Building a harmonious society through genomics
Dan Vorhaus points me to this Newsweek feature on BGI. My friend Steve Hsu gets some face time in the piece:
…Last year, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced plans for a research collaboration with BGI, as the Chinese company’s revenue hit $150…
Two new genome bloggers
Zack pointed me to two new ones, Fennoscandia Biographic Project, and Magnus Ducatus Lituaniae Project – BGA analysis project for the territories of former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. So I guess the circum-Baltic region is getting some thick covera…
Outbreeding won’t save the British royal family
Image credit: Wikimedia
A few years ago I blogged a paper on how inbred the last Spanish Habsburgs had become, leading to all sorts of ill effects. Take a look at Charles II of Spain! He was as inbred as the product of a sibling mating. An extreme cas…
ScienceBlogsTM to National Geographic
You can read about the details here. Interestingly, Christopher Mims has been tweeting the “secret” early history of ScienceBlogs under the #SBhistory hashtag. I was one of the original 14 in January of 2006, so I saw a lot of things go dow…
Sectionalism submerged
Aside from transient memes such as Jesusland sectional sentiment tends to be implicit and remain below the surface, especially outside of “Dixie”, in the United States today. In a nation the size of a continent and populated by over 300 mil…
South Asian endogamy predates the British
One of the things that happens if you read ethnographically thick books like Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India is that you start to wonder if most castes were simply created by the British and for the Brit…
South Park
Season premier this Wednesday. Three days and counting….
Beware of one tree!
Sometimes in the comments of this weblog people get into heated disagreements about one figure and its proper interpretation. I don’t get much involved most of the time because different visualization techniques often differ on the margin, so get…
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
The future of knowledge?
Matt Ridley has a predictable op-ed in the WSJ (based on our knowledge of his prior normative frame), Your Genes in an Envelope? More, Please. But the last section is interesting:
If freedom does not appeal, the clinching argument for allowing consumer…
American Empire, American Bankruptcy
Image credit
Time has a worthwhile piece up, How to Save a Trillion Dollars. One thing the author brings up in relation to our exorbitant military spending is that in certain sectors the lead of the American armed forces technologically is such that…
Resolutions in the Indian genetic layer cake
Two years ago Reconstructing Indian Genetic History reframed how we should view South Asian historical genomics. In short, Indians can be viewed as a hybrid between a West Eurasian group, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and a very different…
Friday Fluff – April 22nd, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: South Indian Phylogeography.
2) Weird search query of the week: “star de hustler”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “Two opinions on D.T.C. personal genomic testing”:
I say go further. Ban …
Climate adaptations & Southern Europeans are part African
No time to blog them now…I’ll get to it. But I really want to point you to two papers of interest in PLoS Genetics (all the good stuff lands on Friday!).
Adaptations to Climate-Mediated Selective Pressures in Humans:
Humans inhabit a remark…
Political moderation, education, and intelligence
After seeing this post up on how high information levels and education may lead to political polarization, I wanted to revisit the GSS data on political moderation and independence in light of educational attainment and intelligence. For the later I us…
A problem of knowledge
A boring man
Immanuel Kant is famous. You’ve probably heard of him. And you know some of his ideas, such as the categorical imperative, or have at some point started the Critique of Pure Reason (if you’re like me, you never finish it). But…
Knowledge of one’s own mortality
In my persistent slog beating the drums for open genomics I’ve made the argument that people should have the right to have more information about what their genetic code entails without the necessary and mandatory imprimatur of professional asse…
Awesome beer commercial
You don’t need to know Dutch:
Visualization of genetic distances, part n
Zack Ajmal has been taking his Reference 3 data set for a stroll over at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Or, more accurately, he’s been driving his computer to crunch up ADMIXTURE results ascending up a later of K’s. Because it is the Harappa…
Is “Game of Thrones” racist? Not even wrong….
One of the aspects of fiction is that it serves as a Rorschach test. Over at Slate Nina Shen Rastogi has a post up, Is “Game of Thrones” Racist?:
The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport …