I agree with Sideways. WHAT happened to GC? I will acknowledge that it was through his blog that I later came to GNXP.

I have an ultra-lame question, but at that point, where do you divide a skill versus a core trait? Some precocious kids talk about how they registered sizable gains on the SAT-M from coursework. You could argue that these experiences are the exception, not the rule, as the study cited below found. However, this research also found that several years of challenging coursework was associated with improvement on the SAT. Does the SAT-M tap into a largely immutable 'g' or is it more of a skills measure from that vantage point? http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/82/4/866/

It's not really clear to me that Diarmuid didn't seem to be the better choice for her. He's younger and less likely to have defective sperm, erectile dysfunction (no viagra in those days), etc. He's also less likely to leave her a young widow. I'm not sure what the implications of being a widow were in her case, but I'm not sure she could have counted on protection and support for her children, and it could have meant that she would waste her reproductive years as a widow if remarriage wasn't the norm. 
 
Also, Diarmuid had that love spot, so he would give her the sexiest son. I believe cuckolding another man was a good way to spread your genes (maybe she would have been better of to cuckold the old man). 
 
Could it be that Grainne's father was reducing her fitness to increase his own inclusive fitness by forging an alliance through marriage to a powerful man?

Mencius, it was completely predictable that America would run the war with a "hearts and minds" strategy. Nobody who anybody listens to ever even proposed that we should run the war like 19th century British colonists. If Bush & friends wanted to prevent a stab in the back, their first step would have been to clean house internally, as a certain dictator with funny facial hair successfully did in the 1930s before starting his war. 
 
But they didn't, because they thought that the Iraqis would love us for blessing them with democracy, because they are part of the problem themselves. So the right position, even for somebody who agrees with your analysis, would have been to oppose the war, because it was obvious from the start that it was doomed to failure if we couldn't actually win hearts and minds. And, to me, it was obvious by May 2003, when it was clear that we were letting Iraq's infrastructure fall apart and their unemployment to go the roof, that there was no way we were going to win any hearts and minds. 
 
Your position is sort of like saying that it's obvious that Ruth Bader Ginsburg needs pancreatic surgery, so let's give an epileptic three-year-old a butter knife and let him have at it. 
 
Back to the main topic of the post, I feel the same way about the things I thought in that era (but at least I didn't support the Iraq War!), but how do we know we're any smarter now? I suppose we won't have to face up to our current errors in 5 years, because the burning issue of the day is the economy, and both sides will say they were right no matter what happens.

I've had a similar idea with respect to birthmarks and other little odd traits that don't serve any obvious purpose. In my family, most people have a crooked second toe on each foot, and so does my son, so that strengthens my belief that he's mine. But I wouldn't think it would work so well with skin color and hairiness, because those traits change so much from infancy to adulthood.

The doctor makes his living off the diagnosis. Once diagnosed you are in his/ her web for along long time. said the spider to the fly- welcome to my parlor! My Dept. Chairman happens to be a developmental pediatrician specializing in autism. He not only diagnoses it he actually Touts a treatment too. What a bunch of baloney. And seeing as it is my Chairman I am deriding- please excuse the anon tag.

Freakonomics' authors make a similar contention with the legalization of abortion and lower crime rates in the 80s.

mistake

I think that you mean "ten or FEWER."

People also forget the role of economic comparative advantage. Even if men and women were identical in performance, so long as women had even slight differences in prefernce for things such as child rearing (assume a mere 1%) or having a family, economic specialization could lead to hugely differing percentages of men and women in different jobs. 
 
Under certain assumptions, the most trivial differences could even lead to perfect segregation without discrimination. A forteriori, this holds if the male-female differences are larger.

Jaakkeli, Isn't is just great how you equate browner skin with "fugliness" youre full of shit 
 
I dont understand why people find northern europeans like sweedes so attractive. I think alot of them look like trolls. But Finland has the highest occurance of troll looks. I think mary kate and ashley olsen have some scandinavian blood. Treasure troll girls ewww.

Actually humanities majors should have to take real hum and ss courses in addition to a real science/math course. Most core requirements are so vague that almost any mix of classes counts at most universities. So h/ss majors are not challenged and this is made worse by the easy grading as well. 
 
In contrast, I would argue that the choice of required humanities and social science courses at Caltech and MIT are much more serious and fundamental than the typical core at lost of state schools and some weaker LACs. 
 
As for science, no one can be said to have any exposure to real science without taking at least one serious math and one serious physics class. By that I mean, serious calculus with some axiomatic proofs and serious physics that requires some derivations based on the calculus rather than formula memorization. The hardest part of modern science to grasp is the link between "ideas" and precise, though abstract mathematical expression. 
 
Oh and I'd support Shakespeare, traditional western history, and Microeconomics for scientists as well. 
 
Yeah, that would be a real core. U of Chicago could probably do it with a slight tweak to their curriculum. But then, fun would probably have to die before reaching Chicago.

Based on my own family history, I would have to say that the example of Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain is actually very plausible. My mother, although identifying herself as African American, would NEVER be mistake for white (she has always been identified as white on traffic tickets and hospital admissions), but she definitely has black ancestry. My mother's uncle moved away from his home town and actually "passed" for white himself, even marrying a "real" white woman, who didn't discover the truth until she met his brother, sometime after they married.

I believe that mtDNA figures more prominently in paleo-DNA studies because there are far more copies per cell than Y-DNA. Hence there is a greater likelihood that more mtDNA will survive over time.

Thats not to say our suffering isnt real. It is scary. Its there.

Imagine you are an Iraqi living in Iraq. Thats your daily life. Everyday more bombings. More killings. More uncertainty. Such media crocodile tears for one time in London. So few tears shed by the media for the same but vastly magnified suffering in Iraq.

At least according to IMDB, Marceau is not Sophie's original surname, and she is not the daughter of Marcel Marceau. Jerry Seinfeld's mother is Syrian Jewish, and his father is Ashkenazi Jewish.

Out of curiosity, what monograph on Charles Martel did you read?

Perhaps some Franks began to adopt Francien soon after conquering Gaul (see below). Like you, I've never come across a reference to what languages Charles Martel himself spoke. Might Gregory of Tours shed any light on the subject?

From http://www.alsintl.com/languages/french1.htm:

"The invasion of Gaul in the 400’s AD by Germanic tribes (including the so-called “Franks”) fleeing nomadic attackers from central Asia resulted in a loss of military control by Rome and led to the establishment in of a new, Frankish ruling class whose mother tongue was, of course, not Latin. Their adaptation to the speaking of popular Latin by the indigenous population tended to impose, by authoritative example, a pronunciation that retained a marked Germanic flavor – notably in the vowel sounds that can still be heard in the French of the present day (the modern French “u” and “eu”, for instance, remain very close to the modern German “ü” and “ö”– sounds unknown to any other modern language descended from Latin)."

Diana, Two Jews in physics, Abrikosov and Ginzburg. See www.jinfo.org