The Economist has an article about the hairlessness of everyone’s favorite primate.
But human hair is generally fine and short, and so humans look naked compared with their closest animal relations. How bare they are, though, does vary racially—which may explain why one Thai lady has requested that her European boyfriend should have his entire body waxed.
The last point discussed was facial hair.
The theory here is that sexual selection has kept facial hair in men, presumably because this advertises their male hormones. But why, then, do so many men, in so many cultures, shave them off? Perhaps the fear of parasites is driving some men to be clean-shaven. Maybe the goatee is a compromise between being clean and manly. Or, perhaps, shaving is popular because facial shape in humans is a sexually dimorphic characteristic. Men tend to have squarer jaws than women, and they shave to highlight this. If so, this would explain the trend for emphasising the edge of the jawline with a fringe of hair.
So is this why men shave? Does The Economist have it right, or is it something else?
Posted by Thrasymachus at 04:47 PM | | TrackBack The Little Polities
Charles Murtaugh points me to this article in The Economist (via Orinn Judd). It argues that there is “…a trade-off between the benefits of scale and the costs of heterogeneity.” Duh! That’s why I’m a federalist, and when I’m less concerned about people wondering if I’m mentally ill, I openly moot the idea of breaking up these United States of America. Overall, it is something to think about in the context of America, the republic started out with 2.5 million people, only 10% being real political & economic stakeholders, but today we are 300 million people with universal sufferage over the age of 18. It’s a pretty good code base that seems to have been extensible, but we might open ourselves to the possibility of a re-write to make it more modular.
In any case, I would like to add that though Charles seems to have a platonic crush on Orrin Judd, the dude makes the following assertion/comparison that seems a bit shallow:
“(2) China and India: neither has a snowball’s chance of remaining whole.”
That strikes me as kind of dumb. China has a 2,000 year history of cyclical oscillations between centralized rule and interregnums of political plurality. But, one pattern that seems to be marked is the tendency for the interregnums to shrink! In contrast, the history of India is one of political plurality, with central rule more often being imposed from the outside (Muslims), so Orrin is probably on solid ground making the assertion in that case.
The dumbness is not in predicting China’s collapse (that happens now & then), but putting China and India together on the same line. India’s political unity is a historical abberation, China’s is not.
Godless comments:
Though I agree with some of the thesis (the heterogeneity vs. economy-of-scale tradeoff), I disagree with many of the points brought up by both Orrin and the writer. Among them:
Singapore is hardly homogeneous. It’s got four official languages. So does Switzerland. Cutting the list off at the top 10 is arbitrary – it includes boutique island nations like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Also, I’m not sure what their source is for the GDP-per-capita figures. The CIA world factbook is out of date on a lot of things (e.g. the ethnic composition of Britain), but let’s assume its GDP-per-capita stats are ok. If we extend the CIA stats to the top 20 nations, the pattern disappears entirely. Now you have multimillion person nations. Among them: USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany. I agree that federalism is a big reason for America’s success. I disagree that it is the only or even primary reason for America’s success. America has only 3-4 times the population of Germany, but is far more ethnically heterogeneous. Is 60-80 million the upper limit beyond which centralized government is impossible? It’s a questionable premise. China and India are utterly different, as Razib pointed out. To make it more concrete – China is 92% Han. India by contrast has thousands of micro-races and micro-dialects. Lastly, let me point out that there are tremendous transaction costs involved with “breaking up the United States”. I don’t think it’s either realistic or necessary.
Bottom line: there are many factors that can unify a nation. Among them are race, religion, language, nationalism, and an external threat. Centralization of government becomes more difficult as less of these unifying factors exist, because it becomes harder to amalgamate preferences successfully.
But while the heterogeneity of nations is a consideration, it is not the only consideration. A far more robust predictor[1] of prosperity than size or heterogeneity is mean IQ. But the Economist can’t write that. It is a fact, however, that the two prerequisites for wealth are a high mean IQ and a capitalist economy. That’s why Iran and Vietnam will likely be prosperous if and when they shed the shackles of Islamism and communism respectively.
