I think the explanation can be found in just two words: "online survey". It's not a random sample, but self-selected. (And that's assuming no group decided to take the survey repeatedly to deliberately skew the results.)

Godless, actually if you enroll low-scoring people in the engineering program, you just get more first year dropouts. Getting an engineering degree still requires meeting objective standards. The problem is, they'd be taking class slots from people who actually have a chance, and so we wind up with even fewer engineers. Ditto for doctors. On the other hand, if race-norming at law schools causes fewer graduating lawyers, I'm all for it - assuming we can't do the logical thing and cut back on the entering class slots...

I'd take those predictions of diamond CPU's with more than one grain of NaCl. Neither this nor any other article I've seen discusses the really important numbers that determine how a semiconductor will perform in electronics, but I think I can get a ballpark estimate from the periodic table position relative to germanium and silicon. That is, column IV is:

C Si Ge Sn

In the form used for semiconductors, Si and Ge both have the same crystal structure as diamond (all the atoms linked by tetrahedral covalent bonds), but they are progressively easier to grow into crystals and softer as you go down column IV. (Sn = tin is a metal, where valence electrons detach from the atoms and flow freely through the material, so the diamond structure doesn't occur.)

Germanium was the first material used for transistors. It has a very low bandgap energy, which means a low voltage drop when current flows across a PN junction in the forward direction (that is, positive is connected to the "P"-biased region). This is good, but Ge also leaks quite a lot of current when the diode or transistor is biased so it should be off. It's pretty hard to get consistent circuit operation when the switching elements won't actually switch off.

So they moved to Si, with a higher forward voltage drop (0.7V), but negligible reverse leakage current. Si transistors also are slower than Ge transistors of the same size and construction, but this problem has been overcome because Si's other characteristics allow shrinking the transistor size, varying the transistor design, and combining lots of transistors on one chip of Si. (Ge parts are still used in some extremely high-speed but simple circuits for communications.)

One bad side to the higher forward voltage drop is that every electron flowing through a PN junction gives up 0.7 electron-volts of energy, normally as heat. Or 1 micro-amp of current flow through one junction = 1 micro-watt of power turning into heat. Multiply that by 35 million transistors and you've got as much heat generation as a small soldering iron. Pentium chips with far more transistors than this survive even with massive heatsinks and fans only because only a few percent of the transistors are used in any one cycle, and these only for short bursts of current rather than conducting steadily.

I expect C (diamond) would have a substantially higher bandgap energy, for several volts forward voltage drop. That is, a diamond Pentium would have several times as much heat to dispose of. Maybe they'll find ways to work around this in 20 or 30 years, but I doubt anyone's going to be putting in the research dollars. Si works so well already. Also, it's much easier to grow Si crystals and to slice them into wafers - I think they use diamond saws for this, what would you use to slice diamonds?

There definitely are potential uses for diamond in electronics, just not for computers and other high-density logic circu
More....

In my family (Americans of mostly mixed northwest European ancestry), it's pretty common for small children to have light-colored hair that gets darker as they grow up. E.g., one of my grandsons was apparently blond, but right now at 3 years old his hair is looking more like light brown. I wouldn't be surprised his hair is dark brown as an adult. So if neoteny is attractive, maybe it explains all the bleached hair in European women. Or maybe it just explains why it's hard to take blonds seriously. (Especially Brad Pitt.)

OTOH, if blondness is sexually attractive because it reminds men of children, ewwww! I suspect that actually blonds are especially attractive when they are a rarity just because they are rare. Now there's a whole big cultural thing grown up around bleached hair, so in America a woman with natural dark brown hair is probably a woman that doesn't consider it worthwhile to try to be "sexy". Maybe you'll marry her, but you'd rather date one that's amping up the sex appeal.

As for my own tastes - now, Sandra Bullock is my ideal woman. But when I was in high school, blonds would make me lose the power of speech.

re: Coral snake mimics, and other mimicry where the signal is "poison!":

These signals are not zero cost. The bright colors make the mimics an easy target for any predator that can tell the difference between the mimic and the real thing, and also for predators recently arrived from a different biome that don't know the signal. And if the mimic becomes too common compared to the actually poisonous creature, the predators may learn to simply take a chance. (It's not likely with something as deadly as coral snakes, but most objects of such mimicry will only make the predator ill, like monarch butterflies and brightly-striped hornets.)

