PLoS Genetics has published an interview with Spencer Wells of the Genographic project. A very good read.

Some new data to throw into the argument about the origin of light skin (it seems that dark skin obviously arose when we lost our fur, seeing as functional constraint is strong in dark-skinned populations and unexposed skin in our nearest primate relatives is pink). From Dienekes:

Women have lighter skin than men do across a wide range of populations, even on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm, possibly because of sexual selection by men for lighter-skinned women. If this hypothesis is true, human skin color should become more sexually dimorphic with increasing distance from the equator, since sexual selection for lighter skin in women would be less constrained by natural selection for darker skin in both sexes. Yet when Madrigal and Kelly (2006) analyzed skin reflectance data from 53 different samples, they found that the most dimorphic human populations were actually those of medium skin color at medium latitudes.

Dienekes presents some values, and suggests that "In these data points it looks to me that Iranians and Kurds have the highest sexual dimorphism." I don't know what to make of that. Recall that sexual dimorphism often arises rather slowly as a genetically coded trait because obviously if you select for one sex at one end of the population range (sexual selection usually operates via male reproductive skew in most populations), their opposite sex offspring should also skew in that direction. A more complex genetic architecture which takes into account modifier genes on sex chromosomes (which will differ across sexes), or modulation via expression of sex hormones (which are dependent upon loci on those sex chromosomes ultimately, like SRY), seems necessary. Also, I was skimming through Nina Jablonski's Skin:A Natural History and on page 89 she states: "...one consistent observation is that women have lighter skin color than men. This is true for all indigenous peoples, even for those who are very dark-skinned, among whom such differences are not readily visible...." Jablonski's own hypothesis is presented in her paper The Evolution of Human Skin Color:

...the lighter skin pigmentation of females is needed to permit relatively greater UV light penetration of the integument for previtamin D₃ synthesis. The extra calcium needs of females during pregnancy and lactation are met by increasing plasma concentrations of 1.25-dihydroxyvitamin D, which in turn enhances calcium absorption in the intestine....

Pregancy and lactation are critical periods which determine fitness. By focusing on this Jablonski gets a pretty good yield in terms of differential fecundity. She does not dismiss the importance of sexual selection as a secondary or subsequent factor in generating or heightening dimorphism. For the general interpopulation variation in skin color Jablonski focuses upon the balance between the need to prevent the breakdown of folate (due to UV) and produce enough vitamin D (also due to UV). She points to the Inuit as exceptions that prove the rule, insofar as their dark-skin is comprehensible because their diet is rich in vitamin D.

From the genomic perspective we know that the architecture varies by location for similar phenotypic outcomes in regards to skin color. Even if the locus where a derived allele emerges is the same across two populations to generate the same phenotype (or contribute to the overall effect), that allele is often different, suggesting an independent mutational event. I would not be surprised if varied selective forces end up shaping human skin color variation. Though the correlation between UV and skin color is pretty clear, that may simply be the first principle component, with other factors rounding out the variation....

Update: Just an additional thought: a lot of the genomic data suggests recent selective sweeps on some of the genes for light skin (e.g., a variation of MC1R in China, the SLC45A2 derived allele in Europe, etc.). I think this is a big weakness in the model proposed by Jablonski, after all, it isn't like humans just showed up in northern Eurasia within the last 10,000 years. So what gives? I suspect that the lack of variety in the diets of agricultural peoples is an important factor. In other words, the more varied diet of hunter-gatherers (or late Ice Age big game hunters) didn't necessitate skin lightening to increase Vitamin D synthesis. Or, there are other selective pressures which we don't know about.

Labels: Evolution, Genetics

In the discussion thread for the Ayaan Hirsi Ali post there was some mooting of the nature of Islamic fundamentalism. I think this story is illustrative of the issues at work that might surprise:

...Khan told him he first became attracted to radical Islam because the tradition he grew up with was forcing him into an arranged marriage. The radical Imams were offering him a way out.

"A lot of guys I know, actually, have become radicalized, or initially took the first steps towards learning more about Islam and their way of life as a result of them being tried to being forced to marry someone they don't want to marry," Butt tells Simon.

Of course "traditional" South Asian youth don't object to arranged marriages, it is those who are inculcated with "Western" values who tend to find them abhorrent in conception. The fact is that the folkways that immigrants from Third World countries bring with them aren't really appropriate for their new cultures, and so their children have to find their own way (I know whereof I speak!). Fundamentalist Islam rooted in the Salafist movement is a safety valve for many of these first generation immigrants because it is a modern creation. I don't want to get into the details of the origins of the Salafi movement, but the reality is that some of its early thinkers were actually quite liberal. The manner it which it mutated makes that seem a bizarre possibility, but it is as it is. My own personal experience is that my more "fundamentalist" relatives are amongst the most open to rejection cultural tradition, so long as that rejection can be grounded in Islamic principles. The malleability of such principles are, I believe, the root of the mutagenic nature of an ideology which presents itself as timeless, and yet is very much a sign of the times. Most immigrant youth do not have the orientation to become atheists whose individualistic self-absorption transcend deep group ties. That's why the emergence of more "liberal" Islams is essential. Some of that process is going on now as Muslims rework the meaning of their religion in a Western cultural context. But part of the dynamic also has to be from without, just as Western culture forced Jews to accommodate outside of the ghetto, and America denied the Roman Catholic Church any status but that of just another denomination amongst many, so we must get our heads out of the multicultural sand and delegitimatize the sense of entitlement that many "community leaders" of a reactionary bent have in the Muslim community (this is more true for our friends across the pond).

