Wings, Horns, and Butterfly Eyespots: How Do Complex Traits Evolve?:

Complex traits require co-ordinated expression of many transcription factors and signaling pathways to guide their development. Creating a developmental program de novo would involve linking many genes one-by-one, requiring each mutation to drift into fixation, or to confer some selective advantage at every intermediate step in order to spread in the population. While this lengthy process is not completely unlikely, it could be circumvented with fewer steps by recruiting a top regulator of an already existing gene network, i.e., by means of gene network co-option. Subsequent modifications of the co-opted network could further optimize its role in the new developmental context.

Tyler Cowen points me to an interesting paper, Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?. Here’s an interesting map which shows states with high and low porn subscription rates (dark = high, light = low).

Here’s a table with the data, controlled for some variables.

This part is amusing:

The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere…However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular, a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.

Remember Pete Du Pont’s op-ed, Gore Carries the Porn Belt?

The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now. A woman was using a Kindle at Starbucks the other day. She really didn’t get much reading done, people kept wanting to talk to her about her Kindle, and look at it themselves. The Kindle will have made it when people can actually use it in a public place without being harassed.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street:

In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn’t understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.
…
They didn’t know, or didn’t ask. One reason was that the outputs came from “black box” computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula’s weaknesses, weren’t the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

Pr[T_A < 1, T_B < 1] = Φ₂(Φ^-1(F_A(1)),Φ^-1(F_B(1),γ)), the Gaussian copula. I’m waiting for the book to come out titled “The World Is Not Normal.” Here’s a PDF of the paper referenced in the article, a quick skim doesn’t suggest that it’s really that opaque a piece of financial mathematics. The problem seems to be the same as with Value at Risk which was profiled in The New York Times Magazine. Long Term Capital Management was claiming regular occurrences of “10 sigma events” when it was going through its meltdown in 1998. Risk has a tail as long and vicious as a Diplodocus.
Update: See comments at Marginal Revolution.

Mystery of the ‘Land of Twins’: Something in the Water? Mengele?:

There was no evidence of the use of contraceptives or fertility drugs among the women, nor of any genetic mixing with people of African origin, who have higher twinning rates than caucasians, Dr. Matte said. But the rate of identical twins here, at 47 percent of all twin births, is far higher than the 30 percent that is expected in the general population, she found.

The part about monozygotic (identical) vs. dizygotic is strange. I knew about this village, but not the high frequency of identical twins. The between population twinning variance alluded to in that passage usually applies to dizygotic twins. The higher twinning rates of Northern Europeans than Southern Europeans, probably due to higher levels of milk consumption, are because of higher rates of fraternal births. My money is on some environmental factor. Though I would be curious about data which show that monozygotic twinning runs in families….

Seed Magazine has a nice review of the brewing controversy over shoddy statistical methods in the field of fMRI. To some extent science is politics, this is a sexy and appealing field. A friend of mine who is a psychologist mentioned that though he doesn’t think much of fMRI the head of his lab group wanted to make sure that there was always some neural imaging in their papers to increase the likelihood of acceptance. A few vivid images is worth a lot of turgid prose; even if some of the criticisms of fMRI are overblown I suspect that it was necessary that the field be brought down a few pegs. Here’s Andrew Gelman weighing in:

Conversely, I suspect one of the frustrations of Lieberman et al. is that they are doing a lot more than correlations and fishing expeditions–they’re running experiments to test theories in psychology, they’re trying to synthesize results from many different labs. And from that perspective it must be frustrating for them to see a criticism (featured in the popular press) that is so focused on correlation, which is really the least of their concerns.

In other words, fMRI is good as a part of a well-rounded scientific portfolio, but not as a silver-bullet.

Are here. Just the frequency data. Past experience tells me that the proportions won’t change much…. (N is well over 300)

Since I asked regular readers to fill out a survey, I’ve received over 300 responses. My own experience with these surveys is that about 50% of the total responses come within 24 hours. Next weekend I’ll put up the .csv file with all the data, and present some of my analyses as well. But below the fold I’ve placed the raw frequency data if you are curious; there isn’t likely to be any major changes in proportions with the next 300 respondents, and there weren’t any great surprises. Here’s a foretaste of weirdness in the survey data that I’ll present next week. 66 respondents claimed they were Muslim or Christian. Of these, here are their attitudes toward the existence of God:
No Answer – 1.52%
Does Not Exist – 12.12%
Skeptical of Existence – 16.7%
Doubtful of Existence – 1.52%
Believe Existence Possible – 24.24%
Beliee Existence Probable – 18.18%
Know God Exists – 19.70%
No Opinion – 6.06%
For comparison, here is two GSS results for all Christians & Muslims on God:
Does Not Exist – 1.2%
Know God Exists – 70%
(For the record, of the 5 Muslims in the GNXP readership, only 1 knew God existed, and 3 were atheists or agnostics on the God question!)

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Obit Magazine has a fascinating rumination on the life & times of Socks Currie-Clinton:

One of the most telling political photographs of the past few decades is a snapshot of a cat. Against an unassuming suburban backdrop, the picture shows a black-and-white feline crouched on a sidewalk while an equipment-laden quintet of photographers close in. The paparazzi, it turned out, had lured the cat outside so they could get the shot all America wanted to see. It was November of 1992, and that animal’s owner, Bill Clinton, had just been elected president of the United States.

In light of my previous comments on Judeo-Christianity, here is a interesting survey about Israeli Jewish views of other religions, in particular Christianity. Some results:

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