Author: Razib Khan
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This book is a big *wow*
War in Human Civilization is an awesomely well written and dense book. Like The Horse, the Wheel, and Language it is a scholarly work which stays broadly engaging and relevant to a wider audience than specialists. Highly recommended if you have some spare time over Christmas. This is naturally not a endorsement of every claim…
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Notes & links – December 9th, 2010
Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said. Carl Zimmer’s correspondence dump is gold. Linear Population Model: Explores a linear model to examine genetic population admixture results and human prehistory. I read every post on this weblog after I stumbled upon it yesterday. The major focus seems to be to use ADMIXTURE results along with…
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How close are scientific disciplines?
Chemistry likes to think of itself as the “central science.” Is that true? Intuitively it makes sense. But how can we measure that more rigorously? In comes the Stanford Dissertation Browser: The Stanford Dissertation Browser is an experimental interface for document collections that enables richer interaction than search. Stanford’s PhD dissertation abstracts from 1993-2008 are…
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Polarization on abortion in the USA
Some comments below made me want to look at attitudes toward abortion in the USA by ideology over the decades. I know that political party polarization on social issues has played out mostly over the past 20 years or, but I assumed that this was less evident in ideology (mostly, liberal Republicans became Democrats and…
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Putting off total transparency
How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace. The author has a website, and here’s some basic tips.
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The men of the north: the Sami
Ole Magga, Norwegian politician On this blog I regularly get questions about the Sami (Lapp*). That’s because I often talk about Finnish genetics, have readers such as Clark who are of part-Sami origin, and, the provenance and character of the Sami speak to broader questions about the emergence of the modern European gene pool. More…
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Knowledge of heritability, ignorance of genes
Does the Slut Gene Exist?: The DRD4 study isn’t an isolated case of shaky genetic science. In fact, it joins a cadre of questionable scientific assertions that link single genes to much broader patterns of behavior. The last decade has witnessed an explosion in genetics studies, and with it, a proliferation of sensational study results…
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The history of us all
I should mention I finished Why the West Rules a few days ago, and Tyler Cowen was spot on. The author is by training a classical archaeologist, and so the first portion of the book which focuses on archaeology, and up to the classical historical period, is thick, dense, and insightful. But as he pushes…
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Admissions of illiberalism
Recently I was having a twitter conversation with Kevin Zelnio and Eric Michael Johnson about the fact that I define myself as “right-wing.” Kevin kind of implied that I was poseur in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. I don’t wear my political beliefs on my sleeve too much in this space because 1) I find talking about…
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The cultural construction of truth
If you know of John Ioannidis‘ work, Jonah Lehrer’s new piece in The New Yorker won’t be a surprise to you. It’s alarmingly titled The Truth Wears Off – is there something wrong with the scientific method? Here are some sections which you can’t get without a subscription, and I think they get to the…
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Diabetes stops at the state line!
Visualization of data is great. And sometimes it tells us something…though we don’t always know what. Slate has an interactive feature showing the rise of diabetes in America by county. Nothing too surprising. But follow the gradient from El Paso to the Illinois-Missouri border. The differences are small across state lines, but the consistent differences…
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The magical power of “genes”
Liberal Überblogger Matthew Yglesias, Pulling Back The Curtain on Human Behavior: People sometimes seem to think that you could forestall a Gattaca-esque scenario of genetic transparency through privacy laws. But it seems to me that you’d actually need to go stronger, and not only guarantee the right to not have your genetic information disclosed. To…
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Around the Web – December 6th, 2010
For Those About to Rock…You’ll Need These. Chris Mooney has a round-up of ‘Rock Stars of Science’. I’ve been meaning to talk about this, as Chris gave me a heads up, but I’ve been kind of busy with other things. But better late than never. I have some of the same concerns as the nay-sayers.…
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Was the medieval European peasant wealthier than an African?
Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations: The figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of “bare bones subsistence” and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the middle ages. However the University of Warwick led researchers found…
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Collapse, stagnation, and explosion – Myspace, Yahoo!, and, Facebook
A tale of three firms via Google Trends. I’ve been checking in on Facebook’s numbers in Google Trends for years to see if I can see evidence of plateauing. Not quite yet. Interestingly all three companies were drawing similar search traffic on Google at the end of 2008, after which Myspace began its long descent,…
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BRICs in charts
The term “BRICs” gets thrown around a lot these days. At least it gets thrown around by people who perceive themselves to be savvy and worldly. In case you aren’t savvy and worldly, BRICs just means Brazil, Russia, India and China. The huge rising economies of the past generation, and next generation. Here’s a […]
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On that Native American ancestor
Traces of Sub-Saharan African and Amerindian admixture in old stock European Americans: Some people like to overestimate extra-European admixture in old stock Americans, while others take the position that it never happened. It did happen, and I can prove it, but certainly not to a great extent, otherwise I wouldn’t be bending over backwards to…
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Extraordinary claims about arsenic
Rosie Redfield has a “must read” post, Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA’s claims). I won’t excerpt it, read the whole thing. To me it is very interesting that many pieces of her critique are ones I’ve encountered in emails or Facebook postings. She stitches them together into a coherent whole. She’ll be writing a letter to Science.…
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Extraordinary claims about arsenic
Rosie Redfield has a “must read” post, Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA’s claims). I won’t excerpt it, read the whole thing. To me it is very interesting that many pieces of her critique are ones I’ve encountered in emails or Facebook postings. She stitches them together into a coherent whole. She’ll be writing a letter to Science.…