Since you've got the missing heritability, why don't you show it for something as simple as height?

Of course the two statements are compatible. I wasn't sure what it was the point about Papuans that Greg is making. when Paabo said the Denisova pinkie was Neanderthal, as recently as two weeks ago. Wow. How could he say that after publishing a paper on mtDNA with the main point that it is not from Neandertal?

Should read "San closer to Han+French than to Papuan". So? The statement "Papuan closer to non-Africans than to Africans" has 10X higher Z-scores.

I don't see any problem with the data, provided that they are described accurately. If real, studying the mechanism should be fascinating. By now Remy should know whether the switch is truly stable or if it goes away after >100 generations. That's the key. And, of course, if it is stable how it behaves in crosses. In any case this sort of "additive epigenetics" is certainly interesting. I haven't seen any examples of such.

Take out top 5% earners and that exponent becomes radically less steep. In my field, quality of undergrad education at Harvard is in no way better than that of any solid public university. Much worse than at many universities, in other words. Harvard graduates, however, are on average appreciably better on average in quality than those from large public schools when it comes to things post-graduate. Simple selection and credentialism. That non-linear relationship on the graph might also be called "it pays to be smart".

“I don’t think any of us in the business believed it would be a cornucopia,” said Frank L. Douglas, the former head of research and development at the drug company Aventis. Seems like a case of victors writing the history. It is now convenient to forget that back in the late 1980s there was sizable and vocal opposition to the HGP. That opposition said exactly this: we wouldn't know how to extract much of a useful information from the raw sequences. To counter sceptics, HGP's proponents hyped the project beyond any belief and promised things they never believed would become reality. One clear positive role of HGP was that it ended up being a huge catalyst for the development of all kind of high throughput technologies that are now becoming common. Still, one wonders if that was inevitable anyway and if all of it could have been achieved much cheaper, without spending massive amount of money to just say "we did it".

That article should have ended with its title. Instead, it went on and on for four pages without saying a single thing that is interesting or original. Since you are generalizing about intelligence, what's your take on biology majors who become journalists? (That's you too, right? Blogging is a form of journalism).

This is the most fascinating type of graph: http://www.gapminder.org/ The first impression is cutesy gizmo but once you play with it, the capabilities are endless and tons of information can be presented very compactly and efficiently.

Really true....introversion comes into play also.. I've said before that the one thing that makes me a truly weird human being. Is that most people consider being stranded on a desert island, alone forever,crusoe style a bad thing...it's something I would aspire to.

Four Russian sprinters were doused with artificial, ultraviolet light. Another group wasn't. Both trained identically for the 100-meter dash. The control group lowered their sprint times by 1.7 percent. The radiated runners, in comparison, improved by an impressive 7.4 percent. 
 
N=4? Random sampling error, per chance?

In what can only be described as a ballsy move, the authors then invested what must have been a considerable amount of time and money on following up this mutation. Which, I emphasize again, was found in only two individuals in a single family. 
 
Publication bias. You never hear from those with ballsy moves that generated nothing. Which is why those in the beginning of their careers cannot afford anything risky and have to make their names doing boring predictable stuff first.

Is there any profession or field of endeavor where women constitute an elite? 
 
As far as authors of mystery novells are concerned, women are very competitive against men.

Speaking of genetic repeatability, check out Vavilov's law of homologous series: 
http://www.biocenter.helsinki.fi/bi/bare-1_html/Pdfs/VavilovLawofVariation.pdf

To Eric J. Johnson: 
 
Like I said, 100 ways why it would not work... You make all good points. Brief Re:  
1) Yep, the danger of making more virus to begin with is obvious. So it comes down to experimental questions of how well HIV propagates out of erythroblasts (I don't know; vaguely recall that K562 erythroleukemia line does not make amplify HIV all that well) and to what extent the added viral load is offset by the later killing of it. One posible tweak would be to also transform in something that messes up WT virus (say, siRNA).  
2) Agreed it's a potential problem. Another worry is the possible havoc a huge excess of CD4 in the bloodstream might wreck onto immune system's balance. 
3) I don't know for sure. Haven't kept up for decades. Logically, there must be one dominant/active enough to make that many RBCs.  
 
