Anthroplogy
razib | March 21, 2010I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, The origins of morality do not matter. Its flavor is a bit different from my typical blog posts because the format enforces more brevity, so I decided to try and leverage some analogies. I conclude:
... Our moral consensus is a river whose course shifts across the plain, constrained by the hills thrust upward by biology. Only history knows where the river will flow next, though evolution can hint at the range of possibilities.
On a note related to this piece, I will be posting a review of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the…
razib | March 15, 2010The strange case of the twins of Kodinji:
The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The average in the rest of the country is 8.1 per 1,000 live births.
...
Unlike in Cândido Godói, consanguineous (blood-related) marriages are not a factor in the Kodinji twin phenomenon. "The majority of the population is Muslim, but the incidences of twinning are present even among the small…
razib | March 13, 2010This comment from Chris is interesting:
I would speculate that the the massive productivity gains were due to a massive resorting of American society along cognitive lines; from 1940 to 1970 a large number of high ability people who were previously locked into agriculture and industry were able to sort themselves into more innovative positions. This would lead to a massive burst of innovation, which led to increases in productivity, as previously unlocked talent was put to use.
From 1970 to 1990 this resorting was mostly winding down and productivity in the economy was heavily constrained by…
razib | March 9, 2010Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:
From page 33:
Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all)...are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in…
razib | March 4, 2010Over the history of this weblog I have blogged about pigmentation a fair amount. The major reason is that that's where the money is; unlike height, let alone intelligence, the genetic architecture and evolutionary history of pigmentation has been elucidated with relative clarity. That is, we know roughly the number and nature of the genes which control much of the between population variation in pigmentation. And, we also have some sense of whether the variation is due to natural selection, as well the historical trajectory of the between population differences.
For example, consider the…
razib | March 1, 2010I have pointed to the fact that mtDNA genetics has suggested that the polar bear is actually a derived lineage of brown bears. And, more specifically, that some extant lineages of brown bears share a more recent common ancestor with polar bears than other brown bears. In other words, brown bears are paraphyletic. Apparently there has been dispute of when the polar bear morph emerged from the brown bears. Luckily polar bears have been resident in a region where the likelihood of preservation of ancient DNA is relatively high. PNAS has a new paper which reports on the extraction of genetic…
razib | February 21, 2010Lost of discussion about Basques below. Some interesting examples which are less speculative.
Hungary = Language changes, genes do not
The intrusion of ethnic Magyars, and later the settlement of Kipchak Turks fleeing the Mongols, within Hungary is historically attested. Additionally, down to the Reformation there were isolated settlements of Turks among the Magyars which maintained their own linguistic tradition. But digging through the literature it is very difficult to find much genetic impact. Anatolian Turks are a milder case; eastern genetic contributions can be found, but it is the…
razib | February 17, 2010The language families of Europe fall into a few broad categories. There are the Indo-European languages, which include the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Celtic subgroups, along with Greek and Albanian. The Iranian languages and most of the languages of India are also Indo-European. Then there are the languages of Finland and Hungary, which are hypothesized to be of a broader Finno-Ugric family. Whatever the validity of this cluster, the relationship of Hungarian and Finnish to languages which are extant deep into Eurasia, beyond the Urals and into Siberia, are not disputed. Turkic and Semitic…
razib | February 15, 2010One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of the day it's not about everlasting fame, but the real world as it was and is and will be. Paradigm shifts are kind of like a box of new chocolates, you never know what new inferences will be generated. Thinking deeply again becomes a surprise.
In The New York Times John Noble Wildford has an…
razib | February 15, 2010Ed Yong reviews a new paper:
The social interactions that come naturally to most people are difficult for people with autism and Asperger syndrome. Simple matters like making eye contact, reading expressions and working out what someone else is thinking can be big challenges, even for "high-functioning" and intelligent individuals. Now, a preliminary study of 13 people suggests that some of these social difficulties could be temporarily relieved by inhaling a hormone called oxytocin.
