razib | November 20, 2008OK, not really, but I have a new piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free on polygamy.
razib | November 20, 2008At my other weblog I have a post which presents dozens of charts gleaned from the GSS. The intent was to compare Catholics and Protestants of New England origin to whites from the McCain Belt, and adduce whether the various Catholic immigrant groups such as the Irish and Italians in New England absorbed the values of the Yankee natives.
razib | November 20, 2008Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million:
If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant's egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes.
The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but…
razib | November 19, 2008That's the question being asked at The Personal Genome. Over at Genetic Future Dan "The Man" MacArthur notes the difficulties which might emerge if we start engaging in widespread embryo screening. So how exactly is the average American voter going to interpret the myriad of genes responsible for only a small fraction of phenotypic variation?
I'm not sure that genetic data adds much value for the body politic. I would want to know, but, I would also take SAT scores and college transcripts before I'd be interested in a candidate's genetic sequence. Our president elect has not, for example…
razib | November 18, 2008The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn't Care to Listen To:
An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.…
razib | November 18, 2008Refugee program stayed after feds confirm fraud:
DNA testing conducted earlier this year by the government to verify blood ties between anchor refugees and their supposed family members revealed that fewer than 20 percent of those checked could confirm their biological relationships, the fact sheet stated.
Doesn't matter how high "paternity uncertainty" is in a culture, this is just way too high a number.
razib | November 18, 2008A new working paper, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings. After some regressions:
In sum, in a large sample of blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative. Unless they are experts, individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. Our results suggest that both price tags and expert recommendations may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers who care about the intrinsic qualities of the wine.
You already know this, but can't hurt to repeat in these times when we are…
razib | November 18, 2008Andrew Gelman has a post up which reports an analysis of the votes for Obama by county as a function of the black percentage. In chart below the circles are counties where size is proportional to turnout.
Click here for a larger version.
razib | November 17, 2008Richard Lawler pointed me to a new paper by Sean Rice, A stochastic version of the Price equation reveals the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in evolution. The Price Equation is the generalization of selective evolutionary dynamics by the amateur evolutionary biologist George Price which so impressed W. D. Hamilton. But as Rice notes it only captures a slice of the various parameters which influence evolutionary processes. Like some other papers I've pointed too Rice presents some relatively counter-intuitive results, or at least results which confound our general…
razib | November 17, 2008A few days ago I suggested that it is folly to expect Europeans would elect a person of color to their highest office when so few Europeans are persons of color. Today in Slate a piece basically suggests that Americans should not be so full of themselves, Only in America? The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here:
People are still amazed he won. In a country where more than a few white folks would still say outright that one of "them'' shouldn't be in charge, here was a politician who didn't downplay his ethnicity, his foreign-sounding name, or his father who…
razib | November 17, 2008Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age:
In 2005 four outstanding multiple burials were discovered near Eulau, Germany. The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other. Skeletal and artifactual evidence and the simultaneous interment of the individuals suggest the supposed families fell victim to a violent event. In a multidisciplinary approach, archaeological, anthropological, geochemical (radiogenic isotopes), and molecular genetic (ancient DNA) methods were…
razib | November 17, 2008Chad has a post up about Cosmic Variance's move to Discover Blogs. He notes that some people lamenting the decline of the "old blogosphere" haven't been around blogs that long. He doesn't mention that he's been blogging since 2002. So have I. Most blogs have always sucked, that's a constant. Some of the less-sucky ones now have the option of remuneration. With four major competing scienceblog networks I think you'll get some competition driving quality. Granted, a great deal of blog writing will remain crap; just like a great deal of the media. The laws of the universe have not changed…
razib | November 17, 2008Here is a chart from Jim Manzi:
I added a trendline of GDP growth in the United States from 1995-2006 to suggest the general economic climate. As they usually don't say: the fundamentals are not strong. Matt Yglesias makes a pointed, if admittedly somewhat unfair, analogy:
To be clear, when I compared arguments for bailing out the auto industry to arguments I feel for before the invasion of Iraq, I'm not saying that the consequences of bailing out the car industry would be as catastrophic as the consequences of invading Iraq. I'm saying there's a certain structural similarity in the…
razib | November 16, 2008Kambiz's review (pointer) to the Humanity's Genes an the Human Condition conference made me aware of Jean-Laurent Casanova's research. His general idea seems to be that heightened susceptibility or death due to infectious disease is in large part a function of inter-individual genetic variation. Among the young this is due to Mendelian genes of large effect, whether it be dominant or recessive (higher frequency among those who are the product of cousin marriage). For the old he suggests that it might be due to QTLs of small effect, just like schizophrenia. To some extent this is a revision…
razib | November 16, 2008If Detroit Falls, Foreign Makers Could Be Buffer:
"You would have an auto industry in the United States more like that of Mexico and Canada: foreign-owned," said Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., which describes itself as a nonprofit organization that has "strong relationships with industry, government agencies, universities, research institutes, labor organizations" and other groups with an interest in the auto business.
Like Canada! Now that's scary. Here are some interesting numbers from the piece:
The transition to that new…
razib | November 16, 2008Look below the fold, don't know how long it will be around (H/T Ross Doutht).
razib | November 15, 2008Elsewhere, I reiterate the common sense case that the decline in the proportion of Americans who are of "English" ancestry over the past 30 years from 22% to 9% is mostly a function of changed questionnaires and cultural preferences.
razib | November 15, 2008Kambiz attended the Humanity's Genes and the Human Condition, and he reports some interesting goings on. Sydney Brenner, Nobel Laureate 2002, had this to say this about human evolution:
Starts off with a zinger: "Biological evolution for humans has stopped." Uhh, really Sydney? You better do better than that. He uses an analogy about how if we feel cold, we don't 'adapt' we just kill an animal, skin it, and wear its pelt as evidence of relaxed natural selection.
I wonder if this the malevolent influence of Steve Jones, but I doubt it. But that wasn't the weird stuff:
Obesity! Lists how…
razib | November 14, 2008In the latest bloggingheads.tv Conn Carroll and Bill Scher have an argument where they brandish dueling public survey results to make the case that the public is to the Left or the Right. How can they do this without totally fabricating their data? Because the average human being is not very smart, ergo, they aren't consistent. If you want a slim little volume which collects all the survey data confirming this hypothesis, just read The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Americans are conservative because they want smaller government and lower taxes, and…