The best obituary of JMS I have seen yet is in the Guardian (22 April), here.

All the obits mention JMS’s liking for discussions to be – er – lubricated. I can confirm this from personal experience. I met JMS once when he was in his early seventies, after he had given a paper at a seminar on the work of Francis Galton. We continued our conversation in a local pub, and after an hour or so – and several pints – he was in much better condition than I was!

Posted by David B at 04:43 AM

Randall asks:

But the ability of people to compare themselves to more other people and to feel to be in direct competition with more people must to be generating resentments and even demoralization due to comparisons that would not have been possible in the past.
…
Are we then headed toward a future that will be characterised as an age of resentment? I’d very much like to hear your comments on this.

OK, well, I made a snarky little comment which implied that the demographic dynamic would simply shift, only the proudly pathetic would reproduce, while those who are demoralized wouldn’t because of self-loathing. Of course the successful don’t have time to have children. A more specific example is the butt-ugly loser who refuses to settle for a “non-hotty” because of “standards.” Over time these individuals will cull themselves from the gene pool.

But Randall points to the current situation in the historical context. Frankly, I wonder if a highly stratified society where envy rules might not be a return to the conditions that prevailed before the rise of egalitarian liberalism and more open economic opportunities and after the decline of the EEA hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In other words, the wheel of history might be turning back to the baroque pyramidal social orders that were dominant for 5,000-10,000 years after the agricultural revolution. I don’t think the analogy is perfect, as explicit familial connections (“noble pedigree”) might be less important than socieconomic and genetic advantages.

One point of interest is the importance of the perception of meritocracy and the reality of social churn. As many have noted, in a social context where all have equal opportunity, that is, a perfect meritocracy, stratification will remain, and perhaps be even more fixed, as only genes are fullly expressed and associated. Reality dictates the importance of the family environment and socioeconomic advantages, but over time, one might hypothesize that these serve only to amplify the advantages of the “natural elite” born of blood. The transition between the non-liberal democratic regimes and our modern age ushered in a period of transition and social churn where many groups rose above their “allotted station.” But one can rise only so far, and the curse of the quest for the most perfect station of status is not mitigated by biological well being or material plentitude.

Moving out of the mode of airm-chair EP theorizing, note this recent article that discusses the trend of elite colleges drawing more from the wealthy professional classes. This is bad for the perception of meritocracy, but recall that in the 1960s the Ivy League Schools raised their academic standards and eased out the predominance of blood & breeding in judging who would matriculate. A whole generation of boomers rose as far as their talent could take them. The period of transition might have lulled Americans into thinking that social mobility is a fact of human existence rather than a transient and ephemeral characteristic of a “phase transition” between two socio-historical paradigms.

Update: Derb has a tangentially related column up.

Posted by razib at 05:53 PM

People Magazine has a dead-tree article on porn exposure of today’s children. This is something I’ve talked about before, the internet has resulted in the initiation of a vast social experiment.

Where in generations past young teenage boys would scheme, plan and quest for porn, or barring that, a racy edition of National Geographic, kids today are bombarded by grotesque pornography of a nature that I was not even aware of until I was told about it in a church youth group (I am speaking of bestiality). I am always confused when I walk by my 10 year old brother deleting his hotmail “donkey lovin'” spam in the living room. One of the kids in the article notes that not only does he see men & women having sex, he gets a regular stream of inter-species menage a trois in his inbox (thankfully I only seem to be the target of hentai porn).

The statistics of porn exposure, on the order of 70-80%, are specified in the article. But the negative results are always presented as anecdote, which suggests to me that individuals who have psychological weak-points are fingering pornography as a causative agent, rather than their own failings (my Christian evangelical friends who had porn or drug problems tended to pin it on the devil). The article concludes with a father’s tale of how brazen and bold his sons have gotten about porn viewing, looking up their bookmarked sites when their mom is cooking, or when their parents go out dinner. Strange days.

Posted by razib at 04:32 PM

I was recently directed to this short article titled “Math favors boys over girls.” Rather ho-hum, and if you are want a quick primer that explains the differential by emphasizing the greater variance of male IQ, here you go [1].

