razib

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Vanity Fair has a long profile of Walter Noel's clan up right now. Noel, if you don't know, is the head of Fairfield Greenwich, which funneled billions into Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme. One of Noel's daughters has this precious quote: Lawyers for aggrieved clients are hell-bent on finding and…
Advanced Paternal Age Is Associated with Impaired Neurocognitive Outcomes during Infancy and Childhood: A sample of singleton children (n = 33,437) was drawn from the US Collaborative Perinatal Project. The outcome measures were assessed at 8 mo, 4 y, and 7 y (Bayley scales, Stanford Binet…
The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 is out. It is complementary to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, and seems to confirm its findings. But its main advantage is that there was a survey in 1990 and 2001, so you have three points in time from which to observe trends. As you can…
As noted by a reader the 2008 GSS just came out. I noticed this variable, ANSCITST: Scientists should be allowed to do research that causes pain and injury to animals like dogs and chimpanzees if it produces new information about human health problems. (Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or…
Evolution is a fact. Lineages change over time, and respond to selection pressures as well as being buffeted by stochastic processes. The arguments about the particular details of the process of evolution can be very vociferous. Scientists are human too, and great evolutionary biologists such as…
The Inductivist had a post up bemoaning the cultural liberalism and secularity of today's youth at the same time that I suggested that the culture wars will continue. My reasoning was that polarization still exists, and in fact is greater among the youth than the older cohorts. On the other hand…
Some have argued that the Culture Wars are in abatement. Out of curiosity I checked the attitudes toward abortion on demand and homosexuality in the GSS broken down by age & political orientation. The ABANY and HOMOSEX variables. Below are the percentages who agree with abortion on demand as…
Genetic Determinants of Height Growth Assessed Longitudinally from Infancy to Adulthood in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. Here's the important part from the discussion: To summarise, our results show that nearly half of the genetic variants associated with adult height in this sample had…
Awesome chart from Calculated Risk: Blue = current Bear Market Gray = Great Depression Bear Market Check out Google Trends for "Great Recession."
Dienekes comments on the paper which showed genetic substructure among a set of Sardinian villages: The take-home lesson is that wherever gene flow is impeded, no matter how geographically close, population differentiation can be recovered with dense autosomal genotype data. Really fine-scale…
Neural Markers of Religious Conviction: Many people derive peace of mind and purpose in life from their belief in God. For others, however, religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious conviction is marked by…
FuturePundit has some musings on the possiblities of $100 genome sequencing in 5 years: Cheap portable DNA sequencers will also lead to surreptitious DNA sequencing of people without their awareness. I expect to see this on the dating and bar scene. I also expect to see it in job interview and…
Geographical Affinities of the HapMap Samples: The CHB and JPT are readily distinguished from one another with both autosomal and Y-chromosomal markers, and results obtained after combining them into a single sample should be interpreted with caution. The CEU are better described as being of…
The author of Liar's Poker sure can write prose. Michael Lewis' massive article on Iceland is very interesting, and sheds light on a general phenomenon with a specific example.
The answer to the question in the title is no doubt multifactorial. Here are a few possible reasons: 1) Fewer numbers of Muslims proportionately 2) A more diverse population of Muslims, so reducing synergy between ethnicity and religion 3) An immigration policy which has resulted in a foreign-born…
Thabet points me to this interactive map which breaks down attitudes to Creationism in the United Kingdom by region. Refreshingly the sentiment in favor of Creationism is far lower than the United States. Below the fold I've reformatted the data for easier viewing and comparison. Below is a map…
If you read an older work like The History and Geography of Human Genes based on classical genetic markers Sardinia stands out on charts of genetic distance. This is probably due to the fact that Sardinia is an island and gene flow from surrounding regions is relatively limited due to the…
There are nearly 500 complete responses to the survey from last week. Here's a CSV file of the results. Below the fold are the frequencies as well as N's. I might report some trends in the data, but a lot of it is predictable. People who only read ScienceBlogs GNXP are way more liberal than those…
You can watch me talk to Greg Cochran about his book The 10,000 Year Explosion on bloggingheads.tv this weekend.... There's something interesting about the front page of bloggingheads.tv right now. Check it. Not only are the two colored people on the front not talking to each other (yeah, I'm…
Matt Yglesias says: There's no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is…
Polish Genetics & Anthropology points out that the Estonian Genetics Project is reporting: The more than 25,000 blood samples collected already make it possible to conduct various background studies. For example, comparing the genetic data of Estonians with other European nations has revealed…
I just got pointed to Confronting Evolution's Racists Roots via my RSS. This is a common tactic. And it might work for unsophisticated people on the margins. Just like a tract like "Christianity's racist past" would also sell. Or, "Socialism's white supremacist heritage." But intellectually it's…
So says John Hawks in Slate.
How bank bonuses let us all down: ...Because banking is not about true risks but perceived volatility of returns: you earn a stream of steady bonuses for seven or eight years, then when the losses take place, you are not asked to disburse anything. You might even start again, after blaming a "…
A few days ago I mentioned that the story about a bumper crop of twins in a German town in southern Brazil was notable because of the elevated frequency of identical, not fraternal, twins. A reader points out that that was an error, and The New York Times has appended a correction: The Cândido…
Mark Chu-Carroll has an excellent smack-down, Financial Morons, and Quadratics vs. Linears. Mark notes: There's one minor problem with that argument: it doesn't work. A couple of weeks ago, some idiot at JP Morgan circulated a chart that was supposed to summarize just how bad the financial…
Just a heads up, the old "AlphaPsy" weblog is now Cognition & Culture. One of the contributors is Dan Sperber, who I interviewed a few years ago.
Daniel Gross of Slate has a piece up, Dumb Money: The villains of the financial catastrophe aren't criminals. They're morons. I just love the use of the term "morons." As Gross notes though there was plenty of g to go around, but that didn't prevent moronic behavior. But, I do think it is worth…
New Safety, New Concerns In Tests for Down Syndrome: The new tests take advantage of techniques that can isolate and analyze tiny bits of genetic information from the fetus that circulate in a woman's bloodstream, in this case from cells or free-floating snippets of DNA or the related molecule RNA…
Association Between Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Level and Upper Respiratory Tract Infection in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey: The median serum 25(OH)D level was 29 ng/mL...and 19%...of participants reported a recent URTI [recent respiratory tract infections]. Recent URTI…