linkfest – 04/28/13

Questions you never thought to ask: Is inbreeding bad for democracy? – i thought to ask. so did a few other people (way before me!): steve sailer, stanley kurtz, parapundit. see also Cousin Marriage and Democracy. and, of course, see also woodley and bell. and see Question of the Day @breviosity. previously: consanguinity and democracy.

A Dose of Clannishness and What’s So Bad About Clanocracy? – @breviosity!

Where do those tensions come from? – “When the Milgram experiment was done with Jordanian assistants, they were just as willing as Americans to inflict pain under orders (62.5%). But they were more willing than Americans [1.4%] to inflict pain when no orders were given, with 12.5% of them delivering shocks right up to the top end of the scale (Shanab & Yahya, 1978).” – great post from peter frost!

Modern Europe’s Genetic History Starts in Stone Age – “Scientists create the first detailed genetic history of modern Europe.” – original research article. see also mtDNA haplogroup H and the origin of Europeans (Brotherton et al. 2013) from dienekes.

As women live longer and have fewer children, they are becoming taller and slimmer, study finds – “‘This is a reminder that declines in mortality rates do not necessarily mean that evolution stops, but that it changes.’”

Birth Defects, FBD Marriages – from anatoly.

HBD Fundamentals – from jayman!

Why the Tropics are an evolutionary hotbed – “Ant family tree shows tropical New World hosts fast speciation while also keeping older lineages alive.”

Study: People Who Believe in God Are More Responsive to Treatment of Depression – “It may be that ‘the tendency to have faith in conventional social constructs’ can be generalized both to religion and the medical establishment.”

Beauty isn’t skin deep – @mangan’s.

Social psychology fraud: Just tell professors what they want to hear – from steve sailer.

Book Review: Quiet – The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012) by Susan Cain – from staffan. and a classic: Caring for Your Introvert. (just shush already! (~_^) )

Ethnic origins of Forbes world billionaires (2013) – @race/history/evolution notes.

Computer scientists suggest new spin on origins of evolvability – “‘[E]volvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.’” – in their computer simulations.

Culture — Not Just a Human Thing – vervet monkeys got culture. also Parrots Barter With Nuts.

Humans Evolved Flexible, Lopsided Brains – some of us more lopsided than others. (~_^)

When Do Babies Become Conscious? – “New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old.”

Fish win fights on strength of personality – “When predicting the outcome of a fight, the big guy doesn’t always win suggests new research on fish.”

Feeding our gut bacteria meat may enhance heart disease risks – “Antibiotics or vegetarian diets block production of a risk-associated chemical.”

On Hold: Genes That Pause Pregnancy Discovered

Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed – “This meat-rich diet, along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones), would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids…. ‘They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village….’”

Earliest Mayan monuments unearthed in Guatemala. see also Ancient Maya discovery sheds new light on the origins of civilization.

bonus: Levels of Commitment to the Dark Enlightenment – @habitable worlds. also What are characteristics of the Dark Enlightenment? @occam’s razor.

bonus bonus: How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended From Sierra Leone Slaves – “The amazing story of the traditional songs and dances, passed down over hundreds of years, that have tied a small Caribbean ethnic group to a remote African tribe.” – cool story!

bonus bonus bonus: Revealed: The Indian village with just 6,000 inhabitants … but more than 100 pairs of twins – another town of twins!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Can Animals Be Mentally Ill?

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: not a news story, but here’s the definition of stubborn – Last Two Speakers of Dying Language Refuse to Talk to Each Other

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Thanks to rare alpine bacteria, researchers identify one of alcohol’s key gateways to the brain – “Discovery is a step on the road to eventually developing drugs that could disrupt the interaction between alcohol and the brain.” – cool! wait. they want to disrupt the effect of alcohol on the brain?! hey!

