razib | February 10, 2009Dienekes points me to a paper, Founders, drift and infidelity: the relationship between Y chromosome diversity and patrilineal surnames:
Most heritable surnames, like Y chromosomes, are passed from father to son. These unique cultural markers of coancestry might therefore have a genetic correlate in shared Y chromosome types among men sharing surnames, although the link could be affected by mutation, multiple foundation for names, nonpaternity, and genetic drift. Here, we demonstrate through an analysis of 1678 Y-chromosomal haplotypes within 40 British surnames a remarkably high degree of…
razib | February 9, 2009Nick Wade's Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential is a good complement to the strained Darwin-skepticism I pointed to earlier. From the perspective of this weblog this comment was interesting:
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. "People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior," Dr. Cronin says. "But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin's tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies -- that's quite an influential body that's still rejecting…
razib | February 9, 2009Chad is complaining that The Best American Science Writing 2008 is too focused on biomedical science. He finds it especially lame that there's no physics when this was the year of the LHC. Here's what I found in the contents....
Amy Harmon, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene
Richard Preston, An Error in the Code
Thomas Goetz, 23anMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
Carl Zimmer, Evolved for Cancer
Tara Parker-Pope, How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002
Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey, and Janet Roberts, Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry's Role
Daniel Carlat…
razib | February 9, 2009Carl Safina has a provocative essay in The New York Times, Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live. I'm sure others will jump all over this, so I'm not going to go exegetic on the essay. Though I disagree with the overly broad assertions, it is elegantly written and points to a reality: there is a cult of Charles Darwin. Where after all is the cult of Isaac Newton? Albert Einstein week? The remembrance of Gregor Mendel? Ruminations on the legacy of Antoine Lavoisier? But that cult is a reaction to the fact that there exists an organized lobby aimed at tearing down the science which…
razib | February 9, 2009Jacob Weisberg has a good corrective to anti-banking hysteria, The Case for Bankers. My post below, Kill the traders!, was an indictment of a small minority who have an outsized effect on the majority. We're talking a power law distribution, most of the havoc is due to a few. Weisberg notes:
If you want to sputter, choke, and turn purple with rage at the people who wrecked your retirement, you might start with Cramer himself, the most prolific dispenser of bad advice to the investing public. But if you're looking for someone in the securities industry, you'd be justified in directing your…
razib | February 9, 2009Below I semi-seriously mooted the possibility of killing individuals who destroy enormous amounts of wealth through risk-taking which inevitably results in particular instances losses. The main issue is that the upside to risk is unbounded, but the downside is constrained (i.e., bankruptcy, etc.). Given a particular personality type it seems absolutely rational to keep cranking up the bets which have an enormous upside which might translate into incredible personal wealth. Huge losses are generally absorbed by institutions or investors (granted, one might lose one's job, but there are…
razib | February 9, 2009Two articles of note, The evolution of Darwin's theory & They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To. John Hawks gets a lot of face time....
razib | February 9, 2009One of the things that really irritates me is when people throw around numbers without normalization. This is a major behavioral economic issue, Robert Shiller suggests that the inability to tell the difference between nominal & real values is one of the major reasons the American public was convinced that real estate was a "sure thing" investment. People confused the nominal rise in housing values with real increases, and didn't have an intuitive sense how weird the last 10 years were in the long-term perspective. In any case, Calculated Risk has a post on Job Losses During Recessions,…
razib | February 9, 2009If you have problems getting Ubuntu Hardy Heron to work properly, I strongly recommend you check out Intrepid Ibex, the newest release. I'm having way fewer issues with it on my Toshiba Satellite notebook (if you are fine on Hardy Heron perhaps "upgrading" will mess you up). The UI also seems slicker. Not nearly as smooth as OS X, or even Vista, but a definite improvement. The Wubi Windows Installer makes it really easy to take it for a test drive without compromising your access to your standard OS, you don't have to go "all-in."
razib | February 8, 2009Conor Clarke observes that in Animal Spirits George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller point to the popularity of Texas hold 'em as symptomatic of the speculative fever of the past decade. I've been reading a fair amount of financial history from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Skeptics of Shiller's arguments during that period fairly depict his theses as a mishmash of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The problem is evident all through Irrational Exuberance, the book which made him the Cassandra of the age along with Nouriel Roubini. But though on the specific causal factors adduced I remain…
razib | February 7, 2009FuturePundit points out that Sweden might not phase out nuclear power:
The decision has angered the Swedish opposition as well as environmentalists around the world. "To rely on nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions," Greenpeace spokeswoman Martina Kruger said, "is like smoking to lose weight. It's not a good idea."
