razib
Posts by this author
June 13, 2007
New Scientist has a short story synthesizing all the accumulating data that Neandertals weren't that primitive, and that the inflection point of cultural creativity 40-50 K BP was the culmination of a gradual process.
June 13, 2007
There's a new paper in Nature (OPEN ACCESS), Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project:
...First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in…
June 12, 2007
A few days ago I posted on "Islamic finance," which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest "work around." This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders.…
June 11, 2007
A few weeks ago I posted on a bizarre fatwa having to do with adult breast feeding. At the time it was kind of a joke, and I wasn't totally sure that it was even a real story (though I did check for multiple sources). Well, today The New York Times has this up: Egypt's Muslims Seek Fatwas on a…
June 11, 2007
There is a somewhat confused piece in The New York Times about eugenics for dogs today. I say confused because the article offers various cautions, but connecting the dots from the facts littered throughout suggest easily why the cautions aren't warranted. One of the big issues lurking throughout…
June 8, 2007
First, check out this quick primer on genetic association studies. With that, Combined Genome Scans for Body Stature in 6,602 European Twins: Evidence for Common Caucasian Loci @ PLOS. You need such huge sample sizes to pick up the relatively weak singals from numerous quantitative trait loci.…
June 7, 2007
The LA Daily News is doing a lush series on porn. They're flash files, so be aware of that, though nothing I saw was not work safe. The ubiquity of porn chronicled in that series in America today is worth keeping in mind when we simultaneously have a teacher convicted of a felony because she…
June 7, 2007
I am a proponent of nominalism when it comes to religion. Or, to put it another way, instead of a religion being a Platonic category with precise and specific boundaries, I think a more accurate model is a distribution of ideas and sentiments in the minds of human beings which is always in flux.…
June 7, 2007
There is a new paper in Current Biology, Genetic Structure and Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. The authors use recovered mitochondrial DNA (passed through the female lineage) to reconstruct the phylogeographic history of the species. It seems to me that the abstract is a…
June 6, 2007
About six months ago the great evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers won the Crafoord Prize. Well, he is now in a public dispute with Alan Derschowitz, resulting in the cancellation of a talk at Harvard. Frontpage Magazine has an amusing article up.
June 6, 2007
Nature today published a paper which reports on a massive genome association study of the British white population with the intent of smoking out loci implicated in disease. The paper is open access, so you can read it yourself! There are many popular press articles, but as usual p-ter has a…
June 6, 2007
John Hawks points me to this story in The New York Times about research to be published in PNAS. Basically the researchers found that chickens buried in south-central Chile about a century before the Spanish contact with the New World were genetically most similar to those from Polynesia. This is…
June 6, 2007
Earlier, I have implied that anti-scientific sensibilities will survive the "death of organized religion," because they preceded the rise of such supernatural peddling institutions. Of the two Korean states, the Republic of South Korea, where 40% of the population are theists is the God…
June 4, 2007
I don't post much about politics since I don't believe I have value to add to the discussion, and generally politics doesn't arouse much interest for me. But I have followed the immigration reform debate closely, mostly because like Ross Douthat I'm a moderate restrictionist. Now, people might…
June 4, 2007
Some of you may have heard about Eric Altermann's altercation with the law (sorry, had to say that!). This is what caught my attention:
A guy came over and asked me who I was and I told him I was a colmunist for The Nation and he told me I had to leave. I thought he was kind of rude, so I asked…
June 4, 2007
p-ter has an excellent review of a new paper, Localizing Recent Adaptive Evolution in the Human Genome. Imagine if you will a flat pristine stretch of snow covered field which exhibits a perfect 2-dimensional symmetry. Now, note what happens when a few snow blowers criss-cross the field. That's…
June 2, 2007
When I was a child during the early to mid 1980s about once a week someone would ask me where I was from, or, would compliment me on my English. Since I had only recently arrived from Bangladesh I would tell them I was from that land and as for the compliment directed toward my language skills I…
June 2, 2007
People often assume I'm a "genetic determinist" because of my close attention to the interface of our species' biology and behavior. I'm also focused on evolutionary science, a discipline where noise, error, and diversity generated by a constellation of variables is assumed (and to some extent,…
June 2, 2007
My piece, Why the gods will not be defeated, has generated some response on the internet. Reihan Salam & Ross Douthat both have some thoughts, while fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Leher offered some kind words. Also, just an FYI, I've been asked to turn the post into an extended essay elsewhere…
June 1, 2007
Tonal languages, ASPM, and MCPH. Over at my other blog p-ter reviews the paper now that it is out in PNAS.
May 31, 2007
The "Boy Genius" Karl Rove recently told The New Yorker that the rise of conservative Christianity bodes well for the Republican party. There's a problem with the hype though: there is a mild, but persistent, trend away from Biblical literalism, in the United States.1 Fundamentalist Christian…
May 31, 2007
OK, most of you know some genetics. You know that immunological profiles are very diverse, and you know that because of the mathematics of this diversity matches aren't easy. The problem increases in magnitude when you can not look within your ancestral population because the combinations will…
May 30, 2007
In my post Why the gods will never be defeated I made many references to the rise in religiosity concomitant with modernization in South Korean. Here is an article which illustrates what I'm talking about:
As recently as 1964, only a little over 3.5 million South Koreans, out of a total population…
May 29, 2007
A few weeks ago I posted on how population bottlenecks can convert dominance variance into additive genetic variance. This is important because it is additive genetic variance that is relevant for population level directional selection upon quantitative characters. Now agnostic posts on how…
May 29, 2007
Islamic scholar promotes adult breastfeeding:
...Izzat Atiyaa had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, offering his bold suggestion as a way around the prohibition in Islamic religious law against a woman working in private premises with a man who was not her close relative. Breastfeeding, he…
May 29, 2007
Note: The authors have a website which summarizes their research (via Language Log).
Speaking in tones? Blame it on your genes:
People who carry particular variants of two genes involved in brain development tend to speak nontonal languages such as English, while those with a different genetic…
May 29, 2007
Check out the 2007 writing contest from Seed Magazine. First prize is $2,500.