Rand Paul
A moderately sympathetic story about Rand Paul, who is running as the anti-establishment candidate in Kentucky. My bias, such that I have, is to look positively upon Paul’s run for Senate, mostly because I know that when I agree with a Paul they’ll actually stick to the stance they’re taking because they actually believe […]
Beautiful butterflies & localized adaptation
Two new papers are out in PLoS Genetics which make inferences about adaptation using butterfly species which exhibit Mullerian mimicry. I’ll give the author summaries instead of the abstracts.Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of …
Hayek vs. Keynes
You’ve probably watched the Hayek vs. Keynes rap by now:Am the only one who was a little weirded out by the incongruity of John Maynard Keynes kickin’ it with the honeys in the back of the limo? It isn’t as if he was exactly on the down-low. He was a f…
Language goes extinct, human race to follow….
Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India:Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages – Bo – had come to an end….”It is generally believed that all Andamanese langu…
Ibn Khaldun In Our Time
Ibn Khaldun on In Our Time. Excellent program. Khaldun’s assessment that the Mamluks of Egypt had developed a system of rule which was robust against the decay of asabiyyah was born out by 450 years of subsequent history (that is, until the liquidation…
…about those cheese-eating surrender monkeys
France denies citizenship over veil:
French officials have denied citizenship to a man because he allegedly forces his wife to wear a full Islamic veil, the immigration minister said Wednesday.
“This individual imposes the full veil upon his wife, does not allow her the freedom to go and come as she pleases, and bans her from going […]
“Synthetic associations” and sickle cell anemia
Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…
Half Sigma’s flawed post on DTNBP1
A while back, Mark and I were working on a comprehensive post which would try to tally the results of the various IQ-gene studies to see what they said about racial differences. We began this quest bright-eyed and hopeful that we would help contribute…
Strange use of the word “conservative”
Iranians celebrate ancient Persian fire fest:
Thousands of Iranians gathered at dusk against a snowy mountain backdrop to light giant bonfires in an ancient mid-winter festival dating back to Iran’s pre-Islamic past that is drawing new interest from Muslims.
Saturday’s celebration was the first in which the dwindling remnants of Iran’s once plentiful Zoroastrian religious minority […]
Jersey Shore coming back
They’ve been signed for $10,000 per episode the next go around. Years ago Joel floated the idea of using Reality TV to test theories in social science. Paying the cast of Jersey Shore this much is going to mean that they’ll be under serious pressure to…
Proud to be red
A friend pointed me to this YouTube clip of a young red-haired man objecting to the term “ginger,” and the opprobrium he’s been subjected to since the South Park episode “Ginger Kids” popularized ideas such as the possibility that redheads have no soul…
Darwin wuz wrong, part n
A review of a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Co-authored by Jerry Fodor, who has been continuing his war against natural selection. I’ve already read Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (at the sugge…
Peer groups & bourgeois virtues
Self-Control and Peer Groups:However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of fiv…
Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept
What is the single best reference for refuting the notion that “race is only a social construct” for a non-scientist? I don’t know. (Suggestions welcome in the comments.) But Neven Sesardic (previously praised here) does a marvelous job in “Race: A Soc…
Maps of white teen birthrate and abortion rates by state
A supplement to the previous two posts. Below are maps which are shaded proportionally. Note how New York seems to be the abortion capital of the USA. Total surprise to me. Remember that these data are for white females from the ages of 15-19.
Red State, Blue State, Teen Birthrate, Teen Abortion rate
A reader pointed to this post in Free Exchange:Here are the 15 states with the biggest percentage drop from 1988-2005 in the ratio of teen abortions—the percentage of teen pregnancies that ended in abortion, not counting miscarriages. Crudely put, th…
Teen birthrates and abortion rates
The New York Times has a new article, After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises. The graphic is OK, but it focuses on aggregate teen pregnancy rates (age group 15-19) instead of splitting it out so as to show births and abortions. The original r…
A bold prediction: “synthetic associations” are not a panacea
There’s a bit of press surrounding the interesting result from David Goldstein’s group that, in certain situations, a number of “rare” (defined as an allele frequency less than 5% [1]) variants influencing a trait can lead to an association signal at “…
Confucius biopic
I noticed that a new biopic of Confucius just opened in China. It’s pretty obvious that they “sexed up” his life, as you can see in the trailer. In terms of a big-budget biopic it seems to me that the life of Confucius is a very thin source of blockbus…