Tom Cruise, who according to the IMDB dropped out of high school, gave what has to rank as one of the most assinine interviews on the Today show, well, today (6/24/2005). I’ll let you read it for yourself to get the full flavor, but here is a highlight:

CRUISE: No, you see. Here’s the problem. You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do……

MATT LAUER:
aren’t there examples, and might not Brooke Shields be an example, of someone who benefited from one of those drugs?

TOM CRUISE:
all it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That’s what it does. That’s all it does. You’re not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance. [empahsis added]

No? Hmmmm. That’s interesting. I wonder if he’s ever tested his hypothesis by taking a sample of articles in PubMed, much less taken biochemistry/psychopharmacology coursework from a non-Scientologist. Hell, I’d be impressed if he’d read any scholarly book on the history of psychology/psychiatry (the two intertwine quite a bit, for better or worse, in their beginnings). I’ll admit the fields have episodes in thier pasts that, by modern knowledge, aren’t anything to brag about, but isn’t that what science is about? Perpetually self-correcting, working to make a given field constantly evolve.

But, Cruise, like any other American, is entitled to his opinion—no matter how (un)informed. What concerns me, occasionally working with people w/ dopamine activiation issues, is having to deal with a client coming in, saying, “But Tom Cruise said…” Maybe its just me, but unless they’ve undergone significant training (e.g., ), I don’t think celebrities should dispense medical advice, no matter, um, how well they know a particular field’s history.

Posted by A. Beaujean at 06:42 PM

ITAA Diversity Study: Numbers of Women, Minorities in Tech Too Low. The IT work force needs to get more diverse! Women are only 32.4%, Hispanics only 6.4%. Blacks are underrepresented by 22.4% and whites by 6.6%! Asians continue to be twice as overrepresented in the IT workforce as in the general population, so we know what the solution has to be, as the report says, “With competitors like China, India and Western Europe on our heels,” we have to decrease the representation of Americans of Chinese and Indian descent in the IT workforce to make room for more diversity!

Also, the consensus among geeks is that there aren’t enough hot chicks in the IT field, and the industry needs to perform outreach so that it can win them away from sales and marketing jobs which are mind-numbing and not nearly as fly as programming….

Posted by razib at 11:03 AM

Interesting use of genetics to elucidate ancient population structure: mtDNA analysis of human remains from an early Danish Christian cemetery:

One of Denmark’s earliest Christian cemeteries is Kongemarken, dating to around AD 1000-1250…A surprising amount of haplogroup diversity was observed (Area 1: 1 U7 (male), 1 H, 1 I, 1 J, and 1 T2; Area 2: 2 H, 1 I, and 1 T, with one H being male); even the three subjects of haplogroup H were of different subtypes. This indicates that no subjects within each area were maternally related. The observed haplogroup, U7, while common in India and in western Siberian tribes, was not previously observed among present-day ethnic Scandinavians, and haplogroup I is rare (2%) in Scandinavia. These observations suggest that the individuals living in the Roskilde region 1,000 years ago were not all members of a tightly knit local population and comprised individuals with genetic links with populations that were from much farther away.

This was a harbor town, so patrilocality and “foreign women” might have been rather exaggerated, but it underscores that it is plausible that men who returned from viking and trading might have brought more than goods.

Posted by razib at 01:36 AM

The drug, which had no effect on a white control group, but reduced heart failure deaths by 43 percent for an African-American control group, was approved by the F.D.A. as a drug for African-Americans yesterday. The New York Times reports that there was some controversy, but it appeared to be mostly between those who cared more about the lives and health of African-Americans and those who cared more about preserving “the greater untruth” that genes don’t differ with ancestry:

“BiDil was endorsed last week by an F.D.A. advisory panel of outside experts. But controversy surrounded the discussions . . . critics said that endorsing a drug for one race gave official government imprimatur to the discredited notion of race as a biological category.

Several influential black political and scientific groups embraced BiDil, however, as a way to redress years of inequality in medical treatment and outcomes.”

Posted by Jason Malloy at 02:48 AM

Fascinating article in The Christian Science Monitor on the state of stem cell research in the Muslim world. This is the most surprising part for me:

Egypt will not be the first predominantly Muslim country to conduct stem-cell research. Iranian scientists developed human embryonic stem-cell lines in 2003 with the approval of Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader, says LeRoy Walters, a professor at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington.

Who’s the Great Satan doing the devil’s work now? Gives a whole new meaning to the Axis of Evil.

Via Get Religion.

Posted by razib at 09:36 PM

Language can be a bitch. I’m not one who believes that “thought is created by language,” there is probably something like mentalese since people can actually ask the question whether language totally bounds thought. But language is a clunker sometimes, and the tendency to talk in terms of a few types, thrown across the cognitive plain in a slapdash manner, whether you mean to or not, is really frustrating.

