Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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The Social Darwinist and the Priests
I was going through my stack of podcasts today and I decided to listen to a discussion between the linguist John McWhorter and the linguist Ben Zimmer, and at one point McWhorter addresses the issue of linguistic diversity, and wonders aloud if perhaps we wouldn’t be better off with one world language, though more as…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Freshman Weight Gain: Women With Heavy Roommates Gain Less, Study Finds. I guess the model makes sense, but it really makes one wonder about the power of prior expectations about these sorts of things. There just so many plausible stories for any given set of data. Why Does Spicy Food Taste Hot? The feeling of…
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Toward human phylogenetic intuitions
100 years ago a science based physical anthropology offered up very little as to a systematics of mankind beyond what you could intuit from visual assessments of phenotypic similarity alone. Instead, there were fantastical taxonomies which had little basis in the true pattern of variation and more in the nationalistic debates of that period. The…
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The illusions of intuition
Sometimes books advertise themselves very well with their title. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us is one of those books. Alternatively it could have been titled: “Giving thinking a second chance.” Or, with an eye toward pushing copies: “Why everything Malcolm Gladwell tells you is crap.” And finally, a more highbrow…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Price’s Second Equation. David B continues his technical review of the Price Equation. Selective pressures for accurate altruism targeting: evidence from digital evolution for difficult-to-test aspects of inclusive fitness theory. “Our investigations also revealed that evolution did not increase the altruism level when all green beard altruists used the same phenotypic marker.” Read a university…
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Swedes are not sexist or nativist
A party, the Sweden Democrats, is about to enter the Swedish parliamanent which is described in this way in Wikipedia: The party has its origins in the nationalist movement Bevara Sverige Svenskt (”Keep Sweden Swedish”)…During the mid 1990s, the party leader Mikael Jansson strove to make the party more respectable, modelling it after other “euronationalist”…
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Pakistanis are just like Indians (not that there’s anything wrong with it)
In the comments below a strange conversation grew out of the politicized nature of Pakistani identity, and its relationship to India the nation-state, and India the civilization. I assume that a typical reader, or more accurately commenter, on this weblog would be sanguine if they found out they were 10% chimpanzee. After all, it’s what’s…
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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…
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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…
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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, […]
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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 […]
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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,…