PERSPECTIVE:SIGN EPISTASIS AND GENETIC CONSTRAINT ON EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORIES:

…We show that it is the consequence of a particular form of epistasis, which we designate sign epistasis. Sign epistasis means that the sign of the fitness effect of a mutation is under epistatic control; thus, such a mutation is beneficial on some genetic backgrounds and deleterious on others. Recent experimental innovations in microbial systems now permit assessment of the fitness effects of individual mutations on multiple genetic backgrounds. We review this literature and identify many examples of sign epistasis, and we suggest that the implications of these results may generalize to other organisms. These theoretical and empirical considerations imply that strong genetic constraint on the selective accessibility of trajectories to high fitness genotypes may exist and suggest specific areas of investigation for future research.

So the deviation is flipping between positive and negative and deep fitness valleys separate peaks, impeding the exploration of the adaptive landscape. At least that’s how I read it….

Related: Through the rugged roads of gene land.

From The Economist:

…For a new generation of British Muslims, such behaviour represents the stirrings of a new identity whose common denominator is not ethnic origin, but religion….

…Soon after America’s invasion of Afghanistan, a poll of British Muslims found that among those over 35, some 30% saw religion as their main source of identity. For those under 35, the figure was 41%.

This is apropos of a thread at the brown-American weblog Sepia Mutiny which sparked a lot of debate over the term “South Asian.” “Asian American” was a catchall term formulated by activists in the 1960s to bring together groups who were tied together by common bonds in the United States (though not in Asia). Eventually South Asians (as well as Southeast Asians) were included under the umbrella of that identity. Asian-American activists have used the fact that Buddhism is derived from India, and has a clear relationship to Hinduism, to make a cultural argument for the coherency of the term, though the rise of desi or South Asian speaks to the reality that brown people are a people apart under the umbrella.1 The term “South Asian” seems to be analogous to Asian American in that it takes a real geographic and cultural relation and attempts to crystalize it into something with more concreteness. Obviously, removing brown people from the Indian subcontinent results in a shift in cultural context.2 For individuals of Hindu identity there seems to be a diminution of the importance of caste and ethnic barriers that were salient in the old country, so pan-Indian (brown, South Asian, desi) identitification becomes more relevant.3 But for Muslims, the relaxation of the peculiar constraints of the Indian subcontinent has resulted in the rise of religious identity because of the simultaneous emergence of non-brown ties of affinities (multi-ethnic mosques) and the loosening of a common sense of brownness (for example, dietary acculturation) among the parental generation who were strangers in a strange land. So, for South Asians of Muslim origin, I would argue that pan-brown identification becomes less relevant.4

1 – Brown and yellow don’t socialize to a great extent from what I can see, at least to a greater extent than other variables (working in the same lab for example) would make you expect.

2 – Also note that like a bottleneck, the Diaspora is usually characterized by skewed sampling toward particular regions, castes and ethnic groups, so there isn’t anything like a recapitulation of the diversity that is found in the motherlands. One reason there aren’t tensions between high castes and Dalits in the UK or the USA is that there aren’t that many Dalits who emigrate.

3 – I am speaking mostly to the modern West, but Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobogo have had 3-4 generations of people of Indian origin residing in a non-South Asian environment, and the extreme simplification of South Asian caste and ethnic markers is notable. Additionally, geographic distance has a large effect even in these two cases, Mauritius is far more “Indian” than Trinidad because it is still connected was still connected with the Indian ocean trade throughout the 20th century, and some groups, like Ismaili Gujarati Muslim merchants, have still retained a strong connection with South Asia through marriage.

4 – Among South Asian Muslim intellectuals there were always many camps. Some favored a transnational Islamic vision, which denied the importance of their Indianness. Some argued for a Muslim Indian nationalism (this was the original idea behind Pakistan, and to some extent became the grounding for the birth of Bangladesh with the “Indian” being replaced by Bengali). And then there Muslims who were more sensitive about the reconciliation of their Indian and Muslim identities. I would argue that in the West the balance of power between these tendencies has shifted toward the first because for believing Muslims the “push” of society that identifies them physically as Hindu (Indian) is not as strong as the “pull” of common religious feeling. Additionally, with the removal of South Asian environmental context many of the sentimental roots of an Indian Muslim identity, as opposed to just an unmodified Muslim one, disappeared.

