I thought readers might find the details about Deep Spring College interesting. It is located in the high California desert, has a student body of 26, offers a full $50,000 bursary to each student, has an average class size of 4, the students must work 20 hours per week on either the college’s 300 head cattle ranch or 152 acre alfalfa farm, and after earning a 2 year Associate’s Degree half of the students transfer to Harvard, Brown and Chicago while the remaining students make their way to Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Wesleyan and Oxford. Two thirds of graduates earn graduate degrees and over half of the students earn a doctorate.

Here is the official site. Here is a modest photo-essay about the College. Here is another photo-essay with follow-on links.

There is a t-shirt sold on campus that has a picture of Lenin alongside Nunn, the founder of Deep Springs, and a caption that reads “In 1917, two radical social utopias were born … only one survives.”

Posted by TangoMan at 06:53 PM

So now a Republican is in favor of Reparations?

Alan Keyes is really batshit crazy.

Posted by scottm at 03:57 AM

In a follow-up to this post on brain morphology the Chinese, no wilting flowers they, in apparent disregard of the notion that race doesn’t exist, have established a Brain Bank to study the Chinese brain.

Researchers in Hong Kong and China hope to persuade Chinese people to donate their grey matter to medical science.

Brain banks in the West do not have an adequate supply of brain tissue from the Chinese to make research feasible.

Hong Kong University says the project will help scientists to gain an understanding of the differences between the brains of different races.

This may have implications for the treatment of disease.

Posted by TangoMan at 12:03 AM

A passing sentence in David Salsburg’s The Lady Tasting Tea made me wonder about the adaptive landscape in the context of culture. Stella Cunliffe, past president of the Royal Statistical Society stated that the “delight in elegance, often at the expense of practicality, appears to me…to be a rather male attribute” during her annual address in 1975. My first thought was “why thank you very much!” Over the years I have had to listen to educators and social crusaders lament the dearth of women in the sciences, and a common sentiment is that for theoretical science to be more “relevant” to young women it has to be repackaged as something more “practical” and “useful.” My first objection is that theoretical science is quite practical, with its applications seamlessly embedded into every aspect of our life, while its uses are as numerous as the stars (to state it rather unscientifically). But the real problem illustrates itself when you read about a “computer programming class” designed for women which emphasizes the stitching together of prewritten modules as opposed to writing low level code from scratch and building your own objects. In this way, the girls could see very quickly the use and execution of their little app without all the drudgery of having to optimize every little loop or document every shitty-ass work-around. The problem is not that the theoretical sciences are not “practical” or “useful” enough, it is that often they are dull 99.9% of the time as you patiently master technique after technique and hope that one day you will be able to tackle real substantive topics.

Technique is paramount, the joy of extracting substance from the world itself or seeing your application being used is something that comes after a long slog through esoteric minutiae. My personal experience is that many women don’t have the patience, or the playfullness, for this sort of thing. Frankly, most men do not have this sort of playfullness. Of course, everything has its context, as most males would find the specifics of stitching rather dull (as would most women, though a smaller proportion). Many less cognitively gifted males who find mathematics and science dull thrive when it comes to the technique of souping up their car or the proper way in which to stand in the batting box so as to maximize one’s batting average.

But I digress. My real point, in the context of an adaptive landscape, is that this fascination with elegance, theory and the abstract isn’t always negative. Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought (see my review) asserts that the Greek (and later Western) fascination with abstraction, paradox and theoretical proof was the key toward seeding the bed for the rise of science. In contrast, Nisbett notes that the Chinese intellectual tradition has been more pragmatic and grounded in empirically informed “common sense.” While ancient Greece produced metaphysical philosophers like Zeno (a Stoic who brought us his famous paradox), China saw the rise to prominence of a succession of pragmatic politically oriented sages. The “logicians,” a Chinese school that did focus on language and thought in a more “Western” fashion had relatively low status, and though the writings of Polybius display cogent observations about the Roman system of government, they are ultimately retrospective rather than prescriptive.

