razib | June 22, 2006Three human gene variants appear to influence tb susceptibility:
Approximately one-third of the world's population is thought to be infected with the M. tuberculosis pathogen, yet only about 10 percent becomes ill with the active disease. Researchers suspect that a variety of factors interplay to determine who develops the full-blown disease. For example, in February 2006 Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers were part of a team that identified a mechanism that explains why people of African descent may be more vulnerable to the disease.
The paper is reputedly in the PNAS -…
razib | June 21, 2006Steve points me to this story which reports that the man reported to be the first direct line descent of Genghis Khan among Europeans is not a Khan. Nevertheless, the more important point holds: the success of the Khan patrilineage seems distinctly an Asian phenomenon, showing how fickle social status for males can be across space & time....
razib | June 21, 2006At my other weblog Jason Malloy points me to Half Sigma who crunches the data from the GSS and finds that yes, religiosity is a predictor of lower intelligence. One of the most googled postings of mine from years back is where I showed that there is a positive trend for mean national IQ to predict mean national religiosity. Of course, by the numbers, most high IQ people are still religious, they are simply less religious than those of lower IQ. Anyway, here is a follow up rant from Half Sigma.
Of course, another fact is that the non-religious also probably like confirmation of the fact…
razib | June 20, 2006A few weeks ago Evolgen expressed irritation that people kept confusing his blog with Jason Rosenhouse's Evolution Blog. Well, check this:
Razib at Evolutionblog has asked contributors to try defining evolution in ten words or fewer.
The title "Evolution Blog" must be cognitively "sticky" or something! Jason did link to me recently, so I suspect this is where the memory leakage and conflation came into play....
razib | June 20, 2006Over at The Corner at National Review Online John Derbyshire has been getting into a debate with his colleagues over Judith Rich Harris' work, and her two books The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. I find it amusing when scientific controversy comes crashing into the punditocracy, though I think it is also a good thing. To frame the issue properly, there is consistent evidence that the majority of non-genetic variation in personality is due to non-shared (i.e., non-home) environment. Judith Rich Harris proposes that peer groups account for this non-shared environment, though this is…
razib | June 20, 2006EurekAlert obviously doesn't have quality control, as of right now their top press release in the Biology category is Graham Hancock, international expert on lost civilizations. If you don't know, Hancock is a pseudoarcheologist. Basically he is just Robert E. Howard with a little more world-creation talent and more literary panache. Hancock reminds us of an important point: quackish beliefs are not the monopoly of religous fundamentalists. In fact, I would argue that religious fundamentalism, for whatever reason, reinforces quackish beliefs, but those beliefs are somewhat innate in most…
razib | June 19, 2006A few weeks ago I was posting on genomic imprinting. I will continue that series in the near future, but until then, I point you to my 10 questions for David Haig, the theorist who originated many of the ideas which I discussed and will discuss. Though Haig is not a popularizer himself, he shows up in Matt Ridley's work, as well as Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy and Natural Selection and Social Theory by Bob Trivers. You may read many of his papers without academic access, so I highly recommend readers to go straight to the source in this case!
razib | June 19, 2006Jake at Pure Pedantry has a lengthy post on heritability. It makes concrete (using real psychological illneses, etc.) some of my points in my previous post where I discuss the complexity of behavioral genetics.
Two issues of note. First, Jake used the example of Huntington's Disease as "100% heritable." I think this is going to confuse people. There is often a distinction between "broad sense" and "narrow sense" heritability, the latter includes dominance effects into the genetic variation component,1 while the latter is focused on additive genetic variation.2 In most genetic discourse…
razib | June 19, 2006As most of you know, SEED will be matching the money we're raising here at Science Blogs. Thanks to the many who've already given. If you haven't, I encourage you too! Step up!
razib | June 18, 2006I will be contributing to the new blog Nation Building, which was the weblog "Dean Nation." Though I am generally of the opinion that the 4-year-election-cycle is generally characterized by transient epiphenomena on a substantive level (though there's a lot of tribalism and "my team won!" going around), I do think the long-term health of the republic (long term as in 20-40 years) is important. My opinions will be more philosophical and historical, but they will have some political relevance. I'll be offering my idiosyncratic perspective as a libertarian/Burkean/transhumanist/evolutionist…
razib | June 18, 2006This hilarious article about "confirming" your descent from Confucius is making the rounds.
Now, my understanding is that the patrilineage of Confucius remains to this day. So the people who would seek confirmation would often have a tradition of descent from the great sage himself. But, I note tradition. We all know that "ancestors" can be concocted, and, we also know that sometimes patrilineages can be "interrupted." When English geneticist Bryan Sykes tested individuals with his surname across the British Isles he found that ~50% of individuals were of the same Y chromosomal lineage.…
razib | June 16, 2006I was hungry yesterday, and everywhere I went the lines were long, so I decided to visit a "fast food" restaurant. While I was waiting for my order a 7 year old child was adding more ice to the soda fountain machine. The child had to use a chair to climb up, and he was having a very difficult time with the task. I assumed this was the owner's child helping out, but he was wearing a fanchise uniform. I couldn't help it, I was outraged, so I blurted out "They let you work here?!" I mean, I was thinking, what is this, Pakistan? The child looked at me, and was like, "What?" And suddenly I…
razib | June 16, 2006The answers keep coming in for my query about "what is evolution?" RPM took me to task for basically answering "what is selection" with my initial response. This is a good criticism...honestly, I wanted to focus on selection because I think random genetic drift confuses many people, and it quickly turns into a black box incantation that explains everything and nothing. But here's another point of interest: selection is stochastic as well! That is, selection favors fitness, and fitness tends to exhibit particular characteristics in particular environments (e.g., extremely fast vertebrate…
razib | June 15, 2006I too defend space cadets, what is mankind without a dream? I remember back in the late 1980s a speech by Joseph P. Kennedy II as he stood on the floor of the house of representatives and asked his fellow members if people here at home should eat less so that vessels could fly above them in the cosmos. Should we be forced to make this choice? (shall I point out that many Americans should eat a bit less!)
I'm not going to defend the details of Hawking's argument, I think the time scale is a little compressed (I'm being generous). But, I am going to defend the dream, because to venture into…
razib | June 15, 2006On the heels of the asinine review of Before the Dawn in Nature, I see Carl is linking to some recent papers that are coming out in regards to positive selection in our own storied lineage. I must say that the new one in Science is quite phat in its broad sweep. Pictures below the fold....
Show me the money honey, you can sneer about incomplete evidence for selection on human lactase persistence, but saying it just ain't gonna make it so.
razib | June 15, 2006Dave and Jonah have both commented on this piece in The New York Times which is something of a mismash of recent studies coming out of the field of behavior genetics. The best thing about the piece, from my selfish angle, is that it references Contingency Table, now absorbed into my other weblog, who was riffing off one of my older posts here at Science Blogs.
The biggest problem with pieces like this isn't the genetics or psychology, it is the utter lack of focus on the importantce of probability distributions and the concept of expectation. There are several types of genetic traits. Some…