This post on the demographics of young Americans over at Pearsall’s deserves some comments.

I have previously covered the main front in the struggle against freedom of speech in Europe – hate speech laws. Now it’s time to move on to another, more low-profile phenomenon: The Government Oriented (or “Organized”) Non-Governmental Organization, or GONGO for short.

The GONGO is a tax-payer-funded organization, set up by the government to promote a specific policy, or point of view.

Sweden has naturally been at the forefront of this effort to snuff out incorrect thinking. Using organizations such as “Flicka”, “Centrum mot Rasism”, and “Forum Syd”, the government has been able to:

– Criticize magazine publishers who publish incorrect, sexist material. (On huge subway billboards, no less…)

– Fight the menace of racist ice cream.

– Promote Global Jihad, as well as a deeper understanding of (often misunderstood) North Korea and Cuba.

Now however, it appears that the GONGO:s have hit a spot of trouble. It has been revealed that the aforementioned “Centrum mot Rasism”:

– Has done preciously little, except for running up large hotel and restaurant bills.

– Has been taken over by representatives of the ruling Social Democrats and the Greens.

– …carried out the aforementioned attack on racist ice cream mostly as a ploy to cover up their own inaction.

Only time will tell if this will stem the tide of governmental non-governmental organizations attempting to snuff out incorrect thinking. I sort of doubt it.

PS.
Update: Replaced the clunky GNGO with GONGO
DS.

Abstract:

…Although rs2076530 was not associated with sarcoidosis in either African American sample, a three-locus haplotype that included rs2076530 was associated with sarcoidosis across all three study samples. Multivariable logistic regression analyses showed that BTNL2 effects are independent of human leukocyte antigen class II genes in whites but may interact antagonistically in African Americans. Our results underscore the complexity of genetic risk for sarcoidosis emanating from the MHC region.

A few years ago I told Randall Parker that I was reluctant to really tackle “Islam” because I didn’t know enough. I know I post here and there (a lot) on the topic, but mostly they are not thematic or interconnected, just random drive-by jottings strewn across the public-web-space. Of late I’ve realized I will never know enough (that is, to my satisfaction), certainly I know very little Islamic history, theology and overall thought compared to someone like Thebit, but I know a lot of non-Islamic history that I find Muslims who are fluent in their own traditions tend to be blind to (you can generalize this about most people steeped in their own culture). So in the near future I’ll write in a more precise and unequivocal fashion and present a series of posts that have a sequential form (last minute spare-time binge of reading though!). Since I’ve already admitted that I’m not particularly educated on the topic (I am compared to the median…but that’s saying very little)1 I invite informed criticisms of the details of my posts. I say informed because superficial reflections are going to just muddy the waters instead of sharpening the progression of thought.

In any case, I will leave you with a little data from Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out

…In 1995 the French daily Liberation conducted a thorough survey. Here are some of its findings:

Thirty percent of those men born in France and both of whose parents were born in Algeria declared themselves to be without any religion. This percentage is higher than the national average: 27 percent of all Frenchmen describes as without any religion. Sixty percent of those men born in France with only one parent born in Algeria declared themselves to be without religion, more than double the national average! The figures for women remain almost unchanged: 30 percent born in France and both of whose parents were born in Algeria said they were without religion. This precentage is even higher than the national average: 20 percent of all Frenchwomen say they are without religion. Fifty-eight percent of women with one parent born in Algeria said they were without any religion, almost three times the national average.6

The notation is: Immigration Supplement, La Libération, Paris, March 22, 1995, p. 5. For context you can check out the France entry over at adherents.com, but this is a good gauge of French religious attitudes:

In contrast, 85 percent of French object to clergy activism – the strongest opposition of any nation surveyed. France has strict curbs on public religious expression and, according to the poll, 19 percent are atheists. South Korea is the only other nation [surveyed] with that high a percentage of nonbelievers….

