Hybrid vigor in humans

This certainly matches my prejudices. Two common ideas come together here. It is generally thought that

• the subjective way females pick their mates is related to how fit they think the male is. A big tail on a peacock or antlers on a deer indicate an ability to thrive even with such a handicap (although this does have the smell of a just-so story)
• Mongrels are fitter; the technical term is hybrid vigor.

Regarding the first, it is often thought that something in how attractive people find other is related to how fit they look.

Now let's take a leap.

This study had study subjects look at a pile of photos of  black, white, and mixed-race people. There was a small but significant effect of thinking the mixed-race people were more attractive. The suggestion is that mixed-race people display hybrid vigor, and this can be discerned in photos.

I don't know. It all sounds plausible, and it matches my prejudices, but that's a good reason to be skeptical about the ability to see this in photos.

I've often thought that, for one generation, we should require that everyone in America marry outside their race, so in a generation, everybody would be related to people of another race, and everybody would be the color of Polynesians. Or me, for that matter, long ago, in the late summer between any two years of high school, my flirtation with skin cancer.

I found this at Science Daily.

Chemical exposure and brain problems in kids

Via Science Daily, A study shows that kids with autism have the same blood mercury levels as kids without autism.

Lead, however is another story.

Exposure to lead in early childhood significantly contributes to lower performances on end-of-grade (EOG) reading tests among minority and low-income children, according to researchers at Duke University and North Carolina Central University.

"We found a clear dose-response pattern between lead exposure and test performance, with the effects becoming more pronounced as you move from children at the high end to the low end of the test-score curve."

This certainly isn't new. They found that a good chunk of the difference between test scores of black and white kids could be attributed to differences in the amound of lead they have in their blood, which can be explained by the fact that they average poorer than whites. I.e., another "racial" difference turns out to be social.