Did you just read the latest mindless talking point on Red State or Daily Kos? Feeling frustrated? Wondering if the propaganda can get any worse? Wonder no more, for the North Korea News Agency archive is now on-line. Read your propaganda the way it’s meant to be read, with over 50 megabytes of hard-core Stalinist propaganda at your fingertips, polished by the masters themselves, from the glittering city of Pyongyang where the vanguard of humanity shows the rest of us stooges the way of the future, the everlasting glory of Scientific Marxism.

Where else can you search a news database, STALIN, the STatistical Analyzer of Language In North Korean Propaganda, with terms like “U.S. imperialist ogres,” “class enemies,” “Human scum,” “Inveterate,” and “imperialist aggressor.”

And a bonus for those who’ve grown jaded about propaganda written by fallible humans – a random insult generator that will create gems undreamt of by mere men. Create you own fantasy scenario – imagine that you have achieved the pinnacle of propaganda spinmeisterness – you’re Mohammad Said Sahhaf, AKA Comical Ali, Saddam’s lackey, ahem, I mean Information Minister, and there you are before the salivating media, captivating them with your briefing and then you get caught unawares by a question. You were in your moment of glory until that cretin reporter bellowed out his question, and now suddenly your mind goes blank. Never fear, one mouse click and you’re saved, you look up, lean into the microphone and let fly with “You loudmouthed beast, your ridiculous clamor for ‘human rights’ is nothing but a shrill cry!” or you could go with “You sycophantic stooge, you have glaringly revealed your true colors!”

Via Yahoo News

Talk about a scarlet pimp, look below the fold….

Scientific American has a summary of a new paper in Science which chronicles the oscillating climate of Africa 3 to 1 million years ago. Here’s the relevant snip:

Lake sediments in ten Ethiopian, Kenyan and Tanzanian rift basins suggest there were three humid periods at 2.7-2.5 Ma, 1.9-1.7 Ma and 1.1-0.9 Ma before the present superimposed on the longer-term aridification of East Africa. These humid periods correlate with increased aridity in Northwest and Northeast Africa and significant global climate transitions….

The main problem with studies like this is the whole correlation does not equal causation issue…though climate change does usually result in selection and drift working on a population. The fact that great a swath of Africa which is today rainforest was once predominantly scrub with mere islands of verdancy is often held to have resulted in the relative profusion of various species which seem to fill the same niche. As the forests retreated and fragmented the thesis is that the fauna that depended upon these biomes retreated into the refuges and over time were subject to allopatric speciation. When the forests expanded the species comingled, increasing local diversity all throughout the forest zone.

For hominids, the relevance is that the repeated shifts in climate and fragmentation of habitats (whether it be savanna or forest) would likely have resulted in repeated selection events as well as spatial segregation. Looking at this chart which shows the putative hominid speciation events in their timeframe the overlap with the period of climate change alluded to above is clear. Of course, I haven’t read the paper, so I don’t know how they claim that this was that much different than any other period in the past…though I suppose Stephen Jay Gould would say something about contingencies and smile munificently.

It’s really frustrating when you can’t find information via google, but, it just reminds you how shallow the the data mining of search engine crawlers can be. On this weblog people have mentioned blondeness among Australian Aboriginals multiple times, and ultimately we really haven’t gotten anywhere (no one has brought up novel data) because no one has any information to offer aside from what they read in C.S. Coon’s books when they were younger. There isn’t much out there on the web.

Luckily, I decided to check the local college library, and I found Joseph Birdsell’s Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, which has a large section addressing the issue of blondeness among the indigenous people of the antipodal continent. Below, I will summarize most of Birdsell’s data and analysis so that google will at least have this to crawl now.

But first, I want to address a minor point that often comes up. One hypothesis about Australian Aboriginal blondeness is that it is due to admixture with Europeans, in particular Dutch sailors who entered into undocumented liasons with native women prior to British colonization. This to me seems like a ludicrous assertion for the following reason: if the blonde alleles introgressed from another population, they can be thought of as proxies for the ancestral admixture of Western Europeans into these tribes. Though a very high frequency of tribal members exhibit preadult blondeness, there are almost no other European diagnostic phenotypes in evidence! That is, their skins are rather dark and their features classically Australian Aboriginal. Most people talk about European blondeness as if it is a recessive trait. I have issues with that simple idea, but, taking it at face value the frequency of blonde alleles in a panmictic population should be higher than the frequency of the blonde phenotype,1 so we are talking about a rather high level of admixture if the blondeness is due to European ancestry. On the other hand, there are no other visible signs of this ancestry. One could hypothesize of course that the initially low frequency (attained via admixture) spread through the population because of positive directional selection on the trait. So in that case the alleles are of European origin, but the frequency of blondeness is not diagnostic of ancestry because it is not a neutral trait. But Birdsell’s data points away from a European origin for blondeness, and many of the recollections of readers of GNXP are correct as to the character of this trait among Australian Aboriginals.

