Ronald Bailey, of Reason Magazine, reports on a 3-day conference with prominent neuroscientists and theologians called ”Our Minds and Us”. Concerned subjects are: Mind-brain duality, bioethics involved in understanding which structures of the brain are involved in things like violence and depression, and existential questions of “What is the self”. Check it out.

Posted by scottm at 09:51 AM

123 years ago today, Charles Darwin died. So grip your glass with your opposable thumb and toast the man who revolutionized biology.

Heres to you, Chuck!

Posted by God Fearing Atheist at 05:20 PM

Below the fold are pictures of Miss Norway 2005 and Miss Namibia 2005. The images are linked to “close ups” (you know you want to click!).

Update: People keep asking what is “unusual” about Miss Norway. I added another picture that makes the issue a bit more crisp. Read her profile in detail if you want to know what I suspect is atypical for a good Norwegian girl.

(Miss Norway)

Another picture of Miss Norway

(Miss Namibia)

(yes, I know Namibia has a white minority, 6% isn’t much)

Posted by razib at 07:25 PM

Decoded at last: the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world. I don’t know if it will rewrite the ‘history of the world,’ rather, the processes detailed in the piece might allow us to fill-in-some-of-the-blanks which dominate God’s Book of History. 50 years ago reductionist physicists and mathematical model builders like Francis Crick and J.M. Smith created and revolutionized molecular and evolutionary biology respectively.1 Certainly they helped biology move beyond the “stamp collection” stereotype, in other words, they taught biologists to fish rather than simply waiting for someone else to reel in the catch. Most degree programs in biology require at least one year of calculus, chemistry and physics to serve as a basis for later methodological explorations. A generation ago E.O. Wilson expressed the ambition to reduce the social sciences to a branch of biology. His project failed more than not, and to some extent I suspect that the full execution of such a goal was doomed by the limitations imposed by our neurological hardware (the exploration of the life sciences is constrained by the realities imposed by those sciences). Nevertheless, I do think that the methods and mindset of the natural sciences can offer some illumination to scholarly fields which have become covered with the dust of unsolved problems. This does not mean that historians, to give one example, need to load up on a large number of irrelevant course work in the natural sciences in preparation for their career, rather, they need to be familiar with the methods which might allow them to extract more data from the mines of the past. Empirical, even positivist, oriented scholars should grasp on to these scientific tools to rebut the all too real challenge of those who would obfuscate the study of the past by spinning a web of Theory which leave the quest for “evidence” in discarded bins.

Via Jim Nutley via Pejmanesque.

Addendum: I have spent a great deal of time on this weblog publicizing the power of genetic science in aiding in the reconstruction of our demographic past. But, I do want to emphasize that its role is supplementary and supportive, on one locus do too many build their theories upon, betraying a lack of understanding of the subtle difficulties of interpretation of hard data and a common confounding of the history of a gene with the ancestry of an individual and the history of a population.

Related: Up from ignorance and Up from ignorance II.

1 – Most of you know Crick was trained as a physicist. Fewer likely know that J. M. Smith was trained as an engineer. Certainly R. A. Fisher (a first in mathematics) brought models to the fore in evolutionary biology, along with J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, but from my reading it seems that in general most biologists of the day neither understood nor cared a great deal for “the sums” as J. M. Smith would say. As late as the 1970s an editor of a zoological journal asked Smith why he did not “cancel out the ds” when he saw a derivative in the form of dy/dx (assuming it had to be an algebraic complexity that could be eliminated).

Posted by razib at 10:04 AM

For all you Star Wars fans out there take a look at this fan-made trailer, Star Wars Revelations.

Posted by TangoMan at 11:09 PM

Regarding an article, Law and Behavioral Biology, in the March issue of the Columbia Law Review >>

Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do, scholars from Vanderbilt and Yale universities argue in the March issue of Columbia Law Review.

“The legal system tends to assume that either people are purely rational actors or that their brains are blank slates on which culture and only culture is written. The reality is much more complicated and can only be appreciated with a deeper understanding of behavioral biology,” said Vanderbilt law professor and biologist Owen Jones. He co-authored the article with Timothy Goldsmith, Yale professor emeritus of molecular, cellular and developmental biology….

All laws at their foundation are designed to influence human behavior, from how we interact with one another, to how we relate to our own property and that of others, to how government agencies interact with each other and with citizens, Jones said.

When developing laws, legislators and legal scholars have traditionally relied heavily on the social sciences, such as economics, psychology and political science, often responding to the popular or political trends of their time. They have rarely looked to incorporate the latest findings from fields such as biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which have grown exponentially in recent years and have shed brand new light on how the human brain is structured and how it influences behavior….

