Clik here to view.
Humans and the olfactory environment
Perfume burner, Egypt, c. 700-900 (Wikicommons, Musée du Louvre, Marie-Lan Nguyen) We have sought to remake our environment in ever more appealing ways, including its smell. But the change hasn’t been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ancestral East Asians and adaptation to coronaviruses
Early farming village in China (Wikicommons – Xinyang City Museum, Gary Todd) Respiratory viruses began to propagate more easily when hunting and gathering gave way to farming and as settlements grew...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Extreme founder events among ancestral Europeans
Expansion of steppe pastoralists (Narasimhan et al. 2019) How much of the present-day European gene pool comes from the indigenous hunter-gatherers? How much from Neolithic farmers of Anatolian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Adapting to bubonic plague
Rash associated with familial Mediterranean fever (Wikicommons – Dr. H.J. Lachman) In the eastern Mediterranean, people were likelier to survive bubonic plague if they had stronger inflammatory...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula
A recent polygenic study has shown that mean cognitive ability is higher in the North of Italy than in the South. Cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest in the Northeast, perhaps because...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent evolution in Estonia
Estonian women at a song festival (Wikicommons – Anastasia Lakhtikova) Estonian women had more reproductive success during the late 20th century if they possessed a more masculine body build, narrower...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vampirism and bloodlust
Ishbosheth is slain (Wikicommons – Maciejowski Bible) Before the State monopoly on violence, an adult male was expected to spill another man’s blood in the course of life. Such action would be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comparing an incomparable?
Stigmata Siciliana (1964), David McLure (Wikicommons) What is the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? There’s no clear answer. Current estimates come from an early stage of the Flynn effect and are also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How real is the Flynn effect?
Changes in mean IQ between 1909 and 2013 (Pietschnig and Voracek 2015, p. 285) Because of the Flynn effect, average IQ has risen by 35 points over the past century. That’s more than the difference...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How real is the Flynn effect? Part II
Can you pass a Grade 8 exam that was given to American children in 1912? Why the Flynn effect never really happened. My last post elicited a tweet from Elon Bachman: Argument by incredulity (w.r.t....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Great Decline
Mean polygenic score of Icelanders by year of birth (Kong et al. 2017, Fig. 2) Three polygenic studies have shown that cognitive ability declined among European Americans, British people, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is intelligence all that matters for a successful society?
If we consider intelligence to be the only worthy mental attribute, we’ll end up with an elite that is not only intelligent but also narcissistic … and indifferent to the rest of us. George Francis...
View ArticleClik here to view.
European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color: Solving the Puzzle
The distinguishing physical features of Europeans began as female features. I’ve published a book through Academica Press. It’s titled: European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color: Solving the Puzzle. It can...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How some populations adapt to vitamin D scarcity
Vitamin D metabolism varies from one human population to another, as do most heritable traits. This is the subject of a review article I’ve recently published in the journal Nutrients. Here is the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sex differences in the whites of the eyes
Women have sclera (whites of the eyes) that are less yellow and less red. Although this sex difference is unknown to almost everyone, people nonetheless perceive a female face with redder and yellower...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eppur si muove
General intelligence (g) varies with ethnicity, as do genetic variants associated with educational attainment (Lasker et al. 2019, p. 445) Bryan Pesta was fired from a tenured university position for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Looking beyond the data
General intelligence (g factor) as a function of alleles associated with educational attainment (Education polygenic score). (Fuerst et al. 2021, p. 165)Among non-Hispanic European Americans,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Giorgia Meloni: The hard work is just starting
Giorgia Meloni, October 21, 2022 In the space of four years, Giorgia Meloni has gone from being the leader of a minor party to being the leader of Italy, with an absolute majority in both houses of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent evolution in human brain size
Human brain size remained stable from 300,000 to 60,000 years ago. It then diversified, becoming larger in some populations and smaller in others. This was when modern humans were spreading out of...
View ArticleMy posts on Substack
I have lately been posting on Substack rather than here. My aim there is to write longer articles that build on earlier posts from Evo and Proud. Some of them may eventually be consolidated into a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Circumventing the X algorithms
J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!", also called "Rosie the Riveter" (Wikicommons)Since my move to Substack, I have been getting much less traffic from X (formerly Twitter), apparently because X is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My wish list for research in 2024: 1. Genetic pacification in Western Europe...
Men fighting with daggers and a sword (Wikicommons)The State consolidates its power by monopolizing the use of violence. To this end, it will eliminate those men who use violence for personal ends. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My wish list for research in 2024: Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa
Drainage basin of the Niger River (Wikicommons - Wizardist)Social complexity was more advanced, and cognitive demands higher, in West African societies that benefited from trade via the Niger River....
View ArticleClik here to view.
My wish list for research in 2024: Why does estrogen make my brown eyes blue?...
Eye colors (R.A. Sturm, University of Queensland)Estrogen seems to favor the expression of non-black hair and non-brown eyes during fetal development. The “new” hair and eye colors are not only more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My wish list for 2024: Hormonal inputs into perception of human skin color by...
Subjects identify the face on the left as female and the face on the right as male. The only difference is the lightness of the skin. Richard Russell, Sinha Laboratory for Vision Research,...
View Article