Monthly Archives: November 2013

Update: Comments enabled now! Until further notice this is my last post as a blogger at Discover Magazine. This shouldn’t impact regular readers. As always you can follow me by going to: My feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed My Twitter, https://twitter.com/razibkhan And of course, my website, http://www.razib.com From December 1st, 2013, I will be blogging at Ron Unz’s […]

The post Endings & beginnings appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Happy Thanksgiving (if you are an American)! It’s been a busy few days in the world of personal genomics. By coincidence I have a coauthored comment in Genome Biology out, Rumors of the death of consumer genomics are greatly exaggerated (it was written and submitted a while back). If you haven’t, please read the FDA’s […]

The post The total information world appeared first on Gene Expression.

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First, download your 23andMe raw results now if you have them. If you don’t know what’s going on, the FDA has finally started to move aggressively against the firm. Unfortunately this is not surprising, as this was foreshadowed years ago. And, 23andMe has been moving aggressively to emphasize its medical, as opposed to genealogical, services […]

The post The FDA and 23andMe appeared first on Gene Expression.

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One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed […]

The post Open Thread, 11/24/13 appeared first on Gene Expression.

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One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed […]

The post Open Thread, 11/24/13 appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Keeping a close watch on media representations of the new Nature paper on the ancient Siberian genome. Here’s The New York Times, 24,000-Year-Old Body Is Kin to Both Europeans and American Indians. I don’t have a problem with the title, but the roll-out isn’t totally accurate in what it will connote to the audience in […]

The post Our ancestors are part us…or the other way around? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world – that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work. – Mark Thomas, as reported by Nature This is in […]

The post The long First Age of mankind appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Alone in a Room Full of Science Writers: You can never overestimate how empowering it is to see someone who looks like you—only older and more successful. That, much more than well-meaning advice and encouragement, tells you that you can … Continue reading

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Finished J. P. Mallory’s The Origins of the Irish. Good book, but it was as illuminating as to the origins of the Irish as Danel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained was in explaining consciousness.

The post Open Thread, 11/17/2013 appeared first on Gene Expression.

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I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence […]

The post The color of life as a coincidence appeared first on Gene Expression.

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I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence […]

The post The color of life as a coincidence appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes, […]

The post Is that white supremacist part black? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes, […]

The post Is that white supremacist part black? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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There’s a nice letter in Nature right now with an understated title, Mating advantage for rare males in wild guppy populations. But if you dig deeper you see some moderately grand claims being made. The key issue is that the authors seem to be implying that negative frequency dependent selection (NFDS) is a major factor […]

The post Isn’t he special! appeared first on Gene Expression.

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For years many in the biological sciences community have been jealous of the exist of arXiv. This preprint server allows researchers to distribute their work widely to all comers. On occasion when when there have been debates about mimicking arXiv for biology there has been skepticism about the nature of the outcomes (my own rejoinder […]

The post bioRxiv is here appeared first on Gene Expression.

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If you have not read Julia Ioffe’s story about getting whooping cough at the age of 31 (also see follow up), you might want to. Here’s some further context, Vaccine Refusals Fueled California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic. This topic has been covered and dissected in great detail by many writers and scientists, so I won’t repeat what […]

The post Vaccination, and social information networks appeared first on Gene Expression.

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Change is the only constant.
The post Open Thread, 11/10/2013 appeared first on Gene Expression.

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One of the secondary issues which cropped up with Nina Davuluri winning Miss America is that it seems implausible that someone with her complexion would be able to win any Indian beauty contest. A quick skim of Google images “Miss India” will make clear the reality that I’m alluding to. The Indian beauty ideal, especially […]

The post Selection happens; but where, when, and why? appeared first on Gene Expression.

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20/23
Razib Khan