A high rate of marriage among deaf individuals can explain the increased frequency of connexin deafness in the United States. The article highlights the importance of assortive mating, as it notes that “85 percent of individuals with profound deafness marry another deaf person.” So the result of this is that though the frequency of this particular recessive allele within the total population might not have increased, you no longer have a random mating population, and the frequency of recessive homozygotes is increasing (possibly).

Posted by razib at 03:24 PM

Randy says:

If there are many noble and good things in your ideology of choice, though, and if you think that your ideology should be known for these things instead of for horrible crimes, you can’t simply ignore your ideology’s connection to and responsibility for those crimes, for by so doing you passively collaborate in its bad marketing. And if you deny your ideology’s connection outright, then you’re either misinformed or lying.

The rest is far gentler….

P.S. The Communists weren’t real atheists, the War of Religion fanatics weren’t real Christians and the Nazis weren’t real neo-pagans.

Posted by razib at 11:43 AM

I notice that I’ve been posting on GNXP for just over a year now. Naturally a lot of the posts have been minor or ephemeral, but in my vanity I think some of them are still worth reading. So for the benefit of new readers here is a guide….

If the links don’t work, try the search engine or the ‘View all entries’ option.
Warning: some of these posts are very long, so if you want to do more than skim an item it may be worth saving it to file and/or printing it out.

I have not tried to revise or update the posts, but I will make a few comments as I go along. My introductory post on Heroes and Villains gave a general idea of ‘where I’m coming from’.

I followed this with a series of long items on ‘cultural evolution’. Biological versus cultural evolution sets out some reasons for not confusing the two. Cultural evolution by group selection examines the idea that cultural traits evolve through their effect on the survival and prosperity of the societies in which those traits are found – a very dubious idea, in my opinion. Altruism and group selection is not concerned with cultural evolution but with the idea that genetically-based altruism is a product of group selection, as proposed e.g. in Eliot Sober and D. S. Wilson’s book Unto Others. I am sceptical about the importance of this, but for those who like the idea, I draw attention to my ‘chessboard’ model for the aggregation of altruists. In a post on Clarifications (and a bit more) I responded to some comments and possible misunderstandings. In Cultural evolution: the meme is the theme I looked at Dawkins’s idea of ‘natural selection of memes’. (A few months later, in More on memes I commented on Susan Blackmore’s book on the subject.) The culmination of this series of posts came with Is culture useful?. The short answer is, ‘not necessarily’. Anthropologists, sociologists, and evolutionary psychologists all, in different ways, tend to assume that cultural traits must provide some kind of benefit, whether for society as a whole, for interest-groups within it, or for individuals. I argue that there is no good reason for this assumption. By analogy, learning, in general, is a good thing, but there is no guarantee that everything we learn is true or useful.

Since writing these posts, I have read a lot of recent academic work on these issues. I hope to give a survey of this literature some time.

My next major series of posts concerned issues about population. Comments in the media on population often show serious misunderstandings, potentially leading to bad policies, such as encouraging immigration to relieve the burden of an ageing population. Population fallacies, Part 1 dealt with the common misconception that in the ‘old days’ few people lived beyond the age of 50 or so. Actually, life expectancy at birth was low because of high infant mortality, but those who survived childhood lived almost as long as we do. Population fallacies, Part 2 explores what is meant by birth rates and fertility rates, and points out that current estimates of fertility in western countries are distorted by trends in the age of child-bearing. Population fallacies, Part 3 does a similar job on death rates. Afraid of growing old? argues that the ‘burden of the elderly’ is much exaggerated. Since I posted this, there has been further evidence that people are not only living longer but staying healthy for longer, so that the cost to health services is less than has been feared. Finally, The future of the birth rate gives reasons from evolutionary theory for expecting birth rates to rise again after a generation or two of birth control.

With population issues still in mind, I gave a breakdown of English ethnic groups in English population patterns, based on the 2001 UK Census. The most interesting point was the large increase in immigration to the UK from elsewhere in Europe. In More Census gleanings I gave some more data from the Census, this time on the educational and economic achievement of different groups. I drew attention to the puzzle that some minority groups seem to do better in higher education and employment than would be expected from their performance in school. Several people asked me if there was any data on the IQ of different groups in the UK, and I tried to answer this in IQ comments. While researching this, I came across some similar data for the Netherlands, which I described in Dutch treat. In both the UK and the Netherlands, the IQ of immigrant groups has partially converged on that of the native population.

