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Saturday, November 29, 2008
Some people have pointed out a major problem with the rendering of this website on IE. I think I fixed the stylesheet issue. Since the site was fine in IE until recently I'm pretty sure it was a Microsoft update of some sort. If you notice anything similar with IE, just email me. I only use IE for Netflix. This only applies to IE 7.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
You probably already know this, but in case you don't, I'm somewhat involved in a new website, Secular Right. Heather Mac Donald, Derb and Walter Olson are current contributors. My own postings there will be mostly about philosophy, history and data analysis, as opposed to rapid response to other weblogs or commentary on current politics.
From time to time I give links to those of my old posts that may still be worth reading. Previous guides are here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
It is over two years since the last update. In that time most of my posts have been on the history of population genetics, and especially on the 'founding fathers', R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright. I recently finished a long series of Notes on Sewall Wright, so this is a convenient time to take stock. Most of these posts are long, and aimed not so much at day-to-day readers as at people searching for specific topics. Notes on Sewall Wright On Reading Wright gave an overview of the planned series of notes, and includes some general reflections on Wright's reputation. Before continuing with the series as planned, I realised that I needed to cover an additional topic, Wright's Method of Path Analysis This note is especially concerned to clarify the concept of a path coefficient, and the relationship between Wright's method and multiple regression. In preparing the note on path analysis, I wanted to refer to some source containing the material on the statistical theory of correlation and regression that would be needed to understand Wright's work. I could not find a suitable source, so I decided to write it myself, using notes I have made on the subject over the years. Notes on Correlation, Part 1 covers the general concepts of correlation and regression, and the justification for using them (which, like much in the foundations of statistics, is a moot point). Part 2 proves some key theorems on the correlation and regression of two variables, and discusses problems of interpretation. Part 3 outlines the theory of correlation and regression for more than two variables. This is particularly important for the understanding of Wright's path analysis. After the note on Path Analysis I got back on the series as planned, with the following notes. The measurement of kinship tries to explain Wright's approach to this, by contrasting it with the now more familiar methods of Gustave Malecot. The essential point is that Wright's kinship coefficients are in principle correlation coefficients rather than probabilities of identity (as in Malecot's system). A consequence of this is that kinship (or relatedness, or inbreeding) is relative to a specified population. The kinship between randomly selected individuals within such a population, relative to that population, is on average zero. This has implications for Hamiltonian inclusive fitness. Another implication is that Wright's kinship coefficients can be, and often are, negative (unlike Malecot's probabilities). Wright's F-statistics. Wright devised a series of statistics known as F-statistics for measuring relationship and diversity within or between populations. The best known of these is FST, which is widely used as a measure of the genetic divergence between sub-populations of a species. My note traces the evolution of the F-statistics in Wright's work. Genetic drift.. This note was originally going to be called 'Inbreeding and the decline of genetic variance', but that is not a very catchy title. I try to clarify the connection between genetic drift, inbreeding, and the decline of heterozygosis (a measure of genetic diversity). The note includes a detailed commentary on Wright's proof that heterozygosis tends to decline by 1/2N per generation. Population size. I discuss the concept of effective population size and point out that Wright overlooked an important class of cases where effective population size is much larger than the current number of breeding adults. Migration. Migration is important to Wright's theories because even very low rates of migration suffice to prevent subpopulations of a species diverging by genetic drift. The note traces Wright's work on the subject including his famous article on 'Isolation by distance'. The adaptive landscape. Wright is closely associated with the concept of the adaptive landscape, though as far as I can find Wright himself never used this term. My note especially aims to explain the concept of a selective peak, and why Wright believed that there are a multitude of distinct selective peaks, usually of different fitness. In a related post on the Adaptive Landscape: Miscellaneous points, I discussed some issues not directly concerned with Wright, such as Stuart Kauffman's NK model, the relationship between selective peaks for genotypes and for gene frequencies, and the accessibility and stability of peaks. The shifting balance theory of evolution. This final note in the series is split into two parts. Part 1 examines the origins of Wright's famous shifting balance theory, and analyses the contents