Technorati suggests that there aren't too many inbound links to Robert Skipper's weblog. There should be. His most recent post is Solving Lewontin's "Paradox of Variation".

I'd like to give a shout out and request submissions for evolution & genetics related raps. Yo, you heard that right. Raps. Something that is redolent of "Lazy Sunday," I'm not looking for hard-core mimics of West coast thuggin' style. Incorporations of R.A. Fisher, Chuck D. (Charles Darwin) and W.D. Hamilton into the lyrics would be good. Doing some conversions like, "I'm going to smack your ass," to "I'm going to stat your ass" would be cool too. Get into a mindset of genomicists and statistical geneticists unintimidated by artful integrations of physical scientists. Not frontin' or trippin,' but calling out for respect.¹ Remember, evolution and genetics is in the end all about "playin."

Keep them short and sweet, and post them into the comments box. I'll take the best ones and repost them (with attribution if offered) on this and my other blog. Evangelicals have their "praise music," the evo-thugs need to represent!

Thanks ahead to all participants.

1 - Please keep intimations of gang-land style violence subtle and to a minimum. I'm look for a "positive" but hip face for evolution and genetics lyrics.

Today's London Sunday Times has an article here about a forthcoming theory on the evolution of blondeness in Northern Europe. The theory is that blondeness become common around the end of the last Ice Age as a result of strong sexual selection on females. Food was short and men had to go on long arduous hunting trips. A lot of them died, leaving a surplus of females, so there was pressure for females to attract mates, resulting in variant hair colour, etc., being selected.

The theory sounds to me like what is technically known as 'a load of bollocks', but hey, what do I know? Actually, what I do know is that women, unless they are very old or seriously ugly, have no difficulty in obtaining mates - all they have to do is to be available. The theory might be more plausible if the society were strictly monogamous, and women found it difficult to get a husband to provide for their children, but very few hunter-gatherer societies are strictly monogamous, least of all if there is a surplus of women.

Added: I see from a Google search that the theory is not that new. The author, Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, has been touting it in one form or another for some time. I should also say that even in a polygamous society sexual selection on females might operate through the quality of husbands, but I guess this would be a comparatively weak force, and what is needed for the theory is unusually strong selection.

Addendum from Razib: Remember, "beware of British newspapers." The story concludes with this old false story from 3 years ago:

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

John Hawks has more. A "recessive" trait like blondness will disappear when the frequency is so low within a panmictic population that the expectation of alleles conferring blondness coming together becomes very low. If you think of it as a monogenic trait (say on MC1R), then it is just a matter of Hardy-Weinberg, p² + 2pq + q² = 1, so if q was the frequency of the blonde allele than frequency of blondes would go to q². As it is, I don't see the process of panmictia in the near future....

Update II OK, I'm going to cut & paste my comment here so everyone sees it. For what it's worth, Dienekes has addressed Frost's thesis and offers his own counter-argument.

re: this theory. props to peter f. for throwing something out there. but, i must say that i am starting to feel that sexual selection is the new deus ex machina in lieu of random genetic drift. ?'s

1) is the asymmetry between Y and mtDNA long term effective population greater in northern/eastern europe than in southern/western europe (the blonde-non-blonde gradient).

2) what about other populations, like eskimos, where this process occurs? since selection can be stochastic it is not inevitable that blondness will be the novel or padaeomorphic cue. could east asian padeomorphism evolve from the same bias?

3) how did blondness increase in frequency among some australian aboriginals? the probability seems high that the trait is endogenous because its transmission mode seems different than that of europeans (though there isn't a perfect coupling between blondness and fair skin, they are connected in europeans via MC1R). i know that blondness is considered attractive among the women and youth there as well.

4) recent work points to selection on non-MC1R loci to generate light skin in europeans. this might have freed up MC1R to explore genetic space and evolve novelty. but, it might be that this process of sexual selection is ubiquitous in many (most) populations and that it stochastically fixed on different traits. (eg., epicanthic fold in asians)

5) is this runaway sexual selection? that implies coupling between the preference and the trait, and extremely fast evolution toward fixation of the trait sans functional/selective constraint. it doesn't seem that blondness has ever fixed, almost no population has a majority of adult female blondes (in c.s. coon he states that only in southern sweden does the intersection of blonde hair and blue eyes exceed 50% of the population).

6) what about traits like blue eyes? that seems unrelated to MC1R.

Here is the link to the abstract.

Just thought this tidbit from The Corner, by Tom Bethell* was interesting:

"Incidentally, this criticism, that Darwinism amounts to the retelling of Just-So Stories, was brilliantly made in the 1970s by Richard Lewontin of Harvard, now emeritus."

*The author of "The politically incorrect guide to science"

PS.
Sweden just won the Olympic Hockey Gold!!!! Whohoooooo! :P
DS.

Update from Razib: Derb schools The Corner on the Left & Right Creationists.

I began this series at my other blog before I became a poster here. You could read this on its own, but the first four parts -- I here, II here, III here, IV here -- provide the necessary background (esp. part I, first 3 paragraphs of part II, and part III, all of which are short). Briefly, the idea was to investigate whether microbes could affect human cognition in ways more subtle than rabies. Now comes the empirical support I've uncovered: a strong winter-spring birth seasonality effect on "genius," which I take to reflect early infection. (Somewhat long read.)