What did this variance yield? In the long run, the 2000 year record of Chinese history shows the recapitulation of a basic dynastic pattern and social system, with periods of equilibrium increasing in length. It is, all in all a pretty good record for a social system that crystallized over 2000 years ago. Contrast this with the “Western” pattern: the Greeks of the Hellenistic period were very different from the Greeks of the 19th century. Though there is some continuity, the transformative influence of Christianity, the fluctuation in Greek political arrangements, remade the Hellenes. What did the Greek period of cultural brilliance do for them in the long run aside from assuring individual Greeks enduring fame and renown? And yet, as I noted, many would assert that the scientific tradition was seeded by the first era of science that began with the pre-Socratics. The better question would be to ask how much the West benefited from the Greek project.

This moves us to a thesis exposited by Jared Diamond (and David Landes, and others): that the multiplicity of Western polities allowed for a profusion of ideas and competing forms and fashions that was more innovative than the unitary Chinese model. Victor Davis Hanson and his ilk would assert that the ancient Greek culture was sui generis, a special creation that gifted to the West, broadly speaking, its own unique genius. Diamond & co. would assert that the geographic fragmentation of the European subcontinent allowed for the rise of this cultural sui generis.

So what does this have to do with the adaptive landscape? I think that individual European cultures and polities can be thought of us as isolated subpopulations that can shift to new fitness peaks because of their own particular local landscapes. In contrast, the Chinese polity was fixed on one particular peak, rather than being scattered in a fashion where random walk innovation, or specific selection pressures, could be brought to bear to explore the full landscape. In the short term, the European situation could be seen as suboptimal, and various subcultures could be perceived to be dysfunctional, fixating peculiar theories of government or religion that would be highly maladaptive if brought under full scrutiny of a common unifiedl system. In contrast, the Chinese system might seem more locally optimal, as the central government channels its resources into pragmatic and utilitarian ‘productive’ ventures. But, in the long run, it was the European cultural complex that settled upon a stratospheric peak because of the peculiarities of its historical pathway.

This explicitly functionalist interpretation of cultural adaptation can be easily reduced to the individual level. The models that the Chinese intellectual had to emulate were essentially heirs of Confucius, or to a lesser extent the masters of the Daoist or Buddhist religious systems. Confucianism throughout much of its history was at odds with the latter two religio-mystical “other-worldly” movements, and served as a polar counterpoint to them. Men might move between the two realms, but integration of Buddhist ideas into Neoconfucianism did not in its essence alter the ends of the latter philosophy, that is, a pragmatic system of political governance stemming from individual self-cultivation and a stern adherence to filial piety. After the Tang dynasty, religious orders were by and large shut out of the mainstream of Chinese elite discourse, so their esoteric and impractical ideas had little influence (note the decline of ‘scientific’ Daoism, with its quest for the exiler of immortality).

The dilettante scholar, sometimes unfocused, occassionally driven by an incadescent passion, had a different status during periods of “Western” history. An Aristotle was unusual only in his brilliance for his age. One could say the same for Newton or Gauss. The point is that though these men had non-intellectual interests and sometimes responsibilities, a preoccuptation with cognition and pursuit of what to some might seem like esoterica was perhaps less unusual than it might have been in the Chinese context (more appropriate to a Buddhist monk in an isolated monaste ry or a Daoist hermit in the forest). This is not to say that the passionate drive toward esoterica was always to bear fruit, Newton’s advances in mechanics and o
ptics stand alongside a lifelong fixation on alchemy and scriptural textual analysis, and few men are Newtons, so for every one “hit” there might be one thousand misses.

Going back to the adaptive landscape, here you might imagine two cultures, one where there is more latitude for individuals to shift and wander about the “fitness peaks,” even toward “maladaptive” valleys. But at some point an individual emerges from the valley and begins to scale a new peak with the aid of a mindbending insight that warps and reshapes the very adaptive landscape itself (“extended phenotype” writ large). Now, remember that for this “success” there might be 1000 “misses,” so the society as a whole might be perceived point to be suboptimal in its mobilization of its human capital toward “productive” uses, but when viewed from a different temporal vantage point, the latitude might seem like foresight.

