It seems that “pathological” left-handedness and pedophilia might share a common origin in some early developmental disturbance(s), possibly a brain infection (or group of infections). I first read about the potential fitness costs that left-handers suffer in a passing remark of Harpending & Cochran (2006), although when I searched PubMed for “left-handed” and “longevity,” I […]

Recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been making the rounds on the talk shows because of a new book. A few weeks ago she was on a Boston radio show, and you can listen to the whole interview, but, I suggest you fast forward to 24:30 and listen to the female Muslim caller. Listen to her […]

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Nature Biotechnology has a little news article profiling some of the companies driving the cost of sequencing down. There’s ambition in spades: Companies have also started to win bids under the NHGRI $1,000 genome program. Unlike the $100,000 technologies, which focus on refining and improving existing methods, the conception of a $1,000 genome requires an […]

Ever since the presence of fetal DNA in maternal plasma was demonstrated a decade ago, a number of teams have been searching for the best way to put this information into practice, so far with fairly disappointing results. The problem, of course, is that maternal DNA is also present in maternal plasma, and given that […]

A few months ago a friend made an offhand comment about how they were on the side of the “Andalusian model.” His assumption was that Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, was far superior in its method of dealing with religious pluralism than Christian Spain. I’ve read a fair amount of popular & scholarly work on this period […]

Over at my other blog I have three posts on Etruscans. Dienekes has been covering the topic closely as expected. The key here is that genetics seems to have answered the age old question of where the Etruscan people, one of the most important influences upon ancient Rome, came from. The Etruscans seem to have […]

The Leutgebs and the Mosers have brought us another interesting datapoint regarding how the hippocampus segregates or lumps the representation of spatial environmens. They recorded from the CA3 and dentate gyrus subregions of the hippocampus while they moved rats between a series of ‘morphed’ environments, moving gradually from a circular to a square arena. The […]

Do you remember the age before polling in politics? I don’t. Today we bemoan the emphasis on polls and idealize the past, before candidates knew in scientific and statistically significant detail the temperature of the democratic water. But no one is going to ban polls in the near future, for every person who complains about […]

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan have been debating religion. Here’s an interesting excerpt from Sullivan’s Feb 14 entry: …That is because I have never met a human being or a human mind that is “contingency-free”, and never will. No child grows up without the contingent facts of their family, place, genes, and any number of […]

Keeping with the diabetes theme, the first genome-wide association study of Type II diabetes has been published, and it’s extraordinarily promising. Besides picking up the oft-replicated TCF7L2 gene mentioned before, they pick up three other loci, including finding a non-synonymous mutations in a zinc transporter. That’s notable because 1. non-synonymous mutations clearly can have phenotypic […]

Speaking of the thrifty genotype hypothesis, a new paper from the cats at deCODE Genetics takes an in depth look at one of the loci consistently implicated in Type II diabetes. According to the authors, the succeptibility allele is ancestral, and the other, non-ancestral allele shows signs of being under recent positive selection in all […]

Readers interested in the range of human phenotypic variation will be interested in inspecting the new SI model index. In particular, some readers might find the Brazil models gallery of particular interest. A certain GNXP contributor will appreciate this photo. Labels: human biodiversity, Ladies

A key part of the kin selection theory of altruism is, well, that people can differentiate between “kin” and “not kin”. A new paper gives a model for how kinship is calculated: As predicted, the kin detection system uses two distinct, ancestrally valid cues to compute relatedness: the familiar other’s perinatal association with the individual’s […]

Dear Henry Farrell, Like many others of your ideological inclinations, you make much of the recent petition in favor of raising the minimum wage which was signed by over 650 economists. I will see you and raise you. Careful where you point that thing, it’s loaded. Regards,Matt (x-posted) Labels: creationism, science wars

This story, China’s changing skin colour caught my attention. The relevant points: “Traditionally, the first objective of a woman is to have pale white skin because whitening can cover many flaws. Many Chinese women will put on sun protection just to go next door because they’re so afraid of getting any kind of sun rays,” […]

Economic historian Greg Clark is arguing that the British may be “Genetically Capitalist.” Tyler Cowen has his doubts. One of piece of evidence that should grab the attention of economists: The long term decline in inflation-adjusted interest rates over the past few centuries: All societies before 1400 for which we have sufficient evidence to calculate […]

Had to link to a paper with such a title. Relative Impact of Nucleotide and Copy Number Variation on Gene Expression Phenotypes: …SNPs and CNVs captured 83.6% and 17.7% of the total detected genetic variation in gene expression, respectively, but the signals from the two types of variation had little overlap…. Here’s a quote from […]

As long as we’re posting videos, you can catch Joseph Ledoux discussing the latest projects in his lab in the NIH neuroscience seminar series (video and audio available here). Also, all-around controversial dude, Bjorn Lomborg, does a TED talk about world problems and says AIDS prevention is high priority.

I already miss Just Science week… Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal wrote an op-ed in the LA Times titled “Can Washington get smart about science?” This post is a response of sorts, mostly an appeal to recognize that the “war on science” goes beyond the participants identified by Mooney and Sokal. For the most part, […]