Monthly Archives: August 2018

The current craze for surgically mutilating troubled high school girls (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) can be looked at another way: as a really slick exercise in negative eugenics.  Being nuts is fairly heritable: I have no doubt that many of … Continue reading →

There used to be all kinds of weird wild animals in the Americas, not so very long ago, if you think like a paleontologist. Mammoths, mastodons, horses, giant sloths, camels, unicorns, and griffins are all well represented in the fossil … Continue reading →

Eight or ten Years ago, liberals had no use at all for Islam or Islamic culture. Today they spend a lot of energy defending them, to the point where liberals that still dislike feel that they can’t talk about it … Continue reading →

Some ( including insurance companies) have claimed that young men are more likely to take risks than young women. Cordelia Fine says that ” The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more … Continue reading →

Most scientific knowledge has been developed by individuals puttering around in labs.  Labs, not something the size of the Pyramids or Hoover Dam. But sometimes it has been produced in large, expensive projects and installations. Cutting-edge optical telescopes are big … Continue reading →

Gregory Clark finds that social status is strongly heritable. Combined with a very high degree of assortative mating for the genetic factors behind this heritability, social mobility is surprisingly low. This happens without anyone particularly trying to make it this … Continue reading →

You know, it shouldn’t exist. Human history and prehistory is crammed with all kind of mayhem and trauma: infant mortality, infanticide, genocidal fights with neighboring tribes.  You routinely lost family and routinely killed enemies. Childbirth hurts a lot.  What’s the … Continue reading →

Suppose that 90% of people are farmers, and 10% are in other occupations, occupations that on the whole have greater prestige and remuneration. Like being a tailor, or a banker, or a king. There is reason to think that those … Continue reading →

Intelligence is highly heritable- so generally, when someone is far smarter than average, his parents are at least somewhat above average. But Gauss’s parents sure looked ordinary: his father had menial jobs such as gardener and street butcher, while his … Continue reading →

Imagine that there was a mutation [Syndrome X] that, by itself, made you ten centimeters shorter than you otherwise would be. It works by messing up iodine metabolism. What environment influences could modify its course?  Maybe growth hormone could make … Continue reading →