Woolly Mammoth best left dead?

An editorial in The New York Times, Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth?:

No one is quite sure why the woolly mammoths died out toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. Theories include warmer temperatures that gradually displaced the plants on which they fed, overhunting by primitive man, an accumulation of harmful genetic mutations, widespread disease, or an asteroid or comet colliding with Earth and disrupting the climate.
If scientists do bring back a few mammoths, we suspect our warming world won’t look any more hospitable than the one that did them in.

A meta-point here is that it’s great that the chattering classes devote time to scientific issues; we’re on the cusp of the age of applied biology. But a question I have is the presupposition that a warmer world would be inimical to the existence of the mammoth. After all, there is tundra, and there is glacier. It seems that some tundra would remain as the glacier retreated, following its march..
But I also decided to figure out when Woolly Mammoths speciated. From what I can tell it seems that they diverged from the Steppe Mammoth about 150,000 years ago. Fossil people can clarify or correct. I was curious about this fact because of this chart:

Read More

R. A. Fisher on Inclusive Fitness (again)

I recently posted a note on an anticipation of Hamilton’s concept of inclusive fitness by R. A. Fisher in the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.

As I pointed out, in that passage Fisher did not quantify the effect of what he called ‘indirect effects of natural selection’, so he did not state what we now call ‘Hamilton’s Rule’ (though later in GTNS he came close to it in his discussion of distasteful insects).

However, I have noticed the following passage in a letter from Fisher to Leonard Darwin dated 27 June 1929, which states Hamilton’s Rule for the special case of parental care:

The reproductive value at different ages must determine the extent to which parental care pays. If all ages were of equal reproductive value, a species would tend to benefit its offspring up to the point at which the offspring gains double the advantage which the parent loses, but no further. Of course immature offspring are usually worth much less, and so should be cared for only at a cheaper rate still. But if crocodiles were able to recognise their mature offspring, I suppose they would co-operate with them not only on terms of mutual advantage, but on terms of joint advantage so long as the loss of either did not exceed half the gain of the other. Hence society starts with the family. – Natural Selection, Heredity and Eugenics: Including selected correspondence of R. A. Fisher with Leonard Darwin and others, edited by J. H. Bennett (1983), p.104-5

The important qualification about the maturity of the offspring is probably also in Hamilton somewhere, but I can’t immediately find it. Dawkins makes a similar point in his ’12 Misunderstandings of Kin Selection’.

Added: I had another skim through Hamilton’s papers, but I still couldn’t find a discussion of the maturity point. However, I imagine Hamilton would have said that differences of maturity should be taken into account in quantifying the ‘benefit’ to an offspring of a given amount of parental care. So, for example, in a species with very high infant mortality, the benefit of a given amount of resources to an immature offspring, measured by the expected number of its own future offspring, would be less (other things being equal) than to an offspring who has already reached sexual maturity. Against this, ‘other things’ are seldom equal, and the benefit of a given amount of resources (e.g. food) to a newborn may be much greater than to an older offspring which can already fend for itself.

Why does the genetic map of Europe still work?

In the comments below Susan C asks an interesting question:

I’m still surprised that this works as well as it does, given that there were mass movements of people during the nineteenth and twentieth century.

For Europe prior to 1815, I’d expect it to work. Genealogical records show that people were very often born in the same village that their parents were, or the next village along. I would guess the rate of diffusion to be a few km per generation.

After the Napoleonic Wars, though, it goes nuts. Changing methods of agriculture (e.g. enclosure of land) meant that many rural agricultural labourers were put out of work, and had to move to the major industrial cities. This migration could easily be in the range of 100km in one generation, or even transcontinental – people emigrating to North America or Australia.

Moving forward to the Second World War, many people from central Europe fled the Nazis and came to settle in Britain.

So if you take a British person today, and ask them where their grandmother was born, likely answers range from Aberystwyth to Krakow, even if they answer “white” to an ethnicity question. (Of course there’s plenty of evidence of immigration from e.g. India or the Caribbean, too)

An interesting point. Some levels of immigration and movement have always been part of European history. Think about the outflow of Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The trade and migration between the Low Countries and the eastern shore of Britain. The immigration of Spaniards, Poles and Italians to France in the 19th century. The relocation of Saxons to Romania, Russia, etc.

Some thoughts:

1) Many of the immigrants, like the Huguenots, settled disproportionately in cities and towns (the Volga Russians are an exception obviously). French in Berlin, British Puritans in Amsterdam, Jewish industrial workers in East London, Asian sailors in Cardiff. And cities until recently were powerful relative population sinks. So modern European cities might be affected by past immigration (e.g., in changing the accent on dialects) culturally, but they are far less reshaped genetically than you would expect.

