I think that the economics of conquering Germany may have not worked out for Rome in part because the kinds of foods that were produced there were too perishable. I suppose barley could have been exacted as tribute, but I don't think they could grow much wheat (which keeps better), and the Alps would stop anyone who wanted to do a cattle drive to Rome :-). And dairy products wouldn't have been too portable either.

Interesting, and ultimately testable. If when we look at the variants that cause these diseases they do indeed look like random noise, then this argument is probably correct. But if some of them stand out as being of unusual antiquity (or otherwise show signs of being maintained via balancing selection), then it's wrong. Personally I think he's too quick to dismiss the possibility of heterozygote advantage. He mentions the classic example of sickle cell anemia and then dismissively declares such cases as extremely rare. But we have no idea whether such cases actually are rare or not - it may be that extreme examples like sickle cell are rare, but alleles with smaller fitness effects might be more common and harder to identify. Further, the fact that modern-day relatives of schizophrenics don't have increased fertility doesn't mean they might not have had some advantage in a prehistoric setting, which we would no longer be able to detect. As regards schizophrenia specifically I would be more inclined to suspect some pathogen or factor in the modern environment to which schizophrenics have a partly-genetic vulnerability. If it had been common in prehistory we would have more early reports of such behaviors. But in the case of manic depression balancing selection seems more plausible; too much of the behavioral repertoire of the bipolar individual seems situationally advantageous for me to dismiss the idea so casually.

'roughly equivalent in general intelligence to an average 8-10 year old European' You are using a definition of IQ that is a hundred years old and almost as out of date. The last place I remember seeing it in an academic context was my mother's undergraduate psychology textbooks from the 1970s. The intelligence of adults and adolescents is pretty incommensurable and in any case you can't get 'mental age = IQ/100 * age of adulthood' (even if the tests once claimed this, long ago). 'If they made an IQ test based upon what was considered important in their world you would probably score in the 50s.. [blah, blah]'. People who design these tests are quite familiar with the issues you describe. Don't teach your grandma to suck eggs.

I think it's very interesting that it's specifically the number 2 monkey that is the *most* pro-social. Not that you can base an academic paper on one monkey but theoretically something like this makes sense if we assume the number one monkey is reaping the rewards of position while the number two monkey is trying hard to demonstrate his worth.

If it were just about the health and life outcomes for the kids, you'd want to exclude older women as well (and you could even make a statistical case for race-based discrimination, if you wanted to go there). The set of risk factors here is chosen to support a puritanical agenda.

Yeah... you can see that the seeming outliers in South Dakota and around four corners are due to the Indian reservations. 
Other thing is even after adjusting for broad racial categories you could still have a situation where the Scots-Irish are somehow less adapted to the modern American diet than other European lineages.

'with the notable exception of those (Amish, etc.) who have strenuously resisted assimilation.' 
 
Have they really, though? They reject certain aspects of modernity, but I have trouble regarding them as truly culturally alien in the way that say Hmong, Japanese, or Somalis would be. The protestant commonality is too strong. Even the French are in certain respects more different from the US mainstream than the Amish are.

What accounts for the multiple entries for some of the countries? When they're next to each other (like Vietnam) it's easy to spot, but there are others (at least 3 entries for Germany) that are more spread out...

One additional point: a lot of comments here point out some effective intervention or other, whether it's bonesetting or stopping blood loss or Incan trepanning. But being effective in one specific area is not sufficient, unless  
 
- no one expects you to do anything else (say, you're a midwife) 
- you have a good enough grasp of your own limitations to do nothing in cases where you can't help, *and* you can either convince people to accept this or have a handy placebo treatment for these cases (seems implausible) 
- your medical tradition includes a lot of placebos, but you yourself don't know this (I think homeopathy is like this) 
 
More usually, though, the pressure to do something (even in cases where the medical professional / witch doctor had no effective treatment) would encourage damaging interventions. And doctors who overstated their capabilities (whether from self-delusion or deliberate fraud) would displace those who presented their abilities accurately, assuming they had the same actual competencies. 
So having a few effective treatments may not result in a net positive contribution if you're forced to act in too many other areas.

