Bloggers on GNXP are mostly “thinkers”, not “linkers”, but I came across a couple of posts which I thought you might enjoy… Steven Den Beste considers cross-pollination in biology, and in culture. This is pretty much the argument of Susan Blackmore’s terrific Meme Machine, with a somewhat political spin.

Lance Morrow at DuckSeason: Losing the Race. In a nutshell, racism is a crutch for failure. I would point out in this connection that any form of affirmative action based on race is, well, racism.

Of all the women who have ever lived, there was one woman who was special.  She was the common maternal ancestor of all women currently alive.  She was “Mitochondrial Eve”. Consider the set of all women who have ever lived.  Each had exactly one mother.  Now shrink the set of all women to contain only […]

My post about Mitochondrial Eve attracted a bunch of interest – thank you! – and several people asked a key question: what species was ME? There is no direct evidence about ME at all – we have not found a fossil record of this particular individual.  We can infer logically that she must have existed, […]

Recently there has been discussion about the child tax credit which is part of the Bush administration’s proposed tax cut.  Essentially it amounts to a $400/child tax deduction for families making less than $26K/year.  Both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of this credit, with the only disagreement being whether the credit should be temporary […]

Just wanted to do a quick rant on the difference between correlation and causality. This difference is important in many things, including studies of people. The Age published an article that Obese Men Eat Up Their IQ Points. This article was written in London for an Australian audience, but describes a study performed at the […]