Not as the crow flies
A comment below:This thought has probably occurred to others as well, but isn’t it interesting that if this theory of Baltics being the “true” Europeans is correct, that history repeated itself several thousand years later when the Baltic peoples becam…
Hitler reacts to Scott Brown’s victory
H/T Ezra Klein
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Open thread on Scott Brown, etc.
In case people want to discuss his victory tonight. I don’t have any unique insights that you can’t find elsewhere, but a quick question. Looking at the pollster.com Coakley vs. Brown polls on the front page right now I get average of 51 for Brown and 44 for Coakley. The final looks like to be […]
Controlling the means of reproduction
The title says it all, Should Obese, Smoking and Alcohol Consuming Women Receive Assisted Reproduction Treatment? The press release is based on a position statement from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. The link is here (not l…
Where are the “Paleolithic Europeans”?
Over at my other blog I have a review up of a new paper in PLoS Biology. The authors argue that a particular Y haplogroup lineage, R1b1b2, which has often been assumed to be a marker of indigenous Paleolithic Europeans (i.e., those who were extant befo…
The few and the many
John Hawks has some commentary on a Nicholas Wade article which previews a new paper on long term effective population size in humans, soon to be out in PNAS (Wade’s piece states that it’ll be out tomorrow, but it’s PNAS). Wade states:They put the numb…
Ant fiction
Steve points me to an except from E. O. Wilson’s new ant novel in The New Yorker. In the late 1990s I read Empire of the Ants, which had a significant ant-centric aspect. A friend who later went on to do graduate work in entemology borrowed it from me,…
A model of the history of human misery
In the comments below I was outlining a simple model which really is easiest to communicate with a chart. I removed the labels on the Y and X axes because the details don’t matter, the X axis is simply “time,” and the Y axis simply reflects the magnitu…
Blind men prefer thin-waisted women
The waist-to-hip ratio research has been done to death, but an interesting twist, Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio:Previous studies suggest that men in Western societies are attracted to low female waist-to-hip ratios (WHR). Several explanatio…
Agriculture & health in the pre-Columbian period
I’ve been interested in the transition toward agriculture, and its relationship to human health, for a while. There seem to have been two dominant paradigms in anthropology over the past century. The first is that agriculture spread because it was supe…
After the fact
Daniel Larison has a post up where he criticizes a David Brooks column. Here’s what Larison observes (Brooks’ quote within):David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false:There is the influence of the voodoo religion…
City squalor
I recently read The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found & Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome. Got me in the mind of thinking more about the history of city life, and what it was like in the past, and how it compares to my …
Levelling off of the “Obesity Epidemic”?
There’s a lot of media buzz right now about a new report in JAMA on the empirical trends on prevalence of obesity in the United States. You can read the whole paper here (too many tables, not enough graphs). Interestingly, like George W. Bush it seems …
Haiti & charity
A reader asked about donating to alleviate the suffering in Haiti. In particular, making sure that the donations don’t go toward religious or Leftist ends. My own personal assumption is in line with the recommendations of the The GiveWell Blog:
A few notes:
Unfortunately, “disaster relief” is not an area we’ve researched. When we’ve (very briefly) looked […]
The Confucian conservatives
I highly recommend John Keay’s China: A History to any readers who wish to familiarize themselves with this civilization. Keay’s narrative is aimed at the general reader. Specialists will no doubt find themselves irritating by the simplifications, or even errors (I’m not a China specialist but even I picked out a factual error here and […]
Using your brain
Frequent Cognitive Activity Compensates for Education Differences in Episodic Memory:Results: The two cognitive measures were regressed on education, cognitive activity frequency, and their interaction, while controlling for the covariates. Education a…
The Dark Age Mighty Whitey
This week David Brooks has a column up on the messianic variant of the “Mighty Whitey” motif. Steve points out that this is a relatively old genre, with roots back to the Victorian period. And, it also has basis in fact. Consider the White Rajahs of Sa…
Localizing recent positive selection in humans using multiple statistics
Online this week in Science, a group presents a method for identifying genes under positive selection in humans, and gives some examples. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this paper, for reasons I’ll get to, but here’s their basic idea:Readers of t…
Don’t be an infidel?
Interesting possibility that Google is engaging in self-censorship in regards to Islam. If true the motive is likely more profit that fear (via Abhi).
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