of the original version of the theory, as published in 1929-31. Part 2 explores subsequent developments in the theory, some of which are very important. Notably, as early as 1932 Wright abandoned his insistence that only genetic drift in small populations could take a population away from a suboptimal selective peak, as he now accepted that environmental fluctuations could have the same effect. In my view this removed much of the rationale for Wright's emphasis on population structure in evolution, though Wright himself never fully absorbed the implications of the change, which many biologists have overlooked. Altogether, this series of posts would come to over 100 print pages. That's very nearly a book's worth! Alas, even if there were a market for such a boring book, I don't have the time, energy, or expertise to research and write it to the necessary standards, but I hope that anyone making a serious study of Wright will find something useful in my posts. R. A. Fisher My various notes on R. A. Fisher are mainly attempts to correct misunderstandings of his views which I have come across from time to time. Fisher and Wright on population size (and here). These two notes were written shortly before I started my series of notes on Sewall Wright. Fisher is sometimes thought to have believed that entire species are randomly mating single populations. As this is palpably false, it is worth examining what Fisher really thought. In my first note I show, using Fisher's publications and letters, that he believed that migration between districts was usually frequent enough to offset their divergence by genetic drift. This does not imply that species are literally random mating (if they were, migration would be irrelevant), but only that for many purposes they can be treated as if they were. In the second note I examine what Fisher says about the actual population size of species. An Addendum is here. Fisher on epistasis. It is sometimes claimed that Fisher ignored epistatic gene effects or considered them unimportant. My post shows that Fisher took account of epistasis in a variety of ways. Two further posts produce additional evidence: here and here. Fisher on the adaptive landscape Following my note on Sewall Wright's adaptive landscape concept, I wrote this post on Fisher's views on the subject. Notably, he believed that environmental change, particularly in the biotic environment, made the idea of a constant landscape inapplicable. Fisher on inclusive fitness In this short post I draw attention to a passage by Fisher which contains a general anticipation of Hamilton's concept of inclusive fitness. J. B. S. Haldane I have written much less about Haldane than about Fisher and Wright. This is not because Haldane was less important or original. Haldane probably originated more of the basic results of population genetics than either of the others. But I tend to write posts mainly on issues that are obscure or controversial, whereas most of Haldane's results are clear and uncontroversial. I have however devoted two posts to Haldane: one on Haldane's Dilemma, which examines Haldane's pioneering attempt to quantify the amount of genetic change possible by natural selection in a given period (see here for some corrections), and Haldane's Selection Theorem which comments on Haldane's proof that the probability that an individual favourable mutation will be successful is 2s, where s is the coefficient of selection. Odds and ends Finally, a few posts cover other issues. Good Point? arises from a study by the economists Samuel Preston and Cameron Campbell. If intelligence is partly inherited, and less intelligent people on average have more children, it seems to follow that the average intelligence of the population will decline from one generation to the next. Preston and Campbell use an elaborate mathematical model to show that this is not necessarily the case. My post examines the argument, using a much simpler model due to the statistician I. J. Good. Briefly, I conclude that the argument is mathematically possible but biologically unrealistic. The case illustrates the danger of using sophisticated mathematics without properly considering the underlying assumptions. Heterosis and the Flynn Effect looked sceptically at claims that heterosis (reduced inbreeding) might explain the long term increase in IQ scores. Origins of the British is a piece examining the evidence on the ethnic origins of the people of the British Isles, following the recent book by Stephen Oppenheimer. Group Selection and the Wrinkly Spreader takes a look at a recent defence of group selection by E. O. and D. S. Wilson, by examining in detail an example (the 'wrinkly spreader' variant of a certain bacterium) that they claim is a good case of group selection in action. It isn't. Ethnic Genetic Interests Revisited looks at the new edition of Frank Salter's book Ethnic Genetic Interests, which includes comments on my own critique of the first edition. Genophilia traces the origins of the term 'genophilia', which has been wrongly attributed to Francis Galton. Labels: Burbridge, Population genetics
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I thought I knew a fair amount about monkeys already, but a BBC wildlife documentary last night still had some surprises for me. The documentary is ouststanding even by the BBC's usual standards for this kind of thing. I dare say it will be broadcast in most countries sooner or later, but meanwhile it can be seen online here (iplayer or equivalent required).
