Month: August 2010
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Inbreeding in the Persian Gulf
On the heels of my post on cousin marriage, I thought readers might find this article on genetic screening in the United Arab Emirates of interest. One way to tackle the problem of genetic diseases which emerge out of consanguineous unions apparently isn’t to discourage the unions themselves, but dodge the outcomes. So pre-implantation screening…
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E. O. Wilson against Hamiltonian inclusive fitness
There is a new paper in Nature which is a full frontal attack on the utility of William D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in explaining eusociality. Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, & Edward O. Wilson are the authors. Wilson is famous in large part for his authorship of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and is…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Welcome (and Welcome Back) to FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver moves to The New York Times. Now if only we could get rid of those stupid made up “trend stories.” Image of inflation adjusted home prices 1890-2006. Crazy! Classic case of a bubble, but it really hasn’t popped. And the government will try and make sure it…
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Across North American borders
There is a border across which fertility drops by a factor of two in North America (defined as from Canada to Panama). Specifically, one nation has a TFR of ~4, and the other ~2. Can you guess the two nations? You can find the answer in the charts below. First, linear: Now, log-transformed: That’s right,…
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The individual & social risks of cousin marriage
The map above shows the distribution of consanguineous marriages. As you can see there’s a fair amount of cross-cultural variation. In the United States there’s a stereotype of cousin marriage being the practice of backward hillbillies or …
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Decline in forest cover
I’ve spent most of my life in relatively forested areas, and took forestry courses in secondary school (which is why I can still distinguish doug fir from spruce by looking at the needles). In my youth I even had friends who were loggers during the summer. But I haven’t taken a deep scientific interest in…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Glenn Beck Wrong on Darwin: How Evolution Affirms the Oneness of Humankind. I can see where the individual is coming from, but I think more people should just come out say that evolution is just science, and has no deeper moral implications besides those which humans impute to it. No one cares about the […]
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The non-superstars you don’t see
Jonah Lehrer has a post up on why it might be that top-level athletes seem to come from smaller urban areas rather than larger ones. The possible reason is interesting. But I was reminded of the “10,000 hour rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. You know, how Tiger Woods’ dad “turned him” into a world class…
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The oldest science blog of all?
I began blogging in April 2002 (I once had a graduate student approach me and tell me that she was a big fan of my blog back in high school!). Derek Lowe is the only science blogger I can think of off the top of my head who was around before I was, is still…
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Just pushing buttons
Mike the Mad Biologist, whose bailiwick is the domain of the small, asks in the comments: I don’t mean to bring up a tangential point to the post, but why does the field of human genetics use PCA to visualize relationships? When I see plots like those shown here that have a ‘geometric pattern’ to…
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Changing to Feedburner
If you are subscribed to my total feed, please change the RSS address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed.
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Submitting your own links to GNXP
I’ve decided to add a “user generated content” component to this weblog. The links submitted by users will now be at the top left. If you read this weblog, you know the stuff that readers (you) might find of interest. The main issue is getting to where you can submit the links. First, initially I’ve…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
I hope you had a good weekend. Why is Israel So Poor? Israel is a nation with a high level of human capital and moderate wealth. The author points out that Israel is a “low trust” society. It is not often remembered that Israel is arguably the most ethnically diverse developed society in the world,…
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A thousand little adaptive platoons
Last week I took an intellectual road trip back nearly a century and explored the historical context and scientific logic by which R. A. Fisher definitively fused Mendelian genetics with quantitative evolutionary biology. In the process he helped birth the field of population genetics. While the genetics which we today are more familiar with begins at…
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Genetic variation within Africa (and the world)
Last year a paper came out in Science which made a rather large splash, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans by Tishkoff et al. Since it’s more than a year old I recommend that those of you curious about the details of the paper and don’t have academic access go through…
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Open thread – August 22, 2010
I found out this week that the idea of the “Noble Savage” is erroneously attributed to Jean Jacques Rosseau. I haven’t read much Rosseau myself, so I’m familiar with the general shape of his ideas through the filters of later interpreters. But even if I’d consumed the great man’s oeuvre in totality I wonder if…
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“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…
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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…
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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:
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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.…