Some red meat for readers, Malcolm Gladwell, Memes and Intellectual Honesty: Gladwell comes across as a child trying to explain why his hand was in the cookie jar. He advances a series of unconvincing, somewhat contradictory explanations, hoping that we will ignore the larger problem. So far as I can tell from Google searching, this […]

Just Spengler (David Goldman) being Spengler, From “Zionism is Racism” to “Judaism is Racism”: Judaism has nothing to do with race-there are Jews of every race-but it does have to do with family. Jews are members of Abraham’s family. Not only tradition, but a great deal of DNA evidence support this claim. To insist that […]

Common Variants in the Trichohyalin Gene Are Associated with Straight Hair in Europeans: Hair morphology is highly differentiated between populations and among people of European ancestry. Whereas hair morphology in East Asian populations has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about the genetics of this trait in Europeans. We performed a genome-wide association scan […]

A genome-wide study of common SNPs and CNVs in cognitive performance in the CANTAB: Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia are commonly accompanied by cognitive impairments that are treatment resistant and crucial to functional outcome. There has been great interest in studying cognitive measures as endophenotypes for psychiatric disorders, with the hope that their genetic basis […]

Over at Secular Right I report again that there is no sex difference in attitudes toward abortion in the general population (if anything, women are a bit more pro-life than men). But, to my surprise in the American Congress women do support abortion rights to a greater extent than men. This holds for both Republicans […]

Just a reminder, Andrew Gelman is now blogging at ScienceBlogs under “Applied Statistics”. Labels: Blogs

Real vs Placebo Coffee. There’s a real effect. Though interestingly those who secretly were given decaf didn’t notice it in their self-reports. Labels: Coffee, Neuroscience

A review over at ScienceBlogs of a new paper, Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies. I’m going to comment more in the near future, as I think this an give us insight into historical dynamics. An interesting find is that pastoralists and settled agriculturalists exhibit the same levels of heritability […]

The cover story for Sports Illustrated two weeks ago described the dominance of the South Eastern Conference (SEC) in US college football. “More players are invited to the NFL combine each year from the SEC than from any other conference,” Ole Miss’s [Head Coach] Nutt says when asked about the quality of the athletes who […]

Early (2002) reader of this weblog, William Gunn, is leaving a biotech company in San Diego and is looking for another job. Here’s his Linkedin. Labels: Blog

One hypothesis I have held is that there is a cultural gap in the United States whereby the West Coast and the Northeast are more “European” than the rest of the nation. So you have ideas crop up like Jesusland. I decided to see if I could compare European nations and American subregions using the […]