I noticed this passage in John Hawks' quote from Green et al: 
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Given that the Neanderthal X chromosome shows a higher level of divergence than the autosomes (R.E.G., unpublished observation), gene flow may have occurred predominantly from modern human males into Neanderthals. 
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It has concerned me for some time, given the different "solutions" the Neandertals and modern humans have "found" to the large brain/small birth canal problem, how a modern-configured baby could be born of a Neandertal woman without killing the mother. Any thoughts?

I think it's the fall of major-league communism that has fueled this change of opinion. Remember that Lewontin was in it for the politics, and the activities against sociobiologists and IQ theorists were agit-prop. Now that leftism is soo-ooo-ooo Back in the USSR, the literary folks have a little more degrees of freedom.

This was the finest essay on Darwin I have ever read, and I've read an awful lot of them. Gopnik's brand of unsentimental magic realism is a wonderful prism to see Darwin's thought through.

I'm with Zack. The accasional "winger rants" are small price to pay, comparable to your sidebar ads, for the excelent essays by razib on evolution, and the links he provides. 
 
By the same token when I read a blog by some leftish physicist, like cosmic variance, I ignore the red stuff.

Fly, thank you so much for the Hofstadter link! He is one of my heroes too, and this text shows why. Who else has spoken so deeply and cogently on the interface between the real and the the artificial? Those "thin partitions" as Pope called them. 
 
The content of his text is important to mull on too. I am tempted to get one of those EMI CDs and see what they "say" to me.

Well I HAVE Models for Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis by Moerdijk and Reyes. Most of it is beyond me so far; I am studying their Appendix I.

If all those small effect genes act independently their statistics add and you get the normal distribution. But if there is epistasis they act concurrently and their statistics multiply. If epistasis were all that happens you would then get the log-normal distribution with its fat upper tail. As things are there must be a mixture of curves which would account for the fat tail of the empirical curve.

Social liberal (80% permissive), Economic moderate(43% permissive) best described as a Democrat. Accurate.

On this subject, there was a review in last week's Science of Ecological Orbits by Ginzberg and Colyvan. They attempt to construct a meaningful concept of inertia, a la Newton, in population dynamics through the causal link:(ability of mothers to sequester an extra share of free energy relative to kin) -> (better than average nourishment of mothers) -> (better than average phenotypes of children) -> (better ability of children to sequester an extra share of free energy relative to kin). 
 
This is apparently an ongoing project associated with Ginzberg. Does anybody have any comments/evaluations about it?  
 
I saw a couple of reviews of the book that brought up "physics envy" and the statement that the causal link above is well-known. The first is of course completely irrelevant, they should be attacked, if at all, on the merits. And the second seems to miss the point, since it's not the mechanism, but what the mechanism implies that is at issue.

I believe that the dialectic law, unity and struggle of opposites, is true at the meme level. The meme of enlightened rationalism has evoked the anti-meme of revanchiste irrationalism in all its many modes. 'Twas ever thus. The struggle is no less fierce or important for being historically necessary. Attempts to find a middle way are as doomed as they alway were before.  
 
Synthesis will come in ways we cannot predict and should not ignorantly attempt to achieve; that is "the denial of the antithesis" and down that road lies the OGPU and the gulag.

Long term positive, constant involvement with intellectual tasks, from the nun studies.

Needham famously asked that is such inventions as the stirrup, gunpowder, and the compass are given such transformative roles in western history, why didn't they transform China, which had them first? Your theory of conformaty as an overarching social principal explains why. We can see that the advantage of conformity which was thought to trump all its obvious disadvantages was community toughness against shocks. Basically Chinese history, like western history, is a tale of successive barbarian invasions. In the west the response was Resist, in China it was Co-opt. The Mandarins replaced the upper class but Confucian meritocracy went right on.

How is your footnote not a nonsequitur? even if physics got a new umbrella, it's still possible to assert that the other sciences are under it. Possible to dissent too, but then it always was.

Portal31,

We did invade a drug producing country; Afghanistan. The Taliban had held the trade down, for basically right wing religious reasons, and to keep the war lords strapped for cash. Since the invasion, Afghanistan is back in its old place as a leader in opium shipping.

Eric Temple Bell used this as one of the tests he applied to supposed child geniuses that were brought to him. He was a Professor of Math at Cal Tech in addition to being a writer on popular math and a science fiction author (lurid 1930s stuff).

Of course the Christians have replied with a logo that shows their fish swallowing the Darwinian one (in the familar "big fish-little fish cartoon style). If the Darwin fish was aggressive, it doesn't look like the Christians went home and cried.

______________________________________ commanding heights of politics, military, church and literature were the domain of alien peoples for centuries _______________________________________

A very few self-regarding specialists, taking in each other's washing. The people went on without even giving them a thought.

Something similar happens here on the web, where all the disputations of the liberals, libertarians, and conservatives blows right by the ordinary people without a trace. If it didn't happen on Oprah, it didn't hsppen.

Doesn't the caste system mean that the IQ distribution - in spite of the mean of 80, is highly skewed, with a fat tail on the upside?

The tragic thing is that a marxist model might fit the Aymara situation best. Collective ownership od "the means of production" and atheism that gets rid of the white man's religion without putting in some other superstition. Maybe it's no accident that the Shining Path in neighboring Peru followed a Maoist line.

____________ It was hard - no, impossible - to set up large centralized kingdoms of the sort that were common in the middle east and the mediterranean when the only means of practical transport open to people was by foot ____________

Difficult, but not impossible. The Inca and their predecessors made an empire in the Andes, and the Olmec-Maya did the alternative of city states in climates nearly as bad as inland Africa.