There is a tremendous amount of impressive information in the Gene Expression archives. And because it’s only organized by date, it’s underutilized.
How to organize it?
The Gene Expression Textbook Project, maybe? Organize it around giving people an introduction into human biodiversity?
Maybe some sort of greatest hits list?
If we get serious about something like this, the best place on the net to look for guidance is Talk Origins. Gene Expression is similar in that it partakes in a similar sort of debate, and could probably benefit from copying some parts of the Talk Origins organizational style.
Posted by Thrasymachus at 01:26 PM
In a recent post on Education and Poverty I commented on the dismal educational performance of the White ‘underclass’ in Britain.
Coincidentally, today’s Sunday Times has a feature article on the new underclass, known in Government circles by the acronym ‘Neet’: Not in Education, Employment or Training. Here’s the article…
Depressing stuff!
Addendum
In comments several people asked about ‘race’.
The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention race or ethnicity, but the photos, etc, all involve young Whites. No doubt some people covered by the official definition of ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ must be from ethnic minorities, but simply on numerical grounds it must be a predominantly White group. According to the ST, there are 1.1 million Neets aged 16-24. In the 2001 Census data there are only in total about 120,000 ‘Blacks’ in this age group. (Of course there are also South Asians, Chinese, etc, but no-one will imagine that they are significant in the Neet phenomenon.) As to young ‘Blacks’, they have a slightly higher unemployment rate than Whites, but they also have a higher rate of continuing in full-time education or training. The only significance of Blacks that I see in the Neet phenomenon is that young White uneducated kids have a tendency to ape the worst aspects of Black urban culture: gangsta rap, crack, petty crime, and general insolence. In London, especially, white yobbos often speak with a touch of Jamaican patois, which sounds comical coming from some skinny pale-faced runt.
Addendum 2
I should have learned by now to be cautious of any statistics I read in the Sunday Times. The ST claims that ‘According to official figures, there are 1.1m Neets aged 16-24 in Britain today’.
There are about 5.6m people aged 16-24 (both sexes) in England and Wales (2001 Census). Let’s bump it up to 6m to allow for Scotland. 1.1m would therefore be about 18% of the age group. This is suspiciously high. The Youth Cohort Study gives only 12% Neets at age 18. It is possible that the proportion increases substantially in the years 19-24, sufficiently to raise the average over the years 16-24 to 18%, despite the fact that the proportion of people actually in jobs also increases after age 18, but if so this is probably for the boring reason that in Britain, as elsewhere, women in their early 20s are often having babies. By no means all of them will be ‘Neets’ in the derogatory sense used by the ST. A better test of the size of the problem would be the proportion of males in this age group who are Neets.
This is not to deny that it is a serious problem, but maybe not quite as bad as the ST’s figures suggest.
Posted by David B at 04:57 AM
…how Terry Schiavo’s parents feel about stem cell research and how well that jibes with the positions of their political patrons?
Posted by jeet at 08:08 AM
Carl posts about differences between the babies of foragers and farmers/moderns. These sort of shifts of infant behavior dependent on the input that parents (and the ability of the babies to manipulate said parents) provide contingent upon social-environmental constraints make me cautious about assuming an overpowering EEA across a host of variables. Additionally, babies also likely differ in intrinsic temperament, as do the sexes, and according to Jerome Kagan infants of different populations also exhibit variant modal personalities. All this suggests a dynamism on a variety of levels, from the proximate behavorial context all the way to the microevolutionary scale, which is underemphasized by fixating on monomorphic universal traits.
Related: John Hawks also comments.
Posted by razib at 03:05 AM
Doing some reading on the Trivers-Willard hypothesis I found this: Engineers have more sons, nurses have more daughters: an evolutionary psychological extension of Baron–Cohen’s extreme male brain theory of autism:
In his extreme male brain theory of autism, Baron-Cohen postulates that having a typically male brain was adaptive for ancestral men and having a typically female brain was adaptive for ancestral women. He also suggests that brain types are substantially heritable. These postulates, combined with the insight from the Trivers–Willard hypothesis regarding parental ability to vary offspring sex ratio, lead to the prediction that people who have strong male brains should have more sons than daughters, and people who have strong female brains should have more daughters than sons. The analysis of the 1994 US General Social Survey data provides support for this prediction. Our results suggest potentially fruitful extensions of both Baron-Cohen’s theory and the Trivers–Willard hypothesis.
I don’t have access to the whole article, so be forewarned (I don’t know if the authors are simply observing a correlation between “male brain” professions with high SES, which would tend correlate with a male-skewed sex ratio according to the Trivers-Willard hypothesis).
Support for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis seems stronger in animals, especially in those that are highly polygynous (greater male reproductive variance, so a bigger payoff for mothers who can “invest” well in sons so they exhibit more attractive phenotypes).
