Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Facebook & Dunbar’s number

    About 20 years ago the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed his eponymous number: Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert…

  • DonorsChoose Challenge 2010 – It’s On!

    So to make a long story short last Saturday I was going to rev up this year’s DonorsChoose but there were some technical difficulties which discouraged me, so I decided to point to other challenges. But my fellow Discover blogger Dr. Sean Carroll has stepped up to the plate, so I decided to buck up…

  • Daily Data Dump – Tuesday

    Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom. ‘By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to…

  • The naked geneticists

    John Hawks, Genomes unzipped, unzipped: What I wonder is, how much will personal genomics be like nude beaches? I mean, it’s been a long time since the first nude beaches, but most people don’t take advantage of the opportunity. Clearly, there’s variation in different countries! But most people neither feel compelled to see others’ data…

  • Heritability and fitness

    Words matter, and they can confuse. Here’s Wikipedia’s preamble for heritability: Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. Phenotypic variation among individuals may be due to genetic and/or environmental factors. Heritability analyses estimate the relative contributions of differences in genetic and non-genetic factors to…

  • Daily Data Dump – Monday

    Good morning WWW. Richard Dawkins publicized the “We Are All Africans” t-shirt on Bill Maher’s show, which resulted in a major backlog of orders. The shirt is factually true. But the “Out of Africa” model is not as clean or simple as it would have been 10 years ago. Ironically Dawkins himself tipped his hand…

  • Can’t we all just get long: evolution of altruism edition

    Samir Okasha is a philosopher of science and author of Evolution and the Levels of Selection. So his recent comment in Nature, Altruism researchers must cooperate, is informed by a scholarly background in these controversies. From what I can gather Okasha’s stance in this case is to “push back” on Nowak & Wilson in […]

  • Natural selection in our time

    Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably…

  • Genomes Unzipped – the naked sequence

    Looks like Dr. Daniel MacArthur & company went and did it, go get their genotypes, or browse them online. This should be interesting. Since Dr. MacArthur’s wife has agreed to be a participant in some ways Tobias MacArthur is also part of the project by implication. To some extent the same is true of the…

  • The folly of the crowds

    With the big hullabaloo around The Social Network I’ve been reflecting a bit about my incorrect intuition since ~2008 that the Facebook bubble would burst at any moment. The bubble may still burst, or a new competitor may come out of the blue, or Google might actually release a comparable offering, but Facebook is still…

  • South Park + Jersey Shore

    This should be good. Perhaps even top the D-Yikes! espide: It Came From JerseyTags: SOUTHPARKRandy Marsh,Eric Cartman,more…

  • Relative & absolute perceptions of well being

    I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose: – A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished? – A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished? The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as…

  • Open Thread – October 9th, 2010

    Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he…

  • Friday Fluff – October 8th, 2010

    1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land 2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes) 3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!: These are all percentages, and the rates…

  • Farmers, foragers, and us

    At the Overcoming Bias weblog Robin Hanson has been ruminating on the shifts in human values and behaviors driven by transitions in modes of production. In particular, the dichotomy between foragers (hunter-gatherers) and farmers. Last week I pointed to Eric Michael Johnson’s review of data which indicate that modes of production may influence the normative…

  • A generation of human genetics & genomics

    If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and…

  • Daily Data Dump – Thursday

    Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE. The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such…

  • Epigenetics – what revolution?

    A reader who goes by the handle “biologist,” and happens to be a molecular geneticist by training, states more clearly what is probably close to my own position (though he is far more well informed) in the comments below. I think it’s worth promoting: As far as I can tell, the existence of epigenetic mechanisms…

  • Arise the vehicle! Arise the cell!

    A quick follow up to my post Epigenetics arise! Adam Keiper, the editor of The New Atlantis, has graciously sent me a copy of the article, Getting Over the Code Delusion. I’ve also been told that the piece will be free to all on the website at any moment, so I invite readers to […]

  • Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

    Epigenome effort makes its mark. “This week, the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a US$170-million effort to identify and map those marks — known collectively as the human epigenome — begins its first comprehensive data release.” At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture. The story of executives taking home millions while the ship goes down is…

Razib Khan