razib
Posts by this author
As you probably know, the Phoenix has landed on Mars. No problems so far. I assume the best place to track the data as it comes back is the NASA mission page for Phoenix. Here are the mission goals:
--Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
--Characterize the Climate of Mars
--Characterize the…
One of the truisms of American politics for the past generation has been the "gender gap" whereby women tend to lean toward the Democrats and men toward the Republicans. This gap has become part of the background assumptions of American political commentary to the point that right-wing polemicist…
A few years ago a poll came out, Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll. My title is a bit misleading insofar as the survey compared several European countries as well as the United States. Below the fold I've placed a few of the…
One of the main facts about American life is hypodescent, "the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent." Barack Obama & the Kenyan politician Raila Odinga (who, probably falsely, claims…
Notes on Sewall Wright: Wright's F-statistics:
A preliminary question is one of terminology. What, if anything, does the letter 'F' stand for? One plausible answer is that it stands for 'fixation', since among other things the F-statistics can be used to measure the rate at which alleles tend to be…
Noam Scheiber points to working paper, SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS IN ESTIMATED SUPPORT FOR A BLACK PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, which attempts to figure out the Bradley Effect by guaging avowed vs. implied support. Mark Blumenthal of Myster Pollster has an interview where one of the authors explains the…
A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Alleles Associated with Hair Color and Skin Pigmentation:
It has been a longstanding hypothesis that human pigmentation is tightly regulated by genetic variation. However, very few genes have been identified that contain common genetic variants…
Will Saletan makes an analogy between cousin marriage and delayed (i.e., 40something) motherhood:
If Bittles' numbers are correct, they substantiate a somewhat embarrassing point made by defenders of cousin marriage. Embarrassing, that is, to all of us good Western folk who turn up our noses at the…
OK, the title is deceptive; but the reality is kind of cool in my opinion (you may not share my normative filter; some people prefer the dead). PLOS One is publishing a paper which takes Tasmanian Tiger genetic material, and re-expresses it in vivo in mice! The reasoning for this is pretty…
Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we'll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it....
At the same time, this just popped…
Via E. Klein, I found out abut a new show on PBS this fall, Spain...on the Road Again, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, and Claudia Bassols. Preview below the fold....
I have to admit that Batali's corpulence makes me recall a Sesame Street game...
I was IMing with a friend about inbreeding depression and came across a map which shows the laws regarding cousin marriage in the United States....
And here's a map of the Mississipi drainage basin....
(nothing else really jumps out at me)
Of course the whole cousin marriage issue isn't as "hot…
As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:
This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is…
Firefox 3 release candidate goes public:
It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.
...
On the performance front, the documentation states that applications…
If you don't have a spare computer, want to try out a Linux distribution, and are a little intimidated by the details of setting up a dual-boot, check out Wubi. It makes a dual-boot pretty much a "one-click" affair, loading up the Ubuntu distribution via a Windows installer.
Since everyone is talking about the fact that the Polar Bear how become a protected species, I thought I'd point to this cool study, Mitochondrial DNA Phylogeography of the North American Brown Bear and Implications for Conservation. Additionally, check out the figure below....
I know I've posted on this topic before, but I thought I'd revisit it again. You do know that sometimes population bottlenecks can actually result in more variation being freed up for selection? This may strike you as a bit strange; after all, the power of selection to effect phenotypic change is…
Many people are talking about David Brooks' new column, The Neural Buddhists. First, I think much respect should be given to Brooks for introducing science into his column; too much punditry today is informed by seat of the pants introspection & anecdote, as opposed to what scholars have…
When I was a child in Bangladesh one of my "charming" activities would be to give the local banana seller some unsolicited advice. As he walked down the street carrying his banana-bunch I would shout down from the balcony and tell him which cultivars my family preferred, and that he better get…
Ron Bailey in Reason, The Genetics of Ensoulment:
Advances in stem cell research may be provoking a kind of "God of the Gaps" retreat on the moral status of embryos. People who subscribe to God of the Gaps thinking believe that the hand of God can be seen in those things which science cannot…
Here. The embed is the best bet if you can view it; the download often fails (server has been slammed?). Only a moderate amount of discussion about religion; Dawkins talks a fair bit about an obscure field, evolutionary biology. Well done.
Via Accidental Blogger.
Another article about cousin marriage in the UK. The issue here is simple; you have a National Health Service which covers everyone, and doctors are noticing that Pakistanis are overrepresented in many cases of recessive diseases. The culprit is probably cousin marriage. Here are two points which…
Last year p-ter put up a post pointing to useful online tools such as Haplotter. One of the great things about biology today is that so much of the data from genomics is being thrown out there within reach of the plebs. And a lot of value is being added through user interfaces which smooth the…
...is live. Don't know what I'm talking about? Natural language search; people have been talking about this as the Next Big Thing for a while.... (though I will say, if people have been talking about something, it isn't likely to be the Next Big Thing)
Pew has an excellent survey up about the state of religion and religiosity in China. There isn't a lot of good data out of China on this topic for obvious reasons. One of the phenomenon of recent years in the West has been the perception among evangelicals that China is the scene of mass…