Monthly Archives: March 2019

There are a few small children, mostly girls, that learn to read very early. You read stories to them and before you know they’re reading by themselves. By very early, I men age 3 or 4. Does this happen in … Continue reading →

“Canalization is the reduced sensitivity of a phenotype to changes or perturbations in the underlying genetic and nongenetic factors that determine its expression. ” as long as environmental ( or genetic) perturbations aren’t too large, they have little effect. Makes … Continue reading →

You can think of the habitable zone as a region in a multidimensional parameter space on which members of a species do well enough to persist. Move them slowly towards the edge of the zone and they often adapt.  Move … Continue reading →

Dr. Paige Harden said “No scientific finding leads inexorably to any particular social policy”.  Well, it would if we were Pak: they have built-in goals and are almost always smart enough to see the best path leading to those goals, … Continue reading →

Seems to me that there’s an awful lot of overlap between the environmental factors in shared family environment and those that are supposed to explain group differences.

There’s a new paper out in Science – ” The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years” .  It discusses genetic change over time, from hunter-gatherer days, the arrival of the Anatolian-ancestry farmers, and the coming … Continue reading →

Some cases involve stronger selection than I would have guessed.  Nigerian male immigrants to Great Britain, 1980-2010: low, medium, and high level of education:  ” We distinguish three levels of education: primary (low skilled: includes lower secondary, primary and no … Continue reading →

Someone on the internet was saying that  “genetically engineering babies for intelligence etc. probably wouldn’t work. All of our associations are inextricably and unknowably culture-bound (both wrt to time & place)”  If I have this right, just because certain genetic … Continue reading →