Debin Ma of the London School of Economics has spent time in the archives and has come to conclusions quite different from Pomeranz’s.

Ma’s recent papers (especially this one and this one) make archive-driven comparisons of European and East Asian living standards around the start of the industrial revolution. Both papers have coauthors, but I focus on Ma because he speaks and reads both Japanese and Chinese, something lamentably rare among economic historians at English-speaking universities.

One quote from the abstract of the first-linked paper:

Matching caloric and protein contents in our Japanese consumption baskets with those in European baskets, we compare Japanese and European urban real wages. Real wage rates in Kyoto and later Tokyo are about a third London wages but comparable to wages in major Southern and Central European cities for the 1700-1900 [period].

From the abstract of the second-linked paper:

In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe and far behind that of workers in the leading economies in northwestern Europe. Industrialization led to rising real wages in Europe and Japan. Real wages declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries….

A lot of Ma’s work is Japan v. China, not Asia v. Europe, so both lines of his agenda are likely of interest to GNXP readers. Given the overfishing in the pool of English-language economic history documents, Ma should be able to just throw his net overboard and pull in the big hauls for at least another decade.

Nature Genetics has reports from two Japanese groups on an association between variants in KCNQ1 and susceptibility to Type II diabetes. The study itself falls into the now-standard genome-wide association study mold (except perhaps for the choice of SNPs in one of the studies–“only” 100,000, mostly genic–and the decision to not type them using a chip), but performing GWA studies in non-European populations is important for a number of reasons:

1. It enables the identification of novel loci involved in a trait. In some idealized model, risk for a disease could hypothetically be influenced by a set of N genes, but in a population polymorphic at only some subset of those genes, only that subset will be found by association studies (which map variation–if there’s no variation, an association study won’t find anything). Due to the vagaries of genetic drift (and perhaps natural selection), different populations may end up polymorphic at a different subset of those genes. So mapping the same trait in a number of distant populations could lead to a much greater understanding of the biology of the trait.

Even if it’s not the case that one population has variation in a gene and another population doesn’t, it’s certainly the case that the power to detect a given variant can differ between populations due to smaller variations in allele frequency. That seems to be the case here–the SNP identified is at low frequency in European populations (~5% minor allele frequency), but at modest frequency in East Asians (~40% MAF), right in the “sweet spot” for detection by an association study.

2. Studies of the same phenotype in multiple populations also allows one to get at questions of “heterogeneity”. Back in the old days of candidate gene approaches to complex disease, the failure to replicate an association was often blamed on heterogeneity, ie. the possibility that the risk alleles in your population were different from the risk alleles in the population in which the association was originally found. That excuse always seemed to be a bit suspect, and now, with sample sizes orders of magnitude greater, it’s testable. In this case, the risk allele in the Japanese sample is replicated in a Danish populations, suggesting heterogeneity (and effects of genetic background) are not an issue in this instance.

A personal experience of mine is that many apostates from religion have…issues. On the other hand, people who were raised, or always were, atheists tend to mostly be almost confused by religion. But I was curious as to possible differences between these two groups, and those believe in God, or were unbelievers and now believed in God. So I decided to check the GSS. Here’s the bottom line for the GODCHNG variable:
64 DON’T BELIEVE NOW, NEVER HAVE
116 DON’T BELIEVE NOW, USED TO
174 BELIEVE NOW, DIDN’T USED TO
2,610 BELIEVE NOW, ALWAYS HAVE
In the tables below you read from left to right, those who are atheists, always were, to those who are atheists, weren’t always, those who are theists, weren’t always, and those who are theists and were always. Two points
1) I’m surprised at how step-wise some of the trends are. Look at the proportions for sex for example.
2) There are some data which suggest that those who leave religion experience stressed relationships with their family. See the data for time spent with family.