These discussions of IQ issues made me more attentive to comments, on GNXP and elsewhere, about IQ comparisons between different countries, deriving directly or indirectly from Lynn and Vanhanen’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Many of these comments seemed to assume that differences in IQ between nations had a genetic basis. In my post IQ comparisons I pointed out the dangers of this assumption. Even if heritability of IQ within populations is high, this is consistent with quite large differences between populations for environmental reasons, and the Flynn Effect (the long term increase in IQ in all developed countries) shows that such differences do occur. In Once more into the breach I followed this up by calculating the correlation between national IQs and an indicator of environmental quality (infant mortality rates). I showed that the correlation was strikingly high, and discussed possible explanations for this. Contrary to some assertions, a significant correlation does indicate a causal connection, but it does not tell you the nature or even the direction of causality. However, we know from the Flynn Effect that differences in economic development can cause differences in IQ levels, whereas we do not know (with any confidence) that differences in IQ cause differences in economic development. I am still quite proud of this post, as it involved more real work than any other, and produced a striking result. (If any competent academic wants to work the idea up properly and publish it, feel free to do so, but a footnote acknowledgement would be nice!) I followed up the point about the Flynn Effect with In like Flynn, which drew together information from various sources suggesting that the cumulative increase in mean IQ in the UK and USA since 1900 was over 25 points, and possibly as much as 30 points. This implies that the IQ of white Americans and Britons in 1900 was below that of some black African countries today. Some people didn’t like this conclusion, but not liking a conclusion does not invalidate it. I returned to some methodological aspects of the problem more recently in Loose ends.

I mentioned early in these discussions of IQ that I had not then read Lynn and Vanhanen’s book, as it was not easily available. A reader alerted me to a library copy, and after trekking off to the library I discussed the book in IQ and the Wealth of Nations I pointed out that Lynn and Vanhanen are in fact quite non-committal on the extent to which IQ differences between nations are genetically determined, and they accept that at least one environmental factor (nutrition) has important effects.

I turned to another aspect of IQ issues in a series of posts about social mobility. Intelligence and social mobility described some recent British studies confirming the link between individual cognitive ability and social mobility (upwards or downwards). A reader drew my attention to another study, which I discussed in Intelligence and education . As I mentioned in the first of these posts, the evidence suggests that rates of social mobility are rather similar in most developed countries, and do not seem to have changed much in the last century. This may conflict with the claim (e.g. by Herrnstein and Murray) that there is an increasing concentration of wealth and ability in a ‘cognitive elite’. I discussed this in A new cognitive elite?

This year I turned with relief from IQ issues to something I find much more interesting: the mind-body problem. In Changing the subject I argued that there was a contradiction in the scientific world-view: on the one hand, it is assumed that the properties of the mind, including such subjective sensations as pleasure and pain, have evolved by natural selection, which implies that they influence physical survival and reproduction. But at the same time is is widely supposed by ‘scientific’ thinkers that subjective sensations have no causal efficacy. In No pain, no gain I developed the argument that subjective pleasures and pains are adaptations produced by natural selection, and therefore must have causal efficacy. In The World Riddle I considered whether there was any escape from this contradiction (none that I can see!) These posts proved highly controversial, which some excellent comments on both sides of the case.

Apart from these clusters of related posts, at intervals over the past year I have posted on several topics related to sex and sexual selection. Sex ratio fallacies dealt with the idea that families ‘trying for a boy’ could increase the ratio of males born. Are men doomed? challenged various pop-science claims that ‘maleness’ was in decline. Adam’s Curse critiqued the arguments on these lines in Bryan Sykes’s book of that title, and I showed in particular that his ‘prediction’ that male fertility would decline to zero within 5000 generations was fundamentally unsound. The Handicap Principle gave a fairly enthusiastic account of the Zahavis’ book of that title. Honest signals gave further references to recent work on sexual selection and signalling theory. Animal signals reviewed a book by John Maynard Smith and David Harper. They make a useful distinction between ‘handicaps’ – signals that are reliable because they are costly to produce – and ‘indices’ – signals that are inherently difficult to fake. Still on the theme of sexual selection, I recently posted two items related to Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind. Wodabout the Wodaabe? examined Miller’s account of the Wodaabe tribe of North Africa and found it wanting, and The Mating Mind looked at Miller’s book more generally.

Finally, from time to time I have posted items that don’t fit into any particular theme but may still be worth a look. Celts and Anglo-Saxons analyses the historical evidence for the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England.

The Shifting Balance describes some recent work on Sewall Wright’s evolutionary theories. Cuckoldry and correlation explores the implications of allegedly high levels of ‘misascribed paternity’. Family Connections pursues the Galtonian theme of talent running in families. Scots Wha Hae discusses the curiously neglected question of why the Scots speak English.

Well, that’s all I think is worth mentioning. I will revise and update the list every month or so, assuming that I have anything worth adding.

Posted by David B at 03:31 AM

It seems that Italy is dropping evolution from primary & middle school curricula. Panda’s Thumb points me to this usenet summation. The author seems to have an anti-laissez-faire orientation that suffuses his critique, but neverthless, I think it is interesting to note that the Vatican has made peace with Darwin, but there still remains a feeling of anti-evolutionism among a segment of the Catholic masses.

