"Whenever you get two people interpreting the same data in different ways, that’s metaphysics."
— Thomas Kuhn. Interview by John Horgan. Via @PsychScientists.
by Mark James Adams
A worker in quantitative genetics, primate psychology, and cooperative breeding. I research the evolutionary dynamics of correlated suites of behavior in wild animals. I am trying to answer the question Why do our personalities differ?
About Differential biology? Ask the Reader
A worker in quantitative genetics, primate psychology, and cooperative breeding. I research the evolutionary dynamics of correlated suites of behavior in wild animals. I am trying to answer the question Why do our personalities differ?
About Differential biology? Ask the Reader
May 28, 2012
May 25, 2012
Turtles all the way down.
The Game of Life, implemented in the Game of Life. (Best watched with the sound off, unless you like high-pitched whines.) Via Tozier.
May 24, 2012
This model shows the genetic structure of psychological well-being. A general genetic factor underlies six components of well-being while four additional mechanisms influence more specific facets. Interestingly the environmental covariances showed no such structure, leading m’colleagues Despina, Gary, and Tim to conclude “that environmental experiences are not, in general, the source of the psychological structure for well-being”
- Archontaki, D., Lewis, G. J., & Bates, T. C. (2012). Genetic influences on psychological well-being: A nationally representative twin study. Journal of Personality. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00787.x
May 23, 2012
GREML
It’s always nice when a new technique gets a catchy name so you can refer to it in conversation more easily. The technique to estimate heritability from SNP data now seems to be called GREML: genomic-relatedness-matrix restricted maximum likelihood.
- Benjamin, D. J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M. J. H. M., Dawes, C. T., Koellinger, P. D., Magnusson, P. K. E., Chabris, C. F., et al. (2012). The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
May 22, 2012
"ELEMENTARY discussions of the development of personality
usually involve the familiar debate over the relative importance of heredity and environment. Such discussions sometimes
proceed on the obviously fallacious assumption that the personality
is merely the sum total of these two constituents-inherited tendencies and environmental influences. The truth is, of course, that
the self develops through a complex chain of interactions with the
environment, so that the resultis not a mixture of heredity and
environmental factors but a compound, the character of which is
determined both by the constituent interacting elements and by
the (usually very complicated) “laws of composition” by which
these elements are united. Thus the analysis of personality development must include not only (1) heredity, and (2) environ-
ment, but also a third factor, namely, (3) the laws of composition
or principles of organization of the self in its various stages. These
“laws of composition” describe the new structural and functional
patterns which emerge from the interacting elements."
— Phenix, Philip H. (1953). A Note on Heredity, Environment, and Personality. The Journal of Philosophy. via Eric Turkheimer.
(Source: jstor.org)
May 22, 2012
"…it is an immense benefit to have institutions I can trust to tell me ‘these claims about cortical columns, or locally compact Hausdorff spaces, are at least not crazy’."
— Cosma Shalizi, If Peer Review Did Not Exist, We Would Have to Invent Something Very Like It to Serve Highly Similar Ends
May 7, 2012
Ramón y Cajal, Chick cerebellum. From Sotelo Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2003 via neurolove
May 6, 2012
Figure 1. Optimality model for peer-review filters and the progress of science.
Aarssen, L. (2012). Are peer-review filters optimal for the progress of science in ecology and evolution? Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, 5(0). doi:10.4033/iee.v5i0.4322
Can we model the peer review process and adjust it to maximize the difference between benefits and costs?
May 4, 2012
"The one respect in which I was overly pessimistic is that I have not, in fact, had to spend much time ‘de-programming students [who] read A New Kind of Science before knowing any better’"
— Cosma Shalizi, Ten Years of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity
May 4, 2012
A pair of Long Tailed Tits making a new nest by gautonphotography
May 4, 2012
Maintenance of genetic variation in personality
A new paper by Verweij et al tests competing theories about the maintenance of genetic variation in personality (neutrality, mutation–selection balance, and balancing selection) against SNP-derived heritability estimates. Each hypothesis makes different predictions about the number of causal variants, the proportion of nonadditive genetic variance, and the proportion of additive genetic variance explained by common variants:
They tested these predictions in four samples using the Yang et al method of calculating heritability from SNP genotypes. The result was that around 7% of the variance in personality (using Clonginer’s dimensions) could be explained by common variants. Thus personality is more likely to be explained by rare variants or nonadditive genetic effects. This is consistent with balancing selection as well as the high proportion of nonadditive genetic effects found in studies of humans, orang-utans, and tits.
April 6, 2012
March 13, 2012
"it’s easy to forget that anyone who publishes enough will end up with some skeletons in their closet"
— Russ Poldrack, Skeletons in the closet. via @hardsci.
March 8, 2012
Fisher's influence
Simply Statistics catalogs some of Fisher’s contributions to statistics:
- P-values: 3 million citations
- Analysis of variance (ANOVA): 1.57 million citations
- Maximum likelihood estimation: 1.54 million citations
- Fisher’s linear discriminant: 62,400 citations
- Randomization/permutation tests: 37,940 citations
- Genetic linkage analysis: 298,000 citations
- Fisher information: 57,000 citations
- Fisher’s exact test: 237,000 citations
And this doesn’t even touch on his contributions to population genetics and evolutionary biology. The University of Adelaide has a collection of his manuscripts related to evolution and genetics.
March 4, 2012
Lytro Light Field Camera
The Lytro embodies a new concept in how cameras work: instead of capturing a single image, it course a “light field” containing information on the angle of each ray of light. This allows you to refocus the shot after you’ve taken the image. This is one case where you can’t believe it until you see it.
While the Lytro is getting panned in reviews (poor image quality, small screen) and for consumers the the ability to focus a shot post hoc feels a bit like a gimmick, this sounds perfect for scientific applications such as fieldwork photography. Pointing the camera at your subject without having to worry about focussing greatly simplifies the process, which is important when you are out in the field having to attend to a lot of things at once.
The other thing I picked up from the video review by Richard Butler for dpreview is just how small the Lytro is. You could almost hang it from the strap of your binoculars. With a DSLR, it would be the other way around.
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