If prediction of anti-social behavior becomes sufficiently accurate, will society adjust by mandating treatment, monitoring, or incarceration BEFORE a crime has been committed? If a person’s behavior is largely a result of an innate, abnormal brain structure, is he morally responsible for his actions. How would our legal and moral systems adapt?

First evidence of brain abnormalities found in pathological liars

MRI brain scan the ultimate lie detector

Perhaps psychopaths could be reliably detected by observing brain function while showing images that normally evoke emotional responses. Perhaps potential child molesters could be identified based on brain responses to images of children. Or potential terrorists.

Joanne Jacobs points to a new blogger, Newoldteacher, a graduate student in education. Hers is a voice crying out in the wilderness of education graduate programs:

My professor is a real history professor from the real university I attend. He specializes in modern Islam and European colonialism in the Middle East. He wears bow-ties, tells us we're wrong, criticizes us when we stay stupid things, and generally emits an air of effortless superiority. It's absolutely awesome. Finally, someone who values knowledge, who doesn't believe it's just a useless jumble of unrelated baubles. He's brilliant, and it's obvious that he's brilliant because he knows so much. It's not that he's used "transfer skills" from critical thinking projects he did as a kid. No. He studied for god knows how long in libraries across America, the Middle East, and Europe. He learned other languages and lived in other cultures, and he just knows his shit. Today he gave a narrative of the last few years in American life that was brief but so incisive I felt I would tear up. I hate that my school doesn't think this type of intellectualism is worth anything. The guy in my class who was so pro-constructivism, he said "our schools produce kids who are good at school." First off, most of them don't. Second, what is wrong with that?

Joanne note that Newoldteacher, who hopes to teach social studies, thinks it's more valuable to know things than to be able to "make a model space station out of plastic pipes and rubber tubing."

Heat-balling wasps by honeybees. Science News has a detailed story about the phenomenon.

Update: Link fixed.

Well...in the post below I alluded to the HIV-does-not-cause-AIDS meme. As always, when we bring this sort of thing up someone points to Duesberg. But I have to say, I've never followed those links. I've never even been tempted. The reason? I know people who know a fair amount about HIV, and they think it is quackery. I know that the overwhelming majority of medical scientists reject this meme. Ultimately, I am a believer in the system, not any specific hypothesis. As such, my worldview and faith in science would not be shattered if HIV did not cause AIDS, scientific consensus can be wrong, it is usually wrong at some point (or less accurate a mapping of the world out there). But it is up to the system of science to methodically expose its own faulty presuppositions. It isn't a perfect system, but show me something better. My post below was not a plea for any particular system, but rather for the idea that systems as conceived in the Western intellectual tradition have validity. Scratch a modern and you will find a Sumerian magician. I tremble for my people, for even we are susceptible to the temptations of false idols and foreign gods, it is in our nature. Though the Western intellectual milieu is not a sufficient condition for modernity, I believe it is a necessary condition, it is a light unto the nations. We are a nation of priests who witness to a living tradition. We may not always comprehend the mysteries of our three-faced trinity of rationalism, skepticism and empiricism, but we should do our best to follow our Law. The Post Modernists of the Left and Right are false prophets who I believe are leading the people alway from fidelity to Law, which would be a shame, because our god and our Law have no other worshippers and adherents in anything more than false words. As youth were are often reviled by those who see in our heterodox predilictions something profane and peculiar, even our own families often perceive us to be unnatural and abnormal creatures. The temptations of the pagan magical world around us are manifold, and we take comfort in the social systems that allow us to communicate and have fellowship with others of our nation. But I fear that too many foreign gods are being worshipped in our temples, and there may come a day when we will scatter among the nations and be reabsorbed into the peoples from whom we came. The sun of our tradition will set and the demon haunted world will be unchallenged once more.

In last month's issue of the conservative Catholic journal First Things:

...Collins also endorses the view that evangelicalism is moving beyond the foundationalist theology of the past and into what is commonly described as a postmodernist understanding of truth. He quotes the very prolific and influential British evangelical, Alister McGrath: "The time has come for evangelicalism to purge itself of the remaining foundational influences of the Enlightenment, not simply because the Enlightenment is over, but because of the danger of allowing ideas whose origins and legitimation lie outside the Christian gospel to exercise a decisive influence on that gospel...We have been liberated from the rationalist demand to set out 'logical' and 'rational' grounds for our beliefs. Belief systems possess their own integrities, which may not be evaluated by others as if there were some privileged position from which all may be judged."

