linkfest – 06/10/13

The breeder’s equation – R = h²S – from greg cochran.

Making Europeans kinder, gentler – from peter frost.

Napoleon Chagnon: Blood is their Argument – “‘It’s almost always for revenge. Blood is their argument. The Yanomamö will always attempt to avenge the death of a kinsman. It may take them a long time, and when the tables are turned on the guys that did it, like they get too small as a group, then it may appear to be a preemptive strike, but it has some historical roots. It’s almost never a case where they attack another Yanomamö village preemptively for no reason at all. It’s usually a consequence of some previous argument.’” – via habitable worlds: Darwin’s Dangerous Clan. see also Historical Reality: Infanticide vs Abortion @occam’s razor.

Zazes, Flurps and the Moral World of Kids – four-year-olds “assume that everybody else will be biased against other groups. And this extends beyond race, gender and religion to the arbitrary realm of Zazes and Flurps.” – h/t charles!

Manly Sweat Makes Other Men More Cooperative – “A chemical component of other guys’ sweat makes men more cooperative and generous, new research says. The study is the first to show that this pheromone, called androstadienone, influences other men’s behavior and reinforces the developing finding that humans are susceptible and responsive to these chemical signals.”

120,000 Years of Cancer – “A Neanderthal who lived more than 120,000 years ago had cancer of the bones, in the earliest known incidence of the disease found in the human fossil record, a new study reports.”

How does inbreeding avoidance evolve in plants? – “Case study of Leavenworthia suggests that loss of complex traits may be reversed.”

A Requiem for Science – from john derbyshire.

The Gentleman Naturalist – “[Darwin and Wallace's] papers were presented to the Linnean Society in July 1858, and met with silence: as Desmond and Moore say, ‘no fireworks exploded, only a damp squib’.”

ORIGINAL PAPER: How clever were the Victorians? A comment on Woodley et al. (2013) – from elijah armstrong!

The Onset and Development of B-W Ability Differences: Early Infancy to Age 3 (Part 1) – from jason malloy. see also dr. thompson: By the age of three, a clear gap in ability.

Slowing immigrant assimiliation – “George Borjas’s latest paper released at NBER shows that newer waves of immigrants are less able to assimilate than previous immigrants waves.” – @gucci little piggy. see also: Two books, one conclusion. Immigration has been and is too high. @conservative home (u.k.).

The Real Threat to British Elites – “Why British elites covered up the Pakistani pimps’ child gangrape horror.” – from steve sailer.

Population history of the Caribbean (Moreno-Estrada et al. 2013) and IBD sharing between Iberians and North Africans (Botigué et al. 2013) – @dienekes.

How Game Might Have Benefited Jason Richwine – ask and ye shall receive! [no double entendre intended. you guys have been reading too much roissy! (~_^) ] – good stuff from heartiste! (thanks, h!)

Geography, race, religion, and class – “[W]ealthy suburban and rural blacks go to church more than poor inner-city blacks do, and wealthy suburban and rural whites attend more than poor inner-city whites do.” – from the awesome epigone.

People Are Overly Confident in Their Own Knowledge, Despite Errors

Ethnic policy in ancient Japan – from spandrell!

“‘[F]ertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict’” [pdf] – via race/history/evolution notes.

Atheists turn to science during times of stress

Genetics and the increase in obesity – from jason collins. see also mr. mangan, esq.: The Rise of Mental Illness and Obesity.

100 Blog Posts – A Reflection on HBD Blogging And What Lies Ahead – from jayman. and jayman jr.!! (^_^)

Back in the saddle – m.g. @thosewhocansee is back (or will be back shortly)! yaaaaayyyyyy!!!! h/t nelson!

Human Biodiversity – Things You Are Not Supposed to Know About – from staffan!

bonus: Review of “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy – from foseti. see also this great set of “randoms” from mr. f. you should click through to every last one of them (if you haven’t already)!

bonus bonus: How the chicken lost its penis – a lesson for all!

bonus bonus bonus: Leviathan Unbound – from malcolm pollack.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: light entertainment – @PRISM_NSA on twitter and Obama Is Checking Your Email on tumblr. (~_^)

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Life wasn’t all trouble at mill – “[T]he Industrial Revolution came as a tremendous boom to a lot of working people: they earned far more than they had done before, escaped lives of crushing poverty and for the first time began to exert some measure of control over their lives.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The Fight to Save Ping Pong – excellent!

_{(note: comments do not require an email. dirty jobs – sexing baby chickens!)}

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! (~_^)

_{(note: comments do not require an email. baby lizards! awwwww!)}

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

_{(note: comments do not require an email. albanian sworn virgin.)}

linkfest – 08/05/12

Genetic Data and Fossil Evidence Tell Differing Tales of Human Origins – neanderthals in africa?

It’s in our genes: Why women outlive men

If Allah Wills It – why so little science (or reading for that matter) in the muslim world? @those who can see.

