Several people recommended Lewontin.

This is someone who says that race doesn't exist because you can't determine it based on a single locus.

Other biologists have made the crazy, brilliant, how-could-Lewontin-have-thought-of-it point that you might, you know, use *multiple loci* in doing your classification. Hence Lewontin's Fallacy. (I am not disputing the idea that variation within a race is much higher than variation between races, or that racial clusters are fuzzy and the lines can be drawn in many places. But Lewontin's claim, if characterized correctly by Wikipedia, is absurd).

Or see Steven Pinker, defending _The Blank Slate_:

Orr is offended by my discussion of Lewontin and Rose, but it was they who used the defiantly blank slate title Not in Our Genes, saw their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create [a socialist] society," praised Mao as a profound biological thinker, and doctored the words of their opponents. Not exactly endearing to me.

Or here:

He accuses two of them -- Dr. Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard, and the late Dr. Stephen J. Gould, a historian of science -- of ''25 years of pointless attacks'' on Dr. Wilson and on Dr. Richard Dawkins, author of ''The Selfish Gene,'' for allegedly saying certain aspects of behavior are genetically determined.
...
The critics of sociobiology caricatured their opponents as ''determinists,'' even though few, if any, people believe human nature is fully determined by the genes. Could Dr. Pinker's description of the Blank Slate similarly overstate their views? He says he shows at length how critics like Dr. Lewontin have made statements that ''are really not too far from the collection of positions that I call the Blank Slate,'' with Dr. Lewontin and others having even written a book called ''Not in Our Genes.''

I worship Pinker, so if he says something, I'm pretty much going to take it as gospel. (I don't feel quite so strongly about Dawkins - his anti-religious passion has led him to some excesses. Not as bad as me, but enough that I don't want to take his word as gospel).

Sarah Hrdy sounds good, though. Here's a favorable GNXP review of her book Mother Nature.

Fascinating map of genes and location in Europe. "an individual's DNA can be used to infer their geographic origin with surprising accuracy--often to within a few hundred kilometres."

The implications are kinda creepy: Imagine if you could figure out what town a criminal's ancestors were likely from based on DNA alone? Additionally, with our better understanding of how genetic variation maps onto phenotype we are getting better and constructing a physical image of someone based purely on DNA alone.

I'm all in favor of people doing cool stuff with their own genes, but given that large government organizations like the State of California are amassing huge genetic databases, I find this somewhat scary. I mean, I'm sure it has some great uses for catching criminals (being able to reconstruct a roofie rapist's face from the cells he leaves behind), but I don't trust the state to stick to those uses.

Oh well, you can't stop technology. And in the long run, mastering the genome will let us all be happy, beautiful, brilliant, and immortal.

I figured out a "cheat" for sextuple word challenge, which is the iphone text twist. There is an extra source of information that I had never realized. I wonder if it is unique to that game, or do all TextTwists work that way?

We have as long as it takes the military to develop effective combat robots to win our freedom.
..
We have to get this done in one generation. We have at most 15 years to tear down the regimes which would abuse the power of state through automated, mass-produced oppression, of policy in the physical world implemented by robotic mass-produced depersonalized political and social violence against the general public.

One generation. Our generation.
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Let me remind you: billions of dollars of R&D money are going into robots designed to win the war that the Founding Fathers imagined the population might one day have to fight against the government, and the clock is ticking on the complete destabilization of the balance of power between the American people and their government.

Get moving. The time to act is now. We must find solidity and unity in our stand on human rights, on civil liberties as the heart of the American state.

(Vinay: A brief history of the future of human liberty)