Dr. Daniel MacArthur and Luke Jostins. Also see the #asgh2009 hash-tag. Labels: ASHG 2009

Reading Joe Thornton’s response to Michael Behe, I’m struck by the de ja vu that the exchange induces. I remember reading Darwin’s Black Box when it came out, and being confused as to why this was such an awesome challenge to evolution, and following the debates in its wake. Behe seems to think he’s pwning […]

A friend pointed me to this article in Slate which noted: This size bias may ultimately play out along party lines. The last presidential election revealed a startling overlap between statewide obesity figures and support for the GOP. Despite losing in a landslide, John McCain carried all nine of the fattest states in the union […]

There are lots of weird search queries which come into this weblog. Or any website, period. But this month 3 times someone arrived via this query: “last december i passed a paper along to razib.” 1) If you’re the person who arrived in this way, could you tell me what’s up? Was I supposed to […]

One of the trends which L. L. Cavalli-Sforza pointed to years ago is that linguistic and genetic cladograms exhibit a great deal of similarity. More recently geneticists such as Marcus Feldman have suggested that the reason behind this is that people tend to marry those who they can communicate with. Once the genetic data becomes […]

Are Humans Still Evolving? Absolutely, Says A New Analysis Of A Long-term Survey Of Human Health: “There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,” said Stephen Stearns of Yale University. A recent analysis by Stearns and colleagues […]

If you’re at ASHG, a session you might want to attend, Scale Effects and Recent Brain Evolution: Theory and Preliminary Evidence. Here’s the abstract: What forces have driven human evolution since the grand human diaspora? In this paper, I argue that the scale effects so central to endogenous growth theory in the field of economics […]

This is the sixth 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. 5. Gradualism (A) , which dealt with Darwin’s views on gradualism in the rate of evolutionary change. The present part deals with another aspect […]

Another episode with me interviewing John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv. Mostly we’re talking about about Ardipithecus. The last 1/3 is about Indian genetics. We recorded on Thursday, but since then I’ve changed my mind on some issues and now disagree with some of what I said. I will likely post on my revisions soon, though have […]

What’s different about Kiva: Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of “you funded a certain MFI” rather than “you funded a certain person”). UNICEF doesn’t […]

Since we’re talking about athletics & heritability, California School Has a Montana and a Gretzky at Quarterback. Unfortunately regression toward the mean implies you’d have to bet against the sons of some of the greatest players in professional sports having anything close to the same impact. On the other hand, having a professional athlete parent […]

The GSS variable GENENVO4: Character, personality, and many types of behavior are influenced both by the genes people inherit from their parents and by what they learn and experience as they grow up. For each of the following descriptions, we would like you to indicate what percent of the person’s behavior you believe is influenced […]

Since Afghanistan is in the news a lot, I keep hearing about it. I decided to double check some numbers, and here’s some weird stuff:Afghanistan, 11 million Pashtuns, Pakistan, 27 million PashtunsAzerbaijan, 8.1 million Azeris, Iran, 17.75 million AzerisMongolia, 2.3 million Mongols, China, 5 million Mongols Labels: geography

The New York Times has a long article on the implications of the new paper in Science, Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Here are the numbers: “Studying peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from CFS patients, we identified DNA from a human gammaretrovirus, xenotropic murine leukemia […]

Bruce Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein write (pdf) in Nature: “Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity.” (Hat tip: Steve Sailer.) The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide, that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group […]

23andMe performs genome-wide association study on NFL players, fails to find athlete genes: It’s unsurprising that the results of this study are negative (more on this below), but the conclusions they draw from this are fallacious. In fact we know from twin and family studies that many (but not all) traits related to athletic performance […]

Virpi Lummaa is at it again, Fitness benefits of prolonged post-reproductive lifespan in women: Using complete multi-generational demographic records, we show that women with a prolonged post-reproductive lifespan have more grandchildren, and hence greater fitness, in pre-modern populations of both Finns and Canadians. This fitness benefit arises because post-reproductive mothers enhance the lifetime reproductive success […]

Peter Turchin is at it again, Coin hoards speak of population declines in Ancient Rome (ungated version): In times of violence, people tend to hide their valuables, which are later recovered unless the owners had been killed or driven away. Thus, the temporal distribution of unrecovered coin hoards is an excellent proxy for the intensity […]

A genome-wide meta-analysis identifies 22 loci associated with eight hematological parameters in the HaemGen consortium: The number and volume of cells in the blood affect a wide range of disorders including cancer and cardiovascular, metabolic, infectious and immune conditions. We consider here the genetic variation in eight clinically relevant hematological parameters, including hemoglobin levels, red […]

An older article on the effects of Toxoplasma gondii in Schizophrenia Bulletin: Consistent and significant differences in Cattell’s personality factors were found between Toxoplasma-infected and -uninfected subjects in 9 of 11 studies, and these differences were not the same for men and women. After using the Bonferroni correction for multiple tests, the personality of infected […]