Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?
A comment below:
Razib, I don’t know much about genetics but is it true that these people of Melanesia are among the least related people (even more so than Europeans) to sub-saharan Africans genetically??
This is a common question. The typical scientifically curious intelligent person is generally aware that on the order of 100,000 years ago there […]
Blondes of the ‘black islands’
Recently I was looking for images of the alpine biomes of the New Guinea highlands* and stumbled onto some intriguing, though not entirely surprising, set of photographs of individuals from Papua New Guinea. They were noteworthy because they manifested the conventional Melanesian physical type, but their hair had a blonde cast to it. For example, […]
Pakistan ~10 years on
Long time readers of this weblog will recognize Zachary Latif. Zachary and I have been having exchanges on various topics on and off since 2002 on the blogs. His early opinionated musings on cultural and historical topics were a definite prod for me to venture out more vigorously into this domain. As a Pakistani […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
How much of the genome is transcribed? Or, the utility of a good genome browser. One of the issues with science today are the necessary capital inputs which make it such a narrow and focused vocation. But there are lots of things you as an individual can discern by poking around the public tools.
‘Mitochondrial Eve’: […]
Genetics is One: Mendelism and quantitative traits
In the early 20th century there was a rather strange (in hindsight) debate between two groups of biological scientists attempting to understand the basis of inheritance and its relationship to evolutionary processes. The two factions were the biometricians and Mendelians. As indicated by their appellation the Mendelians were partisans of the model of inheritance formulated […]
Native American ancestry in African Americans
That is, in the African American sample in the HapMap3 population set. I was just browsing the Admixture manual, and stumbled onto this plot:
CEU = Utah Whites, and YRI = Yoruba. They should be familiar from the previous versions of the HapMap. MEX = Mexican Americans from Los Angeles. K = 3, three ancestral populations. […]
Third World means nothing now
I recently had an exchange on twitter about the term “Third World” (starting from a tweet pointing to the idea of “Third World America”). Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of the term:
The term ‘Third World’ arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Dogs’ Family Status Depends on Family’s Locale. “People who think of their pets as their children often re-evaluate this thought when they have human children of their own.”
The Politics of Ideas : Hauser Gone Wild. “Must read” post on “Hausergate.”
Low Loan Repayment Is Seen at For-Profit Schools. They attract weak students. No wonder they don’t […]
Gene-culture interaction in Koreans and Americans
Genes and culture: OXTR gene influences social behaviour differently in Americans and Koreans. Korean Americans are more like white Americans than Koreans in the pattern of the effect of the allele on behavior.
Where writing is silent
In my post on Empires of the Word I observed that quite often the written record is silent on many matters which only language or genes tell us must have occurred. The Indo-Aryan character of the dominant language on the island of Sri Lanka seems to be a geographical anomaly in the least, but perhaps […]
Empires of the Word & anti-Babel
To the left you see a map of the distribution of languages and language families in Europe. Language is arguably the most salient cultural feature of our species, as well as one of the most obviously biologically embedded. The trait of language is a human universal, to the point where even those without hearing can […]
China is #2
China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy:
After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.
The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that […]
Open Thread – August 16th, 2010
The usual. If it’s off topic, etc., leave it here.
The socioeconomic status of white ethnics
In the post below on the prolific nature of the Kennedy clan some commenters were curious as to the general socioeconomic slant of Irish Catholics. The GSS has a variable ETHNIC which asks which nation an individual’s ancestors came from. Combine that with RELIG, and you can figure out how Irish Catholics stack up nationally. […]
The Future is Kennedy
One thing which has struck me about the Kennedy clan is that it seems inordinately fecund. The GSS tells me that in the 2000s white non-Hispanic liberals who are over the age of 45 have on average fewer than 2 children each. The ideal family size for the same segment is given as a little […]
Marc Hauser: the end is nigh?
David Dobbs has a link roundup and commentary on what’s been going down with l’affaire Hauser. It doesn’t look good for Hauser et al., though it seems that the downfall was precipitated ultimately from within if press reports are to be believed. Part of the issue here seems to be that there’s a level of […]
Japanese as Solarians
One of the podcasts I subscribe to is Thinking Allowed from Radio 4. The most recent one was on the role which robots are envisaged to play in the future of Japan:
Also, the rise of the ‘fembot’. The Japanese government is investing billions in the development of robotic technology. They think the robot will do […]
Google Public Data Explorer
One of the main issues that we as human beings have is that we don’t have a gestalt understanding of social data, and its change over time. Among biologists one of the major recurring problems is the gloominess which is a consequence of the Malthusian mindset (which is understandable because of their professional bias) which […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
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 […]