The first admixture mapping study for intelligence
There's a new study out of note: Xia, R., Jian, X., Rodrigue, A. L., Bressler, J., Boerwinkle, E., Cui, B., ... & Fornage, M. (2024). Admixture mapping of cognitive function…
Large environmental effects on hand grip strength internationally
Hand grip strength is a pretty interesting measurement. Fast to do, reliable, and seemingly irrelevant to most of modern life devoid of physical labor. But it turns out to be…
Wikipedia’s political bias demonstrated by sentiment analysis
The great David Rozado has a new study out on the politics of Wikipedia: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?. He downloaded the English Wikipedia database, and analyzed whether the articles covering…
What do genomic principal components mean?
There's a new study out making the rounds, but first I want to divert and ask: Who invented admixture regression? Here I mean the analysis where admixture (ancestry) estimates of…
The gender equality ‘paradox’ and genetics
There's a number of studies that find that egalitarian cultural values correlates with larger not smaller actual measured sex differences. These are the first major studies using large international surveys:…
Italian fascists were big on trains actually
There's a slogan about Mussolini that, setting aside his faults, he did at least make the trains run on time. Given this one positive statement about Italian fascism, one will…
Reaction time based intelligence measurements and race differences
There's a wide variety of different ways to measure (general) intelligence, or what researchers call g. One can estimate vocabulary size, query about verbal analogies, general knowledge, ask people to…
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…
The Polgár sisters success story
The essence of my pedagogical program is that in my opinion, every healthy child can be raised to be an outstanding person, in my words, a genius. When we began…
Educated birds of a feather
Parent-child similarity is a much studied topic. So much studied that various fields have come up with many different terms for the same thing: intergenerational elasticity, intergenerational persistence, intergenerational mobility…