Only 13 individuals. That being said, since we're a medicated nation we might as well consider all…
razib | February 13, 2010I have pointed before to dating research which shows a stronger race-bias from women than men, correcting for physical appearance. In other words, if a man found a woman attractive the extra bonus for being of the same race was relatively marginal compared to the inverse. Well, it seems that this strong element of race-consciousness in the fairer sex might manifest in an even more evolutionarily relevant context. Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle:
Although a considerable body of research explores alterations in women's mating-relevant preferences across the menstrual…
razib | February 10, 2010The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence:
The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that neural activation of a large fronto-parieto-temporal network may underpin a variety of spiritual experiences, information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking. Combining pre- and post-neurosurgery personality assessment with advanced brain-lesion mapping techniques…
razib | February 10, 2010Archaeology has a very interesting piece up, Should We Clone Neanderthals?. It begins with the nitty-gritty of ancient DNA extraction & sequencing, moves to the possible avenues of cloning, and of course the bioethical conundrums that we might be placed in. I know that there is an expectation that a neo-Neandertal will be some sort of "ape-man," but we should remember that the ancient Neandertals had greater cranial capacities than modern humans. I suspect thought that the biggest issue for a neo-Neandertal might be disease; "savages" brought back to Europe invariably died from Illnesses…
razib | February 8, 2010In my discussion with Eliezer I referred to "recreational genetics." Basically, "for entertainment purposes only" genetics. For example, someone with blue eyes confirming that they have the alleles on OCA2 & HERC2 associated with blue eyes. Or a man with the surname O'Neill discovers that he has the Uà Néill Y chromosomal marker. Yes, people will pay money to find out these facts which are already highly probable.
I think the news that Charles Darwin was likely of the R1b Y chromosomal haplogroup falls into the recreational category, though due to Darwin's fame the media has really been…
razib | February 6, 2010A few days ago I discussed a new paper which explores the patterns of natural selection in the genome of the X chromosome. As you know the X is "carried" disproportionately by females, as males have only one copy, so it offers up an interesting window into evolutionary dynamics (see The Red Queen for a popular treatment). Today Dienekes points me to a new paper in Genome Biology which puts the focus on the X chromosome again, Characterization of X-Linked SNP genotypic variation in globally-distributed human populations:
Background
The transmission pattern of the human X chromosome reduces its…
razib | February 4, 2010Highly Punctuated Patterns of Population Structure on the X Chromosome and Implications for African Evolutionary History:
It is well known that average levels of population structure are higher on the X chromosome compared to autosomes in humans. However, there have been surprisingly few analyses on the spatial distribution of population structure along the X chromosome. With publicly available data from the HapMap Project and Perlegen Sciences, we show a strikingly punctuated pattern of X chromosome population structure. Specifically, 87% of X-linked HapMap SNPs within the top 1% of FST…
razib | February 1, 2010Population Will Come Down -- We Choose How:
So, as I once wrote, for a person to produce more than two children is unethical. If you want lots of kids, then adopt -- preferably from an affluent country, as you only make things worse if you move people from cultures with a small environmental footprint to a land of big cars and hamburgers.
We need to give little girls worldwide a good education, because that makes them have fewer kids when they grow up. And we need to combat various religious organisations that sow doubt about the efficacy and moral acceptability of contraceptives.
The whole…
razib | February 1, 2010Could be the title of the paper. Anyway, Genome-wide association mapping identifies multiple loci for a canine SLE-related disease complex:
...Incidences of specific diseases are elevated in different breeds, indicating that a few genetic risk factors might have accumulated through drift or selective breeding. In this study, a GWA study with 81 affected dogs (cases) and 57 controls from the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever breed identified five loci associated with a canine systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)-related disease complex that includes both antinuclear antibody (ANA)-positive…
razib | February 1, 2010PLoS Biology reviews Why We Cooperate:
What makes us human, what sets us apart from other animal species, and which traits do we share with our closest living relatives? Ever since Darwin introduced the notion of continuity in his theory of evolution, humans have been obsessed with the question of how to distinguish themselves from all other species. In the postwar period, our species became known as "Man the Toolmaker," until in the 1960s Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees using sticks to fish for termites, and that was that. We then distinguished ourselves using the term "Man the Hunter," but…
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…