Jones argues that integrating law with behavioral biology, which examines the biological underpinnings of human behavior, could strengthen legal measures in a variety of areas. Such an approach might enhance understanding of why some penalties are more effective than others, how people make choices in areas such as environmental protection and retirement savings, and what the underlying causes of aggression are and how they help explain why young men are sometimes willing – even in the face of the severest penalties – to kill in reaction to threats to their status.

Posted by theresa at 08:26 AM

Why are Americans so conservative, so religious, and so resistant to modern western ‘Liberalism’? These subjects, with some variation, are a staple of European discussion regarding the United States. While explanations tend to focus on the metaphysical (“That redneck God of theirs!”), I believe another very significant factor is to be found in empirics – to be specific, in a single graph.

This is the US annual murder rate per 100 000 inhabitants. The US murder rate hovered around 4,5 per 100 000 during the fifties. Then, in a few short years in the mid-to-late sixties, the rate doubled. What happened? In short: Liberalism happened, and Americans haven’t forgotten yet.

The murder rate has been debated quite a bit recently, because of the Levitt-Sailer dispute regarding the impact of abortion. Sailer also recently used the murder rate explosion, and all those factors that it is a proxy for, as an explanation for the resilience of the US white working class – People were simply scared off from getting too carried away by all their newly-won social freedoms by witnessing the drastic deterioration of social conditions in Black America.

Still, in the general debate on why the US political scene looks the way it does, the “murder rate factor” has never gotten enough attention. When it did, the material presented was often of dubious informational value. (Read: “Bowling for Columbine”)

Still, in order to be able to quantify the political impact of the social upheaval that led to the murder rate explosion, some raw numbers can be helpful. The graph below shows the absolute number of murders per year, and the number of murders as it would have been, had the average 1950-63 murder rate remained constant.

In this way, we can determine that all in all, the US had roughly 300 000 more murders between 1964 and 2002 than had been the case if the sixties ‘explosion’ had not happened. The ‘excess murder rate’ causalities during the Vietnam War years of 1965-75 alone number roughly 74 000 people – well above the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam.

Vast amounts of ink have been spent detailing the impact of Vietnam on the American psyche. Some of that ink would probably have been better used in determining just how the great killing spree that lasted from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties changed how Americans view the world.

UPDATE:
As pointed out in the comments, having some data on how large the murder-prone part of the population is can be handy when discussing these kinds of issues. Added this graph, showing the indexed murder rate and the (indexed) share of the population that is between 14 and 34 years old:

UPDATE 2:

Steve Sailer fleshes it out in comments:

“The FBI’s “homicide offending” statistics broken down by age, race, and gender only go back to 1976. Before that, they just are by total population.

What I don’t know for sure is whether the black crime rate went up sharply in the 1960s or whether simply the number of blacks in big cities went up due to the Great Migration out of the South following the mechanization of cotton farming in the mid-1940s.

I suspect that what happened was that the black crime rate in Northern cities was fairly low from 1945 into the early 1960s because blacks newly arrived from the South were still feeling intimidated. Then, the Civil Rights movement and the Warren Court taught Northern urban blacks not to fear The Man, and indeed to actively resent whites.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Northern liberal states began raising welfare payments and stopped hassling unmarried mothers. This led quickly to a breakdown of marriage among young urban blacks, which freed young men from the supervision of wives, allowing them to live a disorderly life while still allowing them the comforts of a woman’s bed.

Meanwhile, restrictions on where blacks could live in Northern cities were breaking down — for example, blacks were restricted to a sharply defined ghetto on the South Side of Chicago throughout the 1960s — both due to legal changes and to sheer numbers arriving from the South and the high birthrate. So, blacks began pouring into formerly all white working class neighborhoods.

After integration in their neighborhood began around 1967, my late inlaws, being nice liberals (he was a classical musician and union leader, she a special-ed teacher), joined a pro-integration activist organization in their West Side of Chicago neighborhood to keep the neighborhood from going from part black to all black. All the members pledged not to sell.

But within 18 months, the first wave of middle class black home buyers in their neighborhood had been driven out by underclass blacks pouring in and driving the crime rate through the roof.

After their kids were mugged three times and the vast Martin Luther King riot occurred in their neighborhood in 1968, my inlaws finally sold out at a very low price, being just about the last whites to leave the neighborhood, losing much of their life savings because they had tried to make integration work.

They moved to what are now the distant exurbs and voted Republican after that.

So, I think four things happened in the 1960s: the number of blacks in the North went up, the black crime rate went up, contact between black and white went up, and black animus toward whites became active. Put them all together and the number of whites violently victimized by blacks shot through the roof in the 1960s, leaving a permanent impact on American politics.

