razib | October 1, 2009That's what Kambiz Kamrani is saying. Significance:
Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says that the fossil changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today's chimp and we'll have to be rewriting our text books soon. This is big folks. What this means is that our common ancestor was a bipedal forest forager and that chimps were an evolutionary offshoot.
Update: John Hawks & Carl Zimmer.
Update II: Science's Ardipithecus page is up. You can get the papers free with registration.
razib | September 30, 2009As you can see by looking to the left (right below the cutest kid that ever was) I'm participating in DonorsChoose this year. You can of course donate to any project you think is worthy, but my current list is biased in two directions:
1) Need
2) Biology
Since last fall a lot as changed economically and socially, and of course people on the margins are squeezed the most. Those of us not on the margins have seen hardship, or seen those around us subject to hardship, but really this sort of thing is normalized to our relative context. Many of the projects require small amounts of money; this…
razib | September 30, 2009Lewis Is Said to Be Leaving Bank of America. Years ago I'd read that there was some social science which suggested that M&As were encouraged by the incentive structure of CEO careers; that is, the upside for a CEO in relation to a successful M&A are higher than for their firm. As for the downsides, the effect sizes are probably inverted. Steve Case & Gerald Levin might have their reputations in tatters, but they remain wealthy men. As for Time Warner....
razib | September 29, 2009The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…
razib | September 28, 2009Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity:
We hypothesized that religiosity, a set of traits variably expressed in the population, is modulated by neuroanatomical variability. We tested this idea by determining whether aspects of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical volume. We performed structural magnetic resonance imaging of the brain in 40 healthy adult participants who reported different degrees and patterns of religiosity on a survey. We identified four Principal Components of religiosity by Factor Analysis of the survey items and associated them with regional…
razib | September 28, 2009From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit:
Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.
Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country -- and the timing could hardly be worse.
The dairy industry is in crisis…
razib | September 28, 2009I remember back in the early 1990s that there was some talk about the United States going from a plural majority Protestant nations, to a Roman Catholic one at some point in the early 21st century. This in itself wouldn't be that big of a deal today, Canada already has more Catholics than Protestants (44% of the adult population is Catholic), and it has retained the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture (also, the influence of Roman Catholicism in Quebec collapsed during the 1960s). But here in the United States things haven't quite worked out. Latinos have become rapidly de-Catholicized, and…
razib | September 28, 2009
Darren Naish has the full story. In a bygone age without scientists who...know stuff, these sorts of finds would become the germ of myth. As it is we cobble together a bunch of banal facts and likelihoods into something far less exciting, but more likely to b a true description of reality.
razib | September 28, 2009The past 10 years have seen a lot of ups & downs in the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) hypothesis, which suggests some veracity to the Biblical narrative whereby the priestly caste status of the Jewish people is passed down patrilineally from Aaron, the brother of Moses. But could there be multiple Aarons? Possibly. Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood:
It has been known for over a decade that a majority of men who self report as members of the Jewish priesthood (Cohanim) carry a characteristic Y chromosome haplotype termed the Cohen…
razib | September 27, 2009
Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to produce viable offspring (in fact, many ligers are fertile as well). Here's the explanation:
Imprinted genes are under greater selective pressure than normal genes. This is because only one copy is active at a time. Any variations in that copy will be expressed. There is no "back-up copy" to mask its…
razib | September 27, 2009I took the Fst values from Reconstructing Indian population history, and decided to plot them in different ways. Remember that Fst measures the proportion of between population variance, the variation which can't be accounted for by the normal variation you'd find within a population. So it's a rough measure of genetic distance. I've removed the Chenchus, Siddis and Tibeto-Burmans from the data because they're outliers, especially the last two. I've taken the Kashmiri Pandits as reference group, so that all Fst values are such that they measure the distance between Pandits and group X. I…
razib | September 27, 2009A geologist, Suvrat Kher, has a very good post on the recent paper on Indian genetics. He concludes:
The Indian Press has made a hash of the finding. For example they have only reported those parts of the study that deal with the kinship among Indians and have stressed that castes and tribes cannot be differentiated or that there is no divide between the Aryans (roughly north Indians) and Dravidians (south Indians). That is all true for average relatedness. But the study also clearly points out that there are genetic differences between north and south Indians and between upper and lower…
razib | September 26, 2009My post below elicited a lot of response. One thing to point out though, which I want to emphasize: a higher proportion of smart people go to college now than in the past. How can this be? First, let's review the change in distributions of intelligence of those with college degrees (or higher) and those without. The first two charts show the proportions of WORDSUM scores for individuals with and without college degrees for two decades. I limited the sample to whites ages 30 and over. So for example in the period between 1974-1984, of those with college degrees and higher 26.8% scored 10 on…
razib | September 25, 2009Eric Michael Johnson of Primate Diaries has a piece up for Seed, where he reviews Franz De Waal's newest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Also a post, Misunderstanding Dawkins: The Role of Metaphor in Science is worth a read. I'll respond to Michael at some point in the near future,
razib | September 25, 2009John Hawks & I did a diavlog for Science Saturday. We decided it would be appropriate to synchronize with dark-rimmed glasses. Also, Mr. Parrot kind of decided it was an opportune time to make a huge racket by swinging his perch against the cage repeatedly. Just so you know....
(I put it below the fold too)
razib | September 25, 2009I made a comment earlier that college students, and by inference college graduates, are not as intelligent as they used to be on average. I made that comment based on what I'd seen in the General Social Survey. What I had seen was a decline in average WORDSUM score over the years (WORDSUM being a variable which records how many correct responses individuals received on a vocab test). But I'll lay out the data here.
I limited the sample to whites between the ages of 22-35. That way I get a snapshot of those who graduate from university in a particular time period, and I need to limit the…