We present evidence that early infection likely contributes to "genius" status -- recall from part II our definition of "genius" as anyone who had an Index Score (IS) of at least 50 (from 0-100) in the inventories of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. The prediction is that at the highest level -- the "giants," who score in any category's 10th "decile" (i.e., IS at least 90) -- the births will be the most lopsided toward winter-spring (WS = Dec-Feb and Mar-May), when infant infection is most likely; that the top 5 deciles will show less lopsidedeness though still toward WS; and that the bottom 5 deciles will not necessarily show the pattern. More, we predict that the more abstract the field (and thus the more it requires superhuman creativity), the more pronounced the bias. We first examine the giants, then the geniuses of the most abstract fields -- Philosophy in the humanities, Music in the arts, and Math in the sciences -- and finally the geniuses of the remaining fields. In our research, we found birth month data only for Westerners, which constrains the scope of the argument w.r.t. the arts, though no non-Westerner is among the geniuses of any science category. All lists of births available by email (see my bl*gspot profile).

First, in HA 18 Westerners scored 90 or above in any field, though only 16 figures had known birth months (unknown: Aristotle & Hippocrates). Of these 16 giants, 14 are WS: Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Euler, Pasteur, Koch, Edison, Watt, Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo, Shakespeare. Among these, 10 are winter, 4 spring. Only 2 of 16 are summer-fall (SF): Lavoisier and Lyell. The prediction checks out: 87.5% are WS, and the actual value of winter births is 2.5 times the expected value of 4.

Next, the most abstract art: Music. Homo sapiens' natural mode of expression is linguistic, and we can grope our way through visual modalities such as gesture, mime, etc. But we are utterly at a loss when it comes to non-linguistic sound. Moreover, Western music emphasizes both complex melodies, which are serial, as well as complex harmonies, where notes are stacked on top of one another. Juggling these elements for various instruments in one's head, all while attempting expression in the most foreign of artistic languages, is the greatest test of artistic genius. The Western Music inventory is particularly instructive since birth months are known for all figures save a neglible number down in the 2nd decile (2D: we use XD as short-hand for the Xth decile). There are 5 geniuses (people in 6D-10D), all 5 of whom are WS: Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Wagner, Haydn. All graphs visible here.

Turning to the most abstract science, Math, there is little role for "inevitable discovery," and the objects it studies are farther removed from the real world than in other sciences. Moreover, we have less innate / intuitive scaffolding to hoist ourselves up by when it comes to math as compared to physics or biology. There are 8 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Euclid in 9D). Again, the hypothesis checks out, though not as strongly as in Music -- of the known 7, 5 are WS: Euler in 10D, Newton & Gauss in 9D, Descartes & Cantor in 6D. The 2 exceptions constitute 8D: Fermat & Leibniz.

As for Philosophy, it is the only humanities field Murray included, presumably because it is (at least for now) the only one demanding genius thought, fields like history being closer to (extremly important) clerical work. Again, we only found data for Westerners. There are 4 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown -- unfortunately, the top-ranked and only figure in 10D: Aristotle. We admit this weakness. Still, the hypothesis checks out -- of the known 3, all 3 are WS: Plato in 9D, Kant in 8D, Descartes in 6D.

To sum up so far: there are 17 geniuses in the three most abstract fields, and 15 of their birth months are known. 13 of these 15 (~87%) are WS, and the 2 exceptions show up in 8D in Math. So, the percentage of WS is almost identical to that among giants, though the gross overrepresenation of winter births is gone: of these 15, only 3 (or 4 -- Plato was born in either Dec or May) are winter, which, depending on Plato's birth, is either 0.25 above or 0.75 below the expectation of 3.75.

The link to the graphs begins w/ raw number and percentage of summer-fall births in the three most abstract fields; SF are shown in order to highlight data points that falsify the hypothesis. A dashed line indicates no data points in that decile; a red numeral indicates the number of points in the decile for which data were not found. Depending on the inventory, some of the lower deciles were not examined since 1) they did not bear on the hypothesis, 2) they had larger numbers that would have required more hard labor to collect, and 3) these are the people most likely to fluctuate in and out of the inventory depending on which encyclopedias are consulted (unlike, e.g., Mozart or Newton).

Next is a graph of the other arts, Western Art and Western Literature. In Art, there are 5 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Titian in 6D). Of the known 4, 3 are WS: Michelangelo in 10D, Raphael in 7D, Leonardo in 6D. The 1 exception, in 7D, is one of the few people widely considered by reviewers of HA to be an epochcentric anomaly (see, e.g., this review by Denis Dutton): Picasso, who scores two deciles above Dürer, Rembrandt, Giotto, Bernini, Cezanne, & Rubens (5D). The least abstract art, Lit, we predict to be least lopsided toward WS since Murray explains that creators of Lit encyclopedias strongly consider the role the writer played in social movements, since writing is used not only for expression but for communication and persuasion. (The Art and Music inventories do not show such an effect.) E.g., for his political impact, Rousseau (in 5D) ranks two deciles above inter alia Aeschylus, Ovid, Whitman, & Proust. There are 5 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Homer in 6D). Of the known 4, only 1 is WS: Shakespeare, the lone figure in 10D. As the graph shows, Lit is the most SF-friendly art, as predicted.

We continue w/ a graph of the Combined Sciences. Murray only listed the top 20 figures, though his point was only to illustrate the "big fish in a small pond" effect for figures such as Lyell who dominate their small pond but don't show up in the larger pond. There are 6 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Aristotle in 8D). Of the 5 known, 4 are WS: Newton in 10D, Galileo in 9D, Kepler & Descartes in 6D. The 1 exception is Lavoisier in 6D. So considering the sciences as a whole, the prediction is met.

