John Emerson opines: 
 
 
GNXP has a polemical tendency to favor biological over cultural explanation, sometimes to the point of wanting to ignore culture (learned, conventional, socially-coded behavior) as much as possible. 
 
 
Those who favor the primacy of culture have got the wrong end of the stick. 
 
We come from a long line of social species, and have developed our biological tendencies extremely. 
 
We are no blank slates that some sort of reified culture writes its dictums on, rather, we are, each and every one of us, active participants in the process of enculturing ourselves. Our very success as reproducing organisms depends on our ability to quickly adopt the cultural norms around us, and then manipulate them to our own ends. (Those who do not reproduce are simply not successful, n’est pas?) 
 
The very successful are those who create new culture. They do so, for the most part, to improve their reproductive success. Mick Jagger is, perhaps, the very best example of such an individual. 
 
I find it very amusing to think of men like Bill Clinton and George W Bush, arguably the most powerful men on the planet for short periods of time. They were/are, in some sense, even more powerful than Temujin, and yet they seem to have very few offspring (although there is some suggestion that GW might have a few other children out there).  
 
Compare that with Mick Jagger. He has children all over the world, and I doubt that very many women who were impregnated by Jagger would have opted for an abortion. His genes are even very likely to survive a nuclear war. 
 
Thus is culture ruled by biology.

TangoMan says: 
 
 
Of the constraints facing them, I think the obstacle of the man being married to another woman will be the easiest to surmount for this surge of educated women will prove to be an incentive for older, successful men to take the opportunity to remarry. 
 
 
Well, you know, there has got to be a payoff for all that hard work 🙂

Diana sez: 
 
 
Kids get their values and their speech patterns from their parents, not their peers. Peers reinforce–but only what they get from parents. African-Americans speak with their distinctive accent because they get it from their parents. Those few who don’t (like McWhorter) get that from their parents. 
 
 
My Chinese sister-in-law has two boys who were born in Australia. 
 
They don’t speak like their parents. They speak English with an Australian accent, and they have Australian attitudes to alcohol and a whole raft of things. 
 
They didn’t get these things from their parents, so I don’t understand what you are saying.

Perhaps there is enough variation that people do need the ability to detect good genes in their prospective partners …

Liv says: 
 
 
But think about it. Girls learn how to talk at an earlier age. They learn how to tie their shoes at an earlier age than boys – BEFORE CULTURE AND EDUCATION. 
 
 
But what are we to make of this, or what would you want us to make of this? 
 
It is certainly conceivable that males and females have different developmental trajectories. 
 
More over, it is well known that boys are developmentally delayed compared to girls and that boys continue developing longer than girls. There are, no doubt, good reasons for both of these. 
 
However, very little of this matters, because scientists are drawn from the extreme right-hand portion of the bell curve, and there is evidence (disputed I know) that males have a larger variance than females. If that is the case, we can never expect to see parity in the sciences … which is something the original essay did not explore. (Ignoring other more recent evidence that suggests males might have an average of about 4.5 IQ points advantage.)

Hmmm, Cosma Shalizi, as I recal, has some unflatering things to say about Wolfram.

kenteoh says: 
 
 
from one of the most reputable and prestigious institutions of tertiary learning in my home country (Australia) 
 
 
Which one might that be? RMIT? Sydney Uni?

neadertal says, wrt Chinese: 
 
 
Pretty much straight svo with really simple tenses. 
 
 
This might be technical pedantry, but when I studied Mandarin for a while (regretably too short a time) they were not referred to as tenses, but rather as aspects. Moreover, with more than 20 years exposure to Cantonese (spoken) it seems to me that they are clearly not tenses.

Hmmm, I wonder what the correlations might be for religiosity among women in patrilocal cultures vs matrilocal cultures?

My daughters are both half Chinese (south-western Han) and half Caucasian (from England originally, but via Austalia). 
 
With one of them you simply could not tell, however, the other is clearly mixed.

Bavid B says: 
 
 
On the theory of Natural Selection, this is exactly what we would expect, but if ID is true, it is explicable only by supposing that the Designer (a) lacks imagination, or (b) wishes to confuse and mislead us. 
 
 
Hmmm, as a computer programmer and protocol person, I often reuse existing bits of programs and code etc, sometimes taped together with Perl or sh scripting. 
 
Perhaps the Grand Old Designer is always in a hurry 🙂

I have the PDF … perhaps I can put it in the files section of the forum.

Hmmm, it seems like a bit of “the sky is falling” tone to me, and also very US centric, 
 
When I went to University in Australia, I took Pure and Applied Math, Chemistry and Physics in my first year, Math and Physics and Comp Sci in my second, CompSci and Math in my third and Comp Sci in my fourth and so on. 
 
Not much has changed, AFAICS, in that it is still possible for people to go through an Australian university without doing a single whimpy humanities subject. 
 
While I can’t say anything about the UK, I suspect that it is the same given that the Australian system is modelled on the British system. 
 
Despite all that (lots of people with no humanities, and there are still trade schools in Australia), the country is not falling apart, but the same sillyness with respect to deconstruction and other shit has caught on. 
 
So, I can’t see that the US is going to hell in a hand-basket, or at least that it is no worse than other Western countries.

Why so pessimistic?

Thrasymachus says: 
 
 
Apply it to child murder instead: people are perfectly find with the hyprocrisy of punishing child murderers without proving one’s goodwill by adopting. 
 
