Griffe has a new article up, Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude. Related: Much ado about women & Larry Summers.

Four Challenges to Postcolonial Theory: More broadly, I question O’Connor’s disdain for inductive reasoning, generalizations, and conjecture. As anyone who has ever struggled with arguments about literature must know, literary studies has never conformed to the modern ‘scientific method.’ One generates viable arguments and new forms of literary knowledge via routes that are often tangled, […]

I have previously covered the main front in the struggle against freedom of speech in Europe – hate speech laws. Now it’s time to move on to another, more low-profile phenomenon: The Governmental Non-Governmental Organization, or GNGO for short. The GNGO is a tax-payer-funded organization, set up by the government to promote a specific policy, […]

From page 332 of After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC: Lloyd Warner argued that warfare and killing within the Murngin was a consequence of their marriage system. This was polygyny, which allowed men to have several wives; most middle-aged Murngin men had at least three. As the number of Murngin men and […]

Since I’ve been doing a lot of reading where “Maghrebi” kept coming up…I decided to see if IMDB had any new pictures of Moroccan Canadian actress Emmanuelle Chriqui (she was Lance Bug-eye-Bass’s romantic interest in his flop movie from a few years back). There were some here and there, but I did a little more […]

This morning I saw a post over at ParaPundit where Randall Parker quoted Marc Sageman, my ubiquitous source for the factoid about the overrepresentation of technical (scientists, engineers, etc.) types in Al Qaeda. As it happens, I had a copy of Sageman’s book, Understanding Terror Networks, on hand, and I decided to read it today. […]

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s magnum opus The History and Geography of Genes opened the flood gates in terms of a series of popular books which attempted to glean the movements of peoples by the examination of data from their genes (of late, usually matrilineally transmitted mitochondrial DNA and patrilineally transmitted Y chromosomal sequences). Of course, there is […]

In Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead he makes a really strange case for the existence of God (I’m not going to try to summarize it). Nevertheless, one of his points is that religion needs science to buttress itself against erosion among the educated. I […]

Dienekes links to two recent papers, one indicates that a pre-Mongoloid substrate existed in Thailand ~30,000 years B.P. through inspection of fossil morphology, while extracted mtDNA shows similarities to the non-Malay Semang peoples of the interior of Malaysia, another article confirms the ancient status of many Native American lineages through comparison with a 10,300 sequence […]

Thought this summer reading list might interest some. I’ve read 9 out of the 40 books listed, with a few in the “pending” category (own ‘em, will get to ‘em).

The Movable Type issues are gone, but I am going to stay with Blogger for now because I am skeptical about the future support for the old free version of MT that ran this site (this blog is too big for the licensing conditions for the current gratis service, and the number of authors is […]

In a follow up of my earlier post: “We know that the killing of innocents is forbidden,” Dr. Waheed said. “But we don’t see two classes of blood; the blood of Iraqis is just as important to us as English blood.” (source: Anger Burns on the Fringe of Britain’s Muslims) I have serious problems with […]

I misreported Heather Norton’s presentation in the post below. I emailed her a few questions, and she responded: Actually, my data do not show that Europeans and East Asians have different MC1R alleles, but rather that they appear to be different for two alleles in the genes TYR and MATP. I didn’t see strong differences […]

Reading After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC by Steve Mithen I came across this interesting fact: ~12,000 years ago the peoples of Western Asia were selectively hunting male gazelle. They clearly understood enough about animal reproduction (perhaps extrapolated from human patterns) that female mammals were the rate limiting step in the perpetuation […]

Y-Chromosome Evidence of Southern Origin of the East Asian–Specific Haplogroup O3-M122: …Our results indicate that the O3-M122 lineage is dominant in East Asian populations, with an average frequency of 44.3%. The microsatellite data show that the O3-M122 haplotypes in southern East Asia are more diverse than those in northern East Asia, suggesting a southern origin […]

Eric Trinkaus says: …in conjunction with the emerging chronology of the earliest modern humans, the paleontological data indicate an assimilation model for modern human origins, in which the earliest modern humans emerged in eastern Africa, dispersed briefly into southwestern Asia, and then subsequently spread into the remainder of Africa and southern Asia, eventually into higher […]

Since we mysteriously tend to show up rather high on some science related google queries, I have decided to copy many of the “species concepts” found in Coyne and Orr’s Speciation below (adapted from table 1.1 on page 27). Google does have a list of sites with a lot of information, but none of them […]

Listening to the BBC (and reading a few articles) I hear some British Muslims griping that the bombings are an inevitable response to British foreign policy and they note that dozens of Iraqis often die in one day. Oh, but did I mention that soldiers are chowing down on vagina roast in the Congo? Sometimes […]

From Perfect Soldiers: [page 15-16]…It’s hard to overemphasize the respect accorded to engineers in much of the Middle East…Within the engineering department, the highest-scoring students were assigned to the architecture program…for the first time in his life, Amir [Mohammed Atta] did not excel. Architecture, more than most creative disciplines, is a blend of the utterly […]

That additive genetic variance1 can increase after a founder event because various alleles can fix onto the genetic background and subtract epistatic effects which would normally cancel out? This is important since response to selection ~ additive genetic variance * selection coefficient. Researcher dissents/critiques welcome. Update: Consider epistatic effects which cancel out over the genetic […]