Evolgen links to a Michael Lynch letter to Nature where he tackles the “issue” of Intelligent Design. RPM echoes Lynch, noting:

it should be made clear that evolutionary biology (specifically evolutionary genetics) is one of the most quantitative fields in biology, and evolutionary biology is not a “soft science.”

Of course, math doesn’t mean that evolutionary biology is a bon afide “hard science” (see economics),1 but evolutionary biologists rely both on ecological observation and experimental breeding to test and explore their theoretical models (not to mention the genomic revolution, etc.). Where molecular biology is a “hard science” because of its relentless empirical reductionism, evolutionary biology is a duet of theory and data in the best tradition of science. I have asserted before that emphasizing natural history2 (morphological change) over the underlying processes (selection, drift, mutation, etc.) tends to skew public perceptions about evolutionary theory, and leaves it as a “just-so” hypothesis in the minds of many. My suggestion was that a more thorough, or at least transparent, grounding in microevolution to compliment macroevolution would reminds the public of the real processes that drive evolution as opposed to the flashy outcomes (flashy when evaluated over geological time scales). Perhaps there would be fewer demands to see “speciations involving gross body plan alternations in a few generations.” The fact is that microevolution and macroevolution are on a continuous spectrum and the separation of one from the other is an artificial human construct. Even “pluralists” who argue for multi-level selection would probably concede the artificiality of any attempt to erect a high wall between the two levels of study. Macroevolution and microevolution kiss each other at the level of the species, and it can be argued that species are the only “real” taxonomic category in the Linnean system, yet even its bounds and definitions are subject to dispute. Though most Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents admit the reality of microevolution, it is too often an afterthought, and concepts like speciation get decoupled from the genetical dynamics which undergird differentiation (for example, the genetic divergence that occurs after geographical isolation, and the possible incompabilities that emerge out of disparate genetic backgrounds).

RPM offers that even the Hardy-Weinberg equation is hard going for many undergraduate biology majors. This is fair enough, but life is often easier when you don’t derive anything and simply offer a few basic formulae to illustrate general concepts. So I am thinking the Hardy-Weinberg equation, the breeder’s equation or one of the equations that gives one a sense of the power of random genetic drift. Students today are primed to memorize rather than understand equations, but even the minimal consciousness of the quantitative structure holding up the squishy semantically amorphous concepts would likely be beneficial.

1 – Fisher and Haldane received their bachelor’s in mathematics. J.M. Smith was trained as an engineer. Richard Lewontin has a master’s degree in mathematical statistics. Also, on the point about economics, I do not mean to imply that it is not difficult, rather, I mean to imply that there are difficulties with testing economic theories. In many ways microeconomics and microevolution are sister disciplines, but natural scientists can test their models on worms and bacteria.

2 – I do not mean to minimize Natural History. Many evolutionary biologists would not be evolutionary biologists if it were not for Natural History, just as many physicists would not be physicists were it not for Astronomy. The key is that the grand questions and panoramic vistas offered by these historical and sensorally rich disciplines must often be explored via more reductionistic methods. Since I have stated that science ~ method, it makes good sense that the public should be more aware of the existence and importance of the methodological (technical) disciplines.

Posted by razib at 12:30 PM

Not much time, but I wanted to link to this blog entry which reviews the recent paper by Kanazawa and Vandermassen which surveys 3,000 individuals and finds a strong tendency for people in “systemizing” professions to have sons and vice-versa for those in “empathizing” professions. If you want a “pulse of the public” (or high schoolers posing as programmers) check out this thread at Slashdot.

Addendum: I have heard from animal science people that a variety of alterations in the equilibrium of chemicals in semen can shift the XX:XY balance greatly.

Related: Previous post on this paper.

