I am reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century. It’s an excellent book. About ten years ago I read an earlier book of his, The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma. The author and I have also corresponded a bit on Burmese genetics (and his own). Anyhow, The Hidden History of Burma is highly recommended (by me and at least).
I posted admixture coefficients for South Asian Genotype Project members at my other weblog (which now routinely gets more traffic than this weblog!).
Blogs I Read, Researchers I Follow, and Podcasts I Listen To. Tanner mentions my own work. Also read his post, Review: Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping.
Speaking of books, my friend Albert Cairo has one out which is likely to be of interest to some readers of this weblog, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information. A little something about Albert: though we differ a great deal on political questions and orientations, he has always tried to take my views seriously and engage in good faith. This is rarer and rarer today in our polarized world.
In Cincinnati Suburb, Some Republicans Are Uneasy About Trump’s Tone. The story is really interesting for this sentence: “…said she used to call herself a “closet liberal” and refrained from talking politics. But in recent years, she found she shared political sentiment with more people than she had imagined.” “Preference falsification” is a lot more common than people in the majority or minority think. See Timur Kuran’s book,Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.
Racial Bias in the Sharing Economy and the Role of Trust and Self-Congruence.
Chinese Woman Denied a Job in Case of Provincial Prejudice—and She’s Suing. People from Henan, the traditional seat of ancient Chinese civilization, are stereotyped negatively.
Why is labor mobility slowing in America? People are settling down.
A multiple-trait Bayesian Lasso for genome-enabled analysis and prediction of complex traits.
I recommend The Han: China’s Diverse Majority (ignore the critical-theory-speak). But I decided to rent this textbook too, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals.
Charles Murray’s new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, is coming out in January.
Some readers may want to check out this interview of Sadanan Dhume for the Brown Pundits Browncast.
Ben Shapiro interviewed David Berlinski. Listening to Berlinski is weird, because he seems to have not moved mentally into the 21st-century. He seems rather hale for someone born in 1942 (he mentions his age), but at the end of the day, Steven Pinker is not the enemy of David Berlinski. Pinker wants to convince through persuasion. There are now people who want to put people like Shapiro and me into reeducation camps. Those are the True Enemies.
The day will come when the evangelical Protestant and the New Atheist wills stand shoulder to shoulder facing massed formations of Critical Theory orcs. And one will say to the other, “I never thought I’d die next to an Elf.”
Berlinski comes off as a major league asshole (to be frank, he always seems like this, even from the first time I saw him debate on PBS in 1997). He would do great on Twitter! He also has a book out, Human Nature. It’s really weird how much time he spends attacking Steven Pinker.
Tad Williams is back in Osten Ard with The Witchwood Crown. Williams’ Elf-analog people are well done. They occupy a behavior “uncanny valley.” Human-like, but definitely not human.
Intra-Species Differences in Population Size shape Life History and Genome Evolution. The abstract is not surprising.
Leaked China Files Show Internment Camps Are Ruled by Secrecy and Spying.
An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 project is kind of like David Barton’s books about how the United States was founded as a fundamentally Christian nation. Basically you start with an ideological wish, and you fulfill it by hook and by crook.
Model-based inference of punctuated molecular evolution.
A principal component approach to improve association testing with polygenic risk scores.
If you want to read a nice survey of Iranian history that’s not overloaded with modern material, try A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind.
A comparison of humans and baboons suggests germline mutation rates do not track cell divisions. This is a very important preprint.
Approximating the coalescent under facultative sex.
I find a lot of ebooks using Bookbub. More specifically, I find deals. But make the settings a little loose so you see random stuff too.
Any recommendations on a history book for children? Asking for a progeny. I really liked A Child’s History of the World when I was seven.
Don’t know if you saw this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-19/china-baby-dna-tests-used-by-parents-to-check-for-prodigy-kids
I unfortunately don’t have any recommendations for children’s history books but I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments. My daughter hasn’t started history yet (she just turned 6) but here in France it’s at about the same level as it was in Canada in the early eighties except French instead of British: Romans, Crusades, French Kings, Revolution, civilizing the colonies, WW1, WW2, present day.
The Hobbit, and even The Lord of the Rings, didn’t really have all that much to say about the Elves, and those books left me with the impression the the Elves were strange and “perilous” beings. A major disappointment when I read the Silmarillion was how human they turned out to be when they became major protagonists in the story. Basically just good-looking people who never got old or sick, but aside from that not especially “uncanny.” So you’ve made The Witchwood Crown sound interesting.
