re: bob sykes, w. d. hamilton kind of makes a similar reference in relation to his late life skepticism of the efficacy of eugenics.

why you are asking me? you do know i'm not the author of this post, right?

wow. awesome post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate China 93.3% India 66.0% game, set, match :-)

try this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed

switching in bloglines to that feed worked. there's some weird issue, yes, but hopefully that will fix it (it wasn't posting to twitter either).

hm. could the fact that israel is a partially militarized society be part of the issue? from what i recall it seems that unless militarized societies steal stuff from societies they conquer (rome) or enslave those they conquer and collect rents (sparta) their level of economic productivity isn't that high. spending too much time engaging in basically a zero sum activity.

also, israel is one of the most multiethnic developed societies in the world.

i don't discount the ability of conscription to form bonds across class/ethnicity, etc. but, nothing so thorough and time-intensive as IDF service is needed for that (way past the point of zero marginal returns IMO). second, re: R & D, i'm skeptical that a small nation like israel couldn't just free-ride off US military inventions which eventually move into the public domain. i don't think israel's comparative advantage is taxing their citizens more to throw money at capital intensive projects which may pay off.

i gave up on wolfram alpha. it only seems to be able to give me answers to stuff i could find in wikipedia pretty easily anyway. re: west bank. the general explanation i hear about this is that west bank & gaza are REALLY underdeveloped socioeconomically, but international AID gives them a better health infrastructure.

A potential explanation, then, is that collectivism provides a network suitable for sustaining emotional well-being in those populations containing a high levels of social sensitivity alleles. i know that mormons have told me that the communitarian nature of their subculture is one reason they have higher than average life expec. would be interesting to look at allele differences in mormons vs. non-mormons. the hapmap whites are mormons.

"non sequiturs and simple factual errors" so how does this happen? they have to pass their letters to some other people for second opinions, right? or are some people just that insulated? it's like turning medical genetics into macroeconomics or something.

three quick comments here 1) my opinions as to the fact of particular correlations are provisional and subject to correction. i'm weak on the empirics, aside from what i know in my head, but i think my theoretical reasoning was robust 2) i think too often those of us interested in culture and history and anthropology, broadly construed, have been scared off by the jargon and normative framework ascendant in modern american cultural anthropology. my post, and my snark and frank unpleasantness, comes from having to deal with the fact that i'm a person interested in ethnography and cultural variation who has to run into a mound of totally unintelligible "discourse." i'm interested in naturalistic anthropology in the tradition of sperber, and modeling in the tradition of boyd and richerson. but this mode of analysis is pretty alien to most anthropologically interested people. 3) i'll have more to say in the near future. i have decided that i'm not going to shut up about this topic.

this was not my post :-)

arosko, don't take things too seriously :-) since i know you, i'll just leave at that.

kind of had the same thought john.

that's not my post.

i think it was after implantation: http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2010/02/my_genetic_future.php

carl, i was going to add that objection since you're the one who made me conscious of it. but i wanted to get discussion going...so yeah. those definitely weigh against it.

as a total ignoramus about this area, i would have assumed it was a non-surprise too. so is there a linguistic version of rRNA?

i can agree with the comment to a point, and yet re: china, i am not so sure. the origins of the chinese script go back to the shang after all, and the zhou framed themselves as the rightful heirs of the shang. though i can see the argument that the zhou were a rupture as well. i just don't think it's as clear cut as in india or greece. i perhaps overstated in regards to egypt and the near east; the ptolemies did view themselves as heirs of the egyptian pharaoh's, while the persians absorbed a lot from the babylonians and assyrians.

I might have already asked this before, but what are some good books on the history of the Persian empires? there's a lot on the achaemenids. but this is the only thing i've read on the sassanians that's devoted just to them: http://www.amazon.com/Sasanian-Iran-224-651-CE-Portrait/dp/1568591691/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277700600&sr=1-3

don't know. this is the closest post http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/obscure-middle-eastern-religious-cults.php