Explaining HIV’s effect on life expectancy in Africa
There's this figure floating on Twitter: Can anyone explain why insanely HIV rates in southern Africa have absolutely no impact on life expectancy? Botswana has 10X the rate of HIV…
More COVID vaccines, less excess deaths worldwide
Back in the days of COVID, there was a lot of debate about the efficacy of the vaccines. Unfortunately, most randomized trials were cut-short or too small to look at…
BMI vs. body fat %
In my previous post I discussed commonly found normal distribution in humans. In general, these result from many small independent causes in different directions which when averaged result in a…
Yes, Elon should clone himself now
Speaking of other science advances we could make right now, human cloning is a good opportunity. Why spend time optimizing embryo selection if we can just take a genome we…
The general disease (“d”) factor and mutational load
Last year, this study was published: Brandt, V., Zhang, Y., Carr, H., Golm, D., Correll, C. U., Arrondo, G., ... & Cortese, S. (2023). First evidence of a general disease…
Is IVF dysgenic?
One of the concerns that conservatives sometimes bring up is that while it is true that using IVF/ART (in vitro fertilization/assisted reproductive technologies) can have a eugenic effect if they…
Can’t say parasites causes low IQ either
Ever since Richard Lynn started compiling national intelligence averages (national IQs), there has been egalitarian minded researchers using these to find evidence of non-genetic causes of group differences. One frequently…
Does aspartame cause cancer?
Recently, the popular artificial sweetener aspartame was put on a list of "possibly carcinogenic" chemicals. This is a rather low category: So naturally we might wonder what the truth is.…
The other Anglo exceptionalism
Economists are fond of talking about the specialness of the United Kingdom back when it kicked off the industrial revolution. Similarly, USA is doing remarkably well by some metrics compared…
Can we pick the best sperm?
A lot of people are interested in embryo selection. Why? When people reproduce through IVF, they will generate more than one viable embryo. Which one to choose? The general approach…