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Why race as a biological construct matters
My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in the latest race and IQ controversy because I don’t have that much time, and the core readership here is probably not going to get any new information from me, since this is not an area of hot novel research. But that doesn’t mean the [...]
Gauging Recruitment
Since recruitment season is coming to a close for most of us (not our lazy asses) I wanted to see how everyone's efforts went with attracting new students to your programs. Our results have been tepid at best but this doesn't reflect a lack of effort on our part. In fact I would say we [...]
Angelina Jolie, Myriad Genetics, & patents on genes
Because of Angelina Jolie’s revelation people are talking about the Myriad Genetics case is in the news again. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. Because of the patent Myriad can charge thousands of dollars for a test which would otherwise be much cheaper (and putting it out of reach of [...]
The Kings of Minos were not Pharaohs
A few years ago I predicted to some friends that ancient DNA would transform our understanding of the human past. The reason being that inferences of population movements via material remains were imprecise at best. We are beginning to see my prediction come to fruit (mind you, the prediction was not a bold or courageous [...]
GATTACA: utopia or dystopia?
Kevin Mitchell of Wiring the Brain has a very long post up inveighing against the specter of eugenics. I don’t have a great deal of time to engage Kevin right now. But in addition to Kevin’s post I highly recommend this episode of WBUR’s On Point. It has Steve Hsu on, and he articulates many [...]
Open thread, 5/12/2013
The usual. I haven’t been able to blog much because of various other responsibilities, but I definitely do feel pent up posting energy. So when I come back I assume that I’ll have a lot of stuff to say. Meanwhile I’m chortling a bit about this bizarre attack on my friend Steve Hsu. Here’s the [...]
How the sauce is made
(via The Festival of Patience)
Is the pornographic singularity real?
The above figure displays results from males in the General Social Survey who answer yes to the proposition that they’ve watched a pornographic film over the past year. This fact was cited in my post Porn, rape, and a ‘natural experiment’, to disabuse people of the notion that porn consumption has increased radically the past [...]
Europeans share common ancestors to differing extents
Standard apologies that I have had not the marginal time to blog much, but I thought it was important that I least note that Dr. Peter Ralph and Dr. Graham Coop’s paper on identity-by-descent segments and European populations and history is out in its final form in PLoS Biology, The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry [...]
SNL parody of Google Glass
In some quarters it is now “conventional wisdom” that Google Glass is going to seem dorky and laughable at first. But it’s probably just the pre-alpha version of the type of technology which seems inevitable (and is familiar to anyone who has read cyberpunk science fiction).
Open thread, 5/5/2013
Last week’s thread was rather informative.
Most Muslims ‘accept’ human evolution
I’ve mentioned before that many (most?) Muslims are Creationists, broadly understood. According to Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey 42 percent of American Muslims accept that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on earth. This is roughly in line with the American public, if a touch on the Creationist side. The numbers [...]
Maternal-fetal health and natural selection
A few years back I was rather fixated on issues of maternal fetal health. In particular I was worried about gestational diabetes in relation to my wife because I come from an ethnic group with an elevated risk for theses sorts of problems, and the effect when you are in mixed-race marriages seems to be [...]
Katz
For old time’s sake. The cat’s have a new companion….
Porn, rape, and a ‘natural experiment’
I am almost literally one of the last of the generation of young men for whom the quest for pornography was an adventure. One could say that I had the misfortune of my adolescence overlapping almost perfectly with the last few years prior to the ‘pornographic singularity.’ I speak here of the internet, circa 1995 [...]
Lamar Smith wants to can NSF peer review
Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), known for sponsoring SOPA, went full stupid and drafted a bill that would fundamentally alter the way the NSF doles out its grant dollars. If good ole Lamar had his way, that kooky concept of peer review would be gone and the science funding would be decided by whether your research [...]
I'm back...
after a self-imposed exile. So what's good?
Open thread, 4/29/2013
What’s going on?
Turtles all the way down!
No time to comment extensively, but check out The draft genomes of soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle yield insights into the development and evolution of the turtle-specific body plan (open access). The paper and the ScienceDaily press release allude to some phylogenetic confusion as to the relationship of turtles to other reptilian lineages, but [...]
Against the seriousness of theology
Over at The American Conservative Noah Millman and Rod Dreher are having a discussion over the basic premise that founding texts (e.g., Bible, Koran) and individuals (e.g., Jesus, Muhammad) have a deep influence upon the nature of a religion. Long time readers will be aware that I side much more with Millman on this. In [...]
