Ideology, evolution and the culture-wars

Mark Kleiman says:

Most of my friends…the blue team…are genuinely puzzled by the anti-evolution fury evident among elements of the red team….

To which I say, I am genuinely puzzled by the anti-genetic fury often in evidence among elements of the blue team. Just because we are animals doesn’t imply we should behave like other animals, and just because we have behavioral biases rooted in our genetic heritage doesn’t mean we should valorize our biases as necessary for the Good Life. I agree with Lindsay Beyerstein, we shouldn’t “play along with those delusions because” we preceive that the ends are just or proper. We should attempt to find a way to attain the Good Life and live by Truth.

Addendum: William Jennings Bryan’s concern that evolutionary accounts of human ancestry from animals dovetailed too well with Social Darwinist attempts to control and oppress the “lower orders” merges the two cautionary impulses.

Also, Mark says:

The account in Genesis, whether believed literally or accepted as a morally relevant metaphor, provides a very direct and convincing argument in favor of universal human rights….

Uh, when was the last time Mark read Genesis?

Via Chris.

Posted by razib at 03:32 PM

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Super-size this!

Here is the explanation of Judaism and Islam in the “devout Christian spends a month as a Muslim” episode of “30 Days”.Jews believe in the existence of one true God and are still waiting for his son, the Messiah, to save them.

[Muslims] base their religions on the writings of a later prophet, MuhammadLet’s start with the fact that this was a voiceover during an animated segment, in contradiction to the prohibition on figurative art that both Judaism and Islam share.

1. Judaism does not identify the Messiah as “God’s son”.
2. Referring to the Qur’an as the “writings” of Muhammad is technically incorrect because, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was illiterate, like most people of his time and setting. Moreover, the cartoon depicted him leafing through a book.

Posted by jeet at 08:22 PM

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Developmental stability, symmetry and heterozygosity

Specific questions regarding general rules in organismic biology can sometimes be rather tricky to answer…because of variation between taxa and environmental context there are usually exceptions. A visitor to this website had a few questions regarding asymmetry and heterozygosity, and I responded that the relationship between the two (generally assumed to be a negative one, that is, heterozygosity tends to correlate with less asymmetry) is one where the latter influences the buffering of the developmental arc which leads to bilateral symmetry. When you see lists of traits with heritabilities bilateral symmetry tends to show a low heritability. The reason is that it is usually considered a genetic trait, there is strong selection against any mutations which would result in asymmetries because such a phenotype is not very fit. That being said, perfect symmetry is not achieved because there are other factors which affect the developmental arc of an organism, whether they be environmental or genetic. I offered that the relationship between heterozygosity and lower fluctuating asymmetry results from the more robust immune systems of heterozygous individuals. The logic is that infection tends to interfere with optimal development. Obviously this logic is most relevant in the case of organisms with adaptive immune systems, so I’m not going to point to flie studies. Here is an on point quote from Asymmetry, Developmental Stability, and Evolution (page 221, use the “search inside” feature on Amazon):

The clear relationships between parasitism and disease and asymmetry may have environmental or genetic origins (Thornill and Moller 1997). The genetics of disease susceptibility in relation to developmental instability have been investigated to some extent for humans by Russian geneticists. Botvinev et al. (1980) found that children with non-modal [rare] body mass suffered disproportionaly from a range of diseases including infectious diseases. These groups of children were characterized by deviant allele frequencies for blood group loci and lower levels of heterozygosity. Althukov et al. (1981) noted that children with acute pneumonia have a marked disposition to viro-bacterial diseases, a high frequency of small developmental anomalies, and a smaller body length and mass at birth. The study also demonstrated significant differences in four genetic systems between the two groups of children, a lower heterozygosity per locus, and a higher frequency of rare antigen combinations and rare electrophoretic protein variants….

More study needs to be done of course (I emailed a researcher who has done some relevant studies, but they seem unpublished for now). Heterozyogsity is not the only variable affecting symmetry and developmental stability (rare alleles probably alludes to deleterious mutations, though heterozygosity is related to this because of its masking potential). There are studies which show that lines of flies that have been separated for many generations may give rise to hybrids which are less developmentally stable. This is not due to a less robust immune system (flies don’t haven’t adaptive immune systems), but likely there are coadapted gene complexes which have evolved in diverging genetic backgrounds and the F1 generation exhibit deleterious epistatic effects.1 Speciation is probably one end outcome of this process as hybrids eventually become inviable.

Related: Here is the PUBMED query for “developmental stability heterozygosity.”

