razib | April 11, 2008About 10 years ago Eugene Volokh wrote How the Asians Became White. I think it's aged rather well. Volokh starts:
Don't believe me? A recent MSNBC news headline announced a "Plunge in Minority University Enrollment" at the University of California, with UC Berkeley reporting that "minority admissions had declined 61 percent." Actually, the total percentage of racial minority students at Berkeley, Asians included, fell from 57% to 49%. If you exclude the burgeoning group of people who decline to state their race, the minority percentage fell only three percentage points, from 61% to 58%.…
razib | April 10, 2008Ancient DNA: Reconstruction Of The Biological History Of A Human Society:
A research team has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains. Knowing the history of past populations and answering unresolved questions about them is highly interesting, more so when the information is obtained from the extraction of genetic material from historical remains. An example is the necropolis at Aldaieta (Araba) where some of these mysteries about these peoples have been answered - thanks to the study of…
razib | April 10, 2008The reports about the widespread use of drugs, cognitive enhancers, among scientists is making the rounds. I tend to think that it might be a positive thing, even if there are side effects. The fact is that if you go into science you're looking at a life of relatively meager remuneration for the intellectual firepower you can bring to any question. Someone who has the abilities and skills to get a tenure track position could almost certainly have been able to make a go of it in a much higher paid profession, but they didn't. Why? Many reasons, from fame to doing what you love. The…
razib | April 10, 2008Speciation with gene flow could be common:
The likelihood of speciation in the face of homogenizing gene flow (i.e. without complete geographical isolation) is one of the most debated topics in evolutionary biology. Demonstrating this phenonemon is hampered by the difficulty of isolating the effects of time since population divergence vs. gene flow on levels of molecular genetic differentiation. For example, weak genetic differentiation between taxa could be due to recent divergence, gene flow, or a combination of these factors. Nonetheless, a number of convincing examples of speciation with…
razib | April 10, 2008When I was a little kid I would check out countries whose vital economic and social statistics were not as good as Bangladesh's. I basically was curious as to what could have happened, how can you be more miserable than Bangladesh??? How??? During the 1980s Vietnam was one of those nations. Torn by war for decade & saddled by a anti-productive Communist economic system this was a nation where I noted that indices like caloric intake and GDP PPP actually had Bangladesh on top!
No more. Vietnam's economy has grown a great deal from its extremely low base over the last 20 years, and it…
razib | April 9, 2008There was a recent article in The New York Times about the boomlet in philosophy majors. Seemed like a classic "journalism by the numbers" (like a coloring book). But via Tyler Cowen via Kids Prefer Cheese comes the graphic to the left. I suppose undergraduates aren't really responding to rational financial incentives, huh? Well, depends on how you define rational:
Jenna Schaal-O'Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.
"That whole deep…
razib | April 7, 2008He's a damn frequentist! (the big issue is that he's not a philosopher, not that there's anything wrong with it....)
razib | April 7, 2008Three papers on genome wide association studies & height. Identification of ten loci associated with height highlights new biological pathways in human growth, Genome-wide association analysis identifies 20 loci that influence adult height and Many sequence variants affecting diversity of adult human height. Dan MacArthur hits the major point:
ScienceDaily puts a positive spin on the story ("Scientists are beginning to develop a clearer picture of what makes some people stand head and shoulders above the rest"), but the real story is this: despite the massive scale of these studies,…
razib | April 6, 2008We've talked before on ScienceBlogs about the extinction risk to Tasmanian Devils because of contagious cancer. Well, perhaps there's a light at the end of this population tunnel, Hope over Tasmanian Devil cancer:
The world's largest marsupial carnivore is facing extinction from a mystery facial cancer.
But scientists say Cedric appears to be naturally resistant to the contagious tumours which have killed half the devil population in Tasmania.
Cedric is the first Tasmanian Devil to have shown any immunity from the disfiguring disease.
I'll be entirely honest here: I'm not surprised. I just…
razib | April 5, 2008A new piece in TNR, Iranian Chic, highlights the fact that nose jobs are all the rage in the Islamic Republic. A more detailed article notes:
One prominent Tehran plastic surgeon says his patients include the daughters of senior Islamic clerics.
Its use in the Islamic republic was officially sanctioned by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's late leader and father of the Islamic revolution. He gave the go-ahead after being consulted by a religious figure whose daughter was due to be operated on by Iran's leading plastic surgeon, Mohammed Abidipour.
One of the main reasons offered for this fixation on…
razib | April 4, 2008Charles Johnson argues that Richard Dawkins has mischaracterized Herbert Spencer:
First, Spencer was not a Social Darwinist. He was not, in fact, a Darwinist at all; he published his most famous work on evolution and society, Social Statics, in 1851, eight years before Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. His ideas about evolution, especially as applied to society, were Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian; which is not ultimately that surprising, since he came up with them independently of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and before that even existed in published form.
Second…
razib | April 4, 2008Many people are noting Rich Florida's singles map. Half Sigma has decided to dig deeper into the data. He breaks it down by state, region and metropolitan area. I'm assuming there's more where that came from....
razib | April 3, 2008A few months ago a paper came out, The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biase, which got a lot of press. Here's the important part:
The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers…
razib | April 3, 2008Danny Pinkus points me to this post which points to a new paper examing public attitudes in Europe and the United States. They find that though overall attitudes toward immigration don't vary much on either side of the Atlantic, Europeans tend to be less positively inclined toward cultural or religious diversity. Check the post & paper for details. To the left is a scatterplot which John Sides kindly produced upon request. It is interesting to point out that Americans and the French both come out as the least fixated on religious homogeneity despite the fact that among Western…
razib | April 2, 2008Interesting new paper in Genetics, Dietary Change and Adaptive Evolution of enamelin in Humans and Among Primates:
Scans of the human genome have identified many loci as potential targets of recent selection, but exploration of these candidates is required to verify the accuracy of genomewide scans and clarify the importance of adaptive evolution in recent human history. We present analyses of one such candidate, enamelin, whose protein product operates in tooth enamel formation in 100 individuals from 10 populations. Evidence of a recent selective sweep at this locus confirms the signal of…
razib | April 2, 2008TNR has a new piece titled The Assimilation Artist, which has the subheading "Jhumpa Lahiri's books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one." Well, that's because the Indian American experience is in large part the coastal elite experience. Here are the numbers from the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey for levels of education of Hindus and the general population:
Less than High School
High School Grad
Some College
College Graduate
Post-graduate
N
Total Population
14
36
23
16
11
35,298
Hindu
4
12
10
26
48
253
Obviously not all…
razib | April 2, 2008A few days ago The New York Times published an article, Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race. Who are the multiracials? Because of the history of black-white relations in the United States, and Barack Obama's own background, the term is often framed so that that dimension is front & center. But what do the numbers say? Census 2000 found that 2.4% of Americans selected more than one race; i.e., they identified as multiracial. The breakdowns were:
Rank
Multiple Race Selection
% of Total Pop.
% of Multiracials
1.
White × Some Other Race
0.78%
32.32%
2.
White × American…