Out-of-Wedlock Births, Liberals and Conservatives – “[U]nintelligent men are less encumbered by bachelorhood when it comes to producing offspring. On the flip side, intelligent men generally are childless if they are not married.” – from jayman.

Too darn hot? – “Does higher IQ correlate with colder temperatures? Not among people belonging to the same cultural system, such as the Chinese.” – from peter frost.

The problem with high IQ – mental illness. from secular blood.

Family Type and Fertility – @hail to you.

Human cycles: History as science – cliodynamics. 2020 – the next bad year.

Research links sexual imagery and consumer impatience – “[S]exual cues cause us to be impatient and can affect monetary decisions.” — “us” meaning men. (~_^)

Conservatives and perversity – from the inductivist.

Did Your Brain Make You Do It?

bonus: ‘Bullingdon Club’ dolphins form elite societies and cliques, scientists find – “Dolphins form cliques based on their skills, scientists have found, suggesting they could be the only non-human mammals to indulge in elite societies.”

bonus bonus: C’est Chick – i had to link to it. you see that, don’t you?

bonus bonus bonus: Double Jeopardy – “In China, the rich and powerful can hire body doubles to do their prison time for them.” – this one’s for luke. (^_^)

bonus bonus bonus bonus: High-Profile Geneticists Post Findings on Popular Pre-Publication Site – arXiv – “‘It’s wonderful if biologists are belatedly joining the late twentieth century,’ he [Paul Ginsparg] quips. ‘Welcome to the party; better late than never.’”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Beak Heat – Evolutionary Theory of Bird Bills May Need Revision – “[B]eak size may also be an adaptation to regulate temperature and conserve water.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: forget the paleo-diet, try the chimp diet! (not as many bananas as you would think.)

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Australian Billionaire Wants To Build Jurassic Park-Style Resort – i’m going!

_{(note: comments do not require an email. cute overload alert! don’t say you weren’t warned.)}

not so many luddites after all

over the weekend, one of my younger first cousins once removed declared that he absolutely, definitely will be a fireman when he grows up (he’s three). his father, one of my in-laws, (half-)jokingly said that, no, you’ll be a lawyer or a doctor or a professor. i chimed in with: “get into genetics, kid. that’s where all the money will be.” (heh! as if i would know.)

my cousin-in-law responded: “genetics? but that’s unethical.” this from a man with a marketing degree. (~_^)

i have to admit i was pretty flummoxed and didn’t really know how to respond or even where to start. our follow up discussion was brief so i didn’t get a satisfactory explanation as to what’s “unethical” about “genetics,” but i got to wondering what the rest of america thinks. thankfully, they’re not so skeptical:

Survey finds wide public support for nationwide study of genes, environment and lifestyle
Nov 12, 2008

Four in five Americans support the idea of a nationwide study to investigate the interactions of genes, environment and lifestyle, and three in five say they would be willing to take part in such a study, according to a survey released today. The research was conducted by the Genetics & Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University with funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)….

“Our survey found that widespread support exists in the general public for a large, genetic cohort study. What’s more, we found little variation in that support among different demographic groups,” said David Kaufman, Ph.D., lead author of the paper and project director at the Genetics & Public Policy Center, which is located in Washington….

The online survey of 4,659 U.S. adults was conducted between December 2007 and January 2008. When asked about their support for and willingness to participate in a large genetic cohort study, 84 percent of respondents supported the study and 60 percent indicated they would definitely or probably participate in such a study if asked.

Survey respondents were carefully selected to reflect the demographic makeup of the United States. No significant differences in support or willingness to participate were observed between whites, Hispanics, African Americans and Asians. American Indian and Alaska Native respondents expressed less support for the study (65 percent), but were just as likely to be willing to participate (63 percent) as other respondents….

the pew folks also conducted a “town hall meeting” about genetics in 2008 — a set of five focus group sessions held around the country. from the report [pg. 11]:

“Participants were asked to consider what types of research should and should not be done with the information collected by the proposed study. Research aimed at curing disease was commonly cited as acceptable, and some participants named conditions such as cancer, birth defects, and diabetes….

“Human cloning was cited in every town hall as an unacceptable use of the proposed biobank, although in one case participants differentiated between reproductive cloning (unacceptable) and cloning aimed at regenerating organs or otherwise curing disease (acceptable). Participants frequently named research aimed at altering humans or creating ‘designer babies’ as unacceptable. Another area of concern was ‘things that point out differences between gender, or race, or anything like that that people use to discriminate.’ Other areas mentioned included weapons development, intelligence, alcoholism, and sexual orientation….”

so a lot of americans don’t like the idea of cloning. personally, i’m looking forward to being able to clone myself. i mean, how great a world would it be with more MEs in it? (~_^) and why should bacteria and some lizards have all the fun anyways?

and a lot of americans don’t like “designer babies” either. the funny thing is, of course, that they don’t realize that that’s what they’re aiming for when they look for that perfect someone to marry, i.e. kids to match their heart’s desire. in fact, a lot of americans don’t like anything that smacks of eugenics. i guess that’s not too surprising at this point in time.

at least the majority haven’t written off the whole discipline of genetics as “unethical” though.

