The Guardian has a piece titled Steve Fuller: Designer trouble, in reference to testimony that the aforementioned professor gave to the Dover court. After reading the article I have to say that I'm not surprised that he testified, he seems to not be of any camp aside from that of Steve Fuller, and oh how he loves himself. Fuller notes that "It is not like people love you for doing this" in reference to his pro-ID testimony at Dover. Sure, but it gets you 1400 word write ups in The Guardian, along with putting "social epistemology"¹ on the map that has to make you somebody.

Addendum: Fuller repeats the common assertion by many that monotheism is a necessary condition for the initiation of science (see Rodney Stark's recent books for a strong form of this argument). I've seen this contention before, and I'm not convinced, though I don't discount it. Of late my main problem has been the tendency of some historians and sociologists to make inferences from perceptions and assumptions about mental states when I sense that these scholars aren't up to speed on the latest work in cognitive psychology which tells you to be cautious about conclusions you derive from introspective common sense.² This sort of abduction should be treated with care, but my impression is that Fuller has used the Christianity ~ science connection in debates several times. That makes his defense of Intelligent Design all the more irritating, because the high standard of proof and certitude that he holds evolutionary theory to doesn't extend to his own views, which in this case seem to be far more tendentious.

Update: Since I mentioned Rodney Stark's work, here is a somewhat overwrought review in TNR of his newest book. Stark's contention that the Greeks didn't have science and that only Christianity has theology are provocative (depending on how you define "science" I could accept the former, though the TNR reviewer points out Stark's tendency to vary the definition depending on how it fits his thesis that Christianity was directly, fundamentally and necessarily responsible for the modern world as we know it). Unfortunately, he has started to take a progressively more polemical tone recently. This does not necessarily invalidate his thesis exposited in his recent books (One True God and For the Glory of God make the same argument), but it does undermine his pretensions toward scholarship (as does dismissing those who disagree with him as believing in "nonsense!"). His claim to erudition was definitively burst for me on page 130 of For the Glory of God where he repeats established orthodoxy of the 1960s in regards to the great "stirrup controversy", as if that is the state of knowledge presently, a few pages after claiming to have immersed himself in the historical literature and criticizing other scholars for relying on out of date models! (he could be selectively using this out of date material to back up his thesis of course, but then he is guilty of what he decries) Though I fully grant that the propogandistic arguments of secularist scholars (see David Gress' critique of Will Durant in From Plato to NATO), there is no reason now to veer to the other extreme in the interests of "balance."

1 - If Wikipedia is to be believed a lot of social epistemology is pretty sensible (and some not). Some of my more off the wall posts definitely assume a sort of social epistemology framed by a transhumanist teleology. It just goes to show you that it is how you use a tool, not the tool itself, that is problematic.

2 - Example (roughly adapted from Stark) - Chinese believe in an unknowable essence, Christians believe in a comprehendible personal God, ergo, Christian universe is comprehensible, making science possible. Chinese universe is unknowable, it just is, making science impossible. Leaving aside the assertions about the character of Chinese and European religious worldviews for a moment, I am skeptical that Chinese and European intellectuls really had a non-nominalist sense of what these terms meant and cognitively represented higher powers any differently. I believe in these generalizations as much as I do in Max Webers work where he predicted that East Asia would never develop economically because of Confucian values (now Confucian values are the reason for development!).

Over at my other weblog I have posted an item titled Blogs of the Union in response to a call from Radio Open Source (listen live to see if Brendan notes my BOTU). The gist of it is that I believe we are the last generation of the old human, and might be the first generation of the new. JM Keynes said of Newton "He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago."¹ I believe somethings similar applies to humanity as a whole in our age. Roughly, my contention is that in the information saturated universe, where obesity is starting to be seen a worldwide problem, mass culture is finally decoupling itself from the sensibilities that have grounded us in a common human experience for the last 50,000 years. True, a minority of humanity has always lived apart, whether it be in monasteries, or in unimaginable luxury, or the case of the likes of Newton, minds whose virtuosity bears no comprehension. But the mass consumer society is taking novel change to the people and consuming them. Roughly, I believe that the rate of the rate of change is increasing (i.e., derivative of change, change', is > 0).

