My interpretation is feminists, male and female, searching far and wide for any shred of scientific evidence they can find or concoct to eliminate a double standard. I.e. sexual differences privileging males to being worth worthy mates of younger and sometimes much younger females, which happens all the time including in hyper feminist countries like the US and Britain. While at the same time the evidence has strongly and unambiguously shown that older females, esp. past 35, rapidly become far less likely to be fertile and if they are, far more likely to produce genetically impaired offspring. 
 
Yes I'm suggesting there's huge PC political motive here, and so the results should be viewed with great skepticism.

I should add though that influencing the American view of Hmong (of mountain spine Vietnam, N and S) is that they were considerable allies of the US in that war. The CIA and esp. Green Berets wing of the Army Rangers recruited them very successfully. They'd always been at odds with lowland Vietnamese, and "we" convinced them that that's why they should side with us. Hence lots of Hmong refugees, relative to their rather small pop., came to the US post war (because we aren't total sh*ts, just sh*ts). The US military mostly wanted them to help prevent traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail of smuggling arms and combatants from north to south, in the mountains and to their West (often in Cambodia). So they were "our" hair trigger violent primatives, from many aging military rightist points of view.

The Hmong are widely viewed among E. Asians, and to some extent among less politically correct (or when guard is down) white Americans who've had contact, as stupid, impulsive, very clannish, hair trigger violent, etc. There seems to be considerable truth to this if one looks at e.g. outcomes of Hmong refugee communities in America, versus other E.Asian, or even SE Asian ones. Now what part of this is likely genetic as opposed to cultural (non literate mountain people, etc.) I have no idea. I thought this was widely appreciated among those who tend to have any clue about these sorts of things.

Razib -- 
 
To be explicit, I wonder if post-human sentience would simply be the apotheosis of the Nerd. 
 
Bingo.  
 
Or anyway, the wishing and imagining of same that commonly goes on.

The real outlier without a completely rational US self interest explanation is obviously Israel. 
 
The rejoinder is that it's obviously due to the ethnic interest of an important group within the US. Ireland rates higher than it might otherwise for similar reasons. 
 
That's undoubtedly true except that Jews make up less than 3% of the population.  
 
So ok we're talking about influence far outsized compared to population percentage, but real nonetheless. 
 
Yup. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Given how successful the Mongols were under Genghis and his successors more or less until the rise of gunpowder armies, it's puzzling to me that steppe nomads didn't more frequently completely overrun China, India and the Middle East in earlier centuries. (Though I guess the Aryan invasion of India was an earlier pre stirrup steppe horse warrior invasion.) 
 
Obviously the many iterations, extensions and rebuildings of the Great Wall were done to deal with steppe warriors, but if their core military technology and basic cheap/free horse grazing lands economy had been in place for centuries, what changed to allow the phenomenal empire building of Genghis, and it's extensions albeit in large fragments by such successor horse warrior princes as Kublai Khan and Tamerlane? 
 
After all the stirrup and composite bow had been around since before the 5th century heyday of the Huns.

Nothing like giving us a Greek dead ringer for Sahlman Rusdie 20 years ago to sing the Christmas carol, and mess with our minds Razib!

Merry Christmas to you too Razib!! 
 
From an ancestral or cultural Christian agnostic / non proselytizing atheist to another secularist, from the Muslim tradition. 
 
Actually, there are many things about multi-culturalism I don't like. One of the things I DO like is the ethos of welcoming others into one's own religious and other traditions, where they have broad resonance, and also being open to exploring those of others, who are also willing to welcome.  
 
Merry Christmas!!

Thanks for the heads up. 
 
I've downloaded to iTunes for my next synch. (I didn't notice the download podcast option at first - it's over on the right hand side, a few screen inches below the top.)

The Economist has an excellent and fairly long open access article on the Hawks, Cochran, Harpending et.al. acceleration paper.

p-ter's critical analysis of the acceleration paper's genomic and statistical methods and assumptions strikes this non-expert as absolutely devestating, if it in turn doesn't have major holes in it. I'm in no position to judge. 
 
I hope those sufficiently knowledgeable to do so will fully engage this argument. Perhaps even one or more of the article in chief's authors.

Not only does the USA have a far higher percentage of "disadvantaged" minority school children (above 30%) than ALL the OECD countries which score above it, the effort to raise the relative school performance of these groups seems to be virtually the only thing our educational elites focus on and our media makes sure they do, at least in our public schools.  
 
Segregation of groups by income which in effect does a fair bit of segregating by ethnicity alleviates this single minded mania to some degree, but it's clear where the education schools focus nearly all their efforts. Any other focus would be elitest at best and more likely racist. 
 
