linkfest – 06/02/13

Genetic Variants Linked to Educational Attainment – “A multi-national team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in the United States, Australia, and 13 western European countries…. Combining the two million examined SNPs, the SSGAC researchers were able to explain about 2 percent of the variation in educational attainment across individuals, and anticipate that this figure will rise as larger samples become available.” – h/t friendly e-mailer! (^_^) – see also steve hsu on this: First GWAS hits for cognitive ability (thanks, grey!). in particular, check out steve’s graph. and john derbyshire for more on looking for iq-related genes via gwas studies. see also dr. james thompson: Educational attainment, intelligence, and the relentless cracking of the genetic code.

Deforestation Plants the Seed for Rapid Evolution in Brazil – “The deforestation of the Brazilian rain forest has created a hidden consequence: The seeds of palm trees have evolved rapidly to be smaller.”

Gene switches make prairie voles fall in love – “Researchers have shown for the first time that the act of mating induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes, affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behaviour.” – epigenetic effects!

Definitions of “Race” and Language and Race — a couple of great posts @habitable worlds!

Genetic structure and different population strata in Italy – “‘Our results show that the Y-chromosomal genetic diversity of Italy is not clinal but structured in three geographical areas: North-Western Italy (NWI), South-Eastern Italy (SEI) and Sardinia (SAR). …suggesting a shared genetic background between Southern Italy and the Adriatic coast from one side, and between Northern Italy and Tuscany from the other side.’” – from dienekes!

Just For Show? – “Of all humans, male and female, European women have the whitest skin and the most diverse range of hair and eye colors. Are European physical characteristics really female characteristics?” – from peter frost!

Apes Regret Bad Decisions, Throw Tantrums – “When apes make a bad decision or took a gamble that doesn’t pay off, they bang on tables and perform other kinds of tantrum-like behaviors, often exhibiting regret by attempting to undo what they had done.”

How Birds and Babies Learn to Talk

GSS on Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory – “The GSS results largely support Haidt’s divisions, with liberals putting greater emphasis on liberty/oppression and especially care/harm, just as he found to be the case. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more concerned with fairness/cheating, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and loyalty/subversion than liberals are.” – from the awesome epigone!

Homosexuality is natural. Fine. But what if homophobia is natural, too?

The Ugly Truth About Obesity – “So yes, the obese group is not unlike its negative stereotypes. Of the, ‘lazy’, ‘sloppy’, ‘less competent’, ‘lacking in self-discipline’, ‘disagreeable’, ‘less conscientious’, ‘poor role models’, ‘unintelligent’, ‘unsuccessful’, ‘weak-willed’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘overindulgent’, it seems ‘disagreeable’ and ‘unpleasant’ are the only clear misses. This is not to hate on the obese, but to call a spade a spade.” – from staffan!

The big fat truth – “More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them.”

“Were the Victorians cleverer than us?” – from steve sailer!

The Argument Ron Should Have Made – italian iq stuff from chuck the occidentalist! — h/t hbd bibliography!

What Science Says About Arousal During Rape

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food – “Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.”

More Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment – eat your radishes! they’re good for you! (^_^)

bonus: Yes, the BBC needs more diversity – of opinion, that is – from ed west!

bonus bonus: immigration i, immigration ii, and immigration iii — from the assistant village idiot!

bonus bonus bonus: Raised from the depths, the face of the Mary Rose

bonus bonus bonus bonus: China Builds EU Beachhead With $5 Billion City in Belarus

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Zoologger: The sea cow with super-sensing hairs – i’ve snorkeled with the manatees! (^_^)

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linkfest – 05/26/13

Diabetes’ genetic underpinnings can vary based on ethnic background, Stanford studies say – the researchers “found a clear geographic pattern in the genetics behind type-2 diabetes. The genetic risk is highest for Africans and drops along the trajectory the first humans took when migrating out of Africa toward East Asia (primarily Japan, China and Korea), where diabetes-linked genes appear to be more protective. Based solely on what is currently known about type-2 diabetes genetics, native Africans would appear to be at higher risk for diabetes, while East Asians would appear to be protected.” – see also genetic risk world map|diabetes.

