Half Sigma is mining the GSS to try and understand the correlates of acceptance of the fact of evolution. He notes:

Of course it’s not surprising that smarter people are more likely to believe in evolution, but the difference is pretty extraordinary. Only 15% of people with Wordsum 10 disbelieve in evolution (although it’s a pretty small sample size), while a whopping 57% of people with Wordum 6 (which is the average score) disbelieve in evolution.

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A week ago I offered my own theory as to why 3rd and 4th cousin pairings in Iceland have been so fertile historically. Now, this from John Hawks, For maximum fertility, marry more than 20 km from your birthplace. John says:

This study isn’t orthogonal to the Iceland cousin study, but it adds another element. These people are about as close to the genetics of Icelanders as we can hope to get. The authors suggest that greater mobility in the last 50 years has removed a significant inbreeding depression. Yet, the inbreeding between people born within 15 km of each other is mostly at the level of third cousins or further — the sample that had the highest fertility in Iceland. Curious.
It would be interesting to see whether this result holds over longer distances. levels out, or even reverses.

As a follow up to Assman’s last post I was thinking I should link to this article from Asian-Nation which parses Census 2000 data on interracial marriage of various Asian American groups. Do read the article (caveats appropriate to identity politics organs), but I just took their data and placed it below the fold. Also, I modified it a little and added the ratios of men to women who marry whites by generation and immigration status. That is, the Census broke up individuals according to whether they were immigrants, or US-raised or born. There are some caveats with analyzing the data in that way; Asian Indians and Vietnamese have only 1 US-raised or born generation which is actually marrying right now. These groups are post-1965, in contrast to Japanese Americans, who are predominantly US-raised or born, with many 3rd, 4th and 5th generation individuals. With that stated, I was surprised at the relatively moderate sex ratios when you constrain marriages only to those where both partners are non-immigrants; i.e., pretty much acculturated as Americans. Arguably the most assimilated Asian American group on this list, the Japanese, have the second most balanced sex ratio, 0.829 between males and females in outmarriage to whites. Why the most second balanced? Asian Indians are tops in terms of balance. In fact, when you look at all marriages men outmarry somewhat more than women in this group. But Asian Indians are a bit different than the others on the list in a whole lot of ways. Look at the very low marriage rates to “Other Asians” for example. These might even include Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, etc., overstating intermarriage with the other groups on the list. The full table below the fold….

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star:

A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,’ says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, ‘the ideology of a retarded culture.
…
He shrugs off anxieties that his film will trigger a fresh bout of violence of the kind that left Van Gogh stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street and his estranged colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali in hiding, or the murderous furore over the Danish cartoons in 2005.
…
For more than three years, Wilders has been paying for his ‘honesty’ by living under permanent police guard as the internet bristles with threats on his life. He has lived in army barracks, in prisons, under guard at home. ‘There’s no freedom, no privacy. If I said I was not afraid, I would be lying.’
‘

I wonder if the term ‘retarded’ doesn’t translate well into English from Dutch? It makes Wilders sound like a somewhat angry child. All that being said, if Wilders’ film project debuts (a depiction of scenes from the Koran) it will result in violence. And I would be willing to bet that more Muslims will die from the chaos that will break out in Muslim countries than non-Muslims; though Wilders probably has a decent chance of not expiring from natural causes. I was in rural Bangladesh when the Rushdie Affair broke and it was really strange having to deal with adults as a child when they kept badgering you about why Americans and Westerners were accusing Muhammed’s wives and Muslim women in general of being prostitutes (not sure that my 7 year old brother even understood the details of what prostitution was until one enraged dude did a stupid pantomime). Remember, 5 people died in riots between Muslims and Hindus in India which were triggered by Jerry Falwell calling Muhammed a terrorist. Cause and effect are definitely Western logocentric constructs! In any case, I remember back in 2002 when Pim Fortuyn was campaigning and how he was depicted as a neo-Fascist. The cultural outlook in much of Europe has certainly changed a great deal; Wilders party looks like it’s going to make some gains. Unlike Wilders I don’t believe that the the Koran necessarily has a strong causal relationship to the regressive tendencies in Muslim cultures today; those tendencies exist though and Muslims themselves justify it via their interpretation of their religion. The current equilibrium needs a shock.

