Razib Khan

Month: August 2018

  • Near universal standardized testing sends more low SES candidates to university

    Most readers are probably aware that meritocratic testing for the selection of the ruling administrative class was a feature of the Chinese system for over 2,000 years. This created in China a civilian ruling coterie unified by cultured cultivation of mental rather than physical feats, similar to the Roman nobility which flourished during the first two centuries…

  • Consumer Genomics in 2018, beyond the future’s threshold

    In 2013 David Mittelman and I wrote Rumors of the death of consumer genomics are greatly exaggerated. This was in the wake of the FDA controversy with 23andMe, and continuing worries about DNA and privacy. Today David and I came out with a new comment in Genome Biology, Consumer genomics will change your life, whether you get tested…

  • Open Thread

    Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.

  • Open Thread, 08/19/2018

    Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story is a “deal” on Kindle. Recommended. Also, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. Greece’s Bailout Is Ending. The Pain Is Far From Over. Seems to me that Greece…

  • The Muslim world stands upon the shoulders of the Ummah

    The two plots above are from a new working paper, On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development. The basic argument is that good Roman infrastructure correlates with modern patterns of prosperity. An ingenious way the authors tested the predictive power is to contrast Europe, where carts and therefore roads, remained…

  • Alpha is finally almost here

    I’ve wondered whatever happened to Alpha, the film about a Solutrean boy? It was supposed to come out much earlier in the year, but they pushed it back to August. So it will be competing with Crazy Rich Asians this weekend. Not sure if I’ll end up catching it, but it seems like they are making…

  • Alpha is finally almost here

    I’ve wondered whatever happened to Alpha, the film about a Solutrean boy? It was supposed to come out much earlier in the year, but they pushed it back to August. So it will be competing with Crazy Rich Asians this weekend. Not sure if I’ll end up catching it, but it seems like they are making…

  • So you want to be a geneticist…

    This week, Razib talks to Dr. Austin Reynolds, an early career geneticist at UC Davis. They talk about how Austin got into genetics, and where he’s going in the field. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/d6LS3rfJ  

  • The Insight Show Notes: Episode 32, So you want to be a geneticist…

    DrosophilaThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we talk to an “early career” geneticist, Austin Reynolds. A graduate of Indian University and University of Texas-Austin, he is currently a post-doctoral fellow at University…

  • Hinduism was not invented by the British (or Muslims)

    I’m reading a book titled The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. It’s works within the postcolonial framework. Unlike a lot of postcolonial scholarship it isn’t bluster and rhetoric riddled with basic historical errors. The author presents a lot of interesting facts. But, as I’ve said elsewhere I disagree with the thesis…

  • Open Thread, 08/14/2018

    Weekly book recommendation, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. V. S. Naipaul has died. I never read his fiction. Perhaps I should. Suggestions? People always talk about A House for Mr. Biswas. Genome-wide polygenic scores for common diseases identify individuals with risk equivalent to monogenic mutations. ” We…

  • Open Thread

    Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.

  • Open Thread

    Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.

  • Live not by the haplogroup alone

    In The population genomics of archaeological transition in west Iberia the authors note that “the population of Euskera speakers shows one of the maximal frequencies (87.1%) for the Y-chromosome variant, R1b-M269…” In the early 2000s the high frequency of R1b-M269 among the Basques, a non-Indo-European linguistic isolate, was taken to be suggestive of the possibility…

  • V. S. has died

    Like many I have only read Naipaul’s nonfiction. His genius, as a literary intellectual, was to distill intuitions and observations that many of us have, but compress them into more economical and clear prose. But, in my opinion, literary intellectuals’ genius lay not in uncovering new things, but unmasking what we already knew. Therefore Naipaul…

  • White people are not gods, they bleed

    I’ve kept my mouth shut on this issue for a while, but it keeps popping up on my Twitter timeline. The comment above was directed at a piece in The Washington Post, White, and in the minority: She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in. You can…

  • The new post-genetic paradigm will come

    Oftentimes the domain on which a technical framework is applied matters a great deal. Imagine, if you will, an explicit statistical test for a phylogenetic relationship between a set of extant populations, whereby one infers a group of ancestral populations. If the genus is Drosophila, it’s academic. Interesting, but academic. If the genus is Homo,…

  • MHC and the Genetics of Attraction

    This week Spencer & Razib have been ousted! The “interns” take over, as Mackenzie Finklea, Brianna and Isabelle discuss the relationship between genetics and attraction. Episode 31 show notes.

  • Open thread, 08/06/2018

    In light of the recommendation of F. W. Motte’s Imperial China: 900-1800, I thought it would be useful to reiterate a minimal set of other books that are important in my intellectual development in relation to the history of China. The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. You need to start at the beginning, and…

  • Genetics is not about “dunking” on Hindu nationalists

    I need to weigh in real quick about something I’ve been noticing: geneticists don’t do genetics because they are excited about debunking views promoted by some Hindu nationalists and other Indians of a variety of political stripes. In fact, most non-Indian scientists (as in people who don’t live in India) are not totally savvy to the political…

Razib Khan