PhDP

The very serious journal Nature found that Wikipedia was as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.

I'm from Quebec, in theory it means I'm a Canadian, not European. But let's face it, except in a very few number of countries, like (I think) Poland and Israel, the United-States are as unpopular as ever. It's just that, here, the change in the perception of Quebeckers towards the US between the Clinton and the Bush era is simply astonishing. For the environment, we're all victims, although other countries, like Canada, aren't doing much effort either, but we've signed and ratified Kyoto, so we can be even worse than you are and still criticize your stance. About the war in Iraq, you know why it's unpopular as much as I do.

Pangloss, I know how the American conversatives treated Clinton, but it has nothing to do with the topic. Under Clinton, the US were certainly a lot more popular than now, and I never saw a wave of conservatives in the world mocking aggressively Clinton and his administration, nor did many political parties won election by attacking Clinton. It has nothing to do with the democrats being perfect and the republicans being evil, but if you ask me about the impact of the Bush administration on the opinions on my compatriots, Bush is really doing everything to be hated. Modern Quebec is deeply rooted in secularism, pacifism and a recent poll shows were more concerned about the environment than the rest of Canada. Is it surprising that, around me, most people dislike Bush and his administration ? There's an interesting article on the subject here

It's certainly not ill-grounded, he asked us about our experience, what we see around us. I wouldn't have voted for Bush, but I also think the reaction against the United-States as a whole is completely out of proportion. Perhaps you misunderestimate how the perceptions of many people were changed by this administration. The image of the United-States was generally good and it has deteriorate at a very fast pace since Bush is in office, it's hard not to see that. Books mocking Bush are best-sellers, and many of "his" speeches ("the axis of evil") were played and ridiculed again and again in the media (while, ironically the expression was coined by a Canadian). Even the most conservatives parties don't support Bush openly, it was interesting to see the Conservative Party of Canada jumping on the first occasion to bash the American ambassador. And the left is appealing to voters by saying how bad the United-States are and how voting for the right will lead us to the same path. I've never witness anything like that before Bush, but now, the adjective "American" is now a word commonly used to discredit a policy. Outside the United-States, we generally don't get many information about the positions of the Bush administration on specific policies, what we know is its stance on the environment, foreign policy, and, quite often, we're fed bits of information about the religious right and the mishaps of the administration. Where I live, for historical reasons, those are really sensible issues, and Bush is unpopular on those 3 issues.

From my experience, the perception of the US has gone from good (Clinton era) to bad (Bush era) to very bad, mainly because of Iraq. Bush has failed miserably to exploit the sympathy and support he had after 9/11. When the US will ratify Kyoto and get the republicans out of the White House (and, hopefully, also the congress), things will probably get better. But Bush is the incarnation of pretty much anything hated about the United-States; he doesn't care much about the environment, he's attacking a country for WMD that doesn't exist, and his manichean rhetoric is widely ridiculed, how could the relation with the US and the rest of the world get better with him in office ?

If you're looking for big, detailed books about genetics, Daniel Hartl (an evolutionary geneticist) has written good books both on genetics and population genetics. I used this one for a course in genetics, and it's very well written.

It leaves us with the question, Stephen Colbert, great humorist ? or the greatest humorist ?

Liza Gross (PLOS); And in a 2005 survey measuring the proportion of adults who accept evolution in 34 European countries and Japan, the United States ranked 33rd, just above Turkey. No other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution, Miller says. “We are truly out on a limb by ourselves.”

The idea of trying to use the prestige of science to provide a justificiation for religion is not new, however IMHO it seems quite unlikely that science would end up justifying superstitions instead of debunking them. Also, like I just said in another topic, the problem of ID is not only that it's not science, but evolution doesn't seem at all to be directed. It's quite hard for an IDist to explain why God would so often lead life forms to dead ends and inneficient design. But I really like the parallel you're drawing between Zukav and ID. Many monotheists, with creationism, have been quite successful in spreading confusion. Just some time ago, I've read here on this forum that "evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamic". I'll give you a hint; that guy didn't learn that in a textbook. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. At the same time, many "New Age" enthousiasts (that include Zukav), have also spread confusion... in physics. It's simply astonishing to see how many of them "know" about the uncertainty principle, what's even more astonishing is their interpretation of it. Just like creationism is doing to biology, "New Agers" (is that a word ?) are deforming science with enthousiam; just read Chopra (quantum physics means that we don't age). So I think the parallel you draw between quantum physics and evolutionary biology is perfectly valid, but I really can't see how the various distortions made by some religious people in those area could be, in the futur, integrated into science.