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linkfest – 04/21/13

Inbred royals show traces of natural selection – “Study suggests the Spanish Habsburgs evolved to mute the effects of inbreeding, but other geneticists are unconvinced.”

Time to get tough on the physiological causes of crime – “[V]iolent criminals are biologically different from the rest of us.” – review of The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.

Scientists find ethnicity linked to antibodies – “‘[I]t’s early days,’ emphasizes Watson, ‘but these findings could mean that past environmental exposures to certain pathogens caused DNA insertions or deletions in different ethnic groups, which could impact disease risk. Our results demonstrate that antibody studies need to take into account the ethnicity of DNA samples used.’”

Those resistant to ‘love hormone’ may also be easier to hypnotize – “Gene variants linked to social detachment may increase suggestibility.”

One Blessing Of Outbreeding – i didn’t write this, i swear! (you’ll never guess who did…)

The gay germ hypothesis – from peter frost. see also Not Final! from greg cochran.

Another reminder… – “[A] prod to certain of my smart liberal friends to start having children.” – from jayman. see also: The end of paternal investment or, more cads, fewer dads from mr. mangan.

The Strange Case of Dr. Robert Trivers – “[Trivers] has been driven off the campus of Rutgers University! He has been involved in a controversy lately over his accusation that one of his graduate students committed fraud in a scientific paper. Apparently he was banned from campus because a colleague who supports the alleged fraudster claimed Trivers had ‘frightened him in his office’.” – from helian unbound.

Women graduates of elite colleges 1/3rd more likely to be stay-at-home moms – from steve sailer.

Scent of a Man: Women Can Sniff Out a Hot Guy – “Women at their peak fertility prefer the smell of men oozing with testosterone, a new study finds.” – and speaking of testosterone: Testosterone pumps up threats for tough guys – “The higher a man’s testosterone level, the more macho he’s likely to act when his masculinity is threatened, a new study finds.”

The Real ‘Hobbit’ Had Larger Brain Than Thought

Egyptian mummies yield genetic secrets – “The ancient Egyptians could soon be getting their genomes sequenced as a matter of routine.”

Why Menopause?

Stonehenge occupied 5,000 years earlier than thought

The Pattern of Female Nuptiality in Oman – “[M]ore than half (52%) of the total marriages in Oman are consanguineous. First cousin unions are the most common type of consanguineous unions, constituting 39% of all marriages and 75% of all consanguineous marriages. About 11% of the marriages are polygynous…. [P]aternal first-cousin marriages constituted 27.7% of all marriages and 72% (565/786) of all first-cousin marriages, while maternal first-cousin marriages constituted 10.8% of all marriages and 28% (221/786) of all first-cousin marriages.”

The Ancient Greeks & Romans, Beauty and Human Biodiversity – @occam’s razor.

Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself? – “[T]wo geneticists have applied Moore’s Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.”

Chimps Communicate Like Passionate Italians – my favorite headline of the week. (^_^)

Live fast, die younger: Actors, singers and sportsman ‘die seven and a half years before other high achievers’

Historic human remains yield epigenetic tags – see also: Epigenetic Inheritance: Fact or Fiction?

Icelandic anti-incest app keeps residents from becoming kissin’ cousins – previously íslendingabók.

‘Real men wear kilts’: The anecdotal evidence that wearing a Scottish kilt has influence on reproductive potential: how much is true? – keep wearin’ yer kilt!

Did this magical little crystal help the Vikings rape and pillage across the world? – “Research suggests crystal salvaged from a shipwreck may be a sunstone”

bonus: What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? – “The Obama DOJ says it intends to question the Boston bombing suspect ‘extensively’ without first Mirandizing him”

bonus bonus: Applicants wanted for a one-way ticket to Mars – let’s go! (^_^)

bonus bonus bonus: ‘Living fossil’ genome unlocked – “The genes of an ancient fish, the coelacanth, have much to reveal about our distant past.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Chlamydia Is Killing Koalas — Will Genetics Find a Cure?

