Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Introducing the Harappa Ancestry Project

    A few weeks ago I hinted at a South Asian equivalent to Dodecad & Eurogenes BGA. It is now public and in the data collection phase. You can read the whole thing here: http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/2011/01/harappa-ancestry-project This is the feed: http://www.zackvision.com/feed/ If your ancestry is from these nations: Afghanistan Bangladesh Bhutan Burma India Iran Maldives Nepal Pakistan…

  • Synthetic associations and all that

    PLoS Biology has four items of great interest out today: – Synthetic Associations Created by Rare Variants Do Not Explain Most GWAS Results – Synthetic Associations Are Unlikely to Account for Many Common Disease Genome-Wide Association Signals – Th…

  • ADMIXTURE vs. MDS, visualization is just visualization

    Dienekes did another run of his data with K = 64. He posted a huge plot with the two largest dimensions of variation. He also posted an accompanying spreadsheet with the coordinates of where the Dodecad samples were. So I found my own position pretty q…

  • The “science diet”

    Cell has an interesting piece, profiling four diets, Cell Culture: New Year’s Diets. I know many of the readers of this weblog take an interest in this area. In particular, many subscribe to the Paleo diet or are avid fans of Gary Taubes’ G…

  • Around the Web – January 18th, 2011

    Yes, The Singularity is the Biggest Threat to Humanity. Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (I): Imitation, Overimitation, and Conformity. Doesn’t fall into the trap of either/or, where chimpanzees are qualitatively different…

  • Introducing the Harappa Ancestry Project

    A few weeks ago I hinted at a South Asian equivalent to Dodecad & Eurogenes BGA. It is now public and in the data collection phase. You can read the whole thing here: http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/2011/01/harappa-ancestry-project This is the fee…

  • The Assyrians and Jews: 3,000 years of common history

    2 Kings, 17: [5] Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. [6] In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in H…

  • Which nation is the most pro-natalist?

    Poking around Google Data Explorer I reacquainted myself with an interesting fact: though the teen birth rate in Bangladesh is greater than that in Pakistan, the total fertility rate is far lower. The disjunction has emerged over the last generation, a…

  • Open Thread – January 15th, 2011

    Interesting review of the history of the term ‘group selection’. After taking a long break and coming back to it I’m almost done with War in Human Civilization.

  • Facebook is for the herd

    That seems to be what John Dvorak is saying, Why I Don’t Use Facebook: Which begs the question as to why anyone would use Facebook when it is essentially AOL done right? The fastest growing group on Facebook are people in their 70′s. Oldste…

  • Friday Fluff – January 14th, 2011

    1) First, a post from the past: More complex than simple addition. 2) Weird search query of the week: “kiera knightly naked truth”. 3) Comment of the week, in response to The genetic affinities of Ethiopians: First of all, you should know that Behar’s Oromos were sampled in areas neighboring the Kenyan border, while Ethiopian…

  • The inevitable rise of Amish machines

    About 20 years ago I lived for a year in a rural area where Amish were a common feature of country roads and farmers’ markets. My parents, being Muslims, would sometimes buy chickens from the local Amish and slaughter them according to halal. We had a relationship with a particular family. They were nice people,…

  • The rules of attraction: the not so golden mean

    Several people have inquired as to my opinion on the OKCupid post The Mathematics Of Beauty. I’ve blogged data from this dating website in the past, in particular, the differential race consciousness of women vs. men. But that material is a different class than the current post. As I have noted before, there is a…

  • More bad mutations = greater fitness

    Does the chart above strike you as strange? What it shows is that the mean fitness of a population drops as you increase the rate of deleterious mutation (many more mutations are deleterious than favorable)…but at some point the fitness of the population bounces back, despite (or perhaps because of?) the deleterious mutations! This would…

  • Around the Web – January 12th, 2011

    Sex and Statistics or Heteroscedasticity is Hot. Heteroscedasticity just means differences in variances. So it turns out that two women who have the same expected attractiveness rating from different males can still exhibit a difference in variance of evaluations. So a woman who is average, and everyone perceives her as average, gets less attention than…

  • When genes matter for intelligence

    Image credit: Aleksandra Pospiech One of the interesting and robust nuggets from behavior genetics is that heritability of psychological traits increases as one ages. Imagine for example you have a cohort of individuals you follow over their lives. At the age of 1 the heritability of I.Q. may be ~20%. This means that ~20% of…

  • The $50 genome in 2014?

    John Hawks notes the MacArthur-Herper debate on the “$1,000 genome”, and responds, Genomes too cheap to meter: ….In it, he notes the comments of several professionals that the $1,000 number itself is not an important fact, it is the availability of sequencing within that order of magnitude. The inevitability of the $1000 genome has already…

  • Me, myself, and Myanmar

    I have spoken of my somewhat atypical, for a South Asian, genetic results before. Recently Dienekes performed some cluster analysis which confirmed the initial findings, while adding a little detail: I am DOD075. The Southeast Asian component is modal in Malays, while the East Asian component is modal in the North Chinese. Vietnamese and Cambodians…

  • The genetic affinities of Ethiopians

    In the open thread someone asked: “Any recent stuff on the genetics of Ethiopians.” That prompted me to look around, because I’m curious too. Poking around Wikipedia I couldn’t find anything recent. A lot of the studies are older uniparental lineage based works (NRY and mtDNA). Ethiopia is interesting because unlike almost all other Sub-Saharan…

  • Print vs. web in science

    I have some Google Alerts set up relating to human evolution and such, and a few days ago I noticed a spike in articles about the evolution of clothing and lice. Like this: We were all naked until 170,000 years ago. Since I blogged this in September, The naked years, I was confused. Here’s the…

Razib Khan