Month: September 2011
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Lack of brown in banks
Sperm bank turns down redheads: Indian sperm was also hard to find, he said, because India does not allow sperm or eggs to be exported, causing a problem for childless international Indians.
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40 hits in 40 years
I’m not very interested in music compared to the average person. But I’m curious about changing tastes in music over time, because it’s part of our cultural fabric. Since I lack real “thick” knowledge in this domain, I started to think of crutches to allow me to get a slice of perception as a function…
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What atheism and autism may have in common
My post below on atheism and autism caused some confusion. I want to quickly clear up some issues in regards to the model which I had in mind implicitly. In short I’m convinced by the work of cognitive scientists of religion (see Religion Explained and In Gods We Trust) that belief in gods and spirits…
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The words of the father
Over at A Replicated Typo they are talking about a short paper in Science, Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In it Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew observe that “A correlation is emerging that suggests language change in an already-populated region may require a minimum proportion of immigrant males, as reflected in Y-chromosome DNA types.” But…
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Atheism as mental deviance
Tyler Cowen points me to a PDF, Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism, which has some fascinating results on the religiosity (or lack thereof) of people with high functioning autism. I’ve seen speculation about the peculiar psychological profile of atheists before in the cognitive science literature, and there’s a fair amount of…
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Forced marriage in the West
Marry—or Else.
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Rational optimist or scientific racist?
I’m quite looking forward to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s coming out in three weeks, so expect to hear a lot more about it. That violence has declined is known outside of Pinker’s own work, and I try and spread this “good news” as much as I…
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The end of “archaic” H. sapiens
The Pith: The Bushmen branch of the human family tree diverged ~130,000 years ago. The non-Africans branched off from the Africans ~50,000 years ago. The Europeans and East Asians diverged ~35,000 years ago. One of the terms in paleoanthropology which can confuse is that of archaic Homo sapiens (AHS). This is in contrast to anatomically…
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Out of Africa’s end?
The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically…
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Saturday Stuff – September 17th, 2011
Very busy week. I don’t have time to look for past posts and I haven’t been reading the comments closely, so I’m skipping those. 1) Weird search query of the week: “why, according to christian, did foragers become farmers?.” 2) And finally, your weekly fluff fix: (a guest kat who made as sojourn at casa…
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Not the great stagnation
Dan MacArthur points me to this story on the sequencing of the West family. You can read the full paper in PLoS Genetics. When the price point for a full genome comes down to $1,000 or so I plan on getting the code for everyone in my immediate family, just like I got everyone genotyped…
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Shades of 2050
I have long had a problem with projections of the racial makeup of the USA which implicitly neglect the complexities inherent in the identity of someone of mixed origin. A new study analyzing Census data on interracial marriages between 1980 and 2008 highlights some of the subtleties: The study also examined trends in biracial and…
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Google+, very different from Facebook
TechCrunch has a post up on the declining public usage of Google+. It’s been several months since I’ve been “using” Google+. I put usage in quotes because I am not a big active poster on twitter, Facebook, or Google+. But I do participate passively a fair amount. At this point for me I can say…
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Poll on personal genomics
Genomes Unzipped points me to a Nature survey on personal genomics for scientific researchers. With price points down to $200 or so many scientists have been at least genotyped. Though it varies by domain. Many molecular biologists seem intrigued by the novelty of personal genotyping services. In contrast, in a room of a dozen or…
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Ötzi, first, but not last, farmer?
Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with…
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When all probable things can not be right
I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some…
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Rick Perry and his transcript
This piece in The New York Times goes through the A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s, of Rick Perry’s transcript. Two questions which come to mind: 1) If we know this about Perry, why shouldn’t we know this about all the candidates? I don’t know what getting a B in business law and a D…
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Personal genomics & rare populations notes
I’m going to address two points in this post. The next possible target for getting an undersampled population, and the Malagasy results. First, lots of great submissions in regards to populations which are undersampled. Some of them are actually …
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China beats India
On trust. I’m sure that the data is from the World Values Survey.
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Neandertal introgression and admixture
Ed Yong has a good good review of a new Neandertal introgression/admixture paper in PNAS. It’s not live on the web yet, so let me quote Ed: Even if the odds of successful interbreeding were just 5 percent, Neanderthal genes would make up the majo…