Labels: Religion

A face you can trust?:

The Intopii computer firm of Helsinki, Finland, announced in February that it has installed software to help voters find candidates who look like them. Intopii is basing this idea on studies that suggest Finnish voters tend to select candidates who most resemble themselves....

Labels: Finn baiting

From page 56 of Ancient Greece:

...Sometimes the colonists [that is, Greek founders of colonial settlements outside of Greece] enjoyed a friendly welcome from the local inhabitants where they settled; sometimes they had to fight to win land for their new community. Since colonizing expeditions were apparently usually all male, wives from the colonists had to be found among the locals, either through peaceful negotiation for violent kidnappings.

This is the second time I've seen a reference to the non-Greek women who were present at the founding of Greek colonial cities (from Naples to Syracuse in the West to Byzantium in the East). Pretty soon I'll have to dig into the scholarly literature. My interest is stimulated by the fact that I don't know of any aspects of these Greek colonies which were culturally non-Greek (though "in the know" can enlighten me!). That is, it seems that the fathers determined the culture of their children. Of course, later colonial males would have arrived, diluting the impact of the initial hybrid generations, but it seems quantitatively this would pale in comparison to the demographic expansion that the founders would have engaged in. Makes me wonder about the Rape of the Sabine Women. Another factor is of course our perception of the ancient world comes through texts filtered through the preconceptions of the authors, a lot of variation "on the ground" is being elided as common motifs are highlighted.

Labels: History

RPM has a long post about the importance of lab courses (in response to a philosopher with some background in physics who suggests doing away with undergraduate lab courses) and Aziz points out that the father of magnetic resonance imaging has died.

Update: From the author of the original post (in the comments):

Actually, I don't advocate doing away with undergraduate labs. Undergraduate labs, done well, can be valuable and are essential in training undergraduate majors in the sciences. What I argue is that the attitude prevailing at many institutions that every or most theory classes needs a corresponding lab keeps science departments from being able to teach classes that would be of great value to students, especially non-majors.

Update II: Also, I'd be remiss in not pointing to RPM's excellent intro post to Neutral Theory (check out the graphs!).

Labels: Links

Note from Razib: This discussion thread will be heavily moderated. If you're not going to be interesting, be banal and polite. Otherwise, be interesting. My point in Islam threads isn't to sit there listening to self-important prigs repeat the same talking points I've heard since 9/11. Been there, done that (myself). Let's add some value.
End Note

Reviewers of Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel, should be required to put relevant cards on the table. Accordingly, here are mine: I am a reluctant atheist, which I mean that I wish I could believe in some comforting suprapersonal code, but I don't (and I have a particular contempt for the latterday "god of the gaps"); that said, I am nervous about and wary of Islam finding a beachhead in the West, even as I reject anguished warnings of the immanence of Eurabia and creeping dhimmitude.

Also, I had no particular interest in reading Hirsi Ali's book. (Parenthetically, I knew of her long before the Theo Van Gogh murder, and it occurred to me when I first heard of her and apprehended her striking physical presence, that she would eventually end up in the United States. I did not, of course, foresee the terrible events that precipitated her move, but I suspected that Holland was simply too small a country to contain her.) I have so far been unimpressed by the intellectual calibre of other Muslim critics. They have zero credibility in the Muslim world and their criticisms of Islam may be valid but the only noteworthy thing about them is that they are undergoing enlightenment two centuries after it became unremarkable in the West. I sympathize, but for my crowd, the thrill is gone.

What sparked my interest in reading Hirsi Ali's was a fierce irritation at the constant references to religion in American public life since 9/11. This was bad enough when the hectoring came from the right, but now it's coming from the left. I could and did ignore the Baptist who said that god doesn't hear the prayers of a Jew, because he's a hick that no one in the cultural elite, among whom I live and work, takes seriously. I don't pray and I don't care. I scorned the leftists who brandished this nobody in my face as an example of the horrors of American anti-Semitism, when it was nothing of the sort.

Now these same people go on Air America to tell the world that Jesus was a leftist (no links, but I heard it) and they supply ludicrous, a-historical examples to prove their non-existent case. This "who can be more sanctimonious" religious competition is driving me crazy, but it has had the salutary effect of clarifying my attitudes. So I paid renewed attention to this literal firebrand. I wanted to see if I could learn anything from her book than the fact that another smart girl grew up and left god-as-daddy with her dolls.

I did. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I am pleased to report, is a much more interesting, deep (and flawed, like all heroic figures) person than any collection of newspaper reports can convey. Those looking for a simple "I hate Islam" manifesto will be disappointed by Infidel. The book -- which should more properly be called "Apostate"-- is a calm, lucid, balanced account of a nightmarish upbringing. She wasn't really raised, as Westerners understand it, she just grew taller while being dragged around to various third world hellholes (Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and then Nairobi), due to her father's clan-based opposition to Somali dictator Siad Barre. Hirsi Ali's mother, grandmother, older brother and younger sister existed on charity doled out by her father's clan members. Hirsi Ali watched her once-vibrant and enterprising mother become distorted with bitterness, subjecting Hirsi Ali's to routine beatings, while turning her outwardly docile middle child into the family drudge.

It is revealing that Ayaan Hirsi Ali divides her autobiography into two parts, entitled "My Childhood," and "My Freedom." The animating force of her life is to tell the world that Islam is essentially infantilizing. The first half of the book, which encompasses the first 22 years of her life, is riveting reading. She describes the ideal of Somali womanwood: to be baarri, whose closest approximation in English would be virtue: "If you are a Somali woman you must learn to tell yourself that God is just and all-knowing and will reward you in the Hereafter." Hirsi Ali explains: "If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works, faultlessly."

