Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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The importance of representativeness
A few weeks ago when I posted on the results of a high likelihood of a partially eastern origin for the Mundari people I received a message via Facebook that the article really wasn’t relevant to most South Asians, since only 1-2% spoke a Mundari language (along with pointers to old out of date articles).…
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Fractional reserve banking: it’s a sin!
The junior Senator from Kentucky, Randal “Rand” Paul, is well known as an icon of the Tea Party movement, son of Ron Paul, and devotee of the “Aqua Buddha.” Paul has already stated that means tests on Medicare and Social Security should be on the table. Additionally, he tipped his hand that he was […]
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Size doesn’t always matter
Neandertals famously had larger cranial capacities than modern humans, and, have gone through multiple phases of de- and re-humanization. A few weeks ago there was a revision of the idea that Neandertals in France ~30,000 years ago adopted some aspects of modern human culture through diffusion. This was a support for the Neandertal “ooga-booga” thesis.…
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The banality of Facebook
Jonah Lehrer (a.k.a. the “boy-king of the neuroscience blogosphere”) has a mild and gentlemanly rejoinder to Zadie Smith essay which verges on moral panic about the Facebook phenomenon. Back in 2000 I remember listening to literary critics rave about Smith’s White Teeth. I’m a nerd, and when I read fiction it tends to be “speculative…
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What intra- & inter- population genetic variance tells us
The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans…
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Engineering the Messiah
In the 1920s the Soviet Union sponsored a “humanzee” breeding program. From what I recall the ultimate rationale for the funding was that the program might create a race of superior warriors, combing the incredible physical strength on a per pound basis of the chimp, with the greater level of intelligence found in human beings.…
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Demographics as political destiny
From The New York Times, White Democrats Lose More Ground in South: There are other signs that the realignment might not be permanent. Growing Latino populations in Florida and Texas, and in Georgia and South Carolina, could rearrange the political map again before too long. And then there is the curious case of North Carolina.…
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Around the great northern circle
Recently there’s been some talk about how the Mercator projection distorts our perceptions of the world, in particular how it makes Africa seem very small in relation to North America, and about the same size as Greenland. But there’s another artifact of the Mercator projection as well: it misleads us in terms of our perception…
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Open Thread – November 6th, 2010
A few days ago I was propounding to an old friend my hypothesis that social networks of cultural affinity are determinative in both the nature and trajectory of attitudes and norms within subcultures. In more plain language, you come to an opinion on many issues through your peer-network. The number one predictor of conversion to…
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Soda vs. Pop & the boundaries of the Midwest
William Easterly asserts that David Brooks illustrates how clueless Easterners can be without local knowledge about My Midwest: A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in…
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Friday Fluff – November 5th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Why the gods will not be defeated. 2. Weird search query of the week: “coon and friends.” 3. Comment of the week, in response to We live in utopia – part n: I thank Dave @8 for the name of Lewis Kay; I’m almost entirely innocent of television,…
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Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
The cockroach as we know it has been around for ~140 million years. That’s a rather long run. The evolutionary design of the cockroach seems to be well suited to avoiding obsolescence; it’s withstood the test of time. I suspect that the particular example of the roach is often used to illustrate the blindness of…
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Religious people have more children because they’re more traditional
Tom Rees has a fascinating post up, Why religious Austrians have more children: On average, the more religious you are, the more kids you’ll have. It’s a widespread phenomenon, seen across pretty much all of the modern world. The problem is, no-one really knows why this happens. It could be something about religious beliefs. Maybe…
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Assyrians & Finns in a worldwide genetic context
Dienekes is now allowing people to “out” themselves in terms of their ancestry on a comment thread over at the Dodecad Ancestry Project. One of the major purposes of the project has been to survey variation in under-sampled groups which could give us insights into human genetic history. Yesterday I pointed to an analysis of…
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The genetic heritage of Europe’s north
If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘ Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published. The samples used in this analysis are:…
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The mid-term elections in the USA
It looks like I was about right in regards to the House, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the Senate I was off. It is likely that there’ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto…
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We live in utopia – part n
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The shades of the ancestors
Joe Pickrell of Genomes Unzipped kept digging and found something totally unexpected. Am I partly Jewish? An unexpected turn of events: In my last post, I discussed how I used 23andMe data to test hypotheses about my ancestry. In particular, I was intrigued by Dienekes Pontikos’s result suggesting that I (and my colleague Vincent) might…
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Data Dump – November 1st, 2010
Might not post these every day for a few weeks as I’ll be busy, and not on the net as much. So no more “Daily” Data Dump until I’m more assured of my schedule. In Icy Tip of Afghanistan, War Seems Remote. Profiles the people of the Wakhan Corridor, which is part of Afghanistan mostly…
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30,000 full human genomes by January 1st, 2012?
That seems to be the inference one can make from this thorough article in Nature, Human genome: Genomes by the thousand. Last summer I pointed to a projection of ~50,000 in 2011. Nature’s current tally is ~3,000 genomes sequenced. Though issues of accuracy are still important to remember, it’s pretty striking isn’t it only […]