After YouTubing VH1′s The Pickup Artist (a contest reality show where guys learn how to pick up girls), something struck me about how the bar and nightclub scene so thoroughly devastated the East Asian contestant. Sure, every guy gets rejection anxiety and experiences rejection, including the occasional antarctic stare and turn-away response that the Asian […]

God (and Gadgets) of the Lonely?: I’ve been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I’ve had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I’ve heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a […]

Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows: The Stanford team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures. They evaluated 96 functional features (such as how the hull was constructed or the way outriggers were attached) that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the canoes and thus have a bearing on fishing […]

By the good graces of google I stumbled upon this ranking system.

As you probably know at my other weblog I’ve been going through Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory chapter by chapter. I just finished the first part of the work, which is a history of science as opposed to a discussion of contemporary science. I’ve blogged chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 […]

Red states, blue states, and affordable family formation is a commentary on new article by Steve about his Affordable Family Formation theory. I don’t have much to add, except a note on this: To get back to the main point, Sailer is making a geographic argument, that Democrats do better in coastal states because families […]

Roger L. Simon reviews a new Russian film, Mongol, which is a biopic of Genghis Khan. See the trailer. If you want a fictionalized, but relatively accurate, narrative of Genghis Khan’s tale I suggest Pamela Sargent’s Ruler Of The Sky (Sargent extrapolates into the blank spaces of his life to fill out the story, as […]

What Men And Women Say And Do In Choosing Romantic Partners Are Two Different Matters: When it comes to romantic attraction men primarily are motivated by good looks and women by earning power. At least that’s what men and women have been saying for a long time. Based on research that dates back several decades, […]

A recent paper in NEJM is worth a read; it suggests a deletion on chromosome 16 predisposes to autism. The phenotype appears to be highly variable, though: [I]n a study of the same population by investigators at deCODE Genetics, this deletion was observed at a markedly increased rate in subjects with a psychiatric or language […]

A few weeks I read a The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800. A fair proportion of the book discussed the introduction of Roman Catholicism into China during the late Ming period (early 17th century) down to the denouement of the rites controversy. Because China and the West had developed on different intellectual […]

T’ang China – The Rise of the East in World History: Interconnections, one may agree, are both old and wide. Initially there was the genetic connection. Although the new alliance between genetics and history is in its infancy, it has already established that, at least since sapiens replaced Neanderthal, habilis and erectus, there have been […]

Richard Dawkins is retiring from his position at Oxford. They are now looking for someone to fill the spot as Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science. I nominate Armand Leroi. He’s young, charismatic, and a very engaging writer.

Imagine a brief which is aimed at both Christianity Today and The Humanist; Cornelius J. Troost’s Apes or Angels does just that. Synthesizing the latest research coming out of modern genomics with ideas first mooted by Charles Darwin 150 years ago Troost launches an extended broadside at the pieties of the modern age and the […]

I’ll admit it: I’m fully baffled by the recent report by the cats at Decode that marriages between third and fourth cousins tend to be more fertile than other relationships. But it’s a pretty fascinating observation–using their extensive Icelandic genealogies, they compile the figure on the right: on the x-axis is a measure of the […]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has stirred up a hornets’ nest this week by suggesting that some aspects of Sharia (Islamic law) are bound to be applied in Britain. Much of the commentary has been wildly inaccurate, so as a public information service here is a link to what he actually said. Congratulations […]

Lordi hopes for monster hit with horror film debut. A Finnish horror film? What, is it going to feature a mutant which makes eye contact with strangers while fully sober? Might this result in a reign of prosocial terror as the eye-contact-making-monsters eat the brains of Finns and transforming them into mutants as well; turning […]

If you like bees, perhaps you don’t want to click this video…. The native honey bees have evolved defensive tactics. Guess it goes to show that kin selectively driven altruism doesn’t matter for jack shit unless you actually have some proximate tactics to go along with the strategic good intentions. Sometimes we could learn from […]

If you don’t know, I’ve been reviewing William D. Hamilton’s Narrow Roads of Gene Land the past week over at my other blog. The papers I blogged were The genetical evolution of social behaviour – I & II, The moulding of senescence by natural selection, Extraordinary sex ratios and Innate social aptitudes of man. In […]

Our adaptive immune system (thought to have evolved around the time of the earliest jawed vertebrates) functions by recognizing things in our bodies that aren’t us and attacking them, which is why transplants and grafts of tissues that are different from our own tend to get rejected by our bodies. But this poses an interesting […]

Did you know that neurons have resonant properties? I didn’t know that until I read this paper from the Johnston lab down in Austin, TX. Usually I think of synaptic transmission in terms of a single action potential or other event that releases neurotransmitter, so I don’t end up in the frequency domain. But, of […]