Miss Iceland wins Miss World! Now, of course, the title is kind of a joke, because she looks a bit different than Miss Sweden or Miss Denmark, though not as exotic as Miss Norway. In fact, though it is surely seeing what you want to see, she seems to resemble Shannen Doherty or one of the Corrs sisters. This is post facto observation, as there is evidence of Irish admixture in this one Nordic nation.

Update: While doing a little research I found out that Miss Thailand, Sindee Jensen, has a Danish father! What’s up with the Siam-Scandinavian combination?

Update II: Dienekes has a post on Norwegian Y chromosomes.

Over Crooked Timber Chris Bertram posts something titled Religious groups as ethnic minorities where he suggests that 1) Muslims are an ethnic group 2) there are can be atheist Muslims and atheist Catholics. My first thought is a Ph.D. in philosophy don’t mean you aren’t an idiot (though it probably makes you more confident about spouting off on things you don’t know about), but my second thought is that looking at the comments Bertram’s operational definition that something is an ethnic group if that group understands itself and another group as different and the feelings are mutual is awful fuzzy. It seems Bertram is concerned that Muslims will be denied special protections, i.e., laws against “Islamophobia.”

On the point about Muslims being an ethnic group, I think a problem is that in many European countries Muslims in a given nation are overwhelmingly from one particular ethnic group. So of course it is easy to think of them as an ethnic group. Bertram lives in England, where brown (“Asian”) and Muslim intersect pretty well (though many Asians are not Muslim, almost all Muslims are Asian). In France, the preponderance of Muslims are North African. In Germany, it is Turks. And so on. The Muslim ~ ethnic group conflation is easy in nations where Islam and ethnicity have a strong correlational relationship. In contrast, this couldn’t happen in the United States, where Muslims are multiethnic, ranging from black converts to immigrants from the Middle East and Asia.

As for whether there can be an atheist Muslim, I think you know my opinion on that. Nevertheless, I am close to a nominalist as to whether individual Y is a member of religion X, but if public policy is contingent upon my definition of a Muslim, i.e., one who professes the shahada, vs. someone who has a ‘culturalist’ idea of Islam, so that even if they reject God they don’t reject his religion (?), well, I think I’d have to lean toward mine as being less nutso. As an irtidad I am not positively inclined toward the religion that the likes of Dr. Bertram would have governments classify us as part of because it is an ‘ethnic group,’ that what really matters is how others perceive us, not the decisions and choices we make in our own life. The Muslim attitude toward irtidads is well known, as is the problem with the way European Muslims treat their own. Certainly European racism is unacceptable, but on the facts it seems clear that much of the most extreme invective against Muslims is derived from ideological opposition (i.e., Oriana Fallaci), not ethnic hatred. Instead of focusing on Westernizing the Muslim community many of Bertram’s ilk seem to want to focus purely on the faults of European civilization, which has birthed the most spectacular and creative culture on the history of his planet, all the while trivializing the quality of life issues arising from Muslim oppression upon each other (mostly male to female) as well as the Muslims’ hostility toward the norms of liberal (“pig eating”) society.

Imagine yourself walking in some woods and you see something out of the corner of your eye. What is your thought as you turn toward the object, a bear, or an old refrigerator? I don’t know about you, but most “woods” in suburban and small town areas have a greater number of discarded junk, from sofas to fridges, than they do of wild animals (the main exception around here are deer, though to be honest I’ve seen many more deer ambling down main streets raiding gardens than in wooded areas where the pickings are slim). Even though banal physical objects or processes are more likely to catch your attention out of the corner of your eye or induce leaves to rustle, we still have a bias toward perceiving animate agents when we are unsure (or worry about them!). Now, imagine another scenario, you see someone who holds a strange object, vaguely metallic, and they throw the object to the ground. The object lands with a thud. OK, big deal. Now, how would you react if the object just slipped into the ground and disappeared. Or, what if you heard a scream eminate from it, and it “ran” away from the location where it landed? I think you’d be pretty weirded out. The point here is that humans have innate and reflexive biases in how the world around us is constructed. Metallic objects don’t scream or run. The ground is solid. We don’t process all the information anew each time we confront a situation. We have an idea that rocks aren’t going to start screaming if we sit on them, we don’t go into each situation consciously evaluating that possibility.

As regards the reflexive aspects of our mind, I don’t mean to imply that a coupling of inputs and outputs are innate, hard-wired or perfect. Many reflexive tendencies do not resemble anything like a hammer-to-the-knee kick. For example, I go to the library a lot, and I have a routine about how I check the books out. Normally I’m thinking about other stuff. A few weeks ago there was a new librarian, and she was a bit slow and did things out of the normal order. She placed the books back where the librarians normally place them after the allotted period of time necessary to check them into the system, so I just picked them up and started walking off. She had to get my attention to stop me from leaving the building because I wasn’t really thinking much about what I was doing. Obviously I don’t have a hard-wired “library checkout” module in my brain, but the process is so set and pat for me that I’m quite close to being on autopilot. Now I’ve been on guard when this librarian is working, and she did it again a few days ago and I almost picked the books up and walked off again (I had to restrain myself).

