razib | August 20, 2009How inevitable was modern human civilization - data:
To me it looks like life, animals with nervous systems, Upper Paleolithic-style Homo, language, and behavioral modernity were all extremely unlikely events (notice how far ago they are - vaguely ~3.5bln, ~600mln, ~3mln, ~200k or ~600k, ~50k years ago) - except perhaps language and behavioral modernity might have been linked with each other, if language was relatively late (Homo sapiens only) and behavioral modernity more gradual (and its apparent suddenness is an artifact). Once we have behavioral modernity, modern civilization seems almost…
razib | August 20, 2009A question below:
I'm curious about the demographics of this category, specifically their geographic distribution, religion and ethnicity.
First, I limited the sample to whites to remove confounds of ethnicity. Interestingly, in the GSS in the period between 1998-2008 24% of black Democrats/lean Democrats considered themselves conservatives, as opposed to 18% of whites. This surprised me, I generally remove blacks from he GSS sample in politics so had no data to fill in the gap where intuition lay. It does reiterate my suspicion that personal assertions of political ideology are less…
razib | August 20, 2009
Common body mass index-associated variants confer risk of extreme obesity:
To investigate the genetic architecture of severe obesity, we performed a genome-wide association study of 775 cases and 3197 unascertained controls at 550 000 markers across the autosomal genome. We found convincing association to the previously described locus including the FTO gene. We also found evidence of association at a further six of 12 other loci previously reported to influence body mass index (BMI) in the general population and one of three associations to severe childhood and adult obesity and that cases…
razib | August 20, 2009Question below about the details of what conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans might believe, etc. I decided to look for a few questions. I removed Independents because their sample sizes are a bit smaller. I clustered all those with socioeconomic status 17-47 as "Low" and those from 47-98 as "High." Again, I limited the sample to whites & the years 1998-2008.
Dem Repub
High Low High Low
Yes – Abortion on Demand Liberal 74.8 57.5 52.9 41.6…
razib | August 19, 2009It was a pleasure to hear Tom Rees, one of my favorite religion & data bloggers, on Thinking Allowed, one of my regular podcasts. Epiphenom is of particular interest because Tom Rees offers up original data and analysis, instead of anecdote laced speculation. As they say, if you enjoy Thinking Allowed, you might also be interested in In Our Time....
razib | August 19, 2009Andrew Gelman has a post up, Who are the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans?, which shows that conservative Republicans tend toward higher incomes, while conservative Democrats tend toward lower incomes. I decided to see if something similar was discernible in the General Social Survey. I used the PARTYID, POLVIEWS and SEI variables to explore the question, and limited the sample to whites and the years 1998-2008 (so as to have contemporary relevance and control for ethnic confounds). I clustered all Republicans & lean Republicans into one category, and did the same for…
razib | August 19, 2009Americans know that the Ogallala Aquifer is important, and declining. This is much more of an issue in India, Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water:
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade - and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.
Here's a map of the population density of India by district:
And now a map of the change in the levels of groundwater (red = decline, blue = increase):
The original letter to Nature,…
razib | August 18, 2009Rod Dreher is aghast at the fact that Americans don't assent to the views of "orthodox" Christianity. The problem that many secular and religious people on the extremes don't get (the anti-devout and the devout) is the cognitive complexity, and, frankly, the fundamental incoherency of the religious beliefs of most humans. In The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation the authors report survey data from the early 1980s which shows that most American Christians would not definitely deny that Hindus could achieve salvation:
Missouri Lutheran
South. Baptist…
razib | August 17, 2009Check this out from Google Trends:
Did Facebook hit an inflection point in early 2009? Google must have much better data sets, probably one reason Hal Varian left Berkeley for Google.
razib | August 17, 2009Fat Tax:
Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic's chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren't legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people. When he mentioned this to me during a recent phone conversation, I told him that I thought many people might consider it unfair. He was unapologetic.
