Delayed childbearing & autism
Independent and dependent contributions of advanced maternal and paternal ages to autism risk: Reports on autism and parental age have yielded conflicting results on whether mothers, fathers, or both, contribute to increased risk. We analyzed restricte…
Rand Paul
A moderately sympathetic story about Rand Paul, who is running as the anti-establishment candidate in Kentucky. My bias, such that I have, is to look positively upon Paul’s run for Senate, mostly because I know that when I agree with a Paul they’ll actually stick to the stance they’re taking because they actually believe […]
Beautiful butterflies & localized adaptation
Two new papers are out in PLoS Genetics which make inferences about adaptation using butterfly species which exhibit Mullerian mimicry. I’ll give the author summaries instead of the abstracts.Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of …
Hayek vs. Keynes
You’ve probably watched the Hayek vs. Keynes rap by now:Am the only one who was a little weirded out by the incongruity of John Maynard Keynes kickin’ it with the honeys in the back of the limo? It isn’t as if he was exactly on the down-low. He was a f…
Language goes extinct, human race to follow….
Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India:Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages – Bo – had come to an end….”It is generally believed that all Andamanese langu…
Ibn Khaldun In Our Time
Ibn Khaldun on In Our Time. Excellent program. Khaldun’s assessment that the Mamluks of Egypt had developed a system of rule which was robust against the decay of asabiyyah was born out by 450 years of subsequent history (that is, until the liquidation…
…about those cheese-eating surrender monkeys
France denies citizenship over veil:
French officials have denied citizenship to a man because he allegedly forces his wife to wear a full Islamic veil, the immigration minister said Wednesday.
“This individual imposes the full veil upon his wife, does not allow her the freedom to go and come as she pleases, and bans her from going […]
“Synthetic associations” and sickle cell anemia
Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…
Half Sigma’s flawed post on DTNBP1
A while back, Mark and I were working on a comprehensive post which would try to tally the results of the various IQ-gene studies to see what they said about racial differences. We began this quest bright-eyed and hopeful that we would help contribute…