Razib Khan

Month: January 2012

  • Catching up to Argentina

    You may not have noticed, but Google has been spiffing up its Data Explorer. Poking around you see nice illustrations of phenomena which you otherwise may just read about. For example, Argentina has been one of the classic illustrations in economic history of stagnation. To a great extent it peaked around 1900, and development has…

  • Genetic profiling: CSI edition

    Apparently the national media is reporting that scientific genealogy may result in leads to a cold case. The principle is simple: apparently Y chromosomal material was matched to public genealogy databases. From this the researcher concluded that the perpetrator is probably a male line descendant of Robert Fuller of Salem, Massachusetts. Contrary to the urban…

  • Who you are thread….

    I haven’t posted one of these in a long time. My own assumption is that I know the core readership of this weblog through various means relating to comments (many of you connect your email addresses to Facebook, and usually I can do an IP trace if that’s not feasible). But I know many people…

  • To be atheist is an offense

    I have seen references to this around the web, and don’t really know if I can believe this, because the details are so disturbing to consider. So I’ll pass it on, You can expect threats if you discuss Sharia: My One Law for All Co-Spokesperson Anne Marie Waters was to speak at a meeting on Sharia Law…

  • “Recreational genomics,” 4+ years on

    In an exchange with Mark Shriver, I was pointed to this 2007 position paper in Science, The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing. It’s an interesting historical artifact. Much of the critique was aimed at AncestrybyDNA, but it can be generalized. Now that 23andMe has ~100,000 customers, have the things which they worried about…

  • How the Amhara breathe differently

    I have blogged about the genetics of altitude adaptation before. There seem to be three populations in the world which have been subject to very strong natural selection, resulting in physiological differences, in response to the human tendency toward hypoxia. Two of them are relatively well known, the Tibetans and the indigenous people of the…

  • Apostate in Indonesia

    Everyone knows that the world’s most populous Muslim nation is Indonesia. And, it is a moderate Muslim nations to boot. Dismay After Indonesian Atheist Charged With Blasphemy: Police on Friday confirmed that they had charged a man with blasphemy after he was reported by the Indonesia Council of Ulema. Dharmasraya Police Chief Sr. Comr. Chairul…

  • The quest for an Afrikaner genotype

    Update: If interested, please email me at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com. Also, I am getting some feedback via 23andMe that people with white South African matches noticed Africa segments in many of the ancestry paintings. This has definitely increased by probability that the admixture proportion is ~5 percent. There will probably be a few…

  • The erectus within?

    The Pith: More caveman admixture in modern humans, especially Melanesians! A new paper on archaic adaptive introgression among Melanesians has been discussed elsewhere. But I think it is worth reviewing, because it’s probably a foretaste of what’s to come. Researchers are combing through the human genome, as more and more genomes come on line, in…

  • The arcologies arise

    How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work: Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute,…

  • African ancestry in South Asians

    In response to a comment below on admixture from Africa in Muslism I ran ADMIXTURE on the HGDP South Asian samples, as well as the more “South Asian” Gujarati HapMap sample. The Luhya proportion is a good proxy for African. Eventually when we have huge geographical and population coverage I suspect we can ascertain Muslim…

  • Physical education teachers are not smart

    So there is a website out there, Educational Realist (via Steve Sailer), which made me aware of some statistics from ETS on the intellectual aptitudes of those who passed a teaching certification. This is relevant because those who major in education at university are notoriously rather weak students. The implication here is that teachers are…

  • The brown narcissism of small differences

    In the post below Zach had a strange, though plausible, comment about how religious differences within South Asia may loom larger than differences which are substantively larger on a host of characteristics. For example, the preference for a Lutheran Finnish daughter in law for a Punjabi Muslim man than a Hindu or Sikh Punjabi daughter…

  • The phylogeography of the trans-Caucasus

    Randy McDonald points me to this fascinating post, Genetic clues to the Ossetian past. In the post author outlines phylogeographic inferences one can make from uniparental lineages; maternal and paternal lines of descent. Specifically, they are in interested in the origins and relationships of the Ossete people. I assume that one reason Randy pointed me…

  • Barack H. Obama, a liminal black Christian

      It is well known that President Obama has a religion issue. The big looming one has to do with whether he is Muslim or not. My own position that he’s as Muslim as I am. With that out of the way, is Barack H. Obama a Christian? To borrow a turn of phrase from…

  • God’s own forks!

    A History of Western Eating Utensils, From the Scandalous Fork to the Incredible Spork: But first back to the fork, which has the most checkered past of all eating utensils. In fact, the seemingly humble instrument was once considered quite scandalous, as Ward writes. In 1004, the Greek niece of the Byzantine emperor used a…

  • Eating with your hands

    The New York Times has a long paean to eating with your hands, Mind Your Manners: Eat With Your Hands: “Eating with the hands evokes great emotion,” she said. “It kindles something very warm and gentle and caressing. Using a fork is unthinkable in traditional Indian eating. It is almost like a weapon.” Eating with…

  • The future is here

    Believe it or not I am probably mildly skeptical about the possibilities for the 21st century as a canvas for human flourishing. That is one reason I like to emphasize the positive, because it is important for me to not get caught up in my own bias. Over the last two human generations (50 years)…

  • Is Barack H. Obama whiter than Mitt Romney?

    For some reason The New York Times has given the execrable Lee Siegel space to write on its website. Ruminating on Mitt Romney’s candidacy Siegel puts up a post with the title What’s Race Got to Do With It?, and states: In this way, Mr. Romney’s Mormonism may end up being a critical advantage. Evangelicals…

  • Genes and Rex Wandalorum et Alanorum

    The idea of a “folk wandering” was once a well accepted idea in history, in particular for the phase of the Late Roman Empire, and the subsequent fall of the Western Empire. It’s a rather simple concept: the collapse of the Pax Romana occurred simultaneous with a mass ethnic reordering of Europe, primarily via the…

Razib Khan