razib | April 24, 2009Funny clip from the "Fatbeard" episode of South Park. Interesting how Cartman turned into a White Rajah with ease.
razib | April 23, 2009Bora points to this report about mega shakeups at Scientific American. The editor for nearly a generation, John Rennie, is out. Nature Publishing Group is now calling the shots. In non-science news Ezra Klein, king of all journolism, is moving to The Washington Post. We live in the age of creative destruction when it comes to media. I'm a dabbler in in writing about science, but as the years go by it seems that the media itself is converging upon my own bloggish means of production. I know that Ross Douthat is going to produce print-worthy column prose for The New York Times, but I have to…
razib | April 23, 2009There are some papers out on the genome of the domestic cow out right now. ScienceNews has an overview:
Two competing research teams have cataloged the "essence of bovinity" found in the DNA of cattle, but not without disagreement on some essential points.
Reporting online April 23 in Science and April 24 in Genome Biology, the two groups compiled drafts of the bovine genome, identifying genes important for fighting disease, digesting food and producing milk.
I don't see the Genome Biology paper on the site yet, but there are two in Science. First, The Genome Sequence of Taurine Cattle: A…
razib | April 23, 2009Misyar: Prostitution By Another Name:
Over the past year many Muslim converts have had the "opportunity" to discover something called a "misyar marriage", or Sunni version of temporary sexual relationship sanctioned by shariah law. From where I stand as a convert, the entire affair appears to be nothing more than prostitution by another name. I just find it interesting how in the over twenty five books on Islamic marriage that I read in English, not once was this little business about temporary marriage mentioned. The fact is that it was hidden from western students and converts to Islam…
razib | April 23, 2009Reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational I was struck and concerned by his data which suggested that once social norms of reciprocity break down it is difficult to regenerate them. In other words, social capital can be thought of as a limited nonrenewable resource, at least proximately. On the macroscale Peter Turchin offers up a historical theory where social capital translated into group cohesion serves as the motor behind the rise & fall of states. And over 10 years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, which surveyed differences…
razib | April 22, 2009See the data that The Audacious Epigone reports. Hope other bloggers will start using the World Values Survey!
razib | April 22, 2009Dan MacArthur's post, Can't find your disease gene? Just sequence them all..., is worth a read. He concludes:
But sequencing won't be enough: we need much better methods for sifting out the truly function-altering genetic variants from the biological noise. This is already difficult enough for protein-coding regions (as this study demonstrates); we currently have virtually no way of picking out disease-causing variants in the remaining 98% of the genome. There's a clear need for developing highly accurate and comprehensive maps of the functional importance of each and every base in the human…
razib | April 22, 2009One of the funnier aspects of the discovery of genes correlated with physical traits is that finding the genetic variant which explains 75% of the variation in blue eyes is interesting, but it isn't as if you now have a better way to find blue eyed people (though it is important for forensic work). But now there is apparently working on looking at pigmentation genes and how they effect melanoma risk in a manner which isn't visible to the eye: Dark Hair? Don't Burn? Your Genes May Still Put You At Risk For Melanoma:
Overall, the presence of certain MC1R variants was associated with a more…
razib | April 22, 2009Interesting bit from Onion News Network:
More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas
razib | April 21, 2009The New York Times has a story about a new paper, Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females:
Skews in the human sex ratio at birth have captivated scientists for over a century. The accepted average human natal sex ratio is slightly male biased, at 106 males per 100 females or 51.5 per cent males. Studies conducted on a localized scale show that sex ratios deviate from this average in response to a staggering number of social, economical and physiological variables. However, these patterns often prove inconsistent when expanded to other human populations, perhaps because the nature of…
razib | April 21, 2009The World Values Survey has a question about immigration policy with four options:
- Let anyone come
- As long as jobs available
- Strict limits
- Prohibit people from coming
I used WVS 2005-2008 from 57 countries first. Then I filled out the countries with the
Four-wave Aggregate of the Values Studies, the combined file of the four waves carried out by both the EVS and WVS. I bring this up because there are discrepancies between the two where there are duplications.