Skin color affects ability to empathize with pain – “Humans are hardwired to feel another person’s pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person’s skin color doesn’t match their own, a new study suggests.”

Motion quotient – “A brief visual task can predict IQ, according to a new study. This surprisingly simple exercise measures the brain’s unconscious ability to filter out visual movement. The study shows that individuals whose brains are better at automatically suppressing background motion perform better on standard measures of intelligence.”

Yikes! Cockroaches Evolved to Avoid Sugary Baits – natural selection is really a nuisance!

Face Blindness – greg cochran on prosopagnosia. also: Is Brad Pitt’s Face Blindness For Real?

The Italian Invasion of American Culture – from steve sailer!

A response to two critical commentaries on Woodley, te Nijenhuis & Murphy (2013) – from woodley, te nijenhuis, & murphy @dr. james thompson’s blog. see also: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – with respect to the claim of intelligence decline since Victorian times – from bruce charlton. (ftr, i never said either that woodley, et al., made an entirely “extraordinary claim,” or that i require any extraordinary evidence.) see previous posts here and here.

More population structure in the Netherlands (Lao et al. 2013) – “Clinal distribution of human genomic diversity across the Netherlands despite archaeological evidence for genetic discontinuities in Dutch population history.” – from dienekes.

New Theory Claims Humans Hunted, Ate Neanderthals

Are There Atheists in Foxholes? Combat Intensity and Religious Behavior – “Study 1 shows that as combat became more frightening, the percentage of soldiers who reported praying rose from 42% to 72%.”

Marketing to the Big Data Inside Us – “In your DNA are clues to your health, your ancestry, and maybe even your purchasing preferences.” – h/t charles!

Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment @radish magazine!

Liberal Race Realism – A Brief Definition – from robert lindsay – h/t hbd bibliography!

Fight Clubs: On Napoleon Chagnon – “One anthropologist’s place in his field’s ongoing battle over questions of power, means and ends.”

A Brief History of Mental Illness in Art.

New ‘atheist map’ of the world dominated by China where half the country’s population describes themselves as non-believers

Syphilis, sex and fear: How the French disease conquered the world – “Researching the Borgias, Sarah Dunant learnt how syphilis took Europe by storm during the 1490s, and the far reaching effects it’s had ever since.” – previously: stds and miiiind control.

bonus: Genuinely, unironically, shocked – from mr. mangan.

bonus bonus: Viruses and mucus team up to ward off bacteria – “Phages may play unforeseen role in immune protection.”

bonus bonus bonus: Dog sniffs out grammar – “A border collie takes command of sentence rules.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus: 2-Child Limit for Muslims in Parts of Myanmar – burmese eugenics.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The Multiple Origins of Wine Grapes

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: What the heck is this strange red rectangle doing in our galaxy?

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questions some of us thought to ask

joshua keating wrote on his foreign policy blog last week:

Questions you never thought to ask: Is inbreeding bad for democracy?

heh. (~_^)

well, some of us HAVE thought to ask that very question, a couple of people waaaay before i did — going back to 2002 in fact:

- Consanguinity prevents Middle Eastern political development from parapundit.
- Cousin Marriage Conundrum – from steve sailer. steve’s essay was also included in a volume co-edited by steven pinker, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.

keating is referring to the woodley and bell paper, Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations, which was published last year and which i blogged about here (and here and here and here) — and steve sailer also blogged about at the time.

just to refresh everyone’s memory, woodley and bell found a negative correlation (r = –0.632, p < 0.001) between the frequency of consanguineous marriages in the 70 nations at which they looked and the level of democracy in those countries. in other words, the greater the amount of consanguineous marriages in a country, the less democracy it probably has.

keating is not convinced:

“As a counterpoint, Iceland — a country so isolated and sparsely populated that people need an Android app to keep them from hooking up with a close relative — has had a representative parliament since the 10th century and a culture of individualism so strong they write Nobel Prize-winning novels about it. So there.”

two things.

first of all, it should be remembered that woodley and bell specifically looked for success at liberal democracy (fwiw, ymmv). from the paper:

