razib
Posts by this author
October 2, 2007
My ideas about skin color & diet aren't original. I am pretty sure that I originally read them in Great Human Diasporas by L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. Here's the extract:
In Europe the development of agriculture has lead to the spread of cereals as the primary foodstuff over the last ten thousand…
October 1, 2007
Archaeology: Sharp shift in diet at onset of Neolithic:
The introduction of domesticated plants and animals into Britain during the Neolithic cultural period between 5,200 and 4,500 years ago is viewed either as a rapid event or as a gradual process that lasted for more than a millennium. Here we…
October 1, 2007
It's that time of the year again! I'm getting involved in Donors Choose for the month of October, check out projects I'm trying to raise money for at the link.
There are other ScienceBloggers involved of course. Below the fold are further details from Janet:
This year, the challenge runs…
October 1, 2007
Vitamin D deficiency and skin color are two biological topics I've focused on a lot. The latter may have a relationship to the former insofar as light skin is better at synthesizing Vitamin D at low radiation levels (i.e., at high latitudes). Additionally, some of the genes that are under recent…
September 30, 2007
I don't know if we should believe Svante Pääbo anymore, but his lab has some new findings re: Neandertal mtDNA:
Neanderthals in central Asia and Siberia
Nature advance online publication 30 September 2007. doi:10.1038/nature06193
Authors: Johannes Krause, Ludovic Orlando, David Serre, Bence…
September 30, 2007
I have to say, this Ian Buruma op-ed, Religion as a force for good, read my mind in relation to the events of the past few days. Another rebellion civil society against an autocracy coalescing around the predominant religion of a society. What's surprising? The Iranian revolution against the…
September 29, 2007
Pew has a new survey out, Public Expresses Mixed Views of Islam, Mormonism. The table to the left summarizes the most important points in the survey: Americans dislike Islam somewhat more than Mormonism, and they think Mormonism is a pretty weird religion (and on the whole, barely Christian).…
September 28, 2007
This post is more of a personal note...here are three papers that are really cool must reads:
Williamson SH, Hubisz MJ, Clark AG, Payseur BA, Bustamante CD, et al. (2007) Localizing Recent Adaptive Evolution in the Human Genome. PLoS Genet 3(6): e90 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030090
Voight BF, …
September 28, 2007
OK, someone got his foot run over by a car, and had to have a few toes removed. He's fine, though he'll go crazy staying in....
September 28, 2007
Yesterday I put up a post where I attempted to use a visual analogy for what I believe might be evolutionary forces operative over short periods of time that result in phenotypic diversification across populations with recent common ancestry. But what about the flip side? In the case yesterday…
September 27, 2007
In my post The new races of man I tried to offer a verbal exposition of my current thinking as to how and why human physical variation shows the patterns we see around us. In short, I believe that powerful selective forces have reshaped a subset of the human genome in similar and different ways…
September 26, 2007
Here are the rankings for this year according to Transparency International.
September 26, 2007
Regular readers know that I often check in on the results from The Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling outfit. On the one hand I think The Barna Group tends to be a bit alarmist (they have a very narrow definition for a "Biblically based Christian," e.g., Catholics don't count), but on…
September 24, 2007
The New Republic has a piece titled The Greatest Dying by Jerry Coyne & Hopi E. Hoekstra (see below the fold for how to read it for free if you don't have a TNR subscription). The piece covers the a) general parameters of the mass extinction and b) the reasons why we should care. Coyne and…
September 24, 2007
The Boston Globe has a long piece titled DNA unraveled. With the subtitle like "A 'scientific revolution' is taking place, as researchers explore the genomic jungle" you know what to except, lots of adjectives and a healthy dollop of hyperbole. I guess I lean toward the side of the…
September 22, 2007
The Inducivist is always digging into the GSS and coming back with interesting stuff. For example, he reports:
Percent who believe astrology is very or sort of scientific
43.3% Extremely liberal
32.2% Liberal
31.4% Slightly liberal
25.9% Moderate
25.9% Slightly conservative
26.1% Conservative
25.0…
September 22, 2007
Well, you may not have blue eyes, but many people do. The post below suggests that there is still a lot of confusion on how eye color is inherited, but now in 2007 we are coming close to clearing up many issues. A paper which came out early this year, A Three-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism…
September 21, 2007
Do any readers know of work which tracks the correlation between characteristics such as blonde hair and blue eyes (within population where these are extant at high frequencies, but not fixed)? I am also interested in geographic distributions. In part I'm interested in exotic combinations, for…
September 20, 2007
Apropos of my post yesterday urging lack of sentimentality regarding the extinction of languages check out this article about Flemish separatism in Belgium. The salient bits:
But Leterme proved anything but a unifying figure. He created a political uproar when he told the French newspaper…
September 20, 2007
I've talked about MHC a fair amount, mostly because of its evolutionary significance, so if you are interested in the topic Mystery Rays for Outer Space is starting a series ion the topic. Check out the first post. Also, PLOS Genetics has a new paper on MHC.
September 20, 2007
Remember those funny little Flores Hobbits? Carl Zimmer has followed the story like a master tracker over the years. In any case, Wrist bones bolster hobbit status:
Painstaking study of Homo floresiensis wrist bones shows that their wrists were far more primitive than ours -- suggesting that they…
September 19, 2007
There is an article in The New York Times which focuses on the fact that many languages are going extinct as native speakers die. Here is the critical issue:
In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than…
September 19, 2007
Over the past few years we've all heard about "Red" and "Blue" America. Pundits like David Brooks have written about how the two Americas are drifting apart through residential segregation in the real world or reading their own ideological media in the cyberworld. But over the past six months I've…
September 19, 2007
From PLOS One, Gain-of-Function R225W Mutation in Human AMPKγ3 Causing Increased Glycogen and Decreased Triglyceride in Skeletal Muscle:
We have identified for the first time a mutation in the skeletal muscle-specific regulatory γ3 subunit of AMPK in humans. The γ3R225W mutation has significant…
September 18, 2007
Michael Lynch in Nature Reviews Genetics, The evolution of genetic networks by non-adaptive processes:
Although numerous investigators assume that the global features of genetic networks are moulded by natural selection, there has been no formal demonstration of the adaptive origin of any genetic…
September 17, 2007
If you read my post about Neandertals and cold climate, you should go read John Hawks' opinion.
September 17, 2007
Check out The Impact of Science Blogging Survey. Below the fold is an explanation:
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic manuscript on…
September 17, 2007
A genome-wide association study of global gene expression:
We found that 15,084 transcripts (28%) representing 6,660 genes had narrow-sense heritabilities (H2) > 0.3. We executed genome-wide association scans for these traits and found peak lod scores between 3.68 and 59.1. The most highly…