Have you ever wondered about the bewildering complexity of Somalia's clan structure? This is the book for you. Somali life, as she describes it, consists of complete, utter, subservience to family and clan, yet it is pervaded by suspicion and violence. When she is a little girl, her one-year older brother pushes her into a shit-filled latrine. And whose fault is it? Ayaan's, because she failed to be suspicious. It's a world where feelings are considered weakness, and pride is everything.

No review can do justice to how crowded with incident and packed with colorful, fantastic characters the first half of the book is. She is moved from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia to a series of dwellings in Nairobi. She and her younger sister are gentially mutilated by their nomad-born grandmother. She learns Arabic, Amharic, English and Swahili. She becomes infatuated with Islamic fundamentalism but describes the process as so natural we never question its inevitability. A crazed Quran teacher shoves her head against a wall and fractures her skull; the hospital costs are covered by (what else?) the clan. Other wandering preachers of Islam drift in and out of the exile Somali community. She elopes with a gorgeous cousin strictly for the sex; they ditch each other quickly and figure out a way to "unmarry" each other. (Hint: the clan works out the details.) She rescues family members streaming out of Mogadishu by bribing Kenyan border police. This is all portrayed expertly, with deft omissions (to keep the story in control; whole books could be written about the era of African history she witnessed), swift pacing, and tight narrative.

The amount of human suffering that Hirsi Ali witnesses in Africa is sometimes overwhelming, and one wonders whether the second part of the book doesn't show evidence of some post-traumatic stress disorder. As Ian Buruma points out, her account of Dutch life is a bit too pat, too admiring. But should we not empathize with Hirsi Ali? after living the life she has, and witnessing what she has, Holland is a paradise. But, as she herself points out, it's a hard-won paradise, created by centuries of conflict between Catholic and Protestant, reclaimed from the sea. Her Dutch experience sounds reported and not fully lived, as her life in Africa was. (Perhaps this is true of the difference between life in Africa and life in Europe and has nothing to do with Hirsi Ali's specific experience -- I report, you decide.)

In Holland, Hirsi Ali committed two signal mistakes. The first was that she fabricated the reasons for claiming asylum in Holland. The fabrications were minor and were common knowledge, but her status could and should have been legally regularized before she stood for Parliament. More seriously, Hirsi Ali's collaboration with Theo Van Gogh on Submission occurred after she was elected to Parliament. Van Gogh's November 2004 murder was not her fault, but Hirsi Ali was a public servant at the time, and would have done her cause of protecting Muslim women greater service by focusing on the passage of laws to protect them, than by auditioning to be the Karen Finlay/Andres Serrano of Holland. These judgement mistakes made her vulnerable to a Swift Boat slandering on a Dutch television show from which her reputation suffered. Family members denied that Hirsi Ali was forced into an arranged marriage and was not genitally mutilated. These slanders continue to be retailed in the Muslim blogosphere and are thoroughly and convincingly refuted in the book. No one who reads the description of her mutilation can doubt that she experienced this horrific abuse; her detailing of the arranged marriage is as watertight as the grass jugs her grandmother used to weave by hand.

Hirsi Ali isn't the first prophet to experience dishonor in her country. What she can do to modernize and moderate Islam is doubtful, as she is now by public profession no more a part of the Ummah. She's our girl now and part of our furious debate about how to get along with Islam. The same neoconservatives whose chief guru cynically valued religion as social control for dummies have insincerely gushed over her book not because she has embraced enlightenment, but because she has rejected Islam.

Hirsi Ali thinks the West is falling apart. I disagree: we've never had it so good, and it's getting better all the time. She thinks that Muslims will destroy the West with higher birthrates: I doubt this. Pim Fortuyn favored a Cold War with Islam. I don't think that's necessary.

However, Fortuyn also said, "I don't want to fight for the rights of women and homosexuals again," and that, I think, is the heart of the issue, although I wouldn't put it that way. Here's how I would put it: "the law of the land is the law." Those of you who wish to keep your youth Muslim and live in the West must figure out a way to reconcile Islam with the dominant culture. If you can't, expect more Hirsi Alis. In fact, expect more Hirsi Alis even if you do -- it's the price of the ticket. The stupid among your children will be seduced by bling; the brilliant, by science.

And, unlike the chicken littles of the Right blogosphere, I think that is exactly what we are saying, if rather mumblingly, hesitantly and stammeringly. Sometimes, it's not way you say, it's what you do. That Puerto Rican girl on the subway isn't exchanging her t-shirt that says, "I must, I must, I must improve my bust," for a burqa. Our industrialists and molecular biologists and physicists aren't going to stop thinking and innovating and creating. They are an army much more powerful than the Quran, yes. We will insist, acidly, on our freedoms, on our laws, on our science, and our crummy t-shirts. If the Muslims in our midst can't handle it, that's their problem. The fact that Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards is disgusting and unacceptable but it is evidence of Islam's fragility, not our weakness.

Finally, we will protect the apostates from Islam who come to our free societies for refuge. If Hirsi Ali has helped us to focus our minds on that task, she deserves our gratitude.

Labels: Islam, Religion

In 1959, 100 years after the publication of the first edition of Darwin's The Origin of Species, the University of Pennsylvania Press published a 'Variorum Text', edited by Morse Peckham, containing all the variants in the six editions published during Darwin's lifetime. Anyone who reads historical studies of Darwin's work will have seen references to the Variorum edition, but the book itself has been out of print and virtually unobtainable for many years. I have occasionally seen it in bookdealers' lists at a price of hundreds of pounds or dollars, but even my enthusiasm for Darwin doesn't run quite that far.

It is therefore a pleasure to report that it has recently been republished in paperback:

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, edited by Morse Peckham, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 816 pages.

The price is about $30 in the US or £20 in the UK.

