Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Just pushing buttons
Mike the Mad Biologist, whose bailiwick is the domain of the small, asks in the comments: I don’t mean to bring up a tangential point to the post, but why does the field of human genetics use PCA to visualize relationships? When I see plots like those shown here that have a ‘geometric pattern’ to…
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Changing to Feedburner
If you are subscribed to my total feed, please change the RSS address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed.
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Submitting your own links to GNXP
I’ve decided to add a “user generated content” component to this weblog. The links submitted by users will now be at the top left. If you read this weblog, you know the stuff that readers (you) might find of interest. The main issue is getting to where you can submit the links. First, initially I’ve…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
I hope you had a good weekend. Why is Israel So Poor? Israel is a nation with a high level of human capital and moderate wealth. The author points out that Israel is a “low trust” society. It is not often remembered that Israel is arguably the most ethnically diverse developed society in the world,…
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A thousand little adaptive platoons
Last week I took an intellectual road trip back nearly a century and explored the historical context and scientific logic by which R. A. Fisher definitively fused Mendelian genetics with quantitative evolutionary biology. In the process he helped birth the field of population genetics. While the genetics which we today are more familiar with begins at…
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Genetic variation within Africa (and the world)
Last year a paper came out in Science which made a rather large splash, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans by Tishkoff et al. Since it’s more than a year old I recommend that those of you curious about the details of the paper and don’t have academic access go through…
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Open thread – August 22, 2010
I found out this week that the idea of the “Noble Savage” is erroneously attributed to Jean Jacques Rosseau. I haven’t read much Rosseau myself, so I’m familiar with the general shape of his ideas through the filters of later interpreters. But even if I’d consumed the great man’s oeuvre in totality I wonder if…
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“India’s” population bomb isn’t rocket science
The New York Times has a piece up, Defusing India’s Population Time Bomb, which reiterates what I was trying to get at yesterday, India’s demographic problems are localized to particular regions, not the nation as a whole. First, let’s review the world’s population growth & fertility rates: Now let’s focus on a few nations: China’s…
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Desmond Tutu, Spaniards, and genetic distance
Since we’ve been talking about Fst a fair amount, I thought it might be nice to put it in some concrete graphical perspective. First, to review Fst in the genetic context measures the proportion of genetic variation which can be attributed to between population differences. To give a “toy” example if you randomly divided the…
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Star Hustler passes away
A little “off topic” for this blog’s core content, but Jack Horkheimer, the “Star Hustler/Star Gazer” passed away today. Here’s vintage 1985:
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Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend. More Evidence for Hauser’s Scientific Misconduct. Stuff like this keeps bubbling up from anonymous “sources.” Excessive regulation of DTC genomics will come at a cost. Sometimes the cost is tangible in terms of slower innovation, but sometimes it is straightforward in monetary terms as increased prices to jump through regulatory hurdles.…
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India’s Deep North
In my post Pakistan ~10 years on I alluded to the fact that despite India’s robust economic growth of the past ~15 years or so in the aggregate there is a wide range of state-by-state variation. It is conventional in the media to point out the massive caste/class divisions in India, but because of the…
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Katz, 8-20-2010
[View with PicLens] Clean Face Off Delicious
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scienceblogging
Just noticed that there’s a new site, scienceblogging, at scienceblogging.org. It’s basically an aggregator. One-stop-shopping I guess.
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The flows and pulses of humanity
Dr. John Hawks points me to a review in BMC Biology, A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small. It’s short, and of interest for the citations themselves. This a field in flux. One point which I think needs to be emphasized in relation to migration parameters is that there are going to…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?. Dienekes argues that Amerindians are the furthest not due to bottlenecks, but because of isolation from gene flow. He points to particular markers which span Africa and Eurasia. I know of the one he’s talking about. I need to rethink whether the first approximation of no […]
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Which population is most genetically distant from Africans? Amerindians
Yesterday I stated that it was wrong to think of any non-African population as more genetically distant from Africans. Well, I was wrong. Sort of. This is obviously a case where I had a model in mind, and went looking for visuals which reinforced the story I was going to tell. As noted in the…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Overweight American Children and Adolescents Becoming Fatter. Reports that the increases in obesity are not equally distributed across socioeconomic segments. So not only is there is a change in the mean, it looks the variance is increasing. News from the west: Ancient DNA from a French megalithic burial chamber. Another paper which indicates we might…
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Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?
A comment below: Razib, I don’t know much about genetics but is it true that these people of Melanesia are among the least related people (even more so than Europeans) to sub-saharan Africans genetically?? This is a common question. The typical scientifically curious intelligent person is generally aware that on the order of 100,000 years…
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Blondes of the ‘black islands’
Recently I was looking for images of the alpine biomes of the New Guinea highlands* and stumbled onto some intriguing, though not entirely surprising, set of photographs of individuals from Papua New Guinea. They were noteworthy because they manifested the conventional Melanesian physical type, but their hair had a blonde cast to it. For example,…