In Human Accomplishment Charles Murray points to the rise of science as being connected to Christianity in part because the transcendant goals and motivations welling up from the faith encouraged thinkers to extreme ends to discover “God’s purpose” or “plan.” Murray seems to imply that science needed the maladaptive kick-start to get over the hill and initialize its engine. He notes that Christianity might not be so essential contemporaneously because the system (which sits atop a “peak”) already exists and generates rational incentives for non-religious individuals. The initialization of science reshaped the whole adaptive landscape, and created modernity itself. This cultural polycentrism, and on the intra-cultural level an acceptance of peculiar fops and dreamers, benefited the West in the long run. It is in its core the type of culture than Karl Popper described in The Open Society, a society where individual freedom is a central value that allows a full expression of various modes of life and profession of viewpoints.

Back to the geeks, it is the fruits of geek play, geek intellectual agony and geek obsession that the “paradigm shifts” described by Kuhn, or the “falsification” of theoretical idols alluded to by Popper, can truly play themselves out. The “male” focus on elegance, technical precision and playfull abstraction might seem without utilitarian benefit in the short run, but historical induction has shown its value in the past 500 years. Modern Western culture has hit upon a balance between work & play, abstraction and application, theoretical purity and pragmatic compromise, and if it ain’t broke, who are we to carp about how science isn’t “woman friendly.” In contrast, I believe that pre-modern China and India, for all their high culture, never achieved real science because they fell at two ends of the spectrum, the Chinese with their focus on the near and obvious, the tried & tested, and the Indians with their heads in the clouds, never bridging the abstract with the material and ameliorating the squalid material conditions of their environs. I fear that in the quest for more “relevant” science, a “pragmatic” Maoist intellectual strain is manifesting itself in the West. If you can’t attract women to science, simply do away with science and give something more palatable its name.

Posted by razib at 10:50 PM

[Crosspost from geneticfuture.org]

Here’s an article that brings up some tricky cause/effect questions:

Genes May Determine Who Developed Gulf War Syndrome [U. Buffalo news wire, Aug 9 2004]

The research showed that a certain gene predicted whether or not veterans who served in the Persian Gulf War would come with Gulf War Syndrome:

External or environmental factors do play a role in Gulf War Syndrome, said Vladutiu, but likely as triggers in those with a genetic predilection, rather than as the initial cause.

These triggers may be extreme exertion, heat, chemical exposures, infections, multiple vaccinations, emotional stress and a combination of these conditions or something else entirely.

This reminds me of another set of controversial studies, those focusing on people infected with Simian virus 40.

“Simian virus what?” Take note! SV40 is something YOU may have! Simian virus 40 used to be exclusively a Monkey Thing, but during the 1960’s the virus hitched a ride into our species when we had the bright idea to manufacture polio vaccines from ground-up infected monkey kidneys. (Vegans take note.)

SV40, like HIV, can’t be cured, and it probably spreads through sexual contact. Unlike HIV, it doesn’t seem to harm you on its own. (There’s a little controversy on this issue, however.) Without a doubt, SV40 doesn’t kill you, so the chances are that someday it will become pretty much ubiquitous among humans, as will herpes and a whole host of other non-debilitating viruses.

So here’s the problem with Simian virus 40. While on its own, SV40 may not be harmful to humans, when combined with asbestos, it’s deadly. For a long time, researchers were puzzled by the fact that while some people who had minimal contact with asbestos died of asbestos-related cancer, other people who lived, worked, and breathed asbestos all day long for years never had any such problems. The breakthrough came when we realized that if you carried SV40, this made you susceptible to asbestosis. Our government, which was responsible for infecting millions of its citizens with SV40, tends to be a little hesitant to admit fault in all this. Understandably, there is some concern that people might not look kindly on preventative vaccination practices if this news got a lot of attention.