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p-ter points me to a new paper in Trends in Ecology, Pleiotropy in the melanocortin system, coloration and behavioural syndromes:

In vertebrates, melanin-based coloration is often associated with variation in physiological and behavioural traits. We propose that this association stems from pleiotropic effects of the genes regulating the synthesis of brown to black eumelanin. The most important regulators are the melanocortin 1 receptor and its ligands, the melanocortin agonists and the agouti-signalling protein antagonist. On the basis of the physiological and behavioural functions of the melanocortins, we predict five categories of traits correlated with melanin-based coloration. A review of the literature indeed reveals that, as predicted, darker wild vertebrates are more aggressive, sexually active and resistant to stress than lighter individuals. Pleiotropic effects of the melanocortins might thus account for the widespread covariance between melanin-based coloration and other phenotypic traits in vertebrates.

The fact that blondes have more fear and redheads feel more pain might make some more sense. Skin color seems to have gotten lighter over the past 5-20 thousand years across northern Eurasia by substitutions and changes in frequency on a few loci of large effect. Evolutionarily this predicts that pleiotropy will product side effect phenotypes before modifier genes can arise to mask the deleterious byproducts of said evolution.

In many vertebrates, there is an association between pigmentation and behavior. One potential reason for this is that genes influencing pigmentation also have pleiotropic effects on other traits, including behavior. A recent paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution lays out this hypothesis:

In vertebrates, melanin-based coloration is often associated with variation in physiological and behavioural traits. We propose that this association stems from pleiotropic effects of the genes regulating the synthesis of brown to black eumelanin. The most important regulators are the melanocortin 1 receptor and its ligands, the melanocortin agonists and the agouti-signalling protein antagonist. On the basis of the physiological and behavioural functions of the melanocortins, we predict five categories of traits correlated with melanin-based coloration. A review of the literature indeed reveals that, as predicted, darker wild vertebrates are more aggressive, sexually active and resistant to stress than lighter individuals. Pleiotropic effects of the melanocortins might thus account for the widespread covariance between melanin-based coloration and other phenotypic traits in vertebrates.

This is clearly far from gospel truth; the authors are laying out the plausibility of this hypothesis and a framework for further exploration. The hypothesis is that higher levels of the molecules that bind the melanocortin receptors (the melanocortins and agouti proteins) lead to both darker pigmentation as well as pleiotropic effects in other tissues (I’ve mentioned before some of the effects of messing with these receptors in sexual behavior and metabolism). Analysis of the way pigmentation and various other traits vary in mouse models leads to results consistent with this hypothesis.

A corollary of this argument is that in vertebrates where pigmentation is controlled downstream of the melanocortins (ie. at, or further downstream of, MC1R), this correlation between pigmentation and other traits should not be consistently true. For this reason, the authors argue that humans should be exempt. However, they may be unaware that some difference in pigmentation both between and within populations is controlled by ASIP, a protein that binds MC1R, acting as an antagonsist for melanocortin binding. Humans, then, could be an ideal test case for the hypothesis–do phenotypes like aggression map to ASIP like pigmentation does? However, the unpalatable nature of this question makes it rather unlikely to be pursued in humans.

Excellent new physics blog, Built on Facts. Highly recommended, though the author of the weblog seems to be a big believer in the omnipresence of porn (perhaps building upon personal facts?).

In the United States we have the free speech built into the law, so it is somewhat a moot point. Of course, as evidenced by comments in many other Western countries the limits to speech are bounded by public consensus. So I decided to look at the GSS in terms of response to one question:

After I read each statement, please tell me if you strongly agree, aggee, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree with the statement.
a. Under the First Amendment guarnateeing free speech, people should be allowed to express their own opinions even if they are harmful or offensive to members of other religious or racial groups.

Here is what I found….
1) Across politics there doesn’t seem to be a strong trend. Extreme liberals do tend to go bimodal where a large minority support speech restriction, but the N is small. Interestingly, moderates are the most open to speech restriction. Perhaps because moderates are the least like to need protection because they’re so inoffensive 😉
2) A very moderate trend while increasing intelligence and free speech absolutism. But far less than I’d expected.
3) A rather noticeable trend toward free speech absolutism from junior college on up in terms of education…but the N for junior college isn’t large. It seems actually the trend is weaker than I’d thought it would be here, the less educated aren’t that much more open to speech suppression!
4) Little difference across races.
5) Some differences across regions.
I checked a few other variables. There doesn’t seem to be much difference. I’m pretty surprised, and happily so! Someone else can check the regression or correlations, but where there are trends the N‘s are suspiciously small for those categories, so I’m skeptical that there will be many statistically significant differences. The tables are below the fold.

