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 […]
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 […]
“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 lineage […]
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 fatherhood) […]
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 […]
The returns on homogeneity
A few days ago on Twitter I wondered if economists had calculated the costs of the world having a diversity of languages, instead of one language. The logic is that unintelligibility naturally throws up barriers to communication, and the flow of ideas and labor. This is one reason why the European Union necessarily has less […]
America in 2050 may still be majority white
I have expressed some skepticism at the idea that in the year 2050 the United States of America will perceive itself as a majority-minority nation; that is, non-Hispanic whites will be be a minority. This projection is repeated and asserted so often that it’s a plausible background assumption when you’re making a model of the […]
Another perspective on Facebook
From Ruchira Paul, who analyzes her own friend network. One issue which I think is relevant is that many people have several Facebook accounts for several different purposes. It’s an interesting window into the psychology of different individuals, as some seem happy to go along with Facebook’s preference of a unitary identity, while others resist […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Subprime for Students – Why does so much federal money go to for-profit schools—and what happens when the system crashes? Steve Eisman, a Cassandra of the subprime meltdown in real estate, is now focused on the student loan & grant racket in the for-profit education industry. I have nothing against competition forcing the relatively static […]
The “how” of cystic fibrosis through the “why”
It’s just a fact that contemporary human evolutionary genetics has relied upon its potential insights into disease to generate funding, support and interest. I don’t think that this is much of a silver lining when set next to the suffering caused by disease, but it’s a silver lining nevertheless. Therefore findings which would be of […]
“What has bioinformatics done for us”
So asks Anthony Goldbloom: A British bioinformatician asks what bioinformatics has ever done for us? Or put differently, what is the single greatest biological discovery made possible by bioinformatics? He is offering $USD100 to the person who puts forward the most compelling answer (the prize is small but the idea is to stoke discussion). Kaggle […]
Time & mind & tipping
I just got back from a European trip, and I have to say I did not miss tipping. I especially appreciated not having to do the song & dance typical of larger groups in sit-down restaurants in the USA where you figure out how much you’re going to tip on a communal basis, when everyone […]
The State May Have Your Genome Sooner Than You Think
Slate has an interesting article, O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s time for legislators to look more closely at familial searches of DNA databases. The principle is simple. States and national governments are already collecting genetic material from persons who have had brushes with the criminal justice system and assembling databases. These individuals naturally have […]
Science is sufficient for any inference
Because I’m a generally somewhat more anthropocentric in regards to my interest in the “squishy science” I am often amused by the wide range of inferences that people make when presented with a set of scientific results. Naturally, when I talk about the genetics of Jews it gets a lot more heated. You did not […]
Jews and genetics
Over at Discover Blogs I have a very long post up on Jews & Genetics. In particular the recent paper in AJHG. One observation I have to make about Jewish genetics: when it comes to PCA plots which illustrate the relationship of Jews, in particular Ashkenazi Jews, to other populations I’ve noticed that two different […]
Grizzly-Polar bear hybrids in the wild
Timely, Pizzly Bears: Scientists confirmed last week that a bear shot by an Inuvialuit hunter in the Northwest Territories is a second-generation grizzly-polar bear hybrid—a “pizzly” or “grolar” bear. Not that big of a deal. It is likely that polar bears are simply a recent derived variant of brown bear. The main issue not noted […]
Who are the living Neandertals?
I guess now we kind of know.
Loading up on human evolution in PNAS
Click the Early Edition and control-f “Sackler.”