razib | March 11, 2009Nine Mouths to Feed:
This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children -- each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart.
Reports of Henry's prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.'s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking.
Talk about a diverse genetic portfolio! So has there been a lot of…
razib | March 11, 2009No surprise that a reader points out that healthier areas seem to map onto "Blue" areas of the United States. But there is actually more to this than meets the eye: Are Republicans Healthier Than Democrats?:
In the International Journal of Epidemiology, S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write that, after controlling for age, sex, race, marital status, religious service attendance, highest educational degree, and total family income, Republicans were 25% less likely than Democrats to report being in poor health. They find a key component of this to be smoking: after controlling for that…
razib | March 11, 2009A few years ago I pointed to a paper which surveyed variation in health across the United States as a function of geography. Today Andrew Gelman points to a new map put out by the heath insurance industry. I've placed the two maps side by side below.
razib | March 11, 2009The Center For American Progress has a new report out profiling the ideological disposition of the American populace. It simply repeats the old finding that the United States prefers Left-liberal policies a la carte to a far greater extent than the label liberal. This is natural, the electorate tends to favor lower taxes and greater spending simultaneously. I can't but notice the similarity with atheism here; many more Americans adhere to the atheist position than are willing to call themselves atheists. But in the younger cohorts this disjunction seems less noticeable, so I wonder if much…
razib | March 11, 2009In my post below where I show that different groups accept free speech to different extents some asked if the fact that those with better vocabularies supported free speech could just be that they were college educated. To some extent this seems to be true. Here is the chart again of support for a racist being allowed to speak by vocabulary test score (0 out of 10 on the left, 10 out of 10 on the right).
Less than High School:
High School:
Some College:
College:
Graduate School:
There aren't too many with college & graduate educations who have vocab scores below 5 out of 10, ergo,…
razib | March 10, 2009The Next Targets in the Madoff Case:
One source said that eventually, many members of Madoff's family will either be indicted by the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York or cop a plea. "You have to look at the fact that Peter and [his daughter] Shana were compliance officers; they were supposed to look at all the statements to see if they were right," the source said. "Either they asked no questions, turned a blind eye, or they could not help but see the falsified trade tickets of blue-chip companies sent to clients."
razib | March 10, 2009One of the issues that often comes up when I report data which show that the young are more secular (or liberal) than the old is that people change with time. And age is presumed to correlate with greater religiosity and conservatism. I'll take politics off the table. The Inductivist suggests that the GSS doesn't indicate that the young become anymore religious with age. In other words, religiosity at age X is a very good predictor of religiosity at age X + n.
Christian Fundamentalist pollster George Barna observes the same in his surveys:
The research data showed that one pattern emerged…
razib | March 10, 2009At Genetic Future. As noted by Dr. MacArthur this is currently an exception to the rule when it comes to predicting traits from genes. This can come in handy when you have DNA samples from a crime scene and reconstructing the appearance of the perp.
Related: OCA2, the "blue eye gene".
razib | March 10, 2009There are several questions regarding speech which which have huge sample sizes in the GSS:
SPKRAC (Allow Racist to Speak), SPKHOMO (Allow Homosexual to Speak), SPKCOM (Allow Communist to Speak) and SPKATH (Allow Anti-Religionist to Speak) all have sample sizes of 53,000. This means that one can look for trends at a relatively granular scale. I decided to check how people lined up as a function of Age, belief in God, political views and intelligence (vocabulary). Lots of charts below.
A key:
1) Age goes from 18-89, left to right.
2) God goes from (left to right) atheist, to agnostic, to…
razib | March 10, 2009Vanity Fair has a long profile of Walter Noel's clan up right now. Noel, if you don't know, is the head of Fairfield Greenwich, which funneled billions into Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme. One of Noel's daughters has this precious quote:
Lawyers for aggrieved clients are hell-bent on finding and seizing whatever's left of the Noels' fortune. "I've been poor before. I can be poor again," Marisa said to a friend.