“As conceived here, democracy refers to a system in which there is opportunity for competitive elections and deliberative referendums, with broad public participation encouraged for both (Vanhanen, 2003). Democracy in this instance refers exclusively to the liberal variety where the emphasis is on competitive politics, rather than the classical type in which the focus is on consensus building and statesmanship (Werlin, 2002). Two key characteristics of liberal democratic systems include the presence of institutions that permit citizens to express preferences for alternative policies and leaders, and the existence of institutionalized constraints that prevent the misuse of power by an executive elite (Inglehart, 2003; Lipset, 1959; Marshall & Jaggers, 2010).”

secondly, tenth century icelandic democracy was not an example of liberal democracy — and wasn’t right through to 1262 when the norwegian crown took over the governance of iceland. rather, the icelandic commonwealth was a system based on consensus which i posted about previously here.

early medieval icelanders were represented at their alþingi by regional chieftans known as goðar. nobody elected these goðar — they were the local strongmen from various areas of iceland, and they typically inherited their position, although these chieftainships were sometimes sold. you could, in theory, pick your own goði to whom you swore allegiance, but apparently in practice this rarely ever happened — because a lot of medieval icelanders were kin to their goðar [pdf], and it’s almost always bloody awkward to break it off with family — especially when you can’t easily move to the other side of the island or something.

so these early medieval icelandic “representatives” bore little resemblance to the representatives we have in modern, parliamentary systems (h*ck – maybe that was a good thing!). if you were an early medieval icelander, your alþingi representative was likely your kin, and you were probably stuck with him for life — until his son took over. this was not liberal democracy.

did the early medieval icelanders marry their cousins? i’m not sure. it’s very likely that their immediate ancestors from norway did (like the early medieval swedes probably did), and the medieval icelanders ignored many other of the church’s teachings and regulations on marriage at the time [pdf], so i wouldn’t be surprised if they did. the fact that medieval icelandic society seems to have devolved from one in which kinship was comparatively unimportant to a state where large clans controlled the place also suggests to me that they married their cousins — or at least mated awfully closely (they may not have had to marry very close cousins since they were such a small population to start off with).
_____

having said all that, when trying to work out why the medieval icelanders — or any other group for that matter — didn’t/don’t have liberal democracy, it’s not really important whether or not they were marrying their cousins at the time in question. well, it is … and it isn’t. (don’t pull your hair out just yet.)

what is important (i think) is whether or not the medieval icelanders — or any group-X — had been marrying their cousins over the long-term. i don’t think that there’s an instantaneous connection between cousin marriage (or other close mating) and failing to manage a functional liberally democratic system. what i think that there is are longer term evolutionary processes connected to inbreeding/outbreeding patterns and the selection for individualism vs. familism or clannism. and if you have clannism, liberal democracy will just not work.

woodley and bell acquired their consanguinity data from consang.net. here’s a map of those data:

what stands out right away is that consanguinity rates are very high in the arab world, the middle east, north africa, and places like pakistan and afghanistan, while rates are really low in the u.s. and scandinavia. that seems to fit the cousin-marriage-doesn’t-promote-democracy theory. but the cousin marriage rates in china are very low — same range as england and western europe. why don’t the chinese manage to have a liberal democracy then?

what you have to understand is that this map is a snapshot. it is a moment in time (mostly the twentieth century). it doesn’t tell us much about the history of cousin marriage in any of these societies — whether any of it’s been short-term or long-term — and without knowing that, we can’t even start to guess at any effects the mating patterns (and related family types) might’ve had on the evolution of behaviors in these populations, including those related to clannishness.

once you know, for instance, that up until very recently, the chinese actually preferred cousin marriage, then you can — i think — begin to understand why they’re clannish (or, at least, extended family-ish). and why, therefore, liberal democracy doesn’t work there — or didn’t arise there in the first place either.

rinse and repeat for all the other locales on the map.
_____

see also Cousin Marriage and Democracy @marginal revolution.

previously: liberal democracy vs. consensus building and democracy and endogamous mating practices and “hard-won democracy”

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tweaking just ONE gene…

…is all it takes to get some of the most recognizable of racial differences between human populations.

via steve sailer, from nicholas wade in the nyt:

East Asian Physical Traits Linked to 35,000-Year-Old Mutation

“Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

“The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded….

