razib
Posts by this author
September 3, 2007
Curious about height? Check out this new paper in Nature Genetics, A common variant of HMGA2 is associated with adult and childhood height in the general population. Nature News has a nice report for public consumption.
Last week when I posted about heritable traits I used height as an…
September 2, 2007
I used the bathroom at Minneapolis International today. Nothing weird that I noticed, but perhaps I wasn't looking closely enough.
August 30, 2007
When someone tells you that height is 80% heritable, does that mean:
a) 80% of the reason you are the height you are is due to genes
b) 80% of the variation within the population on the trait of height is due to variation of the genes
The answer is of course b. Unfortunately in the 5 years I've…
August 29, 2007
I've talked about menopause a fair amount on this blog, usually in relation to the Grandmother Hypothesis. So I thought I'd pass along this article, Eusociality, menopause and information in matrilineal whales, along. I know that many think that menopause is something that will naturally happen…
August 29, 2007
Update: Comment from Chris Surridge of PLOS One:
Just a quick note. The paper is now formally published on PLoS ONE. The citation is:
Tuljapurkar SD, Puleston CO, Gurven MD (2007) Why Men Matter: Mating Patterns Drive Evolution of Human Lifespan. PLoS ONE 2(8): e785. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.…
August 28, 2007
Genetic and environmental contributions to prosocial behaviour in 2- to 9-year-old South Korean twins:
...The best-fitting model indicated that 55%...of the variance in the 2- to 9-year-olds' prosocial behaviour was due to genetic factors and 45%...was due to non-shared environmental factors. It is…
August 28, 2007
I was talking with a friend of mine who is an economist about science, and the great productivity in modern societies which allows for the perpetuation of narrow specialties in scholarship. I repeated to him my own hunch that if all scientists who were alive today disappeared and the next…
August 28, 2007
Over at my other blog Herrick posts a response to 10 questions for Gregory Clark. Clark is an economic historian whose most recent book Farwell to Alms is making a splash. I read the book recently, but because I'm not well versed in economics I've held off saying much. I will add that Clark's…
August 25, 2007
Check out this new interview with Steven Pinker. It ostensibly focuses on his new book, The Stuff of Thought, though it covers a lot of ground. My own feeling is that the interviewer should have let the focus be more on Pinker than his own pet theories, but there's a lot of good stuff in there.
August 25, 2007
Yesterday I posted on the resurrection of the "redheads going extinct" meme (as I noted, this story seems to cycle every few years). The current source is National Geographic Magazine, which doesn't have the "article" online. I went to the bookstore and checked out the September 2007 issue, and a…
August 25, 2007
Check it, Chris Mooney is on bloggingheads.tv. He's promoting his book Storm World, which is a really good read. I can't speak in detail to the area of science which Chris covers, but the bigger picture issue of the "intersection" between public policy and the culture of science and the ensuing…
August 25, 2007
p-ter points me to a new paper which documents interspecies hybridization in monkeys whose lineages putatively diverged about 3 million years ago. Note that the hybridization follows Haldane's rule: the heterogametic sex (in mammals the males) exhibits sterility while the other sex does not.…
August 24, 2007
Every few years it seems that a new meme declares that "blondes will go extinct!" or that "red hair will go extinct!" I've only been blogging for 5 years, and this story has already cycled multiple times. A co-blogger of mine told me that he did some digging and it seems that this meme is of old…
August 24, 2007
RPM pointed me to this new paper, Major Histocompatibility Complex Heterozygosity Reduces Fitness in Experimentally Infected Mice:
...Our results show that MHC effects are not masked on an outbred genetic background, and that MHC heterozygosity provides no immunological benefits when resistance is…
August 22, 2007
This is more of a quick note than a post. In Africa (and to a lesser extent other regions) the rise of malaria has resulted in an extreme evolutionary response, basically the heterozygote is extremely fit vis-a-vis mutant homozygotes (which exhibit Sickle Cell Anemia) and the wild type homozygotes…
August 21, 2007
This morning in NYC I took a cab to Penn Station. It was raining really hard...so I was curious, I asked the cab driver, "So do you get more fares when it's raining?" He explained that yes, there are more fares on hand, but because of the rain and traffic jams it works out to less revenue in a…
August 20, 2007
Most of you know that I was in NYC this weekend and I hung with the ScienceBlogs crowd. Others have summarized the goings on with eminent competence, so I won't add more to that. There was lots of fun to be had, and I made sure I had some of it. But, I would like to give a shout out to two…
August 20, 2007
I went to Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn tonight. Great food, great wine. But here is why I am giving them props: habanero tabasco sauce!. Yes, instead of offering me cayenne tabasco, they actually offered me a nice spicy condiment. And I shall remain eternally grateful. So:
Bacchus…
August 19, 2007
Went to see Superbad with Jake, Kara & Jason Rosenhouse. I thought it was OK, only checked time once. But again, the pairing of fug dudes with un-fug chicks leaves me unsuspended in my disbelief.
August 16, 2007
1 hour after I landed in NYC from the land of green trees and the Pacific I had to explain to another visitor that the E train could take him to Penn Station, that you could recognize it by the colored label affixed to the front and the sides. And yes, they would announce it when they arrived at…
August 16, 2007
For the Northwestern bibliophiles, did you know that Powell's started in Chicago? I did not. There is a small Powell's bookstore (the original) about 5 blocks east of the University of Chicago. Seeing the exact same font on the sign and the name is pretty strange if you aren't expecting to…
August 14, 2007
In a line.
Guy in front of me: Line's long, hey?
Me: You Canadian?
Guy in front of me: [surprised look] What! How'd you know? How could you tell.
Me: Well, you said "hey" in your first three words. I thought you were either joking and pretending to be Canadian for laughs, or actually Canadian.…
August 14, 2007
I'm on the road/traveling for the near future, so posting will be light, but these four papers look interesting (haven't had a time to look closely).
Accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in mitochondrial protein-coding genes of large versus small mammals
Varying environments can speed up…
August 13, 2007
Ezra Klein asks "How Quickly Do Genes Change?" in response to Andrew Sullivan gushing over Greg Clark's new book, A Farewell to Alms. Clark offers the hypothesis that the industrial revolution in England was catalyzed in part by changes in behavior which might have been reinforced by selection for…
August 10, 2007
TNR has an interesting piece (here is a cache version of the first page) about Jewish-Christian polemics (in both directions). It is mostly a review of Peter Shaeffer's Jesus in the Talmud; a scholarly work which predictably appeals to anti-Semites. My comment on Noah Feldman and his…