Monthly Archives: March 2015

There is a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience,  mainly by Kimberly Noble, on socioeconomic variables and and brain structure:  Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. They found that cortex area went up with income, … Continue reading →

A recent paper on  Y-chromosome phylogeny  found that a big fraction of Y-chromosomes  fall into a few star-cluster lineages that are a few thousand years old.  You’ve  already heard of some of these (R1a and R1b, for example). I might … Continue reading →

Razib Khan managed to get himself hired and fired by the New York Times over the course of a single day, an enviable record.  Having the Times look upon you with favor is a dubious honor in the first place, … Continue reading →

A lot of ice moons seem to have interior oceans, warmed by tidal flexing and possibly radioactivity.  But they’re lousy candidates for life, because you need free energy; and there’s very little in the interior oceans of such system. It … Continue reading →

Iain Mathieson and the Reich-Patterson crew have a new paper out on natural selection over the past 8,000 years in Europe, much fortified by the availability of ancient DNA and knowledge of the ancestral mix. The first point is that … Continue reading →

If you had a gene with a conspicuous effect (like a green beard) that at the same time caused the carrier to favor other individuals with a green beard, you could get a very powerful kind of genetic altruism, one … Continue reading →

A couple of interesting articles just came out in MBE on how natural selection has affected human populations that ran into problems with trace elements, either too much or too little.  One talked about adaptation to selenium shortages (which I’ve … Continue reading →