razib
Posts by this author
April 1, 2009
Richard Dawkins: 'There is something illogical about the fear of death':
The comfort of a dying soldier, the succour for a grieving mother or belief in the after-life of a widower - is it still possible to see the utility of certain psychological aspects in some religious beliefs or customs? […
April 1, 2009
Check out the introductory post. I had thought Felix was a more traditional financial journalist, but looks like he took a rather unorthodox route. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
March 31, 2009
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 diverse, with the European population in-…
March 31, 2009
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 carry the gene for blue eyes. To use a computer analogy the way you can get…
March 30, 2009
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 or 40 or 50,' " said Baym. "But what having a lot of…
March 30, 2009
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 more genes in humans than it did in…
March 30, 2009
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. Crossâculturally, paternity confidence (a man's…
March 30, 2009
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 its foraging caste.
The gene is active in soldier…
March 30, 2009
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 compared to a sample of 435…
March 29, 2009
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. With internet speed the latency seems far more attenuated; there's…
March 28, 2009
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 dug through the GSS on this…
March 28, 2009
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 been disproved or brought into doubt. These arguments…
March 27, 2009
Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, has a post up where he notes how bad political "experts" are. Nevertheless, I'm a little confused, isn't the whole point of political pundits & stock pickers to be entertaining, as opposed to expert? It seems that the premise that the public is rationally…
March 27, 2009
A few days ago The New York Times had a blog post up which addressed the relationship between genes & environment in shaping our behavior & choices (see Genetic Future). One of the authors even posted a follow up comment where they evinced some surprise at the bile of the responses. I have…
March 26, 2009
New York has a very long piece, Monster Mensch, which profiles Bernie & J. Ezra Merkin. Psychoanalysis can get kind of old, the profile is more interesting in terms of the light it sheds on other figures in Bernie's world.
March 26, 2009
New Nail in Google Cloud Coffin:
Here's what Google fears: If its cloud-computing system crashes, or inadvertently lets companies view their rivals' confidential documents all over the world, the entire system of cloud-based business-information processing collapses. Companies' most precious…
March 25, 2009
Excellent episode. Should it be titled "In praise of fiat currency?"
March 25, 2009
Dan MacArthur already posted some of the supplementary figures from Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations, but he didn't put up one that I thought was really striking. The text:
First, there is extensive sharing of extreme iHS and XP-EHH signals between…
March 25, 2009
Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece on a review on the relationships between male competition, signaling and sexual selection. If the topic interests you I strongly recommend Animal Signals, John Maynard Smith's last book.
March 25, 2009
There's a critique up of Michael Lewis' entertaining if somewhat less than illuminating (compared to the piece in The New Yorker) profile of the Icelandic financial meltdown. No surprise that Lewis spun here and there to extract more entertainment out of the straight story, but I have to take…
March 24, 2009
Black Girls Are 50 Percent More Likely To Be Bulimic Than White Girls:
Rather, girls who are African American are 50 percent more likely than girls who are white to be bulimic, the researchers found, and girls from families in the lowest income bracket studied are 153 percent more likely to be…
March 24, 2009
Genetic Future's summary of Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations is an excellent complement to mine. Highly recommended.
March 24, 2009
John Hawks & Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to a new paper in Genome Research, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. As Dan notes, it's Open Access, so you can read the PDF yourself. That being said, "Just read it!" might be somewhat a tall…
March 23, 2009
I thought this Genetic Future post was an exaggeration, as it seemed to indicate that the Gene Sherpa was accusing 23andMe of terrorism. I thought there has to be context, right? Uh, not really:
In healthcare, imagine if your doctor was found to be breaking the law. Stole from Medicare? Non-…
March 23, 2009
Sweden Says No to Saving Saab:
Which makes it all the more wrenching that the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car…
March 23, 2009
Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of-Africa scenario:
The interpretation of genetic evidence regarding modern human origins depends, among other things, on assessments of the structure and the variation of ancient populations. Because we lack…
March 23, 2009
Richard Sturm in Human Molecular Genetics has a really good review of the current state of pigmentation genetics, with a human centric focus:
The genetic basis underlying normal variation in the pigmentary traits of skin, hair and eye colour has been the subject of intense research directed at…
March 23, 2009
Just a heads up, they're had Discover Blogs now. Just want to note, I welcomed Tapped (which Chris Mooney was instrumental in setting up) to the blogosphere in April of 2002. Chris' acknowledgment of welcome, and my own pre-blogspot weblog, have been vaporized by the digital dustbin, but I wanted…
March 23, 2009
The rise in eczema, or asthma, or the general return of infectious disease, reminds one that though we live in a post-Malthusian Age generally, many of the truths of earlier times hold. While with physical technology we can rest assured that the feature-set and power will increase monotonically…
March 21, 2009
The GSS has a variable, ODDS1, which represents the question:
Now, think about this situation. A doctor tells a couple that their genetic makeup means that they've got one in four chances of having a child with an inherited illness. Does this mean that if their first child has the illness, the…