The new comments
Make up a name if you want to comment. I’m not going to let any “Guest” comments through from now on, since they seem to mess up the recent comments, and it makes it hard to know who is who.
Social science data sets
At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free.
Shellfish & the human bottleneck
How shellfish saved the human race:Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals–just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our…
Settlers, Slaves & Immigrants
A few weeks ago I referenced Campbell Gibson’s paper, The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population, which estimated that ~1990 50% of the population of the United States could be attributed to those enum…
Carbs & ancestry
Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry:Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were …
Monkeys & language
The paper is out, Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Nicholas Wade and Ed Yong review the evidence. One of the issues is that chimps don’t seem to have syntax, so how can a monkey? But since domesticated …
More Jewish Genetics
Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. I posted on it at ScienceBlogs. Nothing too new.
The Mating Mouth
Gingival Transcriptome Patterns During Induction and Resolution of Experimental Gingivitis in Humans:A relatively small subset (11.9%) of the immune response genes analyzed by array was transiently activated in response to biofilm overgrowth, suggestin…
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain
Peter Frost on Roman Britain:Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the…
Technical difficulties
There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can al…
Religious identity vs. religious activity (and God is not back!)
One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down…
David Sloan Wilson & Razib Khan (me) on BHTV
Here. All I have to say is that 60 minutes really isn’t that much time.
On insults and religion
When I was a younger man I recall watching a documentary on missionaries in Mississippi. They were Southern Baptists who were on a mission to “save” everyone (this included Roman Catholics and Protestants who had not had a “Born Again” experience). At …
A shifting mode
Here’s the source. The fact that there’s been so much change since 1990 is what is striking to me.
The Deadweight Loss of Gift Giving
Q&A: Scroogenomics Author on the Holidays’ ‘Orgy of Wealth Destruction’.