Considering each scientific pond, we turn next to the three most established sciences after Math: Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomy. In Physics, there are 9 geniuses, of whom only 4 are WS, though these include the two in 10D -- Newton & Einstein -- along w/ Galileo in 9D and Thomson in 6D. The exceptions are Rutherford & Faraday in 9D and Cavendish, Bohr, & Maxwell in 6D. In Chemistry, there are just 3 geniuses, 1 of whom is WS: Scheele in 6D. The 2 exceptions are Lavoisier in 10D and Berzelius in 7D. In Astronomy, there are 9 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Ptolemy in 8D). Of the 8 known, 5 are WS: Galileo & Kepler in 10D, Laplace & Copernicus in 8D, and Brahe in 6D. The 3 exceptions are Herschel in 9D, and Halley & Cassini in 6D. So, by zooming in closer on each pond, the actual value of WS is 0.5 below expectation (10 of 21 in these three fields), which weakens the hypothesis. Alternatively, sub-giant-level insight in these sciences may not require as much "outside the box" creativity as does giant-level insight in these sciences, or as does sub-giant insight in the arts.

Now we consider the two least abstract sciences (as of 1950, when Murray's survey ended): Earth Sciences and Biology. In Earth Sciences, there are 4 geniuses, 2 of whom are WS: William Smith & Agricola (Georg Bauer) in 6D. The 2 exceptions are Lyell in 10D and Hutton in 8D. This matches the prediction that the least abstract field will not show lopsidedness toward WS (as w/ Lit). Biology is another case in point, since by 1950 it was barely established as a field and not very abstract at that. There are 7 geniuses, 2 of whose birth months are unknown (Aristotle in 10D and Harvey in 6D). Of the known 5, just 2 are WS: Darwin in 10D and Linnaeus in 6D. The 3 exceptions are Lamarck in 10D, Cuvier in 9D, and Morgan in 8D.

None of the geniuses who developed biology into a mature science during the 20th Century even made it to 4D, again because Murray's encyclopedias focused on periods before 1950. For example, Darwin the Second -- Bill Hamilton -- is not included at all, while R.A. Fisher barely shows up in 1D. Though it is too early to provide a ranking of who encyclopedias 200 years from now will consider the equivalents of Newton and Rutherford, we can at least come up w/ an unordered list of newcomers and their birth seasons: Hamilton (sum), Haldane (fall), Fisher (win), Wright (win), Smith (win), Trivers (win). This is not definitive, but on the right track.

Haldane is clearly an exception, and though Hamilton's data point may appear to falsify the hypothesis of higher likelihood of infant infection among geniuses, the fuller story is revealing. Unlike every other European genius, he was born in Cairo, Egypt's most crowded, slum-ridden urban area, in Aug 1936 -- less than 4 months after Egypt had even established a Ministry of Health! More, his mother was a medical doctor, who would've been exposed to god knows what in those days and potentially have brought it home. In this sole case, we consider geographical location to be more informative than WS birth in assessing likelihood of infant infection. The geniuses in other categories show a general bias toward urban birth, but the effect is not as strong as birth month, and it is susceptible to alternative interpretations. We return to this point later.

Finally, we consider the two applied sciences: Technology and Medicine. While Technology is by definition creative and inventive, we are agnostic on whether it requires the genius of Beethoven or Newton; and Medicine is largely discovery, not creative model-building. Nevertheless, next is a graph for these two. In Technology, there are 6 geniuses, 1 of whose birth months is unknown (Archimedes in 6D). All 5 of the known are WS: Edison, Watt Leonardo, Huygens, Marconi. In Medicine, there are 8 geniuses, 3 of whose birth months are unknown (Hippocrates in 9D, Galen in 8D, and Paracelsus in 7D). Of the 5 known, all 5 are WS: Pasteur in 10D, Koch in 9D, and Ehrlich, Laennec, & McCollum in 6D. We interpret these data as not falsifying the hypothesis, though hardly a ringing endorsement of it, given the conceptual nature of the fields, their relative immaturity up to 1950, and the lacunae among the data for Medicine.

So, overall the hypothesis passes the tests for finding lopsided seasonality among genius births in abstract, creative fields, as we believe the Combined Sciences ranking better highlights scientific genius than the rankings in the separate fields which compose it. This was especially so for the mostly-winter "giants." But how do we interpret this finding? First, imagine we examined another trait w/ 0.5 probability of occuring in the general population -- say, male vs female sex. If we observed a similarly lopsided male to female ratio, we would need to account for it somehow: sex discrimination, different distributions in cognitive ability, a mix, etc. We find it implausible that social factors contribute to the seasonality of genius births: there is no evidence that WS children are encouraged more, that SF suffer Zodiac "stereotype threat," that either of these would make such a difference in magnitude anyway, and so on. In epidemiological studies, seasonality of births is typically taken to reflect the role of infection, as it cannot be easily confounded w/ other variables, unlike the effect of urban birth -- the latter could reflect selection bias for higher IQ, class structure, better access to mentors, and so forth. But the only powerful, non-magical explanation for seasonality is infection.

In principle, WS seasonality could also reflect, e.g., lack of sun exposure and thus lack of vitamin D. But unlike vitamins, microbes are alive & evolving, meaning their presence (or absence) can have either positive or negative effects, depending on whether they are mutualist or parasitic. We cannot easily conceive of how lack of vitamin D would help smart people become singular geniuses, so we find subtle microbial influence much more plausible. Indeed, a recent study done to assess seasonality of schizophrenic births also found higher cognitive development among normal WS children, as measured by various psychometric tests, though the data do not report adult IQ, which would be more noteworthy.

