razib | September 24, 2009A reader pointed me to an article, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Some of the authors of the paper I reviewed today (actually, I wrote the post yesterday and put it in schedule) had some interesting things to say:
The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed ''fact'' that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth.
''…
razib | September 24, 2009Mugabe denies blame for Zimbabwe woes. I recall listening to a debate recently via Planet Money on reforming the banking system. A lobbyist for the big banks made the case that our principles of free enterprise, initiative and and flexibility, letting the market work, meant that the government couldn't and shouldn't regulate the banks more restrictively, or even break them up. Whatever the merits of the specific issues, I was struck by th bald-faced gall he had in making these assertions with TARP + easy money from the Fed + explicit guarantees. The panelists were economists or treasury…
razib | September 24, 2009A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians:
The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century...Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible...Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of…
razib | September 24, 2009A few months ago a friend tipped me off to the fact that David Reich was going to publish a paper about the genetics of Indians which he ascertained was going to model these populations as hybrids between "Europeans and Andaman Islanders." The paper is out, and my friend was roughly right. Reconstructing Indian population history:
India has been underrepresented in genome-wide surveys of human variation. We analyse 25 diverse groups in India to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the 'Ancestral North…
razib | September 23, 2009From American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population:
"Belonging" refers to people who self-identify as "X." For example, someone who asserts that they are an atheist. "Belief" refers to the content of one's avowed beliefs, as opposed to label. Someone who asserts that they "do not believe in God" is placed within the atheist category. As you can see, many more people avow atheist & agnostic beliefs than will own up to the terms. "Soft agnostic" refers to those who say they're not sure about the existence of god, while "hard agnostic" are those who believe there's no way to…
razib | September 23, 2009Being raised in a single-parent household, especially when a woman is head of household, puts you at higher risk for all sorts of negative personal outcomes, right? If that data is all you know, yes. But as they say, correlation does not equal causation. But the assumptions of causation come out in the responses of people to these social statistics; conservatives often want to maintain stability in the home, put the father there because the father is critical. Many liberals will focus on the economic outcomes of single motherhood, and argue that buffering the family against fiscal stress…
razib | September 22, 2009I watched this rather bizarre Kirk Cameron video today. He's promoting a plan to distribute Origin of Species with what seems to be a scurrilous preface to college students. His argument is that college students need to know the truth about evolution. I don't know how far he'll get, but I suspect many people will be favorably inclined, most college students are impressionable and dumb, and a non-trivial subset will probably reconsider their nominal acceptance of evolution. I only think back to an acquaintance who was a computer science major, and raised irreligious by his anthropologist…
razib | September 22, 2009Seems to be the upshot of this finding, I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others:
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese than…
razib | September 22, 2009Bing Keeps Gaining Ground:
For August, Bing's share of the American search market came in at 9.3 percent, up from 8.9 percent in July and 8.4 percent in June. Perhaps more importantly, Bing's growth didn't come at the expense of Yahoo (YHOO), which held steady at 19.3 percent. For the first time, Bing took market share away from Google, which dropped a tenth of a point to 64.6 percent of the market. (AOL was the big loser here, losing a tenth of a point to fade to a dismal 3 percent share.)
I actually stopped using Bing. I liked its UI for many tasks, but Google's breadth and relevance of…
razib | September 22, 2009Sometimes I wonder if the period between the publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes and The Journey of Man, roughly from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, will be seen as a golden age for historical population genetics in hindsight. A few weeks ago I pointed to new data based on DNA extraction which really confuses the picture of how Europe was populated over the past 25,000 years. It seems the more data we get, the more interesting things get. In the late 1990s the emergence of powerful technologies to extract and amplify genetic material and sequence it shed light on several…
razib | September 21, 2009Two papers in PNAS this week.
Human origins: Out of Africa:
Our species, Homo sapiens, is highly autapomorphic (uniquely derived) among hominids in the structure of its skull and postcranial skeleton. It is also sharply distinguished from other organisms by its unique symbolic mode of cognition. The fossil and archaeological records combine to show fairly clearly that our physical and cognitive attributes both first appeared in Africa, but at different times. Essentially modern bony conformation was established in that continent by the 200-150 Ka range (a dating in good agreement with dates…
razib | September 21, 2009Lawmakers' inside advantage to trading:
A year ago this week Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke dashed to Capitol Hill. They hastily met with a small group of congressional leaders to tell them that the country was teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe.
Paulson and Bernanke asked Congress to spend hundreds of billions to save the banks.
JOHN BOEHNER: We clearly have an unprecedented crisis in our financial system.
GOP House Minority Leader John Boehner...
BOEHNER: "On behalf of the American people our job is to put our partisan differences aside and to work…
razib | September 19, 2009Poking around the CensusScope site I found some interesting maps to compare & contrast. Here are the frequency of "nuclear families":
No big surprises here. Utah & the Heartland have a high proportion of households composed of nuclear families. The Black Belt, not as much.
How about families composed of people "living in sin"? That is, unmarried couples.
Looks like "Greater New England" likes the sin. Though that isn't a function of climate, as Florida mirrors New England with high rates of cohabitation and low rates of nuclear families.
Now how about families where grandparents are…
razib | September 19, 2009This is a weird little fact which I've known for a while, but I thought readers might get a kick out of it. What is the longest-lived vertebrate individual which we have records to the extent that we can confirm with a high degree of certitude? You can guess the age and the rough species, but click below the fold for the answer. As hints I will state that the age was in excess of 150 years, and that the individual was not a tortoise.
It was a koi named Hanako who made it to the age of 226 years. Hanako was born in 1751, and died in 1977. (I notice this was posted on Boing Boing, so likely…
razib | September 19, 2009p-ter points out that selection of model organisms can shape the path of scientific research because of the very nature of model organisms. Normative considerations in science are pretty obvious when you look at the set of disciplines; there's a whole field of biological anthropology which studies one species. There is the rather well known case that doctoral research arcs are constrained to a relatively short period, which resulted in a focus short-lived organisms in zoological studies. Imagine trying to write up grant applications focusing on the life history of the tortoise.
razib | September 18, 2009Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States:
Increased religiosity in residents of states in the U.S. strongly predicted a higher teen birth rate, with r = 0.73 (p<0.0005). Religiosity correlated negatively with median household income, with r = -0.66, and income correlated negatively with teen birth rate, with r = -0.63. But the correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate remained highly significant when income was controlled for via partial correlation: the partial correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate, controlling for income, was 0.53 (p<0.0005).…
razib | September 18, 2009The Nightmare Of Regulatory Reform:
...the SEC and the CFTC, two agencies that have fought hard to stay apart while the products they regulate grow more and more intertwined. Both Republicans and Democrats agree the two should become one, but former House Financial Services Committee chairman Mike Oxley says the chances of that happening are about as good as him beating Tiger Woods.
This is obviously public choice theory at work. But more generally an inspection of history shows that institutions tend to go through phases, as if they have a life history like organisms. The Chinese dynastic…