I see two major causes which aren't mentioned in the post, though Razib gets one of them: Cost of the military - while some military R&D drives innovation, and bonds formed in the military can overcome some of the low-trust society problems, military spending is fundamentally not productive, no matter how necessary. For a society as militarized (and beseiged) as Israel, the question maybe should be "Why is Israel so rich, compared to other militarized societies?" The other is that while Israel is realtively free-market now, that's fairly recent. As late as the 1980s, Israel was pretty socialist, until the current generation of Likud leaders added free-market policies to the way they differntiated themselves from Labor. The arrival of lots of Russian Jews probably helped drive this change.

Looking at some data on per capita income, it looks like Israel is showing growth rates since 1965 similar to those of most other countries filled with europeans while non-communist, other than Ireland and Russia (Ireland is growing faster, Russia slower and much more irregularly.) So if the average IQ of Israel is similar to that of european countries, there's no real surprise.

"it is selfish of me to want these small communities to remain in a bubble, free from the very same benefits I enjoy in belonging to a modern, post-industrialised society." You deceive yourself.

"The argument that humans were simply too picky to have ever mated with Neanderthals is plain ridiculous: at worst, they were a lot more human than sheep." I assume you get some giggles out of mentioning sheep, but it cheapens your argument and invites responses like Doug's. Unless you were simply baiting.

Just looking at the first map, I have to wonder what happened in Wisconsin. First guess is a change in eligibility rules.

While college-educated white liberal women may be a small group in the population as a whole, "college-educated white" is very over-represented in Congress as a whole, and "liberal" is over-represented among Democrat Party elected officials (just as "conservative" over-represented among Republican party elected officials). So the Democrat Congresswomen being solidly pro-choice is not really surprising; what is somewhat surprising is that Republican Congresswomen are more pro-choice than the general population.

Mark Houston said: "as a means of creating communication easy throughout a population" 
 
I think other motives were prevalent in the U.S. For example, they wanted to prevent balkanization and, in particular, stamp out German sympathies. This was largely carried out by compulsory public schooling, first, and then mass media later, I believe.

Regression to the mean, in a high school classmate of mine: Scooter Barry. Professional basketball player, but not as highly ranked as his father. 
 
Razib, your question: are these really the 1,700 best athletes who could be playing in the NFL? is not well-formed.  
 
What is the number of people who play football well enough to be in the NFL? Probably not much more than 5100, maybe less than 3400. 
 
What is the number of people who could have tried out for the football team in college and from there made it into the NFL, or alternatively, what is the population of people who could train up to NFL-quality football before they became too old? I think Steve Hsu's estimate fits this question: about 17,000.  
 
What is the number of people who have the genetic endowment that if they had made the NFL their goal, they could have made it? Probably another order of magnitude higher, but lots of people either don't care enough, or have different ambitions, or otherwise are diverted. 
 
(Of course, all these estimates are for the U.S. population - people in other countres by and large don't end up going into American-rules football, even if they have the genes and talents for it.)

Microsoft Word for DOS was a horrible, awful product. WordPerfect was much, much nicer, and even WordStar was better. It wasn't until Word for Windows that MS had a usable word processor to sell on PCs. 
 
Eoin - perhaps in the earliest versions of WordPerfect you had to tag your formatting; by the time I was using it, you did things like highlight and type ctrl-b to bold. The tagged markup was accessible (which was a godsend!), but you didn't actually type in [bold] to get bold text.

I'm a little surprised that a post on a blog called "Gene Expression" thinks that innovation is slowing down, given the rapid pace of discovery and innovation in the life sciences right now. Not all of this innovation is leading to consumer goods terribly quickly, but how long did it take from the invention of the CRT to consumer television, from the invention of the transistor to transistor radios in every pocket? (That said, I do see a longer cycle from major breakthrough to mass consumer good than there used to be, but does that mean that there is less innovation, or that something else has changed?) 
 
Prozac was claimed as the first SSRI, though Eli Lilly had to issue a retraction of that claim. But it was discovered in 1974, and first sold in 1986, so doesn't belong to 1995.

Razib - to what extent is the (heritable) impulse to religiosity satisfiable in non-theistic ideological movements? How does that affect your view of the proportion of people who are "religious"?

X% of the children of the religious will be religious, while 100-X% will beocme secular. Y% of children of seculars will be secular while 100-Y% will become religious. Even if the number of children of the religious is greater than the number of children of the secular, this will lead to a stable state where some percentage is religious and some percentage is secular.  
 
