razib | April 13, 2009Over at Secular Right I point out that Romania is set to decriminalize consensual sexual relations between adult first-order kin. That is, incest. There are a few angles that this story offers. First is the moral-ethical one. From a rational individualist perspective how reasonable are laws which ban consensual sex between adults who just happen to share distinctive genetic information? The love that dare not speak its name because of alleles which are identical by descent?
Of course all this rational talk is irrelevant for most people. Incest is gross, repugnant and immoral. Not because…
razib | April 13, 2009Over at Gene Expression Classic p-ter points to an interesting paper, Genetic Architecture of Tameness in a Rat Model of Animal Domestication:
A common feature of domestic animals is tameness - i.e. they tolerate and are unafraid of human presence and handling. To gain insight into the genetic basis of tameness and aggression, we studied an intercross between two lines of rats (Rattus norvegicus) selected over more than 60 generations for increased tameness and increased aggression against humans, respectively. We measured 45 traits, including tameness and aggression, anxiety-related traits,…
razib | April 12, 2009That's what Dan MacArthur found in the GSS after doing a follow up on my post below.
razib | April 12, 2009Science Not Fiction has a review of Kröd Mandöon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire:
In Robin Hood fashion, the insecure hero, Kröd Mandöon (played by Sean Maguire), leads the struggle against the evil rule of Dongalor, a local king with big ambitions. Kröd is aided by a none-too-bright pig-man, an utterly ineffective wizard, the very gay Bruce, and his sexually liberated pagan warrior girlfriend. (A note on these last two characters--there's a very fine line between ironically parodying how women or homosexuals are portrayed in a genre, and simply exploiting stereotypes anew. Once…
razib | April 12, 2009Gallup has a new report up, This Easter, Smaller Percentage of Americans Are Christian, which is rather self-explanatory. These data aren't surprising, other surveys report the same general finding. Here's an interesting chart with some long term trends:
I want to point to the numbers for Catholicism. In the early 1990s I remember reading popular press accounts about how Catholicism would become the dominant religion of the United States in the early decades of the 20th century because of immigration. That doesn't seem like it's panning out. Why? The American Religious Identification…
razib | April 11, 2009
There are nearly 7 billion human beings in the world, so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that there are adult women who decide to jump into a polar bear exhibit during feeding time. Right? When I saw this on CNN's front page one word that described the photo would be "compelling." If polar bears could talk.... (you can see some video here) This really needs to make it into a South Park episode in the future.
razib | April 11, 2009Who's manning the TARP desk?:
Less than half a dozen people are responsible for making the final decisions about which banks get part of the $700 billion in bailout money available through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to Department of Treasury officials. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the Sunlight Foundation in January for the members of the TARP Investment Committee, a FOIA officer recently responded with just four names, including Assistant Secretary, Neel Kashkari; Chief Investment Officer, James Lambright; Acting Assistant Secretary for…
razib | April 11, 2009Science News has an interesting piece up, Shared Differences: The architecture of our genomes is anything but basic. The main focus is on genetic variation, the possibility that there might be important information in copy number variance, and that the common disease-common variant hypothesis is dead. At least for complex traits that we're interested in like schizophrenia. If any of this is unfamiliar or confusing, I recommend the article, it even has references to the primary literature that you can follow up on.
razib | April 11, 2009The leader author of the PLoS Genetics paper Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, which I blogged a few days ago left a clarifying comment:
I just have few remarks. I do not expect that the Bantu expansions are responsible for the separation of Western and Eastern Pygmies. In a recent article in Current Biology, Paul Verdu and colleagues showed that the separation of Pygmy groups, but only those from the Western part of sub-Saharan Africa, diverged concomitantly with Bantu expansions (3,000-5,000 years ago…
razib | April 10, 2009Megan McArdle notes:
The scale of Bernie Madoff's crimes has largely eclipsed the more interesting scam that broke around the same time: the antics of Mark Dreier, who bilked institutional investors for millions with faked securities. What we know about Madoff suggests that he may have become an almost accidental crook, like many of the accounting fraudsters of yesteryear: take big losses, cook the books to cover them until he could "catch up", and when you realize you're too far behind, simply ride the fraud as long as you can.
Megan's right. I remember Mark Dreier, Bernie broke just…
razib | April 10, 2009Signatures of natural selection are not uniform across genes of innate immune system, but purifying selection is the dominant signature:
We tested the opposing views concerning evolution of genes of the innate immune system that (i) being evolutionary ancient, the system may have been highly optimized by natural selection and therefore should be under purifying selection, and (ii) the system may be plastic and continuing to evolve under balancing selection. We have resequenced 12 important innate-immunity genes (CAMP, DEFA4, DEFA5, DEFA6, DEFB1, MBL2, and TLRs 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 9) in healthy…
razib | April 9, 2009Just though readers might be interested to know that we have a a non-Icelandic astrophysicist at ScienceBlogs now. Also, ScienceBlogs now has a photolog manned by a rotating crew. If you're not on a Lynx browser it might be worth your time.
razib | April 9, 2009Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set:
The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved a major cultural innovation that has spread rapidly over most of the globe in the last ten millennia. In sub-Saharan Africa, hunter-gatherers have begun to shift toward an agriculture-based lifestyle over the last 5,000 years. Only a few populations still base their mode of subsistence on hunting and gathering. The Pygmies are considered to be the largest group of mobile hunter-gatherers of Africa. They dwell in…
razib | April 9, 2009Jonah's interview of Judith Rich Harris is much recommended. Clearly related to my post on adoptive parents.
razib | April 9, 2009Via Dienekes, Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children:
Stepchildren are abused, neglected and murdered at higher rates than those who live with two genetically related parents. Daly and Wilson used kin selection theory to explain this finding and labeled the phenomenon "discriminative parental solicitude." I examined discriminative parental solicitude in American households composed of both genetic and unrelated adopted children. In these families, kin selection predicts parents should favor their genetic children over adoptees. Rather than looking…
razib | April 9, 2009The GSS has a variable, GENEGOO2, with an N ~ 2,500, that asks:
Some people say that genetic testing may cause trouble. Others think it is a wonderful medical advance. Based on what you know, do you think genetic testing will do more harm than good or more good than harm?
Below the fold are charts which show attitudes based on politics, highest degree attained, vocab score, attitude toward Bible, sex, religion, income, socioeconomic index and race.
Low income at the left:
Low socioeconomic index at the left:
razib | April 8, 2009The dark side of Dubai:
"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."
The article isn't fair at all. It isn't meant to be. But it does give one a window into the peculiar paradoxes of Dubai, and in a hyper-charged manner the effect of naked capitalism upon human societies over the past 200 years.
razib | April 8, 2009The New York Times has an awesome interactive map which shows which sectors the foreign born from various countries are concentrated. Nothing too surprising, but nice to see it quantitatively displayed. Below the fold screenshots from "Computer software developers" and "Skilled construction workers."