Women more racist when fertile

Via TGGP:
Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle.

Psychol Sci. 2009 May 4. [Epub ahead of print]

Navarrete CD, Fessler DM, Fleischman DS, Geyer J.

Although a considerable body of research explores alterations in women's mating-relevant preferences across the menstrual cycle, investigators have yet to examine the potential for the menstrual cycle to influence intergroup attitudes. We examined the effects of changes in conception risk across the menstrual cycle on intergroup bias and found that increased conception risk was positively associated with several measures of race bias. This association was particularly strong when perceived vulnerability to sexual coercion was high. Our findings highlight the potential for hypotheses informed by an evolutionary perspective to generate new knowledge about current social problems-an avenue that may lead to new predictions in the study of intergroup relations.
PDF. Discussion at Mind Hacks.

Replies to Guy White

Guy White is a little bitch with no integrity who likes to pretend he is a master debater but censors comments that point out his errors of fact and reasoning. He prefers to argue against straw men and only allows posts by the dumbest proponents of ideas he disagrees with.

Guy,

You're way too smug for someone who has no idea what he's talking about. Try applying the standards of evidence you demand from "anti-semites" to yourself rather than simply rehashing misinformation you read on blogs, or "reasoning" starting from flawed or incomplete information.

"But how did this stereotype come about? Because blacks were better than whites. Because they look like they are better."

Strength and performance are not measured by appearance -- much less by the subjective impression of some dork on the internet.

"Blacks are known to have thicker skulls and stronger bones. This is the by-product of having higher testosterone"

Not likely.

Wright et al (34) obtained measurements of both growth
hormone and BMD in 16 black and 17 white men. Serum 17bestradiol,
growth hormone concentration and secretion, and BMD
were all greater in blacks than in whites. The authors suggested
that the higher circulating estradiol concentrations in blacks may
have contributed to the greater secretion of growth hormone,
which in turn led to an increase in bone mass
. Heaney (35) suggested
that BMC and BMD may be regulated by a “mechanostat,”
which is analogous to a thermostat that regulates temperature.
According to the mechanostat theory, a network of osteocytes
detects bone strain and modulates the activity of remodeling
cells. The mechanostat set point in blacks is lower than that in
whites; ie, the strain needed to trigger bone growth is less in
blacks, giving them denser bones
. Heaney speculated that growth
hormone plays a role in establishing the bone mass set point.

Measures of body composition in blacks and whites: a comparative review
DR Wagner, VH Heyward - American journal of clinical nutrition, 2000 - Am Soc Nutrition
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/ajcn;71/6/1392

"It is grotesquely unscientific to suggest that blacks commit more crime because of testosterone, but somehow their testosterone doesn’t produce any positive effects."

Keep the first half of that sentence. There's never been any good evidence racial differences in crime are caused by racial differences in circulating testosterone. This was merely a theory suggested by Rushton. Problems with the theory (which I pointed out to you months ago in a comment you failed to post -- let's see if this one goes through):

- Large, representative US samples show little or no black-white differences in T.
- T is markedly lower in Sub-Saharan Africa than in America and Europe, while the African crime rate is higher.

IQ apparently accounts for more than half the black-white difference in criminality in the US. I suspect variation in genes such as MAOA will eventually be found to account for most of the rest.

Guy White doesn't post the comment, but attempts a response via email. My reply:

2. Stereotypes come about as a result of something being "usually true".

Stereotypes come into existence in any number of ways. Many have at least some basis in in reality, but what you've written above is simply retarded.

If I have this right, one of the "stereotypes" you're promoting is that black men are taller than white men, which is of course ass backwards -- white men are taller than black men in the US.

Negroes commonly claim all serial killers and pedophiles are white. This "stereotype" is not "usually true". The kernel of truth is that blacks are merely less overrepresented among serial killers and pedophiles than they are among most other classes of criminal.

3. Strength and performance could be estimated by looking at the person.

The degree to which that's true is an empirical matter, not something to be decided by Guy White "logic". And it's much simpler to just measure strength and performance directly.

One can think of several racial differences that affect appearance but not sports performance. Bodybuilders tan in the belief that darker skin makes muscular relief more apparent. Relative to whites, blacks also tend to store less of their subcutaneous fat on the fronts of their body and more on the back. Blacks have shorter torsos and narrower and shallower chests (as well as smaller lungs), which may make whatever upper body muscle mass they possess look more impressive by contrast. The smaller torso should present an advantage in sprinting, but not in sports like wrestling or weightlifting.

