razib | April 23, 2008Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England? :
It has recently been argued that there was an apartheid-like social structure operating in Early Anglo-Saxon England. This was proposed in order to explain the relatively high degree of similarity between Germanic-speaking areas of northwest Europe and England. Opinions vary as to whether there was a substantial Germanic invasion or only a relatively small number arrived in Britain during this period. Contrary to the assumption of limited intermarriage made in the apartheid simulation, there is…
razib | April 22, 2008Mother's Diet Influences Infant Sex: High Energy Intake Linked To Conception Of Sons:
...The study shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The findings may help explain the falling birth-rate of boys in industrialised countries, including the UK and US.
The study focused on 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK, who did not know the sex of their fetus. They were asked to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy. They were then split into three groups according to the number of…
razib | April 22, 2008Seems like both the Republican nominee and the likely Democratic nominee entertain the autism and vaccination "hypothesis". I don't follow politics very closely, this sort of comment really disturbs me....
Via TNR.
Update: And Clinton too.
Update II: Insolence & Aetiology have more.
razib | April 21, 2008A follow up to the scientists & drugs topic, Wired's current issue is devoted to cranking up your intelligence. Most of the advice is kind of kooky, but there is a neat chart of mind-amping drugs if you are so inclined.
razib | April 21, 2008History and Geography of Human Genes is one of my favorite books; it might rank up there in my "top 10" if I ever wished to enumerate one. But in both Human Evolutionary Genetics, a textbook, and A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey, a biography of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, it was noted that the PCA maps pioneered in History and Geography of Human Genes have never really caught on. There might be a reason...Interpreting principal component analyses of spatial population genetic variation:
Nearly 30 years ago, Cavalli-Sforza et al. pioneered the use of principal component analysis (PCA) in population…
razib | April 21, 2008Vitamin D Important In Brain Development And Function:
McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D's involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D's ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior. The review also discusses studies in both humans and animals that present suggestive though not definitive evidence of cognitive or behavioral consequences of vitamin D inadequacy. The authors…
razib | April 20, 2008If you don't like the word "racial," just substitute "population." In any case, Many African-Americans Have A Gene That Prolongs Life After Heart Failure:
About 40 percent of African-Americans have a genetic variant that can protect them after heart failure and prolong their lives, according to research conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and collaborating institutions.
...
"By mimicking the effect of beta blockers, the genetic variant makes it appear as if beta blockers aren't effective in these patients," he explains. "But although beta blockers have no…
razib | April 20, 2008Chris Mooney is claiming Expelled is a box office success. Documentaries don't make a very big splash typically, but whatever you think about the impact of Expelled, the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 will go down as a much bigger success illustrates the contrast between depth and breadth of feeling from their respective audiences. Michael Moore's politics have a smaller potential audience than the half of Americans who are Creationist, and the 3/4 of Americans who are open to the idea of "equal time," but the devotees of Moore's brand of Leftism are far more intense in their sentiment. I am…
razib | April 19, 2008Massimo Pigliucci's wedding profiled in The New York Times... (did a double-take when I saw that on the front page...but it's for real)
razib | April 19, 2008...as a piece of propaganda. I noticed that the local "art house" theater was screening Expelled, so I decided to check it out. There weren't many people there. It started off very heavy-handed, a montage of archetypical scenes from the Communist and Nazi regimes, but the production values & execution of the first half of the documentary wasn't half bad. I assume the producers were pitching this to a sympathetic autidence, so the intent was glamorize and present the argument effectively, not convert anyone to the message. The interviews with the eminences of the Intelligent Design…
razib | April 18, 2008Some debate below about the various parameters which shape social pathologies. One of facts which we are well aware of is that the United States has a lot of homicide compared to other developed countries. But another fact which is also well known is that a disproportionate number of these murders are committed by racial & ethnic minorities, as well as by particular subcultures (e.g., Southerners vs. New Englanders). So I took the state-by-state homicide rate and compared them to the international data for selection nations. Results below the fold....
