I thought readers might find the details about Deep Spring College interesting. It is located in the high California desert, has a student body of 26, offers a full $50,000 bursary to each student, has an average class size of 4, the students must work 20 hours per week on either the college’s 300 head […]

So now a Republican is in favor of Reparations? Alan Keyes is really batshit crazy. Posted by scottm at 03:57 AM

In a follow-up to this post on brain morphology the Chinese, no wilting flowers they, in apparent disregard of the notion that race doesn’t exist, have established a Brain Bank to study the Chinese brain. Researchers in Hong Kong and China hope to persuade Chinese people to donate their grey matter to medical science. Brain […]

A passing sentence in David Salsburg’s The Lady Tasting Tea made me wonder about the adaptive landscape in the context of culture. Stella Cunliffe, past president of the Royal Statistical Society stated that the “delight in elegance, often at the expense of practicality, appears to me…to be a rather male attribute” during her annual address […]

[Crosspost from geneticfuture.org] Here’s an article that brings up some tricky cause/effect questions: Genes May Determine Who Developed Gulf War Syndrome [U. Buffalo news wire, Aug 9 2004] The research showed that a certain gene predicted whether or not veterans who served in the Persian Gulf War would come with Gulf War Syndrome: External or […]

In my webtravels I’ve come across another instance of someone proclaiming that “Race Doesn’t Exist” and he directed me to his manifesto: Essentially, poking around the literature has convinced me that people at higher levels of education — be they Republican or Democrat — are essentially nonracist; that once one has any post-Bachelor’s education, one […]

The hope just keeps on coming for GC. Posted by Thrasymachus at 03:17 PM

For the first time, Moroccan primary schools are teaching Tifinagh (Berber) to children. (hat tip: Mirabilis.ca) Woohoo!Kent Davis-Packard, “At last, an ancient tongue will be taught”, The Christian Science Monitor, 2004 August 17. The letter “yaz,” shaped like a joyful human being, is the symbol of the Imazighen people. It’s one of the 39 letters […]

Matt Rosenberg has an interesting post on how the University of Arizona has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to come up with more culturally-sensitive math instruction for Hispanic students. He links to this report: Latino youths, especially those from low-income or working-class families, tend to score lower on standardized math tests than their […]

[crosspost from geneticfuture.org] The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report (available as a book, or as a free download from here) which says that genetically modified food is no way substantially different from non-GM food. It says that GM foods, just like regular foods, carry risks. The report admits that GM technology can […]

A slight thought experiment, which I have alluded to before, but never been totally explicit about. Take a population, say 1,000 females of the black race and 1,000 males of the white race. Allow them to interact, isolated from the distractions of the outside world. In a few years, little brown children are born…. Moving […]

Usually we read about research that has uncovered single letter differences in the human genome, but in the current issue of Nature Genetics Stephen W Scherer & Charles Lee, in their study entitled, Detection of Large-Scale Variation in the Human Genomereport the discovery of huge segments, numbering into the hundreds of thousands of letters, of […]

The Jewish magazine Forward has an article up titled A Skeleton in the Jewish Family Closet?. The genetic angle, the possible non-Levantine origin of the Levite male lineage (the article points to a Slavic source) is somewhat old news. Over the past few years several researchers have suggested a non-trivial level of intermarriage occurred between […]

America is bad. You wanna know why? Because it puts so many people in prison: 715 per 100,000 population, the highest incarceration rate in the world. For every 100,000 people, Sweden imprisons only 75 and Sudan only about 36. That’s because they’re more enlightened. Also, America imprisons more people because it’s so violent, unlike peaceful […]

John B Whitfield writing in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research and working with data from three studies conducted between 1980 and 1995 on volunteer adult male and female Australian twin subjects conclude that reported alcohol consumption was mainly affected by genetic factors and that genes that affect alcohol intake do affect […]

G. H. Hardy’s letter to science . He notes that: In a word, there is not the slightest foundation for the idea that a dominant character should show a tendency to spread over a whole population, or that a recessive should tend to die out. Reading a biography of Ramanujan a few years back I […]

We’re all familiar with the concepts of darwinian selection but let’s for a moment consider the conseqences of a world in which we turn the model on it’s head. What happens when mate selection becomes a information blind (or almost so) process? No, I’m not referencing arranged marriages because in that practice the families act […]

or, Are the Chinese a bunch of prudes or what? I bring this up because, not only does the sexual morality of modern Britons dismay Laban (a proud Briton though he may be, I doubt he’ll dispute the assertion), but the survey “cited” by the article (I put “cited” between scare quotes because the article […]

Just got this in the mail today: I have put our Ashkenazi manuscript back up on my website together with some quotes from the editor rejecting it. Meanwhile you are free to tell folks about it. http://harpend.dsl.xmission.com/Documents/Ashkenazi.IQ.pdf Best, Henry Enjoy. Those readers with blogs should link, would be interesting to see Greg & Henry’s work […]

New ACT data out. Surprise, surprise regarding rank order, etc. What is interesting is the stability of the mean score. If you look at a little longer time period, the stability of mean scores is uncanny1: National Average ACT Composite Score, 1994–2004 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 20.8 20.8 […]