Razib Khan

Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site

  • Christopher Beckwith against modernism

    A few months ago I reviewed Empire’s of the Silk. I focused on the historical scholarship, but Lorenzo Warby puts the spotlight on the more normatively charge jeremiad against “modernism” interlaced throughout the book. Share/Save

  • 10 questions for Peter Turchin

    Peter Turchin has appointments in ecology & evolution and mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of five books, three of which, Historical Dynamics, Secular Cycles and War and Peace and War, outline tests of models derived from the new field of cliodynamics. I have reviewed Historical Dynamics and War Peace and…

  • Small genetic effects do not preclude drug development

    Daniel MacArthur points me to a Newsweek article on the bankruptcy of Decode Genetics. The author describes (one of) Decode’s problems like this:The genetics of illness turned out to be more complex than researchers expected. At deCODE and elsewhere, t…

  • Social cycles

    An addendum to my comments on the posts on natalism. As I suggest below I think as a whole it is appropriate to model humans before 1800 as a conventional animal subject to Malthusian constraints. When a new crop (e.g., Champa rice, the potato) was introduced there would be a population increase, but that increase…

  • You need to know history to talk about history

    The New York Times Magazine has a long piece, How Christian Were the Founders?, which outlines the efforts of school board members of fundamentalist inclinations to shift the narrative about the founding of the American republic. In short, these activists would like children to understand that the United States was founded as a Christian nation…

  • Homo erectus and EDAR?

    In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has the following parenthetical aside about population variation in morphology in H. erectus:(H. erectus from China…had shovel-shaped incisor teeth not found in other populations) This stopped me dead in my track…

  • Low IQ correlated with cardiovascular disease?

    Second Only to Cigarette Smoking in Large Population Study:While lower intelligence scores — as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ — have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared …

  • Jersey Shore nickname

    What’s your Jersey Shore nickname? I like “The Prediction” for myself.

  • Books & guidance

    Read More Books!:If you really want to understand any issue more complex than Brad and Angelina’s marital status, there’s really no substitute for a book. Not instead of blogs and newspapers and Twitter, but in addition to them. So: read more books! Th…

  • Gene Expression Survey

    That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I’ll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don’t need to a…

  • Delayed childbearing & autism

    Independent and dependent contributions of advanced maternal and paternal ages to autism risk: Reports on autism and parental age have yielded conflicting results on whether mothers, fathers, or both, contribute to increased risk. We analyzed restricte…

  • Rand Paul

    A moderately sympathetic story about Rand Paul, who is running as the anti-establishment candidate in Kentucky. My bias, such that I have, is to look positively upon Paul’s run for Senate, mostly because I know that when I agree with a Paul they’ll actually stick to the stance they’re taking because they actually believe […]

  • Beautiful butterflies & localized adaptation

    Two new papers are out in PLoS Genetics which make inferences about adaptation using butterfly species which exhibit Mullerian mimicry. I’ll give the author summaries instead of the abstracts.Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of …

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky & Razib Khan on bloggingheads.tv

  • Hayek vs. Keynes

    You’ve probably watched the Hayek vs. Keynes rap by now:Am the only one who was a little weirded out by the incongruity of John Maynard Keynes kickin’ it with the honeys in the back of the limo? It isn’t as if he was exactly on the down-low. He was a f…

  • Language goes extinct, human race to follow….

    Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India:Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages – Bo – had come to an end….”It is generally believed that all Andamanese langu…

  • Ibn Khaldun In Our Time

    Ibn Khaldun on In Our Time. Excellent program. Khaldun’s assessment that the Mamluks of Egypt had developed a system of rule which was robust against the decay of asabiyyah was born out by 450 years of subsequent history (that is, until the liquidation…

  • …about those cheese-eating surrender monkeys

    France denies citizenship over veil: French officials have denied citizenship to a man because he allegedly forces his wife to wear a full Islamic veil, the immigration minister said Wednesday. “This individual imposes the full veil upon his wife, does not allow her the freedom to go and come as she pleases, and bans her…

  • “Synthetic associations” and sickle cell anemia

    Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…

  • Half Sigma’s flawed post on DTNBP1

    A while back, Mark and I were working on a comprehensive post which would try to tally the results of the various IQ-gene studies to see what they said about racial differences. We began this quest bright-eyed and hopeful that we would help contribute…

Razib Khan