There are now some articles which are detailing the other Ponzi schemes which are coming out in the wake of l’affaire Madoff. One thing that is notable: the next biggest scam is an order of magnitude less significant. That is, while Bernie Madoff’s scam was on the scale of billions, the next ones in the rank order are on the scale of hundreds of millions. If you haven’t read The New York Times‘s piece which speculates on the psychological roots of Bernie Madoff’s skill at extracting money from the wealthy, you should read it. It’s nothing surprising, most people I’ve discussed the details of Bernie’s modus operandi immediately assume some sort of sociopathy. I would note though that sometimes there is a fine line between salesman and con-artist. In modern America the distinction seems obvious, but in a world of haggling and caveat emptor these were two faces of the same coin. Additionally, a commonly quoted number for the compensation forms sent to those conned by Bernie are 8,000. But this doesn’t include everyone who was screwed by the funds-of-funds. It seems that Bernie Madoff will be a name that will echo down the generations, because thousands of families have likely lost their perches in the upper class because of this fiasco. There will be children later this century who might be told that but for Bernie Madoff they would have been American aristocracy (though to be fair, many will not be told that because of Bernie Madoff many of their forebears became American aristocracy)….

One of my friends has built a Django site for a corp and wants to have a blog to accompany it. The blog will be pretty full featured with a lot of posts per day. His question: will he be better off using WordPress + plugins, buying Expression Engine, or rolling his own in Django using some of the stub apps out there?

Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation:

Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname “warrior gene” because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies have tested whether the warrior gene actually drives behavioral manifestations of these tendencies. We report an experiment, synthesizing work in psychology and behavioral economics, which demonstrates that aggression occurs with greater intensity and frequency as provocation is experimentally manipulated upwards, especially among low activity MAOA (MAOA-L) subjects. In this study, subjects paid to punish those they believed had taken money from them by administering varying amounts of unpleasantly hot (spicy) sauce to their opponent. There is some evidence of a main effect for genotype and some evidence for a gene by environment interaction, such that MAOA is less associated with the occurrence of aggression in a low provocation condition, but significantly predicts such behavior in a high provocation situation. This new evidence for genetic influences on aggression and punishment behavior complicates characterizations of humans as “altruistic” punishers and supports theories of cooperation that propose mixed strategies in the population. It also suggests important implications for the role of individual variance in genetic factors contributing to everyday behaviors and decisions.

I blogged this at Gene Expression Classic the other day, focusing on the “big picture” in terms of evolution. But I thought it was worth taking a closer look at the paper itself. The authors note a few issues in relation to MAOA, in particular for those who are known to have “low activity” genetic variants (MAOA-L):
1) Gene-environment interaction effects whereby abused children with MAOA-L are much more likely to become abusers than those who are MAOA-H (non-abused children show no difference).
2) Neuroimaging which shows greater reactivity in the amygdala and lower activity in the regulatory prefrontal areas during emotional arousal for MAOA-L individuals.
3) MAOA’s interaction with various neurotransmitters (or specific, the gene product’s interaction).
4) A family study where the subjects were generally criminal in inclination, and, were to be mostly MAOA-L.

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Extremely readable OA paper in PNAS, Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks:

Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks of individuals. In each of 81 experiments, 36 human subjects arranged in a virtual network were financially motivated to reach global consensus to one of two opposing choices. No payments were made unless the entire population reached a unanimous decision within 1 min, but different subjects were paid more for consensus to one choice or the other, and subjects could view only the current choices of their network neighbors, thus creating tensions between private incentives and preferences, global unity, and network structure. Along with analyses of how collective and individual performance vary with network structure and incentives generally, we find that there are well-studied network topologies in which the minority preference consistently wins globally; that the presence of “extremist” individuals, or the awareness of opposing incentives, reliably improve collective performance; and that certain behavioral characteristics of individual subjects, such as “stubbornness,” are strongly correlated with earnings.

To some extent this shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. How many French wanted to banish the Catholic Church from national life in the 1790s? Here’s the bottom line:

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I ran into an interesting comment on the net the other day.. “for some, it is hard to determine what productive and ethical use society can make of genetic knowledge that certain individuals are predisposed to higher than average intelligence”

Perhaps others can think of some productive and ethical uses. Any suggestions?

Some people may already have a certain amount of such knowledge. For example, my high school geometry teacher thought I would probably do well – he had some strange rationale based on remembering how my mother had done in his class. I did do well, but maybe he was just a lucky guesser.

In lieu of a full review of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending’s new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, I’ll keep this short: this book is interesting, well-written, and probably mostly wrong.

The book reads as a series of historical narratives grounded around recent work by the authors in population genetics. In particular, they focus on claims very familiar to readers of this site: that Neandertal introgression was in fact probable, that the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is a result of strong recent selection, and that thousands of new selected alleles are currently sweeping through human populations (along with novel theories, like that the evolution of lactose tolerance was a major force in population expansions). All of these things are, a priori, vaguely plausible, and are certainly fun to read about, but let’s be honest: in a few years, most, if not all, of these are going to be in the dustbin (if any of them are true, my money is on Neandertal introgression).

In any case, this book is not intended to be “correct”, so to speak–it seems to be more intended as an overarching frame of reference for viewing human history, acting as a counterpoint to that presented by authors like Jared Diamond. But if anthropology has a “Guns, Germs, and Steel problem“, I just hope population genetics doesn’t end up with a “10,000 Year Explosion problem”.

The normal story we are told is that as rose civilization, so declined evolution. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, inverts that formula as indicated by the title. The idea that humans are beyond evolution isn’t limited just to non-scientists, Steve Jones, an evolutionary geneticist, made the same argument last year. I’ve pointed why the emergence of modern culture and all its accoutrements, such as effective medicine, does not mean that the power of evolutionary forces are somehow negated. In The 10,000 Year Explosion Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending suggest that the rise of complex societies, and in particular agriculture, increased the tempo of evolution! Contrary to the idea that humanity is the post-evolutionary animal, Cochran & Harpending sketch out compelling reasons why one can not separate our biological heritage from our cultural development (and vice versa).

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Michael Blowhard is doing a 4-part interview with Greg Cochran on his new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Part 1 is up.

Michael Blowhard is doing a 4-part interview with Greg Cochran on his new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Part 1 is up.

The latest disease to be put under the scrutiny of a large genome-wide association study is psoriasis–see articles here, here, and here. These are mostly standard studies, but once again I’m struck by the effect of the MHC (HLA) region (see the figure). It was well-known, of course, that variation in HLA affects all manner of immunity-related phenotypes, but what’s becoming clear is that this variation has much larger effects than other loci in the genome. I find this somewhat surprising–associations with MHC variability were identified because typing HLA was feasible many years ago; well before genome-wide association mapping with SNPs was even considered. This could be a case where, in the analogy to the man searching for the lost keys in the dark, looking under the lamppost was actually the best bet.