This is what she is referring to:
As they grew up, her daughters helped her with it. The eldest four--Corina, Lisina, Ariane, and Alix--went to public and private schools. They spent…
razib | March 9, 2009Advanced Paternal Age Is Associated with Impaired Neurocognitive Outcomes during Infancy and Childhood:
A sample of singleton children (n = 33,437) was drawn from the US Collaborative Perinatal Project. The outcome measures were assessed at 8 mo, 4 y, and 7 y (Bayley scales, Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale, Graham-Ernhart Block Sort Test, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Wide Range Achievement Test). The main analyses examined the relationship between neurocognitive measures and paternal or maternal age when adjusted for potential confounding factors. Advanced paternal age showed…
razib | March 9, 2009The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 is out. It is complementary to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, and seems to confirm its findings. But its main advantage is that there was a survey in 1990 and 2001, so you have three points in time from which to observe trends.
As you can see, the number of atheists & agnostics tracks the general increase in the number with no religion, it's doubled in the past generation. But, though only 2% of the population identifies as atheist & agnostic, around ~10% of the population holds to beliefs which are atheistic or agnostic.…
razib | March 9, 2009As noted by a reader the 2008 GSS just came out. I noticed this variable, ANSCITST:
Scientists should be allowed to do research that causes pain and injury to animals like dogs and chimpanzees if it produces new information about human health problems. (Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree?)
I checked a few demographics. Results below the fold. I had to label them because the font was so small (also, red = "Strongly Agree," yellow = "Strongly Disagree").
Variables: GOD, BIBLE, SEX, RACE, RELIG, POLVIEWS and DEGREE.
razib | March 8, 2009Evolution is a fact. Lineages change over time, and respond to selection pressures as well as being buffeted by stochastic processes. The arguments about the particular details of the process of evolution can be very vociferous. Scientists are human too, and great evolutionary biologists such as R. A. Fisher stooped to venomous insult when backed into a corner (see his disputes with Sewall Wright during the 1930s). But the superstructure of human foibles and follies rests upon a foundation of genuine scientific dispute, and attempts to refine models which map onto reality.
For example…
razib | March 7, 2009The Inductivist had a post up bemoaning the cultural liberalism and secularity of today's youth at the same time that I suggested that the culture wars will continue. My reasoning was that polarization still exists, and in fact is greater among the youth than the older cohorts. On the other hand readers observed that the trend is toward more liberalism.
One of the major changes over the past generation which has gone under the radar of the media is that rapid rise of disaffiliation. After the 20th century seemed to disprove a strong form of the secularization hypothesis, some began talking…
razib | March 6, 2009Some have argued that the Culture Wars are in abatement. Out of curiosity I checked the attitudes toward abortion on demand and homosexuality in the GSS broken down by age & political orientation. The ABANY and HOMOSEX variables. Below are the percentages who agree with abortion on demand as well as the contention that there is nothing wrong with homosexual relations.
Yes To Abortion On Demand
Extremely Liberal
Liberal
Slightly Liberal
Moderate
Slightly Conservative
Conservative
Extremely Conservative
65 or older
57
50
34
32
32…
razib | March 6, 2009Genetic Determinants of Height Growth Assessed Longitudinally from Infancy to Adulthood in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. Here's the important part from the discussion:
To summarise, our results show that nearly half of the genetic variants associated with adult height in this sample had a measurable effect on PHV [peak height velocity] in infancy or puberty. Only one variant was associated with PHV in both infancy and puberty. We found suggestive evidence that the associations of some of the variants may be age-dependent. The majority of signals associated with growth parameters in…
razib | March 5, 2009Awesome chart from Calculated Risk:
Blue = current Bear Market
Gray = Great Depression Bear Market
Check out Google Trends for "Great Recession."
razib | March 5, 2009Dienekes comments on the paper which showed genetic substructure among a set of Sardinian villages:
The take-home lesson is that wherever gene flow is impeded, no matter how geographically close, population differentiation can be recovered with dense autosomal genotype data.
Really fine-scale ancestry analysis is now possible; I suspect that a combination of geography, religion, social class, language, and ethnic identification will be found to be predictive of a person's broad genetic makeup and vice versa. But, to discover these correlations, a large-scale collection of genotypic data is…