Some of you may know that California is in a budget crisis. A significant portion of the proposed stimulus package is going to go to the states which are in a financial crunch because of tax shortfalls. But did you know that the in the 19th century several American state went into default to European […]

See Greg Clark‘s paper In Defense of the Malthusian Interpretation of History if you haven’t read Farewell to Alms. Commentary from Calculated Exuberance. Labels: Economics

Huge Rise In Male Mortality Coincided With Move From Communism To Capitalism. In other news, A Trivers-Willard Effect in Contemporary Humans: Male-Biased Sex Ratios among Billionaires (H/T Dienekes). Economics might not take human biology into account, but it have an influence on human biological processes (recall that fertility collapsed in Russia after the fall of […]

Over at my other weblog I review a paper on the genetics of Koreans. The title is a shout-out to an old Korean American friend of mine who received a great deal of grief from his female Korean American peers for openly admitting that he was into a Hmong girl. She was very good-looking, but […]

Genetic Differences between the Determinants of Lipid Profile Phenotypes in African and European Americans: The Jackson Heart Study: Single-base changes in DNA can affect biochemical measures, such as blood cholesterol or lipid levels. Such changes or “variants” can be associated with a trait either because they cause the trait or because they are linked to […]

Rebecca Skloot points me to a piece which claims that the idea that there are, on average, six degrees of separation is false: It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target. Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed […]

Recordkeeping alters economic history by promoting reciprocity: We experimentally demonstrate a causal link between recordkeeping and reciprocal exchange. Recordkeeping improves memory of past interactions in a complex exchange environment, which promotes reputation formation and decision coordination. Economies with recordkeeping exhibit a beneficially altered economic history where the risks of exchanging with strangers are substantially lessened. […]

Serotonin Transporter Genotype Modulates Social Reward and Punishment in Rhesus Macaques (paper is OA, so click through for stats & charts): Serotonin signaling influences social behavior in both human and nonhuman primates. In humans, variation upstream of the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) has recently been shown to influence both behavioral measures […]

Everyone is talking about Steven Pinker’s article in the NY Times on his experiences toying with results from personal genomics companies Counsyl and 23andme. The article is, like most of Pinker’s writing, entertaining and scientifically legit; well worth a read. One interesting point to notice is that the different companies involved in this nascent field […]

Matt Yglesias has a post up where he says: I tried to explicitly say that I didn’t want the story to be read as an analogy since I don’t believe in trying to conduct arguments by analogy. Analogies are sketchy, though useful when used well. There are two primary issues I think. First, analogies are […]

I have a piece up at Taki’s Magazine, The Limits of Certitude. It might be read along with a post at ScienceBlogs, Science is rational; scientists are not.

Dan MacArthur points to a paper claiming that large allele frequency differences between populations are due to demographic effects. The data the authors are working with is a set of a few thousand markers (SNPs and others) genotyped on 53 populations from across the world. Their main points boil down to two things: 1. “Large” […]

[Updated] After declining pretty steadily from 1991 to 2005, in 2006 teen birth rates showed a slight uptick. Rather than swallow what the mass media and doomsaying blogosphere infers, read the report for yourself — what you want to know is contained in the first 5 to 10 pages. Since most people worry about the […]

Of late I have come to believe that something close to the Transparent Society is inevitable in the near future. One of the primary complaints about the proliferation of surveillance and distribution of personal information is that it curtails privacy. But it came to my mind that perhaps this is another case of the the […]

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, has a website up, http://the10000yearexplosion.com. If there is an accelerating wave of media coverage that would probably be the place to track it…. Labels: 10000 Year Explosion

…well. I took a bit longer than I had intended in getting to work on this next post, but it’s okay. When I left you hanging a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the idea of reinforcement (that is, selection for increased pre-mating isolation in the presence of post-mating isolation) was out of favor for […]

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species. Predictably, there will be a large number of commemorative events and publications. I found a useful list here. I suspect that by March we will all be heartily sick of CD, but I am still […]

This note concludes my discussion of R. A. Fisher’s neglected treatment of human evolution in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. In Part 1, here, I pointed out that Fisher believed that human evolution was continuing rapidly in the present day. He also argued that natural selection among humans now operated mainly through differences in […]

One of the established cool examples of convergent evolution (which for my purposes here I’ll define loosely here as the evolution of different populations to the same phenotype via different mutations) has been the repeated loss of pigmentation (and eyes) in fish that have adapted to life in light-poor, nutrient-poor caves. In 2006, a group […]

Everyone & their mother is emailing me about Jonathan Haidt’s new commentary in Edge, FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES: I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this […]