And the role of Malik on this weeks Enterprise (with Data creating superhumans) will be played by Paul Atreides.

Posted by scottm at 08:16 PM

Cancer is far more common today than at any time in history, according to a study of 3,000 human skeletons in a Croatian archaeological collection.

The researchers argue that cancer is more common today because people now have much longer life spans than they did just a few centuries ago. In Croatia, for example, the current average life expectancy is around 74 years. But the average age of death found in the archaeological remains that researchers studied was just 36 years.

Fair enough. But adjusting for life expectancy should be straightforward enough. There is more than one way to do it. I wonder how the comparison comes out then.

Posted by Thrasymachus at 10:57 AM

Gladstone, Bill [I shit you not]. “From King David to Freud to Marx, new book traces a family’s history”. JTA. 2004 October 24.

In [“The Lurie Legacy,” Neil] Rosenstein links the Lurie lineage — which includes such modern luminaries as Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber — to Rashi, the 11th-century sage, and many other revered Jewish figures from Hillel to Hezekiah — and ultimately to King David of the 10th century BCE.
….
The family tree boasts an astonishing array of celebrated historical figures from the prophet Isaiah to Sir Isaiah Berlin, from Felix Mendelssohn to Karl Marx and Moses Montefiore.

The list also includes Yehudi Menuhin, Helena Rubinstein, the Rothschilds and even Rosenstein himself. If it begins to sound like a “Who’s Who” of the Ashkenazi world, that’s because it is.

hat tip: normblog

Posted by jeet at 11:49 AM

Hong Kong pop star Faye Wong in upcoming sci-fi movie 2046; Ruan Lingyu, the Chinese Garbo: when she took fatal overdose in 1935 at age 25, 3 women committed suicide during 3-mile long funeral procession & NY Times ran front page story as ‘the most spectacular funeral of the century’

Mark Cousins has a sensational overview of Asian cinema, arguing that its current energy & artistry puts it reels ahead of world film. Michael Moore’s schlockfest may have copped the Palme d’Or, but this year’s Cannes was mesmerized by 4 Asian films: House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s sensual Hero followup; 2046, Wong Kar Wai’s Bladerunner-noir; Nobody Knows, an urban fairy tale from Japan; & Tropical Malady, a homoerotic Zen fable from Thailand.

Cousins details the 100-year panorama of Asian cinema – largely unknown in the West – & the influence of Buddhist, Tao, & Hindu aesthetics on the films of China, Japan, & India. Among the great directors profiled: Yuan Muzhi, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Yasujiro Ozu, Mehboob Khan, Bu Wancang.

Predictably, Hollywood is turning Japanese, with 7 American versions of Asian hits in the works, including:• Tom Cruise in remake of Hong Kong horror hit The Eye
• Scorsese is remaking crime thriller Infernal Affairs, possibly with Brad Pitt
• Jennifer Connelly in remake of Dark Water, supernatural tale by Hideo Nakata (The Ring)
• Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham) is remaking Korean comedy My Wife is a Gangster with Queen LatifahCousin’s article makes me eager to read his brand new book, The Story of Film

Posted by jeff at 11:57 AM

There has been recent talk about the idea that ~120 IQ is ideal for a president, or an executive in the generality. I realized that there might be a way to take a stab at this topic as far as the US government is concerned: analyze the educational backgrounds of the 100 senators and 50 governors. The two groups do overlap (some governors become senators and some senators become governors), but while the former are legislators who often focus on certain specific public policy issues the latter are general executives.

I don’t have time to check this now, but will do so later if someone doesn’t beat me to it.

Posted by razib at 09:49 PM

Dominus, Susan. “Growing Up With Mom and Mom”. The New York Times Magazine. 2004 October 24.

When [Cade Russo-Young] went to Smith College, she met other women who, like her, were lesbians and had been raised by lesbian mothers. In some cases, she said, those women faced mothers who actively disapproved, distressed that their children were living out conservative policy makers’ most potent fears.

A central argument advanced against gay marriage is that gay relationships have a corrosive effect on the institution of the traditional family. In that context, the children of gay parents are…a form of evidence in the political debate. How do the children of gay parents turn out, when compared with the children of straight parents, in terms of eventual marital status, income, psychological well-being? If gay couples give birth, seek to adopt or become foster parents, what kind of adult members of society will they produce?

….

