Free Republic

There are good reasons not to confine the discussion to academic journals. In the latest issue of National Review, John McWhorter has a challenging and thought-provoking essay about the topic of race and IQ — specifically, about whether that topic should even be up for discussion in liberal-arts classrooms and in the media, as opposed to in scientific journals. He suggests not, as there is nothing to gain from discussing it. I read McWhorter’s essay with special interest because I have violated the norm he proposes. I have written about race and IQ on numerous occasions — and for a...

Every bird alive today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana, a new study suggests. The new family tree, compiled using information from fossils and from genetic analyses of modern birds, also reveals that this lineage underwent a major burst of evolution after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago and killed off the rest of their dinosaurian kin. "This is one of the most comprehensive studies that attempts to date when these evolutionary divergences happened," says Luis Chiappe,...