Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we’ll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it….
At the same time, this just popped into my RSS, The freedom to say ‘no’: Why aren’t there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren’t interested:

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Via E. Klein, I found out abut a new show on PBS this fall, Spain…on the Road Again, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, and Claudia Bassols. Preview below the fold….

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I was IMing with a friend about inbreeding depression and came across a map which shows the laws regarding cousin marriage in the United States….

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I came across an interesting 2007 talk that social psychologist Roy Baumeister gave to the American Psychological Association, “Is There Anything Good About Men?” He informally reviews the literature on sex differences in ability and motivation. Some of it will be old news for readers, such as the discussion of Larry Summers, but there’s quite a lot that will not. Some interesting tidbits:

– Most people in the West now believe that women possess more desirable qualities than men do. (Agreed — I only interact with males as colleagues, keeping all of my friends female.)

– Women are more likely than men to commit violence against an intimate partner.

– About 80% of those who work 50-hour weeks are men.

– 93% of those killed on the job in the US are men.

– Men appear more oriented toward large-scale social groups where relationships are shallow but many, women toward small-scale groups where they are deep but few. Baumeister suggests that this is a key source of male-female inequality after the transition to agriculture: men were more suited to the large-scale networks that came to run social, political, and economic life.

Click for UncensoredIn the comments section to a 2blowhards post on booty shakin’, blogger Alias Clio puts forth an argument from incredulity regarding several hypotheses I proposed: 1) that male preferences for different parts of the female body have, over time, correlated with personality traits; 2) that natural selection has had a role in causing some men to prefer one body part over another; and 3) that the correlation could be caused by some simple mechanism. She also repeats an evolutionary just-so story about why human females developed large breasts — that is has something to do with face-to-face sex — and that too is worth taking a hard look at (the story, that is).

As to 1), the available data do paint a somewhat clear picture that assmen, boobmen, and legmen are not the same on average for personality traits. What Clio doubts is that the correlations here and now can be projected back into the past or into other parts of the world. That’s true enough, but it’s true of anything psychological, and only for technical reasons: when we discover which gene variants in males are implicated in preferring T over A, we can dig up or unfreeze ancient humans, sequence their DNA, and see if the males were boobmen or assmen. That’s how we found out that some Neanderthals were probably red-headed, despite the fossil evidence not telling us anything about their hair color.

Though everyone knows it’s a dubious move, the best we can do to see what preferences may have been like in sub-Saharan Africa 100,000 years ago is to investigate present-day hunter-gatherers in Africa. The Hadza are a well studied hunter-gatherer group who live in Tanzania, and a study by Marlowe et al. (2005) (free PDF) shows that Hadza males prefer females who have a low waist-to-hip ratio in profile (i.e. due to protruding buttocks), rather than from the front (i.e. an hourglass or wasp-waist shape), while Western males prefer the converse. The authors did not collect personality data on the Hadza males, and did not test to see whether a male preferred boobs or buttocks, but in principle this would not be difficult to do, and we could see whether a similar pattern showed up among African hunter-gatherers.

That brings us to 2), whether or not natural selection had a role in the emergence of boobmen. Clearly they are a new morph within homo sapiens. They are too high in frequency to be the result of de novo mutations here and now, and they did not all migrate from some pre-historic Martian colony of homo sapiens. That leaves genetic drift or natural selection. Genetic drift can cause allele frequencies to go up or down over time, but it cannot produce design. Mate preferences are too specific and coordinated during development to admit a believable drift explanation: natural selection appears to have fashioned them.

But toward what end? We don’t need to know, really. With the completion of the HapMap project, we are learning of tons of cases of natural selection in human beings, and we largely have no clue what it was up to. The numbers don’t lie. Still, let’s indulge in a little conjecture just to show that the idea isn’t so perplexing in the case of boobmen.

In many areas of life, there is no one best solution, and we face a trade-off. If I develop conspicuous ornaments, that may make me more attractive to females, but it may also give me away to predators more easily, or provoke the envy of duller looking males, who might ostracize me (no small matter in a social species). Duller looking males might avoid predators and envy-based ostracism, and may be able to work better in groups because of this, but they won’t be as attractive physically to females. The result is that some fraction of males will be dull and the rest conspicuous. We would need tools from game theory and differential equation modeling to spell out what parameters are involved, and what the exact frequency of each would be at equilibrium. But the point is that neither is universally favored, so both will co-exist.

So it could be with boobmen and assmen. I don’t think these preferences per se were the target of selection, but again that they correlate with other personality traits that have been under selection. For instance, everyone says that compared to boobmen, assmen are more likely to have polygynous tendencies, to prefer short-term relationships, and to emphasize female qualities most relevant to the short-term (such as her most sexual body part, the derriere). We don’t know if that’s true, but it would be surprising if everyone had the same specific delusion. Since both short-term and long-term strategies have pros and cons, both could co-exist.