 
I don’t understand what you are saying here? 
 
Do I really have to adopt children (when I already have two and they take up all my time) just to be able to suggest that a step-father who murders his partner’s child should be punished?

Michael Vassar says: 
 
 
In some climates, a woman can easily gather enough calories for herself and children in a few hours per day. 
 
 
And, to the extent that this is true, we should expect them to be less interested in paternal investment and more interested in other things, like indicators of good genes. 
 
Wonder if we can get some such women into an MRI study to explore that …

I have noticed a number of papers and people suggest that individuals are making a conditional response to the environment.  
 
More than that, they are suggesting that the brains of the individuals are noticing something (unconsciously) and switching on/off genes that affect development. 
 
It seems to me however, that what could be happening is that there are several phenotypes in a population that have different reproductive success in the different environments they are likely to encounter, but no one phenotype is driven out of the population because none of the others are driven to fixation. 
 
It seems that it will be hard to distinguish between the two hypotheses. 
 
On the other hand, primates have been social for a very long time (50 million years?), so it seems possible that conditional responses could have arisen, as they have in other species. 
 
With respect to male pheromones driving menarche in female offspring, ummm, in the west, many fathers spend a great deal of time with their daughters, and yet, menarche seems to be more related to childhood nutrition.

Terry says: 
 
 
Who said anything about everybody’s “real” goal being reproduction? That is true of an animal, or an insect. 
 
 
I often wonder, when my poor castrated cat looks at me with those wise-looking eyes of his, is he damning me for what I did to him, or does he even realize? 
 
 
Is it true of those with free will? 
 
 
You are free to believe in that illusion, if you wish. 
 
 
to paraphrase Startrek: the human brain/mind will be going places in the future where no one has been before.  
 
 
Indeed, but it will be the brains of those individuals who are descended from those of us who bothered to reproduce.

The labels on the axes are? 
 
Y: Volume in CC? 
X: Thousands of years BP?

Terry asks: 
 
 
There’s such a thing as “unncessary brain power? 
 
 
Every part of an individual’s body costs, to build and maintain. 
 
The human brain absorbs something like 25% of our daily calorie intake and 20% or our daily oxygen intake. It is an expensive organ. 
 
Given that each individual’s real goal is reproduction (those that don’t have lost the game and do not contribute their genes to the future), building more brain than is needed to do the job will reduce that individual’s reproductive success when other individuals can and do get by with less. 
 
Indeed, we might be seeing the result of exactly this tradeoff having been made in the past, with individuals derived from humans who have lived in Africa or the Pacific islands or regions near the Equator, where life is, on average, easier than elsewhere, having less ‘intelligence,’ on average, than others. 
 
These arguments are the same ones that demonstrate that the old crap about humans only using 10% of their brains is exactly that. Any individual that expended that much growth time and energy building an organ to use only 10% of it will be out-reproduced by those that are more sophisticated in their use of time and energy.

terry says: 
 
 
That takes only a slightly higher iq? 
It always seemed to me like the female suppressed a few points to make herself more easily impressed. 
 
 
All of this noise ignores the economics of the situation. 
 
Every CC of brain matter costs, both to develop and to maintain. 
 
If females are suppressing their intelligence for whatever reason, then any individuals that actually do away with the unneeded brain cells win, because of the lowered cost to build and maintain that brain power, so they can devote more resources to reproduction or start reproducing sooner. If that reduction in brain cells is heritable, then we have evolution in action. 
 
Similarly, males will not maintain expensive brain power that is not necessary. 
 
In a similar vein, because males and females actually have different problems to solve, vis-a-vis life histories and reproduction, you can expect differences in behavior and the underlying neural circuitry that drives behavior.

Anon says: 
 
 
I guessing that the bottom 5 percentile of the population was underepresented in this study 
 
 
Ahhh, so you accept the claim that males show a larger SD than females. 
 
I’m guessing that the male SD would have to be twice the female SD for the overrepresentation of males at the extreme to increase the male mean by approximately 5%.

BTW, Nyborg reports a similar difference between males and females. Slightly under 5 points.

David B says: 
 
 
Jensen says (G Factor, p.532) ‘the best available evidence fails to show a sex difference in g.’ 
 
 
Well, Nyborg, in his article in the tribute to Jensen book, claims that Jensen now agrees that there is a sex difference. Google will give you the PDF for tghe chapter.

David B says: 
 
 
I remember reading about the blond abos.  
 
 
David, that is a very insensitive way to refer to Australian Aborigines. Back in the 1930 when white farmers were shooting them, they were referred to that way, and when redneck Aussies refer to them in a pub, they also “abos.”

I will be very interested to see a map of the occurrence of this in Australia, as I don’t recall seeing any blond-haired Australian Aborigines, ever. I lived there for 45 years, including around 18 in Darwin.

It’s just another way to control people by getting the to feel bad because nothing bad ever happened to them …

Here’s another review of The Robot’s Rebellion.

razib says: 
 
 
I think some readers might question the use of the term “robot” to define humans. 
 
 
No me. During my recent visit to Australia I started thinging very strongly along these lines. Perhaps true liberation occurs when you realize that you are an automaton running a program set up by your genes …

How very interesting. This article claims to be from Monday, but it is Tuesday here, and I sure didn’t see it yesterday.