Showing posts with label human biodiversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human biodiversity. Show all posts

February 10, 2011

The complicated genetics of alcoholism

The strongest gene associations found to date involve the so-called Asian flush. Roughly 40% of people of East Asian descent carry one or two gene variations that rapidly convert alcohol into the chemical acetaldehyde, which causes nausea, rapid heart beat and a severe flush. It's a strong deterrent to drinking, much like the drug disulfiram, or Antabuse. "You don't even need a genetic test to detect it," says David Goldman, chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "If you have a dinner party and somebody has this variation, they'll turn red when they drink a glass of wine."

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have tentatively identified a similar "tipsy gene" that makes carriers feel inebriated after just one or two drinks. Between 10% and 20% of the population has this variation, which is also thought to protect against becoming alcohol-dependent.

Other people feel especially euphoric when they drink—probably due to variations in the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain's reward circuits. A variation in the DRD2 dopamine receptor gene was identified in 1990 and found in a large number of alcoholics as well as drug addicts and smokers, although later studies have been mixed.

Last month, researchers at the University of California-San Diego reported that people with the DRD2 variation tend to have friends with the same genetic marker. That would give them both a biological compunction to drink and social reinforcement, the authors noted in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like the Asian flush, some alcohol-related genes are particularly prevalent in certain ethnic or geographic groups. A recent study in Nature found that a rare variation in the HTR2b gene, linked to severe impulsiveness, is found almost exclusively in Finnish people. "Almost all these severely impulsive individuals are also alcoholic, and their worse impulsive problems occurred while they were drunk," says Dr. Goldman, the study's senior investigator. 

I have this theory that alcohol facilitates the evolution of non-impulsiveness.To get through life well, you need to be prudent much of the time, but you also need to take a chance on other people some times. So, social drinking allows women to lower their barriers when in selected company, like at an expensive nightclub or a wedding reception (that's the point behind the hit movie Wedding Crashers), men with their fellow soldiers, and for people in general to lower their barriers when with their coworkers or business associates for the purposes of bonding.

Separately, variations in two genes for receptor to neurotransmitter neuropeptide Y, associated with stress and severe withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, are common to about one-quarter of the population. Clearly, not all those people are severe alcoholics.
So much is still unknown that most experts don't advise consumers to use genetic-testing services to try to understand their risk for complex conditions like alcoholism.

"Even if you learn you have a protective version of some gene, you could still be vulnerable due to a gene we haven't discovered yet," says Dr. Goldman, who adds that anyone with a family history of alcoholism should definitely approach alcohol with caution.

"Looking at your family history is simpler, cheaper and at the moment, gives you more information than a genetic test," says Dr. Edenberg. He also stresses that DNA is never destiny when human behavior is involved. "You can carry all kinds of genes, and if you manage to push away the glass or the bottle, you won't have an alcoholism problem."

January 28, 2011

Harpending on NFL Linemen

Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples goes looking for the places that produce the best NFL linemen:
For West Coast programs that can afford the steep airfare, the best bet is to cast their nets even further west into the Pacific. Hawaii produced five NFL linemen, and tiny American Samoa (population: 67,190) produced six. Those who can't afford the flights to paradise may want to check closer to home in Salt Lake City, a metro area that produced five NFL linemen -- including former Oregon great Haloti Ngata. Like Ngata, three of the other future NFL linemen who grew up in Utah are of Polynesian descent. Salt Lake City has a high Polynesian population because the Mormon church does extensive missionary work in the Pacific islands, and many families have relocated from the islands to Salt Lake City, where the church is headquartered.

SI VAULT: How Samoa became Eden for recruiters

Anthropology may help explain why so many good linemen developed in certain areas. Many of the linemen from west of the Rockies are of Polynesian descent. Polynesian cultures tend to produce large men capable of generating massive amounts of force. And with good reason. "Big, fast males sound like what ought to come out of centuries or millennia of social systems where there is direct male-to-male violence, but not where there are standoff weapons used in war like bows and arrows," University of Utah anthropology professor Henry Harpending wrote in an e-mail. "There was certainly this kind of violence on Polynesian islands, which were demographic pressure cookers."

Harpending is one of the authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which argues that, contrary to popular belief, the advent of advanced societies didn't stop human evolution but actually kicked it into a higher gear. In a phone interview, Harpending called the development of the Polynesian islands "a unique experiment in human history."

"They were fighting for land," Harpending said. "There just wasn't enough arable land in most places. The records and the archaeology both show that there was just a lot of warfare, violence, turnover of chiefs."

Harpending wrote that it might be more difficult to explain the anthropological reasons for the explosion of players in the South without knowing more specifics about their ancestries. Most would be classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as black, and Harpending said most black Americans are descended from ancestors who lived in the tropical regions of central Africa. He wrote that throughout history, most violence in those areas tended to be "hand-to-hand," which would have produced large, fast, muscular males through natural selection. Like the Polynesians, ancient people in central Africa never favored the bow-and-arrow as a hunting or warfare tool. Harpending said archaeological evidence from central Africa shows the ancient residents preferred spears and bludgeoning instruments. In other words, the biggest and strongest would have survived the fighting to reproduce. "Bows and arrows kept the distance between people," Harpending said. "It decreased the premium on being big and strong

December 22, 2010

"Out of Africa, with Benefits"

Here's that big new science story I teased a couple of days ago. By Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:
An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea. 

