I have commented a few times on french/francophone forums that polygamy/gyny was something that involved "Ousmane and Mamadou" and did not involve " Samir, Ozgur and Khan" at all. Ousmane and Mamadou are west african muslim names, btw. 
 
I'm kind of surprised by the maghrebian numbers because i always thought that polygamy was also very rare there. Some friends from marocco told me that polygamy was strictly an old rich man's thing . Maybe the younger generation still thinks it's cool but isn't practicing it at all.  
I'm not sure what the younger malians or senegalese think about it and whether they're still doing it.

Soul searcher, 
 
I'll stop by Frost's site. It should be interesting.

steatopygia isn't just having a large ass.  
What's striking about it is the shape of the overdevelopped body part : it's characterised by a profile in the shape of an upside down right triangle . The ass projects horizontally from the lower back and then slopes down abruptly towards the tighs. It's like having some kind of table attached to the lower back. It's **quite** different from the "booty" that african americans usually like . I find it extremely unattractive even though i don't usually have a problem with immodest glutei maximi :) It must be some kind of primitive trait that's been shed in most modern populations ( including black africans ).

I'm in quebec actually , but I'm very familiar with "standard " french . 
You're underestimating accent . There are regional accents here and in france, especially in the countryside, that sound extremely rough and unpolished :) 
 
Latin rooted words form the vast majority of french vocab and they  
 
broadly came to us in 2 ways.  
The first way was via the natural transformation of vulgar latin by speakers of a celtic and germanic background . This gave us words like "moyen" and "chevre" for mean and goat .  
People who knows lots of romance languages notice  
that common, everyday speech french word are in general morphologically much more removed from the original latin than the corresponding spanish or italian or even rumanian words. This is especially because modern french derives from northern french dialects , whose pronunciation was very germanic influenced.  
 
These organically transformed words can sound quite earthy. They're the everyday language words , basically , along with a few germanic rooted words.  
 
The 2nd souce of latin rooted words in french comes from wordsmithing by intellectuals .This happened a lot towards the end of the middle ages, during the renaissance and early modern era . This gave words like "medium" and "caprin" . The germanic sounds like -CH are nowhere to be seen in that group of words. They sound more "airy"  
 
Does anyone know ways to make italian sound earthy and not silly ?

For what that's worth : 
I'm a french speaker and i find english prose that's too close to french or too latinate to be slightly annoying . English prose that's heavy on the anglo/germanic is cool because i actually learn new words reading it , not just anglicized french words that i already know . Of course too anglo-saxon a style quickly overwhelms a modern english speaker . English isn't really english without its latin heritage afterall. A good mix of both kinds of roots is probably the best.

John Emerson : 
This constant possible overturning of major paradigms in fields that rely on "digging" is something I'd find paralyzing, i think, if i worked in those fields. How can one confidently assert anything ? 
 
With paleontology , I would think that what we know from evolution and genetics has managed to give that field a solid "backbone" framework. It's very unlikely that they'll find modern human remains that are 1M years old, for instance , forcing a rewrite of the field . 
 
With prehistory or even history , there aren't yet any solid backbone theories , because the time frames require resolutions not yet provided by current gentics/human evolution knowledge . As razib mentioned several times, progress in human evolution and genetics will change that .

pconroy : 
 
i've never heard of celtic being particularly unique or a split off branch of indoeuropean. Isn't considered almost the twin branch of Italic ? Langauges that branch off early in indo-european are armenian and hittite for example .

I find that I have in general been able to find family that i could chat with about "serious" topics . 
 
i don't talk to my stepdad often but when we do, after the usual family news we can easily slip into a conversation about various economico-social topics. I especially like to ask him what he thinks about various prospects for his country (a central african country ). We had those conversations even when i was a kid.  
 
One of my favorite people to discuss with is my sister. We mostly talk about, once again, various socio/economico/politico topics . She thinks about things, for real and i appreciate that very much. The only problem is that she's basically a leftist : that can get annoying sometimes. I still enjoy the long , never ending discussions very much !  
 
My younger brother is a special case. He loves to read *a lot* and is quite curious about many topics. Like one day we were talking about how the chinese were taking over africa and he gave me his impressions , from trips he took there and things he read . He's kind of a special case because he's actually learning disabled and has low IQ. He's very curious though and would go very far into investigating things, if only he could. Our conversations are more like me teaching him stuff , since he won't be coming up with many insights himself. But he likes to talk about non mundane things and that counts for something in my book . He was always like this, even as child . 
 
