Yesterday I posted on the resurrection of the “redheads going extinct” meme (as I noted, this story seems to cycle every few years). The current source is National Geographic Magazine, which doesn’t have the “article” online. I went to the bookstore and checked out the September 2007 issue, and a write up does exist about the redheads going extinct. Unlike the secondary sources it isn’t as sensationalist, and makes more than a passing nod to the Hardy-Weinberg logic from which the inference is derived.
That being said, the write up in National Geographic Magazine simply recycles older versions of this story which emerged a few years ago, and doesn’t add any new “data” or analysis. In other words, we have here a staffer who needed a short paragraph or two to fill up a page in National Geographic Magazine, so they googled around (or something that effect), and simply repeated claims made in the previous rounds of reportage. As I noted earlier, those claims were pretty much made up. So you have here a case where a non-story from a few years ago was picked up by National Geographic, and the imprimatur of such a high status publication repeating the story has resulted in the reemergence of the meme in the venues which originated it in the first place!
In any case, the numbers which are injected to add a layer of scientific plausibility were likely concocted by the original writers who repeated the meme. I am skeptical that even 1% of the world’s population has red hair; people of European descent form around 15% of the world’s population last I checked, so such a high world wide frequency implies that around 1 out of 10 people of European descent is a redhead. Doesn’t pass the smell test.

Alice Dreger’s account of the Bailey story is available here [pdf]. It’s a dizzying trip through the looking glass– there are plastic vulvas, Stalinist purges of the transexual ranks, and, of course, a neo-conservative conspiracy. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, just imagine an Almodovar movie gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Check it, Chris Mooney is on bloggingheads.tv. He’s promoting his book Storm World, which is a really good read. I can’t speak in detail to the area of science which Chris covers, but the bigger picture issue of the “intersection” between public policy and the culture of science and the ensuing controversies have a universal resonance.

I’m reading When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise And Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, a history of the Abbasids. This on page 169 caught my attention:

…the caliph called for wine. A golden goblet was brought and the drink was poured into it. Ma’mum drank and handed it to Hasan….Hasan, a good Muslim had never drunk wine, yet to refuse could be seen as an insult to the caliph…’Commander of the Faithful,’ he said, ‘I will drink it with your permission and following your order,’ for if the caliph himself had commanded him to do it, how could it conflict with Islam? The caliph replied that if it had not been his order, he would not have held out the goblet to him. So the tension was relaxed and they drank together

There are many references in this book to the consumption of wine at the court of the Abbasids, and even the patronage of a genre of poetry focused upon wine. I knew the general outline of this, and amongst Muslim rulers alcohol consumption doesn’t seem that rare. I recall that the Mughal ruler Jehangir was an alcoholic, as was Saud bin Abdul Aziz, the king of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and early 1960s (his problems with alcohol were one of the reasons that he was forced to abdicate by his brothers). Of course, Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol, and yet here you have the titular spiritual leaders of the Islamic world, the caliphs, making it a normal part of their lifestyle. What’s going on here?

One of the main reasons that I have generally turned a skeptical eye toward explanations of religious constraint upon behavior are these sorts of examples. From an atheist perspective I had always tended to view religions as clear and distinct sets of axioms; but operationally the practice seems far more subject to social consensus and individual rationalization. This isn’t only an issue with religions, I have known of environmentalists who drive SUVs, self-proclaimed social conservatives who are heavy users of drugs and indulge in non-standard sexual practices, and so on. I’m sure most people can repeat such examples. Years ago when I found out that George H.W. Bush had switched from being pro-choice to pro-life, as had Ronald Reagan to some extent (Reagan’s pro-choice period was more that he simply signed laws decriminalizing abortion in California as governor), I assumed this was conscious political opportunism. The same for Al Gore or Jesse Jackson, who made the inverted transition. And surely some aspect of political calculation was at work here on the ultimate level, but what about the proximate cognitive processes? Humans are good at rationalization, and I’m not sure anymore that the elder Bush or Reagan were insincere in their rather fortuitous conversions. Or, at least part of their minds were pretty convinced that their change in opinion had more to do with reflective shifts in the underlying assumptions and values and not an exogenous push due to circumstance.

In short, humans beings perceive themselves to be reflective beings shaped by essential axioms open to conscious inspection. But the reality is that human behavior and psychology seems to exhibit a great deal of contextual contingency which shape a host of cognitive processes insulated from conscious inspection. We regularly seem to make up, and believe in, stories which reinforce our self-perception that we are rational beings with free will who make decisions and form beliefs by carefully taking into account data filtered via our avowed norms. But cognitive psychology shows that humans can be easily influenced by priming inputs which they are not conscious of in regards to the choices they make, all the while happily regaling researchers with their theories that sketch out the underlying causal factors behind their behavior. Yet it seems here that as in the case above the reason is posterior to the act; constructed post facto to give intellectual support to decisions made via other means.

