Today I noticed Michael Grant’s World Of Rome is on Kindle. It’s a pretty decent survey. If you want a meatier survey, I recally recommend History of Rome. But that’s not in print anymore, so you’ll have to get a used copy.
I love contemporary scholars, but they generally don’t write big long surveys aimed at the general audience from what I can see (SPQR is an attempt, and it’s an exception).
What Genetics Is Teaching Us About Sexuality. I’ve known about this study for a while now. To be honest, I was surprised they found GWAS hits. I will at some point write a blog post about the paper.
Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought. This seems like the sort of “big” and collaborative science that the historical sciences are going to benefit from in the coming years.
Amid Italy’s Beauty, a Vista of Decline. Italians are not having children. They’ve written the ending to their story already.
Polygenic Prediction of Substance Use Disorders in Clinical and Population Samples.
Genome Scans for Selection and Introgression based on k-nearest Neighbor Techniques.
Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins. You should know this…but a write-up in a high-tone science magazine indicates that paradigms are shifting.
One Scientist’s Quest to Bring DNA Sequencing to Every Sick Kid.
Large-scale Genetic Analysis Identifies 66 Novel Loci for Asthma.
Use ancient remains more wisely.
Legacy Data Confounds Genomics Studies.
Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?.
College Board Drops Plans for SAT Student Adversity Scores.
Selective Sweep at a QTL in a Randomly Fluctuating Environment.
Razib – Related to “Humans Dominated…” above, what are the estimates for the size of the largest human settlements/villages/cities at various timepoints between 10,000 BCE and 1,000 BCE?
The problem with the study on homosexuality is that it lumps different types of people in one pot. Clearly one part is the experimental, risk taking, novelty seeking, oftentimes intoxicated male which tries it, but is never a true homosexual. Some become bisexual and identify with full homosexuality, but usually they are more or even totally attracted to females. Oftentimes its just a single tryout. Then there are special situations, like prison, which should be taken into account as well if talking about “sexual experiences”.
The other is the full homosexual, which has no or very little sexual arousal by female signals and is going for the same sex early on in his life.
I didn’t get all the data, but I saw the correlation of those which just tried homosexual practises and those which are (almost) exclusively same sex oriented. The genetic correlation is very, very low. This should be an alert.
Clearly they didn’t distinguish properly. This also relates to higher acceptance rates nowadays, as well as more drugs and stuff, more risk-taking, individualistic behaviour in general. That’s why homosexual rates are rising in time, especially among women in Europe – among feminists its even fashionable these days to spare men and have a “female only” relationship. Needless to say Feminism was to a large degree always pushed by homosexual women disproportionally.
Those of the “clearly homosexual male” type won’t be as elastic – they are not dependent on fashions or prisons, they have a prime preference. And that should have been investigated, because the genetic relationship to this type of homosexual personality should be significantly higher than to the general population of people “experimenting” with sexuality and what’s fashionable.
But since I didn’t got into all the data, probably they had looked at that too. But it wasn’t communicated enough in the media reports and the texyt of the study, which is my main criticism.
Your link to ‘Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins’, scroll down to the comments. There is an interesting comment i’d like to re-state here:
“Neanderthals are NOT us. There was mixing (limited interbreeding). But, many “re-looks” at sites for Neanderthals indicate that they lacked so many human traits. There was no real high culture, music, jewelry, (even burial that was touted), etc.that seemed to just spring up overnight when homo sapiens sapiens showed up (between 100,000 and 150,000 ya). It is interesting and fine to trace down the relating/breeding. But, we must be careful about our characterization of non-humans.
Fossil studies are not always clear (sometimes alluded to above). And, much needs to be reconciled regarding “the bones” and the overall genetic reductions showing a fairly concentrated origin point for mitochondrial Eve, etc.”
@Insightful: The commenter’s religious views might colour his arguments a little…
@A. Karhumaa: No doubt. Most of our arguments begin as what Mercier and Sperber kindly call intuitions, what others might call gut feelings or prejudices or emotions. Only later are they expressed in the language of reason.
The important question is whether the reasons are good ones.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/756536v1 re: ethiopia. kind of what i’ve been saying?