Now, are we saying that early infection is all there is to genius? No, because we already know from Behavior Genetics that in adulthood, the broad-sense heritability of g is ~0.7, so genes certainly play a crucial role as well, not to mention access to mentors, etc. Recall that in the lower 5 deciles of the inventories, there was no apparent seasonality, so this infection likely plays a role in a tiny minority of cases indeed -- though these are the most impressive of cases -- and again we assume the affected individuals already had a high IQ due to additive genetic effects. But since we do not know exactly what the germs are, we cannot tell what effect they would have on an average or below-average intellect; in principle, it could go either way. Therefore if the germs were identified, administering them in the hopes of turning one's child into the next Mozart would almost certainly fail, since presumably many more individuals were infected in addition to Mozart, Newton, et al. Now, if the parents had good reason to believe their child's IQ would already be quite high, the prospect would be more promising.

Where, then, does this leave us as far as exploring the cells in the "brain germ" matrix outlined in part III? We are utterly clueless as to the route, aside from knowing that it must begin early after birth, and we are also unsure of its impact of reproductive fitness. We could not easily locate data for average family size in the times and places that produced the "giants," but here are the numbers of children sired by each of the 14 WS giants: 0 (Newton, Beethoven, Michelangelo), 1 (Koch), 3 (Galileo, Kepler, Einstein, Shakespeare), 5 (Pasteur), 6 (Edison, Watt, Mozart), 10 (Darwin), and 13 for the man whose genetic output was second only to his mathematical (Euler). How these actual values compare to the expected values given the time & place in which they flourished, we leave open for now.

So if early infection is one piece of the puzzle behind Galilean excellence, might better hygiene play a role in the decline of the per capita *rate* of accomplishment that Murray wrestles w/ in HA (Ch. 21), which accelerated downward after 1800? Part of his argument is that the secularization of Europe left each generation after ~1800 w/ less motivation to pursue their calling in life. As in our discussion in Part IV of Judith Rich Harris' personality model, we don't discount social influences such as the ones Murray mentions. However, in Murray's own list of "Significant Events" (Ch. 9) for Medicine, he has boldfaced the entry of 1796 to underscore its importance: "Edward Jenner systematizes vaccination for smallpox, founding immunology" (p.194; original emphasis).

During the 19th Century, the scientists Paul Ewald calls "the microbe hunters" in his book Plague Time began searching out infectious causes for diseases and proposing cures or preventative measures, including Semmelweis' efforts to introduce rigorous hygiene among doctors who were delivering newborns in order to cut down neonatal mortality rates, not to mention Pasteur's establishment of the germ theory of disease and Koch's formulation of Koch's Postulates to determine infectious origin. Conversely, we interpret the increasing rate of accomplishment up to and shortly after the Renaissance to reflect in part the increasingly frequent exposure to microbes as a result of urbanization. Similar reasoning suggests a partial reason for why advanced civilizations produce more geniuses than hunter-gatherers.

The early immunological efforts and their present-day descendents have surely improved the quality of life for the average person born in Western nations. Yet they might also have contributed to the decline in the rate of genius-level accomplishment. As elsewhere, science can only illuminate a trade-off -- if our interpreation is correct, in this case between level of public health and rate of genius-level excellence -- and the value judgment of where to resolve the trade-off is ultimately up to the individual or the society, not scientists. More big thinkers are better than fewer, ceteris paribus, but few will accept a larger percentage of geniuses if it requires diminishing the effect of public health on quality of life for the average person. Still, we feel a certain optimism is in order: after all, the Industrial and Information Revolutions took off when the rate of accomplishment was declining, suggesting that what matters on a day-to-day level -- e.g., having electricity so you can listen to a Chopin CD -- is more a function of the raw number of big thinkers rather than their proportion of the general population.

Epilogue: Psychology. I can hardly drone on about genius cognition w/o mentioning the geniuses of Psychology. Now, the field is far too immature to show up in Murray's survey, but I came up w/ the tiny handful of psychologists I estimate will compose the top 5 deciles in the 200th anniversary edition of HA. There are two main groups in psychology: those that deal w/ universals and those that deal w/ individual differences. From the former, I'd wager that Francis Galton (win) will make it. From the latter, I'd wager that William James (win) will make it, and perhaps the founders of the two fields of cognitive psychology that are best understood: language pioneer Noam Chomsky (win) and vision pioneer David Marr (win). Just as I assume Cuvier will fall from the top 5 deciles in Biology once Hamilton & Fisher work their way into the encyclopedias, I assume the following will drop from their (even now decreasing) Deity status: Freud (win), Skinner (spr), & Piaget (sum).

Michael J. Totten has an interesting piece where he interviews the religious leader of the Yezidis. I read a book on the Yezidis in college...and their "history" is difficult to untangle. If I had to bet I would contend that their assertion of the being the ur-religion of the Kurds is a rather late invention. I once talked a Kurdish cab-driver in Chicago who repeated the idea that Yezidism was the Kurdish ur-religion, so this idea seems accepted among Muslims. The Yezidi beliefs are a melange, and there are indications from their rituals that they were either Jacobite Christians or strongly influenced by Jacobite Christianity. Additionally, there are historical records of paganism within the mountains of Kurdistan, during the 17th century a Ottoman padishah was making his progress through this region and stumbled upon a village where everyone worshipped the sun. This solar paganism offended the padishah, and eventually the village converted to Jacobite Christianity (at least outwardly) to avoid his wrath. This area has a long historical record of solar paganism, the city of Haran in upper Syria was spared forced Christianization¹ during the 6th century because of special protection that the Persian shah extended to it (though it was in Byzantine territory, its nearness to the Persian Empire rendered it vulnerable to attack). Haran remained a pagan city with an indigenous religion at the time of the Muslim conquest.