I posted comments (or tried to*) at the cultural anthropology weblog Savage Minds, and Kerim excised this portion of my post relating to “ethno-autism”:

Hindus, it is true, do not proslyetize aggressively or practice much intolerance, but then, but of course, caste acts as an integrative and segregative phenomenon that makes conversion or unified outlook unecessary. Tolerance and religious pluralism is gained at a rather repulsive cost (from the Western perspective).

I bold the part “Hindus” because what exactly does it mean to be a Hindu? Are Hindus as I have characterized them? One response, which is fair enough, is that Hindus have been known to engage in religious intolerance. And no, I’m not talking about the recent communal tensions between the Hindutva nationalists and Islamists as two antipodes, I’m talking about battles between Jain and Hindu kings in southern India in the early medieval period which resembled sectarian conflict like that between Protestants and Catholics in Reformation Europe or Asharites and Mutazilites during the Abbasid Caliphate.

If one thinks of “Hindus” as a Platonic bounded ideal than any characterization of Hindus is basically impossible. Unlike the Abrahamic monotheisms belief in God is not necessary in Hinduism, not only is Hindu identity partially ethnic, there are atheistic schools of Hinduism. Additionally, some Hindus claim even atheistic and materialistic (rejecting spirit and karma) sects like the Carvaka as part of the “broach church” of their tradition, not to mention the contention that everyone is a Hindu because they are part of the monistic reality of the Brahma.

We must move past purely deductive and Platonic absolutes and settle for working definitions. “Hindus” are a finite subset of humanity who espouse an overlaping set of doctrines, practice, customs, traditions and self-identify as “Hindus” as opposed to non-Hindus (note that for much of history Hindu was less a religious identity than simply the term for an inhabitant of the Indian subcontinent and a member of the wider cultural complex that defined that region). Despite the instances of religious intolerance that characterize Hindu culture as a whole, overall there is a qualitative difference in the modal behavorial attitude toward other religions when compared to the traditions of Christianity and Islam. This can be illustrated by the attitude of Hindus toward Jews and Zoroastrians, both groups which fled western Eurasia because of religious or social persecution. In India both groups have integrated into the social structure and preserved something of their distinctive folkways in the midst of far more numerous peoples. In contrast, both Muslim and Christian societies have had a tendency toward periodic persecutions, which are often accompanied by wholesale absorption of minority religious traditions (these persecutions need not be frequent, simply frequent enough over the long term to result in a persistent shift toward the majority cultural complex).

But I’m going to get the point now. All this is important because Platonic thinking really throws a wrench into discussing public policy in terms of cultural and civilizational relations with any sort of precision. I have of late expressed some skepticism toward the putative Islamicization of Europe because the numbers seem upon closer inspection far less impressive than the often disturbing anecdotal tales bandied about in the press. The key here is numbers, the magnitude of the vector matters. In the same light casual analogies to Spain and Greece when discussing possible absorption of Turkey into the European Union are frustrating, because even assuming that Spain and Greece are analogous culturally,1 there seems a cavalier neglect of the magnitude of numerical difference. Turkey would come into the European Union as an enormous nation-state. When you make recourse to Platonic thinking these sort of obvious realities can be glossed over, “Turkey” is a type, and if you can present the Kemalist elite as the idealized “Turkey” than your argument is won, while opponents of Turkish entry will argue that if you scratch the Turk undernearth you have the Ottoman (or Saracen?). Buth are correct in that the Kemalist and Ottoman-Islamic strains are both components of the vector that is “Turkey.”

In any case, I have I think shown my cards as to how I feel about Turkish integration into the E.U., but, keeping in mind the internal variation of what it means to be Turkish (the populational distribution) and the relative numbers of “Turks” and “Europeans,” I think people can have a fruitful discussion about the sociological dynamics. As it is, too many debates around this issue seem purely rooted in norms, values and projections of the intentions of the “opposition,” with a sideshow of trying to characterize Turks or Europeans as Platonic ideals of some sort that are, or aren’t, compatible.

* The spam-filter is Leninist, its algorithm was designed by a resurrected NKVD agent!

