“Jaqueline” is single (her personal info). Never say we never provide “reader services.”

David Quellar of Rice University will explore the genetics of the social evolution of the amoeba. Full story here. I suggest anyone with further interest browse Dr. Quellar’s publications. I really don’t know much about protist sociality, and it’s not as sexy as human evolutionary psychology, but at least it’s not drosophila!

Posted by razib at 11:26 PM

Diana, Dienekes has a post about Guanches. They probably are “Berbers”….

Quotes from this article:

The guidelines, for marking key national curriculum exams, recommend that the current F grade, for ‘fail’, should be replaced with an N grade, for ‘nearly’.
…
They include instructions that maths exam answers should be marked as either ‘creditworthy’ or ‘not creditworthy’, rather than correct or incorrect.

Via Fox News.

This article on the ambiguities of Muslm Spain, its famed pluralism & toleration, is interesting in the light of my previous post titled Dar-al-Europa. The author of the Tech Central Station article arguing for a coming “melange civilization” focused on early Ottoman Turkey, a culture that has not been idealized and scrutinized to the same dgree-which I think is a clue as to the present status of Al-Andalus as a Muslim pluralist exemplar. I have stated that I believe many Muslim cultures have a pluralistic & tolerant moment, only to give way to a more assertive Islamic polity, but I am beginning to wonder, do we live in the liberal moment, before the emergence of a more conventional human ordering of things?

The Face of Evil just got a column at The National Post. Congrats! Satan must be dancing for joy, flicking his tail and clapping his cloven hooves together.

Posted by razib at 12:50 AM

Mijailo Mijailovic held in connection with the murder of foreign minister Anna Lindh.

Posted by razib at 02:05 AM

Google data ports here I come!

This article reports what I assume everyone expected-incomes fell during the recession. It begins with the assertion that “The worsening economic conditions fell heaviest on Midwesterners and nonwhites.” It then proceeds to present a parade of percentages (alliteration unintentional). What I find curious is that I would like to know absolute numbers-for though minorities suffered, I suspect that whites were a majority, especially when you add the smaller group of non-Midwestern whites, of those who experienced the downward pressure toward poverty. Interestingly, Asian Americans sufferred a 4.5% drop in median income (vs. 3% drop for blacks and 2.9% for Hispanics). This might be the result of their concentration in IT, where salaries were inflated for several years in the late 90s and have dropped back down to earth.

Posted by razib at 01:45 AM

“52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East,” according to a new report. “The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century.”
I remember Arthur Koestler asserting this in The Thirteenth Tribe. Apparently, the potentate was trying to split the difference between the Christian west and the Moslem east, and made his kingdom jewish by fiat.

See extended entry for the full report.