The Australian Tourism Board has a new commercial out titled So where the bloody hell are you? At the link provided you have options to view the video, but, as a test I invite you to select the windows media or quicktime (not the “play” button) video and place the screen in the background so you can’t see the people and listen to the female voices and rank them in attractiveness. The second time please click the “play,” it will cover your full screen and you can check out what people look like see how closely your inferences by voice match reality.

Norm Levitt throws an excellent broadside against Steve Fuller (yes, it is a polemic, but a delicious one!).
Update: Ron in the comments suggests we be cautious about accepting Levitt’s jeremiad in its totality. He concludes:

And from our own point of view, we must view the whole universe, including those parts which the candle of our scientific knowledge does not reveal. In this effort, religion, understood as the rational ordering of our values, ethics, wisdom and compassion, is an indispensable guide.

A does not imply Z here. That is, I cautioned that Levitt’s piece was a “polemic” and use the term “jeremiad” for a reason. Though he expresses a sentiment with which I tend to concur, his details exhibit a tendency to be overly glib and superficial in his treatment of the opposition. To give an example, Levitt characterizes William Dembski as a Protestant when he is an Orthodox Christian (a convert). Additionally, his characterization of Steve Fuller implies that he is a species of Post Modernist, when he technically is not.
I believe that characterizing your opponents precisely is essential to making a good reasoned argument. Levitt’s piece has a core with which I agree, but some of the scaffolding is sloppily applied. Both Higher Superstition and The Flight from Reason, tracts penned in part by Levitt, exhibit this tendency. They are polemics that offer a great deal of red meat, but suggest that the authors do not feel fully comfortable in the landscapes of nonsense which they traverse to pass judgement.
Nevertheless, there are real issues that Levitt brings up which need to be addressed, and the primary once is that Fuller and many scholars of science seem to lack any scientific background themselves. I do not necessarily believe that a scientific background is an automatic precondition for someone to study science as a social enterprise, anymore than being a black American is a necessary precondition for studying that community. Nevertheless, unlike being a black American, full participation in the scientific culture is accessible to scholars of science. Thomas Kuhn was a physicist before he became a philospher and historian of science. And a stint as a scientist is not necessary in my opinion to understand the culture of science, but some time in a lab as a tech might help, and that is within reach of almost anyone. An analogy with anthropology is appropriate here, one does not need to become a member of the tribe, but one must certainly live amongst them. When I expressed some of these opinions over at The Valve Jonathan Goodwin missed my point by saying:

Razib, I disagree very strongly with Fuller’s position about this–to the point of mystification–but it’s parochial to suggest that more time taking multiple-choice tests and dissecting things would have affected his later thinking. It’s just completely irrelevant to the argument he’s making.

If one believes that science is “taking multiple-choice tests” and “dissecting things” than one certainly doesn’t know science. Even a year as an undergraduate in a laboratory would disabuse you of such notions! Levitt does speak to a serious problem among scholars of science. This problem is exacerbated by the problem that science is not natural, so it is even harder to understand than a typical “alien” culture (see See the Naturalness of Science and the Unnaturalness of Religion).
All that said, I think Ron’s last point is tenditious. He states, “In this effort, religion, understood as the rational ordering of our values, ethics, wisdom and compassion, is an indispensable guide.” First, I do not believe religion in general is about a “rational” ordering of much of anything. Christianity has coopted the ethical philosophy of the classical world to generate systems of Natural Law which can be “proved” a priori, but I don’t think that these “proofs” are anything other that posteriori rationalizations of innate moral intuitions. Certainly a world without poetry, religion, literature or music would be poorer to most people, but some people are tone deaf, some people lack appreciation for poetic meter and emotion and others lack a interest in the interpersonal dynamics so central to literary exposition. And yes, some people simply do not perceive a need to populate their universe with supernatural agents which bring a “rational” ordering to the laws and dynamics which characterize our natural universe, nor is there a need for these for godlings to lay the stamp of divine favor upon moral laws which they believe are good and true because they express our innermost humanity in some fashion or form. They are no less human for it.
A common refrain by those who criticize my enthusiasm for science is that there is more to life than science. My response is because I do not speak of it does not mean I do not give it its due. Similarly, the assault on the structure of modern science that the likes of Steve Fuller are engaging in to further their own careers and pet theories is naturally going to invite a sharp and vociferous response. But never confuse this response with the totality of experience and sentiment of the responders, a reflexive kick back in the face of an assault does not encapsulate the range of action of said individual.
Related: Fuller full of himself and Amongst the Savage Scientists.

