Monthly Archives: September 2012

I got a notification today from Ian Logan that he set up a page on my genotype using a method which detects rare homozygous SNPs in the ~1 million markers I put up from my 23andMe results. My raw data is online, so anyone can analyze it. Here is the su…

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Recently I was at the dentist and I was told that because I did not have any caries at this age, I would probably not have to worry about that in the future (in contrast, I do have some issues with gingivitis). I wasn’t surprised that I didn&#82…

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Will Saletan has has published a piece making a traditionalist American absolutist case for free speech. He points out that in most Western nations there are in fact curbs on speech which is considered offensive, disturbing, and perhaps dangerous. Ther…

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New Scientist has a piece up, Europeans did not inherit pale skins from Neanderthals, based on a paper I blogged last month. One thing that I hadn’t though about in detail…how did anatomically modern humans of various shades perceive Neand…

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I’ve mentioned a few times that the Reich lab has been finding suggestive evidence for admixture between indigenous South Asians and a West Eurasian group on the order of ~3,000 years before the present. The modal explanation is probably an Indo-…

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Last spring I made a bet with a friend that Mitt Romney would win. He gave me 5:1 odds, and I assumed a 40% chance that Romney would win. So I expected to lose, but if I won I’d win big. At this point I assume I’m out that money, because I&…

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It seems a new field is being born! Jeff Wall & Monty Slatkin have a pretty thorough review out, Paleopopulation Genetics:
Paleopopulation genetics is a new field that focuses on the population genetics of extinct groups and ancestral populations …

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Be heard!

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Via Haldane’s Sieve, Genetics has a new preprint policy:
POLICY ON PRE-PRINT DEPOSITS
GENETICS allows authors to deposit manuscripts (currently under review or those for intended submission to GENETICS) in non-commercial, pre-print servers such a…

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To the left is a PCA from The History and Geography of Human Genes. If you click it you will see a two dimensional plot with population labels. How were these plots generated? In short what these really are are visual representations of a matrix of gen…

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As regular readers know I have been to two previous Singularity Summits (2008 and 2010), and will be at the 2012 event. The speakers look particularly interesting to me this year. I may finally be stupid enough to blurt out to Vernor Vinge how awesome…

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In the comments below there is a discussion about whether personhood is a continuous or categorical trait. I lean toward the former proposition as a matter of fact, but let’s entertain the second. What if personhood, and in particular consciousn…

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Today there was a short article in Discover on a paper published last spring on the models for the settling of Madagascar. I didn’t pay too much attention when the paper came out for two reasons. First, it focused on Y and mtDNA, and I’ve b…

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Apparently when he was a consultant Mitt Romney would praise the merits of ‘wallowing in data.’ I agree with this, you can’t get more data than you need. Therefore I highly commend Public Religion Research Institute‘s survey of…

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Via a referral I stumbled upon this really bizarre post by science fiction author and Catholic convert John C. Wright, Saint James Matamoros, Lead Us in Crusade!: The effort has been so successful that it is the default assumption of … Continue reading

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A site called Quartz is going to go live today. I have been hearing a lot about it in the media (e.g., The New York Times). One of the people who launched ScienceBlogs, Chris Mims, is involved. I’ve seen a guideline for its freelance writers, and…

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John Hawks prompts to reemphasize an aspect of my thinking which has undergone a revolution over the past 10 years. I pointed to it in my post on the Khoe-San. In short, the common anatomically modern human ancestors of Khoe-San and non-Khoe-San may n…

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There are now over 400 responses to the survey. Here is a link to the responses in CSV format. If you import this into R, an extra parameter in regards to encoding may be necessary:
responses=read.csv(“responses.csv”,sep=”\t”,header=TRUE,fileEncoding =…

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Razib Khan