I can recommend the book to anyone who wants to make a serious study of the Origin. Let me be clear: it is not a suitable edition for anyone who just wants a reading copy. For this purpose, the text of the first or the sixth editions, both of which are easily available, would be more convenient. The layout of Peckham's Variorum edition is unusual. Each sentence of the first edition text is printed in full, followed by any amendments or additions in each of editions 2 - 6 in turn. Often this means that a whole page or more is devoted to one sentence of the original text. This makes it difficult (though not impossible) to follow a continuous text of any of the editions. I have seen the Variorum edition criticised for this reason, but this is missing the point. As Peckham himself says in his Introduction (page 27) 'this arrangement makes the text difficult to read, but I cannot imagine anyone reading such an edition in order to obtain a general knowledge of the book'. Its purpose is to enable historians and others interested in the development of Darwin's thought, and his reactions to criticisms and new evidence, to trace how this was shown in his revisions of the Origin. For this purpose it seems to me well-designed, and I don't know of any substitute for it. It is true that all six editions of the Origin are now available online from the Darwin Online Project, but even if you can find some way of getting all six texts on screen at the same time, it would be extremely laborious to compare them. One of the most striking lessons of the Variorum text is to show just how much revising Darwin did. As Peckham points out, around three quarters of all the sentences in the first edition were amended, often several times, and as a result of numerous additions the sixth edition is nearly a third as long again as the first.

And yet the substance of Darwin's views is remarkably little changed. The common view that he watered down his emphasis on natural selection in favour of 'Lamarckism' does not stand up to examination: changes in this direction are few, and do not greatly affect the balance of the book.

So congratulations to the publishers for making this available again.

PLoS One has a new article on detecting recent natural selection in the human genome. As opposed to previous studies mentioned on this site [1][2], this study looks for fixed differences between populations, rather than those on their way to fixation. This is a potentially very important set of differences between populations, and one that is as of yet unexplored.

My inital reaction to this study was lukewarm, but their approach isn't biased in any way, rather it's just not particularly rigorous-- the statistic they use is based on blocks of homozygosity, an approach which is strongly influenced by demographics. They note themsevles that, among the candidates for being under selection, "a relatively large proportion...are false positives". This makes it particularly difficult to judge any single gene as being under selection from this dataset. However, some of the genes they report as being under selection are worth mentioning.

First, when comparing African and European-origin samples (the data used are from the HapMap), they find a number of pigementation related genes, as well as genes involved in skeletal development. These genes could be involved in the notable phenotypic differences between Western European and Nigerian populations. Some gene involved in fertility also show up, as do immune-reponse related genes. But as mentioned before, it's tough to make any strong statements with an approach like this.

How would I attack this problem? The limited amount of data, along with some amount of prior information, cries out for a Bayesian approach. Plus, the fact that the chimpanzee genome is also available could be used to one's advantage. This paper is a decent first strike at the problem of identifying important population-specific adaptations, but expect much more rigour in the future...

UPDATE: I've started a discussion on this paper on the PLoS One website (see the first link in the post). Feel free to join in.

Labels: Genetics

Over at my other blog I've posted several times about Buddhism. The main reason was to clarify a boundary condition when it came to the discussion of the evolution and psychology of religion. When addressing the intersection of these two disciplines and their relevance to modeling religious phenomena it was important to emphasize the relative lack of importance of written texts and elite formulations upon the modal mental representation amongst the believers. In large part this is because many Westerners who are by temperament anti-religious, and in their personal ontology scientific materialists, will tend to excuse Buddhism from the general critique which they apply to other faiths. When discussing religion as a natural phenomenon, that is with an analytic gaze, one must approach it from some remove, and the view that many secularists have of Buddhism as being the "atheistic religion" tends to result in less skepticism then would otherwise be the case. That being said, I am not as ignorant of the elite traditions of Buddhism, and the view from the "commanding" heights, as some SB readers assumed. Additionally, I do not believe that elites or their formulations are irrelevant. Rather, their importance must be modulated and held in perspective, people may kill each other over the fact that they are Shia or Sunni, and tens of millions may be expended to "convert" a people from the profession of belief in one god to another, but all the while the conflicts may not be based on any substantive psychological distinction. In any case, with that in mind I picked up All is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West, a history of the interplay of Buddhist ideas and Western intellectual history.


The author, Lawrence Sutin, is a secular Jew who is clearly a religious seeker and sympathetic with a broadly ecumenical world view (he states as much in the forward). It shows in the text, as he is very conversant in the details of the contemporary American Buddhist "scene," and sympathetic toward the community while being objective enough to shed light upon shortcomings (e.g., ethical lapses amongst the leadership). But his treatment of the first thousand years is a bit sketchier, Sutin is obviously relying on only partially digested secondary sources. For example, at one point he states that Buddhism was introduced into Japan in the 4th century, and later on he says it arrived in the 5th century. Actually, it was the 6th century. In covering the last flowering of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent centered around pre-Islamic Bengal he states that the Buddhist Pala kings were conquered by Muslim warlords from central Asia, but in fact the Palas fell to the Hindu Sena dynasty (who are often considered anti-Buddhist), who were then defeated by Turkic invaders. These are minor historical errors in the broad sweep of the story, but it does suggest that the author has a relatively vague sense of early Asian Buddhism. On the other hand, as you shift the time scale closer to the present, and address the various flirtations with Buddhism by modern European intellectuals starting with the Sinophilia of late 17th century, the author becomes far more confident and detailed in his description and analysis. Fundamentally, Sutin's narrative is one which focuses on the transformation of Buddhism into a modern Western religion through several centuries of interaction, spanning the Age of Exploration down to the post-colonial period. As such, it will be of special interest to Western converts to Buddhism and those who are "fellow travelers" in regards to Buddhist beliefs.

