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Is Harry Turtledove? Compare the similarity in output to Patterson. I just noticed that Glenn Reynolds received a copy of Turtledove's second book in a quasi-alternate history series he's been working on. Turtledove shines when he's applying what he knows. Even if the Videssos cycle wasn't artful…

A few days ago I pointed to a paper, Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986. It looks at the specific case of the Andaman Islanders to explore the general phenomenon of "pygmy" populations, especially among "Negritos." The Andaman…

Reading the papers on Ardipithecus ramidus which just came out in Science one of the take-home points that jumps out at me is that extant apes may be very misleading analogs to extinct hominins. Here is Owen Lovejoy: In retrospect, clues to this vast divide between the evolutionary trajectories of…

It's been a few weeks, but I thought I would point you to an interesting post on OkCupid's blog about race and dating. They report an interesting trend of preference for white men among all groups of females, as well as lots of other interesting nuggets. Of course, as many have noted the core…

I'm talking about coeliac disease: Coeliac disease is caused by a reaction to gliadin, a gluten protein found in wheat (and similar proteins of the tribe Triticeae, which includes other cultivars such as barley and rye). Upon exposure to gliadin, the enzyme tissue transglutaminase modifies the…

A new paper adding some decimal places on Indian mtDNA phylogeography, Updating Phylogeny of Mitochondrial DNA Macrohaplogroup M in India: Dispersal of Modern Human in South Asian Corridor: To construct maternal phylogeny and prehistoric dispersals of modern human being in the Indian sub continent…

I've talked about menopause before. One question in evolutionary anthropology is whether it is an adaptation, a derived trait in our species which emerged due to the force of natural selection, or simply a physiological byproduct of some other phenomenon. The key point is the peculiar asymmetry in…

Eliezer Yudkowsky is on bloggingheads.tv with one of my favorite producers of brain-candy, the statistician Andrew Gelman. Here is Eliezer's An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and David Spiegelhalter's article on Bayesian statistics in Scholar pedia (which Gelman refers to favorably).

Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986: Despite considerable interest in the evolution of small body size, there is little evidence for changes in body size within smallâbodied human populations. This study combines anthropometric data…

Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes: The concern of the researchers is that a woman who gets involved with a guy while on the pill might find…

About two weeks ago I pointed to the peculiar disjunction between what a paper on Indian genetics actually said, and how people, including some of the researchers who contributed to the paper, were spinning it. For instance, the finding that South Asians can be reasonably modeled as a two-way…

Dienekes points to a new paper which attempts to quantify the genetic ancestry of South Asian Muslims into indigenous and exogenous components: Islam is the second most practiced religion in India, next to Hinduism. It is still unclear whether the spread of Islam in India has been only a cultural…

A friend pointed out to me that the regular brown guys on bloggingheads.tv (Reihan Salam, and to a far lesser extent Ramesh Ponnuru and myself) 1) have names that start with "R" 2) lean Right

More Singularity stuff. I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid, says Eliezer Yudkowsky in response to my summary of his talk. The last line of his post says: "I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid." So the issue is craziness, not stupidity in Eliezer's reading. The…

Copenhagen dreaming: In defense of the scientific method: As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of global…

From Matt Springer of Built on Facts. For what it's worth, many people at the Summit were skeptical of Kurzweil's specific vision. I mean in the audience, not just among the speakers.

For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard…

My thoughts on the talks at The Singularity Summit 2009 below the fold.... Shaping the Intelligence Explosion - Anna Salamon: A qualitative analysis of the implications of the emergence of artificial general intelligence. Having talked to Anna before, and knowing the general thrust of the work of…

That's what Kambiz Kamrani is saying. Significance: Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says that the fossil changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today's chimp and we'll have to be…

As you can see by looking to the left (right below the cutest kid that ever was) I'm participating in DonorsChoose this year. You can of course donate to any project you think is worthy, but my current list is biased in two directions: 1) Need 2) Biology Since last fall a lot as changed…

Lewis Is Said to Be Leaving Bank of America. Years ago I'd read that there was some social science which suggested that M&As were encouraged by the incentive structure of CEO careers; that is, the upside for a CEO in relation to a successful M&A are higher than for their firm. As for the…

Hawking steps down as Lucasian professor in UK. H/T Anthropology.net

The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well…

Read about it here

I missed this from last week, Newmarket picks up Jon Amiel's 'Creation'.

Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity: We hypothesized that religiosity, a set of traits variably expressed in the population, is modulated by neuroanatomical variability. We tested this idea by determining whether aspects of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical…

From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit: Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort…

I remember back in the early 1990s that there was some talk about the United States going from a plural majority Protestant nations, to a Roman Catholic one at some point in the early 21st century. This in itself wouldn't be that big of a deal today, Canada already has more Catholics than…