razib | January 7, 2009Over at Gene Expression Classic there has been discussion of a new paper elucidating exactly how blind cavefish become depigmented. Please read the comments, as there's a lot of good discussion on evolutionary genetic parameters....
razib | January 5, 2009Madoff Investor Awaits 'Imbecile' or 'Dupe' Verdict:
Patrick Littaye, co-founder of Access International Advisors, lost his savings after investing with Bernard Madoff, expects to lose his house in his hometown of Saint-Malo, France, and says he'll canvass investors over the next few weeks to see whether he has also lost his business.
Littaye, 69, invested all of his own money with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC last year, enticed by the firm's positive returns as other hedge funds slumped. His error was compounded because he borrowed money to increase the return on his…
razib | January 4, 2009A commenter below sayeth:
I remember reading somewhere that a child can't be darker than the darker of his two parents and that in such instances the biological father is not the putative father. I have no idea if that's true or not.
This seems like a common sense assertion, but as I noted this is not really strictly correct in an apodictic sense. That is, just because you have a very dark skinned parent and a light skinned parent, it does not necessarily follow that the range of the offspring shall be bounded by the values of the parents. To some extent I can see how this makes sense; I…
razib | January 2, 2009Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer:
We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this boundary layer but not above or below that interval. Cubic diamonds form under high temperature-pressure regimes, and n-diamonds also require extraordinary conditions, well outside the range of Earth's typical surficial processes but common to cosmic impacts. N-diamond concentrations range from 10 to…
razib | January 1, 2009Every now and then British newspapers publish the story of twins born to an interracial couple who seem to resemble only one of the races of their parents. The irony being that siblings may appear to be of different populations. I've commented on several of these stories before. Now we have another one to ring in the new year, Mixed-race couple give birth to black and white twins - for the second time:
Seven years after having one black twin and one white twin, the 27-year-old mother has given birth to a second set of twins with different coloured skin at odds of one in 500,000.
When the…
razib | December 31, 2008So implies The Audacious Epigone:
Mormons are the least likely of the 19 denominations to live alone, but I suspect among the married, they are among the most likely to have a single breadwinner household.
Atheists and agnostics, by contrast, come in at the bottom. The low rates of multiple person households is part of the explanation, but the high number of lone wolves among their ranks illustrates their social marginality in another way relative to the cognitive endowments they enjoy. This does little to dispel stereotype I hold of atheists as cynical, single white guys who live in…
razib | December 31, 2008ScienceBlogs has a new contributor, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The title is in part a reference to her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Looks interesting. If Henrietta Lacks doesn't ring a bell, look her up, it's rather freaky....
razib | December 31, 2008Most Americans are not aware that the debtor status of our nation is not particularly novel; we have been a debtor nation for most of our history. This fact serves as one of the major linchipins in Eric Rauchway's Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, a economic historical look at how globalization made America then, and is making it now. One of the major points that Rauchway attempts to hammer home is that American exceptionalism is posterior to the conditions which framed the republic, it is not the cause of the peculiarities of the American condition.
One of the major ways…
razib | December 29, 2008I'm old enough to have very faint memories of the very first shuttle missions, though I do not recall the last moon landings. I recently heard a science fiction writer observe that when he was a child the idea of a moon landing was so futuristic. Then it happened...and we stopped going. It's been over 30 years since humans set foot on the moon.
Granted, there's been a lot that's happened since then. Your rescale your awe meter, so the plethora of Mars landings and detailed exploration of the outer planets via the Galileo and Cassini missions don't register in the same way. Various…
razib | December 29, 2008Patient's DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Drugs:
The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested to narrow use of the drugs, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 a month.
To some extent this sort of thing is a gimme; intelligent & proactive patients already "help" their medical professionals by channeling them appropriately in terms of decisions because with the veritable tsunami of data no human…
razib | December 29, 2008Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion:
Despite a long history of investigation, considerable debate revolves around whether Neanderthals became extinct because of climate change or competition with anatomically modern humans (AMH).
...