I have noted before McGrath's smug exultation at the coming "Post Modern" age, which he concludes will usher in the death of atheism as rationalism retires from the intellectual playing field. McGrath is not alone, as I have noted many a time, the law professor who sparked the rise of the modern Intelligent Design movement, has also spoken highly of Post Modernism:

CJ: Much has been said about the impact of our entering the post-modern era. How do you anticipate post-modernism will impact the debate?

Phil: ...I think it's positive, on the whole, in the sense that it focuses attention on assumptions that people make, and there really isn't one single kind of rational system that can combine everything in the world. Then, where it becomes excessive is when it verges over into nihilism or indifference ideas...taken in the right doses, it's a healthy antidote to excessive rationalism; taken in overdose, it poisons the mind. But you find the notion that non-Western ways of thinking must be treated with respect, that even ancient traditions of tribes may have their truth value--these are healthy developments, I think, and they help open up the universities to challenges to the dominant scientific materialism. So yeah, it's having a big effect and I think, on the whole, a healthy one.

I thought of McGrath and Johnson when I read this from HIV-causes-AIDS denier Christine Maggiore:

...She has stayed healthy, she said, despite a cervical condition three years ago that would qualify her for an AIDS diagnosis. In a 2002 article for Awareness magazine, she facetiously refers to it as "my bout of so-called AIDS," saying it coincided "perfectly with the orthodox axiom that we get a decade of normal health before our AIDS kicks in."

Presupposing the "orthodoxy" of HIV-causes-AIDS, it seems that Maggiore's 3 year old daughter died of the disease. Of course, that hasn't fazed Maggiore or her allies (yet) in their belief. As McGrath noted, "Belief systems possess their own integrities."

Critical skeptical scholarship, of which "Post Modernism" is one strand, is a good thing, in some measure. The post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition depends upon skepticism and empiricism to alternatively prune and build the great rational systems which undergird science and traditional scholarship. Nevertheless, just as Neo-Thomism and Objectivism became drunk on "rationality," while the various Positivist schools tended to be slavish toward a particular conception of "empiricism," many modern scholars seem to have became fixated on skepticism, primarily I think because it is a magic key which opens the door to an innumerable kaleidoscope of negative paradigms. I have asserted many times that the brews concocted by ivory tower intellectuals eventually become poison in the hands of movements and individuals that said ivory tower intellectuals would consider reactionary. It happened with the anti-porn arguments of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, though the ultimate grounds for objection to pornography on the part of grassroots activists seem to be moral and religious, the proximate arguments to a broader (and often elite progressive) audience are couched in terms of female worth and autonomy. The multiculturalist paradigm is now being used, opportunistically, by a subset of Muslims to push to recreate the social strictures of their "homelands" and nullify the basic rights that have become part of the post-Enligthenment consensus.

Perfection is impossible, we shall all miss the mark of an accurate representation of the world around us. But there seems to be a subset of intellectuals, a looming simmering anti-consensus, which rebels against the injunction to strive toward accuracy, systematic coherency and plain transparency. But some may ask if the threat of some babbling quasi-philosophers and critics of the established system of Western intellectual inquiry as it has crystallized by the early 20th century is that great. The bits of evidence above to me are an illustration of a truth that I believe we should all be aware of: the default cognitive state of humanity is far more congenial to loose, imprecise and emotionally satisfying narratives and fabulations than the unnatural models which modern science and scholarship promote. Humans want to believe certain things. Ergo, the timeless appeal of pseudoscience. The relative immunity of mass religion to the universal acid and the lack of awareness, or interest in, systematic theology which presumes to respond to that universal acid (many evangelical apologetics are riddled with question begging arguments and circular reasoning, but their purpose is to buttress faith with the patina of rationality, not win a point by point debate). Rational intellectualization is in some measure a rebellion against our nature. I remember my mild let down reading Carl Sagan as a child when he dismissed crankish science because said crankish science was so entertaining and dazzling, and did not require the same cognitive outlay as the equivalent spectacular vistas of real science. Authors of popularizations of science or scholarship make their books accessible to a broad audience by scaffolding rationality with a superfluous entourage of anecdotes, analogies and biographies, cold reason and dry fact transformed into a vivid living narrative.

Most people who have scientific training can not design a chemical plant. They can not scribble some equations which would accurately predict the results of selective breeding regimes. They can not extract active ingrediants from mixtures given a few beakers, burners and pipets. Scientists are technical specialists, embedded in a social system, and owing fealty to a common understanding of the how the world works, and trusting in the intersection of the world and that social system. Similarly, scholars in non-scientific fields are also specialists, and their disciplines operate via rules and accepted standards. These individuals are keepers of the flame of modern civilization which all humans today, more or less, benefit from. I believe there is some complacency amongst us moderns that scientific and intellectual modes of thought have diffused widely enough among the general public that the meme would survive any assaults, whether sociological or natural. I do not for a moment believe that Johnson or McGrath, both evangelical Christians, see in Post Modernism as anything more than a tool to deal with the disease of secularism. They surely believe in Eternal Truths. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease....

