There seems to be some evidence linking Spinal Muscular Atrophy to intelligence.  It is often found in very intelligent children, and according to Loveline’s Dr. Drew, patients often report feeling that their intelligence has increased during the course of the disease. Posted by Thrasymachus at 12:32 PM

The links have not been posted on the web yet, but you can listen to the Dawkins interview anyway because it appears that NPR puts them up on the server before making the links. RealWindows Media Posted by Thrasymachus at 01:01 PM

One of Steve Sailer’s readers has pointed out an online culture fair IQ test from Danish Mensa. Click “Start Testen” to begin. I got 124 with a standard deviation of 15. Only one point below our President. I think. The only words of Danish that I can understand are “majestik møøse.” Or maybe that’s Swedish. […]

A new explanation for Homo floresiensis: Microcephaly I know that paleontologists don’t like the “maybe the one we found is weird” explanation. But modern tools together with a 380cc brain is rather hard to swallow, I’ll admit. Posted by Thrasymachus at 02:56 PM

At the beginning of the world it had been the Creator’s intention to place both men’s and women’s genitals on their foreheads so that they might be able to procreate children easily. But the otter made a mistake in conveying the message to that effect; and that is how the genitals come to be in […]

Vaccine for HPV Will vaccination for HPV in schools be the same debate as condoms in schools, I wonder? (Of course, I’m open to the idea that condoms in schools cause more promiscuity than they alleviate the effects of, but I think it would be fairly hard to conduct a study that could be accurate […]

There has been a certain amount of agitation among the scientific class about the popular opposition to stem cell research. I have heard perfectly rational people go so far as to talk about “a new dark age.” Religion is throttling scientific research in the cradle. Our President is anti-science. It just ain’t so. A good […]

A shocking new way to boost mental performance. Posted by Thrasymachus at 06:57 PM

Cancer is far more common today than at any time in history, according to a study of 3,000 human skeletons in a Croatian archaeological collection. The researchers argue that cancer is more common today because people now have much longer life spans than they did just a few centuries ago. In Croatia, for example, the […]

Something Awful manages to nail down the differences between Republicans and Democrats with their New Voter Exam. Posted by Thrasymachus at 08:19 AM

Link from Steve Sailer. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. Wow. Just read it. Posted by Thrasymachus at 04:41 PM

I came across this footnote in Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights: This prominence of the glutaei muscles is always insisted upon, because it is supposed to promise well in a bed-fellow. In Somali-land, where the people are sub-steatopygous, a rich young man, who can afford such luxury, will have the girls drawn up in […]

I’m sure all GNXPers will join with me in celebrating a happy 6,000th birthday to the universe. Posted by Thrasymachus at 12:34 AM

This didn’t really turn out to be a response to razib’s post below, so I’m giving it its own topic instead of posting a comment. Two good papers on Multiregional evolution are Wolpoff’s Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution and Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory. My conception of […]

Has anybody read the article “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis” by Richard Florida in Harvard Business Online? He is going to be on Charlie Rose tonight to talk about it. His article looks interesting, but being a cheap bastard, I am canvassing for opinions before spending my $6.00 for the pdf.Here is the description on the […]

An interesting site on Uncommonly Difficult IQ Tests. I took the Word Classification Test because it seemed the easiest to do online, although it does seem to be the least valid for testing actual IQ. I scored 163 out of 200 on it. (Am I the only one who has noticed that Swedish speakers of […]

Where do you get your news on Iraq? I am starting to get the feeling that I would like to develop a really good picture of what is actually going on there. The daily news is almost pointless for that. What is a good online resource for Iraq information? Posted by Thrasymachus at 05:44 PM

Dyslexia is a problem affecting different brain regions in different cultures. Well, not quite. Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own. The NSU article headlines with the culture thing, but the problem is actually one of phonetic scripts versus ideographic scripts. It takes a different skill set to learn Chinese or Japanese (the world’s most […]

Sorry if this is a repeat, but it was the first that I’ve seen of it. There is a study in the July 7th Journal of the Royal Society that claims that we seek similar faces to our own in our friends, but divergent faces in our partners. Here is the BBC News story: Familiar […]

John Derbyshire has made the point that Republican women are generally better looking than their Democratic counterparts. I have yet to be impressed by the photos of Anne Coulter that he has offered in support of his argument. But the other day, one of my apolitical coworkers happened to be near the city convention center […]