Posted by razib at 02:19 PM

In The New York Times today there is an article that highlights the trend of increased evangelical enrollment at Ivy League universities. There is a folk-anthropological feel to the whole piece, and I found it interesting that the author states that Calvin College is “an evangelical institution.” Specifically, Calvin is an institution that derives from the Reformed tradition of Protestant Christianity (as the name Calvin should emphasize). This subtly is irrelevant to most readers of The New York Times, but of more interest to the general audience is the fact that 1/3 of Calvin College professors recently signed a letter saying that disagree with the President’s policies prior to his arrival to make a commencement speech. My point is that terms like “evangelicals” are used very sloppily by most in the establishment media because of their unfamiliarity (and disinterest) in the nuances that a wide swath of America takes very seriously. The term “evangelical” as understood by many right-thinking liberals connotes a generally “backward” and conservative worldview, so a story that chronicles the emergence of an evangelical upper middle class and its entrance into the Ivy League has a “ain’t that somethin'” feel. These articles add little to the readership’s base of knowledge, and don’t disrupt the standard model of the target audience by injecting surprises, such as the fact that the rise of evangelicalism in academia in places like Harvard is strongly correlated with the prominence of Asian-American Christians, or that perhaps evangelicals who attend and graduate from Ivy League schools might not be your run-of-the-mill believer. Remember, Princeton was founded in part as a low church proto-evangelical Presbyterian alternative to Harvard and the other New England Ivies, who had abandoned orthodox Christianity (many had Congregationalist or Baptist origins) by the late 18th century, but in its turn it became absorbed into the elite milieu and shed its own sectarian past.

Posted by razib at 04:35 PM

A week ago I noticed this article which profiled the All-Girls National Chess Championships. On the one hand the author seems to want to break down the stereotypes,1 but then you get this:

…the hallways were filled with boys roughhousing, and that “when they find out you’re on the opposing team, they’re nasty.”

“This is calmer,” Alex said. “It’s like, ‘O.K., we played a game. O.K., you lost, I won. Want to go get some ice cream?’ “”

Today, I stumbled on to this: ARE GENDER DIFFERENCES IN HIGH ACHIEVEMENT DISAPPEARING? A TEST IN ONE INTELLECTUAL DOMAIN (that domain being chess). The authors conclude that there has been little convergence in the sex ratio at the higher ends, Judit Polgar aside.

Chess isn’t something that was present in any hypothetical EEA, though the usual suspects predominate, so I won’t speculate on what the biological, psychological and social variables are that result in success in that field. But, it seems any attempt to simply assert that nebulous “social pressure” is the cause of the imbalance has to control for geekitude. If those who feel that sexual equalitarianism in fields like chess and the physical sciences are among the great pressing concerns in a world where burquas and beatings are common place, I really want them to outline their model of “Geek Reducation Camps” where young XX minds are cleansed of their excessive focus on interpersonal skills, bodily hygiene and less than monomanical enthusiasm for esoteric cognitive domains.

It seems that the proponents of sexual equalitarnism in outcomes play a bait and switch: on the one hand they will admit that both biology and sociology play a role, but we should attempt to level the playing field and see where chips may fall. The problem occurs when the chips don’t fall the way they want them to fall. Instead of “let’s remove barriers to female entry,” there is a shift toward “let’s make this more ‘female friendly,’2” and if that isn’t possible, “let’s give women a ‘space of their own.'” The ball keeps getting kicked around in their attempt to enforce parity until you realize that the aim here is basically social reengineering and manipulation of groups, not the opening up of opportunities for individuals.

1 – I await the “All-Gentiles National Chess Championships.”

2 – The idea that something needs to be ‘female friendly’ makes one wonder if a) females have average biases which need to be considered or b) there is a wider scale program at work of not just equalizing males and females, but reworking the norms of society as a whole.

Posted by razib at 07:29 PM

Simon Baron-Cohen has a new piece over at Edge elaborating on his ideas about systemizers and empathizers. He received many responses and responded to those responses.

I think there are two primary issues that I see here:

In the details Baron-Cohen’s theory will probably be wrong because most scientific hypotheses are wrong in terms of the model that they present for a given subset of data.

Over the long term research like Baron-Cohen’s will stimulate the generation of counter-hypotheses and concurrent hypotheses by those who take the step beyond critique.

