Author: Razib Khan
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The rise of men & the fall of the non-men
Dienekes Pontikos ruminates on the changes in human genetic variation on a world-wide scale over the past 10,000 years based on an MDS plot of East Eurasian genetic variation which he generated. I’ve taken his plot and added geographical labels, so you can see the difference in scale between geography and genetics in terms of…
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The cult of Korea
There are currently some scary goings-on in the Korean peninsula. If you have some time, I recommend Inside North Korea from National Geographic. Here’s the final scene. Jump to 5 minutes.
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Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project
Since I have been promoting the Dodecad Ancestry Project, it seems only fair to bring to your attention Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project. The sample populations are a bit different from Dodecad, but again ADMIXTURE is the primary tool. But the author also makes recourse to other methodologies to explore more than simply population level…
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A positive rate of rate of change
A Cheaper Plan at Netflix Offers Films for Online Only: Netflix said Monday that it was introducing a subscription plan for customers who want to watch movies only online, underscoring yet another step away from its roots in DVD rentals by mail. The new plan offers unlimited access to Netflix’s library of streaming movies and…
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Of interest around the web & elsewhere – November 22nd, 2010
Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle. Two points to note: 1) modern medicine seems to have strongly resisted the ketogenic diet because of ideology, 2) this treatment works, but they don’t really understand why. It shows the importance of empiricism in medicine, but the reality that even an empirical discipline can be shifted by ideology. Grumpy Kvetching…
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The flux of genes on the South Seas
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands, Painting of Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin Many demographic models utilized in genetics are rather simple. Yet the expansion and retreat of various demes in post-Ice Age Europe seems to be far more complex than had previously been assumed, though I suspect part of the rationale…
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Open Thread – November 20th, 2010
A friend pointed me to Mapping the Measure of America. It allows for the creation of maps really quickly without any nerd-grease needed. To the left is a a map of life expectancy at birth by Congressional District. West Virginia’s 13th Congressional District has the lowest life expectancy in the USA at birth at 73.93…
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Too clever by a half
On a recent BHTV Jeff Sharlet and Amy Sullivan discuss a recent trend in the conception of Islam among the military: As I listened to them I got really annoyed. It is not accurate to say that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, but it is also not without foundation. Many Muslims would…
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Why H. L. Mencken is popular with nerds
The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem: Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States. Some members of Ms.…
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Asian Buddhists are not atheists
In response to my two posts below on atheism statistics, people in the comments and around the web (e.g., Facebook) have pointed out that Buddhism is necessarily/can be atheistic, and that Buddhism, is not/not necessarily a religion, and therefore that explains the statistics. Some of these people are lazy/stupid judging by the way the argument…
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Friday Fluff – November 19th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: From each according to their nature, to each according to their nature. 2. Weird search query of the week: ‘cloning family values.’ 3. Comment of the week, in response to Homozygosity runs in the family (or not): Dude, when your genes are as good as mine, you want…
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Sex differences in global atheism, part N
Whenever I blog religion and atheism I brace for a bunch of uninformed comments. Everyone has an opinion, but few seem genuinely interested in digging for data, or reading about the history of religion, and the empirical realities of the phenomenon. If you are an exception to this trend, you’re awesome, and more power to…
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Most atheists are not white & other non-fairy tales
Xunzi Over at Comment is Free Belief (where I am an occasional contributor) there is an interesting post up, The accidental exclusion of non-white atheists. Actually, I disagree with the thrust of the post pretty strongly. But here’s the important section: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, James Randi … if you’re a…
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15 ancestral components to bind them all
Dienekes Pontikos keeps chugging along, and has cranked out a new bar plot from the ADMIXTURE program with 15 putative ancestral components. He has “69 populations, and 1,189 individuals in total.” Most of these were assembled from public data, but some of them are particular to the Dodecad Ancestry Project. He contends: In comparison to…
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Icelanders descended from Native Americans?
That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?: Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and…
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I am the email generation!
David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, has a breathless take on the rise of Facebook and its impending assault on Google in The Daily Beast. There’s a lot of hyperbole and Facebook-cheering throughout the piece, but this bold but unsupported assertion caught my attention: Email is, as we all know, a horribly broken system.…
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Homozygosity runs in the family (or not)
The number 1 gets a lot more press than -1, and the concept of heterozygosity gets more attention than homozygosity. Concretely the difference between the latter two is rather straightforward. In diploid organisms the genes come in duplicates. If the alleles are the same, then they’re homozygous. If they’re different, then they’re heterozygous. Sex chromosomes…
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The technology or the company?
TechCrunch is reporting on Facebook’s new “modern messaging system”. The first few comments immediately telegraphed my first impression: is this Facebook’s Google Wave? Interesting then to see if Facebook can make this work. If it can’t, then score one for the proposition that people don’t want a seamless integration of various tools which emerged in…
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Privacy as a bourgeois privilege
Ruchira Paul has her own reaction to Zadie Smith’s pretentious review of The Social Network. One of the aspects of Smith’s review which Ruchira focuses upon is her concern about the extinction of the “private person.” I have mooted this issue before, but I think it might be worthwhile to resurrect an old hobby-horse of…