No one who has raised stepchildren alonside their own children can believe that (aside from gross abuse or starvation) environment is more important than genetics in determining behavior.

I think Robert A. Heinlein said it best. "Doctors have a word for women who rely on the rhythm method. They are called 'mothers'."

From Time Enough for Love, IIRC. It's been about 25 years, so I may not have the words exactly right.

The Black Plague in 14th century Europe caused death tolls similar to those projected for the hardest-hit African nations, but did not destroy European civilization. Less than two centuries later, the Renaissance was starting in Italy, wind-driven exploring ships of newer and better designs were fanning out across the world, and the first harbinger of the industrial revolution appeared as fire-arms replaced muscle-powered weapons on the battlefields.

Not to imply that I expect an African Renaissance to result from this - but the long-term effects of a plague depend on the strength and flexibility of the society far more than on the virulence of the disease. If the African nations are truly even half the centralized socialisms that their intelligentsia claim they are, then they are in deep, deep trouble, because central planning will fail even more dramatically than usual as planners die and the population they are trying to control shrinks. OTOH, I'm sure there is also a substantial unofficial free market, and perhaps collapsing government power will let that come to the forefront. A bigger question is how AIDS deaths will interact with tribal warfare - whether the warriors will decide that too many have died already, or that reduced numbers and no effective government give the chance to finally wipe out their enemies...

Neither hunter-gatherers nor early agriculturists kept death records, but they did often bury their dead, so some statistics can be deduced from archeological excavations. It's quite clear that in the period when agriculture was getting started, hunter-gatherers that survived until adulthood were better-nourished, healthier, and considerably taller than the farmers of that era, or most pre-industrial farmers in general.

It's also obvious that far more farmers' babies survived to reproduce, because eventually the farmers overran the Earth and pushed the remaining hunter-gatherers onto the most worthless land. Since the farmers were small, diseased, and had less skill with weapons, but still won, they must have had a considerable numeric advantage... (Once agriculture really took over, the surviving hunter-gatherers often became smaller and far less healthy, due to trying to scrape a living from land the farmers didn't consider worth stealing. Pygmies may be an extreme example of this.)

It's harder to measure life expectancy, because in general you can't consider the bodies you find as anything like a random sampling. Hunter-gatherers generally didn't use cemeteries.

Slayer: That should be no surprise. Moors were not subSaharan African (that is, "black"); they came mostly from the coast, and probably some had come all the way from Arabia. The present population of north Africa probably includes quite a few descendants of subsaharan slaves, but as far as I know the practice of slave-raiding across the desert was started after the Muslim conquest. So in Mohammed's time you'd probably have found more German genes (from Visigoths and Vandals) in the Moors & Berbers than subSaharan. The Spanish of the time were also a mix of Visigoth and darker earlier natives, but it's likely that there were simply more Visigoths in Spain, so Spanish christians tended to be lighter, especially in the upper classes.

And so the light brown Spaniards found it made good propaganda to call the darker brown invaders "black." It emphasized the difference to help maintain their own unity. Possibly distinguishing themselves as "white" versus "black" invaders gave them more of a common bond with the Franks (still German) than the religious issue alone.

And finally, Isabella and Ferdinand kicked out the Moors. Then they gave extraordinary powers to the Spanish Inquisition to investigate whether the Moors and Jews who converted rather than leaving were truly practicing Christians. This eventually turned into a persecution of anyone with Moorish or Jewish ancestry and enemies willing to make up stories (and be rewarded with a share of the victims estates!). I suspect that over a few centuries, this not only eliminated the Moorish remnant, but also anyone who looked too Moorish - say, a descendant of a black Roman slave.