Perhaps you also spend a lot because your healthcare system is costly and inefficient.

ENTP/INTP, mostly ENTP, but very close to INTP.

Bascule, Memeticists (and you) are using memetics to explain religion, politics, morality; if you concende it's not science, why are you using it to explains X and Y ? What's the difference between saying religion is god's gift to humanity and that it's caused by memes ? Both being nonscientific, you can't choose rationally between those two options. I really prefer looking at what science (evolutionary anthropology/psychology) has to say. I think it makes no sense to defend evolutionary biology on one hand and then to use something as speculative and pseudoscientific as memetics. Memetics is using and distorting the language of evolution ("genetics", "population memetics", "natural selection"), how could I not care ? We're fighting creationists and we told them that natural selection is important, it's not tautological, it can be used to make predictions. And then, we have a bunch of memeticists, using natural selection for trivialities. If the pattern you're talking about was more than superficial, we could build a predictive science out of it. The problem is that cultural evolution may looks like the evolution of genes, but it's totally different. Memetics is all about semantic.

...except if you're really big (like a whale) and have a very low surface/volume ratio.

In biology, things are faster when they're hot.

That's incredible. I really can't believe they don't know they're lying and misleading the public. Also, it's quite disturbing when they are misquoting evolutionist (like A.F.Fisher and R.Lewontin) to prove their point, I would certainly not like to see my name attached to lunatics just because I, as a scientist, have the right (perhaps even the duty) to be critical. And anyway, A.F.Fisher was not even critical, he was only saying we don't know how life began and how the major phyla started out because of our lack of information, not because evolution has failed as a theory. I'm very curious to know how many creationists really understand evolution. There's some creationists here on the forum, I would like to know how many of them really took the time to read a book of evolutionary biology. If you watch this video and know nothing about evolution, then you might possibly think the people who created it have an excellent understanding of evolution.

First of all, "aryan" has no biological meaning, it's mytholgy. However it makes sense for a linguist. Second; Frost, P. 2006. European hair and eye color: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution And Human Behavior 27(2):85-103. Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two factors combine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation.

I really need an article in a scientific journal. In fact, I've access to "all" the volumes of this journal for its start, "Evolutionary Ecology", but some numbers are missing. Evolutionary Ecology, 1989, Volume 3, Number 2 and 3 are missing from the electronic version (on SpringerLinks). Also, I've looked at the library of my university and of all the biggest universities in my province (even McGill), those 2 number are always missing, I've even contacted the author of the article, and he don't have it.

Neon

jeskill, I think the definition is ok. Life history can be resumed by; [math]1 = \int_\alpha^\infty e^{-rx}l(x)m(x)dx[/math] [math]\alpha[/math] is age at maturity, l(x) is the change to survive to age x, m(x) is the fecundity function (generally of the form fecundity = a[body size]^b) and r is the intrinsec rate of growth (a measure of fitness). Life history is about strategy, is it better to invest in survival, growth or fecundity ? As fecundity rise with growth, it's a good idea to invest in growth when mortality is low. But again, it can be shown what a genotype can have higher fitness even if it has lower survival AND fecundity, simply by having offsprings early in life (because they start spreading their genes faster, so the contribution of that genotype would be higher). It's a question of trade-offs, you can't have it all ! Life history evolution is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting aspect of evolutionary biology, simply because it's very close to the concept of fitness and it has proven its predictive power.

Well, Bascule, I think you are dodging the real issue here. I'm aware of Dennett's theory, but although I'm skeptical of his understandings of evolution since I've read the "debate" he had with Allen Orr, I don't know enough about consciousness to say his theory is plausible or not. But this has nothing to do with memetics, for some reasons, you're making memetics' ambitions shrink, dramatically ! It's supposed to be an unified theory of how "information" evolves. It has been "used" to understand the evolution of birds' songs, and we're still waiting for "population memetics". But if population memetics ought to be used for the evolution of information, from birds' songs to computer viruses, how could it depends on an empirical theory of consciousness, which has nothing to do with birds, or, for that matters, nothing to do with at least 99% of the evolution of information on earth ? Also if memetics; has nothing to justify the relation between "genes" and "memes", if it predicts nothing new and has to be taken on faith, but still claims being a protoscience/science, then it's clearly fitting into the definition of pseudoscience given by wikipedia; "Pseudoscience is a term commonly applied to any body of knowledge, methodology, or practice that is portrayed as scientific but diverges substantially from the required standards for scientific work or is unsupported by scientific research".