Steve on Extended families and materialism:

Anyway, I have a theory about why West Asian materialism runs in such narrow ruts. If you are Ed Begley, you want to impress other people who share your tastes and values, so you socialize primarily with other environmental fanatics who will be impressed that your house is off the power grid. But if you are from a West Asian group, there’s much pressure on you to socialize mostly within your extended family and their in-laws and in-laws’ in-laws. And because extended families are pretty average on average, specialized interests don’t cut much ice. Instead, the common denominators are the surest road to approbation.

You just bought a state-of-the-art kayak? Ho-hum. Sure, your kayak-nut friends will be wowed, but your family? Yawn. In contrast, your cousin Aram just bought the most expensive BMW. Now, that’s something that everybody in the family can be floored by!

I think he’s on to something here. When I visited Bangladesh in 2004 I found myself seeking out my uncle who is a religious fundamentalist for conversation. Trained as a geologist he spends all his marginal time engaging in dawah and harassing less strident Muslims about following all the picayune details of shariah. Why did I seek his company? It wasn’t because I enjoyed chit-chatting about the inanity of Islamic law, or that I agreed with him about the negative implications of Muslim immigration to the West because of inevitable assimilation. No, when a critical mass of Bengali women come together the constant talk about the family-matters makes you want to commit seppuku. I really didn’t give a shit that my second cousin was going to marry some random loser who was from across-the-river and spoke-Bengali-with-a-weird-accent; or whatever banal chatter that they were obsessing over.

There were two ways to escape this sort of mind-asphyxiating conversation. First, seek out people not interested in mundane topics. Despite my secularity my uncle’s rationales and preoccupations were interesting from an academic perspective; his relative admiration of Buddhism for example was not something one might expect from a Sunni fundamentalist (he had traveled to Australia and Southeast Asia with his religious order multiple times). Even better conversation was my cousin who had a master’s degree in math, an interest in cosmology and was employed as a systems administrator. She was much more like the sort of person I would proactively associate with in my natural environment, and despite the fact that we shared relatives in common she didn’t have a great need to review every last incident of gossip that she’d stumbled upon. But there was another way to dampen family-gossip: don’t hang out with family! One of my father’s best friends from college was an engineer, and we went to have dinner at his house one day. His brother, a physics professor at Dhaka university was there, and much of the conversation hinged upon whether the current excitement within the biological sciences compensated enough for the fact that it lacked the elegance and beauty which physics could offer. Now there’s a conversation I could bite into! Of course we weren’t going to talk much family gossip because they weren’t family.

As family sizes shrink within a society I assume that the mind-numbing chatter which emerges from the social-networking of families will slowly diminish. People will associate based on shared-traits instead of shared lineages, mostly because lower fertility means that there’s less lineage to go around. I have on the order of half a dozen aunts and uncles on each side of my family (paternal and maternal). But in my own generation the average number children is about 2 (some have 1, some have 3, etc.). There simply won’t be hordes of cousins in the next generation because the sibling groups are too small (and some of them won’t reproduce, as a few in my parents’ generation have not).

Values, norms and ideas float on a social surface. If one’s local network is saturated with family members…family values will be preeminent. Eccentric interests are not likely to be shared across the family network unless one is totally inbred. So there is a strong selection for banal conversation topics which everyone can participate in, or signalers that everyone can appreciate. There’s a local fitness peak of mediocrity around which a family gathers in terms of topic and creative expression; everyone knows uncle-so-and-so or the terrible thing that happened to that particular cousin. Remove the close relations and the landscape is no longer so regular and coalescence around a local fitness peak no longer as inevitable. An isolated individual you move to a new location and float in and out of social circles based on common affinity. In other words, the non-family world is one of a shifting balance of ideas and an exploration of a more rugged topography. The sample space of possibilities is larger, the risks greater, the comfort zone less incestuous. Depending on your values, that might be a good thing….

