February 29, 2008

Guest Katz  permlink

Category: Blog

Got these pix via a forward. Thought it might be a nice change of pace.......

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 10:15 AM • 6 Comments

Rewriting Islam  permlink

Category: Religion

Lots of articles on the radical reinterpretation of the Hadith in Turkey. The Hadith serve as the basis for Islamic law, and orthopraxy more generally. I am on the record as saying that texts don't in the end determine anything,...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 5:05 AM • 3 Comments

Selection, but for what???  permlink

Category: Genetics

In my post below about a possible locus to look at to explain the normal variation in hair form we see around us a reader asked: I was once suckered into giving a course on animal ecophysiology (I was told...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 1:27 AM • 15 Comments

February 28, 2008

Delegate calculator  permlink

Category: Blog

If you haven't, check out Slate's delegate calculator. It looks hard for HRC.......

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 9:44 PM • 1 Comments

Science blogs, what are they good for?  permlink

Category: Blog

John Hawks as a long post on the kerfuffle over "good" science blogging. I think John is right to emphasize the importance of search engine traffic for "specialist" posts; there's a significant long tail effect here....

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 1:25 PM • 0 Comments

William F. Buckely was a racist  permlink

Category: Politics

Many are quoting this from an editorial by William F. Buckley Jr.: "The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 4:55 AM • 22 Comments

Mitty Romney is hyper-typical for a Mormon  permlink

Category: Religion

The Audacious Epigone crunches the Pew Religion Survey and comes up with some more insights.......

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 2:00 AM • 1 Comments

February 27, 2008

Why is hair kinky?  permlink

Category: Genetics

I saw this paper in Nature Genetics, Disruption of P2RY5, an orphan G protein-coupled receptor, underlies autosomal recessive woolly hair: The genetic determinants of hair texture in humans are largely unknown. Several human syndromes exist in which woolly hair comprises...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 2:24 PM • 12 Comments

Maybe it's agriculture - soft sweep TRPV6  permlink

Category: Genetics

Parallel Selection on TRPV6 in Human Populations (Open Access): ...The selective footprints, however, are significantly differentiated between non-African populations and estimated to be younger than an ancestral population of non-Africans. The possibility of a single selection event occurring in an...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 1:03 PM • 0 Comments

February 26, 2008

Where are brown people short?  permlink

Category: Culture

In the comments to my post, Why brown people are midgets, a reader pointed me to this paper, which tabulates and analyzes some data from the 1960s for males. There isn't anything too surprising in the data set; Punjabis are...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 2:18 PM • 1 Comments

Bee evolutionary genetics  permlink

Category: Genetics

John Hawks has commentary on a new paper, A genome-wide signature of positive selection in ancient and recent invasive expansions of the honey bee Apis mellifera. John's point is that evolutionary dynamics are evolutionary dynamics. I'm sure as a species...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 4:23 AM • 2 Comments

The two streams of American irreligiosity  permlink

Category: Culture

Despite the fact that the mainstream media likes to write a lot of stories how religious revival in the United States one of the great unreported facts of the last 15 years is the rise of the proportion of Americans...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 1:10 AM • 9 Comments

February 25, 2008

F*cking Ben Affleck  permlink

Category:

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 11:33 PM • 2 Comments

Biology determines what language you speak....  permlink

Category: Culture

Well, sort of. I'm reading Henry Kamen's Empire: How Spain Became a World Power. Kamen is no Charles C. Mann, his story isn't 1491. For him the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas were haphazard affairs driven more by entrepreneurial...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 1:20 AM • 5 Comments

February 24, 2008

Why brown people are midgets  permlink

Category: Genetics

I'm 5 feet 8 inches tall. 1.73 meters. In the United States that's somewhat on the short side, most of the charts suggest I'm around the 30th percentile for white men. Of course, I'm not white. In any case, though...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 2:59 AM • 29 Comments

February 23, 2008

85% of genetic variation is within groups...  permlink

Category: Genetics

...yes, true. On a typical single locus (on some loci, such as SLC24A5, most of the variation is between groups). But that doesn't mean that you can't use genetics to differentiate population clusters. Here are 938 individuals (the points) from...

Read on »

Posted by Razib at 2:56 PM • 10 Comments