Monthly Archives: August 2011

One of the things I really hate are unqualified linear projections. They’re so useless most of the time. A science fiction magazine will give you more insight about the future than the United Nations population projection for the year 2100. This …

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I was asked by the person who provided me the Tutsi genotype for detailed results. Of course I would do so! So I uploaded the raw csv files to Google Docs. The format and explanation isn’t totally clear, though if you follow my posts you’ll…

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Sort of and possible. I’ve been talking about this for years, and Greg Cochran points me to an abstract at the human genetics conference referenced earlier. Novel coding variation at TYRP1 explains a large proportion of variance in the hair colou…

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Just got this email, and I thought I would share with my readers: I’m a biologist from Germany and together with 2 fellow biologists I’m currently working on a project that evaluates the sharing of raw data from DTC-genetic-testing companie…

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Dienekes alerts me to the fact that the International Congress of Human Genetics abstracts are online. I spent an hour using only a few keywords, and came up with a lot. 1) If you have a presentation and think it might interest the readers here, feel f…

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Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations: Linguistic and genetic studies have shown that most Indian groups have ancestry from two genetically divergent populations, Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). However, the date of mixture still remains unknown. We analyze genome-wide data from about 60 South Asian groups using […]

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India Measures Itself Against a China That Doesn’t Notice: “Indians are obsessed with China, but the Chinese are paying too little attention to India,” said Minxin Pei, an economist who was born in China and who writes a monthly column for The Indian Express, a national daily newspaper. (No Indian economists are known to have […]

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In my post below, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, there were many comments. Some I did not post because they were rude, though they did ask valid questions. I will address those issues, but let me quote one comment:
That’s an interes…

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Derek Lowe asks “Why Isn’t There an ArXiv For Chemistry?” Where indeed. A few years ago I went to a talk given by Michael Eisen and asked him about why the biological sciences didn’t have an ArXiv, and one of his explanations wa…

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George Monbiot’s piece, Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, is making the rounds. This paragraph jumped out at me:
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the acad…

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With this post, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, I hope to tamp down all the talk about how the Belgians invented the Tutsi-Hutu division. After putting the call out it took 2 months for me to get my hands on a genotype, and less than 2…

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Paul Kagame with Barack and Michelle Obama
I first heard about Rwanda in the 1980s in relation to Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas. The details around this were tragic enough, but obviously what happened in 1994 washed away the events d…

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Thoughts on the BGI IQ study.
Language Evolves in R, not Python: An apology. Open science is good.
Are Twin Studies “Pretty Much Useless”? One interesting, but unsurprising, aspect of the response to execrable Brian Palmer piece is that se…

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In the comments below a weird fact came to light: it does not seem that liberal/Democrat reduced skepticism toward astrology vs. conservatives/Republicans can be explained just by a secularization, and therefore diminished Christian orthodoxy. There ar…

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Above is the Ngram result for paradigm shift, a ubiquitous descriptive concept which can be quite slippery when applied to contemporary science. For example, every few years there is always a new “revolution” which is going to overturn &#8…

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Someone on twitter was curious about GOP attitudes toward astrology. I left the party breakdown out of the previous post because ideology accounts for most party differences. In other words, conservatives are more skeptical of astrology than liberals, …

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I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason C…

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Over at Culture of Science Sheril Kirshenbaum posts a figure from the NSF displaying what proportion of those without high school educations and those with college educations accept the scientific status of astrology. It’s pretty clear to me that…

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1) Post from the past: Men at work: hoes, ploughs, and steel.

2) Weird search query of the week: “neanderthal human hybrid.” Do they have someone in mind?
3) Comment of the week, in response to Twin studies are not useless:
Brian Palmer

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The Pith: Evolution is a sloppy artist. Upon the focal zone of creative energy adaptation can sculpt with precision, but on the margins of the genetic landscape frightening phenomena may erupt due to inattention. In other words, there are often downsid…

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20/72
Razib Khan