To review, there are two primary melanin pigments, dark eumelanin and red-gold pheomelanin. The dosage of these two pigments results in the various hair colors we see in people. Redheads tend to have a great amount of pheomelanin, but almost no eumelanin. Ash blonde people are the reverse when it comes to pheomelanin, while golden blonde individuals tend to be somewhere in the middle. People with auburn hair have relatively high levels of both. But note that pheomelanin is more diffuse and less abundant, and it is no a surprise that black haired individuals may simply mask their “red” pigment. Many people with black hair (including yours truly) go through a “red blonde” phase during hair bleaching, as the dense eumelanin granules are stripped away by the bleaching agents first. It seems that the expression of the phenotype is dependent on many genes, though a few, like MC1R, have an outsized influence (perhaps through regulation of other loci). This is probably one reason that despite the typological division of Europeans into “blondes,” “brunettes” and “redheads,” there tends to be a continuous gradation of color. Not only do the combinations of eumelanin and pheomelanin dosage add “mixed” categories (strawberry blonde, auburn) to the triplet, the expression of these pigments is not an “on” or “off” matter as one would expect if one locus was at the heart of the process. I have made the repeated argument that the “recessive” character of blondism and the “dominant” character of brunette hair is partially an artifact of how we classify hair color. All the various non-blonde hair colors, from brown to black are slotted into the “dominant” category, when I would argue that even among black haired people there is a wide variance of pigment concentration of eumelanin that visual inspection might miss, for example between a light skinned Japanese individual and someone from southern India or Africa (basically, one can not get below a certain level of reflective, so all the extra melanin does not register any change in color).

Now, to the Australian Aboriginals.

1) The perception (based I assume in color plates in older anthropology books) that the blonde Aboriginals were ash in their coloration is correct. The reason, according to Birdsell, is that they exhibit very little pheomelanin in their hair. Of course there is a lack of eumelanin in the hair samples as well. Unfortunately Birdsell did not assay the concentration of granules quantitatively, but inspected them visually under a microscope. Nevertheless, he saw what was going on at the proximate level pretty well. It wasn’t, to consider an outlandish example, a case where a yellow pigment was being produced that obscured the eumelanin.

2) There is both sexual dimorphic and paedomorphic tendencies to the trait. In short, pre-pubescent children are blonder, as are females.

3) This is not a rare trait that is expressed by a few individuals in many tribes. Rather, the frequency of the phenotype can approach 90-100% in children, and still remain significant even in adult males. Also, the “darkening” is often to a brown color, rather than black.

4) Birdsell suggests that the allele which causes this blondeness, in reality the loss of function or expression of both traits (dark and red pigment), is characterized by “incomplete dominance.” The frequencies for the expression of the trait are extremely high. If it was a “recessive” trait the allele(s) must be close to fixed. I don’t find his arguments persuasive because he didn’t mention crosses between dark haired aboriginals and blonde aboriginals, in part because the unmixed peoples of this sort (that is, without European ancestry) are also not likely to go on cross-continental searches for husbands or brides from other Aboriginal groups. But, that being said, Birdsell offers the following observation: hybrids between Europeans and dark-haired (eastern) Aboriginals never exhibit hair that is lighter than brown. Obviously, not all Europeans are blonde, or carry blonde genes, but the conclusion of blonde phenotypic recessiveness is hammered home. Hybrids between blonde Aborigines and Europeans almost always exhibited the ash blonde phenotype of the Aborigines as children. I don’t put too much stock in terms like “incomplete dominance,” aside from that it is saying “hey, we don’t know much about this gene.” Nevertheless, I think the hybrid phenotype is a strong line of evidence that it isn’t localized on the same part of the genome as the blonde loss-of-function alleles in Europeans. Crosses between dark haired Europeans and blonde Europeans do not almost always result in blonde children (many times the children are blonde and they become dark haired as they develop, but, Birdsell seems to suggest that inheritance pattern is more det
erministic when one of the parents is an Australian Aboriginal blonde).

