Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
-
Why are Mormons the American success story?
I was skimming through a book on Scandinavian migration to Utah the other day, these Scandinavians being converts to Mormonism. The author noted that while most Scandinavian Americans settled in areas where farming was relatively easy, these converts w…
-
Selection & African Americans
I already posted on the new paper on African American Genetics. I noticed that Frank Sweet says:It is interesting that the 18 percent mean of Euro DNA markers in A-As has been holding steady for about 8 years now, having replaced the prior estimate of …
-
The Trouble With Forgetting Your Own History
The Trouble With Standing Athwart History: But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South.…
-
NPR has a science blog
Cosmos and Culture.
-
Reminder on comments, enter a handle
Please remember to enter a name when you put in a comment. Can be fake and such. Just something distinctive. I’m deleting comments from “Guests.”
-
Canada & North American theocracy
In the comments Europeans often point out that nations we Americans consider very secular, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, actually provide state subsidy to religious schools. Part of the issue here is that Americans have a caricature o…
-
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
-
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
-
Crime way down. Who exactly knows stuff?
Despite recession, crime keeps falling:In times of recession, property crimes, in particular, are expected to rise.They haven’t.Overall, property crimes fell by 6.1 percent, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected b…
-
How many Senators don’t have a university degree?
Only one out of 100! If you don’t know, this is the one. Share/Save
-
Coincidence or adaptation?
Different Evolutionary Histories of the Coagulation Factor VII Gene in Human Populations?:Immoderate blood clotting constitutes a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in modern industrialised societies, but is believed to have conferred a survival ad…
-
Cultures of constraint; Islam, India and Marxism
Pew has a new report, Global Restrictions on Religion (HT JohnPI). It illustrates rather clearly some general trends which I’ve been mulling over for several years looking at cross-cultural data. Here’s a 2-dimensional chart which plots the 50 most pop…
-
Avatar
Open thread for reader reactions. Don’t plan on watching it in the near future myself, but curious….
-
Wikipedia Article on Group Differences in IQ
As penance for my sins, I have been involved in a lengthy mediation process at Wikipedia concerning the Race and Intelligence article. Check the links and the history for examples of how the (controversial) sausages are made.As a result of this process…
-
We are all cost vs. benefit utilitarians now!
Many liberals now want to kill the healthcare bill. At Talking Points Memo here is a dissent from an individual who is obviously going to get screwed if the bill is not passed: If I feel abandoned, it’s not by Obama and the Democratic party, it’s by those on the left advocating to kill the…
-
The new comments
Make up a name if you want to comment. I’m not going to let any “Guest” comments through from now on, since they seem to mess up the recent comments, and it makes it hard to know who is who.
-
Social science data sets
At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free.
-
Shellfish & the human bottleneck
How shellfish saved the human race:Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals–just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our…
-
Settlers, Slaves & Immigrants
A few weeks ago I referenced Campbell Gibson’s paper, The Contribution of Immigration to the Growth and Ethnic Diversity of the American Population, which estimated that ~1990 50% of the population of the United States could be attributed to those enum…
-
What Heritability is Not
Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me t…