But I did track down the original paper (full text PDF at the link) that the piece above was based on, “Interhemispheric Interaction During Global–Local Processing in Mathematically Gifted Adolescents, Average-Ability Youth, and College Student.” It was interesting to me that the focus of the paper did not seem to be gender differences, but rather, the importance of an fully integrated and active right hemisphere during mental tasks, especially among the mathematically gifted. Additionally, the researchers note the over-representation of left-handedness among the mathematically gifted (the right brain controls the left half of the body). The article above was in The Times of India, and knowing how negatively South Asians tend to view those of the leftish persuasion, I am not surprised they did not play up that angle.

On a related note, a month ago Diana asked me about the EP reasoning behind the persistence of right-handed dominance. She did not find this article that hypothesized a correlation between right-handedness and left-brained speech ability, a heterozygote advantage that resulted in balancing selection, ergo residual frequency of non-hand-biased homozygotes (some of whom are “left handed”), convincing. But if we want to go out on a limb, what the paper above might suggest is that there is a possible avenue of selection pressure in favor of left-handedness.

It is often said that “naturally” about 10% of the population prefers the left hand to the right. I would be willing to bet that coincidentally that’s probably the proportion of the population that prefers mathematical study to more verbally oriented endeavors. Perhaps the 90/10 is just an ESS?

[1] I recall seeing a study which tracked boys and girls of the same mathematical aptitudes (as measured by tests taken when they were 13), and there was still a strong tendency for the females to go into “people” fields like medicine and law over physical science & engineering graduate programs 10 years later, so the interplay of personal preference & cultural expectations amplify the differences (the two latter factors I assume are bi-directional in their influence).

Posted by razib at 02:08 AM

Just chatted a bit with Aziz earlier this afternoon, and I feel like I want to clear up a few things that I left implicit in the previous post.

I have, as I earlier noted, advised great caution in importing Christian analogues when speaking of Islam. But, I believe that my objection was specifically in the context of the Protestant/Catholic-Sunni/Shia metaphor. Therefore, I think I have dodged the letter of the law as far as my objection goes, since I am making an analogue between Calvinism and the general expression of Islam. But, I think it can be argued I violated the spirit of my previous position-I even make a point of cautioning against over-emphasizing points of similarity between Sunni practice & Protestant practice.

So, let me be a bit more explicit & narrow in my focus:

I wanted to highlight similarities between Calvinism as it evolved in the United States, and the possible future trajectory of American Islam. I make a few references to Europe, but I think any sort of projection by analogy is far more difficult in that context. I do believe that American Muslims are reinterpreting their religion in a Protestantized fashion, and as I have stated earlier, short term compromises often work their way up through systems of belief (that is, superficial Protestantization can lead to more thoroughgoing internalization of Protestant ways of thinking and practicing). In fact, Randy used the American Catholic analogy in his post on Muslims in France, and I think that part of the problem is that I’m not convinced that the American system of religious pluralism and public piety exists in Europe.

Posted by razib at 05:25 PM

A few years ago in southern England a drunken teenager threw a brick at a truck. The brick hit the driver’s window; the driver had a heart attack and died. The police forensic services obtained a DNA sample from the surface of the brick, but could not find a match. The case went cold…

Then last year the Forensic Science Service told the police that the newly developed process of “familial searching” might help. This is based on the reasoning that close relatives of the criminal will have partially similar DNA, and there may be a close relative somewhere in the police DNA records, especially as criminality tends to run in families.

On this basis the FSS searched their databases (containing about 2.35 million DNA profiles in England), and found one profile with an 80 percent match to the sample from the brick. The police listed close relatives of the partial match, identified a likely suspect, and obtained a DNA sample from him which proved to be a perfect match. After initially denying all knowledge of the crime, when confronted with the DNA evidence the suspect pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He has been sentenced to six years in jail.

So-called “civil liberties” organisations are said to be worried at the implications. Personally, I set a higher value on the civil liberty of not having drunken louts throwing bricks at me.

However, the case does raise some delicate questions of methodology. The use of DNA matching depends on a calculation of probabilities. In this case it was said (according to the report in the London Times, April 20) that the probability of a perfect match from someone who was not the true villain was one in a billion. But if the ‘sampling frame’ is constructed by identifying close relatives of people with a good partial match, then the probability of getting a perfect match by chance (i.e. from an innocent person) among those relatives must be greatly increased as compared with the probabilities in the general population. What is needed is the probability that someone identified by this method is the true villain.