State
Homicide/100,000…
razib | April 17, 2008The post below where I observed that in the United States men are over-represented among the Religious Right as opposed to the general population elicited a lot of response. I took some of the data from American Piety in the 21st Century which is broken down by sex and posted it below the fold....
Identify as...
Black Prot.
Evangel.
Mainline
Catholic
Jewish
Other
None
Total
5.0
33.6
22.1
21.2
2.5
4.9
10.8
Male
2.8
30.0
22.1
23.8
2.5
6.0
12.8
Female
6.9
36.7
22.1
18.9
2.4
3.9
9.0
Self describe as...
Bible Believing
Born Again
Theol. Conservative
Evangel.…
razib | April 17, 2008Religiousness and Infidelity: Attendance, but not Faith and Prayer, Predict Marital Fidelity:
High religiousness has been consistently linked with a decreased likelihood of past infidelity but has been solely defined by religious service attendance, a limited assessment of a complex facet of life. The current study developed nine religiousness subscales using items from the 1998 General Social Survey to more fully explore the association between religiousness and infidelity. Interestingly, logistic regressions using currently married participants (N = 1,439) demonstrated that attendance, but…
razib | April 16, 2008The finding that men are more likely to be secular than women is a relatively robust result. You can note this in the Pew Religious Survey, to the point where 70% of self-identified atheists in the United States are male. In places as disparate as East Asia and Latin America women are stereotypically more religiously identified as well (or, religious practice is categorized as a female-identified activity). So what about the patterns within denominations? Men, being more secular in orientation on average, would probably sort into the more liberal and less demanding denominations, right…
razib | April 15, 2008Via Dienekes, The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene:
Krause et al. (2007) recently examined patterns of genetic variation at FOXP2 in two Neandertals. This gene is of particular interest because it is involved in speech and language and was previously shown to harbor the signature of recent positive selection. The authors found the same two amino-acid substitutions in Neandertals as in modern humans. Assuming that these sites were the targets of selection and no interbreeding between the two groups, they concluded that selection at FOXP2 occurred before the populations split, over…
razib | April 15, 2008Sheril pointed me to this data rich release of Science and Engineering Indicators. I was interested to see this table:
Table 7-12
Perceptions of scientific nature of various fields: 2006
(Percent)
Field
Very scientific
Pretty scientific
Not too scientific
Not at all scientific
Haven't heard of field
Don't know
Medicine
81
16
1
--
--
1
Biology
70
24
2
1
--
2
Physics
69
21
3
1
2
4
Engineering
45
32
11
7
--
4
Economics
16
35
31
13
1
3
Sociology…
razib | April 14, 2008Effect of Variation in CHI3L1 on Serum YKL-40 Level, Risk of Asthma, and Lung Function:
Background The chitinase-like protein YKL-40 is involved in inflammation and tissue remodeling. We recently showed that serum YKL-40 levels were elevated in patients with asthma and were correlated with severity, thickening of the subepithelial basement membrane, and pulmonary function. We hypothesized that single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that affect YKL-40 levels also influence asthma status and lung function.
...
Results A promoter SNP (–131C→G) in CHI3L1, the chitinase 3–like 1 gene encoding…
razib | April 13, 2008David Burbridge continues his awesome series of posts on the history of evolutionary genetic thought with Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship. Here's a taste:
In Malecot's system two genes at the same locus, in the same or different individuals, are defined as Identical by Descent (IBD) if they are both descended from the very same individual ancestral gene, without either of them undergoing mutation in the interim. The relatedness between two individuals can be measured, roughly speaking, by calculating the probability that two genes at the same locus in the two individuals…
razib | April 11, 2008A few months ago I blogged a paper, Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA. Now these results have hit the press with really wack titles. Jake at Pure Pedantry and Joseph at Corpus Callosum offer the appropriate scientific caution. Caution is warranted, but I think the next decade at the intersection of behavioral economics & genetics is going to be very big. Papers such as Heritability of ultimatum game responder…