How many Senators don’t have a university degree?
Only one out of 100! If you don’t know, this is the one.
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Coincidence or adaptation?
Different Evolutionary Histories of the Coagulation Factor VII Gene in Human Populations?:Immoderate blood clotting constitutes a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in modern industrialised societies, but is believed to have conferred a survival ad…
Cultures of constraint; Islam, India and Marxism
Pew has a new report, Global Restrictions on Religion (HT JohnPI). It illustrates rather clearly some general trends which I’ve been mulling over for several years looking at cross-cultural data. Here’s a 2-dimensional chart which plots the 50 most pop…
Wikipedia Article on Group Differences in IQ
As penance for my sins, I have been involved in a lengthy mediation process at Wikipedia concerning the Race and Intelligence article. Check the links and the history for examples of how the (controversial) sausages are made.As a result of this process…
We are all cost vs. benefit utilitarians now!
Many liberals now want to kill the healthcare bill. At Talking Points Memo here is a dissent from an individual who is obviously going to get screwed if the bill is not passed:
If I feel abandoned, it’s not by Obama and the Democratic party, it’s by those on the left advocating to kill the bill.
I […]
The new comments
Make up a name if you want to comment. I’m not going to let any “Guest” comments through from now on, since they seem to mess up the recent comments, and it makes it hard to know who is who.
Social science data sets
At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free.
Shellfish & the human bottleneck
How shellfish saved the human race:Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals–just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our…
Settlers, Slaves & Immigrants
A few weeks ago I referenced Campbell Gibson’s paper, The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population, which estimated that ~1990 50% of the population of the United States could be attributed to those enum…
What Heritability is Not
Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me t…
Who argues the most from authority?
Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following:Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Div…
New “old format”
The old format is back. But without the customization. I’ll do that later when I have time….
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The “new format”
The old theme broke on update. So I swapped in a random format. I’ve switched to the generic WP theme for now. Will try and get the old format back soon.
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Carbs & ancestry
Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry:Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were …
Monkeys & language
The paper is out, Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Nicholas Wade and Ed Yong review the evidence. One of the issues is that chimps don’t seem to have syntax, so how can a monkey? But since domesticated …
More Jewish Genetics
Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. I posted on it at ScienceBlogs. Nothing too new.
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 […]
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…