Steve’s article is up: This Just In—Kerry’s IQ Likely Lower than Bush’s!. It’s a long piece, but probably not too surprising for those of us who always wondered why Kerry went from Yale to Boston College. Posted by razib at 07:46 PM

I have stated before that I think a naive secularist historiagraphy that manufactures a “War Against Science” is fallacious, that myths like the church’s “burning of Galileo” (almost certainly a conflation of the burning of Giordano Bruno, a minor figure who was replaced in the public mind with a major one) issue out of a […]

Dean Hamer is doing press interviews for his new book The God Gene. In an interview with Beliefnet he says straight up: The God gene refers to the idea that human spirituality has an innate genetic component to it. It doesn’t mean that there’s one gene that makes people believe in God, but it refers […]

Razib has set up, at my request, a sister blog to GNXP called GNXP Science Fiction (you can either click that link or the one up in the right hand corner). While it is open to all things Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Cult, Horror etc, I would like it to not descend into only posting about your […]

It’s OK for men to hit us, says wives’ poll in Turkey: More than a third of Turkish women believe they deserve to be beaten if they argue with their husbands, deny them sex, neglect children or burn a meal, according to a survey reported by the Anatolia news agency yesterday. The survey found that […]

About six months ago Dr. Henry Harpending expressed to me the opinion in an email that the mtDNA pattern we see (the seed from which genetic Out-of-Africa emerged) is the result of a selective sweep. Since Henry knows this shit, I was pretty troubled. You see, I have half a dozen books on human evolution […]

Diana links to a page that has SAT scores of famous people. But, as the page notes, they are unverified. I find John Kerry’s score, 1190, plausible, but some of the others I don’t buy. Howard Stern getting an 870 for example. Or Al Franken’s 1020, he went to Harvard during the meritocratic tenure (and […]

Right now I’m reading an outstanding book by John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact. I don’t really want to get into the Jew discussion again, but this part about quotas really caught me, and I thought I’d share it with you… On 25 April 1933, the Nazi government passed with much […]

This post over at Panda’s Thumb leaves me speechless, Social Darwinism and “The Political Brain”. It starts: By “conservative,” I mean those political and economic ultra-conservatives who oppose taxes of all kinds, promote free-market economics, and generally oppose government intervention in anything. By “liberal,” I mean anyone from, say, a New Deal Democrat to a […]

Godless has said before that the “Intelligent Design” contingent is foolish and wrong. This article in Wired points out that they don’t have to be correct, accurate or scientific, they just have to have good lawyers. As a pre-breeder that plans on using public schools, this scared the heck out of me. :( Posted by […]

“Who’s Getting Your Vote?” Reason. 2004 November. Steven Pinker Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate (Penguin), How the Mind Works (W.W. Norton), and The Language Instinct (HarperCollins). 2004 vote: Kerry. The reason is reason: Bush uses too little of it. In the war on terror, his administration […]

This didn’t really turn out to be a response to razib’s post below, so I’m giving it its own topic instead of posting a comment. Two good papers on Multiregional evolution are Wolpoff’s Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution and Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory. My conception of […]

If you are a GNXP contributor, and want to divulge who you are voting for and why, go ahead in the extended entry. If you don’t have full privs to do that, email me. Limit explanations to 10 words or less! A link to your own site with more explanation is OK. I put mine […]

Ruotsi on parempi kuin Suomi ja koko maailma tietaa, paitsi Suomalaiset! Posted by razib at 12:29 PM

Greater Hepatic Vulnerability after Alcohol Intake in African Americans Compared with Caucasians: A Population-Based Study (PDF). Here is a popular press summation of the research. In short, the study shows that an enzyme that signals liver damange, gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), is found to be at higher concentrations among African Americans after drinking than among European Americans […]

I’ve just finished reading the new book by Marek Kohn: A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination. This is ostensibly a history of the theory of natural selection in England since Darwin by way of biographical studies of six major theorists: Alfred Russel Wallace, R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John […]

Is it just me, or is Google Desktop search an order of magnitude better than Microsoft’s? Granted, it only searches particular formats, but they are the important ones. Posted by razib at 02:20 AM

New study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies indicates that Bush has doubled his 9% rating from 2000 to 18%. It appears that it involves mainly his stance on social issues and the change is occuring much more likely amongst the 50+ crowd. So if the life expectency of AA is extended […]

Michael Pollard has some Team America clips. Posted by razib at 03:21 PM

Rezwan has an interesting post about the vulgarization of Bangladeshi cinema: With vulgar titles and sexy posters these movies attract those people with a view to give them some cheap entertainment. Did you ever wonder why the Bengali Cinema actresses keep on gaining their weight? On public demand. For the poor a fatty figure represents […]