I would suggest that there are diminishing returns to be gained from focusing efforts on improving the educational performance of those with IQ's below 80-85. Sure they should be able to read and do arithmetic, but this leveling mania is just that, a mania and one that saps our educational energies.  
 
America focuses far too little attention on the education of those in the middle, 90 to 110 or even 115, in my view. It sometimes in some places even focuses too little attention and resources on our most educationally able, which is truly idiotic. These two groups are where we could REALLY improve, and that's where the public schools really fail our kids. A far more frank public discussion and understanding of IQ would help immeasureably here, but of course the cultural Marxists and Marxist lites in academe and the media block this at every turn.

Actually, the high scoring Asians are "only" the NE Asians, specifically the Japanese, Koreans, Mongols and Chinese (and their overseas emigrants who are e.g. thick on the ground in Singapore and to a lesser extent Malaysia), not the SE Asians. However the NE Asians though concentrated in only a few countries are super numerous, constituting ~20% of humanity. 
 
Ethnicities historically located to the south in Asia albeit sometimes even further east such as the Philippines and Indonesia (Malay related peoples) score near the overall world average, which is well below the European 100.  
 
We are of course talking Mongoloids vs. "Austronesians", or NE vs SE Asians if you prefer, in terms of large continent level racial groupings. When you get to the furthest south branch of the later, the Papuans and Aust. Aborigines (which more than a few think really should be a separate "continental level" racial grouping), you find some of the lowest scoring groups on IQ.

As BW alludes to, the phenomenon of easier tests artificially lessening the gap between higher performing populations and less performing ones is VERY real, and can also be very dramatic. 
 
La Griffe du Lion has one or two excellent pieces on this.

I'm not opposed to people holding out for more evidence, but imputing nefarious motives to writers for talking about the evidence that exists I do find questionable. 
 
That's technique is not "questionable" but rather downright evil. It's an attempt, often successful, to head off investigation and discovery of scientific truth on the grounds that any results showing a genetic component of sensitive group differences (such as IQ, proclivity towards violence or aggressiveness, time horizons, etc.) are "scientific racism" and hence verboten. 
 
It's a version of the old Marxist notion that "bourgeois truth" (aka reductionist truth) must always yield to "political truth".

How about this: 
 
Mainstream female sex stars (esp. in this age of readily available hard core and other porn addressing other fantasy needs) = fantasy trophy wife. Tallness aids in the impressing and even intimidation of other men (look what you could get and they can't), which is all good in a trophy wife. 
 
Female porn stars = fantasy abandoned sluts, where the most important thing is how much the eager male believes she can be utterly sexually overwhelmed by the big dicked fantasy surrogate stand in. She's just or at least overwhelmingly for the bedroom or other f*ck location, and looking intimidating, as opposed to succulent and pretty easy, is not a plus. Hence height ain't a plus, whereas big and even esp. fake tits (she's trying really hard) most definitely are. 
 
Any takers?

I have one very simple, and I?m sure some or perhaps many would say simplistic comment to make about the differences between mysticism and theology: their purposes are utterly different. Though simplistic, I?m not at all sure that much more detailed theories of the commonalities of different traditions of mysticism versus different traditions of theology have much utility or real resonance. 
 
The general and unifying (across different traditions) purpose of mysticism I think is at the beginning to lessen or escape from psychological (and much physical) stress or disharmony, and then to have ecstatic personal experiences. It?s not so entirely different from the purposes of taking certain drugs, or even of becoming addicted to some (if only addiction didn?t also lead to habituation, where ever greater and more physically destructive doses are required for the same psychological effects). The ?faith healing? sides of traditional medicine (and even some modern medicine, esp. psychiatry) incorporate some mild and widely accessible sorts of ?mystic? religious power I think. The patients ?know? from observed experience that belief often ?works?, sometimes to (aid in the) cure or at least to diminish psychological suffering. 
 
The ?purposes? of theology on the other hand have much more to do with power, and attracting a wide ?voluntary? following or renewed adherence to an existing group. Theology seeks to persuade by anecdote, awe and logic; it?s leading practitioners seek to demonstrate how much more knowledgeable and intelligent and in communication with the otherworldly powerful they are, and accordingly how necessary it is for one and all to follow them and their creed rather than some other.  
 
It probably is the case that most mystics have some theological trappings, especially when dealing with novices, and that most or anyway many theologians draw upon mystic experiences or at least those of others to bolster the persuasiveness of their creed.  
 
Nonetheless I think there?s some utility in bearing in mind this basic distinction in what the two different poles of religion are intended to accomplish. Though it?s in the nature of things that those wishing to use theology (or ideology more generally) as a means towards power and group cohesion to want to greatly obfuscate that connection, including often enough to themselves.  
 
