razib
Posts by this author
At my other site I've put up 10 questions for Jon Entine. He has a new book out, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, which covers the fascinating area of Jewish genetics.
Salon has a must read interview of Steven Pinker & Rebecca Goldstein.
If you haven't seen it, this is a hilarious story: Vatican Official Insists He's Not Gay:
A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.
In an interview published Sunday,…
Sheril tagged me with a meme of the form:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can…
Everyone at ScienceBlogs is talking about Al Gore. Well, all I have to say is that boy have things changed. Just look what Gore was up to a few years ago....
Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States (Open Access). Here's the most interesting finding for me:
The 12.8-y gap in life expectancy between females in Americas 1 and 7 is approximately the same as the gap between Japan,…
The New York Times has an interesting article, Picky Eaters? They Get It From You, which I'm sure many parents can relate to. Here's the most critical part:
The study, led by Dr. Lucy Cooke of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, was published in the…
Sheril had a post where she included a link to New Kids up. That reminded me, in the boy band craze of circa 2000 I remember one group which seems to have not received the accolades which I felt were appropriate. Below the fold....
Nature has two papers on language which I'll pass along (I don't know enough about this area to say anything non-tardish) for those who have an interest in such things.
First, our old friend Martin Nowak is behind a group which published an article titled Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of…
The paper Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians has some great maps which show the frequencies of major alleles for some major skin color genes. I've placed them below the fold with some minor edits (added the gene label prominently to each map).
Predicting Odor Pleasantness from Odorant Structure: Pleasantness as a Reflection of the Physical World:
Although it is agreed that physicochemical features of molecules determine their perceived odor, the rules governing this relationship remain unknown. A significant obstacle to such…
I have posted before on recent work which seems to establish that the OCA2 locus is responsible for the majority of the variation within populations where both blue and brown eyes are extant. Well, now there's a massive paper out by Tony Frudakis, Multilocus OCA2 genotypes specify human iris colors…
An Open Access review paper in Human Molecular Biology, Challenges in human genetic diversity: demographic history and adaptation, has a short and easy-to-digest review of many of the major findings over the past 5 years in human evolutionary genomics and the "big picture" implications:
Modern…
Ancestral reconstruction of segmental duplications reveals punctuated cores of human genome evolution:
Human segmental duplications are hotspots for nonallelic homologous recombination leading to genomic disorders, copy-number polymorphisms and gene and transcript innovations. The complex structure…
Genetic triple dissociation reveals multiple roles for dopamine in reinforcement learning:
...Here, we show with genetic analyses that three independent dopaminergic mechanisms contribute to reward and avoidance learning in humans. A polymorphism in the DARPP-32 gene, associated with striatal…
Shelley needs help to win a blogging scholarship. If you're so inclined vote for Shelley. General information on the scholarship.
Amusing story in The New York Times. As I have said, scientific genealogy can answer specific and narrow questions; though in this case I think there's going to be enough wiggle room for the myth-makers to contine publishing books (note: I don't know which ones are the mythical ones!).
The Seattle Times has a piece titled Anthropology: the great divide. Here's the essential bit:
At the extremes, one school of thought insinuates dark, possibly racist intentions of scientists under sway of their Eurocentric biases, linear thinking and arrogance in their dealings with modern tribes…
You'll never know what you might find if you go looking....
So, on my question for skin color genes, Signatures of Positive Selection in Genes Associated with Human Skin Pigmentation as Revealed from Analyses of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms:
...We identified eight genes that are associated with…
Pew has released a massive survey of global attitudes. There's a lot of good stuff you can find if you dig deep into the massive 2 MB PDF that has all the results. Something I found interesting....
In response to the query "Do you have to believe in God to be moral?" Here are some select…
Effects of metabolic rate on protein evolution:
Since the modern evolutionary synthesis was first proposed early in the twentieth century, attention has focused on assessing the relative contribution of mutation versus natural selection on protein evolution. Here we test a model that yields general…
Over the past few weeks I've been looking closely at all the skin color related genes in humans which have been studied over the past few years. A little over two years ago the evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi wrote:
We don't know what the differences are between white skin and black skin,…
Evolution happens faster than originally assumed:
Studying animals from Bighorn sheep to guppies, the research has revealed that animals are evolving to human changes in the environment within 200 generations. "They can be pretty dramatic [changes]," Kinnison said.
...
"People are just catching on…
Paired-End Mapping Reveals Extensive Structural Variation in the Human Genome:
Structural variation of the genome involves kilobase- to megabase-sized deletions, duplications, insertions, inversions, and complex combinations of rearrangements. We introduce high-throughput and massive paired-end…