Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Sons of the farmers, the story of Japan
Ainu in 19th century Hokkaido, and rice paddies Unlike some islands Japan has a long history of human habitation. More interestingly, under the Jomon culture the Japanese archipelago was home to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, societies which used pottery. The Jomon do not seem to have been intensive agriculturalists. Rather, with…
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“Genome blogging”
Nature profiles Dodecad, the Pickrell Affair, and the emergence of amateur genomicists in a new piece. Interestingly David of BGA is going to try and get something through peer review. In particular, the relationship of Assyrians and Jews. So we have Genomes Unzipped, Dodecad, and BGA. What next? Who next? I hope Dienekes doesn’t mind if…
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To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental…
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Re-visualizing European ancestry
I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to…
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The face of Ariadne
In response to my post from this weekend positing that the Sardinians are a particularly pristine distillation of the genetic heritage of Europe’s first Neolithic farmers, a friend suggests that I compare & contrast Sardinian actress Caterina Murino and the depictions of women which one sees on the walls of Minoan palaces. The Minoans being…
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Ron Bailey Unzipped
Over at Reason Ron Baily has an excellent piece up, I’ll Show You My Genome. Will You Show Me Yours? He reviews his results from two genotyping chips, and has placed his results online. I doubt readers of this weblog will learn anything that new, though the article might prove illuminating to friends & family.…
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To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web: AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science…
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Around the Web – December 13th, 2010
Estimating Heritability Using Twins. Luke Jostins lays out the A’s, E’s, and C’s. Very informative. This part was kind of funny though: “Interestingly, the Bioscience Resource Project post cites this paper, which makes their mistake somewhat surprising.” Wonder if Luke is making a reference to the tendency for people not to read papers they cite…
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Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on…
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The study of humankind: questions, answers, and good faith
John Hawks, Anthropology in transition: Of course, by the 1980’s, anthropology was already disowning many of the central figures of its early development. If they had not themselves been tools of the colonialist oppressors, they were dupes of their knowing research subjects. Lewis is quite correct — many students of anthropological theory were no longer…
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What is this “Western culture” you speak of?
This is my comment of the month: Pontifications about “Western culture” bother me. The people who use the term seem to assume that “we” are part of “Western culture” and know what it is. No explanation is necessary. But if you stop and think about it, in what sense are a Hungarian peasant farmer and…
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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…