The great rollback
Derek Thompson in The Atlantic has a piece up, How to Survive the Media Apocalypse, which gets at something I’ve come to believe: Advertising has been critical to the affordable distribution of news for a century and a half in the U.S. Today’s media companies don’t have to reach all the way back to the […]
Crescent over the North Sea
Pew has a nice new report up, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population. Though it is important to read the whole thing, including the methods. I laugh when people take projections of the year 2100 seriously. That’s because we don’t have a good sense of what might occur over 70+ years (read social and demographic projections from […]
The Elephant, dragon and eagle
The relationship between China and India is clearly one-sided: India is obsessed with a China which is approaching lift-off toward becoming on the verge of a developed nation within a generation (certain urban areas are already basically developed, albeit not particularly wealthy in comparison to Hong Kong or Singapore). Often when I see interviews […]
Razib Khan’s raw genotype data on 23andMe, Family Tree DNA, Geno 2.0 and Ancestry
It has been a while since I posted an update on my genotype. Since then I’ve been tested on most of the major platforms. I don’t see any harm in releasing this to the public or researchers who want to look at it (though I don’t know why anyone would). You can download all the files here. […]
Understanding prehistory through genetic inference and ancient DNA
Before David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, I highly recommend a new preprint from Pontus Skoglund and Iain Mathieson*, Ancient genomics: a new view into human prehistory and evolution. It’s basically at the sweet spot for a lot of readers: […]
Neanderthal vs us: for wont of a SNP?
Recently at a human evolution conference in England Svante Paabo (or someone in his group) was alluding to discovering how modern humans and Neanderthals differed by looking at the ~30,000 genetic positions (bases) where modern humans and Neanderthals exhibit fixed differences. That is, Neanderthals and modern humans exhibit totally disjoint frequencies. I’ve been saying this […]
Open Thread, 11/26/2017
A few days ago there was a Twitter thing about top five books that have influenced you. It’s hard for me to name five, but I put three books down for three different reasons: Principles of Population Genetics, because it gives you a model for how to analyze and understand evolutionary processes. There are other […]
One month of DNAGeeks & Cyber Monday sale
For a while, one of the weird things about DNAGeeks sales in quantities has been that people who look at haplogroup I1‘s page have not been buying the shirts. This is in contrast to haplogroup R1b. The geographically the two groups overlap a fair amount. It’s not totally implausible to guess that 75% of the humans […]
What does Ajit Pai’s race have anything to do with net neutrality?
This comedian has some choice words for the FCC chairman pic.twitter.com/QKEalkZaWd — NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 25, 2017 Not surprise that Hari Kondabolu goes there. The problem with making everything about racial dynamics is that more white people in the United States might take a page from that. I don’t wish to encourage that. Also, believe … Continue reading “What does Ajit Pai’s race have anything to do with net neutrality?”
The question should be “Who Are Salafi Muslims and Why Are Many So Extreme?”
Because of the horrible massacre at a mosque with Sufi tendencies in Egypt, there are a lot of “explainers” out there about sectarian divisions in Islam. The one in The New York Times, Who Are Sufi Muslims and Why Do Some Extremists Hate Them? could be worse. This portion especially gets at the major issue: […]
Cultural and religious relics as clues to cultural process
Much of the public is given the impression that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the reign of Constantine. Though it is hard to deny that it was the favored religion, especially by the end of his rule, modern ideas of the “official” religion of a given state are somewhat anachronistic […]
Soft selection for gentleness in Puerto Rican African Honeybees
When I was a kid “killer bees” were a major pop culture thing. There were movies about the bees, and we would get updates about their march northward in the news. They were a cautionary tale of our species’ hubris. Today we have a little bit more perspective. These bees were actually just African […]
Dodging the Apple Premium (still)
Because of what I have been provided by my employers over the last few years I’ve been working on a Macbook Pro. These are fine machines, but they have not converted me to being a convert to all things Apple. I have two machines with Ubuntu at home that I have no problem with using […]
Regional Ancestry by Insitome
Shill alert! When readers and friends found out I was going to work with Spencer Wells, many asked about ancestry analysis. By and large I said “wait.” Wait no longer. This is now a 3 day pre-sale promotion for our Regional Ancestry product. Basically, you can get it for $19.99. I wrote a blog post on the […]
The Neanderthal-modern human handover
We live in a time of transitions when it comes to Neanderthals. Since the 2010 discovery of strong genomic evidence for Neanderthal ancestry in most humans they’ve been…humanized. This was pretty much inevitable, but, I also think it was right. Neanderthals were a big-brained human species which dominated much of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands […]
Against the rectification of names of the enemy
Since the beginning of this weblog, a particular tick that is common to humans emerges over and over. A tick that is seductive, inevitable, and which I periodically react negatively to (and surely do engage in). That tick is the one where peculiar or exotic terms, or common terms in specific senses, are deployed to […]
Cystic fibrosis as the sickle-cell anemia of the north
Cystic fibrosis is one of those ‘classical’ recessive diseases you learn about in medical genetics. It’s frequent enough that doctors will always be interested in it, and its inheritance pattern is relatively simple, following a rough Mendelian pattern of recessive expression. The reality is a little more complicated than that though, as there are different […]
Open Thread, 11/19/2017
So we put up a 3rd reviewer mug. Kind of an “inside joke”, but we liked it. One thing we have noticed: people really like the DNA helix logo. They click it. They buy it. More visual, less wordy. One thing that’s funny, when it paternal haplogroups I1 clicks a lot, but they never buy […]
PCA remains the swiss-army-knife to explore population structure
genotype-based methods? — Razib Khan (@razibkhan) November 15, 2017 I put up a poll without context yesterday to gauge people about what methods they preferred when it came to population genetic structure.* PCA came out on top by a plural majority. More explicitly model-based methods, such as Structure/Admixture, come in right behind them. Curiously, the […]