Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Neandertal admixture, revisiting results after shaken priors

    After 2010′s world-shaking revolutions in our understanding of modern human origins, the admixture of Eurasian hominins with neo-Africans, I assumed there was going to be a revisionist look at results which seemed to point to mixing between diffe…

  • 23andMe v3 chip & me

    Yesterday the first batch of results from 23andMe’s v3 chip came online. Instead of 550,000 SNPs you get ~1 million. The difference is pretty clear when you look at the raw SNPs. Under Account → Browse Raw Data, I can enter LCT, and this is wha…

  • Around the Web – January 24th, 2011

    Participants So Far. Zack reports 10 people of South Asian ancestry have sent their raw data. His coverage seems OK, but he only has multiple samples from Punjabis. I know some people who will be sending their data in soon, and I’m going to swap …

  • Harappa Ancestry Project, update

    Last week I announced the Harappa Ancestry Project. It now has its own dedicate website, http://www.harappadna.org. Additionally, it has its own Facebook page. For Zack to get his own URL he needs about 10 more “likes,” so please like it! (…

  • The genomic heritage of French Canadians

    Image Credit: Anirudh Koul One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…

  • Administrative notifications

    Had to reinstall WordPress because of security problem over the last couple of days (iframe injection). I’ll slowly be getting the site back to normal look & feel wise.

  • Portlandia

    The boss pointed me to this new series, Portlandia. I lived in Southeast near the Hawthorne neighborhood in 2002, so the following video brings back some funny memories….

  • Stop using the word “Caucasian” to mean white

    About four years ago blogger emeritus RPM of evolgen brought into sharp relief an issue which has nagged me: Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populat…

  • Open Thread – January 22nd, 2011

    Google is in the news, with Larry Page’s ascension. Generally when I hear people compare Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is Page who is described as the “Big Think” guy. But these guys didn’t always think big. Stupid Business Deci…

  • A quick RSS note….

    Posts within the RSS feed will now be truncated. Since I occasionally write longer pieces, it is likely you’ll now have to “click through” to read the full post. If the ending of a post mystifies you, there is a good chance that it&#8…

  • Friday Fluff – January 21st, 2011

    1) First, a post from the past: Neandertal & H. sapiens sapiens interbreeding. 2) Weird search query of the week: “nicole kidman androgen insensitivity”. I thought she had a baby a few years ago? Say it ain’t so! 3) Comment of t…

  • The stupid rich and poor smart do exist

    WORDSUM is a variable in the General Social Survey. It is a 10 word vocabulary test. A score of 10 is perfect. A score of 0 means you didn’t know any of the vocabulary words. WORDSUM has a correlation of 0.71 with general intelligence. In other w…

  • The rise and fall of great powers is stochastic

    Long time readers know well my fascination with quantitative history. In particular, cliometrics and cliodynamics. These are fields which attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes. Cliometrics is a well established field, in…

  • Friends & genes & heritability

    A few people have inquired of the PNAS paper On sharing genes with friends. I avoided comment in part because I’m skeptical of the findings. So much behavior genomics just hasn’t panned out over the long term, and is probably susceptible t…

  • Promoting baby-bloggers

    Today I received an email from an academic with whom I am acquainted about how to get a successful blog going. Obviously the main necessary condition is actually to keep plugging away.  Though that’s not sufficient. Jason Goldman has a post up,…

  • The rise of genetic architecture

    In science, like most things, one prefers simple over complex whenever possible. You keep adding variables until the explanatory juice starts hitting diminishing marginal returns. So cystic fibrosis is due to a mutation at one gene, and the disease exp…

  • Genetic Future has moved!

    The day has come! Dr. Daniel MacArthur has finally gotten the stamp of approval from Tobias MacArthur, and Genetic Future is over at Wired, with all their other great science blogs. Since it can sometimes be a bit difficult to figure out where these di…

  • 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…

Razib Khan