I’ve been following the development of the BGI study on IQ pretty closely. I wanted to note two main caveats people should be aware of with regard to its methodology. First, as with any case-control study, volunteer bias will be an issue. If the cases are a certain class of very smart people, rather than […]

A while back, Mark and I were working on a comprehensive post which would try to tally the results of the various IQ-gene studies to see what they said about racial differences. We began this quest bright-eyed and hopeful that we would help contribute to ending a calamitous debate that has gone on for way […]

Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me to address here, feel free to comment. This post will […]

A frequent claim in the IQ debates is that which family you are raised in has no lasting impact on your IQ. Jensen argues in The g Factor that the only causes of IQ similarities between adult identical twins are genetic. Many researchers go so far as to argue that by 12 years of age, […]

In researching for a review of The Nurture Assumption, I read over the debate between Harris and Sulloway over birth order effects on personality. Sulloway’s thesis, explained in Born to Rebel, is that last-born children have more rebellious, agreeable, and open-minded/liberal personalities, and that this manifests itself in history with revolutions spearheaded by last-borns. This […]

A family member just sent me this New York Times article on the recent failure to replicate a serotonin gene associated with depression in a meta-analysis by Risch and Merikangas. It gives a pretty good overview, but I think the article might be misleading in two ways: First, beginning with the title “Report on Gene […]

A study from Wicherts et al published online in the journal Intelligence today: On the basis of several reviews of the literature, Lynn… concluded that the average IQ of the Black population of sub-Saharan Africa lies below 70. In this paper, the authors systematically review published empirical data on the performance of Africans on the […]

Price of “Ahmadinejad to Win Iranian Election” on Intrade: Labels: politics

Compare monochorionic to dichorionic twins. If there’s a teratogen causing homosexuality then it should show up as a statistical difference in concordance for homosexuality. Of course this would only tell us whether there is a prenatal pathogen. It wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there is a pathogen that only strikes later on. Labels: Behavior […]

Check out Mark Wethman’s new quant blog, Congenial Times. It’s been around for only a couple of weeks but in that time he’s posted a lot of interesting data/analysis on topics ranging from international politics to human biodiversity. His most recent post is on racial differences in educational attainment in Sweden. The most interesting article […]

In a recent post, Agnostic dismissed Jean Twenge’s thesis that narcissism has increased over the last couple of decades. Twenge has been on my reading list for a while, so this intrigued me. Not feeling knowledgeable enough to play devil’s advocate against agnostic, I sent Professor Twenge an email inviting her to join the thread. […]

Not a single state was predicted incorrectly by pollster.com’s final map. The average error in predicting the state margins between the candidates was less than .5%.The popular vote is not completely in yet, but it seems to be conforming to pollster’s predictions.For now on when someone makes an argument devoid of facts or logic I […]

Jim Manzi writes that it’s plausible that epistatic interactions are central to complex mental phenotypes, and that they might therefore prevent genome-wide association studies from achieving much success. In the comments to a response post by Razib, Jason Malloy does a pretty good job of showing that traits like IQ are primarily additive and that […]

While reading through a Nature Genetics Review article, I came cross a link to this catalog of published genome-wide association studies. Pretty cool stuff. Labels: Genetics

Andrew Sullivan points to a post by DJ Drummond which makes the claim that the polls are significantly biased towards the Democrats. This is a perfect example of partisanship taking precedence over facts, and it thus deserves a thorough fisking. Drummond begins:it needs noting that all of the major polling organizations are based in locations […]

In Obama’s unexciting review of the Bell Curve, he remarked: no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they’re pregnant are going to have developmental problems. The relevant studies reveal a more complex picture, though. The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on IQ remain heavily contested to this day. However, recent evidence from […]