The other day I was wondering whatever happened to A New Kind of Science. Well, Stephen Wolfrom is on the latest bloggingheads.tv.

(if you don’t see Hebrew in the title please change “Character Encoding” to “Unicode”).

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An In-Depth Look at Genetic Variation, covers Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation (about ~15 minutes long, interview with Rick Myers). Also, Wired blogs the most recent spate of papers (and gets a sound-bite from Marcus Feldman)….

Update: Readers might appreciate this from the Science paper:

However, the between-population variance is sufficient to reveal consistent population structure because subtle but nonrandom differences between populations accumulate over a large number of loci and yield principal components that can account for a major portion of the variation (21).

What’s reference “21”? A. W. Edwards, Bioessays 25, 798 (2003). Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy. Ding, dong….

(A figure from the Science paper below the fold)

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Cool paper in Nature, Global trends in emerging infectious diseases. Not cool because infectious diseases are great, but I believe they’ve been (and are) major evolutionary pressures on our species. Great map too. From the legend:

a) zoonotic pathogens from wildlife
b) zoonotic pathogens from non-wildlife
c) drug-resistant pathogens
d) vector-borne pathogens

Not surprised about the intersection with world population density. Just by inspection, the Indo-Gangetic plain looks to be the “winner” here! Though it does seem that Sub-Saharan Africa holds its own in terms of representing above its population-weight class in the wild-life derived and vector-born pathogen categories. Might we be able to chalk that up to a long history of coevolution between the African ecosystem and hominid species? Domesticated animals seem to be more of an issue in the old Eurasian Oikumene as you would expect. For more precision on the global trends and correlates, check out their regressions.

I haven’t had time to read them, but John Hawks already commented:

A flush of papers this week (two today in Nature, one tomorrow in Science) describe new analyses of SNPs across the genome. Two of the papers sample SNPs in global samples numbering more than 500 individuals.

…and Yann Klimentidis.

This is a post for Google. A post I wish had been there for me during my periods of confusion on this topic. I notice that Chris Roach recently referred to Robert J. Samuelson as a “Respected economist.” He isn’t. Robert J. Samuelson is a financial and economic journalist. He has bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard, so one assumes he has taken an economics course or two or three. Samuelson has a column in Newsweek which often focuses on economics; this means that he is a major public figure in this area. I had assumed that Robert J. Samuelson was a prominent economist who was moonlighting as a journalist until a few years ago when I was curious if he was related to Larry Summers. I knew Summers was related to an economist with the last name Samuelson. I think this is a reason that people assume that Robert J. Samuelson is an economist. Paul A. Samuelson is obviously an economist, to some extent the economist of the 20th century (along with Kenneth Arrow and a few others). When I didn’t know anything about economics I too believed that Robert J. Samuelson was an economist partly because I vaguely knew Paul A. Samuelson was the economist, which says a lot about how eminent Paul A. Samuelson must be if I had any awareness of the man!

A few days ago I noted that smart people believe in evolution. And stupid people do not. Inductivist looked at the IQ scores in the GSS for whites and this is what he found for various religions:

Mean IQ of whites from General Social Survey by religious affiliation
Episcopalian	109.9
Lutheran	107.4
Mormon	105.7
Presbyterian	102.3
United Methodist	101.8
Southern Baptist	98.0
Assembly of God	94.5
Pentecostal	92.2

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I’ve been reading a fair amount of economic history and political economy recent (e.g., A Concise Economic History of the World, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and Angus Maddison’s substantial body of work). I’ve read a few micro & macro texts so I come into this with some vague theoretical understanding of the framework which economists are marinated in, and of course I know about comparative advantage and am broadly sympathetic to globalization. The analytic sharpness that economics brings to broad historical questions is illuminating. That being said, on occasion there are comments which make me wonder about the excessive simplicity of the economic narrative.

Consider the case of two nations which trade with each other. One nation starts out far wealthier. Businesses in the wealthier nation relocate some factories to the poorer nation. This increases aggregate utility, consumers in the wealthy nation can now purchase cheaper products, while a substantial number of workers in the poorer nation are more well off than they otherwise would be. But, there’s an issue here, inequality is likely to increase within the nations. Overall inequality in the aggregate has decreased, the poorer nation is now far wealthier and so the income gap is not as stark across national boundaries. But a minority of those who had factory jobs in the wealthy nation now might have to shift to lower paying service sector employment. Additionally, income inequality might initially also increase in the poorer nation as some are left behind (though as economic development proceeds one might suppose that the lower orders would catch up).

As someone who lives in a relatively wealthy nation let’s just consider that case. I’m not sure if I’m particularly reassured that aggregate utility has increased across the world while a bunch of factory workers now go unemployed or are marginally employed. It’s not that I’m a particularly empathetic person, I’m not, but perhaps I’ll run into these people in the subway or at the shopping mall. It’s great that people in a far off country are now wealthier and also increase my own access to more baskets of goods; but I can’t but help be a little worried about idle hands and potential riots in the streets from the “victims” of the redistribution of economic activity. More immediately, what’s the point in my being able to purchase more bling if it only invites a mugging at hands of the victims of globalization?

I have Joseph Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work on my “to read” list, so perhaps my qualms will be addressed at some point. So far I’m not reassured that economists truly internalize the structural biases in human psychology when talking about these macro-level issues. It seems that in universal suffrage democracies the political class always has to pretend as if comparative advantage doesn’t exist and mouth populist slogans, but they always favor globalization when it comes to implementing policy (at least over the long term). At this point most humans understand that the the earth is not at the center of the solar system; but it seems to me that that is an easier concept to grasp than the logic of economics, in part because human intuitions about social facts and dynamics are very strong and persistent in the face of intellectual persuasion.

Note: Feel free to recommend books on economic history in the comments. Douglass North is also on my “to read.”

Natural selection and cultural rates of change (Open Access).