…eat birdz 🙂
 

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Theological Incorrectness by Jason Slone is a pretty slim and insubstantial book, but, it has a great chapter that comes close to parodying the “discourse” in modern cultural anthropology. I am interested in anthropology and comparisons between cultures. Myself, I personally span two cultures,1 and feel somewhat an alien in both. Because of my perspective there is one trend in modern cultural anthropology, and to some extent the “multiculturalist” zeitgeist, that I have found profoundly alien, and that is to view culture as something out there that has almost divine power to shape and distort our perception and experience of the world around us. To be succinct, many who are influenced by a “Culturalist” mode of thinking seem to conceive of the world like so:

Culture (individual) = suite of behaviors and perceptions

That is, culture operates like a function upon the individual and spits out a particular range or likelihood of behaviors and modifies and shapes one’s understanding of reality. This is taken to its extremes in claims of cultural relatively, in a denial that humans across societies have some basal fundamental feelings, yearnings and priorities. In other words, it is the idea that norms and personalities are arbitrary complexes shaped purely by cultural inputs. Being a divine essence which pervades the universe the new Culturalism denies intelligibility across peoples, it argues that relativism must reign supreme because each Culture has its own independent set of norms, inviolate axioms which lay are the foundations of individual worldviews. Warped by their cultural filter humans can not “step out” and view the world from the without and model it as a dynamic system which can be characterized by general patterns, trends and laws.

I won’t belabor my point, most of you know what I am getting at. Slone suggests that the “thick description” and anti-generalist discourse & critique in modern anthropology is a path to nowhere, a dead end. Anthropologists like Scott Atran have plainly called bullshit on the tendency to claim that each culture exists as a distinct set of norms and values only intelligible from the “inside,” as the anthropologists who are making the assertion themselves are on the “outside” but making knowledge claims, and often in their everyday conversation belie their contention of the reality of outsider-ignorance.

It seems a trivial assertion to contend that culture exists within the minds of humans and throughout the course of their interactions. Since humans exist in this world there are obvious constraints and probabilistic paths of cultural evolution and selection. Intelligibility is a given because we are all humans. Clarity is not guaranteed, and misunderstanding is common. When the vessels of the Chinese Muslim explorer Zheng He visited the Malabar coast of southern India they characterized the Hindus as Buddhists (idolaters). When Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut nearly a century later he doffed his cap to some Brahmin priests he saw on the promenade, taking them for Roman Catholic clerics. Hindus are neither Buddhists nor Catholics, both groups who came from the outside saw what they were conditioned to see by their own experience of the world and the categories with which they were familiar, but, it is understandeable why they made the mistakes they did. These sort of confusions, ubiquitous as they are, make cross-cultural communication as impossible as male-female relationships (don’t finish that thought!). In other words, necessary and doable, if not always easy.

Culture is an amorphous mess, and its constituent parts influence each other, as do the people who channel ideas and motifs. I have spoken of the fact that I believe that the God of the philosophers and the God of the people are two different entities, just as some Gnostics asserted that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of the New Testament were different entities. In this case, variation within the human mind results in different outputs from the same putative inputs. Or, consider the Protestant Christianity of South Korea and that of Sub-Saharan Africa. Both these regions have been Christianized only within the past few generations from northern European cultural sources, but the forms that the faith has taken differs radically. My exploration of the scene of Protestant Korean Christianity suggests that it is taking a course not dissimilar from that of European Christianity, developing a sophisticated liberal modernist theology at sharp variance with the orthodox conservative substrate. One strand of Korean Christianity is highly rational, systematic and philosophical, even if the majority of it reflects a shamanistic sensibility in the power of God to offer favor to his believers or an Old Time fundamentalist literalism. I do not know of similar developments in Africa even though the religious scene is just as vibrant (in fact more so, half of Koreans lack religious affiliation and a large minority are atheists). The point is that the different cultures had their own biases and simply refashioned a set of beliefs and norms which were transmitted to them from Europeans. This is why I tire of heuristics such as “Christianity implies….” One can speak to creedal confessions, but as to whether Christianity accepts polygyny, prosperity theology or ancestor worship is culturally conditioned. Humans aren’t robots who are preprogrammed with hard-coded lines of C without flexible conditionals.

