Reason is but a slave of passions as it always has been
David Hume stated that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” I don’t know about the ought part, that’s up for debate. But the is part seems empirically true. The reasons people give for this or that is often just a post hoc rationalization. To give a different twist to […]
Is that white supremacist part black?
Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes, […]
The post Is that white supremacist part black? appeared first on Gene Expression.
Is that white supremacist part black?
Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes, […]
The post Is that white supremacist part black? appeared first on Gene Expression.
Miss America, Nina Davuluri, does not look like Miss India
Miss America 2013 is an Indian American woman, Nina Davuluri. This has predictably ushered in lots of sad and sometimes so-sad-it’s-funny (frankly) racism on Twitter. But there’s another interesting angle: a friend pointed out that Nina Davuluri is probably too … Continue reading →
Gendered perceptions of parental identity
At the super market my wife pointed out an article in the parenting section which she stumbled upon while waiting for me to finish at the checkout line, Is She Yours? In a stray moment I decided to see if … Continue reading →
The law of reversion to type as cultural illusion
A comment below:
Does the higher genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africans explain why mixed children of blacks + other couples usually look more black than anything?
As in, the higher number of genetic characteristics overwhelms those of the other pa…
A little food & medicine go a long way
I clicked through on the links to Zack’s post below and was pretty shocked. I know this somewhat, but not having grown up around many Indians (or South Asians generally) I didn’t have a good sense. That being said, a … Continue reading →
The Scots-Irish as indigenous people
A fascinating comment below:
In traveling across America, the Scots Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social …
Fear of a black past
I notice that the media has started reporting that scientific genealogy has now established to a great extent the likely origin of the Melungeons. You can find the original paper online. The gist is that the Melungeons seem to exhibit a large proportio…
Education encourages integration?
It is sometimes fashionable to assert that higher socioeconomic status whites are the sort who will impose integration on lower socioeconomic status whites, all the while sequestering themselves away. I assumed this was a rough reflection of reality. B…
Richard Dawkins accepts the usefulness of race
There have been a variety of responses to my column in The Crux on race. To be fair, because the audience for The Crux does not consist of genome nerds I engaged in some first approximations which some readers have taken objection to. For example, the …
An algorithm is just an algorithm
In the comments below:
You should include a Moroccan or otherwise native North African sample. Without a North African sample West Africans act as proxy for some of that North African ancestry that does exist in Iberia, specially the Western third (Por…
A deeper dive analysis of two Cubans
About a week ago I put up a post put on an analysis of a paper which reported on the ancestral make up of 50 Cubans (as well as assorted other Hispanic/Latino groups). One aspect of the paper which was somewhat notable is that 1 out of 3 Cubans were 90…
The case of the white Cubans
In a follow up to a post below, a new paper in PLoS Genetics has some data on American Hispanics. Specifically, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Cubans, as well as assorted Central and South Americans. I am not too interested in the cases excep…
Where the wild clines aren’t
In the recent ‘do human races’ exist controversy Nick Matzke’s post Continuous geographic structure is real, “discrete races” aren’t has become something of a touchstone (perhaps a post like Cosma Shalizi’s on I.Q. and heritability).* In the post Matzke emphasized the idea of clines, roughly a continuous gradient of genetic change over space. Fair enough. […]
Race: maybe it’s agriculture
I’m too busy to really blog today, but I thought of putting up a post, the gist of which was actually expressed in Ian’s comment below: When I was younger, I thought of human races as archetypes, and the variation between them a product of mixing. I blame it on the fact that I read […]
Jerry Coyne on race: a reflection of evolution
After my post on the ‘race question’ I thought it would be useful to point to Jerry Coyne’s ‘Are there human races’?. The utility is that Coyne’s book Speciation strongly shaped my own perceptions. I knew the empirical reality of clustering before I read that book, but the analogy with “species concept” debates was only […]
The race question: are bonobos human?
Recently Jason Antrosio began a dialogue with readers of this weblog on the “race question.” More specifically, he asked that we peruse a 2009 review of the race question in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Additionally, he also pointed me to another 2009 paper in Genome Research, Non-Darwinian estimation: My ancestors, my genes’ ancestors. […]
The social and biological construction of race
Many of our categories are human constructions which map upon patterns in nature which we perceive rather darkly. The joints about which nature turns are as they are, our own names and representations are a different thing altogether. This does not mean that our categories have no utility, but we should be careful of confusing […]
Mendelism is not magic
Michelle points me to this article in The Lost Angeles Times, The Colors of the Family: I was holding my 1-year-old, ambling about downtown with some friends. White friends. She must have thought my boy belonged to one of them. There’s a simple explanation: I’m black but my son, Ashe, is white. At least he […]