Perhaps it is just my day job influencing me, but I'm inclined to believe that life develops everywhere, soon burns out its energy resources, and then dies off.

The whole business of correlation analysis depends on the assumption of a linear model. The correct model may be wildly nonlinear, which means we'll never get far with simple superposition.

You seem to say that if it's not economic then it's cultural. No argument was offered in defense of the statement that violence is simply genetic and no cultural factors were addressed at all. 
 
As for the "checkers", how exactly do checkers impede breeding and how does fewer checkers lead to greater breeding? Do yo have data to offer as to the number of police (or prison population, deceny leagues, religiousity, or other "checkers") in relation to breeding of the violent? 
 
In other words, Citation Needed!

The continent seems too big for a few small bands to control it, expecially with the technology they had.

Too bad about the macaque study. They were able to study the differences between mothers, but not the differences between offspring -- which would have been revealing, IMHO.

One thing I know about children is even within a family they differ a lot. Some invite spanking much more than others! This could be the extra data dimension that enables resolution of some of the confounds.

I'd have given Social Science credit for IQ and twin studies but they don't seem to want that.

"sorting for quality", why that's something Razib does for me every day. Hooray! It takes time for the world to grow such people. I noticed yesterday something on youtube called a playlist. I suspect the small-time manufacturer (Clark jungle hammocks) was putting together some good clips on his product. Hooray for him too. It was just what I was looking for. I've been casting about on Google Reader to find good aggregators of econ ideas. "sorting for quality", that's just what I do too. Anybody want to know about seismic imaging? (wink,wink)

Who should pay for bringing up her children? Whoever made her pregnant should pay. The doctors of course.

Life in Arabia has been absolutely humdrum by comparison with Iraq. News media like to cover places where something happens, especially if it is something awful.

Consider that an average iPod holds 30 gigabytes or 30,000 megabytes. Consider that there are 300 million Americans. So each iPod can hold 100 bytes of reputation information on each American. Now consider the many people who wish to trade information among their iPods. Should they be motivated to trade reputation information, no central organization can stop them.

When is Steve Sailer's new book going to be available AT AMAZON ?

Human biodiversity remains undefined at Wikipedia, although recently defined there is Human biodiversity institute, a pointer to Steve Sailer. Too bad nobody from gnxp will go over there to Wikipedia and give them the scientific definition of Human biodiversity. Lots of people waste a lot of energy arguing about the definition of the word race, when all they are really interested in is establishing the existence of HDB

It says 6000 questionnaires were sent out and 1300 responses were received. 'nuff said.

By law to keep my job here at Stanford University I must spend two hours every two years learning about US anti-discrimination laws. I can't finish the course (and keep my job) unless I agree it would be illegal for the University Transportation Office to refuse to hire any driver who has been convicted of a felony, because this is presumed to be racial discrimination. 
 
This inversion of logic makes me lose respect for American laws. I value coed safety far above ex-cons' rights.

If men fit a normal distribution, and women fill a normal distribution with a different mean and variance, then PEOPLE do not fit a normal distribution.

One wonders if the loci would be the same for Spanish musical aptitude.

women maintain closer relations with their parents 
 
No different from here (USA). We have a saying I got from a dear old auntie, "A son is a son till he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter all of your life."

(Continental vs. maritime climates.) 
 
I see Finland looks just like Norway. I seem to recall the ultraviolet mostly passes thru clouds.

the error term must includes simple stochastic noise on any part of the complex mapping from genotype to phenotype 
 
I see it a little differently.  
Let's talk about IQ. It's variation could be regressed against a sum of parental IQ and SES (Socio-Econ-Standard). What better environmental model do you have besides SES? Maybe none, and that one is not measured very precisely. You end up with a big residual even after doing your best to model both the genes and the environment. As I'm a seismologist I can only guess at the numbers, so I'll stop there. The point is, there are lots of sources for errors besides in the gene-->phen transform