S knows that P, iff:1. P is true,2. S believes that P is true, and3. S is justified in believing that P. Winner of the thread for the most clear exposition of what’s wrong with this and how to improve it. Labels: philosophy of knowledge

Attraction ‘down to testosterone’: Dr Ben Jones, a psychology lecturer, said: “People preferred different types of face in the session where their testosterone level was highest than in the session where it was lowest. “When men’s testosterone levels were high, they were more attracted to feminine women. When women’s testosterone levels were high, they were […]

In response to a recent paper detailing how to identify an individual from aggregate allele frequency data, the NIH has removed all such data under its control from the public eye. This is obviously overkill (to identify an individual from such data, one would have to have genotyped them independently), but it’s easier to inconvenience […]

These are numbers from July. More recent months have gotten “launches” from blogs like Andrew Sullivan’s. As you note, there are many transients coming in through search engines, but a substantial number of “core” readers. Some of the repeats are just due to comments of course. I was prompted to check after noting Arnold Kling’s […]

At least on the state level. A bold Swede who is not shy about plotting data took a stab at checking to see if the results in the personality variation paper could also show trends in GDP per capita: Extroversion correlated weakly positive (0.16), agreeableness moderately (0.31), conscientiousness moderately (0.34), neuroticism weakly (0.13) and openness […]

ORMDL3 variants associated with asthma susceptibility in North Americans of European ancestry. ScienceDaily has a summary: Asthma researchers have found that a gene variant known to raise the risk of childhood asthma in European children plays a similar role in white American children, but not in African American children.…Researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia […]

Update: Another post where I’ve transcribed the highest correlations for each trait. Jason pointed me to this Guardian piece, US personalities vary by region, say researchers. It’s pretty thin on the details, but luckily the original paper can be found online in full, A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in […]

This week’s Science has a nice article mapping the hairless phenotype in dogs to a small deletion in a poorly-characterized transcription factor. One of the hairless breeds used in mapping is the Chinese Crested, members of which are perennial contenders in the World’s Ugliest Dog Competition. As more dog phenotypes are mapped, one imagines that […]

I recall once in high school history my teacher telling us that the average American lived like a king compared to Henry VIII. Not implausible considering the conveniences which were the products of only the past few generations, let alone centuries. That being said, people were in abundance during Henry’s period, at least when it […]

The Epigone, Half Sigma and Inductivist look at a lot of American state-level data. But I have started to get curious about other countries. I’ve heard weird things like the claim that at some point in the 1990s northern Italy was the wealthiest part of Europe. I don’t know about Italy yet (Italy at one […]

Individual differences in non-verbal number acuity correlate with maths achievement. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I would recommend The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. It’s actually not much about mathematics, but more about numeracy. H/T Jonah

In Obama’s unexciting review of the Bell Curve, he remarked: no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they’re pregnant are going to have developmental problems. The relevant studies reveal a more complex picture, though. The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on IQ remain heavily contested to this day. However, recent evidence from […]

Related: Wayne Allyn Root smarter that Barack Obama?. Jason’s comment deserves promotion so that Google picks it up: NPROctober 28, 1994SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET) Charles Murray’s Political Expediency DenouncedBYLINE: BARACK OBAMASECTION: News; DomesticLENGTH: 635 words HIGHLIGHT: Commentator Barack Obama finds that Charles Murray, author of the controversial “The Bell Curve,” demonstrates […]

Steve points me to a John Tierney column, As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen: “Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. “In some ways modern progressive cultures […]

Wrote a small script which totes up how White one is using the full list of Stuff White People Like.

So while skimming this paper on a genome-wide association study of leukemia, I noticed one of their hits falls in the gene IRF4. What other phenotype has variation in this same region been associated with? Pigmentation. Of course, the actual causal polymorphisms in each case aren’t known, but still, kind of an interesting fact. Labels: […]

Update: Added populations. Update: Added 1980 vintage language data. Note that Italians are the largest foreign population traditionally. Update II: I tried to plot the 1980 language proportions against 2005 per capita income. I know, not kosher, but doesn’t matter, almost none of the income variation can be accounted for by language variation (around 5%, […]

I randomly decided to click The Audacious Epigone’s Sitemeter. Its magnitude was far too modest. I encourage GNXP readers to add it to their RSS. I get irritated by commenters with great thoughts who never seem to set aside any marginal time to do some digging themselves. No problems on that front from the Epigone. […]

Cliodynamics, a science of history?  Peter Turchin pops up in the comments via Massimo, and offers a link where you can get a full copy of his next book, Secular Cycles, in pdf form.

On the most recent bloggingheads.tv Brian Ferguson says he will place a rebuttal to The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence on his website, it will be titled "How Jews Became Smart," within a week (it’s 70 pages).