Monthly Archives: December 2010

I’m not big for introspection. So I’ll keep this plain & simple. Thanks to Amos Zeeberg & Gemma Shusterman for taking care of the technical details of this weblog so I don’t have to deal with it. This is not a trivial matter; I’ve dealt with the technical upkeep of other weblogs for many years, […]

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Guelta d’Archei, Chad. Credit: Dario Menasce. Everyone who is literate knows that the Sahara desert is the largest of its kind in the world. The chasm in cultural, biological, and physical geography is very noticeable. Northern Africa is part of the Palearctic zone, while the peoples north of the Sahara have long been part of […]

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1. First, a post from the past: Golden ideas. 2. Weird search query of the week: “young girls gone mature”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to Slouching toward idiocracy: JWM and Dave Both hit on key concepts here. Its not just cats, cattle and humans, in fact the relative brain size of almost all […]

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Predictions, expectations, etc. More use of the term “polytypic”. Ötzi turns out to have Near Eastern affinities. The Hobbits finally have some genetic material successfully analyzed. Many, many, more human origins stories spun out of control by the press. Without a rock-hard interpretative framework like “Out of Africa” there is less “functional constraint.” Facebook peaks […]

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According to Google Analytics, they are: 10 – 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan. 9 – Most atheists are not white & other non-fairy tales. 8 – Which American racial group has the lowest fertility? 7 – No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes. 6 – To classify humanity is not that […]

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I know many people decide on their yearly charitable giving between Christmas and the New Year. If you’ve waited until now, you might want to take some more time and check out GiveWell’s Top international charities.

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A few days ago Robin Hanson brought this chart of world population to my attention: On the x-axis you have time, 12,000 years ago to the present. On the y-axis an estimate of the total world population log-transformed. The data is derived from the US Census low estimate. Granting the data’s accuracy for the purposes […]

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To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in […]

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I assume there will be more stories like this in the next year, Gene Machine: The machine that could change your life is a compact device, only 24 inches wide, 20 inches deep and 21 inches high. At a glance you might mistake it for a Playskool toy–or, better yet, the Apple II computer, which […]

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The maps above juxtaposes the counties which shifted Republican in the 2008 presidential election vs. 2004 (reddish) and the age-adjusted estimated rates of obesity by county in 2007 (darker blue). One issue which I haven’t seen explored too much are the two faces of Appalachia; the Atlantic facing counties are generally healthier than the lowland […]

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Several readers have pointed me to a headline in a British newspaper, Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man: Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains. Until […]

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Neanderthal, La Chapelle-aux-Saints Fossils matter. Fossils are evidence. That was Milford Wolpoff’s refrain in the 1987 NOVA documentary which heralded the long cresting of mitochondrial Eve and Out of Africa. Fossils remain highly relevant and important when it comes to deeper time phylogenetic relationships, but it does seem that they have only served to supplement […]

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Professor, web entrepreneur Denis Dutton dies. Readers of this weblog probably know him for Arts & Letters Daily and The Art Instinct. I never knew the man personally, but he made an impact on me through his website and articles. We shared friends, and I was proud when Arts & Letters Daily put this website […]

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Dilettante human genetics blogger Dienekes Pontikos has a post up with a somewhat oblique title, Is multi-regional evolution dead? I say oblique because a straightforward title would be “Multi-regionalism lives!” He posted a chart from a 2008 paper which outlines various models of human origins, and their relationship to molecular data at the time. I […]

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Hope Christmas went well for everyone. No complaints about mine. Pinboard. Thanks for the Delicious replacement recommendations. I know that Delicious is going to be sold and not shutdown, but confidence is lost. Pinboard seems to work well, and you can import all your Delicious bookmarks. Additionally, there’s a serviceable Chrome extension so that I […]

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The September issue of Discover Magazine had an interesting piece, If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? It’s now online, though to read the full article you’ll have to have a print subscription, or, pay 99 cents to get a digital copy of that issue. John Hawks is described as “a […]

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Steve Hsu, The mystery of height: I was looking at The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society, A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources. The Dutch came to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in the early 17th century and these translated documents record their impressions of the Austronesian natives. (Both the Dutch and Chinese […]

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This is a scheduled post (As many of my posts are by the way. Shout out to the stupid readers who occasionally wonder why I’m not partying when a post goes live on Friday night!). Merry Christmas! I’m probably playing around with my HTC Evo 4G if you’re reading this on Saturday, or eating, etc. […]

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1. First, a post from the past: Lions, and tigers, and snow leopards! Oh, my!. 2. Weird search query of the week: “Lions, and tigers, and snow leopards! Oh, my!”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to Heritability and genes as causes: I knew some people thought I had over-reacted to the initial item/press release. […]

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A reminder that 23andMe’s sale is valid until Christmas. Including the mandatory yearly subscription to their “Personal Genome Service”, that’s $160 (though you only get charged $99 + shipping initially, the subscription is $5/month). I didn’t quite go up to the 10 kits per person, but I did come close. There will likely be new […]

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Razib Khan