Over at Psychology Today, clinical psychologist Ellen Walker has a blog called Complete Without Kids, which is dedicated to the modern child-free (presumably professional) adult. There, she extols and rationalizes the conscious decision to not reproduce. Of course, it's not like Psychology Today isn't loaded with the typical cutting-edge suspect psychological wisdom, and it isn't... Read More

EDIT, 5/30/15: [Post updated with results of new meta-analyses of behavioral genetic studies. See below!] Edit, 1/3/13: [Post updated to reflect additional information provided in the comments. See below and see the comments.] The time has come for a little reminder of the First Law of behavioral genetics. In my final post of 2012, I... Read More

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere as of late as to whether the "cads"—i.e., low paternal investment, promiscuous (and often low-IQ) men were siring more children than "dads"—high paternal investment, monogamous, high-IQ men. While I and others have produced some evidence (primarily from the GSS) that tenuously indicates that this is... Read More

Last month, neuroscientist Dario Maestripieri committed a faux pas after visiting a conference of his fellow neuroscientists. On his Facebook page, he left the following statement about his female colleagues: An uproar over this ensued. Despite the furor, Meastripieri's comment actually sounds like a fairly sound empirical observation. Nonetheless, his comments have not sit well... Read More

(CNN) -- Boys in the United States are starting puberty earlier than ever, according to a new study publishing in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics. In the study, lead author Marcia Herman-Giddens from the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health and her colleagues show that boys are starting to sexually develop... Read More

Commenter redzengenoist has brought to my attention that in his homeland of Denmark, policy seems to have accomplished two rather remarkable feats: Fertility among non-Western immigrant women (primarily Muslims) is down to 1.88 children/child-bearing woman, from a high of 3.4. And, more importantly, the fertility rate among educated Danish women has nearly caught up to... Read More

Post edited (9/28/2012), see below! A new study was released, discussed by Ilana Yurkiewicz at her Scientific American blog, that seems to conclusively prove that gender bias in the sciences does exist. The article describes the challenges involved in studying this and how these challenges were overcome: It’s tough to prove gender bias. In a... Read More

Following up on my three previous posts, I want to talk again about what to do with this HBD knowledge. It is now clear, or at least should be, that demographic issues drive many of our current problems. Indeed, changes in the population drive history, and these changes are the primary reasons that civilizations rise... Read More

Half Sigma has an excellent post up which talks about a topic that is an under-appreciated concern: the obsolesce of human labor, thanks to automation. Virtually all of the increase in worker productivity over the past few decades is due to increased automation. I've quoted this post and some of the comments here: There’s an... Read More

Following my previous post. [youtube Liberals especially be mindful:

Steven Pinker, a great academic, and whose 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature introduced me to hereditarian explanations for human behavior (and which is required reading for anyone with no familiarity with the role that genes play in human behavior) has recently sent a note to Ron Unz attacking his... Read More

Ron Gunhame over at Inductivist has an interesting post looking at out-of-wedlock births had by Americans, by political orientation. By looking at the GSS data, he seems to have found that among the never married, conservatives were far more likely to have children. This is interesting, for one, because of its implications for my "pioneer... Read More

Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending have recently proposed a hypothesis on their blog that posits that the lower average IQ of tropical peoples may be related to the number of fitness reducing mutations these people carry. Apparently, the rate of mutation is higher in the tropics. The majority of mutations that occur are neutral and... Read More

Courtesy Razib Khan's Pinboard Feed: ScienceDaily (July 15, 2012) — Your genes determine much about you, but environment can have a strong influence on your genes even before birth, with consequences that can last a lifetime. In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have for the first time shown that the environment experienced... Read More

Anecdotally, I have noticed that those who have sexual fetishes (or paraphilias as they are known technically) as a group have a higher average IQ than those who don't. I don't know of any data that verifies this (I haven't seen any studies linking sexual fetishes to IQ), but I suppose that runs into the... Read More

Post updated, 11/17/13 4/14/13 1/19/13, see below! It is already known that educational attainment and income are highly heritable. However, finding specific genes linked to cognitive and behavioral traits has been difficult. This is primarily because most traits arise not from a few genes with large effects, but from many genes with small effects (and... Read More

Post edited, 9/24/2012: See below! Earlier I discussed the origin of modern levels of IQ and the origin of modern ideologies. I noted that both of these things have roots in the societal conditions during the Middle Ages. But what, exactly, about this period led to the evolution of these traits? In this multi-part series,... Read More

In the spirit of (partial) full disclosure, in my earlier post on the topic, I announced that I'm liberal. In this post, I'll announce that I am Black. That is, at least, according to American hypodescent; I'm a mixed Black/White/Chinese second generation Jamaican-American. As such, of course I have a soft spot for the American... Read More

Edited, 6/6/13. See below! I'll have much more on this later, but I stumbled across this map, and I thought it was too poignant to ignore: This is a map of the 2010 unemployment rates across Europe, broken down by region, originally found here. I have filled in the unemployment rates of the former Yugoslav... Read More

Someone brought this to my attention (sensational title and all), and I couldn't resist. All I can say is it's about damned time he said this! By Amelia Proud PUBLISHED: 19:36 EST, 27 April 2012 | UPDATED: 10:44 EST, 28 April 2012 Barack Obama had some advice for the single men of America today -... Read More

Edit, 3/13/14 8/24/13: Post updated. See below! This started as an e-mail I wrote to a friend to sum up the important events of the Middle Ages for Europe and the Near East. Then I decided that this was blog post worthy, so here it is: a nice, fairly concise summary of the events of... Read More

In an earlier post I mentioned the recent Italian cruise ship disaster. I stated that this was an example of "Italian incompetence." Italians have a certain reputation attached to them, as many of you may have seen with Italian jokes after the tragedy (a word I use deliberately, as we'll see). Southern Italians have been... Read More

I had promised a couple of posts to bring those not necessarily familiar with HBD (i.e., Human BioDiversity) up to speed, but as I've not been getting around to those transitional posts, I've decided to skip that step and go on ahead. So here is my first semi-original contribution to the world of HBD. I'm... Read More