I've had the pleasure of discussing some historical/social topics with my mother too. I suspect my mom is much more knowledgeable about things than she lets on. She sometimes surprises me .  
 
Unfortunately i don't really have people who are into science , so i can never go really far in that direction with the people i mentionned. 
 
My dad enjoys serious conversations. Unfortunately he brings a christian fundamentalist perspective that i was able to ignore when i was younger, but that became really, really annoying with the years , so i don't get much into discussions with him anymore.  
 
I guess people in my family pretty much know that I have very little interest in regular chat. I won't be *rude* to chit chatters, but it's probably pretty obvious what i care about. Those who can't get into good conversations never get very close to me .

razib, 
 
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage#Black_and_White : 
... Yet, African American men are 2.5 times more likely to be married to European American women than African American women to European American men.... 
 
So in the UK , black women are about 2/3rd as likely as black men to be involved with a white.  
In the usa, black women are only 2/5th as likely as black men to be involved with a white.

Peter says : 
... 
 
For that counterexample to be tested white or Asian men would have to try to seduce black women in appreciable numbers. For whatever reason or reasons, that doesn't really happen. 
 
___ 
 
It'd be really interesting to have a european (or other non northamerican ) perspective on this. Is black/white interracial dating as lopsided in europe as it is in the usa ? Are bm/wf couples much much more prevalent than wm/bf couples in the UK, France or Germany ?

The author of the post (Jessie Daniels ) is a sociologist.  
There doesn't seem to be any point in discussing these matters with sociologists or cultural anthropologists. They don't get it and they don't want to get it , at all . Most biologists and other life scientists seem pretty ignorant about race right now, but they might not remain so. The biologists and life scientists on that funding board probably let the sociologist have her way because they just didn't know how to articulate a defense of the race concept.

Anna, 
i don't think there's anything that unreasonable about asking whether the immigrant filipinos are heavily chinese. from what i read on wikipedia, the chinese and mixed chinese/filipinos make up about 15% of the population . Are they over , under or fairly represented in the USA ? 
My own anecdote : one girl I knew at university, whom i thought was simply chinese, on her own mentionned that she was half chinese/half filipino . I don't know if her parents were from there or if they met here in canada. In any case, she wasn't ashamed of her filipino heritage. 
 
Koreans/chinese/japanese may have been given tests in their own languages back home but they don't have much trouble with IQ tests in english given in the USA or elsewhere in the west anyways. Also ,It seems to me that a lot of indians are quite familiar with english and grow up with it all their lives so I don't see why giving those tests to educated indian adults is a problem . It could be a problem if you give them to illiterate people, I suppose . 
 
Spike , 
 
Holding stereotypes means that one has learned something about other people , either from one's own experience or indirectly through others and readings/etc . When combined with an open minded willingness to change one's opinions given new information, stereotypes are OK by me .

Dale J , 
 
I'd be curious about what proportion of american filipinos are CHINESE philipinos like Amy Chua.  
I wasn't able to find that information ... 
It could also be that filipino immigration was largely middle class (and that class is strongly chinese ) .

to A.T : 
 
What if, T.A , there was * really, for real* something keeping us from being competitive with , among others , whites ? Admitting for the sake of argument that whites have historically preyed upon black people , what if there was something about blacks made that predation easy ? I'm not saying that the people studying these things all have our interest at heart. I'm just saying that maybe they know something that we should also be aware of , if only to remediate . 
 
You say that people will just see whatever reinforces their prejudices. You assume prejudices are set in stone. Are they, really ? East asians , for instance , seem widely acknowledged nowadays , even among racist whites (!), as civilizational equals . Do you think this was the case in the early 20th century ? Most people have prejudices but most people aren't fanatical ideologues and their attitudes are subject to change , to varying degrees .

UU : 
 
I'm black , though i'm certainly not speaking for anyone but myself. 
As far as I'm concerned , just as James Watson said, there is simply no good reason to assume as a given that different ethnic or racial groups evolved in such a way that they're equally endowed with genetic features that promote, depress or do nothing for mental ability.  
 
Some may say that intelligence is so useful that it must have been selected in each population so as to end up distributed identically in modern populations. Intelligence is of course very useful and of course it gets selected , but there's no such guaranteed of equal outcomes that I know of.  
 
Our primate ancestors were at some point not very distinguishable from any ape. Intelligence was probably quite important back then and yet it didn't get selected for in equal amounts among the different apes . We got much , much smarter than our cousins. Anyways, it doesn't seem to me that nature believes in equality.  
 