The Middle East certainly has many peculiar cults. One observation I have read is that the closer you get to the center of the Islamic world the greater the variation in belief and tendency toward heterodoxy. For example, the frequency of Shiism drops to zero at the antipodes of the Dar-al-Islam. The Muslim nations with non-Sunni majorities or large minorites are generally part of the "Islamic core," many of the Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia), Oman, Yemen, Syria, Iran and Lebanon. Heterodox semi and quasi Islamic groups also seem far more prominent in the Fertile Crescent than elsewhere. Aside from the Yezidis you have the Druze, the Alevis, the Alawites and the Mandaeans.

1 - The Baalbek valley was forcibly Christianized while missionaris were sent into central Anatolia during the 6th century under Justinian so as to finally complete the nominal unification of the Byzantine Empire religiously.

The Australian Tourism Board has a new commercial out titled So where the bloody hell are you? At the link provided you have options to view the video, but, as a test I invite you to select the windows media or quicktime (not the "play" button) video and place the screen in the background so you can't see the people and listen to the female voices and rank them in attractiveness. The second time please click the "play," it will cover your full screen and you can check out what people look like see how closely your inferences by voice match reality.

Theological Incorrectness by Jason Slone is a pretty slim and insubstantial book, but, it has a great chapter that comes close to parodying the "discourse" in modern cultural anthropology. I am interested in anthropology and comparisons between cultures. Myself, I personally span two cultures,¹ and feel somewhat an alien in both. Because of my perspective there is one trend in modern cultural anthropology, and to some extent the "multiculturalist" zeitgeist, that I have found profoundly alien, and that is to view culture as something out there that has almost divine power to shape and distort our perception and experience of the world around us. To be succinct, many who are influenced by a "Culturalist" mode of thinking seem to conceive of the world like so:

Culture (individual) = suite of behaviors and perceptions

That is, culture operates like a function upon the individual and spits out a particular range or likelihood of behaviors and modifies and shapes one's understanding of reality. This is taken to its extremes in claims of cultural relatively, in a denial that humans across societies have some basal fundamental feelings, yearnings and priorities. In other words, it is the idea that norms and personalities are arbitrary complexes shaped purely by cultural inputs. Being a divine essence which pervades the universe the new Culturalism denies intelligibility across peoples, it argues that relativism must reign supreme because each Culture has its own independent set of norms, inviolate axioms which lay are the foundations of individual worldviews. Warped by their cultural filter humans can not "step out" and view the world from the without and model it as a dynamic system which can be characterized by general patterns, trends and laws.

I won't belabor my point, most of you know what I am getting at. Slone suggests that the "thick description" and anti-generalist discourse & critique in modern anthropology is a path to nowhere, a dead end. Anthropologists like Scott Atran have plainly called bullshit on the tendency to claim that each culture exists as a distinct set of norms and values only intelligible from the "inside," as the anthropologists who are making the assertion themselves are on the "outside" but making knowledge claims, and often in their everyday conversation belie their contention of the reality of outsider-ignorance.

It seems a trivial assertion to contend that culture exists within the minds of humans and throughout the course of their interactions. Since humans exist in this world there are obvious constraints and probabilistic paths of cultural evolution and selection. Intelligibility is a given because we are all humans. Clarity is not guaranteed, and misunderstanding is common. When the vessels of the Chinese Muslim explorer Zheng He visited the Malabar coast of southern India they characterized the Hindus as Buddhists (idolaters). When Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut nearly a century later he doffed his cap to some Brahmin priests he saw on the promenade, taking them for Roman Catholic clerics. Hindus are neither Buddhists nor Catholics, both groups who came from the outside saw what they were conditioned to see by their own experience of the world and the categories with which they were familiar, but, it is understandeable why they made the mistakes they did. These sort of confusions, ubiquitous as they are, make cross-cultural communication as impossible as male-female relationships (don't finish that thought!). In other words, necessary and doable, if not always easy.

Culture is an amorphous mess, and its constituent parts influence each other, as do the people who channel ideas and motifs. I have spoken of the fact that I believe that the God of the philosophers and the God of the people are two different entities, just as some Gnostics asserted that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of the New Testament were different entities. In this case, variation within the human mind results in different outputs from the same putative inputs. Or, consider the Protestant Christianity of South Korea and that of Sub-Saharan Africa. Both these regions have been Christianized only within the past few generations from northern European cultural sources, but the forms that the faith has taken differs radically. My exploration of the scene of Protestant Korean Christianity suggests that it is taking a course not dissimilar from that of European Christianity, developing a sophisticated liberal modernist theology at sharp variance with the orthodox conservative substrate. One strand of Korean Christianity is highly rational, systematic and philosophical, even if the majority of it reflects a shamanistic sensibility in the power of God to offer favor to his believers or an Old Time fundamentalist literalism. I do not know of similar developments in Africa even though the religious scene is just as vibrant (in fact more so, half of Koreans lack religious affiliation and a large minority are atheists). The point is that the different cultures had their own biases and simply refashioned a set of beliefs and norms which were transmitted to them from Europeans. This is why I tire of heuristics such as "Christianity implies...." One can speak to creedal confessions, but as to whether Christianity accepts polygyny, prosperity theology or ancestor worship is culturally conditioned. Humans aren't robots who are preprogrammed with hard-coded lines of C without flexible conditionals.