Monday, November 24, 2008
 From Henry Harpending:This is from a 1984 paper, citation below the figure. The genetic data were 6 red cell antigens, 9 electrophoretic systems, and HLA and HLB. The context was the authors' effort to set up a big population genetic and demographic database of Mormons, which was criticized because the Mormons were thought to be derived from a small isolated inbred group. They wrote this paper to show that Mormon allele frequencies were generic northern European. Another paper the followed this showed that Amish and Mennonites were indeed off in another dimension, but not Mormons. I made a minor modification to the figure, which is courtesy of Lynn Jorde. Labels: Genetics
Sunday, November 23, 2008
I recently posted a note on an anticipation of Hamilton's concept of inclusive fitness by R. A. Fisher in the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
As I pointed out, in that passage Fisher did not quantify the effect of what he called 'indirect effects of natural selection', so he did not state what we now call 'Hamilton's Rule' (though later in GTNS he came close to it in his discussion of distasteful insects). However, I have noticed the following passage in a letter from Fisher to Leonard Darwin dated 27 June 1929, which states Hamilton's Rule for the special case of parental care: The reproductive value at different ages must determine the extent to which parental care pays. If all ages were of equal reproductive value, a species would tend to benefit its offspring up to the point at which the offspring gains double the advantage which the parent loses, but no further. Of course immature offspring are usually worth much less, and so should be cared for only at a cheaper rate still. But if crocodiles were able to recognise their mature offspring, I suppose they would co-operate with them not only on terms of mutual advantage, but on terms of joint advantage so long as the loss of either did not exceed half the gain of the other. Hence society starts with the family. - Natural Selection, Heredity and Eugenics: Including selected correspondence of R. A. Fisher with Leonard Darwin and others, edited by J. H. Bennett (1983), p.104-5 The important qualification about the maturity of the offspring is probably also in Hamilton somewhere, but I can't immediately find it. Dawkins makes a similar point in his '12 Misunderstandings of Kin Selection'. Added: I had another skim through Hamilton's papers, but I still couldn't find a discussion of the maturity point. However, I imagine Hamilton would have said that differences of maturity should be taken into account in quantifying the 'benefit' to an offspring of a given amount of parental care. So, for example, in a species with very high infant mortality, the benefit of a given amount of resources to an immature offspring, measured by the expected number of its own future offspring, would be less (other things being equal) than to an offspring who has already reached sexual maturity. Against this, 'other things' are seldom equal, and the benefit of a given amount of resources (e.g. food) to a newborn may be much greater than to an older offspring which can already fend for itself. Labels: Burbridge, Population genetics  In the comments below Susan C asks an interesting question:I'm still surprised that this works as well as it does, given that there were mass movements of people during the nineteenth and twentieth century. An interesting point. Some levels of immigration and movement have always been part of European history. Think about the outflow of Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The trade and migration between the Low Countries and the eastern shore of Britain. The immigration of Spaniards, Poles and Italians to France in the 19th century. The relocation of Saxons to Romania, Russia, etc. Some thoughts: 1) Many of the immigrants, like the Huguenots, settled disproportionately in cities and towns (the Volga Russians are an exception obviously). French in Berlin, British Puritans in Amsterdam, Jewish industrial workers in East London, Asian sailors in Cardiff. And cities until recently were powerful relative population sinks. So modern European cities might be affected by past immigration (e.g., in changing the accent on dialects) culturally, but they are far less reshaped genetically than you would expect. 2) Many of the immigrants were from nearby regions. Spanish and Italian immigration to France was far higher than Polish. So the affect would be more to subtly shift the positions and centers of gravity, as opposed to rearranged the expected spatial relationship. 