What do ancient genomes show about recent human evolution?
Davide Piffer and I have a new study out: Piffer, D., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2024). Evolutionary Trends of Polygenic Scores in European Populations From the Paleolithic to Modern…
Should you watch that recent movie?
Many people are currently wondering whether to bother going to the cinema to see the new Dune movie. It currently has a rating of 9.0 on IMDB with 90k votes.…
The practical utility of selection for hiring
Over at SlateStarCodex AstralCodexTen commenter Himaldr asked me: >"because strength of the correlation has a linear relationship with the expected return of using it for selection (hiring) purposes."< Can you…
Will USA cease to be a safe space for embryo selection?
You may have heard about the new Supreme Court of Alabama decision. You can read the full decision here, which I did (130 pages). The case is straightforward enough: Facts…
The UMAP brouhaha
If you follow population genetics on Twitter, you may have seen the current thing to be concerned about. For instance, we have Jonathan Pritchard at Stanford: https://twitter.com/jkpritch/status/1759769445759893832 And Graham Coop…
Group differences on the Wonderlic short IQ test
I have written a couple of times about how to measure intelligence well and in a short time. Mainly I was interested in which single type of item is best…
A new dataset of science knowledge by country
By coincidence I found this paper the other day: Sturgis, P., Brunton-Smith, I., Allum, N., & Fuglsang, S. (2024). Testing the cultural-invariance hypothesis: A global analysis of the relationship between…
Fiscal impact of immigrants by country of origin, and the immigration debate
There is a lot of debate about immigration. While it is relatively easy to find crime rates by various immigrants by country of origin, these don't directly tell you whether…
Heritability for individuals too, and the application to group differences
It is commonly said that heritability is a population level statistic that doesn't apply to individuals. For instance, here's Robert Plomin et al's textbook Behavioral Genetics (2017, 7th edition), the…
Using the Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) to understand correlations
When I talk science to non-scientists, I often get questions about how to interpret sizes of correlations or other metrics. While one can give rough guidelines invariant of the topic…