At the very most general level one can posit that these two sides of religion have in some ways a single purpose ? that is to manage the dilemma and psychological stress of man at once being an intensely social animal, who at the same time also has individual and competitive drives and abilities, which are plastically mediated by culture, including centrally, both poles of religion. So at this highest level of abstraction, the purposes of the two poles of religion are not utterly different, but instead ?the same?.

What Zora said. 
 
John Emerson said: 
 
In several mystical discourses "Nothing" lies behind the One as a field of infinite possibility. Oneness is a tendentious unification of the Nothing, Duality is Oneness plus the residue of the attempt at unification, Manyness is a pluralist to at least enumerate all the elements of the nothing, but Nothing is undefined reality behind the others. 
 
To me John this while accurate enough is essentially besides the point. This is approaching mystical traditions from a theological point of view, whereas the essence of those traditions, I think, is to guide adherents towards transcendent mystical experiences. That is if they?re really at root mystical traditions, rather than another flavor of theology.  
 
I do have some direct experience with mystical immersion. For one six month period (with several less intense ?shoulder? months before that) in the 70?s I attended a 24/7 Trancendental Meditation ashram on a European island. There was a certain amount of quasi theology involved in lectures particular in the beginning and then while ?coming down? towards the end, but the culmination of the experience was a week or perhaps it was ten days of literally 24/7 meditation / trance sleep in total isolation in one?s (hotel) room, with simple meals slipped into the door. (Not everyone participated in this on a 24/7 basis, or among those who did, lasted through the whole experience.) No, I did not remain an adherent (though I do still meditate from time to time), and in fact never really was one. I went into it with more of a (non ideological) cultural anthropological point of view, though I also immersed myself, if not really in the theological side of it all, most definitely in the mystical or transcendent experience side of it.

I guess the question is, what fraction of American blacks have a mixed-race set of parents or grandparents. You're almost certainly going to know the apparent race of your parents. 
 
I think the great majority of notably light skinned blacks are aware that they have a substantial percentage of white ancestry, even when it entered quite a ways back, i.e. even when both of their parents would be and were classified by overall American society and most blacks as being "black", and even when all four of their grandparents were as well. (Obviously if all four grandparents of a light skinned black are "black", then all or most of them would most likely have had to be light skinned blacks.) This was not an uncommon pattern among more upper class blacks through the 1930's and beyond. See e.g. the book "Our Kind of People".

p-ter said: 
 
Lastly, her main point seems to be that genetic ancestry and self-identified race might not match up. They do.  
 
Razib said just a bit above: 
 
but it isn't a platonic category, it is a statistical or instrumental one. what geneticists want to do in these association studies is eliminate confounding background noise, right? how do you do that? you can genotype people and assign them to their appropriate clusters, or have them self-report. the former is probably better, but does it add enough value for you to justify the cost? self-reporting isn't as accurate, but it is cheap, as in free. you basically want to remove the genetic correlation substructure from your pool, right? that's the instrumental aim. self-identification works to do that, to an extent. 
 
It seems to me that researchers can get far more accurate self reporting of race or ethnicity if they ask subjects that question in the ?right? sort of way. I think, in other words, that most people have a pretty good idea of their racial and ethnic background ? or anyway, a much better idea than they might reveal if the are simply asked their race or ethnicity. Politics and cultural stance gets involved; as well many or most people conflate genetics (ancestry) and culture if they aren?t specifically asked not to do so. 
 
For example, if one asks Haley Barry what her race is she has and will under most circumstances say she?s black. Period, end of story. (For one thing she?s a trail blazer as a black actress, and not at all as a white one, and a lot less so as an amorphously mixed race one.) However she certainly knows her mother is 100% white / Caucasian (or anyway nearly so), and almost certainly knows that her father probably or did have some (perhaps considerable) white ancestry as well. She?s probably seen pictures of him for example. 
 
If researchers looking for more accurate racial self identification by study participants, had a preamble that said that a great many Americans come from racially and or ethnically mixed, or partly mixed backgrounds, and asked them to self report not what group they most identify with, or feel the world regards them as belonging to, but rather how much of their ancestry was e.g. black versus white or some other racial group (e.g. Amerindian or Hispanic), I think one would get self reported results which are FAR closer to what DNA testing might reveal. Not all the way there certainly, and some particularly politically/ culturally adamant types might refuse to give what the researchers are looking for but instead stick with their platonicly absolutist identification, and some dimmer subjects may be unable to make the distinction as well particularly when e.g. their white admixture isn?t as personally close as their mother but instead one of their great grandparents, but I do think these virtually cost free self reported res
More....

Is that Lindsay Lohan?

I've got a question of prime importance for you all. 
 
The "tart" pic to the right of Paltrow is of whom?