This reminds me of a telling line in some chick TV sitcom (Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives?) in which one female protagonist tells another, "Nobody likes their friends! Well, maybe men do." The implication being that female friendships, while more intense, tend also to be more judgmental and more quick to focus on one another's flaws in taste, clothes, men, behaviors, etc. while men "like" their friends precisely because they don't focus on intense analysis of each others flaws.

In answer to David B's and Eric Johnson's queries, the sheep industry doesn't use A.I. to the extent it is used in the cattle industry. In cattle, a superior bull can be used to sire thousands of offspring and his semen is shipped everywhere. In sheep, however, owning to a slightly different cervical structure it is extremely difficult to fertilize trans-cervically (i.e., the turkey baster method). Almost all sheep A.I. is done surgically using a laproscope (a much more invasive and costly procedure), so the potential to use any one superior sire on thousands of ewes is just not practical. I use A.I. regularly since I import semen from the top rams in the UK to the US (I've got several guys on ice at UC Davis right now). But it's not cost-effective by any means. Certainly semen from gay sheep can be collected just as easily as it can from straight ones (perhaps even more easily....given the method used to obtain a specimen ). But the reality is, any top ram that's gay, probably has about a dozen or so straight brothers hanging around that are just as good, so why bother worrying about it?  
 
Also, more to the point, almost all livestock breeding involves one male with a group of females. If he's solo, and there's no other rams around to take out to the local disco, he's going to do the job - it may not be his sexual 'preference' but hey, it's breeding season, and the testosterone is running high.... In the middle of rut, most ruminants will boink anything (surely you've see the you tube clips of sex-crazed moose mounting statutes, etc).  
 
In a range situation (on a Western ranch or an Ozzie or Kiwi sheep station) with multiple males running unsupervised with lots of females, sure, the gay rams will be off on their own listening to the Pet Shop Boys or whatever, but their straight brothers will be only to happy to fill in for them. So, again, there' no economic need to study homosexuality in livestock. Interesting topic, though, nevertheless.

Ahem. As a gay person AND a sheep farmer, let me set a couple of things 'straight.' First off, sheep are not the only animals that show exclusive homosexual behavior. There are well documented life-long homosexual pair bonds in a number of bird species. A number of other wild ruminants related to sheep exhibit same-sex orientations - it's just harder to study in the wild (Wildebeests X & Y in a herd of 1,000 are gay - how you gonna prove that?). 
 
Second, gay sheep studies may have been cloaked with an 'economic' rationale originally - perhaps as a means of justifying the grant to study homo sheep, but to suggest that there is ANY economic impact on the sheep industry at all because a percentage of rams are getting it on with each other rather than the ewes is laughable in the extreme! That's out-of-touch academics grasping desperately for a real-world impact for their research.  
 
The 2% to 4% of rams that are gay have zero impact on any sheep operation's bottom line - No one, I repeat, no one, "loses a lot of money on those duds." It is a non-issue in the industry. There are roughly the same percentage of rams born with only one descended testicle. No one is worried about the economic impact of monorchidism.

Um..isn't our global connectedness allowing for greater assortative mating?

How much of this is just the usual shoddy (slightly sensationalist) British journalism and how much actual fact? Black color morphs are fairly common in grey squirrel populations in North America, but they're never more than 10% of the population. The Washington, DC area has a higher concentration of black squirrels, and while I don't have any documentation on it, I estimate it at no more than 10% of the total squirrel population. They've been stable at those levels for decades. Olney, ILL has a stable population of a white color morph. Don't know why the British black color morphs have so much advantage over the greys when their American cousins don't.

Razib - 
 
As someone of half German / half English extraction with an practically unpronounceable germanic surname, I can tell you that the number of German surnamed Americans anglicizing their family names is incredibly small. Where I live in Virginia there are a few Millers that were once Muellers in the early 1700s, but other than John (Deutchendorfer) Denver and Doris (Kappelhoff) Day, I can't think of any American with a German surname who would feel the need to anglicize his or her surname in the 20th or 21st century. That may not be the case for Jewish immigrants with Germanic surnames, who more frequently anglicized their names, but gentile German immigrants from the mid 1800s onward pretty much kept their names.  
 
Similarly the opposite. Americans of German extraction outnumber those of Anglo extraction, as they have in every census report from around 1900 onwards(though often, as in my case they overlap). Growing up in the Midwest, I can attest to the regional taste for beer and bratwurst(especially in Wisconsin) and very clumsy and clueless attempts at celebrating German heritage (Oktoberfest and fat American guys running around in Lederhosen), but there's really no such thing as German-Americans - they all very rapidly became/become deracinated unhyphenated Americans, and it beggars the imagination that some Smith is going to get in touch with his "ethnic" heritage by changing his name to Schmidt.  
 