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France Reaffirms Its Faith in Future of Nuclear Power:

Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France’s electricity, according to the government, and relatively few public doubts are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas.
…
France generates half of its own total energy, up from 23 percent in 1973, despite increased consumption.
Electrical power generation accounts for only 10 percent of France’s greenhouse gases, compared with an average of 40 percent in other industrialized countries, according to EDF.

There is No Free Lunch, and life is about trade offs. Those who live in the American Pacific Northwest know this well; hydroelectric power is great and low risk, and results in cheap electricity which helps drive high tech industry such as aerospace and electronics. But, there are ecological downsides.
The key isn’t to rely on a silver-bullet energy source which we need faith in. Rather, it’s to evaluate and weight the risks and rewards of various technological portfolios. Any given action will have costs, we simply have to judge whether the benefits are worth those costs. As it is, most of the objection nuclear to power seems almost animistic at the root. These sorts of “gut-level” heuristics and biases draw upon the same “wisdom of repugnance” which is wielded against biological engineering and technology, though of course with coalitional politics being what they are different sects, so to speak, emphasize different domains when it comes to unleashing their intuitive aversion.
Note: The sign of the reflexive vector can go in both directions. Today many people have a strong bias against nuclear energy based on a small number of accidents and disasters, while in the 1950s the belief in its ability to free up humanity was almost religious and messianic. Both stances are problematic, and I believe fundamentally not rooted in empiricism as opposed to faith.

Svante Paabo’s group just finished sequencing the complete mitochondrial DNA of a Neanderthal. The article is in the newest Cell. John Hawks has a summary.

One of the big findings: In one tiny way, we’ve become more like monkeys recently, since Neanderthals, chimps, and other sequenced apes have the same non-homo-sapiens variants on COX2, but these human variants are common among old world monkeys. Guess I’ll have to take my pet macaque off of Vioxx now.

Upshot: Something big may have happened to human metabolism in the last few hundred thousand years since our split from the Neanderthals. And on this one gene, the solution our species found looks like the same solution that works for monkeys.

MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives:

Previous studies in animals and humans show that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours and that females often prefer odour of MHC-dissimilar males, perhaps to increase offspring heterozygosity or reduce inbreeding. Women using oral hormonal contraceptives have been reported to have the opposite preference, raising the possibility that oral contraceptives alter female preference towards MHC similarity, with possible fertility costs. Here we test directly whether contraceptive pill use alters odour preferences using a longitudinal design in which women were tested before and after initiating pill use; a control group of non-users were tested with a comparable interval between test sessions. In contrast to some previous studies, there was no significant difference in ratings between odours of MHC-dissimilar and MHC-similar men among women during the follicular cycle phase. However, single women preferred odours of MHC-similar men, while women in relationships preferred odours of MHC-dissimilar men, a result consistent with studies in other species, suggesting that paired females may seek to improve offspring quality through extra-pair partnerships. Across tests, we found a significant preference shift towards MHC similarity associated with pill use, which was not evident in the control group. If odour plays a role in human mate choice, our results suggest that contraceptive pill use could disrupt disassortative mate preferences.

It’s Open Access, you can read it yourself. I’ve gotten a few emails inquiring about this paper, and Darwin Catholic pretty much baited me into posting on this. There’s been a fair amount of treatment of the results in the media as well. This isn’t the first paper of this kind, there’s a large genre of work (copiously referenced above) on the relationship between smell, MHC and female attraction to men. To restate the basic findings here: taking the birth control pill seems to have resulted in a shift of women toward greater preference of those with immune profiles similar to themselves. We already know that women have very strong preferences for individuals of the same race as compared to men, so a follow up on male preferences at some point would be interesting. Perhaps men don’t care what a woman smells like?

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