razib | March 28, 2009Faith in science and social conservatism:
Except for crime and gun control, faith in science is associated with socially liberal positions. For guns and crime, the direction of the relationship is liberal, but the relationships are not statistically significant.
I've dug through the GSS on this and this seems about right. Even on topics where many would assume that conservatives trump liberals, there isn't a strong difference. For example, Genetically Modified Foods:
The main exception seems nuclear energy. But the key is social liberalism; there's a lot of sympathy for economic…
razib | March 28, 2009So I'm reading/hearing about something flaring up in Texas again in regards to Creationism. I always get these strange "articles" in my RSS for the "evolution" query on Google Alerts where an uninformed columnist rambles on how the theory has been disproved or brought into doubt. These arguments are not my brief, I'll leave that to Josh Rosenau et al. Nevertheless one of the interesting things about the discussion in regards to Creationists has been the reality that the United States is swarming with them, though there are Creationists elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. It is a…
razib | March 27, 2009Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, has a post up where he notes how bad political "experts" are. Nevertheless, I'm a little confused, isn't the whole point of political pundits & stock pickers to be entertaining, as opposed to expert? It seems that the premise that the public is rationally consuming expertise is just false.
razib | March 27, 2009A few days ago The New York Times had a blog post up which addressed the relationship between genes & environment in shaping our behavior & choices (see Genetic Future). One of the authors even posted a follow up comment where they evinced some surprise at the bile of the responses. I have to say that some people are naive; statistical sciences are a good reflection of the tenor of society. If you say a trait is 50% heritable, that is a statement of fact, but individuals will "spin it" however they want to based on their own outlook and the preferences of their target audience. Years…
razib | March 26, 2009New York has a very long piece, Monster Mensch, which profiles Bernie & J. Ezra Merkin. Psychoanalysis can get kind of old, the profile is more interesting in terms of the light it sheds on other figures in Bernie's world.
razib | March 26, 2009New Nail in Google Cloud Coffin:
Here's what Google fears: If its cloud-computing system crashes, or inadvertently lets companies view their rivals' confidential documents all over the world, the entire system of cloud-based business-information processing collapses. Companies' most precious secrets are leaked, as are government files; suddenly, your tax history is available for anyone to read. The world's governments and businesses panic and come fleeing back to software that is embedded in individual computers, but not before incalculable damage is done to the modern economy and the privacy…
razib | March 25, 2009Dan MacArthur already posted some of the supplementary figures from Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations, but he didn't put up one that I thought was really striking. The text:
First, there is extensive sharing of extreme iHS and XP-EHH signals between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, while overlap between other regions is much more limited. In fact, 44% of the genomic segments in the 1% tail of iHS in Europe fall in the 5% tail for both the Middle East and Central Asia (89% are shared between Europe and at least one of these two), while…
razib | March 25, 2009Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece on a review on the relationships between male competition, signaling and sexual selection. If the topic interests you I strongly recommend Animal Signals, John Maynard Smith's last book.
razib | March 25, 2009There's a critique up of Michael Lewis' entertaining if somewhat less than illuminating (compared to the piece in The New Yorker) profile of the Icelandic financial meltdown. No surprise that Lewis spun here and there to extract more entertainment out of the straight story, but I have to take objection to a few points:
5. "Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth -- geneticists often use them for research."
Now this is insulting. Icelanders' DNA shows their roots to be a healthy mix between Nordic Y chromosomes and X chromosomes from the British Isles. The reason genetic-…
razib | March 24, 2009Black Girls Are 50 Percent More Likely To Be Bulimic Than White Girls:
Rather, girls who are African American are 50 percent more likely than girls who are white to be bulimic, the researchers found, and girls from families in the lowest income bracket studied are 153 percent more likely to be bulimic than girls from the highest income bracket.
"As it turns out, we learned something surprising from our data about who bulimia actually affects, not just who is diagnosed," says USC economist Michelle Goeree.
Surprised me. Then again, whenever when I watched Law & Order on the airplane I'm…
razib | March 24, 2009Genetic Future's summary of Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations is an excellent complement to mine. Highly recommended.
razib | March 24, 2009John Hawks & Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to a new paper in Genome Research, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. As Dan notes, it's Open Access, so you can read the PDF yourself. That being said, "Just read it!" might be somewhat a tall order if you don't have some background, so make sure to read the papers at this link. In particular the paper refers to two tests for detecting natural selection which utilize haplotype structure, integrated haplotype score (iHS) and cross population extended haplotype homozygosity (XP-EHH).
One of…
razib | March 23, 2009I thought this Genetic Future post was an exaggeration, as it seemed to indicate that the Gene Sherpa was accusing 23andMe of terrorism. I thought there has to be context, right? Uh, not really:
In healthcare, imagine if your doctor was found to be breaking the law. Stole from Medicare? Non-Compliance with State regulations? Spousal Abuse? Selling Drugs?
Most of these are career killers. In fact in CT we just had a large group of GI doctors who are now not doing so well because one of their partners was just charged with endangering a minor.
Why is it so vital that physicians, nurses and…
razib | March 23, 2009Sweden Says No to Saving Saab:
Which makes it all the more wrenching that the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
Such a view might seem jarring, coming as it does from a country with a reputation for a paternalistic view of workers and companies. The "Swedish model" for dealing with a banking crisis -- nationalizing the banks, recapitalizing them and selling them -- has been much debated lately in…
razib | March 23, 2009Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of-Africa scenario:
The interpretation of genetic evidence regarding modern human origins depends, among other things, on assessments of the structure and the variation of ancient populations. Because we lack genetic data from the time when the first anatomically modern humans appeared, between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago, instead we exploit the phenotype of neurocranial geometry to compare the variation in early modern human fossils with that in other groups of fossil Homo and recent modern humans.…
razib | March 23, 2009
Richard Sturm in Human Molecular Genetics has a really good review of the current state of pigmentation genetics, with a human centric focus:
The genetic basis underlying normal variation in the pigmentary traits of skin, hair and eye colour has been the subject of intense research directed at understanding the diversity seen both between and within human populations. A combination of approaches have been used including comparative genomics of candidate genes and the identification of regions of the human genome under positive selection, together with genome-wide and specific allele…
razib | March 23, 2009Just a heads up, they're had Discover Blogs now. Just want to note, I welcomed Tapped (which Chris Mooney was instrumental in setting up) to the blogosphere in April of 2002. Chris' acknowledgment of welcome, and my own pre-blogspot weblog, have been vaporized by the digital dustbin, but I wanted to put it into the oral record of blog history.
razib | March 23, 2009The rise in eczema, or asthma, or the general return of infectious disease, reminds one that though we live in a post-Malthusian Age generally, many of the truths of earlier times hold. While with physical technology we can rest assured that the feature-set and power will increase monotonically over time as if it is a natural law, biological or social processes are much more halting and subject to reverse. I recall several years ago that some steakhouses were heartened, so to speak, about the widespread usage of statins, since they assumed that this would result in greater comfort with…
razib | March 21, 2009The GSS has a variable, ODDS1, which represents the question:
Now, think about this situation. A doctor tells a couple that their genetic makeup means that they've got one in four chances of having a child with an inherited illness. Does this mean that if their first child has the illness, the next three will not have the illness?
The obvious answer is that each child is an independent "trial," and so has a 1 out of 4 chance. Only 10% of the respondents answered incorrectly. Below are the frequencies against some variables of interest (whites only, sample sizes 1500-2500).
The…