Anyhow, what’s interesting about both these diseases — Gulf War Syndrome and Asbestosis — is that they seem to express themselves exclusively in the presence of certain environmental conditions. It kind of makes you wonder what other genes we have lurking inside of us, just waiting for the right circumstances for them to expose their secret nature…

Posted by canton at 11:29 AM

In my webtravels I’ve come across another instance of someone proclaiming that “Race Doesn’t Exist” and he directed me to his manifesto:

Essentially, poking around the literature has convinced me that people at higher levels of education — be they Republican or Democrat — are essentially nonracist; that once one has any post-Bachelor’s education, one is extremely unlikely to believe that races exist as anything other than social constructs and have any genetic basis in reality. Bob Jones university is interesting because it is spectacularly unusual. Okay.

However, people at lower levels of education are much more likely to hold racist attitudes. These people trend Conservative, and since the Parties are pretty well-defined at this point (with some overlap), uneducated people (again, talking only about whites) trend Republican.

Further, racist attitudes are to some degree counteracted by liberalism. While uneducated liberals may feel racism toward African-Americans, the overall liberal ideology of government assistance for all and equal opportunity acts as a countervailing force, so relatively few racist acts are advocated or taken. By contrast, the conservative philosophy of individual responsibility and private action acts as a lens through which racist attitudes can be transmitted through the world.

This graduate student in economics also bought into the Gore Voters = High IQ / Bush Voters = Low IQ hoax from a few months ago but at least we know that he’s not compounding his error by dismissing the validity of IQ testing.

If race doesn’t exist someone should get on the horn pronto, and tell, for instance, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which is in the midst of a campaign that specifically targets different population groups with their own unique treatment and prevention regimes:

The campaign focuses on empowering people at high risk to make modest lifestyle changes that can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes. Campaign materials include motivational tip sheets for consumers as well as print and radio public service ads. Each set of materials is specifically tailored for one of the high risk groups:

African Americans;
Hispanic and Latino Americans;
American Indians and Alaska Natives;
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; and,
Adults aged 60 and older.

Someone should really tell the Pima Indians of Arizona that there is no genetic basis for race and that their high incidence of diabetes is just a statistical fluke as is their average male life expectancy of 57:

“Over the age of 35, it’s now more common to have diabetes than not to have diabetes. Probably more like 70 [percent],” says Bogardus, adding that in the general population, it’s much lower – approximately 6-8 percent.

And it’s rising. What scientists are learning from studying the Pimas’ diet, metabolism and genes, is that a genetic mutation first makes them overeat and become obese. Then, they think another mutant gene kicks in, triggering the diabetes.

In the Phoenix NIH lab, they’re searching through billions of genes, and they’re closing in on two culprits: chromosomes 1 and 11.

“On chromosome 1, we’ve identified a region that contains a diabetes susceptibility gene in the Pimas and this has been confirmed in many other populations around the world,” says Bogardus. “And on chromosome 11, we have a region that harbors an obesity susceptibility gene.”

The people who are claiming that race is solely a social construct should get into contact with the genetic research community for there happen to be 491 papers cited in a PubMed search on Pima and Diabetes, the group operating the Pima Indians Diabetes Database and the aforementioned NIDDKD which has published this news brief for Native Indians, and this news brief for African Americans. Furthermore, there are physicians who take race into account as well as pharmocological researchers:

Recognizing that our one-size-fits-all approach to medicine has serious flaws, some doctors are urging research into the development of racially targeted drugs. In March 2001, the Food and Drug Administration allowed the testing of a drug called BiDil in about 600 black subjects who will participate in the African-American Heart Failure Trial, the largest clinical trial ever to focus exclusively on African-Americans.