In Why would anyone believe in God? Justin L. Barrett answers that exact question by utilizing banal cognitive truths. Though Barrett’s treatment is more focused, the topics addressed and the hypotheses put forward draw deeply upon the research of cognitive anthropologists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) and Scott Atran (In Gods we trust). Nevertheless, Barrett is more sympathetic to theism and less clinical than either of the two thinkers above, which makes sense, as Barrett himself is a theist who is currently employed with the Christian organization Young Life. This is relevant because it reiterates that Barrett is not decomposing a phenomenon which is to him alien and a curiosity, he is in effect explorating cognitive processes which are essential to the core of his own being.1

The two meta-concepts which undergird the ideas within the text (which is only a bit over 100 pages) are the human mental processes which result in hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) and theory of the mind (ToM). These cognitive traits are slotted under the umbrella of hard & fast response reflexive cognition. For example, when someone is gossiping with you you do not spend a great deal of time consciously threading all the personal interrelationships which might come into play as relevant to the various interactions being alluded to. Though there are reflective “Oh, yes!” rememberences (x is y’s cousin), many of the cognitive operations are occurring under the hood and are encapsulated away from your reflective mind. This is why many extremely intelligent people are socially inept, they simply do not possess the requisite reflexive cognitive aptitude and so must rely on slow and klunky reflective cognition which simply can’t keep up and is highly error prone. Unlike ToM, HADD is a little more obscure. In short, when people say they see design all around them, this is a reflective aspect of HADD at work. But why hyperactive? It is simply the classic false positve vs. true positive contrast. Going back to the example with the bear vs. the fridge, if it does turn out to be a bear you better be ready to run! If on the other hand it doesn’t turn out to be a bear, you probably stressed yourself out more than is healthy, but you’ll survive. Though there might not be an archetypical “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” (EEA), I think it is safe to say that sophisticated mental models derived from assumptions about intraspecific and interspecific competition have always been extremely fitness relevant to homonids.2 If you think you saw a scout from an enemy tribe, or that your cousin is trying to screw you over by doing the nasty with your wife while you are out in the fields, it is often better to be safe than sorry. In other words, there might be strong adaptive value in seeing agency all over the place, even if that implies that there are lots of false hits (“only the paranoid survive”). Similarly, ToM is crucial in smoothing over cooperation and modeling the social networks which are relevant to your own fitness within the group, so going a little overboard might give you a reputation as a busy-body, but it might also save your ass if you know that an ‘enemy’ is trying to get you kicked out of your clique and turn you into a social pariah.3

So how does ToM and HADD intersect to help generate G-O-D? First, it is gods, not one God. “Higher” theism is a particular subset of the general tendency toward acceptance of supernatural agents which seems to be a human norm. I have a friend who works at a place which is dominated by non-Christian liberals, and yet they are convinced about the reality of astrology. When something good or bad happens they appeal to astrological explanations (i.e., the moon is full, Jupiter is ascendent, etc. etc.). They might not be Christian, but don’t tell me they don’t have religion. When things happen people have a bias toward attributing agency, someone was responsible, and better get credit or take the fall. Barrett gives the example of a friend who was stuck in an exploding grain silo. Somehow he was lifted 12 feet off the ground and went through a window and survived. He recalled that when he was stuck inside he muttered, “Take me home God,” but he heard someone whisper “Not yet.” His hypothesis was that angels had lifted him up and saved his life. What to think of this? I clearly am skeptical, nevertheless, it does sound like his survival was improbable. The first propane explosion should have killed him from asphyxiation according to the doctors who examined this individual. Additionally, it is not known that humans can leap 12 feet into the air. Flying through a window is also rather dangerous, but he didn’t exhibit many scratches. What happened? The joint probability of the physical events that would have had to occur, i.e., the firs
t explosion throwing him up and through the window, his physiology managing to tolerate proprane poisoning, etc., is low, but I conclude that that is what happened. Why? Well, I don’t believe in angels, for a variety of reasons. The individual in question though did believe in angels, so it was entirely rational for him to think that angels might have saved his life (if you do believe in angels, what is more improbable, a succession of unlikely physical events or angels coming to your rescue?). Even if the individual had not believed in angels before the event, I am not convinced that he would not find angelic rescue a plausible hypothesis post facto. There is the common report that life-after-death experiences tend to strong biased toward the cultural background of the individual experiencing it. Americans see Jesus, Japanese see a Bhoddisattva, and so forth. No matter if they had strong beliefs a priori, their mind was probably interpreting the experience filtered through the ideas floating around in their culture. What is going on here is that the individual is engaging in abduction, reasoning to the best possible explanation that comes to mind for a given set of facts. The reflexive ToM and HADD all tell you that being lifted up and having your life saved is what agents do, not physical processes (rocks don’t lift you up, people do, or super-people, supernatural agents). If you are not a believer in supernatural agents, you might consider that an extremely unlikely chain of physical events had occurred to save your life, but here you are weighing reflexive biases which tell you an agent helped you against reflective reasoning based on a conception of how the world works (i.e., angels don’t come to save the day except in The Left Behind series). Consider something else, how many times do people attribute winning the lottery to their faith in God? We know pretty much how people win the lottery, it is a randomized process. Yes, your chance of winning is 1 in 100 million, but the chances are good that someone has the winning ticket, it isn’t an unexplainable miracle. Or is it? The person who won must wonder “why me?” A naturalistic explanation doesn’t offer much in terms of ontological “whys,” reflectively you might wax on about the randomness of the quantum world as being the root of the non-deterministic nature of the universe, but that has little appeal for many with ToM and HADD is firing “something special happened! Someone cares! Someone intervened!” Shit doesn’t just happen.