Surely there is a method to the madness, and the outline of human behavior is constrained by a host of concrete parameters (biology, sociology, history, even rational calculation!). But, the biases which serve as weighted parameters in the function that generates the distribution of human behavior are likely more complex, contingent and opaque to the naked eye then we might have hoped for. Just as “friction,” “bounded rationality” and “behavioral economics” are emerging as necessary and essential tools in economics, so broad brush histories and anthropologies must take into account the multi-dimensional nature of human psychology and the disjunction between the stories we tell and the dynamics which drive us.

p-ter points me to a new paper which documents interspecies hybridization in monkeys whose lineages putatively diverged about 3 million years ago. Note that the hybridization follows Haldane’s rule: the heterogametic sex (in mammals the males) exhibits sterility while the other sex does not. Whatever genetic incompatibilities built over the period during which the two populations became distinct the less robust sex (males have only one copy of the X chromosome, ergo, sex-linked diseases) naturally exhibits greater breakdown in hybrids. In any case, the story is obviously relevant to Neandertal introgression, since the divergence between moderns and Neandertals is on the order of 1 million to 100,000 years.
Related: Mammalian hybridization potentialities.

From an article in Genetics:

Well-documented cases of natural hybridization among primates are not common. In New World primates, natural hybridization has been reported only for small-bodied species, but no genotypic data have ever been gathered that confirm these reports. Here we present genetic evidence of hybridization of two large-bodied species of neotropical primates that diverged ~3 MYA. We used species-diagnostic mitochondrial and microsatellite loci and the Y chromosome Sry gene to determine the hybrid status of 36 individuals collected from an area of sympatry in Tabasco, Mexico. Thirteen individuals were hybrids. We show that hybridization and subsequent backcrosses are directionally biased and that the only likely cross between parental species produces fertile hybrid females, but fails to produce viable or fertile males. This system can be used as a model to study gene interchange between primate species that have not achieved complete reproductive isolation.

The fact that the species (two species of howler monkey) diverged about 3 million years ago is pretty striking– the divergence time of humans and chimps is “only” one or two million years more than that, but creating a humanzee doesn’t seem to be possible. Humans and Neandertals, though, only split a few hundred thousand years ago.

The UK Times today has a short report into some surprising research findings. The main text is as follows:

A study into the mysterious changing skull shape of medieval man casts serious doubt on current theories.

The peculiar shift from long narrow heads to those of a rounder shape, and back again, which took place between the 11th and 13th centuries, has been noted at sites throughout western Europe. But a study of skulls found at the deserted village of Wharram Percy, near Malton, North Yorkshire, suggests that the anatomical blip was not down to an influx of Norman immigrants, or climate change, English Heritage has said.

It examined nearly 700 skeletons recovered from the village. Unlike other research, data from the Wharram site traces the change to a single, indigenous community which has been radiocarbon-dated.

Simon Mays, a skeletal biologist, said: “Our work has yielded few clues on why skulls changed, but we have cast serious doubt on some of the current theories. Despite the best efforts of science, we’re still in the dark to explain why it happened.”

Another report, in the Guardian, has more detail, including the important point that the changes are only found in male skulls.

And yet another report is here.

It’s all very mysterious. I was aware that archeologists had found some changes in the shape of English skulls over the last thousand years, but I didn’t know it was a change found elsewhere in Western Europe, or that skulls had changed in one direction and then back again in a few centuries.

And before anyone says ‘Black Death’, and has me chewing the carpet, I must point out that the change between the 11th and 13th centuries precedes the Black Death.

Every few years it seems that a new meme declares that “blondes will go extinct!” or that “red hair will go extinct!” I’ve only been blogging for 5 years, and this story has already cycled multiple times. A co-blogger of mine told me that he did some digging and it seems that this meme is of old vintage, with “blondes going extinct!” stories dating back to the 19th century. The current craze (as evidenced by blogs) seems to have started at an Australian newspaper. But, it is sourced originally to National Geographic Magazine.
First, the story doesn’t appear on National Geographic Magazine’s website that I can tell. Perhaps it is in the print issue? A reader who has a copy of the current issue might want to post their finding in the comments (I will probably go the bookstore tomorrow and check myself). Let’s assume that the story is correct. What are they actually trying to say here? They are actually just restating inferences derived from the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium in a panmictic population; this isn’t really a “discovery.” Let me clarify what I mean.

Read More

John Hawks has put up an inaugural post in a series on natural selection. His background as an English major shows (in a good way). It is interesting to note that John alludes to the Malthusian background of natural selection, since Greg Clark’s work presupposes exactly this dynamic up until the 19th century for our species (Clark notes we were subject to the same dynamics as any other animal, though I would add that more or less we still are).

Read all about it in Spiegel Online (who knew that Yoda wrote for a German audience?). Here is the original post by “Tyler Cowen.”