Guess who’s coming to dinner: the stranger
A preprint on aRxiv, The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via Online Dating, purports to explain the increased rate of interracial/ethnic marriage in the United States as a consequence of online dating. They have ways to control for the fact that the proportion of non-whites in the United States has been increasing over the […]
Life expectancy in South Asia
India is very heterogeneous. Nevertheless, the contrast between Assam and Bangladesh is very curious to me. 1 Kerala 74.9 74.0 2 Delhi 73.2 – 3 Jammu and Kashmir 72.6 – 4 Uttarakhand 71.7 60.0 5 Himachal Pradesh 71.6 67.0 5 Punjab 71.6 69.4 5 Maharashtra 71.6 67.2 8 Tamil Nadu 70.6 66.2 9 West Bengal … Continue reading “Life expectancy in South Asia”
Rousseau vs. Descartes & incest
Greta Scacchi, cousin-lover
There has been some discussion in the comments why the posts on inbreeding are getting so much attention. I think this is a milder form of the same sort of curiosity about why young males have a fascination with pornograph…
Like modestly attracts like
I saw this link posted on twitter, IQ and Human Intelligence: An interesting finding from genetic research, which Mackintosh mentions, only in passing, as posing a problem in the estimation of the heritability of g, is that there is greater assortative mating for g than for any other behavioral trait; that is, spouse correlations are […]
Nature vs. nurture, again, and again, and again….
In The New York Review of Books Richard Lewontin has a long review up of Evelyn Fox Keller‘s last work, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Here’s the blurb from Duke University Press:
In this powerful critique, the esteemed h…
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Link to review: The wheel of history turns to the gods.
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Link to review: The wheel of history turns to the gods.
Privacy as a bourgeois privilege
Ruchira Paul has her own reaction to Zadie Smith’s pretentious review of The Social Network. One of the aspects of Smith’s review which Ruchira focuses upon is her concern about the extinction of the “private person.” I have mooted this issue before, but I think it might be worthwhile to resurrect an old hobby-horse of […]
The rise and crash of civilizations
One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare […]
Facebook & Dunbar’s number
About 20 years ago the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed his eponymous number:
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that […]
This time it’s different
I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big […]
We are a social animal
Occasionally we get emails like this:
Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization.
Yours truly,
[name omitted]
One of the […]
Who argues the most from authority?
Google results for +”nobel laureate” +X, where X is one of the following:Chemistry: 317,000Physics: 415,000Medicine: 467,000Economics: 484,000Of course, there are more winners to refer to in Physics than in Economics, so we should control for that. Div…
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…
A simple framework for thinking about cultural generations
In this discussion about pop music at Steve Sailer’s, the topic of generations came up, and it’s one where few of the people who talk about it have a good grasp of how things work. For example, the Wikipedia entry on generation notes that cultural gene…