One could argue that the miracle of existence is amazing enough to start triggering ToM and HADD. But why supernatural agents? Because they have innate inferential richness, and you know people didn’t make you, so by elmination it has be something supernatural. Saying that the universe emerged inexplicably and crossed the first Plank unit threshold doesn’t tell you much, at least if you aren’t a theoretical physicist. On the other hand, our ToM and HADD can automatically generate many inferences from the idea that a supernatural agent created the universe, that a supernatural agent cares about you. It is orders of magnitude more informative than “shit happens,” and far less intellectual taxing and inscrutable than probability theory, and in the end, it offers the possibility of final ultimate answers which are intuitvely satisfying and generate a cogent and flexible model of the world.

Of course gods, even conventionally conceived, are mildly weird entities. That is, they often exhibit counterintuitive tendencies. Barrett labels them ‘minimally counterintuitive,’ to indicate that there are strange enough to remember, but normal enough to relate to. In short, they inhabit an optimum mental locus where their peculiarities induce awe, rememberence, and powers that make them relevant to our lives, but their conventionalities allow us to seemlessly generate inferences and ‘explanations.’ ‘What would Jesus do?’ is a much easier on-the-fly mental computation than ‘What would Kantian ethics imply?’ In the former case you simply mobilize ToM, put yourself in the position of Jesus (in a fashion) and slot in the general characteristics of that individual and his relation to the world around him, and you are good to go. In the latter case, it isn’t so simple.

There is more to Barrett’s work, but that is the broadest outline. He goes on to to explain why Abrahamic monotheism is appealing, the role of ritual and moral ethics in religion. These details are for another day. I will jump to the second to last chapter where Barrett addresses the question, why would anyone be an atheist? Seeing as how a majority of gnxp readers are unbelievers, I suspect this would interest us. One simple answer is that you have to go back to ToM and HADD. It might simply be that atheists usually have underdeveloped aptitudes in both traits. This has been suggested by others, and Simon Baron-Cohen has even hinted that autistics tend to be religiously unfocused and apathetic. In short, ToM is important in establishing a relation and relevance to supernatural agents, so if it is weak, there is a high chance that one can reject god hypotheses because they just aren’t as intuitive as they should be, and they lack inferential power (i.e., just another irrelevant weird idea). Barrett points out that this can explain a curious cross-cultural fact: women are more religious than men on a host of metrics. Males might dominate the professional aspects of organized religion, but women are more reliable consumers. Barrett posits that this is a function of the fact that a greater proportion of males have underdeveloped ToM and HADD. That is, men are less concerned about the implications of agents and their relation to the networks of interaction that these agents engage in and in which they are embedded.

Barrett also lists off other factors which would bias someone toward atheism:

1. Consider other explanatory candidates. In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins famously declared that Darwin’s theory of evolution allowed atheists to be intellectually satisfied. Whether you agree with this or not, the general idea is that more powerful hypotheses to explain a given phenomenon (in that case, adapted species) can supersede the reflexive constructs generated by ToM+HADD+culture. For example, many people now discount that shooting stars are messages from the gods, because the physical process by which they occur has been elucidated.
2. Minimize the outputs from the reflexive mind. For example, if HADD tends to go into overdrive because of concerns about safety at the hands of other agents, avoid a life where you are at others peoples’ mercy so that you become habituated toward not being on alert for them, or at least concerned about their actions. The modern Western life, where even government welfare is sufficient to induce obesity, is an example of this, as dangers from interpersonal relationships (vendettas, retribution against your clan, etc.) are minimal, and from wild animals are non-existent. Additionally, immersing ourselves in an artificial urban world filled with exotic but explicable phenomena might also dull the tendency for HADD to get triggered excessively. Not only is everything around us obviously human generated (so not supernatural), but many of the objects behave as if they did have agency (a car with dark tinted windshields so you couldn’t have drivers), but you know they don’t.
3. Reduce reliance on se
   condhand accounts. Barrett points out that in homogenous societies where common idioms and experiences are shared people tend to trust each other’s veracity more. In a modern world filled with occupational, social and regional diversity, as well as fluid mobility, we tend to give less credence to local superstitions. In a world filled with novel experiences it is easy to discount eye witness accounts (I had a friend once tell me he saw a UFO in the hills above Pendleton, but I asked another friend about this and he noted this was a common assumption, but the US army had some searchlights going there a lot, so that’s probably what my other friend saw).
4. Fixate on reflective thought so that you discount reflexes. This is pretty straight forward. If you have read Critique of Pure Reason a dozen times, ‘What would Kantian ethics imply?’ might be a much more relevant starting point. If you are embedded in a controlled world where everyone else privileges detached rationality and distrusts ‘common sense’ and ‘instinct’ than you have internalize a reflexive anti-reflexiveness.