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA. 

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them.  ...

Next, the researchers looked for evidence of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa, Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.

“The correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and Bougainville genomes. ...

Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of these ancient genomes.”  

If the genomes of New Guineans come almost 5% from non-modern humans, then the obvious next step is to test the genomes of Australian Aborigines, who are last in line in the original Southern, Indian Ocean shoreline route Out of Africa. However, there are a lot of regulatory barriers against testing Aborigines, perhaps out of fear that scientists will find something like this. After all, Aborigines look a little archaic, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if their genes turn out to be a little archaic.

It was lucky that the first findings of non-modern human ancestry involved Europeans, or it would have been hard to get up the political courage to publish this.

So, the Out of Africa model of evolution of the current human race turns out to be mostly, but not wholly, correct. Greg Cochran calls the new model "Out of Africa, with Benefits:" modern humans picked up useful genes from older human types, and not all of those inheritances spread equally to the entire current human race, probably in part because they aren't equally useful in all environments.

Here's an FAQ by John Hawks. And here are comments by Dienekes.

By the way, here's an interesting 2006 article on Nick Patterson, one of the scientists involved. He's had successful three careers, first as British and American government cryptologist, then as a quant for James H. Simons' hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and now as a genome researcher.

October 27, 2010

My H.L. Mencken Club speech

From VDARE, here's the opening of my speech last weekend to the H.L. Mencken Club in Baltimore, in which I try to do a quick summing up of my epistemological approach:
I’m glad to be back addressing the H.L. Mencken Club.

Richard Spencer has asked me to speak on the topic “Can HBD Trump PC?” So let me begin by explaining what those acronyms mean.

PC stands for “Political Correctness”. HBD is short for “Human Biodiversity”.

In an intellectually healthy world, of course, the study of “human biodiversity” wouldn’t be imperiled by the reign of Political Correctness. Instead, HBD would be recognized as a necessary complement to the study of human cultural diversity. To a student of the social world, human biodiversity and human cultural diversity ought to be complementary tools, like a straight right and a left jab are to a boxer, or like words and numbers are to a thinker.

In 21st Century America, however, noticing reality is often, by unfortunate necessity, a political act. As George Orwell pointed out, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle”.

Should HBD be a field of study … or a political movement … or both?

Let’s consider the term “Political Correctness” first. This is an old New Left phrase. I first recall hearing it about 30 years ago in an interview with Joe Strummer of The Clash, in which the punk rock star lamented how stultifying the demands of Political Correctness were even for a lifelong leftist like himself. (Despite Joe’s Old Left proletarian façade, Strummer’s father, a British diplomat and secret agent, had been a close friend of Kim Philby.)

We’re often told that Political Correctness is a trivial matter of using the latest name for minority groups, but I always do that. That’s less Political Correctness than politeness.

No, PC is vastly more far-reaching. It enervates American intellectual discourse on many levels.

As John Derbyshire noted last night [in a speech on "Men Versus the Man, 100 Years On"], the best depiction of how Political Correctness functions is from the appendix to George Orwell’s 1984:
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments …, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

What Orwell got wrong, though, is that inculcating crimestop doesn’t require an army of men watching you from your TV.

Instead, you watch your TV—and learn from it what kind of thoughts raise your status and what kind lower your status.

It’s a system of Status Climbing through Stupidity.

Every so often, a celebrity is fired to encourage the others: NPR dumped Juan Williams this week for admitting that passengers in Muslim garb on airplanes make him nervous. Earlier this month blowhard Rick Sanchez was sacked by CNN for responding sarcastically to his interviewer’s suggestion that Jews are an oppressed minority in the media. (As one wag commented, Sanchez got fired for the first story he ever got right.) 

Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.


July 20, 2010

"Adventures in Very Recent Evolution"

Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I've been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular. 

But think how Nicholas Wade, the genetics correspondent of the New York Times, must feel. He has the top soapbox in the world for educating the public, the New York Times, and he covers for the NYT the trendiest topic in science, genetics. He has spent the last decade (here are VDARE articles I wrote praising Wade's NYT work in 2003 and 2006) diligently debunking the reigning dumb ideas of our age, such as "Race doesn't exist," "Race is just skin deep," and "Racial differences couldn't have evolved because there hasn't been enough time." For nine or ten years, he has used dozens of New York Times articles to aim a firehose of the latest scientific findings at these dogmas ... and, as far as I can tell, nobody ever notices

They don't Watson him. I've never noticed anybody objecting to Wade. They just don't ever get what he's saying. It doesn't register. The conventional wisdom is so comforting and so status-raising that relentless reporting in the New York Times can't dent it, or even make most NYT readers notice that their favorite beliefs are being subverted. Wade has been engaging in Popperian falsification of the age's dominant theories, and nobody notices.

Perhaps the average NYT subscriber reads each Wade article on the latest findings of genetic differences among racial groups, nods complacently, and then says to himself, "Yes, those Red State racist Republicans are just too stupid to realize that Darwin proves that race does not exist, whereas I live in New York and subscribe to the Times which keeps me up to date on ... on ... well, on whatever this article was about, but whatever it was about, I know, because I subscribe to the Times, that it proves that science shows that race is only skin deep, because there wasn't enough time for differences to evolve like those stupid Jesus fish people believe who don't believe in evolution, sometimes they just make me so angry because they come from a long line of hereditary idiots," and then he moves on to closely peruse an article about how to get his kid into a Park Slope school district with really good schools.