Addendum: Though I speak firmly with the voice of an atheist biased toward a positivist methodology and a naturalistic ontology, I explicitly do not reject the common ground I share with many humanists and religionists. Though I reject the arguments promoted by Neo-Thomist philosophers within the Roman Catholic Church, I can understand the basic process of reasoning. In contrast, a Post Modern conception of Christianity evades engagement and discourse. Similarly, though I may find the contentions of some scholars as to the genius of Shakespeare unconvincing or inscrutable, I can conceive of the general outline of their argument. In contrast, the post-Derridaesque style of discourse seems to make a mockery of the communicative facility that god or nature has granted our species. There are certain intellectuals out there who share a common currency, backed by the gold standard set by the Classical and Enlightenment thinkers (flawed and futile in execution, but inspiring in vision), around which a common intelligible discourse can be perpetuated. In contrast there other others who wish to print currencies which are measured only against the fiat of social whim and which stubbornly refuse interconversion.

Note: I bring up Neo-Thomism several times because McGrath's rejection of "ideas whose origins and legitimation lie outside the Christian gospel" seems reflective of a particular strand of Protestantism which makes an ostentatious attempt to discard Classical philosophical influences on Christianity. This of course is in direct conflict with the main thrust of Roman Catholic intellectuals, who drink deeply at the well of non-Christian Hellenic philosophy, whether it be Neo-Platonism via St. Augustine, or, more contemporaneously, Aristotle via St. Thomas Aquinas. I say ostentatiously because from the inception of the Reformation Protestants have balked at discarding crucial centerpieces of Christian theology which do seem to be ideas that derived from the engagement of gentile converts with the non-Christian milieu, for example, the Trinity. When early Protestant radicals attacked reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin on these particulars they were rejected as heretics, and appeals were made to the Church Fathers to supplement sola scriptura. Some pre-Reformation intellectuals who brought up these issues eventually became Jews (they are recorded because of their trials as apostates).

Addendum II: One thing I want to be clear about, I specifically aimed to be "Broad Church" here, McGrath refers to the "Enlightenment," which might imply the French Enlightenment. I am not one who thinks that the French Englightenment was an unmitigated disaster, nevertheless, my defense of "rationality" is a bit broader than the school of Voltaire and Diderot, and includes the general Western intellectual tradition that encompasses skepticism and empiricism as essential legs in the tripod completed by rationalism. Not only does this include the Scottish and English Enlightenments, but I do not exclude the Roman Catholic Thomistic philosophical tradition as a player in the market of ideas, because it shares the same cognitive currency. To various extents many streams of Western and non-Western intellectual thought express each of the elements noted above, but I think that one strand in particular which one can push back as far as the pre-Socratics, has resulted in the critically rational intellectual outlook of modernity. The "threat" that relativists, Post Modernists and primitivists on the cultural Right and the Left is not that they will undermine the intellectual outlook of the broad masses, the common folk have only a perfunctory attachment to any sort of intellectualization in any case, rather, I worry about the negative effect excessive skepticism might have on the cohesion of the social system which furthers science and scholarship in the West, and this instability might undermine the tacit deference that the public concedes to scholars due to their erudition and analysis of positive truths.

The always enjoyable Victor Davis Hanson has a good piece in the online WSJ today talking about the out-of-control diversity problem on college campuses. Go read.

It's easy to find articles on the long term impairment to IQ due to fetal alcohol syndrome and other causes, yet terribly difficult to find anything on the much more common-place phenomenon of temporary impairment. I think that it would be very useful to know the number of standard deviations by which a given level blood alcohol, sleep deprivation, or other impairment alters IQ, reaction time, etc. Does anyone here have any idea where this sort of research is published, or if it isn't published, why it isn't? Government resistance to research facilitating the direct comparison of the hazards of different drugs is an obvious reason, but doesn't seem sufficient.

For that matter, any thoughts on why the magnitude of the cognitive benefits of aderall, ritalin, modafinal, caffeine, and the like are so rarely quantified?

The birth of Emylea Tharby in London, Ontario last April may one day be looked on as a watershed moment in the abortion debates. Little Emylea's birth was a unique event, not just for her parents, but for the medical profession as well:

On April 30, Ms. Tharby gave birth to her daughter, Emylea, at 33 weeks. It was only during the vertical caesarean section that doctors discovered the umbilical cord was attached to the outside of the uterus. Emylea had grown in her mother's abdominal cavity, her skull flattened slightly from butting Ms. Tharby's liver.

