Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Raging against the population genetics machine

    An interesting readable review in PLoS Genetics taking on population genetics, Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology: In conclusion, I return to Michael Lynch’s challenging questions about blind spots and bad wheels in evolutionary biology which motivated this review…Concerning blind spots I have pointed out some limitations of current population genetics. There is too much emphasis…

  • Daily Data Dump – Monday

    Summer is almost over. What was malt liquor? The history of malt liquor, and also Pabst Blue Ribbon. No idea that malt liquor used to have an upscale association. The Genetics & Linguistics Of Central Asia. Excellent overview from a somewhat different angle from my own. Excellent map. Cousin marriage in the UK and genetic…

  • Gypsies on a genetic island

    If you live in the States one of the things you hear a lot about Europe in regards to its relationship to its ethno-religious minorities are the problems with Muslims. This is probably an Americo-centric perspective shaped by 9/11, when many of the hijackers had turned out to have spent time in Germany. Additionally, […]

  • The empty heartland

    In a comment below I alluded to my idea that the heart of Eurasia was relatively unpopulated before the Holocene, explaining why many Central Asian groups seem to be recent hybrids from very distinct populations. Normally the sort of model which posits K ancestral groups is an idealization to some extent. To assign every K…

  • Open Thread – September 18th, 2010

    Last weekend of summer. I plan to have my reviews of The Invisible Gorilla and The Lost History of Christianity up very soon. I recommend both heartily! Next in the stack: Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain. A question was asked about the focus on extremes when it came to perceptions of the genetic influence…

  • Melody Dye & Jason Goldman on BHTV

    Just wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Jason Goldman who has a discussion up at bloggingheads.tv with his co-blogger at Child’s Play Melody Dye. Recommended.

  • Friday Fluff – September 17th, 2010

    1. First, a post from the past: Why patriarchy? 2. Weird search query of the week: “pygmy porno.” 3. Comment of the week, in response to More exercise = more I.Q.?: but how does this explain Steven Hawkings , he has a great IQ and is on a wheelchair! 4) Poll question…. (last week’s results…

  • Of Iran, Turan, and Turks

    There’s a new paper out in The European Journal of Human Genetics which is of great interest because it surveys the genetic and linguistic affinities of two dozen ethno-linguistic groups from the three Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This is what the Greeks referred to as Transoxiana, and the Persians as […]

  • Liberals more hereditarian than conservatives?

    Sometimes I run into things in the GSS which just don’t fit expectations. On occasion the results are so weird or unexpected I check my coding over and over. Or, I have a suspicion that something was input incorrectly. This is one of those cases. As often happens a comment was made as to the…

  • Discover Blogs, a voice for the Other 85%

    Today I was curious what people thought of Wired Science Blogs. More honestly, I was really trying to see if anyone else was a little put off by the forced registration to comment. But in the process I ran into this post, In which I notice a trend. The author did some counting before talking,…

  • More exercise = more I.Q.?

    Interesting post by Gretchen Reynolds reviewing the evidence on exercise and intelligence. The title is “Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter?”, so this is definitely seen as something which is “actionable” in a public policy sense, especially in light of the increases in obesity among young people. Intuitively I think most people are going…

  • Daily Data Dump – Thursday

    Detecting positive natural selection from genetic data. “I’ve tried to avoid the alphabet soup of acronyms for tests for selection in the above discussion.” Eminently readable. A New Power Broker Rises in Italy. An article about the Northern League. The inclusion of Tuscany indicates a “broad church” vantage point. An indication of the mishmash of…

  • A fly’s life: adventures in experimental evolution

    Natural selection happens. It was hypothesized in copious detail by Charles Darwin, and has been confirmed in the laboratory, through observation, and also by inference via the methods of modern genomics. But science is more than broad brushes. We need to drill-down to a more fine-grained level to understand the dynamics with precision and detail,…

  • Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

    Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Interesting: “in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on…

  • The seeds of another science blogging network

    Alert! Some Big And Important And Exciting News!: So yes, I will be working with the Scientific American editors and staff in conceptualizing, building, launching and then running a new science blogging network. How could I say No when given such a chance? To do what I love and what I think I can do…

  • Daily Data Dump – Tuesday

    Mike Castle trailing Christine O’Donnell in poll: What’s going on? I remember O’Donnell from her numerous appearances on Politically Incorrect in the late 1990s. She seemed sweet, but kind of dull. The media reports make her out to be a sociopath though. Here’s an old clip. George C. Williams, 83, Theorist on Evolution, Dies. Nicholas…

  • By our genes, though not alone

    David Dobbs over at his new digs has a massive post on the relationship between behavior genetics, genomics, neuroscience, environment, and culture. It’s titled The depression map: genes, culture, serotonin, and a side of pathogens, and he concludes: In a sense, these studies are looking not at gene-x-environment interactions, or GxE, but at genes x…

  • Wired Science, a new science blogs network

    The empire of the boy-king grows! Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers. David Dobbs and Brian Switek have already set up their domains, but Dr. Daniel MacArthur will be moving in the near future as well. And to think that Dr. Dan was just a commenter over at ScienceBlogs in the spring of 2006…

  • The silver age of altitude adaptation

    With all the justified concern about “missing heritability”, the age of human genomics hasn’t been a total bust. As I have observed before in 2005’s excellent book Mutants the evolutionary geneticist Armand M. Leroi asserted that we really didn’t have a good understanding of normal variation of human pigmentation. At the time I think it…

  • The child is the father of the man

    Prenatal undernutrition and cognitive function in late adulthood: At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to…

Razib Khan