If The New Yorker is giving the topic coverage…. (though a lot of probably is more Craig Venter’s celebrity status) Labels: Synthetic biology

Taliban targets descendants of Alexander the Great.* In this case, we’re talking about the Kalash of Pakistan, a non-Muslim cultural relict in the mountains of northwest Pakistan. The Kalash are like the Mari of Russia, a relatively isolated group who managed to maintain their explicit pagan religious traditions down to the modern era, at which […]

While traveling I’ve often had the experience where I’m sitting on my laptop at a Starbucks or some other establishment, and someone gets up to go to the restroom and asks if I could watch their computer. These are people whose only connection with me is that they have been sitting next to me for […]

I stumbled onto these data which show meat consumption in kilograms over the years for a range of nations. I was curious as to the relationship between meat consumption & GDP PPP per capita. My logic is that the more $ you have the more calories you’ll purchase in form of flesh protein & fat. […]

Tyler Cowen points me to this article from last spring about the profligacy of professional athletes. Here are numbers which seem constructed for the sake of plausibility more than anything else: * By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress […]

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Charles Darwin’s view of evolution. Previous posts were: 1: The Pattern of Evolution. 2: Mechanisms of Evolution. 3: Heredity. 4: Speciation The present part deals with the subject of gradualism. Gradualism is contrasted with views of evolution as a sudden, discontinuous or even instantaneous process. […]

One question which I have touched upon repeatedly is why is it that in some regions languages of elites replace those of the populace, and in other regions the inverse occurs? This is one reason why I’m very interested in genetic studies of populations, they add a new dimension to the large set of often […]

There has previously been some discussion on this site about the failure of past candidate gene association studies for identification of genetic variants that truly influence a phenotype. Much of this involved discussion of the interpretation of p-values in this context (for example, see this thread). Nature Reviews Genetics has just published a must-read review […]

I thought I’d point quickly to a really nice paper showing that the RNAi pathway, thought to be absent in budding yeasts, is actually only missing from baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Remarkably, the authors are able to reconstitute the pathway (which was presumably present in the ancestor of all budding yeasts) in S. cerevisiae with […]

I recently listened to a radio program which featured the topic of “e-memory.” The guests are promoting their book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Here’s part of the description: Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual […]

Toward the end of this episode of EconTalk, Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan) talks about religion and the history of medicine. He notes that one of the benefits of adhering to religious practices was that you probably avoided going to a doctor when you were in trouble — you prayed to a […]

Via Anthropology.net, The prehistory of handedness: Archaeological data and comparative ethology: Homo sapiens sapiens displays a species wide lateralised hand preference, with 85% of individuals in all populations being right-handed for most manual actions. In contrast, no other great ape species shows such strong and consistent population level biases, indicating that extremes of both direction […]

ScienceDaily has an interesting piece, Individual Genetic Data Illuminates How Genes Influence Human Health. Points to two papers, Epistasis and Its Implications for Personal Genetics and Genetic Population Structure Analysis in New Hampshire Reveals Eastern European Ancestry. If you read a weblog like Genetic Future you are probably cognizant of the fact that personal genomics […]

Quantitative trait loci predicting circulating sex steroid hormones in men from the NCI-Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3): Twin studies suggest a heritable component to circulating sex steroid hormones and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). In the NCI-Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium, 874 SNPs in 37 candidate genes in the sex steroid hormone pathway […]

Expectations influence sensory experience in a wine tasting: Information about a product may shape consumers’ taste experience. In a wine tasting experiment, participants received (positive or negative) information about the wine prior to or after the tasting. When the information was given prior to the tasting, negative information about the wine resulted in lower ratings […]

Dienekes points me to an interesting article, Ancient figurines were toys not mother goddess statues, say experts as 9,000-year-old artefacts are discovered: Made by Neolithic farmers thousands of years before the creation of the pyramids or Stonehenge, they depict tiny cattle, crude sheep and flabby people.In the 1960s, some researchers claimed the more rotund figures […]

Just wanted to put some concrete data from China’s Cosmopolitan Empire out there. Most people know that the Tang Dynasty witness the rise of South China, defined as the Yantgze river valley and on south, as the economic and demographic engines of China (though arguably the plains around the Yellow river remained the cultural and […]

The Tang Dynasty is to a great extent a contemporary favorite because of the norms of the modern day West. It was a notionally native dynasty which was also open to outside influences and was strengthened by its cosmopolitan tenor. The merit-based industry of the Song lacks scale and romantic glamor. The Ming withdrew from […]

Seems to be the “take away” message from Bryan Caplan’s post, Monogamy and Heterogeneity. Interestingly, I’ve run into nature-based arguments in regards to human behavior and norms (e.g., “it’s the natural way” or “it’s against nature”) mostly from two sets, back-to-nature-hippies and social conservatives. As Caplan suggests there is a tendency in these cases for […]

If you have a minute, I’d appreciate it if you fill out this survey, the 6 questions should take 30 seconds (2 optional questions about where you came from to take the survey). This is for a friend’s research project. The results will be posted next week.