Continuing the discussion from my previous post: strong interactions at the level of individual genes do not preclude a linear (additive) analysis of population variation and natural selection.On epistasis: why it is unimportant in polygenic directional selection[Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2010) 365, 1241–1244 doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0275]James F. Crow*Genetics Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USAThere is a difference in viewpoint of developmental and evo-devo geneticists versus breeders and students of quantitative evolution....
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Monday, 29 August 2011
Two important points from my talk on cognitive genomics, with references.1. Most of the genetic variation in intelligence is additive. This may be confusing to those infected by the epigenetics revolution meme. Yes, epigenetics is important, but fortunately for us linear effects still dominate the population variation* of quantitative traits. As any engineer or physicist can attest, linearity is our best friend :-)Data and Theory Point to Mainly Additive Genetic Variance for Complex Traits (PLoS Genetics) The relative proportion of additive and...
Saturday, 27 August 2011
I just saw this for the first time in HD. It's visually quite stunning.Embryo selection, but no additional engineering:Geneticist (Blair Underwood): Keep in mind, this child is still you -- simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result ...According to this discussion, an offer of enhancement didn't make the final cut: In an outtake to the movie, the geneticist states that for an extra $5,000 he could give the embryo enhanced musical or mathematical skills – essentially splicing in a gene that...
Thursday, 25 August 2011
From The Genius of Science, a portrait gallery of 20th century physicists by Abraham Pais.So it came about that I met Pauli for the first time in Denmark, in early 1946, at a dinner party in Bohr's home. At that time he had already long been recognized as one of the major figures in 20th century physics ... I witnessed for the first time his chassidic mode, a gentle rhythmic to and fro rocking of the upper torso... "No, perhaps you don't know much,...
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Dan and I were Junior Fellows at the same time (even in the same year, IIRC). I was never that interested in "bone-diggin-ology" but Dan was always a good person to talk to about the subject. I wonder if Dan follows a paleo diet.NYTimes: Among his academic peers, Daniel Lieberman, 47, is known as a “hoof and mouth” man.That’s because Dr. Lieberman, an evolutionary biology professor at Harvard, spends his time studying how the human head and foot have evolved over the millenniums. In January, Harvard University Press published his treatise, “The...
Friday, 19 August 2011
This is a photo from the talk I gave yesterday at Google to kick of our US intelligence GWAS. See www.cog-genomics.org for more information. If you're having any problems with the site, especially the participant registration, please let us know. We've received a great deal of feedback just in the last 48 hours about the study, so please be patient if you sent me a message. There were a lot of good questions from the audience at the talk. I only...
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
I'll be giving a talk at Google tomorrow (Thursday August 18) at 5 pm. The slides are here. The video will probably be available on Google's TechTalk channel on YouTube, perhaps after some delay.The Cognitive Genomics Lab at BGI is using this talk to kick off the drive for US participants in our intelligence GWAS. More information at www.cog-genomics.org, including automatic qualifying standards for the study, which are set just above +3 SD. Participants will receive free genotyping and help with interpreting the results. (The functional part of...
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Tyler Cowen, Brad DeLong and Greg Clark discuss A Farewell to Alms in a seminar from three or four years ago. Thanks to Jason Collins for the link. I liked Tyler's overview (@36min), which emphasizes that culture, genes and institutions all affect economic growth. He lists of order 10 factors (17!) that impact the industrial revolution, and notes that we have only one historical data point. (To be more accurate we probably have a few, but certainly not enough.) Therefore there must be many models consistent with the facts. (This is of course the...
Friday, 12 August 2011
His crude but expressive drawing style and mythic sensibilities made him unique among early comic artists.Silver Surfer #18 was the prize of my grade school comic book collection. It's the issue in which the Surfer first encounters Black Bolt and the Inhumans. Richard Gere's Jesse Lujack is seen reading it in the remake of Breathless (Godard's À Bout de Souffle)....
Very nice profile of Svante Pääbo in the New Yorker. (Subscription only.)Pääbo's father was a Nobel laureate and I think the son has a good shot as well. What impresses me most is his creativity and willingness to take on difficult projects. Video of a 2008 lecture by Pääbo.New Yorker: ... Svante Pääbo heads the evolutionary genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany. At any given moment, he has at least half a dozen research efforts in progress, all attempting to solve the question of what...
Thursday, 11 August 2011
If flash mobs or riots (like the ones in London) are organized using Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry and SMS, won't it be very easy to catch the people responsible? Not only are the organizers / initiators easy to track down, but with geolocation (GPS or cell tower) and a court order it would be easy to determine whether any particular individual had participated. Perhaps current privacy laws prevent that data from being stored, but we can easily modify the laws if necessary.Where are those law enforcement data scientists when you need them? ...
See also this follow up article from O'Reilly Radar, and the earlier post Exuberant geeks.What is data science: ... Data science requires skills ranging from traditional computer science to mathematics to art. Describing the data science group he put together at Facebook (possibly the first data science group at a consumer-oriented web property), Jeff Hammerbacher said:"... on any given day, a team member could author a multistage processing pipeline in Python, design a hypothesis test, perform a regression analysis over data samples with R, design...
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
In an earlier post I discussed the population history uncovered by Gregory Clark in his book A Farewell to Alms. By examining British wills, he showed that the rich literally replaced (outreproduced) the poor over a period of several centuries.The excerpt below is from a review of Greg Clark's book. The review is mostly negative about Clark's big picture conclusions, but does provide some interesting historical information. Note, the reviewer does...
Below are the title and abstract of the paper I hinted at in this earlier post. Although the study failed to find any specific loci that are associated with intelligence, a global fit showed that a significant chunk of the heritability expected from twin and adoption studies is accounted for by SNPs. In other words, genetic similarity is correlated with similarity in g score, even though we don't know which genes are specifically responsible. The results of the study were expected from what we already knew: many genes of small effect, accounting...
Friday, 5 August 2011
Bernard Hopkins shows Rashad Evans a little about the sweet science. I've never seen Rashad in such good shape, but I don't think Tito will be easy tomorrow. Bernard talks about the chess game inside boxing. Grappling and jiujitsu have it too: feints within feints within feints. In a real fight Rashad would put Bernard to sleep.UFC ...
My Ditch Day stack was an honor stack: the underclassmen only got access to the room if they could accomplish the assigned task, to change the Hollywood sign to read CALTECH. Unfortunately, one of the students working on the stack did an interview with a local TV reporter, describing their plans. This reporter called the Hollywood police for comment, which led to the underclassmen being met at the sign by a police unit. The task was not carried out...
Thursday, 4 August 2011
Two paragraphs I neglected to quote in the previous post. See also Intellectual honesty.A recent meme that's been circulating is that of the ideological Turing test. Until you can faithfully and convincingly emulate the severest opponents of your ideas, you have not yet thought about those ideas in a balanced and complete way.You and Your Research: ... There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great...
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
I was never enamored of his fictional writing (I've read more biographies of Mishima than novels by him), but Yukio Mishima lived one of the most fascinating lives of the mid 20th century, culminating in his suicide:With a prepared manifesto and banner listing their demands, Mishima stepped onto the balcony to address the soldiers gathered below. His speech was intended to inspire a coup d'état restoring the powers of the emperor. He succeeded only...
Monday, 1 August 2011
In the comments of this earlier post a father wondered to what extent one can predict adult IQ from measurements at age 5. The answer is that predictive power is fairly weak -- the correlation between a score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
