The best obituary of JMS I have seen yet is in the Guardian (22 April), here. All the obits mention JMS’s liking for discussions to be – er – lubricated. I can confirm this from personal experience. I met JMS once when he was in his early seventies, after he had given a paper at […]

Randall asks: But the ability of people to compare themselves to more other people and to feel to be in direct competition with more people must to be generating resentments and even demoralization due to comparisons that would not have been possible in the past.…Are we then headed toward a future that will be characterised […]

People Magazine has a dead-tree article on porn exposure of today’s children. This is something I’ve talked about before, the internet has resulted in the initiation of a vast social experiment. Where in generations past young teenage boys would scheme, plan and quest for porn, or barring that, a racy edition of National Geographic, kids […]

I was recently directed to this short article titled “Math favors boys over girls.” Rather ho-hum, and if you are want a quick primer that explains the differential by emphasizing the greater variance of male IQ, here you go [1]. But I did track down the original paper (full text PDF at the link) that […]

Just chatted a bit with Aziz earlier this afternoon, and I feel like I want to clear up a few things that I left implicit in the previous post. I have, as I earlier noted, advised great caution in importing Christian analogues when speaking of Islam. But, I believe that my objection was specifically in […]

A few years ago in southern England a drunken teenager threw a brick at a truck. The brick hit the driver’s window; the driver had a heart attack and died. The police forensic services obtained a DNA sample from the surface of the brick, but could not find a match. The case went cold… Then […]

Of 80 people who voted:60% want to keep extended entries.30% want to get rid of them.10% don’t care. Of six people who contacted me via email, one disliked extended entries, while all the others wanted them to remain. Posted by razib at 11:36 AM

If you read this blog you know that I am of the opinion that some religions are “brittle,” and internal change can be precipitated by a “tipping point.” Against this is the idea of slow evolution of ideas and groups over time. Obviously all groups evince both characteristics, and words like “fast” and “slow” can […]

Slate’s “cover-story” today, The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it brings back one of the oft-neglected, and important, characters in the HB-D pantheon: the Psychopath. Writer David Cullen states that the FBI has come to a conclusion about the reason why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered […]

France to expel second Muslim prayer leader in a week: Bouziane, 52, from Algeria, was quoted by Lyon Mag as saying he favors beating a wife “under certain conditions, notably if the woman cheats on her husband.” He claimed that the Quran, the Muslim holy book, “authorizes” such punishment – an interpretation rejected by most […]

Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith dies (via PZ Myers). Update: David B points me to a good obit in The Daily Telegraph, while Carl Zimmer offers his thoughts. From the obit: Professor John Maynard Smith, the biologist who died on Monday aged 84, applied game theory to animal behaviour and found that natural selection tends […]

Brian Greene (author of The Fabric of the Cosmos) is interviewed over at the Powells. On a related physical science note, I agree with FuturePundit, We Should Develop Defenses Against Large Asteroids, this is an implementation of the precautionary principle that I think the Left & Right can agree on, and hell, even the libertarians […]

When I was in high school I was in a short-lived relationship with a girl from a Christian fundamentalist background. One day I asked her, “What if God decided to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth and blot them from existence, would that be ‘good’?” Her answer was, “YES!” […]

Friedrich over at 2 Blowhards has an exegesis of Spencer Wells’ Journey of Man with handy maps (via Steve Sailer). Two major points: 1) Wells’ book focuses on the Y lineage, that is, the direct male ancestry of modern humans, ergo, the title of the book. Just like Genesis focuses on the patrilineage of humanity, […]

India is having an election, blah, blah…but check out this audio file about the use of vote machines, there is a funny jingle at the beginning that’s really hilarious. Posted by razib at 02:45 PM

Report on the U of Wisconsin symposium titled Race, Genetics & Disease: Questions of Evidence, Questions of Consequence. Posted by razib at 04:10 PM

I have occasionally mentioned Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature (2000). Here is a more considered view. As the title indicates, Miller’s thesis is that sexual selection has been a major factor in human evolution. In fact, he argues that it is the main impulse behind […]

This study of a group of pacific baboons is rather interesting, though I think it is a bit much to call it “cultural transmission.” The freak outbreak of disease from infected meat that killed the aggressive alpha males reminds me of the kind of thing that might appeal to someone working within the paradigm of […]

I know some readers of this blog use internet dating services, so here, it can’t hurt…. Posted by razib at 05:14 PM

Fascinating article in The New York Times about genetics and neuroscience. One of the most bizarre things though is how the article concludes: Dr. Walsh’s success is partly a result of his research strategy: he has focused on populations and regions, like the Middle East, where the deformities are more easily found because families are […]