Samuel Huntington died yesterday. Though famous for his Clash of Civilizations thesis, more recently he argued for an emphasis on the reality that this (the United States) is an Anglo-Protestant country. But I think that this assertion needs to clarified to a finer grained scale. In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, the author makes the claim that the culture of the United States is a synthesis of four strands of colonial settlers; New England Puritans, the Lowland Southerners (e.g., Tidewater Planters), the Highland Southerners (i.e., the Scots-Irish of Appalachia) and the polyglot peoples of the Mid-Atlantic (e.g., Quakers of Philadelphia, Dutch Patroons of New York and Swedes of Delaware, etc.). After reading quite a bit of American history, especially the period between 1600 and 1850, I think that over the long haul the concrete political and social realities of America owe much more to New England than the other regions.  After I came to this conclusion (which I will flesh in more detail later), I couldn’t help but note that today New England isn’t included in the “Real America.”

PLOS has a think piece up, “It’s Ok, We’re Not Cousins by Blood”: The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective, which comes out against the laws in the United States which ban the marriage of cousins:

It is obviously illogical to condemn eugenics and at the same time favor laws that prevent cousins from marrying. But we do not aim to indict these laws on the grounds that they constitute eugenics. That would assume what needs to be proved – that all forms of eugenics are necessarily bad. In our view, cousin marriage laws should be judged on their merits. But from that standpoint as well, they seem ill-advised. These laws reflect once-prevailing prejudices about immigrants and the rural poor and oversimplified views of heredity, and they are inconsistent with our acceptance of reproductive behaviors that are much riskier to offspring. They should be repealed, not because their intent was eugenic, but because neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible.”

Here’s a map which shows the time period when these laws were enacted:

Here are the numbers for the increased risk of congenital diseases for progeny of first cousin marriages:

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Massimo Pigliucci has a post up, Economics learns a thing or two from evolutionary biology. There are many points within the post which I would agree or disagree with, but, I get the sense that the current economic morass is precipitating these sorts of criticisms of “economics.” I’m not one to disagree on the importance of behavioral economics, and I believe a serious engagement with the reality that rationality is bounded will only benefit the human sciences. That being said, it seems to me that the current problems are not ones of economics or the economics profession as much as the particularities of the finance profession in terms of its incentive structure. By analogy, imagine blaming zoologists and botanists for the actions of agribusiness (e.g., excessive utilization of antibiotics so as to maximize short term firm productivity at cost to a risk of a high negative externality). Rather than suggest that economics needs to learn from the life sciences (I think this is happening), I believe that you need to look to public choice theory and other extant frameworks available off the shelf.

THE MATH SEX GAP REVISITED: A THEORY OF EVERYONE by La Griffe, via Half Sigma.

This is a pretty thorough review of biology and evolution of lactase persistence. It’s interesting that the precise genetic mechanism underlying the phenotype remains unknown-this seems like a potentially very interesting model phenotype for people interested in the temporal and spatial regulation of gene expression.

Say you have a abstruse paper such as, Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa:

Comparisons of chromosome X and the autosomes can illuminate differences in the histories of males and females as well as shed light on the forces of natural selection. We compared the patterns of variation in these parts of the genome using two datasets that we assembled for this study that are both genomic in scale. Three independent analyses show that around the time of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, chromosome X experienced much more genetic drift than is expected from the pattern on the autosomes. This is not predicted by known episodes of demographic history, and we found no similar patterns associated with the dispersals into East Asia and Europe. We conclude that a sex-biased process that reduced the female effective population size, or an episode of natural selection unusually affecting chromosome X, was associated with the founding of non-African populations.

Over at Gene Expression Classic p-ter expresses his befuddlement:

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Evolutionary curveball for curvy?:

While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker waists.
That’s because the same hormones that increase fat around the waist can also make women stronger, more assertive, and more resistant to stress, according to a new study published in the December issue of Current Anthropology.
Given those findings, it makes sense that the slim-waisted body has not evolved to become the universal norm, said the study’s author, Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah.
Her study takes aim at a theory popular in evolutionary psychology and medicine: that men universally prefer women with narrow waists and larger hips because their higher levels of estrogen make them more likely to conceive a child, and less vulnerable to chronic diseases. These preferences, the theory goes, have defined women’s ideal body shape over time.

One of the most tiresome aspects of evolutionary psychology is the paradigmatic straitjacket which many of the practitioners operate under; the only type of evolution that exists is unidirectional. Deviations from expectation are explained away. The importance of human universals mean that variation can not exist. These sorts of evolutionary psychologists resemble the caricature of the economist who holds to rational choice so that behavior which deviates from the model is explained by ad hoc contingencies. The most popular current expositor of this view of evolutionary psychology is Satoshi Kanazawa, who is also not a big fan of statistics. In any case, the paper will come out in Current Anthropology, but isn’t on the website, but there is a press release:

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Check out Mark Wethman’s new quant blog, Congenial Times. It’s been around for only a couple of weeks but in that time he’s posted a lot of interesting data/analysis on topics ranging from international politics to human biodiversity. His most recent post is on racial differences in educational attainment in Sweden.

The most interesting article to me has been the one on Amish IQ scores. He found data which showed the Amish to have above average reasoning and quantitative analysis skills.* Data like this is essential for anyone trying to understand the Flynn Effect or between-population differences on IQ scores.

*They scored lower on language tests, but according to Jason Malloy this was solely due to the tests not being in their native Pennsylvania Dutch.

Even Bernard Madoff Doesn’t Deserve This:

Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom’s former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his company’s shareholders. Sure, these men destroyed enormous shareholder value, just as the targets of today’s criminal cases allegedly did. But it’s hard to contend that they deserved prison terms longer than the average sentence for murder (22 years), kidnapping (14) and sexual abuse (eight).”

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Check this out, Matt Yglesias was dissing on an obscure D.C. outfit, Third Way, a few days ago. Today, the CEO of The Center For American Progress put up a Very Special Post on his weblog clarifying that CAP thinks much of Third Way. Creepy. I guess we always knew there was a puppet master back there, but it seems a bit unseemly to pull the strings so publicly.