razib | January 28, 2010The New York Times Magazine has a long profile of an American from Alabama, Omar Hammami, who is now fighting for the Islamists in Somalia, The Jihadist Next Door. The optics of his family background seem tailor-made for a compelling narrative (or a TV-movie). A father who is a Syrian immigrant, a standard-issue American Muslim and professional. A mother who is a Southern Baptist and native Alabaman. The childhood is framed as "torn-between-two-worlds." Both his parents were members of exclusive religious traditions. Apparently Omar's was raised in both his parents' religions, and both sides…
razib | January 28, 2010Excellent one at A Primate of Modern Aspect:
Okay, so we've got lots of increases in brain size, and a few decreases. In the cases where we have decreases, we usually have body size decreases as well. More often than not, we have body size decreases which result in a disproportionately large brain size, but occasionally we have a body size increase which results in a disproportionately small brain size. And all of that brings us to the Hobbit.
The authors looked at Homo floresiensis in relation to the Dmanisi hominids, Homo habilis, and a Homo erectus from Ngangdong and found that if we…
razib | January 27, 2010I've got a few installed now. Has anyone had any issues with performance yet? I recall back when I used Firefox that was the main downside of having extensions.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, see TechCrunch. Or just update your browser and Google will start telling you all about it, in Settings -> About Google Chrome.
razib | January 27, 2010Mike the Mad Biologist points me to an interesting article in Wired, Uranium Is So Last Century -- Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke. Of course Wired is a booster of many things which never take off, but in general I think it's probably safe to bet on nuclear power becoming more prominent in the near-to-medium-future. I recently have been reading a bit about oil, stuff that's not written by Daniel Yergen, and was fascinated by this chart of long term crude prices:
The inflation adjusted values are of interest. But look at the lack of volatility before 1974! My whole life has been…
razib | January 27, 2010NASA to Review Human Spaceflight:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is preparing for a major evaluation of its human spaceflight program, even as many who will conduct the survey have yet to be informed of the agency's revised mission.
...
The administration might also enlist the help and financing of other nations to handle parts of space exploration -- perhaps giving the European Space Agency the job of building a lunar lander, for example.
Perhaps China vs. the world? Fodder for near-future science fiction.
razib | January 26, 2010Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?:
Brain expansion began early in primate evolution and has occurred in all major groups, suggesting a strong selective advantage to increased brainpower in most primate lineages. Despite this overall trend, however, Mundy and his colleagues have identified several branches/lineages within each major group that have shown decreasing brain and body mass as they evolve, for example in marmosets and mouse lemurs.
According to Mundy, "We find that, under reasonable assumptions, the reduction in brain size during the evolution of Homo floresiensis is not…
razib | January 26, 2010The debates about the timing of the extinction of the last Neandertals in Iberia seem to one of those interminable disagreements around which paleoanthropologists can't ever reach a resolution. Another offering from PLoS ONE, Pego do Diabo (Loures, Portugal): Dating the Emergence of Anatomical Modernity in Westernmost Eurasia:
Methodology/Principal Findings
Using AMS radiocarbon and advanced pretreatment techniques, we dated a set of stratigraphically associated faunal samples from an Aurignacian III-IV context excavated at the Portuguese cave site of Pego do Diabo. Our results establish a…
razib | January 26, 2010Update: Also see p-ter at Gene Expression Classic.