1 – Imagine an ancestral population with genotype AABB. In population 1 there might a mutation which gets fixed so that the population is now AAbb. Now imagine a second substitution so that population 1 is now aabb (the BB -> bb substitution happened first!). Assume that population 2 remains AABB. If there were epistatic interactions between the two loci, then an AaBb genotype might be less fit because of negative epistatic effects between the ancestral and derived states.

Posted by razib at 02:50 PM

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North African mtDNA lineages in Iberia

Dienekes has an interesting post which summarizes a recent paper that surveys “African” (north and sub-Saharan) mtDNA lineages in Ibera. Here is a snip of interest:

…However, the observed geographic structuring for one of the haplogroups does not fit the expected distribution provided by simplistic historical considerations. In fact, although for haplogroup L the north-south increasing frequency is corroborated by historical data, the opposite trend, observed for haplogroup U6, is more difficult to reconcile with the magnitude and time span of the Islamic political and cultural influence, which lasted longer and was more intense in the south….

U6 seems to be of north African origin, and the researchers are curious as to its north-to-south gradient. Let us grant that U6 is north African (as opposed to an ancient Iberian variant which they lacked resolution to distinguish) and that the north-south gradient is not an artifiact of methodological error. It might interest the researchers that in Infidels : A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam the author (who seems to be well versed in Iberian history) asserts that the Berber soldiers who first crossed over into Iberia were settled in the north of the peninsula (the Arab generals and tribes who crossed over received the choice southern regions). And it is also relevant that the first Berber settlers were likely “converted” to Islam within their lifetimes,1 so their fidelity to their new faith might not have been reinforced by custom, habit or tradition.

1 – I put converted in quotes because all histories that mention these Berber soldiers recruited by the general Tariq ibn-Ziyad offer that their embrace of Islam was quite pro forma.

Posted by razib at 11:56 AM

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localization of g

The extreme localization of g strongly confirms that psychometric tests are measuring something real, but also strongly suggests that g is only an aspect of intelligence. After all, the rest of the brain is also doing information processing of a variety of types. This information processing is vital to goal accomplishment. Ultimately, this should not be new news. There are plenty of examples of people being severely cognitively impaired by brain damage without loosing IQ. Lobotomy patients are one of the more historically important examples of this. At any rate, how do those here interpret this. Is there simply not enough normal variability between people in how their non-g associated information processing works for it to have practical significance?

Posted by michaelv at 06:36 AM

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Euro-radical Islam

Swung by a book store where I saw a Foreign Affairs article titled Europe’s Angry Muslims. You can’t read it online, but that’s OK, the piece is mostly a hurried jumble of assertions. Instead, check out this report, Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11, which is clearly the source of the article in Foreign Affairs. I haven’t read the whole ~150 pages, though I did jump down to the figures and data collection appendix. The point that I found unsurprising, though still concerning, is the prominence of Euro-Muslims in these jihadi movements (that is, second generation+). The unfortuante santorum of the Euro-Muslim cultural interface? Perhaps. So where’s the clean-up crew?

Posted by razib at 08:40 PM | | TrackBack AI and the Human Brain

(I decided to reply to this comment with a post.)

Been Lurkin’: “What exactly (i.e. which books, websites, etc.) have you been reading on these topics? I used to be somewhat into this kind of thing like five years ago – I read Kurzweil’s book and a lot of the transhumanist stuff on the web – but it doesn’t seem like much has changed conceptually since then, although processors are faster and all that.”

I used to follow AI closely. I did work in image recognition. I evaluated expert systems applied to automatic configuration and system tuning. I studied the blackboard planning systems used for navigation systems and neural net systems applied to feature detection in photos. Most methods showed early promise but failed to scale when applied to tough problems or were too slow when interacting with real world events or were too brittle when handling unexpected events. At that time a 10 MIP processor with 256 Meg of RAM was considered a powerful AI platform.

Things have changed.

Hans Moravec: “When will computer hardware match the human brain?”

“matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power”

Moravec estimated that such computing power would be commonly available for AI use by 2020. I believe we will reach that point in the next few years.

The teraflops are popping as IBM’s Blue Gene performs 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software.”

The Cell processor that will be used in game consoles has:
· Peak performance (single precision): > 256 GFlops
· Peak performance (double precision): >26 GFlops

It is designed to support large multiprocessor architectures. I expect such cheap, powerful processors to significantly enhance AI application performance.

Been Lurkin’, you asked for web sites or books on this topic. I’m just starting my search but I found these sites interesting. I don’t yet have a good source for new articles on this topic.