The most accurate model that explains human psychological variation along the axis of sex (and beyond) mixes genetic biases and a developmental arc that is both biologically (hormones, nutrition, etc.) and socially mediated. The scholarly 1 argument is generally over the details. The empirical data on the ground is mixed, and seems (to my eye) be bogged down by semantic cross-talk. For example, Baron-Cohen’s systemizer-empthaizer spectrum quickly becomes depicted as a typology by one respondent, to which he replies that he perceives it as a spectrum. But of course verbally he can’t simply refer to a numerical point on his spectrum and assume he’ll be understood, he has to decompose the range of variation into two categories. This is why Baron-Cohen likely placed spare normal distribution graphs on many pages of his book The Essential Difference, verbally he had to speak in categories not to be bogged down in stat-jibberish, but quite clearly he does not conceive his model in a typological fashion in its essense and wanted to remind his readers of that reality graphically.

Another point, which Helena Cronin’s response zooms in on, is that there are a priori considerations as to why human males and females should display a wide range of phenotypic median differences. This is a crucial point that I think many who operate outside the natural sciences, in particular evolutionary biology, miss. Sex is an evolutionary mystery. Any given parthogenetic (asexual, virginal procreation) individual would generate twice as many copies of their genes (two alleles instead of one) with each gestation as a female who exchanges genetic material with a male. Additionally, the existence of the male sex, which itself does not gestate, seems very wasteful. The short of it is that in terms of adaptation sexual reproduction must increase the fitness of said sexual individual by at least a factor of two over asexual reproduction. There have been many explanations of sex, and many hypotheses for why males exist, most of them starting with the position that sex facilitates faster evolutionary response to selection via an increase in variation (recombination and allelic exchange). Additionally, the high possible reproductive variance of males means that they can act to dampen down the genetic load of a population due to a correlation between fitness and fecundity in every generation (so that unfit males with high mutational load act as carriers of deleterious alleles into evolutionary oblivion). Some people appeal to structural constraints, that is, sex exists in higher animals because of the phylogenetic past of these species or genetic competition between cytoplasmic DNA (there are parthogenetic insects and what not, so I am skeptical of this). But even if sex is a structural holdover from our past, it is a background condition against which animals must compete and evolve.

Sexual dimorphism is a reality in human beings. Regardless of the origin of sex, humans have been stuck with the fact ~1/2 of the species can not gestate and bring forth offspring, and this will have evolutionary consequences (though more slowly than usual). This compelling background assumption makes the theories of individuals like Simon Baron-Cohen much more intelligible, and invidious accusations of political motive can take a step back. I suspect this explains two primary forms of response to Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis: No, you are wrong, and, probably wrong, but here are other options and possibilities. Some people are aware that something needs to be explained outside of cultural shaping (because sex differences precede the emergence of human culture in other animals, so parsimony suggests that there is a biological aspect to it), while others seem to wish away this reality.

Related: By now you have probably noticed that Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke debated sex differences in the mind, but check out the responses.

1 – There are some on the traditionalist Right who welcome the findings of evolutionary psychologists because it buttresses their own moral normative positions. But the reality is that usually these positions are solid and live without fear from biology because they precede scientific empirical data. Therefore, a mapping of biology -> ideology must always be examined in light of the factors involved in the “->”, as opposed to simply assuming that the connection is transparent, as many on the Right do. And, as many on the Left do, for the opposition to biologistic thinking tends to issue from a naive understanding among those who style themselves “progressives” about the possibilities that are constrained by the progress of science. The reality I would argue is that constraint is a condition of human existence, and the constraints suggested by science are more than counteracted by the possibilities and new avenues of exploration opened up.