The baby's survival, while being described as miraculous, also lends credibility to a theory almost universally relegated to the realm of science fiction: that any human, woman or man, can give birth.

Most commentary is focusing on the novel prospects of men carrying babies to term, which doesn't surprise me considering the amount of continued interest we see in my post on Male Lactation. However, I think that more a more likely outcome will be an outsourcing of fetal gestation, especially as research in artifical uteri continues to progress, and the cost-effectiveness of egg-banking brings that practice within range of many more young woman, thus enabling them to combine eggs harvested during prime years with child rearing at a more mature age, where the mother is better equipped in terms of personal capital.

However, the pro-life forces will surely have recogized that little Emylea viably developed outside of the womb. A way to short circuit the abortion debate might be to offer fetal extraction procedures instead of fetal extinction procedures. The extracted fetus is then gestated within the womb of another or within an artificial uterus. Fetal extraction procedures would certainly make it more difficult for the pro-choice movement to argue for the right to fetal extinction. Such a leap in technology would also undercut a woman's legal claim to the privacy and primacy of her right to control her reproduction and that by extracting the fetus and transplanting it, she hasn't provided consent to having her child be born. Such an argument would be weakened for her rights to assent to the birth would now be on equal footing with men who don't have the right to veto a woman's pregnancy on the grounds of not consenting to having a child. Men's rights currently take a secondary role to those of women because the health burden of pregnancy or abortion falls solely on the woman. Of course, the issue of state intervention and the financial responsibility for unwanted fetuses would still be in the air. Would pro-life forces be willing to provide either natural or artificial gestatation and adopt all of the extracted fetusus or will they seek to push that responsbility onto their fellow citizens?

Now let's avoid the standard pro-choice/pro-life talking points in comments, which means the ethical and religious aspects of the debate. Advocates of each side won't make any inroads with their opponents and we won't really advance the debate by progressing down that road. Instead, let's focus on the legal, scientific and sociological implications associated with advancing reproductive technology.

Apparently Genghis, et. al., had a few stowaways:

A report in the October issue of Genome Research suggests that Genghis Khan's invasions spanning the continent of Asia during the 13th century may have been a primary vehicle for the dissemination of one of the world's most deadly diseases: tuberculosis....

Mokrousov's team hypothesized that, given the strong gender bias of TB infectivity and the likely family-based mode of TB transmission during pre-industrialized times, M. tuberculosis dissemination has reflected the unidirectional inheritance of the paternally transmitted human Y chromosome. To test this hypothesis, the authors compared the genetic profiles of a common form of M. tuberculosis, called the Beijing genotype, with known patterns of prehistoric and recent human migrations, as well as with global patterns of Y-chromosome variation.

Strikingly, they observed that over the past 60,000-100,000 years, the dispersal and evolution of M. tuberculosis appears to have precisely ebbed and flowed according to human migration patterns.

Further:

The authors describe how the Beijing genotype of M. tuberculosis originated in a specific human population called the K-M9 in central Asia approximately 30,000-40,000 years ago following a second "out of Africa" migration event. The bacteria and its human host then disseminated northeast into Siberia between 20,000-30,000 years ago and throughout eastern Asia between 4,000-10,000 years ago. More recently, the Beijing genotype of M. tuberculosis was introduced into northern Eurasia, perhaps by Genghis Khan himself during the 1200's, and into South Africa, possibly through sea trade contacts with Indonesia or China during the last 300 years.

Tuberculosis and migration patterns

Origin and primary dispersal of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing genotype: Clues from human phylogeography

Sometimes illustration is as important as argumentation. The East in the West by Chris Caldwell is just that, illustrating the rough textures of the "Turkish question." There is very little data in Caldwell's piece that can be quantitized. Caldwell suggests that the religiosity of Turkish petite bourgeoise is akin to ardor of the American middle class rather than the staid post-Christianity of Europe...but he doesn't offer survey data which points to the reality that 71% of Turks affirm "strong religiosity," as opposed to 65% of Americans, and 57% of Italians, 38% of British, 34% of French and 26% of Swedes. The piece alludes to the reality that liberalization of culture is not a necessary implication of democratization, but it never states it in a succinct and point by point fashion. Worth a read, for a reminder rather than any new insights.

For the last few days I've been involved in an ongoing debate with Steve Verdon and one of his readers, Victor, on whether President Clinton is a bald-faced liar for making this statement:

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.

"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said.

