Monthly Archives: October 2017

Read some of The Red Flag: A History of Communism. In the interests of being candid, I do have to say that many intellectuals today who are skeptical of Communism might be much more open to the ideology in the early 20th century. Marxism literaly hadn’t been tried. The key issue is that it has […]

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The Information has a piece up, The Case Against Video. The Information charges a decent amount for its services which are in text form, so of course there is some bias here insofar as this belief was probably preexistent. But I happen to agree. It strikes me that video is relatively low density, and it […]

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Every generation has its nostalgia. Some of them have their year. For the boomers it’s the summer of ’67. For Bryan Adams it was the summer of ’69. For people born between 1965 and 1980, I will bet the summer of 1999 is that special summer. It was near the end of the long boom […]

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A while back I made from of bonobos and chimpanzees for being kind of losers for looking across at each other on either side of the Congo river for ~1.5 million years the time elapsed since their diversion. I finally ended up reading the paper from last year, Chimpanzee genomic diversity reveals ancient admixture with […]

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When I was a kid Halloween was my favorite holiday. First, candy! Second, costumes! Third, you could be a little naughty! Finally, my parents were not the most inquisitive people and didn’t realize the pagan and Christian influences on the holiday. They liked it because unlike Christmas, at least to their perceptions, it didn’t have […]

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In 2006 South Park premiered Go God Go. The episode synthesized Buck Rogers in the 25th century, the Wii craze of the middle 2000s, and Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion engendered fame. In some ways, this was a sad reflection on Dawkins’ reputation, because before he got full-bore into atheist activism he was a great science […]

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Scott Alexander asks How Did New Atheism Fail So Badly? It’s in response to an obnoxiously fact-free Baffler rant. I think what Scott is alluding to here is the lack of fashionability of “New Atheism.” But in the American context, I do think that New Atheism arose is a particular time and context, George W. […]

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Terrible news: I just heard that Mel Green passed away. — Andrew Kern (@pastramimachine) October 24, 2017 Mel Green co-taught a “history of genetics” course that I took as a first-year grad student at UC Davis. It was fitting because Mel Green was a living embodiment of the history of genetics. Mine was one of […]

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In various forms, I’ve been talking about genetic modification and testing of children for years. As most of you know my older son was whole-genome sequenced before he was born. This was in large part scientific activism. I wanted to show people it could be done, and it’s not scary. Genes are not destiny, they’re […]

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A few weeks ago a very Left-wing (I believe Marxist?) reciprocal follow on Twitter quoted Sebastian Gorka. I couldn’t see what was being said, so I assumed Gorka had blocked him. I clicked the link only to find that I was blocked by Gorka! This really confused me because to my knowledge I have never […]

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The people, whoever they are, at ScienceBlogs have announced that they’ll be shutting down at the end of the month. I actually should have all my archives, so there’s no worry on that end for me. The first few years for Seed were pretty flush for a small operation. There were a couple of blogger […]

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Reading The Turks in World History and confused how any state whose elite were non-nomads held out before the gunpowder revolution. Also, the persistent defection of Chinese generals and soldiers to the side of the barbarians is interesting light of other conversations we’ve had. Are there any (post-)Roman examples of this? I know that an […]

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One of the major issues that confuses people is that the distribution of a trait or gene is often only weakly correlated with overall phylogeny and the rest of the genome. To give a strange but classic example, the MHC loci are subject to strong balancing selection. This means that novel alleles do not substitute […]

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Dan Schriber and Andy Kern have a new review preprint out, Machine Learning for Population Genetics: A New Paradigm. On Twitter there has already been a little snark to the effect of “oh, you mean regression?” That’s fair enough, and the preprint would probably benefit from a lower key title, though that’s really the sort […]

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Both Slate and When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy, have pieces deconstructing the fall from grace of an idea like “power posing.” This is all obviously wrapped up in the “replication crisis”, which is impacting most sciences which use some statistics and are generally characterized by modest and complex causal effects (social and biological […]

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The gratuitous use of the word “weaponized” really annoys me.

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There are many theories for the origin of farming. A classic explanation is that farming was simply a reaction to Malthusian pressures. Another, implied in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, is that ideological factors may also have played a role in the emergence of sedentary lifestyles and so eventually farming. I don’t […]

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E. O. Wilson has a new book out, The Origins of Creativity. Did you know about it? Honestly totally surprised. Wilson’s been retired for a while now, so his profile isn’t as high as it was. He’s 88, so you got to give it to him that he can keep cranking this stuff out. The […]

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The paper which surveys the relationship of the 40,000 year old Tianyuan sample is finally out in Current Biology, 40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia. There isn’t anything too surprising here. Here is the part of the abstract that presents new finding: …we generated genome-wide data from a 40,000-year-old […]

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“The southern Indians resemble the Ethiopians a good deal, and, are black of countenance, and their hair black also, only they are not as snub-nosed or so woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; but the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians in appearance.” – Arrian I might almost say that the same animals are to be … Continue reading “Race is not just skin color”

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Razib Khan