What I hope intelligent black people get out of all this is that we should do something about this problem (it is a problem ) . What I hope is that those black people with the means and the brains ( they exist) will explore technological solutions ( genetic engineering ), social solutions ( eugenics ) and who knows what else . I hope people won't lie to themselves and think that we're just fine because we can "avoid malaria" (dixit robert sternberg).

Shakey : 
You said previously that employers using social realist's hiring methods would suffer.  
 
I'm saying that IQ-heavy environments like wall street front offices and technology firms that are at the top of their game hire heavily based on school pedigree or university major pedigree . This is almost the same as hiring mostly whites, asians and indians and it's not obvious to me that those firms are suffering from this state of affairs . 
 
Anyways, if this is not a big deal at all then social realist's hiring practices are no big deal and thus merit neither scorn nor praise, just indifference. Right ?

Ikram : 
 
Social realist tells us that he's actually been successful in business using the quick and dirty filtering that he describes. I don't have a hard time believing him .  
 
Filtering by race is similar , in a way , to the filtering by school that's commonly practiced by elite employers. Just like social realist's race based selection , school based selection seems to work ok . Ask Wall Street and Google. Ask the top french companies. Ask the top British companies and institutions . There are few enough false positives (dummies from great schools) and false negatives (geniuses from bad schools) that implementing more complicated selection procedures doesn't seem worth it for the talent seekers . Basically , using stereotypes isn't that stupid at all, as long as one allows one's belief to change according to new information . 
 
Thumbs up or down ? I'm a black man . If more and more people think like Social Realist ( how many already do ? ) it will make things pretty damn hard . Social Realist mentionned that he doesn't even care about educational pedigree and only trusts personal recommendations, when it comes to hiring black people ( that last point tells me that there is cold rationality in his attitude towards black employees. Were he hateful fanatic, he would make no exceptions whatsoever ). What can I say ? Were there no affirmative action of any sorts , Social realist would probably trust pedigrees more . 
 
The libertarian in me tell me that social realist should be allowed to hire whom he wishes to hire, no matter how inconvenient that is for me.  
But that can't work can it ?  
 
Thumbs halfway between up and down. This is only the beginning of the discussion on those issues .

Shakey says : 
 
"i don't see what the big deal is" 
 
Inded you don't see anything at all. 
Did you bother reading *anything* that was previously posted ? 
 
Social realist is serious.  
There are probably whole economic areas like high finance , high technology , high law (to a lesser extent maybe ?) where a company can *easily* thrive without paying any attention whatsoever to "diversity" , which mostly means non eastasian/non indian minorities . 
As for those jobs that require no ability at all, are you talking about education and low level gov jobs ? Surely you don't mean serious finance or serious engineering , science , manufacturing , serious trades or even serious arts and litterary endeavours . 
 
Just read the previous posts and countless others and you will see that everything you've said, every single word , has been already addressed and demolished when necessary.

Razib, 
small correction :) 
 
Though I spent my childhood in that region ( it was in gabon actually, the southern neighbour ) I'm actually of black carribean origin. I might also be one of the few here whose mother tongue is french .

sandgroper said : 
It's like seeing an African-American guy in a Chinese jacket doing kung fu - doesn't work visually 
--- 
Only if you're not used to it. While i was growing up in an african country, kung fu and other asian martial arts seemed a significicant youth subculture. Kung fu movies were extremely popular and some young men took these things very seriously . 
--- 
About nerdcore : 
It's surprising how segregated the scenes can be. The only black people who seem to be part of that scene are black nerds who only have white friends anyways. Some speak and dress "black" but they still only have white friends .  
The segregation can go quite far: I once ran into some guy in a chatroom who was looking for people into nerdcore rap like aesop rock/daedalus/prefuse73/etc and he actually said that he wasn't into "n*gger beats" like 50cents ! I asked him a few questions and he basically said that he was into rap, not into hiphop and that as far as he was concerned, that was white music now even if it had been invented by black people. I was surprised by his willingness to admit to it. 
 
about the original article : 
I guess for that "researcher" , it's all about black people, all the time. One would think that the nerds use their large vocabulary to convey precise meaning , but no, it's all about signifying that they're not black .  
 
Poor nerds.  
If they are into black culture, they're coopting, exotifying, exploiting and exerting their "white proviledge", whether they intend to or not (as progressive types will tell you, intend doesn't matter ) . 
 
If they don't particularly feel close to mainstream black culture (certainly the case for me ), they's shunning , outcasting , separating , keeping out , segregating , excluding, etc.  
As usual with people of a certain mindset, if you're white ( or rather, if you're not black/latino/gay/etc) you're wrong no matter what .