3) Aside from France, there wasn't much migration as a proportion of the population. The ancestors from Aberswyth and Krakow are very salient because of their exoticism. This is just subject to the same dynamics as disappearing English phenomenon. 4) They sampled from only a few locations within each nation, so the clumping is exaggerated, and combined with #3, the migration effect wasn't strong enough to change your impression. Perhaps they also generally don't sample ethnic minorities in these studies; e.g., avoiding Hungarians and Saxons in Romania. 5) Some migrations, like the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II, rolled back the obscuring effects of earlier movements. I was thinking about following the notes and what not and see where the samples came from, but I'll leave it to enterprising readers. I'm sure that can answer some of these questions. Labels: Genetics
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Dear Readers,
Currently I'm compiling my own dataset of international cognitive test scores. Right now I'm moving on to China. China contains nearly 20% of the human species, with every province being the size of a large country, so it would be nice to get a fuller picture for China than other places. The good news here is that Chinese scientists have engaged in a good deal of intelligence testing. The bad news (for me) is that most of these studies are confined to Chinese language journals. I'm looking for a temporary collaborator who can read Chinese to help me find and extract data from Chinese language studies. Ability to read Chinese and curiosity about the subject are all you really need. If you are interested, please contact me by clicking my name above. Also if any readers are at an institution with electronic access to many Chinese journals (such as the following) and are willing to share the wealth, please contact me as well. Thanks!
This week's To The Best Of Our Knowledge interviews George R. R. Martin. If you have iTunes just subscribe to their podcast and you'll see it on the list of shows (I don't know where to find it streaming online). I was talking to an owner of a local science fiction bookstore, and we agreed that many angry fans are going to break down the gates of hell and tear him to pieces if Martin does a Jordan. Apropos of which the proprietor mused how worrying it was that the 60 year old Martin is corpulent (also, he resented the fact that Martin took vacations!). On the other hand, we agreed that there's no way Brandon Sanderson would ever be commissioned to complete A Song of Ice and Fire.
Friday, November 21, 2008
I pointed to the paper at my other weblog, but since ScienceBlogs has a narrow page width, I've put the important charts below the fold.
  Table 4 - Each horizontal line in the table shows the proportions of test samples originating from a given country that were assigned to each possible target country. I made a few edits, see paper for original.
Labels: Genetics
The Audacious Epigone has two interesting posts up right now. Conservative men more intelligent than conservative women; Liberal women more intelligent than liberal men and Politics and IQ; Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans least intelligent. The titles are self-evident, but, I would add that with hindsight it might make sense that liberal Republicans aren't too bright. If you're a liberal Republican you are probably just in denial, or, confused and dull. When I think liberal Republican I think Tom Campbell or Chris Shays, but these may simply be elite examples who don't reflect the fact that most ideological outliers in parties are just individuals who don't think deeply. For example, someone who was born into a "Republican family," and doesn't reflect much about ideology and so continues to vote Republican despite being liberal. I don't feel I need to explain conservative Democrats, as it seems to me that political exemplars of this class are generally duller than liberal or moderate Democrats.
Note: I know this is kind of a political post, but I'm going to be strict about not letting the comment thread degenerate immediately. So don't get offended if I don't let you through the mod-queue even if I normally do. Labels: IQ
Thursday, November 20, 2008
OK, not really, but I have a new piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free on polygamy.
