Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Natural selection in our time
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably…
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Genomes Unzipped – the naked sequence
Looks like Dr. Daniel MacArthur & company went and did it, go get their genotypes, or browse them online. This should be interesting. Since Dr. MacArthur’s wife has agreed to be a participant in some ways Tobias MacArthur is also part of the project by implication. To some extent the same is true of the…
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The folly of the crowds
With the big hullabaloo around The Social Network I’ve been reflecting a bit about my incorrect intuition since ~2008 that the Facebook bubble would burst at any moment. The bubble may still burst, or a new competitor may come out of the blue, or Google might actually release a comparable offering, but Facebook is still…
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South Park + Jersey Shore
This should be good. Perhaps even top the D-Yikes! espide: It Came From JerseyTags: SOUTHPARKRandy Marsh,Eric Cartman,more…
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Relative & absolute perceptions of well being
I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose: – A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished? – A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished? The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as…
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Open Thread – October 9th, 2010
Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he…
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Friday Fluff – October 8th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land 2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes) 3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!: These are all percentages, and the rates…
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Farmers, foragers, and us
At the Overcoming Bias weblog Robin Hanson has been ruminating on the shifts in human values and behaviors driven by transitions in modes of production. In particular, the dichotomy between foragers (hunter-gatherers) and farmers. Last week I pointed to Eric Michael Johnson’s review of data which indicate that modes of production may influence the normative…
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A generation of human genetics & genomics
If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE. The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such…
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Epigenetics – what revolution?
A reader who goes by the handle “biologist,” and happens to be a molecular geneticist by training, states more clearly what is probably close to my own position (though he is far more well informed) in the comments below. I think it’s worth promoting: As far as I can tell, the existence of epigenetic mechanisms…
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Arise the vehicle! Arise the cell!
A quick follow up to my post Epigenetics arise! Adam Keiper, the editor of The New Atlantis, has graciously sent me a copy of the article, Getting Over the Code Delusion. I’ve also been told that the piece will be free to all on the website at any moment, so I invite readers to […]
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Epigenome effort makes its mark. “This week, the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a US$170-million effort to identify and map those marks — known collectively as the human epigenome — begins its first comprehensive data release.” At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture. The story of executives taking home millions while the ship goes down is…
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Epigenetics arise!
Last week I quipped on twitter that epigenetics had started to become the scientific deus ex machina of our age, a phenomenon which offered the potential for boundless explanatory power. In the past I have felt that sexual selection and random genetic drift have fulfilled the same roles as one-size-fits-all-explanations at the service of all.…
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Ancient Rome as a death pit
One of the assumptions that I’ve made on this weblog repeatedly based on ancient literary references is the idea that before 1900 urban areas were population sinks. In Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America the historian Eric Rauchway asserts that ~1900 in the USA urban health and life expectancy surpassed that of rural…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Urban and rural differences in mortality and causes of death in historical Poland. Unfortunately good demographic data on urban vs. rural death rates only date from the early modern era, but here in this Polish data set from the 19th and early 20th century you see the large urban > small urban > rural rank…
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The Human Nature Top 10
A few days Kevin Drum proposed a “Human Nature Top 10.” Here are the criteria: Not personal pet theories, but aspects of human nature that are (a) widely accepted and relatively noncontroversial among professionals, and (b) underappreciated by most of us. They can come from anywhere: economics, psychology, sociology, politics, anthropology, whatever. He offers two:…
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Things are looking up for the world’s poor!
I just listened to a discussion between John Horgan and Madhusree Mukerjee, and the conversation ended on a moderately down note as Mukerjee seemed pessimistic about the prospects for the world’s poor. Where do these people get the idea that things are getting worse? I recall the same sentiment from Massimo Pigliucci. These are people…