Inductivist

Methods

Results

This new meta-analysis synthesizes the results from 16 studies (total sample of 24,767) that examined the relationship between religiosity and non-suicidial self-injury (e.g., small cuts on one's arms).  The researchers found a small negative correlation, meaning that more religious people are less likely to intentionally injure themselves.

This result is based on correlations which don't tell us what is causing what. Religious involvement could lower self-injury, or some trait like good mental health could both lead to more church and less hurting oneself.

Since I've come to see biology as so important for explaining behavior, I'm inclined to interpret the MANY ways religiosity predicts good outcomes to mean that people who have positive traits are more likely to value religion. I'm inclined to see religiosity as a marker of positive traits.

There are positive correlations between IQ and both longevity and height.  Many genes underlie these traits -- it looks like there are health-promoting genes that manifest themselves not only through a long life but perhaps a better functioning brain and ending up taller. And a smart/tall/long-lived person might also have a comparatively small number of mutations that work against health.

Does being an athlete fit in with the rest of these traits?  One might expect height and athleticism to be correlated simply because popular sports like basketball and football favor bigger people.  How about IQ and being a good athlete?  Here are the correlations for IQ and self-rated athletic ability (GSS):

White males (n = 440)   -.05
White females (n = 553)  .01
Black males (n = 74)  -.09
Black females (n = 103)  -.14

For all demographic groups, IQ and athletic ability are either not correlated or a negatively correlated. It does not appear to be the case that there are genes that promote both at the same time (or that subtract from both simultaneously).

We saw in a recent post that the women with poor health have the most kids.  Is this true for heavy women, too?  Yes, it is: look at this graph (General Social Survey, self-reported weight, N = 200):
















Women with one child are the lightest group with a mean of 165.6 pounds.  Compare this to the heaviest group: Women with seven children weigh an average of 208.5 pounds. The difference is roughly one standard deviation -- huge, no pun intended.

Of course, it's hard for a woman to lose the weight she gains from being pregnant, but it is also possible that genes underlie both weight and fertility.

For example, perhaps women who score low on conscientiousness (self-discipline, long-term planning) lack control over both eating and fertility.

Americans are likely to get fatter and fatter as the generations go by.  If civilization eventually collapses under all the dysgenic trends I have been documenting lately, these fat Americans might finally lose weight due to food shortages.

UPDATE: Readers might suspect that a respondent's weight is due to her height, and perhaps tall women are having more babies.  I checked: fertility does not vary by height. 

Research shows that more than one-third of the variation in self-reported health is due to genetic differences.  Do healthy Americans have most of the kids, so future generations will trend toward good health?  The answer is, no.  Look that this graph that shows the current number of offspring for women ages 40-55 (General Social Survey, N = 965):
















Women with excellent health average 2.08 children.  Those with poor health have a mean of 2.32 kids.  Now the gap is only small (one-sixth of a standard deviation), but it's enough of a difference to have an impact over the long-term.

So now we've documented negative fertility trends for IQ, education, and self-reported health. 

Liberals obsess over about how people on the bottom of society have got it so bad (they exclude poor, straight white men, of course), but in evolutionary terms, the bottom is made up of winners.

This new study used data on more than 11,000 Americans to test the "Black-White Mental Health Paradox": researchers have found that blacks suffer lower rates of psychiatric illness than whites. 

The researchers looked at 12 disorders for the past year and also over one's whole lifetime:

Results showed overwhelming evidence of the paradox across lifetime and past-year disorders for women and men. In addition, Blacks’ mental health advantage over Whites widened after adjusting for socioeconomic factors.

So the data is clear that rates are higher for whites, and the gap is even wider if you compare high-income blacks and whites, or if you compare low-income blacks and whites.

Researchers call this a paradox, but it's only a paradox if you subscribe to the theory that America is a racist society, and so the trauma of oppression should cause rampant mental illness among blacks.

The greater mental health of blacks is evidence that there are big biological differences between the two races. Whites are biologically more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders.

In this context, liberals have told me that blacks are just really strong people. Who else could survive slavery and Jim Crow? Although they won't admit it -- they tend to be lazy, biased, dishonest thinkers -- they are really saying that blacks have a biological mental health advantage.

As the genetic evidence of racial differences becomes more and more indisputable, I imagine lefties will concede the importance of biology where blacks have an advantage in order to look scientific, but will continue to flip out over biological differences where blacks come up short.

