razib | June 7, 2007There 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 bit more cryptic than it needs to me, but Eureka Alert has the meat of their paper in the form of a few quotes:
"In combination with the results on other species, a picture is emerging of extinction not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of…
razib | June 6, 2007About 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.
razib | June 6, 2007Nature 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 summary of the important points.
razib | June 6, 2007John 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 a pretty obvious case for pre-European contact between Old and New World peoples.
Frankly, on a priori grounds this is a no brainer, if Polynesians could make to Easter Island it seems implausible that continental South America would be too far. Also, there is historical documentation which…
razib | June 6, 2007Earlier, 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 intoxicated half. At least on paper. North Korea is an atheistic Communist culture, but I've stated to friends many a time in reality it is basically a "god-kingdom," more akin to Pharonic Egypt than a modern nation-state, except with the capacity for totalitarianism. Many of the social and psychological…
razib | June 4, 2007I 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 find that strange seeing as how I'm a naturalized American myself, but really I don't have much empathy for other immigrants as immigrants because I view myself much more as who I chose to be (an American) than what I am (an immigrant). During the 1936 campaign Ayn Rand was an activist for Wendell…
razib | June 4, 2007Some 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 him his name, thinking it might go into Altercation the next day....
One of the realities of life is having to deal with "officials," whether it be faceless bureaucrats, customer "service" representatives, or the police. In many situations there is a major power imbalance between said officials and…
razib | June 4, 2007p-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 the sort of thing I imagine when attempting to analogize selective sweeps going through human populations over the past few tens of thousands of years. Money shot:
...In general, we find that recent adaptation is strikingly pervasive in the human genome, with as much as 10% of the genome affected by…
razib | June 2, 2007When 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 took it as just that. Over the past 20 some years there has been a noticeable drop in the number of these events, roughly declining in frequency as a proportion of the time from 1980 or so. I would offer that over the past year I've been complimented on my English perhaps on average once every 4 or…
razib | June 2, 2007People 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, essential). From my interest in the latter it can be easily inferred that I don't think there is anything necessarily deterministic about how mind and society manifest themselves over the course of development. Rather, an understanding of human nature can make us aware of the constraints and biases…
razib | June 2, 2007My 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. Wait a few weeks for the notification when it goes up. Regular readers won't find anything new, but it will have all of my baroque ideas cheek by jowl in one sequence of text, we'll see how it works out....
PS: Some have taken to criticizing the specific numbers in some of the surveys. Sample…
razib | June 1, 2007Tonal languages, ASPM, and MCPH. Over at my other blog p-ter reviews the paper now that it is out in PNAS.
razib | May 31, 2007The "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 pollster George Barna documents some small recent shifts. This isn't new, those who favor the Secularization Hypothesis for the United States have pointed to data which suggests a gentle ebbing away of Biblical fundamentalism. That being said, the process of rescaling "conservatism" every generation…
razib | May 31, 2007OK, 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 tend to draw from the modal alleles within that population. If that isn't clear: many small minorities in the United States are faced with the prospect of very long odds when it comes to tissue matches because of low numbers. This means proactive drives are necessary, as a matter of life & death…
razib | May 30, 2007In 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 of almost 28.2 million, noted a religious affiliation on government census forms. In other words, less than four decades ago, only a little more than 12% of the South Korean people declared themselves to be Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, or a follower of one of Korea's many other organized…
razib | May 29, 2007A 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 epistatic variance can be converted into to additive genetic variance.
razib | May 29, 2007Islamic 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 argued, would create a familial relationship under Islamic law.
Dr Atiyaa explained to the Egyptian newspaper al-Watani al-Yawm that: "A man and a woman who are alone together are not (necessarily) having sex but this possibility exists and breastfeeding provides a solution to this problem (by)…
razib | May 29, 2007Note: 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 profile are more likely to speak tonal languages such as Chinese.
In tonal languages, which are most common in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, subtle differences in pitch can change the meaning of vowels, consonants and syllables. Nontonal languages, which prevail in Europe, the Middle East and…