From the NYT:
by Nicholas Wade

Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol. 

I imagine American Indians left too early to didn't get this gene?

Here's a question I've wondered about. There are two scandalous scenes of drunkenness in the Book of Genesis, Noah and Lot, but how many are there in the rest off the Bible? The Wedding at Cana, for example, is non-scandalous.

The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

... Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress....

So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.

One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.

About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.

Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.

From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.

A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.

She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold.

Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.

... Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them. ...

That's interesting because you can walk from, say, Normandy to Korea. The physical anthropologists of Carleton Coon's mid-century generation believed from looking at bones that the biggest division in mankind was caused by the Himalayas and other mountains dividing West Afro-Eurasia from East Asia, although subsequent genetics studies suggested the biggest division was between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. But, the old bone guys must have been a little bit right about this Europe-Asia divide.
Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. 

By the way, this is the source of the widely held dogma/ urban legend for the quasi-educated that black Africans are the most genetically diverse people on Earth, or, in increasingly crazier variants, that two white Americans might less related to each other than to a black African, or that you and your brother are less similar to each other genetically than you are to an African. This is true for neutral ("junk") genes that aren't selected not for functional genes. (I debunked this ten years ago in Seven Dumb Ideas about Race.)
Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.

One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute. ...

But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.

Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.

Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home. 

A lot of human biodiversity at the phenome level is relative rather than absolute, quantitative rather than qualitative.



July 2, 2010

Political Evolution in Tibet

Nick Wade writes in the NY Times:
Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.
 
If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans.

... The biologists found about 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.

Such an enormous difference indicates that the version typical among Tibetans is being strongly favored by natural selection. In other words, its owners are evidently leaving more children than those with different versions of the gene.

The gene in question is known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha, or HIF2a, and the Tibetans with the favored version have fewer red blood cells and hence less hemoglobin in their blood.

The finding explains why Tibetans do not get mountain sickness but raises the question of how they compensate for the lack of oxygen if not by making extra red blood cells.

... Genetic differences between Tibetans and Chinese are a potentially delicate issue, given Tibetan aspirations for political autonomy. Dr. Nielsen said he hoped that the Beijing team’s results would carry no political implications, given that it is cultural history and language, not genetics, that constitute a people. There is not much genetic difference between Danes and Swedes, he added, but Denmark and Sweden are separate countries.
 
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. The Chinese government is encouraging Han Chinese to flood into Tibet and demographically overwhelm Tibetans. Is this strategy doomed by the Han's genetic lack of adaptation for living and reproducing at roughly the top of Pike's Peak? Or do these new findings hold out hope to the Chinese government that they could start a program to genetically screen potential Han colonists to find the small percentage with the right gene variants to thrive and reproduce in Tibet? After all, there are a lot of Han to choose among.

May 5, 2010

Sexual selection in the Sudan

Some of the tallest peoples in the world are also some of the most oppressed: the black Dinka and Nuer tribes of the South Sudan, who fought a long civil war against the brown Arab-speaking government in Khartoum. Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection driving racial differentiation appears to be at work here. From the LA Times:
The man in the orange sunglasses and a fur hat with earflaps seemed more like a jazz musician on a cigarette break than a tribal chief, but as soon as he spoke, village men gathered for a lesson on brides, poor boys and cattle.

The shade was just right. John Modi Jubek crossed his legs, striking as regal a pose as a chief can when he's sitting in a plastic chair. It was odd to him that a stranger didn't know the Mundari tribe smiles more upon tall women than on short ones. A father may love his diminutive daughters, but affection does not bring longhorns and riches.

"Tall girls fetch more cattle because their daughters will quickly grow and can be married off to fetch even more cattle," said the chief, shooing a stubborn fly. "A tall girl can command 60 to 100 cattle from a suitor. A short girl may get 20 head, and, sometimes, short girls overstay their welcome in the father's home and end up fetching only five cattle. By then, a tall girl has already borne five children."

The chief paused, letting daughter-cattle ratios sink in. The men shook their heads at his calculations.

The chief was wise, cool in the late morning heat, watching sunflower-high women brush beneath the branches of a big tree with jugs and food sacks balanced on their heads. They strode past a man selling padlocks and Jesus calendars; they glided beyond a short sister wobbling in the sunlight with a numb smile and alcohol on her breath.

"Things get competitive for a tall girl," said the chief. "Once she reaches 12 years of age, men come to the father and promise many cattle. Of course, a suitor with no cattle will never marry. Our laws forbid that. He is single for life. If he sleeps with someone's daughter or gets her pregnant, he'll be killed."

What do tall women think about marriage and cattle?

The chief bit his lip, bafflement drifting across his face.

"Women have no say," he said.

April 28, 2010

Harvard Law student crimethinks

A woman who is a third year Harvard Law School student and in line for federal clerkships, is in trouble for sending out the following email (From "Harvard Law School 3L's Racist Email Goes National" on Above the Law:
… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

Of course, the Black Law Students Associations are attempting to pull a Larry Summers on her and deny her a clerkship.

April 27, 2010

Genetic Relativism

Carl Zimmer writes in the NYT in "The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places:"
Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumors by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working. Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.  

