Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Excavating the Neolithic genetic strata
After linking to Marnie Dunsmore’s blog on the Neolithic expansion, and reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers, I’ve been thinking a bit on how we might integrate some models of the rise and spread of agriculture with the new genomic findings. Bellwood’s thesis basically seems to be that the contemporary world pattern of expansive macro-language families…
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Mark Madoff suicide
Long time readers know that I’ve been fascinated with the whole Bernie Madoff saga over the past few years. It looks like one of Bernie’s sons, Mark, committed suicide on the two year anniversary of his father’s arrest. If you haven’t, I strongly suggest you read this profile of the elder Madoff’s time in prison:…
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Open Thread – December 11th, 2010
Weird story about twin brothers contesting paternity, Who’s Your Daddy? Paternity Battle Between Brothers: “With identical twins, even if you sequenced their whole genome you wouldn’t find difference…they’re clones,” said Dr. Bob Gaensslen, a forensic scientist at Orchid Cellmark labs in Texas. “There are a few things in science that are cut and dried and…
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Verbal vs. mathematical aptitude in academics
It isn’t too difficult to find GRE scores by intended major online. In reviewing articles/posts for my post below on anthropology I noted the distinction made between quant & qual methods, and aversions to regressions and scatter plots (or the supposed love of biological anthropologists for these tools). That got me wondering about the average mathematical…
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Friday Fluff – December 10th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Natural selection of a human gene: FUT2. 2. Weird search query of the week: “cognitive miser”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to The history of us all: 1. I take it you think Angus Maddison’s Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD is too technical for […]
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Painting the human tree of life
Tishkoff et al. Reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, I’m struck by how much of a difference five years has made. When Bellwood was writing the ‘orthodoxy’ of the nature of the expansion of farming into Europe leaned toward cultural diffusion. Today the paradigm is in flux, as a new generation…
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“The” unbearable “whiteness” of “science”
Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift: Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers…
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A cloud forest in….
A “cloud forest” The lush image above is of a cloud forest biome. Can you guess where it is? The Arabian country of Oman! How’s that for a surprise? I had known of the Green Mountain of northeast Oman, which is ~3000 meters above sea level and receives ~15 inches of rain (enough for shrubby…
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Does majoring in science make a difference?
On occasion I get queries about what distinguishes people with science backgrounds from those who don’t have science backgrounds. I think an anecdote might illustrate the type of difference one is expecting. Back in undergrad I was having lunch with my lab partner, when a friend saw us and decided to chat with us as…
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This book is a big *wow*
War in Human Civilization is an awesomely well written and dense book. Like The Horse, the Wheel, and Language it is a scholarly work which stays broadly engaging and relevant to a wider audience than specialists. Highly recommended if you have some spare time over Christmas. This is naturally not a endorsement of every claim…
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Notes & links – December 9th, 2010
Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said. Carl Zimmer’s correspondence dump is gold. Linear Population Model: Explores a linear model to examine genetic population admixture results and human prehistory. I read every post on this weblog after I stumbled upon it yesterday. The major focus seems to be to use ADMIXTURE results along with…
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How close are scientific disciplines?
Chemistry likes to think of itself as the “central science.” Is that true? Intuitively it makes sense. But how can we measure that more rigorously? In comes the Stanford Dissertation Browser: The Stanford Dissertation Browser is an experimental interface for document collections that enables richer interaction than search. Stanford’s PhD dissertation abstracts from 1993-2008 are…
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Polarization on abortion in the USA
Some comments below made me want to look at attitudes toward abortion in the USA by ideology over the decades. I know that political party polarization on social issues has played out mostly over the past 20 years or, but I assumed that this was less evident in ideology (mostly, liberal Republicans became Democrats and…
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Putting off total transparency
How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace. The author has a website, and here’s some basic tips.
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The men of the north: the Sami
Ole Magga, Norwegian politician On this blog I regularly get questions about the Sami (Lapp*). That’s because I often talk about Finnish genetics, have readers such as Clark who are of part-Sami origin, and, the provenance and character of the Sami speak to broader questions about the emergence of the modern European gene pool. More…
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Knowledge of heritability, ignorance of genes
Does the Slut Gene Exist?: The DRD4 study isn’t an isolated case of shaky genetic science. In fact, it joins a cadre of questionable scientific assertions that link single genes to much broader patterns of behavior. The last decade has witnessed an explosion in genetics studies, and with it, a proliferation of sensational study results…
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The history of us all
I should mention I finished Why the West Rules a few days ago, and Tyler Cowen was spot on. The author is by training a classical archaeologist, and so the first portion of the book which focuses on archaeology, and up to the classical historical period, is thick, dense, and insightful. But as he pushes…
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Admissions of illiberalism
Recently I was having a twitter conversation with Kevin Zelnio and Eric Michael Johnson about the fact that I define myself as “right-wing.” Kevin kind of implied that I was poseur in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. I don’t wear my political beliefs on my sleeve too much in this space because 1) I find talking about…
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The cultural construction of truth
If you know of John Ioannidis‘ work, Jonah Lehrer’s new piece in The New Yorker won’t be a surprise to you. It’s alarmingly titled The Truth Wears Off – is there something wrong with the scientific method? Here are some sections which you can’t get without a subscription, and I think they get to the…