I am looking for parenting books to give this season, or rather books for parents about parents or parenting. This blog has mentioned several I have read:
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (1999) by Hrdy (mentioned here),
Mother’s and Others (2011) by Hrdy (also here), and
The Nurture Assumption by Harris (mentioned too many times on this blog to list, but see here).
Also discussed here (but which I forgot until I came across it elsewhere and then searched the blog)
The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2015) by David Lancy (mentioned here as a jumping off point)
I have come across the following, which I checked out yesterday:
Parenting for Primates by Harriet Smith (2006)
Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior (2012) by Gray and Anderson
Building Babies: Primate Development in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective (2013) edited by Clancy et. al
These last 3 I have not found on this site, and the very last is rather expensive and I suspect too technical for the kind of gift I am looking for. I have begun Fatherhood and think it may be too detailed and discursive for my targets. Except for Harris, all of these lean more to the evolution and anthropology side of things than genetics, but this blog discusses all these issues so … What do people know about the substance &/or style of these books? Are they factually correct, at least according to current knowledge? I can find solid reviews of all of these somewhere online, including in some professional journals, but I am wondering if any here are familiar with these books and what their (considered) opinions are.
jb, good point!
tad williams and r scott bakker have hit the uncanny behavioral valley the best for me.
MP, emily oster’s book is good.
Thanks. They already own that (and have taken it to heart).
Concerning history books for children: you might like “The Story of Mankind” by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. It’s illustrated by the author.
The Nurture Assumption is interesting. Be sure to get the second edition.
The book ends with a mystery. She says genes generally account for about 50% of the variance in people’s characteristics. Parenting accounts for almost none. So what causes the non-genetic, non-nurture differences? Kevin Mitchell, in his recent Innate, suggests that a good deal of it is randomness in development. E.g, if one identical twin is schizophrenic, there is only a 50-50 chance that the other one is.
@Roger Sweeny: IIRC, Harris believed that the largest part of non-nature, non-nurture was peer effects; the lesson I recall coming away from the book with was that the biggest thing parents can do is arrange things so that children have a peer group that meets with their approval.
@marcel proust: Yeah. She put forth more ideas in her second book, No Two Alike. I put it this way in an amazon review:
“About half of what makes your personality different from other people’s is the fact that your genes are different from other people’s. The other half comes from three systems in your brain, a relationship system, a socialization system, and a status system. Like the language acquisition system that made you fluent in your native language by age five, they work automatically and unconsciously (though unlike the language acquisition system, which does its major work in early childhood, they continue to be pretty active into early adulthood).”
But I also said:
“Harris never really tells how these systems work together. And she hasn’t done any original research to test her theory. … Harris doesn’t tell the reader her theory for why people are so different until page 244 (of 265!). She doesn’t even begin to build it until page 163.” [The preceding pages are pretty much a reworking of The Nurture Assumption.]
The day will come when the evangelical and the New Atheist wills stand shoulder to shoulder facing massed formations of Critical Theory orcs. And one will say to the other, “I never thought I’d die next to an Elf.”
I’m stealing that.
My 9-11 yos have liked the horrible histories series by Terry Geary and the Nathan Hale graphic novel series about history. My 7yo likes the I Survived series.
Classic children’s literature – although more challenging than the stuff above – is infused with history and can make it come alive. Depending on your kids’ ages, look at Frances Burnett, Kipling, Stevenson, Twain, Alcott, George MacDonald, Nesbit, Jack London.
History for Kids: I’ve gotten my son the “Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales” graphic novel series and he seemed to enjoy it. As the title suggests, they are about American History, except the book on WWI, which I believe takes a larger European view. I’m not sure of age-range and some people may not like the subject matter of some of the books, but it’s never graphic. It looks like I got my son the Donner Party book when he was ten, probably because we were taking a trip somewhere along those lines.
Oops, just noticed this one was mentioned by Em already.
Razib, should I read Karen Armstrong’s “Fields of Blood” and “The great Transformation” or no? I remember you saying I should avoid her but they seem like they might be informative as long as I know her biases. Thanks
great transformation is OK. she’s a pop-historian.
Don’t have a book rec’n, but when I was a child the historical bomb was a time-line poster that was about 1.5 x 6 feet, long out of print. There are several other extant versions. I referred to it through high school, not to learn history as such, but to see how events and developments in different cultures lined up. Most of the history I learned as a child was through biography, and to me the caliber of writing tended to be above par for children’s books. Historical adventure stories. Oh, and maps. Maps!