In previous studies including both white and black patients, BiDil provided a selective benefit for the black subjects. White subjects did no better on average than those given a placebo. The leading explanation for this disparity revolves around the molecule nitric oxide, a chemical messenger that helps regulate the constriction of blood vessels, an important mechanical dynamic in the control of blood pressure. High blood pressure contributes to and worsens heart failure because it makes the heart pump harder to overcome peripheral resistance in the arteries. BiDil acts by dilating blood vessels and replenishing local stores of nitric oxide. For unexplained reasons, blacks are more likely than whites to have nitric oxide insufficiency.

Lastly, someone should tell the editors of journals like Scientific American and save them the trouble and expense of printing multipage articles on the question of “Does Race Exist?”

Godless comments:

Here are half a dozen more references on the topic:

MIT technology review article on the The Haplotype Map (mirrored on our site)

formed a $100 million, three-year plan to chart just such a map. It’s called the International HapMap Project, and beginning with several hundred blood samples collected from Nigeria, Japan, China, and the United States, it will use highly automated genomics tools to parse out the common haplotype patterns among a number of the world’s population groups
…the HapMap, together with a series of powerful genomic tools developed over the last several years, will make it possible to spell out in great detail the genetic differences between peoples from different parts of the world.
…Ultimately, all of genetics boils down to measuring the genetic variation in some population of people and comparing it to their characteristics and looking for correlations. That’s all genetics ever is.” And, adds Altshuler, the HapMap “is simply a tool to study genetic variation at unprecedented levels of accuracy and detail.”
… They also found that how people categorized themselves—whether they called themselves black or white or Asian—correlated closely with the genetic categories.
…Race, of course, already plays a huge role in how doctors diagnose and treat patients. Physicians are well acquainted with the idea that Caucasians with northern-European ancestry have higher rates of cystic fibrosis than Asians and blacks, while African Americans suffer from higher rates of hypertension and diabetes.

Here is the official site.

Yale’s ALFRED

ALFRED contains allele frequency data on polymorphic loci for different human populations. As genetic polymorph
isms, the common alleles at these loci must be considered normal variations. While it is a demonstrable fact that different populations have different frequencies of these alleles, most of the common alleles are present in most human populations. Many studies have shown that for any one genetic polymorphism most of the variations will occur among the individuals within each population because of the different genotypes. Only a small additional proportion of the global variation occurs as gene frequency differences among populations. Those differences, however, can illuminate evolutionary histories of human populations and may be especially relevant to design and conduct of biomedical research.

The cover of scientific American (mirrored on our site)

Does Race Exist? If races are defined as genetically discrete groups, no. But researchers can use some genetic information to group individuals into clusters with medical relevance
…scientists have collected data about the genetic constitution of populations around the world in an effort to probe the link between ancestry and patterns of disease
…about 10 percent of the variation distinguishes continental populations
…Some polymorphisms do occur in genes, however; these can contribute to individual variation in traits and to genetic diseases. As scientists have sequenced the human genome (the full set of nuclear DNA), they have also identified millions of polymorphisms. The distribution of these polymorphisms across populations reflects the history of those populations and the effects of natural selection.
…The frequency of the FY*O allele, which corresponds to the absence of Fy antigen on red blood cells, is at or near fixation in most sub-Saharan African populations but is very rare outside Africa
…By looking at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member’s self-reported ethnicity.
…West Africans generally have polymorphism frequencies that can be distinguished from those of Europeans, Asians and Native Americans
…Several of the polymorphisms that differ in frequency from group to group have specific effects on health
…In these examples–and others like them–a polymorphism has a relatively large effect in a given disease

Neil Risch’s Genome Biology article

Neil Risch of Stanford University, a leader in the field of genetics, contends that race is helpful for understanding ethnic differences in disease and responses to disease.

His position was prompted by an editorial last year in the New England Journal of Medicine asserting that “‘race’ is biologically meaningless,” and one in Nature Genetics warning of the “confusion and potential harmful effects of using ‘race’ as a variable in medical research.”

