How does this relate to Axelrod's work? The models, as described, seem weird and primitive to me (and not just in the sense that all simple models are weird and primitive). Presumably because I am wholly ignorant of the literature, I don't get why these models are even interesting. If someone asked me to rationalize seemingly altruistic behavior on evolutionary grounds, for sure the toolbox I would pick up is something like Axelrod's. In that world, "groups" are just sets of individual organisms which have a high probability of future interaction, and the rationale for altruism is that altruism today will be reciprocated in a future interaction (if the other organism is playing a "nice" strategy). This avoids the rigid line-drawing exercise to delineate groups. It also points towards key supporting features of the environment. Environments (or traits) which create lots of opportunities for future interaction or which help organisms recognize other individual organisms or which help organisms recognize other nice players support cooperation. Furthermore, the reciprocal altruism stuff is old now. Why am I wrong?

Do these studies typically save some specimens in a freezer? If so, the whole issue disappears, dynamically, as the cost of sequencing goes down. So, collect N, use the chip now and save the specimens for later when the cost of whole-genome sequencing is lower. Right?

In "The 10,000 Year Explosion" Chochran and Harpending argue that delayed gratification is a relatively recent trait. Hunter gatherers get no benefit, perhaps even cost, so they are best to eat what they get, when they get it, and share any excess. 
 
Agriculture turned that all around. Suddenly there was benefit, even necessity for delayed gratification, and a very strong selection pressure appeared. People who could successfully juggle future events had a decided advantage. They were the ones who acquired wealth, and mating opportunities. 
 
Now what happens, I suspect, is that we have such a strong pattern of behavior that even in cases where delaying does not benefit, we 'feel good' about the self denial (religion capitalizes on this... deny yourself now for benefit in the afterlife). 
 
I see myself doing this with vacation days. I have to use them before the end of the year, but I always wind up having to 'burn' them because I've saved so many that I can't carry over.

That mother goddess thing does sound suspect. Next anthropologists will be finding badger or cougar goddess statues all over the place.

 
despite being consistently outgunned in terms of money due to the structural nature of the their local television market.  
 
 
Football isn't baseball. NFL teams share the national TV contract revenue equally. Teams are usually pretty close to the salary cap. The main differentiator in revenue among teams is in merchandise, and the Steelers do well at that. The Steelers have, if anything, above average player costs. They are about 4 million under the 127MM cap, right now. 
 
That being said, you do a fine job of sketching the conventional wisdom about the Steelers' success. Their personnel policies emphasize bourgeois values in players and coaches. They like non-criminal, hard workers over flashy uber-talents. Then they emphasize continuity and investment, at least in the coaching staff and key players. 
 
For example, Chuck Noll used to have a policy that a player could not lose his starting job via injury. Starters who got hurt were guaranteed their job back when they returned from IR. This encouraged players not to play too hurt, potentially exacerbating injuries. It also headed off feelings of injustice which would otherwise arise. Noll also emphasized teaching football fundamentals over cutting edge tactics and trickery. 
 
Many players played for the Steelers well after a normal team would have benched or cut them. Late career Franco Harris, most of Kordell Stewart's career. 
 
This works for the Steelers but probably has limited replicability. There are only so many good enough athletes and coaches who display bourgeois values. 
 
I was sure that unrestricted free agency was going to destroy the Steelers. The incentives to invest in a player drop dramatically if he can bug out for a big payoff once he has learned enough. Why this did not happen, I don't know.

It looks like there's a lot less variation in the SOI scores among men living in different countries than there is among women in different countries.

One really interesting thing here is the lowess line itself. Assuming that non-whites' propensity to vote for Obama is roughly constant among counties, what the results say is that whites living in mixed-race counties are much less likely to vote for Obama than are whites in overwhelmingly white counties. Notice how the Obama vote falls linearly as the mixture of whites increases until the county gets pretty white and then levels off (which can only mean that whites are becoming more likely to vote Obama as you move from about 65% white up). The lowess line actually slopes up at the far right. 
 
Some of this has to be a South effect --- there is a big concentration of blacks in the South and whites vote in an ethnic block for Republicans there. It would be interesting to restrict the sample to the non-South and re-plot the lowess line to see if it is just a South effect or if the effect shows up everywhere. 
 
The other thing that would be interesting is smaller geography and individual voting data. Census has demographic info conveniently at the Congressional district level. I wonder if any of the individual level election surveys present geocodes at the congressional district level.

A big point of Cosma's post was that the existence of a large first factor is not the proof of the existence of a specific ability called g. Its a theorem. The first factor is an average of many abilities (14 in the WAIS), so that anything that taps into a different average of those abilities is going to be correlated with g. If you want something orthogonal to g, then you will need to start taking averages of differences of those abilities.  
 
Part of this gets into the whole idea of psychological measurement. You might want to look at the measurement theory faq for some pointers into this sub-area

I'm AB+ and have a B+ wife (all North/Western Euro ancestry) . Two kids are AB+, one's AB neg, and one's B+. I guess we're staying away from the equatorial zones. The good news, being a universal recipient, is that "all your blood are belong to us".

Got to like the fact that the words "be" and "think" are given as being precisely "38,800 and 14,400 years old respectively". I didn't realize that linguistics was so inexact.

