razib
Posts by this author
February 3, 2009
Bonnie Newman will be appointed Senator from New Hampshire. That means that 4 of the female Senators will be from the northeast portion of England; all of New Hamphsire & Maine's Senators are women. What about the rest of the country? Map below the fold.
Red = both Senators male
Tan = one…
February 2, 2009
I hear & read the term "anecdotal evidence" a great deal. But wouldn't it be better to say "anecdotal illustration"? After all, most of the time a few anecdotes do nothing to increase confidence in a hypothesis, rather, they illustrate possible instances assuming that the hypothesis is true.
February 1, 2009
OK, it died soon after resurrection, and they used "brute force" methodologies.
January 31, 2009
A commenter below wondered how much of Southern American religiosity is just a function of black religiosity, seeing as how blacks make up a larger portion of the American South's population. A fair amount. That being said, I decided to look at two GSS variables, GOD & BIBLE, and break them…
January 31, 2009
My Sister's Keeper:
They called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women's liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community,…
January 31, 2009
Gallup has an interesting survey up, State of the States: Importance of Religion. The title makes rather clear the result, but check out this map:
January 30, 2009
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, is now available from Amazon & fine local bookstores. Over at 2 Blowhards one of the authors Greg Cochran has done a 5-part interview: part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Set some time aside, there's a lot there....
January 30, 2009
I'm thinking of getting a netbook. Any recommendations/experiences?
January 30, 2009
Well, it isn't just the old media that's having issues. A few days ago Culture11 folded. Now it looks like Pajamas Media network is shutting down (they're going to go into vlogging fulltime?). I got a few links from PM back in 2005-2006, very little traffic. It didn't seem like the aggregation…
January 30, 2009
Over at The Root Keith Adkins has a post, Sandra Laing: Born Black with White Parents:
I'm no geneticist or biologist, but it looks like Sandra is a product of an black South African and maybe a white Afrikaneer. I'm saying, it looks like somebody in her family was lying. The tests they used…
January 30, 2009
My friend Aziz Poonawalla has a post up, is evolution sufficient? No, it's not the standard Creationist cant:
The implication of such rapid evolution is that we should actually notice it on human timescales. And that there is actually is some mechanism of action that is actually driving the…
January 29, 2009
A few years ago PLoS Medicine published Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States. The results were:
-- Asian-Americans, per capita income of $21,566, life expectancy of 84.9 years.
-- Northland low-income rural…
January 28, 2009
Mars Rover Disoriented Somewhat After Glitch:
More strangely, the Spirit had no memory of what it had done for that part of Sol 1800. The rover did not record actions, as it otherwise always does, to the part of its computer memory that retains information even when power is turned off, the so-…
January 28, 2009
Read Genetic Future on Navigenics crappy new product. Better yet, link to the post yourself to crank up the google ranking, you're doing potential consumers a service.
January 28, 2009
There are now some articles which are detailing the other Ponzi schemes which are coming out in the wake of l'affaire Madoff. One thing that is notable: the next biggest scam is an order of magnitude less significant. That is, while Bernie Madoff's scam was on the scale of billions, the next ones…
January 28, 2009
Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation:
Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies have tested…
January 27, 2009
Extremely readable OA paper in PNAS, Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks:
Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased…
January 26, 2009
The normal story we are told is that as rose civilization, so declined evolution. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, inverts that formula as indicated by the title. The idea that humans are beyond evolution isn't limited just to non-scientists, Steve Jones…
January 25, 2009
Michael Blowhard is doing a 4-part interview with Greg Cochran on his new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Part 1 is up.
January 22, 2009
Sheril has a post up, On Sacrificing Reproductive Fitness For Career Advancement..., which makes a common sense point:
Angier references a recent survey of 160,000 Ph.D. recipients that found 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children while only 44 percent of their female…
January 22, 2009
Carl Zimmer pointed me to a new paper, A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans. The title is so informative that pasting the abstract is almost unnecessary, but here is…
January 21, 2009
The Monito del Monte is the only extant member of its order, the Microbiotheria. This order is itself part of the superorder Australidelphia, which includes Australian Marsupials and the Monito del Monte, whose native habitat are the forests of Chile and Argentina. In other words, the Monito del…
January 21, 2009
Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda:
Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the…
January 21, 2009
About every single post on human population clusters tend to shift into a discussion as to whether human variation is clinal, or where one can make assertions of discrete groups. I think it is fair to note that most of the populations sampled have been skewed to one locale. For example, "French"…
January 20, 2009
In the comments about the term Judeo-Christian the Marcionite tendencies of liberal Christianity was mentioned. Sometimes I have encountered the idea that a rejection of the Hebrew Bible within Christianity naturally results in Anti-Semitism (granted, the argument is often from neconservatives who…
January 19, 2009
The End of Banking as We Know It:
The bright side is that all those displaced financial services professionals can now set their sights on doing something, well, truly useful.
Still, this adjustment will be painful for all those who have to carve out new careers, as well as for New York and other…
January 19, 2009
The post yesterday about the deletion which results in heart disease later in life had some interesting ancestry related material. This makes sense, the genetic maps which I post on now and then ultimately have a medical rationale behind them; eliminate population structure so that you don't have…