My Goodness My Guinea-ness?
Update: After this post a researcher who is planning on publishing work on the genetic structure of Great Britain and Ireland and who has a very large N forwarded me a PCA which he gave me permission to repost. I’ve uploaded it here.
As you mi…
The Bantu völkerwanderung
Image Credit: Mark Dingemanse
I recall years ago someone on the blog of Jonathan Edelstein, a soc.history.what-if alum as well, mentioning offhand that archaeologists had “debunked” the idea of the Bantu demographic expansion. Because, unf…
Mapping ADMIXTURE components
Over at Harappa Simranjit has been allowing Zack to post his isopleth maps of the frequencies of ADMIXTURE components by region. He now has his own blog, The Jatt Gene. On unrelated note, does anyone know of an easy way to generate isopleth maps which …
The New York Times “pay wall”
So what do readers of this blog think? Pay or no pay? It’s useful, and The New York Times is pretty massive in scope, if sometimes lacking in breadth. I love their data-oriented stuff, but I ignore their columnists and a lot of their “analy…
Personal genomics gets very personal
Dan MacArthur points me to this nice post over at Daily Kos, Our Genome Decoded: How Companies Like 23andMe Are Advancing the Field of Personal Genomics:
…However, in the past few years several private biotech companies have started offering a &#…
Bravo for Mormons!
Trying to Relish the Big Time, Even When It Brings a Cringe:
The house lights came up and it was intermission at “The Book of Mormon,” the new Broadway musical about a pair of innocent young Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda to spread the faith. …
The end of Ayla & The Land of Painted Caves
I read Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear in elementary school at a friend’s house during a sleep over. It was next to the bedside, and I decided to pick it up. I’d thought it was a human evolution book from the cover. I read 2/3 …
The day of the farmer
About five months ago I read Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Bellwood’s thesis is simple: that the first adopters of farming entered into a period of rapid demographic expansion and by and large replac…
The excitement of clothed porn stars
Porn Stars, Clad? They Seem to Appeal to Indonesian Filmgoers:
Ms. Aoi, and others like her, are the secret of a winning formula stumbled upon by Maxima Pictures, the production house where Mr. Hidayat is an executive producer. For two years, Maxima ha…
The limits of computational power – shades of 1982
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back:
I got my daughter a netbook, so now my computer is doing Harappa Prohect work 24×7.
Also, Simranjit was nice enough to offer me the use of a server. For privacy reasons, I am not going to upload any of the participan…
Genetic paternalists are very patronizing
An comment below on my post Genetic paternalism & the F.D.A.:
I came across your inflamed post from March 9th and the more I read the more disappointed I became, especially when I read your comment “following twitter, it seems there may be a dis…
The flat and the fit
The Pith: In evolution if you want to win in the long run you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, even if that’s the choicest basket. Sh*t happens, and you better have some back up strategies.
Diversity is a major question in evolution…
Who thinks the sun goes around the earth?
My post earlier today prompted a few emails about the bizarre result that a substantial minority of Americans accept that the sun goes around the earth. The General Social Science variable is EARTHSUN, and it asks:
Now, does the Earth go around the Sun…
Genetics as the myth buster: Indian edition
Whenever Zack Ajmal posts a new update to the Harappa Ancestry Project he appends some data to his ethnic database. This sends me to Wikipedia, because how many people are supposed to know what a “Muslim Rawther” means? Well, if you are a M…
The Republican fluency with science
The Audacious Epigone has a post up, Republicans are more scientifically literate than Democrats or independents are, where he reviews pro vs. anti-science attitude by party in the General Social Survey. He concludes that in fact Republicans are more s…
It’s about heritability….
I’m going to promote a comment:
…would knowing the root biological cause for differences which are already apparent to us change anything?
It’s obvious to you that there’s a contradiction here, but to the average educated person this…
The decline of web 2.0
In 2006-2007 I worked at a firm which had its own web application, and “web 2.0″ was a big term in the marketing materials. This article in DealB%k, Is It a New Tech Bubble? Let’s See if It Pops, made me wonder what happened to that term….
Guest posts @ Sepia Mutiny
Since it doesn’t show up in my total content aggregator (RSS), and I don’t know how to author filter Movable Type posts easily, I thought I would point to my guest posts over at the Sepia Mutiny weblog:
Speaking of a demonstration in Pakist…
Another genome blogger….
Reader “Diogenes,” with ADMIXTURE in hand, and way more knowledge of archaeology than I can comprehend, now has a blog. Why am I starting a blog…:
I named my blog Artemis since I believe the “Neolithic” which shaped our wo…
Friday Fluff – March 25th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow. Arguably the doyen of modern population geneticists. Take a look at who he’s had as graduate students or post-docs, and there’s a high probability there is someone you know of, you…