razib | March 21, 2009A few years ago a brown friend of mine complained that there were all these diseases which non-white people were susceptible to at a higher rate (e.g., Type II Diabetes, hypertension, ateriosclerosis, etc.), perhaps the white race was really superior (or medical geneticists were entering into a conspiracy to prove that this was so). So with that, I point to a new PLoS Genetics paper, An African Ancestry-Specific Allele of CTLA4 Confers Protection against Rheumatoid Arthritis in African Americans:
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune condition affecting the synovial membranes of…
razib | March 21, 2009Needed for AIG and the TARP: Silicon Valley Compensation Schemes:
The engineers of Silicon Valley startups are significantly smarter and work a lot harder than do the traders of Wall Street. Some of the engineers of Silicon Valley make fortunes: they are compensated with relatively low salaries and large restricted equity stakes in the startup businesses they work for, and so if the businesses do well they do very well indeed--in the long run, in the five to ten years it takes to assess whether the business is in fact going to be a viable and profitable going concern. And the engineers of…
razib | March 21, 2009Genetic Future has a post which mulls over the idea that not screening for particular diseases is similar to child abuse. I was interested in this last comment:
Naturally there are objections to embryo screening among religious conservatives who believe that inflicting severe disease on children is the will of God - but why does the prospect raise such unease among even the secular community? I share Le Page's puzzlement on this question, and would invite opponents to lay out any well-reasoned arguments against routine screening in the comments below.
Religious conservatives, particularly…
razib | March 19, 2009See the data over at The Audacious Epigone. This sort of finding shouldn't be super "counter-intuitive," there are a lot of variables which affect the opinions of a set of people on a disparate set of questions, and one shouldn't expect too much internal consistency. I may be that all things equal liberals don't exhibit this tendency, but in the real world all things are rarely equal.
The variable is TAXCHEAT. Below are the values for belief in God (left = atheist, right is = know God exists) and race.
razib | March 17, 2009A lot has happened since the mention of the AIG bonuses yesterday on this weblog. The media is overflowing with stories on it, and people are frothing with rage from high to low. In the age when many people are becoming aware of the power of "animal spirits" and the economic irrationality which emerges from psychology, it seems like we've swung to the other extreme from exuberance. In fact, swung might indicate a smooth continuity which just doesn't reflect reality, rather, the mental state of the populace has snapped. I was IMing with a friend who has been abroad for the past 3 months, and…
razib | March 17, 2009This bloggingheads.tv about war robots is pretty fascinating. One of the issues with robots is that people are fixated on androids and really human-like artifice, and that hasn't really panned out. But it seems that technology is becoming a seamless part of our lives in a way that we're not even particularly aware of. The new shuffle isn't just a technology story, it's a lifestyle & fashion story. I'm very interested near the end when Peter Singer recounts how someone with a chip implant began to consider un-augmented humans "cows." I'm moderately skeptical of extrapolating from this…
razib | March 17, 2009Readers were right. I posted about the idea of shaming the AIG execs, but events move faster than thoughts:
A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn't show up at all.
I wonder if…
razib | March 16, 2009Was this Britain's first black queen?, in The Guardian:
Among those who attended Aptekar's focus groups is congressman Mel Watt, one of very few African-Americans in the House of Representatives and who represents the 12th district of North Carolina which includes Charlotte. "In private conversations, African-Americans have always acknowledged and found a sense of pride in this 'secret'," says Watt. "It's great that this discussion can now come out of the closet into the public places of Charlotte, so we all can acknowledge and celebrate it."
I suppose this isn't a gross example of ignorance…
razib | March 16, 2009I've kind of been thinking this already: Provoking the AIG Walk of Shame:
What would happen if those names were made public? The populist rage that's bubbling in this country is not something to be toyed with. The very prospect of having their names publicized should be enough to scare the pants off these people.