To Vince: 
That competitive binding works is no surprise but the approach is not realistic. It's like hemodialysis every month at an astronomic cost every session.

Here is an "HIV vaccine" idea I came up with over 20 years ago as an undergrad. My career took me away from immunology so I never got a chance to test. Still, the basic technology was there 20 years ago and is routine now (I think):  
 
Take a person's erythroblasts (or whatever appropriate RBC precursor is known today), transform them with HIV receptor CD4 (and CCR5, I might add today), treat them with growth factor that commits the cells firmly toward erythrocyte lineage (erythropoetin is all I knew then), inject back into the infected patient. Now... Mature RBC count in the blood is 6-8 orders higher than all other cells. And they don't have nucleus - meaning that they can't propagate virus. And they WILL carry CD4/CCR5. And their lifetime is few months. What it means is that you have a good chance of having ~ 1000X excess of HIV receptors that bind HIV unproductively, carrying the virus to the deathbed with them rather soon. This will likely reduce active virus titer down to negligible levels very quickly.  
 
Obviously, there are easily 100 ways why this would not work but I'd love to see it tried - because it just may. What's more, the basic scheme can potentially work not just against HIV but against any chronic viral pathogen with a well-defined receptor. Testing it in the mouse these days is almost trivial.

is convinced that 99% of government funded science and technology is a complete waste of time and money  
 
Well, NIH's intramural research certainly is not 99% waste of time and money. And keep in mind that government/NIH/NSF funds about 80% of all good/decent biomedical research in the USA. That's the government funded and technology that has brought to you all the spectacular advances of the past 50+ years. Remind your friend that surely someone in his family is alive today because of this "complete waste of time and money".

Rafal Smigrodzki: I scored 153 [on libertarian purity test] 
 
Oh, so 100 is not a top score? Good! 'Cause I was really disturbed when I scored 47 - because I regard myself as an liberal but the one who strongly disagrees with some of the liberal idiocies (like the blank slate and all the logical conclusions and policies that follow from it).  
 
I was almost violently against Iraq war. The big lies and the big stupidity were so obvious on so many levels that there was no other choice. Now that we broke Iraq, however, I am against the withdrawal. Before we do that, we need to:  
1. Stop the pretence of transplanting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Democracy is an expensive form of government. Only rich countries can afford it in full measure.  
2. Find and nurture "our sun of the bitch" dictator in both countries. Make sure stability and basic economy is his priority - at any cost. Stalin, Mao, Pinochet, Gaddafi - whatever. Any internal iron fist won't kill as many as already have been killed and as many that will probably be killed if the current mess continues for much longer.

- Is there a factor of two between gay and straight fertility rates when looking only at males (when looking at whether someone is shouldering his burden, so to speak)? As in, for the former case looking at females (lesbians sleeping with straight men) gives you something new, while for the latter (straight women sleeping with straight men) it doesn't. 
 
- How do microbe theories of homosexuality get around the twin studies? 
 
(are comments held up for moderation, or are mine just being lost in the ether?)

- Skimming the thread I came across the idea that the best known explanation of homosexuality is microbe based. How does that get by twin study results for example? 
 
- Are gay and straight statistics directly comparable when looking only at males or is there a factor of two somewhere?

These days on State St, a place most flooded with UW students, you simply won't see steel grates on any display windows! None that I can recall anyway.  
 
Beer drinking in WI is a tradition. Traditions have a tendency to stick around for a long time. Plus, some of the local brews are excellent! Even then, in the past decade in Madison, along with the general national trend, there is a distinct shift from drinking beer to drinking wine.