One of the implicit assumptions of a book like Albion's Seed is the "First Settler Effect," (FSE) whereby the groups which originally settle a region have a disproportionate effect on its cultural character in perpetuity. Obviously there are boundary conditions, the first settlers might be totally replaced demographically rapidly, or, superseded by a cultural complex which views itself as dominant and superior. But in the cased of the United States the best illustration of FSE is linguistic dialect. In New England the tendency to drop the final "r" in words like "car" (non-rhoticity) is a South English linguistic development, and is traced to the East Anglia bias of the original Puritan settlers. This tendency is today strongest in the regions around Boston. Of course, this is probably the area where the Irish Catholics overwhelmed the Yankee Protestants to the greatest extent, showing the strength of FSE ("r" was kept longer, or, is, in Irish and Scottish English, making the illustration of FSE symmetrically persuasive in this case).
But many of the arguments in favor of FSE are rather impressionistic. They are impressions filtered through the eyes of historians, though sometimes they are backed up by quantitative data (New England remains the smartest American region, as it was in 1700). Luckily for us, New England is one of the Census Divisions in the GSS, and so one can explore the differences between Protestants and Catholics, which would roughly map onto the division between original stock and later white ethnic immigrants, and compare them to the McCain Belt whites. Like New England, the East South Central Division of the GSS regions is nice and compact, and correspondences with a relatively homogeneous cultural area. What are the religious breakdowns of New Englanders?
This looks about right checking with the Pew Religious Survey. I'm not totally sure about the representativeness of the GSS in terms of within New England balance, but since I'm interested in comparing New England Protestants and Catholics and McCain Belt whites I'm not too worried. Earlier I said that the proportion of people with "No Religion" in New England probably was going to be disproportionately Yankee. I'm not so sure. The two tables below have rows which add up to 100% for religion and ancestry respectively.
If the Irish and English & Welsh are the canonical white ethnics vs. Yankees, it seems secularization hit them both to the same extent. Since 88% of whites in the East South Central Division are self-identified Protestant, I won't even give a breakdown by religion for that region. From now on I'll refer to Yankee for Protestant New Englander, and White Ethnic, for Catholic New Englander, and the McCain Belt. Remember that I'm excluding those who put religion down as "None" for New England. Instead of an impression based on impressions, I went through the GSS and looked at a host of variables. Some of them might not be surprising to you (WORDSUM score), and some of them more so (# of sex partners since 18). The point was to collect a lot of disparate data, spanning explicit and implicit cultural markers. I tried excluding any question where N was smaller than 100 for any category, though some of the questions have N's bigger than 1,000. On some characters New Englanders cluster together against McCain Belt Whites. On other characters Yankees and McCain Belt Whites custer together against White Ethnics. Finally, there are cases where White Ethnic cluster with McCain Belt whites against Yankees. In many (most it seems to me) cases the pattern seems to be McCain Belt Whites at one end, Yankees at the other, and White Ethnics in the middle, and more often than not, closer to Yankees than McCain Belt Whites. The cases where the White Ethnics are outgroups can I think be chalked up to aspects of Roman Catholicism and the immigrant culture which make them unique vis-a-vis the other two groups, who are old line Protestant stock. Sometimes, as in abortion on demand, I suspect that the White Ethnics are more conservative than Yankees because of their Catholicism, but they still remain more liberal than McCain Belt conservatives. On the balance, I would say that FSE is plausible and supported by these data, even though Yankees did not turn White Ethnics into Catholic Yankees, they did change their outlook or standard reference point a considerable amount (i.e., they may be socially conservative and emphasize education to a lower extent than Yankees, but they are far more liberal and more educated than McCain Belters. In some cases it seems likely that White Ethnics and Yankees evolved together over time as one regional culture, so I don't know if one can say that similarities are always due to FSE as such, though