Month: January 2011
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Open Thread – January 15th, 2011
Interesting review of the history of the term ‘group selection’. After taking a long break and coming back to it I’m almost done with War in Human Civilization.
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Facebook is for the herd
That seems to be what John Dvorak is saying, Why I Don’t Use Facebook: Which begs the question as to why anyone would use Facebook when it is essentially AOL done right? The fastest growing group on Facebook are people in their 70′s. Oldste…
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Friday Fluff – January 14th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: More complex than simple addition. 2) Weird search query of the week: “kiera knightly naked truth”. 3) Comment of the week, in response to The genetic affinities of Ethiopians: First of all, you should know that Behar’s Oromos were sampled in areas neighboring the Kenyan border, while Ethiopian…
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The inevitable rise of Amish machines
About 20 years ago I lived for a year in a rural area where Amish were a common feature of country roads and farmers’ markets. My parents, being Muslims, would sometimes buy chickens from the local Amish and slaughter them according to halal. We had a relationship with a particular family. They were nice people,…
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The rules of attraction: the not so golden mean
Several people have inquired as to my opinion on the OKCupid post The Mathematics Of Beauty. I’ve blogged data from this dating website in the past, in particular, the differential race consciousness of women vs. men. But that material is a different class than the current post. As I have noted before, there is a…
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More bad mutations = greater fitness
Does the chart above strike you as strange? What it shows is that the mean fitness of a population drops as you increase the rate of deleterious mutation (many more mutations are deleterious than favorable)…but at some point the fitness of the population bounces back, despite (or perhaps because of?) the deleterious mutations! This would…
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Around the Web – January 12th, 2011
Sex and Statistics or Heteroscedasticity is Hot. Heteroscedasticity just means differences in variances. So it turns out that two women who have the same expected attractiveness rating from different males can still exhibit a difference in variance of evaluations. So a woman who is average, and everyone perceives her as average, gets less attention than…
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When genes matter for intelligence
Image credit: Aleksandra Pospiech One of the interesting and robust nuggets from behavior genetics is that heritability of psychological traits increases as one ages. Imagine for example you have a cohort of individuals you follow over their lives. At the age of 1 the heritability of I.Q. may be ~20%. This means that ~20% of…
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The $50 genome in 2014?
John Hawks notes the MacArthur-Herper debate on the “$1,000 genome”, and responds, Genomes too cheap to meter: ….In it, he notes the comments of several professionals that the $1,000 number itself is not an important fact, it is the availability of sequencing within that order of magnitude. The inevitability of the $1000 genome has already…
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Me, myself, and Myanmar
I have spoken of my somewhat atypical, for a South Asian, genetic results before. Recently Dienekes performed some cluster analysis which confirmed the initial findings, while adding a little detail: I am DOD075. The Southeast Asian component is modal in Malays, while the East Asian component is modal in the North Chinese. Vietnamese and Cambodians…
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The genetic affinities of Ethiopians
In the open thread someone asked: “Any recent stuff on the genetics of Ethiopians.” That prompted me to look around, because I’m curious too. Poking around Wikipedia I couldn’t find anything recent. A lot of the studies are older uniparental lineage based works (NRY and mtDNA). Ethiopia is interesting because unlike almost all other Sub-Saharan…
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Print vs. web in science
I have some Google Alerts set up relating to human evolution and such, and a few days ago I noticed a spike in articles about the evolution of clothing and lice. Like this: We were all naked until 170,000 years ago. Since I blogged this in September, The naked years, I was confused. Here’s the…
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Print vs. web in science
I have some Google Alerts set up relating to human evolution and such, and a few days ago I noticed a spike in articles about the evolution of clothing and lice. Like this: We were all naked until 170,000 years ago. Since I blogged this in September, The naked years, I was confused. Here’s the…
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Around the Web – January 10th, 2011
Denisovans did not have red hair. John Hawks pokes around the Denisovan genome. Interesting that he notes that the coverage of the Denisovans is very good in comparison to the Neandertals. I Won’t Hug This File — I Won’t Even Call It My Friend. A weird screed against the internet and free content, posted on…
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The second aftershock & the rise of irreligion
The book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us has been getting a lot of press, as it should. It’s pretty rich in data, and finally puts a spotlight on one of the most underreported trends between 1990-2010, the massive surge in irreligion. Because of the power of the Religious Right many Americans perceive…
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Ancestry in the Americas
The populations of the African Diaspora have a particular interest in the new genomics, and its relationship to ancestry. Unlike other post-Columbian Diasporas they have sketchy, at best, knowledge of the regions from which their ancestors arrived. This probably explains the popularity of Roots and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s various genealogical projects which have utilized…
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Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular…
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Open Thread – January 8th, 2011
What books are you planning on reading this year? I have The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel in the stack. Also, in case you’re curious: My Pinboard page: http://pinboard.in/u:gnxp My Pinboard RSS: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:gnxp/ The Pinboard app on my Evo means I’ve started archiving stuff from my phone too. I may start…
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Friday Fluff – January 7th, 2011
1. First, a post from the past: The ancient origins of African pygmies. 2. Weird search query of the week: “method man wife”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to The empires of American English: I live in the Galesburg, Illinois area and here there still is a noticible boundary, that runs just north of…
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How America is a little like Pakistan
Recently a “hot story” in the barbaric nation that is Pakistan is that a politician did not know how to recite a prayer properly. An important back story here is that Muslims generally pray in Arabic, but most Muslims are not Arabic language speakers (and in any case, colloquial Arabic is very different from “Classical…