In the case of the sterile classes of social insects Darwin saw fairly clearly that the solution was in the relatedness of the members of the colony: 
 
This raises all kinds of conceptual trouble. 
 
Technically it is true that some degree of relatedness is necessary for the maintenance of eusociality. Imagine you take a couple colonies of social insects, and then, at every generation, you randomly reassign sterile workers among colonies, all other things remaining equal. This has the effect that workers in a colony are unrelated to their queens, or to each other. What would happen then? Well, eusociality would eventually fade away. Queens / colonies that beget good workers would not have any reproductive advanatge over those that beget lazy, feeble, or even (Heaven forbid) fertile workers. As a result, their genes would not be favoured, natural selection for good (cooperative) workers would not occur, and eusociality would decay in mutational meltdown. 
 
This is why the two Wilsons' insistence that group selection is a valid, autonomous explanation for the maintenance of eusociality (let alone its emergence) is difficult to understand. The thought experiment above isolates the effects of "pure" group selection - and demonstrates their inability to maintain eusociality. "Group selection" only works in association with (one could say "as a crutch to") kin selection. 
 
And yet... 
 
Notice that in eusocial colonies, individuals are completely dependent on each other. If they start reproducing selfishly, they can be successful while the colony survives, but cannot escape from it. When the colony finally collapses, they perish with it. The situation is exactly equivalent to that of cells within a multicellular body - they can start reproducing selfishly, and be successful within the body (that't what we call "cancer"), but once the body dies, they die with it. It's almost (almost) impossible for cheaters to survive and thrive in the long term. 
 
Yet we have no qualms in stating that the delicate organisation of the human body is maintained by individual-level selection (that is, selection at the level of groups of cells), but somehow when it comes to social insects we insist that kin selection is important and that group selection (that is, selection at the level of the colony) cannot suffice as an explanation. 
 
It's not easy to see the objective difference between the two cases.

My guess is that there is a sort of moral general factor too and that if you score higher on purity it indicates that the person has stronger overall moral instincts. 
 
Only if you value "purity" (which, by the way, seems to have little to do with cleanliness) above other factors. Or in other words, only if you have a "conservative" morality (emphasis on observing taboos) as opposed to a "liberal" morality (emphasis on being good to others).  
 
Slightly OT: Jonathan Haidt on morality, evolution, and why the "new atheists" get it wrong.

Steve: perhaps we are lucky, but looking at the whole fact, once our laws of physics and chemistry are taken for granted, it seems that the emergence of complex life is pretty certain. 
 
Emregence of life and complex molecules: contrarily to what you may hear, there is no chicken and egge problem here. You can have rough replication (and therefore Darwinian evolution) among simple autocatalytic reactions within primitive containers (lipid droplets). Proteins or DNA can come later. Check out Chrisantha Fernando's work, it's worth it. 
 
Emergence of complex life: Once a solid genetic repository exists (nucleic acids), and once proteins are formed, the sky's the limit. The amazing flexibility of proteins provides an ideal playground for evolution: mutating a protein will give you another protein, which has a high chance of doing something interesting as well.  
 
That's why the "local fitness optimum" argument is weak in biological evolution (as opposed to artificial life simulations and evolutionary algorithms, where it is very real). In the real world, there is no local fitness optimum - there's always a way to do something else, lurking nearby in the "adjacent possible" (Stuart Kauffman's expression). Biochemistry is weird like that. When you add in the fact that living creatures define each other's fitness landscape, and that one lineage's evolutionary change may well destabilise the fitness landscape of many other lineages, you have a recipe for perpetual change. 
 
Now you may argue that amazing power of proteins is in itself an extremely improbable event. But when you look closely, you realise that this power has a very simple cause: the ability of carbon atom to form long, flexible chains. So you need to regard the existence of carbon itself as an improbable event. That's Fred Hoyle's position. I can't really evaluate it - again, I take the laws of physics for granted. 
 
All: you really want to read "Chance and Necessity", by J. Monod (the guy who discovered gene regulation). It's the death certificate of vitalism and creationism as a serious scientific position. It was written in no small part as a rebuke to the "leftist creationists" of the time, but it also addresses spiritual concerns about evolution and the absence of meaning or purpose in the universe (in short: "get over it"). Importantly, it's packed with actual scientific content - you learn a lot about the behaviour of proteins.

I'm confused. I thought the North Indian - South Indian division discussed in this paper was much, much older than the Dravidian / Aryan cultural division (IIRC Vedic people are thought to have arrived c. 1500 BC)?

The Noah family: 
 
Zacharie Noah (the grandfather): Football player for the Cameroon national team. 
 