_{(note: comments do not require an email. clone.)}

mexico city considers temporary marriages

from the christian science monitor:

“Mexico’s ‘temporary’ marriages: till death – or two years – do us part”

“Mexico City is studying a plan to introduce ‘temporary’ marriage licenses – letting couples choose after two years to split or renew the license for life – in an effort to mitigate the effects of divorce….

“The left-leaning assembly is studying a new initiative to introduce temporary marriage licenses that would expire after two years if the couple so desires.

“The proposal, intended to reduce the bureaucratic costs and emotional toll of divorce, has garnered as many fans as foes: Some see it as a pragmatic alternative, while others, including the Roman Catholic Church, see it as an attack on family values. It comes as Mexico grapples with its own culture war in the world’s second-largest Catholic country.

“‘The centrality of family in Mexico is changing,’ says Norma Ojeda, a sociologist at the San Diego State University who has studied the evolution of marriage in Mexico since the 1970s. ‘That is something that is part of a global social change in many countries.’

“To its authors, the proposal reflects social changes in Mexico City, where they say most divorces occur in the first two years. If after two years, couples decide to until ‘death do us part,’ they can renew their licenses. If not, the proposal specifies how children and property are handled.

“‘The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends,’ Leonel Luna, the assemblyman who co-wrote the bill, told Reuters. ‘You wouldn’t have to go through the tortuous process of divorce.’”

plenty of societies have or had laws providing for temporary marriages. many muslim societies (primarily shi’a ones?) have a temporary form of marriage known as nikah mut’ah. it can be used as a way of covering up prostitution (“get yer four hour marriages!”), but that’s not the only reason the practice exists.

temporary marriage was also an option amongst the early medieval irish [pg. 302]:

“The adaltrach [one type of wife in early medieval ireland] may not have brought much property at all, since in many cases, the primary intention of the union was merely to achieve social acceptance of a sexual relationship and its progeny. Another goal was to set up a temporary working relationship, in which the man supplied the farm and the woman supplied the labor. Where CL [Cain Lanamna, 'the law of marriage'] discusses spouses who were brought in to live on another’s farm, it emphasized the labor aspect of the spouse’s relationship; this was as true of a man supported on a woman’s farm as it was of a woman supported on a man’s property. CL #28 depicts the woman in this case as keeping half her handiwork, and one-ninth of the milk, corn and bacon produced during the time the couple lived together. The relationship envisaged as likely to end at Beltene, the spring festival of May 1, which was also the time many women traditionally moved with the livestock to the summer pastures. The departing woman was supposed to have ‘a sack (of produce) for every month’ she had spent on the man’s farm.”

the thing is, tho, that no society with temporary marriages ever invented things like science or succeeded with liberal democracy. those seem, for complex reasons, to go along with strong monogamy (not to mention a relatively high iq).

mating practices affect the patterns of genetic relatedness amongst the members in any given society; and those patterns, in turn, affect the historical and evolutionary trajectories of societies.

_{(note: comments do not require an email. strong monogamy.)}

not even a thank you card

seven billion people on the planet now…

U.N. Says 7 Billion Now Share the World

… around six billion of them have arrived since the 1800s …

… thanks to science and modern medicine and agricultural innovations, which were mostly invented by europeans (european men).

don’t see much gratitude out there, tho.

see also: Doomsday argument

_{(note: comments do not require an email. gratitude.)}

linkfest – 06/05/11

Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain – “The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation…. The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again.”

An Epidemic of False Claims – “Competition and conflicts of interest distort too many medical findings”

Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans’ Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes

Atheists and the Big 5 personality traits – “[A]theists are disagreeable and open to new things.” from the inductivist.

Scientists find BEES suffer from negative emotion

Non-independent mutations present new path to evolutionary success – “Mutations of DNA that lead to one base being replaced by another don’t have to happen as single, independent events in humans and other eukaryotes, a group of Indiana University Bloomington biologists has learned after surveying several creatures’ genomes…. [They] found that across the board, about three percent of new mutations are ‘multi-nucleotide mutations,’ or MNMs, perhaps the result of a single, error-prone DNA polymerase making two or more mistakes as it made its way down the chromosome.”

Will Neuroscience Challenge the Legal Concept of Criminal Responsibility?

Female Australopiths Left Home Once Mature, Males Didn’t – “Teeth from ancient human ancestors suggest that females joined new social groups once they reached maturity.”

Asphalt may have poisoned ancient Americans

Women have a little less sex and a couple more partners than they did 20 years ago – from the audacious.

Color Red Increases the Speed and Strength of Reactions

Researchers characterize epigenetic fingerprint of 1,628 people

Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends to 150 – “The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.” – the dunbar number again!

Californian dolphin gang caught killing porpoises

bonus: Quantum mechanics rule ‘bent’ in classic experiment