razib
Posts by this author
January 25, 2010
David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke, has critiqued the current focus on large-scale genomwide associations before. Now he is taking to the next step, as his group has a paper out which suggests that the reason that association studies have been relatively unfruitful in terms of bang-for-buck is…
January 25, 2010
In Bats and Whales, Convergence in Echolocation Ability Runs Deep:
..."However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called convergent traits have arisen by different genes or different mutations. Our study shows that a complex trait -- echolocation -- has in fact evolved by identical…
January 24, 2010
Changes in human diet driven by cultural evolution seem to be at the root of many relatively recently emerged patterns of genetic variation. In particular, lactase persistence and varied production of amylase are two well known cases. Both of these new evolutionary genetic developments are…
January 24, 2010
As a follow up to the previous post, here's some of the raw data for the ARIS. I sorted by "Nones" for 2008.
None '90 None '08 Christian '90 Christian '08 Δ Christian Δ None VT 13 34 84 55 -29 21 NH…
January 24, 2010
Barry Kosmin at CUNY has published the results of three surveys of American religion since 1990. These "American Religious Identification Surveys" (ARIS) were done in 1990, another in 2001, and finally in 2008. One of the major findings of the ARIS has been the rise of those who avow "No Religion…
January 23, 2010
In the wake of my post on selection and variation in dog skull shape, I thought it would be useful to point to this short paper, A canine chromosome 7 locus confers compulsive disorder susceptibility. Here's the conclusion:
The highly significant association of CCD with the CDH2 region on…
January 23, 2010
I noticed that Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan was watchable online on Netflix the other day, so I checked it out. I liked it. As any movie there were liberties taken with aspects of Genghis Khan's biography, but I felt like most of them were true to the general outlines of what really happened.…
January 22, 2010
James Patterson Inc.:
TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of…
January 21, 2010
Modern civilization has extremely deleterious consequences in regards to species richness, primarily through destruction of habitat. Because of these negative aspects of modernity hunter-gatherers have been idealized as a model of humanity at equilibrium with their ecology. 1491: New Revelations of…
January 21, 2010
A western Eurasian male is found in 2000-year-old elite Xiongnu cemetery in Northeast Mongolia:
We analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y-chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNP), and autosomal short tandem repeats (STR) of three skeletons found in a 2,000-year-old Xiongnu elite cemetery…
January 21, 2010
Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic, is opening in a few large cities tomorrow.
January 20, 2010
If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe:
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was "12345."
Today, it's one digit longer but hardly safer: "123456."
Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google's e-mail…
January 20, 2010
Sometimes scientists report on research which clarifies what we already know. 'Survival of the Cutest' Proves Darwin Right:
The study, published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to…
January 19, 2010
At least that was my take home message from a new paper in PLoS One, Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure:
Background: Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that…
January 19, 2010
Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception:
What makes one person socially insightful but mathematically challenged, and another musically gifted yet devoid of a sense of direction? Individual differences in general cognitive ability are thought to be mediated by "generalist…
January 19, 2010
Tom Rees reports on an analysis of the GSS which point to the correlation between low verbal skills and a Biblical literalist outlook. Well, I've talked about this at length. Religion & IQ, Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first?, Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart? and…
January 19, 2010
For the past few decades there has been a long standing debate as to the origins of modern Europeans. The two alternative hypotheses are:
* Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.
* Europeans are descended from…
January 18, 2010
Mathematical support for insect colonies as superorganisms. Click through for the scatterplot.
January 18, 2010
Are Antarctic minke whales unusually abundant because of 20th century whaling?:
Severe declines in megafauna worldwide illuminate the role of top predators in ecosystem structure. In the Antarctic, the Krill Surplus Hypothesis posits that the killing of more than 2 million large whales led to…
January 18, 2010
Another idea, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left:
The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why…
January 17, 2010
One of the things about evolution you sometimes hear is that it has "stopped" for humans. Steve Jones, a British geneticist, is one of the more prominent public expositors of this viewpoint today. The key fact that most people latch on to is that infant and child mortality is very low, so the vast…
January 17, 2010
Researchers find clues to evolution by studying genes of living people. It's a profile of her group's composite test for natural selection.
January 17, 2010
A friend pointed me to this fascinating article about stray dogs in Moscow:
... It has become a symbol for the 35,000 stray dogs that roam Russia's capital - about 84 dogs per square mile. You see them everywhere. They lie around in the courtyards of apartment complexes, wander near markets and…
January 17, 2010
New genetic loci implicated in fasting glucose homeostasis and their impact on type 2 diabetes risk:
Levels of circulating glucose are tightly regulated. To identify new loci influencing glycemic traits, we performed meta-analyses of 21 genome-wide association studies informative for fasting…
January 17, 2010
That's what New York Magazine is reporting. By spring. I've actually paid for online content before, but generally have let my subscriptions lapse because the net has so much information that it didn't seem worth it. It seems likely that Google News and other aggregators will be the big winner out…
January 16, 2010
No Longer Their Golden Ticket:
In fact, "The Deep End" was conceived in 2007, that halcyon era of $160,000 starting salaries and full employment even for law grads who had scored in the 150s on their LSAT's.
Those days are over. As the profession lurches through its worst slump in decades, with…
January 16, 2010
I was doing some exploring of the effect of a transition to agriculture on human height. Until the past few centuries humans were much shorter than they had been during the Ice Age. In the process I came upon some interesting data. Height, health, and development:
Adult height is determined by…