain rather than Poland. Wooden tops, however, are found in cultures around the world over millenia and are widely played with throughout Latin America. Sometimes a top is just a top. However, I would agree with you that the Atlantic article goes too far in the other direction with all the Seventh Day Adventist stuff.

Comment on An Orientalist fantasy by Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:49:55 +0000

. I thought the treatment of chinese historical dynamics was nuanced and interesting but I don’t know very much about China.

so? isn’t the point that it’s fantasy??? i know that ggk’s stuff is historical fantasy, but i think that’s the beauty of these sorts of derivative fictions. the details don’t matter too much.

Comment on Vaccination as heterodoxy by Sandgroper

Sandgroper — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:53:47 +0000

elbowspeak – *yes*! I’m just old enough to remember living through a polio epidemic when I was 4 years old. I was playing with a 3 year old friend one day, drinking from the same cup and all the stuff that little kids do, and the next day she was in an iron lung and her family were in quarantine. She survived, but never walked again. I was still a young kid when the first polio vaccine became available, but I couldn’t get that damned needle into my arm fast enough, and all of my classmates felt the same. You only need to live through that terror once.

People don’t understand balancing risks, and community responsibility. They will continue not to understand until they live through an epidemic. Then maybe they’ll understand.

The way things are going in the USA and Australia, they won’t have to wait long.

Comment on An Orientalist fantasy by RafeK

RafeK — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:48:06 +0000

Guy Gavrial Kay’s Under heaven is an interesting example of a white western author setting a story in “oriental” setting that was well received. I thought the treatment of chinese historical dynamics was nuanced and interesting but I don’t know very much about China. The only complaint I had was presence of the bad ass chick trope.

Comment on The utility and reality of species by John Emerson

John Emerson — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:38:17 +0000

how do you define species in a non-arbitrary manner?

You don’t. Like with any other abstract concept, at some point one has to make an arbitrary decision and just agree on something by convention.

Not every concept. When there’s a real discontinuity the dividing line isn’t arbitrary, e.g. the periodic table of elements. But with speciation you don’t have that discontinuity. Speciation is also hierarchal, so after deciding whether two individuals are one or two species you also have to decide whether a division is at the level of family, genus, or species. I know that the classification of birds and of flowering plants are both terribly messy.

Comment on Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry by Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:09:26 +0000

There is a little mixing apples and oranges here.

no there isn’t. the likelihood of the models of anthropologists are conditional on the genetic data. autosomal information is much more informative than the uniparental stuff (e.g., mtDNA).

Comment on Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry by Bill B

Bill B — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:52:11 +0000

There is a little mixing apples and oranges here. The cultural anthropologists cited in the Atlantic article were saying that much of the evidence presented for the continued existence of a crypto-Jewish culture among Hispanics was suspect. While the presence of Jewish genes is a prerequisite for the survival of Jewish culture among Hispanics, it is not proof that their descendants were secretly practicing Jewish traditions into the twentieth century. As part of a high school project, my niece recently discovered that our shared mtDNA traced back to South Asia. This did not make my blue-eyed, blonde-haired devoutly Catholic Austrian great-grandmother a crypto-Muslim or crypto-Hindu even though she did not let Christmas trees into the house because of the mess they made.