There’s yet a third position in the debate about gay parents, one that argues passionately that there are differences, not to castigate gay parents for deviance but to embrace the uniqueness of being raised in a same-sex household. Around 1999, Judith Stacey, then a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, took a broad look at the bulk of research claiming no difference in kids of gay parents and rejected its claims that a parent’s sexuality bore no influence whatsoever on his or her kids. ”That just didn’t make sense to me,” said Stacey, 61, and now a professor at New York University. A trim, animated woman, she sat, her feet tucked under her, on the sofa in her sunny apartment near the school’s campus when I spoke to her in August. She has no quarrel with research suggesting that children of gay parents are as well adjusted as their peers, but she does contest the idea that there is no difference when it comes to sexuality. ”Every theory out there — be it social constructionist, biological determinist, environmental or psychoanalytic — would lead you to expect that a larger minority of children with gay parents will grow up not to be exclusively heterosexual. Even a genetic theory would lead you to that conclusion.”

….

Stacey freely admits that she wants to get ahead of the legal curve: ”My position is that you can’t base an argument for justice on information that’s empirically falsifiable in the long run,” she said. ”If your right to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes along and says you’re wrong, then where are you?”

Posted by jeet at 11:25 AM

(27 October, 18.00 GMT)

Search Google News for ‘Hobbit’ right now and you’ll fall off your chair.

Addendum from Razib: I was in the air most of today, and paid $4.95 to access Cincinnati airport’s wireless connection, and boy was it worth it, as I saw this post by David. I didn’t have much time to peruse the articles, but now I’m in Houston and I spent about an hour looking at the various stories. I didn’t quite fall out of my chair, but the effect was similar. Nevertheless, I am far less shocked by this story than I would have been 5 years ago. The Great Leap of 50,000 years BP hypothesis seems on shakier ground than it once was, while Out-of-Africa is being challenged by new pieces of data.

The possibility of a new ape species under our noses seems to have been timed well to precede this finding of a nearly contemporaneous hominid people. But, the excellent summation of this research over at Nature seems to make objections about its overall veracity (as opposed to interpretation of various elements) untenable.

The small size of these island hominids is a testament to the universality of natural selection, as islands tend to shift many animals away from their worldwide modal size. Additionally, the fact that it seems probable that a form of Homo erectus must have crossed a non-trivial body of water is really amazing. The possibility of “advanced” tools are easy to quibble with, and I’m not so sure about that, but the geological history is something that is less amenable to spinning. In my post about Out-of-Africa revisions because of possible ancient Asian genes in modern East Asians I noted that many of my recent books are being rendered obsolete, well, this will probably push that process along.

One final note. The use of the term “Homo erectus” seems to be so broad that I wonder about its utility for the general public. It seems that “Homo erectus” is almost a negative definition, that is, it is not sapiens, not Australopithecines, not neanderthalis, etc. It seems likely that the human family tree is very bushy, especially since hominids have been a worldwide genus for about 2 million years. Unfortunately, the press release capsules tend to be worded in a way that implies a progression upward and onward, rather than the reality that it seems difficult for many paleoanthropologists to differentiate various species or subspecies with great precision. The morphological features of the new homonid highlighted in the article are distinctive enough that I do not doubt their interpretation, but on the catchall use of the term “Homo erectus” for various homonids (with the exception of Neanderthals) before the rise of modern humans, I am more dubious. The term seems to obscure more than illuminate.

Nick Wade has a good thick piece on this topic in The New York Times. Steve offers some more juicy bits about the possibility of a modern relic population still existing. Coelacanth’s of our time? I doubt it, though the stories told by Flores natives are tantalizing, pulled out from their context they sound much like tales told by many peoples the world over about barbaric tribal neighbors who behave like animals. Remember that a few years ago Indonesians were beheading “witches” and “warlocks.” In much of the world ghosts, witches, spirits and demons are real elements of their universe, and I suspect tales of quasi-humans emerges from the same cognitive predisposition (same goes for the legend about ancient Formosan pygmies offered in the comments section). Strange inhuman behaviors like cannibalism are accusations nearly always made against other peoples, but genetics indicates it is part of Homo sapiens common heritage.

Related: In 1988 Harry Turtledove wrote the book A Different Flesh, a collection of short stories based on an alternate history where Homo erectus survived into modern times.

Tangentially related: A pygmy mammoth population survived on Wrangel Island until 3,700 years ago (that is, they went extinct around the time of Hammarubi).

Update: Carl Zimmer has an excellent entry up on the topic.

Posted by David B at 11:07 AM

This post evolved out of a question razib posed to me in the comments section of an earlier post. I’m keeping it in extended-entry since it’s political and, typically of me, unnecessarily loquacious: it concerns the general topic of US-born Asian kids going to their mother countries and, through the pop culture, giving the public there the whole song and dance (literally) about “how oppressed we are in the US.” Usually this occurs through the medium of pop tunes, rap, and movies, often presented by artists who failed to break into the US entertainment industry. They return to Asia (where, in many cases, marketing is more important than talent) to try their luck again, and popularize their "political struggle".