In large part, the controversy stems from advances in DNA research streaming from the Human Genome Project — and trying to reconcile the fact that the pattern of DNA data differs among ethnic groups. All humans have the bulk of their genetic heritage in common and possess the same set of genes. But because of mutations — or changes in DNA — each gene comes in slightly different versions, and some of them are more common in one ethnic group than another. These genetic differences often have medical significance — since some occur among genes that affect susceptibility to disease and the response to drugs. For example, a mutation that causes hemochromatosis, a disorder of iron metabolism, is rare or absent among Indians and Chinese, but occurs in 7.5 percent of Swedes. Differences involving susceptibility to sickle cell anemia and lactose intolerance have been noted among ethnic groups and races. Risch points out that many studies have shown that these differences cluster into five major groups, which are simply the world’s major continental areas and the people who once bred in them in isolation — sub-Saharan Africans; Caucasians, including people from Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; Asians; Pacific Islanders and native Americans

Cavalli Sforza’s Geography of Human Genes

These studies were soon extended to other blood-group systems, and a body of data began to accumulate showing that different human populations have different proportions of blood groups. However, the first glimpse of the staggering magnitude of genetic variation came later–beginning in the 1950s and coming to full development in the 1960s–when individual differences for proteins could be systematically studied. A protein is a large molecule made of a linear sequence of components called amino acids; different proteins vary considerably in their amino-acid composition and serve very different functions

Sally Satel’s NY Times op ed on the utility of race in medicine:

Not surprisingly, many human genetic variations tend to cluster by racial groups — that is, by people whose ancestors came from a particular geographic region. Skin color itself is not what is at issue — it’s the evolutionary history indicated by skin color. In Africa, for example, the genetic variant for sickle cell anemia cropped up at some point in the gene pool and was passed on to descendants; as a result, the disease is more common among blacks than whites. Similarly, Caucasians are far more likely to carry the gene mutations that cause multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis.

Admittedly, race is a rough marker. A black American may have dark skin — but her genes may well be a complex mix of ancestors from West Africa, Europe and Asia. No serious scientist, in fact, believes that genetically pure populations exist. Yet an imprecise clue is better than no clue at all.

See also this post with a review of Bamshad’s latest paper from Nature Genetics.

Posted by TangoMan at 02:19 AM

The hope just keeps on coming for GC.

Posted by Thrasymachus at 03:17 PM

For the first time, Moroccan primary schools are teaching Tifinagh (Berber) to children. (hat tip: Mirabilis.ca)

Woohoo!Kent Davis-Packard, “At last, an ancient tongue will be taught”, The Christian Science Monitor, 2004 August 17.

The letter “yaz,” shaped like a joyful human being, is the symbol of the Imazighen people. It’s one of the 39 letters of Tifinagh, the ancient language all children in Morocco will be required to learn – in addition to classical Arabic and French – by 2008.

“It’s our maternal language,” says Amina Ibnou-Cheikh Raha, director of Le Monde Amazigh, a newspaper dedicated to Imazighen, or Berber, cultural issues. “It’s the first language that existed here in Morocco. What’s abnormal is that it has never been taught.”

Berbers – the name given to the Imazighen people because they were viewed as “barbarians” who at first did not accept Islam – have inhabited North Africa since 7,000 BC. Their ranks have included St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and they have managed to preserve their languages despite French, Roman, and Arab conquests. [You missed the Phoenicians/Carthaginians, Kent.]
….
Tamazight [the term used to designate all Imazighen languages] speakers constitute 40 percent of Morocco’s population, 20 percent of Algeria’s, and 1 percent of Tunisia’s. This year, Morocco’s Ministry of Education and the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) have introduced the 9,000-year-old language into some 300 primary schools throughout Morocco for the first time.D’oh!

Some Moroccan educators also hope the use of the language in schools will lower the Imazighen dropout rate.

