I was confused by the statement about Calhoun. I read it as referring to brand-name Unitarianism, the church of his president, JQA; which would make it false, since he attended his wife's lax Episcopal church. It would have been clearer to me to repeat the word "Deism" of the previous sentence.

TGGP, I guess 20 monkeys were tested with non-kin (solid circles) and 10 of them were also tested with kin (open circles), but that's not quite what the text of the article says.

razib: 
i regularly see the 19th or early 20th century as the "turn around" date for the efficacy of the medical profession in increasing, rather than decreasing, lifespan. anyone have a citation from where this comes from? 
 
This is not the hard data you probably want, but Lewis Thomas's memoir "The Youngest Science: notes of a medicine-watcher" begins with the transition in the early 20th century. He talks about how his physician father knew that there was practically nothing positive he could do to help the patients, but that his colleagues did intervene, to negative net result. here is a summary of these first few chapters (with titles like "1911 Medicine,""1933 Medicine," "1937 Internship") 
 
I second Fabian and Caledonian, among others on this thread. Vassar has proposed almost exactly the opposite theory, that people are evolved to respect priests and that doctors are priests. The evolved part is awfully specific; I can accept the second part while rejecting the first. There are some great parallels, like compliance: people acknowledge the authority of priests, but don't actually obey all that much.

John Emerson: Probably local newspapers will become even more shopper-like than they are already 
 
I don't know what you mean, whether I'm agreeing or disagreeing, but that 31 page pdf, which was mainly not about this particular plan, says that there are several local newspapers that charge for access. One possibility is that they have a monopoly on local news, that lots of papers could charge for content. But national and international news may be more competitive and have to stay open. Still, if people start buying access to their local paper, that may bridge the penny gap.

Yes, the 31 page report is the most detailed. Here are all its details: 
 
"To preserve traffic from search engines, make the headline and the first paragraph of  
every story free.  
 
Charge a micropayment of 10 cents to read a full article.  
 
Charge 40 cents for a daily pass and $7.50 for a monthly pass.  
 
Establish an annual pass for $55 with print subscribers getting the first year of full  
online access free, but possibly moving to 50 percent of the online price.  
 
Establish a 5-cent charge, also known as a pass-along fee, to forward an article unless  
the recipient already has a subscription." 
 
It also talks about things other than Jornalism Online, like the idea that newspapers are better lobbyists than Google and should extort money through threat of anti-trust litigation.

The WSJ does not make the false claim.  
 
To say that Word won only because of monopology and bundling is false, but to say that they played a role is not. At least it is not immediately contradicted by any of the data you link to. I don't find that data terribly convincing, either. The magazine ratings, user ratings, and market share don't seem terribly related.

One man's crap... There's a long tail problem: if they could monetize the niche stuff, they'd win on volume. The problem is that they have less information about the niche stuff, so it's difficult to figure out what to advertise.

bioIgnoramus, 
Andy Razaf's mother was African-American, ie, probably West African.

John Emerson (or anyone else), 
what are the good features exaggerated in the three disorders you named? 
 
(The one that springs to mind is that mania is too much hypomania, which seems to be pretty much purely good. But classic bipolar is not just mania, but also depression.)

I would say that the difference between pathogens and carnivores is the relative number of generations of the predator and prey. Humans live similar times to megafauna, so African megafauna was able to keep up the arms race. But pathogens can reach virulence in a single host generation. 
 
But then it occurred to me that long incubation period, which may be necessary to prevent a virulent disease (of animals) from being only locally virulent, means a long life-cycle and thus a long effective generation time.

Can you define "ethical" to match society's current use of IQ tests? Having done so, are you left with any ethical use of genetics?

John Emerson, 
I see two complaints that you seem to make about the Polish race, which you seem to alternate between. It would be better if they were cleanly separated, particularly if you are really only making one of them. 
 
The first is that one shouldn't use the word "race" for such fine gradations as Poles. I am certain that the common word used to have little connotation of size, but I am uncertain of the current usage. It may be that it shifted to very coarse divisions, particularly as they became important in America--perhaps this is even a regional usage. But it also seems possible that this history is propaganda intended to move the current definition. It is certainly an advantage of not using the word that one completely avoids wondering about its common usage. 
 
The second complaint is that the Poles are an artificial group, not a reasonable population to consider. So then I would say that the common usage is simply an error, on its own terms.

georgesdelatour, 
there's a key on the right side of the graph. (I missed it, too.)

I'll go with the explanation of ZBicyclist from the original thread: typo. A less plausible explanation is that SSA has a radically different methodology than the census. 
 
But the decline from census 1990 to census 2000 is surprising on its own. The total population of Schmidts is comparable to that decline, so that isn't the answer. (+33 ranks for Schmidts is about 10% increase)

John Emerson, 
migration is 1-way; diffusion is 2-way. That's what I would say is the difference. I'm not sure how I'd detect that from PCA.  
 
Also, migration is faster than diffusion. That should show up. An east-west migration would make the east-west genetic difference smaller, hence decreasing the weight of that component, making the north-south gradient show up first. I bet a lot of people would give the exact opposite interpretation.

Joseph Smith's cult is the most exotic outlier 
 
Most exotic of the ones that survived, but, say, Oneida seems more exotic to me. And I think it an interesting example because it was tolerated in upstate New York. (I learned the comparison from David Friedman.) 
 
the nuclear family is an *eternal* unit in Mormonism 
 
I don't know what you mean by this (perhaps you just meant "central"), but here's something I heard that seems to contradict "eternal": a woman claimed to have been told that she had to get used to polygyny because there would be a shortage of men in heaven; and that she shouldn't worry about whether her husband would get in, just that she needed a proper marriage herself.