Apparantly many people are. It’s notable that you can either be born a non-taster or become one through high consumption of Capsaicin.

I wonder what the population percent is for different continents?

Addendum from Razib: Here are my previous related posts, Genetics of taste, PTC taste, balancing selection? and PTC, part II. From what I recall there was some correlation between non-PTC taste and relative insensitivity to capsaicin.

Posted by scottm at 09:37 PM

Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, former commander of the 101st Airborne Division and now commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq (and perhaps the smartest and most competent commander we have over there, not to mention a person who I am a pretty big fan of) has a very good editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post. One interesting tidbit in it caught my eye:

In the months ahead, the 16,000-strong border force will expand to 24,000 and then 32,000. In addition, these forces will be provided with modern technology, including vehicle X-ray machines, explosive-detection devices and ground sensors.

Once you’re done over there, General, why don’t you come over here and secure our border?

Note: Most of the links on this post, except for the actual article that Petraeus wrote, were written or posted when he was still a Major General. He has since been promoted.

Posted by Arcane at 10:45 PM

Richard Dawkins has a long piece in The Prospect on the issue of race (based on a section of his new book The Ancestor’s Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution). Two points:

He rejects Lewontin’s Fallacy (more here).
He avoids the full implications of some of the statistical assertions he is making about how “informative” racial identity can be.

I will leave it to readers to to figure out what I’m talking about on point #2, partly because I think we should focus on point #1 and be positive, and partly because it would serve you to “read the whole thing.”

When arguing about science in public forums, “Lewontin’s Fallacy” and the race-is-social-construct meme are really hard to refute, because people don’t really care much about the nitty-gritty, they take the word of “world famous evolutionary biologists” like Stephen Jay Gould as the last word. Well, Richard Dawkins just asserted in the above article that “In short, I think Edwards is right and Lewontin wrong.” Edwards is the geneticist who authored Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy.

Richard Dawkins is no W.D. Hamilton, J.M. Smith, let alone R.A. Fisher. Nevertheless, he is accepted by the public as an “authority,” so his words are precious gems that can to be used like drilling diamonds to bore into the established orthodoxy. I doubt most of the public has read The Darwin Wars or Defenders of the Truth, so they would not be aware that Gould and Dawkins were the leaders of two rival evolutionary biology polemical gangs. Rather, Gould and Dawkins are writers of books you have to have, but never need to read! Dawkins can help nullify Gould & co., and more importantly, for some in the liberal set, since Dawkins is European, and it’s always “better in Europe,” he trumps Gould!

Update: Dawkins on Race by Steve Sailer.

Posted by razib at 04:00 AM

Randall Parker already caught this as of this posting, it appears.

In an astonishing report from the left-leaning BBC News, the brother of Thabo Mbeki, Moeletsi Mbeki, has come out roaring against Robert Mugabe and stated, “The average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism. In the 1960s African elites/rulers, instead of focusing on development, took surplus for their own enormous entourages of civil servants without ploughing anything back into the country . . . ” He also made comparisons between Nigeria and China, saying that while China had lifted 400 million (the article states, incorrectly, 400,000) out of poverty, Nigeria had pushed 71 million below the poverty line.

Of course, the BBC article ended with the statement, “[Moeletsi Mbeki] has business interests across Africa.” It’s as if that somehow makes what he says illegitimate. How can a person who owns businesses and creates wealth possibly care about poverty? This is sort of like what they taught in my African Politics class, where we studied things as dependency theory and world-systems analysis out of Marxist journals such as the New Left Review (which, I will admit, does publish some very interesting stuff).

BBC also links to a neat set of charts comparing poverty levels from 1990 to 2000 on various continents.

See Parker’s post for more neat stuff about this. Of course, there are always those who [foolishly] argue the exact opposite about countries like South Africa.

Yes, there is crime, unemployment, and AIDS. But from my perspective on the street, in the heart of it, I don’t believe the problems are as big as the reports make them out to be, or as insurmountable as the naysayers would have them seem. With a black majority that is stunning in its patience, understanding, and willingness to find a way, South Africa will not only survive but thrive.