5) Birdsell notes that the blonde phenotype does not apply to all body hair. Almost all the rest of the body hair is rather dark, the only exception being the hairs on the forearm, which tend to be even blonder (that is, those who darken with adulthood retain blonde forearm hair).

I would like to end with a tentative hypothesis. Obviously Birdsell is trying to convey the impression that this is a trait that is “incompletely dominant,” even though it is a “loss of function” trait (eumelanin and pheomelanin seem to not be found in the hair). The “incompletely dominant” part suggests that there is a locus of large effect at work here. Additionally, Birdsell only mentions gradation in hair color as a function of development or maturation, not population. What I mean by this is that one doesn’t get the impression of individuals with light brown or dark blonde shades as youth who become black haired as adults. Continuity (normalish distribution) is a feature of polygenic traits, while discrete or binary tendencies are exhibited by classical mendellian traits. With this in mind, I offer that perhaps these Australian Aboriginals carry an allele which results in the synthesis of a trans-acting factor which suppresses gene expression on the loci which control for melanin production (or, it could be interfering with a crucial regulatory step). This suppression is obviously dependent on factors relating to development and cell-cell differentiation, because the melanin is found in copious amounts in other body hairs as well as in the skin. A sequencing of the loci which we know affect melanin dosage might not turn up anything out of the ordinary in comparison to other dark skinned people. In contrast, I suspect many Europeans have multiple polymorphisms which result in the overall reduction in melanin production via melanocytes throughout their skin, their body hair as well as their irises.

So why is this trait expressed in frequencies of 90%+ (that is, adults who started out ash blonde as youth) in the west-central deserts of Australia? Birdsell doesn’t offer any selectionist reason, and I can’t think of any environmental ones. There was obviously constraint on skin color, which makes sense in light of the protection that dark skin confers against radiation. The only thing I can come up with is sexual or social selection (ie; it might have been preferences for a particular type of child as opposed to males and females choosing each other for this trait). But it is basically a default hypothesis (I do not credit genetic drift in this case, but I do not know the demographic history of these tribes, so that is a possibility I suppose). Also, blondism might just be a byproduct of the allele’s function, which we do not know yet (or, we know it, but have not made the connection).

I was going to scan the map up, but I’m having some driver issues, so no go in that direction (if someone wants to find the book and scan it up and put it on flickr I will link to it-it’s on page 196). Descriptively, you have a modal frequency of this phenotype in the middle of western Australia of 90-100%. The frequency drops off to around 50% by the southwest coast and the geographic center of the continent, and more sharply north toward Arnehm Land until the phenotype is almost nonexistent on the north coast. The phenotype is absent from the eastern third of the continent. Overall, one can imagine an area of the map where the phenotype is absent like a crescent, thick and rotund in the southeast, and becoming a relative sliver as it arcs around the zone of blondeness around its northern edge.

Related: Black and strawberry.

1 – p2 + 2pq + q2 = 1. The “recessive” allele is usually signified by q. The q2 is the frequency of expression of the recessive phenotype, so for example, if the blonde allele is present in a frequency of 0.5 throughout the random mating population, 1/4 of the individuals will express it. If a population is 1/2 blonde, than 70% of the alleles floating in the population are blonde. So, if you had a tribe that was 50% blonde, if blonde alleles are neutral (no selective advantage), ignoring drift one could assume that 70% of the ancestry was European if the alleles had to have come from that source population. Of course, I don’t think that the dominance-recessive concept really works well a lot of the time, and I certainly don’t think that blondism is a one locus mendellian trait, contrary what they taught us in high school.

A researcher who studies melanin hits a lot of data nuggets in one post. NuSapiens offers some related speculations (sort of). Also, you might be interested that Heather Norton has a paper in press, Worldwide polymorphism at the MC1R locus and normal pigmentation variation in humans. Of course, I have no access to Peptides, though Heather gave us the gist I think if not the details….

