The most important public sources of genetic data for understanding human population genetics to date have come from the HapMap and the Human Genome Diversity Panel. A new paper presents an analysis of human population structure in a somewhat complementary data set assembled from thousands of samples largely from Mexico, Europe, East Asia, and Central […]

Some birds like a threesome: see here.

Check out Calculated Risk. I came for the charts, but stayed for the bank failures.

Slate has a piece up, Pregnant Pause: Who should pay for in vitro fertilization?. What might the objection to the bolded section be?: Roughly 10 percent of couples experience infertility, a rate possibly accelerated by the increasing average age of prospective mothers. This demographic trend of older mothers is encouraging (since higher maternal age is […]

Today is the 200th birthday of you-know-who. I’m sure most people are already sated with Darwiniana, but I can’t let the day pass without making my own small contribution. One of the pleasures of reading Darwin is that one can still find nuggets of insight in unexpected places. Here I want to describe two of […]

Genetic Determinants of Financial Risk Taking: Individuals vary in their willingness to take financial risks. Here we show that variants of two genes that regulate dopamine and serotonin neurotransmission and have been previously linked to emotional behavior, anxiety and addiction (5-HTTLPR and DRD4) are significant determinants of risk taking in investment decisions. We find that […]

This is a pretty nice little story: a man enters a clinic with leukemia and HIV, gets a bone marrow transplant from a donor homozygous for the CCR5 deletion (these individuals are largely resistant to HIV infection), and ends up no longer needing anti-retroviral therapy. It’s just a single patient, and I somehow doubt this […]

Disentangling prenatal and inherited influences in humans with an experimental design: Exposure to adversity in utero at a sensitive period of development can bring about physiological, structural, and metabolic changes in the fetus that affect later development and behavior. However, the link between prenatal environment and offspring outcomes could also arise and confound because of […]

And Baby Makes How Many?: In 1976, census data show, 59 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 20 percent had five or more and 6 percent had seven or more. By 2006, four decades after the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to use birth control (and the last […]

On the topic of Razib’s atonement for war-blogging, at my personal blog I showed a decline in the media’s coverage of terrorism and of the individuals and groups involved in 9/11. How much broader does this pattern apply? Here I show similar rises and falls in the coverage of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well […]

FuturePundit has a post, Mate Preference Trends: Strip away tradition. Strip away religious beliefs. What happens? Men and women are looking at each other in ways that seem even more influenced by their evolutionary heritage. The mating market looks like it is becoming more competitive. He goes on to observe that men are becoming more […]

My nemesis Ikram mentioned on another blog that I used to be a Warblogger. I mildly disputed this, but I went back and skimmed over all my posts from 2002 and many of them from 2003. People have a tendency to rewrite the past, but I’ve got archives here which go back almost 7 years […]

Molecular and Evolutionary History of Melanism in North American Gray Wolves: Morphologic diversity within closely related species is an essential aspect of evolution and adaptation. Mutations in the Melanocortin 1 receptor (Mc1r) gene contribute to pigmentary diversity in natural populations of fish, birds, and many mammals. However, melanism in the gray wolf, Canis lupus, is […]

Heritability estimates are slippery animals, but this recent PNAS paper is a great illustration of how they can be used to discipline theories of social network formation. The authors start by showing that three building blocks of social networks are heritable, namely the number of friends you have, the number of people who name you […]

The Audacious Epigone looks into what type of people cheat on their spouses. The transparent society looks better and better….

Jim Manzi: This Baconian revolution is coming to economics and social science. In fact, it’s already happening. Weirdo experimental economists are starting to win the Nobel Prize. The recent Economist magazine round-up of the 10 most promising young economists in the world is rife with it. Established economists working in the current paradigm, as always, […]

I stopped watching professional football, or even kept track of it before the playoffs, after 2003. Since then “my team,” the Steelers, have won 2 Super Bowls. I stopped watching professional basketball at around the same time, and of course last spring “my team,” the Celtics, won a championship.

A week ago I posted MAOA, aggression and behavioral economics. In a related vein, I thought I would point again to Genetic Variation in Preferences for Giving and Risk-Taking (see Herricks’ post on this last fall). From the conclusion: In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation into the relative contributions of individual differences […]