I think it is clear that to be not religious is a phenotype that is probably the outcome of a host of factors which load the probability for or against. Consider American scientists. The most elite, members of the National Academy of Sciences, seem to exhibit only a 1 out of 10 chance of being theists. This is highly atypical. And yet if you look at the conditions above, scientists probably come close to meeting many of them. They tend to be prosperous, urban, live in artificial conditions and fixate to a far greater degree on counterintuitive reflective cognitive states than is the norm. To some extent many scientists wouldn’t be scientists if they trusted ‘common sense’ to the first order, their models are often technical because they are intuitively opaque, and the instrumentation they use often yields up bizarre findings in regards to the fundamentals of the universe around us. The general Ph.D. population is far more religious than NAS members, but they are likely far less monomaniacal in their scientific career. Scientists themselves fuck up constantly and have problems thinking outside the common sense box, especially out of their field. That is why the social system of science is so important to dampen and restrain individual biases and confusions. But I think the most important reason that scientists are less religious is that they simply discount common sense assertions based on gestalt intuition in many areas where others do not because it would be professionally detrimental if they were the type of people who did not explore questions that seemed a priori open to introspective understanding.

Because the reflexive mind tends to be encapsulated and detached from the reflective conscious, the reasons that people give for opinions and decisions are often fabulations that derive from the first thing that pops into their head, or a socially agreed upon convention. I recall that when I was younger Creationist friends would point to a tree and assert, “Look at the Design, of course I believe!” Now, I doubt that the tree was really that important, but it was a token that had gained currency and could be offered as a reason for their inner computations. There is research that suggests that children from non-fundamentalist homes are just as prone to thinking in “kinds” and in a Creationist fashion as fundamentalist children. The reality is that as we grow many of us have to shed our intuitions, our reflexive minds, and put faith in reflective paradigms which we might not fully understand. Ultimately, my rejection of the angel hypothesis for any given scenario is not predicated on that specific scenario, and I am willing to remain an agnostic in how particular miraculous events occur without angels, because I attach great weight to a broader contingent system of how the universe works. That contingent system is only loosely, and not necessarily, tied to my intuitions.

One thing that Barrett’s book does bring home though is that science fictional works which depict an atheist future might be just a little less unrealistic than I had thought, because if civilization continues, and our species remains as it is, it seems likely that our day to day world will be more human designed than natural. The reality of design by humans will obviate the need for supernatural agents, because abduction will have a clear best working culprit for agency, our own species. This does not imply that everyone will be an atheist, but it seems plausible that there will be a withdrawl of God from the world that is entirely man-made, as a time might come when someone within a space colony might point to a tree, and wonder at the beauty of genetic engineering which generated it de novo with tailor-made DNA sequences which preadapted it to low g environments….

Related: Inducing disgust, We are born Manichaeans, Reflections on the God Module, Theological incorrectness.

1 – Barrett’s undergraduate degree is from Calvin College, the premier Reformed institution of higher education in the nation, which implies he is likely a philosophically serious Christian (Wheaton is more ecumenical and I think less focused on systematic theology). There are strong clues within the text that he is a theistic evolutionist who finds Dawkinsian atheism and its intolerance unacceptable.

2 – Some species, for example herbivores, tend to be constrained mostly by environmental and resource related factors, i.e., drought decreases feed. Cows are basically grass processing machines and they don’t have to worry about ‘competing’ for grass when it is plentiful because it is abundant but low quality in character. The race isn’t against other cows, but against the reality that the metabolic and microbial processes needed to extract nutritive value out of grasses is a close thing. In contrast carnivores and omnivores engage in a great deal of competition within and between species, for obvious reasons. Humans are more like the latter than the former, ergo, they better be aware of the agents all around them in a sophisticated fashion.

3 – Being a social pariah is a matter of self-esteem today, but in the past it might have been life or death in communities where variance in hunting and gathering within families was dampened by redistribution within the clan or village from those who were at surplus. In short, without a social network the next famine could kill you.

With all the ‘debate’ about Intelligent Design out there I’m sure some of you are curious about evolution. I just heard from an acquaintance of mine that he purchased Mark Ridley’s anthology Evolution (Oxford Readers). Good. Recently I happened to refamiliarize myself with some old articles in The Boston Review by H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester. Here is an interesting snip:

To a historian or electrician, Behe certainly looks qualified. He is a biologist. But it’s not that simple, as can be seen by turning the tables for a moment. If I, an evolutionary biologist, were to announce that biochemistry is deeply flawed-I’ve shown, for instance, that enzymes are not catalysts-I doubt I’d get a listen. I surely wouldn’t get a publisher….
…
Now I don’t pretend to know the details of Behe’s education, but I do know this: he is not at home in the technical evolution literature. His book reveals that his grasp of evolution derives mostly from the pop literature (Gould, Dawkins-good stuff, but no stand-in for the real thing) and from computer searches of the scientific literature that he strangely makes a big deal of. While I have utter confidence in Behe’s biochemistry, I am less confident that he can say what soft selection, or Muller’s ratchet, or the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection is-all bread and butter of evolutionary biology….