Nevertheless, despite its contemporary skew All is Change is still illuminating as a guide to the literature of Eurasia's cultural development after the rise of the "world" religions. Though not an expert himself, Suttin does a good job of offering bite-sized summaries of the current state of scholarship in regards to questions about the possible influence of Buddhism upon Christianity, and Christianity upon Buddhism. The reality seems to be that the exact answer to most of these questions are not extractable from the morass of human history, the possibility remains that features of Buddhism such as monasticism might have played a role in serving as an indirect template for early Christianity. Or, inversely, that Nestorian Christianity, or religions influenced by this eastern variant of Christianity such as Manichaeanism, may have played a role in the genesis of Pure Land Buddhism, whose evangelical flavor and theistic bent have long been observed by Westerners as at least superficially analogous to religions with which they are more familiar with. But from the perspective of cultural science it is also critical to entertain the possibility that many aspect of transcultural religions which exhibit similarities may also be naturally evoked properties of the human mind's interaction with its environmental substratum. For example, the idea in parts of the early Christian Church that the soul may enter into a process of transmigration need not necessarily imply an influence of Indian religious thought (with Buddhism as the vector). Reincarnation seems a common religious idea which can be found in a variety of pre-Christian religious traditions in Europe (e.g., the Celtic world). This does not mean that an influence from Buddhism was not possible, it simply suggests that a hard reliance on diffusionism of universally recurrent motifs should be treated with caution. In contrast to the typical muddle the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat is clearly a garbled retelling of the life of the Buddha, which can be attested by the 8th century in Christian Georgia. In terms of specific & precise "small ideas" it seems that diffusionism is far easier to appeal to, unless one believes in a sort of Jungian meta-consciousness. I think Sutin's narrative converges upon the most plausible explanation for cross-cultural influences and similarities, between the 6th century BCE and 6th century CE Eurasia was slowly shifting from "civilization" being defined as islands in a sea of tribal barbarism toward a robust network of cultures and meta-civilizations with multiple foci of creativity (e.g., even though the Western Roman Empire fell, the Byzantines during the 6th century fundamentally maintained continuity with late antiquity and kept the fire of Roman Christian civilization alive). Within this common pool of networked cultures idea could move relatively fast if they were selected, e.g., bureaucratic states arose all across Eurasia within a few centuries. But, one might also offer that bureaucratic states might simply be a 'natural' form which large political agglomerations focused upon urban areas must take as a necessity for their perpetuation.

With the rise of Islam the Buddhist and Christian worlds were separated and interacted only via the new mediator civilization. Sutin's story is therefore relatively brisk until one reaches the 16th century, when European colonialism began to make inroads into societies where Buddhism was the dominant religion. The early interactions also show the importance of semantics and form to elites. In Japan the Jesuits dressed like Buddhist monks because Buddhism had a relatively high status there in the eyes of the ruling caste. In China the Jesuits switched to aping Confucian officials in their style of dress and avoided associations with Buddhist monks because they were considered to be rabble. Additionally, across the chasm of centuries and languages problems arose because the Christians had to make sure that their religion was not viewed as just another sect of Buddhism. Catholics initially adopted some of the terminology of Pure Land Buddhism only to abandon this because of the ensuing confusion. Latin religious phrases which had no intelligible Chinese resonance were necessary lest the similarity of terminologies (e.g., for "God") result in the lack of distinction between the faiths.

This brings me to reiterate the point that modal religiosity on the ground was often little different between the various world religions. One reason that semantics was crucial was that conventional beliefs of the culturally naive could easily confuse devotions to bodhisattvas with that of the Christian religion. Such confusions were not unknown going in the other direction, along the coast of western India the Portuguese spared some Hindu statuary which depicted the three faces of the godhead precisely because they assumed that it must be their familiar Trinity. Histories of the Chinese Jews consistently reiterates that the native elite had difficulties distinguishing this religion from Islam, and to some extent Christians also were easily confused with the other monotheistic religions. Perhaps because of these confusions the early missionaries, such as Francis Xavier, focused on bringing lettered elites to Christianity first. In late Ming China a small core group of intellectuals along with members of the court had sympathy with Catholic Christianity, while in Japan the conversion of the populace in Kyushu was primarily a top-down affair through the conversion of daimyos. The choice to "start at the top" during the early centuries caused problems due to the connection between Christianity and a particular political faction. The fall of their patrons was one reason that Catholicism went into decline in China (with the rise of the vigorous Manchus and their suspicion of the Jesuit's foreign connections and the rejection of the ancestor cult by the Catholic Church) and was exterminated in Japan (where the ruling shoguns looked with suspicion at Christians who seemed to be allying with Iberian powers). It is important to remember that for several centuries the Jesuits were the face of Christianity for many East Asians. I think this prefigures in some ways the introduction of Buddhism to the West.

