Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results: The NE Asians performed about .5 SD better on average (consistent with IQ test results), and exhibited similar (slightly higher) variance. Interestingly, the Finns performed quite well on the exam, posting a very high average, but their SD is slightly smaller. The usual arguments about a (slightly) “narrow bell […]

Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders: It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, […]

I am sick of hearing Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers complain about a perceived cultural decline among the younger generations. For a variety of measures, things started to go bad already by the 1950s, became obscene during the 1960s and ’70s, and plateaued some time during the 1980s. Since roughly 1990, however, things have gotten […]

The post on soft drink terms has elicited a great deal of response (on my other blog as well). Many people want a little more granularity; well, it was brought to my attention that Google Maps based survey is up. You can vote and increase the N. I ask all American readers interested in the […]

Since I’ve been posting on DRD4 a bit, a reader asked that I post this link: A gene X gene interaction between DRD2 and DRD4 is associated with conduct disorder and antisocial behavior in males. It’s Open Access, so you can read the whole thing. Also, you might be interested p-ter’s critique of the MAOA […]

Update: A Google Maps based survey is up. You can vote, so please do! Every few years I post this map. Anyone have good explanations for some of the patterns? (e.g., what’s going on around St. Louis and Milwaukee?) Larger fine-grained version below the fold. I would say that one inference that you could make […]

At other weblog a review of Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History. Nothing new for readers of this weblog, but a respectable introduction to various topics which might surprise and interest many people. Labels: Population genetics

In The Atlantic Is Google Making Us Stupid?. I am obviously more positive about Google than the author of this piece; e.g., I happen to believe that “The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Additionally, I think focusing on Google is too narrow, Wikipedia […]

The subtitle, The Case for Genetic Screening, seems to say it all. But Cowan comes at the topic as an historian with an interest in medical ethics. Here’s how she makes her case: 1. She shows that historically the folks who came up with eugenics were different from the folks who came up with genetic […]

Dan points me to this working paper, Friendships Moderate an Association Between the DRD4 Gene and Political Ideology: Studies of identical and fraternal twins suggest that political ideology has a heritable component…but no specific gene associated with…political ideology has so far been identified. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we investigate […]

Lesbos islanders want to stop homosexual women calling themselves Lesbians. There’s a video report by the BBC about this story, jump to 1 minute and watch as an old Greek dude expresses his proud identity as a Lesbian, at which point the interviewer asks if he’s a lesbian. Labels: bad humor

Update: Here’s the paper, Dopamine receptor genetic polymorphisms and body composition in undernourished pastoralists: An exploration of nutrition indices among nomadic and recently settled Ariaal men of northern Kenya. I’ve put the most relevant figure below the fold. Is ADHD An Advantage For Nomadic Tribesmen?: While those with the DRD4/7R allele were better nourished in […]

Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night: …Erwin Chargaff, an eminent Columbia University biologist, called genetic engineering “an irreversible attack on the biosphere.” “The world is given to us on loan,” he warned. “We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who […]

Since GNXP is now a little over 6 years old as of 1 week ago, I thought I would point to this short history of blogging. Most of the comments seem about right.

Readers in the UK may have seen recent press reports about a controversial article by Bruce Charlton, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle. Charlton points out that average IQ differs in different social or occupational classes (e.g. doctors or lawyers have higher IQ than casual labourers), and that in consequence, if IQ is […]

Check out this interview (radio) with the author. This is more about heuristics & biases than probability as such.

Alan Jacobs of The American Scene has a piece in The Wall Street Journal titled Too Much Faith in Faith (also see Ross Douthat). He starts: If there is one agreed-upon point in the current war of words about religion, it is that religion is a very powerful force. Perhaps you believe, with that vigorous […]

In The New York Times of all places. Also, in Dana Stevens in Slate.

Ross Douthat points me to this Reason piece which eviscerates a “Google Pundit.” I’m not too interested in the details of the article itself, rather, I like the term, and would add “Wikipedia Pundit” as another flavor of the same species. It’s a problem everyone suffers from now and then, the urge to win the […]

Continuing my series of notes on the work of Sewall Wright, I come to the question of population size. This is important in Wright’s formulation of population genetics and his evolutionary theory generally. One of the major differences between Wright and R. A. Fisher is that Fisher believed that, in general, evolutionary processes could be […]