Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 6/5/2016

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14726Reading Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. It’s a quick read. Not because it is not scholarly, it is scholarly. But unlike The Shape of Ancient Thought is relatively economical in its prose (to be fair, The Shape of Ancient Thought covers more ground). Also you probably benefit from reading Beckwith’s Warriors of the Cloisters and Starr’s Lost Enlightenment essential complements. The author is a scholar of Buddhism, so a Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road has a somewhat superficial treatment of the Muslim side from what I can tell. The most interesting stuff so far has been the tendency for Muslims to “Orientalize” the “Other”, in the exact same way that postcolonial theorists assume is some sui generis characteristic of Western civilization.

Just 5% of Indian marriages are inter-caste: survey. This only a little lower than the proportion of interracial marriages in the USA (though Hispanic to non-Hispanic does not get tabulated in this, and so is somewhat a slight underestimate).

If you spend time on the internet you can find “Game of Thrones Spoilers” websites. Some of them seem to have sources from extras or people working on set. This is what George R. R. Martin’s tardiness has wrought: he’s now being scooped by the HBO versions of Reality Steve. Go to Google News and type “Game of Thrones,” and you can find out a lot of what will probably happen in the next book.

I still have no idea how Martin is going to unwind his narrative in even two 1,500 page books. 90% chance if he finishes the series that there are more books to come, especially if you imagine the “last book” is split out into a part 1 and part 2.

Thinking about George R. R. Martin’s Weltanschauung I’ve always had a lot of issues with the role that prophecy plays in his universe. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. But now I have a theory: all prophecies in in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire come from one being, outside of the normal flow of time and space. That being is incarnated in the books as Bran.

Dogs may have been domesticated more than once. I believe this is wrong. Though the process we call domestication probably occurred several times in wolf lineages, almost all the ancestry of modern dogs descends from one single divergence event from a wolf lineage (now extinct). The issue is that the divergence is almost certainly considerably older that 15,000 years ago. The Amerindians had dogs. They separated from other human groups ~15,000 years ago. I’d take the origin of domestic dogs from wolves some time before the Last Glacial Maximum. If that is true, then there is probably a lot of old population structure that came down to the Holocene, some of which was erased. Similar to the story for humans.

I think we’re in a recession. The last time I wondered about this was in May of 2007.

For UCLA shooter Mainak Sarkar, sudden rage after years of intense academic studies. Well, I’m glad it’s not a white guy. Wouldn’t see the end of Twitter and Facebook posts from people on how white men are dangerous and stuff (my maternal grandfather’s family surname was Sarkar).

An addendum to my post from yesterday, It All Began at Eden. I have a tentative hunch that between-group pairwise Fst was far higher in the past than the present as a function of geography. Basically, cultural distinctions where harder and sharper, and trade and commerce less prominent, so there was less gene flow between neighboring groups. That to me is a possible reason that the ‘blow up’ effect of farmers in the ancient Near East may have resulted in very different streams hurtling toward different antipodes of Eurasia….

Screenshot 2016-06-04 22.40.51Comments at Eurogenes interesting. Hints of new ancient DNA papers. Will probably see some posters/presentations at ASHG in Vancouver this fall….

My wife saw my Edge on the table with its case off, and commented on how pretty it was. I only bring this up because I’ve been thinking about this recently. On the one hand I spend money on a higher end phone which has a sleek form factor, but I put it in a clunky case to prevent it from being damaged, and even then there are cracks here and there. I assume in the near future some phone maker will figure out a way to make the screen a little more robust?

The Evolution Meeting in Austin is literally a little more than a week away. I’m pretty excited. Yes, the $ won’t flow like at ASHG, but I’m genuinely curious about evolutionary biology beyond genetics.

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