Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory (Part 2):

Part 1 of this note dealt with Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance theory of evolution (the SBT) in its original form, as propounded between 1929 and 1931. This final part deals with subsequent developments in the theory. These include refinements and elaborations, some changes of emphasis, one major addition, and one major change of substance. In particular I will cover:

1. The role of new mutations
2. The concept of selective peaks
3. The effect of changes in environment
4. The adaptiveness of evolution
5. The process of intergroup selection
6. The three phases of the shifting balance.

I will throw in a few remarks about Fisher and Haldane as well.

Related: Sewall Wright & the Shifting Balance Theory, Notes on Sewall Wright: the Adaptive Landscape, Notes on Sewall Wright: Migration, Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size, Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship, Notes on Sewall Wright: Path Analysis and On Reading Wright.

Political Behavior through the Lens of Behavior Genetics:

These are all fascinating questions and Fowler and colleagues are only beginning to uncover the answers. I anticipate that Fowler and his partners in crime will continue to leave a trail of evidence from which we can build an even stronger case for a political science which does not make assumptions that are at odds with stylized facts from behavior genetics. Or, for that matter, at odds with facts derived from any of the other scientific disciplines from which the "genopolitics" crowd draw inspiration.

Read the whole thing, as the links are worth checking out. I've addressed how we can and should interpret the heritability of political orientation before; suffice it to say that the key is to remember what heritability really means, as opposed to transforming the descriptions of mapping from genotype to phenotype into coarse cut-outs.

Anthropology.net & prefonal both have posts up which survey a new paper, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders:

We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human cortex. On analyzing CNTNAP2 polymorphisms in children with typical specific language impairment, we detected significant quantitative associations with nonsense-word repetition, a heritable behavioral marker of this disorder (peak association, P=5.0x10-5 at SNP rs17236239). Intriguingly, this region coincides with one associated with language delays in children with autism.

Yes. This weblog is ostensibly about genetics. And yes, I've gotten a little obsessed about crunching election data. Honestly, I get a little bit like this every four years...I remember the '96 election and the primitive years of the internet even. I decided I might as well post on my fixation for a few days to get it out of my system. Be aware that you won't have to deal with any normative political arguments from me; I don't care enough about ought, or, more accurately I don't think you are really interested in my opinions about the Good Life and how to obtain it.

In any case, since Dan MacArthur is a subject of a monarch, he isn't blogging about republican politics. So make sure to check out this thorough post on the publishing of Asian & African genomes.