Razib Khan

Author: Razib Khan

  • Soda vs. Pop & the boundaries of the Midwest

    William Easterly asserts that David Brooks illustrates how clueless Easterners can be without local knowledge about My Midwest: A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in…

  • Friday Fluff – November 5th, 2010

    1. First, a post from the past: Why the gods will not be defeated. 2. Weird search query of the week: “coon and friends.” 3. Comment of the week, in response to We live in utopia – part n: I thank Dave @8 for the name of Lewis Kay; I’m almost entirely innocent of television,…

  • Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

    The cockroach as we know it has been around for ~140 million years. That’s a rather long run. The evolutionary design of the cockroach seems to be well suited to avoiding obsolescence; it’s withstood the test of time. I suspect that the particular example of the roach is often used to illustrate the blindness of…

  • Religious people have more children because they’re more traditional

    Tom Rees has a fascinating post up, Why religious Austrians have more children: On average, the more religious you are, the more kids you’ll have. It’s a widespread phenomenon, seen across pretty much all of the modern world. The problem is, no-one really knows why this happens. It could be something about religious beliefs. Maybe…

  • Assyrians & Finns in a worldwide genetic context

    Dienekes is now allowing people to “out” themselves in terms of their ancestry on a comment thread over at the Dodecad Ancestry Project. One of the major purposes of the project has been to survey variation in under-sampled groups which could give us insights into human genetic history. Yesterday I pointed to an analysis of…

  • The genetic heritage of Europe’s north

    If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘  Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published. The samples used in this analysis are:…

  • The mid-term elections in the USA

    It looks like I was about right in regards to the House, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the Senate I was off. It is likely that there’ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto…

  • We live in utopia – part n

  • The shades of the ancestors

    Joe Pickrell of Genomes Unzipped kept digging and found something totally unexpected. Am I partly Jewish? An unexpected turn of events: In my last post, I discussed how I used 23andMe data to test hypotheses about my ancestry. In particular, I was intrigued by Dienekes Pontikos’s result suggesting that I (and my colleague Vincent) might…

  • Data Dump – November 1st, 2010

    Might not post these every day for a few weeks as I’ll be busy, and not on the net as much. So no more “Daily” Data Dump until I’m more assured of my schedule. In Icy Tip of Afghanistan, War Seems Remote. Profiles the people of the Wakhan Corridor, which is part of Afghanistan mostly…

  • 30,000 full human genomes by January 1st, 2012?

    That seems to be the inference one can make from this thorough article in Nature, Human genome: Genomes by the thousand. Last summer I pointed to a projection of ~50,000 in 2011. Nature’s current tally is ~3,000 genomes sequenced. Though issues of accuracy are still important to remember, it’s pretty striking isn’t it only […]

  • Leigh Van Valen Obit in The New York Times

    If you haven’t, check out the Leigh Van Valen obituary in The New York Times. I hadn’t been aware of the breadth of his work, and the disciplinary range he showed over his career.

  • On the “liberal gene”

    Jim Manzi has already posted on the warranted skepticism of DRD4 being reported in the press as the “liberal gene.” Here’s the original paper. The main issue I have is not with the original research, but the inevitable confusions in the media which always arise. First, we know that complex behavioral phenotypes such as religiosity…

  • Election 2010 Predictions

    For Congress, I think that the breakdown will be: Senate – 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats House – 240 Republicans, 195 Democrats My reasoning? I just took FiveThirtyEight’s numbers and shaded them a bit to the Republican side. There’s no point in making predictions unless you predict something novel and a bit off expectations. Additionally, since…

  • Have ADMIXTURE run on your genetic data

    The last 24 hours of the initial sample collection phase of the Dodecad Ancestry Project are upon us. So if you have raw 23andMe data, you got a day to send it in, if you’re of the following groups: -Greeks (not necessarily from Greece: Cypriots, Pontic Greeks from the former USSR, North Epirotes, Griko speakers…

  • The global human – II

    A reader pointed me to a second composite image of a “global human.” It is “a composite itself from four composite of Northwest European, South & West Asian, East Asian and African faces….” I was very taken aback by this face, because it was familiar: staring back at me is a younger variant of the…

  • The possible impossibility of truth and the importance of incorrectness

    In the post below on the genetic history of India, or earlier when discussing the revisions of European prehistory, one general trend that is cropping up is that the future seems more complex and muddled than we’d presumed. This introduces the real possibility that in the foreseeable future we won’t be able to opine with…

  • Open Thread – October 30th, 2010

    Oren Harman, author of The Price of Altruism is on BHTV. Recommended.

  • Coon and friends

    This week’s episode of South Park was OK, but I really loved this take off on a scene from A Clockwork Orange:

  • My Dodecad results

    A few days ago Dienekes opened up the Dodecad project to a wider range of Eurasians. I decided to send my 23andMe sample to Dienekes ASAP, and the results came back today. I’m DOD075. Dienekes also just put up an explanation of the 10 ancestral components he’s generating from ADMIXTURE (along with tree-like representations of…

Razib Khan