I would argue that contingency means that the original Yankee culture loaded the die in turns of future developmental paths. A little history is warranted at this point. Around 30,000 whites settlers arrived in New England during the 17th century, but 75% arrived in the period between 1630-1640. Most of the derives from this decade and entered into a period of population growth unrivaled in the New World. The next major wave of immigrants were of course the Catholic Irish. Italians and Quebecois are also significant segments of the White Ethnic population. In sharp contrast to the Puritans, who were screened for education and skills to produce the world's first universal literacy middle class society, the white ethnics came from contexts where they were much lower on the social ladder. The Irish and Italians were classical European peasant populations who lacked the bourgeois sensibilities of the Puritans. In the McCain Belt the dominant ethnicity is Scots-Irish, broadly construed. They generally arrived in the 18th century into the port of Philadelphia and expanded through the Southern Uplands, driving all the way to the Gulf of Mexico by the early 19th century. A secondary element consisted of migrants from the Southern lowlands, from the Tidewater down to the Carolinas. From these groups the small planter minority emerged. But demographically the former are more important, and represent the heart of the McCain Belt white culture. Collecting these data was tedious. I expect comments to not be tedious. Clicking on any of the phrases below will result in an image of the chart below Abortion On Demand, Affirmative Action, Aged Should Live With Children, Drinks Alcohol, Allow Anti-Religion Book in Library, Allow Anti-Religionist To Speak, Allow Communist To Speak, Allow Doctors To Assist Death, Allow Racist Books In Library, Allow Racists To Speak, Amount Of Sex Within Last Year, Attendance (Religion), Ban Prayer In School, Beaten As Child Or Adult, Belief In Life After Death, Concern About Racial Issues, Confidence In Education, Confidence In Existence Of God, Confidence In Financial Institutions, Confidence In Military, Confidence In Organized Religion, Confidence In Science, Courts Dealing With Criminals, # Of Children, Disparate Racial Outcomes Inborn, Divorced, Educational Level, Ever Smoked, Extramarital Sex, Favor Law Against Interracial Marriage, Federal Income Tax Rate, Gun Permits, Had Affair While Married, Homosexuality Wrong, Hours Watching TV, How Fundamentalist, How Often Read Newspaper, How Often Spend Evenings With Relatives, How Often Spend Time With Neighbors, How Often You Pray, Human Evolution, Hunt?, Ideal Number Of Children, Life Exciting?, Liking For England, Liking For Israel, Birth Control For Teens, Make Divorce Laws Easier, Males Who Have Paid For Sex, Marijuana Legal, Marital Status, Marriage Happy, Money Spent On Blacks, Money Spent On Education, Money Spent On , Money Spent On Environment, Money Spent On Mass Transit, Money Spent On Military, Money Spent On National Parks, Money Spent On Roads, Money Spent On Space Program, Money Spent On , Mother Working Doesn't Hurt Children, Own Or Rent, Owns Gun, People Can Be Trusted, People Are Selfish, Political Views, Vocab Score (rough proxy for intelligence), Seen Porn In Past Year, Sex Partners Since 18 Female, Sex Partners Since 18 Male, Spanking Appropriate, Threatened Within Gun Or Shot At, Warm Feelings Toward Jews, World Is Evil, Wrong To Cheat On Taxes, Years In Armed Forces  Labels: culture
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Two studies published today demonstrate what was immediately evident from genome-wide association studies of many common diseases: the genetic variants identified account for only a small fraction of risk.
In these cases, the authors try to predict whether an individual will get type II diabetes from a number of clinical variables, as well as recently identified genetic risk factors. The genetic factors only marginally improve the prediction of diabetes, likely to a clinically insignificant extent. This was obvious, of course, from the initial studies themselves--you can't expect variants responsible for a meager fraction of overall disease risk to function as effective predictors of the disease. But somewhat notable nonetheless.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Previously I looked at changing fashions in academic theories and their associated buzzwords, using the articles archived in JSTOR as a sample: see part 1, part 2, and part 3. What about the thing that arts & humanities academics are supposed to study -- the text itself? I mean, the vulgar consuming public may flit from one "it" author to the next, but surely academics are above such fickleness?
