Cultural innovation, Pleistocene environments and demographic change. Gene-culture coevolution gurus Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that climatic fluctuations may work to the advantage of humans because of the adaptive flexibility inherent in a cultural species.

Common versus rare variants, again. Some skepticism of the new exhortation to look for rare variants of large effect instead of common variants of more modest effect. This sort of posturing by biologists strikes me as similar to what happens in social science (to a great extent all of what falls under the rubric of sociology seems to be posturing with doctorates). Does this happen in the physical sciences?

Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel. I wonder when he’s going to stop being asked about how he got together with Jennifer Ouellette. People meet up through internet. Via blogs. It happens.

Media to Tea Partiers: Can You be More Racist? Mind-reading is hard. Conservatives are racists and liberals are crypto-Leninists. Meanwhile, there’s life to be lived.

Neural Correlates of Being a Total Bad-Ass. Psychology with fMRI = telling you stuff you already know with a pretty picture to boot.