Addendum: The point can be generalized. Even shared affinity groups can become too incestuous, to the point where all creativity is removed. As an example, consider that William D. Hamilton believed that the George Price’s formalism, which was far superior and more general than that which he had introduced earlier, was a product in large part of the Price’s ignorance of what had come before in the field of evolutionary biology. Because of his ignorance George Price started in a very strange part of gene land and stumbled upon very startling vistas unknown to mainstream theoreticians who were constrained by the precedents of their elders.

Update: I do want to be clear, the dangers of family conversation isn’t even that family members are that mediocre. It’s that you have so much in common with family that the topics tend to be pretty banal. Even if your brother has a Ph.D. you might be more likely to talk about figuring out how to handle the fact that your parent is succumbing to dementia. These are needful conversations, but if your socialization experience is strong skewed toward family members they start swallowing up all your marginal time. The same dangers are applicable to the tendency for many Americans to spend all their marginal time with their significant other. Diversity is good.

Related: Theresa’s cousin on cousin marriage & corruption. And the famous profile of the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn.

After YouTubing VH1’s The Pickup Artist (a contest reality show where guys learn how to pick up girls), something struck me about how the bar and nightclub scene so thoroughly devastated the East Asian contestant. Sure, every guy gets rejection anxiety and experiences rejection, including the occasional antarctic stare and turn-away response that the Asian guy received. But he looked like he was about to commit suicide, which he ended up doing symbolically by electing himself to be kicked off the show. You see the same stewing-in-rage pattern among Angry Asian Male websites, where they barely contain their bitterness about how White females show no interest in them. * Why is it that Asian guys seem to experience shell-shock in the bar and nightclub scene?

The answer may lie in the arms race between the sexes, whereby males become better and better at showing off or charming and seducing females, which makes females evolve higher standards for the showing-off trait or greater skepticism and iciness when they sense they’re being hit on. It’s clear that this arms race has escalated much farther in sub-Saharan Africa and other places of similar latitude, compared to more extreme latitudes (although latitude is not the primary cause — probably pathogen load, ease of female farming, and so on, that correlate with it). So, when an Asian male is dropped into the lion’s den of the Western bar and nightclub scene, he is not dealing with a merely unfamiliar group of females — a large proportion of Europeans and Latin Americans — but one that has evolved to defeat a far tougher opponent than he.

If European, Latin American, and African females have evolved levels of skepticism and strategies for rejecting an unwelcome suitor that reflect the levels of male seduction skill in their own populations, then when they use these against the far less threatening Asian male, he will perceive it not as a woman’s natural self-defense, but as malicious overkill, as though a first-world superpower dropped bombs on a hunter-gatherer tribe that had picked off some of its members with crude arrows. **

Because there has been very little contact — cultural or genetic — between Europe, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas for most of the time after these groups went their own way, it is not surprising that this pattern is pervasive when they meet for the first time. A well known example is the devastation of American groups when European colonists introduced pathogens that were not just unfamiliar but the outcome of thousands of years of arms-race evolution against the human immune system. Similarly, Europeans never managed to colonize sub-Saharan Africa: they dropped like flies in the even harsher pathogen-load areas there. There is no reason to expect the pattern would not show up in social arms races.

Steve Sailer has collected data on who marries who interracially: African male with White female is far more common than White male with African female. While plenty of causes have been given — for example, dark skin is more attractive on males than on females — I don’t know of anyone mentioning the seduction arms race. African males would have an easier time charming over White females than African females, other things equal, since Whites are more naive to high-level seduction skills. *** Conversely, White males are underprepared in the charm department to evade the African female’s more sensitive bullshit-detector, and their show-off skills are unlikely to meet her higher standards (in dancing ability, for example).

