Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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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…
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Around the Web – January 10th, 2011
Denisovans did not have red hair. John Hawks pokes around the Denisovan genome. Interesting that he notes that the coverage of the Denisovans is very good in comparison to the Neandertals. I Won’t Hug This File — I Won’t Even Call It My Friend. A weird screed against the internet and free content, posted on…
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The second aftershock & the rise of irreligion
The book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us has been getting a lot of press, as it should. It’s pretty rich in data, and finally puts a spotlight on one of the most underreported trends between 1990-2010, the massive surge in irreligion. Because of the power of the Religious Right many Americans perceive…
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Ancestry in the Americas
The populations of the African Diaspora have a particular interest in the new genomics, and its relationship to ancestry. Unlike other post-Columbian Diasporas they have sketchy, at best, knowledge of the regions from which their ancestors arrived. This probably explains the popularity of Roots and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s various genealogical projects which have utilized…
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Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular…
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Open Thread – January 8th, 2011
What books are you planning on reading this year? I have The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel in the stack. Also, in case you’re curious: My Pinboard page: http://pinboard.in/u:gnxp My Pinboard RSS: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:gnxp/ The Pinboard app on my Evo means I’ve started archiving stuff from my phone too. I may start…
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Friday Fluff – January 7th, 2011
1. First, a post from the past: The ancient origins of African pygmies. 2. Weird search query of the week: “method man wife”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to The empires of American English: I live in the Galesburg, Illinois area and here there still is a noticible boundary, that runs just north of…
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How America is a little like Pakistan
Recently a “hot story” in the barbaric nation that is Pakistan is that a politician did not know how to recite a prayer properly. An important back story here is that Muslims generally pray in Arabic, but most Muslims are not Arabic language speakers (and in any case, colloquial Arabic is very different from “Classical…
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The empires of American English
Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map: One thing that immediately stood out is the latitudinal banded pattern of the dialects.…
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Visualizing West Eurasia
Over at his blog Dienekes Pontikos has taken some public data sets and his own Dodecad samples and generated a massive MDS plot of West Eurasian populations. The MDS is fine as it goes. It illustrates clearly that when you visualize an individual on a plot defined by the two largest dimensions of variation in…
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Hobbit DNA in 2011
I predicted earlier that Hobbit DNA would be extracted in 2011. It was pretty much an educated guess based on various omissions I sensed in papers in 2010. But it seems that an attempt is going to be made: Scientists are planning an attempt to extract DNA from the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis, the 1-metre-tall extinct distant…
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Profiling hair color by DNA
Hair Color of Unknown Offenders Is No Longer a Secret: The research findings demonstrate that on the basis of DNA information it is possible to determine with an accuracy of more than 90 percent whether a person has red hair, with a similarly high accuracy whether a person has black hair, and with an accuracy…
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Kissing & the science of humanity
I approached Sheril Kirshenbaum’s The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us with some trepidation and excitement. The former is a consequence of my hypochondria and its associated germophobia. I have no aversion to kissing in my own life (apologies for divulging personal information), but I did have some worries about having to…
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Around the Web – January 3rd, 2010
I don’t do too many New Year’s Resolutions. My main goal this year which is of interest readers is increase total quantity of quality in terms of content. In other words, I want to keep volume up, but increase the quality of posting. If you haven’t contributed to the Open Thread this week, it’s about…
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Open Thread – January 1st, 2011
So what should I post about this year? I do get a fair number of ideas from reader comments & emails, so this thread might be useful.
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2011, onward, ho!
I’m not big for introspection. So I’ll keep this plain & simple. Thanks to Amos Zeeberg & Gemma Shusterman for taking care of the technical details of this weblog so I don’t have to deal with it. This is not a trivial matter; I’ve dealt with the technical upkeep of other weblogs for many years,…
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Mapping the “Green Sahara”
Guelta d’Archei, Chad. Credit: Dario Menasce. Everyone who is literate knows that the Sahara desert is the largest of its kind in the world. The chasm in cultural, biological, and physical geography is very noticeable. Northern Africa is part of the Palearctic zone, while the peoples north of the Sahara have long been part of…
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Friday Fluff – December 31st, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Golden ideas. 2. Weird search query of the week: “young girls gone mature”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to Slouching toward idiocracy: JWM and Dave Both hit on key concepts here. Its not just cats, cattle and humans, in fact the relative brain size of almost all…
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On to 2011….
Predictions, expectations, etc. More use of the term “polytypic”. Ötzi turns out to have Near Eastern affinities. The Hobbits finally have some genetic material successfully analyzed. Many, many, more human origins stories spun out of control by the press. Without a rock-hard interpretative framework like “Out of Africa” there is less “functional constraint.” Facebook peaks…
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Top 10 Gene Expression posts of the year
According to Google Analytics, they are: 10 – 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan. 9 – Most atheists are not white & other non-fairy tales. 8 – Which American racial group has the lowest fertility? 7 – No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes. 6 – To classify humanity is not that…