Monthly Archives: January 2012

I have long been on the record as a skeptic of the of the proposition that democratization in the Arab world will usher in liberalism. To a great extent I think that my skepticism has been vindicated, though these are early times yet. But looking at the events as they are playing out in Egypt […]

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In The New York Times, DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All: The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea […]

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The title is rather loud and non-objective.  But that seems to me to be the upshot of Henrich et al.’s The puzzle of monogamous marriage (open access). In the abstract they declare that “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Seems superior to me. As a […]

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While I have the blog open, let me throw in a quick two cents to support the Boycott Elsevier movement. As most working scientists know, Elsevier is a publishing company that controls many important journals, and uses their position to charge amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries — and then makes the published papers very […]

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Apologies that real work (to the extent that what I do can be called “work”) has gotten in the way of substantive blogging. But I cannot resist sharing the amazing things I learned this weekend — amazing to me, anyway, although it’s possible I’m the only one here who wasn’t clued in. Thing the first […]

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According to the reader survey 88 percent said they understood what heritability was. But only 34 percent understood the concept of additive genetic variance. For the purposes of this weblog it highlights that most people don’t understand heritability, but rather heritability. The former is the technical definition of heritability which I use on this weblog, […]

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My own working assumption is that the demand side impulse toward mass adoption of human genomic technology in the USA is going to be dampened by fear of downside consequences, GINA notwithstanding. Rather, I assume that the more deregulated consumer environment in parts of Asia with very low fertility rates, as well as European states […]

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The Pith: New software which gives you a more fine-grained understanding of relationships between populations and individuals. According to the reader survey >50 percent of you don’t know how to interpret PCA or model-based (e.g., ADMIXTURE) genetic plots, so I am a little hesitant to point to this new paper in PLoS Genetics, Inference of […]

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In light of my previous posts on GRE scores and educational interests (by the way, Education Realist points out that the low GRE verbal scores are only marginally affected by international students) I was amused to see this write-up at LiveScience, Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice. Naturally over at Jezebel there is […]

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Jay Leno & NBC Sued Over Mitt Romney Joke: Dr. Randeep Dhillon of Bakersfield filed the suit today in Los Angeles Superior Court. On behalf of himself and Bol Punjabi All Regions Community Organization, the suit charges that the broadcast was libelous on its face and exposed Sikhs and their religion to hatred, contempt and […]

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They’re bbbaaaccckkkk!

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The latest edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics has two papers using “old fashioned” uniparental markers to trace human migration out of Africa and Siberia respectively. I say old fashioned because the peak novelty of these techniques was around 10 years ago, before dense autosomal SNP marker analyses, let alone whole genome sequencing. […]

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In the survey below I asked if you knew about how many migrants per generation were needed to prevent divergence between populations. About ~80 percent of you stated you did not know the answer. That was not totally surprising to me. The reason I asked is that the result is moderately obscure, but also rather […]

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There is a new paper in Nature, Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers, which is very interesting. As Joe Henrich observes in his view piece the panel of figure 2 (see left) is probably the most important section. The study focuses on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. Their language seems to be an […]

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The post below on teachers elicited some strange responses. Its ultimate aim was to show that teachers are not as dull as the average education major may imply to you. Instead many people were highly offended at the idea that physical education teachers may not be the sharpest tools in the shed due to their […]

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In almost any project, the path between “a good idea” and the “final exciting result” contained a proposal. It may have been a proposal to obtain access to scarce resources (like telescopes or accelerator beams), or it may be have been a proposal to obtain other more prosaic resources (i.e., money, to pay for the […]

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The excellent site io9 has a piece up today which is a fascinating indicator of the nature of popular science publications as a lagging indicator. It is a re-post of a piece published last April, How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution. In it you have an encapsulation of a particular period […]

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A regular issue that comes up on this weblog is that many of my posts are difficult to understand. I am aware of this. Unfortunately a problem is that there is a wide variation in fluency in genetics knowledge among the readership. To get a better sense I have created a survey with 60+ questions. […]

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With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family: Several companies provide tests that can confirm whether adoptees are related to individuals they already know. Others cast a wider net by plugging DNA results into databases that contain tens of thousands of genetic samples, provided mostly by people searching for their ancestral roots. The tests detect genetic […]

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Readers of this weblog will appreciate the tragic irony. Muhammad cartoon row leads to resignation: The society at University College London (UCL) published an image on its Facebook page showing “Jesus and Mo” having a drink at a bar. … Ahmadiyya Youth Association is continuing with its protest against the image, saying it has wider […]

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Razib Khan