John Hawks added his two cents about noise including an interesting discussion on the source of circadian rhythms. Note that the real author of the noise post was not me (Coffee Mug), but a friend of mine who goes by deadsmith, when he goes by internet names..

In my recent post, A DNA database nation?, I commented that including everyone in a criminal DNA database would solve several ethical concerns with their current and expected use. You can get a sense of the utility and concerns about DNA databases by reading the latest issue of Genomics, Society and Policy, which is apparently […]

Yeah, I never thought I’d write something with that title either, but serendipity happens. Today I read an article on mathematical cognition in adults and 4 year-olds from the new PLoS Biology, and I was trying to think of something neat to say about it, rather than just summarize what they found. So I put […]

I’ve been meaning to write this up for awhile now, so here goes. It’s more of a pointer to what books & articles to read, so it may not cover every question you have about g and creativity. [1] In Carroll’s (1993) encyclopedia of cognitive abilities, Ch. 10 surveys psychometric data on the ability of […]

The most recent Current Opinion in Genetics and Development has a number of articles grouped around the theme “The sex chromosomes and human disease”. A bit that might be of interest from this one: The accumulation of intelligence (i.e. MRX) genes on the X might have occurred as the result of sexual selection – the […]

A few papers out right now, like Jackson and Rushton, revolving around Frey and Detterman’s formulas for converting SAT scores into IQ scores. First, gnxp’s own A.A. Beaujean has a paper in the latest Personality and Individual Differences, providing additional evidence that the SAT is a reasonable measure of g, matching it up reliably to […]

An old friend of mine (handle: deadsmith) dropped me this discussion of selection and noise in biological systems. I figured with the various discussions of noise around here, you folks might enjoy it. The words below are his, the errors in formatting are mine: I’d love to tell you that this entry is going to […]

In less than two weeks GNXP will be four. A small little weblog that started out at 300 uniques per day in the summer of 2002 is now steady at 3,000 per day in 2006 (and, has spawned a spin off weblog). We’ve been #1 for gene expression on google for a while now, and […]

At my other blog…I post about why The Da Vinci Code is important (unfortunately). Also, a quick introduction to David Haig’s kinship theory hypothesis re: genomic imprinting.

Glove compartment, gotta get my cash. Cause the crooked cops’ll try to come up fast. – Chamillionaire If you’re interested in the molecular mechanism of learning and memory, you read a lot about synaptic plasticity and long-term potentiation (LTP).. If you’ve read anything at all about LTP, you’ve probably read that there is this special […]

Interesting article in The Boston Globe which profiles researchers who suggest that variation in gut flora (the mix of bacteria) might be the cause of differences in body weight. Interesting fact: there are an order of magnitude more bacteria in your gut than cells in your body. Also, to my knowledge (hearing this from a […]

The second point made by Eyre-Walker et al. in their paper “The distribution of fitness effects of new deleterious amino acid mutations in humans” is that “it will be very difficult to locate most of the genes involved in complex disease” (see my discussion of their first point here). They come to this conclusion because, […]

Lordi wins Eurovision song contest… Update from Razib: Finland vs. Sweden re: educational performance. Take home message: Finns are nerds!I know Razib was rooting for them.

Ron Bailey has an article in Reason, Slouching toward a DNA database nation. I would like to argue that becoming a DNA database nation is not in itself a bad thing, and that there are better and worse ways to go about doing it. First, what information is in a DNA database? From what I […]

Global Beauties got their shit together and finally put up a facebook of sorts for the contestants we know about. Despite the vagaries of image quality (some of these are glamor shots, some are only stills of the victory crowning, etc.), my 0-10 ranking below the fold (no more than 5 seconds viewing each contestant). […]

Comment on twinning & diet over at my other blog.

I was going to mention this before, but I forgot. Recently I went to a talk given by a physical anthropologist, and he mentioned how humans are superior as far as large mammals go in maintaining a high level of function during the heat of the day. Offhand, he offered that if you took a […]

Yann Klimentidis points to a preprint of a paper by Eyre-Walker et al. coming out in Genetics entitled The distribution of fitness effects of new deleterious amino acid mutations in humans. The abstract finishes with this: We argue that the relaxation of natural selection due to modern medicine and reduced variance in family size is […]

Saw a talk yesterday by a guy named David M. Eagleman. He’s down at UT-Screwston. He is involved in that tricky cognitive neuropsych / philosophical area that you can talk and write about for a long time and end up with a more convoluted version of the same idea you had to begin with. Apparently […]

…with the wrong guy is available here, in case you missed it. Destined to be a classic.