It’s nice to see a bad idea demolished. And that’s what Greven, et al. do in “More than just IQ.” Their subtitle tells most of the story: School achievement is predicted by self-perceived abilities (SPAs)–but for genetic rather than environmental reasons. So asking kids “Are you good at math and English?” is indeed a good […]

Anti-Irish caricatures, the hypothesis that some races contain little intra-race variation, and how economists keep arguing–normatively and positively–for the rough equality of humankind: It’s all in Peart and Levy’s book The Vanity of the Philosopher. The book is highly recommended to GNXPers with any interest in the complicated historical relationship between genetics and social science. […]

Or is it more like “letting sleeping dogs lie?” On the issue of that new statue: That Proto-German sex toy is fun enough, but it’s time the media stopped elevating things like it as evidence that our species only learned to think abstractly among its subset who, if the lifespan of our species were 24 […]

The surnames of the criminal and the poor, of course. Greg Clark provides new evidence for the “survival of the richest” here (and he thanks Nick Wade for the idea). From the abstract: [E]vidence from…surnames…again shows the takeover of English society by the economically successful between 1600 and 1851, and the disappearance of the criminal […]

That’s the result from a new experimental study of 1,000 people attending truck driving school. The authors tested all of them with Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a real IQ test. They then put pairs of them through a prisoner’s dilemma game, and found: [M]easures of cognitive skill [CS] predict social awareness and choices in a sequential […]

Economists are getting into the twin-study game more often. The latest entry is forthcoming in the Harvard-MIT run Quarterly Journal of Economics. They ran tests on a bunch of Swedish twins, tests that involved real money. The goal: See how altruistic they were (how much money did they share with a pro-homeless charity?) and see […]

The first correct daily temperature forecast was not broadcast [in China] until July 1999. Previously, temperature predictions were never permitted to fall outside the range for efficient factory work. That’s from Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture, by Eric Jones. Jones is best known for his book The European Miracle, an anti-Pomeranz […]

Debin Ma of the London School of Economics has spent time in the archives and has come to conclusions quite different from Pomeranz’s. Ma’s recent papers (especially this one and this one) make archive-driven comparisons of European and East Asian living standards around the start of the industrial revolution. Both papers have coauthors, but I […]

Svante Paabo’s group just finished sequencing the complete mitochondrial DNA of a Neanderthal. The article is in the newest Cell. John Hawks has a summary. One of the big findings: In one tiny way, we’ve become more like monkeys recently, since Neanderthals, chimps, and other sequenced apes have the same non-homo-sapiens variants on COX2, but […]

Daniel Koretz of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education took the lecture notes from his course, “Methods of Educational Measurement,” and turned it into a book: Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It’s readable, filled with funny anecdotes, and contains absolutely nothing that will be new to regular GNXP readers. But because Koretz takes […]

Tabarrok nails it. Agnostic adds: Here’s a graph using the new study’s finding of same mean for males and females, and taking male to female ratio in variances to be 1.16 (they estimate it between 1.11 and 1.21). This is the ratio of a normal with mean = 0 and s.d. = 1.077 (male) to […]

Gintis and Bowles have done great work cleaning up a lot of the discussion about cooperation, evolution, and economic outcomes. A Google Scholaring of their names turns up 14 items with over 100 citations, most of which would be well worth reading for GNXP regulars. But that said, in their 2002 Journal of Economic Perspectives […]

From Oded Galor and his promising grad student Quamrul Ashraf, another paper that ties together genes and group productivity. Their big result (Figure 5 below) is that a population cluster’s genetic heterozygosity has a Goldilocks relationship with population density in 1500AD: Too much heterozygosity (Sub-Saharan Africa) or too little heterozygosity (Americas) predicts low population density. […]

Slate has been having a debate on sex differences. Along the way, they hit on a key Summers issue: The apparent higher male variability of math scores. Shaffer, the author, refers to the classic Feingold piece, a cross-cultural meta-study of the variability of mental abilities across genders. Shaffer makes the common claim that there are […]

The subtitle, The Case for Genetic Screening, seems to say it all. But Cowan comes at the topic as an historian with an interest in medical ethics. Here’s how she makes her case: 1. She shows that historically the folks who came up with eugenics were different from the folks who came up with genetic […]

James R. Flynn is a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, as well as Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University. His best-known paper, “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations,” (Psych. Bulletin, 1987), documented what Herrnstein and Murray later called the “Flynn Effect”: A long term increase in […]

In economics, a rule of thumb is that an academic article that largely agrees with Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve must start off by attacking The Bell Curve–maybe it’s just a way to get past peer review, maybe it’s a way of keeping your status in the academic community, maybe it’s because they didn’t […]

Economists Oded Galor of Brown and Omer Moav of Hebrew U. argue in a new paper that the Agricultural Revolution created longer lifespans. A simple version of their model goes like this: Agriculture–>Disease–>Somatic Investment in stronger bodies–>Longer lifespans once things settle down. This result hoists Jared Diamond on his own petard: If the Agricultural Revolution […]

Couldn’t find a thread on this yet: Actor/Politico/Author Ben Stein has apparently become a “You can’t handle the truth“er. He appears in a documentary on the persecution of the intelligent design movement *yawn* but here’s his key claim: …[Stein] said in a telephone interview that he accepted the producers’ invitation to participate in the film […]

In this invited address to the American Psychological Association, Roy Baumeister has quite a lot of fun with his topic: “Is there anything good about men?” His major themes will be familiar to GNXP regulars–Larry Summers, the high male variance of IQ, genetic and cultural explanations, a rejection of the culture war and a call […]