Chinese inevitabilities which aren’t
Like the last pagan Neoplatonists in the 6th century A.D., Scholars Stage and I keep blogging, even though that world is the past. Recently he wrote a post worth reading, Give No Heed to the Walking Dead. He reflects on the forecasts of China optimists and concludes in a rather gloomy manner. I’ve been thinking […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 24: Deconstructing the Denisovans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 24: Deconstructing the DenisovansThe Dali skull, 200,000 years old. A Denisovan?This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Spencer is back, as we go back to our old two-ma…
The expansion of modern humans ~50,000 as part of a regular Poisson process
Last of the giants: What killed off Madagascar’s megafauna a thousand years ago?: The first job is to understand exactly when the megafauna died out. Radiocarbon dating of over 400 recent fossils demonstrates that animals under 22 pounds lived on Madagascar throughout the last 10,000 years. For animals over 22 pounds, there are abundant fossils […]
Echoes of Europe’s Pleistocene Past
Lascaux Cave, 17,000-year-old Magdalenian “paintings”40,000 years ago the first modern humans arrived in Europe. They were the scions of a great scattering of Africans. One branch of the “Out of Africa” migration, from which the vast majority of the an…
Elizabeth Warren carries Native American DNA – she’s running!
Since I’ve talked about this issue before, Warren releases results of DNA test: There were five parts of Warren’s DNA that signaled she had a Native American ancestor, according to the report. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on her 10th chromosome, according to the report. Each human has 23 pairs of […]
Beyond “Out of Africa” within Africa
It looks as if the vast majority (95% or more depending on the population) of the ancestry of non-African humans derives from a population expansion which began around ~60,000 years ago. Before this period some researchers argue there was a non-trivial period of isolation. The “long bottleneck” (David Reich alludes to this in Who We […]
New Gene Expression live soon….
Please be patient. Loading archives so backlog of posts might show up over the next month.
My 23andMe affiliate link
Friends have been asking if I have an affiliate code for 23andMe since I have been promoting it so much over the past few years. Well, I finally got one. Here it is: Razib’s 23andMe.com affiliate link. Full URL: http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-7088698-11032058
Is publishing your genome unethical?
Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won’t offer my own response in any detail. They’re handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn’t […]
Diminishing returns of ancestry analysis (for me)
Zack has finally started posting results from HAP. To the left you see the results generated at K = 5 from his merged data set with the first 10 HAP members. I am HRP002. Zack is HRP001. Paul G., who is an ethnic Assyrian, is HRP010. Some others have already “outed” themselves, so I could […]
Print vs. web in science
I have some Google Alerts set up relating to human evolution and such, and a few days ago I noticed a spike in articles about the evolution of clothing and lice. Like this: We were all naked until 170,000 years ago. Since I blogged this in September, The naked years, I was confused. Here’s the […]
George C. Williams, (1926-2010)
Jerry Coyne notes that George C. Williams died a few days ago. I’d heard he was ill. Michael Ruse has an obituary up. Williams’ book Adaptation and Natural Selection prefigured Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.
Update: Please see Car…
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
More on The Social Sensitivity Hypothesis. At A Replicated Typo a post which explores a model whereby different morphs emerge which migrate and flourish based on genotype. The “sensitive” and “non-sensitive” tendency is optimized for different ecologies, whereby in high resource zones the sensitives do better. The author expresses a lot of caution, but the […]
After the codex
Today we’re seeing a transition in the medium of literacy. I’m alluding to the emergence of digital formats, which will transform the physical experience of reading. You’re part of the process right now, unless you’ve printed this out. Of course we have books around, and we will for quite some time. I assume for the […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Human Meat Just Another Meal for Early Europeans? The argument about cannibalism always goes back and forth. It seems entirely plausible that at some point in our lineage’s history the consumption of conspecifics may not have been shocking, as the human cognitive toolkit had not evolved to the level of sophistication which makes cannibalism cross-culturally […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Big brains attributed to mother’s care. Interesting that the correlation between various characteristics and brain size is highly sensitive to the taxa you include in your scatter plot. Marsupials seem to be substantially different from placental mammals, while primates are different from placentals as a whole. Throwing all the mammalian taxa into the analysis results […]
Genetic differences within European populations
One of the more popular posts on this weblog (going by StumbleUpon and search engine referrers) focuses on genetic variation in Europe as a function of geography. In some ways the results are common sense; populations closer to each other are more genetically related. Why not? Historically people have married their neighbors and so gene […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Happy Labor Day!
Price’s First Equation. An in-depth review of the Price Equation. First installment of several.
DNA fingerprinting pioneer discovers role of key genetic catalyst for human diversity. The strange behavior of PRDM9 could be thought of as a factor in the second term of the Price Equation.
Resentment Simmers in Western Chinese Region. “It used […]
In the lands of the living God
On the face of it Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam is a book whose content is summed up accurately by the title. The author recounts her experiences in various African and Asian lands which straddle the tenth parallel north of the equator: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, […]
More school, more work
Tomorrow is Labor Day in the USA. I was actually shocked to realize last week that the USA has a higher unemployment rate than many European nations. I grew up in the 1990s when we were conditioned to assume that Europe would always have higher structural unemployment for a variety of reasons. In any case, […]