Predictions for 2018
I don’t normally do year-end stuff. But I figured, why not? After all, I put up a post at my work blog about the major things that happened in historical human pop gen this year. Indian population genomics will move forward notably. The ancient DNA work really feels like vaporware sometimes. Some of the researchers […]
Preparing for Nero
Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God grapples with the reality that over time in the Biblical narrative the deity becomes less and less a direct presence. In Genesis, humankind has conversations with the divine, and arguably even wrestles with God himself. This is not what we see in later books. Or more precisely, […]
The iPhone killed commenting
Back when this domain received about 15 or 20 percent of the traffic it now receives there were many more commenters. What happened? One of the reasons the Sepia Mutiny weblog was shutdown was that as the commentariat withered after 2007 there was less motivation to keep a community going (there was none). The explanation […]
Why Darwinian metaphors work for start-ups
Peter Thiel is a deep thinker. I say that because some of my friends in the Bay Area who I respect for being punctilious practitioners of cognitive hygiene nevertheless exhibit awe in relation to their conversations with him (for what it’s worth, most do not agree with his politics). Though Thiel has the standard educational […]
Against Thomas Jefferson!
I was unexpectedly traveling on an airplane recently, so I had some time to read Michael Lind’s Land of Promise (I had just finished Peter Thiel’s Zero to One). Though with the subtitle “An Economic History of the United States,” it’s not a dispassionate, or frankly scholarly, take. Lind marshals a great deal of evidence, […]
Why the Democratic wave may be bigger because of gerrymandering
I’ve been saying for a while that I think the Democrats will probably retake the House in 2018. More recently the probability seems to be getting higher and higher if you look at the generic ballot. But I noticed something on Twitter and made an observation which I think perhaps I should put here: the […]
Open Thread, 12/24/2017
Well, Merry Christmas Eve! I’ve been rereading Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Recommended. A little different now that I’ve been involved in start-ups. I would say that a lot of it is a pretty straightforward application of stuff you’ll encounter in economics and economic history to Silicon Valley […]
“Rakhigarhi paper” out in January 2018?
Tony Joseph has an interesting piece up, Who built the Indus Valley civilisation?, which people are asking me about via email. First, I don’t have any inside information. Last I heard in September was that the Rakhigarhi results were “one or two months away,” like they have been for a year or so. So I put […]
The general social complexity factor is a thing
The above is the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world, derived from responses to the World Values Survey which are subject to principal component analysis. Basically, you take all the variation and pull out the biggest independent dimensions which can explain the variation. You’ve seen this with genetic data, but the method is pretty common […]
Finland to sequence 10% of its population in 6 years
As you may have heard, Finland is starting a major genomics initiative. Basically , hey’re going to try and sequence 500,000 Finns over the next 6 years. Obviously, these are goals, and sometimes efforts fall short. But sequencing is only going to get cheaper, so I think they’ll get it done. After the UK Biobank, […]
Natural selection in humans (OK, 375,000 British people)
The above figure is from Evidence of directional and stabilizing selection in contemporary humans. I’ll be entirely honest with you: I don’t read every UK Biobank paper, but I do read those where Peter Visscher is a co-author. It’s in PNAS, and a draft which is not open access. But it’s a pretty interesting […]
Pick the right team, not the right answer (most of the time)
Often you will hear people say “why do people always engage in ‘group-think’”? As if group-think is always a bad thing! The reality is that group-think is often highly adaptive. That’s why people engage in it. You’re outsourcing expensive cognition to the collective, tradition, or in some cases to someone with expertise. Of course, there are […]
Motivated reasoning in “science journalism.”
The “reproducibility crisis” has really benefited some sectors of science journalism, as there is less credulous amplification of spurious results. That being said, motivated reasoning is powerful. They “want to believe.” So when I saw this piece in Quartz, Highly motivated kids have a greater advantage in life than kids with a high IQ, I […]
Samsung Galaxy S8 is pretty good
One of the more convenient things with having a blog that has more than a few readers is that you can ask questions and get some answers. Recently I was figuring out whether I’d go full-Apple, and get an iPhone. I got a lot of feedback, but ultimately I decided to to be boring and get […]
A living fossil, back to GNXP.COM
Just a note. I am moving back to the original Gene Expression domain. If you consume my content through my Twitter auto feed (not my main Twitter account) or my Total Content Feed, it’s pretty irrelevant, since all the places I post content to push to them (I still post to Brown Pundits and Secular […]
A Christmas Metabolism Story
Spencer, Razib and guest Gareth Highnam take you “behind the scenes” of your holiday meal. A whirlwind tour of 10,000 years of history, you’ll discover how and why your genome plays a role in metabolizing what you eat and drink during the festive season.
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
A genetic map of the world
The above map is from a new preprint on the patterns of genetic variation as a function of geography for humans, Genetic landscapes reveal how human genetic diversity aligns with geography. The authors assemble an incredibly large dataset to generate these figures. The orange zones are “troughs” of gene flow. Basically barriers to gene flow. […]
A genetic map of the world
The above map is from a new preprint on the patterns of genetic variation as a function of geography for humans, Genetic landscapes reveal how human genetic diversity aligns with geography. The authors assemble an incredibly large dataset to generate these figures. The orange zones are “troughs” of gene flow. Basically barriers to gene flow. […]