Just noticed that The BBC has a new site all about Darwin! God bless the British television owners! Also, our old friend Armand Leroi has a program this Monday, What Darwin Didn’t Know. And Armand’s been busy, apparently he’s going to host a special for National Geographic, Darwin’s Lost Voyage. Also, remember about Blogging For Darwin. I suspect I’ll participate over at ScienceBlogs…but I’m not going to unless I reread Origin, which I haven’t since I was about 12 years old when I didn’t know anything about evolution.

About every single post on human population clusters tend to shift into a discussion as to whether human variation is clinal, or where one can make assertions of discrete groups. I think it is fair to note that most of the populations sampled have been skewed to one locale. For example, “French” might mean a few hundred patients from hospitals in the Paris area. “Belgian” might be a few hundred patients in hospitals in Brussels. The “gap” between the French and Belgian cluster may simply have to do with the fact that the populations are not representative of their nationalities. Surely as the genetic data gets more fleshed out and the sample sizes increase to the point where there are no “Here Be Dragons” spaces on the maps many of the clusters will begin to exhibit some continuity with each other. On the other hand, I do thinking of this purely as changes in allele frequency removes some important information.
Consider an idealized circumstance where you have 11 demes positioned in a sequence.

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In the historical literature on Charles Darwin one of the commonest assertions (or assumptions) is that there was a long delay (of about twenty years) between Darwin’s first formulation of the theory of natural selection, and his publication of that theory in 1858 (followed in 1859 by a fuller publication in the Origin of Species). Based on this assumption the historian or biographer then procedes to speculate on the psychological or social reasons for this extraordinary ‘delay’.

I have long been sceptical about this approach. Of course, in one sense there was a delay: we know that Darwin formulated his first private version of natural selection in 1838, and didn’t publish it until 1858. But to call this a ‘delay’ – with the implication that it requires some deep explanation – requires us to assume that everyone should publish the first idea that comes into their head. While this is undoubtedly a common practice – both now and in Victorian times – it isn’t necessarily a good one, and it wasn’t Darwin’s. He liked to do things thoroughly, and most of his major works took years to prepare. As a well-known example, he took about 8 years over his study of barnacles. This isn’t unduly long, when we consider that he described about 200 species in 30 genera, each requiring careful comparison and often dissection of many specimens, a reading of all the existing literature on the species, and careful writing up of the results. In fact, at an average of one species every two weeks, it might be considered a rushed job, though it was widely admired by experts at the time and since. (Added: for comparison, Thomas Davidson and Sydney Buckman each spent more than 40 years studying brachiopods and ammonites respectively, but at a higher rate of species per year than Darwin with his barnacles.)

I am therefore pleased to find that the common assumption of a ‘delay’ is strongly challenged in a recent article by John Van Wyhe, available here. Maybe he slightly protests too much, but in my view he is a great deal more right than wrong. At least there is now no excuse for glib repetition of the usual version.

In the comments about the term Judeo-Christian the Marcionite tendencies of liberal Christianity was mentioned. Sometimes I have encountered the idea that a rejection of the Hebrew Bible within Christianity naturally results in Anti-Semitism (granted, the argument is often from neconservatives who are attempting to solidify the evangelical-neocon alliance). I decided to look into the GSS.

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@ Genetic Future.

Someone has suggested that the cover of our new book (the 10,000 year explosion) symbolizes the splitting of the human race into different species. I will award a metaphorical cigar to the first person who figures out what it _really_ means.

(Daddy’s Skeleton Army is the alternate title suggested by my son Ben)

From Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market:

What must have been most galling was a simple point Cowels often made that was never answered effectively by the investment advice practioners. As Cowels put it, “Market advice for a fee is a paradox. Anyone who really knew just wouldn’t share his knowledge. Why should he? In five years, he could be the richest man in the world. Why pass the word on?”

In spite of the conclusions he reached, Cowels never doubted that investors would keep buying newsletters. As he put it, “Even if I did my negative surveys every five years, or others continued them when I’m gone, it wouldn’t matter. People are still going to subscribe to these services. They want to believe that somebody really knows. A world in which nobody really knows can be frightening.“

The quote is from Alfred Cowles, the early patron of econometrics. It’s kind of like The Bachelor, people know it’s not really going to work out, but they keep watching just in case there’s a repeat of Trista & Ryan. This book was written in 2001, but a great deal of it will be of interest to those of us who live in 2009 (see this review).

The End of Banking as We Know It:

The bright side is that all those displaced financial services professionals can now set their sights on doing something, well, truly useful.
Still, this adjustment will be painful for all those who have to carve out new careers, as well as for New York and other places these companies call home.
Finally, what will a humbled financial services industry mean for consumers? Higher borrowing costs, Mr. Miller said.
“The leverage that these companies were using allowed them to lower their rates,” he said. “Rates have to go higher for the banks to operate in a safe and sound manner and make money.”
Credit is also likely to remain tight, in Mr. Miller’s opinion. A result is that consumer spending won’t recover to bubble levels.

The bloated banking sector did have a use: propping up conspicuous consumption in a culture where for a small moment everyone fancied themselves a potential real estate millionaire in the making. It seems the current opinion is that all those extra iBankers were like all the extra bureaucrats at any large corporation; no value added except for their own bottom line. To be fair, I think this argument could be made about most scientists and science. But there is a structural difference between science & finance. Just because 99.99% of scientific possibilities are false leads, it doesn’t mean that it is then acceptable that 99.99% of financial decisions are also missteps. In finance the remaining 0.01% of decisions won’t result in something like electricity or the railroad.

Fortune is apparently digging….

The post yesterday about the deletion which results in heart disease later in life had some interesting ancestry related material. This makes sense, the genetic maps which I post on now and then ultimately have a medical rationale behind them; eliminate population structure so that you don’t have spurious correlations confusing you when you try and get a fix on the genetic underpinnings of a disease. By example, consider a study with cases & controls, and individuals with the trait or disease have five times the likelihood of carrying a particular allele at a particular gene. But you look more closely, and you see that if you control for race this doesn’t hold, in fact you are just picking up the fact that one population has a greater propensity for the trait or disease as well as the reality that populations differ in allele frequencies on many genes. The old chestnut about correlation not equaling causation applies here. But, causation can ascertained using correlation as a precondition. Eliminating cryptic population substructure with ancestrally informative markers (AIMs) is the way you would do this, so that there’s nothing in the genetic background confounding the associations you pick up.
In any case, the supplementary material has some graphs that I thought would be of interest.

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