In a flashback to the IQ by state hoax, the Times has published a list of IQs by country for most, but not all, European countries. The ranking is attributed to Richard Lynn, without references.
The IQ range of 107 (Germany) to 89 (Serbia) resembles real IQ by US state data.
Razib whispers: Beware of British newspapers!!!
You want to know what John Hawks sounds like? He’ll be on Radio Open Source tomorrow (there should be a web feed). I talked to David Miller about getting John on the show before he became famous in Slate, so I am going to take a little credit for this. John and Spencer Wells will be “facing off.” John, can you ask Spencer to make his email address more accessible? I’m tired of people emailing me and asking about ways to contact him!
Update: John was really amused throughout the whole show. Spencer Wells asked kind of sarcastically (?) if I was “Richard Dawkins.” No, I’m not, Spencer 🙂 Thanks to Chris Lydon for giving a shout out to me at the end of the show. Also, Brendan said that both John and Spencer were on the show at my suggestion, so that’s cool, I guess I’m a “scientific activist” of sorts now?
I have a maxim, “beware of British newspapers.” I guess I should add the BBC to that list after reading this slapdash piece, Obese men ‘have lower IQs’. Speaking as a normal weight individual with a BMI of 22.8 I don’t have a personal axe to grind, but this study screams correlation does not equal causation.
The Boston study found that men with a BMI of 30 or more scored on average 23% lower marks in tests of mental acuity.
The authors make some noise about blood circulation, and I’m sure you can posit thousands of halfway plausible causative components, but perhaps fat dudes are just sluggish because they just ate before the test? Anyway, I suppose this is an example of a “contagious” meme. The science is plainly ludicrious, but it is pretty funny. And I am evil, so I guess it makes sense I would want to talk about obesity in somewhat mocking tones.
Addendum: The same researcher has found a positive link between high cholesterol and IQ.
A few days ago I received an email from a reader asking me about the possibility for differentiation of populations because of the postgenomic era, eg., the use of multiple markers to achieve separability. They brought up the near disjoint character of the Duffy antigens between Europeans and Africans (ergo, its historical utility in calculating white admixture into the African American population). One thing I offered is that if a derived allele is near fixation (near 100% in group X), then it will likely be characterized by high frequencies in many other groups and one might find it more worthwhile to search for populations that remain in the ancestral state. In other words, resistence to the acquisition of beneficial alleles by particular local populations, or, more likely, their insulation because of time and space from the region of the origin of a current selective sweep, will be more common than the detection of locally stable clusters of high derived allele frequencies. My hunch is that highly beneficial alleles that emerge within a population will most likely be beneficial in other populations and deme-to-deme gene flow is a powerful force. For example, I think something like lactose tolerance is relatively common, an allele which swept through distinct and varied populations in Eurasia where cattle culture was feasible. This doesn’t people separability is not possible or plausible, obviously Risch’s work falsifies that manifestly, rather, I think that the pairwise comparison of nearly disjoint allele frequencies across populations is going to be a lot less interesting than the richly complex relief of gradients which will track geography and history ways we don’t even understand yet.
Crooked Timber has done a web seminar on Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science
I was especially happy to see John Holbo’s piece, “Mooney Minus the Polemic?”, which points out the exception of science friendly libertarians and their own disdain for the liberal abuses of science:
[hypothetical libertarian soliloquy:] Liberals are the ones who are always refusing to look at the facts. Look what they did to poor Larry Summers because he tried to speak truth to power! They buried their heads in the sand when The Bell Curve came out! Whimpering “frankenfood.” Postmodern nonsense! What the academy needs is a return to reason!
The comments thread of “The Stars and Stripes Down to Earth (posted for Daniel Davies by HF)” includes some suggestions re: a Democratic war on science along the same lines.
Overall, Chris [link to his site at ScienceBlogs] does a good job of handling the criticism.
Below is an image that should strike fear into the hearts of all birds, from below and above, evil knows no bounds! On a serious note I was chatting with a friend of mine about the possible hypotheses for the domestication of the dog, and when we moved onto cats he remarked that I’d had it flipped around, it was the cats who domesticated us….
Interesting report out, Evolutionary biology research techniques predict cancer. Medicine has been around for thousands of years, from the “healings” of shamans to the “theoretical” paradigm of Galen. It seems possible that until the last 100 years or so medical techniques were just as likely (or more likely in many situations) to exacerbate illnesses as they were to help. The medical arts might be an outgrowth of our psychological biases, not materialist considerations (an analogy with financial “analysts” might be appropriate). Purely empirical sciences focused on proximate aspects of phenomena are often groping blindly in the dark, so the inclusion of microevolutionary theory can add in the elimination of alternative hypotheses. Modern medical science has progressed very far, but the integration of the temporal and spatial perspective of evolutionary science may help us in outwitting nature by cutting off the pathological dynamics at the pass.
This whole conversion story in Afghanistan has been in the news recently. The Christian Science Monitor attempts to put the issue of conversion from Islam to another religion in an international perspective. I am cautious about making large generalizations without qualifications, but I will offer that as a civilization, “Dar-al-Islam,” has particular issues with conversion when set against “Hindu” or “Christian” civilization. Though the difference is quantitative, not qualitative, some facts are so naked that caveats can not truly cover up the shame.