Monthly Archives: December 2012

Is a book by two UCLA sociologists, Vila Ortiz and Edward E Telles, published in 2008. It originated in a fair-sized data set (1576 people) collected in 1965, which was rediscovered in 1992. The original respondents and their adult children … Continue reading →

In principle you can imagine a  group experiencing selection for some trait by having members leave.   However, it takes special circumstances, unusual circumstances.  First, the people who defect have to be uncharacteristic: they  have to differ from the group in … Continue reading →

Rushton thought that the explanation of geographical variation in IQ was adaptation to a world with winters.  I didn’t think that was crazy, but I was pretty sure I could come up with ten other comparably plausible explanations.   In … Continue reading →

My middle boy, Roddy, he of mampire fame,  got his PSAT score.   230 (out of 240): not bad at all. He will be a NMSQT finalist, as long as he doesn’t burn down the school.  Which is a good … Continue reading →

We have found that important traits such as height or IQ  are highly heritable, but that no single allele explains much of the variance in those cases. Taken as a whole,  common variants  do explain a lot,  but even they … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking, off and on, about sudden changes in the cognitive abilities of populations: groups low suddenly scoring much higher or lower on a time scale too short to be explained by selection: say, three generations or less.  This … Continue reading →