linkfest – 04/07/13

A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Five Loci Influencing Facial Morphology in Europeans – “Our results also suggest that the high heritability of facial phenotypes seems to be explained by a large number of DNA variants with relatively small individual effect size, a phenomenon well known for other complex human traits, such as adult body height.”

The Genetic Correlation between Height and IQ: Shared Genes or Assortative Mating? – “In this study, we used a large (total N = 7,905), genetically informative dataset to understand why two potentially sexually selected traits in humans—height and IQ—are correlated. We found that both shared genes and assortative mating were about equally important in causing the relationship between these two traits.”

ScienceShot: Monkey Smiles Are Contagious – “Previously, only humans and orangutans had been shown to quickly and involuntarily mimic the facial expressions of their companions, an ability that seems to be linked to empathy.”

No evidence for higher testosterone in black compared to white adolescent males – @race/history/evolution notes.

Brain scans decode dream content – “Researchers have decoded the content of people’s dreams using brain scanning technology”

Fertility and Happiness: A Global Perspective and A Fat World – With a Fat Secret? – from jayman (he was on a roll this week!).

Genes behind obesity mapped in large-scale study – “An international research team has identified seven new gene loci linked to obesity.”

Is Psychometric g a Myth? – @human varieties. see also Is the g Factor a myth? from steve sailer.

Darwin: Are the races of man separate species or merely separate subspecies? – from steve sailer.

Inbreeding, race replacement, genetic disease, “diversity” – @race/history/evolution notes.

Wyld Stallyns and House O’Rats and Undecidable Propositions – from greg cochran (he was also on a roll this week!).

Have We Evolved to Be Nasty or Nice? – from matt ridley.

Shocker — married mothers smarter than single moms – from the awesome epigone.

Sex, models and housework – b.s. king takes a critical look at the (suspicious) maths behind that “sex and housework” story that made the rounds recently.

The Parsis – “At present, we simply don’t know enough about Parsi history to understand what social and psychological characteristics may have been favored during the long centuries between the arrival of this community in India and its encounter with the British from the 17th century onward.” – from peter frost.

Mankind’s Collective Personalities – from john derbyshire.

Polynesian mtDNA in extinct Amerindians from Brazil – @dienekes.

Religiosity and fear of death: a three‐nation comparison – “Overall, the patterns in all three countries were similar. When linearity was assumed, there is a substantial positive correlation between most religiosity measures and fear of death…. [F]emales were more religious and feared death more than did males, and Muslims expressed considerably greater fear than did members of any other major religion.” – @mein naturwissenschaftsblog.

Researchers see antibody evolve against HIV

Shocker: Colorado shooter on prescription psychiatric meds – @mangan’s.

The average human vagina – yes, there’s a lot of variation down there (sorry, no exciting pics @the link!).

Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math – “E.O. Wilson shares a secret: Discoveries emerge from ideas, not number-crunching” – hmmmm. i still think that (*ahem*) being able to do maths is an awfully handy skill in biology, not to mention population genetics.

Could playing ‘boys’ games help girls in science and math? – “[M]en and women with either a strong masculine or androgynous gender-identity fared better in mental rotation tasks.” – so, the women who were more guy-like were better at the mental rotation tasks. duh!

Global E-mail Patterns Reveal ‘Clash of Civilizations’ – “The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists.”

In Praise of Kinship – “You don’t have to be a relativist to see that one-size individualism can’t fit all cultures, or that clannish bonds are often deeply fulfilling.” – wsj review of mark weiner‘s book, The Rule of the Clan. see also What Modern Democracies Should Understand About Clan-based Societies Explored in New Book by Rutgers–Newark Law Professor.

bonus: The secret superdads: More than a dozen UK sperm donors have fathered 20 or more children EACH – “Five-hundred men have sired more than 6,100 children in Britain”

bonus bonus: French people mired in ‘collective depression’ – “A new survey published on Thursday found that 70 percent of them see their country as afflicted by a ‘collective depression’, with two thirds believing that France is ‘in decline’…. ‘This deep French depression is explained in large part by a sense of lost identity.’”

bonus bonus bonus: Xenophobia has no effect on migrants’ happiness, says study

bonus bonus bonus bonus: An Emergency Hatch for Baby Lizards – “Unborn lizards can erupt from their eggs days early if vibrations hint at a threat from a hungry predator, new research shows.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Lego pulls toy following accusations of being anti-Islamic – but Lego denies discontinuing Jabba’s Palace over race claims – previously.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Boy, 17, builds DNA testing machine [polymerase chain reaction machine] in his bedroom to find out why his younger sibling has ginger hair

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Chinese president urges openness, respect for diversity – of types of governments! (~_^)

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linkfest – 02/25/13

Natural selection acts to maintain diversity between Out of Africa and sub-Saharan African populations in genes related to neurological processes and brain development – aapa abstract @race/history/evolution notes.