2) Many of the immigrants were from nearby regions. Spanish and Italian immigration to France was far higher than Polish. So the affect would be more to subtly shift the positions and centers of gravity, as opposed to rearranged the expected spatial relationship.

3) Aside from France, there wasn’t much migration as a proportion of the population. The ancestors from Aberswyth and Krakow are very salient because of their exoticism. This is just subject to the same dynamics as disappearing English phenomenon.

4) They sampled from only a few locations within each nation, so the clumping is exaggerated, and combined with #3, the migration effect wasn’t strong enough to change your impression. Perhaps they also generally don’t sample ethnic minorities in these studies; e.g., avoiding Hungarians and Saxons in Romania.

5) Some migrations, like the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II, rolled back the obscuring effects of earlier movements.

I was thinking about following the notes and what not and see where the samples came from, but I’ll leave it to enterprising readers. I’m sure that can answer some of these questions.

Reader Request

Dear Readers,

Currently I’m compiling my own dataset of international cognitive test scores. Right now I’m moving on to China. China contains nearly 20% of the human species, with every province being the size of a large country, so it would be nice to get a fuller picture for China than other places. The good news here is that Chinese scientists have engaged in a good deal of intelligence testing. The bad news (for me) is that most of these studies are confined to Chinese language journals.

I’m looking for a temporary collaborator who can read Chinese to help me find and extract data from Chinese language studies. Ability to read Chinese and curiosity about the subject are all you really need.

If you are interested, please contact me by clicking my name above.

Also if any readers are at an institution with electronic access to many Chinese journals (such as the following) and are willing to share the wealth, please contact me as well.

Thanks!

George R. R. Martin on science fiction

This week’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge interviews George R. R. Martin. If you have iTunes just subscribe to their podcast and you’ll see it on the list of shows (I don’t know where to find it streaming online). I was talking to an owner of a local science fiction bookstore, and we agreed that many angry fans are going to break down the gates of hell and tear him to pieces if Martin does a Jordan. Apropos of which the proprietor mused how worrying it was that the 60 year old Martin is corpulent (also, he resented the fact that Martin took vacations!). On the other hand, we agreed that there’s no way Brandon Sanderson would ever be commissioned to complete A Song of Ice and Fire.

Similarities & differences: American Indians & Real Indians

After reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I was struck by the incredible similarities in British modus operandi in North America and India the 17th and 18th centuries. These two imperial domains seem very different, but recall that Lord Cornwallis plays a prominent role in both Colonial and Indian history. This was a world-wide empire, the French and Indian War in North America was just a piece of the broader Seven Years’ War, which also played out in India.

Read More

Opinions on evolution, intelligence & religion

In my post yesterday where I compared Catholics & Protestants in New England with Southerners in the McCain Belt, I was struck on the evolution question that in New England Protestants exhibited much more variance than Catholics. More Protestants rejected evolution or definitely believed it was true than Roman Catholics, who tended to agree that it was probably true. To me, this indicates the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism, whereby new sects emerge from schisms within denominations, in contrast to the “broad church” philosophy of Roman Catholicism as well as the due deference to clerical elites. Though acceptance of some sort of evolutionary theory is not demanded by the Roman Catholic church, there is a general acceptance among the clerical caste as to the validity of general evolutionary processes. In contrast, liberal Protestants have arguably taken much more enthusiastically to evolutionary theory (e.g., Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, admits to believing in evolution with more certitude than angels), while conservative Protestants make its rejection a touchstone of their distinctiveness.
So I decided to go into the GSS, and see how the SCITEST4 variable relates to WORDSUM.

Read More

More genetic maps of Europe

Another paper on European phyogeography, Investigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studies:

An investigation into fine-scale European population structure was carried out using high-density genetic variation on nearly 6000 individuals originating from across Europe. The individuals were collected as control samples and were genotyped with more than 300 000 SNPs in genome-wide association studies using the Illumina Infinium platform. A major East-West gradient from Russian (Moscow) samples to Spanish samples was identified as the first principal component (PC) of the genetic diversity. The second PC identified a North-South gradient from Norway and Sweden to Romania and Spain…The next 18 PCs also accounted for a significant proportion of genetic diversity observed in the sample. We present a method to predict the ethnic origin of samples by comparing the sample genotypes with those from a reference set of samples of known origin. These predictions can be performed using just summary information on the known samples, and individual genotype data are not required. We discuss issues raised by these data and analyses for association studies including the matching of case-only cohorts to appropriate pre-collected control samples for genome-wide association studies.

Below the fold is a PC map where I’ve added clarifying labels.

Read More