We apply a new methodology integrating archaeological and chronological data with high-resolution paleoclimatic simulations to define eco-cultural niches associated with Neanderthal and AMH adaptive systems during alternating cold and mild phases of Marine Isotope Stage 3. Our results indicate that Neanderthals and AMH exploited similar niches, and…
razib | December 28, 2008A few days ago the Audacious Epigone pointed out that Episcopalians are in the same neighborhood as Jews in the United States on intelligence tests; i.e., on the order of a bit more than 2/3 of a standard deviation above the norm. The recent paper on religion & IQ confirmed these findings. One of the peculiarities of American Jews is how liberal they are; the old saying was that they "live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans." With the rise of the Religious Right Episcopalians are actually starting to vote more like Jews; the Pew Religious Survey suggests that 49% are now…
razib | December 28, 2008Dienekes points me to a new paper, Searching for the origin of Gagauzes: Inferences from Y-chromosome analysis:
The Gagauzes are a small Turkish-speaking ethnic group living mostly in southern Moldova and northeastern Bulgaria. The origin of the Gagauzes is obscure. They may be descendants of the Turkic nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes, as suggested by the "Steppe" hypothesis, or have a complex Anatolian-steppe origin, as postulated by the "Seljuk" or "Anatolian" hypothesis. To distinguish these hypotheses, a sample of 89 Y-chromosomes representing two Gagauz populations from the…
razib | December 24, 2008PLOS has a think piece up, "It's Ok, We're Not Cousins by Blood": The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective, which comes out against the laws in the United States which ban the marriage of cousins:
It is obviously illogical to condemn eugenics and at the same time favor laws that prevent cousins from marrying. But we do not aim to indict these laws on the grounds that they constitute eugenics. That would assume what needs to be proved - that all forms of eugenics are necessarily bad. In our view, cousin marriage laws should be judged on their merits. But from that standpoint…
razib | December 22, 2008Say you have a abstruse paper such as, Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa:
Comparisons of chromosome X and the autosomes can illuminate differences in the histories of males and females as well as shed light on the forces of natural selection. We compared the patterns of variation in these parts of the genome using two datasets that we assembled for this study that are both genomic in scale. Three independent analyses show that around the time of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, chromosome X experienced much more genetic drift than…
razib | December 22, 2008Evolutionary curveball for curvy?:
While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker waists.
That's because the same hormones that increase fat around the waist can also make women stronger, more assertive, and more resistant to stress, according to a new study published in the December issue of Current Anthropology.
Given those findings, it makes sense that the slim-waisted body has not evolved to become the…
razib | December 21, 2008Even Bernard Madoff Doesn't Deserve This:
Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his company's shareholders. Sure, these men destroyed enormous shareholder value, just as the targets of today's criminal cases allegedly did. But it's hard to contend that they deserved prison terms longer than the average sentence for murder (22 years), kidnapping (14) and sexual abuse (eight)."
What…
razib | December 21, 2008Check this out, Matt Yglesias was dissing on an obscure D.C. outfit, Third Way, a few days ago. Today, the CEO of The Center For American Progress put up a Very Special Post on his weblog clarifying that CAP thinks much of Third Way. Creepy. I guess we always knew there was a puppet master back there, but it seems a bit unseemly to pull the strings so publicly.
razib | December 20, 2008In the social circles I move in there is a lot of concern with overpopulation. Now, it is somewhat ironic to me that those who are concerned do not tend to breed so as to be virtuous...while others who are not so concerned, such as Sarah Palin (and also these ladies and gentlemen) make up for the balance (and some!) and render the valiant efforts of the concerned rather moot. In any case, I had a thought today...I remember when I was a small child that world population was between 4 and 5 billion. Today is between 6 and 7 billion. That is rather staggering...that my lifetime has witnessed…
razib | December 20, 2008I remember that back in mid-2007 I was mooting the possibility of a recession. Part of the reason was that I'd been looking at the statistical trendlines in real estate MLS data at the time for a software project, and I'd been getting a bad feeling from the summer of 2006 on (the flip rates in many markets were not going in a "good" direction). Check out the comments. Days of innocence....