Hispanic Genomic Diversity, Part I: European, African, and Amerindian Admixtures and the Taíno ‘Extinction’ Controversy – “This post deals with the variance in European, African, and Amerindian/Taíno admixture in five of the twenty Hispanic subgroups….” – from nelson!

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past – “Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending even suggest that human evolution as a whole has, on the contrary, accelerated over the last several thousand years, and they also believe that relatively isolated groups of people, such as Africans and North Americans, are subject to differing selection. That leads to the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that such groups might be evolving in different directions—a controversial notion to say the least.” – i dunno why that suggestion should be uncomfortable, but i guess it is. -?- see also steve sailer.

Predictable evolution trumps randomness of mutations – “Separate bacteria populations may respond to environmental changes in identical ways.”

Mediterranean Diet Cuts Heart Disease Risk – IN MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLE! – “Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.” – *facepalm*

Where Men See White, Women See Ecru – “Neuroscientists prove what we always suspected: the two sexes see the world differently” – i love ecru!

Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered – FOXP2 gene. and an objection: The “Language” Gene and Women’s Wagging Tongues.

Bone Marrow Transplants: When Race Is an Issue – via hbd biblography.

“Know Thyself” Is A Lot To Ask

Low mobility associated with inherited ability is no social tragedy – from gregory clark, via jayman.

The sociology of dysgenia – “Eugenics is a great idea, and perhaps it’s not as complex as I make it to be here. But the fact remains that for all we speculate, we know very, very little about it.” – from spandrell. via foseti.

Modern sub-fertility may be a pathologically slow life history, triggered by a supernormal stimulus of modernity – from bruce charlton. see also mangan and malcolm pollack.

The Riddle of the Human Species – multilevel selection argumentation from e.o. wilson. i like the opening paragraphs very much. (^_^)

Can India’s Democracy Defeat Corruption? – “Of course, big corruption scandals are commonplace in the developing world (and the developed world, for that matter). Yet the scale and relative peacefulness of the corruption debate in India may be unprecedented…. And although the Indian political system is imperfect in ways too numerous to list here, the central authorities most of the time do respect free speech and free press. Civil society works. Freedom of association works….”

Study finds maize in diets of people in coastal Peru dates to 5,000 years ago – “Up until now, the prevailing theory was that marine resources, not agriculture and corn, provided the economic engine behind the development of civilization in the Andean region of Peru.”

Fun With HBD: Racial Differences in Women’s Asses – (~_^)

How Christianity stopped Anglo-Saxon England eating horsemeat: Church officials claimed it was ‘pagan’ food

bonus: The Big Question – “Q: What day most changed the course of history?” – i like freeman dyson’s response. (^_^)

bonus bonus: Dolphins Call Each Other By Name – “Bottlenose dolphins call out the specific names of loved ones when they become separated, a study finds. Other than humans, the dolphins are the only animals known to do this….”

bonus bonus bonus: The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole – behavioral evidence suggests that hierarchy is heriditary in elephants.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Grey langurs spotted treating a wild dog to a grooming session in India

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: How male alligators have PERMANENTLY erect penises which they keep hidden inside their bodies

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Most zombie ant photographs are upside down

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The 15th-Century Equivalent of Your Cat Walking on Your Keyboard – meow!

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linkfest – 02/12/13

(sorry. the dog ate my sunday linkfest….)

And Yet Another Tale of Two Maps – from jayman.

Why are girls and boys maturing earlier? – from peter frost.

When Did Humans Come to the Americas?

Large study shows substance abuse rates higher in teenagers with ADHD – “When the adolescents were an average of 15 years old, 35 percent of those with ADHD histories reported using one or more substances, as compared to only 20 percent of teens without ADHD histories.”

Tribal societies and war – from mangan.

Crime and Twins – from dienekes.

HVGIQ: Cayman Islands – from jason malloy.

Evil Genes and the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul – @bad data, bad!

Digging Deep in the DNA – “‘I think I’m one of the few people,’ she said, ‘who have taken the rectal temperature of a grizzly bear.’”

Men are from Mars Earth, women are from Venus Earth – “That men and women approach their social world similarly does not imply that there are no differences in average scores between the sexes. Average differences do exist, write the authors.” – yes, average differences do exist.

