I also saw the lack of well-crafted prose being the primary reason that SF carries the stigma that it does as.  
 
A problem for your hypothesis would seem to be the success of novelists who write in a magical realist style and have had their works considered serious literature, writers like Jose Saramago, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The characters in their works are definitely less wooden and more complex than you would find in typical SF fare but a good amount of their stories goes into exploring the fantastical worlds they've created and the implications of them. The fantastical/imaginative elements in these works do differ from SF in that they generally have some symbolic or metaphoric import but that same motif is present in mythic stories. Does anyone else have the sense that I do that men tend to gravitate toward these magical realist type works more so than women?  
 
Looking over the wikipedia entry on magical realism just now it seems there is a lot of literary criticism baggage to this term. Just to clarify I only mean in the broad sense which I'm familiar with, an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting.

Interesting how the big leg man psychological profile seems to really nail Robert Crumb, the comic book artist and rather infamous leg man.

Any speculations or insights into how the this female professional-yet-not-elite class will impact mate selection dynamics? With less concern over having a reliable bread-winner by their side will there be a greater premium placed on men's looks, sex appeal, i.e. more cad less dad?

The article's author finishes the piece by parroting Bucholtz's conclusion that nerds are rejecting white appropriation of black youth culture, yet he starts off the article mentioning nerdcore rap, an example of nerds appropriating black youth culture! I am definitely not looking forward to his book on nerd culture, what kind of sorry excuse for a nerd are you if you can't spot a logical contradiction?

Pleasing to the eyes but not exactly awestruck. As hotty news anchor go, I'm more taken with Ghida Fakry, aka Peppermint Gomez. 
 
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/341081/al_jazeera_english_via_the_daily_show/

Like Dawkins and Hitchens he picks out the easy targets (religion, postmodernism),  
 
Well, he did take on the issue of gender differences pretty forcefully and received considerable flack for his effort. He seems to be going at it incrementally, tackling first the blank state/SSSM, then further on gender and some aspects of race such as the ashkenazi IQ, testing the waters as it were. It is a fine line between being a coward and being tactical.  
 
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Pinker writing more about language and its relation to cognitive science. The blank slate and its related issues are important but that mostly seems to be pointing out what is right under people's nose, his treatments of language/psycholinguistcs seem to have much more analytic depth and insight.

 
'Towns' do matter, or in Greek 'Polis's do matter. One of the reasons that 'behavioral economics' doesn't really work is that it works best on small groups of humans living in relative autarkia, kind of like the EEA as it were. It doesn't scale. 
 
Razib's 'Homo Urbanis' is another way of saying 'Homo Economicus' or 'rational economic man'.  
 
That's going overboard, village style cooperation isn't viable city wide but I doubt this make city dwellers act like "rational economic man," any cooperation game data or some such to support that?

Language Log has a short post on the topic, offering some papers and brief discussion. Haven't read it but I'm guessing the paper by Pesetsky et al. cited in the post tries to sequeeze Piraha back into the UG framework since he is a pretty strong UG adherent.  
 
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004387.html

but this is one case where economists' imperialism really pissed a lot of people off. 
 
Yeah, it was cited as one of the examples of freakonomics run amok in this recent New Republic piece

Hmmm, so that explains Zach Braff's appearance, pandering for a larger audience with guest star celebs. Have you no shame Robert Wright?

Any chance of bringing back the open thread or something like it? There are topics and questions I would like see the GNXP community respond to but chat doesn't seem like the best medium for it. Any chance of community forums?

It would take a cyclone of a maelstrom of a shifting fashion trend to drive the Brazilian booty to extinction -- there's just too many of them (thank God).  
 
I realize this of course, but that the bunda is even on the defensive is an entirely lamentable state of affairs. And since this view is being propagated by fashionistas, the prettiest girls might be become the most likely to surgically deflate their rumps. The horror!  
 
that' "badonkadonk", not "badunkadunk". Get REAL! 
 
Spare me your orthographic tyranny. I call upon all my fellow dyslexics do to untie against this kind of discrimination.

John Tierney had a blog entry about a month ago on how fashion trends are endangering the brazilian badunkadunk. Oh, how sad it would be if inter-female beauty competition led to the decline of the magnificence of the bunda.  
 
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/the-new-and-not-so-new-miss-brazil/#comments

er, celebrate our differences

I think GNXP readers who spend so much time scrutinizing the facets of human biodiversity need to take a break and remember to celebrate our differences.

Does he give a source for this? I recall another study that put the total at only 75%.

"not to put to fine a point on it, 
say that I'm the only bee in your bonnet, 
make a little birdhouse in your soul..." 
 
Did They Might Be Giants ever do any songs about genetics? I heard S-E-X-X-Y was suppose to be about Klinefelter's syndrome (XXY), but I'm doubtful about that take on the lyrics.

Is the distribution related to how blacks outperform whites on the short-term memory subdivision of IQ tests?

Well, I guess this more evolutionary psychology than evolutionary biology, but Michel Gondry's "Human Nature" can be seen as a satire of two core bad ideas that plagued 20th century social science, behaviorism and the noble savage.

A better term might be "Islamic anarchists." The imposition of shariah law or the creation of an Islamic state in Britain or the USA is as realistic as an anarchist utopia emerging out of violence which triggers a revolt against the capital class. 
 
The parallel you make is a valid one but I think seriously using the term "Islamic anarchist" would mostly lead to confused speculation about how imposing an islamic order is anarchistic, the term "anarchist" isn't sufficiently associated with the specific means of violence used by it's followers to be very communicative.