Liberty or Libel?
There has been much discussion in the blogosphere (for example by Olivia Judson here) of the current libel case between the science writer Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association. Most of the comments have supported Singh and criticised b…
The malleability of political religion
The Big Money has an entry up, Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult […]
No support for birth order effects on personality from the GSS
In researching for a review of The Nurture Assumption, I read over the debate between Harris and Sulloway over birth order effects on personality. Sulloway’s thesis, explained in Born to Rebel, is that last-born children have more rebellious, agreeabl…
GWAS, population structure and the Han Chinese
Two new articles in AJHG, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies:To date, most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and studies of fine-scale population structure have been conducted pr…
Maps of diabetes & obesity
Hope readers have a happy Thanksgiving. I assume this is also a day when you’re not going to think too much about your diet and eat what you want to eat. But I thought this map on diabetes and obesity for those age 20 and up was interesting. These are …
Discussion of CRU Materials
The debate over global warming is relevant to GNXP (previous posts here and here) not so much because our readers are interested in climate science but because the dynamics of the debate — scientific “consensus” versus politically incorrect minority …
The Biggest Loser and Indian obesity
After reading this article about the The Biggest Loser, I checked out the Wikipedia page for the show. There are international versions. Through that I found out that there is an Indian version of the show. I thought this was weird. I mean, it’s India,…
R1a1 and the peopling of Eurasia
A few weeks ago people in the comments were nagging me a bit about some new papers on the haplogroup R1a1. This Y chromosomal lineage is found at very high frequencies from East-Central Europe into India. Initially, researchers such as Spencer Wells as…
Why whales get no bigger
Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…
Prediction markets
It’s News On Academia, Not Climate:Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opin…
1 million SNPs to bind us all
A a new paper in PLoS ONE, Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs:Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various disp…
Lying with the GSS, easy, but not necessary
About year ago I thought perhaps more bloggers would start taking up the GSS. That really hasn’t happened. Sometimes I wonder why, and the other day I had one idea: it isn’t necessary for what most bloggers want to do, confirm what they already believe…
Mythical heroes
There’s a new evangelical Christian college in New York, the King’s College. You can read a somewhat quizzical article in The New York Times about it. This part caught my attention:
Clues about the college’s philosophical underpinnings reveal themselves here and there. One bulletin board recently listed the activities of the various houses, the King’s College […]
The mosaic of North American populations
A few months ago an interesting paper connected the historical demographics of New Hampshire with genetic variation. One of the notable features of North American history and culture is that it is a mosaic of different populations, and, that mosaic has…
A tale of two nations
One of the mantras of the new age is that European nations have to deal with diversity, something that’s new to them. This actually ahistorical. Some military units in the Austro-Hungarian Empire actually used English as the lingua franca because of th…
Data and social networks
Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident i…
Models of IQ & wealth
Steve Hsu has been interesting of late (interesting like Steve, not Malcolm). So, IQ, compression and simple models and If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?. For a theoretical physicist I find Steve to be eminently clear in his exposition of abstra…
Variation in belief 1988-2008, the rise of skepticism
Below in the comments David Heddle says:
Of course there is no way, that I can see, of estimating how many of those leaving the church were self-identified Christians but who were actually in-the-closet unbelievers. Perhaps (who knows?) this is a sizable group, one that is beginning to come out of the closet as the stigma […]
Latin America is not panmixia
A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results:Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and…
Being wrong is good
I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes […]