Brad Delong reports that Yale professor Chris Blattman is looking for suggested readings for his class “Why is Africa poor and what (if anything) can the West do about it?” Blattman’s syllabus (pdf) seems excellent but includes nothing on IQ. What reading(s) would the GNXP crowd suggest he add? I expect that your suggestions will […]

Most scientists believe that only objective factors are real and try to eliminate all subjectivity from their explanations — subjectivity is seen primarily as a source of error. Economists are the most objective social scientists, and they customarily sneer at dumber so-called scientists who fail to reduce human behavior to hard facts. When things are […]

In Jason’s post on the distributions of hair and eye color, it looks like women are claiming their hair is lighter than it is. The sex differences are the opposite of what is found when the hair is rated by others. Women are lying because they think it makes them look better. If they’re going […]

So sayeth Aggro in the thread down below: “They should have measured eye and hair color — we don’t have any representative data! Seriously, they’ll take extra long to measure all kinds of weird things that only an anthropometer would know of, but not eye and hair color.” I too have previously lamented this odd […]

Steve has a modestly titled post up, Height and Weight, where he analyzes data from Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: 2003-2005 (PDF). This is government data on American men, women and children who are Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black and Mexican American. I invite readers to peruse the raw data themselves. Steve did a […]

Systems biologist, geneticist make notable ‘Under 40′ lists: For a fortunate, capable few, life gets rolling sooner. Two of them, Kevin White and Jonathan Pritchard, both 37 and members of the Department of Human Genetics, have been singled out for getting ahead of the numbers. The Monday, Nov. 3 issue of Crain’s Chicago Business named […]

At Secular Right I stated: Right now only a few weblogs (that I know of!) seem to make regular recourse to the GSS when confronted with a question amenable to inquiry. The Inductivist, The Audacious Epigone and to a lesser extent Half Sigma. I wish there were more weblogs out there where individuals would take […]

Matt Yglesias is in Finland right now, and putting up a series of posts on his observations. I invite any Finnish readers who see him around Helsinki to put their observations in the comments! Perhaps Yglesias should drop in on Jaakkeli’s office so he could be schooled on Finnish physics?

Well, Razib said not to do an intro post, but I figured I should at least say that I’m new ’round these parts, and give a bit of background on my interests. Everyone knows that evolution is a continuous process, where one population is descended from an ancestral population by a string of intermediates who […]

In early 2007, a paper on expression differences between populations claimed that something like 25% of all genes are differentially expressed between two population groups (in that case, in cells lines from people of either European or Chinese origin). That paper, though, had a pretty serious flaw–ancestry effect on expression were completely confounded with microarray […]

Distance from Africa, not climate, explains within-population phenotypic diversity in humans: The relative importance of ancient demography and climate in determining worldwide patterns of human within-population phenotypic diversity is still open to debate. Several morphometric traits have been argued to be under selection by climatic factors, but it is unclear whether climate affects the global […]

Check out the the charts over at Steve Hsu’s site. The author of a forthcoming paper sent him a draft. Since around 2/3 of the population of East Asia resides in China, there would be some value-add in getting many disparate samples from Han groups from all over the country and seeing what the population […]

I’m going to look at the IE issues again. Might even rework the tags underlying the presentation to make things simpler. If you are having a problem with formatting, please tell me what, and the browser (including version) & OS, in the comments.

An interesting paper published today examines the intestinal flora of twins who are either obese or lean in an effort to learn something about the contribution of microbes to human weight. One finding is that obese people tend to have less diverse “microbiomes”, and the authors have a fun analogy: Across all methods, obesity was […]

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up, Gregory Cochran’s new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, is available for pre-order on Amazon. Of course, I wouldn’t trust Amazon’s publication date too much…. Labels: Human Evolution

A report in Science from the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics focuses on copy number variation. Some interesting observations: Don Conrad and his colleagues at the Sanger Institute have their eyes on smaller common CNVs, as little as 500 base pairs in length. Checking about every 50 base pairs across parts […]