Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith dies (via PZ Myers).

Update: David B points me to a good obit in The Daily Telegraph, while Carl Zimmer offers his thoughts. From the obit:

Professor John Maynard Smith, the biologist who died on Monday aged 84, applied game theory to animal behaviour and found that natural selection tends to maintain a balance between different characteristics within a species, a balance he called the “evolutionary stable strategy” (ESS).

The acronym term “EEA” (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness) has cropped up a lot in my recent blog entries, I should start balancing that out with ESS, after all, there are human universals, and universal human differences….

Posted by razib at 06:03 PM

Brian Greene (author of The Fabric of the Cosmos) is interviewed over at the Powells.

On a related physical science note, I agree with FuturePundit, We Should Develop Defenses Against Large Asteroids, this is an implementation of the precautionary principle that I think the Left & Right can agree on, and hell, even the libertarians over at Marginal Revolution agree.

Posted by razib at 10:18 AM

When I was in high school I was in a short-lived relationship with a girl from a Christian fundamentalist background. One day I asked her, “What if God decided to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth and blot them from existence, would that be ‘good’?” Her answer was, “YES!” She wasn’t a Christian philospher, and wasn’t going to give me any complex refutation of the problem of evil, rather, she had in her mind a perfect identity between God and Good.

This sort of mind-set can be seen in some who argue that Nature dictates what is ‘good,’ a viewpoint that recently in the past century had grave consequences for the human race. I would advise caution to those who make these arguments, Nature does not by its essence take into account human conceptions of morality, nor does it dictate its affairs in a way most congenial to our proper ordering of things (that is, with the needs of logicians & moral philosophers in mind).

Where God(s) issue specific edicts from on high, Nature’s laws are more inscrutable, and must be slowly and methodically teased out from the perceived chaos that surrounds us. Even when an injunction might seem straightforward, there is almost always a way to extract enough nuance to justify the converse position from what seems self-evident.

Let me illustrate: recently I think I have made it clear that the negative outcomes of consanguinity can echo throughout a society. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the genetic load, the number of deleterious genes carried within a population, may be lower for Japanese than for American Caucasians [1], possibly as a consequence of the long term practice of cousin marriage in Japan (via negative selection against the higher frequency of recessive homozygotes). In such a fashion, one could argue that cousin marriage has a long term benefit that outweighs the short-term risks!

Now, I’m not going to make any sort of argument along those lines, but my main point is that just as religion has been used to justify almost any position under the heavens, Nature can be used to verify or refute any norm accessible to the verbal gymnastics of a sophist. Nature may act as the parameters which norms must take into account (a suggestion as to limitations or costs), but one must be not allow it to dictate what the norms themselves are.

[1] Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy, page 17

(update from GC below)

GC Emeritus:

Here is the full text of the paper TJ Jones cited in comments, in pdf. Conclusion:

These results are also relevant to populations undergoing disturbance by humans. Inbreeding of formerly outbred populations occurs in many zoo populations, as well as domesticated populations and populations subjected to severe reductions in size as a result of human alterations of the environment. Extreme inbreeding has been recommended to purge genetic load and force the adaptation of endangered populations to the inbreeding regime they will experience under human management. This assumes that lowered fitness inevitably caused by increased homozygosity during this process will not be too severe or prolonged. The validity of this assumption depends on the severity and dominance of the mutant alleles in the population being inbred. Our results indicate that purging by the most severe inbreeding, self fertilization, could decrease fitness considerably with little recovery under inbreeding, and that fitness is restored only when the inbred lines are intercrossed.

Which is what I said initially. Now, one can come up with scenarios in which the selection is not solely focused against recessive homozygotes, in which case it will be considerably more efficacious (i.e. partial dominance situations where f(AA) != f(Aa) in the single locus case). But the time frame for elimination of recessives is very long if you’ve got complete dominance, and in the mean time you have to take the *massive* fitness hit of inbreeding depression.

Addendum from Razib: See, I told you there are problems relying on nature! Of course, that doesn’t mean that I think biological arguments are worthless, rather, they offer a perspective on the costs that might be necessary if we aim toward a social “good.”

Posted by razib at 12:57 AM

Friedrich over at 2 Blowhards has an exegesis of Spencer Wells’ Journey of Man with handy maps (via Steve Sailer).

Two major points:

1) Wells’ book focuses on the Y lineage, that is, the direct male ancestry of modern humans, ergo, the title of the book. Just like Genesis focuses on the patrilineage of humanity, so does Wells’ book, neglecting our foremothers.

2) An accessible but more technically oriented summation of much of Wells’ work can be found in the paper The Eurasian Heartland: A continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity.

New readers might find my my take on the book from last year interesting.

Also….

Freddy says:

The Central Asian ‘clan’ apparently followed the steppe band across Asia and into what is now Germany, thus becoming the parents of modern Europeans.

This group made a substantial contribution to the ancestry, but neglects the possible importance of “demic diffusion” in southern/eastern Europe from a source population in the Levant/Anatolia, as well as isolation of European populations during the last glacial maxima into peripheral regions (Iberia, Ukraine, etc.). There is a reference to the Neolithic migration later, but If Freddy had limited the generalization to Swedes or Finns, I would probably not nitpick.