Update: If you are curious, here is an article that attests to some polymorphism among Sub-Saharan Africans on the MC1R locus (one of the three nonsynonomous mutations was found in a Khoisan individual). The standard assumption is that MC1R has been under strong functional constraint amongst dark skinned peoples, and far less (or least different selective forces have become important) among light skinned peoples (see here for an extensive review article). Henry and Greg have suggested that some variants of MC1R that result in reduced eumelanin production could be the result of introgression from non-African hominids (“archaic” H. sapiens, like Neandertal), though here you see that there is at least some variation for selection to work upon even in the African genetic background. Some older hair color related posts here and here. For more about MC1R go here.

Two papers in PNAS of some interest: Geographic routing in social networks and Kinship-based politics and the optimal size of kin groups.

I’ve developed a mild interest in John Brown, but before I began reading about him I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the cultural history of slavery in the United States…and I noticed a little book titled Islam’s Black Slaves, and I had to pick it up. It’s real short, I read it in when I was walking to the grocery store and other sorts of errands, but it’s got some good data. This post isn’t about slavery per se, but rather an issue that crops up now and then, what are the textual constraints on the expression of the Muslim faith? I have periodically expressed mild skepticism at the amount of text derived inferences people sometimes assert are determinants in the modal shape of behavior or median cultural expression. No doubt the constraints exist on some level, and ideas can change the world. That being said, I was curious at how slaves were treated in Islam because the sharia has explicit instructions on this point. The author begins by noting the standard talking points, there are Islamic hadiths which state that there is merit in freeing a slave, a mother and child should not be parted and the child of a master and slave woman is free and not a slave. The standard assertion that slavery in the Muslim world was never so cruel, dehumanizing and barbarous as the chattel slavery deployed for plantation agriculture that became normative in the New World (from Brazil to the American South) seems correct. One thing to consider is that in the Muslim world many more blacks were “house slaves,” and so the brutal conditions of the field were less of a concern (there had been revolts by slaves in Iraq early in the history of Islam which discouraged the practice of slave labor on plantations). Nevertheless, there were incredible brutalities, especially in the high mortality rates in transport. And of course, hypocrisy and breach of “Islamic law” was the norm.

I want to highlight two passages from the book. First:

Muslim propriety permitted no such scrutiny as came to be common in the slave markets of the Americans. Male slaves might be eamined only above the navel and below the knees, female slaves only by viewing their faces and hands….

But, near the end of the book the author reprints an article from 1956 verbatim that described a slave auction in Djibouti where the merchants were going to transport their “goods” to Arabia, in parctiular, the city of Jiddah:

…A trader would nudge a slave’s jaw with a stick and the man would open his mouth to display his teeth. Another probe with the stick and he would flex his arm muscles. Young women were forced to expose their breasts and buttocks. A dispute developed over the virginity of a tall young ebony woman, and during the hour-long argument she was forced to squat while one of the most prominent buyers examined her with his fingers. She was terrified; her trembling was visible fifty yards away.

Occasionally children were sold in batches. They did not cry, mainly, I think, because they had no tears left, but they held tightly to one another and kept looking around as if for help. Boys of about ten or twelve had their anuses examined; homosexual buyers are fussy about disease.

This and many other passages in the book makes the idea that Islamic slavery was more humanitarian as a matter of kind as opposed to degree seem ludicrous. Granted, in Islam there was far less stigma attached to slavery, and the racial bar was not absolute. Many of the great rulers were once slave soldiers, and potentates often had slave mothers (black and white). But my point in highlighting the above passage was to show how ludicrous the idea that sharia injunctions really made a big difference in the way slaves were treated, the bestial scene occurred in 1956, and the “merchants” were from the “fundamentalist” state of Saudi Arabia.1

There are other issues relating to slavery where sharia commands a particular course of action, but Muslims generally found ways to skirt the letter of the law. For instance, castration is banned in Islam, but eunuchs were omnipresent in Muslim courts. How was this so? There were multiple avenues of recourse. In some places non-Muslims specialized in castrations, in Al-Andalus it was Jews, in the Ottoman Empire it was Christians. In other cases slaves were castrated outside of Muslim lands, so that Prague in Christian Bohemia became a center for the generation of eunuchs for Ottoman service. In Africa the Muslims were often castrated en route. Sometimes, castration was attributed to a “mistake,” the slaves were sent to a barber who was going to circumcise them and he simply grasped their genitals and sliced everything off (while European slaves generally had their testicles removed, black slaves had both testicles and penis removed).