In general, it appears that females will date males of other groups if the latter are higher in seduction skills, and so males will date females of other groups if the latter are more naive to seduction than same-group females. I don’t claim this accounts for all of the variation, since it would suggest East Asian female with African male would be the most common pattern — but this datum is a thorn in the side of all other explanations too, such as differing levels of masculinity and femininity between groups.

* The rant linked to contains the following:

“I’d be willing to bet that you could scan entire racks of trashy romances at your local supermarket and not find a single one that depicts an Asian man seducing and romancing a white woman.”

Well, the novelists have to keep the plot somewhat believable, and they have to supply a real rather than non-existent demand. The stereotype, probably true, is that East Asians are more pragmatic, tough-minded, and call-it-like-it-is compared to the more idealistic Europeans. But this example shows that the male contest for mates can fog up anyone’s clear mind.

** Finnish males may also count here as honorary East Asians.

*** Maybe not so true for Italian females — any female who’s been to Rome or Staten Island knows how relentless Italian males are.

God (and Gadgets) of the Lonely?:

I’ve been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I’ve had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I’ve heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who’ve been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the psychological origins of religion. While the final answer to why people are religious is a long, long way off, I can say with some confidence that the first of the two answers above is almost certainly wrong. People’s religious impulses stem from much more mundane sources than the mysteriousness of the world around us. That’s not to say that religion can’t serve to help explain the otherwise inexplicable, or that this isn’t an important purpose of religion, but it doesn’t seem to be one of the fundamental or original purposes of it. Instead, it seems that religion’s social functions are actually more foundational. This leads to the second answer above — the one that says religion is around to make us feel less lonely — seeming plausible. Most of the research on the social aspects of religion to date, however, has been on its function in communities. A paper in this month’s issue of Psychological Science, however, takes a more direct look at the role of loneliness in religion.

When the adaptive acceleration story hit the wires I started wondering if population size wasn’t the only parameter that might have changed in the past 10,000 years. To make it short, perhaps a small-world network model is more much accurate now with the rise of complex societies (the complexity being contingent upon the parasitism of elites upon the marginal surplus productivity of the larger population sizes due to agriculture). I assume that in the hunter-gatherer world occurrences such as the burial of a Swiss man at Stonehenge in the British Isles 4,300 years ago were not unheard of; but, I suspect that they became appreciably more common after the rise of mass societies.

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If you enjoyed William D. Hamilton week, I highly recommend Lee Alan Dugtakin’s books. The Imitation Factor is a book length exposition on research which shows how many organisms use socially embedded information in making their decisions; if you want to understand the utility of conformity it’s enlightening. The Altruism Equation consists of seven biographical sketches of prominent thinkers in social biology; worth checking out just for the chapter on J. B. S. Haldane. That being said, the prose is definitely workmanlike as opposed to masterful, A Reason for Everything and The Darwin Wars are both more polished, while exhibiting overlap considerably in material. Finally, Game Theory and Animal Behavior puts the lie to the idea that organismic biology is simply “social work.” Dugatkin is the editor, but his chapter is probably the best in terms of depth of clarity and width of scope. Though the section on the intersection of game theory, ethology and quantitative genetics is a close second in my book. If you read this blog you know that I’m a big fan of population genetics, and the derivations from a priori assumptions, but sometimes it is important to approach questions from the other angle and try and grapple with modeling the messy reality of animal behavior as the starting point. And understanding animals is a right step in the direction to understanding humans….

Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows:

The Stanford team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures. They evaluated 96 functional features (such as how the hull was constructed or the way outriggers were attached) that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the canoes and thus have a bearing on fishing success or survival during migration or warfare.

They also evaluated 38 decorative or symbolic features (such as the types of carved or painted designs). They analyzed mathematically the rates of change for the two groups of canoe design traits from island group to island group. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. This cultural analysis is similar to analyses of the human genome that have been successful in finding which genes are under selection.