What Orr referes to is a problem. In the fall of 1996, when I read this piece in The Boston Review, I was pursuing a degree program in biochemistry. I found Darwin’s Black Box unconvincing, Michael Behe after all was simply reworking some old philosophical ideas in cytochemical clothing. But on a fundamental technical level I had missed most of Orr’s points, I didn’t know what the Fundamental Theorem was, nor Muller’s ratchet. Going over Orr’s work for The Boston Review I am struck by the density and layers of information that he nested within them, the subtle sneers, crystal clear insights and occasional dirty tricks.1 10 years after I first read Orr’s articles I now have an “evolutionary education,” I know the details of the processes of microevolutionary theory, the fundamentals of population genetics. I was missing that back in 1996.

Obviously the man on the street is never going to know much about evolutionary genetics, and acceptance of evolution will have to be via faith or a cursory examination of the literature. But you my dear reader are not the man on the street. The ‘technical’ aspects of the first minimal tier of evolutionary biology are trivial, basic algebra and difference equations. Introductory textbooks are pretty accessible to anyone with high school algebra, so here are texts that I think are useful if you don’t plan to become an evolutionary biologist, but want to get a deeper grip on the topic:

(in order of mathematical technicality)

Evolution, Mark Ridley (the text, not the anthology)
Evolution, Doug Futuyma
Molecular Evolution, Wen-Hsiung Li
Evolutionary Genetics, JM Smith
Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics, D.A. Roff (this is the only one where the mathematics starts to swamp the biology)

For the more population genetically & quantitatively curious:

Principles of Population Genetics, Daniel Hartl, Andrew Clark
Introduction to Quantitative Genetics, D.S. Falconer
Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits, Michael Lynch, Bruce Walsh

After getting through some of these The Selfish Gene or The Red Queen will read like breezy and relaxing novels. By laying down the foundational skeleton you can sit back and appreciate the unfolding architecture as wordsmiths like Dawkins apply gilded flesh to the bones.

I’m not saying read all of these books. For my money, I think Evolution by Ridley and Principles of Population Genetics would be the two to get if I was starting out all over again (Ridley has kind of a plodding writing style, but with the broad topic he is covering it is inevitable that the book would get tiresome at certain points). But, if you sample any of these books I would not be surprised if you had done more than Michael Behe did in preperation for this intellectual coming out! Of course, that probably screws you out of publishing a book where you hail yourself in the following manner:

The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell…is so unambiguous and so significant that is must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin….

Interestingly, when I’ve seen Behe taunted in debates on this point, he seems totally at ease.

1 – See Orr’s exchange with Daniel Dennet. On the part about speed of change of gene frequencies when comparing selection and genetic drift, my take is that I think Dennet reveals a lack of familiarity with the lexicon of population genetics but is trying to get across the ubiquity of functional constraint. I think Orr knows this, but he’s toying with him and pretending like he doesn’t know it because Dennet is not fluent in the lingo. Whether this behavior is kosher or not, that’s up to you to decide.

10 words or less, what is biological evolution? (I’m looking for layperson gestalt perceptions)

Seed magazine has an article on Pinker’s recent lecture at the Institute for Jewish Research, but the author recommends you listen to the podcast instead so you can hear her “authentic New York Jewish accent” which is vital to the piece, which doesn’t discuss the theory so much as make fun of the audience (the article is sarcastically titled Jews on Jews: Jews are Great).

The author, (who is sympathetic enough to Pinker’s presentation) is being light-hearted, but there is also a serious message:

And many [Jews] in attendance were there to hear that Jews are naturally smarter than everyone else.

So now they’ll head out into the world, and spread the twisted word in their homes, at parties, in op-ed columns. And a paper that proposed an intriguing and plausible theory, and the man who eloquently analyzed it, will cause an impassioned backlash. Would that people were like genes and the deleterious ones weren’t so darn dominant.

In reality though, a Jewish audience being open-minded for the “wrong” reasons and then heading to the media, is probably preferable (or at least more conducive to the scientific study of intelligence) than a Jewish audience being close-minded for the wrong reasons and heading to the media. Pinker and his audience are a welcome alternative to the vacuousness of much of Jennifer Senior’s cover story for New York Metro a couple of months ago, where we were informed that, despite passing peer-review, Greg and Henry’s paper is based on “exploit[ing] stereotypes” and does “not meet the standards of traditional scientific scholarship”. The Metro article was chock full of helpful critiques such as “I’d actually call the study bullshit”, along with de rigueur comparisons to cold fusion and Hitler (and Arthur Jensen’s earlier attempts to “prove the racial inferiority” of blacks, etc.), and plenty of strategically cultivated misunderstandings (e.g. all Jews are smart).

Take as another example this op-ed last week in the Jerusalem Post. This author uses scare-quotes to describe the study as “scientific”, and also suggests that most scientists think it’s so much crankishness. Worse still the author goes on to tell us – “as an educator”; his professional opinion, of course – that we all have equal potential, and that “Psychologists maintain that the average person uses only 5-7% of that potential”. It’s doubtful from what I’ve read that any psychologists maintain this, and it sounds suspiciously like he’s just parroting the sorry old wives’ tale that “you only use 10% of your brain” (his number might come from pathological scientific fraud, Margaret Mead, who asserted we only use 6%).

