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 – 02/03/13

Can plants be altruistic? You bet, says new CU-Boulder-led study – “‘Embryos with the same mother and father as the endosperm in their seed weighed significantly more than embryos with the same mother but a different father,’ said Diggle, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. ‘We found that endosperm that does not share the same father as the embryo does not hand over as much food — it appears to be acting less cooperatively.’” – previously: even plants do it!

How to Survive a Siberian Winter – “[T]he study shows how, over the more than 25,000 years that modern humans been lived in Siberia, various peoples have adapted to the region’s cold weather and meaty food sources through selection on multiple genes that control several biological mechanisms.”

National intelligence and personality – “‘[T]aken together, Big Five traits and IQs of various cultures statistically explained 70% of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. The most important predictors of economic success were intelligence and extraversion, which proved to be strongly positively related to GDP.’” – from mangan.

Childhood intelligence is heritable, highly polygenic and associated with FNBP1L – from race/history/evolution notes.

IQ and homicide – from the awesome epigone.

HVGIQ: Cuba – from jason malloy.

New Geology study raises questions about long-held theories of human evolution – “While the shift to bipedalism appears to have occurred somewhere between 6 and 4 million years ago, Feakins’ study finds that thick rainforests had already disappeared by that point—replaced by grasslands and seasonally dry forests some time before 12 million years ago.”

Ice Age Lion Man is world’s earliest figurative sculpture – 40,000 years old! – h/t dienekes.

New study sheds light on the origin of the European Jewish population – “Elhaik’s findings strongly support the Khazarian Hypothesis, as opposed to the Rhineland Hypothesis, of European Jewish origins.” – h/t jayman!

Aztec conquest of Xaltocan led to population replacement – from dienekes.

Students with Autism Gravitate Toward STEM Majors – duh.

When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense – “Historically, polyandry was much more common than we thought.”

The supposedly educated believe in astrology – “‘Only 52% of science majors said that astrology is ‘not at all’ scientific.’” – from mangan.

Some chores linked to less sex – “Couples in which the husband did plenty of traditionally male jobs reported more sex than those in which the guy didn’t.” – but you already knew that, didn’t you? (~_^)

bonus: Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit – from jayman! (i LOVE baloney! fried baloney sandwiches — mmmmmm! (^_^) )

bonus bonus: ‘I feel like a stranger where I live’ – “As new figures show ‘white flight’ from cities is rising, one Londoner writes a provocative personal piece about how immigration has drastically changed the borough where she has lived for 17 years.”

bonus bonus bonus: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II – “In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: America’s most luxurious reservation: Huge homes of country’s richest Native American tribe where members make $1m EACH – “The tribe is also well-known for their charitable giving. It often donates cash to poorer tribes and charities across the country. Since 1996 they have given away $243.5 million…. ‘If it wasn’t for Shakopee, especially during this time when things are tough for loans, tough in this economy — there’s tribes who would be in a very tough situation,’ Ernest Stevens, chair of the National Indian Gaming Association explains. ‘There’s nobody in the gaming industry that I know of that can compare to what Shakopee does.’ In 2010 they were given a Jefferson Award for Public Service.”

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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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cheap labor…

…on roman latifundia undercut the native roman farmers. nihil novi sub sole, eh?:

“The first latifundia were accumulated from the spoils of war, confiscated from conquered peoples beginning in the early 2nd century BC. The prototypical latifundia were the Roman estates in Magna Graecia (the south of Italy) and in Sicily, which distressed Pliny the Elder (died AD 79) as he travelled, seeing only slaves working the land, not the sturdy Roman farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic’s army….

“The latifundia quickly started economic consolidation as larger estates achieved greater economies of scale and senators did not pay land taxes. Owners re-invested their profits by purchasing smaller neighbouring farms, since smaller farms had a lower productivity and could not compete, in an ancient precursor of agribusiness. By the 2nd century AD, latifundia had in fact displaced small farms as the agricultural foundation of the Roman Empire. This effect contributed to the destabilizing of Roman society as well. As the small farms of the Roman peasantry were bought up by the wealthy and their vast supply of slaves, the landless peasantry were forced to idle and squat around the city of Rome, relying greatly on handouts….

Pliny the Elder argued that the latifundia had ruined Italy and would ruin the Roman provinces as well. He reported that at one point just six owners possessed half of the province of Africa….” [wiki-p]

see also pliny’s natural history.

previously: the farming problem

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