The study is coming out on the 19th in PNAS (so that means it will show up on the website at some time after that date). As most of you know in the 1960s the neutral theory of molecular evolution emerged in response to the finding that there was a great deal of extant genetic variation on allozyme loci (OK, to be fair neutralist ideas predate the empirical results; but I think it is clear that those results made the model intellectually far more compelling). Prior to this there were two broad schools of evolutionary genetic thought; one group accepted that there would be low levels of polymorphism due to balancing selection, and another assumed that there would be little to no polymorphism because of selective constraint. No matter the rearguard attempts by the likes of Richard Dawkins to argue that molecular variation “doesn’t count,” I think the neutralist (or nearly neutralist) insights are important in giving us a better understanding of the nature of evolutionary dynamics on the genomic scale. In The Origins of Genome Architecture Mike Lynch argues that low effective population sizes have had a strong role in shaping the character of genomic variation in more complex organisms. In other words, we are all non-adaptationists now!

What does any of that have to do with the paper above? Peter Richerson & Robert Boyd, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman and E. O. Wilson & Charles Lumsden have all attempted to show how evolutionary processes are relevant to our understanding of human soceties. Unfortunately, as L. L. Cavalli-Sforza observes, cultural anthropologists are less interested in understanding humans as opposed to interpreting them. Formal frameworks to accompany the mass of empirical observations are simply neglected or seen as unnecessary. This is an unfortunate overreaction to the hubris of earlier generations of anthropologists who attempted to shoehorn all human variety into a set of functional adaptations. Instead of a happy medium where skepticism is balanced with empiricism and rationalism, anthropology has swung from a total lack of critical analysis toward one where positive assertions are eschewed on principle (unless, of course, those assertions are directed toward Western culture).

In Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson tries to make an argument for resurrecting a functional understanding of cultural traits as adaptations. I think that this sort of work is hard-going, at least beyond the level of triviality (e.g., the rationales for why the Inuit dress the way they do is rather straightforward). That is because “culture” is a very broad and ill-defined term and the selective pressures are myriad; the environment, the social matrix and the correlations with other traits are all critical. Wilson’s methodology in Darwin’s Cathedral was to use case studies; I don’t think that that will cut it. Rather, massive surveys of collected data tested via statistical methods are probably more useful in extracting out the adaptive trends as a function of time and space. I do not, for example, think it is a coincidence that over the last 2,500 years all the complex cultural traditions on the World Island became associated with what we would call “Higher Religions,” roughly, the fusion of supernaturalism with philosophy and institutional structures. But were these parallel developments a function of the specific adaptive needs of these complex societies? Or where they perhaps inevitable byproducts of the sufficient intersections of modal human psychology with the rise of the novelties of mass post-tribal society?

These are big complex questions. I think that are certainly functionally significant cultural adaptations. That being said, I am not sure sure that they are responsible for the preponderance of between cultural variation. To go back to the example of Higher Religions, I think one can plausibly argue that some sort of synthesis between intuitively appealing extant supernaturalism with the intellectual & institutional abstracting tendencies of complex societies made them inevitable, necessary perhaps. Societies which were united by a common religious ethos may very well have been more fit than societies still characterized by a welter of tribal gods uncomfortably corralled under one political dispensation (though the dynamic might usually have been played out within an intrasocietal context; e.g., the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet and Japan by a particular faction at court and the subsequent nativist reaction with failed). But the specific nature of the Higher Religions may very well be arbitrary, neutral so to speak, because like a synonymous substitution they have no functional significance.

Obviously the paper above targets the law hanging fruit. Engineering is not contingent upon the caprice of human social dynamics; it works, or it doesn’t, by the grace of Mother Nature. But it’s a start, as it is a reality check upon those who would argue that the full sample space of cultural possibilities are theoretically at play, and equally likely. The next step is to start examining traits not so strongly constrained by physical conditions.