razib | January 22, 2009Sheril has a post up, On Sacrificing Reproductive Fitness For Career Advancement..., which makes a common sense point:
Angier references a recent survey of 160,000 Ph.D. recipients that found 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children while only 44 percent of their female counterparts were. Further, twelve years or more after receiving doctorates, tenured women were more than "twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced." Another California study reported nearly double the number of female faculty agree with the statement, "I…
razib | January 22, 2009Carl Zimmer pointed me to a new paper, A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans. The title is so informative that pasting the abstract is almost unnecessary, but here is the conclusion which gets to the point:
In conclusion, we show that, at least in the context of the studied sample, it is possible to predict full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity, although it should be noted that the exact dividing line between a Jewish and non-…
razib | January 21, 2009
The Monito del Monte is the only extant member of its order, the Microbiotheria. This order is itself part of the superorder Australidelphia, which includes Australian Marsupials and the Monito del Monte, whose native habitat are the forests of Chile and Argentina. In other words, the Monito del Monte is more closely related to the Marsupials of Australia than to those of the New World.
razib | January 21, 2009Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda:
Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men…
razib | January 21, 2009About every single post on human population clusters tend to shift into a discussion as to whether human variation is clinal, or where one can make assertions of discrete groups. I think it is fair to note that most of the populations sampled have been skewed to one locale. For example, "French" might mean a few hundred patients from hospitals in the Paris area. "Belgian" might be a few hundred patients in hospitals in Brussels. The "gap" between the French and Belgian cluster may simply have to do with the fact that the populations are not representative of their nationalities. Surely as…
razib | January 20, 2009In the comments about the term Judeo-Christian the Marcionite tendencies of liberal Christianity was mentioned. Sometimes I have encountered the idea that a rejection of the Hebrew Bible within Christianity naturally results in Anti-Semitism (granted, the argument is often from neconservatives who are attempting to solidify the evangelical-neocon alliance). I decided to look into the GSS.
Fundamentalist
Moderate
Liberal
Relative to marry a Jew?
Strongly favor
10.4
13.2
15.2
Favor
15.8
16.3
13.2
Neither
54.7
57.5
59.4
Oppose
11.4
9.2
9.0
Strongly oppose
7.7
3.8
3.2…
razib | January 19, 2009The End of Banking as We Know It:
The bright side is that all those displaced financial services professionals can now set their sights on doing something, well, truly useful.
Still, this adjustment will be painful for all those who have to carve out new careers, as well as for New York and other places these companies call home.
Finally, what will a humbled financial services industry mean for consumers? Higher borrowing costs, Mr. Miller said.
"The leverage that these companies were using allowed them to lower their rates," he said. "Rates have to go higher for the banks to operate in a…
razib | January 19, 2009The post yesterday about the deletion which results in heart disease later in life had some interesting ancestry related material. This makes sense, the genetic maps which I post on now and then ultimately have a medical rationale behind them; eliminate population structure so that you don't have spurious correlations confusing you when you try and get a fix on the genetic underpinnings of a disease. By example, consider a study with cases & controls, and individuals with the trait or disease have five times the likelihood of carrying a particular allele at a particular gene. But you…
razib | January 18, 2009In some of the popular press pieces on the genetic variant which is implicated in heart disease among South Asians there are references to the fact that only 1% of the world's population carries it. Actually, that's obscuring an important piece of information: that 1% is almost exclusively South Asian, so that the 1% is simply 5% X 20% (20% being the proportion of the world's population that is South Asian). I've placed the table from the supplementary data which shows the populations in the HGDP data set which do, and don't, have the deletion on MYBPC3.
Notice the trend? Except for 2…
razib | January 18, 2009
A common MYBPC3 (cardiac myosin binding protein C) variant associated with cardiomyopathies in South Asia:
Heart failure is a leading cause of mortality in South Asians. However, its genetic etiology remains largely unknown1. Cardiomyopathies due to sarcomeric mutations are a major monogenic cause for heart failure...Here, we describe a deletion of 25 bp in the gene encoding cardiac myosin binding protein C (MYBPC3) that is associated with heritable cardiomyopathies and an increased risk of heart failure in Indian populations (initial study OR = 5.3...replication study OR = 8.59...combined…
razib | January 16, 2009There's a new paper, The Peopling of Korea Revealed by Analyses of Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosomal Markers:
Methodology and Results
We analyzed mitochondrial DNA...sequence variation in the hypervariable segments I and II...and haplogroup-specific mutations in coding regions in 445 individuals from seven east Asian populations...In addition, published mtDNA haplogroup data...mtDNA HVS-I sequences...Y chromosome haplogroup data...and Y chromosome STR da...were analyzed to elucidate the genetic structure of East Asian populations. All the mtDNA profiles studied here were classified into…
razib | January 16, 2009I have a big round up of various responses to my posts on Judeo-Christianity at Secular Right. Ross Douthat responds:
Indeed, the only real problem with the term for his purposes may be that it isn't intellectually lazy enough - that it doesn't create an umbrella big enough for liberal-Protestantized Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists to huddle under as well. And reading his post again, maybe that's what he's getting at: That we need Christians and Jews to "retain their distinctiveness in at least a notional sense," as he puts it, in order to make other faiths feel comfortable joining the…
razib | January 16, 2009Farewell to evolgen. I guess the Facebook account must occupy all his time....
razib | January 16, 2009Pervasive Hitchhiking at Coding and Regulatory Sites in Humans. Here's the author summary:
There is much reported evidence for positive selection at specific loci in the human genome. Additional papers based on comparisons between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees have also suggested that adaptive evolution may be quite common. At the same time, it has been surprisingly hard to find unambiguous evidence that either positive or negative (background) selection is affecting genome-wide patterns of variation at neutral sites. Here, we evaluate the prevalence of positive or background…
razib | January 15, 2009A neat new paper on Icelandic genetics, then and now, Sequences From First Settlers Reveal Rapid Evolution in Icelandic mtDNA Pool:
A major task in human genetics is to understand the nature of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the gene pools of contemporary populations. Ancient DNA studies have great potential to shed light on the evolution of populations because they provide the opportunity to sample from the same population at different points in time. Here, we show that a sample of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences from 68 early medieval Icelandic skeletal…
razib | January 14, 2009About 3 years ago a paper was published on pigmentation which heralded the breaking of the dam when it comes to skin color genetics, SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans. The zebrafish, a model organism familiar to evo-devoists the world over, played an important role in the paper. The new issue of Zebrafish is totally devoted to pigmentation. The press release was kind of weird, Zebrafish Journal Publishes Skin Pigmentation Studies That Shed Light on the Evolution of Race:
"With the election of the first African-American president of the United…
razib | January 14, 2009Ross Douthat (also, James Poulos) makes an intelligent, well-informed defense of the term using the general framework that I began with (as opposed to some people who simply insist on digressing immediately to forward their own position). There are also intelligent comments below. Instead of responding in a point-by-point fashion to Ross's rejoinder in this post, I'll just elaborate in the comments here and below. Rather, I want to tack to a different issue. My main concern as an atheist who lives in a progressively more religiously pluralist society characterized by liberal democratic…
razib | January 14, 2009Arnold Kling put up a chart which shows how the Masters of the Universe were empty suits. He says:
The pattern is big egos, big money, and big power offering big promises, getting big media play, and making big mistakes (Spitzer's mistakes were relatively small, to be honest). To me, the fiscal stimulus represents yet another redistribution of power away from ordinary people and toward the elite, when already the imbalance is too high. I am more worried about rot at the top of society than at the bottom.
Kling notes that there is also rot at the bottom; the speculative credit binge mentality…