Saying that religiosity is heritable means that X and Y will be high, but as it is not completely heritable, cultural conditions can cause variation in both X and Y.  
 
Dividing up the population into only two baskets is probably an oversimplification, as there are people who are weakly religious and strongly religious, as well as weakly secular and strongly secular; I'd guess that that "strongly/weakly" lines up with a hereditary personality variable that doesn't correlate with actual religiosity. Add to that the differential impact of cultural conditions on people of different levels of zeal, and it gets messy quickly. For example, moving to the city probably makes some weakly religious become weakly secular and some become strongly religious, while the seculars are more likely to drift more secular, while some strongly religious will become strongly secular and vice-versa.

The commenter who compares the discussion to one at Brad DeLong's blog is being highly unfair to Cowen - nobody's so much as alleged that Cowen is suppressing comments which are critical, something which DeLong does with frequency. 
 
Cowen does state up front that he's dodging the question, though that's lazy. It wouldn't be that hard for him to email Sailer and ask "what do you believe about IQ and race, in 200 words or less?", then answer to that. 
 
In Cowen's place, I'd either have been flip, and discussed why government mandated universal health insurance is a bad idea, or gone into a discussion about Sailer's policy recommendations which derive more directly from his views on IQ and race, and how those differed from mine, or if they didn't, why not.

Oh no! Overhyped paranoia is going to kill us all!

I wouldn't be surprised if the fellow who knew the Bible was Alexander Cruden, who wrote the first thorough concordance to the Bible. 
 
The life sciences are famously more memorization-intensive than the physical sciences; Feynman complains of it, and Fermi quoted as having said "If I could remember all these (subatomic) particles, I'd be a botanist". 
 
My daughter pretty much knows the letters of the alphabet - she can name them correctly, and that feat took her significantly more than an hour. But she's not yet 2. It took me more than an hour to memorize the Greek alphabet, at the age of about 5 or 6, and the Cyrillic, at the age of about 10 or 12. I never did memorize the Korean, though I studied it (and others) in a class as an undergrad.

"Saudi" Arabia and Iraq matter, only because they have far more oil than they can consume internally. Pakistan matters because they have the bomb.  
 
But a Scramble for Africa is about as pointless as the first one was, perhaps more so, as we aren't willing to exploit the natives quite so ruthlesslessly as we did in the late 19th centurey.

Someone did some work on the network size of Livejournal (pdf), which showed most probable minimum path length of 6 (but there are completely isolated islands in LiveJournal, and significant clustering along linguistic lines - lj.ru is a separate cloud weakly linked to English LJ). However, like with many social networking sites, a link does not necessarily mean "socially close enough to ask for an introduction to a non-mutual acquaintance" or some other measure of actual connection. 
 
David - my life shows lots of clustering due to affinities, but I have more than one affinity, and many of my friends do, too. A person I know through social dance is an employee at Google, and knows many higher-ups there; another is a moderately senior person at Apple. Both those connections put me one degree away from a lot of people who have connections all over the place. A hill tribesman in India may actually be only 6 or 7 links away from me.

"A good cup of mead is at the same level as a Falernian." 
 
Making mead or wine is pretty straightforward. Making *good* mead or wine is another matter entirely ... Having said that, have you *had* a good cup of mead? Do you know what it takes to make? It sounds a little like wine snobbery opposed to beer. Fine beer can require a lot of sophisticated instruments of civilization, detailed knowledge, and so on to bring it forth ...

I read somewhere that the only crime statistics which are really reliable and comparable across countries are homicide and auto theft. The authorities can't readily ignore dead bodies (it's different when they're the ones generating the dead bodies, though), and due to the high value and high visibility of cars, and the prevalence of insurance, most car thefts get reported. Anything else can suffer from both reporting frequency problems as well as definitional problems. 
 
The large spike in crime 1900-1930 in the U.S. may be due to the large wave of immigration, especially as immigrants tend to be similar, demographically, to criminals. Certianly, Prohibition had something to do with the tail end of it, as well as the decline after 1932.

I've only ever lived in "soda" country (Delaware and the SF Bay Area), but I've heard people use "pop", rarely, and "soda-pop" a little more frequently. I've never, ever, heard someone use "coke" as a generic for all soda, just as a generic for cola.