Month: June 2011
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In thrall to Abraham’s God
In reading Strange Parallels I am struck by the broad cross-cultural tendencies in mainland Southeast Asia to transition from a Hindu sacral state to a Theravada Buddhist sacral state. Granted, the latter does not seem to be at great rupture with the former, as is evidenced by the “Hindu” aesthetic resonances of Thai and Khmer…
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Of literality and metaphor in the war between Arya and Dasa
Over at Brown Pundits Zach Latif brings up the point that the Indian bias for light skin may date back to the Aryans. And it does seem that such a bias manifests in the earliest texts. But as someone not …Read more »
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False positive!
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Grain, disease, and innovation
I just finished reading a review of the literature since 1984 on the bioarchaeology of the transition to agriculture. Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record: The population explosion that …
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Friday Fluff – June 17th, 2011
1) Post from the past: The biological bases of behavioral variation. 2) Weird search query of the week: “clothedpornstars.” OK, so now I know what this is. But are there stars in this kink-genre? 3) Comment of the week, in response to …
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Muslim over-reliance on logic
I’ve been mulling over omar’s comment below: And about women, he made the argument that all this equality business is a sideshow and even a net negative. We dont have to buy this silly notion that “we are wasting the talents of 50% of the population”. Once we sort out our technology issues, we will…
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Does heritability of political orientation matter?
At The Intersection Chris Mooney points to new research which reiterates that 1) political ideology exhibits some heritability, 2) and, there are associations between political ideology and specific genes. I’ll set #2 aside for now, because this …
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Brown Pundits in SFGate
Jeff Yang wrote up an article for SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, All brown everything. Here’s the section on Brown Pundits: That’s been a recurring theme on Brown Pundits, a blog community cofounded by Berkeley-based Bangladeshi American Razib Khan, who writes the Gene Expression blog for Discover magazine, and Zachary Latif, a London-based finance…
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Massive Neandertal & Denisovan introgression
Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!) So claimed Peter Parham at a…
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Where are you from, etc.
I have no idea how old Jordan is. But I’m 34. Here is my experience in a graph, where the Y axis represents frequency: I look as brown as I used to, and I never dressed “ethnically.” So my own hunch is that the social environment has changed greatly since the early 1980s. When I…
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Parents don’t matter that much
Update: Stephen Dubner emailed me, and pointed me to this much longer segment which has a lot of Bryan Caplan. So it seems like the omission that I perceived was more of an issue with the production and editing process and constraints of the Marketplac…
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Bengali Muslims are new (?)
A quick follow up to Zack’s post on Rohingya. On the demographics, if you believe the claims of Muslims and Christians in Burma, they are the majority of the population, not the Theravada Buddhists. This means ethnic Burmans are a minority, as are the combination of Burmans, Mons, and Shans, three ethnic groups that are…
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Editors!
Mr. Eurasian Sensation pointed out to me that I keep misspelling his handle. Fair enough. But out of curiosity, and I double checked. Everyone who can post on this weblog is an “editor.” So if you see something that needs scrubbing, get to it! If you wish that is. (a few of you were “authors,”…
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Present genetic variation is a weak guide to past genetic variation
As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A …
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Why are Muslims so eloquently barbaric?
I want to follow up Eurasian Sensation’s post on female false-consciousness. If you look in the World Values Survey you’ll see that plenty of non-Muslim societies are very reactionary and barbaric, even savage. The anti-gay hysteria in Uganda is representative of the non-Muslim face of barbarism. China, Japan, and Korea, are very secular societies, where…
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The Cape Coloureds are a mix of everything
A Cape Coloured family I’ve mentioned the Cape Coloureds of South Africa on this weblog before. Culturally they’re Afrikaans in language and Dutch Reformed in religion (the possibly related Cape Malay group is Muslim, though also Afrikaan…
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Language, genes, & peoples of Southeast Asia
As I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s magisterial Strange Parallels: Volume 2. So I was very interested in a new paper from BMC Genetics, Genetic structure of the Mon-Khmer speaking groups and their affinity to the neighbouring Tai populat…
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Brown and the “woman thing”
India fourth most dangerous place for women: survey: Afghanistan is the most dangerous place for women followed by Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, India and Somalia in the survey conducted by Thomson Reuters’ Trustlaw Women, a hub of legal information and legal support for women’s rights. Proposition: BIMARU is no different from Pakistan. South and…
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Two public genotypes
First, Sam Snyder. Here’s the link to the file in dropbox. Second, Heather Frawley. I’ve uploaded her text file as well as pedigree format at RapidShare as a zip file. Click “Free Download” at the bottom right of the page. It…