razib | August 6, 2007Stumbled upon this survey from Britain which shows that 'Asians' are the most averse to interracial relationships. I put Asian in quotes because that means something different on the other side of the pond then in the USA; here Asian is a catchall group with East Asians as the most representative perception and South Asians as outliers. In the UK Asian is almost totally synonymous with South Asian, and Chinese have their own classification. The survey results are not particularly surprising, British Asians are the most reluctant to admit the possibility of interracial relationships.…
razib | August 5, 2007Update III: John Hawks comments.
Update II: Here is the paper. The abstract:
A common assumption in the evolutionary scenario of the first Eurasian hominin populations is that they all had an African origin. This assumption also seems to apply for the Early and Middle Pleistocene populations, whose presence in Europe has been largely explained by a discontinuous flow of African emigrant waves. Only recently, some voices have speculated about the possibility of Asia being a center of speciation. However, no hard evidence has been presented to support this hypothesis. We present evidence from…
razib | August 5, 2007Gene For Left-handedness Identified in ScienceDaily. The original paper is LRRTM1 on chromosome 2p12 is a maternally suppressed gene that is associated paternally with handedness and schizophrenia:
Left-right asymmetrical brain function underlies much of human cognition, behavior and emotion. Abnormalities of cerebral asymmetry are associated with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. The molecular, developmental and evolutionary origins of human brain asymmetry are unknown. We found significant association of a haplotype upstream of the gene LRRTM1...with a quantitative measure…
razib | August 4, 2007In many parts of the Muslim world people claim to be descendants of the Prophet. Generally these are Sayyids:
Sayyid (سÙد) (plural Saadah) is an honorific title that is given to males accepted as descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad through his grandsons, Hassan and Husayn, who were the sons of his daughter Fatima Zahra and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Are the people who claim to be Sayyids really Sayyids? If they share common descent from Ali, their Y chromosomal lineage should be the same. Or, more likely assuming a small proportion of infidelity per generation you will have one…
razib | August 4, 2007I saw The Bourne Ultimatum today. Good movie, only checked the time once (10 minutes before the film ended). Julia Stiles looks totally Asian with black hair.
razib | August 3, 2007Note: I got this article via AJHG's RSS. It doesn't seem to have gone live on the site so there might be temporary problems accessing the link.
Evidence of Still-Ongoing Convergence Evolution of the Lactase Persistence T-13910 Alleles in Humans:
A single-nucleotide variant, C/T-13910, located 14 kb upstream of the lactase gene (LCT), has been shown to be completely correlated with lactase persistence (LP) in northern Europeans. Here, we analyzed the background of the alleles carrying the critical variant in 1,611 DNA samples from 37 populations. Our data show that the T-13910 variant is found…
razib | August 2, 2007So I go in and get the exact same coffee at a particular coffee shop usually. Today I wanted a juice. So I ask for the juice, and the barista gets me some coffee (the usually mild brew) and then charges me for the juice. After a few moments, he realizes that he hasn't gotten me the juice, he got me the coffee. The coffee machine is to his right, the juice to his left. He heard me ask for the juice, and it was internalized so he knew what to press to charge me after he made the coffee. Now, I was going to ask why he was making me coffee, but there were other people waiting for stuff and…
razib | August 1, 2007In biological anthropology there is a Grandmother Hypothesis as an explanation for why adult human females live so long after their reproduction ceases, and, why menopause occurs in the first place (male fertility tapers off over time, while women undergo a concerted physiological change which shuts down their ability to reproduce). The basic idea is that beyond a particular age women can increase their own genetic fitness to a greater extent by investing in their daughters reproductive output.
The idea is pretty easy to illustrate. Imagine an allele, M, which induces menopause in an…
razib | August 1, 2007There has been a lot of comment on the blogosphere about eugenics. From the Right, Ross Douthat here, here & here, from the Left Ezra Klein here, here & here, Kevin Drum here & Henry Farrell here. And from the libertarian angle the Elf here. Since a few of my posts were referenced I added a bit here & here. I think I'm pretty clear about "eugenics," and biological technologies. I'm not a "bio-utopian," but I think the future is coming and we need to grapple with it. I'm not scared of the word eugenics, but accept that the new biological technologies and choices will have…
razib | July 31, 2007As Kevin Beck points out Google News dropped ScienceBlogs.com, but kept the Discovery Institute's blog. If you have issues this with particular pair of decisions, tell Google.
razib | July 31, 2007Gene Duplications Give Clues to Humanness:
All told, the researchers found more than 4000 genes that showed lineage-specific changes in copy number, with the numbers steadily increasing over evolutionary time. Humans, for example, only had 84 genes with increased copy numbers over those of our closet relatives. In contrast, lemurs, which have evolved for 60 million years, have 1180 genes with extra copies. "This is further evidence that genomic differences between humans and other primates is far, far more complex than we originally imagined they might be," says Ajit Varki, who studies human/…
razib | July 30, 2007Zack talks about his personal Dell Hell. I took had a Inspiron 5100, and it exhibited all the issues he has noted.
razib | July 30, 2007Carl Zimmer has a fascinating profile of Martin Nowak, whose work I have talked about before. Carl saves the best for last:
Dr. Nowak sometimes finds his scientific colleagues astonished when he defends religion. But he believes the astonishment comes from a misunderstanding of the roles of science and religion. "Like mathematics, many theological statements do not need scientific confirmation. Once you have the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, it's not like we have to wait for the scientists to tell us if it's right. This is it."
razib | July 30, 2007 Were Neanderthals our enemies or lovers?:
One difficulty in working out how these ancient humans rubbed along is that there is a lack of clear evidence of close encounters. That changed two years ago when a paper was published by Prof Paul Mellars, of Cambridge University, and his student Brad Gravina, suggesting the two kinds of human lived together at Grotte des Fées at Châtelperron in France.
The study was criticised but the Cambridge team published a detailed rebuttal. "The importance of the new paper is that it confirms at least 2,000 years of coexistence/overlap between Neanderthals…
razib | July 30, 2007Steven Pinker explores The Genealogy Craze in America in TNR. He covers most of the angles, and expands a bit out from a laser-like focus on scientific genealogy toward the relevance of relatedness in the evolution of social behavior.
razib | July 30, 2007Circumcision doesn't reduce sensation: study:
The study, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, looked at a group of 40 men, half of them circumcised. Using sensory testing, the men were monitored at two points on the penis and the forearm while viewing erotic films. Thermal imaging was used to measure sexual arousal.
I think one can criticize this study on the relative coarseness of measure, after all, registering qualia is not a trivial task. Nevertheless, do note that in my previous comment on circumcision I did suggest that "pleasure" might be renormalized by the brain. Remember…
razib | July 28, 2007Ancient and continuing Darwinian selection on insulin-like growth factor II in placental fishes:
...We found that IGF2 is subject to positive Darwinian selection coincident with the evolution of placentation in fishes, with particularly strong selection among lineages that have evolved placentation recently. Positive selection is also detected along ancient lineages of placental livebearing fishes, suggesting that selection on IGF2 function is ongoing in placental species. Our observations provide a rare example of natural selection acting in synchrony at the phenotypic and molecular level.…