Diversity – Razib Khan

July 28, 2021 by Razib Khan 0

crime, criminology, Culture Wars, Diversity, Identity, Politics, Review, Social Policy, Top Stories

Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas hewed more or less to the dismissive conventional wisdom. It wasn’t until I read a 1998 essay in Commentary magazine by Christopher Chabris that I began to reconsider. Chabris argued that the media furor around The Bell Curve obscured more than it illuminated, and that the consensus among psychologists on the importance of intelligence to life outcomes was indeed close to what Murray and Herrnstein had asserted. To my surprise, in the 21st century, my relationship …

March 18, 2019 by Razib Khan 0

Diversity, Evolution, Language, Linguistics

The evolution of languages

Map of language families of the world todayThe story in the Bible about the “Tower of Babel” was the explanation that the ancient Hebrews gave for why there was so much linguistic diversity in the world around them. Ancient people were curious and obse…

March 5, 2019 by Razib Khan 0

Diversity, Genetics, GWAS, Medicine

The dearth of diversity in genomics

Citation: Martin, Alicia R., et al. bioRxiv(2019): 441261.One of the curious things about genomics is the field has exploded in the 21st century so fast, with such explosive growth and increase in power, that it is hard to keep up if you blink. The fir…

May 5, 2011 by Razib Khan 0

Amazon Rainforest, Amazonia, Diversity, Ecology, Environment, Speciation

Why the Amazon Rainforest is species rich

A monkey frog
The Pith: The Amazon Rainforest has a lot of species because it’s been around for a very long time.
I really don’t know much about ecology, alas. So my understanding of evolution framed in its proper ecological context is a t…

April 21, 2011 by Razib Khan 0

Diversity, Evolution, Evolutionary Genetics, Genetics, Macroevolution, The Court Jester, The Red Queen, Tree of Life

The Court Jester and the averaging fallacy

The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is “dominant,” as that framing is not even wrong.
Yesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, whi…

July 15, 2010 by Razib Khan 0

Culture, Diversity, Economic Growth, Economics, Language, Norms, Values

Linguistic diversity = poverty

In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]