Razib Khan

Month: July 2010

  • Daily Data Dump – Friday

    Have a good weekend. Death of A Language. Since I started being more pro-active about my general lack of respect for modern American cultural anthropology I’ve gotten a lot of response. On the specific question of whether linguistic diversity is inversely proportional to economic growth, I’ve gotten some mixed-responses, and find all the conclusions inconclusive…

  • Koreans, not quite the purest race?

    PLoS One has a paper out on Korean (South) population genetics and phylogeography, Gene Flow between the Korean Peninsula and Its Neighboring Countries: SNP markers provide the primary data for population structure analysis. In this study, we employed whole-genome autosomal SNPs as a marker set (54,836 SNP markers) and tested their possible effects on genetic…

  • Katz

    (click image for larger view)

  • Finland, still going its own way

    Dienekes points to a new paper which highlights genetic variation in Fenno-Scandinavia (or in this case, Finland, Sweden and Denmark). A two-dimensional plot with the variation is pretty illustrative of what you’d expect: Finns are genetic outliers in Europe, to some extent even in comparison to Estonians, who speak a very similar language. But, I…

  • Reader survey results: politics

    Since the reader survey is topping out in response, I though I’d report some of the results. Since I’ve been doing these surveys my readership has exhibited a few patterns, and I was curious as to any changes since moving to Discover. Not too much has shifted. Instead of 15% female, as was the case…

  • ResearchBlogCast #11

    ResearchBlogCast #11: Using The Genome To Identify Species. Check out Kevin Zelnio for more details. We also talk about the ScienceBlogs kerfuffle a bit at the beginning.

  • Daily Data Dump – Thursday

    If you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. N = 300, so I’ll stop buggin’ now and start posting results in the next day or so. Ancient iceman’s gene map underway. Does anyone have any inside dirt on Otzi? His mtDNA was an outgroup…

  • The Anglo Revolutions

    Over my lifetime in the United States there has been a shift toward a set of values which emphasize diversity, understood as being expressed along a few particular parameters: racial, sexual and ethnic. Part of the project is obviously concrete: increased representation of various segments within American society at the commanding heights of institutions and…

  • Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

    Another reminder, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. Assortative mating, regression and all that: offspring IQ vs parental midpoint. Very sad: “For n = 3 (parental midpoint of 145) the mean for the kids would be 127 and the probability of exceeding…

  • Investing in a nanny state for social returns

    Jonah Lehrer has a post up, How Preschool Changes the Brain over at Frontal Cortex. He reports on a paper, Investing in our young people, which has been around for about 5 years. The top line of it is this, an investment in a $2,500/year (inflation adjusted) pre-school program in the early 1960s seems to…

  • Daily Data Dump – Tuesday

    First, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. A horse is a horse, of course of course. Horses, like dogs, may be able to “read” human cues. In general intelligence dogs are less intelligent than wolves, but geniuses at this. In fact before…

  • Summer books, what’s readable?

    Danny reminded me that I still hadn’t read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Since I know him a bit (at least internet “know”) I’ve decided I can’t put it off any longer, and I’ll tackle it soon. I just finished two books, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the…

  • Snap, phenotype, genotype and fitness

    One of the main criticisms of the population genetic pillar of the modern evolutionary synthesis was that too often it was a game of “beanbag genetics”. In other words population geneticists treated genes as discrete independent individual elements within a static sea. R.A. Fisher and his acolytes believed that the average effect of fluctuations of…

  • The rise (and fall?) of second-tier lingua francas

    The New York Times has an interesting piece, As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language. It is dense with the different strands of this story. Basically, upper and upper middle class Indonesians are switching from Bahasa Indonesian to English to give their children a leg up, and are sending their children to English-medium schools.…

  • Daily Data Dump – Monday

    Hope the heat is treating you well (if you live in the northern hemisphere). If you are a regular reader and haven’t taken the summer 2010 reader survey, click here. Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability. A post which addresses some of the issues emerging out of my comment about the relationship between linguistic…

  • A Replicated Typo empire

    Just want to note that GNXP contributor bayes has transformed A Replicated Typo into a fascinating group weblog. Feed here.

  • Diseases of the Silk Road

    Nature has two papers out about something called “Behçet’s disease.” It has apparently also been termed the “Silk Road Disease”, because of its associations with populations connected to the Central Eurasian trade networks.Though described by Hippocrates 2,500 years ago, apparently it was “discovered” only in the 20th century by a Turkish physician. The reason that…

  • Reader Survey, summer 2010

    So that reader survey that I mentioned last week is done. I’m mostly interested in seeing the changes since I’ve moved to Discover from ScienceBlogs. I assume that the standard 85% male readership has shifted somewhat toward more balance, but I don’t know. Many of the basic demographic questions (sex, race, age, etc.) are the…

  • Reader survey results: Science vs. social science vs. humanities

    About six months ago I did a survey of the readership of my two Gene Expression blogs (before moving to Discover). The N was around 600. You can view the raw frequency results here. One of the issues which I was curious about: did the disciplinary background of readers have any major correlates with responses?…

  • Linguistic diversity, other views

    Readers might find these responses of interest. Mostly I just laughed, though some of you may be a bit more serious than I, so if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don’t follow the links. As I told “ana” below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling…

Razib Khan