Monthly Archives: December 2011

People often make “year end predictions.” I haven’t done that because I just haven’t bothered. But, it’s probably a nice way to see how full of crap you are. You can look back at how many mistakes you made, suggesting to you that you’re really a lot more ignorant of the shape of reality than […]

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That’s the question a commenter poses, albeit with skepticism. First, the background here. New England was a peculiar society for various demographic reasons. In the early 17th century there was a mass migration of Puritan Protestants from England to the colonies which later became New England because of their religious dissent from the manner in […]

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As I’ve joked before, The New York Times always seems to be pushing free market private sector solutions in South Asia. Many of India’s Poor Turn to Private Schools: For more than two decades, M. A. Hakeem has arguably done the job of the Indian government. His private Holy Town High School has educated thousands of […]

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About ~25 percent of the traffic to this website search engines. Mostly Google. Below are two sets of top 25 search results. The first is pretty straightforward. But the second has all the key words which are probably by and large people just looking for weblogs removed. The links are to search results are on […]

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A few qualifications. First, I removed all Google referral sites except for G+. Second, I removed Discover Magazine urls. Some of these sites should perhaps have been omitted from the list as well because of my past or current association with them (gnxp.com, Secular Right, Sepia Mutiny and Brown Pundits). ScienceBlogs is mostly, though not exclusively, from my old website there. […]

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In this list I’ve limited it to posts which were published in 2011. For much of the blog’s history I didn’t autoclose comments after 2 weeks, so the comparisons aren’t appropriate. And comments tend to be less timeless in any case. Comments are a double-edged sword on a weblog, because they often invite the stupid […]

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Below are the top 20 accessed posts on this website over the year 2011. Note that some of them predate 2011, but due to search engines or other forms of referral they remain highly accessed. Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath Which undersampled groups would you like to see? […]

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My friend Holden Karnofsky always pings me at this time of the year. Holden is co-founder of GiveWell. If you’re curious, you can look up more on the outfit yourself, I’ve talked about it enough over the years for you to get why I’m interested and a supporter. Holden is a numbers and data driven […]

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A questioner below was curious if vocabulary test differences by ethnic and region persist across income. There’s a problem with this. First, the INCOME variable isn’t very fine-grained (there is a catchall $30,000 or greater category). Second, it doesn’t seem to control for inflation. But, there is a variable, DEGREE, which asks the highest level of […]

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I wonder if in future years we’re going to look at “species debates” in the context of human evolution like we look at counting angels on the head of a pin. Over at BBC News Clive Finlayson has a rambling opinion piece up, Has ‘one species’ idea been put to bed? Finlayson, the author of The […]

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In my post below on selection for the “better” zygote Michelle observes that “This would be relatively easy for the father, not so much for the mother.” I took her to mean either of two things, 1) Extraction of eggs is a major surgical affair. Extraction of sperm is not. 2) Males generally have many […]

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The Pith: Even traits where most of the variation you see around you is controlled by genes still exhibit a lot of variation within families. That’s why there are siblings of very different heights or intellectual aptitudes. In a post below I played fast and loose with the term correlation and caused some confusion. Correlation […]

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Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Modest Proposal: Alabama Whites Are Genetically Inferior to Massachusetts Whites (FOR REALZ!). The post is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it’s actually an interesting question: what’s the difference between whites in various regions of the United States? I’ve looked at this before, but I thought I’d revisit it […]

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In earlier discussions I’ve been skeptical of the idea of “designer babies” for many traits which we may find of interest in terms of selection. For example, intelligence and height. Why? Because variation on these traits seems highly polygenic and widely distributed across the genome. Unlike cystic fibrosis (Mendelian recessive) or blue eye color (quasi-Mendelian […]

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‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This […]

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I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought I’d pass on the latest report on MaterniT21, the prenatal noninvasive Down Syndrome test. Currently it has a $235 copay for women with insurance. As of now only a few percent of the ~5 million pregnancies in the USA are subject to amnio or c.v.s. This procedure may […]

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With all the talk about Basques I decided to do my own analysis with Admixture. Dienekes gave me a copy of his IBS file, which has all the 1000 Genomes Spanish samples, including Basques. I merged it with the HGDP sample, which has French Basques (just “Basques” in the plots below) and French non-Basques. I […]

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As I’ve noted in this space before many of my “web friends” and readers are confused why I call myself “conservative.” This is actually an issue in “real life” as well, though I’m not going to get into that because I’m a believer in semi-separation of the worlds. I’ll be giving a full account of […]

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This is probably old news to you, and I’ve read about Digg’s problems in the tech media, but I just realized how much reddit has eclipsed Digg in referral traffic. I’ve always gotten way more attention from reddit (some science bloggers have told me that reddit readers are a “smarter set”), but when I did […]

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I flog R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection a fair amount on this site. You don’t need to understand everything in the book, nor do you have to agree with everything in it, but it is a great point of departure toward understanding evolutionary genetics. I’ve noted that you can get it […]

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20/75
Razib Khan