Now, the issue of circumcision is important because the enslaved should be non-Muslim, one can not enslave Muslims, though one could encourage a slave to convert. But there were ways to get around this issue of not enslaving Muslims. In the Hausa states of modern northern Nigeria disobedience to the potentate was ruled tatamount to apostasy, so Muslim villages were attacked and enslaved and sold to pay off debts on the pretense that they were in rebellion, ergo, apostates (the rebellion might be due to an incredibly high tax which they could not pay). Another common argument was that Muslims whose practice or tradition deviated from the slavers were not truly Muslims, so they could be enslaved. Of course, sometimes there wasn’t even a pretense at following this injunction, there are multiple records of African village leaders as well as Muslim “holy” men leading pilgrimages to Mecca, where they promptly sold everyone into slavery and absconded with the gold to some far off land (this occcurred in Mali in the 20th century, and a delegation to Libya was sent in the hopes of extraditing a man who had led his village on Haj and then sold everyone to merchants and then opened a business in Tripoli with the proceeds). As the demand for slaves increased the merchants became far less scrupulous in determining whether the goods were ill-gotten.

Obviously there is a lot more I could say, but I think I have made my point. Sharia stipulates very specific ways one should treat and obtain slaves. Sharia was almost always breached, sometimes quite blatantly. Nevertheless, often transparent pretexes were concocted to generate an imprimatur of correct form and practice. There seems to have been a wide variance of the expectation that a slave could have about his life, and how he was treated, or whether an innocent villager (Muslim or non-Muslim) could become a slave, and the threads that seem to be the variables that determine the nature of slavery are usually based on historical and social conditions, or just plain greed. All the while in the background are the same common Islamic textual injunctions and specificied practices, which nevertheless seem to have been rendered a dead letter. So the implication here is clear, some Muslims today justify slavery because it is the sharia (see Mauritania, where the white Berbers come close to engaging in racial slavery reminiscient of the American South, though perhaps operationally more like Apartheid South Africa). But in the past the way slavery was practiced violated even th
e most “liberal” precepts of the sharia, so it seems a short step for one to find out a way that one could render slavery operationally forbidden (for example, consider the argument against polygyny that since Muhammad said that all wives needed to be treated equally and this was not possible, polygyny is not possible). The key here is not just the texts alone, but the interaction between the texts and the stubborn social matrix which interprets the text in a self-serving fashion.

Addendum: This article might be of interest to readers: Extensive female-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa into near eastern Arab populations. Here is part of the abstract:

…a very high frequency of African lineages present in the Yemen Hadramawt: more than a third were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried approximately 10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no such lineages, suggesting that gene flow has been preferentially into Arab populations….

1 – The author suggests that slaves in the Muslim world played a very different role in the economy than in the New World (or ancient Greece and Rome for that matter!). Muslim slaves tended to be consumer items, they were symbols of prosperity, and also domestic helpmates. And quite often, they were also soldiers. These two states, household help and martial occupations, meant that slaves were not treated as commodities toward a profit motive in a production oriented economy like they were in the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World. Though the mortality rates during transport, and especially for males after the castration, were probably as high as the “Middle Passage,” those that survived probably lived less dehumanizing existences in the Muslim world. One could argue this was because of the character of sharia (with its stipulations for good treatment toward slaves), but I suspect a more plausible explanation is that they occupied a different niche in Muslim societies, perhaps analogous to slaves in pre-Christian (and early medieval) northern Europe, as opposed to the mass agriculture of ancient Sicily or cash crop plantations of the New World.

Comments about my “Ethics is hard and so is science” got me interested in the naturalistic fallacy: “the argument tries to draw a conclusion about how things ought to be based solely on information about how things are in fact.” An example: “There have always been wars. Hence there is no reason for you to object that our bombing of Serbia was morally wrong.”

Prima facia, the naturalistic fallacy seems like a stupid mistake to make. Adding science to the mix, and evolution in particular, certainly exacerbates the reasoning problem. But surely this is not the only reason that so many people commit this error.

The naturalistic fallacy is actually a very limited proposition. It entails that empirical facts alone cannot be the foundation for moral judgment. But clearly empirical facts can and should be a part of ethical reasoning. W.R.T. Darwinism, empirical facts about human nature tell us how difficult it will be to achieve a desired outcome.

In the comments, Steve Sailer pointed out that “the belief that all human beings are equal” is pre-Darwinian belief, promoted by Christianity. I now think that the tendency to commit the naturalistic fallacy has a similar cause; it involves the inappropriate attribution to Darwinism of the pre-Darwinian concept of a “moral order” instantiated in the natural world. The concept of a coincident natural and moral order is easy to see in Christian theology, and it appears to bedevil rational thought today.

