razib
Posts by this author
November 17, 2008
Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age:
In 2005 four outstanding multiple burials were discovered near Eulau, Germany. The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other…
November 17, 2008
Chad has a post up about Cosmic Variance's move to Discover Blogs. He notes that some people lamenting the decline of the "old blogosphere" haven't been around blogs that long. He doesn't mention that he's been blogging since 2002. So have I. Most blogs have always sucked, that's a constant.…
November 17, 2008
Here is a chart from Jim Manzi:
I added a trendline of GDP growth in the United States from 1995-2006 to suggest the general economic climate. As they usually don't say: the fundamentals are not strong. Matt Yglesias makes a pointed, if admittedly somewhat unfair, analogy:
To be clear, when I…
November 16, 2008
Kambiz's review (pointer) to the Humanity's Genes an the Human Condition conference made me aware of Jean-Laurent Casanova's research. His general idea seems to be that heightened susceptibility or death due to infectious disease is in large part a function of inter-individual genetic variation.…
November 16, 2008
If Detroit Falls, Foreign Makers Could Be Buffer:
"You would have an auto industry in the United States more like that of Mexico and Canada: foreign-owned," said Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., which describes itself as a nonprofit…
November 16, 2008
Look below the fold, don't know how long it will be around (H/T Ross Doutht).
November 15, 2008
Elsewhere, I reiterate the common sense case that the decline in the proportion of Americans who are of "English" ancestry over the past 30 years from 22% to 9% is mostly a function of changed questionnaires and cultural preferences.
November 15, 2008
Kambiz attended the Humanity's Genes and the Human Condition, and he reports some interesting goings on. Sydney Brenner, Nobel Laureate 2002, had this to say this about human evolution:
Starts off with a zinger: "Biological evolution for humans has stopped." Uhh, really Sydney? You better do…
November 14, 2008
In the latest bloggingheads.tv Conn Carroll and Bill Scher have an argument where they brandish dueling public survey results to make the case that the public is to the Left or the Right. How can they do this without totally fabricating their data? Because the average human being is not very…
November 14, 2008
Yesterday I implored the country not to save Detroit. Today Daniel Gross argues that Detroit's Big Three Are a National Disgrace: But we still need to save them. This is the only part which I think is on point:
But General Motors wouldn't be a typical bankruptcy. GM's management argues that the…
November 13, 2008
Well, the title doesn't matter. I think it is a fait accompli. Some Coastal Democrats might be suspicious of the car culture, but they have empathy for the problems which emerge from de-industrialization. Republicans have no credibility or capital. A bailout will happen, but I believe that most…
November 12, 2008
The map to the left shows the counties which voted for Obama (blue) and McCain (red) in the 2008 election. The blue counties are part of the Black Belt, the area where blacks are a majority of the population because of the economic concentration of cotton culture during the 19th and 20th centuries…
November 11, 2008
A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record:
A record from Wanxiang Cave, China, characterizes Asian Monsoon (AM) history over the past 1810 years. The summer monsoon correlates with solar variability, Northern Hemisphere and Chinese temperature, Alpine…
November 11, 2008
The New York Times has a piece up, After Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror, which quotes people who wonder when Europe will have its own colored head of state. Let's ignore for a moment that the longest serving Prime Minister in British history was 1/8 Indian; that was nearly 200 years ago and…
November 11, 2008
You can watch Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark online (Chris & Sheril have two segments). Unfortunately the neat Flash interface means you can't just load an audio file into your ipod....
November 10, 2008
In regards to the title, in a word, I don't think so. More on that later. Nationally the exit polls suggest that these are results for Barack Obama broken down by "Size of Place":
Urban: 63%
Suburban: 50%
Rural: 45%
There's a rather clear relationship here whereby Obama's vote totals in urban…
November 10, 2008
Michael Lewis has a very long piece up sketching out the fever dream that was the late great Wall Street:
This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. "The investment-banking industry is fucked," Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how…
November 10, 2008
Chorus of demands to let doctor Bernhard Moeller stay:
The Rudd Government is under pressure from all fronts, even Labor colleagues, to overturn a decision denying German doctor Bernhard Moeller permanent residency in Australia because his son Lukas has Down syndrome.
The Immigration Department…
November 10, 2008
Recently I listened to an interview of the historian Joseph Ellis. Ellis observes that the decimation of Native Americans was a Greek tragedy, while the perpetuation of slavery for three generations of the republic was a Shakespearean one. The distinction which Ellis makes is that Greek tragedy…
November 10, 2008
You know what the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) is implicitly, they're the list of populations you've seen in many human genetics papers already. Now the Pritchard lab has put up a nice browser to query the data in a manner analogous to Haplotter. One of the major improvements, aside from…
November 9, 2008
Politico is the pleasure of the pundit-class. That being said, Andrew Gelman's site makes it rather clear that Politico is also US Weekly for politicians. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but their fixation on epiphenomenal froth should really have "for entertainment purposes only"…
November 9, 2008
E.O. Wilson shifts his position on altruism in nature:
It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build…
November 9, 2008
Notes on Sewall Wright: The Shifting Balance Theory (Part 2):
Part 1 of this note dealt with Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance theory of evolution (the SBT) in its original form, as propounded between 1929 and 1931. This final part deals with subsequent developments in the theory. These include…
November 9, 2008
Political Behavior through the Lens of Behavior Genetics:
These are all fascinating questions and Fowler and colleagues are only beginning to uncover the answers. I anticipate that Fowler and his partners in crime will continue to leave a trail of evidence from which we can build an even stronger…
November 9, 2008
A new story about Vitamin D, Could Vitamin D Save Us From Radiation?. I don't even post most of the stuff on Vitamin D that shows up in my RSS. I have to wonder: is there some industry group pushing this? I know that there are often fads for "miracles cures" and biochemical silver bullets.
November 8, 2008
Earlier this week Andrew Gelman suggested that it looks like Barack Obama's election had less to do with "realignment" then an overall tilt in the electorate, which just managed to "tip" a few borderline states. This is rather clear when you look at maps of the results from 2004 to 2008. But…
November 7, 2008
Anthropology.net & prefonal both have posts up which survey a new paper, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders:
We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human…
November 6, 2008
Over the past few months I've been reading books on American history seeing that I am American and I should know a bit about the country which I call home. For example, right now I'm reading Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877. I was surprised when I stumbled upon Richard…