razib | September 25, 2008Dienekes points me to a new paper, Japanese Population Structure, Based on SNP Genotypes from 7003 Individuals Compared to Other Ethnic Groups: Effects on Population-Based Association Studies:
....Here, we examined Japanese population structure by Eigenanalysis, using the genotypes for 140,387 SNPs in 7003 Japanese individuals, along with 60 European, 60 African, and 90 East-Asian individuals, in the HapMap project. Most Japanese individuals fell into two main clusters, Hondo and Ryukyu; the Hondo cluster includes most of the individuals from the main islands in Japan, and the Ryukyu cluster…
razib | September 24, 2008What if there were no God? Politically conservative and liberal Christians imagine their lives without faith:
A sample of devout Christian adults, ranging widely in political orientation, described what their lives (and the world) might be like had they never embraced faith. Politically conservative Christians (also scoring high on right-wing authoritarianism) tended to imagine a life deficient in impulse control, wherein unrestrained sexual and aggressive urges, addictive behaviors, and human selfishness undermined the social good. By contrast, politically liberal Christians (also scoring…
razib | September 23, 2008Austin Bramwell makes a point that has been noted elsewhere:
Instead, perhaps a plurality of the rich private school kids in Manhattan--even at historically Protestant schools--are Jewish. The Jewish Daily Forward goes so far as to report that Trinity and Dalton, two of the top private schools in New York, are “largely Jewish.” An entire media industry follows the lavish bar mitzvahs of Manhattan private school kids. The closest real-world model for the high school in Gossip Girl, The Dalton School, has historically been the most recherché school for Jewish New Yorkers. (Most WASPs prefer to…
razib | September 23, 2008A few weeks ago I had a post up, Down syndrome and abortion rates. Today I noticed a variable in the GSS, GENEABRT, which gives responses to the following question:
1567. Suppose a test shows the baby has a serious genetic defect. Would you (yourself want to/ want your partner to) have an abortion if a test shows the baby has a serious genetic defect?
I decided to check the responses for different demographics of course. The table are below the fold, but there seems to be a trend with people with more education, less religion and more liberalism being more prone to being inclined to…
razib | September 22, 2008I was browsing RedState today and I noticed an advertisement for the National Geographic special on the Neandertal genome. At first I was surprised at the appearance of this on a right-wing website; after all, there is a bias toward Creationism on the modern American Right. Then I realized that the ad was probably part of a network and RedState was just one of many sites which were automatically included in some package. Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the Right and Creationism. Why is there this association on a deeper level? A survey from several years back showed that in…
razib | September 22, 2008Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis and Tara C. Smith have a new paper, Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy, in PLoS Biology. Also, Living the Scientific Life has posted a similar article which will be published in Research Fortnight.
razib | September 21, 2008Carl Zimmer has a post up where he points to a piece he just wrote for Scientific American, Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes. Here's the major point:
Intelligence tests do identify a difference among people that has predictive power, and that difference can be linked-in part-to differences in people's genes.
The news about intelligence is that now scientists have new tools for probing intelligence, from brain scans to gene chips that can search for variations in half a million genetic markers at a time. But so far, those tools are yielding some pretty scant results. For example, just…
razib | September 20, 2008Dienekes points out that John Hawks is staring in a new National Geographic special on the Neandertal genome.
razib | September 19, 2008You might have heard that Richard Dawkins' website has been blocked in Turkey because of that moron Harun Yahya (H/T Thabet). Here's the justification:
His press assistant, Seda Aral, said: "We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people. We found the comments hurtful. It was not a scientific discussion. There was a line and the limit has been passed. We have used all the legal means to stop this site. We asked them to remove the comments but they did not."
This isn't that strange of a claim; contemporary Anglo-American and to a lesser extent Continental…
razib | September 19, 2008The intelligent can be wrong very coherently. The intelligent can be right very coherently. The stupid can be wrong very incoherently. The stupid can be right very incoherently. The intelligent can do some stupid things very quickly. The stupid can do many stupid things very slowly. The intelligent are good at extrapolating, so they can assert the absurd rationally from absurd axioms. The unintelligent are not good at extrapolating, so they may reject the absurd from absurd axioms, despite acceding to absurd axioms because of their lack of inferential capacity.
razib | September 18, 2008FuturePundit points me to a new paper in Science, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits:
Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies,…
razib | September 18, 2008Excellent summary. I don't have anything to add obviously; I've heard/read all the fragments, but nice to see it all in one place from people in the know. H/T The Elf.
razib | September 18, 2008In my post below responding to David Goldstein's implication that intelligence has been subject to strong directional selection I put up a chart from the GSS which illustrated the fact that women who have weaker vocabularies tend to have more children. If you don't believe that intelligence "means anything," and that it isn't heritable, read no further.
On the other hand, if you think intelligence as measured by something like a vocabulary test is important and that it is heritable, below the fold I've placed some charts which show the same relationship between number of children and vocab…
razib | September 17, 2008Does the reconstructed Neandertal look like someone you know? I was talking to a friend and he mentioned it looked like a friend, and I immediately thought of some dude I know.
Update: A reader says that the Neandertal looks like Pete Postlethwaite.
Update II: Sandman has more.
Update III: Some are saying Heath Ledger....
razib | September 17, 2008Lactase persistence-related genetic variant: population substructure and health outcomes:
Lactase persistence is an autosomal-dominant trait that is common in European-derived populations. A basic tendency for lactase persistence to increase from the southeast to the northwest across European populations has been noted, but such trends within countries have not been extensively studied. We genotyped the C/T-13910 variant (rs4988235) that constitutes the putatively causal allele for lactase persistence (T allele representing persistence) in a general population sample of 3344 women aged 60-79…
razib | September 15, 2008A few months ago I reviewed David Goldstein's Jacob's Legacy, a geneticists look at the history of the Jewish people. Today The New York Times has a piece, A Dissenting Voice as the Genome Is Sifted to Fight Disease, which profiles Goldstein and uses his own positions and opinions as a jumping off point into many diverse topics. First, he suggests that the common disease-common variant hypothesis has been falsified. Or, more pragmatically it has not returned great results which may be applied by medical researchers in the quest for treatments and diagnoses of susceptibilities. Goldstein…