meh. so what if i'm an evolutionary dead end? i'll be dead. should i care what happens to the world as long as it's not while i'm alive? 
 
for those who have plenty of kids, great! do whatever makes u happy. but there's no way i'm having 5 kids just so i can potentially help ward off the "coming idiocracy." 
 
if u wanna compete w/ octomom, be my guest. i don't care enough. not nearly enough. switch up the incentives so that i'll benefit in my own lifetime and i'll reconsider.

"My new PC comes with a separate graphics card with a 3-d graphics chip so enormous that it has its own fan to keep it from melting down from all the heat it generates." 
 
welcome to the 3d graphics world... of 10 years ago. apparently u aren't much of a gamer. the gpus of today handle physics calcs too. but the two are beginning to converge as cpus get more cores and gpus become more generally programmable. 
 
but, i'm not sure that visual processing in ppl is really all that similar to graphics processing. the gpu is running algorithms designed to output colored pixels on a monitor. the visual part of the brain is running algorithms to interpret incoming visual data. gpus are doing almost the opposite of what the visual brain is doing. maybe they could do the same thing if given the correct algorithms, but even then i'm not sure the gpu architecture would be very optimized for the task. would the brain's architecture look the same if it was designed to output information instead of interpret it? 
 
this is however speculation. someone familiar w/ neuro-architecture feel free to debunk me.

inductivist said: "How about this argument: We have to be worried about world opinion, and I suspect that, except for part of Western Europe, much of the globe thinks we're freaks for instituting gay marriage." 
 
not only western europe. thailand openly tolerates gays, lesbians and cross-dressers. it even openly allows gays in the military. it doesn't allow gay marriage (it does have civil unions), but there are certainly many advocates for it there. 
 
cambodia is also relatively tolerant. it's king actually shows support for gay marriage in 2004, but no law was passed in regards to this. 
 
there have been attempts in other parts of asia to allow gay marriage by law. these laws haven't passed, but i don't think they would necessarily consider us "freaks" for allowing it in a few states.

i suppose i couldn't disagree more w/ that observation. i've met a few whites that were intellectually curious, but i've met far more asian americans that were. maybe it's a function of socializing w/ more asians than whites.

haven't read thru this (nor am i knowledgeable enuf to make informed comments anyways), but i thought this might be an important development. 
 
anyways, here's the summary: 
 
Development and function of the brain requires the coordinated action of thousands of genes, and currently we understand the roles of only a small fraction of them. Recent advances in genomics, such as the sequencing of entire genomes and the discovery of RNA-interference as a means of testing the effects of gene loss, have opened up the possibility to systematically analyze the function of all known and predicted genes in an organism. Until now, this type of functional genomics approach has not been applied to the study of very complex cells, such as the brain's neurons, on a full-genome scale. In this work, we developed techniques to test all genes, one by one in a rapid manner, for their potential role in neuronal development using neurons isolated from fruit fly embryos. These results yielded a global perspective of what types of genes are necessary for brain development; importantly, they show that a large variety of genes can be studied in this way. 
 
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000111

what i was really wondering/interested,in though was why you (and seemingly several others who frequent this area of the blogosphere) seem to take joy in such a scenario and the crushing of egalitarian dreams. 
 
i have often wondered the same thing. better policy decisions would certainly be one outcome, but a loss of hope in a large segment of society would be another outcome. egalitarianism may indeed turn out to be a pipedream, but those who would rejoice in such an outcome seem to be afflicted with a great bout of schadenfreude.

"* to some extent i do think that it is an arguable point that anyone who is smart enough to be a tenure track professor is probably irrationally diminishing their earning power. " 
 
possibly, but there's also a potential explanation for this behavior. males are geared to strive for status, and money is but one kind of status. what professors lose in financial gain, they might make back in respect or deference for their demonstrated intellect. if they are extremely talented, they also have a chance of having their name forever associated with whatever discoveries they make.

look it up urself if u're so concerned about it.

It doesn't matter. 
 
so u really see no difference between believers of naturalistic evolution and believers of intelligent design?

Belief that "human beings developed from an earlier species of animals" is 70 % for all of Europe and highest in the northwest; both southern and ex-communist countries score lower. The only "European" country where a majority disagrees is Turkey. 
 
i think that question is poorly worded. there's no way to tell if the respondents believed in naturalistic evolution or a guided one like intelligent design. by that measure, 40% of americans would agree.

someone had to call my bluff.  
 
