Month: May 2012
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Are Hispanics that socially conservative?
I often hear in the media that Hispanics are “socially conservative.” For that sort of thing you do need “quick & dirty” rules-of-thumb, and the assertion seems broadly plausible. On the other hand, the Hispanic attitude tow…
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The utility and reality of species
Of all the taxonomic ranks species is the most clear, distinct, and concrete. More practically, it is the level which most naturally falls out of the patterns of life’s tree. Or does it? If the term “species concept” does not ring a b…
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India’s monkey problem
Indians Feed the Monkeys, Which Bite the Hand. Animals are likely H. economicus, they respond to incentives. There used to be problems with bears approaching cars in Yellowstone in the 1960s, before the practice was discouraged and banned.
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The American Community Survey: mend it, don’t end it!
To my surprise there is apparently a move on the part of the Republicans in the House of Representatives to curtail funding for The American Community Survey. I am not too excited by the idea that you could get fined for not filling out a government su…
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GEDmatch
For genetic genealogy buffs, I highly recommend Gedmatch. It’s been rolling out a lot of new features, including ancestry inference tools from the major genome bloggers. Here is my “chromosome paining” using Zack Ajmal’s referen…
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The Atlantic has competition
Foer Returns to New Republic as Editor: Two months after buying a majority stake in The New Republic, the technology entrepreneur Chris Hughes has lured one of its former stars, Franklin Foer, back to the magazine as its editor. … The print magaz…
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Education encourages integration?
It is sometimes fashionable to assert that higher socioeconomic status whites are the sort who will impose integration on lower socioeconomic status whites, all the while sequestering themselves away. I assumed this was a rough reflection of reality. B…
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Doing psychology right (trying)
I highly recommend Åse Fixes Science, in light of our recent conversations about psychology. It’s a fascinating and important discipline, but it is hard to make heads or tails of it all.
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White supremacy and white privilege; same coin
A few weeks ago I met Chris Mooney for some drinks & snacks, and we talked about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. It was an interesting conversation. We have a long history, so it wasn̵…
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What if you are more likely to be a psychopath?
In the comments below Nathaniel Comfort asks: What I do, as a historian, is take something apparently simple and make it more complicated. I wonder about how your curves, e.g., would be applied in real life. *Specific* couples, *particular* children–…
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Violence in Science
The special “Human Conflict” issue of Science seems free if you register. No time to read it now, but there’s a lot of interesting looking articles. (via Dienekes)
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We are all special (genomically)
John Hawks already discussed the Keinan and Clark paper in Science, Recent Explosive Human Population Growth Has Resulted in an Excess of Rare Genetic Variants. To borrow a critique, much of human genomics up to this point has been WEIRD. A reanalysis …
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Bias in psychology
Ed Yong has a piece in Nature on the problems of confirmation bias and replication in psychology. Yong notes that “It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results.̶…
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Genes are overrated, genetics is underrated
A few days ago Nathaniel Comfort pointed me to this post, Genetic determinism round-up. If you are curious go read Comfort’s whole post. I honestly didn’t enjoy it very much, I think I got what he was saying, but there were all sorts of cir…
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Abraham’s genetic threads
Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness: For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told i…
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It doesn’t always get “better”
The History News Network has a post up, Now It’s Obama Who’s Our First Gay President!, which hammers home points which I’ve been making implicitly and explicitly about historical processes, especially in the United States: Today, I kn…
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Porn, a new age, an old age, and all that
I’ve been commenting on internet porn for nearly 10 years. One reason is that as someone who graduated high school in the spring of 1995 I’m probably in the very last cohort of American males for whom pornography was an item subject to scar…
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Collective “honor”
Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse: The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested. Old friends started walking stonily past…
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The Malagasy Ancestry Project
Just a heads up, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell has begun moving on the Malagasy Ancestry Project. More information: The genetics of the Malagasy people have been essentially unstudied. Analysis of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA markers have corroborated t…
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The bell curve of personality?
I stopped reading much in the area of personality and behavior genetics a few years back. The main reason is I had a really hard time believing there were very good quantitative measures of many of the traits. A secondary issue, though probably nearly…