Recent posts – Grasshoppermouse

Review of Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary by Agustín Fuentes

Does Sex is a Spectrum offer a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex?

Create a webpage listing all your twitter threads

Notes on how to import your tweets into R and create a webpage listing all your threads

Twitter threads

Links to my twitter threads since I joined twitter

Is evolutionary psychology impossible?

science

Subrena Smith recently argued that “evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is…impossible” (Smith 2019). I agree with most of Smith’s premises, which are…

About 90% of the genome is junk, which is very informative about ancestry but says little about biology

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The genome, taken as a whole, has a profound influence on our biology. Many scientists, myself included, see it as a blueprint for the organism, or perhaps more accurately…

Should scientific publishing move to Github and friends?

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TL;DR: Open access publishing has very high administrative overhead and is therefore too expensive. Github and similar services have substantial and perhaps insurmountable…

A theory of natural selection, 5th century BC

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How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?

Measles, mothers, leadership, and the evolution of big brains

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Nancy Pelosi recently won a major conflict with Trump over border wall funding, and her victory flipped the media narrative. Instead of the insider who was out-of-step with…

Seven reasons why most Major Depression is probably not a brain disorder

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Virtually all mental health researchers accept that Major Depression (MD) is a mental disorder, i.e., a brain dysfunction. I argue that this widespread belief should instead…

Suicide and #MeToo

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What single recent event in a woman’s life is most strongly associated with her subsequent suicide attempt? A sexual assault.

Most shooters are suicidal. Would arming teachers deter them?

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The FBI recently released a report on pre-attack behaviors of active shooters. The report analyzes the 63 shooters between 2000 and 2013 who had case files, which contain…

The universal genetic program and the custom-built phenotype: implications for race and sex

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The human genome, for many, represents differences, essential differences. The real spectre that such differences fuel racism, sexism, and eugenics has lead much of academia…

While it may be true that Evolutionary Anthropologists consider themselves scientists…

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Casey Roulette, a former PhD student of mine who is now an assistant professor at San Diego State University, recently received an email from a member of the Biology…

Our statistics don’t suck, our theories do

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Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Karl Popper, 1963.

Data dredging is the Dionysian soul of science

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Yin and Yang. Apollo and Dionysus. Heaven and Hell. Id and Superego. Reason and Emotion. Spock and McCoy. Many intellectual and moral frameworks are structured around two…

Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam

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Nature just published five brief commentaries by statisticians on the reproducibility crisis:

PCA: new coordinate system, same data

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There are many ways to teach Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This way is mine.

Put your data in an R package

stats

Updated: Feb 26, 2025

Monkey butts, menstrual cycles, sex, and the color pink. The statistical crisis in science

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A couple of years ago, when I was starting a new project that used cross-national data, I picked up a popular statistics textbook by Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill because…

Pavlov’s dogs, dopamine and drug use

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Findings from studies investigating only stimulants (generally cocaine or amphetamine) were often discussed as though they applied to all addictions, even though there was…

I’m a sucker for a good theory

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I’m a sucker for a good theory.

Is pregnancy immunosuppression a myth?

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My grad student Caity Placek is working on behavioral immunity during pregnancy. Behavioral immunity refers to psychological adaptations that help defend against pathogens;…