“The first of those sites to be studied contains the gene known as EDAR. Africans and Europeans carry the standard version of the gene, but in most East Asians, one of the DNA units has mutated.

“Seeking to understand if the gene was the cause of thicker hair in East Asians with the variant gene, a team of researchers led by Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., decided to test the gene in mice, where its effects could be more easily explored….

“The Broad team engineered a strain of mice whose EDAR gene had the same DNA change as the East Asian version of EDAR.

“When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell.

“One was that the mice, to the researchers’ surprise, had extra sweat glands. A Chinese member of the team, Sijia Wang, then tested people in China and discovered that they, too, had more numerous sweat glands, evidently another effect of the gene.

“Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

“East Asians have distinctively shaped teeth for which their version of EDAR is probably responsible. But the mice were less helpful on this point; their teeth are so different from humans’ that the researchers could not see any specific change….

“A team led by Dr. Sabeti and Sharon R. Grossman of the Broad Institute has now refined the usual scanning methods and identified 412 sites on the genome that have been under selection. Each site is small enough that it contains at most a single gene.

“Each race has a different set of selected regions, reflecting the fact that the human population had dispersed from its African homeland and faced different challenges that led to genetic adaptation on each continent. About 140 of the sites affected by natural selection are in Europeans, 140 in East Asians and 132 in Africans, the authors report in another article published Thursday in Cell….“

so cool!

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random notes: 02/14/13

cousin marriage rates for german jews living in the prussian province of hohenzollern between ca. 1875-1920 (117 marriages):

- first cousin marriages = 16.2% ± 3.4%
- consanguineous marriage up to and including second cousins = 19.6% ± 3.7%

source [pdf]. original source: Reutlinger, W. 1922. Über die Häufigkeit der Verwandtenehen bei den Juden in Hohenzollern, und über Untersuchungen bei Deszendenten aus jüdischen Verwandtenehen. Arch. Rassenb. 14: 301-305.

a little more on these rates from In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria 1918-1933 [pgs. 234 and 241]:

“On the other hand, there is considerable evidence to back up the impression that village Jews were marrying cousins and other close relatives in increasingly large numbers.[44] …

“[44] In Hohenzollern, there was an 11 percent rate of marriage to relatives (5 percent to first cousins) among Jewish couples who died before 1922; of those still alive in 1922, the rate had increased to 22 percent (16 percent to first cousins. These rates were several times as high as the rates for Christian marriages. See Wilhelm Reutlinger, ‘Uber die Haufligkeit der Verwandtenehen bei Juden in Hohenzollern und uber Untersuchungen bei Deszendenten aus judischen Verwandtenehene,’ Archiv fur Rassen- un Gesellschaftsbiologie 14 (1922): 301-303, quoted by Marion Kaplan The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991), p. 273 note 206. See also Cahnman, ‘Village and Small-Town Jews,’ pp. 122-23, for an impressionistic discussion of the same phenomenon.”

so, the rates of consanguineous marriages increased for jews in hohenzollern over the period from 1875-1920. that pretty much mirrors the general trend of increasing cousin marriage rates right across europe at the time, only the actual rates for the hohenzollern jews were much higher than for most europeans — well, at least most germans.

this 11% consanguineous rate (5% to first cousins) for jewish couples who died before 1922 is a lot higher than the only other definite rate i have for european jews which is from alsace-lorraine in 1872-76 (so i’m thinking these might be kinda contemporaneous rates) — and that rate was 2.3% (consanguineous marriages).

see also: jewish mating patterns in nineteenth century russia.
_____

a bizarre story on a case of cousin marriage and inbreeding depression from china that … well, i’ll just let you read it for yourselves. from A Family That Climbed Out of Inbreeding Depression [pg. 1064]:

