Reading some stuff on the Neolithic transition. From Neolithic …Neolithic populations from Europe to Sri Lanka lost an average of two inches in height, and in Japan, there was a two-to-five-year drop in the average age at death for men and a three-year drop for women…. …The skeletons of early agriculturalists also exhibit the marks […]

Botanists reported the discovery of a species of palm tree in Madagascar which sprouts a giant inflorescence (images from the BBC and National Geographic). In the New York Times: "It's spectacular," said Mijoro Rakotoarinivo of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Madagascar. "It does not flower for maybe 100 years and can be mistaken for other […]

If agriculture, and the social and cultural revolutions triggered by this new form of extracting economic productivity from land, was a major variable in triggering recent human evolution it is important to know when it swept over a particular region. With the big ranges given for when selection pressures began to reshape a genomic region […]

John Derbyshire has a tribute up for a passing in the family. Labels: Blog

Since we’ve been talking about anthropology, I am posting this mostly to satisfy my curiosity and get something off my chest. There was a time in the past when I was a hard-core libertarian. I was at a book store recently and flipped through Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty’s intellectual history of the libertarian movement. […]

Two posts to check out over at Half Sigma. First, he suggests that John McCain’s daughter is hot. I don’t have a huge N, but that looks like a good picture, and it certainly benefits from any contrast effect, if you know what I mean. But you can’t discount the photo, and her mother seems […]

I was talking with a friend about Native American skin color. From the Canadian north down to Chile it seems that though there is variation these populations exhibit some sort of brownish shade. There are no black-skinned Amazonians, nor are there pink-skinned peoples on the Canadian Arctic. So what gives? First, it seems likely that […]

One of those generic de-lurking threads if you are in the mood. Labels: Blog

I have published my own take on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” here. Since GNXP is not a political site (and since many here are not in sympathy with my point of view) I will not publish the whole thing here, though I am willing to discuss it in comments. UPDATE: Thanks, everyone. I didn’t expect […]

A site with the URL Anthropology.net puts up a post titled Fighting the mantra, “People vary more within the groups than vary between groups”? What’s going on here! Since Lewontin’s Fallacy is one of the axioms at the heart of much of modern anthropology (that is, when anthropologists bother to accept the validity of linear-logo-centric […]

Found this why doing research on the web, The Devolution of Britney Spears: From Pop Star to Celebrity Trash in Less than 7 Years. Labels: culture

Secret Of Scottish Sheep Evolution Discovered: …gene and one copy of the light gene are quite large and also have quite high reproductive success. Sheep with two copies of the dark gene are larger still, but have poor reproductive success. Sheep with two copies of the light gene are small, but still have quite high […]

Big Think is getting some press. Personally, seems a bit of weak tea next to Meaningoflife.tv and Beyond Belief. But I guess they’re new, so we’ll see…. Labels: Blog

Because they’re not into you? Ha, no, I don’t mean when they turn their head or whole body away. I mean when their body and head remain facing you but they move their eyes away, usually up and away but sometimes straight to the side. Imagine them giggling and saying “Wellll…..” — that look. (For […]

Mark Kirkorian points out that Barack Obama is a Muslim apostate: Several implications: first, Obama’s has a unique opportunity – even a responsibility – to speak out on behalf of former Muslims under threat of death for converting to other faiths. Second, there are likely to be even more lunatics trying to kill him than […]

Jonathan Rauch has an amusing piece in Reason, The Coming American Matriarchy. To some extent it is not noteworthy, it’s the sort of thing you see in the mainstream press when journalists skim over data sets for some superficial insights. I know some D.C. libertarians do read this weblog, so they should point out the […]

p-ter’s post about a new allele for lactase persistence is a powerful testament to the reality of gene-culture coevolution. These alleles which allow for lactase persistence have almost certainly spread over the last 10,000 years, and likely within the last 5,000. The fact that multiple alleles arose which exhibit disparate geographic distributions suggests that population […]

Back in the days before I’d ever read any probability or population genetics, I imagine I considered, as many laymen still do, evolution as a sort of deterministic march towards some optimum. I still remember being amazed at the simple equations that show how much stochasticity is involved; how random chance and historical accident can […]

Ross Douthat points to a WSJ piece which profiles scholars who are attempting to reconstruct the evolution of the Koran based on new (old) archives. I assume that Islam will collapse once certain central tenets exhibit a high degree of falsification, just has Mormonism has due to new findings in archaeology and history since the […]

I know that there are many readers of this weblog who are interested in both history and genetics. I assume that those who share these interests with me were very excited by the publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes 15 years ago. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s magnum opus ushered in a new era […]