I presume that the experts were satisfied that the probability of a perfect match by chance was still sufficiently remote, but as the suspect ‘copped a plea’ the matter was never tested in Court. It all sounds like an episode of CSI – I wonder if the same issue has come up in any American cases?

Posted by David B at 03:28 AM

Of 80 people who voted:
60% want to keep extended entries.
30% want to get rid of them.
10% don’t care.

Of six people who contacted me via email, one disliked extended entries, while all the others wanted them to remain.

Posted by razib at 11:36 AM

If you read this blog you know that I am of the opinion that some religions are “brittle,” and internal change can be precipitated by a “tipping point.” Against this is the idea of slow evolution of ideas and groups over time. Obviously all groups evince both characteristics, and words like “fast” and “slow” can be subjective in the context of difficult to measure objects like “culture” or “religion.”

I would like to explore these questions by starting with an analogy that others have used, that Islam by its nature resembles Reformation Protestantism, and in particular, the iconoclastic Calvinist strain in Protestant thought. I have expressed serious reservations about mapping Christian typologies over to Islam, but I will attempt to be as circumspect and general as I can in the following treatment to mitigate charges of hypocrisy.

First, I will tip my hat to Stark & Bainbridges A Theory of Religion, in that though I do not accept all of their propositions about the evolution of religious beliefs in a rational choice context, I think they do offer some insights that are worth examining (this is especially true in the American context of religious pluralism and relative state non-interference in conversion). One of their major points is that religious groups often go from high tension with society at large to low tension as a function of time (tension has a strong inverse correlation with numerical strength and social standing of a given sect and its members).

This tendency of religious groups to shift from “high tension,” that is fundamentalist, to “low tension,” that is mainline, can be seen in many American sects. For instance, American Methodism initially owed its origins to revival movements that today would be more characteristic of Baptists, or even Pentecostals. Similarly, American Presbyterianism was early on characterized by a traditionalist reaction against the liberalism of their Congregationalist theological siblings in New England. Finally, Congregationalism is often said to be the most liberal of American Christian churches, for example the United Church of Christ (the successor national umbrella group to the Congregationalists) ordain homosexuals. But, what many people must recall is that Congregationalists are direct genetic descendents of the Puritanism of the Calvinist settlers of New England! And despite its diverse origins, the post-Christian Unitiarian-Universalist Association in the American context is a direct outgrowth of the early 19th century Congregationalist liberal movement! In such a fashion, one can connect John Calvin in a direct line of ministers to a religious group that accepts pagans within its fold.

Now, there are many conservative Presbyterians, and the Reform/Calvinist movement has produced many traditionalists, from Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantiga, to anti-abortion activist Randall Terry or members of mainline Presbyterian congregations like former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed. But the center of gravity of American Calvinist/Reform believers tends to be less fundamentalist, and more moderate. The Unitarian-Universalist movement is the left-wing outlier, while Christian Reconstructionism can be viewed as the right-wing extreme, even more fundamentalist than Calvin’s original “theocracy” in Geneva in their conception of church-state relations. But, there are more explicit adherents to Unitarian-Universalism in the United States than Christian Reconstructionism (630,000 UUs).

This change in the Calvinist/Reform tinged denominations in the United States reflects a few general dynamics.

1) A sect/cult often starts out with fanatic believers, “die hards” who have little to lose.
2) These people start getting the “word out,” and the rate of growth skyrockets.
3) There is in the general population a fraction of people who are congenial to whatever message/orientation that is being propogated by the new sect and they come on board as they hear about it. This is the initial phase when the rate of growth keeps increasing (the second derivate is going up).
4) There comes a point where the sect is more established. It becomes a “denomination.” The “fanatics” are now in positions of more power & prestige. They have something to lose. There are many more “normal” people in the church, who are changing the internal dynamics. Those who are predisposed to join for whatever reason have heard about it, so the rate of growth slows down over time (the second derivative is dropping).
5) The denomination becomes “established.” People are “born” into the church, and some join for reasons of social networking, it has gained a “high status” in society. There is less pressure to convert others, and the fanatic personality type is a small minority. The rate of growth stops, and the church has reached a “saturation point” or carrying capacity.
6) At this point, a lot of things start happening, the….
A) the “fanatics” who are still around might start a new sect.
B) though the “tenets” or axioms of the church remain the same, the people “re-interpret” them to their own benefit. In this way, the name might remain the same, but the animal has a make-over. This is a dynamic process, the act of attracting new members changes the way the church attacts new members (that is, fewer fanatics are attracted, more social networkers, and the process hits a tipping point beyond which you can’t shift back).

