linkfest – 01/20/13

Feeling Threatened Makes Us Nicer – “Perceived menace makes people kinder to their kin but nastier to outsiders. Whether they use this strategy depends on family size.” – hmmm. maybe. part of the study was done on WEIRD students, so … hmmm.

Implicit Race Bias Increases the Differences in the Neural Represen-tations of Black and White Faces – “[T]he ways in which Black and White faces are represented in this brain region [fusiform face area] differ for people with a stronger, implicit race bias compared to people with less or no bias. This implies that people with stronger, negative implicit race attitudes may actually perceive Black and White faces to look more different.” – or maybe people who perceive black/white faces to look more different have stronger, negative race attitudes? – original research article here.

Gene flow between Indian populations and Australasia ~4,000 years ago – from dienekes. see also A Three-Hour Tour from greg cochran. (i loved that show! (^_^) )

Genealogy Databases Enable Naming of Anonymous DNA Donors – oops. see also: Matching names to genes: the end of genetic privacy?

HBD: An Abbreviated History of Quisqueya and the Rise of Today’s Dominicans (and Haitians) – from nelson!

The Human Varieties Global IQ Dataset – “I’m going to try and use Human Varieties to tabulate a more thorough, immediate, and accurate dataset of international intelligence studies. A dataset that is participatory, updated frequently, and available for download.” – jason malloy’s excellent goal to (single-handedly!) make global iq data open source. yay! (^_^)

Study Discovers DNA That Tells Mice How to Construct Their Homes – “The research could eventually lead to a better understanding of what kind of internal reward system motivates mice to dig, or tells them to stop. And although humans do not dig burrows, that, said the leader of the three-person research team, Hopi E. Hoekstra of Harvard, could ‘tell us something about behavioral variation in humans.’”

‘Adventurous’ Woman Needed as Surrogate for Neanderthal Baby – holy cr*p! – via charles!

The Danger of Making Science Political – “Many more scientists identify as Democrats than as Republicans…. [B]y some polls only 6 percent of scientists are Republican, and in the recent U.S. Presidential election, 68 science Nobel Prize winners endorsed the Democratic nominee Barack Obama over the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.”

People with low risk for cocaine dependence have differently shaped brain to those with addiction – “New research from the University of Cambridge has found that recreational drug users who have not developed a dependence have an abnormally large frontal lobe, the section of the brain implicated in self-control.”

Many researchers taking a different view of pedophilia – “Pedophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life. Now, many experts view it as a deep-rooted predisposition that does not change.”

Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will

Like Lance Armstrong, we are all liars, experts say – “During a 10-minute conversation between two strangers, 60% lied at least once, Feldman reported in a 2002 study in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology…. Though men were more likely to lie to make themselves feel good, women more often lied to make their conversation partner feel good. Either way, Feldman said, the urge to make oneself likable and competent was a powerful motivator.”

Got milk? Then you might get a Nobel Prize, study suggests – “[C]ountries in which people drink the most milk, per capita, also win the most Nobel Prizes, per capita….” – (~_^)

The Truth behind the HBD cult prt 1 – << only good for a laugh. no, really! – via jayman!

bonus: Portraits of ‘sworn virgins’ of Albania fascinate – “Northern Albanian women … live and dress as men in order to provide for their families.”

bonus bonus: Great Oxidation Event: More oxygen through multicellularity

bonus bonus bonus: There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written – cool!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Chinese migration to Angola tops 250,000

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linkfest – 06/03/12

Haplogroups as evolutionary markers of cognitive ability [pdf]

Memory training unlikely to help in treating ADHD, boosting IQ – h/t chris!

Corruption: The exception or the rule? – from m.g. @thosewhocansee.

Liberalism, HBD, Population, and Solutions for the Future – from jayman.

Is the Aboriginal (AUS) IQ really 62? – from chuck.

Nearly 1 in 6 Adult White Women on Antidepressants – from dennis.

