Does she address the game theoretic analysis of egoism vs. altruism?

There is also a rich game theoretic literature on the balance of egoism v altruism. Does she address any of this?

The scatter in the diagram does not really support a J-shape. It looks more like a flat minimum extending from about HDI 0.8 to the right. This is an example of using a line to impose meaning and pattern on a scatter plot that has none.

"If the shift from GWAS [genome wide association studies] to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals." This quote assumes much more than is warranted. Even if we do get large numbers of fully sequenced DNA samples, what would it mean? We know just about nothing about how DNA affects the behavior. In fact, we know very little about how DNA affects disease.

hbd chick had a more detailed analysis yesterday: http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/germanic-peoples-are-sooooo-trusting/

What is most striking about this graph is that trust is much more a matter of culture than it is of public expenditures. Note that all (as in all) of the high-trust countries are not merely Anglo-Saxon but Germanic plus Finland. I.e., northwest European or settled by northwest Europeans.

This is stunning. Is there some sort of packing rule at work as in bee honeycombs?

This is the same agency that lets James Hansen fabricate surface temperatures.

It is instructive to consider known cases of scientific fraud. The great majority of these are found in medicine. All the major medical journals have had a substantial number of papers withdrawn for outright fraud. How physics journals have had fraudulent (as opposed to "not even wrong") papers? Or chemistry journals, geology journals?

TGGP, thanks for the citation. An interesting progression. You might like, William Broad and Nicholas Wade (1982), "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," Simon & Schuster,New York, My own personal experience in a big-time engineering college is that a significant fraction of faculty engage in questionable or fraudulent activities, perhaps 10% or so. When discovered, the administration always attempts a cover-up and usually succeeds. Whistle-blowers are usually punished, often severely. This is typical of all institutions; the reputation of the institution must be protected at all costs, even if obviously guilty people get away with their misdeeds. How much this affects the quality and reliability of the information available to scientists and engineers, I don't know. In the hard sciences, errors and fraud are usually discovered, but it might take years or even decades for this to happen. In the so-called social "sciences", errors and fraud persist indefinitely, viz. Margaret Mead.

Once the price gets down to a couple of hundred debased dollars, sequencing will become a routine medical lab procedure, and virtually everyone will be sequenced. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? How could one possibly use, analyze or act on that much data (6 billion x 6 billion)? Does the NSA have enough computers? Or programmers?

Can you find a way to get rid of that annoying facebook add that is covering up Figures 33 and 37? I'm running Firefox on a Mac.

Many years ago I read Edwin Land's retinex theory in Scientific American (back when it reported on science). What's the status of his theory?

Four color printing used to be standard (CMYK) and there are many six and eight color desk top printers on the market. Of course, color printing is color by subtraction.

Here is an actual attempt to estimate extinction rates, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/ Willis Eschenbach does it for birds (because they are so visible) and concludes that only 129 species have gone extinct in the last 100 years or so. There may be something wrong with the Macarthur/Wilson species/area theory. More importantly, Wilson's own estimate of extinction rates was a top of the head guesstimate made in the middle of an interview and had no empirical basis. To my limited knowledge, Eschenbach's attempt has not be duplicated or peer-critiqued, so there may be significant errors in it. But, it does put in question almost all the discussion of habitat loss and extinction. This is important enough for someone knowledgeable to sort out.

It should be obvious that all humans are in fact "wild type." We are living in rapidly changing environments not kept in laboratories.

I beg to differ. Human culture does not shield us from natural selection. Culture is itself part of the environment that selects for traits. The fact that mutations that would be deleterious under paleolithic conditions are now accumulating merely points out that the environment has changed, and we are being adapted to the new conditions. We are not living under paleolithic conditions. World-wide, the great majority of us are living in cities, and it is the city environment that is selecting new traits and evolving us.

The Great Flip seems to be located in the parties themselves, not in the voters. The voters merely select the party closest to their beliefs. In 1860, the Republicans were liberal by the standards of the day, and the Democrats were pro-slavery and reactionary. It seems the map indicates the regions have kept their original tendencies, although there has been some evolution of content. Church-based liberalism of 1860 becomes secular liberalism in 2008. Pro-slavery evolves into social conservatism with a tinge of racism.

Actually, under the rules that most universities pay lip service to, Gladwell did commit plagiarism. At the beginning of every school year, our Provost sends out a detailed memorandum explaining the various kinds of plagiarism in tedious detail; no doubt other Provosts do so, too.  
 
Under these rules, plagiarism is not merely the appropriation of exact wording or data or figures without citation, it is any paraphrase without citation no matter how short. Failure to cite Dawkins (and others) for the meme concept clearly is plagiarism at my school. 
 
Whether Gladwell would be penalized, of course, depends on his institution's local politics. There are numerous examples of gross plagiarism and outright theft of laboratory samples in the biological/medical field that went unpunished because of the prestige of the accused.

Setting aside all the ID/Creationist nonsense, Behe has posited a really sweet scientific problem: viz., How did flagella evolve? 
 
I'm not competent to provide a solution, but I bet that when someone does it will open up some nice biology.