“In 2008, a family was fortuitously found in Northeast China. Before the 1948 Revolution, this family was wealthy and owned vast amount of land. After nationalization, the family was given a tiny house with a small plot of land. Subsequently, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), all landowning families in the country were severely prosecuted and socially ostracized. The social stigma on the members of former land owning families was so persuasive that any form of association with them was deemed as dangerous. At that time, there were two children of marriageable age. As their parents were unable to find unrelated mates from the society, they arranged an intra-family marriage between available first cousins. The union produced five offspring: three mentally retarded girls, one deaf-mute girl, and one mentally retarded boy who did not survive (Figure 1). The consanguineous (first cousin) parents supported their four disabled daughters throughout their childhood. By the time these daughters were of marriageable age, the Cultural Revolution in China was over and the social stigma of land-owning families was lifted. Thus, the consanguineous parents were able to arrange marriages of their four unfit daughters with four biologically unrelated men. The deaf and mute girl was married to a deaf and mute man from the same village. The three mentally retarded daughters were married to healthy men, of low socioeconomic status, and they resided in their husbands’ homes in the same village. The most severely retarded daughter was married to a poor man who came to their family looking for food; he was offered this daughter and accommodation within the family household. After marriages of their daughters, the consanguineous parents continued to support all four families, and each of the four daughters produced one healthy child (maximally allowed number of children in China at the time). The most severely retarded daughter accidentally lost one child at birth. Today, the consanguineous couple has four grandchildren who are attending regular school and are expected to marry to biologically unrelated mates….”

could the cultural revolution have encouraged cousin marriages during the time period in china? at least in some sectors? weird.
_____

weregilds. did you know that weregild payments were made directly from one clan/kindred member to his corresponding clan/kindred member in the other clan/kindred (whichever was the aggrieved clan)? i didn’t.

i always imagined that all the weregild payments were sorta pooled together and passed from one clan to the other, but no … the father in one clan paid directly the father in the other clan, the father’s brother in one clan paid directly the father’s brother in the other clan, and so on and so forth. at least that’s how it was done in iceland … at least according to phillpotts [pg. 13]:

“Each class pays to the corresponding class of the opposite side, thus the father, son and brother of the slayer pay to the corresponding kinsmen of the slain. It is to be observed that the slayer pays nothing, the assumption being that he was exiled and his goods forfeited.”

huh.
_____

i mentioned over here that edmund i (922–946) seems to have been one of the first anglo-saxon/english kings to have really tried to put an end to the traditional blood feuds in england (which were tied to the weregild payments — see above — if the weregild wasn’t paid when someone was slain, the aggrieved clan/kindred had the right to exact revenge on the slayer’s clan/kindred). re. one of his law codes (from phillpotts – pgs. 218-19):

“Eadmund’s secular laws mark a notable advance in one respect: private warfare between families, as a result of a slaying, is to be stamped out, and the slayer alone is to bear the feud, if feud there is to be.

“II. 1. ‘If henceforth anyone kills any man, let him himself bear the feud, unless with the help of friends he pays full wergild within 12 months, whatever the birth (of the slain man,’ i.e. however high the wergild be).

“It must be remembered that a slayer is not involved in a feud unless he cannot or will not pay wergild; and if he can pay wergild there is no feud. So here we must assume that the slayer has not been able to produce the sum out of his own pocket, and that his kinsmen have been unable or unwilling to help him. That even this secondary liability of the kinsmen is purely voluntary is seen from the next clause:

“1. ‘If the *mægð* [kindred/extended family] forsakes him, and will not pay for him, then I will, that all the *mægð* be without feud, save the actual delinquent, if they give him thereafter neither food nor protection.

“2. ‘If however thereafter any one of his kinsmen shelter him, then let him be liable to the king for all that he possesses, and bear the feud with the *mægð* (of the slain), for they (the kinsmen) had before forsaken the slayer.

“3. ‘If however one of the other *mægð* takes vengeance on any other man than the actual delinquent, let him be outlaw to the king and to all his (the king’s) friends, and lose all that he possesses.’”

so edmund is the earliest example i know of in england of the state trying to position itself in between all of the homicidal lunatics in order to put an end to the violence. he (or the crown, i suppose) would pay the weregild if a clan/kindred wouldn’t in order to stop a blood feud from erupting.

edmund didn’t live very long though — he died (heh) in a fight when he was just 26 — so i don’t know how well-enforced his edict ever was.

