Interesting Links for 17-10-2014

[andrewducker]

• The effect of transgender students on America's women's colleges.
  (tags: education lgbt gender usa society feminism women )
• The myth of a wild British countryside
  (tags: uk wildlife history WarrenEllis )
• Bill Gates on "Why Inequality Matters"
  (tags: inequality billgates economics )
• After California decriminalized marijuana, teen arrest, overdose

Comments

[heron61]

Is reheated pasta less fattening?
That is truly bizarre.

Wrt the article on intelligence, I'm deeply unimpressed with the bit "These five findings arose primarily from twin studies." - Given that twin studies (IOW, studies that look at the same 40 or so pairs of separated-at-birth twins who have since learned of one another) are inherently junk for a multitude of reasons, the rest of this seems built on sand.

[andrewducker]

Twin studies with that low a number of people would indeed be terribly suspect. But if they're actively finding actual genetic correlations and groupings then that's very interesting in its own sake.

Edit: Particularly as the sample sizes they're talking about the genetic tests are in groups ranging from 3,000 to 11,500 people. That's certainly a large enough sample size to be interesting.

[heron61]

There are two sorts of studies involving identical twins and both are junk

[heron61]

I'm glad my explanation was helpful. It often seems to me that people doing evo psych studies are utterly blind to social and cultural influences and that's part of why they want to find genetic explanations to everything.

As a side-note, here's a fascinating article about how (at least when measured as IQ) intelligence scores can and do change for individuals and that the role genetics plays is likely vastly overstated.