spent less time gazing at face than non-face images, less time looking in the eye region of faces 
 
What, no Finn baiting?

In the case of Russia, it would have taken quite a lot of luck, but if Peter the Great's modernizations had stalled 
 
and/or if he had failed to found St Petersburg, that would have had all sorts of interesting consequences.

I don't understand this as lack of gene-flow but as continuous drift towards a narrow genotype. 
 
There is no gene flow in their model: 
 
The African and European populations were simulated independently of each other and modeled as Wright-Fisher panmictic populations. 
 
So in the model, the two populations actually never split. Wouldn't it be better to make a model which includes the subset-taking?

"Yes, what the researchers thought was Mungo's mtDNA is actually nuclear DNA that we all have" 
 
Do you have a reference for that? The original authors of the Mungo Man DNA paper were aware of the insert and claim that their DNA is not an insert, but a mitochondrial variant related to it.

Henry, I beame less concerned about Mungo's DNA being an artifact of contimination or error when I saw that it was compared to chimps, Neanderthals, as well as to modern humans, and it was placed on the Homo branch intermediate to Neanderthals and modern man. It could still be an error, of course, but a very lucky error, because Mungo's exact position on that tree would-- again -- be just what you'd imagine mitochondrial evidence of regional pre-modern mixture to look like. 
 
It's been suggested that postmortem damage at mutational hotspots may produce such weird results. 
 
Apropos John Hawks, his latest post today discusses a fictional story in Nature with a "surprise ending" that may delight GNXP readers. But isn't there a second surprise ending that Hawks has missed?

"legs-shaving"? LOL. How many % of women are "full women" according to this criterion?

The only thing that makes sense is K=3, if we take the blue and red components as one. But in that case, I'd expect the "component" to be the yellow one 
 
Which "one" do you mean?

Despite their Semitic linguistic and genetic nature they are accepted as fellow Europeans by almost all members of the EU because thy are aware of the bloody fights they have engaged in which always seem to fall on the side of "western civilisation". 
 
Really? People in Finland and Sweden (for example) seem to care fuck all about whether Maltans are Europeans or not. So those tourist islands in the Mediterranean have a few more or less swarthy natives, who cares? If Malta was the size of Turkey, people would care more about the ethnic makeup, but they would also start caring about the theocratical aspects of the island.

"Until northern Europeans learned how to malt grain to brewing beer" - this implies that malting came late to northern Europe? Aren't there some grave goods etc that say otherwise? 
 
"the relative low-yield per acre of northern fruits" - this should be less of a problem as razib pointed out. It's relatively easy to pick large amounts of northern berries, but a lot of them contain large amounts of natural 'preservatives'. This makes brewing from them difficult even for modern home brewers who can easily add extra sugar.

Attracting a mate long-term is about more than making his dick stiff. And even if your physical appearance could do that, a manly attitude (lawyers, bankers) will dampen this potential. 
 
But if *crying* is the ticket, why is it that in situations where much mate selection happens (for example, groups of young people out on the town), females tend to be comforted by their female friends when they get upset?

...the rank order seems about right for getting married too. 
 
About right, meaning what? Fugly people don't get married? 
 
Next, let me clarify the term "emotional fragility." It's a tendency to cry easily about something that would upset a caring person, a trait that will move men to protect and comfort her. [...] So, it serves the dual purpose of attracting mates and detecting who among them is worth hanging onto. 
 
So - let me get this straight. Men get hot if a woman they aren't already attracted to starts blubbering over random shit? Must try this out asap...

...I will post a short note about them on gnxp soon. 
 
Sounds good!

And indeed, some of the [other examples], like the Wilsons' reference to the territorial behaviour of female lions, seem even worse. How can anyone sensibly discuss this without mentioning that the lionesses of a pride are usually closely related? 
 
Another blatant example was in their popular article in the New Scientist: "Genes that cause beavers to build dams are still at a local disadvantage compared with genes in beavers in the same pond that don't build dams" 
 
For anyone still reading this thread: the work of A Gardner, SA West and AS Griffin (and other combinations) features some interesting criticism of the Wilsons and other new group selectionists.

Tahina spectabilis grows 4-10 meters tall - and sprouts an inflorescence that is 4 meters long! What evolutionary process could lead to such an expensive reproductive investment? 
 
Hm, compared to plant height it's Arabidopsis that has the more monstrous inflorescence :)

Finns were some of the best fighters in WWII but they don't seem to be aggressive people. 
 
Riight... less than 100 years from one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern times, and counting! 
 
Well, if you listen to those Swedes, Finns are above all else notorious for violence and pointless machismo. 
 
Jaakkeli, if your Swedish is up to it, you might enjoy this Swedish TV comedy, part 4, about 6 to 11 minutes in.

But the Swedes were pretty warlike as late as the 17th century, when under Gustavus Adolphus they invaded most of Germany and the Baltic states... 
 
A large part of those armies weren't ethnic Swedes, and in some battles mercenaries and/or Finns outnumbered them! This doesn't let the Swedes off the hook for warlikeness, but perhaps it demonstrates some dangers in deducing "national character" from history.

"The 500,000 Finns in Sweden have no rights," he pointed out. 
 
We are the shunned caste! 
 
It's not geographically continuous and there'd be no rational way to draw a state for Swedish-speakers, so there isn't the separation issue, but an author who would write that "Finland's struggles as a bilingual country can hardly be compared to those in Belgium or Canada" clearly knows nothing. 
 
I think they are referring to the separation issue. 
 
I never knew there was such enmity between Finns and Swedes. If I were to guess the people Finns disliked the most before reading this site, I would have guessed the Russians. 
 
No, you would be right. It's a love-hate relationship with the Swedes, plain hate with the Russians... 
 
And these aren't actual Swedes we are talking about. Real Swedes hardly know that the Swedish-speaking Finns exist, thinking they are simply a bunch of ethnic Finns aping Swedish sounds.

yeah, why so many more green-eyed ladies than men? 
 
Has self-reporting been controlled for? 
 
Just got a bit suspicious after finding poll results at the Finnish Cosmopolitan site (presumably mostly female) where 22% claimed to have green, 17% blue-green and 5% green-brown eyes. That's 44% shades of green which sounds a bit high to me. (The rest: brown 12%, blue 24%, blue-gray 14%, other 3%). Could women be reporting slightly "fancier" eye colors more often?

they may well have simply gone by *assuming* that the Saamis are swarthier and drawn the map darker according to where the author has believed Saamis to live in. 
 
That may be likely, I was extending the author some benefit of the doubt and assuming there were samples :) It does say that the "source" is the artist who drew the map, which doesn't sound that convincing.

Does it list the villages where the Saami samples were taken or at least the source? Predominance of dark hair and eyes might be more plausible than the swarthy Saami parade that jaakkeli predictably rains on, but that blob looks a bit too neat. The majority of modern Saami live in Norway, btw.