Posted by razib at 11:25 AM

John Hawkes reviews a Jared Diamond review of some literature on the evolution of human skin color variation. It seems plausible that on a world-wide scale skin color variation is a reaction to a variety of environmental selection pressures, relaxation of functional constraints and social/sexual selection. Diamond focuses on the idea that balance of catabolism of folate and synthesis of vitamin D as a function of ultraviolent radiation (UVR) exposure is the primary determinant. But then he asks, what explains the dark skins of Australian Aboriginals and Tasmanians? In The Third Chimpanzee Diamond opined that sexual selection, not enviornmental selection, was the primary factor in diversifying human skin coloration. This was a qualitative assertion, and I do not not believe it has stood the test of time, seeing as how a strong positive quantitative correlation between UVR levels and melanin levels as well as evidence that purifying selection has been operative amongst these same dark skinned peoples in maintaining a low diversity on the MC1R locus both suggest long-term environmental selection (it being the central nexus in the regulation of melanin production).

The Australian Aboriginals are the great exception, and their extinct Tasmanian relatives were the specific example that Diamond noted when he offered that sexual selection was crucial, as these peoples remained dark skinned even after 10,000 years of isolation in their cool cloudy island home. John suggests that the low genetic variation common among island peoples might be the factor behind why the folks of Oz remained dark. Certainly in the New World there is some variation in skin color among the indigenous peoples, but the tribes of the north remained far darker than equivalent Old World groups (and similarly those of the equatorial regions do not rival Africans, South Indians or Melanesians in complexion). This suggests that the genetic background does matter.

Nevertheless, in the case of Australia proper, I suspect that the problem might have been less the isolation, than the fact that there was a fitness barrier over which alleles for lighter skin could not cross (note that Dingos only arrived in Australia over the last 5,000 years, so I suspect that some people did stray into Australia now and then as well). That is, the reservoir for alleles for lighter skin in eastern Eurasia would have had to have been passed from population to population across the archipelagos of Southeast Asia and likely via Papua New Guinea. Of course the relatively light complexions (in comparison to Melanesians) of the peoples of Polynesia suggests that such alleles could “hitchhike” with culturally adept folk. How likely would this have been over the ~40,000 years of human habitation of Australia? How about mutations for light skin?

In any case, what ever happened to those blonde Australian Aboriginals? Was that all the result of admixture? Internet searches come up blank, though C.S. Coon seemed to discount that they were byblows of Dutch sailors.

Related: Julian David has pointed out that much of Australia is tropical, and Tasmania is at the same latitude as Corsica. This is a fair point, but at the latitude of Corsica Eurasians generally have brunette white or pale olive skin. Still many shades fairer than the condition of the Tasmanians.

Posted by razib at 11:58 PM

Randall Parker has a wide ranging post reflecting on the response to the “Koran flushing” incident. Aziz Poonwalla argues that the Koran abuse was only a trigger for underlying rage. Part of the problem of course is that stories like this range over multiple countries and several layers of analysis get confounded together.

Posted by razib at 03:56 PM

A new study pinpoints a polymorphism on the androgen receptor gene (AR), located on the X chromosome, as the primary factor in early male pattern baldness among German men. The authors also postulate recent selection for this gene.

Posted by razib at 08:12 PM

I’m on semi-vacation, but I want to give a quick blurb to Armand Leroi’s Mutants. This is a really entertaining book, though if you aren’t into developmental biology and epigenetics, you’ll have to get used to weird uses of words like “abolished” (or “silenced,” for some reason specific technical uses of these terms in molecular/developmental genetics always sounds pompous to me, I always imagine methyl groups going ssshhhh!!! in a school-marmish fashion). The pictures are pretty bizarro, and I’ve had multiple queries from strangers asking what the hell I’m reading. Also, there is stuff on midgets in here, so it’s already a keeper in my book (though some of the midget stuff is Mengele related, so that was kind of a downer).

Jason Malloy adds: This might also be a good time to share a website I stumbled onto many weeks ago and never got around to posting:

‘Race and Genomics’. It features new articles from a number of familiar people in the anti-race crowd specifically commenting on Leroi’s March pro-race essay, A Family Tree in Every Gene in the New York Times. Probably of most interest is the response by Richard Lewontin. It’s hard to know what arguments Leroi actually made that Lewontin could be fighting against when he writes things like this:

“For purposes of medical testing we do not want to know whether a person is “Hispanic” but rather whether that person’s family came from a Caribbean country such as Cuba, that had a large influx of West African slaves, or one in which there was a great deal of intermixture with native American tribes as in Chile and Mexico, or one in which there was only a negligible population of non-Europeans. Racial identification simply does not do the work needed. What we ought to ask on medical questionnaires is not racial identification, but ancestry. “Do you know of any ancestors who were (Ashkenazi Jews, or from West Africa, from certain regions of the Mediterranean, from Japan)?” Once again, racial categorization is a bad predictor of biology.”

