One of the topics we’ve touched on before on this weblog is historical genetics, the use of genetical methods to elucidate historical questions. This technique has been particularly fruitful in exploring the “history” of the British Isles between the withdrawl of the Romans in the early 5th century to the time of the Venerable Bede […]

Here is an interesting new paper in PNAS. You can read a news article about it here. In a typically insightful piece, the underground statistician La Griffe du Lion estimates that South and East (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) Asians average an SAT-M score of ~630-640. This implies that the average East/South Asian student obtains a higher […]

Update #1 at Bottom of the post. Update #2: We have followed up with a briefer rejoinder here. PLoS Blogs has linked to both posts responding to the commentary by Ben Barres. In my view, when faculty tell their students that they are innately inferior based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, they are […]

Twin studies have somewhat fallen out of favor in genetics– instead of estimating parameters like the heritability of a trait, it’s now common to simply skip to studies designed to locate genes that play a role in them. If the heritability turns out to be zero, then, well, not a whole lot is going to […]

Gingrich and Biden on Meet the Press apparently in near total agreement Sneak peak at 2008?

Here is an interesting new paper in PNAS. You can read a news article about it here. Ten native Chinese speakers (of Chinese ethnicity) and ten native English speakers (white) were put through four different tasks while their brains were scanned by fMRI: (1) Symbol, deciding whether the third figure in a triplet of figural […]

I ain’t affected by the negative. It’s the Reflection and we dealin with the positive. It’s for the love and cause of that we got a lot to give. It’s the Reflection kid. Never gotta look between the lines to get the messages. – Talib KweliThe latest Erin Schuman paper came out two and a […]

A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences contends: I measured eight indices of immune function (haemolysis, haemagglutination, concentration of haptoglobin and concentration of five leukocyte types) in 15 phylogenetically matched pairs of bird populations from North America and from the islands of Hawaii, Bermuda and the Galapagos. Immune responses were […]

Just an FYI for y’all out there, GCeleb = Not work safe The Superficial. Be warned, page down fast past ‘Alecia Moore aka “Pink” Topless Photos.’ And you’re welcome :) A shout out to those who focus on phenotype and not genotype.

Miss Universe 2006 finally updated their website so I could collect some phenotypic data for analysis! The delegates seem rather thin, so I suspect that the ones who are turned to the side are more shapeless. In any case, below the fold are pictures of Muslim women in 2-pieces. Just in any case any Salafi […]

In September of last year, Bruce Lahn’s group at the University of Chicago published two articles in Science arguing that two genes which, when mutated, cause microencephaly had recently been (and possibly currently are) under selection in humans. The phenotype under selection was (and still is) unclear, but the fact that mutations in the genes […]

In these debates about science & religion, evolution & Creationism, there are implicit assumptions lurking in the background. The primary one in relation to evolution, elucidated by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker and A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral, is that Darwin’s theory resulted in the natural and necessary decline in religiosity for the elites. […]

Once again into the breach, etc. Derbyshire, when responding to the latest creationist article published in National Review (link), makes this observation: It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a […]

Not only have I forgotten my high school French, but also I have forgotten my undergrad organic chemistry. More accurately, I never bothered to learn it very well. Imagine my dismay, then, when I discovered that it might actually come in handy for answering important memory questions. Dieterich et al (2006) recently reported the use […]

This letter to the editor in the Lansing State Journal is making the rounds on the blogosphere: …Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it. Islam is being […]

John Hawks is the Chris of Mixing Memory for paleoanthropology, and Chris of Mixing Memory is the John Hawks of cognitive psychology. And Robert Skipper is the philosopher & historian of science equivalent of the pair. Can you name other weblogs that stand head & shoulders above the pack in terms of their scholarly orientations?

If you’re an animal wondering around trying to figure out what to eat and not die, you are going to want to remember to avoid any and all substances that made you feel the slightest bit ill. This is why conditioned taste aversion is a prime example of single-trial learning. This post isn’t about conditioned […]

So. A red card for head-butting a dude in the chest, and the career of Zinedine Zidane is over. I’ve got to disagree with Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript on this one: that card may have cost France the game. But hey, what aggressive player doesn’t blow his top once in a while? And […]

Regular readers know that ASPM is a microencephaly gene under selection in humans, though the particular pressure driving the selection is unknown. A group of Spanish researchers decided to test whether there is an association between variants of the gene and schizophrenia. The result: nothing. Of course, with only 233 cases and 161 controls, the […]

Short short commentary on Neandertal DNA. And yes, I’m daring John Hawks to jump in….