razib
Posts by this author
April 18, 2008
Some debate below about the various parameters which shape social pathologies. One of facts which we are well aware of is that the United States has a lot of homicide compared to other developed countries. But another fact which is also well known is that a disproportionate number of these…
April 17, 2008
The post below where I observed that in the United States men are over-represented among the Religious Right as opposed to the general population elicited a lot of response. I took some of the data from American Piety in the 21st Century which is broken down by sex and posted it below the fold…
April 17, 2008
Religiousness and Infidelity: Attendance, but not Faith and Prayer, Predict Marital Fidelity:
High religiousness has been consistently linked with a decreased likelihood of past infidelity but has been solely defined by religious service attendance, a limited assessment of a complex facet of life.…
April 16, 2008
The finding that men are more likely to be secular than women is a relatively robust result. You can note this in the Pew Religious Survey, to the point where 70% of self-identified atheists in the United States are male. In places as disparate as East Asia and Latin America women are…
April 15, 2008
Via Dienekes, The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene:
Krause et al. (2007) recently examined patterns of genetic variation at FOXP2 in two Neandertals. This gene is of particular interest because it is involved in speech and language and was previously shown to harbor the signature of…
April 15, 2008
Sheril pointed me to this data rich release of Science and Engineering Indicators. I was interested to see this table:
Table 7-12
Perceptions of scientific nature of various fields: 2006
(Percent)
Field
Very scientific
Pretty scientific
Not too scientific…
April 14, 2008
Effect of Variation in CHI3L1 on Serum YKL-40 Level, Risk of Asthma, and Lung Function:
Background The chitinase-like protein YKL-40 is involved in inflammation and tissue remodeling. We recently showed that serum YKL-40 levels were elevated in patients with asthma and were correlated with…
April 13, 2008
David Burbridge continues his awesome series of posts on the history of evolutionary genetic thought with Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship. Here's a taste:
In Malecot's system two genes at the same locus, in the same or different individuals, are defined as Identical by Descent (…
April 11, 2008
A few months ago I blogged a paper, Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA. Now these results have hit the press with really wack…
April 11, 2008
About 10 years ago Eugene Volokh wrote How the Asians Became White. I think it's aged rather well. Volokh starts:
Don't believe me? A recent MSNBC news headline announced a "Plunge in Minority University Enrollment" at the University of California, with UC Berkeley reporting that "minority…
April 10, 2008
Ancient DNA: Reconstruction Of The Biological History Of A Human Society:
A research team has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains. Knowing the history of past populations and answering…
April 10, 2008
The reports about the widespread use of drugs, cognitive enhancers, among scientists is making the rounds. I tend to think that it might be a positive thing, even if there are side effects. The fact is that if you go into science you're looking at a life of relatively meager remuneration for the…
April 10, 2008
Speciation with gene flow could be common:
The likelihood of speciation in the face of homogenizing gene flow (i.e. without complete geographical isolation) is one of the most debated topics in evolutionary biology. Demonstrating this phenonemon is hampered by the difficulty of isolating the…
April 10, 2008
When I was a little kid I would check out countries whose vital economic and social statistics were not as good as Bangladesh's. I basically was curious as to what could have happened, how can you be more miserable than Bangladesh??? How??? During the 1980s Vietnam was one of those nations. Torn…
April 9, 2008
There was a recent article in The New York Times about the boomlet in philosophy majors. Seemed like a classic "journalism by the numbers" (like a coloring book). But via Tyler Cowen via Kids Prefer Cheese comes the graphic to the left. I suppose undergraduates aren't really responding to…
April 7, 2008
He's a damn frequentist! (the big issue is that he's not a philosopher, not that there's anything wrong with it....)
April 7, 2008
Three papers on genome wide association studies & height. Identification of ten loci associated with height highlights new biological pathways in human growth, Genome-wide association analysis identifies 20 loci that influence adult height and Many sequence variants affecting diversity of…
April 6, 2008
We've talked before on ScienceBlogs about the extinction risk to Tasmanian Devils because of contagious cancer. Well, perhaps there's a light at the end of this population tunnel, Hope over Tasmanian Devil cancer:
The world's largest marsupial carnivore is facing extinction from a mystery facial…
April 5, 2008
A new piece in TNR, Iranian Chic, highlights the fact that nose jobs are all the rage in the Islamic Republic. A more detailed article notes:
One prominent Tehran plastic surgeon says his patients include the daughters of senior Islamic clerics.
Its use in the Islamic republic was officially…
April 4, 2008
Charles Johnson argues that Richard Dawkins has mischaracterized Herbert Spencer:
First, Spencer was not a Social Darwinist. He was not, in fact, a Darwinist at all; he published his most famous work on evolution and society, Social Statics, in 1851, eight years before Charles Darwin first…
April 4, 2008
Many people are noting Rich Florida's singles map. Half Sigma has decided to dig deeper into the data. He breaks it down by state, region and metropolitan area. I'm assuming there's more where that came from....
April 3, 2008
A few months ago a paper came out, The Threat of Appearing Prejudiced and Race-based Attentional Biase, which got a lot of press. Here's the important part:
The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates…
April 3, 2008
Danny Pinkus points me to this post which points to a new paper examing public attitudes in Europe and the United States. They find that though overall attitudes toward immigration don't vary much on either side of the Atlantic, Europeans tend to be less positively inclined toward cultural or…
April 2, 2008
Interesting new paper in Genetics, Dietary Change and Adaptive Evolution of enamelin in Humans and Among Primates:
Scans of the human genome have identified many loci as potential targets of recent selection, but exploration of these candidates is required to verify the accuracy of genomewide scans…
April 2, 2008
TNR has a new piece titled The Assimilation Artist, which has the subheading "Jhumpa Lahiri's books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one." Well, that's because the Indian American experience is in large part the coastal elite experience. Here are…
April 2, 2008
A few days ago The New York Times published an article, Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race. Who are the multiracials? Because of the history of black-white relations in the United States, and Barack Obama's own background, the term is often framed so that that dimension is front & center…