"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."--emphasis added

Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

After a few rounds of back and forth it looks like we've adopted two differing interpretations of what "financed" means. Steve and Victor argue from the default position that there have always been significant foreign debt holders of US Securities, and their default hypothesis must be refuted entirely by accounting for 100% of the debt sourcing. To account for less than 100% automatically implies foreign contribution, and even an insignificant foreign contribution, falsifies President Clinton's statement. I'm interpreting "financed" to mean the costs of the entire endeavor, not simply a minor part of the endeavor. This seems to be the more common usage, such as "I financed my house with a $600,000 mortgage from the bank" being a true statement even though I received a $5000 loan from my father-in-law in order to help with the downpayment.

Let's get into the details of the argument. Steve points to WWII as the case to prove that President Clinton is lying. I pointed out that on June 30, 1941 the National Debt stood at $49 Billion and that the debt grew to $259 Billion by June 30, 1945 and during that time there were 8 War Bond Drives which raised $185.7 Billion and that more traditional financial instruments, like Treasury bonds and Certificates of Indebtedness, were also being marketed. The War Bonds by themselves accounted for 88.4% of the proceeds borrowed. Turning to another source, (see Figure 12,) we see that there was no debt issued under the Foreign Government Series until 1960. I certainly wouldn't conclude that the WWII US war effort was financed by foreign borrowing.

Aside from sticking to the position that any amount of foreign borrowing, no matter how minor, invalidates President Clinton's position, Steve insists that the likely points of foreign capital were Canada and Britain. I think that contention unlikely, considering they had entered into WWII two years before the US and each were on a massive war footing with their own War Bond Drives, and in the case of Britain, were already receiving aid from the US in the form of Lend-Lease:

On 11th March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. The legislation gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the powers to sell, transfer, exchange, lend equipment to any country to help it defend itself against the Axis powers.

A sum of $50 billion was appropriated by Congress for Lend-Lease. The money went to 38 different countries with Britain receiving over $31 billion. Over the next few years the British government repaid $650 million of this sum.

[ . . . . ]

Britain was in pawn, at the very time that Attlee was fighting to exert some influence on the postwar European settlement. The only solution was to negotiate a huge American loan, the repayment and servicing of which placed a burden on Britain's balance of payments right into the twenty-first century.

The rest of the Commonwealth joined with Britain in fighting against the Axis powers before the US joined the war. Their economies were also set on a war footing, which included extraordinary measures, such as found in Australia:

- the fixing of profit margins in industry;
- restrictions on the costs allowed for building or renovations;
- the pegging of prices;

I find that to posit that the private capital of the citizens was being used to finance the US deficit to be incongruent with the massive capital requirements that their countries were facing for at least 2 years before the US deficit started to rise. Isn't it more parsimonious to assume that the capital was being soaked up by their own governments? I looked for information on foreign exchange controls but couldn't find any information in my searches. Does any one know if such controls existed during the war period.

So, if not Canada and Britain, which countries were the major financiers of our debt? Japan, China, France, Germany, Saudia Arabia, Korea, the colonies of Africa? Anyone see a problem here? Maybe the Germans wouldn't have minded if the neutral Swiss financed the American war effort against them? Maybe the countries that financied our WWII debt were Boliva and Panama? The coffee barons must have had a lot of surplus capital that they wanted to invest in safe instruments.

So, WWII seems to me to be a bust as a case for falsification. Victor follows in his comments with the case of the Revolutionary War being financied by the Dutch and the run-up in debt during the Vietnam War era. If we couldn't agree on the semantics of financing a war like WWII how are we going to come to an agreement on whether a Republic exists before it wins a revolution?

On the issue of Vietnam, let's go back to President Clinton's text. The overall context of the remarks makes clear that he is concerned by the historical anomaly of cutting taxes and borrowing the foregone tax revenue in order to finance the tax cuts, the war effort, massively increased domestic spending and disaster reponse. There is a case to be made that some, if not all, of the additional borrowing could have been replaced with tax revenues absent the tax cuts. Underlying President Clinton's remarks are what I take to be two moral arguments common to the Democratic critique: 1.) It is immoral to not ask the citizens to sacrifice in times of national crisis and instead expect future generations to make the required sacrifice, and; 2.) It is immoral to actually lower taxes and raise discretionary domestic spending, thus necessitating borrowing, in times of national crisis and burdening future generations with the debt obligations. The added debt, much of the which is being supplied by foreign entities, would be smaller if tax cuts weren't implemented.

Now we got into a side argument about whether foreign sourced debt is less preferable to domestically sourced debt and my position is that any effort to broaden the market for the debt will lower the cost of servicing that debt and thus create a benefit for US taxpayers. However, President Clinton isn't saying having foreigners buy our debt is a negative for the US. His position is that the fiscal mismanagement we're seeing from President Bush is unprecedented in the history of the Republic.

