Month: December 2011
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Elite kin groups down the generations
The Pith: The purported sons of great men often are really the sons of great men. Another case of “Conan was right”. Dienekes points me to a neat new paper, Present Y chromosomes reveal the ancestry of Emperor CAO Cao of 1800 years ago, which attempts to validate the claims to descent from a particular…
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Would you have your fetus genetically tested?
There’s a variable in the GSS, GENESELF, which asks: Today, tests are being developed that make it possible to detect serious genetic defects before a baby is born. But so far, it is impossible either to treat or to correct most of them. If (you/your partner) were pregnant, would you want (her) to have a…
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Richard Feynman’s intelligence
Interesting interview of Steve Hsu. I’ll reproduce the part about Feynman: 3. Is it true Feynman’s IQ score was only 125? Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a…
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The aliens among us
Amy Harmon has a very long piece in The New York Times, Navigating Love and Autism. It’s about a couple who both have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Like cancer I suspect that this term brackets a lot of different issues into one catchall label, not to mention the acknowledgment that it’s a spectrum. When…
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The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood
Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present,…
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D.I.Y. population structure analysis
I badger readers here to actually use all the analytic tools which researchers put out into public circulation, rather than just offering cheap opinions. Obviously it’s way more fun and informative to have discussions with someone who can check their own hunches by doing a few “runs” overnight. Secondly, if you have minimal technical skills…
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Detracting from Christmas cheer
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Have a merry Christmas!
And, if applicable, Hanukkah, and/or Kawanzaa, Yule!
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D. S. Falconer, 1913-2004
In response to comments and queries below I’ve been poking around for more experimental material on quantitative genetics, and in particular the breeder’s equation. That’s how I stumbled upon this very interesting and informative obituary of D. S. Falconer in Genetics. It reviews not only the biographical details of Falconer’s life, but much of his…
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How much do siblings differ in height?
In the comments below a reader asks about the empirical difference in heights between siblings. I went looking…and I have to say that the data isn’t that easy to find, people are more interested in the deeper inferences on can make from the resemblances than the descriptive first-order data itself. But here’s one source I…
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The reasons for the seasons
John Farrell points me to this interesting post, Whose Christmas Is It Anyway?, which reports on revisionist scholarship which expresses skepticism that the Roman Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th is a co-option of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the birth of Sol. The context is that in the 3rd century various…
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A mediocre man’s great son, a great man’s mediocre son
Kobe Bryant is an exceptional professional basketball player. His father was a “journeyman”. Similarly, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. both surpassed their fathers as baseball players. Both of Archie Manning’s sons are superior quarterbacks in relation to their father. This is not entirely surprising. Though there is a correlation between parent and offspring in…
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India worried about the feelings of primitives
India Orders Google, Facebook, Yahoo To Remove Religiously Offensive Content: U.S. companies Facebook, Google and Yahoo, and other internet firms, have been ordered by two Indian courts to remove material considered religiously offensive, the latest skirmish in a growing battle over website content in the world’s largest democracy. I was going to post this image…
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The evolutionary necessity of lying
John Horgan has a long review of Robert Trivers’ long overdue book, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. I really don’t care how well Trivers analyzed the topic, this is such a rich and important issue that I can’t help but think he must have hit some important…
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The seasons
Over at Less Wrong there is a discussion on the Winter Solstice celebration. It being Less Wrong there’s a great deal of introspective analysis. That’s fine. When I was younger I did the “Solstice” celebration thing, though today at this age I think that if you live in the United States you should just own…
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Have the “culture wars” gotten worse?
The assertion in the title seems almost trivial in an impressionistic sense. There really wasn’t a strong distinction on cultural issues between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. By the 1980s there definitely was a gap between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. And that chasm got wider as the years went on.…
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Dalit capitalism
When it comes to caste and capitalism in India, The New York Times reads rather like Reason or a house publication of the Cato Institute. Last fall there was Business Class Rises in Ashes of Caste System. Now, Scaling Caste Walls With Capitalism’s Ladders in India: As the founder of a successful offshore oil-rig engineering…
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The F.D.A. has better things to do than persecute Trent Arsenault
For several days I’ve gotten referrals from message board discussions about the case of Trent Arsenault. Trent is a “free sperm donor” (see the link for the details). For various financial reasons he can’t adhere to all the regulations which sperm banks are subject to. I don’t dismiss the concerns out of hand, but I…