Author: Razib Khan
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Friday Fluff – October 29th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Atheism, Heresy and Hesychasm. I used to post about religion a lot more, especially in the fall of 2006. That was back when ScienceBlogs was small enough and tight enough to have a back & forth discussion among the weblogs pretty easily. I also was working a lot…
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Daily Data Dump – October 28th, 2010
A very special note: I endorse Christie Wilcox for 2010 Blogging Scholarship. A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing. This paper is getting a lot of play. A taste of things to come from the 1000 Genomes Project. It’s OA, so check it out. Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher.…
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The global human
Paul Conroy sent me a link to a Dutch article which purports to illustrate what the average human male’s face looks like. From what I can gather this is a weighted average by population. Click through and tell me what you think. Seems plausible e…
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Sons of the conquerors: the story of India?
The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were…
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The future shall belong to the odorless!
My blog post prompted this response: He notes research hypothesizing a link between high latitudes and the dry earwax gene, and also research that suggests that the dry earwax gene, something that would seem to have little selective impact, may be linked to the same gene that regulates body odor. Low body odor might conceivably…
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Daily Data Dump – October 27th, 2010
In Mideast House of Cards, U.S. Views Lebanon as Shaky. Some of the problems here are structural demographics. The institutions of Lebanon’s democracy were formed when Maronite Christians were the plural majority, followed by Sunni Muslims, then Shia Muslims, and finally minorities such as the Greek Orthodox and Druze. Today the likely plural majority are…
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Australian Aboriginal people are one?
Richard Broome’s Aboriginal Australians is one of those books which I own which I finally managed to finish recently. It was a quick overview of Australian Aboriginals and their relationship with the settler society, and later in modern Australia. From what I could tell it was a serviceable introduction, though it took a persistent preachy…
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Daily Data Dump – October 26th, 2010
Just a heads up, I might be posting less later in the week and into the weekend. So might skip these at some point. Are Democrats Overachieving in the Senate? Is Nate Silver is having a downward pressure on other political coverage? I don’t even bother checking the other analytical stuff in The New York…
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‘dem bones tell strange tales
There is a new paper in PNAS on remains from China which re-order and muddle our understanding of the emergence of anatomical and behavioral modernity in Eurasia. Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia: The 2007 discovery of fragmentary human remains (two molars and an anterior mandible) at Zhirendong…
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If you’ve done 23andMe….
The Dodecad ancestry project might be of some interest. In particular if you have ancestry from a gold-chain wearing culture.
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The Dodecad ancestry project
Dienekes Pontikos, Introducing the Dodecad ancestry project: 1) Project goals The Dodecad ancestry project has two goals: – To provide detailed ancestry analysis to individuals who have tested with 23andMe; other testing companies may be included in the future. – To build samples of individuals for regions of the world (e.g. Greeks, Finns, Albanians, Southern…
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Daily Data Dump – October 25th, 2010
Detailed admixture analysis of West Eurasian populations (+ GenomesUnzipped individuals). Dienekes looks at the Genomes Unzipped guys in the context of Eurasian variation. He explains why he prefers bar plots of inferred ancestral quanta over PCA and MDS charts. A World Upside Down for Greeks. “In Greece, small businesses — defined as stores or workshops…
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History and Geography of Genes on a Desktop
In case you don’t know, Dienekes Pontikos has been posting a lot of analyses of available population genetic data sets with the ADMIXTURE program. You can find his myriad posts under the ADMIXTURE-experiments tag. Below is a bar plot he generated today. To follow up a debate which occurred last spring, it does seem from…
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Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had…
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A relationship in attitudes toward Global Warming & evolution?
In my post earlier in the week I mentioned the possible relationship between attitudes toward evolution and the causes and likelihood of Global Warming. I haven’t seen any survey data myself relating the two, so naturally I wanted to poke into the General Social Survey. Two variables of interest showed up, both from 2006: 1)…
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The genomics future is almost now
Stephen Hsu on developments at the Beijing Genomics Institute: I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 10^6 genomes per year is right on the horizon). According to him, they can be profitable at a price…
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Open Thread – October 23rd, 2010
Autumn is here. And winter is coming. The fresco to the left is the cover jacket illustration for Why we’re all Romans, a new cultural history which attempts to argue for the unique debts of Western civilization to Rome (in particular as a mediator of the wisdom of the Greeks and Hebrews). If you’re on…
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The future is now, but more so
If you have some time to kill, the Paleo-Future weblog is really awesome. It shows what people thought the future was going to be like (often around the year 2000) from the 1870s through every decade of the 20th century. As usual with this sort of thing it tells you more about the salient aspects…
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Friday Fluff – October 22nd, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: The Round-Eyed Buddha. 2. Weird search query of the week: “straight jacket sex.” 3. Comment of the week, in response to Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties: People who don’t believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution. Evolution is a struggle to survive as a species. How…
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A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find…