razib | October 2, 2008Rise of colonial African cities kick-started AIDS pandemic: scientists:
"As there must have been many opportunities for such transmission over past millennia, why did the AIDS pandemic not occur until the 20th century?
"The answer may be that, for an AIDS epidemic to get kick-started, HIV-1 needs to be seeded in a large population centre."
There are many ways that selection can operate on populations. There can be intraspecific competition, interspecific competition, as well as variation in fitness driven by changes in environmental factors. All of these are often in flux in a complex…
razib | October 2, 2008Again, Bayblab looks into it. I've checked it out myself for obvious reasons and found similar stuff. You have to look at the net effects of something.
razib | October 1, 2008Ta-Nehisi Coates asks:
...I don't want to scapegoat my brown bothers--my sense is that ethnicity is a really bad filter here--for blacks, whites and Latinos. For instance, is homophobia tied to wealth? Is it tied to education? Is it tied to region? What is the best predictor of homophobia? Is it really race? Or is it something like poverty or even church attendance?
The charmingly named "HOMOSEX" variable in the GSS has large sample sizes, so I decided to look into the various relationships. The question is: "What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?" The responses are…
razib | October 1, 2008PLoS One has an interesting new paper on the intersection of archeology, history and genetics, Mitochondrial DNA Evidence for a Diversified Origin of Workers Building Mausoleum for First Emperor of China:
In conclusion, we showed that MBWs was an admixture and bore genetic continuity with contemporary Chinese populations. Its origin was much diversified, which seems to be compatible with historical accounts that the sources of slaved workers at Qin. Dynasty tend to be extremely diverse. Furthermore, we showed that a strong presence of the workers of southern origins although the results of…
razib | October 1, 2008Hey, check this out:
We've rented out the top floor of the place for the event and will be providing food and a bar tab up to about $600. The Delancey will be suspending their usual cover charge. In attendance will be GrrlScientist, PhysioProf, Jake Young, Ginny Hughes, Erin Johnson, and Logan Elsass, among others.
Things that make you go hhhmm....
razib | October 1, 2008During a conversation with Nick Matzke he asserted that Creationists weren't less intelligent necessarily. I contended that they were less intelligent. I based on this on snooping through the GSS when I was posting about the association between lower educational attainment and intelligence and religious fundamentalist & Biblical literalism. There are several variables in the GSS which ask respondents about their views on evolution, and the more intelligent and educated a person is the more likely they are to accept evolution. But this prompts a question: is this association simply due…
razib | September 30, 2008It's fall 2008, and I'm starting the 3rd DonorsChoose drive in this weblog's history. In 2006 $1,941.06 was given through this weblog's challenges. In 2007 $4,354.19. First, thank you to everyone who donated! Second, the priority is obviously to give money where needed, but, it would be nice to keep the trend monotonic as long as possible, if you know what I mean! There are two types of proposals in my list this year: having to do with biology, or from schools which are in disproportionate need. More updates later in the month....
razib | September 29, 2008The New York Times has an article up about how French Muslim girls are enrolling in Catholics schools, in part because of the relatives freedoms these religious schools offer in terms of their dress vis-a-vis the normal public schools. I found this portion interesting:
The biology teacher at St. Mauront has been challenged on Darwin's theory of evolution, and history class can get heated during discussions of the Crusades or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Muslim students shocked the staff by showing glee, Mr. Chamoux recalled.
I am not one of…
razib | September 29, 2008Bayblab has a post up, Which organisms can feel pain?, on capsaicin. The post also points to an article about a man dying after eating habanero chili paste (though the article makes me suspect it was some allergy).
Related: 7 days of hot sauce.
razib | September 29, 2008Agnostic has three posts of interest over the past week: Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads, Response to criticism on the death of academic -isms and Graphs on the rise of scientific approaches to humanity.
razib | September 29, 2008Another paper with another technique to detect positive selection in the human genome, Identification of local selective sweeps in human populations since the exodus from Africa:
Selection on the human genome has been studied using comparative genomics and SNP architecture in the lineage leading to modern humans. In connection with the African exodus and colonization of other continents, human populations have adapted to a range of different environmental conditions. Using a new method that jointly analyses haplotype block length and allele frequency variation (F(ST)) within and between…
razib | September 28, 2008FuturePundit comments on the recent story about the shift away from the "Mediterranean diet" in the Mediterranean, specifically Greece. This is naturally leading to greater obesity. FuturePundit states:
Fresh produce and olive oil can't compete with hamburgers and fries. We need to either genetically engineer ourselves to dislike junk food or we need to genetically engineer our metabolisms to handle junk food without harmful effects.
