Monthly Archives: July 2011

In the early 2000s I recall Joel Grus telling me how reality television would become a pretty powerful exploratory tool for social science. I’m not quite sure of that now (there here’s a game-theoretic analysis of Survivor!). For example, c…

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Apparently Nikki Haley checked her race as “white” in some form in 2001. The horror! First, Nikki Haley kind of looks on the white side. Second, though I check “Asian” I do so because of its cultural valence, and that valence is socially constructed. The “Asian American” category as encompassing South Asians is an artifact […]

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I just finished reading My Fertility Crisis, which is excerpted from a longer piece you can get on Kindle for $1.99. The author is a single woman in her early 40s who is going through IVF treatments, without success so far. She outlines the choices she…

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What SlutWalk Looks Like in New Delhi. I don’t want to minimize the problem of sexual assault in a general sense anywhere, but considering the specific issue of how rape in addressed and confronted in much of South Asia this seems to be a worthwhile campaign. More broadly there needs to be the emphasis that […]

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The figure to the left is from a new paper in Science, When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. It reports the findings from 133 cemeteries in the northern hemisphere in regards to the proportion …

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1) Post from the past: Why does race matter for women?

2) Weird search query of the week: “hustler buyuk memeli.”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “Smart educated men less likely to think cheating always wrong”:
BTW – …

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Chris Mooney pointed me to a report on a study which finds that white males are the most sanguine in relation to climate change. Unfortunately there wasn’t a link to the full report that I could see. But no worries, the GSS added a variable, TEMP…

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I would like to throw out the word that I am looking for a person with Malagasy ancestry for the African Ancestry Project. To my knowledge there are no thick marker autosomal analyses of the Malagasy people. After my recent exploration of Southeast As…

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Lots of commentary below on my post about extramarital sex. I guess that’s fine, but I’m really not too interested your theories, I can do basic logic after introspection too. In fact, I can go down the street and ask a random person and I&…

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Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine

The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.
In the USA we often speak of “Chinese fo…

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Are Empowered Women Driving Reduced Tolerance Of Extramarital Affairs?:
My girlfriend’s theory about this, which makes sense to me, is that as women’s labor market opportunities have improved their dependency on husbands for economic security has d…

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Dienekes Pontikos has just released DIY Dodecad, a DIY admixture analysis program. You can download the files yourself. It runs on both Linux and Windows. Since I already have tools in Linux I decided to try out the Windows version, and it seems to wor…

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In my post below where I focused on patent law it was noted that even more obviously blatant abuses of the spirit of intellectual property occur in copyright. So I was interested to see that George Lucas has lost a law suit in the United Kingdom in rel…

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In Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s post on Roots into the Future Blaine Bettinger left an interesting comment:
It will be interesting to see how 23andMe deals with the pool of people that respond to the 10,000 free kits. Doesn’t seem like they can p…

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Andrew Oh-Willeke, Esq., observes:
One example of cyclicality that continues to today is the practice of law. The basic principles of Roman private law and the complaints that people made about lawyers and litigation were remarkably similar in the 300s…

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See his announcement: Genome in the Wild. If you don’t know, Zack is the driving force behind the Harappa Ancestry Project. Seeing how the Indian scientific-bureaucratic complex still seems to be retarding rapid progress in human genomics (how ma…

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23andMe is announcing a new research initiative into African American genetics today. Dr. Daniel MacArthur has blogged it so well that I recommend you just read him: Personal genomics: not just for rich white folks. This looks like it will focus more o…

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For most of my life I have had an implicit directional view of Holocene human culture. And that direction was toward more social complexity and cultural proteanism. Ancient Egypt traversed ~2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the fall of the New Ki…

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“Interesting” email from Glenn Davey objecting to the way in which I closed the thread on evolutionary psychology:
Why bother with a blog if you’re so bad with people?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/the-end-of-evolutionary…

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A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer:
At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11…

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20/97
Razib Khan