Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident in that state for the 1856 or 1860 election (that […]

Steve Hsu has been interesting of late (interesting like Steve, not Malcolm). So, IQ, compression and simple models and If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?. For a theoretical physicist I find Steve to be eminently clear in his exposition of abstract topics (perhaps he has practice from having to talk to experimental physicists?). […]

A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results: Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and the San Francisco Bay Area, and Puerto Rican spouse pairs recruited from Puerto Rico and New York City. In the […]

How Will Religion Evolve?, asks John Tierney. He notes: If there is a religious instinct, how do we make sense of the declining church attendance in western Europe? As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general move toward secularism as societies become richer and more educated. […]

This is more a question for readers who know this stuff, what do you think about Patricia Crone & company in their revision of the early history of Islam? I’m more of a Hugh Kennedy guy because I don’t know much about this field and would prefer to stick to the mainstream, but a few […]

Over at ScienceBlogs now. It’s a dense book and I only focused on a few major elements. Like the God of the philosophers sometimes it seems like attempts to analyze religion always have to face up to the fact that the phenomenon is awesomely complex, and we look through the glass darkly. Labels: Religion

In case you didn’t know, the SDA Archive has more than the GSS. For example, something called the Dutch Prejudice Survey 1998. Poking around, I confirmed a general trend you see in the GSS, more educated people tend to be ideologically polarized: Though I am skeptical that more education makes one more intelligent, I do […]

Steve has an interesting column up this week: Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are supposed to mean.) Here’s another site that has […]

John Derbyshire has review of The Faith Instinct up. He hits the major points well. I should elaborate on something. In Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson outlines two dimensions of religion, the horizontal and the vertical. The vertical is pretty straightforward, supernatural agents and forces. The cognition of religious ideas. The horizontal is the communitarian […]

At Cognitive Daily, Men often treat their friends better than women do: The researchers say these three studies show that men are more tolerant of their friends’ failings than women. Does this mean that men are more “sociable”? That’s less certain. After all, it could be that women value the friendships more, and so are […]

Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies: “Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as much as three millennia ago,” says UC Irvine clinical professor of cardiology Dr. Gregory Thomas, a co-principal investigator […]

Follow up post on the Isles, the distribution of German Americans. 25th quartile = 0.10Median = 0.2075th quartile = 0.30 Correlation(German, English) = -0.16Correlation(German, American) = -0.74Correlation(German, Irish) = 0.11Correlation(German, Scots-Irish) = -0.31 Now let’s exclude the South, where there are the fewest Germans. 25th quartile = 0.21Median = 0.2775th quartile = 0.39 Correlation(German, English) […]

Years ago there was a South Park episode which commented on the primitive nature of Canadian transportation. Turns out that there was some truth to the jibe (via Tyler). Labels: Canada, Superfluous North America

It’s easy to find maps of American ancestries, but I wanted to play around with the data, and in particularly the visualization myself. So I went to the Census and got the county level numbers. The first thing I wanted to do was look at non-Hispanic white ethnicities as a proportion of non-Hispanic whites. That […]

In this discussion about pop music at Steve Sailer’s, the topic of generations came up, and it’s one where few of the people who talk about it have a good grasp of how things work. For example, the Wikipedia entry on generation notes that cultural generations only showed up with industrialization and modernization — true […]

Nicholas Wade has an article up in The New York Times, The God Gene, which serves as a precis of the central arguments of The Faith Instinct, his new book. The title is catchy, but it should really be “The God Phene.” Depending on how you measure it, religiosity is a heritable trait, with its […]

How universal are human mate choices? Size doesn’t matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate: It has been argued that size matters on the human mate market: both stated preferences and mate choices have been found to be non-random with respect to height and weight. But how universal are these patterns? Most of the […]

Doing a literature search on the Price Equation for some weblog posts I found that Peter Turchin had written a new paper on world history using Price’s formalism explicitly. A quantitative ecologist by training, Turchin has already written a series of books attempting to model human history in a more formal fashion than is usually […]

Since readers of this weblog tend toward nerdishness I’m assuming they’re following the buzz around Avatar: The Movie. I only got interested in it last night trying to figure out the references in yesterday’s South Park episode, Dances with Smurfs. Check out the tailer below. Obviously actors in regular films aren’t going to be replaced […]

Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2: …It has been proposed that the amino acid composition in the human variant of FOXP2 has undergone accelerated evolution, and this two-amino-acid change occurred around the time of language emergence in humans…However, this remains controversial, and whether the acquisition of these amino acids in human FOXP2 […]