Author: Razib Khan
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First they came for Dave Weigel
Dave Weigel of The Washington Post has resigned over his juvenile postings on an e-list. Basically the postings allowed for Weigel’s mask to slip, and showed him to be a vulgar and immature young man in some contexts. That’s no different from many of us in the proper context. The e-list is now defunct because…
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Katz
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Daily Data Dump – Friday
23andMe research article finally published. Dr. Dan MacArthur offers his take on a new PLoS Genetics paper which was published using 23andMe’s user base. Of course there’s already information coming out of 23andMe’s user community not getting into the academic literature, see this comment below. Group Solidarity and Survival. For what it’s worth, I think…
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What has Rome to do with Nairobi?
There are very few books which would attempt to connect the experiences of the 1st century British who lived through Roman conquest with the French under the Vichy regime in World War II. The The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall by Timothy Parsons attempts…
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The dismal gods
Larry Witham’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion is a manifestly ill-timed book. He states that “…around 2006 I began to notice a good deal of hoopla in the book market about economic explanations for just about everything-books that were best sellers.” Marketplace of the Gods was obviously written to capitalize on the…
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You have no privacy, deal with it
The Washington Post’s blogger-journalist Dave Weigel has a post up where he preemptively apologizes for stuff he posted on an “off-the-record” e-list,. Extracts are going to be published by a gossip site. Journalists are the tip of the iceberg; privacy is fast becoming a total fiction, remember that. We’re slowly drifting toward David Brin’s model…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
This Doctor Does What to 6-Year-Old Girls’ Clitorises? This reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story of a pediatrician being attacked in England because a really stupid outraged person was opposed to pedophilia. Here’s a sentence for the ages: ” Because much as Savage might like it to be, the world is not yet a…
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The English & Irish, together again
One of the peculiarities of the synthesis of 19th and early 20th historical linguistics and biological anthropology was the perception by many British thinkers that the English, as the scions of the Anglo-Saxons, were fundamentally a different race from the Celtic nations to their west, the Welsh and Irish, and the Scots to the north…
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Project your own probability
By now you’ve probably stumbled onto Wired’s profile of Sergey Brin, and his quest to understand and overcome Parkinson’s disease through the illumination available via genomic techniques. I want to spotlight this section: Not everyone with Parkinson’s has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the mutation get the disease. But it does increase the…
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
GDP PPP inhabitant by European region. Combining Italy or the UK into one GDP number is deceptive. Lombardy has twice the GDP PPP of much of southern Italy. The regional differences are not nearly as stark in Spain, where poor regions like Andalusia and Galicia exhibit less of a gap from prosperous regions. By the…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Sexual urges overcome cultural taboo. So it turns out that the female children of immigrants from conservative societies (South Asian and Islamic) are paying for hymen restoration surgeries. The more interesting question would be if these children become sexually conservative themselves, perpetuating the life history trajectory so that their own children have to go through…
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The future of fertility; more kids please
After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks: What do you think is the ideal number…
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ResearchBlogCast #9: Genetics, Fertility, And Disease
The 9th ResearchBlogCast is up. We talk about the recent paper on cystic fibrosis genetics which I blogged.
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
I won the 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize. ‘Top quark’. Heh. “I” = Ed Yong. ‘nuf said. Brown-eyed men perceived to be more dominant. Dienekes offers up a more banal explanation, that the disjunction between blue vs. brown-eyed males in dominance perception has to do with a correlation that’s a holdover from past population differences…
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To be fruitful and multiply
Over at The Wall Street Journal Bryan Caplan has an op-ed, The Breeders’ Cup: Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. Much of the op-ed focuses on behavior…
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Animal Apartheid
Here’s an article from Canada on the debate about whether hybridization should be discouraged. I understand the impulse toward preserving nature as it is, but the drive for presumed purity seems almost fetishistic. Consider this sentence: ” Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?” What does “genetically pure” mean in a…
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“Here be dragons”
I just stumbled onto two amusing articles, Ancient legends once walked among early humans?, and The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago is no surprise. The second is a letter from a folklorist: Sir, The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin…
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Cuckoldry more common in past generations
We have some data that in fact older generations were more sexually promiscuous, contrary to the moral panic perpetually ascendant. As a follow up to my previous post, there is some scholarship which suggests that misattributed paternity rates have been declining. Recent decline in nonpaternity rates: a cross-temporal meta-analysis: Nonpaternity (i.e., discrepant biological versus social…
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The paternity myth: the rarity of cuckoldry
An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear…
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How “Predator” should have ended
Here