Monthly Archives: March 2017

Since Since the earlier “10 Things” was quite popular, I thought I’d try my hand at another one on a topic I know rather well. This involves Roman history. Unfortunately, history is a less clear and distinct topic than evolutionary biology, so there may be some disagreement with the assertions below. But here we go…. […]

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Sometimes the old gods slowly fade into oblivion. Contrary to popular perception this seems likely the case for ancient paganism. The conversion of Constantine to the Christian religion began the process of a hand-off and the commanding heights of classical culture that took over a century to complete. There were punctuating moments, such as the apostasy […]

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What is your list of the top 10 evolutionary biologists in history? I’m asking because this came up in a discussion with a friend. Obviously the composition of the list will have to do with disciplinary bias and geography and history (there are Russian population geneticists from the 20th century who should be more famous […]

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Pretty much any person of Indian subcontinental origin in the United States of a certain who isn’t very dark skinned has probably had the experience of being spoken to in Spanish at some point. When I was younger growing up in Oregon I had the experience multiple times of Spanish speakers, probably Mexican, pleading with […]

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Many of you know I use Twitter. It’s replaced a lot of the “link posts” I might have done in the early 2000s or so. Some have argued that Twitter cannibalized a lot of blogging, and that seems true. And that hasn’t always been for the good…there are some arguments and discussions which don’t work […]

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Anyone with a passing familiar with human population genetics will know of the Duffy system, and the fact that there is a huge difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and other populations on this locus. Specifically, the classical Duffy allele exhibits a nearly disjoint distribution from Africa to non-Africa. It was naturally one of the illustrations in […]

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We’re almost two years past 1999, but some of the things imagined in this conception of the future in the 1960s for the turn of the century are only now just coming true (e.g., electronic medical records, home health monitoring). I was surprised how well they anticipated a lot of the function of information technology, […]

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Lots of tweaks and changes on regards to the blog platform recently. As they say in the start-up world we’re “iterating.” The content/substance is going to remain pretty much the same, but over time I’ll be trying to figure out different ways to deliver. This might cause some minor issues in terms of continuity (I […]

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Lots of tweaks and changes on regards to the blog platform recently. As they say in the start-up world we’re “iterating.” The content/substance is going to remain pretty much the same, but over time I’ll be trying to figure out different ways to deliver. This might cause some minor issues in terms of continuity (I […]

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The figure above is from Noah Rosenberg’s relatively famous paper, Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure. The context of the publication is that it was one of the first prominent attempts to use genome-wide data on a various of human populations (specifically, from the HGDP data set) […]

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For about three years I consulted for Family Tree DNA. It was a great experience, and I met a lot of cool people through that connection. But perhaps the most interesting aspect was the fact that I can understand the various pressures that direct-to-consumer genomics firms face from the demand side. The science is one […]

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It galls me to agree with the proposition that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato, but it is at least fair to admit that Western intellectual thought exists in dialogue with him and his thinking. But the spare and arrogant idealism which Plato and his followers promoted is not entirely alien to the landscape of human cognition. It is […]

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Sarah Haider is co-founder of ex-Muslims of North America. She is prominent in social media as an activist, after bursting onto the scene by giving a speech at The American Humanist Association conference in 2015. More recently I would highly recommend watching her defend the novel idea that there shouldn’t be safe spaces on a […]

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Sarah Haider is co-founder of ex-Muslims of North America. She is prominent in social media as an activist, after bursting onto the scene by giving a speech at The American Humanist Association conference in 2015. More recently I would highly recommend watching her defend the novel idea that there shouldn’t be safe spaces on a […]

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In response to my earlier post some people suggested that the language was impenetrable. Nathan Taylor​ offered to make it more plain spoken, so here is this go at it. I think it’s pretty good. (text below is from Nathan)   1) Modern humans stayed in Africa for tens of thousands years of before expanding […]

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Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He is also the host of Finding Your Roots, and Africa’s Great Civilizations (among many other documentaries). Below are 10 questions. If you were eighteen and had to choose a different profession from the one you have now, […]

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In 2011 I had dinner with a friend of mine from college. He’s a smart guy. Ph.D. in chemistry form M.I.T and all that. I mentioned offhand how it was rather proven to good degree of certainty there was Neanderthal gene flow into modern humans (our lineage)[1]​. He was somewhat surprised by this information, and […]

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In the years that I’ve had this blog I’ve had many correspondents and communications with people who I’ve come to consider friends. Some of these correspondences go back over 10 years now. Some of them are people you would know. But many are not known to you insofar as they do not leave comments in […]

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Updates on the changing situation…

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20/25
Razib Khan