Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is a professor of genetics at Stanford University. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza’s magnum opus The History and Geography of Human Genes is a landmark of human historical population genetics, while his text coauthored with Walter F. Bodmer, The Genetics of Human Populations, is one of the most thorough introductions to the field of […]

The most recent issue of the Lancet has an interesting case study: a child overdosing on morphine acquired through the breast milk of her mother (who was taking codeine, a chemical precursor to morphine). Normally, codeine is considered safe for nursing mothers. What happened here? If turns out that newborns have trouble metabolizing morphine, but […]

The cute little girl to the left has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. She needs a bone marrow donor. She’s brown (obviously). I know I have many brown readers, some of you live near donor drive locations. If you read this blog, you also know that for those of us from small racial minorities our genetic distinctiveness […]

I just saw a re-run of a Charlie Rose roundtable discussion with EO Wilson and James Watson from last year. The free video is here; check out the bit starting around 44.30 for their comments on recent human evolution, natural human variation, and where biology (especially genetics) is headed. According to them, this is the […]

A few months ago Agnostic alerted us to an issue of PLoS Medicine devoted to skeptical appraisal of “disease mongering.” In this issue the psychiatrist David Healy claimed that the evidence supporting the efficacy of medications commonly prescribed for the prophylactic treatment of bipolar disorder is either weak or nil. As bipolar disorder is the […]

There is an interesting article concerning the Official Poverty Rate in the latest issue of Policy Review. The thrust is that in the past 3 decades the OPR shows stagnation while all sorts of other indicators of the well-being of the lowest income portion of Americans are rising. How come? The OPR is based on […]

Steve Hsu pointed me to this article The Quintessential Quant. The article highlights the standard, IIT, MIT, etc && physics, math, etc. need only apply. On the fly C++ under pressure, etc. But here is the money shot: A typical offer, say sources, starts with a base salary of around $250,000, plus a guaranteed annual […]

Hawks on Hobbits. ‘nuf said.

Perhaps because the topic is so removed from the orthodoxies of the day, this article on Pakistani Americans isn’t totally idiotic. Points to note…. Fewer than 0.1% of Americans are ethnically Pakistani. 1.3% of Britons are ethnically Pakistani. 50% of Muslims in the UK are Pakistani. Assuming a low bound of 1 million American Muslims, […]

Over at my other weblog I threw up a 10 assertions about evolution post modeled on my post about 10 words about evolution. Other responses: RPMRobert SkipperAfarensisJohn WilkinsJohn Hawks I invite readers to try their hand in the comment box.

Mendel’s Garden #4 is up.

After a month of reading it on and off I finally finished Robert Pape’s Dying to Win. This is an excellent companion to Marc Sagemen’s Understanding Terror Networks. While Sagemen focuses on what may loosely be termed the “Salafist terror international,” Pape examines the phenomenon of suicide terrorism in a cross-cultural context. I am going […]

Props to Svoboda for most redonkulous imaging.

I started writing a summary of this interesting article on pig evolution, but hell, it’s in PLoS, so they’ve already done the work for me. Here’s the synopsis: Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is unique to mammals. It is rich in mitochondria and generates heat to maintain body temperature during cold stress, referred to as nonshivering […]

Too many to describe each of them: “Genome-wide genetic association of complex traits in heterogeneous stock mice” Nature Genetics 38, 879 – 887 (2006) — News and Views — Interesting technique to handle correlation structure in the QTLs. They were able to account for ~75% of the additive variance while most QTLs found were in […]

You’ll want to read this: Daniel Garrigan and Michael F. Hammer “Reconstructing human origins in the genomic era” Nature Reviews Genetics 7, 669-680 (September 2006) Abstract: Analyses of recently acquired genomic sequence data are leading to important insights into the early evolution of anatomically modern humans, as well as into the more recent demographic processes […]

Wendy Johnson and Thomas Bouchard are tearing up the “Articles in Press” section of Intelligence. Their latest work expands on their recent paper on sex differences in mental abilities described by Darth Quixote. The follow-up, “Sex differences in mental ability: A proposed means to link them to brain structure and function”, argues that the pattern […]

Over in The Corner today Heather Mac Donald stated: The Bible is as open-ended a text as any other. Ever since Medieval theologians tried to contain Biblical interpretation through hermeneutics, it has evaded all efforts to rein it in. Long time readers of this blog will know that I tend to accept this as a […]

The model is: white man = omnipotent oppressor, non-white man = helpless victim. The New York Times headline is: Minority Students Decline in Top New York Schools. The graphic? Here: Is something off with this graphic in relation to the headline, or what? Ah, click the link in the story, and you see this: What […]

I have post on my other weblog where I follow the discussion about God & conservatism over in The Corner and offer my own commentary.