At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free. Labels: data

How shellfish saved the human race: Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals–just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our species to the brink, said Curtis Marean, Ph.D., a professor with the Institute of Human Origins […]

A few weeks ago I referenced Campbell Gibson’s paper, The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population, which estimated that ~1990 50% of the population of the United States could be attributed to those enumerated in the Census of 1790. In other words, the first generation of white settlers […]

Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me to address here, feel free to comment. This post will […]

Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following: Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000 Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Dividing the number of Google results by the number of winners gives these per capita rates: Chemistry: […]

Haloscan is forcing an upgrade something called Echo. I am not inclined to switch comment systems since this has worked since 2004. So commenting may not work for a bit. But blogging will be light from me for a bit anyway. Update: The new comment system is working, after a fashion. But I can’t install […]

Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry: Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were both differentially expressed between American subjects self-identified to be of either African or European ancestry and that also contained single nucleotide polymorphisms that distinguish distantly […]

The paper is out, Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Nicholas Wade and Ed Yong review the evidence. One of the issues is that chimps don’t seem to have syntax, so how can a monkey? But since domesticated dogs have better human-comprehensible theory of mind than chimps I don’t think genetic distance or […]

Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. I posted on it at ScienceBlogs. Nothing too new. Labels: Jewish Genetics

Gingival Transcriptome Patterns During Induction and Resolution of Experimental Gingivitis in Humans: A relatively small subset (11.9%) of the immune response genes analyzed by array was transiently activated in response to biofilm overgrowth, suggesting a degree of specificity in the transcriptome-expression response. The fact that this same subset demonstrates a reversal in expression patterns during […]

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s the correlation? 0.32. Pretty modest. If I correlate for white […]

A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as to argue that by 12 years of age, […]

Peter Frost on Roman Britain: Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the fifth century, much of this population fled to Wales and Cornwall, where they would retain their language and […]

There were some difficulties with the site overnight. Probably best place to check for updates is my twitter feed, http://twitter.com/razibkhan. 99% of the stuff there are just re-posts of my blog content. If you don’t have my email address, you can also contact me http://razib.com. Additionally, I set up an aggregator weblog a few weeks […]

In a recent special issue of The Economist magazine, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico writes that there is a “looming crisis in human genetics”. Setting aside a number of mistakes Miller makes, a core truth he reports is that to date most genetic variants that have been associated with complex […]

One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down to the 20th century that religion will disappear in the generation […]

Here. All I have to say is that 60 minutes really isn’t that much time. Labels: BHTV, bloggingheads

David Killoren points me to this Ed Yong post, Creating God in one’s own image. It is based on the paper Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs: People often reason egocentrically about others’ beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence […]

When I was a younger man I recall watching a documentary on missionaries in Mississippi. They were Southern Baptists who were on a mission to “save” everyone (this included Roman Catholics and Protestants who had not had a “Born Again” experience). At one point the missionaries encountered a man from Pakistan, who was a Muslim. […]

Here’s the source. The fact that there’s been so much change since 1990 is what is striking to me. Labels: science