Jumping to the 19th century Sutin's story really starts kicking into high gear. This is when Arthur Schopenhauer makes a strong case for Buddhism as a religion superior to Christianity, which is fundamentally non-theistic. Like many intellectuals of the time Schopenhauer contended that many core features of Christianity were derivable from Buddhism, and the racial conceptions of the time played into his model, as he conceived of the Buddhist element as what made Christianity distinct from Semitic Judaism. Since Schopenhauer thought of of Buddhism as an "Aryan" religion he believed in the future northern Europeans would naturally defect from the "Mediterranean" derived Christianity to the new religion, which was non-theistic to boot. Other intellectuals had differing opinions, racialist thinker Arthur Gobineau believed Buddhism was rooted in an anti-Aryan cultural rebellion in the Indian subcontinent, so he did not believe that the religion was fundamentally a sound basis for European spirituality. From a few intellectuals the Buddhist ideas spread by the end of the 19th century to have cultural influence via the rise of spiritualism and neo-Eastern religions, centered around the Theosophical Society. Though many of the new religious adepts claimed tutelage under Eastern mentors, in general the primary mode of transmission seems to be textual. Transcendentalism in New England was less shaped by real Brahmins from India than the readings of Hindu scriptures enabled by Orientalist translators. On occasion a Western enthusiast would also produce a translation of a Buddhist text. Obviously Buddhism was not a mass religion being spread through a "Great Awakening" (as men like Schopenhauer might have dreamed), but an elite sect which combined elements of esoterica and rationalism. Schopenhauer's contention that Buddhism was non-theistic was and remains a common viewpoint among Westerners, who dismiss forms which seem operationally theistic (Pure Land) as debased or culturally muddied (e.g., "that's not real Buddhism").

But the influence of Buddhism upon a small core of Western intellectuals was not without consequences for lands traditionally Buddhist. Men like Anagarika Dharmapala, born David Hewavitarne to a Christian Sinhalese family, were strongly influenced by individuals from the Theosophical society to fight back against the inroads of Christianity in Sri Lanka. Though a resistance movement to Christian missionaries was already emerging, the impact of Westerners was clearly non-trivial in the emergence of what has sometimes been termed a "Protestant Buddhism." The term is meant to be ironic, but I think it reflects the crystallization of an elite Buddhism which could communicate effectively and intelligibly with Westerners, Christian and non-Christian. Though elite Buddhism has always had a transparent and fundamental non-theistic side, Buddhism does exhibit some axiomatic logic, many of the 19th century intellectuals in the West reinterpreted Buddhism through a definite Enlightenment lens. This sensibility has also spread to many elite Asians, many of whom already saw Buddhism as a meditative avocation as opposed to a mass religion. Just as Native Americans sincerely embrace a self-perception of being "close to Nature" after several centuries of European depiction as Noble Savages, so educated Asian Buddhists can see in their religion's ambiguities and complexities vis-a-vis the uncompromising simple message of the Abrahamic faiths as a testament to its sophistication. Dharmapala was also a man of his time insofar as he fused Buddhism with Sinhalese racial identity (mimicking Western racialists who would declare that Europe was the faith, and that the faith was Europe), formulating the precursor to the compound identity espoused by many Sinhalese nationalists today.

In many ways it seems to me that Christianity and Buddhism are inverted in their sociological role in the Pacific Rim and the West. I have spoken to many Taiwanese converts to Christianity who speak of how it is a more rational religion than "superstitious" Buddhism. And yet one can find the exact same sentiments from Westerners who accept Buddhism after leaving a Christian background. In South Korea Christians tend to be more well educated than Buddhists, while in the United States the reverse is true. In Japan Christianity and its ideas are culturally prominent in relation to its numbers, and one may say the same about Buddhism in much of the West. This illustrates I think a parallel process to modal religiosity, and that is the systematic rational religiosity of segments of the elite. If by chance Buddhism had lodged itself in the lower classes of the West its modal nature in the West would be, I suspect, far different. Similarly, in Taiwan Christianity is a middle class religion, while in parts of North India is fundamentally a lower class religion. These social realities may strongly shape belief and practice.

The history of the Buddhist Churches of America is shows the nature of the cleavages in Western Buddhism. This ethnic Japanese offshoot of Pure Land Buddhism has been present on American soil for a century, but it remains by and large stuck in its ghetto, and has had very little impact upon the convert community. In contrast, Zen has been far more influential, and I think that that is due to Zen's more individualistic and less devotional orientation. Western "seekers" aren't looking for another "Church," they are looking for the Way. Similarly, Sokka Gakkai devotional form of Buddhism is known to have a far larger proportion of blacks and Latinos than is common amongst converts. I believe this is a function of the fact that Sokka Gakkai resembles religion as these communities experience and understand them to a far greater extent than mainstream American Buddhism, which has been shaped by an elite white sensibility.

In regards to the elite sensibility, I think it is important to observe, as Sutin does, that a disproportionate number of Buddhists in the United States are of Jewish ancestry. Sutin states that about 1/3 of American Buddhist leaders are Jewish ethnically, and offers that some have estimated that 3/4 of the whites who reside in Dharamsala are Jewish. Sutin offers that the attraction of Buddhism is of a spirituality that speaks to Jews who can not find what they are looking for in their natal religion, but do not wish to turn to "rival" religions like Christianity. Sutin is under the impression that Jews did not convert to Christianity in great numbers in the past, or today. This is false. The American Jewish Identity Survey shows that a large minority of Jews are Christian, and the historical record is clear that converts formed a large minority of "Jews" in many nations of the West in the past few centuries. But, surveys of Jewish identity do show that Christian Jews, for lack of a better word, tend to be much closer in socioeconomic profile to the Christian population than Jews. I would argue that Jews attracted to "New Religions" or neo-Eastern faiths are of a different orientation than those who would be attracted to conservative Christianity. In The Future of Religion the authors show that Jews are very over represented in "New Religion Movements" (e.g., Hare Krishna), as the educated as a whole are. This doesn't surprise insofar as small exotic sects often have an appeal to avant garde elites. Some have made the case that Hellenistic Jews were the core of the early Christian community, viewing this faith as a way to assimilate into Roman society without turning their back on their Jewishness, so I think we are seeing the same process again in a different guise.

