razib
Posts by this author
December 10, 2007
This google news query should get you to popular press articles. I'll start putting links to blogs when more come in.
Blogs: One of the lead authors, John Hawks, promises lots of commentary this week. Greg Laden has some questions regarding the demographic assumptions. Steve Sailer with a round-…
December 10, 2007
Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we…
December 9, 2007
A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the…
December 8, 2007
Bloggingheads.tv segment where a cat-lover and bird-lover get into it.
December 7, 2007
Thought I'd pass on two links. Greg Laden has posted a video of Robert Wright's interview with the late John Maynard Smith. I've watched it before, it's a great interview (or, at least Smith's responses are really interesting & meaty quite often). Also, this week's In Our Time covers Genetic…
December 7, 2007
I noticed that Laelaps liked The Golden Compass movie, and is defending it from negative ratings over at Rotten Tomatoes. I went and saw it yesterday, and read the trilogy about seven years ago. Like most movies the plot and character development really pales in comparison to the more detailed…
December 7, 2007
Check out Popgen Ramblings. There isn't really much up yet, but it looks like it's going to be good. Something new for the RSS!
December 6, 2007
Most ancient case of tuberculosis found in 500,000-year-old human; points to modern health issues:
Although most scientists believe tuberculosis emerged only several thousand years ago, new research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals the most ancient evidence of the disease has been…
December 6, 2007
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:
Since variation in the length of a repetitive element in the vole AVPR1a promoter region is…
December 5, 2007
Watching Beyond Belief 2 I was interested in Jonathan Haidt's contention that liberals and conservatives exhibit alternative valences on five different "Moral Foundations." In short, liberals tend to emphasize "Harm" and "Fairness," and manifest little interest in the values of "Loyalty," "…
December 4, 2007
Neanderthal Children Grew Up Fast:
Scientists found differences in the duration of tooth growth in the Neanderthal when compared to modern humans, with the former showing shorter times in most cases. This faster growth resulted in a more advanced pattern of dental development than in fossil and…
December 2, 2007
Over at Gene Expression James Flynn answers 10 questions.
November 26, 2007
Several years ago Oprah Winfrey asked Tiger Woods what he would say to people who say that when they look him they see a black man. The issue was that some African Americans objected to Woods' contention that he was multiracial, Cablinasian, which reflected the fact that he was ancestrally 1/2…
November 25, 2007
Ali Eteraz has an article titled Mistaken identity in The Guardian which is a long rambling reflection on Islamic identity, and specifically his Islamic identity. He is somewhat confused by the conflation of Islam with a quasi-ethnic identity.
There are a few distinct issues here; though in the…
November 25, 2007
Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock:
. To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. "We don't subscribe to this idea of the 'God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more…
November 25, 2007
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters is an expansive new book authored by vertebrate paleontologist Donald Prothero and lushly illustrated by Carl Buell. The quality of the plates and illustrations, the binding as well as the texture of the pages, screams out "Coffee Table Book."…
November 23, 2007
The Future of Reading:
All these ideas are anathema to traditionalists. In May 2006, novelist John Updike, appalled at reading Kelly's article ("a pretty grisly scenario"), decided to speak for them. Addressing a convention of booksellers, he cited "the printed, bound and paid-for book" as an ideal…
November 22, 2007
I downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0 beta. It might have some bugs, but it resolved all the problems I'd been having earlier with Firefox crashing in gmail.
November 20, 2007
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
Here we describe a genome-wide effort, carried out as part of the Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) project, to identify human genes not yet in the gene catalogs. Our approach was to produce gene predictions by algorithms that rely on…
November 19, 2007
The most common emails I receive are about hair and eye color, and of these the most frequent source seems to be from individuals in interracial relationships. Quite often they are curious as to the possible outcome of their offspring's phenotype. Sometimes they wonder why their offspring looks…
November 18, 2007
Technology dramatically speeds gene mapping. A short little piece which repeats the standard mantras; faster, cheaper and better. The Human Genome Project was proof of principle. Right now, with all the stuff that is starting to bubble up around personal genomics it looks like we're at a…
November 18, 2007
Just talked to my mother today and she phoned relatives in Dhaka. Everything is OK, electricity is coming back online. She seemed dismissive of the idea when I asked if it was all well in the rural areas where some of my distant relatives live; it wasn't that big of a deal. On the other hand a…
November 17, 2007
My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA:
For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday…
November 17, 2007
Update: OK, not to be morbid, but the confirmed death tolls is now greater than 3,000, and there is a tentative projected death toll on the order of 10,000. That's in line with my comments below. End Update
The death toll is pushing 2,000. I think I might be safe in saying that the fatalities…
November 17, 2007
A few weeks ago I reported some research that seemed to show a relationship between a gain in IQ due to breastfeeding and a particular genetic variant. Looks like I spoke too soon. p-ter has the goods:
The fact that they have a measure of maternal IQ but don't directly include it in the published…