Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Proud to be red
A friend pointed me to this YouTube clip of a young red-haired man objecting to the term “ginger,” and the opprobrium he’s been subjected to since the South Park episode “Ginger Kids” popularized ideas such as the possibility that redheads have no soul…
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Darwin wuz wrong, part n
A review of a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Co-authored by Jerry Fodor, who has been continuing his war against natural selection. I’ve already read Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (at the sugge…
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Peer groups & bourgeois virtues
Self-Control and Peer Groups:However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of fiv…
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Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept
What is the single best reference for refuting the notion that “race is only a social construct” for a non-scientist? I don’t know. (Suggestions welcome in the comments.) But Neven Sesardic (previously praised here) does a marvelous job in “Race: A Soc…
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Maps of white teen birthrate and abortion rates by state
A supplement to the previous two posts. Below are maps which are shaded proportionally. Note how New York seems to be the abortion capital of the USA. Total surprise to me. Remember that these data are for white females from the ages of 15-19.
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Red State, Blue State, Teen Birthrate, Teen Abortion rate
A reader pointed to this post in Free Exchange:Here are the 15 states with the biggest percentage drop from 1988-2005 in the ratio of teen abortions—the percentage of teen pregnancies that ended in abortion, not counting miscarriages. Crudely put, th…
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Teen birthrates and abortion rates
The New York Times has a new article, After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises. The graphic is OK, but it focuses on aggregate teen pregnancy rates (age group 15-19) instead of splitting it out so as to show births and abortions. The original r…
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A bold prediction: “synthetic associations” are not a panacea
There’s a bit of press surrounding the interesting result from David Goldstein’s group that, in certain situations, a number of “rare” (defined as an allele frequency less than 5% [1]) variants influencing a trait can lead to an association signal at “…
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Confucius biopic
I noticed that a new biopic of Confucius just opened in China. It’s pretty obvious that they “sexed up” his life, as you can see in the trailer. In terms of a big-budget biopic it seems to me that the life of Confucius is a very thin source of blockbus…
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The rise of the irreligious Left, the reemergence of Republican religious neutrality (?)
Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post up where I explore the differences by state between the American Religious Identification Survey in 1990 and 2008. I then compare these data to the national election results in 1988 and 2008. Here is a chart which shows the relationship between % “No Religion” and proportion of votes…
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How much is “The Situation” worth?
‘Jersey Shore’ — MTV Tries to Divide and Conquer:Sources tell TMZ the network has told the cast if they don’t accept MTV’s deal by the end of business Monday, they will be replaced. And, MTV has told them it does not have to be a package deal — the c…
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Lactase persistance in India
Frequency of lactose malabsorption among healthy southern and northern Indian populations by genetic analysis and lactose hydrogen breath and tolerance tests:Volunteers from southern and northern India were comparable in age and sex. The LTT result was…
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What era are our intuitions about elites and business adapted to?
Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of a…
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How much faster
Athlete Atypicity on the Edge of Human Achievement: Performances Stagnate after the Last Peak, in 1988:The growth law for the development of top athletes performances remains unknown in quantifiable sport events. Here we present a growth model for 4135…
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Not as the crow flies
A comment below:This thought has probably occurred to others as well, but isn’t it interesting that if this theory of Baltics being the “true” Europeans is correct, that history repeated itself several thousand years later when the Baltic peoples becam…
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Hitler reacts to Scott Brown’s victory
H/T Ezra Klein Share/Save
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Open thread on Scott Brown, etc.
In case people want to discuss his victory tonight. I don’t have any unique insights that you can’t find elsewhere, but a quick question. Looking at the pollster.com Coakley vs. Brown polls on the front page right now I get average of 51 for Brown and 44 for Coakley. The final looks like to be…
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Controlling the means of reproduction
The title says it all, Should Obese, Smoking and Alcohol Consuming Women Receive Assisted Reproduction Treatment? The press release is based on a position statement from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. The link is here (not l…
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Where are the “Paleolithic Europeans”?
Over at my other blog I have a review up of a new paper in PLoS Biology. The authors argue that a particular Y haplogroup lineage, R1b1b2, which has often been assumed to be a marker of indigenous Paleolithic Europeans (i.e., those who were extant befo…
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The few and the many
John Hawks has some commentary on a Nicholas Wade article which previews a new paper on long term effective population size in humans, soon to be out in PNAS (Wade’s piece states that it’ll be out tomorrow, but it’s PNAS). Wade states:They put the numb…