razib
Posts by this author
February 28, 2008
John Hawks as a long post on the kerfuffle over "good" science blogging. I think John is right to emphasize the importance of search engine traffic for "specialist" posts; there's a significant long tail effect here.
February 27, 2008
Many are quoting this from an editorial by William F. Buckley Jr.:
"The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The…
February 27, 2008
The Audacious Epigone crunches the Pew Religion Survey and comes up with some more insights....
February 27, 2008
I saw this paper in Nature Genetics, Disruption of P2RY5, an orphan G protein-coupled receptor, underlies autosomal recessive woolly hair:
The genetic determinants of hair texture in humans are largely unknown. Several human syndromes exist in which woolly hair comprises a part of the phenotype;…
February 27, 2008
Parallel Selection on TRPV6 in Human Populations (Open Access):
...The selective footprints, however, are significantly differentiated between non-African populations and estimated to be younger than an ancestral population of non-Africans. The possibility of a single selection event occurring in…
February 26, 2008
In the comments to my post, Why brown people are midgets, a reader pointed me to this paper, which tabulates and analyzes some data from the 1960s for males. There isn't anything too surprising in the data set; Punjabis are tall compared to non-Punjabis, higher castes are taller than lower castes…
February 25, 2008
John Hawks has commentary on a new paper, A genome-wide signature of positive selection in ancient and recent invasive expansions of the honey bee Apis mellifera. John's point is that evolutionary dynamics are evolutionary dynamics. I'm sure as a species which spans multiple continents and all…
February 25, 2008
Despite the fact that the mainstream media likes to write a lot of stories how religious revival in the United States one of the great unreported facts of the last 15 years is the rise of the proportion of Americans who are not affiliating with any religion. The reason this isn't reported much is…
February 24, 2008
Well, sort of. I'm reading Henry Kamen's Empire: How Spain Became a World Power. Kamen is no Charles C. Mann, his story isn't 1491. For him the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas were haphazard affairs driven more by entrepreneurial intent than religious zeal or Spanish patriotism; his lens is…
February 23, 2008
I'm 5 feet 8 inches tall. 1.73 meters. In the United States that's somewhat on the short side, most of the charts suggest I'm around the 30th percentile for white men. Of course, I'm not white. In any case, though I'm on the short side for the typical American male, I'm a giant in my family.…
February 23, 2008
...yes, true. On a typical single locus (on some loci, such as SLC24A5, most of the variation is between groups). But that doesn't mean that you can't use genetics to differentiate population clusters. Here are 938 individuals (the points) from 51 world populations (the color of the points)…
February 23, 2008
A new paper came out in Science this week, Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation, that's getting some media play. The second-to-last author is L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and the general combination of means and ends on display in The History and Geography of…
February 22, 2008
In my post below, Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?, I derived some conclusions from data which suggests that different religious groups in the United States have different IQs and/or academic aptitudes. The data are not particularly surprising, as some noted the class biases of…
February 22, 2008
(if you don't see Hebrew in the title please change "Character Encoding" to "Unicode").
February 20, 2008
I haven't had time to read them, but John Hawks already commented:
A flush of papers this week (two today in Nature, one tomorrow in Science) describe new analyses of SNPs across the genome. Two of the papers sample SNPs in global samples numbering more than 500 individuals.
...and Yann Klimentidis.
February 20, 2008
A few days ago I noted that smart people believe in evolution. And stupid people do not. Inductivist looked at the IQ scores in the GSS for whites and this is what he found for various religions:
Mean IQ of whites from General Social Survey by religious affiliation
Episcopalian
109.9…
February 18, 2008
Half Sigma is mining the GSS to try and understand the correlates of acceptance of the fact of evolution. He notes:
Of course it's not surprising that smarter people are more likely to believe in evolution, but the difference is pretty extraordinary. Only 15% of people with Wordsum 10 disbelieve…
February 18, 2008
A week ago I offered my own theory as to why 3rd and 4th cousin pairings in Iceland have been so fertile historically. Now, this from John Hawks, For maximum fertility, marry more than 20 km from your birthplace. John says:
This study isn't orthogonal to the Iceland cousin study, but it adds…
February 17, 2008
'I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam,' says Holland's rising political star:
A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an ideology,'…
February 16, 2008
When the adaptive acceleration story hit the wires I started wondering if population size wasn't the only parameter that might have changed in the past 10,000 years. To make it short, perhaps a small-world network model is more much accurate now with the rise of complex societies (the complexity…
February 16, 2008
If you enjoyed William D. Hamilton week, I highly recommend Lee Alan Dugtakin's books. The Imitation Factor is a book length exposition on research which shows how many organisms use socially embedded information in making their decisions; if you want to understand the utility of conformity it's…
February 15, 2008
Very cool paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders (Open Access):
The human species inhabits a wide geographical range encompassing a diversity of climates, and adaptation to these climates likely played an important role in shaping genetic and phenotypic…
February 14, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And so with the completion of the 7th chapter the first half, book I of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, ends. From this point on we shift from history of science to science proper. At over 1,300 pages of narrative prose (add index, bibliography, etc.,…
February 14, 2008
I did the Project Implicit Presidential Candidate IAT. Results below the fold....
February 13, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Chapter 6 of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was short. Yes, you read that right, this was a short chapter! It was only 38 pages, but it was also one of the most readable and fast paced. Additionally, Stephen Jay Gould told me things I didn't know…
February 13, 2008
I stumbled upon Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity at the bookstore. I don't have time to read it right now, but I thought I'd point to it since I'm sure some readers would be interested. Accuse me of being excessively Whiggish if you must, but it just reiterates that Creationism doesn't…