Yannick Noah (the father): Tennis champion, won the French open. Went on to coach the national side and win the Davis cup. Also a successful pop singer. 
 
Joakim Noah (the son): Basketball player in the Chicago Bulls' starting 5 (chose France as a national side, despite speaking French with an American accent, in contrast to Tony Parker). 
 
All of them succeeded at the very highest level, the one you can't reach without good genes. On the other hand they all succeeded at different sports, requiring different characteristics: Joakim's 2m11 frame would be a hindrance in football.

The Pashtuns of Pakistan may be a special case: many of them are war refugees. OF course, some have been refugees for a long time, so even if we succeed in turning Afghanistan into a land of milk and honey, it's not at all clear how many would return.

In contrast Lucy is already upright in posture, yet her brain volume is far from amazing. There's more of a whiff of contingency and mystery about what exactly was going on back then, compared to the Homo period. 
 
The general trend of australopihecines was not towards getting smarter, but rather getting tougher, apparently developing increasingly "robust" types. The development of the Homo branch was originally an evolutionary footnote which locally reversed the global trend. In the words of Lewin and Foley ("Principles of Human Evolution"), a "much more isolated and insignificant trend" compared to the general trend towards robustness. Only with Erectus did Homo achieve prominence over the austalopithecines. 
 
Or at least so goes the current conventional wisdom. Maybe this new specimen will help rewrite the books?

Let me be the first to suggest the dumb, obvious, almost certainly wrong hypothesis: life expectancy at birth increases in a depression, because in a depression poorer people make fewer babies! 
 
The mortality rates for old folks seem rather difficult to explain. Can caloric restriction explain a distinct year-to-year difference in mortality among 80 years old people? For younger people, you might invoke socio-environmental causes (e.g. working conditions), but those don't apply to the 70+yo class.

You have to admire the timing: the mother of all archeological treasures has just been found in England, including an Anglo-Saxon golden strip from the 7th Century with a quote from the Latin Vulgate engraved on it. 
 
The quote is not random: it talks about striking enemies, on a weapon fitting. So the owner was educated (and Christian) enough to have an appropriate Old Testament quote engraved (in correct Latin) on military hardware.

France was a kingdom, not a nation, and France and the French, or England and the English, as they are understood now, did not as yet exist, and noone who lived in England or France identified themselves as such, not even on the level a modern day Red Sox fan identifies with Red Sox nation. If the real John of Gaunt had delivered the 'this England' speech in the 1390's that Shakespeare puts in his mouth in a play written in the 1590's, his contemporaries would have looked at him like he was from Mars. 
 
That might be an exaggeration. Joan of arc was very explicit about the ethnic motivation for her struggle ("Bouter les Anglois hors de France").  
 
In the Roman de Renart, there is a scene where Renart the Fox pretends to be English to dupe Ysengrin the wolf, adopting a stereotypical "Englishman-trying-to-speak-French" language that is surprisingly similar to the modern one. In Chretien de Troyes' version of the Arthurian cycle (pretty much the standard one for us moderns), Lancelot is explicitly described as French, as opposed to the mostly British other knights. Note that both were written down by highly educated clerics, elaborating on popular material. 
 
National feelings extended over smaller areas (the "culturally French" Duchy of Burgundy had no qualms in siding with the English, and let's not even talk about the South), but the concept of an "us" as opposed to a "them" was nevertheless very much present. I think.

the suggestion that Christianity was responsible for the perpetuation of classical high culture is incoherent, the same level of civilizational complexity which would allow for the perpetuation of classical high culture in some form may also be necessary for the perpetuation of Christianity 
 
But the pro-religion argument is precisely that the Christian organisational network was itself the enduring backbone that allowed for the maintenance of some degree of complexity (literacy and inter-regional communications). When barbarian rulers sought to establish some form of bureaucracy, they relied heavily on the structures and manpower provided by the Church. 
 
The fact that this network failed in Britain and the Balkans, together with "civilisation" in general, does not indicate the causal direction between the two. For one thing, was it really as developed and structured in these regions as in, say, Gaul?  
 
Also, it's worth pointing out that the Anglo-Saxon rulers remained pagans, while the Franks converted to various forms of Christianity (Arianism/Catholicism, the latter eventually winning out with Clovis). This may comfort the pro-religion viewpoint: areas where the barbarian leaders converted to christianity saw the persistence of (some impoverished form of) organised civilisation, while those where the barbarian elite remained pagan did not. Of course, there may well be counter-examples to this idea. 
 
