razib | February 28, 2008John Hawks as a long post on the kerfuffle over "good" science blogging. I think John is right to emphasize the importance of search engine traffic for "specialist" posts; there's a significant long tail effect here.
razib | February 27, 2008Many are quoting this from an editorial by William F. Buckley Jr.:
"The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."
--William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957
I do want to put on the record that he recanted:
Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil…
razib | February 27, 2008The Audacious Epigone crunches the Pew Religion Survey and comes up with some more insights....
razib | February 27, 2008I saw this paper in Nature Genetics, Disruption of P2RY5, an orphan G protein-coupled receptor, underlies autosomal recessive woolly hair:
The genetic determinants of hair texture in humans are largely unknown. Several human syndromes exist in which woolly hair comprises a part of the phenotype; however, simple autosomal recessive inheritance of isolated woolly hair has only rarely been reported...In all cases, we discovered pathogenic mutations in P2RY5, which encodes a G protein-coupled receptor and is a nested gene residing within intron 17 of the retinoblastoma 1 (RB1) gene. P2RY5 is…
razib | February 27, 2008Parallel Selection on TRPV6 in Human Populations (Open Access):
...The selective footprints, however, are significantly differentiated between non-African populations and estimated to be younger than an ancestral population of non-Africans. The possibility of a single selection event occurring in an ancestral population of non-Africans was tested by simulations and rejected. The putatively-selected TRPV6 haplotype contains three candidate sites for functional differences, namely derived non-synonymous substitutions C157R, M378V and M681T. Potential functional differences between the ancestral…
razib | February 26, 2008In the comments to my post, Why brown people are midgets, a reader pointed me to this paper, which tabulates and analyzes some data from the 1960s for males. There isn't anything too surprising in the data set; Punjabis are tall compared to non-Punjabis, higher castes are taller than lower castes. There is a lot of unaccounted for variation. This was before Indian Shining, and the Green Revolution probably hadn't sunk in yet (I wouldn't be surprised if the between-state differences increased, while the between-caste differences decreased, in the past 40 years). So appropriate caveats.…
razib | February 25, 2008John Hawks has commentary on a new paper, A genome-wide signature of positive selection in ancient and recent invasive expansions of the honey bee Apis mellifera. John's point is that evolutionary dynamics are evolutionary dynamics. I'm sure as a species which spans multiple continents and all the latitudes and longitudes we might be able to learn a bit about ourselves from examining other lineages of great geographic range.
razib | February 25, 2008Despite the fact that the mainstream media likes to write a lot of stories how religious revival in the United States one of the great unreported facts of the last 15 years is the rise of the proportion of Americans who are not affiliating with any religion. The reason this isn't reported much is that it won't sell that much copy; the irreligious by their nature don't get that excited by irreligion. In contrast religious people want to read about how religion is on the rise. There will always be stories about how religion & science dovetail in the media because that sells magazines; the…
razib | February 24, 2008Well, sort of. I'm reading Henry Kamen's Empire: How Spain Became a World Power. Kamen is no Charles C. Mann, his story isn't 1491. For him the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas were haphazard affairs driven more by entrepreneurial intent than religious zeal or Spanish patriotism; his lens is that of social and economic history. Kamen's goal is to debunk those who would attempt to assert that the colonization of the New World was part of some grand imperial plan. It obviously wasn't, the personal correspondence of Charles V, the titular sovereign under whom the original New World…
razib | February 23, 2008I'm 5 feet 8 inches tall. 1.73 meters. In the United States that's somewhat on the short side, most of the charts suggest I'm around the 30th percentile for white men. Of course, I'm not white. In any case, though I'm on the short side for the typical American male, I'm a giant in my family. My father is 5 feet 4 inches. My mother is around 5 feet now. They're possibly shorter than they were due to age, but they would have been short in the United States no matter what. As I was growing up, and surpassed my parents in my mid-teens, I assumed that their relative lack of height was a…
razib | February 23, 2008...yes, true. On a typical single locus (on some loci, such as SLC24A5, most of the variation is between groups). But that doesn't mean that you can't use genetics to differentiate population clusters. Here are 938 individuals (the points) from 51 world populations (the color of the points) displayed on a figure with the two largest principle components of the variation.
From Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation. Also see Lewontin's Fallacy.
razib | February 23, 2008A new paper came out in Science this week, Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation, that's getting some media play. The second-to-last author is L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and the general combination of means and ends on display in The History and Geography of Human Genes, is all over it. From the introduction:
We first studied genetic ancestry of each individual without using his/her population identity. This analysis considers each person's genome as having originated from K ancestral but unobserved populations whose contributions are described by K…
razib | February 22, 2008In my post below, Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?, I derived some conclusions from data which suggests that different religious groups in the United States have different IQs and/or academic aptitudes. The data are not particularly surprising, as some noted the class biases of American Protestantism have long been observed, and class usually has some correlation with education and performance on intelligence tests. That being said, one must be careful about extrapolating from one nation to others. Darwin Catholic stated:
For comparison, I seem to recall reading that…
razib | February 22, 2008(if you don't see Hebrew in the title please change "Character Encoding" to "Unicode").
razib | February 20, 2008I haven't had time to read them, but John Hawks already commented:
A flush of papers this week (two today in Nature, one tomorrow in Science) describe new analyses of SNPs across the genome. Two of the papers sample SNPs in global samples numbering more than 500 individuals.
...and Yann Klimentidis.
razib | February 20, 2008A few days ago I noted that smart people believe in evolution. And stupid people do not. Inductivist looked at the IQ scores in the GSS for whites and this is what he found for various religions:
Mean IQ of whites from General Social Survey by religious affiliation
Episcopalian
109.9
Lutheran
107.4
Mormon
105.7
Presbyterian
102.3
United Methodist
101.8
Southern Baptist
98.0
Assembly of God
94.5
Pentecostal
92.2
Surprised? I hope you're not so ignorant that you are! Here are the top 10 religious groups in SAT score from 2002:
Average SAT score by religion for…
razib | February 18, 2008Half Sigma is mining the GSS to try and understand the correlates of acceptance of the fact of evolution. He notes:
Of course it's not surprising that smarter people are more likely to believe in evolution, but the difference is pretty extraordinary. Only 15% of people with Wordsum 10 disbelieve in evolution (although it's a pretty small sample size), while a whopping 57% of people with Wordum 6 (which is the average score) disbelieve in evolution.
You can see the full data over at his place. So does this mean that acceptance of evolution is due to close examination of the issues on the…
razib | February 18, 2008A week ago I offered my own theory as to why 3rd and 4th cousin pairings in Iceland have been so fertile historically. Now, this from John Hawks, For maximum fertility, marry more than 20 km from your birthplace. John says:
This study isn't orthogonal to the Iceland cousin study, but it adds another element. These people are about as close to the genetics of Icelanders as we can hope to get. The authors suggest that greater mobility in the last 50 years has removed a significant inbreeding depression. Yet, the inbreeding between people born within 15 km of each other is mostly at the level…