Chemistry and biochemistry are great refuge for those who like science but don't like maths. Most of the "maths" in chemistry is elementary arithmetic and algebra. Nothing very complicated.

It unifies ? There's no "population memetics", no mechanism of the evolution of memes. Memetics is based on an analogy it hasn't justified, how could that be unifying ? I'm all for searching general laws, I'm the first to get angry at biologists for not trying hard enough, but you can't draw an analogy without a justification, just because it seems to unifies. It's making me think about the analogy between the solar system and atoms, it's elegant, but it's downright false and unjustified. If you believe memetics is valid, you have to justify the need for this analogy, as memetics is based on an analogy. You certainly don't think memetics has invented the study of cultural evolution ? About language, From what I know, the study of the evolution of language is booming, but it's not based on memetics. Searls (2003) is building trees for languages, much like phylogenetic tree we use to draw the tree of life. Is this tree a good tool to understand the evolution of human population and dating languages, he thinks so. In this very short (2 pages) articles, he draws a lot of parallels to evolutionary biology, going as far as invoking Margulis' "endosymbiotic theory" to explain the invasion of the English language by Germanic elements. But he don't only draws parallels, he use mathematical and statistical tools from evolutionary biology, his "trees" are not trivial, they are an interesting contributions to our understanding of human evolution. Memetics, in 30 years, has done nothing of the sort. So Why is memetics necessary to study language ? Why do we need an analogy between genes and ideas ? It's not because the evolution of languages and religions "looks like" the evolution of species that we can make a science out of this resemblance. About religion, I still fail to see in your parallel between the evolution of religion and evolutionary biology how the concept of "meme" is useful. Perhaps the link you made between religions and species is novel, but what does it explains ? We all know religions are not species, and while I'll agree some parallels can be made, I fail to see, from a scientific point of view, their use, and I fail to see how you can call memetics "protoscience" with such parallels. At best, it's simply a metaphor, an analogy, a pedagogical tool maybe, but not science, it doesn't give us anything new. When it does present new "ideas", they're not very good, like the idea that memes are behind the enlargement of the human brain (Blackmore, 1999). Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press Searls, D.B. 2003. Trees of life and of language. Nature 426:391-392.

