As Some Grow Weary of Web, Online Sales Lag: …Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits, said that the leveling off of e-commerce reflected the practical and psychological limitations of shopping online. She said that as physical stores have made the in-person buying experience more pleasurable, online […]

I just looked at the google analytics data for this website for the first time in about 6 months. Sitemeter is great, but google analytics allows for a fine grained analysis of the data. Looking at the top key word search queries and the highest ranked landing pages, I conclude that people really like porn. […]

So, I saw this article about a Charles Darwin exhibit at a museum, and this quote irritated me: “A lot of people don’t know his mother was heir to the Wedgwood ceramics fortune or that Darwin married his first cousin,” Skwerski [the curator in charge of the exhibit] says. “For a man who essentially studied […]

A recent paper on the genetics of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) notes that the some of the genetic variants predisposing to disease are fixed or at high frequency in some populations, suggesting the work of natural selection (see here for molecular evidence and review). The authors note that “it is unclear if ADHD […]

TNR is continuing the debate on race. Not much to read really, but this caught my attention: I found your characterization of race as a “cluster concept” provocative and intellectually honest, since you admit its imprecision…. Imprecision? Really? Well: Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their […]

I am a bit tardy with my second part of my review of God’s Contintent, Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis. There are some other things I have to take care of, and the previous post, though fruitful, took a lot of my time in terms of moderation (once the post went off the front […]

There have been reports in the British Press this week about the influence of ethnicity on the decisions of juries. This is based on a study published by the newly formed Ministry of Justice (formerly part of the Home Office). The press reports have generally been along the lines that ‘juries are not affected by […]

Article in The Economist. Labels: culture

New Scientist has an article about Neandertals being human. Kambiz has an extensive comment, but this is important: Another hotly debated piece of Neandertal humanity, is the burial at Shanidar Cave, where archaeologists found pollen from flowers on and around the Neandertal individual. They interpreted it as a form or mourning, or paying respects, like […]

Andrew Sullivan says: And lepers everywhere! I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever. This is a common perception that comes up over and over again. From Albion’s Seed: …The founders of Massachusetts, unlike rulers of other European colonies, […]

Edge has a transcript of a talk by Dan Everett, the heterodox linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker. Video coming soon. Labels: Psychology

Darwin Catholic has an interest post about work Americans won’t do. Darwin & his wife believe in doing their own yard work (I believe they live in Texas, so is probably pretty transgressive). So check this: I was pounding away with a short-handled mattock when one of a group of teenagers slouching by shouts in […]

TNR, the journal of the center-left, just published an article titled Why genes don’t determine race. The article doesn’t merit much of a response aside from “Why Platonism is wrong on race.” The article makes it implicitly clear that the new racial genetics is often one of conditional probabilities, not fixed determinism, but the strawman […]

First, Daddies’ girls choose men just like their fathers: Women who enjoy good childhood relationships with their fathers are more likely to select partners who resemble their dads research suggests. In contrast, the team of psychologists from Durham University and two Polish institutions revealed that women who have negative or less positive relationships were not […]

Via ALDaily comes this profile of Edward Tufte, described in the article as “the world’s only graphic designer with roadies”. The guy has a huge following in the scientific community–The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is proudly displayed on many a bookshelf. I’ve only browsed through it, but even that has been enough to make […]

Melissa Theuriau, is she all that? Labels: Ladies

I found this amusing paper, Adaptation to Sperm Competition in Humans, via google scholar. The topic itself isn’t necessarily amusing, but the description of how a human penis is engineered to scoop out the sperm from another male can’t help but induce some smirks. In any case, most of the time we’ve discussed sperm competition […]

Most studies of the genetics of human traits focus on a specific disease phenotype, or some extreme of phenotypic variation that a clinician can call “pathological”. Because of this disease-centric approach, the genetics of basic cellular processes often go unstudied in humans (I’m not kidding when I say some medical doctors and clinicians were resistant […]

A recent paper issue of Cell came with an ad for the Calcium Signalling series from Henry Stewart Talks. These are apparently nicely produced lecture-format videos from experts reviewing diverse areas of biology. I’m not willing to shell out the $690 it would take to view the whole thing, but they have a free talk […]

Xun Zi, the least idealistic of the great Confucian sages stated, “Mozi was blinded by utility and did not understand culture.” Blinded by the utility, it seems a problem which intellectuals are still plagued by, until they realize they are bounded by the culture…. Labels: History