The waist-to-hip ratio research has been done to death, but an interesting twist, Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio: Previous studies suggest that men in Western societies are attracted to low female waist-to-hip ratios (WHR). Several explanations of this preference rely on the importance of visual input for the development of the preference, including […]

I’ve been interested in the transition toward agriculture, and its relationship to human health, for a while. There seem to have been two dominant paradigms in anthropology over the past century. The first is that agriculture spread because it was superior. Farmers were not as poor or ill-fed as hunter-gatherers. More recently, there has been […]

Daniel Larison has a post up where he criticizes a David Brooks column. Here’s what Larison observes (Brooks’ quote within): David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false: There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. Of […]

I recently read The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found & Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome. Got me in the mind of thinking more about the history of city life, and what it was like in the past, and how it compares to my own experiences. In Blessed Among Nations: […]

There’s a lot of media buzz right now about a new report in JAMA on the empirical trends on prevalence of obesity in the United States. You can read the whole paper here (too many tables, not enough graphs). Interestingly, like George W. Bush it seems that Harry Reid is prejudiced against the overweight. The […]

Here’s the link to the new paper in Naure on the evolution of the human & chimp Y chromosome, Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content. ScienceDaily and The New York Times have summaries up. Wonder if there’ll be future editions of Adam’s Curse…. Labels: Genetics

Frequent Cognitive Activity Compensates for Education Differences in Episodic Memory: Results: The two cognitive measures were regressed on education, cognitive activity frequency, and their interaction, while controlling for the covariates. Education and cognitive activity were significantly correlated with both cognitive abilities. The interaction of education and cognitive activity was significant for episodic memory but not […]

This week David Brooks has a column up on the messianic variant of the “Mighty Whitey” motif. Steve points out that this is a relatively old genre, with roots back to the Victorian period. And, it also has basis in fact. Consider the White Rajahs of Sarawak. But Mighty Whitey highlights something more general, and […]

Online this week in Science, a group presents a method for identifying genes under positive selection in humans, and gives some examples. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this paper, for reasons I’ll get to, but here’s their basic idea:Readers of this site will likely be familiar with genome-wide scans for loci under positive selection […]

Lots of talk about how the “underwear bomber” was from a wealthy and cosmopolitan background in the media. Like the poverty = crime meme, the poverty & backwardness = terrorism meme is still floating around, though the evidence of the past decade of the prominence of affluent and well-educated individuals in international terrorist networks is […]

Last month I pointed to a paper on Chinese population structure, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies. One to note was that the average FST differentiation Han populations was on the order of 0.002, while those differentiating Europeans was on the order of 0.009. Below are the […]

In Our Time has several episodes up on The Royal Society. You can listen online at the link, but I’d recommend that you just subscribe on iTunes to IOT. Labels: History

Geographic distribution of autism in California: a retrospective birth cohort analysis: Prenatal environmental exposures are among the risk factors being explored for associations with autism. We applied a new procedure combining multiple scan cluster detection tests to identify geographically defined areas of increased autism incidence. This procedure can serve as a first hypothesis-generating step aimed […]

Stochastic epigenetic variation as a driving force of development, evolutionary adaptation, and disease: Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on exquisite selection of phenotypes caused by small genetic variations, which is the basis of quantitative trait contribution to phenotype and disease. Epigenetics is the study of nonsequence-based changes, such as DNA methylation, heritable during cell division. […]

The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details: …the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be […]

Hazaras Hustle to Head of the Class in Afghanistan: For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers. … The Hazara resurgence is not so geographically concentrated. The principal Hazara provinces, while relatively […]

This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty remarkable, and brings together a number of lines of research in evolutionary genetics. How so? […]

Here. Or embedded: We talk about The Faith Instinct. Labels: Religion

As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers tell. Enjoy. Previously I looked at how […]