(Btw, it's written "?uvre", or "oeuvre" if ligature is unavailable, but never "ouvre" - that means something else. Thus quoth the nitpicking gallotroll.)

But when you're an oppressed minority you see the virtue of tolerance firsthand. When the shoe is on the other foot this principle of the religion seems to fade. 
 
Some dude in Mekkah, weak and isolated: "No constraint in religion!" 
 
The same dude a few years later in Yathrib, strong and well-manned: "kill them wherever you find them". 
 
Naskh does tend to work in a very clear direction, and that sure ain't towards more of the touchy-feely, warm fuzzy stuff.

There is also a pretty good argument that Shang and earlier proto-Chinese were in some kind of cultural contact with Pacific coastal peoples of the Americas.  
 
I'd really like to get some reaonably reliable sources for that. Sounds pretty mind-boggling.

Well, America united Europeans into homogenous white people.  
 
If by "America" you mean the joint spread of Christianity and Hellenistic culture, then you might have a point. 
 
Admittedly, the division between Western+Central (Latin) and Eastern (Greek/Slavic) Europe was quite deep and lasted for some time, as indicated by the sack of Constantinople by Latin crusaders. But by the time of the Rise of Nations in 1830-1848, Western Europe clearly saw the Greeks as part of "us". Of course, the involvement of an unambiguous "them" (the Ottomans) certainly helped. 
 
Note that even today, national identities still take precedence over the sense of common Europeanness (even though the latter is still very real). So I'm not sure "homegeneous" is the right word. 
 
It seems to me that Europe is, and has always been, very similar to China in the Warring States period - just even more heterogeneous than that (I'm ready to guess there was much less difference between the languages of Wu and Qin than between Finnish and Greek).  
 
The major differences are: 
 
1- Our presumptive Qin (leaders that would unify the area by force) have either failed (Napoleon, Hitler) or have had their empires divided after their death (Charlemagne). 
 
2- We got rid of the "Warring" part - though that's admittedly quite recent.

To me that emphasizes how much World War II still looms in our popular culture, while the Great War is an ignored prologue. 
 
Also, this reflects the fact that the US were much more involved in WWII than in WWI. 
 
In France, WWI is still the the archetype of the horrors, the madness, and the general imbecillity of war, rather than WWII (the Holocaust and Nazi policies being separated from the war itself). High and local command ordering mindless charges of infantry against machine-gun fire, hundreds of thousands dying to gain just a couple hundred meters, "lunarisation" of the terrain - the encounter of mankind with industrial war had a long-lasting effect on the Western European psyche.  
 
Also, Western Europeans in general are rather oblivious to the fact that the Soviets won much of WWII for them, essentially by massively out-dying the Germans. The horrors of the Eastern Front are rather abstract for them (us).  
 
Also, at the risk of getting some flak, I found Wikipedia surprisingly useful and informative for WWII. In particular, I was aware of most of the details mentioned in the comments above (the Nazi plans for the East, how the Wannsee conference actually went on, the allied Morgenthau plan, etc.), basically from reading about them on Wikipedia.

IIRC, Mandelbrot's early observations are not so much about "Fractals" (geometric objects with a non-integer dimension), but rather about power laws, their scale-invariant structure (if I give you a variation graph, you won't be able to determine whether it describes daily, monthly, or yearly variation), and their consequences (mostly: large events are much more likely to occur as under a nomal law, essentially making any kind of forecasting useless in the long run).  
 
Essentially, it's statistics. Do statistics count as a "social science"? Certainly Mandelbrot and Paul Levy (his mentor) saw themselves as mathematicians rather than social scientists, or even economists.

I would classify "quantification of sub-conscious attitudes and prejudices" as both interesting and non-obvious. Social sciences have been on it for decades.  
 
In that regard, the implicit association test is pretty neat. Admittedly it post-dates the introduction of computers (though there is nothing in the design that requires computers, you could do it with just paper and photographs).

Obama didn't win the white vote, but neither did any Democrat since LBJ. 
 
In fact, according to this table, Obama did surprisingly well among white voters, for a (black) Democrat. 
 
Supporting Bill above, there does seem to be a Southerner effect: the three best performing democratic candidates were Humphrey, Carter and Clinton - they still lost the white vote, but only by 2-4 points. All were Southerners. The related article notices this as well.

If it's the same Robert Wright who committed that Nonzero book , I'm not expecting much.

if you see us linking to netnazis feel free to email me 
 
A lot of folks (myself included) would definitely put La Griffe du Lion in that category. Of course, it's your blog, so I guess "a lot of folks" (myself included) can just - how do you say - "suck it".