On another forum I got into a long dispute with someone who was expressed a Culturalist perspective. Ultimately we kept talking past each other until he asked me whether I thought that a Chinese peasant and a European peasant would have the same cognitive states. His contention was that "forward thinking" Christianity was critical to breaking out of the normative "cyclical" mode of cosmology that dominated the pagan mentality. I think the problem here is that most humans can barely define the difference between a circle and a line, let along allow the implications of linear eschatologies to percolate into their minds. I get tired of the stories about how culture A makes people behave in way X because you can tell almost any story with the enormous sample space of data you have. I know because I do know enough factual tidbits that I could dishonestly abduce all sorts of rubbish which I have no faith in simply by biasing the data set.

But do cognitive differences exist? Yes, I suspect so. But need we to get off our asses, and stop pretending like what we think we know is sufficient to model the world as it is.

Consider this paper (PDF):

This study examined the emergence of cultural self-constructs as reflected in children's remembered and conceptual aspects of self. European American and Chinese children in preschool through 2nd grade participated (N = 180). Children each recounted 4 autobiographical events and described themeslves in response open-ended questions. American children often provided elaborate and detailed memories focusing on their own roles, preferences, and feelings; they also frequently described themsleves in terms of personal attributes, abstract dispositions, and inner traits in a positive light. Chinese children provided relatively skeletal accounts of past experiences that centered on social interactions and daily routes, and they often described themselves in terms of social roles, context-specific characteristics, and overt behaviors in a neutral or modest tone....

The findings aren't too surprising, but read the whole paper, some of the results conflicted with the researcher's a priori expectations based on their model of cultural differences. That's why they did the research!

About 6 months ago I asked Chris of Mixing Memory about cognitive psychological studies which examined how believers in different religions conceived of the world around them, how they reacted to a range of inputs, etc. Chris didn't know of any such studies. My knowledge of the literature suggests that cognitive scientists are spending a lot of time understsanding the universal basal aspects of religious belief, as opposed to the cross-cultural variation and possible deep differences in perception and reaction to the world based on the religious ideology they profess to follow. My hunch is that controlling for variables the impact of religious ideology is less than one would think. That is, religious views and interpretations are driven forward by cultural assumptions and currents, they do not hold culture and individual on a tight leash. To be specific and frank, the savagery of Islam today is a function of the savagery of the cultures that espouse Islam, not the religion itself (and there was a time when Islam was an exemplar of civilized cosmopolitanism). Did Islam have a role independently in the current state of the Muslim world? Perhaps. But the current models bandied about in the public forum are far too glib and skeletal for my taste. Since I've come close to espousing nominalism in terms of what the religious labels mean substantively I'll stop there, because I've come close to saying something about nothing.

Suppositions need to be tested. My patience is running thin on bullshit derived from reading The Jerusalem Post and two Bernard Lewis books (if you know considerably more than me about an aspect of history which I'm enthusiastic about I'll be sure to be wowed of course!). I nearly shut down the blog in disgust after Matt McIntosh's post (and one GNXP contributor had their account deleted and I sent out some nasty emails to people I don't normally pick fights with).

I recall watching a documentary about the Ottoman Empire once. There was one montage where janissaries were drumming on the war march. There is something hypnotic about battle music, thousands of men marching in tandem to kill other humans, emotionally driven to irrational self-sacrifice and putting their own existence in jeopardy. The reptilian brain is a persistent seductress. Whatever general intelligence humans have, that does not imply that our rationality is not easy to scratch off given the appropriate teases. I see us standing at the apex of a steep ridge, and the snake is whispering in our ears to dash left or right. To one side are the howlers of the one true faith, those who know the truth and live for the acclaim of their fellows, who thrive on boiling blood and the exultation of rhetorically slippery point after point sliding under the armor. To the other side are thriving legions drunk on the delusions of their own solipsistic dreams, follies and fantasies. They have abandoned the quest in favor of indulgences and personal gratification. Shall we join the battle? Not yet. We may broker a less costly peace if God is on our side. But if you want to prepare your armor for battle, be my guest, leave us, but the hill is steep, I don't expect to see you back.

1 - The span is not symmetric. My Bengali aspects are accidents.

Over the past day the query Shiite vs. Sunni in google has sent us a swarm of traffic, for obvious reasons. Religious taxonomy is a nasty thing. Godless Capitalist once expressed the opinion that trying to figure out the stamp collections of religous sects was as worthwhile as comic book systematics...the only problem of course is that people don't kill each other over comic book differences. As an unbeliever I have expressed the opinion that I don't think most religions are that special or distinctive cognitively, but as a student of humanity I also am aware that believers imbue their religious affiliation with deep and powerful significance. People kill each other over religious differences...but these motivations are also usually in part a mask for other fissues and factions. The Greek pagans of the 4th century quipped that the Christians killed each other over a letter, homoousia, the same essence, being the Trinitarian position, and homoiousia, the similar essence, being an Arian position. There was certainly more to it than one letter,¹ many have noted the power of heresies in non-Greek regions of the Eastern Roman Empire, ergo, the implication that theological disputation was a mask for nationalist dicontent. This begs the question as to the validity of "nationalist" identities during this period, and further ignores the reality that Aramaic speaking Palestine was firmly orthodox while the primary propagandizers for the heretical movements within the Eastern Church were Greek speakers themselves.