I also concur with Razib and Matt. In my limited experience (as a Ph.D. biostatistician / epidemiologist) doctors avoid statistics and go for what they think is a "sure thing". They also have difficulty in dealing with odds of success, blowing it off with comments like "I'm not a bookie!" I believe part of the reasoning is the extreme focus on the current case, rather than thinking about trends and groups.

Where does one put the blended degrees such as biometry and biostatistics, bioengineering and so on? There was a math guy named Fisher once who made a few contributions to genetics.

I haven't seen similar studies in other countries. But wouldn't the result differ in more competing environments? At least from personal experience in my home country (China), wealth and social status is tightly linked to your attractiveness to opposite sex (more so for man than for woman). And intelligence (partially reflected by IQ) correlates to your wealth and status.

I scored a 1. Given that I'm an Emergency Physician, it's probably a good thing.

Razib, 
 
Can you remind us about the average age of your readers? From earlier polls?

Under how one found GNXP, you need a "follower of Derb" option. Come to think of it, that could also be options for political and religious views (I'd mark all three).

Another interesting question would be: 
 
What is your current occupation?

I think that the most significant achievement was the attempt by the Greeks to find nonsupernatural reasons behind causes and events. This applied to the natural world and also to the actions of men and nations.  
While they did believe in gods to some extent, they had no real organized priesthood in general. Moreover, they recognized, as in Homer, that their gods were not perfect, but could be even more capricious and meretricious than men. 
This mindset led them to develop such things as deductive reasoning and philosophy in general, whereas other cultures appear not to have seen a need for this.

the greatness of classical athens seems, to me, to have been prefigured by the ionian flowering of the pre-socratics, which wasn't built upon a radical political foundation.  
That may be so, but Athens itself seemed to have the elements (free assembly, payment to attend the law courts, publicly and privately funded festivals and architecture, true democracy, albeit very arbitrary to the point that later intellectuals feared mob rule) that allowed for the actual flourishing to occur (very small area, no more than 50k male citizens, yet produced Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, the Parthenon, et al in a tiny span of time that's never been matched anywhere at any time). 
Certainly other Greeks (Pythagoras in Syracuse, those in Hellenistic Alexandria) also produced great works/ideas, but there wasn't the same concentration in time/space. 
 
by my reckoning the cultural prominence of france and its intellectuals continued to rise even with the growing power of monarchy and curtailment of traditional freedoms 
The Church and monarchy were opposed to these (the Church moreso). Both were essentially destroyed (but eventually made comebacks because of the widespread disillusionment/destruction) by the ideas of the Enlightenment, which led to the Revolution (the apex of prominence of intellectuals). 
 
similarly, the efflorescence of german intellectuals which rose in the 19th century was accompanied by the expansion of centralizing and autocratic prussia). 
The great German intellectuals and artists (the mathematicians, poets, composers,philosophers) almost all predated the rise of the strong Prussian state in the mid to late 1800's. Certainly the patronage was important, but the smaller Prussian state of the 1700's and early 1800's, fighting against French militarism, was very different from the Prussia of the Kaisers and Bismarck.

This is sort of like saying that the victory of the United States at Midway is more of an illustration of a general trend of the Japanese reaching the limits of their expansionary capacity than the turning of the tide... it's just as unlikely that a Japanese victory at Midway would have resulted in the conquest of the United States... 
 
I agree with Arcane on this statement, in reference to the Muslim expansion being halted in 732. After seeing Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt, N. Africa, and Iberia all fall in 100 years, there's no reason to believe that the Franks weren't next. It still took over 750 years to drive them back out the Iberian peninsula.

Not to go to much off tangent, but numerous scholars, ancient and modern, attribute the numerous achievements of Athens (the architecture, development of tragedy and comedy, etc) specifically to their democratic way of life. Rome, too, made numerous advances under the Republic, as well, where a fair degree of freedom was available to many (though not all).  
Slightly later in the West, our Renaissance began in the Italian city states where a degree of freedom was possible for merchants, scholars, and the like (as opposed to the contemporaneous feudal societies elsewhere in Western Europe). Likewise, the spread from Italy into Europe occurred initially in the free cities of the Netherlands and Germany, as well as in relatively free England. 
On the other hand, many ancient states/cities were indeed totalitarian, ruled by tyrants, despots, and oligarchies.

As for criticisms of the Spartans/Greeks in general, there is fair reason to believe that had the Persians conquered Greece, the history of the Western world and civilization may have been very different. 
Athens may never have flourished and such things as democracy, drama, literature, philosophical inquiry, rationalism, and the like might not have developed (or would have done so in truncated fashion). 
The nascent Roman republic might have been snuffed out next. Our concepts of law, our language, many of these words, et cetera, may never have been passed on. 
Others such as VDH can do a better job defining what was defended/at risk. I personally feel that we are better off today because the Persians were defeated, as were the Muslims in France in the 700's and at Vienna more recently.

I think some of y'all need to hand in your man cards, or be driven over the cliff. I'm 40, with 4 kids and I'm trying to figure out how old they need to be (currently 12, 9, and two 3 year olds) before they can see this.