Less intelligent people want to exclude racists from the public square
Logit Coefficients B SE(B) Probability SEX 0.739 0.217 0.001 DEGREE -0.302 0.092 0.001 WORDSUM -0.338 0.068 0 POLVIEWS -0.078 0.078 0.317 INCOME -0.026 0.06 0.671 AGE 0.007 0.007 0.283 ATTEND 0.09 0.046 0.05 GOD -0.018 0.077 0.819 Constant 3.341 0.937 0 It’s been a while since I’ve done much GSS blogging. Part of […]
Beyond “Out of Africa” and multiregionalism: a new synthesis?
For several decades before the present era there have been debates between proponents of the recent African origin of modern humans, and the multiregionalist model. Though molecular methods in a genetic framework have come of the fore of late these were originally paleontological theories, with Chris Stringer and Milford Wolpoff being the two most prominent public exponents of […]
“Out of Africa” bottleneck is what really matters for mutations
At least in relation to mutational load, if you read a new preprint in biorxiv, The demographic history and mutational load of African hunter-gatherers and farmers: The distribution of deleterious genetic variation across human populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology and medical genetics. However, the impact of different modes of subsistence on recent […]
Why do you read me and who are you
The first time I tried to get through Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, I gave up because it seemed so pretentious and impenetrable. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that the subtitle alluded to evolution, and I was interested in evolutionary psychology. But though In Gods We Trust does […]
The anti-“End of History and the Last Man”
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man has often been misconstrued. But, it did argue for the long term trend of the ascendancy of democracy and market values. Though Fukuyama did not necessarily predict the universal dominance of Western liberalism, that is one of the corollaries many associate with The End of […]
Austin vs. Portland
The above video is from a Portlander who is quite anti-Austin, though in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. The issue of cross-city comparisons was on my mind for two reasons. First, Joel Kotkin wrote an article last fall in Forbes, America’s Next Great Metropolis Is Taking Shape In Texas, that friends are sharing on Facebook. Second, I’m […]
Dost thou know the equilibrium at panmixia?
If you read a blog about Biblical criticism from a Christian perspective it would probably be best if you were familiar with the Bible. You don’t have to have read much scholarly commentary, rather, just the New Testament. Barring that, at least the synoptic gospels! At this point, with over 400 individuals responding to the […]
The civilization before history
A forgotten civilization? No, I am not talking about Atlantis or Hyperborea or Lemuria. Nothing made up here. Nor am I talking about the real Neolithic cultures highlighted in War Before Civilization. I alluding to the period between 3500 and 3100 BCE in the Near East when the city of Uruk was the nexus for […]
LaTeX notes
I recently installed a plugin that will allow me to render LaTeX. Mostly this is because I’ve long avoided writing out equations because it’s awkward in HTML, and it gets unintelligible quickly. This will allow me to explore population genetics in its “natural language” a little easier. But I just noticed on my RSS feed […]
Why the rate of evolution may only depend on mutation
Sometimes people think evolution is about dinosaurs. It is true that natural history plays an important role in inspiring and directing our understanding of evolutionary process. Charles Darwin was a natural historian, and evolutionary biologists often have strong affinities with the natural world and its history. Though many people exhibit a fascination with the flora and fauna […]
The logic of human destiny was inevitable 1 million years ago
Robert Wright’s best book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was published near 20 years ago. At the time I was moderately skeptical of his thesis. It was too teleological for my tastes. And, it does pander to a bias in human psychology whereby we look to find meaning in the universe. But this is […]
The case against nutrition “science”
My attitude toward nutrition science is to be skeptical of everything. I am of the generation that lived through the SnackWells fat-free cookie craze (demand was so high at one point that there was a problem with continuous understocking). A friend who is a professor of biology once admitted to me that part of him […]
Open Thread, 3/23/2017
The reader survey now N > 300. I assume it will stabilize in the next few weeks in the 400s. So far the biggest surprise that I’ve noticed is the ratio of married to divorced; 14o to 9. But, this aligns with research that college educated people do not get divorced at a high rate, and […]
America’s great Saudi foreign policy sin
Periodically on my Twitter feed there is mention of the new series, The Handmaid’s Tale. The New York Times has a typical positive review. The author attempts to assert its contemporary relevance, ending with ‘the new “Handmaid’s Tale” enters the culture as its own kind of Offred-like resistance, pushing back against a reality that somehow […]
2017 Gene Expression reader survey
Since I’m finally getting settled in here, I thought it was a good time to do a reader survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MW3YFZH. So it’s open. You can only take it once, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. There are 30 questions but the first 20 are mostly demographic and should go very quickly (e.g., […]
Aryan marauders from the steppe came to India, yes they did!
Its seems every post on Indian genetics elicits dissents from loquacious commenters who are woolly on the details of the science, but convinced in their opinions (yes, they operate through uncertainty and obfuscation in their rhetoric, but you know where the axe is lodged). This post is an attempt to answer some questions so I […]
Oxford Nanopore finally giving hope to biologist’s dreams
I don’t talk too much about genomic technology because it changes so fast. Being up-to-date on the latest machines and tools often requires regular deep-dives right now, though I believe at some point technological improvements will plateau as the data returned will be cheap and high quality enough that there won’t be much to gain on the […]
10 Things About Ancient History You Should Really Know
For this “10 things” I am going to constraint the historical period to the period before 1000 BCE. Basically all that came before Greece and Rome (from a Western perspective). 1) The Bronze Age Near East had its own equivalent of a Westphalian system. See The Brotherhood of Kings. 2) Even in the 3rd Millennium […]
Mouse fidelity comes down to the genes
While birds tend to be at least nominally monogamous, this is not the case with mammals. This strikes some people as strange because humans seem to be monogamous, at least socially, and often we take ourselves to be typically mammalian. But of course we’re not. Like many primates we’re visual creatures, rather than relying in […]