Month: March 2011
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Darwin, eh?
At The Intersection Sheril Kirshenbaum posts some rather stark data from Gallup and a Canadian outfit on the differences in attitudes toward evolution between Americans and Canadians. Those Tories are different! The answers seem very similar to those o…
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Human population genetics & identity politics
Joshua Lipson has a column up in the Harvard Political Review, DNA and the New Identity Politics. I’m generally very keen on spreading insights from the biological sciences into other domains; not as an imperialist, but as a intellectual entrepre…
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Islam, creationism, and anti-modernism
The other day I was listening to NPR and they were discussing at length the upheavals in the Arab world. Offhand I noted how the discussants would occasionally shift between “the Arab world” and “the Muslim world,” and naturally…
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Twins: Brazil edition
A few years ago a story came out about a town populated by Germans in Brazil which exhibited a tendency toward twinning. The combination of Germans, Brazil, and twins, naturally meant that Josef Mengele came into the picture. A more prosaic explanation…
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The genetic world in 3-D
When Zack first mooted the idea of the Harappa Ancestry Project I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. I wonder if his daughter and wife are curious as to what’s happened to their computer! Since collecting the first wave of participants he…
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The shadow of the Emishi
Randy McDonald just pointed me to a 2008 paper in AJHG, Japanese Population Structure, Based on SNP Genotypes from 7003 Individuals Compared to Other Ethnic Groups: Effects on Population-Based Association Studies. It speaks to an issue I brought up ear…
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Nuclear power as the “shark attacks” of energy
Image Credit: Stefan Kuhn I was at a coffee shop recently and a SWPL couple (woman had dreads to boot!) a number of tables away were reading a newspaper, and the husband expressed worry about the Fukushima disaster. The wife responded that “n…
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Genetic paternalism & the F.D.A.
It’s been over a week since I’ve addressed the “F.D.A. D.T.C.” controversy. I plan on getting back to the issue in more detail later, but right now I thought I’d point you to Robert Verbruggen’s article in National R…
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Puzzling the odds of disease risk
I don’t currently put much stock in disease risk estimates given by personal genomics firms. My pedigree is pretty large, so I already have a lot of information on the table (though the demographic transition across the generations in Bangladesh …
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Genome bloggers & Indian genomics
Dienekes, David, and Zack, have now integrated the insight from Reconstructing Indian History that the programs which infer population structure, such as STRUCTURE, frappe, and ADMIXTURE, can produce ancestral components which are themselves actually s…
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Around the Web – March 22nd, 2011
Monuments to Clan Life Are Losing Their Appeal. A rule of thumb is that the Chinese tend to emphasize permanent architecture less than other societies, probably due to the tendency not to use durable materials. The Next Bubble: Farmland. Did not know: …
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Can biologists admit they are wrong?
Jason Collins, an economist strongly grounded in biological principles, has a post up in response to Mike the Mad Biologist’s critique of economic misunderstandings of biology. Jason asks: On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respecti…
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British movie
I wonder what “American movie” would be like….
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Space, the final evolutionary frontier
There’s a rather perplexing paper out in PNAS which I stumbled upon today, An evolutionary process that assembles phenotypes through space rather than through time. Perplexing because I wonder if it is almost so obvious as to be boring, in the tr…
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Different Neandertal strokes
John Hawks, Europe and China have different Neandertal genes: This is very striking. China and Europe by and large have different Neandertal-derived haplotypes. Haplotypes from Neandertals that are common in Europe — say, with more than two or th…
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The New York Times flubs basic facts about Islam
Since 9/11, and even earlier back to the Iranian Revolution, Western journalists have served as oracles for the mass public, decrypting the ethnographic confusions of the Islamic world. There are many subtle shadings which no doubt can’t make int…
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Input determining output in ADMIXTURE
One reason I posted about how to run ADMIXTURE was so that the more readers themselves could become familiar with the biases of the program. That way they would get cautious about over-reading one particular set of results (the same goes for using PCA …
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Friday Fluff – March 18th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. 2) Weird search query of the week: “cheap pretty tutus.” 3) Comment of the week, in response to “Think Twins”: An interesting point. No one ca…
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Foragers to farmers: a tale of collective action?
The economist Samuel Bowles recently had a paper out in PNAS which caught my attention, Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. This naturally begs the question: why did farming conquer foraging as a lifestyle…
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Looking for relatedness in the HapMap Gujaratis
Recently I was looking at a 3-D PCA animation which Zack generated from the Harappa Ancestry Project data set. Click the link and come back. Notice the outlier clusters? The Burusho are straightforward, they seem to have low levels of Tibetan admixtur…