razib
Posts by this author
December 21, 2006
Via Genetics and Health, Many Clinics Use Genetic Diagnosis to Choose Sex (on NPR radio feed). Of course, the couple profiled are brown.
Related: To breed a better human - we have the technology.
December 21, 2006
Over at GNXP p-ter posts two profiles from Science on Bruce Lahn.
December 20, 2006
My review of The Gecko's Foot is out in Science & Spirit. I'll be honest, I'm not happy with the review since I was on a time crunch (I was a back up reviewer and the piece needed to be sent in on a short deadline) & very busy with other things. Nevertheless, the take home message is about…
December 20, 2006
Well, as many of you know I have been criticized quite a bit by some fellow ScienceBloggers (this query will take you where you need to go if you are a virgin to this incident). I haven't really responded for a few reasons
1) I've been very busy with week at work
2) I've been reading a great book…
December 19, 2006
Check out the list (upon which a book is based). Food for thought, some of the "myths" are actually starting points for philosophical debates (e.g., Dawkins vs. Gould).
December 19, 2006
I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 almost immediately, but am feeling user's remorse. Perhaps 2.0 was a non-trivial improvement over 1.5, but the lack of familiarity with its options and preferences because things were changed (I'm sure there was a UI rationale) really means that I took a short-term step…
December 18, 2006
The whole post is worth reading, but the money shot:
The central point of the paper is exceedingly simple. Haldane demostrated in 1927 that the fixation probability of a single copy of a new adaptive allele is 2s. This means that if archaic humans had any alleles that would have been adaptive for…
December 18, 2006
About a month ago I posted quite a bit about Neandertal introgression into modern humans. That is, the uptake of Neandertal alleles are a few specific adaptively salient loci even while ancestry remains predominantly African. Now John Hawks and Gregory Cochran have a new paper out, Dynamics of…
December 17, 2006
Randall Parker has some comments on my neo-eugenics post.
December 17, 2006
Here is a summary of findings by a paper which suggests that the vast majority of genetic counselors tend to err on the side of protecting a mother's privacy if her husband is not the father of her child. Here is an important point though:
It is much more likely that bringing up the possibility…
December 16, 2006
Check out the ScienceBlogs group portrait. They caught me chillin' with my buddy PZ. I wonder if the designer who worked on this ran out of brown pixel, cuz Selva & I look mighty pink! Chris Mooney out front looks a bit uncomfortable. And straight up, WTF are Evil Monkey & Mike Dunford…
December 15, 2006
Welcome Deep Sea News! These are some manly hhhaawwwttt bloggers!
December 15, 2006
Ali is talking about Andrew Sullivan using his "30 years War:Sunni vs. Shia, etc., in Iraq" analogy. All the talk is cool, but there's a serious problem with the analogy: no one knows anything about the 30 Years War! You heard me right. For an anology to work like so: X ⇒ Y, you need to know a…
December 15, 2006
Storm slams Pacific Northwest. People ate in because the wind was so bad outside for lunch in the office. We are also the most unchurched region of these United States.
December 14, 2006
P-eter comments on the Pakistani family which can't feel pain. I remember in a genetics course once seeing the professor chart out a pedigree and calculate inbreeding coefficients and the expectation of the unmasking of deleterious alleles given certain matings. Now and then we would laugh…
December 14, 2006
Bryan Caplan reviews a survey which suggests that women are more religious cross-culturally than men. If you've been involved in the Freethought movement this won't surprise you. Here's an important point:
Once people admit that this gender gap exists, the most popular explanation is that…
December 13, 2006
Juan Cole has a Ph.D., while I have overdue library book fines (never over $10 at one time though!). He has a map, and so do I. Look below the fold (some explanations as well).
What do the labels mean? Here are some rough, rough, generalizations. Muslim readers are encouraged to offer their…
December 13, 2006
Read the details. And a happy 21st century to you too....
December 13, 2006
Chris has two posts on psychology and religion which are worth reading.
December 12, 2006
The virginity thread generated a lot of response. The virgin lot of the nerd, ah, so cliche. And yet now I'm having a really weird moment, I'm at the local wine bar and a very attractive hostess1 is recommending books in the science fiction genre to another (far less attractive) hostess. So far…
December 12, 2006
The Genographic Project is elicting a new round of objections from indigenous community leaders. Genetics and Health has a good post up highlighting the issues. Two prelim points:
I am skeptical of the science that is going to come out of this. I believe that the "hot stuff" is going to be…
December 12, 2006
The story of lactose tolerance evolving multiple times has blown up a bit, thanks to Nick Wade at The New York Times. Some people are making analogies to light skin evolving via different genetic architectures (remember, skin color is a polygenic trait, albeit dispersed over ~4 loci of large…
December 11, 2006
Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe:
A SNP in the gene encoding lactase (LCT) (C/T-13910) is associated with the ability to digest milk as adults (lactase persistence) in Europeans, but the genetic basis of lactase persistence in Africans was previously unknown.…
December 9, 2006
Mike Dunford points me to an organization that supports families who've lost loved ones in the Iraq War. From Mike:
As I mentioned recently, a number of soldiers in Iraq will be running the Honolulu Marathon this weekend. The course goes around a base several times, mostly over dirt roads. In part…
December 8, 2006
Data from Sexual Experiences of Adolescents with Low Cognitive Abilities in the U.S.
What's the reason for these results? I think one of the simple ones (though not the only one) might be a form of positive assortative mating: like with like. If you assume that affinity is proportional to…
December 7, 2006
The New York Times Magazine has an article about being gay in the Arab world. Scary stuff. NPR interviews an author who has a book out on the gay culture in the Middle East. One point, which I find interesting, is the peculiar juxtposition of extreme anti-gay sentiment in the Arab world combined…