razib | May 21, 2009California, a Broke State, Reels as Voters Rebuff Leaders:
Direct democracy has once again upended California -- enough so that the state may finally consider another way by overhauling its Constitution for the first time in 130 years.
The problem is simple. Voters approve services through ballot measures, and reject taxes which might result in revenues to pay for those services, through simple majorities. Fair enough. But the legislature needs a 2/3 vote for tax & budget related actions. So the problem here is that the stupid electorate is complemented by a paralyzed legislature.
In the…
razib | May 20, 2009Turns out there is a new weblog which showcases some Brazilian ScienceBlogs posts, translated into English.
razib | May 20, 2009Check out this Felix Salmon's interview (video) with Gillian Tett, author of Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (the reference to "Tribe" is a wink to Tett's background as an anthropologist). Also, she was recently on NPR.
razib | May 20, 2009Poor, poor Ida, Or: "Overselling an Adapid"
Physics in Star Trek
Online social networking isn't for everyone
Decoding the brain's response to vocal emotions
Philosophy and evolution
razib | May 19, 2009
Seed's Mr. Space Lee Billings has an interesting piece, The Long Shot:
"If planets are found around Alpha Centauri, it's very clear to me what will happen," Marcy said. "NASA will immediately convene a committee of its most thoughtful space propulsion experts, and they'll attempt to ascertain whether they can get a probe there, something scarcely more than a digital camera, at let's say a tenth the speed of light. They'll plan the first-ever mission to the stars."
The premise seems to verge on science fiction. But then much of science could be fiction if it weren't fact. In any case, some…
razib | May 19, 2009You'll be seeing a lot of media hype about a new paper, Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. Here's some perspective, A Discovery That Will Change Everything (!!!) ... Or Not and There is no missing link. Bora has just about every commentary on this paper in his link list....
razib | May 19, 2009400-500 years ago in the midst of the Great Dying somewhere the indigenous inhabitants of the New World suffered mortality rates on the order of 90-95%. This was almost certainly due to the facts of evolutionary history; the indigenous peoples had little defense against Eurasian pathogens. A result has been the reality that most of the New World is inhabited by European, African or mixed populations. But there are exceptions. In Mesoamerica there is still an indigenous dominated region from southern Mexico into the highlands of Guatemala. More substantially the highlands of the Andes, and…
razib | May 18, 2009Amusing web view parodying the data-bleed overload of today's youth, from 5-minute-twitter-updates to a sea of cellphone pictures at parties of people posing like tools. Perhaps a transparent society is a society of trivialities?
Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire
razib | May 18, 2009Ed Yong has an excellent review of new research which casts substantial doubt on the trivia chestnut that Komodo dragons kill their prey with their extremely pathogen rich saliva. The more prosaic answer seems to be that they utilize poison, not particularly surprising or trivia worthy for a reptile. But the truth is not always sexy.
razib | May 18, 2009There are several papers and letters in Nature Genetics on the relationship between menarche, menopause, etc. and genetics.
Meta-analysis of genome-wide association data identifies two loci influencing age at menarche:
We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association data to detect genes influencing age at menarche in 17,510 women. The strongest signal was at 9q31.2 (P = 1.7 10-9), where the nearest genes include TMEM38B, FKTN, FSD1L, TAL2 and ZNF462. The next best signal was near the LIN28B gene (rs7759938; P = 7.0 10-9), which also influences adult height. We provide the first…
razib | May 16, 2009I was looking up some data on obesity rates, mostly for American states, and I stumbled onto the maps below on obesity rates by nation for males & females (in that order):
You can find the source and legend here. In any case I was totally surprised at how fat Arabs are, particularly Gulf Arabs. They aren't in the NationMaster data set so I had never encountered any numbers on obesity. And the Gulf Arabs I've met in my life didn't strike me as disproportionately obese. But in hindsight I think I have an explanation: most of the Gulf Arabs I've met are upper or upper middle class males…
razib | May 16, 2009Does secularization of the USA spell social meltdown?:
That's certainly what two European sociologists, Loek Halman and Thorleif Pettersson, have concluded. Using data from the European Values Survey, they found that there was no relationship between how religious a country was (on average) and a rich it was in social capital.
For example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have similar levels of social capital, although Slovakia is far more religious than the Czech Republic. Some of the countries with the most social capital, Sweden and Denmark, were also the least religious.
In fact, in…
razib | May 16, 2009There was a somewhat funny, if stupid, comment below in regards to minority opposition to gay marriage:
This has to be one of most ignorant and race obsessed articles I have ever read. Since you are so blinded by race you decided to leave out the most determinative factors in ones opinion concerning sexuality. The fact of the matter is black people are products of being enslaved and socialized in the bible belt. Black people are actually more tolerant of homosexuality then there white counterparts from the same cultural/geographic areas. Compare black opinions on homosexuality to Scotts-Irish…
razib | May 15, 2009Genome-wide Insights into the Patterns and Determinants of Fine-Scale Population Structure in Humans:
Studying genomic patterns of human population structure provides important insights into human evolutionary history and the relationship among populations, and it has significant practical implications for disease-gene mapping. Here we describe a principal component (PC)-based approach to studying intracontinental population structure in humans, identify the underlying markers mediating the observed patterns of fine-scale population structure, and infer the predominating evolutionary forces…
razib | May 15, 2009Rebecca Skloot has a piece up in Double X, Slate's new webzine, on the controversy around Myriad Genetics.
razib | May 15, 2009
When I was reviewing the paper on skin color and ethnic ancestry a few days ago I saw a peculiar figure in a related paper which I thought I would highlight. The paper is Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping. The samples were 232 African and African-American individuals living in Washington, D.C., 173 British African Caribbean persons, and 187 individuals of European-American ancestry living in State College, Pa. The goal was to compare the ancestry of individuals to see how it related to their complexion. The African ancestry of these populations was:
African…
razib | May 14, 2009I heard on the radio several times in the past few weeks commentators refer to minority opposition to gay marriage, specifically the fact that New York and California have large numbers of blacks and Latinos who are voters. I was curious if Latinos really are notably more opposed to gay marriage than non-Hispanic whites. So I looked in the GSS. I limited the data to the years 2006 and 2008 for the variable MARHOMO, which asks:
Do you agree or disagree? j. Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another.
The sample sizes for the groups are as follows:
Non-Hispanic whites = 2,292…
razib | May 14, 2009One of the peculiarities of American discussion about race is that skin color is assumed to be synonymous with racial distinctions. That is, skin color is not just a trait, but it is the trait which defines between population differences. There's a reason for this, the skin is the largest organ and it is very salient. Populations with little phylogenetic relationship to each other, from India to the Pacific to Southeast Asia have been referred to as "black" by lighter-skinned populations. No population is referred to by their neighbors as those "straight hairs," to my knowledge. But another…