Follow up on yesterday's post on the new Dickson et al. paper from David Goldstein's lab, A New Way to Look for Diseases' Genetic Roots:
The Icelandic gene-hunting firm deCODE genetics, which emerged last week from bankruptcy, has long led in detecting SNPs associated with common disease. Dr. Kari Stefansson, the company's founder and research director, agreed that whole genome sequencing would "give us a lot of extremely exciting data." But he disputed Dr. Goldstein's view that rare variants carried most of the missing heritability. Both…
razib | January 26, 2010One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The Neandertal genome story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there've been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the past. The input of genetics has basically demanded a revision of the contemporary consensus of the origins of the Etruscans which emerged from archaeology. Though certainly ancestry and genetic relationship are informative, ancient DNA has also given us windows into the change of function and a…
razib | January 25, 2010David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke, has critiqued the current focus on large-scale genomwide associations before. Now he is taking to the next step, as his group has a paper out which suggests that the reason that association studies have been relatively unfruitful in terms of bang-for-buck is due to the fact that they're picking up "synthetic associations." Rare Variants Create Synthetic Genome-Wide Associations:
It has long been assumed that common genetic variants of modest effect make an important contribution to common human diseases, such as most forms of cardiovascular disease,…
razib | January 25, 2010In Bats and Whales, Convergence in Echolocation Ability Runs Deep:
..."However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called convergent traits have arisen by different genes or different mutations. Our study shows that a complex trait -- echolocation -- has in fact evolved by identical genetic changes in bats and dolphins."
A hearing gene known as prestin in both bats and dolphins (a toothed whale) has picked up many of the same mutations over time, the studies show. As a result, if you draw a phylogenetic tree of bats, whales, and a few other mammals based on similarities in the…
razib | January 24, 2010Changes in human diet driven by cultural evolution seem to be at the root of many relatively recently emerged patterns of genetic variation. In particular, lactase persistence and varied production of amylase are two well known cases. Both of these new evolutionary genetic developments are responses to the shift toward carbohydrates over the last 10,000 years as mainstays of caloric intake. Rice and wheat serve as the foundations of much of human civilization. It is notable that both China and India are divided into rice and wheat (or millet) belts, so essential are modes of agriculture in…
razib | January 24, 2010As a follow up to the previous post, here's some of the raw data for the ARIS. I sorted by "Nones" for 2008.
None '90 None '08 Christian '90 Christian '08 Δ Christian Δ None VT 13 34 84 55 -29 21 NH 9 29 85 62 -23 20 WY 14 28 74 67 -7 14 ME 11 25 85 69 -16 14 WA 15 25 79 64 -15 10 NV 14 24 80 64 -16…
razib | January 24, 2010Barry Kosmin at CUNY has published the results of three surveys of American religion since 1990. These "American Religious Identification Surveys" (ARIS) were done in 1990, another in 2001, and finally in 2008. One of the major findings of the ARIS has been the rise of those who avow "No Religion". Looking through the data it is also clear that aggregating nationally understates some of the local changes. In 1990 47% Vermonters were non-Catholic Christians (i.e., Protestants). In 2008 29% were. In 1990 13% of Vermonters had No Religion. In 2008 34% of Vermonters had No Religion! In fact, No…
razib | January 23, 2010In the wake of my post on selection and variation in dog skull shape, I thought it would be useful to point to this short paper, A canine chromosome 7 locus confers compulsive disorder susceptibility. Here's the conclusion:
The highly significant association of CCD with the CDH2 region on chromosome 7 is the first genetic locus identified for any animal compulsive disorder, and raises the intriguing possibility that CDH2 and other neuronal adhesion proteins are involved in human compulsive behaviors. A genetic association of cadherins with autism spectrum disorder, which often includes…
razib | January 23, 2010I noticed that Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan was watchable online on Netflix the other day, so I checked it out. I liked it. As any movie there were liberties taken with aspects of Genghis Khan's biography, but I felt like most of them were true to the general outlines of what really happened. The main downside was the whole warlord-with-a-heart-of-gold element to his personality. I'm definitely looking forward to The Great Khan, the rumored sequel.
razib | January 22, 2010James Patterson Inc.:
TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it's certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of "24." Books, at least in their traditional…
razib | January 21, 2010Modern civilization has extremely deleterious consequences in regards to species richness, primarily through destruction of habitat. Because of these negative aspects of modernity hunter-gatherers have been idealized as a model of humanity at equilibrium with their ecology. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus lays out the revisionist, and to some extent now mainstream, argument that the American wilderness which European settlers encountered was actually an instance of "re-wilding" in the wake of native demographic collapse due to disease. But setting this case aside, what…