OK, so back to the real world. How does this apply? In the generality, we might use these concepts to interpret news stories about “religious explosions” the world over. For instance-the high growth rates of Pentecostalism in Latin America, Christianity in Korea or Islam among black Americans. News stories often project these numbers outward in a very naive fashion. The number of Latin Americans who are dissatisfied with the Catholic Church is finite. Additionally, the nature of Pentecostalism changes with new members who enter the faith, so the people it attracts is also something that is dynamic and hard to project forward (that is, imaginings of a fundamentalist Protestant Brazil based on 20 years of growth seems unlikely). It seems in South Korea that the past decade has seen a flattening of the growth of Christianity, and many people who “convert” to Christianity are now switching sects, that is, converting from one church to another within the Christian fold (recall that many fundamentalists have a narrow view of who is “Christian,” so a conversion from a liberal Christian denomination to a fundamentalist sect might be thought of as “converting to Christianity” by that respondent). Many of those who were potentional converts have probably converted. Korean Christianity is also now in an internal debate, as its fundamentalism is being challenged by “liberals” (interesting coincidence, but Presbyterianism is the dominant Protestant sect, so you are seeing the same processes that worked in the United States recapitulating themselves).

Finally, let’s move back to Islam. This is a big religion, 1 billion people, and because of the dynamics of Muslim polities, “rational choice” really isn’t much of an option in many of these countries. But looking at American or European Islam, we can apply some of the same principles. As Muslims rise in social status, they should try to reduce tension with the surrounding society, “re-interpret” their texts to be more liberalism friendly, and their rate of growth should drop as there’s less incentive for psychologically deviant individuals to join the confession (since it is now less deviant). Of course, the other direction might also work, where Islam becames the “sect of fanatics” par excellence and as deviants who seek to be at tension with the society around them convert and join, those who want to assimilate drop out, resulting in a tipping point to permanent fundamentalism.

Now, there are some axiomatic issues with Islam, does the interpretation of the Koran as the literal Word of God serve as a block “re-interpretation” and liberalization? I don’t think we should neglect this, human minds tend to want to avoid obvious logical conflicts (or at least explain them away easily), and this is a hard point to work around on first blush. Some Muslim liberals are attempting to formulate such a “work around,” but they need to make it simple enough to convince the masses. Once this “channel” is opened, then the option of wholesale “cracking” of Islam might be foreseeable because of the faith’s weak ecclesiastical structure.

Amen to the last.

Posted by razib at 01:04 PM

Slate’s “cover-story” today, The Depressive and the Psychopath: At last we know why the Columbine killers did it brings back one of the oft-neglected, and important, characters in the HB-D pantheon: the Psychopath. Writer David Cullen states that the FBI has come to a conclusion about the reason why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates five years ago to this day (+1), and it boils down to a chance combination of two special personality types (if you couldn’t tell by the title).

First in a brief table[1], Cullen lists many of the misconceptions surrounding Columbine and folk wisdom of the killer’s motivations. This includes many of the ideas about the kids being “outcasts”. In fact they were really very normal and no less popular than the average teen. This is in high distinction to the ‘goths vs. jocks’ mythology of revenge that still follows this story. Which misleads, not only in the motives of the killers (which was about a masturbatory body-count, not geek revenge or damaged egos), but in how it reinforces biased outlooks on these high-school archetypes.[2]

Next Cullen addresses the FBI conclusion that the Columbine shootings can mainly be attributed to the unique mental condition of Eric Harris. Most of the diagnosis of Harris was made possible through the intimate and disturbing writings in his journal (partially online via alternative news-weekly Westword):

Harris’ pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist [Here – JM] and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath.

It begins to explain Harris’ unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable. But they’re actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think they’re facing one. It’s like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)

None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn’t grasp what they feel The truly hard-core psychopath doesn’t quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.
“Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,” Hare writes. “For example, they can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”

The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership. Despite earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and driving force.