So far, we haven’t seen most Asian-Americans turning to Asia to gain support for their identity politics, for one big reason: the public in Asian countries couldn’t care less. But that might be changing.

Unlike, say, Mexico, most Asian countries are not all that concerned with their emigrants or the descendants of those emigrants, and even look down on them. India dubs theirs "Non-Required Indians" (a play on the official government designation of "Non-Resident Indians"). In Japan, even Japanese kids who live overseas for a few years and then return to Japan suffer discrimination and bullying (google “kikoku shijou”), to say nothing of Japanese descendents such as 4th-generation Japanese-Americans who speak no Japanese (sometimes turned down for English-teaching jobs in favor of Swedes) or the equally un-Japanese Brazilian labourers imported en-masse. Thus, the public in Asian countries have remained largely indifferent to the issues their co-ethnics face in the United States.

Korean-Americans might seem an exception to this trend, but missed their chance to gain sympathy for their struggles among Koreans — they had long had influence in the Korean music industry (try listening to some Seo Taiji rap to find the obvious American roots), and emigration to the US was a hot topic in the 1980s, thus keeping Korean-Americans central in the public imagination. But the same event that crystallized the Korean-American political identity — the 1991 L.A. riots — was largely ignored in Korea. Some even believed the emigrants and their children deserved the calamity, for having abandoned the mother country and contributed their efforts to building up a foreign economy. Korean-Americans, having failed to gain sympathy or assistance from their brethren for a real calamity filled with destruction and death, figure that asking their assistance on smaller grievances such as racial discrimination would be pointless.

However, there already exists at present one true major exception to the above rule of non-involvement: Taiwan, a country which emerged from the Chinese cultural matrix and shares its traditional values. Thus, Taiwan’s present state is at least a bit better than any other for forecasting cultural trends in mainland China. And at present, we can clearly see the influence of Taiwanese domestic politics at work among student organizations for (US-born) Taiwanese-American students. To understand how this situation came about, we need a brief overview of Taiwanese society and history.

Taiwan consists of four broadly-defined groups, presented here in decreasing order of their numbers:

Hokkiens, Minnan-speaking Han Chinese, who began coming over from Fujian province and settling in Taiwan in the 1600sMainlanders, post-WWII immigrants who came over with the Nationalist government and armyHakkas, a separate Han Chinese linguistic group who also began settling in Taiwan at the same time as the Hokkiens and often came into conflict with themAboriginals, non-Han Austronesians who were driven into the mountainous areas by Han settlement, and for the most part have occupied the lowest rung on the economic ladder ever since then

Broadly speaking, from 1949 up until recent years, the Mainlanders totally excluded the other 3 groups from politics, especially the majority Hokkiens, and surpressed their languages. No formal opposition parties existed, just a generalized underground with leftist tendencies, more concerned with trying to get the existing Nationalist dictatorship out of power than with any concrete political or social platforms. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution happening next door in mainland China, aside from scaring the pants off the Taiwanese people and government, largely delegitimized Communism in Taiwan. This forced the slowly-forming Taiwanese left to abandon Marxism as any form whatsoever of intellectual basis (if only to ensure their own survival and avoid even more ruthless surpression by the Nationalist government), and to evolve towards ethnic politics and its familiar demagoguery, arguably early and faster than the equivalent shift in certain segments of the American left. (For a much more detailed look at this process, see this article from the previous edition of New Left Review).

Chinese people, unlike other Asians, are fairly interested in their diaspora — no less than the national father Sun Yat-Sen studied in the US — and the Taiwanese share this Chinese cultural tendency. The Nationalist government began outreach towards overseas Chinese communities almost immediately after its resettlement on Taiwan. (See this post from the blog East South West North for one example of the results: the 1956 riots in Hong Kong, in which the Swiss consul’s wife burned to death). The most familiar example of this outreach today is the so-called "Love Boat," Youth Study Tour to the Republic of China, where Taiwanese descendants all over the world converge on Taiwan with the excuse of language and cultural study, and spend 6 weeks hooking up with each other (much to the delight of their Taiwanese parents of all political persuasions, who hope they’ll marry within the race), but also listening to propaganda from the Nationalist government.

The Taiwanese left showed themselves to be no less interested than the Nationalist government in using their overseas compatriots as a tool to advance their agenda in Taiwan. Taiwanese students in the US, already exposed and often sympathetic to the language and concepts of identity politics back in Taiwan by their local leftists, easily found common ground and sympathetic understanding with young Taiwanese-Americans and their growing ethnic consciousness and generalized sense of political dissatisfaction.

