Razib Khan

Author: Razib Khan

  • Daily Data Dump – October 20th, 2010

    My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just…

  • Genetic watersheds on the Great Himalayas

    One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the…

  • Daily Data Dump – October 19th, 2010

    Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the “pain of paying.” I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards.…

  • Did cavemen eat bread?

    Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of…

  • Daily Data Dump – October 18th, 2010

    Elitism in the Senate. Harvard Law School:Tokyo University::Congress:Diet. Perusing The Almanac of American Politics makes it pretty clear that Harvard Law is way overrepresented. Barbara Billingsley Dies. All icons shall pass. Common variants at TRAF3IP2 are associated with susceptibility to psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis. Will this pan out in replication? Am I partly Jewish? Testing…

  • Sex with thee and the last woman

    A quintessentially sexy topic in biology is the origin of sex. Not only are biologists interested in it, but so is the public. Of Matt Ridley’s older books it is predictable that The Red Queen has the highest rank on Amazon. We humans have a fixation on sex, both in our public norms and our…

  • The “Hispanic Paradox”, and others

    The New York Times has a piece out on the “Hispanic Paradox”. The paradox is that American Hispanics are longer-lived than non-Hispanic whites, despite the relatively lower socioeconomic status of Hispanics (poorer, less educated). The paradox has been around for a while, and these stories tend to emerge whenever there’s a Census or CDC data…

  • Leigh Van Valen, 1935-2010

    John Hawks is reporting that Leigh Van Valen passed away this weekend. I had the pleasure and honor of Leigh Van Valen being an occasional reader of my musings. He would leave comments as “leigh.” Here’s one which he left in February 2008: Goldschmidt did a great deal more than hopeless monsters. I was with…

  • Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance

    The German magazine Der Spiegel has a rather thick new article out reviewing the latest research which is starting to reintroduce the concept of mass folk wanderings into archaeology. The title is How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe. In the story you get a good sense of the recent revision of the null model…

  • Japan’s end of history

    A rather depressing piece in The New York Times, Japan, Once Dynamic, Is Disheartened by Decline: But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new…

  • Support for bans on interracial marriage by sex

    A quick follow-up to my previous post which points to the data that women tend to be more race-conscious in dating than men. There’s a variable in the GSS which asks if you support a ban on interracial marriage, RACMAR. Here’s the question itself: Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans)…

  • Female race consciousness as prudence

    Big Think has a post, Do Women Value Ethnicity Over Income in a Mate?: The results are striking. An African-American man would have to earn $154,000 more than a white man in order for a white woman to prefer him. A Hispanic man would need to earn $77,000 more than a white man, and Asian…

  • Open Thread – October 16th, 2010

    Yesterday regular contributor “miko” announced two things. First, he’s signed up as one of the 1,000 for the Personal Genome Project. And, he’s fired up a weblog to chronicle his journey. I know at least one other reader, my friend Paul, is also among the 1,000. Combined with the recent reveal of Genomes Unzipped, we’re…

  • Friday Fluff – October 15th, 2010

    1. First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow 2. Weird search query of the week: “black mormons in utah”. They exist. One of my friends from college ended up marrying one and they live in Utah (he is Mormon as well, though not black). 3. Comment of the week, in response…

  • The decline of Survivor

    I just realized that the American television show Survivor is now over 10 years old. Though The Real World had been around for nearly ten years when it premiered in the spring of 2010, Survivor was what triggered the lift-off of the current generation of “reality television.” I haven’t watched it since season (series) two,…

  • The rise and crash of civilizations

    One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare…

  • Daily Data Dump – Thursday

    As you can see, I got the DonorsChoose widget to work. Here’s the Discover Blogs leader board. Sean Carroll et al. are “beating” me by an order of magnitude right now. Not that that’s the point…. It’s a Jersey Thing. New South Park episode. I noticed a bunch of references to The Lord of The…

  • The blood of kings

    One of the more fertile grounds of modern genetics with all its various tools is that it makes for some interesting possibilities of inquiry in relation to the genealogy of aristocratic elites. The vast majority of us have very shallow roots in terms of genealogy. Some of this ignorance can be compensated if you have…

  • The essence of the alien

    If you found out a new fact about yourself could that reshape how you view yourself? An extreme case involves the Polish Neo-Nazis who found out that they are actually of Jewish origin. But it can be more subtle. A friend recently told me that her proud Irish American father found out that he carried…

  • Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

    Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. Is gay male sexual promiscuity a myth? “…in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.” Bloggers that deserve a wider readership. I second Andrew Gelman. Fiber Meets Flavor in New Whole-Grain Pastas. I like whole-grain…

Razib Khan