razib | February 9, 2010At least in my book. How to split up the US. The author took social networking data and split up the United States into clusters. Here's the map:
Clicking through you can find the top fan pages of various nations. I noticed Megan Fox came up high on a list of many. She's #8 in Pakistan, and #2 in India. #7 in England. #6 in Saudi Arabia! Isn't that haram? #1 in Canada, #2 in Australia, #6 in USA and #4 in Mexico.
Anyway, read the whole post.
razib | February 8, 2010That time of the year. Please take the Gene Expression Survey. I'll put up the analysis and the csv file next week. I have the usual questions, but also added a few more that might seem a bit weird. There are 30 questions total, and you don't need to answer all of them, but as I said the more you answer the more data there'll be. I did a trial run and it took less than 5 minutes; most people can answer a question about their sex or religious identity pretty quickly.
Update: You can view the results of the survey here.
razib | February 8, 2010In my discussion with Eliezer I referred to "recreational genetics." Basically, "for entertainment purposes only" genetics. For example, someone with blue eyes confirming that they have the alleles on OCA2 & HERC2 associated with blue eyes. Or a man with the surname O'Neill discovers that he has the Uà Néill Y chromosomal marker. Yes, people will pay money to find out these facts which are already highly probable.
I think the news that Charles Darwin was likely of the R1b Y chromosomal haplogroup falls into the recreational category, though due to Darwin's fame the media has really been…
razib | February 7, 2010After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made it from front to back as a sentient adult. At this point I'm 3/4 of the way through, and I need to get something off my chest: I now believe that Charles Darwin was a very smart man, a genius. I had heard other people to refer to Darwin in such a fashion, but reading his original works has brought…
razib | February 6, 2010A few days ago I discussed a new paper which explores the patterns of natural selection in the genome of the X chromosome. As you know the X is "carried" disproportionately by females, as males have only one copy, so it offers up an interesting window into evolutionary dynamics (see The Red Queen for a popular treatment). Today Dienekes points me to a new paper in Genome Biology which puts the focus on the X chromosome again, Characterization of X-Linked SNP genotypic variation in globally-distributed human populations:
Background
The transmission pattern of the human X chromosome reduces its…
razib | February 4, 2010I went and saw Creation today. I enjoyed the film, though personally I am a bit tired of the religion vs. science angle. To some extent I felt that there was a conflation between the views & emphases of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Paul Bettany's character seemed to be expositing a view of evolution which was less subtle than what the real Darwin outlined so as to juxtapose his own stance cleanly against the simple narrative offered by traditional religion.
But a movie is a story about characters, not a perfect reenactment of history. One thing that struck me about Creation was the…
razib | February 4, 2010Highly Punctuated Patterns of Population Structure on the X Chromosome and Implications for African Evolutionary History:
It is well known that average levels of population structure are higher on the X chromosome compared to autosomes in humans. However, there have been surprisingly few analyses on the spatial distribution of population structure along the X chromosome. With publicly available data from the HapMap Project and Perlegen Sciences, we show a strikingly punctuated pattern of X chromosome population structure. Specifically, 87% of X-linked HapMap SNPs within the top 1% of FST…
razib | February 4, 2010Check out what has learned from being on ScienceBlogs. Some of the comments are funny.
razib | February 1, 2010Population Will Come Down -- We Choose How:So, as I once wrote, for a person to produce more than two children is unethical. If you want lots of kids, then adopt -- preferably from an affluent country, as you only make things worse if you move people from cultures with a small environmental footprint to a land of big cars and hamburgers.
We need to give little girls worldwide a good education, because that makes them have fewer kids when they grow up. And we need to combat various religious organisations that sow doubt about the efficacy and moral acceptability of contraceptives.
The whole…
razib | February 1, 2010Could be the title of the paper. Anyway, Genome-wide association mapping identifies multiple loci for a canine SLE-related disease complex:...Incidences of specific diseases are elevated in different breeds, indicating that a few genetic risk factors might have accumulated through drift or selective breeding. In this study, a GWA study with 81 affected dogs (cases) and 57 controls from the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever breed identified five loci associated with a canine systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)-related disease complex that includes both antinuclear antibody (ANA)-positive…
razib | February 1, 2010I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?
razib | February 1, 2010PLoS Biology reviews Why We Cooperate:
What makes us human, what sets us apart from other animal species, and which traits do we share with our closest living relatives? Ever since Darwin introduced the notion of continuity in his theory of evolution, humans have been obsessed with the question of how to distinguish themselves from all other species. In the postwar period, our species became known as "Man the Toolmaker," until in the 1960s Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees using sticks to fish for termites, and that was that. We then distinguished ourselves using the term "Man the Hunter," but…
razib | February 1, 2010A comment at Secular Right:
Ever since the Revolution the Mullahs have wanted to erase all traces of the pre-Islamic Persian society. They realized they couldn't go and raze Persepolis and other relics without losing the support of the people. I've heard that it is common for people in Iran to complain openly that worst thing to ever happen to them was the Arab invasion.
A similar strain in Egyptian Islamist clerics and leaders exists but again, they cannot destroy the pyramids without losing legitimacy. Too many Egyptians are attached to their history, whether for economic or cultural…
razib | February 1, 2010Pew has a new report out, Almost All Millennials Accept Interracial Dating and Marriage. Pretty straightforward. But one thing that I found interesting, if not surprising, was that the gap in black-white attitudes had basically disappeared over the generations. I made a chart to illustrate this:
In fact, in more recent generations whites seem somewhat more accepting of interracial marriage within the family than blacks. I suspect that the black-white gap for Millennials and Gen-Xers is within the margin of error, but it's suggestive that the gap grew from the latter to the former.
Also, Pew…
razib | January 30, 2010Two interesting graphs from Calculated Risk. The first shows that the changes in GDP seem during the last recessive are on a par with those of the early 1980s and before (though we don't know if we're in a U or V shaped recession yet, though the odds are probably more U than V right now). But the second shows that in terms of employment we may be in uncharted territory, the worst of both worlds in terms of the jobless recoveries of the shallow recessions of the 1990s and early 2000s as well as the deep declines in employment of earlier recessions.
I've been hearing about the soon-to-come…
razib | January 29, 2010A comment below prompted me to slap together a post quickly displaying some data which illustrates just how religious South Asians are compared to East Asians. Anyone with an interest in world history will not be surprised by this assertion. When reading surveys of East Asian history I would occasionally reach a chapter titled "Religion," and the author would offer a quick explanation and apologia for why the topic was not given pride of place. By contrast, some have argued to a first approximation South Asian history is a history of South Asian religion. (Though I do not focus on that issue…
razib | January 29, 2010Jobless Turn to Family for Help, Often With Complications:
More than half of the respondents to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of 708 unemployed adults nationwide said they had borrowed money from friends or relatives. In most cases, their financial pictures were bleak. Nearly 80 percent of those who reported borrowing money said their family's financial situation was "fairly bad" or "very bad," a significantly greater proportion than among those who had not had to borrow.
The numbers here might exaggerate the effect some, as an individual who is going through financial turmoil may…