…as a piece of propaganda. I noticed that the local “art house” theater was screening Expelled, so I decided to check it out. There weren’t many people there. It started off very heavy-handed, a montage of archetypical scenes from the Communist and Nazi regimes, but the production values & execution of the first half of the documentary wasn’t half bad. I assume the producers were pitching this to a sympathetic autidence, so the intent was glamorize and present the argument effectively, not convert anyone to the message. The interviews with the eminences of the Intelligent Design movement were presented in very tight “sound bite” formats, in appealing settings with natural light. In contrast, the anti-Creationists were depicted in a far less flattering fashion; the lighting often artificial and harsh, the angles strange, and the cutting often was choppy. There wasn’t really that much data or new evidence in the film, and the arguments for and against Intelligent Design weren’t really explored with any depth. It was a superficial exposition of the issures, but Expelled does a good job of being less embarrassing than the ameteurish films that Creationists have been peddling for years (this is a low bar, I know).

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Some debate below about the various parameters which shape social pathologies. One of facts which we are well aware of is that the United States has a lot of homicide compared to other developed countries. But another fact which is also well known is that a disproportionate number of these murders are committed by racial & ethnic minorities, as well as by particular subcultures (e.g., Southerners vs. New Englanders). So I took the state-by-state homicide rate and compared them to the international data for selection nations. Results below the fold….

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The post below where I observed that in the United States men are over-represented among the Religious Right as opposed to the general population elicited a lot of response. I took some of the data from American Piety in the 21st Century which is broken down by sex and posted it below the fold….

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Religiousness and Infidelity: Attendance, but not Faith and Prayer, Predict Marital Fidelity:

High religiousness has been consistently linked with a decreased likelihood of past infidelity but has been solely defined by religious service attendance, a limited assessment of a complex facet of life. The current study developed nine religiousness subscales using items from the 1998 General Social Survey to more fully explore the association between religiousness and infidelity. Interestingly, logistic regressions using currently married participants (N = 1,439) demonstrated that attendance, but not faith, nearness to God, prayer, and other religious attributes, was related to infidelity. Exploratory analyses also found that individuals with high religious importance but low attendance were more likely to have had an affair and weak evidence that marital happiness moderated the association between religiousness and infidelity.

I wouldn’t put that much weight on one study…but this speaks to the functional significance of religious phenomena. Secularists often make the critique that great evil has been acted upon in the name of religion, but the flip side of this is that the same psychological and social parameters which result in group conformity which generates hostility toward perceived outgroups also can serve as critical buffers for those within the circle of the ingroup. The fact that institutional religion is declining as a source of social cohesion and identification, but supernatural beliefs far less so, suggests that anomie and anti-social behavior may increase….

A common SNP of MCPH1 is associated with cranial volume variation in Chinese population:

Microcephaly (MCPH) genes are informative in understanding the genetics and evolution of human brain volume. MCPH1 and abnormal spindle-like MCPH associated (ASPM) are the two known MCPH causing genes that were suggested undergone recent positive selection in human populations. However, previous studies focusing only on the two tag single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs) of MCPH1 and ASPM failed to detect any correlation between gene polymorphisms and variations of brain volume and cognitive abilities. We conducted an association study on eight common SNPs of MCPH1 and ASPM in a Chinese population of 867 unrelated individuals. We demonstrate that a non-synonymous SNP (rs1057090, V761A in BRCA1 C-terminus (BRCT) domain) of MCPH1 other than the two known tag SNPs is significantly associated with cranial volume in Chinese males. The haplotype analysis confirmed the association of rs1057090 with cranial volume, and the homozygote males containing the derived alleles of rs1057090 have larger cranial volumes compared with those containing the ancestral alleles. No recent selection signal can be detected on this SNP, suggesting that the brain volume variation in human populations is likely neutral or under very weak selection in recent human history.

They used EHH & iHS. Also, they suggest that the derived form of rs1057090 is very ancient (the SNP has a very small window of linkage disequilibrium around it).

Related: This is Bruce Lahn’s brain on ASPM and MCPH1, Did Modern Humans Get a Brain Gene from Neandertals?, Microcephalin & ASPM and Selection “controversy”.

The finding that men are more likely to be secular than women is a relatively robust result. You can note this in the Pew Religious Survey, to the point where 70% of self-identified atheists in the United States are male. In places as disparate as East Asia and Latin America women are stereotypically more religiously identified as well (or, religious practice is categorized as a female-identified activity). So what about the patterns within denominations? Men, being more secular in orientation on average, would probably sort into the more liberal and less demanding denominations, right? Not really. See below the fold.

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Via Dienekes, The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene:

Krause et al. (2007) recently examined patterns of genetic variation at FOXP2 in two Neandertals. This gene is of particular interest because it is involved in speech and language and was previously shown to harbor the signature of recent positive selection. The authors found the same two amino-acid substitutions in Neandertals as in modern humans. Assuming that these sites were the targets of selection and no interbreeding between the two groups, they concluded that selection at FOXP2 occurred before the populations split, over 300Kya. Here, we show that the data are unlikely under this scenario but may instead be consistent with low rates of gene flow between modern humans and Neandertals. We also collect additional data and introduce a modeling framework to estimate levels of modern human contamination of the Neandertal samples. We find that, depending on the assumptions, additional control experiments may be needed to rule out contamination at FOXP2.

Update: Kambiz has much more.

The discussion continues in regards to the relationship of various West Eurasian and North African groups (i.e., Europeans, North Africans and Near Easterners). There have been several papers published within the last few years which shed some light on these questions. We’ve blogged them before, and I don’t think that they radically alter what you might find in History and Geography of Human Genes, but I thought I’d point to them again, with a special focus on figures of note.

European Population Substructure: Clustering of Northern and Southern Populations. Figure 4 B:

Analysis and Application of European Genetic Substructure Using 300 K SNP Information, Figure 1 B & D:

Discerning the Ancestry of European Americans in Genetic Association Studies, Figure 3 A:

Analysis of genetic variation in Ashkenazi Jews by high density SNP genotyping, Figure 9:

Since these papers are all Open Access there’s really no excuse to not read them (at least the “Discussion” sections). I hope people won’t go around looking for charts to “prove” whatever pet hypothesis they want to promote, the population-level classifications we generate often have only an approximate relationship to the multi-dimensional shape of human genetic variation at the finer-grained level. Note that some of these principal component charts really don’t have that many individuals typed, and you may wonder about the representativeness of the samples of their putative national populations. Though these are important points, I do think we need to be cautious about our expectations in regards to the sort information we’re going to extract on the margins as the N increases and the individuals typed come from every region of a nation. I suspect we’ll get more oddities like the Etruscans as isolated or peculiar populations are included in these samples, and the exceptions to the broad patterns tell us a lot about the details of human history. But, I doubt we’ll overturn the general shape of the relationships and clinal gradients we see here.

Addendum: I somewhat played down the future surprises that these sorts of fine grained analyses might have for us…but I do want to note that the studies will continue. That’s because they aren’t done for the purposes of elucidating human genetic history as such, rather, the primary rationale is to highlight substructure which might be relevant when attempting to ascertain disease relevant alleles. In the medical context then there may be significant returns on the investment here which I don’t want to underestimate. If, for example, a particular drug’s efficacy within the African American population in the United States is directly proportional to the makeup of one’s ancestry then identifying ancestry-informative markers is very useful.

Update: Measuring European Population Stratification with Microarray Genotype Data, Figure 1 A:

Sheril pointed me to this data rich release of Science and Engineering Indicators. I was interested to see this table:

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