Emma Lazarus’ famous lines “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” reflect in part the perception of some Americans of who the emigrants to the New World were. A friend of mine in 8th grade told me proudly that his ancestors (Scotch-Irish) were the “trash” of Europe, but they […]

I have posted about the collective of Muslim women in Tamil Nadu (southern India) organizing to build their own mosque before, but here is a story which updates us on the progress of the group (and there has been progress!). I am not one who expects that most of the world’s 1 billion Muslims are […]

Help me out here. A year or so ago the blogosphere was abuzz about a blog post some British tourist wrote in which he lamented the loss of native culture in Africa and India as modernity encroached. He felt his experience as a tourist was diminished because he couldn’t witness the ancient traditions of the […]

Sometimes, when the mood is just right, I reach for a little logically challenged writing to pick apart. This time I was in the mood for some post-modernist femininst gibberish. However, rather than savoring the insights I gleaned from reading Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism I thought I’d share her remarkable grasp of […]

My friend Manish has a new blog client debuting. It’s cheaper than City Desk :)

I’m sure that few would dispute the claim that our elite universities are bastions of liberalism. The faculty are well known for advocating public policy like integration, hiring quotas and all sorts of redistributive schemes. They tend to minimize criticisms, and the critics, of their schemes on the grounds that they are protecting class interests. […]

Evidence for Recent Positive Selection at the Human AIM1 Locus in a European Population. The authors took samples from whites from South Africa, Tamils and Sinhalese from Sri Lanka, Chinese from Guanghzhou, Ghanians from Accra and Xhosans from South Africa. They found that one particular allele on AIM1 locus seems to have been under strong […]

Brad DeLong might be an economist by day, but as nightfall approaches, he dons his stained lab coat to become: Ninja Geneticist! Enemies of the people, like the infamous Sully-Man, seldom prevail when confronted with Ninja Geneticist’s famous Super-Piercing Insight: “There is no age in which you can say what Andrew Sullivan wants to say: […]

A year or two ago I posted a lot on population topics such as fertility, life expectancy, and dependency ratios. For those who are interested in these subjects, I have put an update on dependency ratios on the politics board. Even if you don’t agree with what I say, I’ve given some useful statistical sources.

A few months ago the buzz around governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts as a candidate for 2008 began to build. You can read a long profile in The Atlantic from September, or this shorter more politically oriented one in The Weekly Standard dating from last June. Romney is in some ways a Republican “dream candidate.” […]

Dienekes has a report on some new studies of DNA in British skeletons dating from the first millennium A.D. I’m not sure what it all means, or how it relates to previous DNA studies, but I mention it in view of my previous post on Celts and Anglo-Saxons.

” “There’s just no correlation,” said Duke’s Wray, calling education and other environmental factors more important for intelligence than DNA anyway.” Rikurzhen: Source

There is a new BRCA1 haplotype with a geographical distribution reminiscent of that seen in microcephalin and ASPM: the new variant is about 30k years old and considerably more common outside of sub-Saharan Africa (~55%) than inside (~20%) . BRCA1 has also been evolving unusually rapidly in the hominid lineage (like ASPM and microcephalin). It […]

[Crossposted from GeneticFuture.org] Scientists at Newcastle University have been given approval for new research aimed at combating a particular set of inherited human diseases: those that are passed on via mitochondrial DNA instead of the nuclear DNA most folks are familiar with. The trick? They’ll be creating human embryos that are the product of two […]

Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving. The crest of articles already seems enormous on Google News as I write. The papers are in the current issue of Science. I gotta run, but I assume other people on this blog will have comments, so I figured I’d act as the thin edge of the wedge…. […]

Does anyone know, statistically speaking, what sort of product the public schools are producing… according to their own advocates… after excluding 8% of the student body from testing for various reasons? Here are the actual numbers. To some degree they speak for themselves, but here are the highlights. The top 10% of 4th grade students […]

Straight from Sweden to a computer near you: The Human Protein Atlas. For all of you people out there who are into proteins and stuff. The Human Protein Atlas

Sex-contingent face after-effects suggest distinct neural populations code male and female faces. Well, the link was titled “Human brain favors familiar faces.” Not ground-breaking research, but I’ve put it in the files.

The Scientist recently did an interview with Bruce Lahn. I got it out of the google cache (it is premium now) so I cut & pasted it below in case something happens to that…. Rebel with a Lab For Bruce Lahn, an interest in human genetics has roots in Chinese protests By Karen Hopkin Bruce […]

Genes in Conflict is a book coming out this November by Robert Trivers and Austin Burt. You can read a full text of a paper titled Theory of genomic imprinting conflict in social insects that Trivers and Burt coauthored, I suspect it gives one a flavor of what is to come. Classic “logic with fractions.”