Of course, this could all be an illusion, a conceit held by every generation. Let me offer two rejoinders, one somewhat esoteric, the other mundane. First, we are not a particularly unique sample of humans who are that privileged at being born when we are,² a large fraction of the individuals who have ever lived are alive today, 1 out of 20 to be precise.³ Second, walking on a college campus is a surreal experience, gone are the days when a stroll between buildings entailed a possible encounter with a stranger, eye contact with humans of unknown provenance. Rather, it is a time when you withdraw into a familiar cocoon and pull out the cell phone to talk to those who are near and dear. This wasn't so 10 years ago. It wasn't so 100 years ago. Or perhaps nearly 1,000 years ago at the University of Paris.

So do I live in a dream world? Do I simply not know what I think I know? Do you share RPM's unbelief? As I tell Michael Vassar, I don't go to church often, I don't know the scripture and the portents, but I do believe....

Related: Tigers of the future, Why the inflection.

1 - Keynes' assertion was made after his purchase of Newton's papers, he knew of what he spoke, for he had seen into the dark mind of the mad genius.

2 - Certainly those of use born into the first world are the lucky subset, but, I would argue that an age where famine is an aberration means even those who live in Bangladesh (for example) are graced.

3 - Due to the world wide drop in fertility we are also near the mode of the probability distribution of the likelihood of a human to be alive at in any given age. I believe that 100 years from there humans as we know it probably won't exist, or that that those who remain will be less numerous than those at the mid-21st century peak (for whatever reason, ill or good).

Evolutionary movement of centromeres in horse, donkey, and zebra:

Centromere repositioning (CR) is a recently discovered biological phenomenon consisting of the emergence of a new centromere along a chromosome and the inactivation of the old one...Even more surprisingly, five cases of CR have occurred in the donkey after its divergence from zebra, that is, in a very short evolutionary time (approximately 1 million years).These findings suggest that in some species the CR phenomenon could have played an important role in karyotype shaping, with potential consequences on population dynamics and speciation.

I though this was interesting because a) I don't know much about higher order genetic changes (chromosomal rearrangements, etc.) b) we've talked about chromosome # differences between wild and domestic horses before (they are full interfertile). Anyway, I know aneuploidy is usually the problem, but I think there will be some really interesting stuff coming out of this area (I wonder if RPM could offer more?).

Eugene Volokh does an admirable job of correcting the math regarding rape statistics and demolishes the claim, made by the Women's Center, that 2,000 rapes occur every 5 minutes.

What he didn't touch on, I will, and that is the demography of the victims. I'm quite sure that John Derbyshire must have had these FBI statistics in mind when he made his "salad days" comment that touched of a firestorm of knownothing commentary from people who are always inclined to think the worst rather than do a minute's checking to see what other implications arise from one's comments.

This site highlights data from the National Victim Center, which in 1992 published Rape in America: A Report to the Nation.

60% of the women who reported being raped were under 18 years old
29% were less than 11 years old
32% were between 11 and 17
22% were between 18 and 24
7% were between 25 and 29
6% were older than 29
3% age was not available

Derb seems to have been off by about 4 years, in that it's not 15-20, but 15-24, that sees the bulk of sexual attacks. If we look at the rapes that occur to women over the age of consent, (which I'll assume to be 18, simply so that this analysis can make reference to the crime statistics) and which amount to 35% of all rapes, less than 17% of rapes of adult women are of women over the age of 29.

I don't really have an overarching theme that I want to develop here other than to point out the startling incidence of rape on young women, especially pre-pubescent girls. Even if we account for accurate reporting of statutory rape and under-reporting of adult rape these numbers are startling. The other point that should be clear is that rapists are driven to targeting young women rather than old women, or in other words, women in their salad days.

I have a long review of The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics at my other blog. The take home message is that scientists are dumb, just not as dumb. Remember, evolution does not shape perfection, just good enough....

I've been cruising through the feminist blogosphere of late and in the past few weeks there have been three stories on the Crisis in Boy's Education that have captured their interest, the first from The New Republic, the second in Newsweek, and the last in The Boston Globe. The tone has ranged from outright hostile mocking of the Boston story, which involves a boy suing his school for discriminatory bias against boys, to outright denial that the problem even exists. Tied closely to both poles of this spectrum of criticism are the outright dismissals of the sociological shifts which are likely to follow, such as the often quoted prediction of the shortage of marriageable men. The odd thing about these commentaries is that they are simply dismissals rather than refutations. I haven't read one blogger tackle the "marriage issue" head-on and argue why it is nonsense, it's simply laughed off as naifish attempt by social conservatives to put woman back into the kitchen.