I pointed out that in terms of genetic similarity, humanity and yeast weren't really all that different in a National Review article in 1999, "Chimps and Chumps," one of the earlier expressions of my constant theme of "genetic relativism:"
Ms. [Natalie] Angier hopes future studies prove we are more closely related to bonobos than to common chimps. Even Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, the dour authors of "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence" ask, "Those loving bonobos -- did we pick the wrong primate to evolve from?" Dr. De Waal asserts that the news about the bonobo lifestyle "commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile … making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago." ...

Fifth, the oft-cited 98% figure for shared DNA is less impressive than it looks. Most DNA is unused, so natural selection never changes it. Another big chunk of your personal DNA controls the basics of earthly carbon-based life, and is extremely common across multitudinous organisms. Thus, one study found we share 70% of our DNA with yeast! Perhaps if you don't have a great ape around, you can scrape by letting a packet of Fleischmann's Quick-Rise pinch-hit as your role model. De Waal's statement that a chimp is as genetically similar to a human as a fox is to a dog may be true, but it should remind us of the striking number of gene-driven differences seen merely among dog breeds. A collie is identical to a pit bull in all but a tiny fraction of its genes, yet the two breeds differ radically in size, shape, behavior, mentality, and personality. Small genetic differences can have big consequences.

On the other hand, a collie and a pit bull are more similar to each other than they are to, say, an octopus. And a collie and an octopus would be more genetically similar to each other than to, say, copper-based lifeforms on Epsilon Eridani IV.

The question: "Is X similar to or different from Y?" is extremely relativistic.

And that's true for races, siblings, even identical twins, who might differ in, say, a half-dozen genes due to copying errors, along with other types of non-genetic differences. 

When you study examples of twins, you notice that there are often consistent differences between them. For example, a glance at the basketball statistics of the 1970s All-Stars Dick and Tom Van Arsdale shows that Dick was consistently a little bit better than Tom over their 12 year NBA careers. For example, to take the most context-independent statistic, Dick made .790 of his freethrows, while Tom made .762. Dick shot .464 on two pointers, while Tom shot .433. Dick averaged 34.5 minutes per game over his career while Tom averaged 30.9 minutes. (In their high school class, Dick was the valedictorian, while Tom had the third highest GPA.)

The differences between Dick and Tom were relevant to NBA general managers. For instance, Dick was drafted 10th in the 1965 NBA draft, while Tom was drafted 11th, which, looking back on their long careers, was the correct order.

On the other hand, in a lot of ways, Dick and Tom Van Arsdale were awfully similar.

I apply the same relativistic framework for thinking about more contentious issues, such as race. My basic approach is to make sure I'm right by pointing out the tautological nature of all questions about similarities and differences: "It depends upon what you want to know." When you keep that in mind at all times, it's not terribly hard to think accurately and insightfully. If you can figure out what the right question is, it's much easier to get the right answer.

Indeed, that's why I'm right about racial questions so much more frequently than other pundits. It's easy to figure things out if you have an intellectually sophisticated basis for your thinking. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is based on an embarrassingly crude mindset.
 

Twins in movies and reality

From my new Taki's Magazine column:
Due to Polish president Lech Kaczyński’s death in the tragic April 10 plane crash, his identical twin brother Jarosław, Poland’s brooding former prime minister, announced on April 26 that he is running to replace his more affable twin.

This kind of heartwarming/unsettling vibe is common with stories about twins. In a civilization that celebrates individualism, identical twins have played a slightly subversive role ever since Castor and Pollux.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spotlight first shone on the Kaczyński twins when they starred in a 1962 hit kids’ movie. Being an identical twin provides an easy entry into acting in front of the camera. Both child labor laws limiting the number of hours allowed on the set and the tantrum-proneness of small children encourage producers to hire spares.

And young audiences, quite reasonably, are fascinated by identical twins. (The real question is why adults aren’t.) Identical twins make up no more than 1/250th of the population. (In contrast, due to late marriages and fertility treatments, fraternal twins are up to around 1/33rd.) Yet, many grown-ups can remember vividly a pair with whom they attended school.

Despite their advantage at getting a foot in the film industry door, identical twin child actors, such as the Kaczyńskis, seldom stay stars as adults.

One reason is that real-life twins almost never get to play twins in movies. In plays and movies, twins often bear a heavy load of symbolism and plot mechanics.

Read the rest there and comment upon it below.

April 23, 2010

Twins

Identical and fraternal twins are particularly interesting for questions of nature and nurture. And, yet, one problem with writing about twins is that there really aren't that many famous identical twins to use as examples.

I'm particularly interested in famous individuals who have an identical twin who isn't famous. For example, movie star Jon Heder has an identical twin, Dan Heder, who isn't as famous, but I'm not exactly sure why Jon Heder is famous in the first place. (And I'm not sure he is either.) But that situation is relatively uncommon. Either both identical twins are famous or neither one is. And the percentage of famous people who are identical twins appears to be lower than the percentage of identical twins in the population.

Wikipedia offers a list of "Famous people with a twin," but most of the twins appear to be either fraternal and/or died young. For example, Elvis Presley had a twin brother, but he died at birth. (That's not uncommon on this list -- carrying and delivering twins is tough.)

I suspect that to get famous in a lot of fields, such as acting (here's Wikipedia's list of twin actors -- most of the names either aren't too famous or are fraternal twins) you have to elbow your way past a lot of people to grab the spotlight as you are growing up. 

