Month: October 2017
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Attendance at ASHG Meetings since 1981
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The architecture of skin color variation in Africa
Very interesting abstract at the ASHG meeting of a plenary presentation,Novel loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations. This is clearly the work that one of the comments on this weblog alluded to last summer during SMBE. There I was talking about the likely introduction of the derived SLC24A5 variant to the Khoisan peoples…
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Can we make Tolkien “woke”?
The Pacific Standard has a piece, How can we untangle white supremacy from medieval studies, which is an equal part nuggets of fact and equal part tripe. Setting aside much which I found disagreeable in the piece, I was intrigued by the references to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and their relationship to the race-theories…
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Guess who’s coming to dinner: the stranger
A preprint on aRxiv, The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via Online Dating, purports to explain the increased rate of interracial/ethnic marriage in the United States as a consequence of online dating. They have ways to control for the fact that the proportion of non-whites in the United States has been increasing over the…
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The four modes of atheism
I have mentioned Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict before. It’s worth reading. I’d describe it as a cross between In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Of course, that means I’m not sure I got the…
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Open Thread, 10/08/2017
What’s going on?
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Smartphones killed the fabulist
In The Wall Street Journal Nicholas Carr has a bizarre but unsurprising op-ed, How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds: Research suggests that as the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens. By the title, you can immediately pick out tells that should induce skepticism. “Research suggests” is usually indicating that the author has a…
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The Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic ancestry of Bengalis
When I first got my father’s 23andMe results the Y and mtDNA were an interesting contrast. He, and therefore myself, carried Y lineage R1a1a, the lord of the paternal lineages. That was not that great a surprise. In the 1000 Genomes results for the Bangladeshi sample 20% of the men were direct paternal descendants of…
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The Singing Neanderthal
I’m not sure this is what Steven Mithen had in mind when he wrote The Singing Neanderthals.
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Genetic variation and disease in Africa
Very readable review, Gene Discovery for Complex Traits: Lessons from Africa. It’s open access, so I recommend it. The summary: The genetics of African populations reveals an otherwise “missing layer” of human variation that arose between 100,000 and 5 million years ago. Both the vast number of these ancient variants and the selective pressures they…
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Life expectancy in South Asia
India is very heterogeneous. Nevertheless, the contrast between Assam and Bangladesh is very curious to me. 1 Kerala 74.9 74.0 2 Delhi 73.2 – 3 Jammu and Kashmir 72.6 – 4 Uttarakhand 71.7 60.0 5 Himachal Pradesh 71.6 67.0 5 Punjab 71.6 69.4 5 Maharashtra 71.6 67.2 8 Tamil Nadu 70.6 66.2 9 West Bengal…
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The Loneliest Neanderthal
Neanderthals are in the news again! This is good for me personally, as my company is selling Neanderthal trait analysis. Ooga-booga! In any case, the two papers which have triggered the current wave of Neandermania are The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans, and A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia.…
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What is molecular biology?
In Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe there is a reference to “molecular biological work.” I regularly see scholarship in evolutionary and population genomics and genetics referred to as “molecular biology” outside of the field, because since the 1960s molecular methods have been part and parcel…
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A very special episode of South Park
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The elves of our imagination and reality
In Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? the late Martin Gardner reviewed evidence for cannibalism and ultimately came to the conclusion that it was not a real phenomenon. He agreed with the interpretations of some anthropologists that cannibalism stories emerge in human groups as a way to demonize their enemies. For various genetic and archaeological…
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My favorite Tom Petty Song
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Attitudes toward abortion and gun laws are not well correlated in the public
Because of recent tragic events there has been some talk about the relationship between abortion rights and gun laws. Basically, the idea is that those who are pro-life also reject restrictions on guns. I don’t see a strong relationship. In the GSS I limited the data to 2010 and later. I looked at the variables…
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Open Thread, 10/01/2017
Thinking about Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. It’s a good book. I’d recommend it. But a lot of the research highlighted pre-dates the era of the “reproducibility crisis.” That is, some of the positive results just didn’t end up being replicated after this book was written (more ethical behavior if you show…