So I think you'll have to look for another explanation of the declining Smiths.

Razib - 
 
Your African model is a good analogy,and the one where I think Rauch was heading.  
 
I think the US is evolving to something much like in the former Soviet Union - where medical care providers (from nursing staff on up to elite doctors) were overwhelmingly female. Only elite surgeons were male.  
 
My real question is why, in human social groupings (college classes, professions, teams, clubs, genetics blogs, etc), males much prefer their own company? I like to think of myself as enlighted and socially progressive, but I am guilty of the same behavior. I've no science to back this up, but in my experience any such group that has a few females will generally find those females patronized or perhaps ostracized or discounted. The greater the female participation in the group however, the less males feel its value. And the tipping point seems to be not a female majority, but roughly 1/3 female participation. At 50% female participation or more, most males start to bail entirely and the group, in male eyes, is less interesting/less valid/less prestigious. Any studies you're aware of to confirm or deny my casual observation?

Razib said:  
 
alan, don't you think your analysis is a bit more interesting than what rauch implied about 'matriarch' then? 
 
Well, I dunno. Don't you think it kinda confirms his (somewhat tongue in cheek) assessment that: 
 
Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)

Razib - 
 
Believe it or not, I had lunch with Rauch just this past Saturday and we didn't discuss this much beyond my mentioning male performance/achievement on either side of the bell curve.  
 
But the point he makes is that in college campuses AND in professional degree programs - females now dominate. That isn't going to change much in the future. So, yeah, males may outperform females, but males aren't enrolled in those degree programs. 
 
My own experience illustrates his point all too well. In October I visited the University of Illinois Vet school (where my dad got his DVM in 1955). They have a whole wall of graduation photos of every graduating class from the 1890s. It's an amazing panorama. All male in every class photo - not a female in sight. Until around 1962 when there are suddenly a few females. By the early 1970s, about 1/3 of the classes are female. By late 1970s 1/2 are female. By late 1990s they're 90% female. In the 21st century classes they are almost completely female with only about 4-5 token male students. As the profession has become 'feminized' it's also lost earning power. Veterinary salaries have eroded in real terms since the 1980s. Is this the result of society valuing women less than men? Or the result of women willing to work part-time and as 'staff' in larger animal hospitals and clinics? I dunno. I do know that my local large animal vet who comes to my farm says that he can't hire anybody to work with cattle or other livestock (the only exception being horses) as no recently minted female vet wants to do the physical labor involved in restraining large and dangerous animals. Yet there are no male graduates to do this work either - Veterinary medicine has become a 'female' occupation that high ability males avoid (due to declining earning power and prestige), and low ability males cannot perform cause they don't have the smarts to get the degree.

Dunno if this is an example of 'sexual antagonism' but among animal breeders there are definitely 'paternal' and 'maternal' breeds which are used in livestock crossbreeding programs to produce commercial offspring destined for the dinner table.  
 
I have a sheep farm and breed one of the quintessential British "maternal" sheep breeds - the Clun Forest Sheep. Farmers have selected for certain 'maternal' traits over the past several centuries in this breed. Maternal is in quotes because I'm not necessarily sure that some of these traits are necessarily more feminine than masculine, but the emphasis has been on maternal instincts, wider pelvic carriages, milk production (more milk and higher butterfat), and multiple births. Other breeds were selected for more 'masculine' traits such as size, muscling, and body frame. Again, the determination of what is a 'masculine' or 'feminine' trait was somewhat subjective on the part of the farmer, but however unscientific, there was a tendency to assign different phenotypes to each sex.  
 
Ewes from my breed of sheep were always crossed with rams of two other breeds of sheep - the Scottish Black-faced or the Border Leicester. Never the other way around.  
 
Maybe because I have an animal breeding background, but I've often looked a humans this way too (though I'd never admit it to anyone), but I can generally look at a dainty, small-framed very feminine woman and know that her dad was certainly not a big hulking macho guy. Same goes in reverse, I've seen some fairly tough looking dames, where it's quite clear daddy must have been a bruiser. It'd be pretty easy to breed humans for hyper masculine or hyper feminine phenotypes. You would definitely run into some fecundity issues (women with narrower pelvises, etc), but I know plenty of families (or even ethnic groups) where some, both male and female have more gracile features, and some, both male and female, have coarser features.  
 
Just some very, very unscientific observations. 
 
