razib | May 29, 2008I'm getting into an exchange with Luis below about the rise of European domination. Unfortunately with historical questions I can't "prove" my case as in mathematics, nor can I cite an empirical result that is extremely generalizable as in much of the natural sciences. I'm trying to describe a distribution of facts over time and space, and I can't really make my own position clear without plugging into Luis' mind all my priors (the inverse might apply from Luis' perspective). That takes time and is basically impossible in blog-format, though I've had better success I think in face-to-face…
razib | May 29, 2008Just got a copy of Short Guide to the Human Genome, put out by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It's a fun little review; appropriate for browsing during your "in-between" time. As the title emphasizes this guide is characterized by extreme brevity, under 200 pages. Nevertheless it attempts a survey of the major results which have come to light over the past decade in human genomics. This isn't really a primer, it assumes you know what UTR stands for and why spliceosomes are important. In other words, return on investment is probably only there if you are reasonably familiar with the basics…
razib | May 28, 2008A good critique of my posts which explored the correlates of Biblical literacy. It isn't surprising that some transformations make the relationship clearer....
razib | May 28, 2008Five years ago Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's International Edition editor, splashed onto the public intellectual scene with The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. It's somewhat heterodox, at least for the mainstream, observation that liberal democracy is more than simple majoritarianism, earned him some notoriety. Enough so that he could receive a fawning profile in New York Magazine. But while five years ago Fareed promoted some rather academically well known but transgressive ideas about the necessity for institutional, economic and cultural supports for a…
razib | May 27, 2008My two posts on religion & IQ/education are getting a lot of attention. I didn't spend more than 30 minutes on both entries combined, so the attention to unit time invested ratio is rather out of wack. Doing some digging it's funny how interested people are in this topic, while at the same time being totally disinclined to do their own leg work. Multiple message boards have also pointed to another similar survey which shows the relationship between religiosity and IQs in international comparisons. You might be amused to find out that I wrote that up in 30 minutes 5 years ago as a joke…
razib | May 27, 2008Current Vitamin D Recommendations Fraction Of Safe, Perhaps Essential Levels For Children:
The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D for children is 200 International Units (IUs), but new research reveals that children may need and can safely take ten-times that amount. According to new research this order-of-magnitude increase could improve the bone health of children worldwide and may have other long-term health benefits.
There are two counterposing factors for me when processing these sorts of medical findings. First, I am cautious about overreacting based on new medical…
razib | May 26, 2008A few weeks ago I mentioned that there is some debate as to the taxonomy of the Polar Bear; specifically, as to whether it was simply a clade of the Brown Bear species. Interesting, I note that today a Polar Bear-Grizzly hybrid was shot in Canada:
There have long been stories of oddly coloured bears living in regions where the two territories overlap.
But until now, grizzly-polar hybrids, dubbed "grolar bears" or "pizzlies", have been found only in zoos.
The hybrid bear was shot last month by an American big game hunter on Banks Island, Northwest Territories, Canada.
His guide, Roger Kuptana…
razib | May 26, 2008The post below where I show that belief in the literal truth of the Biblical tends to correlate well with IQ scores from the General Social Survey on a denominational scale is getting a lot of response; enough of it is of low quality that I'll close the comment thread soon enough. As I observed the "truth" which I had extracted out of the data is rather banal; I doubt it surprised anyone that a "fundamentalist" attitude toward religious scripture tends to be associated with low cognitive ability. The correlation here is probably not one of simple causality in either direction. It seems the…
razib | May 25, 2008Update II: Many links into this entry are labeling this a "study." It wasn't a study, I literally took 10 minutes before I went to sleep to collect the data and produce the chart. The data on literal interpretation of the Bible is from a book which you can read via Google. The IQ scores are from the General Social Survey as reported by The Inductivist. I already knew that this sort of correlation existed, it's pretty unsurprising as I noted. The same pattern shows up if you use post-graduate eduation as the dependent variable. And I spot checked SAT scores by denomination, and again…
razib | May 25, 2008As you probably know, the Phoenix has landed on Mars. No problems so far. I assume the best place to track the data as it comes back is the NASA mission page for Phoenix. Here are the mission goals:
--Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
--Characterize the Climate of Mars
--Characterize the Geology of Mars
--Prepare for Human Exploration
razib | May 23, 2008One of the truisms of American politics for the past generation has been the "gender gap" whereby women tend to lean toward the Democrats and men toward the Republicans. This gap has become part of the background assumptions of American political commentary to the point that right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter has proposed restricting the vote to men. Though Coulter's proposal is obviously ludicrous, there isn't that much objection to the assumption she makes that women support the Left party and men the Right. That's been empirically a valid judgment in the United States for the past…
razib | May 22, 2008A few years ago a poll came out, Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll. My title is a bit misleading insofar as the survey compared several European countries as well as the United States. Below the fold I've placed a few of the tables which I think might surprise, or not, depending on where you stand. One thing I will observe is that despite the substantive differences which lay at the heart of the rivalry between France and the United States, there are also similarities between these two "universal nations" that lead to…
razib | May 21, 2008One of the main facts about American life is hypodescent, "the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent." Barack Obama & the Kenyan politician Raila Odinga (who, probably falsely, claims to be Obama's first cousin) are both "black," despite the fact that when compared to each other Obama's substantial European ancestry is rather clear. I recall years ago watching the Oprah Winfrey television show where they were discussing the issue of self-hatred with a young black woman who was…
razib | May 20, 2008Notes on Sewall Wright: Wright's F-statistics:
A preliminary question is one of terminology. What, if anything, does the letter 'F' stand for? One plausible answer is that it stands for 'fixation', since among other things the F-statistics can be used to measure the rate at which alleles tend to be 'fixed'. Wright himself in his later writings sometimes refers to F as an 'index of fixation'.
Believe it or not, Fst is one of thos population genetic concepts you've almost certainly encountered no matter your background.
Related: On Reading Wright, Notes on Sewall Wright: Path Analysis and…
razib | May 20, 2008Noam Scheiber points to working paper, SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS IN ESTIMATED SUPPORT FOR A BLACK PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, which attempts to figure out the Bradley Effect by guaging avowed vs. implied support. Mark Blumenthal of Myster Pollster has an interview where one of the authors explains the methodology and touches upon some confusing issues....
To a great extent I think this is the sort of thing which should give us caution about overreading from social science; you might not be smoking out the dynamics which you think you are smoking out. I've put the results from the most relevant…
razib | May 19, 2008A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Alleles Associated with Hair Color and Skin Pigmentation:
It has been a longstanding hypothesis that human pigmentation is tightly regulated by genetic variation. However, very few genes have been identified that contain common genetic variants associated with human pigmentation. We scanned the genome for genetic variants associated with natural hair color and other pigmentary characteristics in a multi-stage study of more than 10,000 men and women of European ancestry from the United States and Australia. We identified IRF4 and SLC24A4 as loci…
razib | May 19, 2008Will Saletan makes an analogy between cousin marriage and delayed (i.e., 40something) motherhood:
If Bittles' numbers are correct, they substantiate a somewhat embarrassing point made by defenders of cousin marriage. Embarrassing, that is, to all of us good Western folk who turn up our noses at the practice. The British Down's Syndrome Association has posted a chart showing the risk of producing a baby with the syndrome at various maternal ages. From age 20 to age 31, the risk doubles. From 31 to 35, it doubles again. From 35 to 38, it doubles again. From 38 to 41, it more than doubles again…