Models of IQ & wealth
Steve Hsu has been interesting of late (interesting like Steve, not Malcolm). So, IQ, compression and simple models and If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?. For a theoretical physicist I find Steve to be eminently clear in his exposition of abstra…
Latin America is not panmixia
A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results:Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and…
Fake fact, America is not secularizing
How Will Religion Evolve?, asks John Tierney. He notes:If there is a religious instinct, how do we make sense of the declining church attendance in western Europe? As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general…
Hagarism, revision, and everything we think is wrong (?)
This is more a question for readers who know this stuff, what do you think about Patricia Crone & company in their revision of the early history of Islam? I’m more of a Hugh Kennedy guy because I don’t know much about this field and would prefer to…
My review of The Faith Instinct
Over at ScienceBlogs now. It’s a dense book and I only focused on a few major elements. Like the God of the philosophers sometimes it seems like attempts to analyze religion always have to face up to the fact that the phenomenon is awesomely complex, a…
The Netherlands & SDA
In case you didn’t know, the SDA Archive has more than the GSS. For example, something called the Dutch Prejudice Survey 1998. Poking around, I confirmed a general trend you see in the GSS, more educated people tend to be ideologically polarized:Though…
Against infotainment
Steve has an interesting column up this week:Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are…
The Faith Instinct in National Review
John Derbyshire has review of The Faith Instinct up. He hits the major points well. I should elaborate on something. In Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson outlines two dimensions of religion, the horizontal and the vertical. The vertical is pretty s…
Band of Brothers
At Cognitive Daily, Men often treat their friends better than women do:The researchers say these three studies show that men are more tolerant of their friends’ failings than women. Does this mean that men are more “sociable”? That’s less certain. Afte…
Elite ancient Egyptians had heart disease
Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies:”Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as muc…
South Park does its homework
Years ago there was a South Park episode which commented on the primitive nature of Canadian transportation. Turns out that there was some truth to the jibe (via Tyler).
The Isles in America
It’s easy to find maps of American ancestries, but I wanted to play around with the data, and in particularly the visualization myself. So I went to the Census and got the county level numbers. The first thing I wanted to do was look at non-Hispanic wh…
Faith as an adaptation
Nicholas Wade has an article up in The New York Times, The God Gene, which serves as a precis of the central arguments of The Faith Instinct, his new book. The title is catchy, but it should really be “The God Phene.” Depending on how you measure it, r…
Height doesn’t always matter….
How universal are human mate choices? Size doesn’t matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate:It has been argued that size matters on the human mate market: both stated preferences and mate choices have been found to be non-random with respect to h…
A quantitative ecologist looks at world history (again)
Doing a literature search on the Price Equation for some weblog posts I found that Peter Turchin had written a new paper on world history using Price’s formalism explicitly. A quantitative ecologist by training, Turchin has already written a series of …
Avatar & the death of “Star Trek aliens”
Since readers of this weblog tend toward nerdishness I’m assuming they’re following the buzz around Avatar: The Movie. I only got interested in it last night trying to figure out the references in yesterday’s South Park episode, Dances with Smurfs. Che…
FOXP2 in Nature
Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2:…It has been proposed that the amino acid composition in the human variant of FOXP2 has undergone accelerated evolution, and this two-amino-acid change occurred around the ti…
Gladwell hatin’
Some red meat for readers, Malcolm Gladwell, Memes and Intellectual Honesty:Gladwell comes across as a child trying to explain why his hand was in the cookie jar. He advances a series of unconvincing, somewhat contradictory explanations, hoping that we…
Spengler does it again!
Just Spengler (David Goldman) being Spengler, From “Zionism is Racism” to “Judaism is Racism”:Judaism has nothing to do with race-there are Jews of every race-but it does have to do with family. Jews are members of Abraham’s family. Not only tradition,…