"Why is it unfair?" he asked. "Has anyone ever shown the law of conservation of matter doesn't apply?" People's weight is a reflection of how much…
razib | August 17, 2009Matthew Stewart in The Big Money, How To Become a Management Guru in Five Easy Steps:
The industry that Tom Peters founded succeeded largely by sticking to the formula devised by America's pioneering preachers. In a sense, Peters brought management theory back home, by reuniting it with a much broader and deeper spiritual tradition that dates from the earliest days of the American republic. To be sure, the management theory before Peters had always had religion, but its religion was a hieratic one. It came down from a priesthood on high--from popelike figures such as Frederick Winslow Taylor…
razib | August 17, 2009Below I repeated the contention that while schizophrenia is a genuine biologically rooted behavioral disease which can not be cured through will, many forms of addiction are not. That is why the genetics of schizophrenia are of such great interest, if the biological pathways of the pathology can be elucidated presumably a cure may be found. Unfortunately finding the genes is easier said than done, see Schizophrenia: The Mystery of the Missing Genes.
razib | August 16, 2009Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great deal of Heyman's thesis is grounded in rather conventional behavior genetic insights. In short, a behavioral trait can have a host of inputs, and is often a combination of environment & genes developing over a lifetime. Alcoholism is not much of an issue among observant Mormons because of their environment, not their genes. Heyman points out that whereas some…
razib | August 16, 2009A very thorough paper in PLoS Genetics on the "obesity gene," FTO, A Mouse Model for the Metabolic Effects of the Human Fat Mass and Obesity Associated FTO Gene:
Geneticists have identified many gene regions that cause human disease by using multiple genetic markers in large populations to find gene regions associated with disease. However, it is often not clear precisely which gene in any given region causes the disease or how the gene exerts its functional effect. For example, a gene variant in the non-coding region of FTO enhances obesity risk, but it is not clear if this is an effect of…
razib | August 15, 2009I hear that a Muslim Bollywood star was detained at an American airport, Shah Rukh Khan (there is some confusion here, and a possibility that this is a publicity stunt related to a film about profiling which he is promoting). Out of curiosity I checked out Khan's bio on Wikipedia, and found out this interesting datum:
Shah Rukh Khan, born into a Muslim family, is married to a Hindu and his children follow both religions.
At home, next to idols of Hindu gods he has the Koran. The most important thing is that "the children should know about the value of God".
In this YouTube video Khan asserts…
razib | August 14, 2009p-ter reports on a fascinating new paper, The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals:
Sleep deprivation can impair human health and performance. Habitual total sleep time and homeostatic sleep response to sleep deprivation are quantitative traits in humans. Genetic loci for these traits have been identified in model organisms, but none of these potential animal models have a corresponding human genotype and phenotype. We have identified a mutation in a transcriptional repressor (hDEC2-P385R) that is associated with a human short sleep phenotype. Activity profiles and…
razib | August 14, 2009Over at Why Evolution Is True Greg Mayer wonders:
I also recalled that the percentage of religiously unaffiliated had gone up noticeably from 1990 to 2008, and that another survey found the percentage was higher among young people. What could have happened so that younger people, growing up in the 90s and 00s, would be less religious? And then it occurred to me: 9/11. Something finally happened which gave religion a bad name. This was forcefully expressed at the time (here, here, and here) by Richard Dawkins.
The the fact that the % of Americans who aver "No Religion" has increased…
razib | August 13, 2009Woman Tells of Affair With Madoff in New Book:
Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi scheme was revealed in December.
What the charity says it did not know, however, was that Sheryl Weinstein, its chief financial officer when it made those investments, was having an affair with Mr. Madoff.
Ms. Weinstein, who has been married for 37 years, discloses that relationship in "Madoff's Other…
razib | August 13, 2009Below I pointed to the rise in acceptance of evolution among the young, in particular the 18-30 cohort. There were some natural questions about other correlated demographic variables (I did point to data suggesting that this is not simply a byproduct of increased secularity of the young). Naturally one wonders about the impact of education. There's a problem with this: people who are 22 are far less likely to have graduate degrees than people who are 40, because most people are just finishing their undergraduate degree at this age! The comparison isn't fair (additionally, the reduction in the…
razib | August 13, 2009Taking a much needed break from vocational productivity, Dan MacArthur of Genetic Future has been on something of a blogging tear this week. Check out his emergence from hibernation.