On another forum I got into a long dispute with someone who was expressed a Culturalist perspective. Ultimately we kept talking past each other until he asked me whether I thought that a Chinese peasant and a European peasant would have the same cognitive states. His contention was that “forward thinking” Christianity was critical to breaking out of the normative “cyclical” mode of cosmology that dominated the pagan mentality. I think the problem here is that most humans can barely define the difference between a circle and a line, let along allow the implications of linear eschatologies to percolate into their minds. I get tired of the stories about how culture A makes people behave in way X because you can tell almost any story with the enormous sample space of data you have. I know because I do know enough factual tidbits that I could dishonestly abduce all sorts of rubbish which I have no faith in simply by biasing the data set.

But do cognitive differences exist? Yes, I suspect so. But need we to get off our asses, and stop pretending like what we think we know is sufficient to model the world as it is.

Consider this paper (PDF):

This study examined the emergence of cultural self-constructs as reflected in children’s remembered and conceptual aspects of self. European American and Chinese children in preschool through 2nd grade participated (N = 180). Children each recounted 4 autobiographical events and described themeslves in response open-ended questions. American children often provided elaborate and detailed memories focusing on their own roles, preferences, and feelings; they also frequently described themsleves in terms of personal attributes, abstract dispositions, and inner traits in a positive light. Chinese children provided relatively skeletal accounts of past experiences that centered on social interactions and daily routes, and they of
ten described themselves in terms of social roles, context-specific characteristics, and overt behaviors in a neutral or modest tone….

The findings aren’t too surprising, but read the whole paper, some of the results conflicted with the researcher’s a priori expectations based on their model of cultural differences. That’s why they did the research!

About 6 months ago I asked Chris of Mixing Memory about cognitive psychological studies which examined how believers in different religions conceived of the world around them, how they reacted to a range of inputs, etc. Chris didn’t know of any such studies. My knowledge of the literature suggests that cognitive scientists are spending a lot of time understsanding the universal basal aspects of religious belief, as opposed to the cross-cultural variation and possible deep differences in perception and reaction to the world based on the religious ideology they profess to follow. My hunch is that controlling for variables the impact of religious ideology is less than one would think. That is, religious views and interpretations are driven forward by cultural assumptions and currents, they do not hold culture and individual on a tight leash. To be specific and frank, the savagery of Islam today is a function of the savagery of the cultures that espouse Islam, not the religion itself (and there was a time when Islam was an exemplar of civilized cosmopolitanism). Did Islam have a role independently in the current state of the Muslim world? Perhaps. But the current models bandied about in the public forum are far too glib and skeletal for my taste. Since I’ve come close to espousing nominalism in terms of what the religious labels mean substantively I’ll stop there, because I’ve come close to saying something about nothing.

Suppositions need to be tested. My patience is running thin on bullshit derived from reading The Jerusalem Post and two Bernard Lewis books (if you know considerably more than me about an aspect of history which I’m enthusiastic about I’ll be sure to be wowed of course!). I nearly shut down the blog in disgust after Matt McIntosh’s post (and one GNXP contributor had their account deleted and I sent out some nasty emails to people I don’t normally pick fights with).

I recall watching a documentary about the Ottoman Empire once. There was one montage where janissaries were drumming on the war march. There is something hypnotic about battle music, thousands of men marching in tandem to kill other humans, emotionally driven to irrational self-sacrifice and putting their own existence in jeopardy. The reptilian brain is a persistent seductress. Whatever general intelligence humans have, that does not imply that our rationality is not easy to scratch off given the appropriate teases. I see us standing at the apex of a steep ridge, and the snake is whispering in our ears to dash left or right. To one side are the howlers of the one true faith, those who know the truth and live for the acclaim of their fellows, who thrive on boiling blood and the exultation of rhetorically slippery point after point sliding under the armor. To the other side are thriving legions drunk on the delusions of their own solipsistic dreams, follies and fantasies. They have abandoned the quest in favor of indulgences and personal gratification. Shall we join the battle? Not yet. We may broker a less costly peace if God is on our side. But if you want to prepare your armor for battle, be my guest, leave us, but the hill is steep, I don’t expect to see you back.

1 – The span is not symmetric. My Bengali aspects are accidents.