_{(note: comments do not require an email. ugly fish!)}

linkfest – 04/15/13

Born to run: genetic test can reveal those best able to run marathons – “[T]o run a marathon in a good time requires the right combination of genes and that nearly a fifth of the population lack this special mix. For runners with the right genes, it means their bodies can quickly adapt to carry large amounts of oxygen to their muscles, allowing them to run faster and for longer. Those who lack these genes, however, will never improve, no matter how much they train, and their performance may even get worse the harder they push themselves.”

Scientists Breed Exercise-Crazy Rats – “While a wide biological gap exists between humans and rats, the researchers do propose that some people could be genetically predisposed against exercising.”

Genetic discovery found to influence obesity in people of African ancestry

New Studies Shake Up Human Family Tree – “[I]n a spate of new studies, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, and a team of collaborators have put forward a controversial claim that another hominin — *Australopithecus sediba* — might be even closer to the origin of our lineage [than *australopithecus afarensis,* the most famous example being "lucy"]….” — see also: Special Collection – Australopithecus sediba @science.

Fish Fossil Shows Why Humans Have Two Arms, Legs

Castaways – “We may have yet another story of long-distance prehistoric contact. A new paper in PLOS genetics suggests that people from the Jomon culture in Japan may have reached northwestern South America.” – from greg cochran. also from south america: Southern Native American Y-DNA: no correlation with language – @for what they were…we are.

Fluctuation of Fertility with Number in a Real Insect Population and a Virtual Population – “Real fruit fly fertility increases with average consanguinity thus decreasing with population size in a pattern that is modelled successfully with a virtual population. This invites the deliberate manipulation of wild insect populations for the control of vectors of human disease.” – from our very own linton herbert! yay! (^_^)

Do drugs for bipolar disorder ‘normalize’ brain gene function? U-M study suggests so – “Brain tissue study shows gene expression in patients treated with antipsychotics is similar to expression in non-bipolar brains.”

Serenity – “If the realities of human nature render your hope on how to make a better world impossible, merely wishing it were not so is not going to help your cause. But instead, better results can be attained to by working *with* what we learn about human nature.” – from jayman. hear, hear!

HVGIQ: Dominican Republic – from jason malloy.

Napoleon Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” – The Life of an Anthropological Heretic – “Napoleon Chagnon’s ‘Noble Savages’ is a must read.” – from helian unbound.

Frequent texters more shallow, racist, study finds – w.e.i.r.d. students. (psychology students, no less! (~_^) ) also: Texting, social networking and other media use linked to poor academic performance.

Study: we assume people stare at us – “People often think that other people are staring at them even when they aren’t, vision scientists have found. In a new article in Current Biology, researchers at The Vision Centre reveal that, when in doubt, the human brain is more likely to tell its owner that they’re under the gaze of another person.”

Political organization in a hunter-gatherer tribe – @mangan’s.

First Encounters of the Close Kind: John Derbyshire’s Address To The 2013 American Renaissance Conference – from john derbyshire.

Jared Taylor Remembers Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen

Our Inconsistent Ethical Instincts – read also: The Pro-Death Movement from jim goad – “[T]here’s an almost universal human definition of good and evil: If it enhances my survival, it’s good. If it harms it, it’s evil.” – yup.

Individual Donation Amounts Drop When Givers Are in Groups, Says MU Researcher – “Numerous studies have provided evidence that people are less likely to help when in groups, a phenomenon known as the ‘bystander effect.’” – see also this old post from steve sailer: Chinese kindness.

The Fraud Of America’s “Rape Culture” – from anatoly. see also his earlier post Much Ado About Rape: Quantifying A Big Taboo – “[I]t is ironic that the public panic over rape and sexual assault has risen to fever pitch at precisely the moment in history when the real lifetime risk of becoming a victim of rape has never been lower.”

