Security expert Bruce Schneier has a long and interesting paper on the various evolved cognitive biases that skew our thinking about risk and security, hampering our ability to make sane tradeoffs. This may help to explain why, when the city of Boston had an expensive panic attack in response to a bunch of LED cartoon […]

[Read more →]

The latest Harper’s Index (not yet online) includes the claim that a male child becomes 33 percent more likely to be gay for each (full biological) older brother he has. Science News apparently reported the finding over the summer. The fact that the connection holds only for biological older brothers suggests that the cause here […]

[Read more →]

The creationist group Answers in Genesis is running an amusing new ad campaign in various conservative magazines, blaming racism on Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published on the eve of the American Civil War, six years after Gobinau’s pseudo-pscientific racialist ur-text An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. It is, of […]

[Read more →]

There are times when I’ll walk into a bar or club, look around, and think: “We can’t possibly be members of the same species. Or at least, I hope we’re not.” Still, count me a shade on the skeptical side about this BBC report on one evolutionary theorist’s prediction of some genetic schism in which […]

[Read more →]

In one further thump on a drum the New York Times has been beating for a while, a Friday editorial calls for routine HIV testing for all patients entering clinics or hospitals. Maybe this is ultimately a good idea—the CDC seems to think so. But one thing I feel pretty sure of is that the […]

[Read more →]

American Scientist reports that the Flynn Effect—the steady increase in IQ scores from one generation to the next—has leveled off and is beginning to reverse. (Presumably this bodes ill for the thesis of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which leaned heavily on the Flynn Effect to support the argument that video games […]

[Read more →]

Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites a recent John Tierney column (mirror) on federal funding for stem-cell research: Even before this week’s veto, anger over the ban has prompted states and private philanthropists to put up their own money. They’ve committed well over $3 billion to this research in the next decade, which might be more than […]

[Read more →]

A BBC report cites research demonstrating that, shockingly, twins don’t feel their individuality is undermined by sharing genetic code with someone else, in support of the idea that the same would hold for clones. On the one hand, I can imagine someone doubting whether this finding sheds all that much light on, say, how it […]

[Read more →]

A fascinating article over at MSNBC reports on how data gleaned from observing quasars has led some scientists to conclude that some physical “constants” like the speed of light or the electron’s charge may not be constant after all. As one of the scientists interviewed in the article notes, this presents a sort of Quinean […]

[Read more →]

I should probably self-impose some maximum percentage of blog posts I devote to poking fun at stuff at National Review, but I can’t resist commenting on George Gilder’s essay “Evolution and Me” from the most recent issue. (Subscriber only, but mirrored at the Discovery Institute.) It’s an impressive farrago of hoary old creationist canards (Darwinism […]

[Read more →]