A crisis of democratic capitalism?
India Feels Pressure as Growth Rate Is Worse Than Predicted: Many analysts have been arguing that the best way for policy makers to respond to slowing growth is further liberalization of India’s economy, large parts of which are still heavily regulated. The government could, for instance, make it easier for foreigners to invest in industries […]
Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?
Community differentiation and kinship among Europe’s first farmers (via Dienekes):
Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely …
H. Allen Orr, most influential evolutionary biologist of all time?
A reader reminded me of an amusing paper, Who Likes Evolution? Dissociation Of Human Evolution Versus Evolutionary Psychology. The gist of the results are below (I added some clarification):
The propositions to gauge acceptance of evolutionary psycho…
The current bias in genealogical databases
As a follow up to my post below on the thick coverage of European information in genealogical and genomic databases, here are the “Ancestry Finder” matches from 23andMe for my daughter using the default settings:
If I increase sensitivity …
Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting….
One point which I’ve made on this weblog several times is that on a whole range of issues and behaviors people simply follow the consensus of their self-identified group. This group conformity probably has deep evolutionary origins. It is often m…
Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting….
One point which I’ve made on this weblog several times is that on a whole range of issues and behaviors people simply follow the consensus of their self-identified group. This group conformity probably has deep evolutionary origins. It is often m…
Science, the genealogical leveler?
I follow CeCe Moore’s blog posts on scientific genealogy pretty closely. But it’s more because of my interest in personal genomics broadly, rather than scientific genealogy as such. My own knowledge of my family’s past beyond the lev…
The end of genealogical illusions: arise the truth!
One thing that Zack Ajmal’s readers have done enough over at Harappa is closely examine the treasure-trove of data he’s assembled. I decided to “go public” with two obvious inferences which seem to jump out from the data to me at this point: – Syrian Christians from Kerala are not by and large descended from […]
Islam as the abomination
Someone who goes by the handle “peave” seem to have left a rather interesting comment: Mr u need a bit metal treatment okay,,we dont purposefully go and disrepair or disuse their “holy”sites…when a lady does,which she does with the Quran ,then she has done the act in order to hurt muslims…. and obviously u cannot control […]
Why blasphemy matters
Via Facebook I stumbled upon a page where an ex-Muslim Pakistani female expat has a picture posted of a Koran placed in front of her vagina (she’s naked). Whether you think this sort of behavior is juvenile or courageous or boring depends upon your perspective. But it does illustrate the power of blasphemy and symbols. […]
Space & the beginning of summer
It’s been a big few weeks for space, with the success of Dragon. I don’t have anything to add in a descriptive or analytic sense, I know as much (or likely less) as you on this issue (this is why should read Bad Astronomy). Needless to say …
Genetics’ random truths
Update: Please do not take the labels below (e.g., “Baloch”) as literal ancestral elements. The most informative way to read them is that they indicate populations where this element is common, and, the relationship of proportions can tell …
The Dao of Learning
Accidental Blogger points me to a rather funny event, the yearly victory of some brown kid in the National Spelling Bee. ‘I was nervous’: Texas whiz kid beats teens in 2012 National Geographic Bee. This Texas whiz kid, Rahul Nagvekar, beat …
Genes in space
From some of the same people who brought you the genetic map of Europe, a very important paper, A model-based approach for analysis of spatial structure in genetic data. Here’s the abstract:
Characterizing genetic diversity within and between po…
Fear of a black past
I notice that the media has started reporting that scientific genealogy has now established to a great extent the likely origin of the Melungeons. You can find the original paper online. The gist is that the Melungeons seem to exhibit a large proportio…
An Orientalist fantasy
A few months ago I had a post up about Game of Thrones, where I argued that to a great extent the book and the world that George R. R. Martin created was racist because that’s true to how pre-modern worlds generally are constructed structurally….
Vaccination as heterodoxy
Apparently Mayim Bialik, Ph.D. neuroscience, is skeptical of vaccination. This just goes to show you that “science education” itself is no guarantee of immunity against acceptance of false propositions. Rather than reason from one propositi…
Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry
A correspondent emailed me to tell me that Linda Chavez, whose father was a New Mexican Hispano, was found to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Henry Louise Gates Jr’s Finding your Roots series. This brings me to point to a recent paper, The impa…
A quick note on comments policy
Happy Memorial Day weekend to Americans. In light of my various time pressures which are going to be operationally indefinite in their temporal scope for me I need to consider various options about optimizing the comments. I generally do rather well on…
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