Now, because none of the commentary took on the issue in a serious fashion, I have no idea how feminists are framing the issue. I imagine that any thought they've actually given to the demographic issues probably centers on an outlandish framing which sees a generation of professional women actively out there scouring their community for suitable mates and this is clearly dismissed as ridiculous. If this is the vision that they're dismissing, then I'll join them in their mocking of the supporters of this vision.

These women will have their choices constrained by a few factors. The first, is obviously, the lack of men in their generation who share their educational achievements. The second is whether these women are going to be able to reorient their mate selection preferences towards men who are great at playing videogames but not so great at pursuing a professional career. The third constraint would be their willingness to remain single, and possibly childless. And the last constraint is whether they're willing to engage in subtle poaching of suitable and desireable men who just happen to be married.

Of the constraints facing them, I think the obstacle of the man being married to another woman will be the easiest to surmount for this surge of educated women will prove to be an incentive for older, successful men to take the opportunity to remarry. Afterall, if the woman is successful in choosing this strategy, she benefits and so does the man. The main loser, in this game of musical chairs, is the older married woman who just had her family torn apart.

Discuss.

I've talked about MHC before. ¹ It is important because it has a key role in the adaptive immune system and is illustrative of an important dynamic in evolutionary genetics, balancing selection, which perpetuations extreme polymoprhism within populations. Over time a functionally constrained locus which has an important fitness effect should fix toward the most advantageous allele. Polymorphism, where the modal allele is exhibited at lower than 95% frequency, suggests a population in transition. One can imagine such a scenario in a newly admixed population which has not had time to fix in populations. But MHC is different, many of the alleles on this locus persistent across species and have extremely deep evolutionary roots. There are two standard reasons given for this, a) heterozygote advantage or b) frequency dependent selection. No matter the details of the case, the importance of MHC and the persistence of polymorphism across many lineages and deep back into time is one of those truisms that thankfully takes a little of the territorial sloppiness that is habitual in much of biology. But assumptions need to be tested, so I pointed you to this paper, MHC class I genes in the tuatara (Sphenodon spp.): Evolution of the MHC in an ancient reptilian order). Here is the interesting part:

Preliminary analysis of variation among individuals from an island population of tuatara indicates these loci are highly polymorphic....

The Tuatara is an extremely ancient reptilian species on a lonely branch of that class of animals.

1 - MHC also might play a role in inbreeding and outbreeding avoidance.

Today's London Sunday Times (January 29) has an article in the Education section on new research which claims that British children's 'intelligence' has declined dramatically in the last 30 years. If the link works, the article is here.

The research is by Profs. Adey and Shayer of King's College London. Adey claims, based on a sample of 25,000 children, that 'the intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades'.

Naturally this is of interest in the context of the Flynn Effect - the long term trend of rising IQ scores. Several recent reports suggest that the Flynn Effect has halted or gone into reverse.

I haven't been able to find any further details of the research than those in the ST article, and I suggest a need for caution. The tests used do not appear to be standard IQ tests but rather tests of 'scientific reasoning', which combine general intelligence (g) and more specific mathematical and physical concepts. In IQ terms, a fall of 3 years in average mental age at chronological age 11 would be massive: if we suppose the baseline 30 years ago is IQ = MA/CA = 11/11 x 100 = 100, the new IQ would be MA/CA = 8/11 x 100 = approx. 73. I don't think mean IQ can possibly have fallen by 27 points in 30 years! The school at King's College is also known for unorthodox views on the nature of intelligence, including the belief that 'thinking skills' can be radically improved by fairly small amounts of direct 'thinking' teaching.

I also note that there is no mention of the ethnic composition of the samples, which must certainly have changed in the last 30 years. However, in IQ terms the fall is far too large to be explained by compositional changes of this kind.

