razib | December 17, 2006Here 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 prior to testing will put the woman in the very position we are trying to protect her from. ... If, as I have suggested, the counselor plans to attempt to keep paternity but not personal genetic information from the man, it is probably better not the discuss the issue ahead of time.
The problem is…
razib | December 16, 2006Check 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 doing???
razib | December 15, 2006Ali 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 about X to map inferences onto Y, for the nature of Y is unfamiliar and X is familiar. The idea is that the 30 Years War will convey information to those not in the know about the current conflicts in the Middle East which emerge from sectarianism. But again, the problem is that hardly anyone knows…
razib | December 15, 2006Storm 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.
razib | December 14, 2006P-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 nervously since of course real matings between individuals so closely related would be creepy and unethical...but Pakistan with its culture of cousin-loving down the generations1 makes the science possible in real life! Let a thousand deleterious recessives bloom across the landscape!
1 - Remember that…
razib | December 14, 2006Bryan 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 women are "socialized" to be more religious. Stark and Miller put this theory to the test. If the socialization hypothesis is true, they reason, then the gender gap should be larger in more traditional societies where socialization pressure is more intense. Make sense to me.
Survey says: Dead wrong.…
razib | December 13, 2006Juan 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 opinion so long as they don't call takfir.
Sunni - catchall for groups within the Muslim mainstream who aren't Shia and adhere to four primary schools of shariat (Islamic Law)
Salafi - originally Sunni reformists who attempted to go back to first principles. Some were originally quite modernist, but…
razib | December 12, 2006The 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 I've heard Ender's Game, Hyperion and Snow Crash tossed off as appropriate for a "newbie." Is this the Twlight Zone??? Am I a freak to think this is freaky? I haven't had a sip of wine, so it isn't the alcohol.
Update: She's reading American Gods I notice (taking a break).
Update II: Smokin'…
razib | December 12, 2006The 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 studying selection in the human genome, not trying to reconstruct phylogenies
I also accept that "science" has been the tool of injustice and even barbarity against indigenous peoples
I say "community leaders" because "indigenous peoples" aren't a monolith. Just as George W. Bush doesn't represent all…
razib | December 12, 2006The 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 effect). But there is a difference, light skin color emerges via loss of functionality or expression on the loci which result in pigment production. There are many ways to lose function, but it generally is considered more difficult to gain function. And yet this is what lactose tolerance is. Or is it…
razib | December 11, 2006Convergent 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. We conducted a genotype-phenotype association study in 470 Tanzanians, Kenyans and Sudanese and identified three SNPs (G/C-14010, T/G-13915 and C/G-13907) that are associated with lactase persistence and that have derived alleles that significantly enhance transcription from the LCT promoter in…
razib | December 9, 2006Mike 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, running the Honolulu Marathon lets folks maintain a connection with home, but that's not the only reason that they are running. They're also running to support TAPS - an organization that provides support to the families of people who die while on active duty in the armed forces.
You can see the…
razib | December 8, 2006Data 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 cognitive similarity than the sample of individuals for someone who has an IQ of 100 vs. 130 or 70 is far higher for any given range. For example, nearly 2/3 of individuals on the frequency distribution lay within 1 standar deviation of someone with an IQ of 100. In contrast, only around 1/7 of the…
razib | December 7, 2006The 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 with ambivalence and ambiguity in the past and the present. After all, there's the old Afghan saying that even pigeons who fly over the lands of the Pashtun cover their rear with a wing, a reference to the prevalence of pedarasty in that subculture (where men and women are rigidly segregated). The…