I am now reading the translations of the basic writings of the Confucian Sage Xun Zi in my spare time. Like much of body of Chinese work on moral and political philosophy from this era the prose is allusive and often meanders from obscure analogy to opaque metaphor. But the passages from the chapter titled […]

There are few things that irritate me more than the deliberate distortion of an argument. It’s especially irritating when I end up believing said distortion. An example: Larry Moran has been railing (as he is wont to do) against what he calls “adaptationists”[1] in a couple recent posts. The “adaptationist” is a scientist who believes […]

Dissent has published an article on how pro-choice advocates should start thinking about the prospects of designer babies and the author broaches the subject of regulating, and perhaps prohibiting, access to such procedures. What’s striking about the article is the heavy reliance on the “barn door effect” wherein pro-choice advocates, once through the barn door, […]

The other day, I mentioned a silly article in Nature Review Genetics complaining about the state of science journalism. The author seems to think that journalists are promoting “genetic determinism”, so let’s consider her evidence. The study she cites asked focus groups, “What does ‘a gene for heart disease’ mean?”, and coded their answers as […]

Tim Krueger writing in the Cornell Daily Sun focuses on the higher admissions hurdles that Asian applicants to Cornell face and advocates that something be done about this injustice. By his back of the envelope calculations: In the interest of space I’ll put the calculations on The Sun website instead of here. The figure I […]

This week’s Science has a news article detailing the strides being made in dog genetics since the publication of the dog genome. Dogs should be one of the best model organisms for studying the genetics of behavior– artificial selection on behavioral traits over the centuries should allow the relevant genes to be isolated with much […]

In the middle of an otherwise boring New Yorker article about where to buy coats for the coming winter, I came across this passage, describing the author’s (possibly tongue-in-cheek) search to understand why she seems to feel cold more acutely than other people: I called Dr. Andrej Romanovsky… to ask how the body detects cold. […]

I posted recently on the Flynn Effect, and some interesting papers on the subject came to my attention afterwards. First, there is a review of Flynn’s recent book by Richard Lynn in Intelligence, 2007, (35), 515-16. Lynn defends his own nutritional explanation of the Flynn Effect against various criticisms. He points out that it is […]

New paper out in PLOS Genetics, PCA-Correlated SNPs for Structure Identification in Worldwide Human Populations: Genetic markers can be used to infer population structure, a task that remains a central challenge in many areas of genetics such as population genetics, and the search for susceptibility genes for common disorders. In such settings, it is often […]

Nicholas Wade of the New York Times is, without a doubt, one of the best science reporters in America. Apart from his writing, which is of course excellent, he shows an impressively deep knowledge of his chosen subject (genetics)– enough to write an excellent book on the topic and to effectively communicate subtle aspects of […]

I’ve referred to Virpi Lummaa’s research on the Grandmother Hypothesis using Finnish records a fair amount, check out this new paper (Open Access) using Gambian data. There are other papers and studies (use books.google.com for this) among groups like the Khasis and Bengalis (Khasis = matrilineal & matrifocal, Bengalis = patrilineal & patriarchal, but both […]

Alex Palazzo gives a nice summary of a recent paper (open access) on adaptation in non-coding elements in mammals. The paper was mentioned briefly by Razib here. Labels: Population genetics

John Hawks has a series of great quotes from a 1963 article by Dobzhansky on the interplay between genetic and cultural evolution. How about this: Being an anthropologist only by avocation, I may perhaps venture to claim for anthropology more than most anthropologists dare claim for themselves. The ultimate function of anthropology is no less […]

I didn’t smoke out any interesting correlations in the GNXP Survey. For example, can you believe that those with more education tend to be of higher economic status? Assman was right, my questions were rather boring, so the analysis was going to yield boring as well. In any case, I’ve put the survey results up […]

On this site, there is often speculation about population differences in various phenotypes, and the role of genetics and natural selection in said differences. Hypotheses are lovely and all, but luckily there are publicly available resources that anyone can access and browse to determine whether their hypothesis has any empirical support. In this post, I […]

I finally had a chance recently to read the Venter genome paper, purportedly a landmark in personalized medicine. The short version of my thoughts: there’s a long way to go. Most of the paper is a straightforward list of the characteristics of Venter’s genome– it’s different than the reference genome in a number of places, […]

Carl Zimmer has a post up on copy number variation and gene duplication. Via evolgen. Labels: Genetics

In his September 14, 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times, David Brooks tells his impression of the latest research in cognitive ability. Unfortunately, he not only misses the forest, but he bungles a few trees as well. Article and comments below. A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence […]

About a week ago I posted on a new paper about worldwide variation on a gene which results in differences in muscle fiber. The author left a comment, which I’ll reproduce below: We thought about selection for cold tolerance, but our latest data on global distribution of the null allele don’t really fit with that. […]

Last week I talked about the fact that a significant proportion of the within population variance of skin color in South Asians is due to a mutant allele which is also responsible for a significant fraction of the between population difference for Europeans and Africans. This mutant allele on SLC24A5 has gone to fixation within […]