This to me is an illustration of the layering of Catholic religiosity, in that the elite view tends to be different from the lay view. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is intellectually nimble enough to dovetail new findings in science and the theological superstructure of their faith, but some of the common people within the church have the same difficulties with these issues that Protestant and Muslim fundamentalists do. The only difference is that the Catholic Church embraces both groups within its umbrella, while other religions tend to enter into periodic schism, “resolving” the segmentation among believers.

Posted by razib at 01:04 PM

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asks Is the welfare state good for growth? (via ParaPundit), and comes up with a even-handed & nuanced answer. Speaking of nuance and subtlety, those are qualities that libertarians are often accused of not possessing, and frankly, often they (we?) are guilty as charged! A few observations:

1) Non-libertarians often conflate libertarians (often unsociable and obnoxious) with libertarianism, to the detriment of the latter.
2) Libertarians often socialize only with “like minded” individuals, which often deceives us about “human nature” because of selection biasing.
3) David Boaz, VP of the CATO Institute, once told me in a chagrined manner that libertarians often like to live around liberals (a subset of the Metrocon Syndrome, a reversal of the old Fusionist alliance).

Posted by razib at 12:21 PM

I highly recommend Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks if you have a few hours to kill (a link under “Science Blogs”). You can find entries on signal processing, Chuang-Tzu and Economics. Certainly one of the most prominent Afghan-Tamil-Italian American thinkers on the web!

Posted by razib at 07:28 PM

Aziz comments on the civilizational gap between “the West” (defined as the cultures who worship the One True God of Abraham) and those of “the East” (in particular, the Confucian East). Though I think Aziz highlights a real difference, the article which he references about the wrath that the recent Japanese hostages found when they returned to the home islands is shocking in its contrast with American culture, for I think that the dichotomy is not between those who worship the One True God and the people of the East, but between the Anglosphere and the rest of the world. More specifically, I believe the argument laid out in The Geography of Thought a proper descriptive framework, that the Anglospheric countries are the most “individualistic,” while most of the world behaves on the principles of group conformity and “shame” (with Continental Europe somewhere in the middle). The reality of Arab “honor killings” (and the past of Anglospheric culture, that is, the Victorian era) shows the importance of shame, and conformity to group norms (or the perception of conformity), even when a people putatively have a personal relationship to God (one might assert that American culture makes such a fetish of non-conformity that they conform to non-conformism!?!).

But there is an underlying problem with these civilizational categories-it neglects the internal dynamics of a society, and takes the perception of one slice as the norm. For instance, when it comes to religion (often the marker used to delineate civilizational boundaries), I think this rough diagram illustrates what I mean:

At the center of religious belief are basic hard-wired “human universals.” These are elaborated into complex rationalized faith systems by those who are prone toward rationalization. But there is a spectrum of belief, not just in intensity, but in conception. The intellectual class works out explicit axioms, rules and norms, and it is this class that serves as the clerics and thinkers who act as religious and civilizational spokesmen. But on the level of of the “common man” things are much simpler, and the religious practice and core beliefs of Muslim, Hindu and Japanese peasants might be more similar to each other than they are to the elite practioners of these cultures. To illustrate of what I speak, the filioque controversy helped spark the rift between the Eastern and Western Churches during the Dark Ages, but on the level of the common European, this had little impact (and in the grand tradition of rationalization, it almost certainly was rooted in political machinations rather than a genuine theological disagreement that could brook no compromise). Though Hinduism is “officially” pantheistic, the devotion of Indian peasants to their local godesses resembles that of Chinese peasants to Guaynin or Latin American peasants to the Virgin.

The counter-intuitive implication here is that the chasm between civilizations is on some level increasing as literacy and “elite values” spread throughout the world. But, the elite values that are spreading are particular to any given region, rather than trans-cultural “McWorld” ideals. This explains the rise of “reformism” and the decline of “traditionalist” beliefs among the Javanese urban class, and the coalescence of lay movements like Muhammadiyah and the expansion of the santri (orthodox) segment of Indonesian Islam. In a similar fashion, portions of the “paganized” elements of Roman Catholic Latin American peasantry are converting to a more “rigorous” Protestant Christianity, while many Japanese are shedding religion in general and simply becoming “Secular.”

