razib
Posts by this author
December 18, 2008
Mike White finally left a comment on my post Complex traits & evolution:
I'm trying to make a distinction between what geneticists call complex or quantitative traits (traits affected by different alleles of many different genes, with a quantitative range of phenotypes), and something I would…
December 17, 2008
Matt Yglesias has a post up, Illusions of Rationalism, where he seems to dismiss some of the anger in the Left-blogosphere at the coronation of Princess Caroline. Like Matt, I don't really care that much who gets anointed to the throne of the junior Senator from New York, though that has much to…
December 16, 2008
United States Death Map Revealed:
A map of natural hazard mortality in the United States has been produced. The map gives a county-level representation of the likelihood of dying as the result of natural events such as floods, earthquakes or extreme weather.
...
Hazard mortality is most prominent…
December 16, 2008
A Sale of Two Doorstops:
Well, that much is correct. I am thinking that this is what somewhat derivative fantasies patterned on George Martin rather than Tolkien are likely to look like (Acacia: Game of Thrones :: Sword of Shannara : Lord of the Rings). More political intrigue, a darker moral world…
December 16, 2008
Sometimes social data are weird & unexpected. Below the fold are two charts which compare the self-reported happiness of people of various weight classes. From left to right: below average, average, above average and considerably above average. Red = very happy, blue = happy and green =…
December 16, 2008
A correspondent forward me this paper, The intelligence-religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans:
The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National…
December 15, 2008
Over at Genetic Future. Dan "the Man" MacArthur has been quite prolific recently. You should add Genetic Future to your RSS, or at least bookmark it if you are old school.
December 15, 2008
Six new loci associated with body mass index highlight a neuronal influence on body weight regulation:
Common variants at only two loci, FTO and MC4R, have been reproducibly associated with body mass index (BMI) in humans. To identify additional loci, we conducted meta-analysis of 15 genome-wide…
December 15, 2008
One of the major reasons that so much human genetic work is fixated on ascertaining the nature of population substructure is that different populations may respond differently to particular drugs. Of course population identification is only a rough proxy, but in many cases it is a good one.…
December 14, 2008
Check out the 1860 vs. 2008 election maps for president on a county-by-county level.
December 13, 2008
The New York Times has a piece, Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches:
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. "We have the greatest product on earth," said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson…
December 13, 2008
Acceptance of Evolution & belief in God, over at Secular Right. Here's my conclusion:
... In any case, I think the two observations I would make is that Roman Catholicism's acceptance of evolution shows, as those nations tend to be above the trendline. And, Communism really, really, messes a…
December 12, 2008
Genetic variation in South Indian castes: evidence from Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal polymorphisms:
We report new data on 155 individuals from four Tamil caste populations of South India and perform comparative analyses with caste populations from the neighboring state of Andhra…
December 11, 2008
I used to watch Jack Horkheimer's show when I was a kid back in the '80s. In fact, sometimes I would stay up late just to catch it. Today I found this out on Wikipedia:
Question: Why did you change the name of the show from 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR HUSTLER' TO 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR GAZER' ?…
December 11, 2008
Interesting bit of interdisciplinary work on the spread of lactase persistance:
Thomas found that the gene variant coincided well with the rise of animal domestication, indicating that humans became dairy farmers almost as soon as they began to keep animals.
To track the gene's spread across Europe…
December 11, 2008
The Audacious Epigone has a long critique of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. The main criticism is that Andrew Gelman did not emphasize the affect that race has on voting patterns enough; a criticism brought to sharper focus by the 2008 election.
December 11, 2008
A lot of evolutionary psychology goes into the "They did a study on what?" category. So check out Daniel Kruger's paper, Male Financial Consumption is Associated with Higher Mating Intentions and Mating Success:
Cross-culturally, male economic power is directly related to reproductive
success.…
December 9, 2008
Prompted by Paul Bloom's piece in Slate, Does Religion Make You Nice? Does atheism make you mean?, I went out and read Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment , the book which which Bloom references. It's a very slim volume, and though the author is a…
December 9, 2008
Article in The New Scientist, Neanderthal genome already giving up its secrets. I went to a talk by Svante Paabo recently where he played up expectations in the near future.
December 8, 2008
Of all the bloggingheads.tv "regulars" I enjoy Will Wilkinson's "Free Will" the most, probably because of an intersection of our interests and general outlooks (though Will is far more liberal than I am). Though the headline for this week's episode has to do with atheism, the really interesting…
December 8, 2008
The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs:
One crucial element for the evolution of cooperation may be the sensitivity to others' efforts and payoffs compared with one's own costs and gains. Inequity aversion is thought to be the driving force behind unselfish motivated punishment in…
December 8, 2008
David Kirkpatrick points me to some interesting new research, Religious beliefs and public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe and the United States:
...Recent research suggests that 'religious filters' are an important heuristic for scientific issues in general5, and nanotechnology in…
December 8, 2008
Today Ed Yong has a post up, Social status shapes racial identity:
To Penner and Saperstein, the study contradicts the idea that races, and the differences between them, are dominated by biological differences between groups of people. They see race not as a fixed entity that is purely determined…
December 8, 2008
T. Ryan Gregory is getting the word out that the latest issue of Evolution is free online.
December 8, 2008
Genetic Future has the temerity to put the shyest people in Europe on the spot, pointing to a paper, Genome-wide association analysis of metabolic traits in a birth cohort from a founder population. Below the fold is a map swiped from Genetic Future, I invite some bold if introverted readers to…
December 8, 2008
Effects of cis and trans Genetic Ancestry on Gene Expression in African Americans:
ariation in gene expression is a fundamental aspect of human phenotypic variation, and understanding how this variation is apportioned among human populations is an important aim. Previous studies have compared gene…
December 7, 2008
Check it out (below). Ed is British. I knew that, but the accent is still funny. I listen to the BBC, so it didn't feel like bloggingheads.tv, rather, I thought it was the World Service.
December 7, 2008
From the comments:
When I first saw this, the first thing that popped in my head was "big [vulgarity expurgated] surprise."
Has someone done a PC analysis on people from all over the United States? That would probably be pretty interesting, given that it almost certainly wouldn't reflect geography…