Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Food stamps and the importance of *doing something*
At Gene Expression I recently put up a series of posts relating to food stamps. For example, the correlates of food stamp utilization by county. I’m really skeptical of the ubiquity of food stamp usage. There are vast swaths of the United States where the majority of children benefit from food stamps. Some statistical analysis…
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The Mating Mouth
Gingival Transcriptome Patterns During Induction and Resolution of Experimental Gingivitis in Humans:A relatively small subset (11.9%) of the immune response genes analyzed by array was transiently activated in response to biofilm overgrowth, suggestin…
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Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
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Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
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Does the family matter for adult IQ?
A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as…
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Does the family matter for adult IQ?
A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as…
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Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain
Peter Frost on Roman Britain:Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the…
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Technical difficulties
There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can al…
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Finding the missing heritability
In a recent special issue of The Economist magazine, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico writes that there is a “looming crisis in human genetics”. Setting aside a number of mistakes Miller makes, a core truth he r…
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Religious identity vs. religious activity (and God is not back!)
One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down…
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The Ottoman years
Frustrated With West, Turks Revel in Empire Lost: Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim…
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David Sloan Wilson & Razib Khan (me) on BHTV
Here. All I have to say is that 60 minutes really isn’t that much time.
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Vox Dei
David Killoren points me to this Ed Yong post, Creating God in one’s own image. It is based on the paper Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs:People often reason egocentrically about others’…
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On insults and religion
When I was a younger man I recall watching a documentary on missionaries in Mississippi. They were Southern Baptists who were on a mission to “save” everyone (this included Roman Catholics and Protestants who had not had a “Born Again” experience). At …
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A shifting mode
Here’s the source. The fact that there’s been so much change since 1990 is what is striking to me.
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The Deadweight Loss of Gift Giving
Q&A: Scroogenomics Author on the Holidays’ ‘Orgy of Wealth Destruction’.
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Being a Popperian about charities
Reading The GiveWell Blog is interesting, as it allows one to exclude charities because they do all the leg-work. For example, a few days ago they put up a analysis of Smile Train’s usage of funds (or lack of transparency). Prompting an evasive respons…
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Implicit Eurocentrism & the eternal infidel
A friend pointed me to this article, Outrage on Swiss minaret vote, but how do Muslim states handle churches?. You don’t need to click, you know the score. To be a kuffar in a non-Muslim land isn’t always the most pleasant experience. Instead of imagining, you could probably just ask a black person who lived…
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There is no society, just homicidal individuals
There’s a new book out, American Homicide, which has some interesting arguments:He concluded that people’s views about the legitimacy of government and how much they identify with their fellow citizens play a major role in how often they kill each othe…
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“Old Europe”
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity:The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the A…