Let's look at the broader financial indicators that occured during WWII (1941-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1965-1973) and see how the Federal Government's finances were being managed compared to the Iraq War period (2001-2004).

U.S. Fiscal Indicators During Periods of War
Year	Public Debt/GDP (%)	Top Marginal Tax Rate (%)	Individual Tax/GDP (%)	Corporate Tax/GDP (%)	Excise Tax/GDP (%)	Other Tax/GDP (%)
World War II
1941	42.3	81.00	1.2	1.9	2.2	0.7
1942	47.0	88.00	2.3	3.3	2.4	0.6
1943	70.9	88.00	3.6	5.3	2.3	0.4
1944	88.3	94.00	9.4	7.1	2.3	0.5
1945	106.2	94.00	8.3	7.2	2.8	0.5
Korean War
1950	80.2	91.00	5.8	3.8	2.8	0.5
1951	66.9	91.00	6.7	4.4	2.7	0.5
1952	70.9	88.00	3.6	5.3	2.3	0.4
1953	88.3	94.00	9.4	7.1	2.3	0.5
Vietnam War
1965	37.9	70.00	7.1	3.7	2.1	0.8
1966	34.9	70.00	7.3	4.0	1.7	0.9
1967	32.9	70.00	7.6	4.2	1.7	0.9
1968	33.3	75.25	7.9	3.3	1.6	0.9
1969	29.3	77.00	9.2	3.9	1.6	0.9
1970	28.0	71.75	8.9	3.2	1.6	0.9
1971	28.1	70.00	8.0	2.5	1.5	0.9
1972	27.4	70.00	8.0	2.7	1.3	1.0
1973	26.0	70.00	7.9	2.8	1.2	0.9
Iraq War
2001	33.1	38.60	9.9	1.5	0.7	0.9
2002	34.1	38.60	8.3	1.4	0.7	0.9
2003	36.1	35.00	7.3	1.2	0.6	0.7
2004	37.2	35.00	7.0	1.6	0.6	0.7

You'll note that there was a big increase in Public Debt during World War II, but there was a steady rate of decreasing the Public Debt/GDP ratio through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The top marginal tax rate was either raised, or reduced to the long term average rate, during those wars. The contribution of individual tax collected increased as a share of GDP during times of war. It is only during the administration of President Bush and the Iraq war that all of these indicators don't follow historical patterns. At times of war we usually make the sacrifices needed to finance those wars, rather than pushing the cost onto the backs of our children while we add irresponsibilty onto irresponsibility by backing multiple tax cuts that have disproportionate benefit across socio-economic classes.

The financing of the Iraq War is different from that of the Vietnam War, in that while we increased our sale of debt instruments abroad during the Vietnam period, we were also growing our economy at such a rate that the added debt was actually diminishing our debt burden as a percentage of our GDP. President Bush's mismanagement of our treasury has resulted in increased borrowing adding to our debt burden as a percentage of our GDP while at the same time decreasing the share of individual tax collections as a percentage of GDP. We've reduced individual tax collections by 2.9% of GDP and increased our debt by 4.1% of GDP. The added financial burden of the Iraq War has been entirely financed by debt. This report (Table #20) shows that in the period July 2002 - July 2004, China has increased its portfolio of US Long Term Debt Securities from $165 Billion to $360 Billion and Japan increased their holdings from $411 Billion to $736 Billion. These two countries alone can account for all of the debt that was issued to finance our war efforts in Iraq.

So, it sure doesn't look to me like President Clinton was out to take a cheap shot at the fiscal policies of the Bush Administration - he had the facts behind him and this was in fact a substantive shot at the fiscal mismanagement we're seeing from the "Party of Spending Like Drunken Sailers", once known as the Republicans. Never before have we financed a war by increasing our Public Debt/GDP and borrowed those funds from abroad.

Lastly, when will we get serious about fiscal management if not at times like this? If we can't show fiscal maturity during a time of war and rebuilding after a disaster, how severe will a future crisis have to be to instill the discipline we'll need to get our fiscal house in order?

Update: Steve Sailer has a piece on the cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War done by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies.

Thomas Friedman speaking yesterday in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun:

Funabashi: Among the emerging Asian countries, India seems to have an advantage in globalization because of its citizens' high English ability. But there are reports that as many as 350 million people are now studying English in China. In a globalizing world, how does English ability impact on a country's potential?