4. Testosterone does increase bone density.

And? Are you seriously this bad at following arguments?

Please do not cite studies with 15 people. Those aren't scientific.

Please shut the fuck up. You don't have the slightest clue what science is.

The excerpt lays out a plausible etiology for greater black bone density. It was not meant to "prove" black men have higher estrogen levels. That fact is not seriously up for debate. Black men have repeatedly and consistently been found to have elevated estrogen levels, here and in Africa, since study commenced in the 1930s.The same can't be said for testosterone levels. If you had done your own research rather than recycling "facts" you got thirdhand (ultimately via Rushton), you would know this.

5. High-T has been linked to violence.

Again: we're concerned with black-white differences. It's sort of difficult to blame black-white differences in crime on black-white differences in testosterone when the latter are very small, non-existent, or even fairly large in the wrong direction when we look at Africa itself.

6. Africans have less T because many have poor diet.

Where's your "mainstream source" for this?

Here's the point, you fucking clown: whatever reason Africans have lower T levels than Europeans, the fact remains: they have lower T levels. Since they don't have lower crime rates, this tends to rule out testosterone as the causal agent in black-white differences in crime. Likewise for testosterone causing black-white differences in bone density or other body composition variables which are stable between American blacks and black Africans.

Some WWII aviation trivia

Real differences were found in national extraction and possibly in education. The principal extraction in all flyers was Old American, with the rest overwhelmingly Northwest European - British, Irish, Germanic, and Scandinavian, in that order. Four per cent were of Slavic and 1% of Mediterranean descent. Successful combat pilots were significantly more Old American in ancestry than cadets, an Old American being a person whose 4 grandparents were born in the United States. Twenty-two per cent of cadets and 60% of the successful combat pilots were Old American on both sides; on one parental side only, an additional 24% and 15%, respectively. This highly significant difference (p < .01) is hardly attributable to geographic provenience, since 10% more of the combat pilots than of the cadets were from the East coast, where recent immigrants are most numerous. Old Americans may have tended to become pilots rather than bombardiers or navigators. The greater metrical homogeneity of pilots as compared to the latter groups (tables 1 and 4) lends some support to this hypothesis; but even so, with twice as many pilots in the AAF as bombardiers and navigators combined, pilots should resemble cadets in national extraction more closely than they did. If Old Americans actually were more successful in military flying - still an assumption awaiting confirmation in larger samples - were they eliminated less often from training? Had they “sounder” personalities; or do the physical traits associated with flying success occur more often or more strongly among Old Americans? Any one of these possibilities might repay further study.

[Damon. Physique and success in military flying. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1955 Jun;13(2):217-52.]


A truly odd bit of data emanating from the war was the fact that aces (those with five or more air-to-air kills) tended to have blue or light-colored eyes (over tow thirds) [. . .]

[James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. Dirty Little Secrets of World War II]

Very fine scale genetic structure

European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication 24 June 2009; doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2009.97

Comparing population structure as inferred from genealogical versus genetic information

Vincenza Colonna et al.

Algorithms for inferring population structure from genetic data (ie, population assignment methods) have shown to effectively recognize genetic clusters in human populations. However, their performance in identifying groups of genealogically related individuals, especially in scanty-differentiated populations, has not been tested empirically thus far. For this study, we had access to both genealogical and genetic data from two closely related, isolated villages in southern Italy. We found that nearly all living individuals were included in a single pedigree, with multiple inbreeding loops. Despite Fst between villages being a low 0.008, genetic clustering analysis identified two clusters roughly corresponding to the two villages. Average kinship between individuals (estimated from genealogies) increased at increasing values of group membership (estimated from the genetic data), showing that the observed genetic clusters represent individuals who are more closely related to each other than to random members of the population. Further, average kinship within clusters and Fst between clusters increases with increasingly stringent membership threshold requirements. We conclude that a limited number of genetic markers is sufficient to detect structuring, and that the results of genetic analyses faithfully mirror the structuring inferred from detailed analyses of population genealogies, even when Fst values are low, as in the case of the two villages. We then estimate the impact of observed levels of population structure on association studies using simulated data.
Keywords:

population structure, genetic isolate, genetic clustering methods, Fst, kinship