Exercise linked with reduced prostate cancer risk in Caucasians but not African-Americans – “Studies have also revealed that African-American men have an increased risk of developing prostate cancer and of dying from the disease compared with Caucasians.”

Gene today, gone tomorrow: Genes for autism and schizophrenia only active in developing brains – “Genes linked to autism and schizophrenia are only switched on during the early stages of brain development, according to a study in mice led by researchers at the University of Oxford.” – curioser and curioser….

The Lab Accident That Led to the Discovery of Supertasters – “A cloud of chemicals. One researcher detects a smell. The other does not. What happens next? Science.”

So THAT’s why women’s feet and hands are always cold! Why they are slaves to their hormones

On Genteels – @bloody shovel.

Oral Mystery: Are Agriculture and Rats Responsible for Tooth Decay? – “Tooth decay is a relatively modern problem. The bacteria feasting on your teeth might have originated in the mouth of a rodent, and found their way to our teeth, thanks to agriculture.”

bonus: ‘Google for spies’ draws ire from rights groups

bonus bonus: ‘It’s a boy!’ Monkey midwife delivers baby

bonus bonus bonus: What Are Dogs Saying When They Bark? [Excerpt] – “Experiments have now shown that dogs use different barks and growls to communicate different things.” – see also: Your dog really does understand you… They’re more likely to steal food if they think you can’t see, research reveals.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Pigeons Get a New Look – “Pigeons, a Darwin favorite, carry new clues to evolution.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Do plants ‘veto’ bad genes? – “Latest evidence fails to quell doubt about whether plants can access “ancestral” genes outside their parents’”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Face-to-face with the earliest ancestor of all placental mammals

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Penicillin Mold Can Reproduce Sexually, Which Could Lead to Better Antibiotics – “Penicillin-producing fungus, previously thought to be asexual, has a sexual side. The finding is the latest in a kind of sexual revolution in fungal genetics.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Fast Food Robot Builds the Perfect Burger – won’t need mexicans for flipping burgers anymore.

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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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linkfest – 01/06/13

All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable – from jayman. (<< read this!)

John Derbyshire’s Vade Mecum For Diversity Conversations (<< read this, too!)

Male Superiority in Spatial Navigation: Adaptation or Side Effect?

Why Girls Do Better in School – “Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys, even when they perform worse on standardized tests?” – basically ’cause they behave better in the classroom (but you knew that already, didn’t you?).

White murder rates by state – from the awesome epigone.

‘Universal’ personality traits don’t necessarily apply to isolated indigenous people – “Researchers who spent two years looking at 1,062 members of the Tsimane culture found that they didn’t necessarily exhibit the five broad dimensions of personality – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – also known as the ‘Big Five.’”

Dopamine-receptor gene variant linked to human longevity – “[S]tudy finds genetic tie to personality traits influencing healthy aging.”

War Before Civilization – from greg cochran.

bonus: The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist

bonus bonus: Cloud of atoms goes beyond absolute zero – whoa!

bonus bonus bonus: The Offenses Clause & Universal Jurisdiction Over Terrorists – bad stuff. =/

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Banter about Dildoes – review of Shopping in Ancient Rome.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: How to Really Read in 2013 – from foseti – i like this!

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linkfest – 12/30/12

Monkey brain area keeps count of kindnesses – “The primates have an altruistic ‘tally chart’ that keeps track of social rewards and gifts.” – mine’s on an excel spreadsheet. (~_^)

Are Babies Born Good? – “New research offers surprising answers to the age-old question of where morality comes from.”

Xenophobia Upside: Ethnic And Religious Diversity Correlated To Less Environmental Action – “Scandinavian countries, low in ethnic and religious diversity, take more collective action than more diverse nations, like the UK, China and the United States.” – reminiscent of putnam’s findings [pdf]. via amren.

It’s not the cads, it’s the tramps – from jayman.

Latin Americans Most Positive in the World – “Singaporeans are the least positive worldwide” – from gallup.

Fluctuating environment may have driven human evolution

Shape of human hand may have evolved for fighting, scientists say

Birdsong study pecks at theory that music is uniquely human – “‘[T]he same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like….’ For male birds listening to another male’s song, it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music.”

Virtual women reveal more skin, regardless of body proportions – “71% of male avatars covered between 75-100% of their skin, while only 5% of females did. In contrast, 47% of the virtual females they studied covered between 25-49% of their skin, compared to 9% of males.”