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linkfest – 01/27/13

A Fat Problem With Heart Health Wisdom – awesome post from jayman. look at the chart. just look at it!

Stress’s impact can affect future generations’ genes – “For the first time, genes chemically silenced by stress during life have been shown to remain silenced in eggs and sperm, allowing the effect to be passed down to the next generation…. They found that a tiny number of methylated gene regions survived unerased: an average of just 233 out of approximately 25,000 in the germ cells examined…. Do the markings survive simply because the erasure process may not always work properly, or are they deliberately spared so that the information they carry is passed to the next generation? The finding ‘doesn’t solve this question’, says Hackett. ‘But it’s a proof of principle for one possible mechanism by which traits might be inherited epigenetically.’”

four part series from frank salter — deals mainly with australia, but still an important read for everyone: The War Against Human Nature in the Social Sciences and The War against Human Nature II: Gender Studies (Part 1) and The War against Human Nature II: Gender Studies (Part 2) and The War Against Human Nature III: Race and the Nation in the Media

HVGIQ: Haiti – “A weighted average of the Cotten study and the de Ronceray study gives us an IQ of 68 for Haiti. More or less identical to the estimate currently used by Lynn.” – from jason malloy @human varieties. see also A Note on the Hypothesized Haitian Average IQ from nelson.

Sex differences on g and non-g intellectual performance reveal potential sources of STEM discrepancies – “Sex differences in cognition are masked by the general factor of intelligence (g). The difference in favoring boys increases across adolescence up to 4 IQ points. Boys show an advantage in mechanical reasoning irrespective of latent g. This advantage might help to understand sex discrepancies in STEM disciplines.” – via mangan.

News in Brief: Ancient human DNA suggests minimal interbreeding – “Genetic analysis indicates Stone Age people mated infrequently with Neandertals and other close relatives” – see also dienekes. also peter frost: When was the split?

Messing with the privates – “[W]omen in the generality are physically different from men.” – thank you for noticing, john! (~_^) – the derb on, amongst other things, the physical differences between men & women and what that means wrt women in the military and on the front lines (bad idea!). eg.: “‘Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test … the upper quintile of women at West Point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.’”

The case for earlier Out-of-Africa – @dienekes’.

The Liberals’ War on Science – “41 percent of Democrats are young Earth creationists….”

Emotional Smarts Tied to General IQ – “The same brain regions that perform cognitive tasks may also provide social intelligence, according to a new study.”

Social evolution: The ritual animal – “A major aim of the investigation is to test Whitehouse’s theory that rituals come in two broad types, which have different effects on group bonding. Routine actions such as prayers at church, mosque or synagogue, or the daily pledge of allegiance recited in many US elementary schools, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘doctrinal mode’…. Rare, traumatic activities such as beating, scarring or self-mutilation, by contrast, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘imagistic mode’. ‘Traumatic rituals create strong bonds among those who experience them together,’ he says, which makes them especially suited to creating small, intensely committed groups such as cults, military platoons or terrorist cells…. [L]ow-frequency but high-arousal imagistic varieties that were more common in societies with a smaller average community size, and high-frequency, low-arousal doctrinal rituals that were more established in societies in which communities are larger.”

‘Man Flu’ might not be a myth after all – “‘Man Flu’ might not be a myth after all as they have different brains, a female academic has claimed. Dr Amanda Ellison claims that men really do suffer more with coughs and colds as they have more temperature receptors in the brain which causes them to experience the symptoms more acutely than the fairer sex.”

Polynesians reached South America, picked up sweet potatoes, went home – “Tubers were spread from New Zealand to Hawaii before European contact.”

