In the HapMap database are genotypes for over 3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 270 people– 90 people of Western European descent, 90 people from Nigeria, 45 from Japan, and 45 from China. This is a spectacular resource for all sorts of population genetic, medical, and evolutionary studies. Yet SNPs aren’t the only way […]

Genetic Variability, Economic Behavior and the Formation of Social Norms: The Case of European Alcohol Consumption Alcohol consumption patterns vary across Europe. Northern Europeans frequently engage in excessive drinking in social situations (EDSS), behavior less common in southern Europe. We develop a model to explore whether these behavioral differences could be rooted in genetic variations […]

Open thread for links to science blogs of interest that aren’t well known yet. Your own blog is fine too. I’ll post the most interesting ones (to me) below the fold on an update to boost the pagerank for google. Some blogs: Phil DowneyBack ReactionAgricultural Biodiversity Update: Julian O’Dea.

Chris of Mixing Memory has a review of a paper which confirms the finding that East Asians think more holistically than Westerners. Specifically, East Asians often tend to look at context, while Westerners focus more specifically on the object of interest. In this case this model seemed to fall in light with the fact that […]

I think I once complained that there is no good collection of J. B. S. Haldane’s technical papers in genetics (as distinct from his popular articles). If I did, I retract the complaint, as I find that there is already a very good collection: Selected genetics papers of J. B. S. Haldane, edited with an […]

Some of you may know that I was not a self-aware atheist until the age of 8. Before that point I was nominally religious insofar as if someone asked I would have said I believed in God. If they asked what that meant I don’t know what I would have said, it wasn’t a question […]

What are the minimal set of values for a Western nation-state? Update: Aziz asks at Esmay’s.

Caught a little of Jonathan Moreno this morning. He’s got a book out called Mind Wars that considers the implications of neuroscience research being funded by DARPA. Here and in another article I read he focuses on modafinil (branded as ProVigil) for USAF pilots. It’s supposed to make you alert and cognitively unimpaired with less […]

John Hawks comments on a new study suggesting that the reason human beings have white sclerae is to facilitate detection of what another person is looking at (press story here). Though the article is not out yet, the gist is that humans pay more attention to another person’s eye movements, while other primates pay more […]

We’re reading a lot lately about how the producers of Borat set up ordinary citizens in order to mock them in the film and here we see how Sacha Baron-Cohen likes having the tables turned on him as his “cousin” Horat crashes the L.A. premiere and ambush interviews him. Sacha Baron-Cohen enters the clip at […]

I’m reading God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, and this on page 293 surprised me: …Neither genocide nor forced baptism was canonically legal. However, some argued that these regions had accepted Christianity from missionaries in the previous decades and so could be regarded as apostates, thus action against them was, as in the […]

Via AL Daily, I came across this somewhat bizarre essay on sociobiology in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s by a professor of psychology, and the premise, ostenibly, is how evolutionary psychology should be taught in our schools to keep it from corrupting our youth. His solution: Preferable, I submit, is to structure the teaching […]

3 years ago a study came out which suggested that the color classifications in Brazil don’t match that well to the ancestry as ascertained by loci which exhibit disjoint frequencies between Africans and Europeans. Yanni points me follow up study which agrees with the previous findings. You can read the pre-print here. Since 2003 a […]

New Scientist asks: What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? Geoffrey Miller answers: Applied evolutionary psychology should revolutionise life in three ways by 2056. First, Darwinian critiques of runaway consumer capitalism should undermine the social and sexual appeal of conspicuous consumption. Absurdly wasteful display will become less popular once people comprehend […]

Nick Wade finally throws together a piece on Neandertals. Update by agnostic: John Hawks also has a new FAQ on the implications and non-implications of the two new studies Wade reviews.

Of course you can look up what a synapse is and find a jillion explanations of dendrites, axons, and neurotransmission, but maybe you just wanted to casually check out the neanderthal news rather than actively seeking synapse education. So while you’re browsing the web-o-tubes, I will direct you to a page containing some nice movies […]

As promised, this week’s Science has an article from Eddy Rubin’s group reporting 65 kb of Neandertal DNA sequence. It’s not the million bases reported in Nature, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either. In terms of admixture, they find no evidence for it, though they can’t rule out low levels: [T]he maximum likelihood estimate […]

From Epigenetics News: Researchers at the Wadsworth Center, the public health laboratory of the New York Sate Department of Health, have shown it is technically feasible to detect DNA methylation using a simple breath test. Dr. Weiguo Han and Dr. Simon D. Spivack have tested seven patients by having them breath into a handheld device […]

The most recent issue of Current Opinion in Genetics and Development has the theme “Genomes and Evolution: From genomics and evolution to medicine”. There are a number of reviews of interest to readers here; check them out.

Two posts on my other blog, I try to show with pictures my own idea of the “3 models” of human origins, Multi-regionalism, Out of Africa, and the new model which Greg & John haven’t christened yet. In another post I try to offer up when I see as the essence of the difference between […]