There's been some buzz over a recent paper, mtDNA Data Indicates a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, less than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves. This is tracing the maternal lineage, and suggests that that lineage is most diverse in southern China (just as human lineages tend to exhibit the most diversity in Africa). Here's the abstract:
...We therefore analysed entire mitochondrial genomes for 169 dogs to obtain maximal phylogenetic resolution, and the CR for 1,543 dogs across the Old World for a comprehensive picture of geographical diversity. Hereby, a detailed picture…
I stumbled onto some peculiar survey data of American Roman Catholic priests:
A somewhat larger percentage of participants (57 percent) believe that the sacraments of the Church are necessary for salvation, and relatively few (17 percent) agree that "all great religions are equally good and true."
Yes, 17% of respondents is a minority. But for me the key is that these are not men who are exhibiting some level of ecumenicalism, accepting that salvation might take place outside of the sacraments of the church. They believe that all other religions are as good and true as their own religion. A…
Religious Attendance Relates to Generosity Worldwide:
Gallup data reveal that adherents of all the major world religions who attended religious services (attenders) in the past week have higher rates of generosity than do their coreligionists who did not attend services (non-attenders). Even for individuals who do not affiliate with any religious tradition, those who said they attended religious services in the past week exhibited more generous behaviors.
These findings are based on Gallup surveys conducted from 2005-2009 in 145 countries, which asked individuals about whether they in the…
His two primary reasons:
1) Robert Wright publicly said that this was foolish, apologized for the poor editorial oversight that led to it, and says they're going to try never to do this again. This looks sincere to me, and given that it's sincere, people really ought to be allowed more chance than this to recover from their mistakes.
2) Bloggingheads.TV has given me a forum to debate accomodationist atheists who are insufficiently condemning of religion - for example my diavlog with Adam Frank, author of "The Constant Fire". Adam Frank argues that, while of course we now know that God…
The story about the giant rat discovered in an isolated crater in Papua New Guinea is fascinating. It's kind of atypical in these days, but if you read through really old copies of National Geographic from the early 20th century it you observe that it occurred all the time back then. I would of course much rather live now at the turn of the 21st century than the turn of the 20th, but there's a certain amount of zoological and anthropological wonder that we'll not be able to attain because so much of the sample space of possibilities has been mapped out.
Another study on obesity & Africans, with a slight twist, Admixture Mapping of Obesity-related Traits in African Americans: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study:
Obesity is an important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the United States, the prevalence of obesity is higher in African Americans than whites, even after adjustment for socioeconomic status (SES). This leads to the hypothesis that differences in genetic background may contribute to racial/ethnic differences in obesity-related traits. We tested this hypothesis by conducting a genome-wide admixture…
At Cognition & Culture, a review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdry's new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. I really liked her previous work, Mother Nature, so I'm definitely going to check this out. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a prominent source in Ullica Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate.
Check it out. That's ~10% of the student body.
This article about Redbox is quaint and suggests some recent trends. First, other stuff I've read about Redbox pretty much indicates that it's a boon for downscale and techphobic consumers who aren't utilizing services like Netflix, and so pay a higher per unit price for rentals than otherwise would be the case. So though Redbox is putting downward pressure on the DVD sales & rental market, this seems a case where the studios want to maintain "cash cows" in the form of consumers who simply aren't making recourse to the internet for various reasons (25% of Americans are not on the internet…
I was doing some digging around on the genetics of Central Asia and stumbled upon the data that 7% of the mtDNA lineages of the Hui, Muslims who speak Chinese, are West Eurasian. This is opposed 0% for the Han, and 40-50% for the Uyghur. No surprises. But then I thought, what sort of exogamy rates would result in the Hui becoming, operationally, 90% Han during their stay in China? I think 10% is a conservative proportion for how much total genome content they have that is West Eurasian because the historical records suggest a male bias in the migration (so mtDNA would underestimate the…
Global Health Magazine has some data up on the "% of women who believe it is OK for husbands to beat them." If you click through the original data, the question is more extensive:
% of girls and women aged 15-49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances (2001-2007)
I was going to cross-reference the data with the World Values Survey (which has a similar question), but I don't have time right now, so I'll simply pass on the raw data sorted by country. There's a rather large gap.
Jordan
90
Guinea
85.6
Zambia
85.4…
This comment is funny:
Just because it is lower in calories doesn't mean that it doesn't have poison in it (toxins such as high fructose corn syrup). Read the labels people.
First, watch this video attempting to dispel the myths about high fructose corn syrup:
Now check out this spoof:
Matt Springer of Built on Facts has a post up where he defends the potential of nuclear power. Regular readers of this weblog will know that I am broadly sympathetic. I understand that the "atomic age" is not going to be a utopia by any means nor will it solve all our problems, I do have a suspicion that much of the opposition is driven by the wisdom of repugnance.
I've surveyed attitudes toward nuclear power in the GSS before, the NUKEGEN and NUKEFAM variables asked people in the early 1990s how dangerous they thought nuclear power was to their family or the environment. There were five…
Sean Carroll points out that physics and math degree holders have the highest LSAT scores. There's the classic chicken or egg issue implied here: does physics make you smart, or do only smart people manage to complete a degree in physics? I think it is more the latter. How individuals in various disciplines do on standardized tests is strongly predicted by mathphobia in said disciplines.
LSAT scores by degree below....
1 Physics/Math 160.0
2 Economics 157.4
3 Philosophy/Theology 157.4
4 International Relations 156.5
5 Engineering 156.2
6 Government /Service 156.1
7 Chemistry 156.1
8 History…
Singapore is a racially diverse society, so there's a natural pool of diversity from which one can draw for study of human variation. The Han majority of Singapore derive predominantly from Fujian in southeast China. The Indians are mostly from the southern regions dominated by Tamils or Telugus, but there are large minorities from all over the subcontinent. Finally, the Malay category is really an amalgam of peoples of Southeast Asian Muslim origin, from native Singaporean Malays, to Malaysian Malays, to immigrants from Indonesia.
Singapore Genome Variation Project: A haplotype map of three…
So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It:
So if Gmail is as good as the power grid, the phone network, and home broadband, why does its failure spark such surprise and outrage--and always make national headlines...An online service's outage, though, is sudden, inexplicable, and communal. Gmail goes down for everyone at the same time, none of us knows why, and because we're all online and gabbing, the news spreads fast. Many people also spend a lot more time on Gmail and other Web services than we do on the phone or watching TV; even if you don't really have any pressing reason to be on e-mail or IM,…
The New York Times has a strange article up, For Your Health, Froot Loops, which profiles the controversy around a new health food guideline/endorsement organized by industry which seems somewhat fishy. This part made me laugh out loud:
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.
"You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr…
After reading Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers I'm left scratching my head a bit. Cut-out black & white models really benefit from lack of data, and now that there's some serious data I think perhaps that we need to think about starting from a clean slate in many ways. The title of the article is rather justified in the local contexts: on the mitochondrial DNA (female lineage) there is an enormous difference between farming and non-farming populations. Here are the locations of these samples:
The genetic disance seems to have been 5-…
Dienekes posted some abstracts of the ASHG 2009 meeting. This one is in the category of facts we assumed but weren't totally sure of:
Abraham's children in the genome era: Major Jewish Diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry
Here, we present population structure results from compiled datasets after merging with the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Population Reference Sample studies, which consisted of 146 non-Jewish Middle Easterners (Druze, Bedouin and Palestinian), 30 northern Africans (Mozabite from Algeria), 1547 Europeans, and…