[Added: The last point should be sufficiently self-evident, but let me expand on it for the benefit of the innumerate. In 1975 the proportion of non-whites at age 11 in Britain was around 5%. In 2005 it was around 15%. (These are very rough figures, but good enough for the present purpose.) Let us suppose that in 1975 the mean 'intelligence' of white 11-year-olds, by standard IQ tests or any other valid instrument, was 100, while that of non-whites was 85. This is about the size of the black-white differential in the US, or the difference between whites and the offspring of recent non-white immigrants in European countries. It probably overstates the differential between whites and non-whites in Britain, since non-whites in Britain include large numbers of Indians and other high-achieving groups. Assume that white and non-white IQ is unchanged between 1975 and 2005. These assumptions gives us mean population IQ of 99.25 in 1975 and 97.75 in 2005 - a fall of less than 2 percentage points. This is far too small to account for the kind of decline reported by Adey and Shayer. To explain such a large decline by changes in the composition of the population, either the magnitude of the compositional change, or the differential between the different components, or both, must be much larger than is at all credible.]

Despite these reservations, this is clearly interesting research, and I will try to follow it up.

Added: I found a more informative account of the research in the Guardian here. The full report will be published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology next year.

Since very few of you have likely read Fair Women, Dark Men: the Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice by Peter Frost, I'd like to you point you to his website, where he introduces many of his ideas in a series of essays. Steve also has an essay on based on Frost's ideas, and you might find this paper by Frost, European hair and eye color A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection?, of interest.

In the news...Parkinson's gene of large effect found in Jews and North African Arabs and group differences in lung cancer rates controlling for variables (or are they?). I am more intrigued by the Parkinson's result because my understanding is that North African "Arabs" are Arabicized Berbers by and large. There is some implication that the Parkinson's Disease gene might be found in common because of phylogeny, that is, both derive from common Middle Eastern stock. But if most North Africans are simply Arabicized Berbers their Middle Eastern origin should be pushed rather far back in history, probably at least greater than 6,000 years before the present (some evidence suggests that post-Neolithic Demic diffusion occurred). Some of the interpretations are based on founder effect being the culprit, but we can't ignore selection, can we? (though if you do a search on PubMed note that there are papers out there that do assert that North Africans seem to be highly substructured and it is difficult to establish a rhyme or reason,)

I was in Cambridge for a weekend, and I made up this saying (after consultation with friends who are grad students at Harvard and MIT):

Harvard students know how to seem smart
MIT students know how to be smart

And while I'm at it, I just thought of this:

Know the name of your enemy
But nothing else about them

Addendum: The point about Harvard vs. MIT wasn't that MIT students are endowed with a non-trivially higher quanta of general intelligence. What I was trying to get at is a point I was discussing with a friend of mine who admires the humanities, but is himself a physical scientist at MIT, one can make humanities majors difficult, but it is not a necessary corollary of that course of study. This was brought home to me when I was discussing grading with a friend who is an instructor at Harvard in a humanities field who expressed frustration at the bullshitting tendencies of his students. He wanted them to work harder and express real thoughts instead of what he assumed they assumed would get them the A with the lowest amount of effort. Being verbally exceptional and always expecting and getting the highest grades, there was a lot of pressure to give those grades out no matter the substance of the material (the impression I got is that the style and presentation were always top notch and reflexively produced). In contrast, in the sciences you either fail or you don't, you can't really bullshit your way out of solving a heat flow problem if you forgot your differential equations. The sciences, especially those requiring a lot of mathematics (physics, engineering, etc.), impose a floor of minimal competency which is capable of taxing normally bright individuals (i.e., ~140 IQ).

Judith Rich Harris is author of The Nurture Assumption and the forthcoming No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. My questions are in bold.


1) One criticism some of my readers made about 'The Nurture Assumption' is that it did not take evolution into account enough, will we see more evolutionary-historical considerations at play in 'No Two Alike'?

Yes, there is quite a lot about evolution and evolutionary history in No Two Alike.

2) Do you believe cognitive psychology has any insights into why people seem to have a strong bias in asserting the overwhelming role of family in the character of a child? Or do you believe that this is a cultural innovation?

Cultural factors are certainly involved. Americans didn't always have this strong belief in the role of the family - in particular, the role of the parents - in shaping a child's personality and behavior. That belief became popular around the middle of the 20th century. Prior to that, when children were troublesome or otherwise disappointing, the general consensus was that they were "born that way."

But there may be a cognitive component as well. There is a cognitive bias that makes people overestimate their own importance and their own ability to influence how things turn out - not just in child-rearing but in everything they do.

