One principal component to rule them all?
Despite the reality that I’ve cautioned against taking PCA plots too literally as Truth, unvarnished and without any interpretive juice needed, papers which rely on them are almost magnetically attractive to me. They transform complex patterns of variation which you are not privy to via your gestalt psychology into a two or at most three […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Kele’s Science Blog. Undergrad who is a double major in biology and history. Attempting to produce content, as opposed to simply opining.
Yes, We Should Clone Neanderthals. Even if modern humanity decides to not do something like this (though at some point in the medium-term future I assume the technological feasibility will be a low enough […]
Readership survey soon (again)
Since I’ve moved to Discover Blogs I suspect my readership has changed a bit. I have the results of a previous survey from early in 2010, back when I was at ScienceBlogs, but haven’t posted on it in detail. I’ll try and do that in the next few days, but I also will put up […]
Dave Appell: remember the messenger
David Dobbs has a long measured response up to David Appell’s strange argument that Pepsi’s “free speech” rights were violated during the recent ScienceBlogs kerfuffle, by way of which he casts some aspersions on the character and agenda of specific bloggers. Here’s the thing about Appell, he has a long history of confused and surly […]
Disease as a byproduct of adaptation
How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Association of Trypanolytic ApoL1 Variants with Kidney Disease in African-Americans. Same subject as a paper I linked to a few days ago. The fact that they came out around the same date and overlap so much in topicality is a window into the competitive aspect of science.
Polyandry increases offspring viability and mother productivity but does […]
The Price of Altruism
A week ago I reviewed The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. As I noted in the review, many individuals who are of interest to the core readership of this weblog make significant appearances in The Price of Altruism, John Maynard Smith and W. D. Hamilton most prominently. […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Patrimony and the Evolution of Risk-Taking. Possible reason that organisms “mix it up” in behavioral morphs.
John Zogby’s Cri de Coeur. Creative destruction in the polling business. What is bad for producers is often good for consumers.
‘More poor’ in India than Africa. Concentrated in the “Deep North”. The social underdevelopment of the subcontinent as a whole […]
Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something.
I think knowledge of many languages […]
ScienceBlogs has good blogs
I don’t have real value to add on the ScienceBlogs controversy. The only thing I want to mention is that there are some nascent superstar weblogs on that network which aren’t big names, yet, but perhaps will be. You can miss them coming in via the front page because they don’t crank out 10-15 posts […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem. Bora Zivkovic is leaving ScienceBlogs, and has a very long retrospective. The only portion I would take some issue with is the ambivalence toward the introduction of bloggers who focused mostly on science and less on politics. Bora says: “In this effort to dilute politico-religious content […]
Genome-wide association for newbies
It looks like Genomes Unzipped has their own Mortimer Adler, with an excellent posting, How to read a genome-wide association study. For those outside the biz I suspect that #4, replication, is going to be the easiest. In the early 2000s a biologist who’d been in the business for a while cautioned about reading too […]
Social and individual behavior genetics
I believe it was Bryan Caplan who introduced me to the analogy of a child’s personality being like a rubber band; parents, in particular adoptive parents, can twist and pull a child in particular directions so long as the child is under their direction, but once the child leaves the home the rubber band “snaps […]
More Jews, fewer markers
At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a […]
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Brain Size Associated With Longevity in Mammals. Doesn’t necessarily entail causation in one particular direction.
A Model for Transgenerational Imprinting Variation in Complex Traits. Easy to conceive of how these sorts of scientific models could be leveraged in public policy discussions.
The Evolutionary Case For Monogamy? Ctd One issue with eliding the distinction between the is and […]
Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe
A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
In Defense of Difference. If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn’t the article written in Eyak? I find the paeans to linguistic and cultural diversity tiresome and knee-jerk. In 1820 there was a relatively wide range of diversity of views in regards to slavery. No longer today. Today the diversity in attitudes toward legal […]
“The Inheritors”
I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it […]