The empty heartland
In a comment below I alluded to my idea that the heart of Eurasia was relatively unpopulated before the Holocene, explaining why many Central Asian groups seem to be recent hybrids from very distinct populations. Normally the sort of model which posits K ancestral groups is an idealization to some extent. To assign every K […]
Open Thread – September 18th, 2010
Last weekend of summer. I plan to have my reviews of The Invisible Gorilla and The Lost History of Christianity up very soon. I recommend both heartily! Next in the stack: Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain. A question was asked about the focus on extremes when it came to perceptions of the genetic influence […]
Melody Dye & Jason Goldman on BHTV
Just wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Jason Goldman who has a discussion up at bloggingheads.tv with his co-blogger at Child’s Play Melody Dye. Recommended.
Friday Fluff – September 17th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Why patriarchy?
2. Weird search query of the week: “pygmy porno.”
3. Comment of the week, in response to More exercise = more I.Q.?:
but how does this explain Steven Hawkings , he has a great IQ and is on a wheelchair!
4) Poll question….
(last week’s results were 75% Dawkins, 25% Gould)
5) […]
Of Iran, Turan, and Turks
There’s a new paper out in The European Journal of Human Genetics which is of great interest because it surveys the genetic and linguistic affinities of two dozen ethno-linguistic groups from the three Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This is what the Greeks referred to as Transoxiana, and the Persians as […]
Liberals more hereditarian than conservatives?
Sometimes I run into things in the GSS which just don’t fit expectations. On occasion the results are so weird or unexpected I check my coding over and over. Or, I have a suspicion that something was input incorrectly. This is one of those cases. As often happens a comment was made as to the […]
Discover Blogs, a voice for the Other 85%
Today I was curious what people thought of Wired Science Blogs. More honestly, I was really trying to see if anyone else was a little put off by the forced registration to comment. But in the process I ran into this post, In which I notice a trend. The author did some counting before talking, […]
More exercise = more I.Q.?
Interesting post by Gretchen Reynolds reviewing the evidence on exercise and intelligence. The title is “Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter?”, so this is definitely seen as something which is “actionable” in a public policy sense, especially in light of the increases in obesity among young people. Intuitively I think most people are going […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Detecting positive natural selection from genetic data. “I’ve tried to avoid the alphabet soup of acronyms for tests for selection in the above discussion.” Eminently readable.
A New Power Broker Rises in Italy. An article about the Northern League. The inclusion of Tuscany indicates a “broad church” vantage point. An indication of the mishmash of policies […]
A fly’s life: adventures in experimental evolution
Natural selection happens. It was hypothesized in copious detail by Charles Darwin, and has been confirmed in the laboratory, through observation, and also by inference via the methods of modern genomics. But science is more than broad brushes. We need to drill-down to a more fine-grained level to understand the dynamics with precision and detail, […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Interesting: “in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on […]
The seeds of another science blogging network
Alert! Some Big And Important And Exciting News!:
So yes, I will be working with the Scientific American editors and staff in conceptualizing, building, launching and then running a new science blogging network. How could I say No when given such a chance? To do what I love and what I think I can do well, […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Mike Castle trailing Christine O’Donnell in poll: What’s going on? I remember O’Donnell from her numerous appearances on Politically Incorrect in the late 1990s. She seemed sweet, but kind of dull. The media reports make her out to be a sociopath though. Here’s an old clip.
George C. Williams, 83, Theorist on Evolution, Dies. Nicholas Wade […]
By our genes, though not alone
David Dobbs over at his new digs has a massive post on the relationship between behavior genetics, genomics, neuroscience, environment, and culture. It’s titled The depression map: genes, culture, serotonin, and a side of pathogens, and he concludes:
In a sense, these studies are looking not at gene-x-environment interactions, or GxE, but at genes x […]
Wired Science, a new science blogs network
The empire of the boy-king grows! Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers. David Dobbs and Brian Switek have already set up their domains, but Dr. Daniel MacArthur will be moving in the near future as well. And to think that Dr. Dan was just a commenter over at ScienceBlogs in the spring of 2006 […]
The silver age of altitude adaptation
With all the justified concern about “missing heritability”, the age of human genomics hasn’t been a total bust. As I have observed before in 2005’s excellent book Mutants the evolutionary geneticist Armand M. Leroi asserted that we really didn’t have a good understanding of normal variation of human pigmentation. At the time I think it […]
The child is the father of the man
Prenatal undernutrition and cognitive function in late adulthood:
At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to have […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
One last week of summer.
Models tell us more than hindsight. Tim Harford, the author of The Logic of Life, defends economics and modeling against a critique of a historian-turned-journalist. My main problem with economists isn’t that the field is formalized and expresses itself in equations. Rather, it’s the tendency to speak with greater force of […]
People with heterodox opinions are just confused
I was having a touch of insomnia a few days ago, and wasn’t alert enough to do anything intellectually challenging, so I decided to poke around the General Social Survey. I found an interesting variable, POSTLIFE, which asks people if they believed in life after death. I decided to cross-check that against those who were […]
Not all genes are equal in the eyes of man
A few days ago I was listening to an interview with a reporter who was kidnapped in the tribal areas of Pakistan (he eventually escaped). Because he was a Westerner he mentioned offhand that to “pass” as a native for his own safety he had his guides claim he was Nuristani when inquiries were made. […]