razib
Posts by this author
November 25, 2009
The New York Times has an article on cousin marriage that's up. Here's some important bits:
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her "cusband," proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not…
November 25, 2009
Last week I pointed to numbers on evolution and the Muslim world. The New York Times has an article up about the conference which inspired my investigation into that topic. The reporter focuses on the rote learning and creativity as the factors behind a lack of knowledge or understanding of…
November 25, 2009
The state of China has 1/5 of humanity within its borders, so it's genetic structure is of interest. It is obviously important for medical reasons to clarify issues of population structure so that disease susceptibility among the Han is well characterized, in particular with the heightened medical…
November 24, 2009
A new paper in PLoS ONE, Evaluation of Group Genetic Ancestry of Populations from Philadelphia and Dakar in the Context of Sex-Biased Admixture in the Americas, doesn't add much to what we know. They looked at a several hundred individuals who are self-identified as African American and European…
November 24, 2009
Since The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago many articles on evolution are seeing the light of day today. Normally I'm all in favor of this, I ♥ evolution. But it also means that woolly thinking is put out there as conventional wisdom as journalists simply act as stenographers for any…
November 23, 2009
In medical news which won't be surprising to anyone, Ethnic Variation in Fat and Lean Body Mass and the Association with Insulin Resistance:
Objective: Our objective was to compare total body fat to lean mass ratio (F:LM) in Aboriginal, Chinese, European, and South Asian individuals with…
November 23, 2009
FuturePundit points me to a new paper on the Toba explosion, Environmental impact of the 73 ka Toba super-eruption in South Asia:
The cooling effects of historic volcanic eruptions on world climate are well known but the impacts of even bigger prehistoric eruptions are still shrouded in mystery.…
November 23, 2009
Cannibalism is a controversial topic. It is routine for particular societies to accuse "barbarians", enemies, or evil mythological figures, of cannibalism. When it comes to the archaeological record some skeptics have claimed that like "sacred objects" too often human remains found in peculiar…
November 22, 2009
National Geographic has an interesting piece of ethnographic travel writing up on the Hadza of Tanzania. The Hadza are one of the few remaining hunter-gather populations in the world, and their language is an isolate which has clicks. There's a bit too much "noble savage" archetype loaded into the…
November 22, 2009
I found this SNL sketch about an Obama/Jintao press conference very funny.
November 21, 2009
Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith…
November 21, 2009
No, this isn't about intellectual property issues and piracy. Whole Genome Distribution and Ethnic Differentiation of Copy Number Variation in Caucasian and Asian Populations:
Although copy number variation (CNV) has recently received much attention as a form of structure variation within the human…
November 20, 2009
Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America:
Although the North American megafaunal extinctions and the formation of novel plant communities are well-known features of the last deglaciation, the causal relationships between these phenomena…
November 18, 2009
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been…
November 18, 2009
I actually saw this SNL Digital Short parody of the Twilight movie trailer before I saw the real one on YouTube.
Make sure to watch the real thing after the parody, makes it way funnier.
November 18, 2009
The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography:
...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny,…
November 18, 2009
In the post below I pointed to an article which claimed:
It's hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world's Muslim countries, but it's definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked…
November 17, 2009
There was recently a conference on evolution in Egypt. Some interesting numbers:
Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true". This stand…
November 17, 2009
The relationship between language families and historical population genetics has a long history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries anthropologists were wont to substitute and synthesize the connections discerned in linguistic relationships with those of presumed biological affinities. This…
November 16, 2009
Changes in the world of personal genomics. Dan MacArthur has the details on 23andMe changing up its offerings, perhaps signalling that the money gush is long over. And deCode is finally dead. Of course, just because the .com bubble burst doesn't mean that the internet is no longer a part of our…
November 16, 2009
This discussion between Michael Specter & Chris Mooney pointed me to an interesting new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Instead of Global Warming or Creationism, Specter addresses less pervasively disputatious…
November 15, 2009
'2012' Opening Earns $65 Million:
It is rare for a movie not based on a pre-existing brand, franchise or hit novel to deliver such robust results. Sony said "2012," with a budget of $200 million, had the highest worldwide opening ever for an original movie.
November 14, 2009
Peter Suderman on 2012, the stupid new film based on the stupid 2012 phenomenon:
And with its never-ending parade of glorious, ludicrous, and utterly improbable catastrophes, it more or less succeeds. 2012 is the sort of movie so aggressively hyperbolic and devoutly over-the-top that it makes…
November 13, 2009
John Emerson points me to some interesting data crunching over at Open Left. The diarist, "dreaminonempty," is analyzing the past few years' election results against demographic variables. What's there not to like? Though I do think the perspective is a bit too The Emerging Democratic Majority. Yes…
November 13, 2009
First, in The New Republic, Malcolm Gladwell's Secret Of Success:
The first sentence here is a classically Gladwellian assertion about what the rest of us think. The rest of the paragraph consists of, more or less, made up numbers and figures which Gladwell claims constitute a "rule". Seriously,…
November 13, 2009
Two Are Charged With Helping Madoff Falsify Records:
Two computer programmers who worked for Bernard L. Madoff's brokerage firm were arrested on Friday on criminal charges of helping perpetuate his long-running Ponzi scheme.
The two men -- Jerome O'Hara of Malvern, N.Y., and George Perez of East…
November 13, 2009
Dynamic of the Cats as some commentary on the LCROSS landing the moon. The "big news" is the very high confidence now that one can put on the proposition that the moon does have water. Since humans are mostly water by weight, this is very important when assessing the practical difficulties of…
November 12, 2009
Greg Laden vs. Matt Springer. Here are some Nidal Hasan headlines (via Steve).