1 – I would argue that there is a difference between an analogy between Roman Catholic emigration to the United States circa 1900 and non-white/non-Christian emigration to the United States circa 2000 vs. integration of Spain and Greece in the past generation and Turkey today into the E.U. The key here is time. In 1900 the subjective perceived distance of the Protestant WASP majority in the United States and “Popish” masses was rather large compared to today in the post-Protestant-Catholic-Jew consensus. Though I am do not necessarily totally accept the analogy between Roman Catholics and Muslims in relation to the Protestant/Christian majority of the United States, when you add time into the picture and the shift toward ecumenicalism on the part of the majority culture, the subjective distance between the majority culture and Muslims might be analogous to that between Protestant natives and Roman Catholics from Ireland, southern and eastern Europe in 1900. The European case though is different because the time scales are compressed a great deal. The absorption of Greece and Spain are rather recent, within cultural memory, so the shift toward Turkey as the “next” circle of integration is not to me as persuasive.

Posted by razib at 06:48 PM

On page 73 of Speciation the authors offer:

…Wilson et al. are probably correct in their main conclusion: although some distantly related species of birds can produce viable hybrids despite more than 15 millions of divergence (Price and Bouvier 2002), it is absurd to suppose that equally old mammalian species (e.g., humans vs. gibbons), could yield the same result….

This passage jumped out at me for the following reason, they reiterate many times that many of the contentions or truisms relating to speciation are grounded more in intuition than data. To correct this their book is chock full of references, some of them quite old (Orr and Coyne seem positively Gouldian in their quest for ancient references, I am somewhat shocked to see dates like 1912 in a work that isn’t primarily historical more than once or twice). In the section above the authors refer to studies which do suggest that mammals might develop hybrid inviability faster than other taxa, though with caution. But to me their dismissal of the human-gibbon hybrid is too flippant in light of the rather qualified and provisional tone that suffuses their text in general.

Do I think ape-human hybrids would be viable? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I don’t have anything more to go on than intuition. Coyne and Orr, who are giants in their field, have more to draw on to base intuitions than I, but they are generally very careful not to pull rank in this way from what I can tell, and in contrast to other assertions in the book I do not see a citation to support their use of the term “absurd.”

I am dwelling on this because Speciation hits another topic that I find interesting, the reality of the Biological Species Concept and the concordance between “professionals” and indigenous peoples in species categorizations, on the other of 70-80%. Orr and Coyne use this finding to suggest that species are objective across human cultures (though higher order taxa are not). This is not surprising, I tend to lean toward the idea that humans have some sort of innate biased folk biology that transcends culture, and likely has biological antecedants. Another contention of this paradigm is that humans also tend to also fixate on our own species, our own group/tribe, as a special kind in and of itself (even though we are formed of the same molecules as other species, to ourselves we have an ontological significance).

Biologists, being human, are subject to the same bias. I will go out on a limb and suggest that Coyne and Orr might find the idea of a viable human-ape hybrid absurd because it is instinctively abominable. In a similar vein my personal impression is that the idea of human-animal chimeras are very disturbing to people, imagine if you will if someone engineered a dog with the face of a man? To some extent our attitudes toward the great apes prefigure these modern discomforts, we see in them a “warped” reflection of ourselves. From a cognitive perspective the chimpanzee might be triggering mental faculties that respond to animal and human input cues, resulting in a mixed cascade of inferences.

But this “mental block” may have more than just ethical and aesthetic consequences, it might have skewed the progress of science in paleoanthropology. Over the past few months Greg Cochran has brought up the issue of “2s” a few times, and I have begun to entertain it seriously. Reading Coyne and Orr’s review of the literature on debates about the various species concepts, with extreme partisans of the species-are-social-constructs coming out of botanical fields where hybridization is ubiquitous (or so they claim), I am in hindsight shocked at the peculiar duality of Out-of-Africa-Alone and Multi-regionalism. In light of the literature reviewed in Speciation both models seem somewhat extreme, but they were offered as the only viable and fleshed out alternatives for two generations. Granted, there were regular admissions by many of possible hybridization events, in The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond offered in an aside that it was possible that hybridization occurred in Eastern Asia (an easy speculation since the fossil record for “archaic” H. sapiens is so scanty). But these musings never really made it very far and were stray thoughts that seemed to never congeal into a model. Anagenetic Multi-regionalism and Out-of-Africa-Alone might simply have been geared toward our cognitive “sweet spot,” we are after all a very special species, a One-of-a-Kind. Either we came out of Africa in one fell sweep, all descendents of a mitochondrial Eve, or we were always one worldwide species slowly hurtling simultaneously toward our inevitable sapiency.

Addendum: Orr and Coyne express repeated caution about inferring species phylogenies from only a few loci, and make the important point that hybridization events can result in homogenization on some loci while selection maintains differentiation on others. For example in many plant species there seems to be a number if signatures of hybridization events in the mtDNA, but the autosomal genome remains differentiated.

Update: John’s post reviewing baboon hybridization is relevant….