What is implicit and instinctive is common to humans as a whole, and local custom, ritual and tradition will often reflect this (that is, local peculiarities often reside within set parameters that define the conventional human range of practice and belief). But, what is explicit and rational is more likely to be dictated by its own internal logic, and once man cedes his will to reason, we may drift from the “equilibrium channel of religious practice” that characterizes most human cultures (and wander into strange territory like the “Death of God” theology). One tension that surfaces with this spread of elite values is that much of the populace can not master the rationalized systems that undergird elite religious formulations, ergo, the rise of hyper-simplistic messages and “fundamentals” that can communicate a few basic axioms without taxing intellectual capacities. Because these “rational” systems of belief are based on a chain of propositions that might be disputed, they drift into very different directions even though core human spirituality might be rather similar from person to person, and this diversity is preserved as the various Truths in the debased “fundamentalisms” that are proliferating in the modern world. The final result seems to be the rise of the possibility of a genuine “Clash of Civilizations,” as opposed to the mobilization of societies on behalf of the selfish interests of the elites under self-serving ideological banners. It is no surprise that there is a contrast between the The City of God, written for the educated Christian and pagan elite of the 5th century, as opposed to Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, written for the broad evangelical masses in the late the 20th century.

Posted by razib at 01:23 PM

Commentary has a review of Thomas Sowell’s Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. Speaking for myself, when I first began to read Sowell’s books back in the mid-90s, I experienced a literal mind-quake, and nothing has been the same since.

Posted by razib at 10:07 PM

Got a forward about this article, Reconstructing the evolutionary history of Microcephalin, a gene controlling human brain size. Abstract & excerpts below.

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of Microcephalin, a gene controlling human brain size.

Evans PD, Anderson JR, Vallender EJ, Choi SS, Lahn BT.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; Committee on Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

The defining process in the evolution of primates and particularly humans is the dramatic expansion of the brain. While many types of genes could potentially contribute to this process, genes that specifically regulate brain size during development may be especially relevant. Here, we examine the evolution of the Microcephalin gene, whose null mutation in humans causes primary microcephaly, a congenital defect characterized by severe reductions in brain size without other gross abnormalities. We show that the evolution of Microcephalin’s protein sequence is highly accelerated throughout the lineage from simian ancestors to humans and chimpanzees, with the most pronounced acceleration seen in the early periods of this lineage. We further demonstrate that this accelerated evolution is coupled with signatures of positive selection. Statistical analysis suggests that about 45 advantageous amino acid changes in Microcephalin might have fixed during the 25-30 million years of evolution from early simian progenitors to modern humans. These observations support the notion that the molecular evolution of Microcephalin may have contributed to brain expansion in the simian lineage leading to humans. We have recently shown that ASPM, another gene linked to primary microcephaly, experienced strong positive selection in the ape lineage leading to humans. We therefore propose that genes regulating brain size during development may have the general propensity to contribute to brain evolution in primates and particularly humans.

excerpts:

“The human microcephalin gene spans 14 exons and has a deduced protein-coding region of roughly 2.5 kb (21). It contains three so-called BRCA1 C-terminal (BRCT) domains, one at its N-terminus and two at its C-terminus. This domain is found in the tumor suppressor gene BRCA1 as well as multiple other eukaryotic genes, and is implicated in protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions. Apart from the BRCT domains, however, the biochemical function of microcephalin is unknown. Expression of microcephalin is found in a variety of human and mouse tissues (21). The most prominent is found in the developing forebrain, within regions of active neurogenesis ( i.e. the walls of lateral telencephalic ventricles). Such an expression pattern is consistent with the role of this gene in regulating brain size during development. (21) “

“Curiously, the BRCA1 gene has been shown to exhibit signatures of positive selection in the human and chimpanzees lineages after they diverged from each other (37,38) It may be a mere coincidence that both Microcephalin and BRCA1 – which share the BRCT domains in common – are subject to positive selection during primate evolution. Indeed, the BRCT domains in both genes are highly conserved and are themselves not subject to positive selection. However, it is also possible that Microcephalin and BRCA1 have similar functions in regulating cell cycle and are therefore subject to similar regimes of positive selection. Consistent with this possibility, BRCA! knockout mice show profound defects in nervous system development such as failure of neural tube closure and severely retarded growth of the forebrain. These results indicate that BRCA1, like Microcephalin, has a critical function in the proliferation and differentiation of neural progenitor cells (39), raising the possibility that positive selection on BRCA1 was actually directed towards its activity in brain development rather than its function in tumor suppression. “

Posted by razib at 09:15 PM

HPGL @ Stanford has a new paper up at their site titled The Levant versus the Horn of Africa: Evidence for Bidirectional Corridors of Human Migrations (PDF). Samples from Egypt & Oman tend to show an affinity with West Eurasian haplogroups with some admixture of Sub-Saharan ones, but the article focuses on the dynamics in northern Sub-Saharan Africa far more than the title indicates. I found this aside interesting:

mtDNA data in African populations…suggest a lower importance of language versus geography in defining differences among the main groups in the female genetic pool. This may reflect a general pattern of cultural assimilation of the indigenous females during the Bantu expansion….

The combination of periodic male population movements on the macro scale and dominance of exchange of females between villages and localities on the micro scale is something that needs to be systematized more. As usual, the men show a greater tendency toward extremes….

Posted by razib at 01:16 PM