Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on the Trobriand Islands (1918 - source). Pro-social behavior seems to be a human universal, but is the same true for full empathy? What is empathy? It has at least three components: - pro-social behavior, i.e., actions of compassion to help others - cognitive empathy, i.e., capacity to understand another person's... Read More

Election poster from the 1930s for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (source). Is the welfare state more workable if the population is more predisposed to obey moral norms? Do we differ genetically in our ability, or willingness, to comply with moral norms? Please note: I'm talking about compliance. The norms themselves can vary greatly from one... Read More

HBD Chick and I talk about how rates of historic inbreeding have had an important impact on the selective pressures acting on the traits of various peoples living today. We have often used Europe and the Middle East as examples of this, because strong regional variations in historic rates of inbreeding exist in those places.... Read More

Edited, 4/11/15 3/17/14. See below! Blogger "Agnostic" over at Dusk in Autumn has a post up about the regional variation in Germany (Oktoberfest, lederhosen, dirndls and Germany's cultural fault-line). As I've noted in my posts on the American nations (most recently here, see the category here), Germany has been one of the most important countries... Read More

Post Updated, 10/9/13. See below! Readers coming to my blog from The Atlantic article "The Mystery of Why Portugal Is So Doomed" saw my comment there directing you to my earlier post "A Tale of Two Maps." Matthew O'Brien over at The Atlantic seemed to indicate the poor economic situation in Portugal was somehow mysterious.... Read More

This is my 100th blog post. Upon reaching this milestone, I thought that this would be a great time to take moment to look back at my experience as a blogger in Human BioDiversity (HBD) and share my thoughts on the things to come. 1. The Beginning 2. Fertility 3. Immigration and the economy 4.... Read More

Following my previous post about national corruption, two countries brightly stand out: those are the #1 least corrupt country, Finland, and non-White Japan, a bastion of orderliness in Asia. The nations of the world generally align with HBD Chick's hypothesis, which posits that Northwestern European countries, with their long history of outbreeding (that is, marrying... Read More

Do older fathers have dumber children? For the past millennium, paternal age has been relatively high in Europe west of the Hajnal line. Yet, if anything, mean IQ is higher there than elsewhere. H/T to JayMan (source) Greg Cochran has been running a series of posts on paternal age and IQ (here, here, and here).... Read More

Post edited, 9/24/2012: See below! Earlier I discussed the origin of modern levels of IQ and the origin of modern ideologies. I noted that both of these things have roots in the societal conditions during the Middle Ages. But what, exactly, about this period led to the evolution of these traits? In this multi-part series,... Read More

Edit, 3/13/14 8/24/13: Post updated. See below! This started as an e-mail I wrote to a friend to sum up the important events of the Middle Ages for Europe and the Near East. Then I decided that this was blog post worthy, so here it is: a nice, fairly concise summary of the events of... Read More

I had promised a couple of posts to bring those not necessarily familiar with HBD (i.e., Human BioDiversity) up to speed, but as I've not been getting around to those transitional posts, I've decided to skip that step and go on ahead. So here is my first semi-original contribution to the world of HBD. I'm... Read More