- Alan

Hey Razib - 
 
I don't have anything to add to the hypertension debate, but since TNR won't let me comment on the articles there (I'm not a subscriber), I thought I'd just leave a general comment on the exchange here - to wit: I'm sure Messers. Chowkwanyn and Shubow are nice young fellows. They certainly seem bright and articulate enoguh, but really, what sort of standing do a law student and a history grad student have to be arguing these points in a national publication? I mean, hell, why not pull some random cab driver and farmer out of the population to debate genetics and race? They'd be just as qualified as those two. I'm not sure I'm getting what TNR is trying to achieve here with this discussion.

......But, the finding that Asian Americans are more secular than other ethnicities is a pretty robust and consistent finding...... 
 
Hmm, could it be that Asian American = higher G? 
 
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of say, Korean-Americans who were raised in a Christian tradtion (the only Asian immigrant group I can think of with a consistently Christian background), and see how many of them are "un-churched" as adults.

My question would be, how do we arrive at such breeds as the Irish Wolf Hound - the largest of all dog breeds - from a relatively recent small canid?? Or is this one of the breeds that contain wolf admixture - though this breed is much larger than wolves itself? 
 
One could ask the same in reverse - how were we able to engineer a Chihuahua out of the same ancestral species that gave rise to the St. Bernard? There seems to be an amazing plasticity in both domestic and wild canids (wolves themselves vary considerably in coat colors and thickness). 
 
Irish Wolfhounds and other "over-sized" dogs such as Scottish Deerhounds, Great Danes, etc, are notoriously short-lived. They average around 6 or 7 years before their hearts give out (average dog lifespans seem to be around 13 years). I think the answer to the question is simply, constant selective breeding for size. In a sense we're pushing the envelope in getting dogs to that size - and I'd argue that selectively breeding humans to achieve giant size would result in the same health problems. 
 
I'm involved in a cat breeding program seeking to produce 'super-sized' pet cats. The Maine Coon cat is the largest domestic breed of cat. For whatever reason cats don't seem to be as 'plastic' as dogs when it comes to size, shape, or facial morphology. The Maine Coon seems to be about the largest size we can achieve using selective breeding with domestics. We've been using the Jungle or Reed Cat (Felis chaus) to increase the size of cats, but while the F1 and F2 generation hybrids are noticeably larger than domestic cats, by the F4 generation, there's really no discernable difference in size.  
 
An interesting aside regarding feline hybridization - rare crosses between the Geoffroy Cat (Oncifelis geoffroyi) and the domestic cat result in hybrids which are considerably larger than either parent species. Something to do with differing number of chromosomes.

I think that Darren Naish's synopsis of the argument of the Pariah Dog as the ancestral 'species' of the domestic dog makes the most sense to me. It's something I've always thought "must" be true - despite supposed genetic evidence of wolf ancestry. Glad to see that others are providing more solid evidence for something that I could never justify as anything more than a hunch.

I think the intelligence goes beyond what IQ tests can measure, that's all the have to say

I'm sorry, typo on the previous message. I meant I think that intelligence goes beyond what IQ tests can measure, that's all I have to say

I totally agree. I actually studied history (to PhD level) before the realities of earning a living dictated a switch to writing software. I always wished I could have something mathematical as a sideline.

I suspect part of the reason for there being more women working in software in the old days is that the software industry in days gone by was much more open to taking people from diverse academic backgrounds than it is now.

I remember a couple of women I worked with when I started out in a "corporate programming position" fifteen years ago (having previously done a PhD in history and decided that academia wasn't for me) - one had a master's degree in French Mediaeval literature, another a degree in German from Trinity College Dublin. Thse days, it seems that almost all entry level software development jobs require a degree in Computer "Science" ... and that the diversity and interesting-ness of the young programmers one meets is declining as a result (although that last bit could be just me becoming an old, or at least middle-aged, curmudgeon)

David, I've been thinking more about this general theme of software industry recruitment - and particularly about an old schoolfriend of mine who is definitely one of the two or three most intelligent people I have ever known. He is the kind of guy who absolutely refuses to put any time or effort into anything he finds too easy or boring. He consequently wouldn't conform to the programme sufficiently to do "well" at school, and dropped out of a comp.sci. college course after a year. Twenty years and a succession of interesting and technically cutting-edge jobs later, he's a senior compiler engineer for a major software company (one that doesn't begin with M).

I seriously doubt whether hyper-intelligent mavericks of that kind will still be in senior positions in major software companies in twenty years time. Is that a loss to the software industry? Maybe, maybe not. It's part of the natural scheme of things that as industries mature, the sort of people who were attracted to them when they were the frontier start to find them boring. But there will be some other industry where people like that will be making a living in the next generation (and if I knew what it was I'd be investing in the startups now)