This is why homeopathy was a good bet in the 19th and early 20th century: their medicines generally were so dilute as to do nothing, which was still better than getting yourself treated by a regular doctor. The history of quicksilver prescription is a good example. 
Of course there are those of us who think that in many areas, modern medicine is *still* a bad idea. The problem now is not that there aren't good techniques available, but that the incentives are bad and that over time this corrupts the practice - as with obstetrics and the American c-section rate...

Is the disinclination to breed based on the male nerd factor here... or what? 
 
I think a lot of the younger male readership just haven't gotten around to it yet. I've done my part (3 kids) and I think a lot of the other 40+ guys here probably have some kids as well.

so we just make s an increasing function of h 
 
How about saving the math until you actually have something measurable to hang it on? With neither hype nor utility being measurable, math here is a hammer looking for a nail that isn't there. 
 
While context (stemware, turd shapes, knowing that something is expensive, having our friends extol it, etc...) is clearly going to affect our enjoyment in general, I think the question is how malleable our response to these different factors is. I suppose philosophically you might want to either reduce the context effects as much as possible (in pursuit of some quasistoic ideal), or else try to manipulate them to increase your enjoyment where possible (if you're more of a hedonist).

The patent repository at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh was an awesome resource in the days before all US patents got put online. Any technology you wanted to know about, and some hours there would give you an idea how it was done. Not usually too busy, either (even back then) - and probably near deserted these days...

Suicide rates have been known to drop paradoxically under stressful circumstances. And I would expect travel-related fatal accidents as well as workplace accidents to be tied to economic activity. On the other hand, murder rates seem to rise and fall with unemployment, up to a point...

My mother took antidepressants briefly after getting divorced from my father. But she stopped after a few weeks; she said she didn't feel like herself. The people I've known who started taking antidepressants also have seemed different afterwards in a way that's hard to pinpoint (beyond just being less depressed, of course).  
 
I see absolutely no reason for suffering when a little pill takes it away. 
 
What if it totally removed your capacity for empathy? If the German word 'Mitleid' (=sympathy), literally 'with-suffering', gives a description of what is going on, then removing your own capacity for negative feelings might well also make you unable to empathize with the suffering of others. Not to say that this is what's going on, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it out to be.

If not no one would have bought a house, because no rational investor will buy something if believes the prices will come down substantially. 
 
Many speculators buy into bubbles, even believing that the price will come down eventually - because they think it still has a ways to go up, and they think they can get out before the tipping point. Or soon enough after to still make a profit. This kind of buyer contributes to the asymmetrical shape of the rise and collapse in speculative bubbles (they jam the exits once the bubble pops).

Psychologically speaking, I find that one of the most fascinating events of the whole war. 
 
I assume you're talking about the mass scuttling at Scappa Flow? Although it was large in scale, it didn't seem psychologically interesting to me - the ships were going to be split up among the victors, and sinking ships to avoid this problem was not at all unusual. Some of the British had expected as much.

Social science is operating at a distinct handicap compared to other sciences: there aren't (or haven't been until recently) a lot of new tools for doing experiments. Further, the kinds of things that social science is concerned with are of general enough interest that you're effectively competing against a large portion of humanity in making observations. And some of those observers are highly talented writers. So when you look to say something novel about human behavior all too often you find that Shakespeare or Montesquieu or Nietzsche already noted it with some pithy epigram.

I hope they end up collecting some data on actual dental health as well... it would be nice to be able to see just how big the effect of less frequent visits to the dentist is. 
 
I think the quality of teeth has more to do with diet and dentistry 
 
Thing is, dentistry seems most valuable once something has actually gone wrong. It seems like diet and genetics alone *can* give you excellent dental health - British sailors were frequently impressed by the dentition of the natives they encountered in places like Australia and Africa (their own dental health being very poor). See also the work of Weston Price, who did a good job of documenting the deterioration of people's teeth as they adopted a modern diet.

Us not visionary enough? Or too unextraordinary? 
 
Probably just too practical. In the category of 'things I'd be pissed at being excluded from' this wouldn't rank too high, anyway.