Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dienekes has already commented on this, but I thought I would go over Ewen Callaway’s piece, Aboriginal genome analysis comes to grips with ethics. It’s not surprising that this was written. Even if you take Keith Windschuttle’s position when it comes to Aboriginal-European contact you can’t escape the reality that Aboriginals did not fare so […]

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  The post below is probably going to elicit a lot of comments. Some of it will repeat chestnuts of historical wisdom which illustrate the ignorance of the typical modern. For example, it is false that the lower classes always have more children than the upper classes. In general it is the reverse, because the […]

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Update: The Slate piece is not accurately representing the original research: Lerner’s article is spreading misinformation. What the Guttmacher Institute study shows is not that the educated are having fewer children vis a vis the uneducated, but that there is a growing gap in family planning: the children of the uneducated are increasingly unplanned. Knocked […]

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A few days ago I noticed that the Dodecad Ancestry Project had nearly nearly 10,000 individuals! ~500 are participants in the project (like myself, I’m DOD075). But most of the individuals were derived from public or shared data sets. You can see them in the Google spreadsheet with all the results. It’s quite an accomplishment, […]

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When I was still regularly contributing to Sepia Mutiny* I really, really, pushed them to move to WordPress. There’s just so much rolled into the software. For example, the News tab now has its own RSS feed! Awesome.
* I am too busy to contribute…

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Pakistanis Tied to 2007 Border Ambush on Americans: The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy. The reconstruction of the attack, […]

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There’s a lot buzz on the internet for a new show called Terra Nova. Didn’t we already do this? It was called Earth 2 (Steven Spielberg also had an indirect role in that show). I’m not going to watch it. I don’t have a television, and my online television watching is very circumscribed. But I […]

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There’s a rather vanilla piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer which reviews the ideas of how humans became human. I say vanilla because the headline is somewhat more sensational than the text itself, which seems sober and accurate. But this paragraph jumped out at me: A main source of the idea that we humans are above […]

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I saw this link posted on twitter, IQ and Human Intelligence: An interesting finding from genetic research, which Mackintosh mentions, only in passing, as posing a problem in the estimation of the heritability of g, is that there is greater assortative mating for g than for any other behavioral trait; that is, spouse correlations are […]

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I don’t really enjoy reading past posts on this weblog (I said too much stupid stuff), and I haven’t been following comments too closely. So I’m going to skip those for now.
1) Weird search query of the week: “razib khan hiv.&#…

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In light of the recent results in human evolutionary history some readers have appealed to me to create some sort of clearer infographic. There’s a lot to juggle in your head when it comes to the new models and the errors and uncertainties in estimates derived from statistical inference. Words are not always optimal, and […]

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Borneo Tribe Practices Its Own Kind of Hinduism: In this village near the heart of Borneo’s great, dissolving rainforest, Udatn is regarded as a man of deep spiritual knowledge. Of all the people in this tiny settlement, he speaks better than any other the esoteric language of the Sangiyang, the spirits and ancestors of the […]

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MIT Technology Review has one of those articles about the exponential growth rate in the number of people who have been fully sequenced. There’s nothing too exceptional in the piece. You do have to be careful about 10 year projections, especially if they’re exponential. But this part caught my eye: ” At this exponential pace, […]

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The New York Times has a puff piece on Sheikh Hasina up. In general I favor the Awami League despite its socialist origins because the party is less bigoted against religious minorities and would likely wink less at de facto ethnic cleansing (though of course the typical Awami League Muslim is still rather prejudiced against […]

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The question has been asked. In light of recent papers, below is a stylized tree I drew up (the lengths of the branches don’t equal time!). The indigenous population of Australia is at minimum a compound of two elements. 1) A very distinctive component which may have pushed out of Africa earlier than all other […]

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That time of the year for a certain type of nerd, the Singularity Summit. Here’s a a preview: This Singularity Summit line-up this year features a mix of 25 speakers from numerous fields, with a central focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular the victory of the IBM computer Watson in Jeopardy! this February. Inventor and award-winning author Ray Kurzweil will give […]

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Just realized. The Science paper has some interesting dates which allows us to make the above inference. – Separation between Europeans and East Asians 25-38 thousand years before present. – Gene flow between proto-East Asians and proto-Australians before the Native Americans diverged from the former 15 thousand years before the present. – A conservative first […]

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There are two interesting and related papers out today which I want to review really quickly, in particular in relation to the results (as opposed to the guts of the methods). Taken together they do change our perception of how the world was settled by anatomically modern humans, and if the findings are found to […]

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Fed Moves on Long-Term Interest Rates to Spur Growth: Three members of the Fed’s 10-member policy-making committee dissented from the decision: Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; and Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The members were […]

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Update: An ungated version of the paper. I used to spend a lot more time talking about cognitive science of religion on this weblog. It was an interest of mine, but I’ve come to a general resolution of what I think on this topic, and so I don’t spend much time discussing it. But in […]

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20/58
Razib Khan