Indonesia’s Islamic spirit of tolerance – “Indonesia is rather middling in terms of attitudinal religious tolerance.” – from the awesome epigone.

Are fathers necessary? – @mangan’s.

DNA of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza to be examined for ‘evil’ gene in first study of its kind ever conducted on a mass murderer – “The study of the killer’s DNA has been ordered by Connecticut Medical Examiner H. Wayne Carver who carried out the post mortems on all the victims. He has contacted geneticists at University of Connecticut’s to conduct the study.”

bonus: Judeo-Christian, Not So Much – from assistant village idiot.

bonus bonus: No heir to run the company? Why adult ‘adoption’ is big business in Japan

bonus bonus bonus: Why Do We Blink So Frequently? – “[B]riefly closing our eyes might actually help us to gather our thoughts and focus attention on the world around us.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Even in same vineyard, different microbes may create variations in wine grapes – “Yeast species may cause differences in otherwise identical grapes from the same vineyard.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Buried Christian Empire Casts New Light on Early Islam – “Archeologists are studying the ruins of a buried Christian empire in the highlands of Yemen.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Unsexing the Language – “Every day, the left is beavering away at the language. Fight back. Proudly use such sentences as ‘Man is a mammal so he suckles his young.’” – heh! i love jared taylor. (^_^)

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linkfest – 12/09/12

Reversal of Fortune – greg cochran on how to raise your population’s iq significantly in one or two generations.

Within one year Amish population grows by 12,000; experts expect trend to continue – “Lancaster Amish, as well as in Pennsylvania and across the country, are doubling their population every 18-20 years.”

You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can’t Make Him Play With It – “Twenty years ago, Hasbro, a major American toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse it hoped to market to both boys and girls. It soon emerged that girls and boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof.” – (^_^)

Women may have the edge on men at detecting unfaithfulness – “Facial masculinity was found to be correlated both with womens’ ratings of unfaithfulness and the extent to which the rated man had actually engaged in sexual cheating and poaching…. [A]ccurate judgements of unfaithfulness can be made from the face alone, in the absence of behavioural cues.”

Psychology Uncovers Sex Appeal of Dark Personalities – “Why are narcissists more physically attractive…? [P]eople with dark personality traits are not seen as more physically attractive than others when you take away their freedom to wear their own clothes and makeup. People with dark personalities seem to be better at making themselves physically appealing.”

Monkey business: What howler monkeys can tell us about the role of interbreeding in human evolution – “The researchers found that individuals of mixed ancestry who share most of their genome with one of the two species are physically indistinguishable from the pure individuals of that species. ‘The implications of these results are that physical features are not always reliable for identifying individuals of hybrid ancestry. Therefore, it is possible that hybridization has been underestimated in the human fossil record….’”

STEM beliefs – from the awesome epigone.

Can Familiarity Breed Desire? Science Explains Why Men Prefer Women Who Look Like Them – “Familiarity does not breed contempt, a new study suggests after it revealed that men find women with whom they share certain facial features more attractive.”

Cavemen Were Much Better At Illustrating Animals Than Artists Today

‘Releasing’ people from Catholic guilt increases generosity towards church, research shows – “People who recall being absolved of their sins, are more likely to donate money to the church, according to research published today in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior.” – heh.

The End of Asperger’s Syndrome – hallelujah! i’m cured! (~_^)

The Plight of the Alpha Female – “Women remain scarce in the most elite positions. And it’s by choice.”

bonus: Evolutionary psychology and the Fermi paradox – @mangan’s.

bonus bonus: Captured: the moment photosynthesis changed the world

bonus bonus bonus: How many Lego bricks can be stacked one on top of the other before one at the bottom breaks? – answer: a LOT!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Palace of First Chinese Emperor Unearthed

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Killer Cave May Have Inspired Myth of Hades – “A giant cave that might have helped serve as the inspiration for the mythic ancient Greek underworld Hades once housed hundreds of people, potentially making it one of the oldest and most important prehistoric villages in Europe before it collapsed and killed everyone inside….”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The most extraordinary feat of British scholarship ever – “Professor Richard Sorabji, of King’s College London, has just completed the Herculean task of editing, translating and overseeing 100 volumes of translations of ancient commentaries on Aristotle, written from 200-600 AD.”

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repeal the 19th amendment! (redux)

at least for the coastal states. from the awesome epigone:

“[I]f only women voted: Obama wins reelection in an even more convincing fashion than was actually the case, trouncing Romney 347-185 (6 undetermined).”

previously: repeal the 19th amendment! and tweedle dee…

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