Morten Østergaard, Danish Minister for Research, Innovation, and Higher Education. Morten, if you’re reading this post, please reply to my e-mail. I first learned about Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg while working on my doctoral thesis. In those pre-Internet days, I plodded my way through the academic literature largely by consulting the Science Citation Index and... Read More

IQ, height, and homicide rate in Japan (red = lowest value, light blue = highest value) (Kura, 2013). The longer and harsher the winter, the greater the need for cognition and male solidarity? The Japanese are descended from the intermixture 2900 to 1500 years ago of indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Jomon people, with incoming farmers from... Read More

An outdoor play where a Paekchong is about to kill a bull. In pre-modern Korea, the Paekchong were outcastes whose occupations tended to involve the taking of life, like butchery, leather making, and capital punishment. (source: Jon Dunbar, link) Like Japan with its Burakumin, Korea used to have its own outcastes: the Paekchong (or Baekjeong).... Read More

Was the scientific revolution (1540-1700) due to an increase in trade and the discovery of the New World? Or were there just more people around who could understand and appreciate new ideas? (source) The past year has seen the deaths of two scholars who tackled the thorny issue of IQ and race, first Philippe Rushton... Read More

Modern humans changed little when they initially spread out of Africa and into the Middle East. Real change occurred farther north, when they entered seasonally varying environments that differed much more even in summer. Three years ago, a research team led by John Hawks found that the rate of genetic change accelerated once ancestral humans... Read More

Linda Vigilant – Was she in on the Big Secret? Was the rhino? The HBD blogosphere has been rife with speculation about the reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome. John Hawks, Razib Khan, and Steve Sailer felt that something big was in the offing. Above all, this something would resurrect the multiregional model of human origins.... Read More