Author: Razib Khan
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The decline of Survivor
I just realized that the American television show Survivor is now over 10 years old. Though The Real World had been around for nearly ten years when it premiered in the spring of 2010, Survivor was what triggered the lift-off of the current generation of “reality television.” I haven’t watched it since season (series) two,…
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The rise and crash of civilizations
One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
As you can see, I got the DonorsChoose widget to work. Here’s the Discover Blogs leader board. Sean Carroll et al. are “beating” me by an order of magnitude right now. Not that that’s the point…. It’s a Jersey Thing. New South Park episode. I noticed a bunch of references to The Lord of The…
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The blood of kings
One of the more fertile grounds of modern genetics with all its various tools is that it makes for some interesting possibilities of inquiry in relation to the genealogy of aristocratic elites. The vast majority of us have very shallow roots in terms of genealogy. Some of this ignorance can be compensated if you have…
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The essence of the alien
If you found out a new fact about yourself could that reshape how you view yourself? An extreme case involves the Polish Neo-Nazis who found out that they are actually of Jewish origin. But it can be more subtle. A friend recently told me that her proud Irish American father found out that he carried…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. Is gay male sexual promiscuity a myth? “…in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.” Bloggers that deserve a wider readership. I second Andrew Gelman. Fiber Meets Flavor in New Whole-Grain Pastas. I like whole-grain…
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Facebook & Dunbar’s number
About 20 years ago the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed his eponymous number: Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert…
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DonorsChoose Challenge 2010 – It’s On!
So to make a long story short last Saturday I was going to rev up this year’s DonorsChoose but there were some technical difficulties which discouraged me, so I decided to point to other challenges. But my fellow Discover blogger Dr. Sean Carroll has stepped up to the plate, so I decided to buck up…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom. ‘By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to…
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The naked geneticists
John Hawks, Genomes unzipped, unzipped: What I wonder is, how much will personal genomics be like nude beaches? I mean, it’s been a long time since the first nude beaches, but most people don’t take advantage of the opportunity. Clearly, there’s variation in different countries! But most people neither feel compelled to see others’ data…
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Heritability and fitness
Words matter, and they can confuse. Here’s Wikipedia’s preamble for heritability: Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. Phenotypic variation among individuals may be due to genetic and/or environmental factors. Heritability analyses estimate the relative contributions of differences in genetic and non-genetic factors to…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
Good morning WWW. Richard Dawkins publicized the “We Are All Africans” t-shirt on Bill Maher’s show, which resulted in a major backlog of orders. The shirt is factually true. But the “Out of Africa” model is not as clean or simple as it would have been 10 years ago. Ironically Dawkins himself tipped his hand…
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Natural selection in our time
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably…
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Genomes Unzipped – the naked sequence
Looks like Dr. Daniel MacArthur & company went and did it, go get their genotypes, or browse them online. This should be interesting. Since Dr. MacArthur’s wife has agreed to be a participant in some ways Tobias MacArthur is also part of the project by implication. To some extent the same is true of the…
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The folly of the crowds
With the big hullabaloo around The Social Network I’ve been reflecting a bit about my incorrect intuition since ~2008 that the Facebook bubble would burst at any moment. The bubble may still burst, or a new competitor may come out of the blue, or Google might actually release a comparable offering, but Facebook is still…
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South Park + Jersey Shore
This should be good. Perhaps even top the D-Yikes! espide: It Came From JerseyTags: SOUTHPARKRandy Marsh,Eric Cartman,more…
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Relative & absolute perceptions of well being
I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose: – A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished? – A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished? The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as…
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Open Thread – October 9th, 2010
Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he…
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Friday Fluff – October 8th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land 2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes) 3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!: These are all percentages, and the rates…