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The gay germ hypothesis
Incidence of chlamydia, a major cause of infertility. The high polygyny rate among the “female farming” peoples of sub-Saharan Africa may have favored the evolution of STDs. Is this where we should...
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Where do those tensions come from?
Home sweet home in the Scottish borderlands. This was one of the last regions of Britain to be pacified and brought under State control. People lived in fortified homes where the second floor could be...
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Cultural modernity and behavioral modernity
Where’s the beard? And the headscarf? In this photo from the 1980s, the Tsarnaevs look secular and modern (Source: Paris Match)Much has been made of radical Islam and its role in shaping the mental...
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Thoughts on the Paris spring
Antifa badge (Norway). Antiracism is now part of a legally enforced system of values and norms. Its followers are surreptitiously becoming the underlings of authority, even to the point of becoming a...
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More thoughts. The evolution of a word
Are you assaulting me because I’m White? How do you react to this poster? Is it antiracist or racist? Why?The word “racist” is so common today that you may have trouble imagining a time when neither...
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Can antiracism reform itself?
Nelson Mandela shakes hands with Frederik de Klerk, 1992. Antiracist iconography is focused on past struggles, like the fight against apartheid. Yet the world is now a very different place...
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Just for show?
Of all humans, male and female, European women have the whitest skin and the most diverse range of hair and eye colors. Are European physical characteristics really female characteristics?...
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Making Europeans kinder, gentler
Hanged, drawn, and quartered. (source)Although the Middle Ages were, in the imagination of our contemporaries, “the time of the gallows,” the reality was appreciably different (Carbasse, 2011, pp....
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How the pacification of Europe came to an end
John Locke: “every man, in the state of nature, has a power to kill a murderer […] such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and...
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Not getting the point
Samuel George Morton, an early American anthropologist. He fudged his data to suit his preconceived ideas on race, according to Stephen Jay Gould. It later turned out that Gould was the fudger....
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Still missing the point
Occurrences of ‘Blumenbach’ in published writings. After a peak in the early 19th century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach faded into the background. He had little influence on the thinking of later...
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White skin privilege
A new arrival (painting by Giuilo Rosati - source). The privilege of white skin …Earlier this year, fashion model Cameron Russell condemned the unbearable whiteness of her industry:[…] I won a genetic...
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The other slave trade
Although the slave raiders usually left infants behind, older girls and boys could be taken, if suitable for immediate sale (Selling a child-slave, painting by Vasily Vereshchagin – source).Europe...
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Trading in fair-skinned women. Did it happen elsewhere?
Austronesian woman (Roekiah Soeara, 1942, Indonesian actress - source). Austronesian and Papuan peoples intermixed in coastal Papua-New Guinea and on the islands to the east. This intermixture seems...
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Skin color and the menstrual cycle
The female torso visibly reddens towards the end of the menstrual cycle. Do men unconsciously pick up on this visual cue? (Figure from Edwards and Duntley, 1949) Women vary in skin color over the...
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Perception of skin color in sub-Saharan Africa
Beyoncé Knowles, 2012. Is skin bleaching consistent with indigenous African values? (source)A Zambian-born sociologist visited his home village with his white American wife and two of their children....
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Great hair ... and how it evolved
Crystal Gayle, American country music singer (source). In humans of Eurasian origin, head hair can grow down to the mid-back and even farther. Long silky hair must have evolved relatively late,...
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Facial contrast and femininity
How to hyperstimulate a sex-recognition algorithm. Women have higher luminous contrast between their facial skin and their lip/eye color. This contrast effect is influenced not only by degree of...
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Women and eye color
Inheritance of eye color doesn’t follow a simple Mendelian model. Although the blue-eye allele (C) is less dominant than the brown-eye allele (T), CT heterozygotes aren’t necessarily brown-eyed and CC...
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Is something afoot with Bigfoot?
Purported Yeti scalp at Khumjung Monastery (source). Has DNA been retrieved from it for the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project? Over a year ago, geneticist Bryan Sykes launched the...
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