“Many Imazighen students do not follow the educational system and they do not succeed, and this is in part because they don’t study in their own language,” says Fatima Agnaou, a researcher at IRCAM.
….
Some worry that the initiative will stumble due to a government decision to begin teaching Tamazight in three separate dialogues, phasing in standardized Tamazight over the course of a decade. It’s a decision some critics suggest was influenced by government fears of too much Imazighen unity.
….
In neighboring Algeria, for instance, the Imazighen were harshly repressed after independence from France. It was even illegal for a child to be given a Imazighen name, and such cultural repression sparked violent reactions.

The King of Morocco, whose mother happens to be a Berber, is cautiously pursuing a politic of incorporation. “I don’t think we will have the same kinds of problems that Algeria went through,” says civil activist Jamila Hassoune. Use of Tifinagh, she insists, is “a cultural richness that, instead of dividing Morocco, unifies it.”Those of you familiar with my writings (alright, bloggings *sigh*) will know that I have reservations about the second half of that article. I’m extremely pleased that an Islamic country has made it official public policy to teach its children to cherish their pre-Islamic heritage from a very young age, you know, instead of denouncing any pre-Islamic cultural identity as jahil, the vernacular Arabic for pre-Islamic, literally “ignorant”, and trying to wipe it out. And I take more than a little ironic pleasure at the notion of an Islamic country implementing what looks suspiciously like a multiculturalist educational philosophy.

However, given the experience of Western schools with Afrocentrism and similar approaches in American schools for Hispanic students, Moroccan educators who hope that the use of Tifinagh will lower the Imazighen dropout rate are likely to be disappointed.

As for the assertion that the use of Tifinagh will unify Morocco instead of dividing it, well, the results of the similar policies in the West, the same ones I mentioned before, suggest precisely the opposite. If anything, the use of Tifinagh will further entrench and deepen the divisions between Imazighen and Arab.

The suggestion that the slow phase-in of Tamazight into schools is due to concerns about Imazighen unity implies that the government is aware (and afraid) of precisely that possibility. I’m surprised to find myself a little relieved that the government’s enthusiasm for teaching Tifinagh is not unbridled. That suggests that the government is being more realistic than those educators who expect Imazighen dropout rates to fall or that civil activist who insists that the effect will be centripetal rather than centrifugal. Were it not, Tifinagh education’s likely failure (in the case of reducing dropout rates) and outright counterproductivity (in the case of Moroccan unity) might cause a backlash on the celebration of pre-Islamic heritage not just in Morocco, but across the Islamic world.

I believe that the war on terror cannot be won without a sea change in how the global Muslim mainstream sees non-Muslim peoples and cultures. Teaching Muslim children to celebrate their pre-Islamic heritage is a step in that direction.

Posted by jeet at 02:37 AM

Matt Rosenberg has an interesting post on how the University of Arizona has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to come up with more culturally-sensitive math instruction for Hispanic students. He links to this report:

Latino youths, especially those from low-income or working-class families, tend to score lower on standardized math tests than their white counterparts and are among the lowest of all ethnic groups.

“The achievement gap is real, and it is growing,” said Virginia Horak, an associate math professor and one of the principal investigators on the grant.

The grant will fund research, professional development of teachers and development of leaders in math education, she said.

Among the goals of the new center are to create teaching materials and ways of teaching that bring in a cultural and linguistic context specific to Latinos, said Ron Marx, dean of the UA College of Education.

[ . . . . . ]

The UA departments involved in the grant are mathematics, language and reading and culture.

Uhm, what exactly is a Dept. of Reading and Culture? Also, note the prominant role for the College of Education which itself is a huge part of the problem, primarily due to the education profession’s gullability in adopting education fads and the low standards of scholarship, faculty intelligence, and admission standards:

Critics have a laundry list of complaints about teacher training. They include: too much theory and not enough practice, mediocre subject-area training and low admissions standards.

Some critics complain of a vicious cycle: graduates of weak public high schools go to weak education colleges and then return, poorly prepared, to teach in the public schools.

