In other news I was excited to find my article on clergy well-being has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Religion and Health. I will give an outline of the findings which have general motivation applications when the dust has settled a little.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Germany here I come
I have not been as active on this blog as I would have liked and I can now give the reason. I will be taking up the Jacob's foundation post-doctoral research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. I cannot emphasis how big this is and I am extremely excited about the project I will be working on. It will in essence involve a focus on publications within a variety of applied domains with extremely large, longitudinal, and multi-national samples. The job starts in January but I am off to London in early December to meet the Max Planck team and members of the project's partner institutions including The University of London and The University of Michigan.
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Congratulations on your fellowship Lazar, that sounds hugely exciting.
ReplyDeleteI just had a brief comment regarding this post over at rdn.
***In the paper he outlines research that shows that 84% of the genetic variance is accounted for by individual differences within so called racial groupings***
You realise this is the Lewontin Fallacy? Hsu explains this here:
"One thing commenters seem particularly confused about is the difference between phenotypic and genetic variation. The clustering data show very clearly that, in certain subspaces, the genetic variation within a particular population cluster is less than between clusters. That is, the genetic "distance" between two individuals within a cluster is typically much less than the distance between clusters. (Technical comment: this depends on the number of loci or markers used. As the number gets large the distance between clusters becomes much larger than the individual cluster radius. For continental clusters, if hundreds or thousands of markers are used the intercluster distance dominates the intracluster size. Further technical comment: you may have read the misleading statistic, spread by the intellectually dishonest Lewontin, that 85% percent of all human genetic variation occurs within groups and only 15% between groups. The statistic is true, but what is often falsely claimed is that this breakup of variances (larger within group than between group) prevents any meaningful genetic classification of populations. This false conclusion neglects the correlations in the genetic data that are revealed in a cluster analysis. See here for a simple example which shows that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if every version of every gene is found in two groups -- as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. Sadly, understanding this point requires just enough mathematical ability that it has eluded all but a small number of experts.) Update: see here for an explanation in pictures of Lewontin's fallacy."
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html
There's also a discussion of this on Gene Expression.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003951.html