Perhaps one could draw an analogy between cultural evolution and evolution in bacteria: Bacteria swap bits of genetic information with other bacterial species, like ideas flowing between cultures. Successful (or temporarily lucky) bacteria reproduce by fission, so the effective evolutionary unit is a clone of genetically identical bacteria - it can grow, shrink, or fission, much like cultures. A really successful clone will spread all over, with minor genetic variations due to transcription errors and to gene-swapping, but maintaining the characteristics that made it successful - much like western cultures spread out from Europe. Less successful clones either die out or manage to acquire the key genes - and many, many human cultures have died out totally, while the survivors have been those able to learn and use foreign ideas when necessary.

As late as the first half of the 19th century, there were people who chose to leave an advanced agricultural society (the US and Canada) to join more primitive societies where agriculture merely supplemented hunting-gathering (American Indians). The northeast Indians way of life seriously lacked security (a high death rate among the young from warfare and among the old from starvation), but it certainly had it's attractions as compared to continuous hard labor on a farm. European-style agriculture supported about 100 times the population density, which is needed for factories manufacturing steel knives, firearms, etc. - so it wasn't at all hard to see that the Indians were doomed, but as long as it was possible to ignore this, there were white men leaving the settlements and joining the Indians.

Possibly in primitive tribes, schizophrenia is oftn a qualification for the important job of shaman. The tribe couldn't afford to support two shamans, but as long as the gene remained rare it was a pathway to staying safe in camp and getting a share of what the hunters brought back.

"the non-altruists outreproduce the altruists, so you left with a self ‘group’"

This depends on how the balance between individual advantages within the group versus group advantages over competing groups works out. That is, it's no good being the last survivor of your tribe...

Beyond that, many species show behavior patterns that reward "altruistic" behavior. E.g., consider a flock of birds where the male birds will take turns staying on watch while the rest of the flock feeds. The females may be noting which males are up there on watch the most, and those males may thus get the most reproductive chances. In some species, this is a big enough advantage that the males will actually fight each other for the sentry positions. Of course, being able to stand watch at all rather than feeding whenever possible means that the male is pretty good at finding food for himself, suggesting superior genetics...

So there is a self-reinforcing closed loop that rewards all the participants. To some experts, this means that the sentries are not "altruistic" at all, but I think that it means that at some time in the past one or a few flocks evolved the behavior patterns forming this loop, and their genes spread across the species as predators gobbled up the flocks that didn't post sentries.

Of course, there are also half-way versions of this in some species. In baboons for instance, young males will show off by taunting any well-fed lion that wanders nearby in what seems to be a pretense of protecting the pack from a predator. It's a pretty safe pretense, since lions do not normally prey on monkeys. But when a leopard comes into sight, the same young males will rush to the tree-tops, leaving females with children behind. Looking like a hero can't pay off if it puts you into a leopard's belly...

In humans, the analogy to the sentry birds is soldiers, policemen, and firemen. There's an old saying that women love a uniform. (My wife certainly did, long ago when I was in the Air Force.) On the flip side, in England in WWI, it was common for women to taunt young men who avoided military service with white feathers - there are records of men who couldn't pass the physical committing suicide due to all the taunts. Since human behavior is largely modified by culture, it's hard to say if there is any genetic element to this. It's often not true in the USA since the Vietnam War (my wife, from a conservative rural family, being an exception). I doubt that soldiers get much respect in western European countries anymore.

But the question is, once a society has become so "civilized" that soldiers are not valued, how long will it be before that culture is wiped out by a somewhat more barbarous one that encourages it's best and brightest to join the military?

Larry, Invisible Man was written about 40 years ago. It describes a world that no longer exists.

Funny how they got through that whole piece without mentioning that our last two presidents were draft-dodgers. But it would be a very good thing to see Jenna Bush enlisting - and it might even straighten her out...

The military does lots of testing, but I don't recall anything like IQ tests. They are a lot more interested in more specific ability tests. It isn't necessary to be smart in the military, but you've got to do your job well...

England had one other thing going for it, long before Reformation. In most of Europe, military force depended only on professionals (knights and mercenaries). The great majority of the population was peasants, who were generally serfs with neither the weapons nor the training to be effective in combat. In England, there were far fewer serfs, and since at least Edward III the yeomen (free farmers) were officially encouraged to obtain and practice with bows and pikes. Furthermore, within a few generations the English professional armies in France had well proven the effectiveness of these peasant weapons by beating larger forces of knights at Crecy and Agincourt.

