January 5, 2009
The French are different: L’Affaire Madoff permlink
Category: Culture
Madoff Investor Awaits 'Imbecile' or 'Dupe' Verdict:
Patrick Littaye, co-founder of Access International Advisors, lost his savings after investing with Bernard Madoff, expects to lose his house in his hometown of Saint-Malo, France, and says he'll canvass investors over the next few weeks to see whether he has also lost his business.
Littaye, 69, invested all of his own money with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC last year, enticed by the firm's positive returns as other hedge funds slumped. His error was compounded because he borrowed money to increase the return on his investment, leaving him with $4 million in personal debts, Littaye said in telephone interviews from Jan. 2 through Jan. 4. He declined to specify the amount he had lost.
"I'm going to sell everything I have and start over," Littaye said from Brussels, adding that he planned to subsist on his French social security payments. "For Access, we'll go to our investors over the next couple of weeks and we'll see what they think of us."
And some candor:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 1:19 PM•4 Comments
Brown + Brown = Black & White permlink
Category: Genetics
A commenter below sayeth:
I remember reading somewhere that a child can't be darker than the darker of his two parents and that in such instances the biological father is not the putative father. I have no idea if that's true or not.
This seems like a common sense assertion, but as I noted this is not really strictly correct in an apodictic sense. That is, just because you have a very dark skinned parent and a light skinned parent, it does not necessarily follow that the range of the offspring shall be bounded by the values of the parents. To some extent I can see how this makes sense; I believe it piggy-backs upon the blending intuitions about genetics which emerge out of innate folk biology, when in the case of complexion its discrete character is now well attested. But, it also bespeaks a specific empirical naivete, as anyone who is of South Asian or Brazilian background might attest to cases where offspring may express phenotypes outside of the ranges of both their parents. Consider height, one certainly knows cases where parents have offspring outside of the ranges of the heights of the parents! But the point I'm trying to make can be illustrated by concretely graphically.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 1:33 AM•5 Comments
January 2, 2009
Diamonds, the Younger Dryas & extinctions permlink
Category: Ecology
Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer:
We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this boundary layer but not above or below that interval. Cubic diamonds form under high temperature-pressure regimes, and n-diamonds also require extraordinary conditions, well outside the range of Earth's typical surficial processes but common to cosmic impacts. N-diamond concentrations range from 10 to 3700 parts per billion by weight, comparable to amounts found in known impact layers. These diamonds provide strong evidence for Earth's collision with a rare swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comets at the onset of the Younger Dryas cool interval, producing multiple airbursts and possible surface impacts, with severe repercussions for plants, animals, and humans in North America.
A few days ago I expressed the opinion that climate change alone explanations are a bit suspicious to me. This particular hypothesis has a bit of a skyhook feel to me. The scenario is not logically impossible, and it could be sufficient as a causal factor, but the reasons for megafaunal extinctions have to consider the broader context of separate events over long periods of time correlated with the arrival of humans. Though climate change is sufficient, I would offer that the arrival of modern humans was necessary.
Posted by Razib at 11:22 PM•6 Comments
Twins of different races, 2009 permlink
Category: Genetics
Every now and then British newspapers publish the story of twins born to an interracial couple who seem to resemble only one of the races of their parents. The irony being that siblings may appear to be of different populations. I've commented on several of these stories before. Now we have another one to ring in the new year, Mixed-race couple give birth to black and white twins - for the second time:
Seven years after having one black twin and one white twin, the 27-year-old mother has given birth to a second set of twins with different coloured skin at odds of one in 500,000.
When the couple's first daughters arrived in 2001, they were astonished to see that Lauren had her mother's blue eyes and red hair, while her twin Hayleigh had dark skin and hair, like her father, Dean.
So when Miss Spooner, from Fleet, in Hampshire, found out she was pregnant again this year, her friends and family joked that they ought to take a bet out on the same thing happening again.
Doctors who delivered the sisters early, because of fears for their health, were relieved to find them well, but also amazed that the second set of twin girls were born with different skin tones.
As her parents discovered when the girls were laid side by side in the hospital cot, Miya resembles her father and Leah has inherited her mother's looks.
