John Hawks has a piece in Slate critiquing the recent scientific genealogy trend. Congrats for John for going "mainstream," and kudos for Slate to contributing something substantive to the discourse. And I've noted before, most of the people taking the tests won't find out anything they don't know....
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First of all, I owe y'all an apology for the radio silence. Somehow this month I've felt a deep need for some quiet, rest and offlineness. It was quite an autumn here - it started with the destruction of Irene and Lee (and dealing with those disasters are still a major part of life in our…
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I've said it before, but I'll say it again: everything you need to know about movement conservatives, you can learn by watching creationists (and admittedly, there's substantial overlap between the two groups). Think about creationists, and then consider this column by Neal Gabler:
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No, this doesn't have Flash or a camera either. Nice text resolution, though...This post is long overdue. It has now been over two weeks since ScienceOnline'10 and the withdrawal symptoms (along with the SciPlague and jet-lag) have now subsided. I've already talked about how much I enjoyed…
The reason that the racial admixture tests aren't very exciting for the great majority of Slate readers who are white is that Most white Americans are over 95% white, and thus their nonwhite proportions are down in the margin of error for the test. For example, if the test reports that you are 98% Caucasian and 2% American Indian then you can be assured of, well, not much. You might have had a few Indian ancestors, or that might be an error caused by Siberian genes migrating into Europe, or who knows what else. So, the reason that racial admixture tests tend to be not very exciting for white Americans is because, in contrast to what we're constantly being lectured, white Americans aren't very admixed at all.