Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • The geographical distribution of autism in California

    Geographic distribution of autism in California: a retrospective birth cohort analysis:Prenatal environmental exposures are among the risk factors being explored for associations with autism. We applied a new procedure combining multiple scan cluster d…

  • Random acts of ill-health

    Stochastic epigenetic variation as a driving force of development, evolutionary adaptation, and disease:Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on exquisite selection of phenotypes caused by small genetic variations, which is the basis of quantitati…

  • We are a social animal

    Occasionally we get emails like this: Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization. Yours truly, [name omitted] One…

  • Singularity Institute Research Challenge

    The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details:…the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have …

  • The “Jews” of Afghanistan?

    Hazaras Hustle to Head of the Class in Afghanistan: For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pash…

  • PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspots

    This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty rem…

  • Nicholas Wade & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv

    Here. Or embedded: We talk about The Faith Instinct. Share/Save

  • Nicholas Wade & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv

    Here. Or embedded:We talk about The Faith Instinct.

  • Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present

    As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…

  • Happy New Year!

    And let’s have a great teens. Share/Save

  • The engineer terrorist

    Slate reviews the scholarly literature. Explaining the mechanics of the over-representation of engineers at the higher echelons of transnational terrorism is a guessing game, but the empirical reality seems relatively robust. Though I suspect that soci…

  • Why do we delay gratification even when there is no downside?

    Earlier this year, John Tierney reviewed several studies on how delaying gratification makes us feel better in the short term by preventing guilt but makes us feel more miserable in the long term by causing regret over missed opportunities. I added my …

  • One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral

    Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector act…

  • New comment format

    A lot of people (including paying readers! kidding!) are complaining about the new commenting format. I’ll be euphemistic and observe that it’s suboptimal. But I don’t have time to work on tweaking and beautifying it now, so please be patient. Over tim…

  • Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution

    Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…

  • On Christmas

    A few years ago I stopped saying “Happy Holidays” as my default and switched to “Merry Christmas.” The main issue for me is that I didn’t want to get hung up on a name. As someone who doesn’t accept that Jesus Christ was the Son of God I don’t celebrate the season for that particular…

  • Merry Xmas

    & a happy New Year.

  • The old old time religion

    Ross Douthat, Into The Mystic:But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to chu…

  • The diversity of the east

    Just a weird random thought. In the early 20th century the Ainu of Japan were considered by many physical anthropologists a branch of the white race. This fit in nicely with the historical fantasy of the period which often featured “Lost Races,” with a…

  • Transhuman Goodness

    Most of the readers of this weblog probably have as much use for the Singularity as John Derbyshire, but for those of you who dig Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, you might check out Transhuman Goodness. The author, Roko Mijic, is so normal he could alm…

Razib Khan