If being a boobman is linked to a more monogamous orientation, we are asking how natural selection could have driven up the frequency of monogamous males in societies where boobmen are common, such as Northern Europe. Maybe agriculture there requires the father to stick around and provide for his kids, whereas in parts of sub-Saharan Africa where farming has lower energy requirements, females can farm on their own and not worry about whether the father will stay with her. I don’t claim that this is the only way it could have happened; this example is just to illustrate how simple the process can be.

Turning to 3), the mechanism does not have to be known in order to talk about the adaptive value of the trait (see Niko Tinbergen’s Four Why’s for clarification). We know that lighter eyes were selected for in Europeans, but we could know this fact even if we didn’t know what biochemical pathways are involved in eye color. Still, let’s indulge in a little more conjecture just to show how non-mysterious the mechanism can be. It may be as simple as testosterone level, with assmen having higher T than boobmen.

This is an incredibly easy hypothesis to study empirically, though from Googling it looks like no one has done so. To repeat a finding from the boobman, assman, and legman study, though, the assmen and those who prefer both large breasts and large buttocks have more ambitious personalities and are Type-A businessmen. We also know that in various species, such as the dark-eyed Junco, higher testosterone makes a male more polygynous and less likely to stick around to help raise the kids. Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, investigating the matter is not so perplexing that we don’t even know where to start looking.

Last, let’s examine some very popular but utterly ridiculous hypotheses for why human females evolved large breasts, summarized here. First of all, it is not true that human females have large breasts — some have small, some medium, and some large. Look at the picture of the chimp in that summary — you see human females with breasts that small (or large) all the time. This is not hairsplitting: it suggests that breast size reflects some trade-off.

For example, the trade-off could be in fat deposition: if you have a fixed amount of fat and want to be conspicuous, you had better put the bulk of it in one place or the other. Only gifted (or cursed) females have so much to go around that they c
an have large breasts and large asses. Those who put it in their chests are probably pursuing a long-term mating strategy, and those who put it in their behinds are probably pursuing a short-term strategy, on the assumption that female supply has evolved to meet male demand.

The evolution of breasts has nothing to do with mimicry of the buttocks — can you think of any other way that a man might view buttocks-resembling things on a woman if he wanted to? Moreover, do assmen respond at all similarly to boobs as to the buttocks? This hypothesis predicts that they should be roughly interchangeable, but I don’t even notice who has big or small boobs unless someone points it out to me, and I have no way of judging what “good boobs” look like, according to boobmen. It also has nothing to do with our species’ face-to-face sexual position — again, can you think of any other way a man might look at buttocks-resembling things while having sex? And as misleading as the name may be, doggy-style is not a trait that humans have lost, like a coat of body fur.

Neither does it have to do with our bipedal posture: it’s true that this posture would have obscured any rump swellings (as chimps have), but the fleshy buttocks have still been in plain view ever since — and typically, more viewable from afar than the breasts, as they take up more volume. Five-hundred years from now, the scientific consensus will be that invoking bipedal posture as a driver of some clearly unrelated change was the 20th century equivalent of ancient Greek theories about trepidation of the spheres.

Since such hypotheses are so easily debunked, why have they persisted for as long as they have? Napoleon said that you should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and here the incompetence surely stems from the majority of researchers and commentators in this area being boobmen, legmen, or women. (Women will grudgingly admit that boobs and legs can be things of beauty, but recoil in disgust upon pondering the booty.) We all have a tendency to extrapolate from the personal to the universal, but when I find out that someone thinks or behaves differently than I do, I ask what forces could cause them to think or behave in such deviant ways. That’s how you get a clearer picture of how the world works, but it relies on there being a diversity of views within the field. It’s about time some assmen joined the ranks of sex researchers to set the field straight.

As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:

This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the average age is soaring, and private foundations are awarding scholarships to retain students and attract new ones.
In Pittsburgh, public school enrollment plummeted from about 70,000 two decades ago to about 30,000 and continues shrinking by about 1,000 a year.

Here’s the graphic that goes along with the article:

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Firefox 3 release candidate goes public:

It’s a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.
…
On the performance front, the documentation states that applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2, and memory usage has been improved. In addition, bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are less susceptible to data loss.

If you are running Firefox, Help → Check for Updates… Or download. Please note that this does break a lot of plugins.

A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Alleles Associated with Hair Color and Skin Pigmentation:

It has been a longstanding hypothesis that human pigmentation is tightly regulated by genetic variation. However, very few genes have been identified that contain common genetic variants associated with human pigmentation. We scanned the genome for genetic variants associated with natural hair color and other pigmentary characteristics in a multi-stage study of more than 10,000 men and women of European ancestry from the United States and Australia. We identified IRF4 and SLC24A4 as loci highly associated with hair color, along with three other regions encompassing known pigmentation genes. Further work is needed to identify the causal variants at these loci. Improved understanding of the genetic determinants of human pigmentation may help identify the molecular mechanisms of pigmentation-associated conditions such as the tanning response and skin cancers.