It is rare enough for two sets of twins to be born to the same parents, but the chances of them inheriting different skin and hair colour from their mother and father are just two in a million.
I would take issue with several points in the article:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 1:53 AM•9 Comments
December 31, 2008
Atheists are losers? permlink
Category: Culture
So implies The Audacious Epigone:
Mormons are the least likely of the 19 denominations to live alone, but I suspect among the married, they are among the most likely to have a single breadwinner household.
Atheists and agnostics, by contrast, come in at the bottom. The low rates of multiple person households is part of the explanation, but the high number of lone wolves among their ranks illustrates their social marginality in another way relative to the cognitive endowments they enjoy. This does little to dispel stereotype I hold of atheists as cynical, single white guys who live in apartments downtown, work at used record stores, love George Carlin, and watch Adult Swim.
Also see Religion, Self-Regulation, and Self-Control: Associations, Explanations,
and Implications.
Posted by Razib at 8:07 PM•17 Comments
Culture Dish & Henrietta Lacks permlink
Category: Genetics
ScienceBlogs has a new contributor, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The title is in part a reference to her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Looks interesting. If Henrietta Lacks doesn't ring a bell, look her up, it's rather freaky....
Posted by Razib at 4:11 PM•0 Comments
America, the way we are permlink
Category: History
Most Americans are not aware that the debtor status of our nation is not particularly novel; we have been a debtor nation for most of our history. This fact serves as one of the major linchipins in Eric Rauchway's Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, a economic historical look at how globalization made America then, and is making it now. One of the major points that Rauchway attempts to hammer home is that American exceptionalism is posterior to the conditions which framed the republic, it is not the cause of the peculiarities of the American condition.
One of the major ways in which America is exceptional is its relatively small public sector. In other words, our state doesn't do nearly as much as is the norm among wealthy countries. Rauchway shows that in 1910 there is a close linear relationship between per capita production and the amount spent by the state per capital. The United States stood outside of this trendline, a wealthy nation which spent relatively little in public monies. And so it still is, more or less.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 1:58 PM•5 Comments
December 30, 2008
Space, the forgotten frontier? permlink
Category: Science
I'm old enough to have very faint memories of the very first shuttle missions, though I do not recall the last moon landings. I recently heard a science fiction writer observe that when he was a child the idea of a moon landing was so futuristic. Then it happened...and we stopped going. It's been over 30 years since humans set foot on the moon.
Granted, there's been a lot that's happened since then. Your rescale your awe meter, so the plethora of Mars landings and detailed exploration of the outer planets via the Galileo and Cassini missions don't register in the same way. Various technologies mean that the increase in knowledge is accelerating, but, the rate of acceleration itself is perhaps not increasing. With the completion of the Human Genome, and the beckoning age of applied genomics, the perpetual promise of a manned Mars mission seems to pale in comparison. Perhaps there are simply constraints of human engineering when it comes to our exploration of space, in particular manned space flight. We are biological creatures, evolved for this earth.
In any case, The New York Times has an interesting piece up, The Fight Over NASA's Future. It is mostly about the next generation of vehicles which presumably will take us back to the moon. Color me disappointed that the goal is to do what we've done before, just better.
Posted by Razib at 1:56 AM•8 Comments
Personalized medicine, the long introduction.... permlink
Category: Science
Patient's DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Drugs:
The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested to narrow use of the drugs, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 a month.
To some extent this sort of thing is a gimme; intelligent & proactive patients already "help" their medical professionals by channeling them appropriately in terms of decisions because with the veritable tsunami of data no human can truly keep up. One aspect of personalized medicine is population level data. To give an example for myself, my doctor told me that I wasn't overweight. Well, actually for my population (South Asian) it seems rather clear that heuristics based on BMI normed to European Americans underestimates the risks of conditions heightened at particular weight thresholds (e.g., Type II Diabetes). Combined with family information I'm always trying to keep my BMI on the low end of normal, because there's normal for one population, and normal for another.
