In the comment board Theresa asserted: “Another side note, lots of ethnic Norwegians have dark hair and dark eyes — the blonde, blue-eyed folks are mainly in the inner valleys — and over there in Sweden.” I don’t know if this is true, but, it did make me wonder. My post Why evolution doesn’t make […]

Ronald Bailey, of Reason Magazine, reports on a 3-day conference with prominent neuroscientists and theologians called ”Our Minds and Us”. Concerned subjects are: Mind-brain duality, bioethics involved in understanding which structures of the brain are involved in things like violence and depression, and existential questions of “What is the self”. Check it out. Posted by […]

Below the fold are pictures of Miss Norway 2005 and Miss Namibia 2005. The images are linked to “close ups” (you know you want to click!). Update: People keep asking what is “unusual” about Miss Norway. I added another picture that makes the issue a bit more crisp. Read her profile in detail if you […]

Decoded at last: the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world. I don’t know if it will rewrite the ‘history of the world,’ rather, the processes detailed in the piece might allow us to fill-in-some-of-the-blanks which dominate God’s Book of History. 50 years ago reductionist physicists and mathematical model builders like […]

For all you Star Wars fans out there take a look at this fan-made trailer, Star Wars Revelations. Posted by TangoMan at 11:09 PM

Regarding an article, Law and Behavioral Biology, in the March issue of the Columbia Law Review >> Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do, scholars from Vanderbilt and Yale universities argue in the March issue of Columbia Law Review. “The […]

Why are Americans so conservative, so religious, and so resistant to modern western ‘Liberalism’? These subjects, with some variation, are a staple of European discussion regarding the United States. While explanations tend to focus on the metaphysical (“That redneck God of theirs!”), I believe another very significant factor is to be found in empirics – […]

A reflection of my Northeast + Northwestern upbringings…. (I still say “soda” and tend to slur “horror” in a New York/New England sort of way) Your Linguistic Profile: 50% General American English 30% Yankee 15% Upper Midwestern 5% Dixie 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Posted by razib at 11:06 PM

A preview of an article that is going to be in the June issue of American Naturalist, The Evolution of Phenotypic Polymorphism: Randomized Strategies versus Evolutionary Branching: A population is polymorphic when its members fall into two or more categories, referred to as alternative phenotypes. There are many kinds of phenotypic polymorphisms, with specialization in […]

A couple of items of interest from today’s London Sunday Times. First is this front page story on the level of illegal immigrants in the UK, allegedly estimated by Home Office officials at around 500,000. Second, an interesting feature article (book extract) by Tarquin Hall on the immigrant ‘community’ in East London. (Read it and […]

http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/gov_exports_11-04.xls. Government and industry data on national arms exports since 1994 Updated 12 November 2004 Copyright: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2002 Sweden: Population: 8,986,400 (July 2004 est.) value of actual deliveries of military equipment, 2002: $354 millionExports of military equipment and other equipment, services and software to military users, 2002: $676 million per-capita arms […]

James Watson, of Watson & Crick fame, once said that “There is only one science: physics. Everything else is social work.” In Naturalist E.O. Wilson recounts the intellectul war that broke out in Harvard’s biology department in the 1960s between the molecularists and the more traditional organismic biologists. The result was that the life sciences […]

Update: Sweden is not the world’s largest per capita exporter of arms, contrary to what NationMaster says. SIPRI data confirms this, as does data from IISS, the U.S. Department of State, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. See Greg Cochran’s post for more info. This is why they peer review stuff in academia! And for those who missed […]

I see that the theories of Frank Salter on Ethnic Genetic Interests are attracting enthusiastic attention on ‘White Nationalist’ sites. (Excuse me if that is the wrong term, but I am not familiar with the nuances of that sort of thing. Apparently the followers of Genghis Khan get very offended if you confuse them with […]

R.A. Fisher, the geneticist and statistician who gave us the greater portion of the theoretical basis for the “Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis,”1 was an ardent eugenicist who applied evolutionary principles to his understanding of history. Fisher explored the human past on his spare time through readings of the great scholars of his time, Gibbon and Frazier […]

What do you think is the greatest threat to the world? The Guardian published a piece today asking ten scientists this very question with some very unique answers varying from black holes to climate change (surprise!). For once, overpopulation was not mentioned, however something far more interesting than black holes was: telomere erosion. “On the […]

New study explains process leading to many proteins from one gene. “Alternative splicing appears to occur in 30 percent to 60 percent of human genes, so understanding the regulatory mechanisms guiding the process is fundamentally important to almost all biological issues,” “Using computers, the UT Southwestern researchers scanned the human genome and found that the […]

Moira on Kennewick again, full linkage to what’s the talk of the bones & stones town. I can’t add much except as I said in a thread below: all the gods are dead, the colored ones too. Posted by razib at 07:35 PM

Nature reports that a hominin in the Republic of Georgia which dates to nearly 2 million years B.P. seems to have survived with only one tooth (popular summation).1 This isn’t that surprising, I’ve been reading a few books on what we used to call Homo erectus and it seems other aged individuals in various states […]

Steve isn’t sure that variance of mutational load1 betweein individuals is responsible for important differences in beauty. Well, no doubt it isn’t responsible for the whole range of aesthetic countenance, but I would be curious to see how much it accounts for differences within a range of siblings. Here is the equation for mutation-selection balance […]