razib | December 29, 2006Earlier this week I sketched out the general theoretical basis for not denying unexpected deviations from expectation, so to speak, when it comes to quantitatve traits. The main issue is that varying genetic backgrounds leave unaccounted for gene-gene interactions, and so our predictions when two populations are crossed maybe confounded (within a population ceteris paribus is far more likely to hold). In any case, I thought I'd give you two obvious examples from humans.
First, in 2005 Helgadottir et. al. found that African Americans are at greater risk for myocardial infarction vis-a-vis…
razib | December 28, 2006Life has been occupying me, why, between good wine (I prefer mild Chardonnay), work, books and beautiful women who detest science fiction I haven't been able to resume my survey of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies. Nevertheless, I'd like to point you to Jason Rosenhouse's Evolution Blog which has been putting the Science in ScienceBlogs. I especially enjoyed Chance, Stochasticity, Probability and Evolution, though I am of the opinion that these sort of disagreements are often more semantical than substantial. Terms like "adaptationism" and "punctuated equilibria" allude…
razib | December 27, 2006I work on two machines in the mid-to-high 2 Ghz range with 1 gig of RAM on a regular basis. And yet the new YAHOO MAIL "Beta" has consistently crashed and throttled Firefox multiple times within the last few days. If your AJAX app does this you're worse than Microsoft.
Client: Is my app Web 2.0TM©® ready???
Me: Oh yeah baby, you won't be able to find a desktop it won't crash!
razib | December 27, 2006John Lynch has a post up about Richard Dawkins' lack of theological sophistication in The God Delusion. John is basically reiterating the point that Dawkins did not truly engage theological arguments for theism on a very high or sophisticated level. In fact, John levels the implicit charge that Dawkins' engagement of theology mirrors the level of good faith that Creationists render toward evolutionary science. Though I am a Neville Chamberlain atheist I am ambivalent about the theological tack. I've told Chris that I think that making a stand on theology isn't the best strategic choice,…
razib | December 26, 2006A few months ago I posted Discrete continuity in genetics to show how the granular nature of genetic inheritance may still manifest to our perception as continuous variation (i.e., quantitative traits). I used skin color as a model trait because it is easy to relate to, and we are beginning to understand its genetics in detail as I write. To recap, it seems that 3-5 genetic loci control more than 90% of the intergroup variation across populations in complexion. That is, you have a small number of genes which generate the range between black and white skin. These genes come in various flavors…
razib | December 24, 2006Below I spoke of historical perspective, while earlier I referred to Christmas as "universal pagan wine poured into a particular Christian chalice." I thought I might elaborate upon this.
First, the cultural and historical origins of Christmas are multi-textured. Though Christians assert "Jesus is the reason for the season," a more precise formulation might be that "Jesus became the reason for the season in the minds of some." This is important. It is not without rationale that Christian groups like the Jehovah Witnesses reject Christmas, it is not a scriptural festival. Its emergence in…
razib | December 24, 2006I'm reading The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather. Most people know I'm a classical history buff (e.g., I've read a fair number of the late Michael Grant's works). Now, one thing that always strikes is this: 2,000 years ago a political organization existed which stretched from Scotland to Iraq, from Hungary to Morocco. How wild is that?
razib | December 22, 2006Steinn Sigurðsson has an has an amusing post up about his multicultural Christmas. Here is the "American Infidel," Robert Ingersoll, on Christmas (1892):
This is the festival of the sun-god, and as such let its observance be universal.
This is the great day of the first religion, the mother of all religions -- the worship of the sun.
Sun worship is not only the first, but the most natural and most reasonable of all. And not only the most natural and the most reasonable, but by far the most poetic, the most beautiful.
The sun is the god of benefits, of growth, of life, of warmth, of…
razib | December 22, 2006New paper in PLOS Genetics, Low Levels of Genetic Divergence across Geographically and Linguistically Diverse Populations from India. Here's the conclusion:
Populations from India, and groups from South Asia more generally, form a genetic cluster, so that individuals placed within this cluster are more genetically similar to each other than to individuals outside the cluster. However, the amount of genetic differentiation among Indian populations is relatively small. The authors conclude that genetic variation in India is distinctive with respect to the rest of the world, but that the level…
razib | December 21, 2006Via 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.
razib | December 20, 2006My 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 right.
razib | December 20, 2006Well, 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 when I've not been busy
3) I don't really see the need to address arguments which don't relate at all to what I said or intended
But, two comments piqued my interest and I feel I have to say something. They deal with my racial identity. Seeing as I'm known in some quarters as "cinnamon love, you…
razib | December 19, 2006Check 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).
razib | December 19, 2006I 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 back. Anyway, this is my first irritation with Firefox, the "release" seemed timed to one-up IE 7.0, it really should have been a bug fix and the switcheroo in the UI seems to be the main reason to stick it with a 2.0, even though as I offer above I think the UI changes mean a loss of short term…
razib | December 18, 2006The 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 modern humans, it would take only a very small amount of interbreeding for modern humans to pick up these alleles, with a near-100 percent likelihood.
Greg Cochran has more. Obviously this work builds upon the Lahn introgression paper. Instead of crude species typologies the data is now pointing to…
razib | December 18, 2006About 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 Adaptive Introgression from Archaic to Modern Humans, which synthesizes the first of the new results. The paper is open access, but I'll throw out the money shot:
We suggest that adaptive introgression of alleles from archaic humans may be one of the central mechanisms leading to the "human revolution…