Posted by razib at 02:07 AM

Sometimes peculiar intersections can be interesting. Here are the American Conservative Union ratings of the 12 Republicans who voted against H J RES 10 (“Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States authorizing the Congress to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States”):

The only note I would make is that Ron Paul, TX, votes against basically everything (he’s an anti-federal paleolibertarian). For reference, Nancy Pelosi has a lifetime score of 3 and Tom Delay a 96. Posted by razib at 02:05 PM

For any who are interested in Intelligence/g research, I highly recommend looking at Dr. Linda Gottfredson’s web site. She has (almost) her entire collected works freely available to the public, even the to-be-published stuff. Of particular note are the following (recent) manuscripts:

1. Gottfredson, L. S. (in press). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. In C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.

[Nice, up-to-date review of group differences, with educational implications]

2. Gottfredson, L. S. (2004). Realities in desegregating gifted education. In D. Booth & J. C. Stanley (Eds.), In the eyes of the beholder: Critical issues for diversity in gifted education (pp. 139-155). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press

[She compares the Discrimination vs. the Distribution hypotheses; a very nice synthesis of the g-Big 5 [give or take a factor] core of much of differential psychology]

3. Gottfredson, L. S. (2003). Dissecting practical intelligence theory: Its claims and evidence. Intelligence, 31, 343-397.

[Gottfredson pretty much shred’s Sternberg’s Triarchic/Practical Intelligence theory]

–See also: Gottfredson, L. S. (2003). Practical intelligence. Pages 740-745 in R. Fernandez-Ballesteros (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychological assessment. London: Sage.

And my two particular favorites (because of my line of work):

Gottfredson, L. S. (2000). Equal potential: A Collective fraud. Society, 37, 19-28.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Suppressing intelligence research: Hurting those we intend to help. In R. H. Wright & N. A. Cummings (Eds.), Destructive trends in mental health: The well-intentioned path to harm (pp. 155-186). New York: Taylor and Francis.

There are, of course, many others, and it is well worth an hour or two of your time to read a handful of the stuff there. If you read the whole site, I recommend going to your academic adviser and asking for some Independent Study credit hours, as you’ll hardly find a better on-line compendium of literature in this particular field.

Posted by A. Beaujean at 06:18 PM

By now everyone has read the article that the heritability (definition 2) of “political ideology” is ~0.5, but the heritability of political party is far lower. There’s a lot of chew on here (unfortunately The American Political Science Review doesn’t have this paper online), but note that this similar to what Tom Bouchard found out as regards to religous attitudes and beliefs of separated twins raised apart, heritability of “religious intensity” or “zeal” was ~0.5, but there was very little concordance of religious denomination.

Two points:

The likely distribution of these tendencies suggests to me that it is better to think of them as heritable polygenic traits with strong environmental components (plus the whole correlational and interactional factor) as opposed to “genetic” traits that can be conceived of as “modules.” This distinction isn’t academic, it has implications with how people approach the topics.
Obviously aspects of your phenotype are going to shape how your life-history tracks in a given social matrix and how you perceive yourself and your values. I suspect for example ugly people will report on a survey that “looks aren’t important to them,” even though I doubt when given an opportunity an ugly guy or girl would turn down a hot date with a fine physical specimen to have dinner with someone with a great personality but who was revolting as sin. In other words, studies like this tell you a lot, but not necessarily in a transparent or simple fashion.

Finally, Steve brings up the point that whites in the northeast are far more liberal than whites in the south, but their genetic differences are probably minimal, at least in light of the wide ideological gap. I think the point about the social matrix is important, the complex behavorial-cognitive phenotypes don’t crystallize in a vacuum. Not only does space matter, but time does. In short I think what these studies are pointing out are relative slots people will fit into given a particular norm of reaction. To use the religion analogy, Swedish Americans in North Dakota are probably genetically the same as Swedes in Sweden, but the latter are likely far more “progressive” and “secular” than their American cousins, the difference being between the social matrices in which the two similar genotypes are expressed. I suspect that what you are seeing is simply a sliding over of the distribution, more or less. Similarly, today the average “conservative” tends to espouse race blindness and the average “liberal” tends to espouse positive discrimination for groups that have suffered negative discrimination in the past, but, 50 years ago the average conservative tended to espouse, condone or tolerate negative discrimination against groups that traditionally suffered such treatment, while the average liberal espoused race blindness. The change, as a function of time, was simply the social matrix, not the frequency of genes.

The take home message for the activists is that if you change social values of the society (whatever that means in the concrete sense, I suspect it translates into coopting the elite organs of civil society) individuals will simply renormalize themselves. I think homosexuality is a good example of social attitudes renormalizing over the past generation (that is, something I’ve observed in my short lifetime).

Related: Reflections on the “God Module”.

Posted by razib at 10:57 AM