Shellfish & the human bottleneck
How shellfish saved the human race:Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals–just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our…
Settlers, Slaves & Immigrants
A few weeks ago I referenced Campbell Gibson’s paper, The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population, which estimated that ~1990 50% of the population of the United States could be attributed to those enum…
What Heritability is Not
Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me t…
Who argues the most from authority?
Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following:Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Div…
New “old format”
The old format is back. But without the customization. I’ll do that later when I have time….
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The “new format”
The old theme broke on update. So I swapped in a random format. I’ve switched to the generic WP theme for now. Will try and get the old format back soon.
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Carbs & ancestry
Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry:Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were …
Monkeys & language
The paper is out, Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Nicholas Wade and Ed Yong review the evidence. One of the issues is that chimps don’t seem to have syntax, so how can a monkey? But since domesticated …
More Jewish Genetics
Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. I posted on it at ScienceBlogs. Nothing too new.
Food stamps and the importance of *doing something*
At Gene Expression I recently put up a series of posts relating to food stamps. For example, the correlates of food stamp utilization by county. I’m really skeptical of the ubiquity of food stamp usage. There are vast swaths of the United States where the majority of children benefit from food stamps. Some statistical analysis […]
The Mating Mouth
Gingival Transcriptome Patterns During Induction and Resolution of Experimental Gingivitis in Humans:A relatively small subset (11.9%) of the immune response genes analyzed by array was transiently activated in response to biofilm overgrowth, suggestin…
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Does the family matter for adult IQ?
A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as…
Does the family matter for adult IQ?
A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as…
Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain
Peter Frost on Roman Britain:Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the…
Technical difficulties
There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can al…
Finding the missing heritability
In a recent special issue of The Economist magazine, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico writes that there is a “looming crisis in human genetics”. Setting aside a number of mistakes Miller makes, a core truth he r…
Religious identity vs. religious activity (and God is not back!)
One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down…