I don’t see how one can be optimistic about South Africa when its president continues to pile up the welfare state and gouge money out the still-small private sector, still questions whether there is a link between HIV and AIDS, refuses to allow the import of AZT, etc.

I could go on, but I won’t.

Posted by Arcane at 01:03 PM

This article highlights a changing trend in medical science, the realization that men and women are physiologically different, respond to diseases differently, and get diseases at different rates. A quote from this doctor is good news;

“Women are different than men, not only psychologically (but) physiologically, and I think we need to understand those differences,” says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

DeAngelis, who became the journal’s first female editor in 1999, says she has made it a mission to publish only research in which data are broken down by sex unless it involves a disease that affects just men or women.

Now they just need to realize and come to terms on the biological differences of race.

Posted by scottm at 08:20 PM

Tha Beeb has posted an eight-image photo journal about the Yezidis

(i.e. Kurds who resisted conversion to the religion of their Muslim conquerors).BBC News
Yezidis are an ancient, pre-Islamic sect of uncertain origin.

LexicOrient
Researches [sic] believe that the Yazidi creed has elements from Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Justin Huggler, “Hell’s Angels”, The Independent, 2003 November 29.
The Yezidi believe that after man’s creation, God ordered the angels to pray for Adam, but that one angel refused – there is a similar belief in Islam.
….
Their problems have been compounded by the widely accepted belief that Yezidism was a sect that split from Islam – which makes them apostates in the eyes of many Muslims. The Yezidi deny that their religion is an offshoot of Islam – they say it is centuries old and predates Christianity.In all likelihood, the story of the angel’s refusal was transmitted from Yezidism to Islam or, at least, from a common antecedent, than the other way round. I’d want to drag my copy of The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels out of storage before I go into greater detail.

Yezidism, like Coptic Christianity, is one of the only religious relicts in the Middle East to have survived the rise of Islam. However, looking at its apparently Gnostic aspects, I personally doubt that Yezidism, in its present form, predates Christianity. The Yezidi syncretism also seems to borrow heavily from the pre-Christian Zoroastrianism (one of the Yazidis in the Independent article is named Nawroz Ali) as well as the post-Christian Manichaeism (itself a syncretism in which Zoroastrianism and Christianity, alongside Buddhism, predominated). Perhaps, before the rise of Islam, the region was characterized by a diverse spectrum of every shade of synthesis between Christianity and Zoroastrianism (and, as one moves further east, Buddhism as well, as evidenced by inscriptions referring to “Buddha-Mazda”) despite the Sassanids’ intolerance of Zoroastrian heresies.BBC News
Yezidis remain fiercely proud of their traditions and have resisted attempts to “convert” them.

This has led to devil-worshipping allegations and, in some cases, oppression by their Muslim neighbours.

Justin Huggler, “Hell’s Angels”, The Independent, 2003 November 29.
Muslim extremists turned the Yezidi elopement tradition against them and started kidnapping Yezidi women from the fields by force, then making them convert to Islam.
….
[Majdal al-Hakkari, who runs the local Yezidi cultural centre in Sinjar] and his friends say that, rejected by everyone else, they have come to think of themselves as ethnic Yezidis. One of them proudly reads out a list of demands, for recognition for the Yezidi in Iraq’s new government, for UN protection. But the sad truth is that no one is listening.

The Yezidi are almost the only minority in Iraq not to have a seat on the new US-appointed Governing Council. Despite Yezidi representations to the Americans, the powerful Kurdish factions simply announced that the Yezidis were Kurds and should be represented by them – an easy way to boost Kurdish numbers, and therefore, influence.

Without a stake in power, the Yezidi remain at risk as conflicting parties struggle for control of this part of Iraq. Worse, they are in serious danger from the Wahabi Muslim extremist factions that have been growing in power since the fall of the Saddam regime.In other words, those from whom the nigh-extinct Yezidis are in greatest danger of genocide, are the same people whom John Pilger, Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein and others have praised as the “resistance”.

Thanks, ass.

Fortunately the following picture means that I don’t have to end on a bitter note.

Could these two be any cuter? They might even give Belle’s belles a run for their money in the adorability stakes.

* Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal, it’s fantastic!

Posted by jeet at 01:56 AM

For the aphoristically minded: Men created civilization…to impress women.