Also:

Members of the European Clan speaking PIE (proto-Indo-European) and having developed a horse-based (chariot) culture expand eastwards across Russia, move into Iran and ultimately invade India. Genetics suggests that this was accomplished with relatively small numbers although the cultural impacts were obviously great.

Well, the genetic evidence here is mixed, my personal opinion is that it is so confused people should not say much about it without great qualification and ass-covering, but Wells has actually offered some of the highest values of “Indo-European ancestry” that I have seen. Here from the paper I have cited:

The current distribution of the M17 haplotype is likely to represent traces of an ancient population migration originating in southern Russia/Ukraine, where M17 is found at high frequency (>50%). It is possible that the domestication of the horse in this region around 3,000 B.C. may have driven the migration (27). The distribution and age of M17 in Europe (17) and Central/Southern Asia is consistent with the inferred movements of these people, who left a clear pattern of archaeological remains known as the Kurgan culture, and are thought to have spoken an early Indo-European language (27, 28, 29). The decrease in frequency eastward across Siberia to the Altai-Sayan mountains (represented by the Tuvinian population) and Mongolia, and southward into India, overlaps exactly with the inferred migrations of the Indo-Iranians during the period 3,000 to 1,000 B.C. (27). It is worth noting that the Indo-European-speaking Sourashtrans, a population from Tamil Nadu in southern India, have a much higher frequency of M17 than their Dravidian-speaking neighbors, the Yadhavas and Kallars (39% vs. 13% and 4%, respectively), adding to the evidence that M17 is a diagnostic Indo-Iranian marker.

See here for more. Here is Spencer being interviewed by an Indian website:

Some people say Aryans are the original inhabitants of India. What is your view on this theory?

The Aryans came from outside India. We actually have genetic evidence for that. Very clear genetic evidence from a marker that arose on the southern steppes of Russia and the Ukraine around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. And it subsequently spread to the east and south through Central Asia reaching India. It is on the higher frequency in the Indo-European speakers, the people who claim they are descendants of the Aryans, the Hindi speakers, the Bengalis, the other groups. Then it is at a lower frequency in the Dravidians. But there is clear evidence that there was a heavy migration from the steppes down towards India.

I think Spencer over-interprets the Y data here, but that’s just me.

Posted by razib at 04:43 PM

India is having an election, blah, blah…but check out this audio file about the use of vote machines, there is a funny jingle at the beginning that’s really hilarious.

Posted by razib at 02:45 PM

Report on the U of Wisconsin symposium titled Race, Genetics & Disease: Questions of Evidence, Questions of Consequence.

Posted by razib at 04:10 PM

I have occasionally mentioned Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature (2000). Here is a more considered view.

As the title indicates, Miller’s thesis is that sexual selection has been a major factor in human evolution. In fact, he argues that it is the main impulse behind the emergence of human intelligence, language, art, and morality. This is a radical claim, so it needs to be backed up by scrupulous reasoning and clear evidence.

The book is brilliantly written and exciting to read, despite its length (over 400 pages).

Unfortunately, I don’t believe a word of it!

Well, hardly any. To be more precise, I am not convinced by the main argument of the book. Maybe sexual selection has really been as important as Miller claims, but I don’t see any strong reason to think so. It is easy to be swept along by Miller’s eloquence and enthusiasm, without noticing that the evidence is painfully thin, and the logic shaky…

Miller’s argument has two aspects: negative and positive.

The negative aspect is a critique of the hypothesis that human intelligence and other unique characteristics have evolved by ordinary natural selection. Miller sees several difficulties with this: (a) “large brains and complex minds arose very late in evolution and in very few species… why would evolution endow our species with such large brains that cost so much energy to run, given that the vast majority of successful animal species survive perfectly well with tiny brains? (b) “there was a very long time lag between the brain’s expansion and its apparent survival payoffs in human evolution”, and (c) “nobody has been able to suggest any plausible survival payoffs for most of the things that humans are uniquely good at…the trouble with our unique human abilities is that they do not show the standard features of survival adaptations – convergent evolution, adaptive radiation, and obvious survival utility – and so are hard to explain through natural selection” (paperback edition, pp. 17-19).

The positive aspect of the argument is to show that sexual selection can explain those features of human evolution – such as the striking differences between humans and other closely related species, and the apparently wasteful development of some human abilities – that are puzzling on a conventional adaptive account. Miller then shows that these distinctively human qualities, such as verbal fluency, humour, and artistic creativity, are among the qualities that people (both men and women) look for in their mates. Therefore, though direct proof is necessarily lacking, it is reasonable to conclude that sexual selection was the major factor behind the evolution of these qualities.

So what’s the problem?

First, so far as the negative part of the argument is concerned, it is always dangerous to argue that such-and-such a phenonemon cannot have evolved through natural selection. There may well have been circumstances in early human evolution in which language and intelligence would have had a high selective value. For example, the key breakthrough may have been the point at which proto-humans began to produce effective weapons. Once any individual has the potential to kill any other individual in a surprise attack, the selection pressures on social behaviour and communication are radically changed. Groups (and individuals) would not survive without new rules and customs, notably to regulate access to females. Warfare between groups also becomes a more serious threat. Communication and forward planning become essential for survival.