As Thomas Sowell has noted:

Education majors achieve much lower SAT scores than those choosing other majors. When they finish college, it’s the same story. Education majors are outscored, on the Graduate Record Exam, by other majors anywhere from 91 to 259 points. College students who major in education are among the least qualified. Some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors, have been entrusted with the education of our children. We shouldn’t be surprised by their falling for fads and substituting methods that work for methods that sound good. This mediocrity isn’t new. When Harvard University’s president retired in 1933, he told the trustees that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” More recently, a knowledgeable academic said, “The educationists have set the lowest standards and require the least amount of hard work.” In some circles, education departments have become known as the university’s “intellectual slums.”

Related posts here and here.

Posted by TangoMan at 03:27 AM

[crosspost from geneticfuture.org]

The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report (available as a book, or as a free download from here) which says that genetically modified food is no way substantially different from non-GM food. It says that GM foods, just like regular foods, carry risks. The report admits that GM technology can cause these risks to pop up in unlikely places (e.g. GM insect-resistant celery that gives farm workers severe skin rashes) but stops short of saying that GM food is in any way less “safe” than non-GM food.

More specifically, the NAS report says that the substances that compose GM food can’t be meaningfully distinguished from the substances in ordinary food. As such, the FDA is basically discouraged from treating GM food in a different way than regular food when it comes to safety.

Generally speaking, this report doesn’t alarm me in any way. It puts forward the point of view that most reasonable science-minded folks hold, that GM food doesn’t contain weird never-before-seen toxins, and that anyone who thinks that GM food is going to kill us is being a little foolish.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much to promote GM food labeling. There are a lot of reasons we should require GM food to be labeled as such. For one thing, there are a lot of folks who don’t want to help finance companies that are participating in the GM food industry. While GM food is probably safe for us, it’s too early to tell whether or not it’s going to mess up our ecosystem. Many consumers would like to vote with their dollars, and spend their money on traditional foods instead of jumping head-first into GM technology.

Also, while GM food is probably safe for most of us, it does risk killing a few of us. A while back, someone had the idea to improve the nutritional quality of soybeans by creating a transgenic soybean — borrowing 2S albumin production from Brazil nuts. As it turned out, if you were deathly allergic to Brazil nuts, you would also be deathly allergic to this soybean. Consider the dilemma of someone who fears Brazil nuts. You grow up knowing that you’re deathly allergic to Brazil nuts, and you learn how to avoid them and products that contain them. How would you cope if GM soybeans containing your allergen entered the market, but weren’t labeled as such? Soybeans are everywhere, from baby food to breakfast cereal to McDonald’s hamburgers.

So while a GM soybean is not “substantially different” from non-GM food, that is, while it doesn’t contain weird proteins that we’ve never dealt with, that doesn’t mean it’s such a safe food that it doesn’t require special FDA attention and labeling.

[Richard Caplan, U.S. Public Interest Research group] cites as a major weakness in the report its discussion of the potential allergenicity of genetically engineered crops. While the report authors agree that allergenicity should be evaluated “in every case” and that improvements to the current system are known and have been thoroughly discussed, it fails to call on the FDA to institute a mandatory pre-market assessment according to commonly accepted protocols like the one laid out by the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization.

U.S. PIRG has long supported a system that requires foods to be labeled if they contain genetically engineered ingredients, which would help to accomplish a recommendation of the report that the government should require that food labels include “relevant nutritional attributes so that consumers can receive more complete information about the nutritional components in GM foods introduced to the marketplace.” The report also calls for a significant increase in transparency of data submissions, which would help remove the large cloud of secrecy surrounding whatever testing is done on genetically engineered crops. For example, a Monsanto study recently reported in Le Monde appears to show deleterious effects on rats in a feeding study of genetically engineered crops, but the company has failed to release it, claiming it as confidential business information.

“The fact is these foods are on our dinner tables right now,” concluded Caplan. “Unfortunately there remains much work to be done to improve the system of oversight for genetically engineered food crops, and it starts by changing the current voluntary system at FDA to a mandatory one.”
— Environmental Media Services

Posted by canton at 10:52 AM