Creatures of myth and dark
A depiction of the monster Grendel from BeowulfIn the dark there are monsters. Bogeymen. “There be dragons.” These are common human psychological reflexes. These reflexes turn into legends, and legends become embroidered into myth.There are two aspects…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 5: Reflections on ASHG 2018
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 5: Reflections on ASHG 2018This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher) Razib Khan and Gareth Highnam discuss our impression of the most recent meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.The A…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 6: Halloween genetics, fact or fiction
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 6: Halloween genetics, fact or fictionThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss human genetic diversity, and how it might feed into the myths and legends that …
Halloween genetics: fact or fiction
This week, Spencer and Razib talk about the intersection of Halloween and genetics. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/Jx54AZoN
The rise of printing and the populist republic
The media needs clicks and people are rather myopic. This explains patently false pieces such as this in Buzzfeed, This Is How We Radicalized The World. It is a rather unorganized list of facts, but they are assembled in a way to convince and persuade the reading audience that modern information technology has facilitated the […]
Muslims have always known how weird Saudi Arabia is
I’m not a big fan of Hasan Minhaj’s “Millennial smug” style of comedy. What it really reminds me is Brad Stine’s “Christian comedy.” It’s aimed toward ingroups and comes off as tone-deaf and stupid to outgroups. So you know what you’re getting into. That being said, as someone who is Muslim Minhaj has always “gotten” … Continue reading “Muslims have always known how weird Saudi Arabia is”
Open Thread, 10/28/2018
An old friend from college has a new book out, Augmented Mind: AI, Superhumans, and the Next Economic Revolution. This looks to be in Jim Miller territory. Sex in humans may not be binary, but it’s surely bimodal. Jerry Coyne is a well known evolutionary biologist who is also a vocal atheist. He’s now emeritus […]
The shadow of culture persists
A new working paper, Ancestry of the American Dream, presents some unsurprising results: Income inequality and intergenerational mobility—the degree to which (dis)advantage is passed on from parents to children—are among the defining political challenges of our time. While some scholars claim that more unequal countries exhibit a stronger persistence of income across generations, others argue […]
Laws of engineering are meant to be broken
A reader pointed out a very interesting passage in Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution on the future possibilities of genome sequencing. Since the book was published in the middle of 2009, it is quite possible the passage was written in 2008, or even earlier. Unfortunately for Dawkins’ prognostication track-record, […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 5: Reflections on ASHG 2018
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 5: Reflections on ASHG 2018This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) Razib Khan and Gareth Highnam discuss our impression of the most recent meeting of the American Society of Human G…
Reflections on ASHG 2018
This week Gareth and Razib talk about their impressions of the American Society of Human Genetics meeting for 2018. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/NebRLt1P
The crash of the cost of genome sequencing
It’s been a wild 10 years. There’s a reason that data compression companies are a big thing in genomics now.
The state origins of “modern humans” in 2018 (it’s a flux)
After reading the supplements to the new Siberian paper I have a few general thoughts that I want to lay out. First, the clines vs. clusters considerations seem to be one we need to revisit. Like the expansion of Native American peoples ~15,000 years ago, it seems that the “Out of Africa” migration pulse happened […]
Reflections on ASHG Meeting 2018
Another meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics has come and gone. I’ve been going since 2012, and so want to post some observations of how things have changed. This is a big conference. From less than 1,000 people in the late 1970s to nearly…
The phylogenetic trees falling on the tundra
A massive new ancient DNA preprint just dropped, The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene: …Here, we report 34 ancient genome sequences, including two from fragmented milk teeth found at the ~31.6 thousand-year-old (kya) Yana RHS site, the earliest and northernmost Pleistocene human remains found. These genomes reveal complex patterns of past population […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 10/21/2018
You may have noticed I haven’t been posting much. Busy with other things, like ASHG, work, family, etc. I don’t normally post “won’t be posting often” notices, as no one really cares much about blogs…but when I go into lower production mode people sometimes worry. No reason to worry. Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great: King […]
The Genetics of the Finns
This week Spencer and Razib talk about the genetics of the Finns, and the Uralic people more generally. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/GYn1-9Jv
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 4: Finnish Genetics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 4: Finnish GeneticsMidsummer in FinlandThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed the prehistory and genetics of the Uralic peoples, with a particular focus on the people …
The expansion of the polar people
The expansion of the polar peopleSami in the far north of EuropeSince the development of agriculture 12,000 years ago, the cultural and genetic landscape of our world has been transformed by the emergence of peasants as the dominant demographic. For mo…