razib | December 14, 2008Check out the 1860 vs. 2008 election maps for president on a county-by-county level.
razib | December 13, 2008The New York Times has a piece, Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches:
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. "We have the greatest product on earth," said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.
Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation's largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and…
razib | December 13, 2008Acceptance of Evolution & belief in God, over at Secular Right. Here's my conclusion:
... In any case, I think the two observations I would make is that Roman Catholicism's acceptance of evolution shows, as those nations tend to be above the trendline. And, Communism really, really, messes a nation up. I doubt that the rejection of evolution has as much to do with Lysenkoism as it does with overall underdevelopment....
But, you should go read the whole thing as there are charts that will likely interest....
razib | December 12, 2008Genetic variation in South Indian castes: evidence from Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal polymorphisms:
We report new data on 155 individuals from four Tamil caste populations of South India and perform comparative analyses with caste populations from the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Genetic differentiation among Tamil castes is low...reflecting a largely common origin. Nonetheless, caste- and continent-specific patterns are evident. For 32 lineage-defining Y-chromosome SNPs, Tamil castes show higher affinity to Europeans than to eastern Asians, and genetic distance…
razib | December 11, 2008I used to watch Jack Horkheimer's show when I was a kid back in the '80s. In fact, sometimes I would stay up late just to catch it. Today I found this out on Wikipedia:
Question: Why did you change the name of the show from 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR HUSTLER' TO 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR GAZER' ?
Answer: The name was changed due to our presence on the internet. When people, especially children, were accessing our Star Hustler site by using a search engine, STAR HUSTLER was not the HUSTLER they got to link to...so, after some upset folks wrote to us calling attention to the situation we realized…
razib | December 11, 2008Interesting bit of interdisciplinary work on the spread of lactase persistance:
Thomas found that the gene variant coincided well with the rise of animal domestication, indicating that humans became dairy farmers almost as soon as they began to keep animals.
To track the gene's spread across Europe, Thomas designed a computer model that took into account both archaeological and genetic data. He then ran multiple simulations, randomly changing other variables and looking for patterns that matched what is known today.
The closest matches pegged the rise of milk-drinking Europeans to about 7,400…
razib | December 11, 2008The Audacious Epigone has a long critique of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. The main criticism is that Andrew Gelman did not emphasize the affect that race has on voting patterns enough; a criticism brought to sharper focus by the 2008 election.
razib | December 11, 2008A lot of evolutionary psychology goes into the "They did a study on what?" category. So check out Daniel Kruger's paper, Male Financial Consumption is Associated with Higher Mating Intentions and Mating Success:
Cross-culturally, male economic power is directly related to reproductive
success. Displays of wealth and social status are an important part of human male mating effort. The degree of male financial consumption may be related to variance in life history strategies, as differences in life history patterns are fundamentally differences in the allocation of effort and/or resources.…
razib | December 9, 2008Prompted by Paul Bloom's piece in Slate, Does Religion Make You Nice? Does atheism make you mean?, I went out and read Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment , the book which which Bloom references. It's a very slim volume, and though the author is a sociologist its is very thick on ethnographic observations and personal interviews. The societies in question are Denmark, and secondarily Sweden (the author lived in Denmark, but drew upon a great deal of surveys of Sweden as well). Perhaps I'll have more to say later, but there are three major…
razib | December 9, 2008Article in The New Scientist, Neanderthal genome already giving up its secrets. I went to a talk by Svante Paabo recently where he played up expectations in the near future.
razib | December 8, 2008Of all the bloggingheads.tv "regulars" I enjoy Will Wilkinson's "Free Will" the most, probably because of an intersection of our interests and general outlooks (though Will is far more liberal than I am). Though the headline for this week's episode has to do with atheism, the really interesting part of this interview with Paul Bloom is the second half. By the end of the diavlog Will admits that he aspires toward being a traitor to the United States, and that he isn't too inclined to engage in a cannibal feast where his grandmother is the main course due to her lack of attraction to his…
razib | December 8, 2008The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs:
One crucial element for the evolution of cooperation may be the sensitivity to others' efforts and payoffs compared with one's own costs and gains. Inequity aversion is thought to be the driving force behind unselfish motivated punishment in humans constituting a powerful device for the enforcement of cooperation. Recent research indicates that non-human primates refuse to participate in cooperative problem-solving tasks if they witness a conspecific obtaining a more attractive reward for the same effort. However, little is known about…
razib | December 8, 2008David Kirkpatrick points me to some interesting new research, Religious beliefs and public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe and the United States:
...Recent research suggests that 'religious filters' are an important heuristic for scientific issues in general5, and nanotechnology in particular6. A religious filter is more than a simple correlation between religiosity and attitudes toward science: it refers to a link between benefit perceptions and attitudes that varies depending on respondents' levels of religiosity. In surveys, seeing the benefits of nanotechnology is consistently…
razib | December 8, 2008Today Ed Yong has a post up, Social status shapes racial identity:
To Penner and Saperstein, the study contradicts the idea that races, and the differences between them, are dominated by biological differences between groups of people. They see race not as a fixed entity that is purely determined from birth, but a flexible one, settled by a tug-of-war between different possible classifications.
Biological traits like skin colour obviously have a strong pull, but they aren't alone - changes in social position can also affect how people see themselves and are seen by others. The researchers…
razib | December 8, 2008T. Ryan Gregory is getting the word out that the latest issue of Evolution is free online.
razib | December 8, 2008Genetic Future has the temerity to put the shyest people in Europe on the spot, pointing to a paper, Genome-wide association analysis of metabolic traits in a birth cohort from a founder population. Below the fold is a map swiped from Genetic Future, I invite some bold if introverted readers to offer comment on the correspondences with their own knowledge of their nation.
Related: Finns as European outliers and The genetics of Fenno-Scandinavia.
razib | December 8, 2008Effects of cis and trans Genetic Ancestry on Gene Expression in African Americans:
ariation in gene expression is a fundamental aspect of human phenotypic variation, and understanding how this variation is apportioned among human populations is an important aim. Previous studies have compared gene expression levels between distinct populations, but it is unclear whether the differences that were observed have a genetic or nongenetic basis. Admixed populations, such as African Americans, offer a solution to this problem because individuals vary in their proportion of European ancestry while…
razib | December 7, 2008Check it out (below). Ed is British. I knew that, but the accent is still funny. I listen to the BBC, so it didn't feel like bloggingheads.tv, rather, I thought it was the World Service.
razib | December 7, 2008From the comments:
When I first saw this, the first thing that popped in my head was "big [vulgarity expurgated] surprise."
Has someone done a PC analysis on people from all over the United States? That would probably be pretty interesting, given that it almost certainly wouldn't reflect geography as strongly. I wonder what kind of clustering you would get...
A substantial number of Americans are derived from the settler population; those Europeans who arrived during the colonial period. In New England most of the population in 1776 was descended from a large wave of Puritans who arrived…