Interesting use of genetics to elucidate ancient population structure: mtDNA analysis of human remains from an early Danish Christian cemetery: One of Denmark’s earliest Christian cemeteries is Kongemarken, dating to around AD 1000-1250…A surprising amount of haplogroup diversity was observed (Area 1: 1 U7 (male), 1 H, 1 I, 1 J, and 1 T2; Area […]

The drug, which had no effect on a white control group, but reduced heart failure deaths by 43 percent for an African-American control group, was approved by the F.D.A. as a drug for African-Americans yesterday. The New York Times reports that there was some controversy, but it appeared to be mostly between those who cared […]

ITAA Diversity Study: Numbers of Women, Minorities in Tech Too Low. The IT work force needs to get more diverse! Women are only 32.4%, Hispanics only 6.4%. Blacks are underrepresented by 22.4% and whites by 6.6%! Asians continue to be twice as overrepresented in the IT workforce as in the general population, so we know […]

Tom Cruise, who according to the IMDB dropped out of high school, gave what has to rank as one of the most assinine interviews on the Today show, well, today (6/24/2005). I’ll let you read it for yourself to get the full flavor, but here is a highlight: CRUISE: No, you see. Here’s the problem. […]

Fascinating article in The Christian Science Monitor on the state of stem cell research in the Muslim world. This is the most surprising part for me: Egypt will not be the first predominantly Muslim country to conduct stem-cell research. Iranian scientists developed human embryonic stem-cell lines in 2003 with the approval of Ayatollah Seyed Ali […]

Language can be a bitch. I’m not one who believes that “thought is created by language,” there is probably something like mentalese since people can actually ask the question whether language totally bounds thought. But language is a clunker sometimes, and the tendency to talk in terms of a few types, thrown across the cognitive […]

On page 73 of Speciation the authors offer: …Wilson et al. are probably correct in their main conclusion: although some distantly related species of birds can produce viable hybrids despite more than 15 millions of divergence (Price and Bouvier 2002), it is absurd to suppose that equally old mammalian species (e.g., humans vs. gibbons), could […]

Sometimes peculiar intersections can be interesting. Here are the American Conservative Union ratings of the 12 Republicans who voted against H J RES 10 (“Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States authorizing the Congress to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States”): Name Lifetime score Shadegg 98 Flake […]

For any who are interested in Intelligence/g research, I highly recommend looking at Dr. Linda Gottfredson’s web site. She has (almost) her entire collected works freely available to the public, even the to-be-published stuff. Of particular note are the following (recent) manuscripts: 1. Gottfredson, L. S. (in press). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within […]

So goes a line in David Plotz’s new tome The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, and, curiously, that is what the reader (at least this one) comes away feeling after completing the book: a lot of effort exerted, but with a highly disappointing result. I picked up the book […]

By now everyone has read the article that the heritability (definition 2) of “political ideology” is ~0.5, but the heritability of political party is far lower. There’s a lot of chew on here (unfortunately The American Political Science Review doesn’t have this paper online), but note that this similar to what Tom Bouchard found out […]

Not any great surprise, a particular gene expression profile1 correlates strongly with late in life fecundity. Interestingly the author studied Ashkenazi Jews and the genes in question are associated with apoptosis (cell death) and DNA repair mechanisms. He has found a similar profile among Bedouin women who conceived late in life. Surely there are some […]

This article in The New York Times about kids who are “picky eaters” is interesting and makes a tacit nod to evolutionary thinking by offering the option that picky eating might have been optimal in the EEA (that is, if you ain’t a picky eater you will put bizarro stuff into your mouth). But, the […]

Check out the Maria Sharapova slideshow over at SI. Unless you are a Lolita fan click quickly through #3. Posted by razib at 04:15 PM

Those of you with a biological education know well the λ phage and its host E. coli and the various life-history pathways that characterize interaction between the two.1 So, I was surprised to see this article in PLOS today, Population Fitness and the Regulation of Escherichia coli Genes by Bacterial Viruses (those of you more […]

Someone just forwarded me this email from Howard Metzenberg: Razib: You edited out the many of the comments in the Bad Science thread, including the one in which Henry says “for chris___ Gregory, stop being so arrogant.” It appears to me that you are not really playing the role of a neutral moderator of these […]

Variation is one outcome of sexual reproduction. Not only does recombination usually disrupt linkage disequilibrium in a population over time, but the law of segregation means that siblings will often receive different alleles from the same parent.1 As an illustration, click here. Sometimes nature just puts all its eggs in one basket…. 1 – If […]

Of late I have expressed some reservations about what I term Evolutionary Psychology™, the model proposed by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, which implies certain theoretical commitments that many sympathetic to a synthetic treatment of human nature that includes biological parameters dissent from. Nevertheless, it is important to understand Tooby and Cosmides’ model because it […]

British researchers are reporting success creating human primordial germ cells (the precursors of egg and sperm) from embryonic stem cells. Reuters has the story: “We’ve shown we can generate primordial germ cells. These are the cells that go on to form either the sperm or the egg depending on the gender of the individual,” said […]

While the New York Times has been effectively race-realist for a while now, the domino-effect may be under way. Today Canada’s own New York Times, the Globe and Mail, offered a five-inch headline: ‘Race’, and this article on The New Science of Race. The catalyst is once again Greg and Henry’s paper but it also […]