In other words those who are being supportive, may or may not being doing so out of a self-serving feeling of “superiority”, but at least they aren’t slipping into absurd arguments or emotional bendings of the truth to do so, which is more than can be said for most people who have decided to take a “skeptical” [sic] stance.

Another problem for those that use bad arguments, is that they may not need to, and in fact may needlessly discredit their position with all of their tom-foolery. In fact a much bigger potential problem with the Ashkenazi theory isn’t Jennifer Senior’s “damning” condemnation of the paper’s highly unscientific “lack of footnotes” [1], but may be with the psychometric data itself. As a new “In-Press” review of Richard Lynn’s upcoming book Race Differences in Intelligence points out:

Another anomaly is that the IQ of Israel is only about 95, which although substantially higher than the median IQ of 85 found elsewhere in the region, is much lower than the IQ of Jews outside of Israel, estimated at between 108 and 115. Lynn breaks the Israeli IQ into three components: 40% Ashkenazim (European Jewish) with a mean IQ of 103; 40% Sephardim (Oriental Jewish) with a mean IQ of 91; and 20% Arab with a mean IQ of 86, which is virtually the same as that of Arabs elsewhere. Lynn suggests these differences could have arisen from selective migration (more intelligent Jews emigrated to Britain and the USA), intermarriage with different IQ populations (those in Europe versus those in North Africa), selective survival through persecution (European Jews were the most persecuted), and the inclusion of ethnic non Jews among the Ashkenazim in Israel as a result of the immigration of people from the former Soviet Bloc countries who posed as Jews.

103 is not appreciably different from the IQ of US whites (103 in the NLSY data, 102 in other datasets), and is noticeably lower than the area of Europe where Ashkenazi IQ was supposedly forged (e.g., the region of the Netherlands and Germany has IQs in the area of 106-107 [2]). Given that Lynn thinks this is an “anomaly” to be explained, he would seem to feel compelled by his data that Ashkenazi IQ in Israel is 103, rather than just manipulating a score he wants to see.

This would seem to pose a more significant problem for the Cochran-Harpending paper, than a lack of footnotes. I myself am skeptical of Lynn’s numbers though, and await his book. Earlier reports of Ashkenazi IQ in Israel have been cited in Miles Storfer’s Intelligence and Giftedness as 115 and higher, so it will be interesting to see Lynn’s citations. And of course, there are other lines of evidence indicating a disproportionate amount of smart coming out of Israel.

Anyway, I’d rather skeptics exist but actually look skeptical in their criticisms, instead of, say, complaining about footnotes, misrepresenting the theory, or just using denial (e.g. asserting something was caused by genetic drift even after mathematical models point strongly against this).

[1] An ironic criticism, given that Charles Murray recently pointed out in How to Accuse the Other Guy of Lying with Statistics that many critics of The Bell Curve claimed that key bits of information were “buried” or “hidden” in footnotes – as if to deceive. Not sure how putting something in a footnote is “hiding” it, but just goes to show that you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t with race and intelligence.

[2] According to Buj’s European data at least. It is likely that these are biased upward with urban samples. Averaged across multiple studies and standardizations, these countries have IQs just like American whites – about 102-103.

A model who for whom ksh/bash vs sh might mean something? Yeah, well, I figure I’d post something since Wired just did a story on Anina, who has her own weblog. I first saw her when Bob Cringely interviewed her for Nerd TV, and I’ll admit I only listened to the first 15 minutes (Anina seemed nervous, though by the time I stopped listening she seemed to be taking charge and enthusing about wireless technology), though I’ll also offer that the only interview that has hooked me so far was the one with Dave Winer. Anina is probably the only person who could marry Unix PowerTools and a Paris catwalk (she “wishes” she had invented Unix, it’s the thought that counts!), so I’ll give her props for that. And unlike “Libertarian girl,” she’s the real deal (and she claims to watch Nerd TV, and if she could listen to joyless Bill Joy droning on & on & on…more power to her).

Below are 10 questions for Warren Treadgold, author of A History of the Byzantine State and Society (and numerous other works).

1 – We hear quite a bit about the impact of Al-Andalus on the Western intellectual tradition, in particular the renaissance of Aristotelianism spurred on by new translations of Greek thinkers available from reconquista Spain. And yet far less is said about the impact of Greek scholars fleeing the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century to Italy. Is this lack of focus simply a quirk of biases in transmission of historical consensus to the public, or, is it a reflection of the fact that Byzantium really wasn’t that important in the spurring the Italian Renaissance?

The influence of Byzantium on the Italian Renaissance was certainly profound, and better recognized at the time than it is today. We Byzantinists haven’t done as good a job of publicizing (and studying) it as we should have, despite a few books like Nigel Wilson’s “From Byzantium to Italy” and Deno Geanakoplos’ “Byzantium and the Renaissance.” Contemporary Renaissance specialists have also been reluctant to give Byzantium due credit. Much of the problem is the compartmentalization of modern scholarship; few scholars know both Byzantium and the Renaissance well.

