There are few issues in Farewell to Alms that I’m still chewing on. One of them is Greg Clark’s dismissal of institutional and cultural barriers to development. In particular, Clark shows how practices such as usury, initially banned by the Church, were mainstreamed through work-arounds. I find this line of thought pretty persuasive, for example, look at what Israelis do during their fallow year. Proximately cultural practices are fixed parameters, but over time they generally evolve and shift. But there was something in Clark’s argument which bothered me, he argues that the consistently worse hygiene of the English can explain their higher mortality rates vis-a-vis the Japanese, and therefore their elevated standard of living (more to go around for the fewer people left alive). Clark contrasts the efficient recycling of “night soil” and its distribution from urban areas out to farms where it could be used as fertilizer with the English practice of simply storing it within one’s house until it could be thrown away like garbage.

But why do people persist in bad hygiene for centuries when it results in greater mortality? Shouldn’t individuals who, for whatever reason, practice better hygiene slowly increase in numbers in relation to those who do not practice good hygiene? Are these habits simply not heritable? And I’m not simply wondering about hygiene here, what about practices like the Muslim ban on alcohol? From what I recall alcoholic beverages are not only good dense calorie sources, they also are less likely to carry high densities of pathogens then plain water. Muslims prided themselves on their customs of bathing and cleaning in relation to Europeans (in some areas of course bathing became dangerous because people might assume you had Muslim sympathies!), but it seems that their aversion to alcohol should have resulted in higher mortality from water born illness as well as poorer nutrition (exacerbated by Ramadan).

I’m sure some of this is explained by dynamics such as the Handicap Principle. Humans show off and do all sorts of irrational things to illustrate that “they’re the man.” Circumcision as a rite of passage for teenagers anyone? That being said, I am also curious as to the cognitive biases and social pressures which make usury inevitable (obviously a financial system spurs wealth creation) but hygiene seem less critical. Is it because usury is a concern of a small minority who are highly motivated and a simple fiat change of the law can result in a switch? In contrast, hygiene is embedded in a whole suite of mores, practices and traditions, and requires self-control and conscious forethought. Even today it is relatively difficult to get many to wash their hands after they use a restroom!

Via Grrlscientist.

The death of an Indian politician due to a monkey mob is getting a lot of attention. But Ruchira Paul points me to an older story which I think is even more interesting:

They have invaded the prime minister’s office and the Defence Ministry, helping themselves to top secret military files.
…
Some 250 monkeys have already been relocated by a court order to forests in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
But many people there are now objecting, saying the animals are bringing with them their hooligan habits learnt in the city and are terrorising rural villages.

Slate has more about the complexity of monkey behavior. We aren’t the only species to facultatively shift our habits in response to opportunities in the environment. Here is a familiar bit, “Female victims might seek protection in a group of men, since monkeys are somewhat afraid of males.” Rember the sexual harassing monkeys?

Well, not really. But here’s a feature about a small town in northeastern Argentina which has had several centuries of self-imposed endogamy, resulting in a sharp increase in the incidence of albinism. This sort of thing isn’t always a function of conscious custom or tradition, in Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy L.L. Cavalli-Sforza documents the rapid drop in inbreeding with the penetration of modern transport into the mountains of Italy. Cavalli-Sforza notes that throughout much of 19th century Europe there were two opposing dynamics; on the one hand the decline in the power of the Catholic Church resulted in an increased frequency of consanguineous marriages (this happened in Protestant countries after the Reformation), but simultaneously more efficient transport increased gene flow across demes and many more people left their villages.

