March 31, 2009
How big does the N need to be? permlink
Category: Genetics
Estimating the number of unseen variants in the human genome: ...Consistent with previous descriptions, our results show that the African population is the most diverse in terms of the number of variants expected to exist, the Asian populations the least...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 7:57 PM • 3 Comments •
Women are the genetic future permlink
Category: Genetics
Dan MacArthur has a post up where he discusses 23andMe's outreach to "mommy bloggers." This makes economic sense for any firm in this field. There's only so much money to be made out of telling blue eyed nerds that they...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:48 PM • 2 Comments •
March 30, 2009
Facebook is not a revolution permlink
Category: Technology
A follow up to my earlier post on information technology, In The Age Of Facebook, Researcher Plumbs Shifting Online Relationships: "You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:56 PM • 5 Comments •
More skepticism of natural selection permlink
Category: Genetics
In the wake of last week's paper, looks like another one is coming down the pipe, Hundreds of Natural-Selection Studies Could be Wrong, Study Demonstrates: "These statistical methods have led many scientists to believe that natural selection acted on many...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:47 PM • 0 Comments •
Paternity rates by population permlink
Category: Culture
A few years ago a paper came out, How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity?: Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Cross‐culturally, paternity confidence...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:37 PM • 0 Comments •
One gene controlling ant behavior? permlink
Category: Culture
Single Gene Shapes the Toil of Ants' Fighter and Forager Castes: Researchers studying the social behavior of ants have found that a single gene underlies both the aggressive behavior of the ant colony's soldiers and the food gathering behavior of...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:32 PM • 0 Comments •
Copy Number Variation in African Americans permlink
Category: Culture
The paper is pretty straightforward, Copy number variation in African Americans: Employing a SNP platform with greater than 500,000 SNPs, a first-generation CNV map of the African American genome was generated using DNA from 385 healthy African American individuals, and...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 10:08 AM • 1 Comments •
March 29, 2009
Every Man A Media Mogul! permlink
Category: Technology
Portfolio & Wired have a one-two punch on the future of broadband up. I've read that it takes 3-4 months for a salary increase to be "discounted" so that individuals move up the consumption ladder and no longer feel flush....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 11:56 AM • 11 Comments •
March 28, 2009
Science & liberalism permlink
Category: Culture
Faith in science and social conservatism: Except for crime and gun control, faith in science is associated with socially liberal positions. For guns and crime, the direction of the relationship is liberal, but the relationships are not statistically significant. I've...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:38 PM • 7 Comments •
Creationism in America & Europe permlink
Category: Creationism
So I'm reading/hearing about something flaring up in Texas again in regards to Creationism. I always get these strange "articles" in my RSS for the "evolution" query on Google Alerts where an uninformed columnist rambles on how the theory has...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 11:56 AM • 13 Comments •