For example, a lot of well-known actresses were the stars of their high school musicals. That's a common rite of passage if you want to be a movie star someday. Say you and your identical twin sister want the role of Maria in your high school production of "Sound of Music." One of you would get Maria and the other would  get stuck being the Head Nun. So, maybe you talk it over with your twin and decide neither will try out for it because it would be too painful for the loser. Or maybe the director feels uncomfortable choosing between you, so he gives the role to somebody else who isn't a twin.

I suspect that considerations such as this tend to discourage identical twins from pursuing a lot of careers with steep pyramids of fame.

April 12, 2010

The cure for race realism discovered: Williams syndrome!

From Yahoo News, a summary of a paper in Current Biology:
Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases
Robin Nixon

Never has a human population been found that has no racial stereotypes. Not in other cultures or far-flung countries. Nor among tiny tots or people with various psychological conditions.

Until now.

Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases.

Well, a lack of social anxiety is not the only characteristic of Williams syndrome. From Wikipedia:

The most common symptoms of Williams syndrome are mental retardation, heart defects, and unusual facial features. ... Individuals with Williams syndrome are highly verbal and overly sociable (having what had previously been described as a "cocktail party" type personality), but lack common sense ...

"Highly Verbal But Lack Common Sense" would pretty much describe most propounders of the conventional wisdom about race.

A 2007 NYT Magazine article on Williams syndrome reported:

These deficits generally erase about 35 points from whatever I.Q. the person would have inherited without the deletion. Since the average I.Q. is 100, this leaves most people with Williams with I.Q.’s in the 60s. Though some can hold simple jobs, they require assistance managing their lives....

The low I.Q., however, ignores two traits that define Williams more distinctly than do its deficits: an exuberant gregariousness and near-normal language skills.

Political correctness, in effect, demands that our intellectual discourse aspire towards Williams syndrome.

From the news report:

They do, however, traffic in gender stereotypes, said study researcher Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Normally, children show clear preferences for their own ethnic group by the age of three, if not sooner, other research has shown.

Actually, the interesting thing is that toddlers tend to develop an insight into race that is generally lost by grown-up intellectuals when writing about race: race is about who your Mommy and Daddy are, topics that are deeply interesting to children (and to all humans), but aren't recognized in conventional discourse about race.

In Race in the Making, the liberal U. of Michigan anthropology professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld sums up the finding of his research on children.

As comforting as this view may be, children, I will show in this book, are more than aware of diversity; they are driven by endogenous curiosity to uncover it. Children, I will also show, do not believe race to be a superficial quality of the world. Multicultural curricula aside, few people believe that race is only skin deep. Certainly few 3-year-olds do. They believe that race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person's identity. Moreover, they seem to come to this conclusion on their own. They do not need to be taught that race is a deep property, they know it themselves already.

For example, if you show preschoolers drawings of people and ask them to match the children with their mommies, on average they will correctly tell you that the skinny white child belongs to the fat white mommy, while the fat black child belongs to the skinny black mommy (or vice-versa). They consider race a better predictor of family relationship than body shape.

From the news report:

And, indeed, the children in this study without Williams syndrome reliably assigned good traits, such as friendliness, to pictures of people the same race as themselves. When asked something negative, such as "which is the naughty boy," they overwhelmingly pointed to the other race.

Children with Williams syndrome, however, were equally likely to point to the white or black child as naughty or friendly.

While this study was done with white children, other research has shown that blacks and people of other races also think more highly of their own, Meyer-Lindenberg told LiveScience.

Williams syndrome is caused by a gene deletion known to affect the brain as well as other organs. As a result, people with Williams syndrome are "hypersocial," Meyer-Lindenberg told . They do not experience the jitters and inhibitions the rest of us feel.

"The whole concept [of social anxiety] would be foreign to them," he said.

They will put themselves at great peril to help someone and despite their skills at empathy, are unable to process social danger signals. As a result, they are at increased risk for rape and physical attack.

Indeed.

Nature or nurture?

While the first human population to demonstrate race-neutrality is missing critical genes, "we are not saying that this is all biologically-based and you can't do anything about it," Meyer-Lindenberg said.

"Just because there is a genetic way to knock the system out, does not mean the system itself is 100 percent genetic," he said.

The study does show, however, that racism requires social fear. "If social fear was culturally reduced, racial stereotypes could also be reduced," Meyer-Lindenberg said.

Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.

The fact that Williams syndrome kids think of men and women differently, but not blacks and whites, shows that sex stereotypes are not caused by social anxiety, Meyer-Lindenberg said.

This may be because we learn about gender within "safe" home environments, while a different race is usually a sign of someone outside our immediate kin. (Studies to test this explanation, such as with racially-mixed families, have not yet been done.)

Racial biases are likely rooted in a general fear of others, while gender stereotypes may arise from sweeping generalizations, Meyer-Lindenberg said. "You watch mother make the meals, so you generalize this to everyone female."

Perhaps, but another explanation for why people with Williams syndrome would be unable to notice racial patterns is because they are mentally retarded.

Sex is simply more obvious than race. Very young children typically notice differences in sex before they begin to notice differences in race. People with Williams syndrome are typically verbally facile but oblivious to the obvious.

Here's a question I have about Williams syndrome. Say you would have had a 140 IQ without it, but you were born with genetic defect, so you have a 105 IQ and not a lick of sense. But you are really good at laying out a spiel of words. Is Williams syndrome just too all-around debilitating for you to ever amount to much in the world?

