Is the social justice exterior overwhelming the Indian nationalist interior?
One of the most interesting things I have experienced over the past 15 years or so interacting with young Indian Americans, usually of Hindu background, is the disjunction between the scripts that they are inculcated with in their education in broader society, and the quite nationalistic/parochial perspectives that are imparted to them by their parents. …
Continue reading “Is the social justice exterior overwhelming the Indian nationalist interior?”
Surfing into the genomic future
The decline in cost per genomeWithin genomics circles, the chart above illustrating the crash in sequencing costs since the year 2000 is famous. The reason it is famous is that it shows that genomic technology began to outrun the famous “Moore’s Law”, …
Reader Survey for The Insight
Reader Survey for The Insight podcastAfter 50+ episodes and 200,000+ downloads, Spencer and I have decided that we want to know a little bit more about the listeners to our podcasts, as well as taking some feedback for the future direction of The Insig…
Browncast Episode 33: an ethnography of doubting Darwin
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than …
Continue reading “Browncast Episode 33: an ethnography of doubting Darwin”
Open Thread, 04/28/2019
Reading The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. A bit too many names and battles (narrative), rather than social and economic dynamics. But it’s a good inversion of the traditional narrative, and illustrates just how chaotic and fractions the Islamic world in the last decades of the 11th-century was. Western European society […]
African genomics tells us about deep structure and history
Two interesting papers in Genome Biology that are open access, Whole-genome sequence analysis of a Pan African set of samples reveals archaic gene flow from an extinct basal population of modern humans into sub-Saharan populations and African evolutionary history inferred from whole genome sequence data of 44 indigenous African populations. Since they are open access […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about. Also, I’ve posted a new linguistic podcast on the patron page. It’s 1 hour and 20 minutes, and really dense with information and wide-ranging. There were five people, but I didn’t say much, and Zach was mostly …
Having a common name in a post-Dunbar’s number world
I’m not sure I believe the model outlined in Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. I’m not even sure about the specific details of Dunbar’s number. But, the overall insight, that the vast majority of human history has been defined by small groups with people you see again and again had an […]
The many ways of being Brown Diasporic
An admission: I have no idea what half of Zach’s posts are about. More clearly, they’re written in English, but there are so many references to Indian/South Asian pop-culture and drop-ins of Hindi-Urdu words that I have no idea what he’s talking about. It might as well be Greek. Often after 30 minutes of Google, …
The Genetics Of The St. Thomas Christians, part 2
Last year I posted The Genetics of the St. Thomas Christians. Recently I got some more samples. Of these, four were clearly self-identified as Southist/Knanaya Christians (as opposed to Northist Christians). The Knanaya are a bit different in their traditions than the broader much larger St. Thomas Christian community. In the PCA above the bottom […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 24: Deconstructing the Denisovans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 24: Deconstructing the DenisovansThe Dali skull, 200,000 years old. A Denisovan?This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Spencer is back, as we go back to our old two-ma…
Deconstructing the Denisovans
Spencer and Razib discuss who the Denisovans were, where they lived, and what it means for us as humans. https://pxlme.me/UPzHwYX6
Denisovans and the human story
The Siberian cave where a new human species was discoveredWe are all aware of the iconic fossil finds which mark the various milestones of our understanding of human evolution. The story of how our species became what it is today. Raymond Dart’s Taung …
College educated conservatives are divided on evolution
A few years ago an academic friend of mine mentioned offhand that it must be difficult for me to be an evolutionary biologist (of sorts) and a conservative (of sorts). As someone in touch with many “elite conservatives” (people who work at think-tanks and the like), that’s not true at all. Though Creationism has substantial […]
Indians are just as stupid as Americans
There it is, guys. The seemingly secular Razib Khan let’s slip that he holds hatred towards “self-righteous white saviors” (by which he means white Christians). But would that hatred go away if they were brown Christians? Not on your life. Notice how he reiterates in the thread https://t.co/KppKQoJpdF — Vikram K. Chatterjee 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇮🇳 (@VikChatterjee) April …
The expansion of modern humans ~50,000 as part of a regular Poisson process
Last of the giants: What killed off Madagascar’s megafauna a thousand years ago?: The first job is to understand exactly when the megafauna died out. Radiocarbon dating of over 400 recent fossils demonstrates that animals under 22 pounds lived on Madagascar throughout the last 10,000 years. For animals over 22 pounds, there are abundant fossils […]
Open Thread, 04/12/2019
Just a reminder for people to check in on The Insight this week. Lots of talk about Denisovans between Spencer and myself. We’ve also got a follow-up podcast scheduled with a researcher working in Denisovan genomics in a few weeks (we’re on Spotify now by the way). Our three new hires at George Mason economics. […]
Easter Attacks in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka blasts: At least 137 dead and more than 150 injured in multiple church and hotel explosions: More than 137 people have been killed and more than 150 injured after coordinated bomb blasts hit a number of high-end hotels and churches in Sri Lanka on Sunday. The blasts, reported to have occurred in the …
Gene Wolfe, death of a master
Gene Wolfe, Acclaimed Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 87. Wolfe’s prose could be challenging to read. I actually read The Book of the New Sun trilogy twice because of some elements of impenetrability in the style, though there’s a reason Wolfe was acclaimed. In general, I’m not a fan of “science fantasy” or the “dying […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.