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm 
(i just searched google for american belief in evolution.) 
 
when i first saw the page i just glossed over the source, so i'm gonna need to retract that 90% statistic b/c it came from a 1991 poll. the more recent polls haven't broken down the participants by race. it does appear that views have changed somewhat since 1991. particularly, the overall belief in naturalistic evolution had risen by 4% and creationist views had risen by 8% by 2006 showing growing polarization. caucasian percentages in 1991 tracked the overall breakdown pretty closely, but i don't know whether that still holds true today. even so, i think it's safe to say that the vast majority of white americans still don't believe in naturalistic evolution.

david, the point i was trying to make was that he limited his defense to the northwestern european civilization as if they existed in a vacuum. he specifically didn't include the greeks, italians, and middle easterners whose works led to the scientific revolution. 
 
any confusion on ur part regarding greeks and english getting lumped together is an error on my part. the white in my mind was that of derbyshire's northwestern europeans. 
 
and my sneering is not directed at whites in general but derbyshire himself. i'm saying that the "civilization" that he proclaims to defend doesn't hold the views that he projects upon it. conflating english and scots-irish is done by derbyshire himself.

leave it to derbyshire to turn a conservative religious attack on evolution into an attack on the entire northwestern european (white) civilization. he conveniently overlooks the fact that 90% of white americans believe not in evolution but in some form of god created/directed/guided process. so much for his vaunted white race.

peter, do u have any statistics that actually show this or is this just by observation? 
 
the men u describe seem to be in the upper echelons of white society. 
 
the ones i've seen are most certainly not of that class. i've seen some men of rather modest education and means after east asian women. these are people i would categorize as dorks rather than nerds because they are socially inept and do not have above average intelligence.

his mother would note that all the white women married to korean american men at their church were fat or ugly. 
 
its funny u mention that b/c many east asians think the asian women white guys go for are ugly. the fact that lucy liu has become so popular has a lot of east asians scratching their heads.

thinking about this further, i think agnostic's generalization is still too broad. he says that asian guys experience shell shock from the bar/nightclub scene. but from personal experience, i know many young east asians love the club scene. in urban centers, clubs realize this and some promote different nights for different crowds. friday nights for blacks and saturday nights for asians, or vice versa. it isn't uncommon to enter a hip club and see 80-95% of the patrons are asian. when asians dominate a club i don't see as many wm as i might otherwise expect w/ such a gathering of af. they prolly aren't comfortable being in the minority or (as has also been observed) are told they aren't especially welcome by the am in the club. 
 
i'm not arguing that this gives am much confidence/success w/ wf. just that asians, including am, are not afraid of clubbing as an activity. east asians are not all boring calculators.

African (and, presumably, African-American) females have high bullshit detectors? That is a load of, well, bullshit. Black neighborhoods all over America are chock-full of black women who've been pumped and dumped by black men, left with nothing but bad memories and illegitimate children. 
 
that ignores the fact that it's predominantly black men who impregnate black women. if in fact bf's have high bs detectors, bm would have developed weapons against it. i'm still not inclined to believe this is the final answer however b/c it doesn't explain why af/bm couplings are not more prevalent. sure they exist, but no where near to the extent that af/wm couplings exist. to date, i've still heard of no single explanation that can account for the observations.

What does "recruitment" mean here? 
 
i was puzzled by this wording too. i looked it up and the best i can tell is that it means the offspring stays alive long enough to make it into the breeding population. i'm still not positive this is the true meaning however.

talked to a guy that lives in japan and he also heard that buildings are numbered by build order. he also mentioned that there are streets w/o names and even vet taxi drivers need u to point to a map to get u where u need to go. so... seems like precedence is the controlling factor. 
 
another person said that suburban areas are structured differently. so it may just be urban areas (in cities that had to be rebuilt after war? or not?) that have this issue.

perhaps the chaoticness also serves a function. if a particular society doesn't particularly welcome outsiders but still wants to receive mail, this would create a disincentive to entering the area w/o good reason as long as ur an outsider. 
 
but if precedence is the only factor, then yeah thats pretty dumb.

Question: Is it any less logical to number houses in a tract in the order they were built, than to number them consecutively along a single street? 
 
it might depend on how that society is organized. build order numbering gives ppl a sense of how old the house might be. in a less mobile society it might also connote a family's "seniority" in the neighborhood. 
 
my speculation may have zilch to do w/ why it was actually numbered that way, but without understanding their values it would be difficult to say whether its logical b/c there is information contained in the numbering.