General Interest

Articles

Interesting Company

Posted by fly at 06:48 AM | | TrackBack

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Euro-radical Islam

Swung by a book store where I saw a Foreign Affairs article titled Europe’s Angry Muslims. You can’t read it online, but that’s OK, the piece is mostly a hurried jumble of assertions. Instead, check out this report, Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11, which is clearly the source of the article in Foreign Affairs. I haven’t read the whole ~150 pages, though I did jump down to the figures and data collection appendix. The point that I found unsurprising, though still concerning, is the prominence of Euro-Muslims in these jihadi movements (that is, second generation+). The unfortuante santorum of the Euro-Muslim cultural interface? Perhaps. So where’s the clean-up crew?

Posted by razib at 08:40 PM

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AI and the Human Brain

(I decided to reply to this comment with a post.)

Been Lurkin’: “What exactly (i.e. which books, websites, etc.) have you been reading on these topics? I used to be somewhat into this kind of thing like five years ago – I read Kurzweil’s book and a lot of the transhumanist stuff on the web – but it doesn’t seem like much has changed conceptually since then, although processors are faster and all that.”

I used to follow AI closely. I did work in image recognition. I evaluated expert systems applied to automatic configuration and system tuning. I studied the blackboard planning systems used for navigation systems and neural net systems applied to feature detection in photos. Most methods showed early promise but failed to scale when applied to tough problems or were too slow when interacting with real world events or were too brittle when handling unexpected events. At that time a 10 MIP processor with 256 Meg of RAM was considered a powerful AI platform.

Things have changed.

Hans Moravec: “When will computer hardware match the human brain?”

“matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power”

Moravec estimated that such computing power would be commonly available for AI use by 2020. I believe we will reach that point in the next few years.

The teraflops are popping as IBM’s Blue Gene performs 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software.”

The Cell processor that will be used in game consoles has:
· Peak performance (single precision): > 256 GFlops
· Peak performance (double precision): >26 GFlops

It is designed to support large multiprocessor architectures. I expect such cheap, powerful processors to significantly enhance AI application performance.

Been Lurkin’, you asked for web sites or books on this topic. I’m just starting my search but I found these sites interesting. I don’t yet have a good source for new articles on this topic.

General Interest

Articles

Interesting Company

Posted by fly at 06:48 AM

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other psychometrics

It occurs to me that many of the people interested in IQ would find it worth their time to investigate other psychometrics. Here (doc) and here would be a few places to start.

I would like to know how well major intellectual accomplishments can be predicted from the combined knowledge of IQ and big 5 personality metrics. I would guess that a good scientist needs high openness, conscientiousness, and low agreeableness almost as much as high IQ, but I could easily be wrong. The would would benefit immensely from a statistical technique that could seperate the Gell-Mans from the Maralyns, or from one which could give us a Harvard class capable of elementary formal reasoning such as is required to complete a Wason Selection task.

Posted by michaelv at 04:22 PM

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honest disagreement

I would like to suggest that many of the people who argue against large genetic influences on behavior are actually doing so in good faith. They assert that environment influences behavior more than genes do because it is obvious that this is the case. It is, for instance, obvious that the difference between the behavior of the African American students and the European students in a typical urban school is trivial compared to the difference between the Franks and their genetic decendents the French, or even compared to the difference between Athens 700BC, Athens 200 BC and Athens 300 AD or between Rome in 0AD, Rome in 1000AD and Rome in 2000AD, or Scandinavia in 1600 and 1900. In a given century, the difference in violence between Columbia and Costa Rica (both Hispanic, 9-fold), between Japan (both East Asian 18-fold), or between Russia and Sweden (both European, 25-fold). By comparison, Linda Gottfredson asserts that intelligence accounts for a 7-fold difference in incarceration rate. If you have any familiarity with anthropology or with history then the evidence that culture matters immensely more than genetics is simply obvious.

The shocking thing which most people don’t realize is the underreported lack of measurable statistical consequences of parenting to the development of broad and predictively important measures of general ability or temprament. Obviously, parents can do much to encourage the development of expertise, from provision of a multi-lingual background to raising the Polgars or the Williamses, and expertise is far more impressive than sheer IQ in terms of the magnitude of the difference in ability it creates, and this also makes it seem that parents can obviously make their children smarter. They can do so, but a) in the vast majority of cases they don’t, and b) psychometrics are intentionally defined in such a manner as to be resilliant to cultural biases, training, etc. Importantly, defining psychometrics in such a manner as to define traits which are resistant to change does not leave us with predictively unimportant traits. Instead, these traits, which seem to almost entirely reflect genes and random developmental patterns are on a statistical level an extremely good predictor of life-outcomes.

Posted by michaelv at 04:17 PM

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