Nuts are supposed to be good for you (I recently posted on a meta-analysis that found that walnuts lower total and bad cholesterol and triglycerides), but they are high in calories. Do they make you fat and bushy like a well-fed squirrel?

A new meta-analysis of thirteen randomized clinical studies (741 people) looked at the issue. It found that nut consumption did not affect body mass index (BMI), weight, percent body fat, or waist circumference. So if you like this kind of food and think it's beneficial, go nuts. 

US Senator John McCain is near the end. Last year he was struck with an aggressive brain tumor, a glioblastoma, that carries with it a strong likelihood of not surviving for very long. 

As a documented in a recent post, whites face more than twice the risk of developing a glioblastoma (as well as other types of brain cancer) compared to all minority groups, and the risk for men is significantly higher than for women. 

Nature does not seem to be cooperating with the liberal claim that minorities and women always get the short end of the stick due to "white supremacy." 

The theory much more consistent with the data is that evolution has produced group differences which sometimes advantage one group, sometimes another. Social conditions might magnify biological differences, but differences are rooted in genes. 

After bouts of skin cancer and now this awful, deadly brain cancer, Senator McCain might be saying it's not so bad to be black.

This meta-analysis of 58 studies documented the "Hispanic Paradox": Latinos are generally healthier and live longer than whites and blacks. To be specific, their rate of dying is 18% lower than that of other Americans.

This kind of finding keeps sociologists up at night because racism by whites is supposed to destroy brown lives, and yet Hispanics outlive whites, and what do people care about more than being alive?

The obvious candidate explanation is that genes are the reason Hispanics live so long, and the authors do manage to write two or three words about the possibility.

Sociologists are also very troubled to find that women live so much longer than men since male oppression, they tell us, absolutely crushes the female soul. And right on time, feminists dream up a million reasons why the sex difference is NOT biological. God forbid we actually develop explanations that fit the data. 

The study also reports that Asians live even longer than Hispanics. But how can any minority overcome the Evil White Man? Not only are Asians non-white, many are non-Christian. And many are immigrants. And we all know Trump's Deplorables--the power structure of this country (ha!)--despise anyone who is not white, Christian, and American.

So, again, how is it possible that Asian Americans are so healthy? How is it that they are so much more educated than the White Devil, and make so much more money than him? Maybe because liberals are 100% delusional, and genes explain these patterns.

This new meta-analysis of 54 randomized studies looked to see which oils improve your cholesterol the best.

The authors found that you can bring down your bad cholesterol (LDL) by eating the following oils instead of butter: safflower, sunflower, canola, flaxseed, corn, olive, soybean, palm, coconut, and even beef fat. All these were better than butter for total cholesterol, and safflower, sunflower, canola, corn, and soybean oil beat lard for total cholesterol.

Compared to lard, safflower, sunflower, canola, corn, and soybean did better on LDL. And sunflower was better than olive and palm oil.

For raising the good cholesterol (HDL), safflower turns out to be the loser. Sunflower, olive, palm, coconut and even beef fat are improvements. Sunflower, olive and beef fat are better than soybean. Coconut and palm beat soybean as well as corn oil. The researchers, however, say there's evidence that high HDL might not reduce your cardiovascular disease risk, so LDL seems to be more important.

For triacyglycerols--fat levels--sunflower, soybean, and palm oil are superior to butter, while safflower, sunflower, corn, soybean, and palm are better than beef fat.

Maybe you didn't need all that, but the big depressing news is that butter--which I love--stinks, and it looks like sunflower oil is the grand champion. I don't see it around as much as other oils, but according to experimental research, it seems to be the healthiest choice.

Myself, I like it when science contradicts the cool people who tell me I need to eat olive and coconut oil 24/7.

UPDATE: The Russians like sunflower oil, but I swear I did not post this research because they have something on me.

A new study finds that several gene variants in African-Americans help explains why they have underweight newborns twice as often as whites. For example, two of the DNA points (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) that affect birth weight vary a great deal by race; for one point, 69% of pure Africans carry the weight-lowering version, while only 2% of Europeans have it. For the other point, it was 91% for Africans and 23% for Europeans.

Now the race-deniers tell us that blacks and whites don't differ on genes, but do these percentages seem the same to you?

Next question, why would Africans frequently have genes that make their babies smaller--a trait that predicts health problems down the road?