Or, could there be, say, a prominent media figure who suffers from Williams syndrome?

If so, who would your candidate be?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 30, 2010

"This is weirdly fascinating."

A friend comments:
This is weirdly fascinating. The proposition that individuals can differ by innate mental ability and that races can differ by the average of such abilities:

1) conflicts with no major Western religious tradition;

2) conflicts with no major Western philosophical tradition;

3) is consistent with everyday experience;

4) is probably believed by the majority of ordinary people of all races;

5) is consistent with the weight of evidence from the most exhaustive and sophisticated empirical studies;

6) is consistent with, indeed is an almost inevitable implication of, the most basic version of evolutionary theory, which theory all educated people are supposed to accept.

And yet the operative assumption of government policy and the protocols of almost all public journals are that this proposition cannot be true.

Here is another, perhaps related paradox. The overwhelming majority of black people I see who work in the private sector, whether in prestigious or decidedly un-prestigious occupations, are efficient and friendly and seem reasonably happy. Disgruntled and dissatisfied blacks are common, on the other hand, in 1) government, 2) education and 3) on street corners, begging.

In other words, we have actually constructed a society in which it is possible for almost everyone who practices a modicum of self-discipline, whatever their innate mental gifts, to earn a reasonably decent living doing not terribly onerous work.

So the question becomes, when will American government, media and educators stop hitting America over the head with a hammer about a problem that is not really a problem anymore?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 23, 2010

"The Genius in All of Us"

Here's an excerpt from my new Taki's Magazine column
A widely-praised new book by David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong attempts to “debunk the long-standing notion of genetic ‘giftedness.’” Instead, it manages to unconsciously exemplify how political correctness paradoxically rationalizes the growing elitism and dynasticism in American life.

One hero of The Genius in All of Us is Mozart. Not Wolfgang Amadeus, but Leopold, the composer’s father, who chose to “shift his ambitions away from his own unsatisfying career and onto his children.” Leopold made sure little Wolfie “had an entire family driving him to excel with a powerful blend of instruction, encouragement, and constant practice.”

The Genius in All of Us serves as a quasi-scientific pep talk for upper-middle class stage moms and sideline dads. Even the most ambitious modern parents sometimes doubt whether their precious progeny have what it takes genetically. Shenk reassures them, however, that new discoveries have disproved all that Bell Curve stuff. What matters instead is implacable willpower.

Besides, Shenk implies, you are not only pestering your kid so he can get a college scholarship, you are simultaneously fighting racism, genetic determinism, and eugenics! Heck, you’re being Green: “… human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel, but potentially plentiful like wind power.”

Shenk endorses a rule of thumb that has become popular among political pundits such as David Brooks and motivational speakers such as Malcolm Gladwell: innate talent matters far less than putting in 10,000 hours of practice.

Indeed, in one sense, the 10,000-hour idea is empirically reasonable. In most highly competitive, highly compensated fields, vanishingly few make it to the top with less than the equivalent of five solid years learning their crafts.

Shenk admits that just because everybody who is a winner puts in 10,000 hours doesn’t mean everybody who puts in 10,000 hours will be a winner: see, your kid also has to practice the right way, making “continual skill improvement.”

That is a wonderfully unfalsifiable notion.


Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 10, 2010

Norman Finkelstein's Amazing Jawline

Not being terribly interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I haven't paid much attention to the endless Alan Dershowitz-Norman Finkelstein controversy, in which OJ's old lawyer, secure in his Harvard tenure, pillories the pro-Palestinian Finkelstein from post to post.

So, I'd never seen a picture of Norman Finkelstein, until I idly clicked on the review ("Is This a Man Who Sheds Light, or Simply Sets Fires?") of a documentary about him in today's NYT. To my surprise, Professor Finkelstein turns out to be a remarkably formidable looking 56-year-old, who could be credibly cast as the colonel of an elite commando squad in a big budget war movie.

Novelists used to be obsessed with the correlation between looks and personality. Dashiell Hammett, for example, goes on at great length in The Maltese Falcon describing Sam Spade's looks, which turned out to be the exact opposite of Humphrey Bogart's: Hammett's Spade was a 6'-3" blonde Scandinavian. In a world where images were expensive, conjuring up images through words were part of what a writer was paid for. It's still a part of high-end literary writing, but for the modern day equivalents of meat and potatoes novelists like Hammett, it's a losing proposition: the idea is to get Leonard DiCaprio and Tom Cruise into a bidding war for the movie rights to your novel, not to dissuade anybody from thinking they could play the part.

But, it was also that old time novelists believed there was a link between looks and personality. I've never paid that much attention to the idea, in part because I have a hard time decoding the facial terminology that old writers used, so I tend to skim over those long sections. For instance, Hammett writes:
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-- from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

I just can't call up a coherent image from these sentences, but, evidently, a lot of readers used to be able to do that.

(By the way, Hammett looked just like another alcoholic novelist, William Faulkner. Who was copying whom?)

How much research been done on questions of the correlation of looks and personality? For example, just from the pictures of Dershowitz and Finkelstein, could people guess at better than random chance which one would take the popular and which one the unpopular side of a political controversy?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 5, 2010

The President of Guatemala

One issue for the Los Angeles Police Department is getting accurate racial identifications from witnesses. It's particularly hard for distant bystanders to distinguish some Latin Americans from Middle Easterners and West Asians. For example, here's a picture of the president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom Caballeros.

