Author: Razib Khan
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This time it’s different
I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big…
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Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good 4th for those who live in the States. Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast? I’m not surprised that John Hawks has serious reservations about the population history of the model in the paper I reviewed below. Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society. I don’t mind the normatively directed…
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Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high
I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude: Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced…
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Katz
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More markers, or more populations?
Here’s a letter to The American Journal of Human Genetics worth reading, Genetic Landscape of Eurasia and “Admixture” in Uyghurs: …In the papers…by Xu and Jin, the genetic structure of Uyghurs was described by 8150 ancestry-informative markers (AIMs). These markers estimated the admixture rate of the Uyghur population to be around 50% East Asian ancestry…
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Very recent altitude adaptation in Tibet
Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Psychological Research Conducted in ‘WEIRD’ Nations May Not Apply to Global Populations. This is the standard objection to psychological studies in terms of the representativeness of their samples; middle class university students. But more broadly they’re Western middle class university students. The grandmother factor: Why do only humans and whales live long past menopause? Interestingly…
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Porn and moral panic
Social conservative blogger Rod Dreher points me to this interview of a Left-wing sociologist on the malevolent influence of pornography on modern relationships. She has a book out, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Her conclusion: To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to…
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Nazis in space
Really interesting trailer for a movie which is premised on a “secret history” where a group of Nazis flee to the far side of the moon at the end of World War II, and are returning imminently in the near future from their exile. Wired has the back story of how this group of film…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
North America’s First Peoples More Genetically Diverse Than Thought, Mitochondrial Genome Analysis Reveals. The paper is free to all. Remember that this is just mtDNA, the maternal lineage. This area seems a bit confused now. The standard simple model, which is barely even a ’stylized fact’ at this point, is that a group of […]
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Your genes are just the odds
Morning Edition has a strange story today about the exploration of one neuroscientist of his own family’s history, specifically its psychological and neurological quirks. To not put too fine a point on it, the scientist in question finds out that he has a history of violence in his family, and, that he carries a […]
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
High Rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections Among Older Swingers. This goes into the “they had to do research!?!?!” category. Older swingers are a “high risk” group, like gay men and prostitutes. Golly, Beav, We’re Historic. I really loved Leave It To Beaver when I was a kid. Religious Extremists Will Inherit the Earth. John Derbyshire…
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More children please: men or women?
In the post below on Bryan Caplan’s arguments for why one should have more children there was an “interesting” comment: As if we’re harmless little creatures at one with our environment and put no toll on the balance of nature around us. Funny how we humans act like mindless rabbits and lemmings and put the…
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The two cycles
I’m reading Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. The book basically outlines the international state system in the ancient Near East which fostered diplomatic relationships between the monarchies of the period. It is noted that this state system and diplomatic culture did not make it through the chaos which marks…
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Psychometrics, epigenetics and economics
Two papers of interest. IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from Immigrant Earnings (ungated). And Human Intelligence and Polymorphisms in the DNA Methyltransferase Genes Involved in Epigenetic Marking. My impression is that the focus on epigenetics has a higher-order social motive; even the sort of humanists who are involved with N + 1 have asked…
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Why educated women are having children
Matt Yglesias has posted some charts showing that 1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common 2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon: I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education…
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Amerindians of Brazil more numerous than you think
A few months ago I was thinking a fair amount about the Neandertals. One issue which became more stark to me due to that particular finding, that a few percent of the human genome seems to have derived from Neandertal populations, is the reality that genetic distinctiveness can persist long after cultural coherency is no…
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Tick-tock biological clock
There will be an interesting presentation tomorrow at the European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology. Basically the researcher is going to present on a method for predicting when a woman will hit menopause. This part from the press release is the important bit: “The results from our study could enable us to make a…
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The essence of pleasure
I highly recommend this discussion between Paul Bloom & Robert Wright. The topic under consideration is the psychology of pleasure, as reviewed in Bloom’s new book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. You can also find out about Bloom’s ideas in this exchange in Slate. The essentialism examined…