Diet, Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ – wonder if the effects are permanent? the diet one (3.5 points w/omega-3) certainly might be.

bonus: echidna penises have four heads – what more is there to say?

bonus bonus: Ethnic origins of US attendees of 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos – @race/history/evolution.

bonus bonus bonus: Chinese man kept alive by self-built dialysis machine – extra iq points can come in d*mn handy!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: HIV-like viruses in non-human primates have existed much longer than previously thought – “Viruses similar to those that cause AIDS in humans were present in non-human primates in Africa at least 5 million years ago and perhaps up to 12 million years ago….”

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chumps

we’re a bunch of chumps.

from geoffrey miller @the edge (via steve sailer) — in answer to the question “What *should* we be worried about?”:

“Chinese Eugenics”

“…The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually — but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of ‘preimplantation embryo selection’ might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness….”

see? chumps.

one interesting point wrt the eugenics program in china: “He [Deng Xiaoping] liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy — partly to curtail China’s population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children ‘later, longer, fewer, better….’”

hmmm. later may not (prolly does not!) mean better — not iq-wise anyway. the chinese might’ve screwed up there.

another side-note: the chinese marriage law was amended in 1980 to ban cousin marriage — another part of their eugenics package? hard to know how well that’s being enforced though (enforcement is difficult in a nation of that size and that is … let’s admit it … given to corruption).

read the whole edge article there.

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linkfest – 11/26/12

i should just move the linkfests to mondays … get it over with. (~_^) (then at some point i’d prolly switch to publishing them on wednesdays or thursdays … and eventually, someday, they’d migrate all the way back to sundays again!)

Are Liberal or Conservative Americans More Likely to Support Restrictions on Racist and Anti-Religious Speech?

Singapore is world’s least emotional country, poll finds – see also steve sailer (who is not the world’s least emotional country).

Does being fat make you more jolly? – “The FTO gene makes a protein associated with obesity and fat mass…. [H]aving one copy of this mutant in your genome decreases the risk of depression by 8 per cent; two copies doubles that dip…. Based on its prevalence among ethnic groups, it should prevent 6.7 per cent of the cases of depression that would otherwise afflict Africans, 5.3 per cent of cases in Europeans, and 2.2 per cent in Chinese.”

Longer life link to low vitamin D – in some dutch people. h/t sean!

Meat, Cooked Foods Needed for Early Human Brain

The Evolutionary Mystery of Homosexuality – i know, i know. greg cochran would say there’s no mystery here. (~_^)

Conservatism is white men – from the awesome epigone.

Why Is Intelligence the Measure of Ultimate Human Worth? – from kanazawa.

Mitochondrial DNA in Ancient Human Populations of Europe (der Sarkissian 2011) – “This work presents direct evidence that Mesolithic eastern Europeans belonged to the same Palaeolithic/Mesolithic genetic background as central and northern Europeans. It was also shown that prehistoric eastern Europeans were the recipients of multiple migrations from the East in prehistory that had not been previously detected and/or timed on the basis of modern mtDNA data. Ancient DNA also provided insights in the genetic history of European genetic outliers; the Saami, whose ancestral population still remain unidentified, and the Sardinians, whose genetic differentiation is proposed to be the result of mating isolation since at least the Bronze Age.” – @dienekes’.

Archaeologists discover 10,000 year-old home – in scotland.

People who live in tropics more likely to die seven years earlier – “Overall mortality in the region was affected by disease, conflict, poverty and food insecurity….”

Improved Water Supplies In Africa Increase Poverty – ’cause of lower death rates. that s*cks. – from parapundit.

bonus: Fraud fighter: ‘Faked research is endemic in China’

bonus bonus: The Black Cat Analogy – from jayman!

bonus bonus bonus: Think twice before using “mankind” to mean “all humanity,” say scholars – scr*w that!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Camel Genome Holds Desert Survival Secrets – “[M]any of the Bactrian genome’s rapidly evolving genes regulate the metabolic pathway…. [C]amels can withstand massive blood glucose levels owing in part to changes in genes that are linked to type II diabetes in humans.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Larry Hagman: the superstar who made history – “In 1991, a Bedouin tribe delayed its annual migration across the Sahara because its elders were not prepared to miss the last episode of Dallas.” – heh.

_{(note: comments do not require an email. baby camel – awwww!)}