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Open Thread – 10/18/2020 – Gene Expression

Taking a break from the book club, I’m finishing up books that I never finished though started. So, The Turks in World History. Recommended. Not so deep as to confuse, but not so casual as to be Wikipedia.

In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past the citation goes to http://www.razib.com/wordpress/. For whatever reason I notice a lot of academics check http://www.razib.com/wordpress/, rather than this weblog. I mention this because http://www.razib.com/wordpress/ is an aggregator that accesses all my RSS, so if I publish something somewhere else, it will be loaded on that website (e.g., if I publish in NRO, City Journal, etc., it automatically gets pushed to the aggregator). I created the website for the total content feed, but just pointing it out for those who like bookmarks rather than RSS feeds. The stylizing isn’t great, but I doubt most readers of this weblog are here for the styling.

The Five Deadly Sins of the Left. The author, Ruy Teixeira, was behind the emerging Democratic majority hypothesis.

Statistics used to infer inter-breeding between humans and Neanderthals are strongly predicted by flanking sequence heterozygosity.

Want to remind readers of Cabellero’s Quantitative Genetics. Excellent book, and pretty affordable and up-to-date.

With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead. Every time I post something like that someone says (on Twitter): “Actually China’s economy is all fake.” As someone who has been paying attention to China’s economy for 20 years, and frankly been very skeptical of a lot of their numbers, this assertion goes into the true-but-trivial category. There’s a lot of fakery. But that’s irrelevant to the qualitative fact that Chinese prosperity in 2020 is a fact.

The Crypto State? How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other technologies could point the way to new systems of governance. This is in City Journal. I’ll be having something out in CJ again soon.

New Research (not by me!) on Kids, Babies, Day Care & Schools. It’s hard to navigate between “the sky is falling” and “it’s just the flu bro.” I think Emily Oster has been trying hard to do so. There’s a lot of politicization in public health, so I listen to her since I think she aims to be as free as possible.


He is undoubtedly the most influential intellectual in America today. And, he is also one of the stupidest. I’ve told my eight-year-old daughter some of his ideas, and she looked at me incredulously. Then again, she’s on the order of 2.3 standard deviations or so above Dr. Kendi’s intelligence. In any case, he’s so dull he has no idea when he expresses thoughts which, as Oliver Trialdi pointed out, suggest he’s joining the “Intellectual Dark Web.”

How Mark Zuckerberg Learned Politics. A few years ago Zuck rediscovered spirituality. All this indicates a future public profile much bigger than toady.

Steven Pinker’s obituary for Judith Rich Harris. She was a friend of this blog, and I always enjoyed corresponding with her and her husband.

Not All Identities Are Created Equal.

Introduction to Social Science Genetics.

The Next China? India Must First Beat Bangladesh. Indians are kind of jumping the shark over this…but, yeah, it’s a bad sign that on a per capita basis Bangladesh will surpass India. But, the real story is India has many regions that lag way behind. Maharashtra, where Mumbai is, has a higher per capita income than Bangladesh and a far larger GDP. But states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are huge, and poorer than Bangladesh.

The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China. This is an excellent book. Recommend it to everyone.

Ancient DNA from Guam and the Peopling of the Pacific. Look like the Lapita. I used to play “ratball” with a guy from Guam named Tulio back when I was 15.

Phylogenetic Permulations: a statistically rigorous approach to measure confidence in associations between phenotypes and genetic elements in a phylogenetic context.

The rate of whole-genome duplication can be accelerated by hybridization.

Empirical variance component regression for sequence-function relationships.

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. I’m against austerity. COVID-19 has been a disaster for the economy, and it’s “no one’s fault.” Not going to lie, I suspect a debt crisis is in our future, but I doubt that this stimulus will be dispositive in either direction.

54 thoughts on “Open Thread – 10/18/2020 – Gene Expression

  1. Razib,

    Regarding Kendi, what in particular strikes you as stupid? You say he has influence, do you really believe the people reading him are credulous? How does that reconcile with Mercier in Not Born Yesterday.

    Regarding India vs. Bangladesh, this is why numeracy is a prerequisite for serious journalism. Why exactly does India have to beat Bangladesh in *per capita* GDP to become a behemoth? Did China surpass SK or Japan in per capita GDP yet?

  2. Regarding Kendi, what in particular strikes you as stupid? You say he has influence, do you really believe the people reading him are credulous? How does that reconcile with Mercier in Not Born Yesterday.

    https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/

    you make a good point, kendi might influence not so much, but kind of be a totem? though i’ve said this sort of stuff in the past, and the influence happens later…

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