The honest answer is, I don't know. But this does remind me of Phil Rushton's theory that blacks and whites have different "evolutionary strategies"; that evolutionary pressures have shifted blacks toward a more "quantitative" approach to reproduction, whereas whites and East Asians are shifted toward "quality" offspring--fewer of them, but greater investment in each one. Baby-enlarging genes have supposedly been selected for among whites and Asians.

Whatever the explanation, this study shows strong evidence that black newborns tend to be smaller, not because of some social disadvantage imposed by racist whites, but because of genes and evolutionary differences.    

I am always looking for easy eating choices that are good for you. This new meta-analysis of 26 clinical trials looked to see if walnuts make a difference. The authors found that daily consumption of walnuts significantly lowered total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol--the "bad" stuff that clogs arteries. It also reduced triglycerides or fats in the blood. HDL, the "good" cholesterol, remained unchanged.

The researchers found that subjects who ate enough walnuts so that it was 10-24% of their daily energy intake got more benefit than those at the 5% level. So for someone about my size--5' 10", 180 pounds--you should probably eat roughly 2 ounces per day.

Of course, all of this assumes that conventional medicine is right about cholesterol and triglycerides.

Glaucoma is a progressive condition caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors and is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. Primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is the most common form of glaucoma and is often associated with elevated intraocular pressure (IOP).

The additive heritability of POAG ranges from 24 to 42%. This new study analyzes data on 4,986 POAG cases and 58,426 controls from 4 race/ethnicity groups. The authors found 24 loci linked to POAG.

The authors found more than double the prevalence of POAG among African-Americans compared to whites--16.1% vs. 7.4%. (The prevalence for East Asians was 9.9%; for Hispanics, it was 7.9%). The figures below shows the relationship between genetic ancestry and POAG. 



Hold it--I thought, as Jonathan Marks instructs us, that race is a cultural and political phenomenon, not a biological one?

Here's a recent study from The European Journal of Paediatric Neurology:

Progressive encephalopathy (PE) in children is a heterogeneous group of individually rare diseases with a cumulative incidence which compares to that of neural tube defects and infantile hydrocephalus. The main cause of PE is metabolic disease, but neurodegenerative disorders lacking known metabolic or other causes also exist. PE poses a challenge to our health care system due to difficulties in its diagnosis and management, 4–6 and a high case fatality. For example, in a cohort study we showed that the case fatality of PE was 36.9%. In the same cohort, the incidence rate was 6.4 per 100,000 person years at risk, and the cumulative incidence was 0.6 per 1000 live births, comparable to that of other reports.

Using data from this cohort combined with outstandingly detailed national-wide population statistics we wanted to pin point the increased risk of PE associated with consanguinity. Over the past 20 years there has been a six-fold increase in non-Western immigration to Norway (the nomenclature regarding non-Western has recently been suggested revised). In 2006, non-Western immigrants accounted for 18.6% of Oslo’s total population of 538,411 inhabitants. The largest non-Western group is from Pakistan. In Pakistan, approximately 60% of marriages are consanguineous and unions occur primarily between first cousins. Norway is the only country in the world collecting data on consanguinity for its entire population at birth. Approximately 50% of children of Pakistani origin born in Norway are the result of consanguineous unions, defined as parents who are second cousins or more closely related. Of first generation Pakistani immigrants, 43.9% were first cousins. In Norway, parental consanguinity in the Pakistani population is associated with an increased risk of stillbirth, congenital malformations, and infant death, all considered complex genetic conditions.

When autosomal recessive gene defects are rare, the likelihood of unrelated parents being carriers for the same defect is small. The less frequent the recessive gene, the stronger the likelihood that an affected individual is the product of a consanguineous mating. Since many of the diseases causing PE are determined by single mutant genes, for example in autosomal recessive inborn errors of metabolism, it was reasonable to assume that children of consanguineous unions had a higher risk of PE, and that PE consequently would be more common in children of Pakistani origin. However, the degree of increased risk of PE caused by consanguinity has not been precisely assessed in previous studies. Here we report an approximately seven-fold increased risk of PE in children of Pakistani origin and an eleven-fold increased risk when consanguineous Pakistanis were compared to the general Norwegian population. We also estimated that avoidance of consanguinity in the Pakistani population would result in 50% reduction of PE in this group.