3) In 'The Nurture Assumption' you argue that children's peer groups are more influential on their behavior than their parents. One of your key illustrations of this is the fact that children of immigrants quickly acquire the language and accent of their non-immigrant peers. But it might be objected that this is a special case, as children have a specific 'language instinct', in Pinker's sense, which governs their language acquisition. What would you reply to this objection, and do you have any equally good alternative examples of peer-groups prevailing over parents?

The language instinct can explain why the child of English-speaking parents learns to speak English, but it cannot explain why, if this child goes outside and discovers that the people out there are speaking a different language, he not only acquires that new language but comes to favor it over the language his parents taught him - a language he still speaks at home.

But I can give you some examples that don't involve language. Robert McCrae found that there are personality differences between people reared in different cultures. For example, North Americans are somewhat more outgoing and less agreeable, on average, than Asians. McCrae gave personality tests to Asian-Canadian college students, the children of immigrants from Hong Kong. He found that the students who had recently arrived in Canada had personality profiles similar to those of the people back in Hong Kong, but the Asian-Canadians who were born in Canada were similar to other Canadians. Those who had arrived in childhood were somewhere in between. So the culture of the home - the culture the parents brought with them from Hong Kong - wasn't what determined the offsprings' personality. The children who were raised in Canada became Canadians.

My second example has to do with neighborhood effects on behavior. Researchers studied two groups of African-American school-age boys. These children all came from the same kind of home: low-income, headed by single parents. But some homes were located in black, poverty-level neighborhoods, and others were in neighborhoods that were predominantly white and middle-class. The researchers found that the African-American boys living in poverty-level neighborhoods were highly aggressive, but that those living in middle-class neighborhoods were no more aggressive than their white,middle-class peers. In both cases, these children had adapted their behavior to the local norms.

4) In your 2005 response to the Edge Question, "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?," you alluded to two things, 1) selection for light skin 2) hairlessness by parents in infants. When you pointed to these facts, did you do so in light of recent genetic work which suggests that dark skin might have evolved in humans as a response to loss of body hair? In other words, one trait would never been selected for if not for the other.

No, I hadn't heard of that work. But it doesn't matter. All humans have more or less hairless bodies, so I assume that the characteristic of hairlessness is at least as old as our species - at least 100,000 to 200,000 years old. Racial differences in skin color, on the other hand, are no more than 50,000 years old. If humans turned dark-skinned as a response to hairlessness (a theory I find dubious), then an explanation is still needed for why their skin turned white again so quickly when they inhabited Northern Europe, thousands of years later. My response to the 2005 Edge question offered a possible explanation.

By the way, I've expanded that essay into an article for a journal called Medical Hypotheses. It will be published in a few weeks.

5) Research that compares correlations of adoptive/biological families (mostly done by a handful of American behavior geneticists) typically finds low shared family influence, but research that compares means of adoptive/biological families (mostly done by a handful of French sociologists) typically finds big roles for genetics and shared family. Is correlation a reliable method for saying there is no shared family influence, might means need to be given more weight by behavior geneticists?

You're talking now about the effects of adoption on IQ. First, let me make it clear that all these studies showed a big role for genetics. Second, I agree that American behavioral geneticists might have underestimated the influence of "shared environment" (the environment that siblings raised in the same family have in common) - not because they've ignored means but because the adoptive homes these researchers looked at tended to come from a narrowed range: adoptive parents are generally middle- or upper-middle class. The French researchers, on the other hand, made a special effort to include lower-class families in their studies, and hence found a larger influence of shared environment. These results, by the way, are consistent with those from the behavioral genetic study of reared-apart identical twins: no influence of shared environment on personality (the correlation between the reared-apart twins was the same as that between the reared-together twins), but a small influence of shared environment on IQ (the IQ correlation was higher for the reared-together twins).

But I have a quarrel with the way you phrased your question: you said that correlational studies typically find "low shared family influence." What the researchers actually find is low influence of the shared environment. The environment shared by reared-together siblings doesn't just include the family: it includes the neighborhood, the school, the ethnic group, and the socioeconomic class. Sometimes siblings even belong to the same peer group. In other words, reared-together siblings share a culture or subculture.

My interpretation of the IQ data can explain both the means and the correlations. Here's how it goes. The family does have an effect on IQ during childhood. If the parents use big words or do various other things that increase a child's vocabulary, the child will score higher on IQ tests. But research has shown that this advantage - measured as an effect of shared environment - is temporary: it gradually fades away and is gone by late adolescence.