[1] Note that Griffe’s analysis needs to be updated for 2002, as the East Asian countries have significantly higher GDP-per-capitas than those (older) statistics indicate. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong are all first world nations (or quasi-nations in the case of HK). Malaysia’s large Chinese minority is getting it close to first world status, and parts of China are already first world.
Posted by razib at 03:22 PM | | TrackBack Less herbs, more synthetics!
Herbal remedy boom threatens plants:
Worldwide demand for herbal remedies is threatening natural habitats and endangering up to a fifth of wild medicinal plant species which are being harvested to extinction, a leading science magazine said.
via Chris Mooney.
With the whole fiasco that is Traditional Chinese Medicine, a.k.a. 101 ways to prepare Tiger Penis, perhaps we should shout it loud & proud again: Chemistry for a better world!
Posted
by razib at 02:39 PM | | TrackBack The price of the great outdoors
Mountain lion ‘out for blood’ killed after attacking bikers. The conflict between mountain lions and humans in the mountain West is not new. These are in general secretive big cats, attested to by the fact that while the wolf was exterminated from most of the lower 48, the cougar continues to haunt the Rockies.
But, many Westerners, often affluent liberal professionals, what to be “near the wilderness.” Yesterday night as my girlfriend and I were walking back from her office late at night a family of deer were taking a rest in the middle of a lawn on a house just off the main street. I myself have seen the strange behavior of the local deer, as they come out of the hillsides and wait for the cars to pass on the main drag, before venturing to the other side of town. Here is the type of scene that is common place around where I live:
If you like the outdoors, clean water and a sky unmarred by smog, visit the portion of the I-5 corridor between Redding, California and Imbler, Imbler. But of course there are downsides to the “country life.” No lights, no big city and no Banana Republic. Those are the things that most people think of when they imagine the urban life, and those are the things that many are escaping.
On the other hand, there are other issues that are more important once you actually live in the country. Fires are a fact of life, 2 years ago it was so bad that it was like twilight at noon. Because of the spread of rural developments for professionals, local resources are overstretched, trying to save houses in areas where old timers might have avoided building because they knew the negatives that came along with hillside vistas. People are pushing their way into the wilderness to enjoy it, but in the process are bringing the amenities that they take for granted with them.
Cougars eating human beings is not something I favor. But, I think some people need to understand that this is the reductio ad absurdum of living “in the wilderness.” If you want to see yourself as just another animal in “harmony” with nature, you might open your mind to the possibility that the predators will start viewing you as meat.
Posted by razib at 02:16 PM | | TrackBack Men On the Moon
After the amazing success (a few failures too) of robots on Mars, Bush plans to follow this up with….
A lunar base! And humans to Mars after that.
Even after we see again and again that NASA’s most amazing results – scientific and public relations – come from their cheap, unmanned missions, our politicians cannot figure out that this is what NASA should be spending money on. It is strange, especially when embarrassing budget disasters are the only thing that politicians usually get in return for the manned missions.
Posted by Thrasymachus at 06:13 AM | | TrackBack Breaking news! Human populations differ genetically!!!
Nicholas Wade is a great journalist, and slowly he is pushing the wedge of acceptable discourse into uncharted territory. I would bet money that he talked to Vincent Sarich or read some of his work for this new article, titled Ice Age Ancestry May Keep Body Warmer and Healthier, because the emphasis on adaptation after the Out-of-Africa radiation is something Sarich puts special focus on. The money shot:
A team of California geneticists has found that many of the world’s peoples are genetically adapted to the cold because their ancestors lived in northern climates during the Ice Age. The genetic change affects basic body metabolism and may influence susceptibility to disease and to the risks of the calorie-laden modern diet.
The finding also breaks ground in showing that the human population has continued to adapt to forces of natural selection since the dispersal from its ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago.
I think the next logical step is to begin to explore selective effects on the genome dependent on the transition to high density living concomitant with the transition to agriculture in most of the world’s populations. Matt Ridley in his most recent book made some references to this topic, so I suspect there are researchers out there he is in touch with who are looking at differences between populations with a history of high density vs. those that remained at the hunter-gatherer stage longer.
NPR’s Morning Edition for January 9th has a piece interviewing the researcher profiled by Wade . The abstract can be found on the ssslllooowww Science site.