The only way to break these employment contracts is for the recipients to agree to it, and if fear is what it takes to make that happen, then so be it. If we can shame bank CEOs into taking $1 salaries and forgoing bonuses, surely we can get these yahoos at AIG to do the country a…
razib | March 16, 2009Model Minority? No, Thanks!:
In reality, Indian Americans, much like other immigrants, have diverse experiences and backgrounds. Indian Americans are doctors, engineers and lawyers, as well as small business owners, domestic workers, taxi drivers and convenience store employees. Community members hold a range of immigration statuses and include naturalized citizens and H-1B visaholders, guestworkers and students, undocumented workers and green card holders. Some have access to higher education while others struggle to learn English in a new country. As with all communities, Indian Americans…
razib | March 15, 2009Dumb article, Nobody's Model Minority, in response to Jason Richwine's Indian Americans: The New Model Minority (H/T Steve), makes a pretty obvious error:
He presses on anyway, attributing Indian Americans' overall "success" in the U.S. to three factors: culture, education (that is, an "obsessive emphasis on academic achievement") and most significantly, IQ. This success is defined by the number of Indian Americans with college degrees (69 percent), their median head of household annual salary ($83,000), and their representation in high-paying fields like medicine and information technology.…
razib | March 15, 2009Genetic Future points to a new paper which suggests that inbreeding is declining over time. Their methodology involved surveying different age cohorts and noting the decreased levels of homozygosity among the youth. Dienekes points out that the use of living people might simply be confounding inferred mating patterns with the fact that homozygous individuals have a higher life expectancy. The plausibility of these two hypotheses varies based on how much weight you put on the shifting of mating patterns. In Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy the authors used Catholic…
razib | March 15, 2009Dienekes & John Hawks have already blogged a new paper, Geographical structure and differential natural selection amongst North European populations:
Population structure can provide novel insight into the human past and recognizing and correcting for such stratification is a practical concern in gene mapping by many association methodologies. We investigate these patterns, primarily through principal component (PC) analysis of whole genome SNP polymorphism, in 2099 individuals from populations of Northern European origin (Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Australia and…
razib | March 13, 2009The Audacious Epigone looks closely at the opinions regarding the banning of unpopular speech which I posted on earlier. I limited the sample to whites, because after all, who cares what coloreds think? No seriously, I was trying to get population substructure out of the way (this is why Barack Hussein Obama won the most religious in the South, and the least religious outside of the South). In any case, it seems that whites are the most robust supporters of free speech. If you think about it closely this makes sense, as speech and power are intimately connected, and whites have a long…
razib | March 12, 2009
Have any of my Canadian readers gotten their hands on the All-In-One Pomegranate Smartphone? I've heard the "hand-warmer" feature was designed specifically for customers in the Great North.
razib | March 12, 2009Joshua Zelinsky says regarding political moderates:
This is interesting. The stereotype is if anything the exact opposite about political moderates. The stereotype is that they are the smart people who can see the shades of gray and who aren't subject to things like belief overkill. This seems to show that if anything the opposite is the case.
A few thoughts:
1) People tend to hang around with people just like them. Joshua seems like a smart person, so I wouldn't be surprised if everyone he knew well was rather smart. Perhaps within the smart set this is exactly why someone is moderate.
2) I…
razib | March 12, 2009Like the little boy who can't help sticking his finger into the socket, Dan MacArthur is talking about race, IQ & genetics again. He quotes an exchange in nature where a researcher states:
So, given that we have logical reason to hypothesize about differences in cognitive abilities, why would we expect to measure these by using a single number such as IQ, which suggests there must be a hierarchy of cognitive function? The prediction surely is that each population will adapt to be better at the particular cognitive tasks that are most important for survival in its own environment. If this…
razib | March 12, 2009I made a comment to the effect that political moderation tends to correlate with lower intelligence when looking over survey data on attitudes toward unpopular speech. This assertion didn't come out of a vacuum, when mining the GSS there were repeated indications that moderates were somewhat stupider than they should be. But here's the WORDSUM scores for whites separated into moderate vs. non-moderate classes (liberals & conservatives aggregated in the second).
But of course you want to control for education!
As you can see, even controlling for graduate degree or high school…
razib | March 11, 2009
p-ter has a post up which he illustrates with a photograph of a rather ghoulish prosimian. I've read that some of the Victorians found chimpanzees & gorillas almost obscene because of their simultaneous resemblance to humanity and manifest inhumanity. I somewhat feel the same about prosimians, especially tarsiers. No doubt this is due to my relative familiarity with immature chimpanzees on television shows. In any case, there is a new paper out which demonstrates that the genetic architecture of blue eyes in two species of lemurs is not similar to that in humans. Contrast this to…