razib | September 3, 2009Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers:
Following the domestication of animals and crops in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, farming reached much of Central Europe by 7,500 years before present. The extent to which these early European farmers were immigrants, or descendants of resident hunter-gatherers who had adopted farming, has been widely debated. We compare new mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from late European hunter-gatherer skeletons with those from early farmers, and from modern Europeans. We find large genetic differences…
razib | September 3, 2009ScienceBlogs is going to be adding user registration. This should be a nice, as I can't flag certain commenters as approved anymore since the "upgrade." They're taking a poll on features you'd like. I'm keen on a vote/starring system. Some readers have awesome comments. Some do not.
razib | September 2, 2009Dan MacArthur has a very good post, New York Times adopts medical establishment line on personal genomics:
The NY Times has an article entitled "Buyer beware of home DNA tests" that adopts the paternalistic party line of the medical establishment: taking DNA tests without a doctor's advice is hazardous to your health.
Remarkably, the article acknowledges that qualified genetic counsellors are few and far between and that "most practicing physicians lack the knowledge and training in genetics to interpret [DNA tests] properly", and yet still suggests that customers should "take the findings to…
razib | September 2, 2009I notice that the NOVA documentary, Is there life on Mars?, is viewable online (from December 2008). Check it out.
razib | September 1, 2009Why Gmail Failed Today:
Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.
The main issue is that Google obviously has to go down less often. But it's never going to be perfect, that's reserved for God. So the question is how often can it go down without people getting angry? It isn't as if not-cloud applications don't fail, we all know of many instances when computers won't…
razib | September 1, 2009I have recently mentioned an analogy between the heritability of height & weight. That is, the proportion of variance of the trait which can be explained by variance in the genes. How closely do parents resemble offspring. A new paper in PLoS ONE, How Humans Differ from Other Animals in Their Levels of Morphological Variation, look at how this variation among human populations compares to other animals:
Animal species come in many shapes and sizes, as do the individuals and populations that make up each species. To us, humans might seem to show particularly high levels of morphological…
razib | August 31, 2009Carl Zimmer is rather mild-mannered, but has expressed rather strong sentiments about what recently happened on bloggingheads.tv. Sean Carroll, not surprisingly, has stronger opinions. But they're now both proactively dissociating themselves from bloggingheads.tv. The McWhorter & Behe discussion is now back online. The issue is really simple. John McWhorter played up Michael Behe's ideas as awesome, mind-blowing and revolutionary for an hour. Most scientists don't consider Behe's ideas controversial, they consider them crankery.
razib | August 31, 2009Mike the Mad Biologist points out that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota and New Hampshire do better on math scores for elementary age students than most of Europe, and are competitive with Asia. Here are Mike's factors for why this might be:
-Low child poverty rates as measured by school lunch subsidies (a common proxy for poverty).
-Low divorce rates.
-Effective public health departments. MA, NJ, and MN have very good public health systems, and NH has some excellent programs (e.g., electronic syndromic surveillance)
-High incomes. Overall, these are healthy state economies (as good as…
razib | August 30, 2009Over at Living the Scientific Life an update on the quest to go to Antarctica. Turns out you can "reassign" your vote. Also, if you haven't voted, please do. Again:
Voting ends at noon EDT on 30 September 2009, and the Official Quark Blogger will travel to Antarctica in February 2010 to blog about the experience, chronicling the action, the emotion, and the drama as this polar adventure unfolds.
razib | August 30, 2009A few months ago I pointed out that minorities don't oppose gay marriage, blacks do. Specifically, there are sometimes assumptions that Hispanics are extremely religious Roman Catholics characterized by very socially conservative views. From what I have seen the data are of much more modest magnitude than what characterizations would suggest, but I thought it would be useful to put some numbers from the General Social Survey up. The years are from 2000-2008, when the "Hispanic" variable was being collected. First I separated into three categories, Non-Hispanics who were not black, which was a…
razib | August 30, 2009Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name.
razib | August 30, 2009Interesting review paper on disease and Sub-Saharan African, Neglected Tropical Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa: Review of Their Prevalence, Distribution, and Disease Burden:
The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the poorest 500 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and together produce a burden of disease that may be equivalent to up to one-half of SSA's malaria disease burden and more than double that caused by tuberculosis. Approximately 85% of the NTD disease burden results from helminth infections. Hookworm infection occurs in almost…
razib | August 30, 2009
I saw Thirst this weekend, a Korean film about a Catholic priest turned vampire. I was expecting strangeness, but it was really strange. The female lead, Kim Ok-bin gave a pretty good performance that I found very memorable. My friend who I watched the film with wondered if Asians produced really strange films, but my own suspicion is that there's a selection bias in terms of the types of "foreign films" which arrive to American shores. After all, what's the comparative advantage of sappy Korean melodramas when we have so many of our own? In regards to special effects driven movies I doubt…
razib | August 30, 2009Anthropology.net points me to a new paper, Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment:
We analyzed genetic linkage and association of measures of language, speech and reading phenotypes to candidate regions in a single set of families ascertained for SLI. Sib-pair and family-based analyses were carried out for candidate gene loci for Reading Disability (RD) on chromosomes 1p36, 3p12-q13, 6p22, and 15q21, and the speech-language candidate region on 7q31 in a sample of 322 participants…
razib | August 30, 2009From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road:
...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the Tarim Basin, the final destination of the people who are known to us as the Tokharians.
I've alluded to this before, the unique hybrid aspect of Uighurs probably is due to the fact that the Tarim basin was only recently settled from both the west and east of Eurasia, closing a gap of settlement which might have existed since the Last Glacial…
razib | August 29, 2009There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers replaced non-farmers genetically. Another model posits that there was no discernible movement of population, but ideas flowed. Apes are not the only ones who can imitate and emulate after all. Peruvians did not move with the potato, so there are cases of the latter. But the genetic data (see links) seem to imply some non-trivial contribution (for…
razib | August 29, 2009Dienekes points me to a new paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups. You've seen this song & dance before:
Population substructure in Japan
Population substructure of Mexican Mestizos
European population substructure
Genetic Map of East Asia
The genetics of Fenno-Scandinavia
Finns as European outliers
Uyghurs are hybrids
Genetic structure of Eastern European populations
Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance
More genetic maps of Europe
Human population…
razib | August 28, 2009On a lark I decided to see how Catholics & Protestants broke down in regards to evolution by American region in the GSS. Specifically, I clustered the Census Divisions to create the categories of:
Northeast = New England + Mid Atlantic
Midwest = E & W North Central
South = S Atlantic + E South Central + W South Central
West = Mountain + Pacific
I limited the data to non-Hispanic whites for the question "evolved," which was asked in 2006 and 2008, so recently. Results below the fold for this question....
Protestant Catholic No Religion…