One of the “fun facts” of American demographics is that the largest ancestry group consists not of Anglo-Saxon stock, but of Germans. So Wikipedia says, “They currently form the largest self-reported ancestry group in the United States, accounting for 49 million people, or 17% of the U.S. population.” Considering that Germans were a numerous, if […]

This article, Some See Big Problem in Wisconsin Drinking, speaks to some of John Emerson’s comments below. This made me laugh: Most people in Wisconsin say the beer-drinking traditions reflect the customs of German immigrants, passed down generations. More than 40 percent of Wisconsin residents can trace their ancestry to Germany. Some experts, though, are […]

As a supplement of some of my posts, I’ve stitched together some maps from American Ethnic Geography. It should make everything clearer (the Midland region might some incoherent to you, but most of the Scots-Irish disembarked around Philadelphia and pushed inland and then expanded throughout the Upland South)…. Labels: culture, Ethnicity

Sydney Brenner has some things to say about fat people, and did so in an impolitic manner. James Watson did pretty much the same thing 8 years go. Really, when you have old scientists who have made their name, you have to be really careful about giving them face time without handlers….

A few friends have emailed me some objections to the four culture model of american history. In short, though New England Puritans, Highland South Scotch-Irish and Lowland South Cavaliers are reasonable cultural entities which are easy to put a finger on, the Mid-Atlantic is a hodge-podge which to a great extent is simply thrown in […]

…is the title of an interesting essay by Ian Deary in this week’s Nature. The article is short and quite accessible, and well worth a read. Labels: IQ

You can watch Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark online. Unfortunately the neat Flash interface means you can’t just load an audio file into your ipod….

That’s the result from a new experimental study of 1,000 people attending truck driving school. The authors tested all of them with Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a real IQ test. They then put pairs of them through a prisoner’s dilemma game, and found: [M]easures of cognitive skill [CS] predict social awareness and choices in a sequential […]

In a recent post, Agnostic dismissed Jean Twenge’s thesis that narcissism has increased over the last couple of decades. Twenge has been on my reading list for a while, so this intrigued me. Not feeling knowledgeable enough to play devil’s advocate against agnostic, I sent Professor Twenge an email inviting her to join the thread. […]

Do you have some marginal time today? Well, now you really don’t, play around with the HGDP browser. If you click and find yourself a bit bewildered, read Do It Yourself: searching for evolution’s signature in 53 human populations over at Genetic Future. Related: So you want to be a population geneticist. Labels: Population genetics

It is good news that the social scientists are finally starting to think seriously about genetic variation and social behavior. This latest Science paper by UCSD political scientists James Fowler and Darren Schreiber is a case in point. A key argument they make in the paper is that political scientists cannot ignore behavior genetics because […]

Part 1 of this note dealt with Sewall Wright’s Shifting Balance theory of evolution (the SBT) in its original form, as propounded between 1929 and 1931. This final part deals with subsequent developments in the theory. These include refinements and elaborations, some changes of emphasis, one major addition, and one major change of substance. In […]

The McCain Belt: So, why did McCain do best, relative to George W. Bush in 2004, in states like #1. Tennessee, #3. Arkansas, #5 Oklahoma, #7 West Virginia, #9 Kentucky, and #10 Alabama? Here’s a map by counties, with counties where McCain improved relative to GWB in 2004 the most shown in reddest red. Before […]

A new theory of MHC evolution: beyond selection on the immune genes: The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a dense region of immune genes with high levels of polymorphism, which are arranged in haplotype blocks. Traditional models of balancing selection (i.e. overdominance and negative frequency dependence) were developed to study the population genetics of single […]

Nature this week has published articles describing the genomes sequences of two individuals–one Nigerian and one Chinese. Both were sequenced using Illumina’s short read technology, and the brute force approach of deep sequencing seems to have worked fairly well–they estimate their SNP calling error rate is on the order of 0.6%. Recall that SNPs called […]

I have some posts on my other weblog about the way regionalism played out in this election. The electoral college map flip; drift?, Where Obama overperformed & underperformed and The Great White Sort. Steve points out the relevance of Affordable Family Formation and the Dirt Gap. It seems likely that we’re entering into a very […]

Not a single state was predicted incorrectly by pollster.com’s final map. The average error in predicting the state margins between the candidates was less than .5%.The popular vote is not completely in yet, but it seems to be conforming to pollster’s predictions.For now on when someone makes an argument devoid of facts or logic I […]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and here is the proof. (There is also a report in the UK Times, which is where I first saw it – honest – but the Times article didn’t come up on Google.)

Jim Manzi writes that it’s plausible that epistatic interactions are central to complex mental phenotypes, and that they might therefore prevent genome-wide association studies from achieving much success. In the comments to a response post by Razib, Jason Malloy does a pretty good job of showing that traits like IQ are primarily additive and that […]