2 – Recalling your work, “A History of the Byzantine State and Society,” I was struck by two things, a) the overwhelming centrality of Greek culture after the 6th century, b) the simultaneous prominence of ethnic non-Greeks as emperors (i.e., Leo III the Isaurian, the presumed Armenian origin of the Macedonian dynasty, etc.). Is thereany way we can map modern terms like “ethnicity” or “multiculturalism” to the Byzantine Empire between 700-1100?

Most Byzantines seem not to have cared much about what we would call ethnicity. Byzantium was essentially a monocultural melting pot. New arrivals learned Greek, called themselves “Romans” (we’d call them “Byzantines”), married Byzantines, and practically forgot their origins in a generation or two.

3 – Why did you choose the field of Byzantine studies as your specialty?

Being drawn to a field is a little like falling in love: there’s an irrational element. The best reason I can give for choosing Byzantine history is that so many important, pioneering things remain to be done in it. That’s also the reason ambitious historians mostly shun it: they know that the best-known fields are the best-recognized, so that the thousandth biography of Lincoln will get more attention than the first biography of Basil I.

4 – Though Justinian closed the The Academy in Athens, I recall that the loose collection of Neoplatonic philosophers continued to teach and write, and the Alexandrian School existed up to the Muslim conquest. Who supported these pagan philosophers during this period when the commanding heights of the state and society were thoroughly Christian?

We don’t know for sure, but most scholars in Byzantium were either independently wealthy or supported by their students’ fees. It’s not even certain that Justinian confiscated all of the Academy’s endowment.

5 – I recently read “The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople” by Jonathan Phillips and was struck by references to statues of Athena and other mythological figures in Constantinople. Were cultural relicts of the “pagan” past quite common in the form of superstition and statuary in Byzantium? In other words, how genuinely “Christian” was the typical citizen of Constantinople during the period between 700-1000?

Constantine collected and set up all sorts of pagan statues at Constantinople, but as artworks, not cult objects. Some superstitious stories circulated about some of them, but that wasn’t real paganism. Nobody had been worshipping the bronze statue of Athena that a mob tore down because it looked as if it was beckoning to the Crusaders.

6 – Do you have any opinions as to the endeavours of historians like William H. McNeill who attempt to construct grand historical narratives reduced to a few primary causative parameters? (e.g., his last book, “The Human Web,” focused on tightening networks of information)

The trouble with most of these grand schemes is that they’re oversold and overly elaborate. Yet most of them are partly right. Plagues, technology, information, irrigation, and so on were all important factors in history.

7 – Is history a social science or humanities?

It can be either; ideally it should be both; but nowadays it tends to be more a social science.

8 – The conquest of Egypt and Syria by the Muslim armies in the 7th century is one aspect of Byzantine history that is well known to the general public. Reasons given often hinge upon religious discord derived from the Monophysite nature of Egypt, exhaustion after the wars of the early 7th century between Byzantium and Persia and the decline of the border Arab polities. Is there any elegant and succinct model that can explain this event?

I don’t think Monophysitism had anything to do with it; most Monophysites preferred Byzantine rule to Muslim rule, and they did nothing to help the conquests. The Arabs benefited enormously from the ruinous war in which the Byzantines and Persians had just worn each other out. The Byzantines wisely kept many of their troops in reserve (the Persians didn’t), which allowed them to stop the Arabs at the first strong natural barrier–the Taurus Mountains in southeast Anatolia. Egypt, Syria, and North Africa were protected only by deserts, which weren’t barriers for the Arabs.

9 – In regards the Christological controversies, do you have any opinions as to why they occurred? They seem to be a feature of the Eastern Christian tradition more than the Western one.

The Christological controversies dealt with a difficult problem–how Christ could be both God and man–and it’s not surprising that Christians took some time to work out all the subtleties of the solution. The controversies were more Eastern than Wester
n because the East had more sophisticated theologians, who saw difficulties that didn’t trouble most Western theologians.

10 – If you could visit Constantinople for one day via a time machine between the battle of Yarmuk and Manzikert, what day would that be?

Probably the day (we don’t know which) in spring 1019 when Basil II returned to celebrate a triumph after his conquest of Bulgaria. It was the high point of the middle Byzantine period, though I doubt that many Byzantines, including Basil, would have thought so at the time.