Finally, the entrance of an enormous immigrant Buddhist community in the last generation is changing things. Theravada traditions arrived from southeast Asia with the waves of Cambodian refugees, as did Mahayana movements with the Vietnamese. A new pulse of Chinese immigrants in the last generation also has resulted in a boom for Buddhism in that community (which, like the Japanese, had been nominally Christianized after the Oriental Exclusion Act). These factions haven't interfaced much with the large convert community, the small Japanese Buddhist Church, or the devotional movements. Religion is a hard thing to define, and it means many things to many people. The difficult part is to keep all the various elements in mind and assign them their appropriate quantitative weights in making our model of the world, and making each weight appropriate to the context. This means an exploration of psychology, evolution, sociology and history, in the general and specific cases.

Labels: History, Religion

One subject I've developed a mild interest in is the modeling of epidemics. So in that vein, here is a post (the first of a possible series, if I feel really inspired) on mathematical epidemiology:

Let's start with a simple discrete-time model for the evolution of an infection: imagine an infinite population of people, of which one has become infected with a disease. This one person will infect each of the other susceptible members of the population with some probability p. In the next time unit, the infected individual will recover and become immune to further infection (i.e. he either has developed resistance to the disease or is dead). Each of the newly infected individuals then independently can infect each of the remaining susceptible individuals with probability p once more (so note that the probability of being infected is p if there is one infected individual in the population, 2p if there are two, 3p if there are three, etc), and so on and so forth. The basic model is shown in the figure-- asusceptible individual (S) can be infected, becoming an infected individual (I). Infected individuals then always recover and are removed from the population (R).

One of the first (and most mathematically tractable) questions to ask of this model is: will an infection become an epidemic?

To answer this question, let's think of the first stages of the infection of the population as a Galton-Watson process (see this wikipedia link if you're wondering what role Francis Galton played in outlining this process). That is, each infected individual infects a random number of susceptible individuals in the next time point according to some probability distribution (called the "offspring distribution") X. If the probability of infecting each individual person is sufficiently low, we can say this distribution is Poisson(lambda).

The quantity of interest, then, is the probability that this Galton-Watson process goes extinct; that is, that there exists a time point in which zero people are infected. Let's call this probability E. At a given point in time, if there is one infected individual, the probablity of excinction is E. If there are two infected individuals, the probability of extinction is E^2. Three infected individuals: E^3. And so on. Given that we start with one infected individual, we can than write:

E = P(X=0) + P(X=1)E + P(X=2)E^2 + P(X=3)E^3 + P(X=4)E^4 ...

Mathematically oriented readers will notice that the right-hand side of this equation is the probability generating function of the offspring distribution, evaluated at E. Indeed, the extinction probability of a Galton-Watson process is the minumum solution to the equation E = A(E) [1].

For our Poisson distribution, this has simple consequences: if the mean of the offspring distribution is less than 1, the infection will not become an epidemic (the only solution to the equation is E = 1). If the mean of the distribution is greater than or equal to one, there is some probability that the Galton-Watson process will never die (in a real population, of course, the epidemic will eventually run out of gas, but we're not interested in those dynamics here). This may seem rather intuitive (if on average, each infected individual infected less than one individual, the infection will die out quickly), but the mathematical formalism allows one to construct more complex models. Plus, reducing lambda (the mean of the Poission distribution), of course, is then the goal of nearly all anti-epidemic precautions-- quarantines, hand-washing, etc.; all can be though of as practical ways to reduce a mathematical parameter.

[1] The probability generation function A(z) of a distribution X is the sum over all possible values of X of P(X=x)z^x.

Labels: Epidemiology

Several people have pointed me to the articles which quote a nationalist Japanese minister as stating, to the effect, that Arabs won't trust blonde & blue-eyed Westerners, but have no historical aversion to East Asians. I found this kind of funny because of course the Sack of Baghdad was at the hands of the Mongols. Though the current post-colonial vogue is to attribute Arab failures to European exploitation, many scholars have long made the argument that the Mongol invasions dealt the Arabs a blow from which they never recovered (the Turks were ascendant from then on).¹ It highlights the importance of history as propaganda and ideology to consider that the Crusades were relatively minor affairs compared to the later invasion of the Mongols, and yet the former loom far larger in the contemporary Arab mind.

1 - The Arab world had been in decline already during this period with the rise of Turkic warlords, but the Mongols snuffed out a late renaissance of the Caliphate in Baghdad.

Labels: History

Unchurched Population Nears 100 Million in the U.S.:

A new survey released by The Barna Group, which has been tracking America's religious behavior and beliefs since 1984, reveals that one out of every three adults (33%) is classified as unchurched - meaning they have not attended a religious service of any type during the past six months....

Some population segments are notorious church avoiders. For instance, 47% of political liberals are unchurched, more than twice the percentage found among political conservatives (19%). African Americans were less likely to be unchurched (25%) than were whites (32%) or Hispanics (34%). Asians, however, doubled the national average: 63% were unchurched....

There has been some talk about the boom in Asian American evangelical Christianity, but it is important to keep in mind that the rate of growth is in part a function of the fact that the "untapped" market is still rather large. Of course, The American Religious Identification Survey found:

...between 1990-2001 the proportion of the newly enlarged Asian American population who are Christian has fallen from 63% to 43%, while those professing Asian religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc) has risen from 15% to 28%.

Many of the non-Christian religions don't have as strong a congregational tradition as Christianity. But, the finding that Asian Americans are more secular than other ethnicities is a pretty robust and consistent finding.

Labels: Religion

Why some people are more attractive than others:

Professor Petrie theorised that since genetic mutations can occur anywhere in the genome, some will affect the 'DNA repair kit' possessed by all cells. As a result, some individuals have less efficient repair kits, resulting in greater variation in their DNA as damage does unrepaired.

