razib
Posts by this author
September 16, 2007
Over at my other blog p-ter has a nice post with a few links to databases where you can do your own querying for SNPs & sniffing for selection.
September 16, 2007
Do you smell what I smell? Perhaps not, and it might not be due to a cold...Genetic variation in a human odorant receptor alters odour perception (Nature):
Human olfactory perception differs enormously between individuals, with large reported perceptual variations in the intensity and pleasantness…
September 15, 2007
Olivia Judson's piece The Selfless Gene in The Atlantic is a pretty good survey of the various theories of the evolution of altruism. If you read Narrow Roads of Gene Land or Natural Selection and Social Theory, nothing new, but if you aren't familiar with the lay of the land it's worth checking…
September 14, 2007
About a week ago I posted on a new paper about worldwide variation on a gene which results in differences in muscle fiber. The author left a comment, which I'll reproduce below:
We thought about selection for cold tolerance, but our latest data on global distribution of the null allele don't…
September 14, 2007
I've spoken about Vitamin D a fair amount on this blog before. Not only have I presented it as a major selective pressure for light skin in the northern latitudes after the switch to agricultural lifestyles (and the concomitant nutrient deprivations due to reliance on a predominantly starch diet…
September 13, 2007
Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology blog carnival, is over at John Hawks' place.
September 12, 2007
I promise to non-Americans that the video below works.
September 12, 2007
Jake over at Pure Pedantry has a lost post titled Why Pairing Science and Atheism is High-Brow. It is a very nice little essay, and I enjoyed the historical perspective brought into the discussion by quotations from a John Dewey article from TNR of the 1920s. Anyway, there's nothing new, but the…
September 12, 2007
Nature has a new paper, Placing late Neanderthals in a climatic context:
...This study shows that the three sets translate to different scenarios on the role of climate in Neanderthal extinction. The first two correspond to intervals of general climatic instability between stadials and…
September 11, 2007
A comment on another weblog asked why the United States might have a confrontation with China at some point in the future. They pointed out, correctly, that Chinese imperialism has been weak tea in comparison to the world-striding European form. That is, the Middle Kingdom asserted a pretense of…
September 11, 2007
Foetal testosterone linked to autistic traits:
This latest update on their progress, presented by Simon Baron-Cohen and Bonnie Auyeung at the British Association's Festival of Science in York today, shows that the correlation between foetal hormone levels and autistic-trait behaviour continues as…
September 10, 2007
I'm sure you know about Alex passing, well, I noticed he made the front page of The New York Times website! Here's the obit & profile.
September 10, 2007
Loss of ACTN3 gene function alters mouse muscle metabolism and shows evidence of positive selection in humans:
More than a billion humans worldwide are predicted to be completely deficient in the fast skeletal muscle fiber protein α-actinin-3 owing to homozygosity for a premature stop codon…
September 10, 2007
The Austrian Economists and Dani Rodrik have been talking about the use of mathematical formalism in their field. I think Rodrik gets it right:
In other words, we use math not because we are smart, but because we are not smart enough.
The low level of mathematics that I am familiar with, calculus…
September 10, 2007
I've been bandying a particular hypothesis about lately in terms of human evolution: strong recent selection for adaptive alleles will result in a fitness drag due to pleiotropic effects. In short, I'm working with the assumption that a new mutant which has significant positive benefits because of…
September 9, 2007
Over at 2 Blowhards there's an interview with Greg Cochran. Greg is of course a "friend of the blog," and you mostly know him because of his work in the area of evolution. But he does have strong opinions on other topics, as you might have noticed if you subscribe to The American Conservative.…
September 9, 2007
Recently I've been reading a fair amount of material in economics. In addition to popular books on specific economic topics aimed such as Farewell to Alms and Knowledge and Wealth of Nations, I've been hitting texts such as Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics.
As I told a friend of mine who…
September 9, 2007
Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation:
...We found that copy number of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1) is correlated positively with salivary amylase protein level and that individuals from populations with high-starch diets have, on average, more AMY1 copies than…
September 7, 2007
Over at my other blog I reaffirm Richard Dawkins' criticism of Freeman Dyson's off the cuff opinions about evolutionary genetics. Dyson is basically asserting that the rate of evolution is inversely proportional to the square root of population size. In short, small populations evolve fast in his…
September 7, 2007
Over at my other blog I have an exposition of a set of ideas which have crystallized in my mind in regards to the patterns of human physical variation that we see around us in the world today. A reconsideration of some concepts was triggered in large part by the material I covered in the post…
September 7, 2007
Last year Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle was the winner of a blog scholarship. This year they've increased the top award to $10,000. Check if you qualify (hint: don't click if you don't blog or aren't enrolled as a student at a college or university).
September 7, 2007
David at my other blog is putting up some posts on statistics as a primer for a series on Sewall Wright's population genetic work. Check out correlation: part 1. Should be interesting nerd candy....
September 6, 2007
Why are brown people so many shades of brown? If you were raised in a South Asian family I'm sure that you've had to deal with the "color" issue somehow. This isn't a cultural blog, so I'm not going to go there, but I do think that the salience of complexion in South Asian culture makes this new…
September 6, 2007
A few days ago I posted on a gene, HMGA2, which seems to be implicated in a small proportion of the normal human variation in height. There seems to be an SNP which comes in two flavors which results in a different in height in an additive & independent manner. A friend of mine pointed out…
September 5, 2007
As my friend Chet Snicker would say to Larry Craig, you sir are no gentleman! Some of you know that I have recently trekked across this great nation of ours. One of the main differences between the most recent of my travels and previous peregrinations has been my relative trepidation and…
September 5, 2007
Proceedings of the Royal Society B has a paper out which reports evidence of positive selection on genes which seem to have some relationship to the heritability of schizophrenia (Nature has a good summary). The authors imply that the genes in question were likely selected for reasons totally…