Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Open Thread – 10/03/2020 – Gene Expression
When I get busy and don’t post open threads you guys start leaving comments elsewhere (which is fine, since the articles/papers are usually pretty good). I’ll be better about posting, […]
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The AJPlus exception! Fascism for thee, but not me
I am not a media person, so I do not understand the deal with AJPlus and its “woke” journalists. AJPlus is owned by the Al Jazeera Media Group, which is a catspaw of the government of Qatar. Qatar is a Salafi petrostate run for the benefit of the Thani family and is run like a…
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Open Thread – 10/03/2020
What’s going on in India with COVID-19? Both deaths and cases are now plateauing. Since India is really many nations, this might just be major population centers recovering, even if there are lots of local outbreaks?
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The pareto principle and stochasticity in COVID-19
Most of you know difference between parameters such as mean and standard deviation. Or, that distributions have variable dispersion or multi-modalities. Standard stuff. In relation to COVID-19 it was clear early on that “superspreader events” were critical. That in fact, these events were driving the pandemic in some deep way, with there being huge variance…
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The practice of untouchability by district
I found the above map from Alice Evans. It’s from a paper, The Continuing Practice of Untouchability in India. The regional patterns turn out to be the most striking. More than education, income, or caste status. You can even see the outline of states, which is indicative of the impact of regional governments on policy…
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White conservatives are falling behind white liberals on intelligence
While working on my previous post I decided to poke around the General Social Survey. I’ve been using this resource since 2007 or so. The data goes up to 2018. The chart above illustrates something that is somewhat important, though not surprising. White conservatives are getting less intelligent in relation to white liberals over time…
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Why most intellectuals are not “conservative”
A progressive friend (non-woke) asked me why the bench of conservative intellectuals is much shallower than those on the Left/progressive side. I believe there are two broad reasons, building on each other. First, if you are a high IQ individual you are more amenable and comfortable with abstraction, system-building, and rationality. Various forms of Leftism,…
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Globalization!
So what is this? What to make of this? We’re in the 21st century, aren’t we.
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Let’s read!
Anyone who has read this weblog over the last few years has sensed my hopelessness and despair about the fallen world and in particular the American republic and Western civilization. I have told Rod Dreher many times privately that we irreligious also need our “Benedict option” in a “darkening world.” But while the Roman Empire…
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White men invented everything!
Over the last decade or so I’ve seen a very strange pattern that was once at the margins, but is now at the center of culture. Take something banal, such as literacy or war, and claim that it was invented and perpetuated by heterosexual white men. In the late 2000s, this started happening in academic…
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Open Thread – 9/26/2020 – Brown Pundits
I have mixed feelings about casting Dev Patel as Gawain. Though my feelings are not strong, they are similar to my feelings about casting white actors as non-Europeans in the past: you get over it, but it takes away from verisimilitude. Please make sure that you subscribe to the podcast (there are links to various…
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The great panmixia
Human inbreeding has decreased in time through the Holocene: The history of human inbreeding is controversial. The development of sedentary agricultural societies may have had opposite influences on inbreeding levels. On the one hand, agriculture and food surplus may have diminished inbreeding by increasing population sizes and lowering endogamy, i.e. inbreeding due to population isolation.…
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Neanderthal Y chromosomes are paleo-modern?
I don’t have time to blog in detail today so I’ll point you to Ann Gibbon’s story, How Neanderthals lost their Y chromosome. You can find the link to the paper in there. The big issue here is that both mtDNA and Y chromosomes were replaced due to introgression from a population closer to modern…
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“Men of character” on the rise, cold numbers fading
One of the major cultural findings of the past twenty years is that developed Western nations exhibit certain peculiarities that set them out from the human norm. For example, reliance and adherence to abstract rules and laws, personal consequences be damned. In most of the world, people see merit in aiding and favoring friends and…
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Three teachers
In my life there have been many great teachers. But three were very influential early on, when I was new to this country, and had spent more of my life in Bangladesh than the United States. Today my wife suggested I look up these teachers, because likely their obituaries would be out there. I remember…
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Demographic Reticulation!
I made an offhand comment on Twitter that it would take a few decades for the public to understand the insight that demographic reticulation is ubiquitous in human prehistory. This is probably the biggest claim in Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Well,…
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Men and women really don’t differ in the generality on abortion
Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice…
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Men and women really don’t differ in the generality on abortion
Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice…
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Demography is destiny, Inshallah
I just finished doing a quick edit of an interview by some of my fellow Brown Punditeers with some fellows at the Middle East Forum (I posted for Patrons, should be live on the podcast in a few days). Listening I felt like I was being thrown back to 2005. All the talk about Islamism,…
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Open Thread – 09/19/2020 – Brown Pundits
The comments are open(ish).