Megan McArdle has has been talking about the high heritability of BMI again. I have expressed concern about her putting the high heritability numbers out there when it comes to its relevance for public policy, though I do tend to agree with her general stance that glib assertions about the importance of will-power are probably […]

Here is a brief description of the idea that price bubbles are caused by people buying something, not necessarily because they think it’s worth anything, but because they think they can find an even greater fool to buy it at a higher price. This continues until no more such fools can be found, and this […]

Greg Mayer, filling in for Jerry Coyne, has a post up on a somewhat odd objection to the appointment of Francis Collins as director of NIH: that he’s a geneticist. The argument seems to be that diseases are complicated and not entirely genetic, and that Collins isn’t hip to non-genetic subtleties. To be frank, this […]

Taller, heavier: the speedy evolution of the fastest people on the planet: While the average person has gained about five centimetres since 1900, the height of champion runners has increased 16.2 centimetres, say Duke University researchers, Jordan Charles and Adrian Bejan, who studied the heights and weights of 100-metre world record holders. ”The trends revealed […]

Online this week, Nature has published a genome-wide association study for response to treatment for chronic hepatitis C infection-the authors identify a polymorphism in an interleukin gene that is a strong predictor of how well an individual is able to clear the virus. Interestingly, the frequency of the polymorphism in different populations tracks the previously […]

I’ve decided to read up on the World Wars recently. I don’t know much about World War I & II aside from what I’ve seen on The History Channel and some books I read in elementary school. I’ve read The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I and The First World War, and am almost […]

In the post from a few days ago showing areas where Non-Hispanic white proportions over & under predicted the % for Obama there were some interesting comments. One of the issues is that lumping different regions together obscures some information. Some readers wondered about regional differences, and I did too. So I thought it might […]

A remarkable study published in Science this week identifies a rare mutation in the gene DEC2 which influences the duration of sleep in humans. The authors started with a family where patterns of short sleep (about 6 hours of sleep a night on non-workdays, versus ~8 hours for other people in the family) seemed to […]

To those with more accrued years of wisdom, or a greater knowledge of intellectual history, what was social science like in the pre-computer era? E. O. Wilson once commented on Charlie Rose’s show that social science hasn’t discovered anything of note (I know Robin Hanson disagrees). Has the introduction of computation changed much? Labels: Social […]

Today I combined some Census data with 2008 election results (thanks Cosma). Though Barack Obama won the vote last fall, he lost the Non-Hispanic white vote. It stands to reason then that the whiter and less Hispanic a county is, the more likely it would be to tilt McCain. I was curious as to geographic […]

Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson in discussed Tyler’s most recent book, Create Your Own Economy, in a recent Bloggingheads.tv. Tyler mentions how he believes there are a diversity of “cognitive profiles” out there, and that the autism spectrum oversimplifies and pathologizes one aspect of this reality. One feature of the modal human cognitive profile which […]

I’ve been poking around the Census data sets for a few days now. I want to merge them with the longevity stuff soon, but while was at it I decided to check to see how variation in geography related to variation in fertility. You can go to the GSS and see all sorts of national […]

Heather Mac Donald reviews Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Labels: Evolution of God, Robert Wright

One of the problems with the maps I’ve been generating is that when one looks at income one has to take into account cost of living. Unfortunately I’m only finding state-level maps, not county-level ones. I’m sure there’re out there, but the US Census has a lot of data files handy if you are persistent […]

There’s a nice post over at Genetic Future getting into the details of a recent paper using ABI SOLiD to resequence a human genome. The comments are quite instructive as well. For those not dealing with these sorts of technologies regularly, it can all seem a bit incomprehensible, but the outcome of these sorts of […]

Evolutionary Processes Acting on Candidate cis-Regulatory Regions in Humans Inferred from Patterns of Polymorphism and Divergence. Let me just jump to the final paragraph since that’s probably what most readers are curious about: Our analysis of human polymorphism and divergence in conserved non-coding sites suggests that the evolution of candidate cis-regulatory regions is often driven […]

It seems looking at the GSS that: 1) The more secularized a population segment is, the bigger the sex difference in beliefs. This is in keeping with Bryan Caplan’s thesis that males become more secular once social and institutional pressures are relaxed to a greater extent than females. 2) Among the segment of the population […]

Steve has the details. I haven’t followed baseball in a long time, and I never did follow it closely, but I remember not be able to align the Sammy Sosa of the White Sox years with that of 1998. If it weren’t for drugs would Ken Griffey Jr. have been a much bigger deal in […]

Altered connections on the road to psychopathy: … Earlier studies suggested that dysfunction of the amygdala and/or orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) may underpin psychopathy. Nobody, however, has ever studied the white matter connections (such as the uncinate fasciculus (UF)) linking these structures in psychopaths. Therefore, we used in vivo diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) tractography […]

Steve points us to a brief review by Steven Pinker on the decline in war and violence. Focusing just on homicide rates, what exactly does that mean — a decline in violence during modern times? It is impossible to have a solid feel for the observation Pinker wants to explain without seeing time series data […]