“India’s” population bomb isn’t rocket science
The New York Times has a piece up, Defusing India’s Population Time Bomb, which reiterates what I was trying to get at yesterday, India’s demographic problems are localized to particular regions, not the nation as a whole. First, let’s review the world’s population growth & fertility rates:
Now let’s focus on a few nations:
China’s coercive policy […]
Desmond Tutu, Spaniards, and genetic distance
Since we’ve been talking about Fst a fair amount, I thought it might be nice to put it in some concrete graphical perspective. First, to review Fst in the genetic context measures the proportion of genetic variation which can be attributed to between population differences. To give a “toy” example if you randomly divided the […]
Star Hustler passes away
A little “off topic” for this blog’s core content, but Jack Horkheimer, the “Star Hustler/Star Gazer” passed away today. Here’s vintage 1985:
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend.
More Evidence for Hauser’s Scientific Misconduct. Stuff like this keeps bubbling up from anonymous “sources.”
Excessive regulation of DTC genomics will come at a cost. Sometimes the cost is tangible in terms of slower innovation, but sometimes it is straightforward in monetary terms as increased prices to jump through regulatory hurdles. Not that […]
India’s Deep North
In my post Pakistan ~10 years on I alluded to the fact that despite India’s robust economic growth of the past ~15 years or so in the aggregate there is a wide range of state-by-state variation. It is conventional in the media to point out the massive caste/class divisions in India, but because of the […]
scienceblogging
Just noticed that there’s a new site, scienceblogging, at scienceblogging.org. It’s basically an aggregator. One-stop-shopping I guess.
The flows and pulses of humanity
Dr. John Hawks points me to a review in BMC Biology, A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small. It’s short, and of interest for the citations themselves. This a field in flux. One point which I think needs to be emphasized in relation to migration parameters is that there are going to […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?. Dienekes argues that Amerindians are the furthest not due to bottlenecks, but because of isolation from gene flow. He points to particular markers which span Africa and Eurasia. I know of the one he’s talking about. I need to rethink whether the first approximation of no […]
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans? Amerindians
Yesterday I stated that it was wrong to think of any non-African population as more genetically distant from Africans. Well, I was wrong. Sort of. This is obviously a case where I had a model in mind, and went looking for visuals which reinforced the story I was going to tell. As noted in the […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Overweight American Children and Adolescents Becoming Fatter. Reports that the increases in obesity are not equally distributed across socioeconomic segments. So not only is there is a change in the mean, it looks the variance is increasing.
News from the west: Ancient DNA from a French megalithic burial chamber. Another paper which indicates we might need […]
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?
A comment below:
Razib, I don’t know much about genetics but is it true that these people of Melanesia are among the least related people (even more so than Europeans) to sub-saharan Africans genetically??
This is a common question. The typical scientifically curious intelligent person is generally aware that on the order of 100,000 years ago there […]
Blondes of the ‘black islands’
Recently I was looking for images of the alpine biomes of the New Guinea highlands* and stumbled onto some intriguing, though not entirely surprising, set of photographs of individuals from Papua New Guinea. They were noteworthy because they manifested the conventional Melanesian physical type, but their hair had a blonde cast to it. For example, […]
Pakistan ~10 years on
Long time readers of this weblog will recognize Zachary Latif. Zachary and I have been having exchanges on various topics on and off since 2002 on the blogs. His early opinionated musings on cultural and historical topics were a definite prod for me to venture out more vigorously into this domain. As a Pakistani […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
How much of the genome is transcribed? Or, the utility of a good genome browser. One of the issues with science today are the necessary capital inputs which make it such a narrow and focused vocation. But there are lots of things you as an individual can discern by poking around the public tools.
‘Mitochondrial Eve’: […]
Genetics is One: Mendelism and quantitative traits
In the early 20th century there was a rather strange (in hindsight) debate between two groups of biological scientists attempting to understand the basis of inheritance and its relationship to evolutionary processes. The two factions were the biometricians and Mendelians. As indicated by their appellation the Mendelians were partisans of the model of inheritance formulated […]
Native American ancestry in African Americans
That is, in the African American sample in the HapMap3 population set. I was just browsing the Admixture manual, and stumbled onto this plot:
CEU = Utah Whites, and YRI = Yoruba. They should be familiar from the previous versions of the HapMap. MEX = Mexican Americans from Los Angeles. K = 3, three ancestral populations. […]
Third World means nothing now
I recently had an exchange on twitter about the term “Third World” (starting from a tweet pointing to the idea of “Third World America”). Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of the term:
The term ‘Third World’ arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Dogs’ Family Status Depends on Family’s Locale. “People who think of their pets as their children often re-evaluate this thought when they have human children of their own.”
The Politics of Ideas : Hauser Gone Wild. “Must read” post on “Hausergate.”
Low Loan Repayment Is Seen at For-Profit Schools. They attract weak students. No wonder they don’t […]
Gene-culture interaction in Koreans and Americans
Genes and culture: OXTR gene influences social behaviour differently in Americans and Koreans. Korean Americans are more like white Americans than Koreans in the pattern of the effect of the allele on behavior.