The Hare quoted is Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopathy. Formerly on GNXP, Godless linked to an interesting article about how psychopaths, or “natural born killers”, are the most valuable soldiers in the military. It corroborates the Slate piece in at least one important way, the role of Dylon Klebold. The author, who totes the war-time efficacy of the NBK, reassures his military audience that ‘atrocity’ is not necessarily one of the most likely draw-backs of this personality type:

However, there are drawbacks to natural killers in a unit too. Their highly aggressive nature may act as a catalyst for violence in tenuous situations such as peacekeeping (PK) operations. This is not to say that they will create atrocities, which are generally initiated by overcontrolled personality types in second-in-command positions, not by undercontrolled personality types.

Atrocities are the result of the release of pent-up hostilities-not a characteristic of sociopaths who live for the moment. Natural killers may participate in atrocities but they will not initiate them. This same “live-for-the-moment” attitude makes the peacetime routine difficult for killers. The sociopath craves stimulation that the peacetime Army often does not provide.

Compare this description of how these two different types of personality combine to create atrocity with Cullen’s role for the rage of depressive Klebold:

The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually psychopathic killers crave the stimulation of violence. That is why they are often serial killers-murdering regularly to feed their addiction. But Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he and Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers complemented each other. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when he got hot-tempered. At the same time, Klebold’s fits of rage served as the stimulation Harris needed.

Perhaps there is a contradiction in who plays who in the over/under-controlled dynamic but it reflects a similar theme of spark and fan. The article makes clear though that Harris was the much more unique and crucial personality type:

The psychiatrists can’t help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris. He might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life.

Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.

One might ask what creates such an “irretrievable” and aberrant “alternate brain mechanism” such as Eric Harris’. Ian Pitchford writes:

Psychopathy is not associated with low birth weight, obstetric complications, poor parenting, poverty, early psychological trauma or adverse experiences, and indeed Robert Hare remarks [In his definitive book on Psychopathy Without Conscience – JM] ‘I can find no convincing evidence that psychopathy is the direct result of early social or environmental factors’ (Hare, 1993, p. 170).

I should note that despite the conclusive language of the article, it still doesn’t really explain what it purports to. For instance psychopaths are about 1% of the population (or 3 million people!), and the article admits that most psychopaths aren’t killers. So we have the necessary raw psychological materials, and a plausible interaction effect and that’s good but . . .

I find it notable that the only two countries I’m aware of where school shootings have
happened are America and Germany, and the only three countries I remember hearing about serial killers are America, the United Kingdom, and Germany. What is it about these partially overlapping cultural spheres that brings thrill-killing to a sub-set of a sub-set of personality type? Are the variables too numerous, ill-defined, chaotic and complex to meaningfully contemplate human behavior this specific with a lens this tight?

Update: Hmm, just glanced through some of the journal entries at Westword. I guess Harris called himself NBK. The title was not a reference to that, but to this return to the subject of the psychopath on gnxp since godless’ post “Natural Born Killers”. Jim in the comments notes that serial killers have been documented in European countries besides those I noted, though I found that 85% have been from America. Does anyone have any good links for cross-cultural comparisons?

[1] This table is an abbreviated version of an article Cullen wrote on Salon in 1999. So the information is not new.

[2] It was interesting in the aftermath seeing how those liberals and conservatives who habitually scapegoat eachother, projected each-other (not just each-other’s policies, but each-other) into these archetypes; with Columbine as an allegory of the damage the other party is doing to America. Liberals saw intolerant, elitist social hierarchies (read: homogeneity) creating troubling and unstable climates. No doubt many remembering the wedgies they received back in their formative years. Basically the same story they see in inner-city crime – economic and social outsiders lashing back. Conservatives saw in the killers the pagans and non-conformists (read: heterogeneity) who lack the moral foundations of tradition and authority, making up their own rules on the fringes – in other words the future liberals!

Posted by Jason Malloy at 09:19 PM

France to expel second Muslim prayer leader in a week:

Bouziane, 52, from Algeria, was quoted by Lyon Mag as saying he favors beating a wife “under certain conditions, notably if the woman cheats on her husband.” He claimed that the Quran, the Muslim holy book, “authorizes” such punishment – an interpretation rejected by most Muslims.

PUNISHMENT FOR NON-MARITAL SEX IN ISLAM from Religious Tolerance (gist: implementation varies by region).

Of interest: the query punishment for adultery in Google.

Update: See Zack’s comment, I was probably a bit quick with this post….

Posted by razib at 10:14 AM