Psychology, sociology and anthropology are sciences. They can be tested and have descriptive and predictive power. I also don't believe the study of cultural evolution is worthless, or that evolution shouldn't be applied to human psychology, evolutionary psychology does a fairly good job in this area. Memetics, however, is pseudoscience. It claims to be science, but it doesn't help us to understand anything, it adds new words (with vague meanings) and it can't predict anything (except extremely trivial things). It has been more than 20 years, still, no clear mechanism of transmissions were discovered. To simplify a little, evolution is caused by three great mechanisms (+ some minor ones); mutations, drift, selection. Contrary to what Dawkins said (1986), we have serious reasons to believe that mutations, or drift, might be more important than selection. Mutationism is far from being dead (Nei, 2005), and neutralism and near-neutralism either (Ohta and Gillespie, 1996). Dawkins and Dennett has been particulary arrogant toward those criticisms. For them, selection is the answer (Dawkins, 1976, 1986; Dennett, 1995). While most biologists acknowledge that adaptation is an important part of evolution, Dennett and Dawkins defend a vision were adaptation IS nearly 100% of the "important" part of evolution, calling neutral modifications "boring" (Dawkins, 1986). Natural selection is the differential survival of genes. Without genetics, it wasn't very helpful, but with the arrival of population genetics and mathematical ecology, natural selection has been able to predict very interesting events. And we are currently developing very good models to predict age at maturity, the effect of environmental factors on phenotypic evolution, neofunctionalisation... But, natural selection acts with constraints. When facing the idea of constraints, Dennett defend the very strange idea that constraints are adaptation in themselves (Orr, 1996). It's this kind of excess that have generated strange researches, like one about rape. The conclusion; it's an adaptation, but a careful study of this "adaptation" show it's a poor one (Coyne, 2000). Memetics is the consequence of this vision of evolution driven by natural selection and adaptation, and were "by-products" and "constraints" often don't even figure in the list of possibilities (Dennett nearly deny their existence). The idea that culture, and ideas, are evolving is not new. Popper, with his "evolutionary epistemology" (Popper, 1969), was already advancing the idea that scientific ideas were evolving a little like gene; the most fit had more chance to survive longer, while poor ideas were doomed to extinction. Memetics is far more than that. First, it's an analogy to genetics, and analogy that cannot be justified. Sure, meme have the power of "self-replication", but they blend. Memes are not discrete in the way genes are, and population genetics can't work without discrete units. Because meme can blend, something that nearly killed "natural selection" as a valid mechanism before the arrival of Mendel's genetics, how can we create a science of population memetics ? And if they have nothing in common with genes, with not just calling it "cultural evolution" ? Second, what's the use of this analogy ? Memeticists have created a whole new set of words, meme, memetics, memeplex, but can you use memetics to create knowledge ? Sure you can use memetics to make naive predictions like evolutionary biology used to do in its early years, the "memetics" of religion is a good example. Did we really need a new science to tell us that a religion unable to convince anyone would eventually die ? Or that a religion using the period in life were children are vulnerable (from a psychological point of view) will have good success ? Read an article about memetics, eliminate everything related to memetics, it still makes sense (in fact, a lot more). It's not normal. It's even more surprising because Dawkins advocate a new scientific language, devoid of jargon, I agree with him, but then why creating a new terminology (because memetics is everything but a novel idea) that cannot generated novel research projects ? For example, what about religion. Memetics, or even cultural evolution is unlikely to be the ultimate cause of existence for religion, which seems to be a by-product of human evolution (Persinger, 1987; Atran, 2002). After you know that, saying that the religion with the best replicating value survived is trivial. Sure, if Islam is more widespead than Judaism, it's probably because Judaism is not as good as Islam to "replicate" their values. Did we need memetics to know that ? Do we need a "science" based on a faulty analogy to understand that ? Was memetics able to create new knowledge. No. According to Edmonds (2005), not only did memetics failed, but the scientific community is even loosing interest in it. It is surprising ? About the current status of memetics. I know only one interesting research in evolutionary science where memetics is mentioned, it's an article by Lynch and Baker (1994), and I'm not sure Lynch is still supporting memetics. It's about the cultural evolution of songs in some species of birds. But because there's no real "mechanism of memetics", I fail to see where the concept of memetics is necessary. Also, Edmonds (2002) ask "Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics" in the Journal of Memetics. Three years later (Edmonds, 2005), he concluded that memetics has failed, and he show that memetics, in the scientific community at least, is starting the fade. I don't consider memetics a protoscience because of its lack of nuance about natural selection, the absence of clear mechanisms of memetics and, more importantly, because protosciences have to make some progress if they want to be considered science one day. It has been 30 years, and nothing conclusive. I'll quote Dennett; "My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless--a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors". It's exactly my view of memetics; a new terminology, useless, and its an obstacle to progress because it puts an emphasis on something that doesn't seems to exist; a relation between the mechanisms of population genetics and the evolution of ideas, and a belief that nearly everything is an adaptation. P.S.: I have all the articles I've quoted in PDF if somebody wants them. Atran, S. 2002. In Gods We Trust : The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford University Press Coyne, J.A. and Berry, A. 2000. Rape as an adaptation (A review of "A Natural History of Rape"). Nature 404, 121-122. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton & Company. Dennett, D. 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon & Schuster Edmonds, B. 2002. Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics. Journal of Memetics 6. Edmonds, B. 2005. The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results. Journal of Memetics 9. Lynch, A. and Baker, A.J. 1994. A Population Memetics Approach to Cultural Evolution in Chaffinch Song: Differentiation among Populations. Evolution 48(2), 351-359. Nei, M. 2005. Selectionism and Neutralism in Molecular Evolution. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 22(12):2318–2342. Ohta, T. and Gillespie, J.H. 1996. Development of Neutral and Nearly Neutral Theories. Theoretical Population Biology, 49, 128-142. Orr, A.H. 1996. Boston Review. Persinger, M.A. 1987. Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. Praeger Publishers Popper K. 1969. Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge.

Apparently, Wikipedia is case sensitive, I've changed LaTex to LaTeX.

Get the real thing then; with Miktex and texniccenter (both are free). And if you want a guide; The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e