razib | February 17, 2009Dan the man's post on Race & IQ generated a lot of feedback. A lot. Those of you who are familiar with my weblog oeuvre know I used to be more interested in psychometrics. No more. Rather, if you don't want to believe in IQ or general intelligence, fine. My own experience is that very intelligent people (e.g, Mark, PhD physiology, now getting his MD, undergraduate background in physics) often are the most robust and cogent objectors to IQ or psychometric testing as a relatively useful reflection of intelligence. Dumb people know very well they're dumb, and they're not too coherent or…
razib | February 17, 2009Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF:
In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a paper reporting that babies conceived with IVF, or with a technique in which sperm are injected directly into eggs, have a slightly increased risk of several birth defects, including a hole between the two chambers of the heart, a cleft lip or palate, an improperly developed esophagus and a malformed rectum. The study involved 9,584 babies with birth defects and 4,792 babies without. Among the mothers of babies without birth defects, 1.1 percent had used IVF or related methods,…
razib | February 17, 2009Felix Salmon on Mini-Madoff Allen Stanford:
Allen Stanford might be a moustachioed crook, but he's not stupid. There's still a good chance that he could live out the rest of his life in sybaritic luxury, even as his investors lose substantially everything they entrusted to him and his offshore bank.
1) 7% on CDs is crazy. If it's too good to be true....
2) If Stanford screwed so many people, what's to stop one of them (or some of them) from taking the law into their own hands? He might be beyond the reach of the law, but vengeance....
razib | February 17, 2009I looked in the GSS on the number of children and age when first child born for evolution related questions. The number of children and age when first child is born should determine the rate of natural increase of a population (balanced with deaths).
# of children
Age when first child born
Humans Evolved From Animals
Definitely True
1.40
26.37
Probably True
1.75
23.72
Probably Not True
1.85
23.31
Definitely Not True
2.12
23.00
Origin and Development of Man
God Created Man
2.14
23.60
Man Has Evolved, But God Guided
1.56
25.13
Man Has Evolved
1.…
razib | February 17, 2009Greg Clark, chair of the UC Davis Econ department, admits he's an idiot:
I myself was so confident of the consensus of the end of the business cycle that I persuaded my wife after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to invest all her retirement savings in the stock market, confident that the Fed would soon make things right and we could profit from the panic of a gullible public. The line "Where is my money, idiot?" is her's.
razib | February 16, 2009Dan MacArthur's post Should scientists study race and IQ? points to a debate in Nature. Well, scientists are studying genetic variation. And others are engaged in the project of psychometrics. This seems to fall into the category of the economist predicting the past perfectly. Lagging indicators & all. I mean, if we're talking about whole genome sequencing of newborns in 2019....
razib | February 16, 2009p-ter points me to a new paper, Global distribution of genomic diversity underscores rich complex history of continental human populations:
Characterizing patterns of genetic variation within and among human populations is important for understanding human evolutionary history and for careful design of medical genetic studies. Here, we analyze patterns of variation across 443,434 SNPs genotyped in 3,845 individuals from four continental regions. This unique resource allows us to illuminate patterns of diversity in previously under studied populations at the genome-wide scale including Latin…
razib | February 15, 2009And in the long run we'll be dead. Put it out of its misery. The probability that GM (let's not talk about Chrysler) could enact a turnaround in a few months was nil. Most people knew that, though it seems some wanted to keep the company from filing for bankruptcy to placate the nervous animal spirits. Is the beast calm enough yet?
razib | February 15, 2009Pew has the numbers:
The main surprise here are Mormons. I knew that they had become much more Creationist over the past 3 generations due to their identification with conservative Protestants, but I didn't know that it went this far. In The Creationists Ronald L Numbers states:
In 1935 only 36 percent of the students at the Mormons' Brigham Young University denied that humans had been "created in a process of evolution from lower forms." By 1973 the figure had risen sharply to 81 percent.