I've been trying to avoid fried foods myself; but one thing that I have been noting is that when I walk by a restaurant where there's a lot of frying going on I…
razib | September 28, 2008When I look through the GSS I am struck, and sometimes disturbed, by the way attitudes toward science track various demographic slices. It is no surprise that Fundamentalist Christians tend to be suspicious of science, but blacks and the poor also tend to be much more hostile than whites and the middle and upper classes. So I was curious as to whether there was a systematic sex difference as there are on some issues (astrology) but not on others (abortion). What differences there are seem very modest. In fact, I am struck that the difference in daily familiarity with science does not…
razib | September 27, 2008I have turned on moderation for all comments. This means that you may have to wait a considerable amount of time before I publish them on the weblog (I will not be checking and approving on an iPhone for example). If your comment is not published within about 1 day then you may assume I have deleted it. Comments which add value, address the post and are delivered courteously will be published. Those which do not meet all three criteria will not be published. So if you are courteous but do not address the post you will not be allowed through the moderation queue. If you do not add value…
razib | September 27, 2008There is some buzz recently about a lawmaker in Louisiana, John LaBruzzo, who is proposing to pay poor women to be sterilized. His logic seems naively reminiscent of Thomas Malthus. It any case, I will admit that I'm generally skeptical of the efficacy of these sorts of programs. But I think government sponsored eugenical projects are I think besides the point and miss the bigger picture.
2 years ago I reviewed a paper by Armand Leroi, The future of neo-eugenics. 2 years is ages in genome-time; it keeps getting cheaper. Notwithstanding the current low returns on investment in the…
razib | September 27, 2008R. A. Fisher and the Adaptive Landscape:
...My own interpretation is that Fisher was sceptical about the value of the landscape concept as such, because both environmental and genetic conditions were too changeable for the metaphor of a 'landscape' to be useful. For Fisher the question of the 'shape' of the landscape therefore did not arise as a major issue, and he had no need to take a firm view on it. I discuss this interpretation below the fold.
Read the whole thing.
Related: R. A. Fisher and Epistasis, Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size, Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of…
razib | September 27, 2008Earlier I reviewed a new paper which made some species-wide grand claims about the nature of human demographic dynamics. Specifically, as it relates to the ratio and reproduction of males and females over time. But to me some of the less ambitious but more specific work in this area where demographics, anthropology and genetics intersect are nearly as interesting.
From example, look at this figure:
This distribution shows the confidence intervals estimated from genetic data in relation to sex-specific migration rates. Granted, as noted in the paper, Molecular analysis reveals tighter…
razib | September 26, 2008Of Names and Politics: The Palin Story (H/T Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science):
Characteristic blue state names: Angela, Catherine, Henry, Margaret, Mark, Patrick, Peter and Sophie.
Characteristic red state names: Addison, Ashlyn, Dakota, Gage, Peyton, Reagan, Rylee and Tanner.
I would like to see state-level data broken down on a finer grained level. After all, it could be that people in red states who give their children very conservative names are the most conservative, and inverted in the liberal states. But it's a really interesting observation. Remember that on…
razib | September 26, 2008I have an interview in the form of 10 questions with Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.
razib | September 26, 2008PLoS Genetis has a neat paper up which clarifies something which we kind of already knew, Sex-Biased Evolutionary Forces Shape Genomic Patterns of Human Diversity:
Like many primate species, the mating system of humans is considered to be moderately polygynous (i.e., males exhibit a higher variance in reproductive success than females). As a consequence, males are expected to have a lower effective population size (Ne) than females, and the proportion of neutral genetic variation on the X chromosome (relative to the autosomes) should be higher than expected under the assumption of strict…