Joseph Wambaugh's LAPD novels going all the way back to The New Centurions 40 years ago, always have an Ambiguously Latino character. In the latest one, Hollywood Moon, the witness reports on the half-Honduran / half-blonde young man list him as Mideastern, which slows down the investigation.

Actually, I'm lying to you. The picture you see is really the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh. I think it's the mustache that throws you. (Instead, here are pictures of the president of Guatemala, who looks more like I'd expect the mayor of Budapest to look.)

In other pictures, the President of Yemen looks a little more Horn of African, like a somewhat more Caucasian version of the late emperor of Ethiopia. (Here's one with GW Bush for comparison.) Once you know he's from Yemen, the gestalt kicks in and you notice the more Arab aspects in a bunch of his photos.

Similarly, few people say, "Funny, you don't look Mexican" to Carlos Slim [Salim], the richest man in Mexico, even though he's Lebanese by descent. Slim looks more or less like rich Mexicans look.

The part-Maori character actor Cliff Curtis has made a nice living playing Latin American and Arab characters. In the movie within a movie of the 1940s period piece, The Majestic, Curtis plays ham actor Ramon Jamon playing "The Evil But Handsome Prince Khalid." Once you know he's a New Zealand Polynesian, it's obvious that's what he is, but until you know that, he can play either Latin American or Middle Eastern.

Now, you may say, "But doesn't that just prove that profiling can't possibly work? All Al-Qaeda has to do is recruit a Maori suicide bomber and get him elected president of Guatemala!"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 29, 2009

Geoffrey Miller: "The Looming Crisis in Human Genetics"

From The Economist:
The looming crisis in human genetics:
Some awkward news ahead
by Geoffrey Miller
Author of Spent

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them....

In 2010, GWAS fever will reach its peak. Dozens of papers will report specific genes associated with almost every imaginable trait—intelligence, personality, religiosity, sexuality, longevity, economic risk-taking, consumer preferences, leisure interests and political attitudes. The data are already collected, with DNA samples from large populations already measured for these traits. It’s just a matter of doing the statistics and writing up the papers for Nature Genetics. ...

GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. They will reassure Big Pharma and the grant agencies that GWAS will identify the genes that explain most of the variation in heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and ageing itself. ...

In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? ...

But the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait. In fact, classical Mendelian genetics based on family studies has identified far more disease-risk genes with larger effects than GWAS research has so far.

Why the failure? The missing heritability may reflect limitations of DNA-chip design: GWAS methods so far focus on relatively common genetic variants in regions of DNA that code for proteins. They under-sample rare variants and DNA regions translated into non-coding RNA, which seems to orchestrate most organic development in vertebrates. Or it may be that thousands of small mutations disrupt body and brain in different ways in different populations. At worst, each human trait may depend on hundreds of thousands of genetic variants that add up through gene-expression patterns of mind-numbing complexity.

Political science

We will know much more when it becomes possible to do cheap “resequencing”—which is really just “sequencing” a wider variety of individuals beyond the handful analysed for the Human Genome Project. Full sequencing means analysing all 3 billion base pairs of an individual’s DNA rather than just a sample of 1m genetic variants as the DNA chips do. When sequencing costs drop within a few years below $1,000 per genome, researchers in Europe, China and India will start huge projects with vast sample sizes, sophisticated bioinformatics, diverse trait measures and detailed family structures. (American bioscience will prove too politically squeamish to fund such studies.) The missing heritability problem will surely be solved sooner or later.

Or will it? At present, we understand the genetics of lactose tolerance fairly well because they are simple. We don't understand the genetics of IQ at all well, presumably because they are complicated. It would be interesting to know what are traits are the most promising targets intermediate in complexity between lactose tolerance and IQ.

The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes.

As Matt Ridley once said, your genes didn't evolve to kill you.

Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.

We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.

If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.

More likely, we just won't hear much about it. For years, I've been hearing that as the evidence piles up, the dominant ideology will have to adapt to it. Why? Why not just lie more and persecute more? A lot of people find covering up the truth to be more emotionally satisfying than learning it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 14, 2009

"Facial Profiling"

Slate has an article pooh-poohing old systems of trying to classify personalities by physical type and then worriedly reporting on new studies showing that maybe there is a correlation between say a heavy brow ridge and aggressiveness after all.
Facial Profiling
Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?
By Dave Johns

What the article leaves out is how fully the arts have always participated in "facial profiling." It was never just some pseudo-scientific fad.

Back when images were expensive but words were cheap, novelists used to devote an extraordinary number of words to describing the looks of their characters, precisely with the assumption that the reader could pick up hints about the character's character. For example, Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, spent two full pages on a minute description of detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: blond, 6'-3", and so forth -- pretty much the exact opposite of Humphrey Bogart. (Robert Heinlein was more forward looking: he never described what his characters looked like, allowing readers to assume wrongly what Johnnie's race is in Starship Troopers. Let's just say that Heinlein's Johnnie looked even less like Casper von Diehn's Johnnie in the movie than Hammett's Sam Spade looked like Bogey.)

Personally, I could never make head nor tail out of what somebody was supposed to look like from these old novelist's descriptions of facial features; evidently, however, readers in the old days could. By the way, European diplomatic correspondence in the monarchical age devoted a lot of time to just this problem, with ambassadors providing lengthy verbal descriptions of the looks of princes and princesses that the monarch back home might want to marry his offspring to in dynastic alliances.