Why the English kings encouraged this seems clear. One of their ancestors (Richard the Lionhearted) was killed by a rebellious baron, and his successor was forced to kowtow to the massed forces of his own nobles at Runnymede. Royal prerogatives were more theoretical than real elsewhere. In France, some Dukes could rival or exceed the king in power, and the king could not even bring Gilles de Retz (a count?) to justice for raping and murdering a hundred boys. In Poland, the nobles elected the king - and then ignored him unless they really, really needed a leader against invasion. So the pike and the bow gave the English kings a potentially overwhelming counterweight to the private armies of the nobles, and rebellions could succeed only against those kings that had lost their credibility with the people. (E.g., Richard III.)

This wasn't the only possible solution, of course. Too many English invasions finally imparted patriotism and respect for their king to the French (with help from Jeanne d'Arc), and then over a few generations the kings built professional armies and rendered their nobles militarily irrelevant. But this could only be supported by heavy taxation, while Edward III's solution posed no costs to the Royal treasury.

However, arming the commoners has another effect. No one is going to succeed in enslaving them, and it took until about 1900 for the Socialists to invent a way of persuading them to enslave themselves. Henry VIII inherited a Catholic England that was probably already the freest country in Europe.

The Reformation also contributed to freedom, of course. Like the Lutheran princes, Henry VIII kept the church heirarchy but simply lopped off the top and substituted himself for the Pope. But this still weakened the church heirarchy, which had served as the ideal model for secular heirarchy since Charlemagne. And it encouraged further sectarianism, including non-approved churches. Churches not approved by the king had to avoid creating a central command that the king could seize...

"mixing the two genomes by genetic crossing." That seems to call for an actual experiment with controlled cross-breeding instead of an after-the-fact study of a mixed population. In fruit flies, it just takes several jars and a few days. Try it in humans, and they'll really call you a Nazi...

The brain demands a lot of energy - about 25% of the calories you eat goes to feed a few pounds of nerve cells. It wouldn't be surprising to see correlations between IQ and height or other growth indicators, but the correlation could go either way depending on the circumstances. On the one hand, Masai genes might truly favor allocating nutrition to increased height (for better cooling), strength, and quick reflexes (for going after lions with spears), while Chinese genes may restrict bodily development to feed the brain sufficiently for the abstract thinking that is needed by merchants and mandarins. On the other hand, in most of Europe up to the early 1900's, the height of much of the population was limited by chronic childhood nutritional deficiencies, not by genetics - so it's quite likely that the brain was often somewhat stunted too. (If you want to research this further, look up studies in the Netherlands where WWII led to a few years of famine in a normally well-fed population; I don't recall all the details, but there are clearly early childhood windows where adequate nutrition is needed to properly develop certain organs. However, it's not clear how extreme cases such as this apply to the effects of lesser degrees of malnutrition, if at all.)

In the last two centuries, every 1st world country saw a steady increase in height following on nutritional improvements from increased wealth, better ways of preserving food for the winter, and the agricultural revolution. (It wasn't just peasants that suffered malnutrition, either. Henry VIII was over six-foot and would have been welcome on any college football team, but his lesser nobles were often stunted, judging by the armor suits they left behind. Getting your pick of the harvest isn't that much help when most everything but dried grains has spoiled by March.) So clearly the common human geneotype includes the capability of restricting height in response to a restricted diet. Probably there is also a maximum height and a target body form set by genetics, and this can vary to adapt populations to extreme conditions. Tall skinny Masai and short round Inuit are adaptations to weather extremes. Pigmys adapted to chronic food shortages plus energy draining tropical diseases. Polynesians grow extra subcutaneous fat as insulation against cold sea water. Other cases are less clear - the Germans far overmatched the Romans in both height and girth, but this may have simply meant that their heavy use of dairy cattle kept their children better fed.

As for women preferring taller men - until quite recently, height was an indicator of good childhood nutrition and the socio-economic status that goes with it, plus freedom from disease. Taller men were better providers. To some extent, they still are - they get noticed more and promoted faster than short men with the same skills.