I’m reading The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather. Most people know I’m a classical history buff (e.g., I’ve read a fair number of the late Michael Grant’s works). Now, one thing that always strikes is this: 2,000 years ago a political organization existed which stretched from Scotland to Iraq, from Hungary to Morocco. How wild is that?
Month: December 2006
T-minus 17 years + 6 months
About 6 months ago I speculated that Shiloh Pitt was going to be a very beautiful baby considering how hyperattractive her parents were. Well, I was in the supermarket checkout line today and I saw some pictures of her in US WEEKLY. This is the best res photo I could find online, but the spread in US WEEKLY confirms that she is an extraordinarily beautiful child that lived up to my expectations based on her parental phenotypes.
And a Merry Christmas to you!
Steinn Sigurðsson has an has an amusing post up about his multicultural Christmas. Here is the “American Infidel,” Robert Ingersoll, on Christmas (1892):
This is the festival of the sun-god, and as such let its observance be universal.
This is the great day of the first religion, the mother of all religions — the worship of the sun.
Sun worship is not only the first, but the most natural and most reasonable of all. And not only the most natural and the most reasonable, but by far the most poetic, the most beautiful.
The sun is the god of benefits, of growth, of life, of warmth, of happiness, of joy. The sun is the all-seeing, the all-pitying, the all-loving.
This bright God knew no hatred, no malice, never sought for revenge.
All evil qualities were in the breast of the God of darkness, of shadow, of night. And so I say again, this is the festival of Light. This is the anniversary of the triumph of the Sun over the hosts of Darkness.
Let us all hope for the triumph of Light — of Right and Reason — for the victory of Fact over Falsehood, of Science over Superstition.
And so hoping, let us celebrate the venerable festival of the Sun.
When it comes to Christmas I’m a Post-Modernist, the “reason for the season” is a matter of social debate and interpersonal discourse. To be pithy about it Christmas is universal pagan wine poured into a particular Christian chalice. I choose not to reject the drink no matter the vessel of its deliverance to our modern age.
Religion – definitions
In the post below I got pretty blogged down by the definition of the word religion. This is not new, almost anything is tagged as a ‘religion.’ Elvis fandom, football, and so forth. Six months ago I spelled out in tedious detail some of the definitions which I allude to contextually when I say “religion.”
To repeat:
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.
These can be thought of as multiple vectors or traits which sum up to what we perceive in a gestalt manner as “religiosity.” All of these are not necessary for religion as I define it. For example, #5 is a development of the last 3,000 years, and at most the last 6,000. #3 is probably a feature which emerged in the last 10,000 years as agriculture resulted in mass societies where non-kin associations became significant. #1 and #2 have always been with us I suspect, and are modal in the human psychology. They’re the “default” state, and we atheists are “oddballs” in our deviation from it. #4 is in some ways the opposite pole from atheism, it is perhaps a hyperactive form of #1 so that perception is distorted/heightened (depending on whether you believe there is anything out there to perceive) to an extreme.
When people say that “Therevada Buddhism is non-theist” I tend to express skepticism because I offer that ethnographic literature strongly implies that #1 is powerful enough to overrule the formal creeds imposed by #5 on a day to day level. This means I’m skeptical of the functional impact of belief, because I don’t think belief is in most people that powerful aside from being a group demarcator in most circumstances. When Rod Stark offers that the Trinitarian Christian theology offers special functional benefits in One True God I wince, he needs to read some psychology. Most Christians have only a fuzzy idea of the genuine meaning, rooting in Greek philosophy (e.g., the technical meaning of the term “substance”), of the Athanasian Creed. And yet nevertheless, Stark does observe that throughout most societies there is operational limit to the number of gods worshipped in a locale (e.g., no Hindu worships, let alone comprehends, 333 million gods, this as sensible as the Athanasian Creed in terms of typical Hindus actually extracting direct meaning out of divinity). He also notes that over time the raw number of gods in most society have decreased. A simple explanation might be that the extinction of many languages and peoples as empires expanded naturally resulted in a consolidation of “god concepts.” The emergence of local “saints” in monotheisms suggests that this consolidation also has a natural break.
In any case, the point of my original post wasn’t to espouse a particular view as to the strength of a meme complex, it was to ask what role historical contingency vs. inevitable directionality played. It seems, for example, that the period between 600 and 600 was especially fruitful for the emergence of “world religions.” And yet it has been over a thousand years since a real heavy hitter appeared on the scene. Perhaps human social complexes have attained a metastability?
Ultimately the questions I’m asking are so vague and general that they’ll spawn a mass of counter-questions. I plan on tightening the constraint in the future.
How nice is that doggie in the window?
A link between coat color and certain behavioral traits has reportedly been discovered in a couple of dog breeds.
A dog’s colour reflects a pooch’s personality, scientists say, at least in one breed, the English cocker spaniel.
The latest study, recently published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, shows that golden/red English cocker spaniels exhibit the most dominant and aggressive behaviour.
Black dogs in this breed are the second most aggressive, while particolour (white with patches of colour) are more mild-mannered.
Earlier research suggests that hair colour is also linked to behaviour in labrador retrievers.
For this breed, the most aggressive are the yellow ones, the next most aggressive are the black dogs and the least aggressive are the chocolate coloured ones.
The behaviour-hair colour connection is likely due to related genetic coding that takes place during the pup’s earliest life stages, according to lead author Dr JoaquÃn Pérez-Guisado.