In regards to this "Shia vs. Sunni" schism, and the barbarity of impending civil war, it makes us reflect on our suppositions about the "unity of Islam." One might suppose that this conflict has deep roots in the conflict between Shia and Sunni in Iraq, but the historical reality is that the Shia majority of the geographical region which composes Iraq today is an artifact of the 19th century! As European engineering reopened vast swaths of southern Iraq to farming, traditionally Sunni nomads began to settle and become farmers. The non-nomad population of southern Iraq at this period consisted of Shia, many of them derived from pilgrims who had settled in the holy cities of the region and were Iranian in origin.² The new farmers picked up the religious affiliation of the long-standing residents of the area, and there you have the Arab Shia majority in the nation-state that became Iraq. The shift from "Sunnism" to "Shia" identity suggests a fluidity that is belied by the fact that people kill each other over these differences. It has been suggested that the number of Shia in Pakistan increased in the 1980s in response to the partial imposition of Sharia in Pakistan during the rule of Zia-ul-Huq because the Shia traditions were more liberal. As I have noted before, the Alawites of Syria seem to have shifted in their identity quite a bit in the 20th century, going from the gray land between Islam and non-Islam to Twelver Shiism. If you may indulge me a bit, the idea that the Alawites are Twelver Shia is ludicruous when you compare their beliefs and habits with non-Twelver Shia who are far less heterodox. But, it makes more sense when you consider that the declaration that the Alawites were Twelver Shia occurred during a time when sectarian conflict in Lebanon made it politic for the Lebanese Shia to express solidarity with the religious elite of their larger neighbor.

The point is that there are layers within layers, and peeling the pages of this book back you become less and less sure of the boundaries, categories and definitions you once thought were hard and fast. On the one hand, I am suggesting that religious identity is far more fluid and subject to the vicissitudes of personal and social history. But I also do not deny that people kill themselves in part due to religious motivations. I suspect part of the answer lay in understanding the cognition of human beings, and stepping back from the assumption that humans are unitary reflective beings. Rather, we are decomposed into various sub-entities with specific axioms and utility functions, and to top it off many of these sub-entities are not exposed to our conscious mind.

Weird Addendum: In the "I don't get religious people category," please read about the Domneh. Also, in No God but God Reza Aslan writes that Shah Ismail, founder of the Safavid dynasty which converted all of Iran to Twelver Shiism, proclaimed himself mahdi by declaring "I am God, very God, very God!" Here is something via google print (type "Shah Ismail I am God"):

My name is Shah Isma'il. I am God's mystery.
I am the leader of all these ghazis....
I am the living Khidr, and Jesus, son of Mary.
I am the Alexander of my contemporaries.

The Perfect Guid has arrived. Faith has been brought to all.
All the ghazis are full of joy at the coming of the seal of the Prophets.
A man has become a manifestation of the truth.
Prostrate thyself!
Pander not to Satan! Adam has put on new clothes.
God has come.

Tell us what you reall think buddy (remember, Islam abominates idolatry!)....

1 - Some historians had asserted that the espousal of Arianism by Constantius II was the primary factor in sustaining that faction as a force deep into the 4th century. Why was Constantius an Arian? Many contend it was the influence of his tutor, the bishop Eusebius. The point is that major historical dynamics may be rooted in such capricious and arbitrary convergences.

2 - I say Iranian specifically to include the large Turkic population of Iran.

Update: More comments here, here and here.
End update

Desidancer and Diana both pointed me to this story about a mixed race couple who gave birth to daughters of very different phenotypes. The explanation in the story is about right, the loci which give you a gestalt impression of racial identity are a tiny sample of your overall genome. In the story it is reported that 7 genes control skin color and F1 (first generation) hybrids should carry half of the variants of each race (since their parents contribute exactly 50% of the genes to each). But the F2 generation can come out as a range of combinations, so it stands to reason that mixed-race couples will have children who vary a great deal in phenotype as the alleles resegregate themselves into alternative combinations. I lay out the details in By the Punnett Square. South Asians, who often exhibit a wide range of color variation from near white to near black, should not be surprised at this sort of dynamic, as the variance within a family can be rather large in complexion.

In any case, independent assortment implies that even if the coloration of these two children reflects one of their ancestral ethnic groups, other traits do not necessarily line up in such a fashion. Since the twins above are babies it is hard to discern facial traits (they just look like babies), but I wouldn't be surprised if the "white" and "black" baby had facial traits that were more equidistant to the metrics of whites and blacks (this would be expectation, though you expect a lot of variance still). There is a reason that in much of the southern part of the New World where admixture between Africans, Europeans and American indigenes is common, there are dozens of definitions for racial phenotypes, because the full range of appearance is expressed in a large enough mixing population (eg, there are terms for people with Negroid facial features and hair form and Nordic coloration and European facial features and hair form and Sub-Saharan African coloration).

By the way, as personal stories like this become more common hopefully we'll stop hearing about how everyone in the future will be brown because of admixture. More values at each variable will result in an increase in variance for the distribution, not a decrease.

Update: OK, I think I need to repost this link, The incidence of superfecundation and of double paternity in the general population:

Sometimes superfecundation occurs by two different men. The frequency with which this occurs must depend on rates of infidelity (promiscuity). It is suggested that among DZ twins born to married white women in the U.S., about one pair in 400 is bipaternal. The incidence may be substantially higher in small selected groups of dizygotic twin maternities, eg. those of women engaged in prostitution.

In other words, double paternity is a possible explanation, but if the number of loci in question is seven or less than this is surely will the expected range due to variance emerging from heterozygosity in the parents¹ (and we are only looking at skin color here from what I can tell, the two infants are still of the "baby race," other features are not at play). I don't think that the expectation of double paternity, evening adjusting for SES, approaches the probability that "white" and "black" color genes will resegregate in this fashion.

