Monthly Archives: November 2011

Mr. Jason Goldman has a post up, On Capsaicin: Why Do We Love to Eat Hot Peppers?. We don’t need no stinkin’ science for this. Do some ethnography with an N = 1: me. Those of us who love spicy food are just awesome! Recently I went to a Thai restaurant for the first time […]

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I went to a seminar where a Pacific Biosciences representative was presenting recently. Along with others I arrived early because we thought it would be rather crowded. Not so much. Has the bubble burst?

Zoom in to the last year….

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The genetic model of the “Out of Africa” scenario is getting more complex. There may be two waves, as well as the likelihood of admixture between the Neo-Africans and “archaic” hominins, such the Neandertals and Denisovans. From what I can gather the genetic evidence is now converging upon the sequence of events where African populations […]

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A Slate piece on the coming Voltron Renaissance sent me to this interesting juxtaposition of the American cartoon and the Japanese original from which it was culled:

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I noticed yesterday that Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a cast of others were having a roiling debate on race and I.Q. My name came up in several comment threads on various issues. I’m aware of this because I have Google Alerts set for my name. I don’t have the time or energy to get immersed […]

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Carl Zimmer points me to a piece in a publication called GeneWatch, The Crumbling Pillars of Behavior Genetics. I won’t quote from it because it’s kind of a tired rehash of the confusions and misrepresentations found in The Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?, thoroughly refuted by Luke Jostins and Dan […]

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Slate recently had a series up on the use of mice as “model organisms.” In particular, it put the spotlight of some limitations of extrapolating from a mouse to a man (or other species). This is in some ways biology’s “WEIRD” problem. There are always going to be obvious reasons why we’d want to use […]

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Genetics is powerful. The origins of the field predate Gregor Mendel, and go further back to plain human common sense. Crude theories of inheritance in the 19th century gave way in the early 20th to Mendelism, which happens to be a very powerful formal system for predicting the patterns of transmission of information from generation […]

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I hadn’t given the issue much thought, but that’ what Randall Parker asserted in the comments below. First, let’s look at Google Trends search traffic with Facebook as well: Facebook dwarfs twitter, so you can’t tell. So with only twitter: Interesting. Now let’s look with Alexa: It’s a little more ambiguous using Google Trends estimate […]

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The New York Times has a short piece on Steven Pinker up. Nothing too new to long time followers of the man and his work. I would like to point readers to the fact that Steven Pinker has a F.A.Q. up for The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He links to my […]

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When perusing Asian groceries I occasionally run into cans of jackfruit. Or should I say “jackfruit,” because often what’s inside of the cans resembles jackfruit flavored wax. Real fresh jackfruit is soft and mushy. Unfortunately the preservation process turns canned jackfruit into a turgid and far less flavorful product. That being said, I recently purchased […]

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Meeting the Taino In the comments below a few days ago someone expressed concern at the diminishing of genetic diversity due to the disappearance of indigenous populations. My response was bascally that it depends. The issue here is whether that disappearance is due to assimilation, or extinction. If a given population is genetically absorbed into […]

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Ruchira Paul points me to this peculiar article, Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’: Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran. Professors at University College London […]

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It’s been a while…what’s going on with Google+? I think we can conclude it isn’t a Facebook killer in anything like the medium term.  After moving away from Facebook I started posting again because almost all of my friends in “flesh space” simply don’t use Google+. Rather, Google+ has become a more elaborate extension of […]

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I have discussed the reality that many areas of psychology are susceptible enough to false positives that the ideological preferences of the researchers come to the fore. CBC Radio contacted me after that post, and I asked them to consider that in 1960 psychologists discussed the behavior of homosexuality as if it was a pathology. […]

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The New York Times has an obit. But if you don’t know who she is, really just read the Wikipedia entry.

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I’ve gotten way behind on my RSS…though I caught up a bit over Thanksgiving. West Hunter. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending’s blog. Eurasian Sensation. Liberal Eurasian Australian blogger. Matt Yglesias moved to Slate. This means that his salary is coming in large part from a firm which he has excoriated in the past. (Slate is […]

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In the middle years of the last decade there were many papers which came out which reported many ‘hard’ selective sweeps reshaping the human genome. By this, I mean that you had a novel mutation arise against the genetic background, and positive selection rapidly increased the frequency of that mutation. Because of the power and […]

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The Curious Case of Freida Pinto: …Theater director and filmmaker Feroz Abbas Khan [Gandhi, My Father] is one of them. “For me, Freida Pinto is a spectacular accident, a dazzlingly lucky by-product of a hugely successful film that grabbed popular imagination I have to admit that, like most, I remain mystified by all the attention […]

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Razib Khan