razib
Posts by this author
September 28, 2009
Darren Naish has the full story. In a bygone age without scientists who...know stuff, these sorts of finds would become the germ of myth. As it is we cobble together a bunch of banal facts and likelihoods into something far less exciting, but more likely to b a true description of reality.
September 28, 2009
The past 10 years have seen a lot of ups & downs in the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) hypothesis, which suggests some veracity to the Biblical narrative whereby the priestly caste status of the Jewish people is passed down patrilineally from Aaron, the brother of Moses. But could there be…
September 27, 2009
Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to…
September 27, 2009
I took the Fst values from Reconstructing Indian population history, and decided to plot them in different ways. Remember that Fst measures the proportion of between population variance, the variation which can't be accounted for by the normal variation you'd find within a population. So it's a…
September 27, 2009
A geologist, Suvrat Kher, has a very good post on the recent paper on Indian genetics. He concludes:
The Indian Press has made a hash of the finding. For example they have only reported those parts of the study that deal with the kinship among Indians and have stressed that castes and tribes cannot…
September 26, 2009
My post below elicited a lot of response. One thing to point out though, which I want to emphasize: a higher proportion of smart people go to college now than in the past. How can this be? First, let's review the change in distributions of intelligence of those with college degrees (or higher) and…
September 25, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson of Primate Diaries has a piece up for Seed, where he reviews Franz De Waal's newest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Also a post, Misunderstanding Dawkins: The Role of Metaphor in Science is worth a read. I'll respond to Michael at some point in…
September 25, 2009
John Hawks & I did a diavlog for Science Saturday. We decided it would be appropriate to synchronize with dark-rimmed glasses. Also, Mr. Parrot kind of decided it was an opportune time to make a huge racket by swinging his perch against the cage repeatedly. Just so you know....
(I put it below…
September 25, 2009
I made a comment earlier that college students, and by inference college graduates, are not as intelligent as they used to be on average. I made that comment based on what I'd seen in the General Social Survey. What I had seen was a decline in average WORDSUM score over the years (WORDSUM being a…
September 24, 2009
A reader pointed me to an article, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Some of the authors of the paper I reviewed today (actually, I wrote the post yesterday and put it in schedule) had some interesting things to say:
The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A…
September 24, 2009
Mugabe denies blame for Zimbabwe woes. I recall listening to a debate recently via Planet Money on reforming the banking system. A lobbyist for the big banks made the case that our principles of free enterprise, initiative and and flexibility, letting the market work, meant that the government…
September 24, 2009
A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians:
The driving force behind the…
September 24, 2009
A few months ago a friend tipped me off to the fact that David Reich was going to publish a paper about the genetics of Indians which he ascertained was going to model these populations as hybrids between "Europeans and Andaman Islanders." The paper is out, and my friend was roughly right.…
September 23, 2009
From American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population:
"Belonging" refers to people who self-identify as "X." For example, someone who asserts that they are an atheist. "Belief" refers to the content of one's avowed beliefs, as opposed to label. Someone who asserts that they "do not…
September 23, 2009
Being raised in a single-parent household, especially when a woman is head of household, puts you at higher risk for all sorts of negative personal outcomes, right? If that data is all you know, yes. But as they say, correlation does not equal causation. But the assumptions of causation come out…
September 22, 2009
I watched this rather bizarre Kirk Cameron video today. He's promoting a plan to distribute Origin of Species with what seems to be a scurrilous preface to college students. His argument is that college students need to know the truth about evolution. I don't know how far he'll get, but I suspect…
September 22, 2009
Seems to be the upshot of this finding, I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others:
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the…
September 22, 2009
Bing Keeps Gaining Ground:
For August, Bing's share of the American search market came in at 9.3 percent, up from 8.9 percent in July and 8.4 percent in June. Perhaps more importantly, Bing's growth didn't come at the expense of Yahoo (YHOO), which held steady at 19.3 percent. For the first time,…
September 22, 2009
Sometimes I wonder if the period between the publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes and The Journey of Man, roughly from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, will be seen as a golden age for historical population genetics in hindsight. A few weeks ago I pointed to new data based on DNA…
September 21, 2009
Two papers in PNAS this week.
Human origins: Out of Africa:
Our species, Homo sapiens, is highly autapomorphic (uniquely derived) among hominids in the structure of its skull and postcranial skeleton. It is also sharply distinguished from other organisms by its unique symbolic mode of cognition.…
September 21, 2009
Lawmakers' inside advantage to trading:
A year ago this week Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke dashed to Capitol Hill. They hastily met with a small group of congressional leaders to tell them that the country was teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe.
Paulson…
September 19, 2009
Poking around the CensusScope site I found some interesting maps to compare & contrast. Here are the frequency of "nuclear families":
No big surprises here. Utah & the Heartland have a high proportion of households composed of nuclear families. The Black Belt, not as much.
How about…
September 19, 2009
This is a weird little fact which I've known for a while, but I thought readers might get a kick out of it. What is the longest-lived vertebrate individual which we have records to the extent that we can confirm with a high degree of certitude? You can guess the age and the rough species, but click…
September 19, 2009
p-ter points out that selection of model organisms can shape the path of scientific research because of the very nature of model organisms. Normative considerations in science are pretty obvious when you look at the set of disciplines; there's a whole field of biological anthropology which studies…
September 18, 2009
Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States:
Increased religiosity in residents of states in the U.S. strongly predicted a higher teen birth rate, with r = 0.73 (p<0.0005). Religiosity correlated negatively with median household income, with r = -0.66, and income correlated negatively…
September 18, 2009
The Nightmare Of Regulatory Reform:
...the SEC and the CFTC, two agencies that have fought hard to stay apart while the products they regulate grow more and more intertwined. Both Republicans and Democrats agree the two should become one, but former House Financial Services Committee chairman Mike…