In that their demographic history is complicated. The Origin and Genetic Variation of Domestic Chickens with Special Reference to Junglefowls Gallus g. gallus and G. varius:

… domestic chickens diverged from red junglefowl 58,000±16,000 years ago, well before the archeological dating of domestication, and that their common ancestor in turn diverged from green junglefowl 3.6 million years ago. Several shared haplotypes nonetheless found between green junglefowl and chickens are attributed to recent unidirectional introgression of chickens into green junglefowl. Shared haplotypes are more frequently found between red junglefowl and chickens, which are attributed to both introgression and ancestral polymorphisms. Within each chicken breed, there is an excess of homozygosity, but there is no significant reduction in the nucleotide diversity. Phenotypic modifications of chicken breeds as a result of artificial selection appear to stem from ancestral polymorphisms at a limited number of genetic loci.

I wonder if domesticates in particular exhibit these more complex reticulated patterns in their phylogenies because they spread along human trade routes.

Reading is not a skill that comes naturally. Unlike learning spoken language, which the human brain has evolved to absorb almost effortlessly, learning to read is a protracted and difficult process. It involves the categorical association of arbitrary visual symbols with phonemes and also the ability to break words down into component phonemes. It thus relies on an integration between visual and auditory processes, combining spatial and temporal information, within a learned linguistic context. The fact that reading is such a specialized and integrative skill may partly explain why it can be selectively impaired in people of otherwise normal intellectual abilities.

Dyslexia, as this type of selective reading difficulty is called, is quite common, affecting anywhere from 5% to 20% of children, depending on the criteria used in its diagnosis. Cohort studies which directly tested all individuals have found that dyslexia is about twice as common in boys as in girls. This is not unusual; many psychiatric disorders show a different rate of occurrence between the sexes, with autism, schizophrenia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder all being more common in males, while depression and some other non-psychiatric conditions, such as synaesthesia, are more common in females. The study of dyslexia is providing some insights into how the interaction between predisposing factors and sex can influence phenotypic outcome.

First, some clues as to what the underlying cause may be. Dyslexia is highly heritable and in recent years a number of genes have been linked to it, through unbiased genetic mapping approaches. Remarkably, all of these genes are involved in some way in controlling cell migration in the cerebral cortex. This astonishing convergence parallels neuroimaging and neuropathology studies which have found a high rate of subtle malformations of the cerebral cortex in brains of dyslexic subjects. These include small clusters of misplaced neurons (termed nodular heterotopia), as well as small infoldings of the cortical sheet (microgyria). Disruption in the normally highly regular organization of the cortex may thus underlie this disorder.
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Insulin Signaling and Dietary Restriction Differentially Influence the Decline of Learning and Memory with Age. I’d be curious what people who practice dietary restriction would say (I know many scientists do this, so it isn’t just quacks).

Spicing the Meat Also Cuts the Cancer Risk, Research Suggests. Spicy foods have antioxidants.

Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation. The big long-term issue is how to explain complex societies from their basic atomic units and elementary dynamics.

Why Science Journals Need to Move to Online Only Publishing. Fair enough, but sometimes the constraints of a print format do impose some discipline.

Massachusetts: Student Accused of Faking His Way Into Harvard. Sounds like a sociopath, though perhaps a touch on the arrogant and dumb side.

In the comments below a question was asked in regards to “fundamentalist” vs. agnostic Jews. I put the quotations around fundamentalist because the term means different things in different religions. As for the idea of an agnostic Jew, remember that Jews are a nation (ethnicity) as well as a religion, and that religious belief has traditionally been less explicitly emphasized than religious practice.

It wasn’t too hard to find some answers in the GSS. I used the somewhat crude “BIBLE” variable again. Remember that BIBLE asks if the respondent believes that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, the inspired Word of God, or a book of fables. I reclassified these as Fundamentalist, Moderate, and Liberal, respectively. There are two variables I used in the first chart, JEW and RELIG. The former looks just as Jews, and breaks down by Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. The latter I combined with BIBLE to bracket out Fundamentalists, Moderates and Liberals of each religious group. The vocabulary test scores are from WORDSUM. Remember that they correlate 0.71 with adult IQ. Because the sample size for Jews was so small I included 95% intervals so you can modulate confidence appropriately. I limited the sample to whites.

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I notice that a peculiar piece of datum from First Things contributor David Goldman is being passed around, repeated by Ross Douthat no less. Goldman states:

Beinart offers a condescending glance at the “warmth” and “learning” of Orthodox Jews, but neglects to mention the most startling factoid in Jewish demographics: a third of Jews aged 18 to 34 self-identify as Orthodox. “Secular Jew” is not quite an oxymoron–the Jews are a nation as well as a religion–but in the United States, at least, secular Jews have a fertility barely above 1 and an intermarriage rate of 50 percent, which means their numbers will decline by 75 percent per generation. It is tragic that the Jewish people stand to lose such a large proportion of their numbers, but they are lost to Judaism in general, not only to Zionism. That puts a different light on the matter.