Friedman: Knowing English was an early advantage for India in a couple of areas. One is, obviously, call centers, where you had to know English to serve an English-speaking company. But today, the second-largest outsourcing capital in the world is Dalian, China, where thousands of Japanese-speaking Chinese are now running the backrooms and writing the software of major Japanese multinationals and American multinationals formerly based in Tokyo. And, as I'm sure people here are aware, there are Japanese language schools on every other corner in Dalian. Japanese language is now required for two years at many schools in Dalian, and I would hardly say that speaking English in Dalian today is a great advantage. In fact, speaking Japanese would be a huge advantage. That's the first point I would make.

The second point I would make is that in terms of hard-core business processes, so much of this is about writing code and things of that nature, that I believe at the end of the day business will go to where the brains are and not where the language is. You will meet companies today in the United States who have already skipped over India and gone right to China for basically the next generation of business process engineering.

In working on my book, I interviewed Bill Gates, and he told me that Microsoft opened its third research center in the world in Beijing in 1998. It used to just have a research center in Cambridge, England, nice English-speaking place, and Redmond, Washington. He told me they opened their research center in China by giving IQ tests to 2,000 Chinese around the country, Ph.D.s and engineering students, recommended to them, and out of those 2,000 they basically chose 20 to open the research center in China.

Now, think what it is actually to be one of those 20 out of a country of 1.3 billion people. In fact, they have a saying at the Microsoft Research Center in China: In China, when you're one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

Now, what Bill Gates will also tell you is that today the China Research Center is the leading research center in Microsoft. You know what he'll also tell you, though? He'll tell you that Microsoft's best game designers all come from Japan. I bet none of them speak English, or very few. So, I don't think this is going to be about language. I think the language advantage is going to quickly be arbitraged out. There'll be more Chinese speakers on the Internet very, very soon.

Related: Why India Will (Probably) Never Catch China, China vs. India: Part I

For those of you in the UK, check out BBC's Horizon tonight for more on the Flores "microcephaly or not" question. (More here: Hobbit hhhmm....)

Professor Bob Martin, one of the team that is set to publish new evidence challenging the discovery team's original interpretation, says the Hobbit's brain is "worryingly" small and contradicts a fundamental law of biology.

"What this law says in simple terms is that if you halve body size, brain size is only reduced by 15%," he told the BBC's Horizon programme.

"So if you halve body size you don't halve brain size, the brain is reduced far less than that."

A while ago I posted on this subject here.

An attentive reader (Omri Tal) has pointed out an error in my analysis. The point concerns Dawkins's 'misunderstanding 10': that 'Individuals should tend to inbreed, simply because this brings extra close relatives into the world'. My analysis agreed with Dawkins that bringing close relatives into the world has no evolutionary advantage if these merely replace equal numbers of genes that would be passed on by mating with non-relatives. But I then argued that this would not always be the case:

The crucial point is therefore whether incestuous matings would simply replace outbred ones. Dawkins notes this question, but does not mention the likely asymmetry between males and females: females can usually only have a limited number of offspring, whereas males can have a practically unlimited number. A male who mates with his sister (or daughter) is therefore more likely to gain in the number of offspring than she is, and the balance between gain of inclusive fitness (measured by the increase in genes identical by descent) and loss of physiological fitness will be different for the two sexes. Suppose that a brother can mate with his sister and thereby gain 2 extra offspring for himself, while she gains none for herself (since the mating with her brother displaces an outbred one); a gene causing him to mate with his sister will therefore gain on average 2 x 3/4 copies, [2 x 1/2 copies of his own genes, plus 2 x 1/4 i.b.d. genes from her] whereas a gene causing her to mate with her brother will gain only 2 x 1/4 copies [since she would pass it on to half her offspring anyway, and it is only the possibility of extra copies from her brother that counts]. We might therefore expect males and females to evolve different attitudes towards incest, with females being much more resistant to it.

Omri Tal has pointed out that this overstates the difference between the position of males and females. I somehow overlooked the fact that if a sister mates with her brother, he 'loses' the nephews or nieces that his sister would otherwise produce by mating with an unrelated partner. This needs to be taken into account in calculating the effect on his inclusive fitness. The result of doing so is that his net 'gain' is only 2 x 1/2 copies, not 2 x 3/4. This is still greater than the 'gain' of his sister (2 x 1/4), but the difference is not as great as I suggested.

In more detail...


Assumptions

We assume that a variant gene (allele) predisposes its bearers to mate with their siblings (though they can still mate with non-relatives), whereas an individual who does not bear the gene mates only with non-relatives.

Each mating pair produce 2 offspring.

A male who mates with his sister also produces 2 offspring with unrelated mates, but a female who mates with her brother produces only 2 offspring in total. Her offspring with her brother therefore replace the offspring she would have had with unrelated males.