Personalized medicine takes it to the next level. The example above is an obvious one, but what about drug combinations where the differences are on the margins of effect? If you have risks for illnesses a sum of marginal effects is not trivial, but it is probably not realistic to assume that your personal physician will be aware of all these "moving parts." Welcome to the world where everyone should have a basic familiar with probability and cost vs. benefit, at least if they want to get the maximum bang from the medicinal buck.
Posted by Razib at 12:06 AM•3 Comments
December 29, 2008
Neandertals on a stick permlink
Category: Evolution
Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion:
Despite a long history of investigation, considerable debate revolves around whether Neanderthals became extinct because of climate change or competition with anatomically modern humans (AMH).
...
We apply a new methodology integrating archaeological and chronological data with high-resolution paleoclimatic simulations to define eco-cultural niches associated with Neanderthal and AMH adaptive systems during alternating cold and mild phases of Marine Isotope Stage 3. Our results indicate that Neanderthals and AMH exploited similar niches, and may have continued to do so in the absence of contact.
...
The southerly contraction of Neanderthal range in southwestern Europe during Greenland Interstadial 8 was not due to climate change or a change in adaptation, but rather concurrent AMH [anatomically modern human] geographic expansion appears to have produced competition that led to Neanderthal extinction.
The main problem I've always had with "the climate did it!" explanations for megafaunal extinctions is that it isn't as if the climate didn't vary quite a bit across the Pleistocene. For example, the warmest phase of the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago saw forests in what is today tundra in northern Norway. So there was a different parameter on the scene more recently which did the big wildlife, including Neandertals. in....
More readable ScienceDaily summary....
Posted by Razib at 2:04 PM•2 Comments
Episcopalians vs. Jews permlink
Category: Culture
A few days ago the Audacious Epigone pointed out that Episcopalians are in the same neighborhood as Jews in the United States on intelligence tests; i.e., on the order of a bit more than 2/3 of a standard deviation above the norm. The recent paper on religion & IQ confirmed these findings. One of the peculiarities of American Jews is how liberal they are; the old saying was that they "live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans." With the rise of the Religious Right Episcopalians are actually starting to vote more like Jews; the Pew Religious Survey suggests that 49% are now Democrats or Democrat leaning, while 42% are Republicans or Republican leaning. But in any case, I was curious, how different are Jews and Episcopalians? And, how do both these groups relate to white Protestants as a whole, who I tend to think are the archetypical "control" in the American context. So I you probably know what I did next: looked in the GSS. If you click to read the whole post, a whole lot of charts....
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 2:55 AM•18 Comments
December 28, 2008
Origins of the Gagauz people - a Turkish dynamic permlink
Category: Genetics
Dienekes points me to a new paper, Searching for the origin of Gagauzes: Inferences from Y-chromosome analysis:
The Gagauzes are a small Turkish-speaking ethnic group living mostly in southern Moldova and northeastern Bulgaria. The origin of the Gagauzes is obscure. They may be descendants of the Turkic nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes, as suggested by the "Steppe" hypothesis, or have a complex Anatolian-steppe origin, as postulated by the "Seljuk" or "Anatolian" hypothesis. To distinguish these hypotheses, a sample of 89 Y-chromosomes representing two Gagauz populations from the Republic of Moldova was analyzed for 28 binary and seven STR polymorphisms. In the gene pool of the Gagauzes a total of 15 Y-haplogroups were identified...The present Gagauz populations were compared with other Balkan, Anatolian, and Central Asian populations by means of genetic distances, nonmetric multidimentional scaling and analyses of molecular variance. The analyses showed that Gagauzes belong to the Balkan populations, suggesting that the Gagauz language represents a case of language replacement in southeastern Europe. Interestingly, the detailed study of microsatellite haplotypes revealed some sharing between the Gagauz and Turkish lineages, providing some support of the hypothesis of the "Seljuk origin" of the Gagauzes. The faster evolving microsatellite loci showed that the two Gagauz samples investigated do not represent a homogeneous group. This finding matches the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Gagauzes well, suggesting a crucial role of social factors in shaping the Gagauz Y-chromosome pool and possibly also of effects of genetic drift.
