Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Ant fiction

    Steve points me to an except from E. O. Wilson’s new ant novel in The New Yorker. In the late 1990s I read Empire of the Ants, which had a significant ant-centric aspect. A friend who later went on to do graduate work in entemology borrowed it from me,…

  • A model of the history of human misery

    In the comments below I was outlining a simple model which really is easiest to communicate with a chart. I removed the labels on the Y and X axes because the details don’t matter, the X axis is simply “time,” and the Y axis simply reflects the magnitu…

  • Blind men prefer thin-waisted women

    The waist-to-hip ratio research has been done to death, but an interesting twist, Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio:Previous studies suggest that men in Western societies are attracted to low female waist-to-hip ratios (WHR). Several explanatio…

  • Agriculture & health in the pre-Columbian period

    I’ve been interested in the transition toward agriculture, and its relationship to human health, for a while. There seem to have been two dominant paradigms in anthropology over the past century. The first is that agriculture spread because it was supe…

  • After the fact

    Daniel Larison has a post up where he criticizes a David Brooks column. Here’s what Larison observes (Brooks’ quote within):David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false:There is the influence of the voodoo religion…

  • City squalor

    I recently read The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found & Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome. Got me in the mind of thinking more about the history of city life, and what it was like in the past, and how it compares to my …

  • Levelling off of the “Obesity Epidemic”?

    There’s a lot of media buzz right now about a new report in JAMA on the empirical trends on prevalence of obesity in the United States. You can read the whole paper here (too many tables, not enough graphs). Interestingly, like George W. Bush it seems …

  • Haiti & charity

    A reader asked about donating to alleviate the suffering in Haiti. In particular, making sure that the donations don’t go toward religious or Leftist ends. My own personal assumption is in line with the recommendations of the The GiveWell Blog: A few notes: Unfortunately, “disaster relief” is not an area we’ve researched. When we’ve (very…

  • On the Y

    Here’s the link to the new paper in Naure on the evolution of the human & chimp Y chromosome, Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content. ScienceDaily and The New York Times have summaries up. Wonder if th…

  • The Confucian conservatives

    I highly recommend John Keay’s China: A History to any readers who wish to familiarize themselves with this civilization. Keay’s narrative is aimed at the general reader. Specialists will no doubt find themselves irritating by the simplifications, or even errors (I’m not a China specialist but even I picked out a factual error here and…

  • Using your brain

    Frequent Cognitive Activity Compensates for Education Differences in Episodic Memory:Results: The two cognitive measures were regressed on education, cognitive activity frequency, and their interaction, while controlling for the covariates. Education a…

  • The Dark Age Mighty Whitey

    This week David Brooks has a column up on the messianic variant of the “Mighty Whitey” motif. Steve points out that this is a relatively old genre, with roots back to the Victorian period. And, it also has basis in fact. Consider the White Rajahs of Sa…

  • Localizing recent positive selection in humans using multiple statistics

    Online this week in Science, a group presents a method for identifying genes under positive selection in humans, and gives some examples. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this paper, for reasons I’ll get to, but here’s their basic idea:Readers of t…

  • Don’t be an infidel?

    Interesting possibility that Google is engaging in self-censorship in regards to Islam. If true the motive is likely more profit that fear (via Abhi). Share/Save

  • On the cusp

    Lots of talk about how the “underwear bomber” was from a wealthy and cosmopolitan background in the media. Like the poverty = crime meme, the poverty & backwardness = terrorism meme is still floating around, though the evidence of the past decade o…

  • The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan

    In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictableI fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise ex…

  • The unpredictable darkness | Razib Khan

    In complex and non-linear systems, the only thing we know is that our predictions are unreliable. I fear the reliably unpredictableI fear the predictable unpredictable. Over the past decade there have been many warnings about Global Warming; precise extrapolations of temperature increases and projections of sea level rise. Such prognostication is understandable, they make the…

  • How Chinese relate to each other and the Japanese

    Last month I pointed to a paper on Chinese population structure, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies. One to note was that the average FST differentiation Han populations was on the or…

  • On signals & design

    Somehow SR’s email address was added to Newsmax’s mailing list for ad buys. The pitch is that one will reach affluent readers. But they undermine their message by formatting their HTML emails in a garish 1997 Frontpage-generated style. I thought they were being ironic, but I think they’re sincere. Share/Save

  • The Royal Society on In Our Time

    In Our Time has several episodes up on The Royal Society. You can listen online at the link, but I’d recommend that you just subscribe on iTunes to IOT.

Razib Khan