What isn't temporary is the advantage given by a culture (or subculture) that fosters intellectual activity. At higher socioeconomic levels, there tends to be a greater awareness that things like reading and going to science museums are good things to do and might pay off in the long run. So socioeconomic class does have a long-term effect on IQ. This is a cultural (or subcultural) effect and results in a difference in means: adoption tends to raise a child's IQ because most adopted children are raised in middle- or upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

A similar cultural effect can explain the gradual increase in average IQ scores that has occurred in the last 75 years all over the world. All over the world, socioeconomic levels have gone up and people are more aware than they used to be that intellectual activities might pay off in the long run.

6) Has behavior genetics declared the death of shared environment prematurely without considering levels of "shared environment" that occur above family - neigborhood, city, state, country, etc? Also if these things matter (which seems indisputable) and are mediated by shared family (which seems indisputable), again are the correlations hiding important details of parental influence?

No, not at all. Most behavioral geneticists are well aware that "shared environment" can mean the environment siblings share outside the home, rather than (or in addition to) the family environment. For example, behavioral geneticists have found an effect of shared environment on teenage delinquency. But, as behavioral geneticist David Rowe showed, the evidence suggests that the relevant environment is the neighborhood or school shared by teenage siblings. Siblings close in age may belong to the same peer group, and Rowe found that the shared environment effect on delinquency is larger for siblings close in age.

I see no justification for saying that the effects of shared environment are "mediated by the shared family." There are things that may in fact be mediated by the shared family - cooking styles and religious denomination spring to mind - but for most of the things that behavioral geneticists have studied, the shared environment should not be equated with the family environment.

You ask if correlations might be "hiding important details of parental influence." Perhaps what you're getting at here is the notion that parents might influence one of their children one way and another child in a different way. For example, the parents' child-rearing style might cause one sibling to become more outgoing and bold, the other to become more timid. If the direction of the effect depends on the preexisting (genetic) characteristics of the child, then what you've got is a gene-environment interaction. There's a whole chapter (Chapter 3)in No Two Alike devoted to gene-environment interactions. I show why they can't account for twin and sibling differences in personality.

But perhaps when you ask whether correlations might be "hiding important details of parental influence," you are talking about sheer unpredictability: the notion that parents do have an effect, but there's no way to predict in advance what the direction of the effect will be. Developmental psychologist Ellen Winner used this notion to explain away the behavioral geneticists' findings, in her response to the 2005 Edge question. "To demonstrate parents' effects on their children," Winner said, "we will need to recognize that parents may influence their children to become like them or to become unlike them." Winner suggested that researchers should study adult adoptees "and look at the extent to which these children either share their adoptive parents' values or have reacted against those values. Either way (sharing or reacting against), there is a powerful parental influence."

It's a heroic attempt to preserve the faith in parental influence, but a futile one. What does it mean to say that parents do have a powerful influence but that the direction of the influence is unpredictable? Is there any way to prove or disprove that statement? Does it have any scientific value? For that matter, does it have any practical value? Would parents be satisfied to be told, "Yes, your parenting will have an effect on your children, but we can't tell you what that effect will be"? It would mean that books of child-rearing advice would have to begin with a disclaimer: "If you follow this advice, your children might turn into happy, successful people; on the other hand, they are just as likely to turn into miserable failures."

7) OK, to something serious, east coast vs. west coast, is there any comparison in weather?

Not according to my older daughter, who lives in Berkeley. Whenever I complain about the snow, ice, or cold here in New Jersey, she points out that where she lives, the weather is "sensible."

8) How far do you go with 'modularity' in 'No Two Alike.' I ask because one of the questions of interest in behavior genetics is variation within a population. On the other hand evolutionary psychologists tend to emphasize human universals and the 'psychic unity of mankind,' often rooted in a paradigm of massive mental modularity which assumes that cognitive organs are fixed genetically (monomorphic) and not subject to non-pathological variation.

I go pretty far with modularity. I don't think it's possible to give a satisfactory description of social and personality development in childhood without thinking in terms of a modular mind. Simple theories of social development don't work because the human mind isn't simple!

You're right that the behavioral geneticists are mainly interested in human differences, whereas the evolutionary psychologists are mainly interested in human universals. But that distinction is starting to crumble. In his book The Blank Slate, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has a chapter (Chapter 19) devoted to individual differences.