I’ve been blogging a lot about “religion” recently, but I haven’t reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide range of combinations of traits, some more common than others. One of the problems addressing this topic is that everyone has a different perception of the subject, a perception shaped by their own cognitive and social biases.
Here are a few of the axes which I believe religion explores:
1) The axis of intuitive supernatural agency. This is basically god(s)-belief, and serves as the lowest common denominator across cultures. Cognitive anthropologists hypothesize that this tendency emerges out of a combination of our social intelligence mixed with theory of the mind, folk physics and other pattern recognition heuristics and modules. One could posit that schizophrenics and autistics occupy two antipodes of this trait, one group seeing agents all around them, another unable to perceive agency even in human beings in front of them.
2) The axis of social ritual and participation. This is basically the liturgical and outward behavorial aspect of religion. Even in “primitive” societies rituals and rites of passage exist, and they are often imbued with supernatural significance. Some people do not take to these rituals for whatever reason (asociality, fear of crowds, etc.) while others thrive on them and the public forum they offer for their charisma.
3) The social functionality. This is basically the phenomenon where church or religious ties serve as an entree into social accepability and smooth the interactions between individuals within a society. It is a reflection of some of the ideas promoted by David Sloan Wilson regarding group selection. Some individuals might not be particularly supernaturalistic or aroused by ritual, but they know that church membership and nominal profession of belief is essential for good standing within a community.
4) The axis of mystical experience of higher consciousness. This is basically an encapsulation of the program of “neurotheology,” which attempts to show that religion can be characterized as altered states of brain chemistry. Obviously some people are more mystical in orientation, while others are relatively dead to the dreams of the cosmos. This is obviously related to #1, but I don’t think the two are coterminus subsets.
5) The axis of rationality and ideology. This is basically the creeds and doctrines promoted by the “high religions” coupled with the insitutional systems that promote them. Out of this religious mileu come the Five Ways of Aquinas or the Four Noble Truths. This mode of religious expression intersects a great deal with ethical philosophy.

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Over the past day the query Shiite vs. Sunni in google has sent us a swarm of traffic, for obvious reasons. Religious taxonomy is a nasty thing. Godless Capitalist once expressed the opinion that trying to figure out the stamp collections of religous sects was as worthwhile as comic book systematics…the only problem of course is that people don’t kill each other over comic book differences. As an unbeliever I have expressed the opinion that I don’t think most religions are that special or distinctive cognitively, but as a student of humanity I also am aware that believers imbue their religious affiliation with deep and powerful significance. People kill each other over religious differences…but these motivations are also usually in part a mask for other fissues and factions. The Greek pagans of the 4th century quipped that the Christians killed each other over a letter, homoousia, the same essence, being the Trinitarian position, and homoiousia, the similar essence, being an Arian position. There was certainly more to it than one letter,1 many have noted the power of heresies in non-Greek regions of the Eastern Roman Empire, ergo, the implication that theological disputation was a mask for nationalist dicontent. This begs the question as to the validity of “nationalist” identities during this period, and further ignores the reality that Aramaic speaking Palestine was firmly orthodox while the primary propagandizers for the heretical movements within the Eastern Church were Greek speakers themselves.

In regards to this “Shia vs. Sunni” schism, and the barbarity of impending civil war, it makes us reflect on our suppositions about the “unity of Islam.” One might suppose that this conflict has deep roots in the conflict between Shia and Sunni in Iraq, but the historical reality is that the Shia majority of the geographical region which composes Iraq today is an artifact of the 19th century! As European engineering reopened vast swaths of southern Iraq to farming, traditionally Sunni nomads began to settle and become farmers. The non-nomad population of southern Iraq at this period consisted of Shia, many of them derived from pilgrims who had settled in the holy cities of the region and were Iranian in origin.2 The new farmers picked up the religious affiliation of the long-standing residents of the area, and there you have the Arab Shia majority in the nation-state that became Iraq. The shift from “Sunnism” to “Shia” identity suggests a fluidity that is belied by the fact that people kill each other over these differences. It has been suggested that the number of Shia in Pakistan increased in the 1980s in response to the partial imposition of Sharia in Pakistan during the rule of Zia-ul-Huq because the Shia traditions were more liberal. As I have noted before, the Alawites of Syria seem to have shifted in their identity quite a bit in the 20th century, going from the gray land between Islam and non-Islam to Twelver Shiism. If you may indulge me a bit, the idea that the Alawites are Twelver Shia is ludicruous when you compare their beliefs and habits with non-Twelver Shia who are far less heterodox. But, it makes more sense when you consider that the declaration that the Alawites were Twelver Shia occurred during a time when sectarian conflict in Lebanon made it politic for the Lebanese Shia to express solidarity with the religious elite of their larger neighbor.