Heh. So note the following “ancestry” categories (just don’t call em’ “racial” categories!) Lewontin advocates as informative about human genetic difference:

1) Japanese (national group)

2) Ashkenazi Jews (ethno-religious group)

3) West African (broad geographical region)

4) Non-European (i.e. Amerindian – continental group)

If this is true, Lewontin has nothing else important to argue about – he admits that genetic diversity tracks patterns of historical social and geographic endogamy, and that these patterns can carry genetic and trait relevant information. “West African” is not just a social construct, because West Africans are not an ethnic group. West Africans in Haiti, Cuba, Ohio, Canada, and Senegal do not share a social identity, they do share genes and ancestry.

If Lewontin wants to argue that Japanese, West-African, and Amerindian “ancestry” is informative about genetic differences (with varying levels of resolution) then there isn’t much of substance to argue about, though we can quibble about whether we want a trendy euphemism to describe this differentiation that exists below the species level. But let’s not pretend that biology doesn’t already have a word for this, or that it has rejected this word – because it does and it hasn’t.

And it hardly needs saying that quantitative genetic traits like intelligence, personality, and all manners of behavior, can certainly differ distributionally by these genetically informative groupings as well, and almost certainly do to some extent. No argument that Lewontin could produce would make these facts go away (though he makes plenty of arguments that effectively muddy them), and I know that tears him up inside, but he doesn’t need to take it out on messengers like Armand Leroi or Theodosius Dobzhansky.

Related: Human biodiversity hits The New York Times, THE NATURE OF NORMAL HUMAN VARIETY, Race Does Exist — New York Times, Debunking Leroi, Responses to
Leroi

Posted by razib at 01:04 PM

Are you an economist, sitting around the department, running some godforsaken regression estimating wheat price elasticity? Do you secretly wish you had taken finance instead, so that you too could have worn nice suits to work? Are the down payments on the Volvo getting you down? Don’t despair! The solutions to all of your problems are to be found in the graph below:

What is this you ask? Simple: This is a plot of Richard Florida’s Euro-Tolerance index for Europe and the US, together with actual GDP growth. Florida, as you might remember, is the economist-come-city-development-guru who coined the term “the three T:s – Technology, Talent and Tolerance”. These factors, Florida claims, are crucial for economic growth. Last year, Florida decided to expand his city-ranking system, based on “The three T:s”, to us here in Europe. He thus came up with a ranking that looks as follows:

So, what does Florida’s model really say? Essentially, he claims:

a) Being good at High-tech is good for growth.

b) Having a highly educated population is good for growth.

c) Having a people that’s non-conservative and into PC ideology is good for growth. This factor is measured in a “Euro-Tolerance index”.

Regarding the two first factors, I have but one thing to say: “Duh.”

Thus, the Tolerance index is what makes Florida’s theory interesting (and highly rewarding for Florida – 35 000 USD per lecture is pretty decent for an economics prof.). And this is where the graph above comes into play. It shows, essentially, that there is virtually no relationship whatsoever between economic performance during the last 10 years and Florida’s ET-index (to the extent there is, it’s negative). As the ET-index is the only original component of Florida’s theory, this is a pretty big deal.

Still, despite the fact that all the non-obvious parts of his theory appear to be bunk, we can learn a lot from Florida. I have even devised a get-rich-quick scheme based on his approach. It goes like this:

1.) Take established economic theory.
2.) Add PC
3.) Profit!

Feel free to devise potential lecture-circuit winners in comments!

Posted by dobeln at 05:10 AM