The fifth thing that happened in the 1960s was that liberals permanently became associated in the popular mind with murder:
Lyndon Johnson won 61% of the vote in 1964 running as a staunch liberal, but his Veep, Hubert Humphrey, won less than 43% in 1968. In 1972, McGovern won about 38%. Watergate helped Carter squeak in with 50% in 1976, but he was the last Democrat to get that high a number.”

SOURCES:

US Dept. of Justice (Murder rate)

US Census (population statistics)

Posted by dobeln at 05:59 AM

A reflection of my Northeast + Northwestern upbringings…. (I still say “soda” and tend to slur “horror” in a New York/New England sort of way)

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

30% Yankee

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Posted by razib at 11:06 PM

A preview of an article that is going to be in the June issue of American Naturalist, The Evolution of Phenotypic Polymorphism: Randomized Strategies versus Evolutionary Branching:

A population is polymorphic when its members fall into two or more categories, referred to as alternative phenotypes. There are many kinds of phenotypic polymorphisms, with specialization in reproduction, feeding, dispersal, or protection from predators. An individual’s phenotype might be randomly assigned during development, genetically determined, or set by environmental cues. These three possibilities correspond to a mixed strategy of development, a genetic polymorphism, and a conditional strategy. Using the perspective of adaptive dynamics, I develop a unifying evolutionary theory of systems of determination of alternative phenotypes, focusing on the relative possibilities for random versus genetic determination. The approach is an extension of the analysis of evolutionary branching in adaptive dynamics. It compares the possibility that there will be evolutionary branching, leading to genetic polymorphism, with the possibility that a mixed strategy evolves. The comparison is based on the strength of selection for the different outcomes. An interpretation of the resulting criterion is that genetic polymorphism is favored over random determination of the phenotype if an individual’s heritable genotype is an adaptively advantageous cue for development. I argue that it can be helpful to regard genetic polymorphism as a special case of phenotypic plasticity.

I have cut & pasted the discussion below….

Studying the evolution of phenotype determination in terms of the signs and relative magnitudes of the branching and randomization disruptivities, as illustrated in figure 1, has the advantage of bringing genetic and random determination into a single analysis. This was achieved by limiting consideration to situations close to a phenotypically monomorphic equilibrium. The approach can be regarded as an extension of the analysis of evolutionary branching in adaptive dynamics (Metz et al. 1996; Geritz et al. 1998), which gives a unified perspective on the evolution of genetic polymorphism. Such conceptual unification is helpful and important, but when alternative phenotypes have evolved away from a previously monomorphic state, there is in principle a new situation that may require a separate analysis. In addition, phenotypic polymorphism could come about in different ways, such as by modification of a previously existing polymorphism or by mutations of large effect or drastic changes in environments. Nevertheless, the individual-based simulations I performed showed that an analysis in terms of branching and randomization disruptivities can often succeed in predicting the evolutionary outcome.

One important feature of my analysis is that cases are split into those where a genotype can function as an advantageous cue for determination of alternative phenotypes and those where such a genetic cue instead would be disadvantageous compared to random determination, as well as the intermediate cases where genetic and random determination are neutral relative to each other. This kind of division has general validity and makes the point that genetic determination of the phenotype is conceptually parallel to environmental determination, for which issues of the accuracy and other statistical properties of environmental cues are fundamental. In fact, it could be helpful to regard genetic determination of alternative phenotypes as a special case of adaptive phenotypic plasticity.

It is common to think of alternative phenotypes as threshold traits or developmental switches (Roff 1996; Lynch and Walsh 1998; West-Eberhard 2003), where trait expression is switched when the value of an internal liability passes a threshold. The liability might be the concentration of a hormone, which in turn could be influenced by genes, environmental cues, or random effects. If we ask in which way such a phenotype-determining mechanism can be an adaptation, there is the question of the perfection of alternatives being switched between, on the one hand, and the question of when to switch, on the other hand. For the latter, we can regard random variation in liability as adaptive if suitable phenotype frequencies are produced in this way, and any further improvement in the fit of phenotype to selective circumstances achieved by a switching mechanism is then also a possible adaptation. Environmental cues are, of course, candidates to be employed in such better-than-random switching mechanisms, but, as we have seen, heritable genetic variation is also a candidate. Thus, the alternative phenotypes of a multiple-niche polymorphism, together with the switching mechanism, are elements of an adaptation to spatially varying conditions. For genetic switching, spatial variation in phenotype frequencies from recent selection, unless obliterated by extensive gene flow, will be the source of information in the genetic cue. There is some similarity to the idea of local adaptation when gene flow is limited, but the difference is that the alternative phenotypes and the switching mechanism make up one adaptation to a range of environments rather than that each phenotype separately is an adaptation to a single environment. So, in the context of an evolved switching mechanism, like a nonlinear genotype-phenotype mapping, it becomes natural to view genetic determination of the phenotype as potentially an adaptation, falling within the general framework of phenotypic plasticity.