Is the perfect the enemy of the good? All energy sources have costs. Even hydroelectricity & wind power have ecological externalities.
razib | February 7, 2009Just for those curious, there's a new website, Islam in China, which might be interesting to some. The site points out that there are more Muslims in China than there are in Saudi Arabia. In fact, if the Muslims of China were a nation unto themselves they would be equivalent to Iraq in population. Of these Muslims about half are Hui, Chinese speaking Muslims who are defined as a nationality. The other half consists mostly of Turkic speaking Muslims who are of Chinese nationality, but not Chinese speaking. While the Turkic Muslims of China have not traditionally been part of Chinese…
razib | February 5, 2009Octuplets' mother wanted 'huge family' for feeling of connection:
The mother of octuplets born last week in Bellflower told NBC News she wanted to have a "huge family" because she longed for personal connections she felt she lacked in her childhood.
"I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I -- I really lacked, I believe, growing up," Nadya Suleman said in an interview today with NBC's Ann Curry. "Reflecting back on my childhood, I know it wasn't functional. It was pretty -- pretty dysfunctional, and whose isn't?"
razib | February 5, 2009Japan's Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson for U.S.. I'll be honest, some of the glowing projections about the multiplier effect I see on some blogs are giving me flashbacks (I was blogging by Spring of 2002).
razib | February 5, 2009I recently finished The Hero of Ages, which concludes the Mistborn trilogy. The author, Brandon Sanderson, has been selected to finish Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Sanderson is a Mormon, so I was curious if anyone else thought that the resolution to the series resembled a very distinctive aspect of Mormon beliefs? (it didn't bother me personally, mythic literature and religious cosmology seem to be moving around the same cognitive furniture)
razib | February 5, 2009Via Dienekes, Interactions Between HERC2, OCA2 and MC1R May Influence Human Pigmentation Phenotype:
Human pigmentation is a polygenic trait which may be shaped by different kinds of gene-gene interactions. Recent studies have revealed that interactive effects between HERC2 and OCA2 may be responsible for blue eye colour determination in humans. Here we performed a population association study, examining important polymorphisms within the HERC2 and OCA2 genes. Furthermore, pooling these results with genotyping data for MC1R, ASIP and SLC45A2 obtained for the same population sample we also…
razib | February 4, 2009
Recently I've been having an on-and-off discussion with a friend about the bioethical implications of neo-eugenics. I brought up one particular issue as a thought experiment: how about selective abortion of dark-skinned fetuses among South Asians? The light and dark variants of SLC24A5 segregate within the South Asian population at high frequencies, the light variant as high as 85-90% in the northwest decreasing in frequency and approaching 50% in the far south an east. SLC24A5 explains about 1/3 of the South Asian skin color variation, just as it explains 1/3 of the difference between…
razib | February 4, 2009If you read my previous post on CEO salary cap, check out Jim Manzi's thoughts. Also, Felix Salmon and Megan Barnett debate the pay cap (he is in favor, she against). After Salmon presented his case I'm inclined to be less charitable to Barnett than I was before. But this post by Bob Sutton seals the deal:
The results still amaze me: After controlling for traditional size and performance measures, the amount of money made outside directors, especially those on the compensation committee, had a huge effect on CEO pay. O'Reilly and his colleagues report that for every $100,000 that the…
razib | February 4, 2009John Hawks notes that Neandertal genome in one week's time? I saw Svante Paabo speak in the fall and he said he was trying to get this out early in 2009, but he didn't clue us in to any surprises. Rather, he seemed to indicate that there would simply be greater precision on what he already had reported.
razib | February 4, 2009Obama Calls for 'Common Sense' on Executive Pay:
resident Obama announced on Wednesday a salary cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive the largest amounts of money under the $700 billion federal bailout, calling the step an expression not only of fairness but of "basic common sense." The restrictions, however, allow an exception for restricted stock.
...
"That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And…