Looking at ADD Health data, I see that 36.9 percent of young males wear eyeglasses, contacts or both. The number for young females is 53.4 percent. The difference is statistically significant. The pattern is the same for all races. Since this is an adolescent/young adult sample, I assumed the sex difference is due to the earlier maturation of girls, but the gap is just as big for those in their mid-20s. How do we explain this? Male stubbornness? Male hunting/warfare?

As a follow-up from my post on migraines, this is from Salon.com:

Why do migraines disproportionately afflict women?

Hormones, probably. About 18 percent of women suffer from migraines, compared with just 6 percent of men. Doctors have proposed several explanations for the disparity, including different levels of external stress and gender-related differences in the psychological response to pain. The best research, however, now suggests that sex hormones are to blame, and loads of circumstantial evidence support this theory. In women, the headaches typically begin after puberty and tend to decrease in both frequency and intensity after menopause. (Migraines are one of the few neurological disorders to subside with age.) They are also more common during menstruation and less common during pregnancy. Intriguingly, doctors treating male-to-female transgendered people have noticed that after their patients begin hormone therapy, they start to experience migraines with the same frequency as genetic females.

Although the research is still unsettled, there is growing scientific evidence that estrogen is the primary culprit. Migraines occur when inflammation around the brain triggers trigeminal nociceptors—cells responsible for pain sensations around the face—to transmit chemical signals. Nancy Berman and Kenneth McCarson, neurology researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center, have shown that in mice these cells have estrogen receptors. Also, rats exposed to estrogen exhibit significantly worse migraine symptoms—except for nausea, since rats don't vomit—than their estrogen-starved counterparts at the same level of inflammation. At a biochemical level, they've documented changes indicating that pain signals are stronger when estrogen receptors are activated. Such evidence suggests the possibility that men might experience the inflammation associated with migraine just as often as women but their pain receptors have a less forceful response to it.

Interesting, but my favorite part is the male-to-female "transgendered" people. A guy's junk is removed, and he's pumped with hormones, but doctors refer to his status as a social construction--"gendered." Hilarious.

What does the Michele Bachmann migraine story teach us about society? According to many feminists in the media, the predictable lesson to be learned is that we still have a sexism problem. But the much more interesting (and valid) story is that men and women really are different in fundamental ways. Research shows that, compared to men, women are three times more likely to suffer from migraines, and that the medical problem is roughly 50 percent heritable (meaning that half of the variation in the illness is explained by variation in genes).

In this new study from American sociology's flagship journal American Sociological Review, self-assessment of overall health of women at age 40 is significantly higher if they had no children out of wedlock. Single mothers experience higher levels of stress, psychological distress, and social isolation. According to the authors, Hispanic women escape the negative effects because their cohabiting more closely resembles marriage, and they have closer kinship networks. Overall, cohabiting or getting married after the nonmarital birth does not mitigate the negative effects. Only an enduring marriage to the biological father improves health. (They adjust for selection effects.)

By the way, it puts a smile on my face to see IQ as a control: not surprisingly, it predicts better overall health.

I don't know how I got so lucky, but I've managed to find a small group of conservative professors to have lunch with every week--three of them are even socially conservative. What are the odds of four of those in the same room?  One fellow is retired and gets angry all the time because greedy, selfish, short-sighted businessmen are ruining the country with mass immigration. He thinks the Southwest is finished.

I worry about his health (he's 79 and has a various health problems), so I told him that this is where religion comes in (he converted to Roman Catholicism a few years back). Thinking about your country will only make you mad, but rest assured that, in the end, everything will be alright. Life is only a moment; focus on eternity.

After, I wondered if it is true that religious people are less angry than the irreligious. I regressed a GSS question on the frequency of feeling angry onto a list of demographic variables and church attendance. Here are the results (sample size = 1,181)

Standardized OLS Regression Coefficients

Age -.18*
Male -.02
Black .02
Education -.03
Income .05
Church attendance -.06*

*statistically significant effect

Older people and those who attend church frequently are significantly less angry than their counterparts. The other characteristics don't matter. (I'm surprised blacks are not angrier than whites. Anger cannot explain their higher rates of violence).

In addition to giving a person "the big picture," religion--most religions, at least--frowns on anger. My priest patiently hears my confessions of anger far too often. Angry white dude--I'm such a stereotype.   

From Gallup (sample size = 550,000):