Out of Africa: mend it, don’t end it!
Dilettante human genetics blogger Dienekes Pontikos has a post up with a somewhat oblique title, Is multi-regional evolution dead? I say oblique because a straightforward title would be “Multi-regionalism lives!” He posted a chart from a 2008 paper which outlines various models of human origins, and their relationship to molecular data at the time. I […]
Around the Web – December 27th, 2010
Hope Christmas went well for everyone. No complaints about mine. Pinboard. Thanks for the Delicious replacement recommendations. I know that Delicious is going to be sold and not shutdown, but confidence is lost. Pinboard seems to work well, and you can import all your Delicious bookmarks. Additionally, there’s a serviceable Chrome extension so that I […]
Slouching toward idiocracy?
The September issue of Discover Magazine had an interesting piece, If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? It’s now online, though to read the full article you’ll have to have a print subscription, or, pay 99 cents to get a digital copy of that issue. John Hawks is described as “a […]
Patterns of human height & lifestyle
Steve Hsu, The mystery of height: I was looking at The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society, A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources. The Dutch came to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in the early 17th century and these translated documents record their impressions of the Austronesian natives. (Both the Dutch and Chinese […]
Open Thread – December 25th, 2010
This is a scheduled post (As many of my posts are by the way. Shout out to the stupid readers who occasionally wonder why I’m not partying when a post goes live on Friday night!). Merry Christmas! I’m probably playing around with my HTC Evo 4G if you’re reading this on Saturday, or eating, etc. […]
Friday Fluff – December 24th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Lions, and tigers, and snow leopards! Oh, my!. 2. Weird search query of the week: “Lions, and tigers, and snow leopards! Oh, my!”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to Heritability and genes as causes: I knew some people thought I had over-reacted to the initial item/press release. […]
Reminder, 23andMe sale through Christmas
A reminder that 23andMe’s sale is valid until Christmas. Including the mandatory yearly subscription to their “Personal Genome Service”, that’s $160 (though you only get charged $99 + shipping initially, the subscription is $5/month). I didn’t quite go up to the 10 kits per person, but I did come close. There will likely be new […]
The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm!
Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution: Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations have been analysed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DMAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived ab7out 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. All the populations examined except the African population have multiple origins, implying that […]
Heritability and genes as causes
Since the beginning of this weblog (I’ve been writing for eight years) heritability has been a major confusion. Even long time readers misunderstand what I’m trying to get at when I talk about heritability. That’s why posts such as Mr. Luke Jostins‘ are so helpful. I had seen references to a piece online, The Causes of […]
The year of the Other human
Update: Please see follow up post. Carl Zimmer, Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals: An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants […]
Romans & gods, Athens & Jerusalem
Ross Douthat’s latest column in The New York Times comes back somewhat to an exchange we had a little over five years ago. He concludes his column: Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — […]
Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East […]
Around the Web – December 20th, 2010
Countdown to Christmas! Hope everyone has pleasant holidays. Apple v Google. Very long article highlighting the different strategies of the two companies. I do though think Google is starting to get a touch annoying trumpeting their “open ways.” They’re not a struggling start-up, they’re a massive corporation. More on “culturomics”. Also see the #ngrams hash-tag. […]
Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature, […]
The season
I used to love the stop action animation specials which would be replayed around Christmas….
Open Thread – December 18th, 2010
I really enjoy Frederick Pohl’s The Way the Future Blogs. If Isaac Asimov had made it to the internet age I’m sure he would have blogged quite a bit.
South Asians too are sons of the farmers?
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries: A note of caution: The reduced […]
Friday Fluff – December 17th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past:
Grooming => Language ~ Larger Social Groups.
2. Weird search query of the week: “scottish hair”.
3.Comment of the week, in response to
Sons of the farmers, the origins of Africans
Most readers at this point are aware that I am very curious as to the origin of Europeans at the interface of hunter-gatherer populations and Neolithic farmers. What we thought we knew around the year 2000 does not seem to align very well with the conflicting results coming out of recent analyses. There is no […]
Which nations think over the long term
One of the major parameters which shape individual success, and macroeconomic growth in the aggregate, is time preference. Time preference basically measures an individual’s future-time orientation. Would you for example take $1,000 in the present, or wait 30 days and accept $1,500 dollars? It doesn’t need to be money, children can exhibit time preference as […]