Most of them are happy to admit that they don't make grand claims about Truth -- that's only what us evil science people do. But they don't freely admit to being driven mostly by a blind adherence to fashion -- whatever they're showing in Paris this season -- and it's time to strike back at them for this, after that knuckle-rapping they tried to give us in the '90s. Again, I've already showed how fashion works in their theories -- now it's time to show that their consumption patterns (i.e., which authors or artists they read and analyze) are also driven by fashion. Here is a graph using only English-language articles and reviews from the "Language and Literature" category of journals in JSTOR:  The search terms were the authors' surnames, except for Jane Austen, whose full name I searched. This presents no problem for Proust and Kafka, although Joyce is a bit more common as a surname. We don't have to worry about Joyce Carol Oates, as she became popular when James Joyce was declining in popularity. Still, it's clear that the order-of-magnitude increase in "Joyce" is due to James Joyce, as no one else with that name was so popular among professors. The graph starts at 1915 because 1914 is, according to an arts-major legend, the year that Modernism was born. I included Jane Austen for comparison. Even a traditional author like she shows ups and downs, although her popularity does not oscillate nearly as wildly as it does for the Modernists. She is clearly less popular than they are, though. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, Joyce and Proust are neck and neck, but in the post-WWII period, Joyce has always been more popular -- for christ's sake, fully 10% of all Lang & Lit articles refer to him during 1970 - 1990. Even scientists were savvy enough to know that he was the guy you named something after just to prove how clever and initiated you were. Kafka is only slightly less popular than Proust -- which I find surprising, since Proust would seem to have much greater snob appeal, Kafka being the emo band whose posters you plastered your walls with in high school, but who you loudly deny ever having liked once you're a grown-up. Unfortunately I can't easily tell where these articles are coming from -- are the upper crust of arts departments writing mostly about Proust and Joyce, while the reject departments with no friends write mostly about Kafka and Salinger? I have no intuition here, so arts people, feel free to weigh in. At any rate, we see that, just as with their theoretical badges, academics make their consumption a fashion symbol too. Between 1935 and 1945, the three Modernists begin to soar in popularity, but somewhere between 1955 and 1965 they hit diminishing returns, peak around 1975, and get tossed out after that. Note that this is not due to the rise of Postmodernism -- that only got started in the mid-1970s and was big in the 1980s and '90s. Already by 1965, Modernist authors saw their growth slow down. Besides, Postmodernism was attacking the assumptions of another group of academics, rather than attacking a group of authors, painters, or musicians. The data only go up through 2001. Just eyeballing it, it's conceivable that by 2025, these three Modernists won't be given more respect than established authors like Jane Austen, and of course some may see their popularity plummet further to zero. This is a separate question from their artistic merit, obviously. For example, here's some insight into the popularity of Shakespeare in Samuel Pepys' London: [A]nd then to the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's Dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure. A devil's advocate would say that academics gradually stopped writing about these authors because they'd exhausted what there is to say about them. But that's not true: the trajectories are too similar. They just happened to decide "we've gotten all we can" from all three authors at more or less the same time? That sounds, instead, like they just grew bored of the Modernists in general and only wore them out to formal events where they're de rigueur, rather than show them off to every stranger they chatted up at a cocktail party, academic conference, or public restroom. Labels: culture, intellectual history
I noticed today that Heather Mac Donald has just engaged in another dialog with Michael Novak about God over at Beliefnet. As an unabashed vocal unbeliever Heather is exceptional on the American Right (compare to George F. Will's relative diffidence about his agnosticism). Simultaneously, there has been some concern that the youth vote swung so decisively toward the Democrats this election. Since it is also known that the young people are more secular than past generations, I wonder if some of the shift might not simply be due to the stronger association between American conservatism and a specific religious tradition (conservative Protestantism). Below the fold are tables which I generated using the GSS. I combined ages and political ideologies to simplify the categories (e.g., adding extremely and slightly liberal together with liberal into one category). Also, I filtered the sample so that all respondents were white.
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