Dwarfism: Genetics, ethics. Medical experts argue whether dwarfism justifies aborting a fetus or warrants painful limb-lengthening surgeries, but advocates within the national nonprofit Little People of America argue that their lives are perfectly OK. Posted by razib at 06:13 PM

Earlier today “Guessedworker” commented on my previous post that offered a reductionistic hypothesis for intra-racial attraction. He seemed to think that I was offering a “Blank Slate” explanation and was being “Oedipal.” In an IM chat with a friend, the same issues of relationshp to Freud came up. This really surprised me and was frustrating, […]

A Pair Of Discoveries Helps Unravel Complex Genetics Of Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Posted by razib at 06:10 PM

We talk about a lot of complex genetic traits. Many of them are only partially genetic of course, but because of their social importance (intelligence, anti-sociality, etc.) we feel it important to approach all angles, including the genetic one. But one thing seems to show up in the emails that I receive, and the conversations […]

Gay Jewish writer gives up sex with men. Here are some money quotes: But Benkof concluded that being gay is a social construct not intended by God, thus ruling out his justification for man-on-man sex. “Historians all agree that there is no evidence of a gay minority,” he said. “If that’s true, it means that […]

One thing that I’ve always noted, Communism was anti-racist and anti-religious. Today Russia is rather irreligious ("control-f" Russia), despite the modest religious revival during the post-Communist era. But articles about Russian racism abound (some of the stuff is reminiscent of pre-Civil Rights United States). I know this might be journalistic hyperbole, but I also recall […]

One thing that sometimes annoys me is that humans have a tendency (and something I have to resist it myself) to have a “vitalistic” conception of things, that traits have some mystical holistic residence in human nature. To clarify, I will bring up something that often comes up in the message boards. When we post […]

I don’t post on politics that much. Frankly, I admit I know very little that most of our readers don’t, while I do read a large number of books & monographs on history, science and social science, my political knowledge is mostly from newspapers, websites, etc. In short, not much value added for me to […]

While we’re giving props to PLOS (and there are some good articles for this month up), check out BioMed Central, which also has a lot of open access material. This is a great time to be alive if you are interested in cutting-edge science! Posted by razib at 04:27 PM

Deep breath… In my last musings on the subject of IQ comparisons, I said (threatened?) that I might return to the subject of the Flynn Effect. The political scientist James R. Flynn was the first to draw attention to the fact that average intelligence test scores in most industrialised countries have increased substantially over a […]

This TNR article makes the point that Howard Dean is too secular to be elected. The article notes that Dean’s family has become more secular over the generations. Political families that have succeeded over the past century have become more, not less, religious. Look at the Bush family, Bush Sr. is an Episcopalian, but G.W. […]

Watch the thread titled NRO Gets Dirty II (on @ Matthew Yglesias’ blog) devolve into a defense of various definitions of the same word. Funny how internet discussions often evolve to the same end-perhaps there is an Internet God that rigged the teleology. 1) People disagree about substance2) People exchange a few posts3) A & […]

Playmate of the Year Preview for 2003. July, October or November seem like the standouts to me. Also, TV GUIDE is doing You Sexy Thing with Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst. All I can say is that Stiles looked feminine next to Franka Potente in The Bourne Identity, while Dunst is a very attractive alien. […]

World of Ideas has a great audio archive of lectures by great thinkers. The most recent one by physicist Murray Gell-Mann was pretty interesting. I always assumed Gell-Mann was a European emigre, but he’s American, and he touches diverse topics such as Galton, Jamaican Creole dialects and the Power Law. WBUR has a good site […]

Boston Review on the mind and nature and nuture. Posted by razib at 10:35 PM

This link Jacqueline provided indicates that human-elf pairings tended to be male human + female elf. It notes that elves are androgynous aside from their bits & pieces, so humans are more sexually dimorphic…. P.S.: My favorite scene from the RotK was when Pippin was singing for Denethor while his son Faramir was leading a […]

Here are the results for the question about how you guys found GNXP:Search engine/9%/11A blogroll (a permanent link from a blog)/24%/29A blog link (a link in an entry of a blog)/43%/51An article on a web site/3%/4Email forward of a link to an entry/0%/0Friend mentioned your blog/7%/9One of your old blogs (before Gene Expression)/10%/12Other/1%/2 I should […]

Saw Return of the King today. Good movie. Anyone can find anything in Tolkien. But one thing that I’ve always wondered is how liberal Tolkien lovers hande the racio-cultural implications. When I googled tolkien racism this site comes out on top. The author says this: The good guys in the story are not racially segregated, […]

LA TIMES article about the head-scarf row over in the Gallic country. Many Brits & Americans have been contemptuous of French attempts to squelch Islamist identification amongst their Muslim minority. Yeah, as a classical liberal, laissez faire, but I live in a country where Muslims are closer to 1% than 10% of the population. The […]

We’ve been at this domain for almost a year, and Gene Expression was on blogspot for 6 months prior to that. So I’m curious, how did people get to this blog? We’re getting a lot of search engine hits now, but I don’t know how stick they are, the comment boards haven’t changed that much. […]