razib | February 27, 2010Check out Dr. Dan MacArthur's assessment of the Pacific Biosciences presentation at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference. Also check out Genetic Inferences take on AGBT (yes, they're really original with catchy blog names at the Sanger Institute!). In any case, a friend of mine was raving about Pacific Biosciences a few months ago, so I assumed it would blow up soon.
razib | February 27, 2010The Genetics of Human Adaptation: Hard Sweeps, Soft Sweeps, and Polygenic Adaptation:
There has long been interest in understanding the genetic basis of human adaptation. To what extent are phenotypic differences among human populations driven by natural selection? With the recent arrival of large genome-wide data sets on human variation, there is now unprecedented opportunity for progress on this type of question. Several lines of evidence argue for an important role of positive selection in shaping human variation and differences among populations. These include studies of comparative…
razib | February 26, 2010For a hot-button issue which is arguably the social lodestar for American culture-wars people make a lot of unfounded assertions and assumptions about abortion. For example, poking around the GSS data set it's pretty evident that there isn't a sex difference in regards to the legal status of abortion. What I have found is that there may be an intensity difference between men an women among the educated pro-choice segment of the population, which might give pro-choice women the impression that there is a general difference (as people tend to extrapolate inordinately from their social milieu).…
razib | February 26, 2010US routs Finland 6-1, will play for hockey gold. It's really not even fair; this is a nation which was oppressed by Swedes for nearly a thousand years. I really hope those losers beat Slovakia so we can face them for the gold. Most of the time we don't have to think about them, except in the areas of humor and hockey.
razib | February 25, 2010Social Cognition in Dogs, or How did Fido get so smart?. This you know:
Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you're pointing to (whether it's a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well.
Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than…
razib | February 25, 2010Citing shame, danger, one Madoff seeks name change:
Stephanie Madoff, who is married to Madoff's son Mark, has asked New York Supreme Court for permission to change her last name to Morgan and also, according to local media reports, made similar requests for her two young children.
razib | February 25, 2010Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, Yes, We Have a PhD Glut... Which is interesting, because it isn't has if getting a doctorate is financially lucrative. Though getting a medical doctorate is financially lucrative. Perhaps the medical profession has the right idea, control labor supply?* Right idea for medical doctors at least....
* At least the medical profession hasn't opened the floodgate and enabled the overproduction of those with MDs who will never practice the profession and so be saddled with a lot of debt, which is the case with the legal profession (and for those who do pass the…
razib | February 25, 2010The New York Times has an article attempting to clarify complex political tensions cross-linked with religious identity (or not), In an Iraqi City, the Real Ballot Contest Is for Shiite Leadership. The author, Anthony Shadid, states:
The contest bears down on one of the unanswered questions in Iraq's tortured narrative of invasion, occupation, war and recovery. The country today stands as the only Arab state in which Shiite Muslims rule. Nasiriya is a stage, rendered small, where several Shiite currents, from street movements to venerable parties, are now vying for ascendancy.
That's not…
razib | February 24, 2010Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent:
The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal…
razib | February 24, 2010Arboreality has allowed for the evolution of increased longevity in mammals:
The evolutionary theory of aging predicts that species will experience delayed senescence and increased longevity when rates of extrinsic mortality are reduced. It has long been recognized that birds and bats are characterized by lower rates of extrinsic mortality and greater longevities than nonvolant endotherms, presumably because flight reduces exposure to terrestrial predators, disease, and environmental hazards. Like flight, arboreality may act to reduce extrinsic mortality, delay senescence, and increase…
razib | February 24, 2010Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable:
Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face…
razib | February 24, 2010The IGF1 small dog haplotype is derived from Middle Eastern gray wolves:
Background
A selective sweep containing the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) gene is associated with size variation in domestic dogs. Intron 2 of IGF1 contains a SINE element and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) found in all small dog breeds that is almost entirely absent from large breeds. In this study, we surveyed a large sample of grey wolf populations to better understand the ancestral pattern of variation at IGF1 with a particular focus on the distribution of the small dog haplotype and its relationship to…
razib | February 23, 2010Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier
I think "Karen the single mom" ad does a better job of selling Denmark:
razib | February 23, 2010A few months ago I read Empires of the Silk Road, where the author makes the argument that contrary to the common perception of Inner Asians as uncouth barbarians who were inimical to civilization as we understand it, in fact these populations were critical to the emergence of particular civilized values, as well as their role as facilitators of the spread of particular ideas and technologies. The latter is addressed in a somewhat overly enthusiastic fashion in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, but the point seems to be robust. The transmission of chariots and horse culture to…
razib | February 23, 2010Papers Link Husband of Professor to '93 Threat:
The husband of the neuroscientist accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville told a witness he wanted to harm a Harvard professor who was later mailed a pipe bomb in 1993, according to newly released federal documents.
James Anderson Jr., the husband of Amy Bishop, wanted to "shoot," "stab" or "strangle" the professor, Paul Rosenberg, according to documents released Tuesday by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Dr. Bishop had worked for Dr. Rosenberg in the neurobiology lab of Children's…
razib | February 23, 2010Two posts for your consideration.
On the Less Wrong weblog, Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych. I am not one to make blanket dismissals of "evolutionary psychology." But, there are structural problems with the strong incentives toward generating hypotheses at the equipoise of novelty and intuitive plausibility. In other words, much of the evo-psych which penetrates the broader public mindspace is driven by demand-side forces.
Over at EconLog Bryan Caplan has a post, Born Gay, where the newly famous Ryan Sorba is shown to be pretty close to a total behavior genetics denialist. Until…
razib | February 22, 2010For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run the Gene Expression Classic website on Blogger. So I've switched over to WP. Please update your RSS feeds if you are subscribed to that blog:
http://www.gnxp.com/wp/feed