I was intrigued by reports in the Press on the start of a trial of several Pitcairn islanders on charges relating to underage sex. The islanders themselves insist that sex with girls from the age of 12 upwards (with their consent) has traditionally been accepted on the island. So I was curious to know what […]

Razib is the muse that inspired this, with his “Islam should be gelded” remark. Blame him. :) David B has a discussion of Sykes’ book, Adam’s Curse here, from a year ago. Sykes projects the end of the Y-chromosome in 50,000 generations or approx 120,000 years. David and the gnxpers disagree with him in the […]

Richard Dawkins’ latest column on race makes some decent points regarding racial classification, makes a few, perhaps surprisingly “conservative”, political suggestions, is ambiguous on the topic of racial differences, and makes a few irrelevant and probably wrong points (the average “man on the street” could probably not, contra Dawkins, tell apart random samples of sub-Saharan […]

From Steve Jones’s column in today’s Daily Telegraph: Men are bigger than women. That imbalance is widespread in nature, but has plenty of exceptions. I often quote the male angler-fish, which is reduced to a mere sack of guts and genitals stuck to the backside of his partner. And, I add, to annoy the men’s […]

Mixed Blog has a post up that points to several links about the Siddis, people of black African origin who live in South Asia. Posted by razib at 03:34 PM

In my recent post on Rawls I mentioned in passing that his famous book A Theory of Justice didn’t say much about territory and boundaries, and it wasn’t clear whether he intended the redistribution of wealth and income required by his principles of ‘justice’ to be carried out on a global scale. In writing this […]

I’m astounded by this small article about the beliefs of Icelanders; Surveys show that despite their obsession with modern technology, as many as 80% of Icelanders believe in the existence of elves. Even today, roads have been rerouted and building plans redesigned or abandoned to avoid disturbing rocks where elves are said to live. Longer […]

All those who say that all celebrities are all a bunch of left-wing nutballs, check out this list that I’ve compiled over the past few months. Trace AdkinsKirstie AlleyStephen BaldwinClint BlackPat BooneLara Flynn BoyleKix BrooksBen BrowderJerry BruckheimerChris CagleKirk CameronDrew CareyEmma CaulfieldLionel ChetwyndAlice CooperKevin CostnerRobert DaviJohn Rhys DaviesBo DerekShannon DohertyJerry DoyleRonnie DunnRobert DuvallSara EvansVincent GalloAndy GarciaJennifer […]

Lately, I’ve been delving into different cultures mythologies (see my earlier post on Icelandic elves) and have become fixated on Japanese ghost stories. Two things I have noticed about these stories is there is a large lower/upper class pathos expressed within them and, in comparison to western ghosts that are just “going through the motions […]

A new Paris Hilton sextape emerges, with two exes. Now I can kinda understand the desire to see a celeb having sex, though I don’t really have that desire, but Paris has always seemed too skinny, too waifish, too blonde, and too idiotic to spark my interest. Too each their own. Posted by scottm at […]

“Race” is not a social construction…but “ethnicity” is. Clarification: Obviously if you are comparing the Japanese and Swedish ethnic groups you would not think they are social constructions, but, the key here is that the ethnic groups correlate to racial differences. My point is that though broad racial clusters seem to exist, ethnic differences are […]

No, I’m not talking about Oswald Spengler, the great declinist, cyclical history theorist, and, most famously, the author of The Decline of the West. He’s a pretty neat read, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I absolutely love his concept of Western Civilization as a “Faustian” culture. Other than that, he’s sort of […]

Recently I was flipping around channels and saw Bill Maher refer to Arabs keeping “half their population dressed like beekeepers.” I found that hilarious. Now, as Stanely Kurtz has noted Westerners should be really cautious about fiddling with Muslim modes of dress. I’m taking that off the table, rather, I want to focus on the […]

I’m about 1/3 of the way through Narrow Roads of Gene Land and I must report that I misled (inadvertently) when I suggested that suggested that William Hamilton believed that interpopulation marriage would perpetuate heterozygote advantage immunologically, something I’ve discussed before. Well, from what I gather, Hamilton didn’t buy heterozygote advantage. Partially this is because […]

It can be hard for girls to find jeans sometimes. Is this because female bodies are particularly difficult because of their morphology? I would submit not. I would submit that it is because women’s jeans have to form fit, while male jeans do not. Why? I think it is because women need to “show off” […]

Rereading Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, I stumbled upon this fact: Bob Trivers, author of Natural Selection and Social Theory, has had bouts of schizophrenia. As has been noted, William Hamilton, pioneer of ‘inclusive fitness,’ and so a key figure in theories about the evolution of animal societies, was likely autistic. Ironic that […]

Parents exist for the care of their children, rather than children existing for the “self-fulfillment” of their parents, a concept that has difficulty penetrating the narcissistic, self-absorbed “therapeutic” ethos of the boomer generation. – me, hereTim Guest, “Bringing Up Me”, The New York Times, 2004 September 26. When I was 4, my mother became a […]

“A history of sex”, The Economist, 2004 September 23. By examining the DNA of living people, [Dr Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson] and his colleagues have found….a lot of variability in the mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA which follows the female line), and much less in the Y-chromosome DNA (which […]

In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World the author tells of the decision to kill all the adult males of the Tatar tribe and adopt their children and women into the Mongol nation after the former had been defeated by the latter in war. When reading this sort of thing, I could […]

Joanna Moorhead, “‘For decades we’ve been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we’ve been duped’”, The Guardian, 2004 September 22. (hat tip: Stambord) ["T]he glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. […]