Review of “Braintrust. What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality”, by Patricia S. Churchland The question of “where morals come from” has exercised philosophers, theologians and many others for millennia. It has lately, like many other questions previously addressed only through armchair rumination, become addressable empirically, through the combined approaches of modern neuroscience, genetics, psychology, anthropology […]

The BBC have just finished a short (3-part) series of documentaries by Adam Curtis, under the general heading ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. It’s impossible to describe them briefly, so I won’t try; suffice to say I found them fascinating but often exasperating with their wild leaps of logic. For GNXP readers […]

There is a paradox at the heart of behavioural and psychiatric genetics. On the one hand, it is very clear that practically any psychological trait one cares to study is partly heritable – i.e., the differences in the trait between people are partly caused by differences in their genes. Similarly, psychiatric disorders are also highly […]

Via the Demography Matters blog, Russian birthrate seems to have recovered: By 2009, the official TFR had risen to 1.537, 1.417 in urban areas and 1.900 in rural areas. Both urban and rural TFRs rose by about the same amount from 2000 to 2009, about 0.330. Vital statistics for 2010 were just released by the […]

This concludes a series of posts on the work of George Price. For the most recent one, with links to the others, see here*. This final post covers the subject of group selection. Price and Group Selection The application of Price’s Equation to group selection, and the related problem of biological altruism, is largely responsible […]

Back in 2004 I wrote a summary of Richard Dawkins’s oft-cited article ‘Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection’. At that time the article was not, as far as I could see, available on the internet or in any easily accessible reprint. However, I have found that a free online pdf is now available, and anyone interested […]

There is one last loose end to tie up before concluding my series on George Price. In a previous post I discussed the meaning of altruism in biology, and the distinction between strong and weak altruism. With strong altruism the altruist obtains no benefit from its own actions, whereas with weak altruism it does, though […]

Via Razib, I checked out Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct. On the human migration to Australia, Finlayson writes: The long-tailed macaque, primate beachcomber par excellence, can teach us another lesson. These monkeys have managed to establish viable populations on a number of remote islands over a wide area of south-east Asia. They even […]

I am writing a series of posts on the work of George Price. For the most recent one, with links to the others, see here I was planning next to cover Price’s treatment of group selection, but this raises side issues more conveniently dealt with separately. A previous post here considered what is meant by […]

Dale and Krueger have responded to Robin Hanson at his blog, which commented on their most recent paper. I’ve also commented on this paper, here. Most of Dale and Krueger’s comments relate to the stability of estimates that suggest that women earn less after attending high-SAT Colleges. I don’t see particularly compelling evidence here either […]

One of the topics I’ve covered here is the all-important issue of whether your choice in College matters in terms of your future earnings. To recap: the best research in the field until a few days ago suggested that the returns to going to a more selective College were quite large; a result which was […]

The New York Times highlights the issue of hospitals opting not to hire smokers. It’s not clear how many places of employment are really banning smoking (or even how strictly such regulations will be enforced), but certainly there have at least been some high-profile cases (ie, Cleveland Clinic). One question that comes immediately to mind […]

Governments are large or small depending on the level of trust and civic attitudes people have for one another. These attitudes shape peoples’ taste for redistribution and public ownership, and also affect the quality of governance. This position has been advanced by a large literature; most recently in this interesting paper put out by IZA. […]

Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff famously argued that patterns of growth across the Americas can be traced back to historic levels of inequality. Natural factor endowments in certain areas (for instance, Caribbean islands) encouraged rent-seeking extraction over investments in human capital, and led to the political empowerment of rich landowners. These elites, in turn, created […]

Had to reinstall WordPress because of security problem over the last couple of days (iframe injection). I’ll slowly be getting the site back to normal look & feel wise.

ALDaily points to this excellent article on the world’s top origami artists. This guy has a hell of a bio: Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation—“Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties”—he designed an origami […]

Now it is the time of night,when all the graves are open wide,to let forth every dancing sprite,along the churchway paths to glide…Midsummer Night’s Dream In Scottm’s post on Japanese Ghosts, gnxpers wondered is there scientific proof of ghosts? I argue that we cannot provide it. Any proof offered is corrupted by our innate ability […]

Doing a search on PUBMED, I get: 6 responses for spandrel 28 responses for punctuated equilibria 107 responses for evolutionarily stable strategies 110 responses for inclusive fitness 263 responses for kin selection “Not scientific” as they say. But when I hear people saying that “Stephen Jay Gould was a world famous evolutionary thinker,” I wonder […]

I have referred on this blog several times to the dispute between the Roman noble Symmachus and St. Ambrose. It was one of the last public disputations between the paganism of classical Rome and the rising Christian confession, after this point (the late 4th century), classical paganism lost any eloquent partisan who could argue for […]

This article in The Washington Post about Iraqis of African descent is fascinating. Recently I’ve been reading books about the Brazilian “racial democracy,” and some of the quotes from Afro-Iraqis are exactly the same as Afro-Brazilians, they often de-emphasize their blackness and look to their commonalities with the general society, all the while being victims […]