Update Well…since someone asked, I did remember this paper: Offspring sex ratio in women with android body fat distribution:
…After statistically controlling for subject’s age, socioeconomic status, and total number of offspring, we found that women with a higher WHR tended to have more sons than daughters. In addition, women who reported greater ease of having multiple orgasms also tended to have more sons than daughters. The results thus support both a hormonal and a behavioral influence on offspring sex ratio.
Baron-Cohen says that the “male brain” is correlated with lower-than-median levels of testosterone in males and higher-than-median levels of testosterone in females. High Waist-Hip-Ratio (WHR) tends to be found in women with higher relative rates of testosterone. The research above (which has been disputed!) suggests that there is a male bias in sex ratio at birth for women who have higher WHR, ergo, higher testosterone levels. Of course this leaves the males out of the equation, but the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is generally concerned with female parental strategies in any case. And don’t discount sex-selective abortions….
Addendum: Testosterone probably plays a role in sex drive as well, so don’t discount the orgasm result being connected to the WHR.
Related: The essential difference.
Posted by razib at 01:34 PM
Kevin Drum, after taking a shellacking for having the temerity to ask about the lack of influential women bloggers, has invited some female journalists to post on topics relevant to women bloggers. Talk about navel gazing. I’m not sure if Kevin’s offering of penance is a solitary burden that he’s bearing or if he’s shifted the burden on to his readership. I favor the latter viewpoint, for I’m definitely feeling that it’s my eyes that are glazing over while Kevin thinks he’s achieved redemption. The first two posts by his guests had a normal amount of comments but as they beat this horse to death the readership seems to be showing a lack of interest.
Rather than playing into the stereotype that women bloggers only write about women’s issues and that this narrow focus is a snore to most people, hence the lack of female influence in the blogosphere, Kevin should have followed the practice we have at this blog, which is not to stereotype our female colleagues in such a fashion. Far better for Kevin’s guests to have a free hand in the choice of topics so that Kevin’s readership could be exposed to the true interests and voices of these women. If they wanted to write about being women in the blogosphere, well then, Kevin would be free of the charge of abetting the crime of gender stereotyping for the women would have been hoisted by their own petard. As it is now, Kevin’s just dug himself deeper into the hole by reinforcing the stereotype that women simply write about women’s issues.
For your analytic pleasure, I’ve gathered the data on this experiment. All of the women’s posts since this adventure began are listed below the fold, with the comments highlighted. To establish a yardstick I’ve used all of Kevin’s posts that were on his front page.
Data Below the Fold.
Amy Sullivan
AND NOW THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR–GIRLS AND BLOGS Comments: 14 NOW, IN SPECIAL FEMALE-FREE VARIETIES Comments: 28 ATTN: WOMEN–PLEASE WRITE FOR US Comments: 39 A RESPONSE TO KATHA POLLITT Comments: 71
Garance Franke-Ruta
AMITY IN THE U.K Comments: 8WOMEN IN THE BLOGOSPHERE: THE DATA Comments: 44THE BROADER PROBLEM Comments: 17
Katha Pollitt
PRIDE, PREJUDICE, BLOGS Comments: 25TOO FEMINIST FOR THE TIMES? Comments: 44TERRIFIC WOMEN ALREADY EXIST Comments: 106
Kevin Drum
BUNNING WATCH Comments: 32 THE VIEW FROM BAGHDAD Comments:96EDUCATION SPENDING Comments: 51SOCIAL SECURITY vs. MEDICARE Comments: 69RANDOM, FREE-FLOATING, NON-POLITICAL WHINING THREAD Comments: 88ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF TERRI SCHIAVO Comments: 113SOCIAL SECURITY LINGUISTICS Comments: 48TERRI SCHIAVO AND THE LIMITS OF CYNICISM, PART 2 Comments: 113GLOBALIZATION Comments: 61VALERIE PLAME UPDATE Comments: 50
Posted by TangoMan at 12:19 AM
“In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.”
Posted by fly at 09:54 AM
I don’t recall where I found this recent paper by David Serre and Svante Pääbo, so my apologies if it has already been linked to.
Here’s the abstract:
Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among ContinentsGenetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for “races.” A recent study in which >350 microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity. Here, we investigate how study design can influence such conclusions. Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or “races.”
The full paper is published in Genome Research, 14:1679-1685, 2004. A pdf may be available here.
Apart from the findings of substance, the paper raises important issues of methodology: in particular, the choice of sampling frame and statistical inference procedures.
I’m not qualified to judge the technical issues, but presumably the authors’ approach is not obviously wrong, or the paper would not have passed peer review. My only thought is that if the aim is to infer patterns of human genetic history before, say, the last 3,000 years, then the choice of samples should not be influenced by present-day patterns of population density, since these are the result of post-Neolithic population changes.
Posted by David B at 04:01 AM