We consider two siblings who are not themselves inbred. They may each have inherited a copy of the gene from a recent ancestor, but cannot each have inherited 2 copies. (Allowing for inbreeding in the siblings themselves would just complicate matters further.)

With these assumptions, we can calculate the 'gain' from inbreeding compared with non-inbreeding. To give a 'baseline' position, suppose that for some reason (e.g. distance) the siblings cannot mate with each other, and therefore mate only with non-relatives. In this case a male who has the gene for inbreeding will on average pass on 2 x 1/2 copies to his offspring. His sister has a 1/2 chance of carrying the same gene, and therefore on average passes it on to 2 x 1/2 x 1/2 offspring. The total expected number of copies of the gene passed on is therefore 1.5. We can do the same calculations for a female who carries the gene. Since the situation is symmetrical with that of the male, the result is also 1.5.

Suppose now that a male carrying the gene mates with his sister. By assumption, he has 2 offspring with his sister and 2 offspring with a non-relative. He therefore passes on 2 x 1/2 + 2 x 3/4 = 2.5 copies of the gene to his offspring. But he no longer has the nephews or nieces he would have had if his sister had mated with an unrelated male. His net gain from inbreeding compared to not inbreeding is therefore simply 2.5 - 1.5 = 1.

The position of males and females is no longer symmetrical, so we need to calculate the position of females separately. Suppose a female carrying the gene mates with her brother. She produces 2 inbred offspring with on average 2 x 3/4 copies of the gene. She produces no outbred offspring, but by assumption her brother still produces 2 outbred offspring, with on average 2 x 1/4 copies of the gene, so in total 2 x 3/4 + 2 x 1/4 = 2 copies are passed on. The female’s ‘gain’ from inbreeding is therefore 2 - 1.5 = 0.5 copies. The ratio of male:female gain is therefore only 2:1, not 3:1 as I originally supposed.

Cattle domestication in the Near East was followed by hybridization with aurochs bulls in Europe:

Domesticated cattle were one of the cornerstones of European Neolithisation and are thought to have been introduced to Europe from areas of aurochs domestication in the Near East. This is consistent with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data, where a clear separation exists between modern European cattle and ancient specimens of British aurochsen. However, we show that Y chromosome haplotypes of north European cattle breeds are more similar to haplotypes from ancient specimens of European aurochsen, than to contemporary cattle breeds from southern Europe and the Near East....

Related: Humans greedy for pig? (which shows that pig mtDNA tends to exhibit diverse lineage signatures)

A genome-wide survey of structural variation between human and chimpanzee:

Structural changes (deletions, insertions, and inversions) between human and chimpanzee genomes have likely had a significant impact on lineage-specific evolution because of their potential for dramatic and irreversible mutation...The events are distributed throughout the genome on all chromosomes but are highly correlated with sites of segmental duplication in human and chimpanzee. These structural variants encompass at least 24 Mb of DNA and overlap with >245 genes. Seventeen of these genes contain exons missing in the chimpanzee genomic sequence and also show a significant reduction in gene expression in chimpanzee. Compared with the pioneering work of Yunis, Prakash, Dutrillaux, and Lejeune, this analysis expands the number of potential rearrangements between chimpanzees and humans 50-fold. Furthermore, this work prioritizes regions for further finishing in the chimpanzee genome and provides a resource for interrogating functional differences between humans and chimpanzees.

Related: Human evolution book and the chimp genome, Regional patterns of gene expression in human and chimpanzee brains.

I notice that a fair # of visitors have .edu addresses, but I never noted which ones were the most popular, but here are the top colleges sending traffic to GNXP from sitemeter:

#1 University of Washington
#2 Indiana University
#3 George Mason University
#4 Hofstra University
#5 Georgetown University

I have occasionally discussed the subject of long-term increases in average height, so I was interested to see an article in today's London Times, here. (Link may expire after a week for non-subscribers.) The drift of it is that average adult height in Britain, as measured from skeletal remains, has not changed very much since Neolithic times. Contrary to popular assumption, people in the Middle Ages were not much shorter than today. There has been a small increase (an inch or so) in recent decades due to better nutrition, but it's not such a big deal.

I think this may somewhat underestimate the increase since the 19th century. Most sources put this at at least a couple of inches. There in some evidence that average height fell in industrial areas during the harshest period of the Industrial Revolution, before rising again from the late 19th century onwards, so the increase since medieval times may indeed only be an inch or so.

While on the subject of press reports, I can't resist repeating the classic headline from Sunday's über-tabloid, The News of the World: 'Cocaine Kate's 3-in-Bed Lesbian Orgy'. (The 'Kate' is Kate Moss, in case you hadn't guessed.) Nothing to do with GNXP, but it's a dream come true!