Skin colour and brain activity genetically linked?

German (Austrian?) geneticist Volkmar Weiss has just pointed out that the effect of the recently identified skin color gene SLC24A5, which makes the difference between the white race and other races (See here), is more than skin deep. SLC24A5 is also active in the brain (See here).

Given the statistical linkage between IQ and skin colour (See for instance the Table below), that should not really be too surprising but there are none so blind as those who will not see. The Table is from an article by Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa that is in press at the journal Intelligence.



There are more details and some commentary about the article from which the table above is taken here but you need to scroll down to get to it. And see here for some interesting comments on Volkmar Weiss's observation.

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Poor whites keeping the U.S. birthrate up? There is a big table of statistics here on female fertility in the USA. The figures that I found most interesting were from non-Hispanic whites aged 35 to 44. Women of that age will have mostly completed their families and the difference between the over 40 and under 40 sectors were in fact slight. Around 20% had NEVER had children, which, to the best of my knowledge, is what it has always been. There were plenty of maiden aunts in Victorian and Edwardian England, for instance. But most encouraging was the no. of children per woman in that age and racial group. At around 1.8 it is quite high compared with Europe. How many of the whites concerned were poor whites is however another matter. My guess would be that the white American birthrate is so high mainly because America has a lot of poor whites. In welfare states, of course, nobody is really poor.

Islamic Jew-hatred: "Outsiders are rarely aware of how intense the Muslim world's Jew-hatred is. "What has surprised me is the virulence of this new anti-Semitism throughout all the Muslim countries," the distinguished journalist and editor Harold Evans wrote in 2002. "It is frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious, and prolific, and is only incidentally connected to the Palestinian conflict." It is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that accounts for this loathing of Jews. It is the loathing of Jews that accounts for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obsessive anti-Semitism almost always characterizes the most dangerous threats to America and the West. Nazism, Communism, Islamofascism -- one thing they have in common is intense anti-Semitism. Which is why Ahmadinejad's strident rhetoric should be setting off urgent alarms. Dictators who talk about wiping nations from the face of the earth generally mean what they say. We should know by now that it isn't only Jews who are endangered by the mullahs and their threats. All of us are. And time is wasting".

The German sickness: "Stern magazine (Germany's # 1 magazine by circulation) has finally discovered why life is so rotten in Germany these days. The Western world is breaking apart and its all America's fault. This time it's a commentary in Stern magazine with a dramatic title: "America is destroying the West." Like so many Stern pieces, this article has all the tell-tale elements of the perverted view of America that has come to dominate and cloud the minds of many in the German media establishment".

Stupid German Leftist women embrace Islam: " More than 1,000 people converted to Islam in Germany this year, the highest figure on record, and the majority were women who were not married to a Muslim, according to a report this week. "This is a considerable rise," Salim Abdullah, the director of the Central Institute of Islamic Archives in Germany, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The Institute said its statistics showed that 14,352 of the 3.2mn Muslims in Germany are of German descent. More than 60% of the converts to Muslim are women and most of them are "university-educated and affluent", Abdullah said. Only a small percentage converted to Islam as a result of marrying a Muslim.

Dennis Prager comments: "Jews who support the Christian right are "Uncle Jakes." So says a pro-Israeli Jewish official in his recent column for the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel organization. "Uncle Jake" is M. J. Rosenberg's term for Jewish equivalent of "Uncle Tom." Just as the left sees conservative blacks as traitors to African-Americans, so it sees conservative Jews as traitors to the Jewish people. I am the "Uncle Jake" most criticized in the Rosenberg column. That a Jew on the left would use this term to describe Jews who support conservative Christians gives one an idea of how irrational, how hysterical are the arguments of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) left. And lacking a rational basis, they frequently rely on name-calling... The use of this smear is the tactic of those who cannot argue".

Freeman calls Black History Month `ridiculous': Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is "ridiculous." "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated - when black history would become fundamental to American history. Freeman notes there is no "white history month," and says the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it."

Arnie strikes back: "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his identity to promote the city. The governor's request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger's decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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