This is interesting because Mormons have no objections to evolution which are distinctively Mormon.…
razib | February 14, 2009I decided to look at the GSS and see if there was anything interesting about fertility of white Americans of various ethnicities. There's a big wide range, with the lowest numbers for national-origin groups dominated by Jews in the United States (e.g., Russia, Lithuania) and southern Europe (Italy, Greece). As it happens, Italy and Greece have low fertility, so I plotted TFR for European nations on the Y axis and CHILDS (the GSS variable) on the X. TFR is not necessarily going to be the same as the mean number of children per woman in the GSS, but it should be close and the rank order will…
razib | February 14, 2009Arnold Kling is skeptical that New York City will ever be as important as it was over the past decade because of the prominence of finance. He is responding to Richard Florida's new piece in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America. Kling declares:
But I think that a lot of my attitude is that, notwithstanding Virginia Postrel's Substance of Style case for aesthetics, I don't think that the arts are all that important. To me, creative innovation that matters is somebody in a lab at MIT coming up with a more efficient battery or solar cell. It is somebody at Stanford coming up with a…
razib | February 14, 2009ScienceDaily has a report on a presentation Mark Shriver gave at AAAS meething this year:
"We started with 22 landmarks on the faces that could be accurately located in all the images," said Shriver.
These landmarks might be the tip of the nose, the tip of the chin, the outer corner of the eye or other repeatable locations. They then recorded the distances between all the points in all directions, so they had a distance map of each of the faces.
From their DNA profiles, Shriver could determine the admixture percentages of each individual, how much of their genetic make up came from each group…
razib | February 13, 2009ScienceDaily highlights an angle on the paper I blogged a few days ago, Chromosome And Surname Study Challenges Infidelity 'Myth':
"People often quote a figure of one in ten for the number of people born illegitimately," says Professor Jobling. "Our study shows that this is likely to be an exaggeration. The real figure is more likely to be less that one in twenty-five."
I didn't comment on this because there is research which contradicts the 1 in 10 number. There's a lot of variation worldwide, but among mainstream Western populations the misattributed paternity rates are on the order of 2%,…
razib | February 12, 2009The Neandertal genome story is in the air. See The New York Times and Wired. Watch the press conference here.
razib | February 12, 2009Extended Haplotypes in the Growth Hormone Releasing Hormone Receptor Gene (GHRHR) Are Associated with Normal Variation in Height. Here's the important bit:
In the VB cohort the height of individuals carrying the associated haplotypes were 3.8 cm and 2.5 cm shorter for males and females, respectively, and in the NB cohort 2.1 cm and 1.2 cm shorter for males and females, respectively. After correcting for sex, age and population affinity, carrying or not carrying the negatively associated haplotype accounts for as much as 1.8% of the variation in height in our two populations (0.9% without…
razib | February 11, 2009A burst of segmental duplications in the genome of the African great ape ancestor:
It is generally accepted that the extent of phenotypic change between human and great apes is dissonant with the rate of molecular change...Between these two groups, proteins are virtually identical...cytogenetically there are few rearrangements that distinguish ape-human chromosomes3, and rates of single-base-pair change...and retrotransposon activity...have slowed particularly within hominid lineages when compared to rodents or monkeys. Studies of gene family evolution indicate that gene loss and gain are…
razib | February 11, 2009Daughter blames dad's death on Madoff scheme:
"He used to go to a wound clinic for bedsores," she told NJJN. "After he found out [about his financial losses], he wouldn't go. Then he developed double pneumonia. He needed 24-hour care. It took at least $200,000 a year just to keep him alive."
Pretty straightforward, and not surprising. Among the thousands of investors who lost money because of Bernie there are surely others in similar circumstances who will suffer shorter life expectancies. This is why Bernie should be locked up forever.
razib | February 11, 2009Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down:
Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai's fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city -- or worse.
"I'm really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here," said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still…