Monthly Archives: May 2018

Though Texas doesn’t get all the glory! The National Geo Bee was won by a kid from Northern California.

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In the generality, I think intergroup selection of paternal lineages is the answer to why star-shaped phylogenies are so evident in the phylogenetic record ~4,000 years ago. More precisely, most of the major clades of R1a, R1b, and I1 undergo massive expansion after a sharp reduction in effective population size around this period. The R […]

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Country Users Rank % Rank  China 746,662,194 1 53.20% 109  India 391,292,631 2 29.55% 143  United States 245,436,423 3 76.18% 54  Brazil 123,927,230 4 59.68% 90  Japan 117,528,631 5 92.00% 15  Russia 110,003,284 6 76.41% 53 The “Brown Pundits” blog was formed on a lark about 7 years ago. The Sepia Munity weblog was clearly … Continue reading “The once and future “Brown Pundits””

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This week Spencer and Razib talk to renowned science journalist Carl Zimmer about his new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh.

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When I was talking to Matt Hahn I made a pretty stupid semantic flub, confusing “soft selection” with “soft sweeps.” Matt pointed out that soft/hard selection were terms more appropriate to quantitative genetics rather than population genomics. His viewpoint is defensible, though going back into the literature on soft/selection, e.g., Soft and hard selection revisited, […]

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I created a SurveyMonkey poll. Check it out…. (after you are done, you can check out the results) Create your own user feedback survey

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She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is now available. The interview with Carl Zimmer will be live on The Insight Wednesday night (EDT). If you haven’t, please consider leaving a 5-star review on iTunes or Stitcher. I’ve told that you can already read The University We Need on Google Books. I can’t vouch for this, but […]

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The figure to the left should be familiar to readers of this weblog. It is taken from A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture (Kamin et al.). Over the past few years a peculiar fact long suspected or inferred has come into sharp focus: some of the Y […]

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One of the problems with Indian history is that a lot of the books are strongly biased toward the Muslim and colonial periods. There are numerous reasons for this. People are interested in the Muslim and colonial periods for nationalist and anti-nationalist reasons, if that makes any sense. But some of it is simply source … Continue reading “Books on Indian history without recency bias”

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Citation: Modeling Human Population Separation History Using Physically Phased GenomesEvolution is sometimes difficult to comprehend in terms of how it plays out in your mind’s eye. This is different from believing that evolution occurred. Evolutionary…

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Stonehenge was first erected around 3100 BC, though the timber was only replaced with stone in 2600 BC. The great monument was a product of the Late Neolithic in Britain. Ancient DNA today tells us that these people were distantly related to the modern Sardinians, and derive from a wave of farmers that radiated out […]

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  On this week’s episode of The Insight, I talked to Matt Hahn about why he wrote his new book, his opinions on “Neutral Theory”, and what he thought about David Reich’s op-ed. Without Spencer’s supervision, I have to admit that I think I lost control and just went “full nerd”. Next week we’re dropping […]

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Razib talks to professor Matthew Hahn of Indiana University about population and molecular genetics, and how the two have combined to form one field.

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The second season of Westworld has some scenes set in Edo period Japan. To spoil things for you there is apparently a scene-by-scene re-creation of a plot arc from the first season of the show set in the American West. Watching this scene, and comparing it to the earlier version, I can’t but help feel […]

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Every few years I check to see if the great mutation accumulation controversy has resolved itself. I don’t know if anyone calls it that, but that’s what I think of it as. There are two major issues that matter here: mutation rates are a critical parameter in evolutionary models, and, mutation accumulation over time matters […]

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It looks as if the vast majority (95% or more depending on the population) of the ancestry of non-African humans derives from a population expansion which began around ~60,000 years ago. Before this period some researchers argue there was a non-trivial period of isolation. The “long bottleneck” (David Reich alludes to this in Who We […]

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It looks as if the vast majority (95% or more depending on the population) of the ancestry of non-African humans derives from a population expansion which began around ~60,000 years ago. Before this period some researchers argue there was a non-trivial period of isolation. The “long bottleneck” (David Reich alludes to this in Who We […]

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Reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War has made me think more about the unique nature of urban civilization of the long 20th-century. The expansion of public health, in particular provision of clean water, meant that for the first time in the history of the […]

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Warren Treadgold’s The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is going to come out in early July, but I’ve written my review. Don’t know when NRO will post it. In general, I’m positive. Though Treadgold has some ideological issues with Leftism in the academy, much of the book is apolitical and shines the light […]

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The plot at the top is from a Peter Turchin post, History Is Now a Quantitative Science. Peter has been on this for more than ten years now. I’ve long been broadly sympathetic, but of late it’s been nice to see his formal and data-intensive approach take hold and make some waves. Using raw data […]

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Razib Khan