Similarly, a quick way for researchers to generate new but plausible hypotheses to test about the relationship between physical features and personalities would be to interview Hollywood casting directors. These middle aged ladies have an encyclopedic knowledge of what audiences assume about the correlation between looks and personality/behavior.

At the leading man level, it's pretty obvious that Russell Crowe, with his sizable brow ridge, looks more like a gladiator than Johnny Depp. It wasn't as obvious that Depp, with his '70s rock star cheekbones, would make a good pirate, but once you come up with the idea of an effete pirate with the personality of a Rolling Stone, then it all fit together.

Of course, with stars it's fun to see them play against type -- Crowe as a mathematician -- but with minor roles, casting directors need to find faces that won't confuse the audience as to what this minor character's function in the plot is supposed to be.

Another way to generate hypotheses about looks, facial expressions, and personalities is to see what talented mimics like Tracey Ullman and Wayne Brady do with their faces when given a personality type to embody.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 2, 2009

African Cougars

Maureen Dowd's pal Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times:
Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. ...

Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.

Note that the first characteristic of "high quality" wife is not "most beautiful" or "most faithful" or "kindest" but "hardest working." This is common in Africa, where women do most of the work of keeping children fed, so men have less incentive to be jealous of their straying wives since they aren't going to invest much in their wives' kids even if they are the fathers.

Let me make a surmise here about Pimbwe women with five or more husbands and about Pimbwe men with five or more wives. In a society in which men don't produce much, the women who marry the most are the women who can afford to marry the most. The harder working women are using their greater income to afford the company of the sexy but unproductive men who catch their fancies. Eventually, much as the industrious wives enjoy their decorative husbands' skills at singing, dancing, fighting, and the like, they tire of subsidizing these drunken gigolos and kick them out. Only to wind up married to somebody similar.
“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”

The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”

... The Pimbwe live in small villages, have few possessions and eke out a subsistence living farming, fishing, hunting and gathering.

Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “The men will cook, do a lot with the kids.”

Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa, where a woman is entirely dependent on the wealth of her husband and in divorce is not entitled to so much as a gimpy goat, Pimbwe women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.

... The goose, like the gander, may find it tempting to wander if it means that her goslings will fly.

Okay, but, let's be frank, not many Pimbwe fly very high at all. They're dirt poor. And one big reason for that might very well be a social structure that selects women for productivity and men for sexiness. You wind up a lot poorer than when it's the other way around. A society that encourages wives to indulge their fickle sexual whims is likely to be poorer than one that doesn't.

The Pimbwe are the anti-Finns. What's the old joke? How can a woman tell when a Finnish man is interested in her? He looks at her shoes rather than his own shoes. The Finns don't make good gigolos. But they do make good cell phones.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 25, 2009

Newsweek v. Evolutionary Psychology

Like all of us, Newsweek's Sharon Begley isn't getting any younger. And she's not getting any happier either about that tenet of evolutionary psychology that asserts, in her scoffing words in the current issue of Newsweek:
Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree.

So, she spends 4300 words renewing her long-running attack on Evolutionary Psychology in:
Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.

... Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds.

I don't think it's too unfair to claim that Begley enunciated her most personal objection to evolutionary psychology in her 2005 review of David J. Buller's book in the Wall Street Journal:
Besides, if you scrutinize the data, you find that 50-ish men prefer 40-something women, not 25-year-olds, undermining a core claim of evo psych.

So that's why 45 year old strippers make so much more money than 25 year old strippers!

I give economists a hard time sometimes, but they all know this very useful concept -- "all else being equal" -- that Begley seems unfamiliar with, even though it's obviously essential to putting evolutionary psychology's assertions in proper perspective.

The really funny thing is that Begley has never figured out that David J. Buller’s attack on mainstream Evolutionary Psychology comes from an even more politically incorrect direction than does EP. Buller focused on two weak links in EP:

1. The brain evolved a wide variety of domain-specific modules.

2. The human race evolved a single human nature back during the Stone Age, with only sex differences being the only differences among humans of interest or importance.

And those premises are indeed weak, but their weakness has major implications that Begley would not want to mention in public.

1. Evolutionary psychology has tended to ignore the key insight of the last 105 years of psychometrics: the existence of a g factor, a general intelligence factor. This is not to say that there aren’t domain specific mental modules, just that the g factor glass is not just half empty, it’s also half full, and thus needs to be included in evolutionary psychology, or, indeed, any form of psychology.

2. Similarly, standard EP has tended to gloss over the fact that The Era of Evolutionary Adaptation has extended up to the present. Indeed, as Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued recently in The 10,000 Year Explosion, the coming of agriculture likely accelerated the rate of genetic change. But continued Darwinian selection after the dispersal of the human race out of Africa to quite different environments on different continents raises ticklish issues about human biodiversity that can be career killers in modern America. (Just ask James D. Watson!)

Considering how much eminent thinkers such as Watson, Arthur Jensen, and Charles Murray have been abused for their frankness in recent decades, it was perfectly reasonable for the founders of evolutionary psychology to shy away from these issues. After all, their taking on Feminist Orthodoxy at the peak of its power two decades ago was enormously brave.

Nonetheless, the future evolution of evolutionary psychology will depend upon finding solutions for these two shortcomings in its fundamental approach. (While somehow avoiding getting Watsoned.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer