Why do you presume successful?  Pew suggests that Mormons are less unequal than other groups--less poverty and less very wealthy--but nothing extraordinary.  Pew also suggests close half of all Jews have a household income in excess of 100K--that's successful.

Speaking of Chartier, Luke Ford has a series of videos interviewing him about growing up Adventist.

Ray: 
 
Eric has covered quite a bit of some of it there. Still I'd like to add my two cents. Pre-contact and post contact Polynesian diet both had carbs as a main staple. Yet, around the mid 20th century Hawaiians started getting all the health problems derived from diet that plague native people much more than Old Worlders. The main thing? The switch from Taro, breadfruit and sweet potatos as the main carb staple to white rice and bread, and fresh fish and meat to processed fish and meat happened at that time. 
 
Also to I'd like to mirror Razib's comment in another way. The traditional Japanese peasant's diet during the Tokugawa period was pretty much nothing but polished white rice supplemented with a small amount of seaweed, miso and fish. While this lead to a host of health problems from vitamin deficiencies that we can determine from examining skeletal remains, obesity definitely wasn't one of them, if anything, quite the opposite. They were wiry as hell. 
 
Still it's interesting to note that when Hawaiians took up white rice, they started ballooning up, and as the Japanese diet becomes more westernized, they're starting to gain weight. 
 
I have a lot more ideas about this, but really I'm not motivated enough to do a large write up, look up sources and all that when diet is something people keep more as a religion than a rational set of beliefs. 
 
In short my body feels best when I minimize grains, processed foods and dairy and eat traditional Hawaiian foods like bananas and raw fish. How my soul feels without Gnocchi and Red Wine is another matter altogether.

Ray: 
 
Did you miss the "more pointedly those advocating a certain diet?" and the "et al"? 
 
Also the fact that I agreed that conventional wisdom about diet is crap?  
 
Ain't no "Aha, Gotcha!" moment here, dude.  
 
While not in the book itself, Taubes aids those who would replace one junk science with another. There's a difference between advocating questioning the common wisdom and silently letting people use your research to justify claims far beyond the merit of your original research. Far as I know, Taubes hasn't said "Whoa, slow down boys" to the guys preaching that Paleo will save your waistlines and that everyone needs to go radically low carb. 
 
If you want me to say it, then yes, I agree with him more than I disagree with him on his primary argument that the common wisdom about diet is crap, though I have my quibbles with his interpretation of how metabolism works and can shift (or not shift as it were). What I vehemently disagree with is his silent assent to those going overboard. 
 
And yes, despite working with Cochran and Harpending and other great luminaries and iconoclasts of our modern times, contingent on what I know about pre-contact Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian diet and health and East Asian historical diet and physical anthropology, I'm saying what Loren Cordain states justifying Paleo diet is crap. And I will stand by that statement even if Greg Cochran himself shows up in this comment roll and takes the rhetorical birch branch to my impertinence.

Agnostic: 
 
In regards to your assertion that the last few thousand years of human evolution has lead to essentially no great or revolutionary changes to group differences in human digestion I have two words: Lactose Tolerance. 'Nuff said. 
 
Ray: 
 
I'm not saying the conventional wisdom is right.  
 
I'm saying that Taubes, and much more pointedly those advocating that a certain diet not only will work for everyone but is healthy for everyone not much better than where we are at nowadays where a fat and sugar free diet is the panacea for everything. I'm more disturbed by the claims being made about traditional and hunter-gatherer diets that are on their head factually incorrect, as well as this stuff about metabolism which is an extraordinary claim that doesn't have the extraordinary evidence backing it up.  
 
I mean have you actually read the papers Taubes et al cites to see what their claims are, or are you taking his word on what it demonstrates? Just because someone has first-hand evidence a diet worked for them doesn't mean that the science and claims made about it are sound. It all really strikes me as people projecting their anecdotal experience on a thin factual and logical framework which they really don't have an deep understanding of to think critically about.  
 
I'm not claiming I have a deep understanding of how human metabolism works, but when the advocates of it make historical and anthropological claims that I *know* are incorrect, I'm inclined to believe their claims about human metabolism also half-baked.

Ray: 
 
Been there, done that. He's full of crap. Cherry-picking, willful misinterpretations of anthropological and archeological data, etc. etc. etc. Not even getting into the dietary part, because I don't feel knowledgeable enough in the basic science behind caloric metabolism to critique it from that end (though I would hazard a guess that neither do most of his supporters). Still the more I look into it, the more dubious I become. 
 
That's not to say his enemies or the mainstream wisdom are correct, but that his interpretation is full of crap as well. 
 
I often find it funny that hbd types are going hogwild for this stuff in their little net subculture. The last few thousand years of human evolution has produced clear individual and group differences above the neck, but not in the gut? Please. 
 
One gets to see the whole attachment to being intellectually contrary is much more important than being factually informed or even logically sound. 
 
Again, that's not to say it wouldn't work for some people. If it works for you, great! I'm not aiming this at those who suggest it as a possibility. What I have issues with is it being made into a dietary panacea for all that ails the modern man. That just swaps hells, where vegetarians who believe they're healthy when they're actually anemic are replaced with paleos who believe they are healthy when their gallbladders are backing up. One shouldn't replace one dietary orthopraxy with another. Even if brats are better than rice cakes.

I'm never bored, except at work. I work in an office, so I can't crack open a book or read an interesting webpage without drawing negative attention. It drives me crazy since I always seem to get done with my stuff halfway through the day. 
 
I'd probably get through the desert island scenario better than most. I have a need for physical activity higher than most intellectuals. No books and my brain feels like it's dying, no activity and I feel like an animal in the cage. Today was a pretty good example. Trimmed the coconut trees and planted a bed of sweet potatos, then read the newest issue of the Atlantic Monthly outside.

Razib: 
 
Usually cold hard cash taken as a usage fee while looking the other way. The scenic historic churches of Hawaii do at least one Asian tourist wedding a day. 
 
The big exception to this rule is the Catholic Church, which tends to be more inflexible about the whole "being Catholic" thing.

gcochran: 
 
I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and go back to the earliest reference that I can recall to being buried in "...the cold cold ground." namely a song either written or written down by Stephen Foster in 1852 (of whom someone at Warner was deeply interested in if you count how much of his oeuvre is used in the old cartoons, hence the Taz riff).  
 
Of course if that's the clue, then it leaves more damn questions than answers, particularly with all the variant verses to the song I'm thinking of. 
 
I could be totally off, though.

Jason: 
 
Thanks for the data point, though I do think it's important to note that a lot of theater is the behind the scenes stuff that's less predominantly gay, and that musical theater was and is always more of a gay haven than regular drama. 
 
If I may attempt to summon Michael Blowhard, the arts are filled with a lot of behind the scene stuff that actually makes it all work. Some branches of it are quite demographically different than the public face of it.

That's the thing, it was a crappy analogy based on specious reasoning and poorly thought out language. I don't dispute that men are on the whole more apt to be homophobic, nor do I dispute that theater is more popular with women and has a large gay subset.  
 
What I dispute is the imputation that heterosexual men "shun" theater. Looking at the GSS data, there's no way you can interpret the two correlated data points as leading to a straight shunning of theater. Straight men are still a statistically significant part of the theater-going audience. 
 
Secondly, if you need an explanation of why drawing an analogy from a rather small subset of voluntary leisure-based activities (in the large scale of things, theater is pretty damn niche, and most people don't consume it for reasons that have nothing to do with gays and much to do with it being uninteresting to them) to a large, historically important, universal social custom with daily life significance that's on the top ten list of importance in a huge proportion of humanity's lives... well... 
 
It's time to take Razib's example and cut my losses. This is getting too 'tarded for me to handle. Stick a fork in it, I'm done.

First off, lol, that's not what you were arguing. You said theater is "shunned" by heterosexual men. Not that theater is shunned by heterosexual men with a negative attitude towards homosexuality. Don't move the goalposts around please. It's pretty damn obvious that folks who don't like gays aren't going to go somewhere where the subculture is chock full of them. The fact remains that you don't have a whit of evidence that the behind the scenes work in theater is as gay as the onstage players, nor that the male audience is predominantly composed of gay men (and to pre-empt you, yes, I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of the audience is gay compared to the general population, the point is specious reasoning and lousy language use on your part). 
 
Not to mention you didn't drop a GSS cite for your notion that "the magnitude of anti-gay bias amongst straight men is underestimated".

Okay, this hits one of my spots. lol, do you have statistical proof that theatre is predominantly gay and avoided by straight men as thus? I'm not disputing that it's a gay haven, but even if you disregard the huge amounts of local theatre troupes (which are the overwhelming if non-paid bulk of the social group), can you say that all the dudes teching the lights, building the sets and handling the set directions and changes are gays as well? Even restricting it to onstage, has anyone really numerated the ratio of gay performers to straights in theatre? 
 
Really, this is the bad kind of "folk wisdom", in which a plainly observable situation is used to draw an absurd conclusion sans any data presentation.

Emerson: 
 
I'd like to dig up some research on Japanese drinking rates and occurrence of the genetic inability to process alcohol well. I think it's actually a pretty interesting phenomenon. 
 
You are correct that Japan is a drinking culture, through and through, but on the ground I'm seeing a rather interesting phenomenon of partial teetotaler practice amongst many Japanese, namely that they prefer not to drink due to their own bad reaction, but more often than not will nominally drink small amounts for show if the social situation requires it. It's a non-insignificant amount of people from the somewhat random sampling of the 100 or so people I work with as clients. 
 
I'd really like to see a real analysis done on it that's both quantitatively tight and yet cognizant of the different qualitative social mores towards the subject.

Makes me wonder who the Romansh in Switzerland would cluster with relatively speaking.

Agnostic: 
 
Hence my saying I'm going to look closer at it. I never dismiss anything with a reasonable amount of data and a good train of logic out of hand, but nor do I accept rather outstanding claims on such without a decent amount of rumination either on the train of thought. I do think one of the problems with some conclusions put for here by some posters is the conflation of simple claims with outstanding claims. In other words, I do think that saying this and statistical inferrence of height by gender from a small sample size, particularly given the hypothesis as to why it may be so is not just apples and oranges, but apples and orangutangs! 
 
Also, I may not be the best with data-crunching, but I can do it if I put my mind to it over a period of time. So, it's not that "one doesn't know the mathematics"; I have other intellectual strengths, if I may be so bold. 
 
Of course, if it's far easier to dismiss the objections of anyone who's not as adept as you are in your strengths out of hand, far be it from me to suggest that there may be the loss of something valuable, especially since my primary objections have very little to do with math and more to do with areas in which I'm stronger (scroll upwards to find them again if you so desire, though Razib has provided a good counterpoint to one of them which has partially satiated me). It's just I've always valued outside analysis and criticism, as a counterpoint to my own weaknesses as a thinker. If I didn't, well then, I wouldn't be here talking about h/bd as a person who became convinced of it's merit, right? That's just me, though. If you're really convinced in all your conclusions and the weightlessness of outside objections, then good for you. Why, I would venture that you have far more testicular fortitude than you grant me!

Correct me if I'm wrong then, but wouldn't the same patterns holding true for Asian-Americans along a North-South gradient make the hypothesis that it's pathogenically caused somewhat problematic? Asian-Americans didn't have much of a population outside of California, the Pacific Northwest and Chicago and New York until well after the advent of the air-con, treated water and nation-wide economy of scale food distribution. Add to that they mostly habitate urban areas with less insect vectors to boot. 
 
Also it's easy to handwave a small sample size if one already believes such things to be true, but if one is still dubious, well then... 
I'm going to be looking at it a bit closer. My non-mathematical mind needs more time to actually crank the data myself.

Well yes, they matter deeply, particularly in validation of this particular hypothesis, but still saying the whole Southern gradient is suffering from a relatively same affect? The same load hitting soggy Louisiana cannot be the same one hitting the dry and semi-alpine Arizona and New Mexico, which relatively speaking share more of their climactic range with the states to the north of them. 
 
There's too much apples and oranges here, plus chicken and eggs for me to think it's a decisive factor, particularly when one looks at it in the global scale.

An interesting case, but as someone once said, what of South China? Or for that matter, Japan? I have no idea how they did anything here between late May and early September before air conditioning, and as the historical and archeological records show, both places were rife with cyclical seasonal epidemics and parasitic infections respectively. 
 
As it is, climate strikes me as a contributive factor contingent on certain priors, not a decisive one. The climactic difference between say Knoxville and Charleston is striking, much less to say Yuma and Flagstaff. In terms of pathogen load, New Orleans and Tucson are apt to be quite different, just as the macrofauna is quite different for both areas, so should the microfauna.  
 
Add to that the historical factors such as the Albion's Seed thing, the phenomenon of post-Civil War brain drain until recently and well... you can see where this is going.

McGraw: 
 
I would, actually. There's also my anecdotal experience here in Hawaii that there is a significant fraction of the Filipino population that rapidly assimilates (my maternal grandfather is second gen and never learned how to speak Tagalong as a child) and another that tends to stay in the ethnic barrios speaking their own tongue at home for three generations. Oddly it seems to correlate to ancestral SES status back in the Philipines.

McGraw: 
 
It would be pretty hard to do. First off, the initial Filipino migrant labor of the early 1900s to the 1940s was gender skewed to the men, as such most of the Filipino plantation laborers who stayed in Hawaii either remained bachelors or out-married into other ethnic groups. The post 1940s immigration has been more like that of the rest of America, though even in the early period there was a strong Sangley (Chinese Mestizo) component to the immigration pattern. I can't remember what the study was, but I remember reading that research showed that 12-20% of Filipinos have some Chinese ancestry, with a strong oversampling in urban areas. Given that Filipino migrants to America are usually urbanites, I wouldn't be surprised if the pattern follows