razib
Posts by this author
April 21, 2009
The New York Times has a story about a new paper, Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females:
Skews in the human sex ratio at birth have captivated scientists for over a century. The accepted average human natal sex ratio is slightly male biased, at 106 males per 100 females or 51.5 per cent…
April 21, 2009
The World Values Survey has a question about immigration policy with four options:
- Let anyone come
- As long as jobs available
- Strict limits
- Prohibit people from coming
I used WVS 2005-2008 from 57 countries first. Then I filled out the countries with the
Four-wave Aggregate of the Values…
April 21, 2009
Neandertal birth canal shape and the evolution of human childbirth:
Childbirth is complicated in humans relative to other primates. Unlike the situation in great apes, human neonates are about the same size as the birth canal, making passage difficult. The birth mechanism (the series of rotations…
April 20, 2009
In response to the NEJM issue on personal genomics and the CDCV hypothesis, p-ter offers a proposal:
Let's follow Goldstein's back-of-the-envelope calculations: assume there are ~100K polymorphisms (assuming Goldstein isn't making the mistake I attribute to him, this includes polymorphisms both…
April 20, 2009
Since none of the physics bloggers on SB have pointed to it yet, Stephen Hawking has been hospitalized with a respiratory ailment. He's 67.
April 20, 2009
Bryan Caplan notes & argues:
If you take a closer look at BG research, though, you'll notice something interesting. Virtually every BG study partitions variance into three sources: genes, shared family environment, and non-shared environment. Typical estimates are something like 40-50% for…
April 20, 2009
There is a question on the World Values Survey which allows people to give a number corresponding to their position on a spectrum where 0 = "Ethnic diversity erodes a country´s unity" and 10 = "Ethnic diversity enriches my life." Below the fold I've placed the countries where this was asked as…
April 19, 2009
I long ago noticed that David Sloan Wilson was a contributor to The Huffington Post. My own inclination at this point is still to believe that Wilson pushes too hard for group selection, and on occasion engages in the same sort of rhetorical excess which he accuses his critics, such as Richard…
April 19, 2009
The blog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle has responded to my post that Buddhists generally believe in God. Some of the comments also brought up some semantic issues which are real in how Buddhists view God, and how it might be distinguished from more personalized conceptions of the divine being,…
April 18, 2009
John Hawks has pointed out that the great archaeologist Colin Renfrew has been making the case that our species has been in genomic stasis for 50,000 years. He contends:
The genetic composition of living humans at birth (the human genotype) is closely similar from individual to individual today.…
April 18, 2009
Update: Readers pointed out that these results are from the cumulative data set from 1972-2002. So the % who favored laws against interracial marriage were ~40% in 1972, and ~10% in 2002, averaging out to ~25% across the years. The relative differences though seem to remain the same across…
April 17, 2009
In light of the relatively recent interaction of Bantu farmers and Pygmies in Central Africa, this paper is of note, Genetic and demographic implications of the Bantu expansion: insights from human paternal lineages:
The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present…
April 17, 2009
A much more thorough post by Dan MacArthur on the recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine & genomics.
April 16, 2009
Another response by Etienne Patin, lead author of Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, to a follow up post:
As to your hypothesis represented by the cladogram, this is a quite reasonable and interesting idea.…
April 16, 2009
There are some really weird comments about Albania below. Part of these confusions have to do with ambiguities as to the religious identity of Albania, traditionally majority Muslim, but after decades of Communism very secular. What exactly are the religious breakdowns? How religious are Albanians…
April 16, 2009
The New England Journal of Medicine has a series of articles up on the impact of new genomic techniques on medicine, specifically in the domain of pinpointing genetic markers which are correlated with increased risk of a particular disease. David Goldstein has a skeptical take up on the future…
April 15, 2009
I found the references to Finland very interesting in the latest episode of South Park. Good riddance!
April 15, 2009
When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear? An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country Well done.
April 15, 2009
Diary of a visit to a coffeehouse run by a madman. See some of the Yelp reviews.
H/T The Elf.
April 15, 2009
Male Circumcision Reduces HIV Risk: No Further Evidence Needed, According To Review:
The clinical trials included in the review took place in South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya between 2002 and 2006, and included a total of 11,054 men. The results show that circumcision in heterosexual men…
April 15, 2009
A year ago I mentioned that the Religious Landscape Survey showed that a majority of American Buddhists believe in God. Some people wondered as to its generality as a finding. Does this apply in Asia? It seems likely. The World Values Survey has data on Buddhists in Singapore, Taiwan and Japan in…
April 15, 2009
Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups among Neanderthals:
The Neanderthals are a well-distinguished Middle Pleistocene population which inhabited a vast geographical area extending from Europe to western Asia and the Middle East. Since the 1950s paleoanthropological studies have suggested…
April 15, 2009
Joel Grus, who was a blogger at Gene Expression in 2002, and who is responsible for the banner graphic, has a weblog up promoting his book Your religion is false! (But so is everyone elses.).
April 14, 2009
The Hapsburgs are one of those royal families who are relatively well known, and in the minds of the public are to a great extent the emblems of the downsides of inbreeding. To painting to the left is of Charles II, king of Spain, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and an imbecile whose premature…
April 14, 2009
Teacher who survived polar bear mauling at zoo 'was depressed over job':
Rifles had already been issued to marksmen and Heiner Kloes, a zoo spokesman, said: "This woman's behaviour not only put her life in danger but also that of the staff who had to rescue her.
"However, we do have guns and we…
April 14, 2009
Chaplain's E-mail Sparks Controversy:
In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was "great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the…
April 14, 2009
I've suggested before that the idea of Turkey entering the EU is a farce. One could make the economic case that it is far too large and poor to be absorbed easily (unlike the Eastern European nations Turkey is nearly as populous as Germany). But there is a strong cultural case too. Turkey is a…
April 14, 2009
I've been on this domain for over 3 years. So I have a fair amount of google analytics data. Care to guess which the top 10 sources are for readers to this weblog in terms of nationality? Answer below the fold.
April 14, 2009
Accelerated Adaptive Evolution on a Newly Formed X Chromosome:
Sex chromosomes originated from ordinary autosomes, and their evolution is characterized by continuous gene loss from the ancestral Y chromosome. Here, we document a new feature of sex chromosome evolution: bursts of adaptive fixations…
April 13, 2009
Two highly recommended Bloggingheads.tv below the fold on religion. First, the cognitive science of religion in Why Are We Religious?, and second religion & conservatism in God and Man on the Right. My co-blogger at Secular Right, Heather Mac Donald, is getting into it with a future columnist…