….Taken together, these four regions explain approximately 21.9% of the residual variation in hair color (black-blond) after adjusting for the top four principal components of genetic variation. (Conversely, after adjusting for these four regions, the top four principal components of genetic variation explain 2.6% of the residual variation in hair color.)….

There are four regions because areas around HERC2/OCA2 and MAPT showed signals. MAPT is also known as AIM1 and SLC45A2, so this makes 3 genes of the potassium-dependent sodium/calcium exchangers implicated in pigmentation (the other is SLC24A5 obviously). They adjusted for the components of genetic variation so as not to be confounded by population stratification (i.e., there was some ethnic variation among their whites and so you don’t have a random mating population).

It’s in PLOS; you can read the whole thing, etc.

Related: Why white people are so colorful!. Sandy also comments.

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Austin Bramwell, Who Are We?:

Whatever the difficulties of conservatism, surely one can improve upon the typical performance of those who take it upon themselves to explain it. In place of the conventional accounts, try this one: Conservatism is the defense of legitimacy wherever it happens to exist. “Legitimacy” here is defined in the empirical, Weberian sense: that is, an institution is legitimate if and only if the opinion has become widespread that it is right (for whatever reason or lack thereof) to obey it. The conservative, in short, cultivates obedience to existing institutions. This definition, I submit, has all the advantages of the conventional definitions, none of their defects, and some important advantages of its own.

To some extent I think one might make the case that Liberalism is the inverse of Bramwell’s definition of Conservatism; what was Liberal in 1920 might be viewed as quite Illiberal today, and what is Liberal in 2008 may seem rather Illiberal in 2028. In any case, I would add that though I don’t agree with Bramwell much of the time I’m always impressed with the breadth of his erudition and his good faith attempt to argue rather than scream. Unfortunately most political and social commentary is much closer to the level of morons like Kevin James. Even when one dodges the rank stupidity of someone like James the “punditry” on offer is generally grounded in the incestuous circle-jerk of CW as opposed to facts.

Back to Bramwell’s point, if you read this blog regularly you know that I have an amateur interest in antiquity, particularly the period of the Roman Empire. Today we assume that Christianity and the Christian clergy are the Conservative party at prayer.1 But if you focus on the 4th and 5th centuries, when Christianity went from being a marginalized sect to the established Church of the Empire, you encounter the fact that the Christian religion was fundamentally one perceived as radical and deeply undermining the legitimacy of the ancients (who were pagans after all).2 In the late 4th century you have powerful pagans such as Symmachus making arguments defending tolerance and subsidy for the ancient faith based on reverence for the institutions and precedents of the past and the ancestors. Fundamentally deeply Conservative reasoning arguing for the legitimacy of what has become before. By the late 5th century the pagan historian Zosimus had become quite dyspeptic toward the new dispensation, bemoaning the fall of the older order and observing the decline of his civilization all around him due to the abandonment of the old gods (Zosimus flourished in the years following the Western Empire’s fall). To a great extent Zosimus reminds me of modern Conservatives of a Christian bent, who seem pessimistic by constitution when observing the decline of Christendom and the repudiation of its truths.

Today I would suspect that post-Christian Liberals would not necessarily align themselves with radicals for change such as St. Ambrose or rationalist refuters of the relevance of the pagan past such as St. Jerome; rather, their sentiments might be with the pagans who were on the losing end of the march of history because of their current quarrels with Christianity. Similarly, of course Conservatives in the West who are Christian or Christian sympathetic would admire the pugnacity of St. Ambrose and other Church Fathers in overturning thousand year old traditions & customs. The axioms of Christianity made such a rejection of the past eminently rational. And yet if temperament was the guide toward affinity I do not think that this would hold. Church Fathers who admitted pagan learning into the canon offered reasons of utility, as such wisdom might be useful toward Christian ends. A convinced pagan would not have to make such an argument because the classical canon was simply part of the customary education of the non-Christian elite; it was received tradition which needed no reflective analysis and justification. In the 4th century Christian intellectuals dreamed of a new world transformed and shorn of the dead weight of the past with its irrational and unnecessary traditions. Nearly two thousand years later the shoe is on the other foot….

1 – Despite the emergence of Leftish Christian movements such as Christian Socialism or the Social Gospel, I think one can make a strong case that on the balance Christianity has been more associated with Conservatism than Liberalism since the French Revolution and the emergence of a modern politics.

2 – Obviously the influx of classically educated men such as St. Augustine and the Hellenic patina which accrued to the religion moderates this judgement.