Although unrepaired DNA is generally harmful - causing tissue to degenerate or develop cancers - it is useful in some parts of the genome, such as those parts resposible for disease defence where variation can help in the resistance to disease. It has long been known that greater variation of DNA in the disease defending regions makes it more likely that an individual can resist attacks by bacteria and viruses.

Using a computer model to map the spread of genes in a population, Professor Petrie demonstrated that the tendency towards reduction in genetic diversity caused by sexual selection is outweighed by the maintenance in greater genetic diversity generated by mutations affecting DNA repair.

I haven't read the paper...and the press release sounds kind of garbled. I guess the results here are suggesting that polymorphism at the disease resistence loci (e.g., MHC) is so important that DNA repair mechanisms can't get too good. A byproduct of this is variance in the mutational load across the population. I suppose this sort of answer to "why we're not all hot" is like the answer to why we're not all parthenogenetic.

Labels: Genetics

I was recently recommended an excellent book with the irresistibly seductive title The Geometry of Multivariate Statistics, which offers more visually oriented people a crisp way of thinking about statistics that still captures what the algebraic formulas say. To be sure, the author is aware that diagrams, pictures, and so on are employed anytime someone draws a histogram, but he seeks to ground the gamut of the most important ideas in statistics -- variance, correlation, regression, and so on -- in a geometric view, focusing mostly on vectors and trigonometry.

I have found this 160-page book to be quite helpful in fully wrapping my brain around the core ideas of statistics*, although it is best used in conjunction with a standard textbook containing the algebraic and computational sides of things. It would also help to read it after or concurrent with a first course in linear algebra: while there is no use of eigenvalues / eigenvectors or matrix algebra, you should be familiar with the basic idea of what vectors and vector spaces are (though some complain that many students memorize the matrix algorithms without "getting" the more basic ideas). The book does provide an overview of these fundamentals, but it is more of a reminder.

Both to share this exciting new way of looking at statistics, as well as to help me get a solid lock on the perspective, I thought I'd give a little taste of what the book has to offer. Unfortunately, I'll be using fake data since I don't have enough time to collect my own or search for that of others, but the goal here is more didactic than empirical. Caveat: anyone who's already read the book or studied statistics in this way will be pretty bored by this post.

Background

The basic idea is that, unlike when we graph scatter-plots, which plot (in variable-space) how various subjects scored on different variables -- say, height and weight -- we're going to plot the variables themselves in "subject-space," to see directly how the variables relate to one another (since usually we don't care about the subjects themselves except as a way to figure out the relationships between the variables). For instance, let's say we tested two subjects on their height and weight, such that the height in inches and weight in pounds (respectively) for subjects A, B, and C were (69, 135), (72, 150), and (79, 200). In a scatter-plot, we'd have 2 axes (height and weight) and 3 data-points corresponding to the 3 subjects.

Standing this view on its head, let's instead create a 3-D graph with one axis for each of the 3 subjects, and just 2 data-points (one for height, one for weight). The height data-point would "score" 69 on the A-axis, 72 on the B-axis, and 79 on the C-axis. The weight data-point would "score" 135, 150, and 200 on these axes, respectively. So then, our new data-points (69, 72, 79) and (135, 150, 200) are just vectors whose components are the heights and weights of all the subjects. Instead of trying to infer the properties of and relationships between the height and weight variables from a scatter-plot, we can see them more directly by examining the magnitude of the vectors and the angle between them.

Notice that if we center each variable by subtracting the mean from each component, the new vector's components are deviations from the mean. Consider two such centered vectors x and y. If we take the dot product of x with itself, we get the sum of the squares of each component. And since the components are deviations from the mean, x dot x is equal to the variance; square-rooting this gives us the standard deviation. Now, recall the following dot product formula for the angle between x and y:

cos(x, y) = (x dot y) / (|x| times |y|)

Since any vector is collinear with itself, the angle between "them" is 0, making the cosine 1. If both vectors on the right-hand side of the equation are the same, then x dot x must equal |x| times |x| or |x|^2 to make the ratio equal 1. Because in our case x dot x equals the variance of the variable it represents, then the variance also equals the square of the length or magnitude of the vector. Thus, the length itself equals the square-root of the variance, or standard-deviation. That's a pretty neat way to see how spread out the values of a variable are: just look at how long the vector representing it is.

As for their correlation, refer to MathWorld's entry on the correlation coefficient, specifically line 22 (the notation for sum of squares, SS, is defined in the first 9 lines). Square-root both sides to get r by itself. Since we've centered our variables, we could re-write the formula as:

r = (x dot y) / (|x| times |y|)

Of course, that's equal to the cosine of the angle between x and y, so taking the inverse-cosine of the ratio on the right-hand side gives us the correlation coefficient. Thus, the larger the cosine -- and so, the smaller the angle -- the larger the correlation. That makes it an easy task to see the correlation: draw the vectors from the same point and look at the angle formed between them.

An example

So, let's take a look at how this might play out in the real world. Suppose we test 50 people on two distinct IQ tests and create a scatter-plot of an individual's score on Test 1 and Test 2. It might look something like this (again, this is fake data for illustration):


Let's just focus on two aspects of the data, the correlation between scores and the variance in scores for each test. Clearly, there is a high correlation between scores, as we'd expect if IQ tests measure pretty much the same underlying construct (general intelligence). As a correlation always lies in [-1, 1], eyeballing the correlation from a scatter-plot forces you to judge angles that range from 0 to 45 degrees in magnitude. When we redraw the two variables as vectors, however, the angle between them (which again indicates the correlation) can range from 0 to 90 degrees in magnitude, which places less stringent demands on our visual acuity to get the gist of the picture. Judge for yourself (this shows the centered variables, but the correlation between them and their variances are unaffected by translating the mean to 0):