Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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The Human Nature Top 10
A few days Kevin Drum proposed a “Human Nature Top 10.” Here are the criteria: Not personal pet theories, but aspects of human nature that are (a) widely accepted and relatively noncontroversial among professionals, and (b) underappreciated by most of us. They can come from anywhere: economics, psychology, sociology, politics, anthropology, whatever. He offers two:…
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Things are looking up for the world’s poor!
I just listened to a discussion between John Horgan and Madhusree Mukerjee, and the conversation ended on a moderately down note as Mukerjee seemed pessimistic about the prospects for the world’s poor. Where do these people get the idea that things are getting worse? I recall the same sentiment from Massimo Pigliucci. These are people…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
I don’t think I’ll post about Mormons this week. Alas, less traffic. Y chromosomes of Vlax Roma. Is it a coincidence that all these Roma genetics papers are coming out at the same time that the Roma are at the center of E.U. politics? Probably. Not So Hidden Influences. Christopher Hitchens asks “Is it so…
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The adaptive space of complexity
Evolution means many things to many people. On the one hand some scholars focus on time scales of “billions and billions,” and can ruminate upon the radical variation in body plans across the tree of life. Others put the spotlight on the change in gene frequencies on the scale of years, of Ph.D. programs. While…
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Open thread – October 2nd, 2010
Won’t be too long until Halloween and a Republican Congress! I thought that today I would outline some implicit rules-of-thumb for comments on this weblog. I don’t have an official comments policy, and won’t write one out explicitly, because I don’t want to give people a false sense of security. – I’d appreciate it if…
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Polygamy and human evolution: maybe it’s agriculture
Eric Michael Johnson has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today, Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists. I want to spotlight a few paragraphs: Keep in mind that in terms of interpreting such genetic evidence we are of necessity confined to a fairly recent time depth (and remember, by “recent” someone like me…
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Friday Fluff – October 1st, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Levels of selection & the full Price Equation 2. Weird search query of the week: “politcal correct cultures in science-fiction.” I direct you to Ursula K. Le Guin. 3. Comment of the week, in response to
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Should you go to an Ivy League School? “Clearly, going to a top-ranked school seems to deliver far higher earnings at age 28 than poorer ranked schools. In fact, the relationship is highly non-linear. Contrary to what you may have heard (“All top-ranked schools are the same”); it in fact looks like the difference between…
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Mormons are average
Clark of Mormon Metaphysics says below: My impression is that atheists, Mormons and Jews did best simply because all three groups tend to be well educated. (Someone mentioned stats adjusted for education but I couldn’t see where that was noted although maybe I just missed the obvious) This is not an unfounded assertion, as it…
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The Bushmen are not primitive! (not necessarily)
To the left is a figure from the 2009 paper The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans. This paper happens to have excellent coverage of African populations, and the figure is a phylogenetic tree generated from distances between those populations, as well as some non-African ones. I’ve labelled the broad clusters. The…
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A world almost built
By now you’ve probably seen headlines such as A Habitable Exoplanet — for Real This Time. Phil Plait has a more sober assessment. Still, he concludes: But perhaps the most interesting and exciting aspect of all this is what it implies. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
A Widespread Chromosomal Inversion Polymorphism Contributes to a Major Life-History Transition, Local Adaptation, and Reproductive Isolation. Edmund Yong has already written this paper up. Sheril Kirshenbaum offers up her thoughts, stimulated by personal communication with the first author. Inferring the Dynamics of Diversification: A Coalescent Approach. The title is more forbidding than the topic: “Applying…
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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…