Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
One last week of summer. Models tell us more than hindsight. Tim Harford, the author of The Logic of Life, defends economics and modeling against a critique of a historian-turned-journalist. My main problem with economists isn’t that the field is formalized and expresses itself in equations. Rather, it’s the tendency to speak with greater force…
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People with heterodox opinions are just confused
I was having a touch of insomnia a few days ago, and wasn’t alert enough to do anything intellectually challenging, so I decided to poke around the General Social Survey. I found an interesting variable, POSTLIFE, which asks people if they believed in life after death. I decided to cross-check that against those who were…
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Not all genes are equal in the eyes of man
A few days ago I was listening to an interview with a reporter who was kidnapped in the tribal areas of Pakistan (he eventually escaped). Because he was a Westerner he mentioned offhand that to “pass” as a native for his own safety he had his guides claim he was Nuristani when inquiries were made.…
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The pristine Amazon – a zone of contention
Last week there was an article in The Washington Post that caught my eye, Scientists find evidence discrediting theory Amazon was virtually unlivable. The headline flattens a complex and roiling debate within academia. A generation ago the forests of the Amazon basin were seen as a pristine climax ecosystem. In the 1990s and 2000s […]
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The confusions of genetic relatedness
Last spring I posted ‘Beyond visualization of data in genetics’ in the hopes that people wouldn’t take PCA too far in assuming that the method was a reflection of reality in a definite fashion. Remember, PCA visualizations are showing you two, and at most three, dimensions in genetic variation within the data set at any…
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Open thread, September 11th, 2010
Well, it’s that day again. Nine years on, what’s changed? After Iraq, and the new quagmire in Afghanistan, it seems that our laser-like focus on what & who caused 9/11 is no longer with us. I can’t believe we haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet. Look at what Eric Raymond is blogging about now vs.…
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Friday Fluff, September 10th, 2010
In the interests of “mixing it up” I’ve decided to try something different on Fridays (I’ve been blogging for eight years, but I’ll admit I haven’t been the most innovative of online content generators so far). I’m going to merge the cat pictures with other assorted potpourri. I envision regular features, so, for example, every…
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George C. Williams, (1926-2010)
Jerry Coyne notes that George C. Williams died a few days ago. I’d heard he was ill. Michael Ruse has an obituary up. Williams’ book Adaptation and Natural Selection prefigured Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Update: Please see Car…
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Leaping to a bigger brain
Years ago an evolutionary biologist mentioned to me almost offhand that with the emergence of genomics and the necessity to master computational techniques a lot of the labor hours which may have gone into a more thorough understanding of specific organisms had gone by the wayside. He believed that his Ph.D. advisor was going to…
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Offense in a globalized world
In my post “The naked years” I used this image to illustrate the transition from furry Australopithecus, to hairless H. erectus, to the sartorially elaborated H. sapiens sapiens: Do you find the image offensive? I obviously didn’t, I’m not an artist and was trying to visually communicate a scientific concept, not “provoke.” My usual procedure…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
More on The Social Sensitivity Hypothesis. At A Replicated Typo a post which explores a model whereby different morphs emerge which migrate and flourish based on genotype. The “sensitive” and “non-sensitive” tendency is optimized for different ecologies, whereby in high resource zones the sensitives do better. The author expresses a lot of caution, but the…
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The naked years
When I talk about sexual selection I usually make sure to have an accompanying visual of a peacock to go with the post. But really I could have used a dandy as an illustration, or perhaps in our day & age “The Situation”. Unlike the peacock much of what passes for human “plumage” is not…
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Fundamentalists are not as “intelligent”
Yesterday I pointed to an OKCupid study on personals ads on their network. I didn’t highlight the fact that the analysis of the ads seem to suggest that secular people have more sophisticated prose, and that of those who claim a religious affiliation the less strongly committed tend to be more sophisticated. The blog Political…
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After the codex
Today we’re seeing a transition in the medium of literacy. I’m alluding to the emergence of digital formats, which will transform the physical experience of reading. You’re part of the process right now, unless you’ve printed this out. Of course we have books around, and we will for quite some time. I assume for the…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Human Meat Just Another Meal for Early Europeans? The argument about cannibalism always goes back and forth. It seems entirely plausible that at some point in our lineage’s history the consumption of conspecifics may not have been shocking, as the human cognitive toolkit had not evolved to the level of sophistication which makes cannibalism cross-culturally…
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Sexual selection: lowered expectations edition
Sexual selection is, for lack of a better term, a sexy concept. Charles Darwin elaborated on the specific phenomenon of sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond endorsed Darwin’s thesis that sexual selection could explain the origin of human races, as each isolated…