Blog posts and talk slides
Updated March 16, 2026 with minor edits for clarity, and an addendum (Section 7) Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex…. - Marketing blurb on Amazon.com Even as he voyaged on the Beagle, Darwin’s social profile was rising. Letters he sent home were read at scientific societies in London, as were parts of his journal, and a prominent geologist gushed that…
Posts express my views and not those of any organization I am affiliated with. If you’ve put a lot of effort into your twitter threads over the years, it would be nice to have a webpage that links to each one. Here are my notes on how to do it using R and rmarkdown or Quarto . These notes will get you started but they’re not a complete recipe – you will have to fill in some details on your own.…
These are my 111 twitter threads from shortly after I joined twitter, 2018-12-19, until shortly before the publication of this blogpost (most recent first):
Subrena Smith recently argued that “evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is…impossible” ( Smith 2019 ). I agree with most of Smith’s premises, which are based on the logic of evolution by natural selection, and I think other evolutionary psychologists would too. So why does Smith conclude that evolutionary psychology (EP) is impossible but I conclude the opposite? Well,…
The genome, taken as a whole, has a profound influence on our biology. Many scientists, myself included, see it as a blueprint for the organism, or perhaps more accurately, as I explain here , a program that generates the entire organism. Why, then, have many geneticists concluded that about 90% of the human genome has no influence on the human organism whatsoever, that it’s “junk”? And if most of…
TL;DR: Open access publishing has very high administrative overhead and is therefore too expensive. Github and similar services have substantial and perhaps insurmountable technical and funding advantages as publishing platforms. Scientific publications should therefore be git repos, created by the researchers themselves, that contain the manuscript, data, and analysis code, and that are hosted…
How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Isaac Newton, Opera Omnia, IV. 237. I’ve always been curious how far back in history the tool-like or machine-like properties of living things were recognized, and how these were explained. It turns out that Darwin was scooped over 2000 years ago. Plato clearly recognized that animals have…
Nancy Pelosi recently won a major conflict with Trump over border wall funding, and her victory flipped the media narrative. Instead of the insider who was out-of-step with both mainstream Americans and the progressive wing of her party, Pelosi was now seen as a masterful leader. The source of Pelosi’s moxie, according to many articles that appeared at the time, is that she’s a mother of five ,…
Virtually all mental health researchers accept that Major Depression (MD) is a mental disorder, i.e., a brain dysfunction. I argue that this widespread belief should instead be treated as an untested hypothesis , and further, that this hypothesis is probably false. Instead, most MD in the general population is probably severe but normal sadness or grief. Here are seven reasons why: Most Major…
What single recent event in a woman’s life is most strongly associated with her subsequent suicide attempt? A sexual assault. In a large, nationally representive study in France, for instance, the odds that a woman would attempt suicide were 17 times higher if she had experienced a sexual assault in the last year than if she had not, the most potent risk factor among those examined. In fact,…
WASHINGTON — The Education Department is considering whether to allow states to access federal funding set aside for academic enrichment and student services to purchase guns for educators, according to multiple people with knowledge of the plan. --> The FBI recently released a report on pre-attack behaviors of active shooters. The report analyzes the 63 shooters between 2000 and 2013 who had case…
The human genome, for many, represents differences, essential differences. The real spectre that such differences fuel racism, sexism, and eugenics has lead much of academia to downplay or even deny a role for the genome in human affairs. Geneticist David Reich confronted this spectre in his recent New York Times Op-Ed where he raised the alarm that scientists are on the verge of discovering…
Casey Roulette , a former PhD student of mine who is now an assistant professor at San Diego State University, recently received an email from a member of the Biology Department who was irate that Casey’s evolutionary anthropology course, Evolution of Human Nature , was being considered to fulfill “Natural Sciences” GE reqs. She informed him that she had complained to her Chair, who in turn…
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Karl Popper, 1963. Arthur: *Brother Maynard! Bring up the Holy Hand Grenade!....How does it, um-- how does it work?* --> Second Brother: *And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the…
Good and Evil Angels. Plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . From The William Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org Yin and Yang. Apollo and Dionysus. Heaven and Hell. Id and Superego. Reason and Emotion. Spock and McCoy. Many intellectual and moral frameworks are structured around two, often opposing, elements. If one element gains the upper hand over the other, beware. William Blake,…
Nature just published five brief commentaries by statisticians on the reproducibility crisis: As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change to improve science. The common theme? The problem is not our maths, but ourselves. The problem is ourselves, but it has little to do with: a…
There are many ways to teach Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This way is mine. The first constellation I learned to recognize was the Big Dipper . In the evening it’s in one part of the sky, and in the early morning, another, but it’s still the Big Dipper. Same thing if I look at it while I slowly spin around. To be more specific, in each of the 3 figures below, the stars have different and…
Updated: Feb 26, 2025 I used to write long R scripts that imported data files, created new variables, reshaped the data, reshaped it again, and spit out results along the way, all in one file. That worked so long as I never wanted to use that data again. But what if I did? Should I just tack on more code for the new analysis, and then even more code for yet more analyses? That approach will litter…
A couple of years ago, when I was starting a new project that used cross-national data, I picked up a popular statistics textbook by Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill because Gelman is known for his analysis of voting patterns across US states, which is conceptually similar to analysis of data across countries. I decided to google Gelman, a prominent statistics professor at Columbia, to see if he…
Findings from studies investigating only stimulants (generally cocaine or amphetamine) were often discussed as though they applied to all addictions, even though there was no evidence for such an assumption. (Nutt et al. 2015) Is it possible to get all the facts right, but still get the explanation wrong? That can happen to anyone . Nutt et al. (2015), writing in Nature Reviews Neuroscience ,…