Razib Khan

A Nile shadow 4,500 years old 2500 BC DNA closes old case, poses new questions about prehistory

A Nile shadow 4,500 years old
www.razibkhan.com/p/a-nile-sha...

jesse singal

Jesse singal

🚨 New preprint out!
We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation.
This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats Epic Explorers of the Stone Age: the full scope of Austronesian audacity, part 1/2

Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats
www.razibkhan.com/p/fortune-fa...

Intermarriage rates by race/ethnicity.

History of Molecular Biology Collection This unparalleled collection includes Rosalind Franklin's historic 'Photo 51,' which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA.

News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n

When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft

This from @razibkhan.bsky.social is very interesting indeed:
"When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot: Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft"
www.razibkhan.com/p/when-civil...

Trump executive order seeks to centralize control of grantmaking under political appointees A sweeping new executive order seeks to transform how the federal government awards billions of dollars in research grants

Trump executive order seeks to centralize control of grantmaking under political appointees www.statnews.com/2025/08/08/t...

Pretty amazing. Potatoes are the outcome of an ~9 million year ago hybridization that led to an explosive radiation. The evolution of storage.

Still no good evidence that inversions dominate evolution.

big names are now putting the stamp of approval on polygenic embryo selection

Frontiers | The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion: what can we learn from landscapes of fear and primate terrestriality? A defining feature of the hominin clade is bipedality, often parcelled together with terrestriality. However, there is increasing evidence of locomotor diver...

Hammond et al 2025. 'The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion' 👌 www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

A human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins mediates immunity via the Toll-like receptor pathway Key actors of mammalian immunity originated from bacterial antiphage systems. The full extent of immune system conservation between bacteria and eukaryotes is unknown. Here, we show that the silent in...

Evolutionary molecular biology paying dividends again - this time in finding new modulators of innate immunity - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I ways forget the 🦠 🐘 🧪

‘People can change their minds’: the evolutionary biologi... Ella Al-Shamahi is the erudite presenter of a breathtaking new series about our 300,000-year history. But her own evolution story isn’t short of drama ei...

observer.co.uk/news/science...

I'm disturbed by tenured faculty on here behaving like high school bullies.

I ask them to look up ad hominem and recognize that what Mamdani did was atrocious and newsworthy.

Why are we defending an uber-privileged applicant whose father was faculty at the Ivy League university he was applying to?

Here are replicas of crania: Kabwe, La Ferrassie Neanderthal, Harbin and a recent human..

Impressive and risky research testing ancient seafaring in Japan (love the map):

Paleolithic seafaring in East Asia: An experimental test of the dugout canoe hypothesis

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

‪Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

This is amazing! SSHash is already one of the fastest existing indexes for kmer queries (esp streaming ones). These performance improvements are surprisingly big! We (@noorpratap.bsky.social & I) suggested streaming improvements & Giulio adopts those & more (w/onhurting the negative lookup case).1/2

blueskye fr

I make my first post in a week and the replies include this stuff from someone with 26,000+ followers (yes, blocking and removing them, but who needs to put up with this on every post?)

They aren't even reactions to the post, just folks hunting for people to insult and attack.

Khanversation #43: Jane Smith on cargo cults and Curtis Yarvin in the New Yorker Khanversation episode number forty-three

Khanversation #43: Jane Smith on cargo cults and Curtis Yarvin in the New Yorker
www.khanversationpod.com/p/khanversat...

Selfie of brunette with glasses at a desk in front of a laptop.

So excited to talk (remotely) at UC Riverside tonight as the student-nominates speaker. It means so much to be selected by the students.

ELON!

TRUMP!

GO!

there are two sexes!

affirmative action is racist!