Monthly Archives: October 2011

I was warned off social psychology years ago by a friend (who was a research psychologist) because of the field’s propensity for ‘sexy’ results which get a lot of media play. As a lay person he doubted I could tell the fake from the reliable, the one off from the replicable. Later someone else told […]

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A new paper in PNAS, Archaic human ancestry in East Asia: “These results suggest admixture between Denisovans or a Denisova-related population and the ancestors of East Asians, and that the history of anatomically modern and archaic humans might be more complex than previously proposed.” It’s open access, so do go read it. John Hawks has […]

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Something different today. First, an elegant international cat: Second, reading Madagascar: A Short History prompts me to repost a very long essay I wrote ~3 years ago. I have some new ideas in the area of the evolution of religious institutions, which I want to work out in a new essay. But that’s going to […]

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In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were […]

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In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were […]

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In case you haven’t seen these….

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  In the comments below Christopher Mims states: But evolution? It seems as if denial of evolution comes from a place so basic — religious fundamentalism — that I wonder whether something like this could ever have even the slightest impact. It’s hard to deny the relationship of religious fundamentalism and evolution denial and skepticism. […]

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So there’s a slick new webzine coming out, Evolution: this view of life. It’s another one of David Sloan Wilson’s projects. I don’t agree a lot with the specifics of David’s theories, but I admire his ambition. James Winters pointed me to the fact that they’re trying to raise money for this webzine via KickStarter. […]

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I dislike cluttering this site with administrative notes, but I want to put this post up as a reference for the future. It’s not really aimed at regular readers/commenters, who know the explicit and implicit norms. 1) If you use quotation marks, make sure that you’re actually quoting something your interlocutor said, rather than adding […]

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I dislike cluttering this site with administrative notes, but I want to put this post up as a reference for the future. It’s not really aimed at regular readers/commenters, who know the explicit and implicit norms. 1) If you use quotation marks, make sure that you’re actually quoting something your interlocutor said, rather than adding […]

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Type “why are x/x people so” into Google, and let it finish your query. You’ll be amused or appalled.

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Dienekes has a long post, the pith of which is expressed in the following: If I had to guess, I would propose that most extant Europeans will be discovered to be a 2-way West Asian/Ancestral European mix, just as most South Asians are a simple West Asian/Ancestral South Indian mix. In both cases, the indigenous component is […]

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Over the past six months we’ve seen the “Libyan revolution” stall and then succeed. There’s no doubt that the late Libyan dictator was a marginally sane megalomaniac. That being said, he’d been on better behavior over the past 10 years, dismantling his nuclear program for example. I can see the logic in wanting to overthrow […]

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I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don’t know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because […]

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Nate Silver has an important post, Herman Cain and the Hubris of Experts. It’s not really about Herman Cain. Rather, it’s about the reality that pundits tend to underestimate uncertainty and complexity. Saying you don’t know isn’t as satisfying as making a definitive categorical assertion. This manifests particularly in the domains of sports and politics […]

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A few weeks ago over at Slate Dave Weigel stated that “Electing Mitt Romney in 2012 would mean electing, for the first time, a president whose religion is not part of orthodox Christianity.” I tweeted to Weigel that this was just plain wrong. There have been plenty of presidents who rejected orthodox Christianity, the last […]

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I don’t have time for this, but I’m sure some readers do. 1000 Genomes has put a tutorial up. Breakdown: 1. Description of the 1000 Genomes Data, Gabor Marth pdf|pptx 2. How to access the Data, Paul Flicek pdf|pptx 3. Lessons in variant calling and genotyping, Hyun Min Kang pdf|pptx 4. Structural Variants, Ryan Mills pdf|pptx 5. Imputation in […]

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I don’t have time for this, but I’m sure some readers do. 1000 Genomes has put a tutorial up. Breakdown: 1. Description of the 1000 Genomes Data, Gabor Marth pdf|pptx 2. How to access the Data, Paul Flicek pdf|pptx 3. Lessons in variant calling and genotyping, Hyun Min Kang pdf|pptx 4. Structural Variants, Ryan Mills pdf|pptx 5. Imputation in […]

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Follow up to the previous post, (Via Ed), Fetal gene screening comes to market: Until last week, scrutinizing a fetus’s DNA for indications of genetic abnormalities meant tapping into the mother’s womb with a needle. Now there’s a test that can do it using a small sample of the mother’s blood. MaterniT21, a Down’s syndrome […]

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A friend pointed me to the heated comment section of this article in Nature, Rebuilding the genome of a hidden ethnicity. The issue is that Nature originally stated that the Taino, the native people of Puerto Rico, were extinct. That resulted in an avalanche of angry comments, which one of the researchers, Carlos Bustamante, felt […]

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20/75
Razib Khan