razib | April 1, 2008A new paper in PLOS One, Ethnic Related Selection for an ADH Class I Variant within East Asia:
The alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH) are widely studied enzymes and the evolution of the mammalian gene cluster encoding these enzymes is also well studied. Previous studies have shown that the ADH1B*47His allele at one of the seven genes in humans is associated with a decrease in the risk of alcoholism and the core molecular region with this allele has been selected for in some East Asian populations. As the frequency of ADH1B*47His is highest in East Asia, and very low in most of the rest of the world…
razib | March 31, 2008Well, it turns out that there isn't a handy-dandy reference for the numbers for various religions in the past. Mark Kirkorian over at The Corner linked to my earlier post where I expressed skepticism about the contention by the Vatican demographer that a larger number of Muslims than Roman Catholics is new. Other people have contacted me as well. In any case, my hunch is that in fact Muslims were more numerous than Roman Catholics in the period between 950 and 1750, though the window could be shorter. My reasoning below the fold....
1) By about 1000 most of the core Islamic lands had…
razib | March 30, 2008The Islamic Republic of Harvard?:
But the decision put Harvard in the awkward position of having to arbitrate what constitutes legitimate religious practice. Marine claims there was a "moral and ethical responsibility" for the administration to act on this request, telling the Associated Press last month that "it's a pretty big breach of their moral and religious code ... and it's just not possible for them to be in a mixed environment." But according to Aljawhary, "It's not like we can't work out when men are around." In fact, "we were not 'demanding' women-only hours," Aljawhary said. If…
razib | March 30, 2008Dan MacArthur at Genetic Future has the details. Some of the stuff coming out of genomics reminds me a lot of what you see with social science; lots of sexy studies which turn out not to be as significant upon later analysis. Perhaps hypotheses are overrated?
razib | March 30, 2008Update: Follow up post with some numbers and logic laid out.
Muslims more numerous than Catholics: Vatican:
Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.
I'm willing to bet that Formenti is wrong. What do others think? Consider that Catholicism was the…
razib | March 30, 2008At my other weblog a long post on religion:
On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran's In God's We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm are operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First,…
razib | March 30, 2008I have a review copy of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence; but I'm not planning on reading it at this point. See John Hawks for why. Sometimes interdisciplinary work sheds new light on old questions because of the ability to think-outside-of-the-box. Sometimes not so much.
razib | March 28, 2008Just an FYI, but Kat photos will be delayed by a day or so this week. But if you are interested in katage, check out this week's South Park.
razib | March 28, 2008Michael C. Moynihan has a article up at Reason, In Defense of Geert Wilders:
In response to the controversy surrounding Fitna, Wilders' website was knocked offline by his American host, Network Solutions; he has been repeatedly denounced by the government of Jan Peter Balkenende as a liability to Dutch "interests"; the country's shriveled monarch, Queen Beatrix, admonished that free speech doesn't allow one the right to offend; and last week 1000 "anti-racism" activists protested Fitna in Amsterdam's city center. As one demonstrator told Reuters, "There should be restrictions on what Wilders…
razib | March 28, 2008Another paper is out which falls under the category of using genetics to understand human history; Analysis of Genomic Admixture in Uyghur and Its Implication in Mapping Strategy:
The Uyghur (UIG) population, settled in Xinjiang, China, is a population presenting a typical admixture of Eastern and Western anthropometric traits. We dissected its genomic structure at population level, individual level, and chromosome level by using 20,177 SNPs spanning nearly the entire chromosome 21. Our results showed that UIG was formed by two-way admixture, with 60% European ancestry and 40% East Asian…
razib | March 23, 2008Do minorities feel they have more in common with each other rather than whites? See Inductivist.
razib | March 21, 2008It was in the 7th century of the Christian Era many of the events which shaped the course of Islamic sectarianism occurred. The major one you are aware of is the Shia-Sunni split; the reality of the origins of this schism and the way in which in manifests today is more complex than the cartoon cut-out you are normally presented, but I want to focus on a group which is outside of the Shia-Sunni dichotomy, the Ibadi. The Ibadi are descended from one of the assorted Kharijite sects. The Kharijites were extremists in the early history of Islam, they rejected Ali because he offered to parlay…
razib | March 21, 2008New PLOS paper, Geographic Patterns of Genome Admixture in Latin American Mestizos. Nothing new, but pushing the ball forward....
A = autosomal
X = X chromosomal
Related: Genetics, the myth-buster? The case of Argentina.
razib | March 20, 2008How a Film Triggered a Global Panic:
But Balkenende is only doing what he believes is the best thing to do under the circumstances. Meanwhile, both the secretary general of NATO and Iran's deputy foreign minister have offered the Dutch advice on how to neutralize Wilders: by invoking Article 29 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
According to Article 29, individual rights must be limited when it comes to respect for the freedoms of others and where the public order makes this necessary. Ironically, the man who invoked this article is the deputy foreign minister of a country,…
razib | March 20, 2008Normally I don't blog politics since I don't know shit really. I generally subscribe to 2-3 political feeds which I regularly rotate to keep me "hooked in." Today I saw something so so shockingly stupid, or, brazenly mendacious, that I had to take note. Red Massachusetts?:
...And a Scots-Irish war veteran as the Republican nominee complicates predictions about whom Kennedy Country will support come November.
Most of the commentary seems fine, if disputable; I might not agree, but it's political pundrity, about as rooted in reality as sports predictions. James Kirchick graduated from Yale…
razib | March 20, 2008I just purchased a copy of A Biologist's Guide to Mathematical Modeling in Ecology and Evolution by Sarah P. Otto and Troy Day. My main rationale for getting this book was that I wanted a reference with the kitchen sink included, and, I was curious about mathematical ecology. This text leans a bit more toward ecology than I would have preferred, but it has a lot of good stuff and I'd recommend it if you are curious about the stiff formal side of biology. I liked the fact that there was a section on probability as well as linear algebra; Otto & Day only assume algebra and calculus, so…