Several decades ago, ecological geneticists were concerned with providing an adaptive interpretation of genetic polymorphism (e.g., Dobzhansky 1951; Cain and Sheppard 1954; Fisher 1958; Ford 1965, 1971), but this interest seems to have declined in recent times. Possibly, the currently dominating idea of the gene as the fundamental unit of selection (Dawkins 1976) has been responsible for the decline because that idea might seem to be in conflict with the notion that genetic variation could play a role in an adaptive device for the organism. In ecological genetics, a traditional but also controversial view was that genetic polymorphism can be adaptive if it renders an organism efficient over a range of environments (Dobzhansky 1951; Cain and Sheppard 1954), corresponding to the modern concept of multiple-niche polymorphism. When examining this idea, Fisher (1958) traced it to the discussion by Darwin (1859) of divergence of character under natural selection and went on to suggest that a “theory of games,” with randomized strategies as one feasible evolutionary outcome, could be a way to understand species interactions, such as those between predators and prey. Fisher’s treatment is significant as apparently the first explicit suggestion of an evolutionary game theory. It is also clear that Fisher (1958) interpreted balanced polymorphism as an evolved randomized strategy. Ford (1965) had a similar view of genetic polymorphism as a means to regulate phenotype frequencies, and he argued that it would usually be preferable as a switching device, compared to environmental cues, perhaps because he felt that environmental cues would result in excessive fluctuations in phenotype frequencies. It then appears that traditional ecological genetics did not view genetic determination of the phenotype as essentially different from random determination. It was only with the subsequent analysis of bet hedging that this distinction became clear (Seger and Brockmann 1987), although the interpretation of genetic polymorphism as a special case of phenotypic plasticity, which I have argued for here, was not made.

My treatment did not deal directly with environmental phenotype determination, which is possibly the most widespread and important system, because I wanted a simple and focused treatment of genetic and random determination. Never
theless, environmental determination could be included in the same kind of analysis. By regarding reaction norms as multidimensional “pure strategies,” one can investigate whether some component of such a pure strategy would be exposed to disruptive selection, possibly leading to evolutionary branching and genetic polymorphism or, alternatively, whether a randomized reaction norm might evolve. A similar kind of approach has recently been used to study environmental sex determination (Van Dooren and Leimar 2003; Leimar et al. 2004). Factors such as the accuracy of environmental cues and the degree of correlation between environmental cue values observed by different individuals, together with other aspects of the ecological situation, will determine if some component of a reaction norm would be exposed to branching or randomization disruptivity.

Of the examples I used, the effect of competition between relatives on the evolution of alternative phenotypes and on phenotype determination seems not to have been modeled previously. The conclusion that random determination should be favored was, however, reached by Moran (1992), and Day (2001) found that relatedness decreased branching disruptivity in situations where relatives compete. In practice, compared to purely random determination, other mechanisms based on phenotypic cues like relative size or age might often be more efficient in reducing competition between interacting relatives and could thus be expected instead.

On the basis of the simulations for the examples, it is clear that the mutational process can have a marked influence on the system of phenotype determination that evolves. For instance, if there is little additive genetic variation in the degree of random phenotype determination, genetic determination might instead be the evolutionary outcome. A similar point was made by Van Dooren and Leimar (2003) and Leimar et al. (2004) in the context of sex determination. The explanation is that genetic and random cues can sometimes serve equally or nearly equally well for phenotype determination. As a consequence, in situations where branching and randomization disruptivities are equal, it seems appropriate to regard a genetic determination of the phenotype as a randomization device. Nevertheless, considering general fitness functions, the theory developed here shows that those situations are marginal. Using heritable genetic variation for phenotype determination will generally either be selectively favored and thus be a case of adaptive genetic determination of the phenotype or instead have a selective cost as compared to random determination.

Posted by razib at 10:11 PM

A couple of items of interest from today’s London Sunday Times.

First is this front page story on the level of illegal immigrants in the UK, allegedly estimated by Home Office officials at around 500,000.

Second, an interesting feature article (book extract) by Tarquin Hall on the immigrant ‘community’ in East London. (Read it and you’ll see why I put quotes round ‘community’.) The article reads not unlike a spoof by Sacha Baron-Cohen, but it is, apparently, genuine.

(Added) …and here’s another extract from Tarquin Hall’s book, that I thought was part of the same article, but has a separate URL.

Posted by David B at 10:29 AM