@Caledonian: Well, in general we're pretty bad at cognizing nonexistence, which is part of why we have so much belief in the afterlife, ghosts, ancestor worship, etc. Anecdotally, it seems like many suicides imagine experiencing the reactions of other people in some way, while still other suicides imagine ending the pain but continuing to be tranquilly conscious, like sleeping late or being really high.

the much more likely explanation ... birth date fraud in poor countries seeking an advantage in international U-17 and U-20 competitions Am I missing something? Wouldn't that work in the opposite direction, with kids born in the early months being made a few months younger?

Sorry, finishing up my thesis so don't have much time to comment. Here's one example of a twin study addressing several commenters' points. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(08)00068-8/abstract Zietsch et al. (2008): "We show that psychologically masculine females and feminine men are (a) more likely to be nonheterosexual but (b), when heterosexual, have more opposite-sex sexual partners. With statistical modelling of the twin data, we show that both these relationships are partly due to pleiotropic genetic influences common to each trait. We also find a trend for heterosexuals with a nonheterosexual twin to have more opposite-sex partners than do heterosexual twin pairs. Taken together, these results suggest that genes predisposing to homosexuality may confer a mating advantage in heterosexuals, which could help explain the evolution and maintenance of homosexuality in the population."

I think what J. Goard is referring to is something like the “Johnny Depp” theory of male homosexuality. In part yes, but appearance and mannerisms are the tip of the iceberg. I would guess that there are many other traits which are significantly stronger in females but may not come to mind as easily when we hear the word "feminine". Verbal facility, ability to manage complex relationships, memory for social details, etc., seem absolutely vital for the would-be playboy. OTOH, overly male minds, at least on one prominent theory, become autistic.

@ziel: It doesn't seem like that big of a riddle to me. It is fairly well-established that non-heterosexuality correlates with increased masculinity in women and increased femininity in men. Other research (from Zietch and colleagues, for example) shows significantly greater number of sexual partners for both heterosexual men with more feminine traits, and heterosexual women with more masculine traits. In short, it seems that typical patterns of sexual attraction serve to keep gender dimorphism from "going off the rails", which means that many of the same traits which predispose someone to homosexuality are advantageous when they turn out heterosexual.

Now, to be on-topic: I think its important for previous commenters to appreciate the selective disadvantages that might attend the early stages of symbolic communication, particularly as cognition becomes more removed from the here and now. I've compared it before with Frost's poem "Out-- Out--", in which a young man is gazing up at the mountains and gets his hand cut off by the buzzsaw with which he's cutting firewood (and dies). Language seems so great once a facilitative context is well-established, i.e. a group of early humans arguing about better ways to kill an antelope, but the first stages might involve a greater tendency to reflect upon the antelope we killed ten days ago instead of what's happening right now, and that kind of shift could easily have gotten an organism killed. This kind of selective "trough" in the early stages of symbolic thought could explain why language is so rare.

Great post. I've commented on Deacon's work over at Babel's Dawn. Had to go and fixate on this, though: If so, genetic dedifferentiation of the nervous system may not only of led to the functional complexity in human language... may...of led: very interesting. I've long suspected that [MODAL+of] is replacing [MODAL+have] at a deep level for many people, as opposed to being merely an effect of illiteracy. Its occurrence in your erudite post is probably the best single piece of evidence I've found.

@ James: An assumption behind my prior point is that "ability to communicate" is not a minimal point of phenotypic variation, any more than, say, "ability to find food" is. And there is reason to suspect that the kind of low-level changes in allocation of cognitive/perceptual resources which, taken together in the right kind of environment, tend to increase "ability to communicate", might, in the early stages and/or without the right environment, be highly adverse variants. Continuing the "Out-- Out--" analogy, Frost's point seems to be that, although its great to be developing into the kind of dreamer who will make a huge difference after getting off the farm, you first have to avoid getting yourself killed on the farm.

Yep, great resource. I've listened to all the talks and occasionally recommended them to classmates. I hope that, as a statement of a new paradigm, the "Five Graces" paper is remembered 50 years from now as much as Chomsky's awful review of Verbal Behavior is today.

Alex the parrot, treated with a human child's level of attention, did things no non-human primate has done. I suspect that great ape hormonal rampaging was a barrier that had to be overcome in getting our symbol system off the ground. And a general instinct for mimicry, downplayed by the Chomskyans, is crucial for our language acquisition. Long lives too. For the symbolic breakthroughs in animal research this century, my money is on Psittaciformes.

Razib, 
 
I think you're missing the crucial point, which is not that low-level shenanigans occur, but rather that there is substantial unidirectional pressure on the system from non-scientific sources, creating the prospect of huge funding for alarmist findings versus unemployment for moderation and/or uncertainty. Interviews with emeritus climatologists on the sociology of their field are particularly enlightening.

Shouldn't we also consider the effect of the stars' status and preferences on the qualities of baby momma genes?

That's fairly weird how more people pick 50-75% than 25-50%. One would have to assume the vast majority of quantitative traits lie in the 25-50% range  
 
Can someone fill me in on what such a percentage figure means to a geneticist (or closely related fields) in practice? Without defined units of comparison, it strikes me as ridiculously ill-defined, like asking "is this New York cheesecake sweeter than it is expensive?" 
 
Depending on the units, one could get arbitrarily near 100% or 0%. Are we supposed to think about the ratio of the genetic difference between George and Verne Troyer, to the environmental difference between George and his separated identical twin who gets raised to watch a little more TV? Or is it more like the ratio of genetic difference between George and his defect-free first cousin, to the environmental difference between George's upbringing in San Jose and his twin's in Darfur?

"the citation for many of Hamilton's two papers" is a somewhat humorous error. How many is "many" relative to a set of size 2?

To me, heavy skepticism seems warranted whenever alleged personality correlates of some trait seem to balance out in an aesthetically pleasing yin/yang kind of way. 
 
But then, it may just be my baby-blues.

Yeah, fuck this Ivy League cachet among hoi polloi. Any physics or math graduate from a decent state school beats English lit from Yale by a mile. The best you can say about such humanities undergraduates is that they probably know how to deal with really smart and eccentric people.

Luke is right, of course, if you mean by "poetry" anything like what I mean. For what I value in poetry, it couldn't help but have major issues with translation. I couldn't get a hooker in Tijuana with my spoken Spanish ability, but I admire Borges because I can read his original with a crude translation and glean enough to appreciate his command of form. And that Rilke is somehow admired by people who only know English translations, is something I don't think I'll ever come to terms with.

Looc, 
 
Come on, let's not backpedal so frantically. Razib objected to your postulating a "logorithmically more authoritarian" West without the USA, and now you're talking about a "major impact". With all the caveats that come with discussing such counterfactuals, it's not like the United States took over territory and power that would have gone to a Hitler or Mao. Most likely, XVIII-Cen Britain and France would have dominated the historical stage, nations whose ideological momentum created the American founders.

Peter, 
 
Of course, in an economic rather than physiological sense, it did leave plenty of "disfigured survivors": widows, orphans, poorly defended villages, etc.

Mark, 
 
Having studied the semantics of definite articles, and studying Korean at present, I share your concerns about manner of reference in these two languages. (No time right now to check the study, but I will.) It strikes me that if the director were to use the demonstrative "that" rather than the definite article (i.e., "Move that wooden block upward"), I would tend to assume that he had a visual line on it, and hence not question which block was meant. Naturally Mandarin has demonstratives, and if these were used as the methodological equivalent of the English definite article, I would have a real problem there. I'll check it out and get back to ya.