razib | February 21, 2010There's apparently a game in this sport at the Olympics tonight. Canada is the favorite. Which is awesome, because if the USA loses, no one in the USA will care. But if the USA wins, we'll get to laugh at the Canadians. Don't lie, you know Canada is the country that keeps on giving in terms of humor.
Update: Yeah, you guys are funny. LOL.
razib | February 21, 2010Lost of discussion about Basques below. Some interesting examples which are less speculative.
Hungary = Language changes, genes do not
The intrusion of ethnic Magyars, and later the settlement of Kipchak Turks fleeing the Mongols, within Hungary is historically attested. Additionally, down to the Reformation there were isolated settlements of Turks among the Magyars which maintained their own linguistic tradition. But digging through the literature it is very difficult to find much genetic impact. Anatolian Turks are a milder case; eastern genetic contributions can be found, but it is the…
razib | February 20, 2010An interesting exchange in Nature on ways to conceptualize the evolution of virulence. First, Adaptation and the evolution of parasite virulence in a connected world:
Adaptation is conventionally regarded as occurring at the level of the individual organism, where it functions to maximize the individual's inclusive fitness...However, it has recently been argued that empirical studies on the evolution of parasite virulence in spatial populations show otherwise...In particular, it has been claimed that the evolution of lower virulence in response to limited parasite dispersal...provides proof…
razib | February 20, 2010From The Boston Globe, Ambition fueled a smoldering rage:
A friendship of sorts was kindled, based largely on a mutual interest in science. Over coffee and lunch, they would discuss Bishop's research and McCann's work in biotechnology.
Bishop never spoke of her husband or growing family.
During one meeting, Bishop listened patiently to McCann for a time before suggesting they switch topics.
"She said, 'That's very nice, Isabel, but can we talk about oxidation?' '' she recalled, with a chuckle. "That one moment in time encapsulated who Amy was. She just couldn't connect with people.''
I would…
razib | February 20, 2010Ruchira Paul points me to a blogger who's been digging through Bishop's recent published works, and there's a lot of fishy stuff in there. You have to read it to believe it. Here's the conclusion:
There is no question that Dr. Bishop is smart. But it also seems very evident that she suffers delusions of genuis. Far from establishing a record of accomplishment warranting the grant of tenure, since joining UAH Dr. Bishop took a long nap on her one true laurel -- her affiliation with Harvard .
Evidence strongly suggests that Dr. Bishop used her husband, her family and by all appearances the…
razib | February 20, 2010Covers all the major angles. Nice that there's a newspaper which can support this sort of reporting (on the other hand). Not surprising that Amy Bishop seems to have some history of delusions of grandeur, she's claiming that both she and her husband have an I.Q. of 180. That's 5.3 standard deviations above the mean. Assuming a normal distribution that's a 1 in 20 million probability. Of course the tails of the distribution are fatter beyond 2 standard deviations than expectation for I.Q., but at these really high levels (above 160) I'm skeptical that most tests are measuring anything real.
razib | February 17, 2010The language families of Europe fall into a few broad categories. There are the Indo-European languages, which include the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Celtic subgroups, along with Greek and Albanian. The Iranian languages and most of the languages of India are also Indo-European. Then there are the languages of Finland and Hungary, which are hypothesized to be of a broader Finno-Ugric family. Whatever the validity of this cluster, the relationship of Hungarian and Finnish to languages which are extant deep into Eurasia, beyond the Urals and into Siberia, are not disputed. Turkic and Semitic…
razib | February 17, 2010To the left I've juxtaposed the images of the four Bushmen males whose genomes were analyzed in the recent Nature paper and compared to Desmond Tutu. I've added to the montage a photo of a Swedish and Chinese man. The Nature paper looked at the HapMap data sets which had within them whites from Utah, northwest Europeans, and Chinese from Beijing, and compared these populations to the Bushmen and Desmond Tutu. One important point that this paper emphasized was that the rule-of-thumb that African populations have the most extant genetic diversity of all human groups, and that the Bushmen have…
razib | February 17, 2010Wow, the Amy Bishop post attracted a lot of comments. I've been hearing/reading a lot about Bishop's brushes with the law over the years over the past few days. One of the issues seems to be that she didn't have a traceable record, and that probably was one reason prosecutors were lenient in 2002 when she was charged with being verbally & physically abusive to another woman at an IHOP. This bit from a mechanic at a car dealership who was held up by Bishop in 1986 struck me:
"I yelled, 'What are you doing' and she screamed at me to put my hands up. So I put my hands up, " recalled…
razib | February 17, 2010There's a new paper out in Nature which details the genomes of several Bushmen, and how they relate to other humans, and one particular Bantu speaking individual, archbishop Desmond Tutu. It's open access, Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from southern Africa. I haven't read the whole thing, but it is probably best to check out Ed Yong's very thorough review first. Here's an interesting point Ed brings up:
Most surprising of all, many of their unique SNPs are actually fairly recent developments. The Bushmen are one of the oldest human groups on the planet and you might expect their genes to…
razib | February 16, 2010Lactase persistence results in the ability to break down the lactose sugar in milk as an adult, lactase being the enzyme which breaks down lactose. If one can not digest that sugar, and still consumes milk, then one exhibits the symptoms of lactose intolerance. Originally diagnosed as a disease it has come to light that 2/3 of the world's population is lactose intolerant, and, that this is probably the ancestral "wild type" (I would be interested if readers could name a mammal which exhibited lactase persistence aside from humans). Lactase persistence is a relatively new trait which emerged…
razib | February 16, 2010At my other blog 10 questions for Peter Turchin. Turchin is an ecologist-turned-quantitative historian.
razib | February 15, 2010Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint-St. Birgitta:
Saint Birgitta (Saint Bridget of Sweden) lived between 1303 and 1373 and was designated one of Europe's six patron saints by the Pope in 1999. According to legend, the skulls of St. Birgitta and her daughter Katarina are maintained in a relic shrine in Vadstena abbey, mid Sweden. The origin of the two skulls was assessed first by analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to confirm a maternal relationship. The results of this analysis displayed several differences between the two individuals, thus supporting an…
razib | February 15, 2010Dr. Daniel MacArthur reports on shenanigans in his homeland, Australian insurance company offers discounted genome scans to customers; read the fine print!:
A reader pointed me to this article in the Australian news: it appears that a major Australian insurance company, NIB, is planning to offer half-price genome scans from personal genomics company Navigenics to 5,000 of its customers.
The catch is in the fine print: those who take up the offer "may have to give the information to life insurance or superannuation providers", according to the article. In a letter to customers, the chief…
razib | February 15, 2010One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of the day it's not about everlasting fame, but the real world as it was and is and will be. Paradigm shifts are kind of like a box of new chocolates, you never know what new inferences will be generated. Thinking deeply again becomes a surprise.
In The New York Times John Noble Wildford has an…