Please note that in France there has been a strong association between anti-clericalism, the proletariat and underclass for over a century, with religion (that is, Roman Catholicism) to some extent being a practice of the middle class. The relative secularism of French of North African ancestry and their simultaenous economic deprivation need not be surprising. I would also not put too much stock in the figures for those with one Algerian parent, as one who would outmarry (both Root French and Algerian) is less likely to have traditionalist religious sensibilities. On the number converting to Catholicism:

…In the year 2000, 2,503 adults were baptized, of which 9 percent were of Muslim origin; thus, 225 Muslims apostasized in France alone in 2000.19

The notation is “Les Pentes Croisees du bapteme,” Le Figaro, Paris, APril 12, 2000, p. 9. There are various estimates for the number of conversions to Islam, but I saw a quote from a French government official (a minister of some type) last year of “4,000 native French per year” converting to Islam (there are reports that there are 30,000-50,000 converts in all of France, so 4,000 seems like a highbound estimate). Since only ~10% of France’s population is Muslim origin (I’m using an estimate at the high end), the rescaled ratio of Muslim → Christian : Christian → Muslim (the religious identities seen in cultural, not confessional terms, in terms of origin) is about 1:2. Of course, since there are many more Christians in absolute terms, the Muslim conversions to Roman Catholicism can almost be ignored. But I highlight Roman Catholicism for a reason: it is possible that there are many more conversions to evangelical Protestant sects among non-religious Muslims than to Roman Catholicism. And unfortunately as my post Profile of Salafi jihadists highlights, North African Islamist radicals are often drawn from the non-religious youth of the Diaspora.

Finally, I want to end with an observation. In the section of the book titled “Testimonies of born Muslims: Murtadd Fitri,” here are the countries of origin (or in one case, parental origin) of the apostates:

Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Far East (the author says he was born in a “Buddhist nation,” likely Thailand I think), Turkey, Pakistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tunisia and India. 6 from Pakistan, 3 from Iran and 3 from Bangladesh. Since the editor is of Pakistani origin the slant is probably a partial reflection of his own social networks, nevertheless, it is sad to see that only two Arabs are on the list since Arabs are, no matter what non-Arabs protest (ie; Mahathir Mohammed’s boast a few years back that Southeast Asia was going to move forward and be the face of 21st century Islam), the preeminent nation of the Muslim religion.2

Update: Muslims or people of Muslim origin might be 70% of the prisoners in France.

1 – There are some technical scientific-genetical questions I’m pursuing and exploring that will prevent me, due to time constraints, from ever being fluent enough in Islamic thought to really be totally unself-conscious about commenting.

2 – Certainly Islam is a universalist faith, but my personal experience at mosques was that Arabs always had a certain confident self-assurance that went with knowing they had nothing to prove, they were all The Natural when it came to the worship of Allah, the very language they spoke was the language of heaven (Punjabis would joke that Pashtun was the language of hell).

In many discussions where genes and sociology intersect there is often a group of individuals who will deny that one can truly make non-trivial assertions about genetic effects over the generations, that interactional influences, whether they be gene-to-gene, gene-to-environment, or even more complex feedback loops, make talk of “heritability” null and void. I’ve talked about epistasis, how R.A. Fisher rejected its relevance as an evolutionary force and its role in his dispute with Sewall Right over the character of the adaptive landscape. By the mid-20th century the orthinologist and systematist Ernst Mayr expressed skepticism toward “Bean Bag Genetics,” a paradigm which held that it was acceptable to treat loci as independent agents which each injected their own quanta or fraction to the variance of a particular phenotype (an additive approach). J.B.S. Haldane, an avowed Marxist, came to the defense of the English tradition of mathematical genetics that he and Fisher pioneered in a famous essay where he rebutted Mayr. My point though is not to recap the history of genetics in the 20th century, but to note that a certain stream of thinkers have a habitual tendency when engaging in public policy debates where the issue of heredity comes up to reflexively appeal to interaction and other non-additive factors to subborn the arguments of their opponents in the genetical-social realm, drawing on the same talking points made prominent by Mayr. By emphasizing the non-linear and contextual/contingent factors in the equation they attack the utility of provisional models as a guide toward making decisions. A genetic-environmental produced phenotype is a complex, almost mysterious system, which simply does not brook analysis and decomposition.

