linkfest – 01/20/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will

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

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

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

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

bonus bonus: Great Oxidation Event: More oxygen through multicellularity

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

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

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pedophilia

this bugs me:

“Paedophile with a foot fetish who abused 18 girls at takeaway is jailed for four years”

“A takeaway worker who claimed asylum in Britain went on to groom 18 schoolgirls for sexual abuse.

“Foot fetishist Homayon Narouzzad, 33, who had claimed he was fleeing persecution in Iran, targeted children as young as 12 when they came in to buy food….

“One 13-year-old unwittingly acted as a ‘pimp’, recruiting friends who in some cases in turn brought along their younger sisters, creating a ring of girls aged between 12 and 15 subjected to regular sexual abuse….”

girls aged between 12 and 15. so that means that the guy — however creepy he may be, and he sounds and looks like a MAJOR creep (just look at him!) — is probably not a pedophile.

pedophilia means being attracted to prepubescent children, which is weird and those people should be kept away from small children, by all means.

but being attracted to young girls who have hit puberty? even if they’re just 12 years old? not so weird, from an evolutionary p.o.v.

that’s not to say that i wouldn’t kill (figuratively speaking) any guy who came near a 12 year old daughter of mine — i’m just saying that the attraction part is not surprising. or even weird.

we have words for people who are attracted to young people at different stages of development (obviously re. the exact ages, your mileage may vary): hebephilia – being interested in individuals in the early stages of puberty, ca. ages 11-14; and ephebophilia – being interested in young adults, ca. ages 15-19, not weird at all afaics.

i wish society would start using these terms because calling everybody who has an interest in someone under the age of 18 a pedophile is just nuts. it makes it sound as though there’s rampant pedophilia in modern society, which there prolly is not.

previously: retarded teenagers

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linkfest – 01/16/11

Men With Macho Faces Attractive to Fertile Women, Researchers Find – “Meanwhile, a man’s intelligence has no effect on the extent to which fertile, female partners fantasize about others, the researchers found. They say the lack of an observed ‘fertility effect’ related to intelligence is puzzling.” [sorry, geeks!]

The Kingdom in the Closet – لا تسأل ، لا تخبر also: Paedophilia ‘culturally accepted in south Afghanistan’

The Mathematics Of Beauty – “The more men as a group disagree about a woman’s looks, the more they end up liking her.”

Lice DNA Study Shows Humans First Wore Clothes 170,000 Years Ago – ewwww!

Scent of a Woman’s Tears Lowers Men’s Desire – *sniff*

No love for outsiders – oxytocin boosts favouritism towards our own ethnic or cultural group – “Carsten de Dreu from the University of Amsterdam has found that sniffs of oxytocin make us more biased towards peers from our own ethnic or cultural group, versus those from other groups.” also Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds from nicholas wade @the nyt.

Born This Way – funny gay blog. (^_^)

Taking the moral high ground: People are more generous ‘when positioned physically higher than others’

Slipping the ‘Cognitive Straitjacket’ of Psychiatric Diagnosis – “Psychiatry’s diagnostic bible [the DSM] meets the awkward facts of genetics”

God’s little rabbits: Religious people out-reproduce secular ones by a landslide also Predisposition for Religion Can Spread Quickly

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