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Rod Dreher mulls his bias toward declinism while evaluating Matt Ridley’s new book The Rational Optimist. Here’s a portion of Ridley’s argument:

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Dreher gloomily observes:

Well, I would certainly love to be wrong; neither I nor my descendants gain anything out of a world of decline. But it would be useful to go back and look at how 19th-century progressives expected the 20th century to be a wonderland of peace, prosperity and progress. Didn’t quite work out that way. I suspect the truth is that nobody knows anything about tomorrow, and that we can only make our best educated guesses based on history and the wisdom of experience.

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Sex Lives of Supreme Court Justices:

Now that the sex lives of Supreme Court justices have become grist for commentators, we are finally free to discuss a question formerly only whispered about in the shadows: Why does Justice Antonin Scalia, by common consent the leading intellectual force on the Court, have nine children? Is this normal? Or should I say “normal,” as some people choose to define it? Can he represent the views of ordinary Americans when he practices such a minority lifestyle? After all, having nine children is far more unusual in this country than, say, being a lesbian.

The GSS can answer this question. Sort of. It turns out that the highest number of children it asks about are “8 or more.” Limiting the sample to 1998-2008 so it has some contemporary relevance, ~1% of respondents in the GSS has 8 or more children. But that’s not quite fair, since many respondents are young adults, or just starting their families. Limiting the sample to those who are 60 years or older you have ~3.5%. Limiting to 70 and above it goes up to ~4.5%. Scalia is 74 years old, so I think it might be appropriate to judge him by his generation, though the relative gerontocracy of the Supreme Court, and American politics in general, might warrant examination. In 2008 in the GSS asked about sexual orientation, and ~2% of women stated they were lesbian, gay or homosexual. So whether Scalia is more abnormal than a lesbian measured against the general population depends on the reference population you use. For his generation, probably not, but for this generation, perhaps.

From fantasy to fact? Personal Genomics, tipping points and a personal perspective:

But now I think we’ve turned a corner. It feels, to mix metaphors, that we’ve hit a tipping point. The Human genome project, the mapping and sequencing of the/a human genome from 1990 to 2003, cost approximately 2,700,000,000 dollars (that’s 2.7 billion, I wanted to get all the zeros in). Celera did the genome for 300,000,000. The cost of sequencing an entire human genome has been plummeting ever since. In 2007, the cost of sequencing the genome of James Watson (co-discoverer of DNA) was about 2,000,000. The today cost is about 10,000. Complete Genomics and other companies are on the march to quickly reducing the cost of sequencing a genome under 1,000.
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So, within a year, the cost of sequencing your, my, genome will reach 1,000. If not less. We’ve seen this coming for years now, and it’s upon us. But what does it mean? A lot of data. But data means nothing without context and analysis. Sequencing my genome would be a waste of 1,000 dollars if I gleaned nothing from it.

I can believe that we’ll be able to get a tarball with our own full sequence for a reasonable price in a few years. Cheaper than orthodontia and cosmetic surgery even. Though the utility in prevention and treatment is a different matter. Most people already have a treasure trove of data through family history, and that doesn’t seem to change behavior for many in the short-term. Once the magical power of genomics wears off I suspect that knowing you have variant X with risk Y will be less transformative than not.

Felix Salmon points to someone who asks, Is the European crisis good for America? A piece at Politico suggests that Midterm fury might leave Nancy Pelosi safe. Journalism of this sort would get very boring, very soon, if the journalists actually had to place any money on their musings, either directly by changing their investment portfolio, or getting involved in betting markets like Intrade.

Gene Tests For Everyone. Probably not much value in most of these tests for most people right now. Also, many of these common variants have been found in subject populations which are European, so if you are Colored it might not tell you anything relevant (i.e., the SNP which is identified as a risk has only been shown to have an effect in Europeans, or, you know you have a trait but it turns out you don’t have any of the “common” variants, perhaps because your population has different variants which are common).

Return of the Neanderchimps. Complex demographic history for one and all! I do find the genetic isolation between Bonobos and Common Chimpanzees interesting. Apparently the Congo river was an imposing enough barrier to allow for allopatric speciation. I wonder if this can tell us about the fear our own ancestors might have had in traversing water barriers.

A New Clue to Explain Existence. Physicists can always make themselves look the non-devilish scientists by inserting a reference to God.

Only Processed Meat Boosts Diabetes And Heart Disease. Medicine was quackery until the 20th century. Nutritional science seems to be quackery into the 21st.

The Microcephalin Ancestral Allele in a Neanderthal Individual. No evidence for introgression/admixture at this locus.