The Turkic peoples have their origins in the Trans-Siberian regions. Until the rise of Genghis Khan the western half of what is today Mongolia was dominated by Turks. Though the Turks of Turkey itself might resemble Europeans both physically and genetically, Turkic populations in Xinjiang and Central Asia exhibit a much stronger exterior affinity to East Asians. The Uyghurs are in fact nearly prefect hybrids insofar as their genetic background is equally balanced between alleles which have presumed origins in western Eurasia and eastern Eurasia. Various genetic and historical data suggest that the original nature of the Turkic speaking peoples in Central Asia was similar to that of eastern, not western, Eurasians.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 5:31 PM•2 Comments
December 24, 2008
Cousin marriage should not be banned (?) permlink
Category: Genetics
PLOS has a think piece up, "It's Ok, We're Not Cousins by Blood": The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective, which comes out against the laws in the United States which ban the marriage of cousins:
It is obviously illogical to condemn eugenics and at the same time favor laws that prevent cousins from marrying. But we do not aim to indict these laws on the grounds that they constitute eugenics. That would assume what needs to be proved - that all forms of eugenics are necessarily bad. In our view, cousin marriage laws should be judged on their merits. But from that standpoint as well, they seem ill-advised. These laws reflect once-prevailing prejudices about immigrants and the rural poor and oversimplified views of heredity, and they are inconsistent with our acceptance of reproductive behaviors that are much riskier to offspring. They should be repealed, not because their intent was eugenic, but because neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible."
Here's a map which shows the time period when these laws were enacted:
Here are the numbers for the increased risk of congenital diseases for progeny of first cousin marriages:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 5:20 PM•15 Comments
December 23, 2008
Human evolutionary genetics is too sexy... permlink
Category: Genetics
Say you have a abstruse paper such as, Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa:
Comparisons of chromosome X and the autosomes can illuminate differences in the histories of males and females as well as shed light on the forces of natural selection. We compared the patterns of variation in these parts of the genome using two datasets that we assembled for this study that are both genomic in scale. Three independent analyses show that around the time of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, chromosome X experienced much more genetic drift than is expected from the pattern on the autosomes. This is not predicted by known episodes of demographic history, and we found no similar patterns associated with the dispersals into East Asia and Europe. We conclude that a sex-biased process that reduced the female effective population size, or an episode of natural selection unusually affecting chromosome X, was associated with the founding of non-African populations.
Over at Gene Expression Classic p-ter expresses his befuddlement:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 12:04 AM•3 Comments
December 22, 2008
Thick-waisted women of the world take heart! permlink
Category: Evolution
Evolutionary curveball for curvy?:
While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker waists.
That's because the same hormones that increase fat around the waist can also make women stronger, more assertive, and more resistant to stress, according to a new study published in the December issue of Current Anthropology.
Given those findings, it makes sense that the slim-waisted body has not evolved to become the universal norm, said the study's author, Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah.
Her study takes aim at a theory popular in evolutionary psychology and medicine: that men universally prefer women with narrow waists and larger hips because their higher levels of estrogen make them more likely to conceive a child, and less vulnerable to chronic diseases. These preferences, the theory goes, have defined women's ideal body shape over time.
One of the most tiresome aspects of evolutionary psychology is the paradigmatic straitjacket which many of the practitioners operate under; the only type of evolution that exists is unidirectional. Deviations from expectation are explained away. The importance of human universals mean that variation can not exist. These sorts of evolutionary psychologists resemble the caricature of the economist who holds to rational choice so that behavior which deviates from the model is explained by ad hoc contingencies. The most popular current expositor of this view of evolutionary psychology is Satoshi Kanazawa, who is also not a big fan of statistics. In any case, the paper will come out in Current Anthropology, but isn't on the website, but there is a press release:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 9:28 PM•6 Comments
Crime & punishment & Madoff permlink
Category: Psychology
Even Bernard Madoff Doesn't Deserve This:
Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his company's shareholders. Sure, these men destroyed enormous shareholder value, just as the targets of today's criminal cases allegedly did. But it's hard to contend that they deserved prison terms longer than the average sentence for murder (22 years), kidnapping (14) and sexual abuse (eight)."
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 12:10 AM•12 Comments