Carl Zimmer has a post put, Tree or a Trellis, which summarizes Alan Templeton’s Out-of-Africa Again & Hypothesis. No biggie, Templeton’s point is that a one locus genealogy does not necessarily represent the whole of a species’ evolutionary population history. Allan Wilson’s work in the 1980s with mitochondrial Eve was a case in conflation of gene history with population history when the data was translated into the public domain. We still haven’t gotten past this, Seven Daughters of Eve, Journey of Man and The Real Eve are three recent books that use this genes-as-prehistory methodology. The History and Geography of Human Genes by L. Cavalli-Sforza was an explicit attempt to do this, and a forerunner, but at least he focused on more than one locus. Recent work has tended to skew toward mtDNA and non-recombinant Y (NRY) lineages, which do not exhibit the nasty tendency toward recombination characteristic of autosomal loci over long periods of time (nasty because recombination destroys easy inference via derived character states, which can be used to create phylogenetic treees). As I have noted before, our own personal genealogies are certainly reticulated loops of spaghetti all knotted up. The utilization of mtDNA and NRY offer us clean and tidy narratives which result in a genius of storytelling, and Wilson’s work in the 1980s certainly (right I think) highlighted the important role that Africa has played in our species’ demographic expansion over the past few hundred thousand years. But the facts on the ground are rather messier, and John Hawks’ post on selection and mtDNA are required reading if you want to scan through the depths a bit. This older post, which was a cut & paste of an email from Henry Harpending, highlights the possible importance of selection across various loci working in ways we might not anticipate. The social effect of biases in the transmission of the uniparental loci (mtDNA ~ female and NRY ~ male) can not be discounted. Consider the pre-modern practice of the Namboothiri Brahmins of Kerala of only allowing the first born male to marry a Brahmin woman. All other sons entered into consortships with women of the Nair caste. This resulted in two tendencies, a) most Namboothiri women did not marry and remained cloistered virigins b) many Nairs had Namboothiri fathers. Over the generations the mtDNA lineages diagnostic for Namboothiris (imagine that they were migrants to the area) would be greatly outnumbered by those for Namboothiri NRY. Cross-cultural anthropology tells us that in societies with stratification the reproductive potential of an elite son is far greater than an elite daughter (both because of the biology of constraints upon the number of female gestations vs. male inseminations, and because of the frequency of polygyny vs. polyandry). You don’t need to be a deep thinker to consider that assaying the NRY gene genealogy might give you a different impression about population history than mtDNA would.

Henry’s paper Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin for modern humans is a good introduction to the nuances of this area if you can’t wait for Templeton’s paper. The reality is that we need to move beyond seeing genes as simply phylogenetic tokens, genes that do things (functional loci) are a dynamic currency which floats in the world markets of selection. MHC alleles are not shared by chimpanzees and humans because the two species have only recently moved past a speciation event, or because introgression via hybridization is common (or at least we don’t think it is), rather, long term selection (either overdominance or frequency dependent) is preserving ancient variants on the order of tens of millions of years.1 More recently, and perhaps more significantly for our purposes (I believe that genetic loci like MHC where diversity is positively selected for are rare), the allele which confers lactose tolerance has experienced widespread selection across the Western half of Eurasia over the past 10,000 years. It is likely that the allele in question first began to increase in frequency in northern Europe, and was transmitted via deme-to-deme genetic exchanges subsequently. Yet, just because the gene arose in northern Europeans and now has attained a relatively high frequency through western Eurasia, it does not follow that a relatively high frequency of the genes of populations outside of northern Europe are northern European. Independent assortment and recombination break genetic associations, so that over hundreds of generations the allele that confers lactose tolerance has become decoupled from its predominant northern European genetic background.2 The point in challenging the Out-of-Africa only hypothesis is not to revive classical anangenetic Multiregionalism, that story is just as simplistic as Out-of-Africa only.

To be honest, I am skeptical that this sort of detail is every going to make it into the popular press books, and I believe that humans have an bias to conflate their intuitions related to recent ancestral genealogy with that of the evolutionary genetic scale.3 Nevertheless, it can’t hurt to correct the misimpressions of those who don’t understand, and one can always fight the good fight against the likes of Bryan Sykes, who stand to profit from confusing the public as to the relevance of one genetic locus.4 As I noted before, Richard Dawkins has promoted Out-of-African Again & Again in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, so I am mildly hopeful that the tide might be turning. And remember, this isn’t all theoretical, we already have candidates for loci which have crossed over between archaic H. sapiens populations…and more are in the pipeline!

Addendum: For the visually oriented, make sure to check out Carl’s copy of Templeton’s diagram which illustrates his model.

1 – Obviously neutral alleles go extinct due to random walk processes. But even alleles with fitness impacts can eventually go extinct if
a new mutant with the same fitness begins to increase in frequency, as relative to each other the two variants are neutral. The preservation of a lot of diversity on the MHC loci is strongly suggestive of selection for the specific alleles.

2 – As someone pointed out to me, just because that the gene increased began to rise in frequency first among northern Europeans, it does not imply that it did not exist within the standing genetic variation of populations across the world. One could hypothesize that the spread of dairy-culture throughout the world resulted in situ selection upon the allele within the local population, but my understanding is that the character of genetic diversity does imply that non-European variants are derived. Additionally, a priori it seems more plausible that migration could introduce far more genetic variation over the small period of time that cultural transitions often occur over. Consider that the probability of fixation of a positively selected allele as 2s, wife-trading between tribes seems likely to introduce many copies of 2s (that is [number of women carrying the gene] X 2s), in comparison to the number copies of the gene in question within the population.

3 – Recombination is not important over 2-3 generations, ergo, it isn’t something we encounter much in our daily experience.

4 – Spencer Wells work with the Genographic Project seems a bit more innocuous, instead of being out to make a big buck, he seems more interested in pushing forward his Y chromosomal research and collecting data by overselling its implications and relevance. That’s science.

According to the Australian, Mike Morwood, leader of the Homo floresiensis discovery team, has now raised the idea that they originally lived in Australia and were pushed out by the colonizing human aborigines.

The article doesn’t go into the details of Morwood’s hunch, but we’ll see if it goes further than the Hobbit-as-Monkey theory.