Author: Razib Khan
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Every variant with an author!
I recall projections in the early 2000s that 25% of the American population would be employed as systems administrators circa 2020 if rates of employment growth at that time were extrapolated. Obviously the projections weren’t taken too seriously, and the pieces were generally making fun of the idea that IT would reduce labor inputs and…
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Religious illiteracy is the norm
By now you probably know that: Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious…
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To gain pallor is easier than losing it
John Hawks illustrates what can be gained at the intersection of old data and analysis and new knowledge, Quote: Boyd on New World pigmentation clines: I’m using some statistics out of William Boyd’s 1956 printing of Genetics and the Races of Man[1]. It gives a good accounting of blood group data known more than fifty…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Just a minor note: if you want an admin update on this weblog, go to my twitter account. You don’t need to subscribe, as you might not be interested in all my random interactions with other bloggers. But if I don’t post for a few days, please don’t email me or post a comment in…
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Obnoxious speech and trusting the Other
Update: After watching the videos of what went down at the cultural festival I seem to have unwittingly slandered the Act 17 missionaries. They behaved well and were obviously unjustly arrested. Their YouTube site is testimony to the reality though that they’re pretty shallow and obnoxious in some contexts, but that’s frankly not atypical for…
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The hobbits were cretins. Perhaps. Or perhaps not
I was thinking a bit about H. floresiensis today. Probably my thoughts were triggered by John Hawks’ post on the propensity for paleontologists to be “splitters,” naming new finds as species when they’re not. The issue with H. floresiensis is a little more cut & dried: if they weren’t a separate species they were obviously […]
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On the varieties of Roma
Dienekes has a pointer to a new paper on Gypsy genetics which surveys Y lineage variation among three Roma groups from Serbia in the context of Europe-wide Gypsy genetic variance, as well as their potential host (European) and source (Indian) populations. Since I recently posted on the topic, and Dienekes didn’t post some of the…
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American family values: where even the dull can dream!
One of the issues when talking about the effect of environment and genes on behavioral and social outcomes is that the entanglements are so complicated. People of various political and ideological commitments tend to see the complications as problems for the other side, and yet are often supremely confident of the likely efficacy of their…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
Wow, it sure feels like summer! No one cares about your blog (part 2). “The thing is – it’s just writing, isn’t it? Talking extensively about science blogging is like having intense discourses about what you can do with pen and paper. “Should we staple all our pieces of paper together, or only the ones…
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Story of X
A month ago I pointed to a short communication in Nature Genetics which highlighted differences in the patterns of variation between the X chromosome and the autosome. I thought it would be of interest to revisit this, because it’s a relatively short piece with precise and crisp results which we can ruminate upon. Sometimes there is…
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Is Christine O’Donnell a kook because she’s a Creationist?
Christine O’Donnell has said a lot of kooky things. Right now people are focusing on her Creationism. Though I’m obviously not a Creationist I think mocking someone for this belief in a political context is somewhat strange: the survey literature is pretty robust that Americans are split down the middle on opinions about evolution. […]
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Open Thread, September 25th, 2010
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is in my “stack,” though I don’t know when I’ll get to it. A few things I’ve been wrong about in the last 10 years: – I was more optimistic about reproducible I.Q. QTLs in 2000 than I should have been. Here’s a 1998 article on Robert…
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Friday Fluff – September 24th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion 2. Weird search query of the week: “porn makes you straight.” 3. Comment of the week, in response to Swedes are not sexist or nativist: I’ve been living in Sweden for somewhat more than a year now. I previously lived in…
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Elmo!
I didn’t realize that Elmo is almost 40 years old. Not only that, apparently some “Sesame Street Traditionalists” refer to him as the “Little Red Menace”. Since I haven’t watched the show regularly since the 1980s I don’t have a strong opinion about his influence, malevolent or not, but generally I’m pro-Elmo. He’s not quite…
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Cities of plague
I noticed this entry on Time‘s Healthland blog, Study: City Life Spreads Disease, But If It Doesn’t Kill You…. The author ends kind of strangely: The authors of the study expressed excitement about the merging of scientific analysis and historical records, but this is also a potential limitation. Scientific and historical conclusions are different in…
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The city that kills you makes you strong!
Over the past day I’ve seen reports in the media of a new paper which claims that long-term urbanization in a region is strongly correlated with genetic variants for disease resistance. I managed to find the paper on Evolution’s website as an accepted manuscript, ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSIS: A link between urban…
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Simple rules for inclusive fitness
With the recent huge furor over the utility of kin selection I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the literature on inclusive fitness. The reason W. D. Hamilton’s original papers in The Journal of Theoretical Biology are highly cited is not some conspiracy, rather, they’re a powerful framework in which one can understand the evolution…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Nobel-winning brain researcher retracts two papers. Looks like there’s the typical blame-it-on-the-Asian going on here, so perhaps this won’t blow up. In Our Time is back. This week: Imaginary Numbers. “200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren”. Most genes of small effect. We’ll see. Don’t get too excited yet, you might be disappointed.…
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What’s the matter with Finland?
I was browsing The European Journal of Human Genetics and I saw this short article from last summer which I missed, NordicDB: a Nordic pool and portal for genome-wide control data. The portal is at http://www.nordicdb.org/database/Home.html. The data itself is for Very Special People, instead of having a simple web form you actually have to…