razib
Posts by this author
At least in my book. How to split up the US. The author took social networking data and split up the United States into clusters. Here's the map:
Clicking through you can find the top fan pages of various nations. I noticed Megan Fox came up high on a list of many. She's #8 in Pakistan, and #2 in…
That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I'll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don't need to answer all of them, but as I said the more you…
In 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…
After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made…
A 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…
I went and saw Creation today. I enjoyed the film, though personally I am a bit tired of the religion vs. science angle. To some extent I felt that there was a conflation between the views & emphases of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Paul Bettany's character seemed to be expositing a view of…
Highly 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…
Check out what has learned from being on ScienceBlogs. Some of the comments are funny.
Population 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…
Could 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…
I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?
PLoS 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…
A comment at Secular Right:
Ever since the Revolution the Mullahs have wanted to erase all traces of the pre-Islamic Persian society. They realized they couldn't go and raze Persepolis and other relics without losing the support of the people. I've heard that it is common for people in Iran to…
Pew has a new report out, Almost All Millennials Accept Interracial Dating and Marriage. Pretty straightforward. But one thing that I found interesting, if not surprising, was that the gap in black-white attitudes had basically disappeared over the generations. I made a chart to illustrate this:…
Two interesting graphs from Calculated Risk. The first shows that the changes in GDP seem during the last recessive are on a par with those of the early 1980s and before (though we don't know if we're in a U or V shaped recession yet, though the odds are probably more U than V right now). But the…
A comment below prompted me to slap together a post quickly displaying some data which illustrates just how religious South Asians are compared to East Asians. Anyone with an interest in world history will not be surprised by this assertion. When reading surveys of East Asian history I would…
Jobless Turn to Family for Help, Often With Complications:
More than half of the respondents to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of 708 unemployed adults nationwide said they had borrowed money from friends or relatives. In most cases, their financial pictures were bleak. Nearly 80 percent of…
The New York Times Magazine has a long profile of an American from Alabama, Omar Hammami, who is now fighting for the Islamists in Somalia, The Jihadist Next Door. The optics of his family background seem tailor-made for a compelling narrative (or a TV-movie). A father who is a Syrian immigrant, a…
Excellent 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…
I've got a few installed now. Has anyone had any issues with performance yet? I recall back when I used Firefox that was the main downside of having extensions.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, see TechCrunch. Or just update your browser and Google will start telling you all about it, in…
Mike the Mad Biologist points me to an interesting article in Wired, Uranium Is So Last Century -- Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke. Of course Wired is a booster of many things which never take off, but in general I think it's probably safe to bet on nuclear power becoming more prominent in the…
NASA to Review Human Spaceflight:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is preparing for a major evaluation of its human spaceflight program, even as many who will conduct the survey have yet to be informed of the agency's revised mission.
...
The administration might also enlist the…
Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?:
Brain expansion began early in primate evolution and has occurred in all major groups, suggesting a strong selective advantage to increased brainpower in most primate lineages. Despite this overall trend, however, Mundy and his colleagues have identified…
The debates about the timing of the extinction of the last Neandertals in Iberia seem to one of those interminable disagreements around which paleoanthropologists can't ever reach a resolution. Another offering from PLoS ONE, Pego do Diabo (Loures, Portugal): Dating the Emergence of Anatomical…
Update: Also see p-ter at Gene Expression Classic.
Follow up on yesterday's post on the new Dickson et al. paper from David Goldstein's lab, A New Way to Look for Diseases' Genetic Roots:
The Icelandic gene-hunting firm deCODE genetics, which emerged last week from bankruptcy, has long led in…
One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The Neandertal genome story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there've been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the…