razib
Posts by this author
Islam on Campus: A survey of UK student opinions. N = 632 for Muslims. Remember that this is an elite sample of the youth insofar as they're polling university students.
You might wonder what exactly Sharia law is in regarding to apostasy. Perhaps these students have a different interpretation…
Tropic Thunder is worth watching again at a matinee price just for a closer observation of Tom Cruise's scenes.
Pineapple Express is not worth a matinee price.
Hey, so everyone's saying that it's Biden. From my rather politically uncomitted and unobsessed perspective, one word: anti-climactic.
My previous post, Weird lands of the tails, had some concepts implicit which I didn't elucidate in detail. For example, I assumed that the speed is a quantitative trait, and the many genes which control its variation have pleiotropic effects. That is, gene 1 has effect on phenotypes 1 through n.…
Yesterday's post on the speed of Jamaican sprinters, and Genetic Future's skepticism of a one-gene answer for their dominance. The discussion brought up some adaptive talk; I'm not against adaptation, and I think it's entirely plausible that populations differ enough in the distribution of…
I haven't been watching the Olympics, but my news feeds are broad enough that I get a general sense of who is winning, and who is not. Over at Genetic Future Dan MacArthur has a post up, The gene for Jamaican sprinting success? No, not really:
And Bolt is not the only Jamaican to impress in short…
A personal experience of mine is that many apostates from religion have...issues. On the other hand, people who were raised, or always were, atheists tend to mostly be almost confused by religion. But I was curious as to possible differences between these two groups, and those believe in God, or…
p-ter points me to a new paper in Trends in Ecology, Pleiotropy in the melanocortin system, coloration and behavioural syndromes:
In vertebrates, melanin-based coloration is often associated with variation in physiological and behavioural traits. We propose that this association stems from…
In the United States we have the free speech built into the law, so it is somewhat a moot point. Of course, as evidenced by comments in many other Western countries the limits to speech are bounded by public consensus. So I decided to look at the GSS in terms of response to one question:
After I…
France Reaffirms Its Faith in Future of Nuclear Power:
Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France's electricity, according to the government, and relatively few public doubts are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas.
...
France generates half of its own total energy, up…
MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives:
Previous studies in animals and humans show that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours and that females often prefer odour of MHC-dissimilar males, perhaps to increase offspring…
Brain Size and the Diversification of Body Size in Birds:
Large brains are associated with increased cognitive skills, enabling animals to use new environments and resources more successfully. Such behavioral flexibility is theoretically expected to have macroevolutionary consequences. First,…
According to assman (yes, that's his name), porn has not become mainstream. The post is totally work-safe FYI.
Pubmed + RSS + iGoogle = Easy Lit Updates:
...The idea is to use the combined power of Pubmed, RSS feeds and iGoogle to create a page of RSS feed boxes that will keep you continually updated on articles containing your keywords of interest, or from specific authors or journals. It is nice and…
The figure above comes from the an article in The New York Times, The Genetic Map of Europe, which draws from a new paper, Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe. The authors sampled 2,500 Europeans across 300,000 points of genetic variation, then extracted out the…
The Daily Star in Bangladesh has published a profile I wrote of Reihan Salam.
25-Hydroxyvitamin D Levels and the Risk of Mortality in the General Population:
In cross-sectional multivariate analyses, increasing age, female sex, nonwhite race/ethnicity, diabetes, current smoking, and higher body mass index were all independently associated with higher odds of 25(OH)D…
Reed Elsevier caught copying my content without my permission:
Scientists provide the content for Elsevier's journals. They donate their time to review, and often edit, the articles that appear in the journals. They make up the bulk of the audience for the journals. Yet Elsevier has, time after…
Today I stumbled on to this article in The New York Times, In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many, and thought of Steve Fuller; the sociologist of science who testified for the Creationists at the Dover trial. John points me to this awesome take-down of Fuller's book, Science v.…
A few weeks ago I reread large portions of A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. There were several chapters near the end which focused a great deal on the men that Galton mentored; from his protege Karl Pearson to the eventual nemesis of the Galtonian…
Georgia. John Edwards love-child. Olympics. Bernie & Isaac. A lot happens when you aren't paying attention in this big world....
In case you were curious.
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 3%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 97%
SiteMale-Female Ratio
google.com0.98
yahoo.com0.9
youtube.com1
wikipedia.org1.08
amazon.com0.9
craigslist.org1.13
facebook.com0.83
walmart.com0.77
paypal.com1.04
cnn.com1.35
blogger.com1.06
imdb.com1.…
New Results On The Domestication Of Barley In Iran & Cattle In Turkey. And stuff on milk a little earlier than we thought...obviously relevant to lactose tolerance.
Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome:
The presence or absence of genetic heterogeneity in Sicily has long been debated. Through the analysis of the variation of Y-chromosome lineages, using the combination of…
At my other weblog, Cliodynamics, the rise & fall of empires and asabiya and Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion. The first is a bit long. The second is rather long. My Voice will not be Silenced!
Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:
"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview.
"Teachers are…
A few months ago I was talking to a friend who is pretty highly "connected," insofar as he seems to know everyone. So we were talking about some genetics issues and I asked him, "You know who Lee Silver is, right?" There was a pause, and my friend was like, "I just got off the phone with him."