The point is that there are layers within layers, and peeling the pages of this book back you become less and less sure of the boundaries, categories and definitions you once thought were hard and fast. On the one hand, I am suggesting that religious identity is far more fluid and subject to the vicissitudes of personal and social history. But I also do not deny that people kill themselves in part due to religious motivations. I suspect part of the answer lay in understanding the cognition of human beings, and stepping back from the assumption that humans are unitary reflective beings. Rather, we are decomposed into various sub-entities with specific axioms and utility functions, and to top it off many of these sub-entities are not exposed to our conscious mind.

Weird Addendum: In the “I don’t get religious people category,” please read about the Domneh. Also, in No God but God Reza Aslan writes that Shah Ismail, founder of the Safavid dynasty which converted all of Iran to Twelver Shiism, proclaimed himself mahdi by declaring “I am God, very God, very God!” Here is something via google print (type “Shah Ismail I am God”):

My name is Shah Isma’il. I am God’s mystery.
I am the leader of all these ghazis….
I am the living Khidr, and Jesus, son of Mary.
I am the Alexander of my contemporaries.

The Perfect Guid has arrived. Faith has been brought to all.
All the ghazis are full of joy at the coming of the seal of the Prophets.
A man has become a manifestation of the truth.
Prostrate thyself!
Pander not to Satan! Adam has put on new clothes.
God has come.

Tell us what you reall think buddy (remember, Islam abominates idolatry!)….

1 – Some historians had asserted that the espousal of Arianism by Constantius II was the primary factor in sustaining that faction as a force deep into the 4th century. Why was Constantius an Arian? Many contend it was the influence of his tutor, the bishop Eusebius. The point is that major historical dynamics may be rooted in such capricious and arbitrary convergences.

2 – I say Iranian specifically to include the large Turkic population of Iran.

Update: More comments here, here and here.
End update

Desidancer and Diana both pointed me to this story about a mixed race couple who gave birth to daughters of very different phenotypes. The explanation in the story is about right, the loci which give you a gestalt impression of racial identity are a tiny sample of your overall genome. In the story it is reported that 7 genes control skin color and F1 (first generation) hybrids should carry half of the variants of each race (since their parents contribute exactly 50% of the genes to each). But the F2 generation can come out as a range of combinations, so it stands to reason that mixed-race couples will have children who vary a great deal in phenotype as the alleles resegregate themselves into alternative combinations. I lay out the details in By the Punnett Square. South Asians, who often exhibit a wide range of color variation from near white to near black, should not be surprised at this sort of dynamic, as the variance within a family can be rather large in complexion.

In any case, independent assortment implies that even if the coloration of these two children reflects one of their ancestral ethnic groups, other traits do not necessarily line up in such a fashion. Since the twins above are babies it is hard to discern facial traits (they just look like babies), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the “white” and “black” baby had facial traits that were more equidistant to the metrics of whites and blacks (this would be expectation, though you expect a lot of variance still). There is a reason that in much of the southern part of the New World where admixture between Africans, Europeans and American indigenes is common, there are dozens of definitions for racial phenotypes, because the full range of appearance is expressed in a large enough mixing population (eg, there are terms for people with Negroid facial features and hair form and Nordic coloration and European facial features and hair form and Sub-Saharan African coloration).

By the way, as personal stories like this become more common hopefully we’ll stop hearing about how everyone in the future will be brown because of admixture. More values at each variable will result in an increase in variance for the distribution, not a decrease.

Update: OK, I think I need to repost this link, The incidence of superfecundation and of double paternity in the general population:

Sometimes superfecundation occurs by two different men. The frequency with which this occurs must depend on rates of infidelity (promiscuity). It is suggested that among DZ twins born to married white women in the U.S., about one pair in 400 is bipaternal. The incidence may be substantially higher in small selected groups of dizygotic twin maternities, eg. those of women engaged in prostitution.

In other words, double paternity is a possible explanation, but if the number of loci in question is seven or less than this is surely will the expected range due to variance emerging from heterozygosity in the parents1 (and we are only looking at skin color here from what I can tell, the two infants are still of the “baby race,” other features are not at play). I don’t think that the expectation of double paternity, evening adjusting for SES, approaches the probability that “white” and “black” color genes will resegregate in this fashion.

