Category Archives: Blog

The usual. If it’s off topic, etc., leave it here.

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Have a good weekend.
Immune Responses During Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia Among Offspring. This is a known association, but the interesting point is that there may be conditionalities to the response based on genetics. That would explain the heritability.
‘Fused’ People Eager to Die and Kill for Their Group, Research Shows. I believe that an individualist-rational focus […]

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The Two

The One

Almost Two

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Elite Isolation. This is a specific instance of a general problem. The rulers as a rule are not sampled randomly from the population. Operationally democracy often seems to turn into competitions between rival elites who are making the “best offer” to segments of the electorate.
Children and Stress. The article connects childhood stress with later life […]

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Genetic Components and Cultural Differences: The social sensitivity hypothesis. The frequency of genes and “memes” change in very different ways. As I have long observed while memes can be passed from only one parent, genes are constricted in sexual reproduction to being inherited in part from both parents. How the two may relate (e.g., lactase […]

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Didn’t get to looking into papers from last week’s open thread…but I will. But as usual, comments, links, etc. While I have your attention, my twitter feed is here. I don’t post what I’m eating or anything, but it’s …

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Have a good weekend.
DNA Dilemma, Day Five: Time to Decide. Mary Carmichael of Newsweek is going to get a personal genomics kit. I predict it will confirm that she is a female of European descent.
Diabetes or Not, Dietary Habits of Aftrican-Americans Are Similar. Remember that there’s variance in white ancestry among African Americans. People with […]

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Have a good weekend.
Death of A Language. Since I started being more pro-active about my general lack of respect for modern American cultural anthropology I’ve gotten a lot of response. On the specific question of whether linguistic diversity is inversely proportional to economic growth, I’ve gotten some mixed-responses, and find all the conclusions inconclusive (I’ve […]

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Since the reader survey is topping out in response, I though I’d report some of the results. Since I’ve been doing these surveys my readership has exhibited a few patterns, and I was curious as to any changes since moving to Discover. Not too much has shifted. Instead of 15% female, as was the case […]

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ResearchBlogCast #11: Using The Genome To Identify Species. Check out Kevin Zelnio for more details. We also talk about the ScienceBlogs kerfuffle a bit at the beginning.

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If you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. N = 300, so I’ll stop buggin’ now and start posting results in the next day or so.
Ancient iceman’s gene map underway. Does anyone have any inside dirt on Otzi? His mtDNA was an outgroup to […]

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Another reminder, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey.
Assortative mating, regression and all that: offspring IQ vs parental midpoint. Very sad: “For n = 3 (parental midpoint of 145) the mean for the kids would be 127 and the probability of exceeding 145 […]

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First, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey.
A horse is a horse, of course of course. Horses, like dogs, may be able to “read” human cues. In general intelligence dogs are less intelligent than wolves, but geniuses at this. In fact before this […]

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Danny reminded me that I still hadn’t read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Since I know him a bit (at least internet “know”) I’ve decided I can’t put it off any longer, and I’ll tackle it soon. I just finished two books, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the […]

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Hope the heat is treating you well (if you live in the northern hemisphere). If you are a regular reader and haven’t taken the summer 2010 reader survey, click here.
Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability. A post which addresses some of the issues emerging out of my comment about the relationship between linguistic diversity […]

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So that reader survey that I mentioned last week is done. I’m mostly interested in seeing the changes since I’ve moved to Discover from ScienceBlogs. I assume that the standard 85% male readership has shifted somewhat toward more balance, but I don’t know. Many of the basic demographic questions (sex, race, age, etc.) are the […]

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About six months ago I did a survey of the readership of my two Gene Expression blogs (before moving to Discover). The N was around 600. You can view the raw frequency results here. One of the issues which I was curious about: did the disciplinary background of readers have any major correlates with responses? […]

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I was travelling on Monday so couldn’t post the open thread and then forgot. But now that I think about I think Friday would be better in any case, because I don’t post much on the weekends. So again, questions, links, what you’re reading. You know my motto, “Don’t be stupid” (fwiw, posting links to […]

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Razib Khan