Posted by razib at 07:25 PM

lindenen:
Man. Our diet is so crappy.

I will be the first to admit that, serendipitously lazy yet nutritious dishes* aside, mine is too.

There was a debate a few months back that, in a nutshell, pitted absolute standards of living against relative standards of living.

The libertarian gourmand Waddling Thunder contributed, “It’s indisputably cheaper to go the grocery store and buy entirely healthy grains and greens than it is to eat some half-garbage from a fast food restaurant. It’s at least as fast as well, and I refuse to believe most people haven’t got a few hours they now spend in front of a TV to cook food and freeze it for their families. The fact is that they don’t want to, and prefer to spend that time doing other things. That’s fine, but they don’t get to them complain that the supposed rich are eating healthily while they’re not.”

I agree with him up to a point but share the same reservation as the commenter who replied, “You are right…that it can all be done healthily on a budget, but it’s not as easy everywhere as you make it out to be. I’m not saying it’s not possible. I’m just saying…”

The fundamental issue here is one of opportunity cost: how we choose to spend the limited resource of our own labor. I enjoy taking a Saturday out to do a week’s shopping and cooking when I have the time to spare. But during term with a part-time job on top of studies, I derive more utility from the completion of my coursework than from a home-cooked meal. For many, if not most, of us, time and money are at a premium, meaning that when a trade-off is forced between time, money and nutrition, nutrition is usually the first to give way.

Opportunity cost is also the force that drives one of the few faultlines between free-market libertarians and “family values” conservatives.Joanna Moorhead, “‘For decades we’ve been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we’ve been duped'”, The Guardian, 2004 September 22.
(hat tip: Stambord)

The unpalatable fact, she says, is that there are only so many hours in the day and only so many days in the week and whatever else we expect of the UK and EU the one thing their legislation cannot give us is the one thing that working mothers so desperately crave: more time.
….
“The fact is that children are a 20-year project and a career is a 20- to 40-year project and there is an incompatibility there.” Over the past eight years, Hakim has written six books and she says, “There’s no way I could have done that if I had had children.”
emphases mineThe more skilled a woman is, the greater the opportunity cost she and her household pay when she spends time to raise children rather than work. When both parents work, the diversification of revenue sources means that the household is somewhat less vulnerable to economic shocks. Of course, the flip side of that is that the more financial independence wives have, the less willing they are to stay in troubled marriages, increasing the rate of divorce.

Skilled unmarried women will both delay bearing children and reduce the number of children they do bear to minimize income lost. This is a pattern we see not only in in the “North” but even in societies as recently industrialized as Singapore.Ellen Nakashima, “With Birthrate Falling, Singapore Targets ‘Lifestyle Impotency'”, The Washington Post, 2004 September 11.

“One of the most radical things you can do in Singapore is be contented with your life,” [said National University of Singapore professor Chua Beng Huat]. “That means you won’t compete like hell for the next dollar. The ability of the government to maintain its competitive edge economically will collapse.” So, he said, people have been conditioned to excel.
….
[Married couple Sarah Wee and James Ng] eat out every weeknight because they can afford to and because Wee is often at her desk until 9 or 10 p.m., make dining at home difficult.
….
“We are so used to a double income,” Ng said. “When she becomes a full-time mother, we will become a single-income family. I don’t know whether we’re prepared for that.”

According to [Victor Goh, an obstetrician who in 2002 conducted a study on sexual habits], if the government wants to boost birthrates, it must get people to have children earlier. A woman’s fertility peaks in her late teens and early twenties, he said. “It’s already a bit late,” conceded Wee, who turns 29 in October. But rather than rush into having a child, she said, “we want everything to be perfect.”

Ng and Wee, a teasingly playful couple who met through their church, voiced another concern that makes them think twice about having children: the stress placed on children in Singapore’s exam-focused schools, what Ng called a “rat race.” He bemoaned the way parents compete to see whose child has more spelling worksheets in nursery school and how parents take part in lotteries to get their children into the best grade schools.Gene Expression readers ought to note that, under this state of affairs, it is the educated classes who are responding most strongly to the procreative disincentive of high income careers. The birthrates of those without the education or aptitude to pursue such careers have not fallen as precipitously. (At this point, I ought to acknowledge the racial dimension to the Singaporean government’s concern.)

