From BBC News: Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women. A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests. Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn claim the difference grows when […]

I have been reading some chapters of A History of Islamic Societies recently, and I noticed something interesting. But first some context. I have read a lot about the dynamics of Indonesian, in particular Javanese, society for many years. The reason is that on this island of 100 million you have a nominally Muslim society […]

A paper should be out on PNAS at some point today which argues (to simplify) that dangerous weapons ushered in an era of cooperation and amity. Here is a report in National Geographic.

A reader pointed me to this new research out in PNAS that suggests that “…Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information.” Scientific American has a popular press piece up on this as well. The reader wondered why the researchers focused on cultural rather than biological factors. To understand, […]

Contemporary Americans don’t eat the same dishes as Medieval Europeans because because many foods in a modern American diet were not available to Medieval Europeans. They either hadn’t been discovered by Europeans yet, such as New World foods like maize, potatoes, and chocolate, or were unavailable for other reasons, such as pepper and other spices, […]

A new report is coming out of Dmanisi, Georgia, about a 1.8 million “Homo erectus” skull. This is a site that has generated a lot of buzz in the past few years, mostly because it is evidence that pre-moderns ventured into northern Eurasia very soon after their emergence in Africa. Here is a map from […]

I’m sure you’ve heard about the very ancient pedigree of tuberculosis by now. Carl Zimmer has posted in depth on this topic already, so I’ll just point you there in case you want something more than the free PDF. Too often people imagine evolution as being driven out environmental change. My recent post which pointed […]

Some new research provides evidence that chimpanzees show ‘cultural conformity’: they follow the learned behaviour patterns prevalent in their group even though they are aware of effective alternatives. A report from the Guardian is here. There are several others on the net. I think this could be important. Several experts on ‘cultural evolution’ have argued […]

I have posted on the “languages wars” before…so I thought that I’d point out that Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser W. T. Fitch have responded (full text) to Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff’s paper which was written in response to their initial manifesto. Note that this is basically back-biting amongst the “innatist” camp as regards language. […]

As some of you know, I am involved in the Cognitive Science Blog Reading Group where we are reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. As I stated on the group I view my participation on the list and posts on the weblog as synergistic, intersecting but not necessarily coterminous activities. The core […]

Did you just read the latest mindless talking point on Red State or Daily Kos? Feeling frustrated? Wondering if the propaganda can get any worse? Wonder no more, for the North Korea News Agency archive is now on-line. Read your propaganda the way it’s meant to be read, with over 50 megabytes of hard-core Stalinist […]

Talk about a scarlet pimp, look below the fold….

Scientific American has a summary of a new paper in Science which chronicles the oscillating climate of Africa 3 to 1 million years ago. Here’s the relevant snip: Lake sediments in ten Ethiopian, Kenyan and Tanzanian rift basins suggest there were three humid periods at 2.7-2.5 Ma, 1.9-1.7 Ma and 1.1-0.9 Ma before the present […]

It’s really frustrating when you can’t find information via google, but, it just reminds you how shallow the the data mining of search engine crawlers can be. On this weblog people have mentioned blondeness among Australian Aboriginals multiple times, and ultimately we really haven’t gotten anywhere (no one has brought up novel data) because no […]

A researcher who studies melanin hits a lot of data nuggets in one post. NuSapiens offers some related speculations (sort of). Also, you might be interested that Heather Norton has a paper in press, Worldwide polymorphism at the MC1R locus and normal pigmentation variation in humans. Of course, I have no access to Peptides, though […]

Two papers in PNAS of some interest: Geographic routing in social networks and Kinship-based politics and the optimal size of kin groups.

I’ve developed a mild interest in John Brown, but before I began reading about him I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the cultural history of slavery in the United States…and I noticed a little book titled Islam’s Black Slaves, and I had to pick it up. It’s real short, I read it in when I […]

Comments about my “Ethics is hard and so is science” got me interested in the naturalistic fallacy: “the argument tries to draw a conclusion about how things ought to be based solely on information about how things are in fact.” An example: “There have always been wars. Hence there is no reason for you to […]

There is going to be publication of a piece in Nature (sometime today) that argues for the reintroduction of megafauna to North American by transplanting African speices. This article in the Economist has an overview, while CNN also is reporting on this. The only thing I would like to add is that I think the […]

Well, I wasn’t going to comment on the Amanda Schaeffer slam of Evolutionary PsychologyTM in Slate drawn heavily from David Buller’s Adapting Minds, but Steve just has, and GC pointed out that someone on Brad Plummer’s blog also noted the implicit opening for human variation that she produced by acknowledging the reality of microevolution over […]