Razib Khan

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  • Don’t genetically profile yourself just yet…perhaps

    Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post: Within an hour of this story’s publication, the…

  • Liberal Creationists Are Not Very Intelligent

    A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM…

  • Malnutrition now, arthritis later?

    Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition: “As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It…

  • Daily Data Dump – Tuesday

    Poutine. It sounds gross, and it looks gross. Apparently Canadians eat it. More on Tibet, demography and selection. John Hawks posts an exchange with Rasmus Nielsen, who did a lot of the statistical analysis on the recent Tibet & altitude papers. Read the whole thing, but this part was funny: “I certainly now understand why…

  • Diplomacy among the aliens

    One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity…

  • How Lost Should Have Ended

    So I’ve never watched an episode of Lost. And I probably never will as people keep saying that the finale made following all those seasons kind of pointless. But could someone interpret the following video? I don’t get what’s so amusi…

  • Sometimes it just tastes good Felix

    The more you know, the better it tastes: People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world…. I agree that the “story”…

  • The Human Edge (on NPR)

    NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered). As a constructive criticism, I wonder…

  • Authenticity and the Fermi paradox

    I know that the simplest explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we’re the first intelligent technological life form in the universe. But thinking about Paul Bloom’s thesis that a sense of “authenticity” is necessary for pleasure made me wonder a bit more about the possibility that once intelligent life forms get to the point…

  • 7/5/2010 Open Thread

    I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which…

  • Who are you….

    Edmund Yong has rebooted the “Who are you?” meme. I’ll quote him: So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you…

  • Daily Data Dump – Monday

    Noting rejection rates for journals across disciplines (from 1967). A review of an old paper which shows that the natural sciences have higher acceptance rates of papers than softer fields. How does this align with the finding that softer fields have more “positive” results? I think part of the issue is that in more ideological…

  • British multiculturalism in action

    Family of ‘Harry Potter’ actress charged with threatening to kill her over boyfriend: The strict Muslim father and brother of “Harry Potter” actress Afshan Azad have been charged with threatening to kill her because she has a boyfriend. Azad, 22, fled the suburban English home she shared with her father, Abdul, 54, mother, Nilofar, and…

  • This time it’s different

    I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big…

  • Daily Data Dump – Friday

    Have a good 4th for those who live in the States. Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast? I’m not surprised that John Hawks has serious reservations about the population history of the model in the paper I reviewed below. Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society. I don’t mind the normatively directed…

  • Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high

    I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude: Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced…

  • Katz

  • More markers, or more populations?

    Here’s a letter to The American Journal of Human Genetics worth reading, Genetic Landscape of Eurasia and “Admixture” in Uyghurs: …In the papers…by Xu and Jin, the genetic structure of Uyghurs was described by 8150 ancestry-informative markers (AIMs). These markers estimated the admixture rate of the Uyghur population to be around 50% East Asian ancestry…

  • Very recent altitude adaptation in Tibet

    Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that…

  • Hamilton’s Rule vs. Increasing returns to cooperation

    If you have even a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will probably have heard of Hamilton’s Rule, a simple formal representation of the logic whereby a gene which favors altruism may spread through a population: rB > C, where r = coefficient of relatedness on the gene in question, B = benefit to those…

Razib Khan