Author: Razib Khan
-
Social and individual behavior genetics
I believe it was Bryan Caplan who introduced me to the analogy of a child’s personality being like a rubber band; parents, in particular adoptive parents, can twist and pull a child in particular directions so long as the child is under their direction, but once the child leaves the home the rubber band “snaps…
-
Katz
-
More Jews, fewer markers
At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a…
-
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a…
-
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Brain Size Associated With Longevity in Mammals. Doesn’t necessarily entail causation in one particular direction. A Model for Transgenerational Imprinting Variation in Complex Traits. Easy to conceive of how these sorts of scientific models could be leveraged in public policy discussions. The Evolutionary Case For Monogamy? Ctd One issue with eliding the distinction between the…
-
Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe
A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being…
-
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
In Defense of Difference. If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn’t the article written in Eyak? I find the paeans to linguistic and cultural diversity tiresome and knee-jerk. In 1820 there was a relatively wide range of diversity of views in regards to slavery. No longer today. Today the diversity in attitudes toward legal…
-
“The Inheritors”
I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it…
-
The girls are all right, they accept human evolution
One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of…
-
Genomes Unzipped
If you haven’t, checked out the new weblog Genomes Unzipped. Familiar names & faces. The first posts are already must-reads, Testing for traces of Neanderthal in your own genome, and Personal genomics: the importance of sequencing.
-
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Old Males Rule the Roost Even as Sex Drive Fades. Seems like older roosters, whose sperm are more likely to carry deleterious mutations, can still be more reproductively fit because they can expend capital earned through their life history of social dominance. This is the revenge of the vehicle against the replicator. Personal genomics: the…
-
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different…
-
Genomic liftoff
The firm GenomeQuest has a blog, and on that blog they have a post, Implications of exponential growth of global whole genome sequencing capacity. In that post there are some bullet points with numbers. Here they are: * 2001-2009: A Human Genome * 2010: 1,000 Genomes – Learning the Ropes * 2011: 50,000 Genomes –…
-
Do liberals and conservatives know what they are?
Matthew Yglesias says: I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out…
-
Open thread – July 12th, 2010
Any interesting papers? Questions?
-
Daily Data Dump – Monday
The Ethics and Etiquette of Statistical Discrimination: A Critique of Readers’ Comments. This isn’t an abstract issue of course. Insurance companies engage in statistical discrimination based on group traits, unless there are legal constraints. So, for example, the recent health care legislation eliminated by fiat the differential in premiums between males and females in […]
-
“Unzipped,” not the film about Isaac Mizrahi
Just got notice of a new weblog, Unzipped, which I have added to my RSS feed. One of the primary contributors is Dr. Daniel MacArthur of Genetic Future (no, he’s not leaving ScienceBlogs!). Another is the always impressive Luke Jostins. Here’s their raison d’etre: Welcome to Genomes Unzipped, a new group blog bringing together experts…
-
India’s life expectancy gap
Poking around some data sets, I randomly stumbled onto to this factoid: According to World Bank estimates India’s life expectancy is now below that of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal’s! Now, I am aware that these data and analyses are somewhat an art, and that there’s a lot of subterfuge (hello Greece!). Additionally, it does seem…
-
Singularity Summit 2010
The Singularity Summit is going to happen in about a month in San Francisco (August 14th-15th). Registration here. Yes, Ray Kurzweil will be there, but also Irene Pepperberg, James Randi and John Tooby. If you want to meet the ladies, probably not your scene (perhaps more accurately the lady, or two). But if you want…
-
The inevitable intelligence
I think about Luke Jostin’s analysis of the growth in cranial capacity in the hominin lineage from last spring a fair amount. In particular, in the comments he notes: The data above includes all known Homo skulls, but none of the results change if you exclude the 24 Neandertals. In fact, you see the same…