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gcochran comments on Q&A with Harpending and Cochran - Less Wrong
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Hawks and I were talking about new genetic studies that showed a surprising number of sweeps, more than you'd expect from the long-term rate of change - and simultaneously noticed that there sure are a lot more people then there used to be - all potential mutants.
As for why someone didn't point this out earlier - say in 1930, when key results were available - I blame bad traditions in biology. Biologists mostly don't believe in theory: even when its predictions come true, they're not impressed.
My advantage, at least in part, comes from have had exactly one biology course in my entire life, which I took in the summer of my freshman year of high school, in a successful effort to avoid dissecting. If I ever write a scientific autobiography, it will be titled "Avoiding the Frog".
Because theory in the field is so often wrong that they treat successes as a stopped clock being right twice a day? Or something more complex?
I think Greg's 'biologists' are a special subset of biologists. As I see it CP Snow was right about the two cultures. But within science there are also two cultures, one of whom speaks mathematics and the other that speaks organic chemistry. Speaker of organic chemistry share a view that enough lab work and enough data will answer all the questions. They don't need no silly equations.
In our field the folks who speak mathematics tend to view the lab rats as glorified techs. This is certain not right but it is there and leads to a certain amount of mutual disdain.
This kind of mutual disdain is apparently just not there in physics between the theoretical and experimental physics people. I wish evolutionary biology were more like physics.
It goes further; there are even two cultures of mathematics!
There are sub-patterns. There are facts about natural selection that every plant geneticist knows that few human geneticists will accept without a fight. I mean, really, Henry, when a prominent human geneticist says " You don't really believe that bit about lactase persistence being selected, do you?" , or when someone even more famous asks "So why would there be more mutations in a bigger population?" - their minds ain't right.
Could you expand on that?