Now, let us move to the broader canvas of society as a whole. The law of unintended consequences suggests to us that social systems are filled with unknown contingencies and variables which are simply not transparent to us on first, or second, or third analysis. Some people would argue that social systems are simply irreducible, that model building and attempting to “rationalize” society is a futile endeavour, that actions have wildly unpredictable consequences. On the other hand, there are those who seem to posit a “Bean Bag Sociology,” where social good A has implication B, rather than being enmeshed in a nest of interlocking relations which might be disrupted if social good A’s state is changed. Let us move this to the realm of specifics. Women were given the right to vote, the South was desegregated and abortion was legalized. I point out policies which progressives tended to favor and conservatives tended to reject to illustrate that in this case the social Left is engaged in a kind of sociological Bean Baggery. In contrast, the more traditional conservatives appeal to custom and tradition because they believe that the organically developed social systems of the past are not simply the reducible sum of their parts (additive), and that “progress” on one issue may have a drastic, non-linear, effect on the society as a whole.

So you have a situation where in two domains of knowledge the parties who demand absolute certainty switch polemics. Of course, I would admit that the analogy is imperfect, genes are a rock-hard theoretical basis for evolutionary biology and the disciplines which draw from it (though I am not offering that the theories themelves are rock-hard, simply asserting that the accused jelly sits upon bedrock), while memes have yet to be properly characterized as anything beyond a metaphor. I will lay my cards on the table and say that I am cautiously optimistic about model building in both situations, though I am not a strict Fisherian in that I think there may be multiple equilibria or peaks on the landscape of genes and society, but even if I was a Fisherian, recall that his theory of evolutionary change via microevolution posited sequential fixations of loci over time, one at a time. Change occurs, simply not through dynamic gene-to-gene interactions, let alone anything like a “genome reorganization.” Make of that what you will in the domain of sociology.

QIMR Scientists Identify Genetic Links to Human Intelligence:

The QIMR group, led by Professor Nick Martin, has identified specific locations on Chromosomes 2 and 6 as being highly influential in determining IQ. To do this, they applied multipoint linkage analysis to data from 634 sibling pairs (including non-identical twins) from Australia and the Netherlands who were genetically scanned for the study.

Although earlier twin studies had revealed the existence of genes that dictated human intelligence, usual genetic association methods had not been effective in identifying them. Where association analysis may overlook closely spaced genes that act together to affect a trait, linkage analysis is more sensitive to such combined effects.

Traditional IQ tests are designed to assess abilities across different areas – memory, vocabulary, semantics, symbolic reasoning – collectively grouped into higher orders such as verbal and performance intelligence. The region on Chromosome 2 shows significant links to performance IQ, also overlapping a region associated with autism. The region on Chromosome 6 showed strong links with both full-scale and verbal IQ with a marginal overlap to an area implicated in reading disability and dyslexia.

During the study, where the non-identical twins and other sibling pairs had significant differences in IQ, they also had significant variation in these regions on Chromosomes 2 and 6.

Article in the San Bernardino News suggesting Ebonics as a way to raise academic achievement for Black students.

There are so many things wrong in that article, I’ll stick the two most basic that it is hard to believe I have to state them:

1) I would like to see one, data-backed and independently tested (i.e., subject to peer-review and multiple investigations) theory that posits speaking Ebonics either a) keeps Black students interested in core academics (e.g., math, reading, chemistry) above and beyond the norm or b) has a positive effect on college admissions to mildly selective universities. Note, I didn’t say a thing about raising IQ scores, which is really what this whole thing is all about.

2) The article says:

A pilot of the policy, known as the Students Accumulating New Knowledge Optimizing Future Accomplishment Initiative, has been implemented at two city schools.

Have any results been published? Can I have access to the data? Or is this going to be another fraud in the name of social justice.

I searched PsychInfo and the Internet in general (i.e., Google and Google Scholar) and found not one article, much less a peer-reviewed one, with the following key words: “Students Accumulating New Knowledge Optimizing Future Accomplishment Initiative” or “Mary Texeira”.

I challenge anyone involved in this project to give citations of where the public can go to review a) their research design, b) their data collection instrumentation, and (if available) c) their analysis.

Until such a time, this effort, to paraphrase KA, will have to be classified as ass.

*Thanks to Scott for the heads up on this article.

Robots replace child jockeys in Arab camel race. Don’t liberal do-gooders know that families in Bangladesh depend on the remittances sent by the child jockeys?

Update: Just want to make clear, the initial post was meant in mirth. I really didn’t know how serious the whole “camel jockey” thing was.