Yeah, this reads like an own-goal -- assuming Wicherts did nothing underhanded or incompetent, it implies that environmental quality matters *less* to mean IQ than *anyone* previously suspected. Granted there's at least one other interpretation, but it's a pretty damn hard sell.

So I'm looking out my window waiting for the rain of toads . . . 
 
Seriously, I would love to know how that happened -- the comment thread will no doubt be hilarious. I've long suspected that the non-stupid movers and shakers among political bloggers (e.g. Yglesias) paid more attention to Steve than they dared let on, but I didn't expect this kind of verification.  
 
The link to Ben Franklin's essay in the second post was a nice touch, considering that the last few paragraphs of Franklin's essay would make any TPM reader choke on their coffee.

(And yes, I know what they're trying to show, it just doesn't make sense conceptually.)

I'm unsure about how to parse this, but I reckon the authors are at least as confused as I am. First they claim that "positive affect allowed individuals to explore novel thoughts and behaviors that departed from cultural constraints", but then they claim that Westerners who were feelin' fine "valued self-expression less" and "showed a greater preference for objects that reflected conformity". So . . . positive affect makes people less conformist by making them more conformist? Uh, say what? Is there a logician in the house? Anybody? Beuller?

if "having a hypothesis" counts as theory, then all experimentalists are theorists. 
 
Actually by that definition *everyone* is. Hypothesizing makes you a theorist in about the same sense that dribbling and shooting hoops makes you a basketball player.

Eric, 
 
From what I know of Ferguson through his work, it wouldn't surprise me if that was accurate.  
 
Personally my favorite bit was when he put on his commissar hat and declared it to be illegitimate research.  
 
"Lysenko is dead; but given the way of tenured men, there may still be academic departments for tens of years in which his shadow will be shown. -- And we -- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."

I don't see what's so baffling about a division of labor between theorists and experimentalists. I'm pretty sure Greg would be as interested as anyone to see the outcome of such an experiment, but in his position I'd say I had better things to do, too.

"I suspect that finding selfworth in one's own intelligence correlates very well with a strong belief in g." 
 
This does not reflect my experience, to put it mildly. Zeeb knows of what he speaks: people opinionated enough to espouse a negative view of intelligence tests are almost invariably big fat hypocrites in this regard.

ADHD is often comorbid with anxiety disorders -- anything that weakens cognitive control by attenuating DA signaling in PFC would do similar things. Bet you'd see something similar with DRD4.

Neat. To one who's already familiar with these concepts it's easy for the eye to just slide right over passages like that thinking it's all obvious, but it's harder to appreciate just how non-trivial all of these scattered insights were back when Darwin was writing. Like Fisher, the more carefully you read him the more brilliant he gets.

"let's be honest: in a few years, most, if not all, of these are going to be in the dustbin" 
 
The kind of words that can come back to haunt a man.

Thanks again, David. I haven't yet made it all the way to the human evolution chapters of GTNS (so much to digest in the first few!), but this whet my appetite.

"a mutation that changes a neutral phenotype is necessarily neutral" 
 
Er, what? Neutrality is something that always requires a sotto voce "ceteris paribus" because it can only be used to describe extant variation within a fixed environment. It's a comparison between two possible states of an organism and a judgment that they're interchangeable as far as inclusive fitness is concerned. A novel mutant that isn't freely interchangeable in this sense is necessarily non-neutral; likewise, a change in the environmental conditions can make a previously neutral variant become non-neutral. There's no such thing as a neutral phenotype in se.  
 
So the question is about our ability to infer fitness consequences, and the Devil's Advocate is wrong: the type of mutation does too give us some information about the range of selection coefficients it might have. It's just probabilistic and needs to be interpreted in the light of a larger body of information. There are probably ways to quantify this with some empirical help, even using existing tools.

If there's a problem with economics as a discipline it's that too much effort is wasted dinking around with pseudo-problems and untangling conceptual messes created by the biases people bring to the table in any subject dealing with political implications. Psychology suffers from the same problems, and for that matter so does medical science, but at least the economists can say they have a body of semi-coherent theory to work with. There's no shortage of useful lessons to be learned from even vanilla neoclassical theory, but the fact is that much like population genetics it's very rare that people actually use it to solve problems.

Also, note that all the memory effects vanished with a mere 8 g/day of carbs. Which would seem to indicate that in fact you don't need much at all. Especially since a low-carb diet will tend to be higher in protein, which your body can also derive glucose from.

Uh, Agnostic, you do realize that fats provide more energy pound for pound than carbs, right? And that your brain can consume the ketone bodies released during lypolysis, right? But hey, who needs biochemistry when you can make jokes about hippies, right? 
 
Like Michael I switched to a low carb diet several months ago, and if anything I'm less sluggish than I was before. Insulin signaling increases tryptophan uptake into the brain, which then gets converted to serotonin and then melatonin, so if anything a high carb diet will make you more tired all else equal. Hence the increased vigilence and lower brain fog for the low carbers. You can try this experiment yourself: have an all-meat dinner one night and an all-starch dinner the next, and see which one you feel drowsier after. Repeat experiment until convinced.  
 
It makes sense that people who are already low-carbing it would be more affected on memory tasks by total carb withdrawal -- they're running closer to the limit. Would be interesting to see this experiment repeated with subjects on a complete no-carb diet for three weeks, though, i.e. with more time for their body to adjust to it.

Greg, the idea is plausible enough but aren't these things just as likely to be from non-archaics? Or do you think that they'd have to be old in order to have evolved to hide themselves well?

"All species are destined to become extinct, but, except as they are parts of a species, subspecies need not follow this rule. By definition, species do not ordinarily interbreed, but subspecies do. The Tasmanians were absorbed by the Caucasoids who replaced them on their island. . . . When subspecies disappear, they usually, if not always, do so by absorption. Their genes linger on polymorphously with those of their conquerors . . . The principle is that when a population has been invaded by members of another race the genes that give it its special adaptation to its local environment retain their selective advantage and eventually come to characterize the mixed population through the process of natural selection." 
-- C.S. Coon, The Origin of Races (p. 34) 
 
Slightly OT, but there's also an interesting section on dwarfing (among other interesting things). Did anyone else know that "Dutch anthropologists found six or more fossil skeletons of small people in a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia in 1955"? I'd never come across this bit of info in anything I read about the Hobbits.

Greg, David Boxenhorn got it a few comments up.

Ben, at least some of those studies (the ones by Caspi's group) have been criticized right here at GNXP: 
 
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/11/questioning-breastfeeding-iq-fads2.php