Monthly Archives: March 2012

Update:  Actually, I was going to put up a post “10 years in blogging.” But right now I don’t have the time, seriously. 10 years is a LONG time though, so I now feel more comfortable talking about events “offline” which d…

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I’m questing about for some answers. My daughter is now two months old, and to the left is an image of her eye. As you can see, they are blue. I was not particularly surprised that she was born with blue eyes. Her mother is of Northern European heritage. But, I’ve had both of us […]

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In the comment below Clark alludes to the fact that Jonathan Haidt kept reiterating that even if there were differences between populations due to recent evolution, if it was due to selection on standing variation upon quantitative traits then the betw…

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He’s back, and he’s out with a new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. I am talking of course about Jonah Lehrer, the enfant terrible of cognitive neuroscience. OK, perhaps more Wunderkind. In any case, I was struck by this post on his web…

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Last night I listened to a very long discussion between Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. If you have been reading my weblog for years the…

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If I have something to share, why not share it? Over the past few weeks I’ve been ruminating on some of the possible intersections between historical population genetics and anthropology, especially in light of the discussion that I’ve had …

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A fascinating post over at The Crux, Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics. Here’s the section which I might quibble with though:
Labov points out that the residents of the Inland North have long-standing diffe…

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Let me make something explicit: I believe that the model outlined in First Farmers is too simple, and that extant patters of linguistic and genetic variation need to accept the likelihood of multiple population reorganizations across vast swaths of Eur…

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Thank god for steppe hyper-patriarchy; it’s a model which we can test. Dienekes points me to a paper, The Y-chromosome C3* star-cluster attributed to Genghis Khan’s descendants is present at high frequency in the Kerey clan from Kazakhstan…

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Here’s the announcement:
As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to…

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I haven’t watched most of the films (or video games, or T.V. shows) being parodied by How It Should Have Ended. But I have read A Game of Thrones. So I’m confused as to why this struck me as rather unfunny, in comparison to most of the othe…

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The USA has been in Afghanistan for over 10 years now. Like many Americans my own personal preference is that we get out as soon as possible. Because of American involvement we see terms like “Pashtun” bandied about in the media, but there…

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I have to point you to this post on royal inbreeding in A Song of Ice and Fire. They reference my post on the Habsburgs. Well done! In any case, one possibility is that the Targaryen lineage may have purged their genetic load through inbreeding. The ba…

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Update: There was a major coding error. I’ve rerun the analysis. No qualitative change.
As is often the case a 10 minute post using the General Social Survey is getting a lot of attention. Apparently circa 1997 web interfaces are so intimidating…

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The face is an important aspect of our phenotype. So important that facial recognition is one of many innate reflexive cognitive competencies. By this, I mean that you can recognize a face in a gestalt manner, just like you can recognize a set of three marbles. You don’t have to think about it in a […]

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One model for the spread of the agricultural way of life into Europe is of inexorable “demic diffusion” via a “wave of advance” of farming populations met by a land surplus. Conceptually and analytically it’s an elegant model. It’s also fundamentally methodologically individualistic, and so in keeping with the spirit of the age. There’s no […]

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A few months ago I listened to Frank Newport of Gallup tell Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace that upper class Americans tend to be Democrats. Ryssdal was skeptical, but Newport reiterated himself, and explained that’s just how the numbers shook out. This is important because Newport shows up every now and then to offer up numbers […]

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I’ve never watched Mad Men, but I really can’t help but hear all about the show. One thing that has struck me about the change from then, ~1960, to now, ~2010, is the alignment of quantitative demographic trends with impressionistic cultural ones. The 1970s were a disaster for the old urban order. Below are the […]

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Recently Daniel MacArthur pointed to the vibrant discussion over at Genomes Unzipped on a moderately infamous paper from Science last year, Widespread RNA and DNA Sequence Differences in the Human Transcriptome, asserting that it is “exactly what open peer review should be like.”  This made me wonder, it’s been over five years since Chris Surridge […]

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Could any real country have an economy like Panem’s? Actually, yes. Not exactly analogous, but: More mobile phones than lavatories for a booming India. I would currently bet that a future like India writ-large is somewhat more likely than China or US…

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20/42
Razib Khan