But I think splitting the natural and ethical should tell us something else. It should tell us that moral progress is not an inexorable outcome of history, but rather is something that we have to work to achieve.

There is going to be publication of a piece in Nature (sometime today) that argues for the reintroduction of megafauna to North American by transplanting African speices. This article in the Economist has an overview, while CNN also is reporting on this. The only thing I would like to add is that I think the analogy to the introduction of rabbits (to Australia) is really dumb. First, megafauna have been part of the North American landscape before, there are all sorts of plants that seem to assume that there are still giant ground sloths hanging around to disperse their seeds (10,000 years is a long time, but not that long). Second, the species they are going to introduce (possibly) are all relatively slow reproducers. If lions really started eating a lot of people, well, killing them wouldn’t be that difficult. And they would eat some people, there have been problems with this issue in Boulder, CO, where a few parks have had three year olds snatched away by cougars. In another incident a jogger was ambushed and eaten (of course, usually the issue is the consumption of cats and dogs, not people). As if to emphasize this problem, Nature has an article up about an increase in lion attacks in Africa. That being said, I’m not sure if the people of South Dakota (for example) would really mind the introduction of megafauna, I’ve been through that state and there really isn’t much to see between Rapid City and Sioux Falls (the cold winters would be an issue in South Dakota of course, but lions were found in Southern Europe and in the highlands of the Middle East into historic times). Certainly it could bring some tourism. I suspect people who could afford to go to Africa for a safari would still prefer the real thing.

Update: If you want big European red deer antlers, go to New Zealand. You want to see wild camels? There are 500,000 in Australia! You want to see wild horses? Look in the American West, the Eurasian steppes.

Update II: Josh Donlan (leader author of the paper above) has just posted his ideas over at Slate. I think it is a sober and realistic plan. I doubt it will happen for a variety of reasons, primarily because of the synergy of the utopian Nature Is Always Right (even when it isn’t nature) sentiment from progressives and Kill the Critters rural folk. I lived among the Kill the Critters folk for many years, and I understand their concerns, it is pretty much common sense, if it kills humans, or it kills human livestock, kill it, right? Well, that depends. With fewer and fewer rural people in America (and even most “rural” people don’t live in the country, they live in towns, less than 2% of Americans live on farms for instance) the ineffable beauty of nature appeals a lot more to those who live their days in an environment of black top rather than black buttes. On the other hand, there are those who I suspect would label themselves progressives and environmentalists who are making somewhat strained, and in my opinion disingenuous, claims. For example, I don’t particularly see why all of a sudden they care what ranchers would think about carnivores, it didn’t matter when wolves were reintroduced. The argument that it would drain the demand for African eco-tourism also strikes me as false, if you are the type who wants to see the African wilds, are you really going to be satisfied with New Mexico neo-savannah? The people who might take “safari” trips to the new Wild West would most likely be the types who would visit the San Diego Zoo or even local petting zoos. They would be two different demographics. Then of course there are there are the particular ecological objections, for instance, climate. First, many of these megafauna, or, their analogs, were indigenous to this continent at some point. Second, many of these creatures have wide ranges. Third, microevolution can work wonders, and one could certainly selection bias the parental population so that its various characteristics are more optimal for the New World.

Overall, this isn’t going to happen. Nevertheless, here is another example of metaphors people don’t live by, selective use of the precautionary principle and of course strained analogies. The fact is that we live in an engineered and unnatural world, there isn’t much about it that is “in balance” as it “should be.” Nature isn’t that much different, there are always metastabilities and requilibrations going on all around us. Relaxed selection on the pronghorn antelope after the extinction of the North American cheetah has not done all its work so that things are in “balance” again….

Update III: John Hawks comments. I made a few comments at Sepia Mutiny (nothing new, but if you are curious).

Update IV: Steve Biodio has two comments worth reading.

Well, I wasn’t going to comment on the Amanda Schaeffer slam of Evolutionary PsychologyTM in Slate drawn heavily from David Buller’s Adapting Minds, but Steve just has, and GC pointed out that someone on Brad Plummer’s blog also noted the implicit opening for human variation that she produced by acknowledging the reality of microevolution over the past 10,000 years. I’ll leave you with the links….