Update II: David points out that this is being reported in the British newspapers, which does alter your Bayesian priors, but walk around Lowell, Massachusetts, and observe the range in phenotype of the Cape Verdian community. The general point still stands.

1 – Fisher’s 1918 paper dealt in large part with the variance expected from heterozygous parents.

The existence of cooperation is one of the major problems in human evolution. Among non-human animals, cooperation is rare except among individuals who are closely related. Among humans, in contrast, it is common. The problem is to explain this in view of the temptation to ‘defect’ from cooperation, obtaining its benefits without its costs. The problem is classically exemplified in the game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where in any single play of the game it is always advantageous for an individual to defect, even though two players who cooperate will both do better than two who defect.

A variety of solutions to the problem have been suggested. They include:

– reciprocal altruism in repeated interactions (Trivers)

– group selection for benefits to the social group (D. S. Wilson, Boyd and Richerson, and others)

– cooperation enforced by punishment, including ‘altruistic’ punishment (see e.g. here)

– indirect fitness benefits to cooperators, such as sexual selection via the Handicap Principle.

An interesting alternative or addition to these solutions has been developed in recent work by F. C. Santos and colleagues. The main papers are available here. (NB some of these are in preprint form, so they may not correspond exactly to published versions). As far as I understand it (which may not be very far) the key feature of the Santos model is that societies have a heterogeneous structure, in such a way that some individuals have more social interactions than others. The results of simulations appear to show that for plausible values of the parameters cooperation can prevail even in the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma game, where each pair of individuals meet at random and interact no more than once.

This appears paradoxical, because there is no doubt that if players interact at random, the average payoff per interaction is greater for defectors than cooperators, whatever their proportions in the population. If payoffs are measured in reproductive fitness one would therefore expect defectors to drive cooperators to extinction. The solution to the paradox is that the total payoff to each individual depends not only on his average payoff per interaction, but on his total number of interactions with all other individuals. Provided the average payoff is positive, a player with a lower average payoff, but a lot of interactions, may do better overall than one with a higher average payoff but fewer interactions. So if ‘cooperative’ individuals have more interactions than ‘defectors’, they may do better than defectors even if their interactions with cooperators and defectors are random in the sense that they are in line with their proportions in the population.

There may be a suspicion of some fallacy in this argument, and on reading the Santos papers I didn’t understand how cooperators could have more interactions overall without also driving up the number of interactions (and the total payoff) for defectors. However, I worked through a few simple numerical examples to satisfy myself that the model can work. The explanation is that an increase in the total interactions of cooperators does increase the interactions of defectors, but not to the same extent as for cooperators. By analogy, suppose that males and females have both homosexual and heterosexual encounters. It would then be possible for males (or females) to increase their total number of both homosexual and heterosexual encounters, maintaining the same proportions of these as before, while the other sex increased only its heterosexual encounters. In the same way, if cooperators increase their number of interactions with both cooperators and defectors, they may increase their total number of interactions compared to defectors. The average payoff per interaction for cooperators is unchanged, while for defectors it increases (because a higher proportion of their interactions are with cooperators), but the total payoff to cooperators relative to defectors can still increase.

Of course, this shows only that the model is possible, not that it is realistic in practice. It is certainly realistic to suppose that different individuals have differing numbers of social interactions, but this does not explain why cooperators should have more interactions than defectors. Unless we suppose that the tendency to interact is somehow correlated with the tendency to cooperate, it would seem to be a matter of chance whether cooperation evolves.

But the problem disappears if we allow something equivalent to reputation to enter the model, because individuals with a reputation as cooperators will have more encounters than those with a reputation as defectors. I therefore suspect that the Santos model will be most useful in conjunction with models involving reputation and reciprocity, which arise mainly in humans and other social animals with advanced cognitive capacities.

Added: I should have emphasised that the ultimate outcome depends on the parameters. If the advantage per interaction of defection relative to cooperation is too large, the ‘Santos Effect’ will only slow down the elimination of cooperators, not prevent it. Cooperation will only prevail in the long run if the difference in payoffs is small-to-moderate.