As for the idea that "cognitive organs are fixed genetically...and not subject to non-pathological variation," I think it's nonsense. There is variation in all our essential organs. Why should my language acquisition module be identical to yours if there are differences in our hearts, lungs, kidneys, arms, and legs?

9) If you had to pick one thing, what do you think has been the most important finding from cognitive neuroscience which psychologists have had to take into account in formulating their theories?

In cognitive science, I would definitely pick modularity. But in psychology in general, I think the most important finding is the behavioral geneticists' discovery that the environment doesn't work the way everyone expected it to. Shared genes, as expected, make people more alike; but shared environment, to everyone's surprise, hardly ever makes people more alike. To put it another way, having different environments - growing up in different homes, being reared by different parents - isn't what makes people differ from one another. So what does make them differ? That's the mystery I try to solve in No Two Alike.

10) If you could have your full genome sequenced for $1000, would you do it? (assume privacy concerns are obviated)

I'd jump at the chance, and I wouldn't give a damn about privacy concerns - I'd want the information to be made freely available. My father spent his adult life crippled by an autoimmune disorder called ankylosing spondylitis. His father died young of an autoimmune disorder called pernicious anemia. And I have been ill most of my adult life with an autoimmune disorder that has launched attacks on several different body systems. So I think my genes might have something interesting to tell medical researchers.

Nicholas Wade did an interview with PLOS Genetics a few months ago. You might be interested, as he has a new book coming out, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors. I am doing a review for a magazine so I have a copy, and the galley has a lot more in it than the history of our ancestors (think his sequence of articles over the past 5 years). I suspect it will be marketed like Spencer Wells' book, but this is a different beast altogether.

Nature Reviews Genetics has a review of the emerging evidence for massive amounts of structural variation in the human genome.

Abstract:

The first wave of information from the analysis of the human genome revealed SNPs to be the main source of genetic and phenotypic human variation. However, the advent of genome-scanning technologies has now uncovered an unexpectedly large extent of what we term 'structural variation' in the human genome. This comprises microscopic and, more commonly, submicroscopic variants, which include deletions, duplications and large-scale copy-number variants - collectively termed copy-number variants or copy-number polymorphisms - as well as insertions, inversions and translocations. Rapidly accumulating evidence indicates that structural variants can comprise millions of nucleotides of heterogeneity within every genome, and are likely to make an important contribution to human diversity and disease susceptibility.

Summary:

* Structural variants in the human genome include cytogenetically detectable and submicroscopic deletions, duplications, large-scale copy-number variants, inversions and translocations.
* The ability to detect and characterize structural variants in the 1-kb to 3-Mb size range in a robust manner across the genome has not been possible until recently.
* New developments in genome-scanning technologies and computational methodologies, and the availability of a reference sequence for comparison, have made possible the large-scale discovery of structural variants.
* Many studies are revealing that the total content of structural variants in the human genome could equal or exceed that of SNPs.
* Structural variants often coincide with low-copy repeat DNA (also called segmental duplications), as these highly related sequences are more likely to undergo non-allelic recombination and subsequent rearrangement.
* Structural variation in the genome can directly or indirectly influence gene dosage through different mechanisms, and therefore influence phenotypic variation and disease.
* The cataloguing of structural variants and their frequencies in populations will be important for disease-mapping studies and for proper interpretation of clinical diagnostic-testing data.

We've mentioned some of these large scale variations before.

There has been talk about cannibalism on this weblog before. A school of anthropologists have been trying to argue for a few decades that legends of cannibalism are simply myths that are used to dehumanize the "Other." Some scholars, like Jared Diamond, disagree with this assessment very strongly and assert that the analysis is not only faulty, but biased by the tendency of some anthropologists to see noble savages where there aren't any. The cannibalism-is-a-myth thesis has some appeal, Martin Gardner, contributor to The Skeptic, found the idea plausible. I say "found" because I suspect that Gardner was convinced (I don't know if he's commented on the topic of late) by the genetic evidence which suggests selection for prion resistence could be detected in many human populations. This is a nice way that genetic evidence can be used to supplement the discourse in other disciplines, especially in fields where the exchanges are somewhat value-laden and emotionally explosive. Another example would be the likelihood that the crypto-Jews of New Mexico might actually have non-trivial Jewish ancestry. The contrarian skeptical bent in cultural anthropology was to explain these stories as myths generated by particular social biases and the relicts of attempts by Seventh Day Adventists to convert Latinos in the American Southwest in the early 20th century (ergo, Jewish ritual traditions). This explanation received featured space in The Atlantic Monthly in the late 1990s, and I accepted it simply because it seemed less sensational than the alternative.