For another possible scenario, see chapter 12 in Terence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species. This includes a role for sexual selection, but only as one element in a complex process. Deacon also points out that language acquisition is so important for humans that the brain devotes more resources to ‘symbolic representation’ than is on average strictly necessary. This is the ‘failsafe’ principle: by analogy, bridges are designed to bear the highest expected load, and not just the average load. Children nearly always acquire a reasonable command of language, even if they are mentally defective in other ways, whereas the most intelligent non-human primates struggle to learn any language at all. This implies that the human brain has a built-in ‘safety margin’ for language acquisition. So it is likely that the average brain has ‘spare capacity’ for symbolism which may be used on artistic creation, rituals, myths, and other activities with no obvious survival value. (But see V. Ramachandran’s The Emerging Mind for a possible selective value of artistic abilities.)

I think also that Miller’s sharp distinction between natural and sexual selection is untenable. The characteristics favoured by sexual selection are not entirely arbitrary. (Under Fisher’s ‘runaway’ process they might be, but Miller concedes that this has not been the main process of sexual selection among humans.) On the contrary, they are favoured because they are reliable indicators of fitness. But if they they are correlated with fitness, they may at least in part be due to natural selection after all. The role of sexual selection might be merely to exaggerate and reinforce characteristics that have a survival value in themselves.

As to the positive aspect of Miller’s argument, I think he understates the difficulties with the thesis that sexual selection explains the major human characteristics. One problem is that he makes it responsible for too much: language, intelligence, morality, the arts, humour, etc. Among animals, sexual selection usually favours development along a single track of excellence. Birds with fancy plumage are usually bad singers, while good singers usually have dowdy plumage. You can be a peacock or a nightingale, but not both. Another problem is that strong sexual selection usually produces strong sexual dimorphism, whereas dimorphism among humans for intelligence, etc., is modest. Miller recognises this, but in my view does not fully answer the objection. Perhaps an even more serious problem is that traits produced by sexual selection usually develop only at sexual maturity. But among humans the relevant traits, such as language use, develop from early childhood onwards.

I conclude that in important ways the pattern of distinctive human characteristics is not what we would expect from sexual selection. The supposed explanatory advantage of sexual selection over natural selection is therefore illusory.

But I have saved the strongest objection for last. Miller’s thesis requires that human females choose their mates, after careful consideration, on the basis of such characteristics as verbal and artistic skill, humour, kindness, etc. Now this may be how women choose their mates in modern California (though the size of your… wallet may be more important), but it is not how things work in primitive societies. In most of them women have no choice at all, being married off as children by their relatives. This is especially the case among hunter-gatherers such as the Bushmen and the Australian aborigines. (See the tables in Hobhouse, Wheeler and Ginsberg’s Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples.) Even where women have some choice, they are usually tightly constrained by rules of exogamy and/or endogamy, which means that in small populations the range of choice may in practice be very limited. Miller gives far too little consideration to the anthropological evidence, and in one of the few cases that he does consider – the Wodaabe – I have pointed out here that his account is bunkum.

Of course, it is conceivable th
at the behaviour of our paleolithic ancestors was very different from that of modern primitive peoples. Maybe they lived in a paradise of free love and women’s rights. Unfortunately we have absolutely no reason to suppose that they did. The Miller thesis therefore requires us to go against the evidence that we have, in favour of an entirely speculative hypothesis.

On reading this through I find that I have got rather carried away by the critical spirit! Despite everything, I think it is an important and valuable book. Do read it. But not everything that glitters….

Posted by David B at 04:21 AM

This study of a group of pacific baboons is rather interesting, though I think it is a bit much to call it “cultural transmission.” The freak outbreak of disease from infected meat that killed the aggressive alpha males reminds me of the kind of thing that might appeal to someone working within the paradigm of Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape.

(and yes, I know that the “adaptive landscape” has some serious problems)

Update: Here is the full article.

Posted by razib at 07:45 PM

I know some readers of this blog use internet dating services, so here, it can’t hurt….

Posted by razib at 05:14 PM

According to Eric Vilain, anyway. You can find his article here (free registration required). I found this quote especially laughable:

Sex should be easily definable, but it’s not. Our gender identity — our profound sense of being male or female — is independent from our anatomy. A constitutional amendment authorizing marriages only between men and women would not only discriminate against millions of Americans who do not fit easily in the mold of each category, but would simply be flawed and contrary to basic biological realities.

OK, so because there are a handful of ambiguous cases, we should just throw out the concept of sex entirely. In any case, “male” and “female” are far more hard and fast terms than “old” or “young,” or “hot” or “cold,” yet we don’t throw those concepts out or view them as baseless social constructs. The idea that any category that isn’t 100% straightfoward is invalid is simply ridiculous, and Vilain’s argument is the same basic argument as the “race does not exist” argument with even less justification.

Posted by bb at 09:59 AM