Politics and citations in science
There are many ways that politics impact science. Many people are aware of the extreme measures taken by Soviet Russia (Lysenkoism) in order to make genetics fit with the party…
Heterodox Academy’s big payday
Everybody knows academia has severe political bias issues. Some people have been trying to do something about it for decades. The main academic organization that has been talking up the…
Sometimes you should speak up with an unpopular view
Every year I try to read a set number of books (30 this year). I've been decreasing the number over the years because blogs and academic articles have become so…
European polygenic scores predict Chinese provincial differences too
If you haven't seen my new article about the new David Reich lab ancient genomes results in Aporia magazine yet, head over there now: Overwhelming evidence of recent evolution in…
Wikipedia editors and politics
I've written a few times about the political bias (defined as deviation from population average) of journalists and academics. Earlier this year, I wrote about how one can study the…
Overwhelming evidence of recent evolution in West Eurasians
David Reich's team has a new kickass preprint out: Akbari, A., Barton, A. R., Gazal, S., Li, Z., Kariminejad, M., Perry, A., ... & Reich, D. (2024). Pervasive findings of…
Explaining global variation in internet speed
I saw this on Twitter earlier today: The narrative seemed right, so at first I retweeted. But then I looked closer at the map and realized it couldn't be right.…
Conspiracies and their believers
Summary Conspiracy theory has negative connotations of falseness, implausiblity or irrationality, but we also know many conspiracies are true, ranging from the ordinary criminal case (conspiracy to commit murder) to…
Direct genetic evidence for ethnic differences in aggressiveness
My recent blogpost about Africans propensity to violence got some attention. In the post I noted that direct evidence was mostly missing. I've done some further reading, and discovered that…
Does racial diversity cause lower fertility?
I know, it sounds like a far right conspiracy theory, however: Gurun, U. G., & Solomon, D. H. (2024). E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates.…