Some of you have probably read the recent article about "Science Blogs" in The New York Times. I announced that I was starting a sister blog to this weblog about a week ago. A few points of note:

1) There will be many posts that you can find there that you won't find here. Though the content and linking will intersect, there will be a great deal of material exclusive to either weblog (this is a group weblog, the other one is not, so that should be obvious)..

2) With that in mind, I would ask that you:

• Add the other blog's RSS feed.
• Or, bookmark it.
• Or read it regularly

3) If you are a weblogger, I would appreciate it if you would add a link to that weblog as well as this one, as John Hawks did.

As I said a few weeks ago, I don't know where this is all going, so I will update you if I receive a vision from God as to how to differentiate the two weblogs more clearly. Right now there just hasn't been much lineage sorting. And if you care about that sort of thing, I suspect I will be posting much more on both weblogs in the near future for a bit.

As some of you might know, Intelligent Design and evolution are becoming issues in Utah. Before we move on, this from Ron Numbers The Creationists might be instructive:

...in 1935 only 36 percent of the students at the Mormons' Brigham Young University denied that human beings have been "created in a process of evolution from lower life forms." By 1973 the figure had risen sharply to 81 percent....

What's going on here? First, you have to know that the Mormon Church has taken different views in regards to evolution and there isn't a strict stance on the issue. This article in Deseret News makes the diversity clear. For one prominent Mormon perspective, see Orscon Scott Card's recent essay (I won't try to rebut and respond to his meanderings). But in light of the recent Vactican restatement supporting¹ evolutionary theory what's going on in regards in this tango between Darwin and God?

In regards to the Mormon numbers one hypothesis that I think is plausible is that the shift in BYU students' perceptions of the theory of evolution is a function of Mormons tracking the conservative Christian subculture in the United States. Though Mormons lay outside conventional Christianity in terms of theological orthodoxy, their mores and non-theological beliefs have tended to be aligned with the conservative end of the sociocultural spectrum, and so they have absorbed a concomitant dose of Creationism from the zeitgeist.²

Recently I read several entries of interest from The Oxford Companion to the Bible and I noted that only a faction of Protestants adhere to a literalist stance in regards to the text of scripture. This is reflected in the historical literature where Roman Catholic apologists argued against Reformation literalists during the debates the 16th century. But the the variance in belief is rather high in Protestantism, so just as there are fundamentalists, there are also groups like Congregationalists (in the United States) who are apt to take an even more allegorical tack on the scripture than Roman Catholics. In any case, the key point is that defenders of the viability of evolutionary theory are empirically correct when they commonly assert that most Christian denominations have no problem with accommodating descent with modification and an old earth. And yet half of the American public has rejected evolutionary theory in all its forms for decades, and there is often a tacit assumption that "genuine" Christianity necessarily rejects evolutionary theory.

Even though Roman Catholics tend to be far cooler to Creationist and quasi-Creationist narratives than Protestants in the United States, a substantial minority still adhere to a Creationist model.³ As a young adult I actually entered in conversations with many individuals who professed Roman Catholicism and Creationism, and here are the flavors I encountered:

• A subset asserted that Creationism was a necessary implication of their religious beliefs, and some averred that it was Church teaching.


• A subset didn't know what the Church taught about evolution (if it taught anything at all) and simply expressed their intuition that "Creation made sense."

The first position was easy to rebut in light of the statements on evolution going back to the 1950s by the Pope. Even in the pre-internet era they weren't hard for me to reference and point too. If the individuals in question did do the follow up reference check they were discomfited but would usually reluctantly switch their position, and least assume a more agnostic stance. This suggests to me that a proportion of the deviation from the American norm by Roman Catholics in regards to belief in evolution is a function of Church teaching, and perhaps even the imprimatur of religious respectibility given to it when it is taught in parochial schools. But where did these individuals get the idea that the Church taught something it didn't? I think the answer likes in the interface between psychology and culture.