Month: May 2019
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Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and Denisovans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and DenisovansK2This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a computational biologist at Brown University abou…
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Altitude Adaptation and Denisovans
Razib talks to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez about her finding that altitude adaptation in Tibetans is due to Denisovan admixture. https://pxlme.me/RECg03af
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Open Thread, 05/22/2019
Sometimes friends ask me about history books (usually scientists). For early modern Europe, Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 is excellent. Read it! One of the reasons I stay on Twitter is direct-messages (DMs). In many ways, it is superior to emails. But over the last few…
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Aladdin!
Disney’s Aladdin is likely to be a hit. And Naomi Scott is likely to be the break-out star. The half-English and half-Guju British chatterbox is also going to play Elena Houghlin in this fall’s reboot of Charlie’s Angels. The casting of the mixed Scott, of white and Indian ancestry, as Jasmine created some silly backlash…
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Problems in PRS?
Variable prediction accuracy of polygenic scores within an ancestry group: Fields as diverse as human genetics and sociology are increasingly using polygenic scores based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for phenotypic prediction. However, recent work has shown that polygenic scores have limited portability across groups of different genetic ancestries, restricting the contexts in which they…
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Adaptation, the gift of the Denisovans
The Tibetan PlateauThe city of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, is at ~12,000 feet above sea level. For comparison, Denver, Colorado, is on average close to ~5,500 feet above sea level. The “Mile High” city has nothing on Lhasa! But…
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Browncast Ep 40: Wael Taji on the Topology of Privilege
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else…).…
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Genetic correlation between friends
There is an interesting, and sexy, line of research which suggests that people who are non-related friends are genetically more similar than you’d expect. For years people have been telling me privately that this is not likely to be robust, and probably just really really subtle structure (friends of mine). But most of these were…
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Browncast Ep 39: Carl Zha, Pakistan, and China’s demographic crisis
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else…).…
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From shades of gray fantasy to woke fantasy
Vox has an interesting but predictable reaction to the finale of the show that much of America was watching, The Game of Thrones finale had a chance to break the wheel. It upheld the status quo. The show is obviously now its own thing apart from the books. But as someone who was reasonably immersed…
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The end of the universal Western civilization
During a conversation with Carl Zha (already posted for BrownCast patrons) I inquired about Chinese views of the rest of the world and China’s relationship to other nation-states. I reflected offhand in some ways we don’t know how to deal with this “multi-polar” world, where Asian powers are again relevant after many centuries of being…
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The myth of the primitive Arab culture
The author of The Map of Knowledge freely admits that her education was in Classics, so it was remiss in “non-Western” history. These gaps show up in the text of her book. For example: It helped that Sassanian culture was one of the most sophisticated and impressive on earth, and that Arab culture was young…
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Genetic variation across many South Asian communities
Someone in the comments posted the results from The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. I put the percentages with a few ratios in a Google doc. I don’t know what a lot of these groups are. Can readers illuminate? We need to be careful about the sample size, but I think there are…
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The long now library?
Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found is written for a non-academic audience, and relays the story of how Classical knowledge was passed down to the West, which eventually leads to the Renaissance. This is a well-known story, and iut is written engagingly (at least…
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The rise of the steppe (on PBS)
David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a bit dated, but it’s still a useful read. Papers such as Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia and Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe come out of…
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Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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Religion and science, a foggy battlefield
One of the similar responses from very different camps to my National Review piece on evolution was that I was wrong to assert evolutionary biology doesn’t have atheistic implications. This perspective came from both some religious evolution skeptics and from atheists who agree with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. My own view on this isn’t…
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What might have happened to earlier modern humans
A few years ago a paper came out, Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals, which recorded evidence of ancestry related to modern humans which evolved in Africa in the Altai Neanderthal genome. There has also been evidence that ancestral Neanderthals had their mtDNA lineages replaced by African lineages more than 200,000…
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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic Massacre
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic MassacreThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to an archaeologist and geneticist who were authors of a paper that documented a Neolithic mas…