Monkey chatter smacks of human speech, researcher says

How Parents Around the World Describe Their Children, in Charts – “A fascinating new study reveals that Americans are more likely to call their children ‘intelligent,’ while European parents focus on happiness and balance.”

DNA Shows It: Birds Are Promiscuous – “Here’s the warm and fuzzy part of this column: most birds really do mate for life. But here’s the cold side: They mess around. And here’s the switch: Blame the ladies.”

How to blackmail your parents for food – “Fledglings extort food by putting themselves in danger.”

When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human – cr*p. i hate sad animal stories. *sniff*

Hawking: Humans Will Not Survive Another 1,000 Years ‘Without Escaping’ Earth – manifest destiny!

In Defence of Pseudonyms in Science: Defending the Right to Write

bonus: read this!>> Sam Parnia – the man who could bring you back from the dead – “This British doctor specialises in resurrection and insists outdated resuscitation techniques are squandering lives that could be saved.”

bonus bonus: James Lovelock: A man for all seasons – lovelock thinks there are too many people on the planet.

bonus bonus bonus: and this week’s “bras in the news” stories >> Bras Make Breasts “Saggier”, 15-year French [of course! - h.chick] Study Reveals and How your under-wired bra could kill you… if you’re a keen walker – “Metal in under-wired bras can cause compasses to be reversed because of the magnetic effect”. (sorry, no naked boobies at either of those pages.)

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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italy – reversal of fortune?

who knows?

but italy could be another place to look for a possible rapid inbreeding drop-off/rapid iq increase connection (see yesterday’s post) just ’cause the consang data are available. and they did, indeed, have a pretty rapid decrease in cousin marriage rates — at least in northern italy — not so much in the south. (i can’t think of any other examples where consang data are readily available — i mean without delving into church records or something like that.)

no idea if there are any early iq data available for italy, though. i won’t be looking for them (iq questions? – meh) — just wanted to let anyone who might be interested know that the numbers for the drop in inbreeding do exist for italy. (^_^)

look for the consang data here: Consanguinity, Inbreeding and Genetic Drift in Italy (tables also available here).

i put together a table of the first and last lustra in cavalli-sforza’s data set for a previous post, but there are data for each lustrum in between, too. you can get an idea of the scale of the drop-off (in the regions where there was a drop-off) from my nifty table:

previously: japan – reversal of fortune?

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consanguinity and polygamy

sean suggests that there is a correlation between consanguintiy and polygamy (or, rather, polygamy and consanguinity). i don’t know if anyone’s ever looked for a correlation between the two. if they have, i haven’t seen it. what someone should do is take the populations from consang.net (not the nations but the populations) and see if there is any correlation between consanguinity and polygamy or not. i’ve put that task on my “to do” list, but i can’t promise that i’ll get to it any time soon.

what i have done is check murdock‘s ethnographic atlas to see what sorts of societies (monogamous, occasionally polygamous, or polygamous) are also consanguineous (here consanguineous means first or second cousin marriage — i haven’t included uncle-niece marriages as that info is not available in the murdock atlas).

the cross tabs i used were DOMESTIC ORGANIZATION and NUMBER OF COUSIN MARRIAGES [Allowed]. the results are sorted into the following rows…

- Missing Data
- Indep. Nuclear Family – Monogamous
- Indep. Nuclear Family – Occasional polygyny
- Indep. Polyandrous Families
- Polygynous – Unusual Co-wives Pattern
- Polygynous – Usual Co-wives Pattern
- Minimal (stem) extended families
- Small extended families
- Large extended families

…and columns…

- Missing Data
- All four cousins
- Three of four cousins
- Two of four cousins
- One of four cousins
- No first cousins
- 1st & some 2nd cousins
- No 1st – 2nd unknown
- No 1st or 2nd cousins

i skipped the two “Missing Data” groups (fourteen results). i also skipped the “No 1st – 2nd uknown” group (twenty-seven results) since the presence or absence of second-cousin marriage was unknown. left out the polyandrous groups (all three of them), too. and i also drilled down (manually!) in the extended family categories (minimal/stem, small extended, and large extended) to check for consanguinity and polygamy there ’cause i couldn’t figure out how work that into the table (you’re welcome). i then combined all the monogamous, occasionally polygamous, and polygamous groups together (n=142 in total).

