Author Archives: harpend

Carl Zimmer’s blog reports a new paper by some Harvard geneticists proposing that differences in incidence of diabetes of pregnancy between native New Yorkers and immigrant Bangladeshi women reflects adaptation to wheat and a high carb diet in Europeans. The … Continue reading →

There is an insightful and data-rich blog called hbd* chick that is well worth our reading. A recent post discusses Steven Pinker’s new book about the decline of violence. I haven’t read the book, but the discussion on hbd* chick’s … Continue reading →

Anyone who works at a university, attends a university, has children at university, and so on must go to the website of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, sign in, and download their packet of “VALUE rubrics.”  You get fifteen … Continue reading →

Looking into how paternal age affects life history evolution, I took our data on survival curves of Herero males and calculated the strength of selection, that is the derivative of fitness with respect to survival, as a function of mean … Continue reading →

Trying to understand how to use and apply Hamilton’s theory of senescence to understanding our old Herero material, I asked my colleague Alan Rogers for a suggestion.  He suggested his own textbook written for his course on evolutionary ecology. It … Continue reading →

Most of social science still operates as if there were no biological differences among human groups. This so-called “uniformitarian” assumption is pervasive and it works in the sense that a lot of research money falls into the social science hole. … Continue reading →