Kin and Kindness

Monkey lip smacks provide new insights into the evolution of human speech – “New research published in Current Biology by W. Tecumseh Fitch, Head of the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, supports the idea that human speech evolved less from vocalizations than from communicative facial gestures.”

bonus: A post-coital switch: Mapping the changing behaviors in the female fruit fly’s mind – “Once successfully mated, a female moves from a highly sexually-receptive to a non-receptive state, actively rejecting further advances from males while altering her feeding and activity patterns…. Previous studies have shown that these behavioural changes are triggered by the male ‘sex peptide’ protein, a pheromone within the fly’s semen.”

bonus bonus: Earth took ten million years to recover from Permian-Triassic extinction – “About 250 million years ago, pretty much everything died.”

bonus bonus bonus: Missing biologist surfaces, reunites with family – margie profet turns up! (^_^)

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Deeper Digging Needed to Decode a Best Friend’s Genetic Roots – “[T]he DNA of modern dogs is so mixed up that it is useless in figuring out when and where dogs originated.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk – just the excuse i’ve been looking for. (~_^)

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linkfest – 02/05/12

Brains of addicts are inherently abnormal: study – “Drug addicts have inherited abnormalities in some parts of the brain which interfere with impulse control, said a British study published in the United States on Thursday…. Scientists at the University of Cambridge compared the brains of addicts to their non-addicted siblings as well as to healthy, unrelated volunteers and found that the siblings shared many of the same weaknesses in their brains. That indicates that the brain vulnerabilities had a family origin….”

Sex-specific behaviors traced to hormone-controlled genes in the brain – “The new evidence shows that the sex hormones – testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone – act in a key region of the brain, switching certain genes on and others off. ‘What this means is that complex behaviors like male mating or maternal care in mice can be deconstructed at the genetic level.’”

Gene related to fat preferences in humans found – “A preference for fatty foods has a genetic basis, according to researchers, who discovered that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene [the AA form] may like high-fat foods more than those who have other forms of this gene.” – i betcha i don’t have that allele. fat. yuck! (^_^)

Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – “Humans are 90-percent chimp, but also 10-percent bee—evolved to bind together for the good of the hive.” – bzzz. (^_^)

Shocker: Women’s rights do not bloom in Arab Spring – from mr. a. epigone.

DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All – “[F]aster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before. Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.”

Y-chromosome admixture in self-identified Australian Aboriginals – “In total, ∼70% of Y chromosomes in the Aboriginal database could be classed as non-indigenous, with only 169 (129 unique haplotypes) or 22% of the total being associated with haplogroups denoting Aboriginal ancestry….” – @dienekes’ blog.

What’s Wrong With the Teenage Mind? – “Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness.”

Strength by outbreeding – “‘US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world.’” – that’s a quote from robert trivers’ new book @evolving economics.

Castaway Lizards Offer New Look at Evolutionary Processes – “Differences caused by ‘founder effect’ persist when populations adapt to new environments”

bonus: Quiet, Please: Unleashing ‘The Power Of Introverts’ – this might be the one and only time i’ll link to npr. ever. (~_^)

bonus bonus: ruh roh.

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linkfest – 09/25/11

Genes linked to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder

Skull points to a more complex human evolution in Africa

Men and women cooperate equally for the common good – “[W]omen were more cooperative than men in mixed-sex studies and men became more cooperative than women in same-sex studies and when the social dilemma was repeated. The ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ was the most commonly used experiment in this meta-analysis.”

Some brain wiring continues to develop well into our 20s: U of A study – “Brain development doesn’t stop at adolescence as once thought”

Calculating crows know how to wait – crows can delay gratification.

Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration

Female promiscuity may be nature’s way of dealing with inbreeding, research claims

Black-white and Hispanic-white incarceration rate ratios by state – from the audacious epigone.

Improving general intelligence with pharmacological intervention – via inductivist.

Archaic admixture – what is it good for? – from greg cochran.

bonus: The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills

bonus bonus: einstein was wrong?

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‘sup with the whole subspecies thang?

why are these two guys classified as coming from two different subspecies…

Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii

Pan troglodytes verus

…but these two guys (gals) are not?:

Inuit woman

Australian Aborigine woman (Trugannini)

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artsy fartsy stuff

western art:

eastern art:

australian aboriginal art:

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