significantly greater number of sexual partners for both heterosexual men That seems like the linchpin for not finding it to be much of a riddle. That certainly flies in the face of what I have observed in life and what the tabloids seem to assume would be attractive to women. Has anyone ever calculated what the added fertility of more feminine men would have to be to balance out the reduced fitness of homosexuality in the population?

Why don’t you ever hear anyone saying that a person chose to be straight? Because its a ridiculous idea. Well of course it's a ridiculous idea - we're an organism that requires heterosexual activity to reproduce itself. By the same token, the notion that homosexuality - in an organism that requires heterosexual activity to reproduce itself - is "naturaal" is equally ridiculous. These studies that suggest genetic bases for homosexuality do not solve that riddle - they only make it more puzzling.

Lots of people in the Northeast make more than 100k, so I was curious as to whether concentration in the Northeast could explain these differences. The Pew study has data by region, and there is of course a correlation with Northeast concentration and numbers making 100k+. But the relationship described holds even after accounting for that. Here's a comparison of % of each denomination earning 100+ and their predicted % based on their concentration in the Northeast using OLS, in case anyone's interested.

The population of Hamilton Co,KS, is less than 3,000. So it could be that the uniformity of obesity levels across these western Kansas counties in contrast with the uniformly lower rates across Colorado's eastern counties could be an artifact of the estimation method, which uses state level data to estimate county level data where the statistical sampling is low.

You get yourself a card affiliated with your local airline hub carrier and you charge all your normal expenes with it and pay it off each month so you don't incur finance charges, then use the points for travel. Its a great deal.

East-Asian-comparable low scores for Botswana and Zimbabwe are surprising, no, given the high rates of HIV transmission?

No, the ability to do number theory or conceive of renates or arcane mathematical constructs has not been selected for. Such abilities are spandrels of more general reasoning abilities of various kinds. 
 
Is it a definite fact that these mental capablities are extant in all hunter-gatherer populations? Are we certain, for example, that there are full-blooded (not that that's easy to define necessarily) San who can do number theory or conceive of renates or arcane mathematical constructs (with of course the requisite education)? I have no idea - and it's not the easiest thing to google - so I'm just asking. How sure are we that these skills did come out of the hunter-gatherer toolkit?

You didn't have to know anything about molecular biology, epidemiology, or virology to smell the rat in Duesberg's argument. If AIDS was the result of recreational drug use, then it should have been rock musicians who were dropping like flies, not ballet dancers. 
 
The sad case of Christine Maggiore and her daughter should have been the final, tragic nail in that coffin.

Is it true that the large number of chromosomes (78) in the dog's genome has enabled such wide diversity in Canis familiaris? I recall reading Jonah Goldberg making that claim, so I'm inclined to be skeptical.

The Sputnik period was atypical for US history. 
 
Edison, Ford and Bell were living legends - American folk heroes decades before Sputnik. Now kids round out their top 5 Americans with Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and MLK. I really can't imagine that people in 1960 would be all that wowed by what we have today. A color television in every room and you can pay your bills online - whoopdeedoo. Sure, lots and lots of incremental improvements, but not much in our everyday lives they didn't already have. Compare that to 1910 to 1960 or 1860 to 1910 - the changes in people's lives were spectacular - and the former period included the 15 year stretch of the Great Depression and WWII. 
 
If you look at GDP statistics at the BEA site, you can see that our rate of growth has clearly shifted downwards over the last 40 years.

Derb: If the GSS had some decent graphing tools built in instead of those clunky bar charts, you'd be seeing a lot more of this. 
 
There is a bit of a learning curve, though granted not a terribly steep one - but between getting used to searching for variables, selecting on Rows vs. Columns vs. Controls and the filtering syntax, and then how exactly to go about capturing and editing the graphs/tables you want to display, it can be a bit daunting until you get your feet wet. You can probably count on dedicating a good hour or so the first time GSS-ing before getting anything useful out of it.

This is a no-brainer. If you spend your entire life learning and speaking a tonal language, of course you're going to be better at hearing and distinguishing music tone than someone who speaks a monotonic language as their mother language. 
 
How is this a "no-brainer." Wouldn't it be a sensible assumption that the meanings in the tones in tonal languages are based on relative intervals rather than absolute tones (else how could deep voices communicate with high pitched ones) and thus not requiring "perfect pitch". Personally, I find these results surprising - absolute tone recognition is a talent I'd have figured to be innate, not learned.

The Keynesians fell from favor because what they claimed could never happen did happen in the seventies, and big time: high inflation, high unemployment, stagnant growth. Then what the monetarists claimed could happen did - stable growth, low inflation, low unemployment from '83 to '01, with a slight blip in 1991. So they've come to dominate. 
 
What none of them understood is how individuals would respond to the underlying incentives these policies created - in particular, the ability of savvy, influential players to tweak rules to their advantage (the most notorious being the leverage rule relaxation of a few years ago). 
 
I don't think micro-behavioral theories like money illusion are needed when the simple incentive concept suffices.

Peter Schiff seems to me to have made a better call on the housing bubble than Shiller, predicting a "precipitous" drop in prices vs. Shiller's prediction that they would "fall 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the next generation." Schiff's description of what was going wrong in the housing market appears in hindsight to have been dead on. Given that, one would think the Austrian school would have gained a bit of respect, yet on Google Trends the term "malinvestment" can't even generate a graph.

I wonder who the other 2 guys are besides Greg who have 5 kids?

The Christian Right has the motivation and bottomless sums of money to help you out. 
 
No, I don't think so. Not that they would mind it if a vaccine could be developed to eliminate homosexuality, but I think their main interest is in curing it as a behavioral deviance (ie., sin). Proving that homosexuality is a real infectious disease would essentially excuse it as a behavior - not what they're looking for.

It makes more sense if we restrict "privacy" to "privacy from elites" 
 
I think one of the concerns in our present environment is that there are fairly common activities that are against the law - underage drinking, pot smoking, tax avoidance, construction without a permit, plumbing without a license, etc. With the advanced snooping techniques now available, it seems any average citizen could find himself in fairly substantial trouble - if not jail, one's career can certainly be in jeopardy. I don't see these things becoming legalized anytime soon, so "privacy anxiety" may only get more severe.

Thanks - comments and links very helpful. At least, I think I'll be able to appreciate the selection/drift debates a little more.

if, say, the common ancestor of a number of species had a gene for smelling compound X, then that gene became a pseudogene in all the species that adapted to environments without compound X, that wouldn't necessarily be evidence for positive selection. 
 
This is why I never understand drift - how could that be - how could this pseudogene make it to fixation without there being some advantage to losing its function? I probably just can't grasp the math, but I find it hard to believe that a trait without any advantage whatsoever can manage to swamp an entire population.

TGGP - just for the record - Article 4 Section 2: 
 
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due 
 
The constitution is sometimes vague, but that clause is about as definitive as it gets.