One of the things that really, really, sucks about the “ID vs. Evolution” “controversy” is how much oxygen it can suck out of the air which could be devoted to shiznit like this, Structural variation in the human genome, Nature Reviews Genetics. One of the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on how you view it) rules of the game in regards to the old classical genetics was that humans were mostly theory and observational inference (eg, pedigree analysis), while the real experimental work was done in flies or mice.1 If terms like “additive genetic variance” and “fitness” were difficult to get a good finger on when you are talking about lines of Drosophila to whom you are the evil demon with the writ of life, death, fecundity and extinction, then they were really in a nasty situation when you knocked around some assumptions to hold you steady in regards to humans. This is kind of a shame because God the Father of the Trinity of modern population genetics, R.A. Fisher, was interested in humans most of all of all the creations of the Demiurge. The great thing about genomics is humans aren’t relegated to the back seat anymore (again, many people might not revel in our return to the state of natural examination). In fact, conservation geneticists who work with wildlife are now eager to piggy back on techniques funded by the good graces of the NIH for the sake of human gene sequencing and expression analysis. The genomic revolution has put humans back at the center of the scientific universe as players. Anyway, the abstract:

The first wave of information from the analysis of the human genome revealed SNPs to be the main source of genetic and phenotypic human variation. However, the advent of genome-scanning technologies has now uncovered an unexpectedly large extent of what we term ‘structural variation’ in the human genome. This comprises microscopic and, more commonly, submicroscopic variants, which include deletions, duplications and large-scale copy-number variants – collectively termed copy-number variants or copy-number polymorphisms – as well as insertions, inversions and translocations. Rapidly accumulating evidence indicates that structural variants can comprise millions of nucleotides of heterogeneity within every genome, and are likely to make an important contribution to human diversity and disease susceptibility.

1 – The old physical anthropology was mostly description and narrative storytelling.

The “standard model” of intellectual history presents the Presocratics as the pioneers of naturalistic explanations of the universe around us. This narrative explains how the messy natural philosophy of the Presocratics gave way to the more metaphysical and ethical schools of the late Classical and Hellenistic and Roman eras. In any case, Socialist Swine asks below:

I know that prior to Darwin people had some notion of evolution though they didn’t have a notion of the mechanism involved. Do you have any idea, who might have first suggested that species change over time?

Well, 10 minutes of google print pointed me to Empedocles, who did happen to be a Presocratic. His “theory of evolution” wasn’t exactly a process of evolution as we understand today. But, it is naturalistic, and it shows that evolutionary thought was not totally novel. The internet encyclopedia of philosophy has extensive commentary on Empedocles’ ideas, but if you want more, I suggest google print, or amazon’s search feature.
I have expressed the opinion that the human mind is biased against Darwinian evolution, but, the idea space that our species explores can be rather large. Even if you have an expectation, human variation (variance or error) often dictates that there are always those who swim against the current and generate some inevitable turbidity in the sea of human experience. In The Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World we see that movements like the Epicureans in ancient Greece, the Carvaka in India or the non-supernatural strain in Confucianism exemplified by sage Xunzi exhibit the naturalistic strain in intellectual history. This strain comes to the fore in complex literate civilizations where dissenters can attain critical mass and organize a counter-culture against normative supernaturalism (for instance, the Pyrrohnian Skeptics dominated the intellectual life of Athens until the rise of Neoplatonism during the Roman period). Of course we don’t need to look just to the naturalistic paradigm to see glimmers of a conception of evolution, the legends and mythologies of most peoples are riddled with transformation of animal to man and vice versa, so extracting the magical elements should naturally occur to some.
Addendum: From A Primer of Conservation Genetics:

The rate of mutation is critical to its role in evolution. Rates are low. For a range of loci in eukaryotic species, the typical spontaneous mutation rate is one new mutation per locus per 100,000 gametes (10^-5) per generation (Table 3.1). Mutation rates are similar across all eukaryotes, apart from those for microsatellites.
…Mutation rates for quantitative characters are approximately 10^-3 times the environmental variance per generation for a range of characters across a range of species. This apparently high rate, compared to single loci, is because a mutation at any of the many loci underlying the character can effect the trait.

What does this have to do with the rest of the post? I conceive of predisposition to religous belief as a quantitative trait. Some people are very “zealous,” some people not at all, and most people somewhere in the middle. The suggestion I’m offering here is that atheists and their ilk (our ilk) might, in part, be a byproduct of the genetic load of any population which is continuously replenished by loss of function mutation. In other words, the reason why we are always hanging around no matter the fact that our stereotypical asociality results in reduced fitness is that we are the end product of inevitable mutational processes. The low, but persistent, frequency of atheists and agnostics within a population might be a case of mutation-selection balance….