The best example of the result is ITASA, a yearly intercollegiate conference held by Taiwanese-American student organizations, at which the topics of Taiwanese independence (or, more precisely, Hokkien nationalism) and Taiwanese-American oppression both receive ample air time. All these identity politics are set against a background of Asian parties which provide the real impetus for most of the students who join the conference and throw their weight behind lobbying the US government in support of both topics. The public in Taiwan still lag in their awareness of the issues of Taiwanese-American and Asian-American identity politics, but an increasing stream of returnee and US-born musicians are slowly attending to this problem. (ctrl-F "racial culture" in that article).

Now, the above don’t amount to a very large problem, because Taiwan is a small island of 22 million who can’t exactly risk annoying the US government too much, lest the latter stop selling them the weapons necessary for their survival. So pushing Asian-American identity politics will likely remain very low on the agenda of the Taiwanese government, regardless of whether Taiwanese-Americans can succeed in riling up the Taiwanese public to protest the US government’s "mistreatment" of Asian-Americans.< /P>

The real worries are the country of 1.3 billion people across the straits, and their government. And there are several reasons to think they (both the people and the government) going to start getting interested in Asian-American identity politics, even to the extent of pressuring the US government about it:

Chinese people have very few forums for expressing very abundant political anger. Complaining about alleged mistreatment of Asian-Americans in the US would be one more vent for a hell of a lot of steam. And the Chinese Communist Party obviously has an interest in encouraging people to expend their political energy protesting pretty much anything other than the CCP.The Chinese Communist Party, having lost any reasonable claim to being Communist except for the fact that they’re not democratic, are encouraging the growth of racial-nationalism among their people, with a generous helping of victimology to boot. Such a "my race, always right" mentality will easily sympathize with the struggles of identity politicos in Asian-America, if only there were someone to present the story properly to the mainland audience — "Look at these poor Chinese in America, blocked by racism from achieving their dreams."The Chinese government already shows little restraint in protesting to other governments about their treatment of Chinese descendants, even if those descendants are not Chinese citizens and thus not properly the concern of the Chinese diplomatic establishment — for example, during the riots in Indonesia which followed the fall of Soeharto. (Though Indonesians certainly committed atrocities against Indonesian-Chinese during this time, many of the most disgusting photographs published by the Chinese media on this topic later turned out to be of East Timorese, not Jakarta Chinese).The Chinese-government has an interest in countering the influence of Taiwanese groups by whatever means possible, and following their move into the American identity politics game is certainly one way of doing that. Don’t imagine that ABCs would be deterred from getting involved just because of their or their parents’ reservations about the mainland government, either — ITASA-like groups have co-opted a lot of the kids of Nationalists and Hakkas who left Taiwan in recent years due to their mistreatment at the hands of increasingly-influential Hokkiens. Besides, as long as the primary focus of an organization remains on “fighting injustice against Chinese-Americans in the US”, most of the kids who grew up in the US couldn’t give three damns about said organization’s views on foreign policy, as long as it promotes their issues and brings together people with their same cultural background for socialization and mating.

What prompted this post? I saw a rather unimpressive Filipino-American rap video of the identity politics variety, shown on a segment on a mainland MTV clone hosted by a returnee VJ, and conveniently subtitled in Chinese, complete with historical background of the "struggle" presented in the video. Just an isolated event, or the herald of a wider trend of mainland Chinese interest in Asian-American identity politics? Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

Posted by ericlien at 08:03 AM

Hey all. A weird question, those of you running weblogs, have you been getting emails from companies (not really spam, though definitely solicitations) to promote technologies that aid in reading and tracking blogs? You know, better RSS aggregators and reader-side block-tracking so that you can know when GNXP has a post on your cellphone or via MSN messenger.

Now, since this site is definitely a non-profit vanity (kind of negative actually), I really haven’t paid much attention to these entreaties. I don’t read many blogs myself, and am not preoccupied with getting the latest of Jonathan Edelstein’s musings (to give a random example of the type of weblog I read when I do read them).

Frankly, I figre that the “core” GNXP reader checks in on the site every other day, and the posting isn’t frequent enough that you’ll miss anything. So I doubt you’ll benefit from these sort of things, but do some of you beg to differ? I have no philosphical objection to enabling these sort of features (some of the technologies require I do some things blogside), and a few have even offered an “affiliate” program so I can get a little bit of cash if you take time to download apps, etc.

The main aim of this blog for me is to get people familiar with W.D. Hamilton’s or Daniel Sperber’s work (for example) and sow the seeds for intellectual discourse in the non-blog world. Don’t know if these technologies will help in that….

Posted by razib at 12:18 AM

John Hospers, in his “An Open Letter to Libertarians” published on Tom Palmer‘s site, has come out in favor of President Bush. Many of his reasons are similar to my own, so check it out!

Posted by Arcane at 02:44 PM