Check out this cartoon: Chris Mooney points me to this article in The Washington Post about the furor erupting over this. You see, look at the crescent, an outhouse, the SLAM. SLAM~Islam, a crescent~Islam and an outhouse~House of Islam? That’s what I thought after hearing that the artist was a Christian fundamentalist. Christian evangelicals do […]

Recently I stumbled upon an assertion in an e-list I’m on that legacies are typically more prepared for college than race-based affirmative action admittees. My first inclination was to respond: No, blacks at Harvard have higher test scores, etc., than legacies. But I’m having a hard time finding such data, though there are plenty of […]

Eric Raymond has had a post on IQ up for about a week. I think he is a bit under-informed about the particulars and leaves out some qualifications. Nevertheless, here is a quote: But male/female differences are insignificant compared to the real hot potato: differences in the mean IQ of racial and ethnic groups. These […]

The BBC recently had a series called The Asian Family. All five programmes are online in audio format. Program 2, titled “When a Girl Marries” is set in Singapore. There are some funny segments detailing the banal realities of Singapore’s Confucian-Orwellianism on the subway. They interview some single professional women as to why they aren’t […]

I’m not much of a hawk and find some of the Francophobia distasteful in its sincerity. Nevertheless, I was just listening to the BBC, and the interviewer asked a French reporter if the French felt affected by the impact of terrorism in the wake of the Istanbul bombings. The response was, “No, we feel insulated […]

The other day I asked: Can a cube be sectioned in such a way as to create a regular pentagon?It appears the regular hexagonal section has the greatest area of all possible sections.  Can you prove it? I know you’ve been breathlessly waiting for the answers, so here you go. First, no, a cube cannot […]

If any of you are doing something mindless (coding, transcribing, etc.) and can listen to audio files (work at home, have your own office, etc.), I highly suggest the following sites: BBC WORLD SERVICE programs archives. Lots of 20-40 minute specials about a wide array of topics. NPR. No elaboration needed, but I like their […]

Remember the old Malcolm X quote: Do you know what white racists call black PhDs? (answer: the n-word). In that vein of thought, this Fred Reed column is pretty brutal in its honesty: What effect does the unmentionable pervasive scorn have on society? One result is the widespread assumption among whites that blacks are incompetent. […]

Hey all, please do not use my razib-at-gnxp.com address…too much spam. I have a mail-form linked from Contact Razib on the left bar. Posted by razib at 06:03 PM

This was passed along to me today, and thought it a nice graphical overview* of Lynn & Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations If it looks familiar, it is probably becasue it was published in The Times (UK) on November 10, 2003. *an “uncondensed” version is available via my web site, just click on […]

In my reading and observation of the "state of the world" I often come back to the same aphorism over & over: The modern West aims for the Golden Mean between the hyper-moralism of the Dar-al-Islam and the hyper-amoralism of The Middle Kingdom. Note there are about 1-1.3 billion Muslims and 1.3 billion Chinese. My […]

A while back, there were some posts on the SES moderation of IQ heritability. The study is finally available to the public. Except for the point that they used youngr kiddo-s, (which tend to have a lower heritability), there is nothing terribly exciting. The main point is that as the environment becomes more unstable, the […]

Seems that Muslim jihad organizers understand economics. This works against Western jihadis like the one profiled in the article. From the piece: …But jihadis say there is a more important factor: the supply of bombers exceeds demand, and British bombers are too expensive. “For the cost of equipping and transporting a British fighter into Iraq—about […]

In previous posts, here and here, I argued that international comparisons of IQ do not necessarily indicate genetic differences between populations. I also provided links to comparative tables of various aspects of demography, education, and health. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to calculate the correlation between some indicator of environmental quality […]

A few days ago I commented on slavery and Islam in response to Zack Ajmal’s manifesto on the same topic. I was mildly hopeful that progressive & heterodox Muslims could change the outlook of the faith in The United States. I’m not the only one, and since 9/11 the questions regarding the possible future evolution […]

The Economist has an article on AIDS in China up. No need to read it, the same old vanilla. Note this: “In 1990, around 1% of adults in both South Africa and Thailand were infected with the HIV virus. Tackling the problem head on, Thailand has managed to keep the rate at roughly the same […]

OK, I was recently pointed to a few articles on redheads. I’ve seen them in the press before, but didn’t notice the mini-bumper-crop recently. First, a few articles on the evolutionary significance of redheads. Here is an article that talks about the connection between pale skin and Vitamin D synthesis. This is the standard adaptationist […]

I’ve gotten a few emails on this topic, but I just noticed that Carl Zimmer has an excellent blog up on the research that indicates that racism is cognitively demanding. I won’t excerpt it, go read the whole thing…. Posted by razib at 02:03 AM

PLOS has an article titled Tough Mining: The challenges of searching the scientific literature. I guess this sort of thing should help prevent fiascos like the obscurity of Gregor Mendel’s work for 30 years, but more importantly, aids to searching the literature are the crucial in these days of hyper-specialization. Posted by razib at 02:44 […]

Steve Sailer writes about the appeal of the Republican party to white Protestants. Well, here is the religious 411 on the Democratic Candidates: Howard Dean: Raised Episcopalian, switched to Congregationalist as an adult (over some political dispute with the local church), Jewish wife and kids being raised in the Hebrew faith.Wes Clark: Roman Catholic, raised […]