Month: August 2012
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The cheating of the chosen
Update: Harvard Students in Cheating Scandal Say Collaboration Was Accepted. Harvard Says 125 Students May Have Cheated on a Final Exam: Officials said that nearly half of the more than 250 students in the class were under investigation by the Harvard …
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Deep dive into the Denisovans
By now you have probably seen the new Denisovan paper in the media. John Hawks has an excellent overview, as you’d expect. The only thing I will add is to reiterate that I think population movements in near and far prehistory significantly obscur…
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Being fat is like being gay (?)
Anti-obesity: The new homophobia?: Consider the many parallels between the treatments advocated by those who claim being gay is a disease, and those being pushed by our public health establishment to “cure” fat children and adults of their supposed…
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Enough with the double standard
Most of the conventionally liberal readers of this weblog would probably term me anti-feminist. I believe that there are sex differences, and that these are important in the way we arrange policy and our personal lives. But I’m really pissed … Continue reading →
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Quantifying the great flip
The two maps above show the Democratic and Republican counties in blue and red respectively. Carter in the 1976 presidential election, and Obama in 2008. A few days ago it was brought to my attention that Matt Yglesias was curious about how Maine beco…
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Evolution: its ideological own refutation
Recently I stumbled upon the fact that Honey Boo Boo‘s sister had a child at age 18. The grandmother, Honey Boo Boo’s mother, is 33 years old. Younger than I am! Then I see headlines in trashy British tabloids of the form: The three …
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Evolution: its ideological own refutation
Recently I stumbled upon the fact that Honey Boo Boo‘s sister had a child at age 18. The grandmother, Honey Boo Boo’s mother, is 33 years old. Younger than I am! Then I see headlines in trashy British tabloids of the form: The three …
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The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…
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The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…
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The eternal question of calorie restriction
There’s a lot of buzz about a new paper in Nature (yes, I know there’s always buzz about some Nature paper or other), Impact of caloric restriction on health and survival in rhesus monkeys from the NIA study. You’ve probably heard abo…
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What I do is what I do
This morning on Twitter the estimable Carl Zimmer stated that I had “reported” on the recent paper on European skin pigmentation evolution. I wondered, wait, am I a reporter? I don’t really know, and this really is rooted in the ̶…
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Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for a…
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A political animal in the genes
Trends in Genetics has a review article, The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn’t that I think they’re revolutionary. Usually they aren’t. Rather, the public…
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Evolutionary & population genetics preprints – Haldane’s Sieve
OK, perhaps I can help with that. Dr. Coop speaks of the collaboration between himself & Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Haldane’s Sieve, which I added to my RSS days ago (and you can see me pushing it to my Pinboard). From the “About”: As …
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Back to the 70s?
Peter Turchin has basically implied that it’s 1970 again, and we’re in for a new age of disturbance. I’m rather skeptical…but, today a co-worker pointed out that I have “70s hair.” My sideburns, yes, but that’…
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A note on open genomics
A few months ago I purchased a decent desktop just to crunch ADMIXTURE and other packages to analyze genomic data. More recently I set up a ~100 GB Dropbox account, and have started to “push” all of my output files from ADMIXTURE, PLINK, et…
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Europeans got less shaded in stages
The Pith: the evolution of lighter skin is complex, and seems to have occurred in stages. The current European phenotype may date to the end of the last Ice Age. A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in E…
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Non-whites consistent on “life” issues
Over at Darwin Catholic a commenter asked whether a pro-choice commenter on this weblog also supported the death penalty. I presume that they were here pointing to the consistent life ethic issue. Many liberals who oppose capital punishment support ab…
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A circumcision compromise?
The New York Times has a piece on an update to the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on circumcision (shifting toward a more pro-circumcision position of neutrality). In the United States the rates of circumcision for infant boys has go…
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A circumcision compromise?
The New York Times has a piece on an update to the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on circumcision (shifting toward a more pro-circumcision position of neutrality). In the United States the rates of circumcision for infant boys has go…