what did i find?:

well, for one thing, there’s a lot more polygamy and occasional polygamy out there in the world than monogamy, but then we all knew that already, didn’t we? there’s also more consanguineous marriage practices out there than not — or, at least, they’re allowed in more societies than not — but we’re all starting to know that now, too, aren’t we? (^_^) even in monogamous societies, there are twice as many that allow some form of cousin marriage (first or second) than those that don’t allow any.

the rate of consanguineous to non-consanguineous marriage allowed in monogamous societies is about 2:1. in polygamous and occasionally polygamous societies it’s about 2.5:1. so, yeah — there are more consanguineous marriages permitted in polygamous societies than monogamous ones, but is the correlation between the two (consanguinity and polygamy) very strong? i dunno. doesn’t really seem like it, but you tell me.

in Ya̧nomamö, chagnon suggests that groups that practice polygamy marry their cousins with greater frequency partly because the individuals in those societies have more cousins. he gives as example two ya̧nomamö extended families, one that had a founder with more wives than the other. because he founded so many lineages, as it were, the descendants of the guy with more wives were able to more easily find a cousin to marry simply because more persons who were their cousins existed. don’t know if this holds true for other polygamous groups, but it’s an interesting idea.

here are the numbers for you:

btw, the monogamous groups which allow(ed) cousin marriage are:

- the inca
- the badjau (pacific region)
- the burmese
- the romans
- the bribri (south america)
- the chinese (in chekiang)
- the tuareg
- the copper eskimo
- the lapps
- the iban (pacific region)
- the japanese (southern okayama)
- in the punjab (west)
- the vedda
- the yapese (pacific region)
- the manchu (aigun district)
- the kaska (north america)
- the toradja (pacific region)

_{(note: comments do not require an email. some toradja folks.)}

consanguinity and homicide

luke says/asks:

“It is interesting to compare world maps of consanguinity and murder rates…. Incidentally, someone who is proficient in computing correlation coefficients could use the country tables in the two links above to compute an actual number.”

here at hbd chick, we take reader requests! (^_^)

so i plotted the consang.net data as compiled by woodley & bell — just to be consistent — against the intentional homicide rates as compiled by the united nations office on drugs and crime and got … *drumroll please!* …

…nuthin’. zip. zilch. nada. a correlation of -0.0758. in other words, there is noooo correlation between modern consangunity rates and known intentional homicide rates. i love non-result results! they’re some of the best. (^_^)

here’s a chart for you — x-axis=consanguinity rates, y-axis=intentional homicide rates (as bob would say: that’s a scatter plot!):

and here’s a table of the data sorted by homicide rates:

like i said, though, i think there are problems with using the modern consanguinity rates when we are (i think probably/possibly) talking about the evolution of behaviors — and steven pinker thinks that there are probably some problems with the collection of homicide rates in certain countries. still — no correlation is no correlation.

previously: consanguinity and democracy

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consanguinity and entitlement

the following prolly doesn’t mean much ’cause, for one thing, the sample size is prolly too small (26 countries) — just think of it as me goofin’ around. (^_^)

however, for your mid-week pleasure, here is the 0.49 correlation (such as is it — see short but sweet intro above) between consanguinity (means taken from hoben, et. al.) and percentage of those who think democratic governments definitely ought to tax the rich to subsidize the poor (% responding “10″):

and here’s a nice picture. x-axis=mean consanguinity rates. y-axis=percent responding *10* to this question. (click on chart for LARGER view.)

previously: a sense of entitlement and a sense of entitlement ii

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