Daily Data Dump - Wednesday

Overweight American Children and Adolescents Becoming Fatter. Reports that the increases in obesity are not equally distributed across socioeconomic segments. So not only is there is a change in the mean, it looks the variance is increasing. News from the west: Ancient DNA from a French megalithic burial chamber. Another paper which indicates we might need to be really cautious about back-projecting contemporary distributions of genes to the past. The genetic side to chimpanzee culture. The blank slate presupposition seems to apply to chimpanzee culture too. It may be that culture is heritable through emulation, but it may also be heritable through the passing of genes. The same issue crops up in psychological and social studies which assume that because someone's parents were abusers that they became abusers because they learned the behavior or were traumatized. It may simply be that there's a particular set of personality predispositions being passed ...