Update II: David points out that this is being reported in the British newspapers, which does alter your Bayesian priors, but walk around Lowell, Massachusetts, and observe the range in phenotype of the Cape Verdian community. The general point still stands.

1 - Fisher's 1918 paper dealt in large part with the variance expected from heterozygous parents.

The existence of cooperation is one of the major problems in human evolution. Among non-human animals, cooperation is rare except among individuals who are closely related. Among humans, in contrast, it is common. The problem is to explain this in view of the temptation to 'defect' from cooperation, obtaining its benefits without its costs. The problem is classically exemplified in the game of the Prisoner's Dilemma, where in any single play of the game it is always advantageous for an individual to defect, even though two players who cooperate will both do better than two who defect.

A variety of solutions to the problem have been suggested. They include:

- reciprocal altruism in repeated interactions (Trivers)

- group selection for benefits to the social group (D. S. Wilson, Boyd and Richerson, and others)

- cooperation enforced by punishment, including 'altruistic' punishment (see e.g. here)

- indirect fitness benefits to cooperators, such as sexual selection via the Handicap Principle.

An interesting alternative or addition to these solutions has been developed in recent work by F. C. Santos and colleagues. The main papers are available here. (NB some of these are in preprint form, so they may not correspond exactly to published versions). As far as I understand it (which may not be very far) the key feature of the Santos model is that societies have a heterogeneous structure, in such a way that some individuals have more social interactions than others. The results of simulations appear to show that for plausible values of the parameters cooperation can prevail even in the classical Prisoner's Dilemma game, where each pair of individuals meet at random and interact no more than once.

This appears paradoxical, because there is no doubt that if players interact at random, the average payoff per interaction is greater for defectors than cooperators, whatever their proportions in the population. If payoffs are measured in reproductive fitness one would therefore expect defectors to drive cooperators to extinction. The solution to the paradox is that the total payoff to each individual depends not only on his average payoff per interaction, but on his total number of interactions with all other individuals. Provided the average payoff is positive, a player with a lower average payoff, but a lot of interactions, may do better overall than one with a higher average payoff but fewer interactions. So if 'cooperative' individuals have more interactions than 'defectors', they may do better than defectors even if their interactions with cooperators and defectors are random in the sense that they are in line with their proportions in the population.

There may be a suspicion of some fallacy in this argument, and on reading the Santos papers I didn't understand how cooperators could have more interactions overall without also driving up the number of interactions (and the total payoff) for defectors. However, I worked through a few simple numerical examples to satisfy myself that the model can work. The explanation is that an increase in the total interactions of cooperators does increase the interactions of defectors, but not to the same extent as for cooperators. By analogy, suppose that males and females have both homosexual and heterosexual encounters. It would then be possible for males (or females) to increase their total number of both homosexual and heterosexual encounters, maintaining the same proportions of these as before, while the other sex increased only its heterosexual encounters. In the same way, if cooperators increase their number of interactions with both cooperators and defectors, they may increase their total number of interactions compared to defectors. The average payoff per interaction for cooperators is unchanged, while for defectors it increases (because a higher proportion of their interactions are with cooperators), but the total payoff to cooperators relative to defectors can still increase.

Of course, this shows only that the model is possible, not that it is realistic in practice. It is certainly realistic to suppose that different individuals have differing numbers of social interactions, but this does not explain why cooperators should have more interactions than defectors. Unless we suppose that the tendency to interact is somehow correlated with the tendency to cooperate, it would seem to be a matter of chance whether cooperation evolves.

But the problem disappears if we allow something equivalent to reputation to enter the model, because individuals with a reputation as cooperators will have more encounters than those with a reputation as defectors. I therefore suspect that the Santos model will be most useful in conjunction with models involving reputation and reciprocity, which arise mainly in humans and other social animals with advanced cognitive capacities.

Added: I should have emphasised that the ultimate outcome depends on the parameters. If the advantage per interaction of defection relative to cooperation is too large, the 'Santos Effect' will only slow down the elimination of cooperators, not prevent it. Cooperation will only prevail in the long run if the difference in payoffs is small-to-moderate.

One of the things that really, really, sucks about the "ID vs. Evolution" "controversy" is how much oxygen it can suck out of the air which could be devoted to shiznit like this, Structural variation in the human genome, Nature Reviews Genetics. One of the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on how you view it) rules of the game in regards to the old classical genetics was that humans were mostly theory and observational inference (eg, pedigree analysis), while the real experimental work was done in flies or mice.¹ If terms like "additive genetic variance" and "fitness" were difficult to get a good finger on when you are talking about lines of Drosophila to whom you are the evil demon with the writ of life, death, fecundity and extinction, then they were really in a nasty situation when you knocked around some assumptions to hold you steady in regards to humans. This is kind of a shame because God the Father of the Trinity of modern population genetics, R.A. Fisher, was interested in humans most of all of all the creations of the Demiurge. The great thing about genomics is humans aren't relegated to the back seat anymore (again, many people might not revel in our return to the state of natural examination). In fact, conservation geneticists who work with wildlife are now eager to piggy back on techniques funded by the good graces of the NIH for the sake of human gene sequencing and expression analysis. The genomic revolution has put humans back at the center of the scientific universe as players. Anyway, the 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.

1 - The old physical anthropology was mostly description and narrative storytelling.

What is the good life for you?

The nature of religion and Breaking the Spell, The story of symbolic algebra and The society of science.

I have a review of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors coming out in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine. Wade's book covered the intersection of genetics and human evolution, so it was a quick and interesting read.