Another day, and another genome-wide association study. Genetic determinants of hair, eye and skin pigmentation in Europeans:

…We carried out a genome-wide association scan for variants associated with hair and eye pigmentation, skin sensitivity to sun and freckling among 2,986 Icelanders. We then tested the most closely associated SNPs from six regions–four not previously implicated in the normal variation of human pigmentation–and replicated their association in a second sample of 2,718 Icelanders and a sample of 1,214 Dutch. The SNPs from all six regions met the criteria for genome-wide significance. A variant in SLC24A4 is associated with eye and hair color, a variant near KITLG is associated with hair color, two coding variants in TYR are associated with eye color and freckles, and a variant on 6p25.3 is associated with freckles. The fifth region provided refinements to a previously reported association in OCA2, and the sixth encompasses previously described variants in MC1R.

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The UK Office for National Statistics has just released its population projections for the next 25 years. The central projections are for UK population to rise to 65 million by 2016, and to 71 million by 2031. The ONS is careful to say that these are not forecasts, since the outcome will depend in part on policy decisions and other events which cannot be foreseen. So that’s all right then.

The ONS’s summary statement is here. Follow the first ‘Related Link’ to get access to the supporting documents.

Some of you know that Bobby Jindal was just elected as the governor of Louisiana. Jindal has an interesting story, he’s the son of Indian immigrants, received degrees in biology and public bolicy from Brown, passed on Harvard Medical School for a Rhodes Scholarship, and took over the Louisiana Public Health System at the age of 24.
He is also a convert to Catholicism, and extremely politically conservative. Conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini had a political orgasm a few days ago in response to Jindal’s victory; and it was typical on the Right blogosphere. I really don’t think that Bobby Jindal winning in Louisiana implies a turn around for the national Republican Party. Nor do I think that he is a trail blazer for brown Americans; very few ambitious browns are going to grow up in the South and convert to Christianity and forgo a medical career because of an interest in public policy. That being said, I think that Jindal’s election does say something about Louisiana.

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Paul asked for recent comments. Look to the right. Just one note: that’s a Haloscan widget, I can’t fiddle around with the parameters or anything. Also, there are apparently Greasemonkey extensions which can give you a lot more control over Haloscan if you want. Just google it.

I just read The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800, and the main thought I came away with was that the more intelligence and status are decoupled in a society, the greater the likelihood of revolution. I assume here that the wealthy bourgeois who were marginalized in the ancien regime attained their gains via sly cunning; surely a simplifying assumption. In any case, demagogues such as Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilian Robespierre acted and organized on behalf of the working man, but unsurprisingly they were personally marginalized intellectuals. The populace may be roused into vicious action against the elites of the age, but the snake always needs a wily head, invariably from aspirant elites.

Secondarily, I am struck by the quicksilver changes in the Spirit of the Age. In 1783 the American republic was a peculiar experiment, an aberration in the age of monarchy (there were small republics). Yet by 1800 the French Revolution had swept such expectations away, at least for a time. These 17 years arguably witnessed changes in the order of societies on a scale far greater than the 1960s across the West, or throughout the Easter Bloc during the 1990s.

Are Some Men Predisposed To Pedophilia?:

A difference in average height is a trait found in other illnesses with biological links. The average difference in height was two centimeters, which is similar to the shorter height associated with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s disease.

Further research is necessary, but this finding re-enforces evidence that pedophilia has a biological cause, possibly related to brain development before birth.

I’m really not that interested in the biological origins of pedophilia, instead my attention was drawn to the fact that such a height difference is known for a range of disorders. In The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller hypothesized that variance in mutational load across individuals tracked beauty. This is basically a “good genes” model for why organisms exhibit sexual preferences. Miller was assuming a polygynous social system, but this makes me wonder as to the importance of “good health” due to provisioning in a monogamous species.

Though height is about 80% heritable in modern environments that still leaves an unaccounted for 20%; where does that come from? Possibly infection or developmental instability early on for whatever exogenous reason. In pre-modern contexts one assumes that heritability would be a bit lower because of the random stresses during pregnancy and during early childhood growth. In any case, adult height in males would surely be a good proxy for how healthy he is, and how productive a provider he might be. Additionally, good genes is still operative in a scenario where ability to resist and fight off infection is a proxy for fitness.