“Maybe the link [to coat colour] is due to the fact that the ectoderm [one of the three primary germ cell layers] is where the skin and central nervous system originate in the embryo,” he says.
Pérez-Guisado, a Spanish researcher in the Department of Medicine and Animal Surgery at the University of Cordoba, and his colleagues measured levels of dominance and aggression in 51 seven-week-old English cocker spaniel puppies that were either full siblings or half siblings.
The tests looked at how quickly a person could capture a puppy’s attention, how well puppies followed the individual, how the dogs behaved while restrained, how they exerted their social dominance and what they did when they were lifted off the floor.
In many cases, the golden-coloured dogs resisted human contact and even tried to bite the tester, while the particolour pups often wagged their tails and seemed to enjoy the attention.
While genes control coat colour and appear to predispose behaviour in certain dogs, Pérez-Guisado says how dogs are raised plays the biggest role in behaviour.
He shows that environmental factors account for 80% of dominant, aggressive personalities while genes only influence 20% of dogs’ demeanours.
“It is very important to give the dog an optimum and suitable environment in order to have a dog with a low dominance aggressive behaviour level,” he says.
“For that reason, owners are primarily responsible for this undesirable dog behaviour.”
I say reportedly discovered because the link to Applied Animal Behaviour Science gives at least the contents of all past issues, but using my browser’s “find” didn’t turn up any paper by a Dr. Joaquin Perez-Guisado published in 2006-2007. If anyone can find a link to any part of it, please update this post or put it in the comments.
Of course it’s impossible to evaluate these claims without reading the paper. This doesn’t seem to bode well:
“Maybe the link [to coat colour] is due to the fact that the ectoderm [one of the three primary germ cell layers] is where the skin and central nervous system originate in the embryo,” he says.
Whether these findings are true and the actual magnitude of any genetic link between dog personalities and color potentially constitutes an important path to more widespread public acceptance of genetic relationships between physical and behavioral phenotypes. If it’s a good enough theory to help you pick out a new Fido for the kids… Or, perhaps more plausibly, the usual fringe crazies on both sides can use bizarre analogies to support their pet paranoias1. Cocker spaniels show that gingers really are a threat to the rest of us!
Via Geek Press.
1 – Pun not intended and only belatedly noticed.
Kat
Brown people are all the same (perhaps)
New paper in PLOS Genetics, Low Levels of Genetic Divergence across Geographically and Linguistically Diverse Populations from India. Here’s the conclusion:
Populations from India, and groups from South Asia more generally, form a genetic cluster, so that individuals placed within this cluster are more genetically similar to each other than to individuals outside the cluster. However, the amount of genetic differentiation among Indian populations is relatively small. The authors conclude that genetic variation in India is distinctive with respect to the rest of the world, but that the level of genetic divergence is smaller in Indians than might be expected for such a geographically and linguistically diverse group.
It’s in PLOS, so you can read the whole thing. This figure is pretty illustrative.
a) Brown people form a distinct genetic cluster. South Asians that is. This shouldn’t surprise.
b) South Asians are more related to other South Asians than non-South Asians. Punjabis (Northwestern India) might resemble Iranians and Arabs more than other South Asians, but they are still more like other South Asians than Iranians or Arabs.
c) This study showed very little internal population substructure within South Asia. I think the caveats are important, the study looks at American South Asians. This isn’t going to be as rich a sample space as all South Asians, there are caste, regional and socioeconomic biases. Within the next 5 years you’ll see a paper on South Asia just like this: European Population Substructure: Clustering of Northern and Southern Populations.
d) Please be cautious about taking comments like this literally:
The correlations are increased by using a linear combination of allele frequencies with ∼2/3 contribution from Europe/Middle East and ∼1/3 contribution from East Asia. At the same time, however, the separate cluster for India in population structure analysis indicates that allele frequencies in India are distinctive, so that predictions obtained based on European and East Asian groups cannot fully explain allele frequencies in Indian populations.
The “take home” message some get is that this means South Asians are 2/3 group A and 1/3 group B. That’s probably not what’s going on. It wasn’t the case that 10,000 years ago a Ur-European race and an Ur-Asian race got together in India and mated. Rather, South Asia is a crossroads in Eurasia, and it makes sense that the flow of genes would reflect influences from both the west and the east. You notice that populations in Eastern India show the biggest influence from East Asia, and populations from Western India show the biggest influence from West Asia. Geography matters!
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
Via Genetics and Health, Many Clinics Use Genetic Diagnosis to Choose Sex (on NPR radio feed). Of course, the couple profiled are brown.
Related: To breed a better human – we have the technology.
Bruce Lahn, gene thug strikes again
Brownology
The authors performed an extensive investigation of Indian genetic diversity and population relationships, sampling 15 groups of India-born immigrants to the United States and genotyping each individual at 1,200 genetic markers genome-wide. Populations from India, and groups from South Asia more generally, form a genetic cluster, so that individuals placed within this cluster are more genetically similar to each other than to individuals outside the cluster. However, the amount of genetic differentiation among Indian populations is relatively small. The authors conclude that genetic variation in India is distinctive with respect to the rest of the world, but that the level of genetic divergence is smaller in Indians than might be expected for such a geographically and linguistically diverse group.
Update: Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Populations (from 2001, Bamshad et. al). Control-f “Alu.”