Over at Edge Armand Leroi was interviewed about human genetics & variation. Most of the talking points are based on his book Mutants. Labels: Genetics

Nothing too surprising in this story about attitudes toward alcohol in Europe. From Finland: Since the government cut tax on alcohol by one third in March 2004, deaths and diseases from alcohol have all jumped by similar amounts in hard-drinking Finland. The cut was made due to cheap alcohol imports from neighbouring Estonia. People respond […]

In PLoS Genetics, there’s a report on the identification of a locus that leads to white coat color in horses. This locus is KIT, a proto-oncogene (ie. certain mutations in this gene lead to increased cell growth and sometimes cancer) important for the survival of melanoblasts early in development. It’s a nice story on its […]

Over at Overcoming Bias Eliezer sings the praises of simple math. Steve was the first person to bring to my attention this phenomenon. For me, a little algebra, probability and statistics goes a long way in making one’s thoughts more precise and rigorous (even one’s own internal monologue). You can attempt this through pure verbal […]

Razib noted, in his post on the IQ-breastfeeding-FADS2 story, that it reminded him of research on MAOA. There’s a reason: it’s by the same group. In fact, the IQ study is the third in a “trifecta” of gene-environment interactions postulated by Avshalom Caspi and colleagues. Curious about whether their statistical methods were similar in all […]

Socialism doesn’t work people, haven’t we learned that? Strike closes nearly 300 liquor stores in Finland. Labels: Finn baiting

Bettany Hughes, our favorite pop classicist, is back with a new documentary, Athens: the dawn of democracy. It should be showing this Monday evening on your local PBS station if you live in the United States. I’ve recently expressed my skepticism at the democralatry which suffuses American discussion. Labels: History

Mary Murphy of The Jacques Barzun Centennial sent me this link to a video of Jacques Barzun accepting an award recently (large file). He talks about his great-grandmother who would talk about events in her life when he was young. She was born in 1830. Labels: Barzun

With AbeBooks and access to massive university libraries, what’s the point of visiting a physical book store? Well, presentation. With online stores and university stacks the search process is rather narrow and focused. You find extremely topical texts with laser-like specificity. But this also means that you won’t stumble upon a book which is just […]

For several years I’ve been suggesting that people should be relatively unconcerned by the rise of the evangelical Christian counter-culture, and in particular its more ambitious projects, such as Patrick Henry College. My rationale was primarily one based on American history and the experience of Christian anti-modernists with founding institutions to battle back against the […]

In an interesting story on the relationship between teen delinquency and sex (long story short: people who concluded early sex caused delinquency unsurprisingly failed to control for genetics and were led astray) I saw this little bit: A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result […]

In DNA Era, Worries About Revival of Prejudice by NYT genetics reporter Amy Harmon is a frank and sensitive look at the burgeoning implications of genetic science to our political and social landscape. Nothing quite like this article has ever really appeared in the press. The underlying message is that the biological information environment is […]

Engineers are not terrorists, rather, the inverse. At least in some circumstances. Tyler Cowen points me to a new paper, Engineers of the jihad: We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have […]

Economists Oded Galor of Brown and Omer Moav of Hebrew U. argue in a new paper that the Agricultural Revolution created longer lifespans. A simple version of their model goes like this: Agriculture–>Disease–>Somatic Investment in stronger bodies–>Longer lifespans once things settle down. This result hoists Jared Diamond on his own petard: If the Agricultural Revolution […]

There was recently widespread publicity in Britain and even internationally for the tragic case of Jean Gambell, who (according to the reports) was locked up as a lunatic at the age of 15 after being falsely accused of theft, and then ‘lost in the system’ until her family rediscovered her shortly before her death at […]

Tyler Cowen points and interest working paper, What’s Love Got To Do With It?Parental Involvement and Spouse Choice in Urban India: …when parents are involved in mate choice, sons are significantly less likely to marry college-educated women and women engaged in the labor force, after controlling for individual and family characteristics. I show that these […]

Alex Palazzo has a little post on the “brainbow mouse“, created using some of the transgenic methods mentioned by amenestic in a post a while back. Each individual neuron in a given mouse brain expresses a random combination of fluorescent proteins, allowing analysis with the naked eye. Pretty amazing stuff. Labels: Genetic Engineering, Neuroscience

Hm. I wonder if Finn-baiting might not be so safe. See here: Although gun violence is very rare in Finland, the country has the highest rate of firearm ownership in Europe and the third highest in the world, behind only the United States and Yemen. Why do so many Finns own firearms? They’re hunters….…While Finns […]

Just curious. I have a rough intuition. So I went to Porn stars by nationality on Wikipedia. I clicked the entries and tallied up the number of porn stars. I excluded English speaking countries since I figure that the listing would be biased that way because this is an English language encyclopedia. I created a […]

I’ve been reading a bit of the literature of the cognitive science of religion, as well as a good deal of material on the Reformation (for the former, see In Gods We Trust and Religion Explained). Trying to make heads or tails of the dynamics which we see in the world around us isn’t easy […]