Andrew Gelman has a post up which reports an analysis of the votes for Obama by county as a function of the black percentage. In chart below the circles are counties where size is proportional to turnout.

Richard Lawler pointed me to a new paper by Sean Rice, A stochastic version of the Price equation reveals the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in evolution. The Price Equation is the generalization of selective evolutionary dynamics by the amateur evolutionary biologist George Price which so impressed W. D. Hamilton. But as Rice notes it only captures a slice of the various parameters which influence evolutionary processes. Like some other papers I've pointed too Rice presents some relatively counter-intuitive results, or at least results which confound our general expectations, by scratching beyond the surface of the assumptions of conventional population genetic models:

A few days ago I suggested that it is folly to expect Europeans would elect a person of color to their highest office when so few Europeans are persons of color. Today in Slate a piece basically suggests that Americans should not be so full of themselves, Only in America? The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here:

People are still amazed he won. In a country where more than a few white folks would still say outright that one of "them'' shouldn't be in charge, here was a politician who didn't downplay his ethnicity, his foreign-sounding name, or his father who wasn't even a Christian. And he wasn't just ethnically atypical. He'd made himself a member of the country's meritocratic elite. He wrote real books that really sold. That blend of outsider detachment and obvious ambition drove his earnest enemies crazy.

So they attacked him as doubly strange, both "not like us'' and elite. They claimed you could not trust this man, that he was unknowable, unreliable, a snob, and a toff. They ridiculed the seal he'd contrived for himself, with its Latin motto meaning, roughly, "yes, we can.'' These same rhetorical ploys did not keep Benjamin Disraeli (motto: "forti nihil difficle''; literally "nothing is difficult to the brave'') from twice becoming prime minister of Great Britain during the reign of his good friend Queen Victoria. So could we Americans stop patting ourselves on the back about the supposed uniqueness of our electing Barack Obama president?

Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age:

In 2005 four outstanding multiple burials were discovered near Eulau, Germany. The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other. Skeletal and artifactual evidence and the simultaneous interment of the individuals suggest the supposed families fell victim to a violent event. In a multidisciplinary approach, archaeological, anthropological, geochemical (radiogenic isotopes), and molecular genetic (ancient DNA) methods were applied to these unique burials. Using autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosomal markers, we identified genetic kinship among the individuals. A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family. Strontium isotope analyses point to different origins for males and children versus females. By this approach, we gain insight into a Late Stone Age society, which appears to have been exogamous and patrilocal, and in which genetic kinship seems to be a focal point of social organization.