Those who believe in both laissez-faire and the heritability of intelligence – and I know that among Gene Expression readers you are legion – ought to at least acknowledge the conflict between the two.

* For another serendipitously lazy yet nutritious dish, click here (hat tip: Belle Waring). In addition to being tasty and nutritious, this recipe is also filling, a virtue not to be underrated.

Posted by jeet at 11:37 PM

etrusco:
Oh you heretic! Ricotta? Bechamel IS an integral part of lasagna….damn americans…;)

Re: The following article

I’d bet good money that what happened to Greek moussaka happened to Italian lasagna. Hegemony, colonization, blahblahblah…

Judith Weinraub, “Back to the Classics”, The Washington Post, 2004 August 11.

[In] 1896, when Athens hosted the first modern-day Olympic Games…the food on the very best Athenian tables was French — chicken in a red wine sauce or a white sauce thick with Gruyere cheese, and boned poached fish with mayonnaise. More traditional regional dishes such as eggplant caviar or the caper, potato and garlic dip known as skordalia or braised wild greens were shunted aside as lower-class.

“The fashionable food of the time was completely French,” says Aglaia Kremezi, a Greek culinary historian and cookbook author. “The chefs were French-trained. The menus were written in French, with all French specialties.”

Kremezi, whose new book, “The Foods of the Greek Islands” (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), celebrates regional foods, thinks that’s a shame. “At the end of the 19th century, they wouldn’t have been interested in these [regional] dishes,” she says. “They weren’t considered fashionable. Even up until the 1970s, no one would imagine cooking these foods at dinner parties or serving them in restaurants. They were considered foods of the poor.”
….
[After the emergence of Greece as a sovereign state in 1832] wealthy Greek families returned from self-imposed exiles in cosmopolitan cities all over Europe [bringing] the latest food trends with them. “They knew what the rest of the world was doing,” says Kremezi. “They knew that French was the ‘in’ cuisine. This is what they tried to imitate and cook for guests in their homes.[“]

Enter Nicholas Tselementes, a Greek chef who trained in Europe and who wrote what is considered the first comprehensive cookbook in modern Greek. Published in 1910, it became an important resource for fashionable Greek women and sold more than 100,000 copies in 10 editions by the time Tselementes died in 1958.

Although he pointed with pride to the ancient origins of the Greek culinary arts, Tselementes had a cooking style that was unabashedly European, and his influence was pervasive. In his kitchen, traditional regional dishes languished: No garlic for Tselementes — or as little as possible. No affection for the spicy dishes of the Turks and Slavs either. And no particular pride in highlighting the bounty of the countryside or the sea.

“He really changed Greek cooking — he destroyed it,” says Kremezi, who has been studying his work and its impact for a decade. Instead of olive oil, Tselementes preferred butter. Instead of presenting foods naturally, he preferred them covered with precisely made French sauces, like bechamel.

In fact, his affection for the classic white sauce made with flour, milk and butter transformed two of the most internationally famous Greek dishes, moussaka (usually made with eggplant and ground meat) and pastitsio (pasta and ground meat). Before Tselementes, the casseroles came to the table without their familiar creamy topping. Ever since, they are rarely served in their original naked state.

The many reprints of his popular 500-page cookbook, “Odigos Mageirikis” (“Cooking Instructions”) — even after his death — extended his reach to several generations. (It is no longer in print.)

“His book made the trend official,” says Kremezi, “so people who were preparing the traditional foods were made to feel inferior.”

emphasis mine

Posted by jeet at 11:34 PM

David Geary has a new book out on Intelligence and EP (here is a précis).

I won’t have time to read it thoroughly until Thanksgiving break, but I have read oodles of Geary’s work (as he and I work at the same university, although in different departments) and, traditionally, he has had a nice appreciation of individual differences and doesn’t appear to back down too much from the controversial issues (i.e., sex differences). Thus, the book will probably be well worth a read if you can get your hands on it (well, if you can believe Pinker, anyway).

Posted by A. Beaujean at 04:27 PM