Tag Archives: US

Noteworthy, Video

The new poster girl of the technocrats

The debate over research privatization is intensifying. Here is my annotated transcript of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video.

I recently angered some people by saying that if I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t want my taxes to pay for research on the description of smell in the English literature. Some have taken that to mean that I want to defund all of academia. So let’s talk about it. Should we defund academia?

I appreciate all experts in English literature; it’s part of our cultural heritage, like many other things worth preserving. Acknowledging my own limitations, I avoid commenting on topics like English literature or dark matter, as they are beyond my expertise. So why doesn’t SH recognize hers? Continue reading The new poster girl of the technocrats →


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Genetics

Non random mating

A new study published in PNAS finds evidence for non-random mating

Spouses are more genetically similar than two individuals chosen at random … our unadjusted GAM result of 0.045 suggests that a 1-SD increase in genetic similarity increases the probability of marriage by roughly 15%. This association is confounded, in part, by intraethnic marriage among whites but we continue to observe GAM even after a se- ries of models designed to eliminate this source of assortative mating.

This comes somewhat unexpected. Unfortunately, the authors missed in their discussion what Carole Ober published about HLA and mate choice in humans

Hutterite mate choice is influenced by HLA haplotypes, with an avoidance of spouses with haplotypes that are the same as one’s own.

So I am a bit confused – more similar in general but still different at the HLA locus??
Reminds me to the old joke, that your male genome is more similar to a male chimpanzee (on a per base statistic) than to your wife.


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