Again Vietnam is at the top of the list. Perhaps Will Wilkson should have picked another country to trade in his American…
razib | April 21, 2009Neandertal birth canal shape and the evolution of human childbirth:
Childbirth is complicated in humans relative to other primates. Unlike the situation in great apes, human neonates are about the same size as the birth canal, making passage difficult. The birth mechanism (the series of rotations that the neonate must undergo to successfully negotiate its mother's birth canal) distinguishes humans not only from great apes, but also from lesser apes and monkeys. Tracing the evolution of human childbirth is difficult, because the pelvic skeleton, which forms the margins of the birth canal,…
razib | April 20, 2009In response to the NEJM issue on personal genomics and the CDCV hypothesis, p-ter offers a proposal:
Let's follow Goldstein's back-of-the-envelope calculations: assume there are ~100K polymorphisms (assuming Goldstein isn't making the mistake I attribute to him, this includes polymorphisms both common and rare) that contribute to human height, that we've found the ones that account for the largest fractions of the variance, and that these fractions of variance follow an exponential distribution.
Now, assume you have assembled a cohort of 5000 individuals and done a genome-wide association…
razib | April 20, 2009Since none of the physics bloggers on SB have pointed to it yet, Stephen Hawking has been hospitalized with a respiratory ailment. He's 67.
razib | April 20, 2009Bryan Caplan notes & argues:
If you take a closer look at BG research, though, you'll notice something interesting. Virtually every BG study partitions variance into three sources: genes, shared family environment, and non-shared environment. Typical estimates are something like 40-50% for genes, 0-10% for shared family environment, and 50% for non-shared environment.
And what exactly is non-shared environment? Everything other than genes and family environment!
...
Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that if non-shared environment's contribution to behavioral variance were a lot smaller…
razib | April 20, 2009There is a question on the World Values Survey which allows people to give a number corresponding to their position on a spectrum where 0 = "Ethnic diversity erodes a country´s unity" and 10 = "Ethnic diversity enriches my life." Below the fold I've placed the countries where this was asked as well as the mean values. In other words, the proportions in each class were used as weights. The results frankly surprised me. Below is an ordered list:
Ethnic Diversity Enriches
Jordan
2.9
Ghana
4.8
Egypt
5
Thailand
5.3
Georgia
5.4
Bulgaria
5.5
Moldova
5.7
Cyprus
5.7…
razib | April 19, 2009I long ago noticed that David Sloan Wilson was a contributor to The Huffington Post. My own inclination at this point is still to believe that Wilson pushes too hard for group selection, and on occasion engages in the same sort of rhetorical excess which he accuses his critics, such as Richard Dawkins, of. That being said it is probably a net positive that a scientist manages to get some face time in the mainstream-web media. In any case, he has a series of posts on group selection up.
Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection I: Why it is Needed
Truth and Reconciliation for Group…
razib | April 19, 2009The blog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle has responded to my post that Buddhists generally believe in God. Some of the comments also brought up some semantic issues which are real in how Buddhists view God, and how it might be distinguished from more personalized conceptions of the divine being, especially in the Abrahamic religions. The short of it is that many Buddhists will accede that gods may exist, but that their role in the religion is relatively marginal. Additionally, Buddhists reject the Creator God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is an important distinction.
First, though the…
razib | April 18, 2009John Hawks has pointed out that the great archaeologist Colin Renfrew has been making the case that our species has been in genomic stasis for 50,000 years. He contends:
The genetic composition of living humans at birth (the human genotype) is closely similar from individual to individual today. That was an underlying assumption of the Human Genome Project and it is being further researched in studies of human genetic diversity. We are all truly born much the same. Moreover a child born today, in the twenty-first century of the Common Era, would be very little different in its DNA -- i.e., in…