Monthly Archives: May 2013

The New York Times has an article about work by researchers at Harvard Medical School, which concluded that immigrants are a net plus for the finances of Medicare – even though most of the immigrants in the current wave have … Continue reading →

I’m aiming at a reasonably comprehensive list of documented attempts to narrow or close IQ gaps between different groups, including planned interventions and natural experiments. I’d include results – primarily adult IQ, if we have that information. This being modern … Continue reading →

Us humans seem to have a specialized mental mechanism for identifying faces. It’s pretty easy to see that could have been favored by selection for a long, long time. In 2006, Ingo Kennerknecht and associates published a study indicating that … Continue reading →

John Horgan believes that research on race and IQ should be banned, and that having university IRBs veto such research would be a reasonable way of doing so. There are problems with this idea. Not just that freedom of enquiry … Continue reading →

MBE has a couple of new articles on altitude adaptation in Tibetans. One talks about a particular mutation in EGLN1, a key gene in the response to hypoxia. The mutation, around 0.5% in most other populations, has soared to 70% … Continue reading →

There is a fungus, Massospora cicadina, that attacks periodical cicadas[often called 17-year or 13-year locusts]. First, diploid resting spores infect cicadas just before they emerge, turning most of the abdomen into haploid spores while leaving the head and thorax intact. … Continue reading →

Running this blog takes time. If you like it, you can help it continue by contributing. Paypal is already set up. If people want to use a credit card, I can check out other methods. This might require a transition … Continue reading →

There have been societies that functioned for a long time, thousands of years. They had sustainable demographic patterns. That means that they had enough children to replace themselves – not necessarily in every generation, but over the long haul. But … Continue reading →