Gene Expression
Archives for December, 2007
Indigenous European paganism
Posted by Razib Khan on December 24, 2007 Found out something interesting today. In the Russian republic of Mari El there exists an indigenous pagan tradition which is not a reconstruction. That is, the pagans of Mari El trace their practice in an unbroken line back to their ancestors, as the Christianization during the period of Ivan the Terrible (the 16th century) was…
She be mighty fly
Posted by Razib Khan on December 23, 2007 M. Yglesias seems to be dissing Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” Well, I’ll raise him “Pon de Replay”….
Jamie Lynn Spears: it runs in the family?
Posted by Razib Khan on December 23, 2007 Hometown Reacts: Residents Respond To Pregnancy News in relation to Jamie Lynn Spears & Casey Aldridge’s impending parenthood: But we did manage to talk to a few locals, who, quite honestly, weren’t too shocked to learn that Britney’s little sister was pregnant, either because teen pregnancies aren’t all that uncommon in Kentwood, or because, after…
Tocharians within the last 6,000 years?
Posted by Razib Khan on December 23, 2007 From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China: Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present in Uygur (42.6%) and Uzbek (41.4%) samples, followed by Kazak (30.2%), Mongolian (14.3%),…
Most Canadian Non-whites have Vitamin D deficiency
Posted by Razib Khan on December 23, 2007 Are you getting enough vitamin D?: The research, which is awaiting publication in a medical journal, found that 100 per cent of those of African origin were short of vitamin D, as were 93 per cent of South Asians (those of Indian or Pakistani origin), and 85 per cent of East Asians (those of Chinese,…
Whither the adaptive hypersphere?
Posted by Razib Khan on December 22, 2007 No, this should not be in the “Physical Science” category. By hypersphere I’m thinking of the model that R.A. Fisher popularized as opposed to Sewall Wright’s conception of the adaptive landscape, a multidimensional sphere within which was located a position which was the adaptive optimum. While Wright’s landscapes were rugged, and so opened up the…
Why adaptive evolution is not evolution
Posted by Razib Khan on December 22, 2007 Specifically, as evolgen points out the acceleration paper was focused on adaptive evolution, the subset of allele frequency changes driven predominantly by the force of natural selection. What’s the rest? Read the post. Why does this matter? Evolution is a science, and in science this sort of pedantic precision in definition, terminology and meaning matters…
Why phenotypic races may not disappear
Posted by Razib Khan on December 21, 2007 In response to my post Mixed-race but homogeneous appearance? several individuals mooted the possibility that admixture may result in the vanishing of race as a social construct. Actually, I don’t think this is the true. To the left is a photo from my post Can you tell if you’re black or white? where I explored…