In this diavlog with Glenn Loury the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan recounts the results of an experiment.
– If given the option of paying $100 for an item vs. $80 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $80 and going across town
– If given the option of paying $1000 for an item vs. $980 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $1000 and not going across town

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You’ve probably heard about the research in the press, but please see Derek Lowe for perspective. The difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar as an additive may, or may not, be problematic. But the uncertainty in this area is why I try and avoid excessively processed foods*, there’s just so much we don’t know. If you’re poor and short on cash perhaps the high ratio of calories per cent of processed foods are simply necessary, but for people of even modest means I don’t think it is that difficult to cut most consumables which come out of boxes from your diet.
Again, I want to reiterate that I don’t necessarily have an atavistic fear of food science and industry. Or think that “nature always knows right.” The human state of nature is Malthusian and characterized by high mortality. But I think some trends in the modern food industry driven by demand side pressures result in medium-to-long term gains in morbidity in return for short-term spikes in pleasure.
* If something has fewer than six ingredients, and you know what the ingredients are (i.e., they’re not obscure chemicals), I don’t know if I would avoid that. After all, cooking is in many ways a form of processing too. As are cheeses and pickling.

Not Exactly Rocket Science, authored by a certain Edmund Yong. Congratulations Mr. Yong, but I will admit being less than surprised.
Update: And also, congratulations to all the other winners, several of whom are in my “regular reads.”

I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, The origins of morality do not matter. Its flavor is a bit different from my typical blog posts because the format enforces more brevity, so I decided to try and leverage some analogies. I conclude:

… Our moral consensus is a river whose course shifts across the plain, constrained by the hills thrust upward by biology. Only history knows where the river will flow next, though evolution can hint at the range of possibilities.

On a note related to this piece, I will be posting a review of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness in a few months.

The Andrew Pollack piece which I hinted at came out a few days ago: Consumers Slow to Embrace the Age of Genomics. For what it’s worth, I think this chart from Dr. Daniel MacArthur is right on:

This too will pass. I believe that like the internet the knowledge and analysis of our genetic information is going to be ubiquitous after a rough period when most of the dreams of grandeur from the first generation entrepreneurs fade.

Ethnic and Geographic Differentiation of Helicobacter pylori within Iran:

The bacterium Helicobacter pylori colonizes the human stomach, with individual infections persisting for decades. The spread of the bacterium has been shown to reflect both ancient and recent human migrations. We have sequenced housekeeping genes from H. pylori isolated from 147 Iranians with well-characterized geographical and ethnic origins sampled throughout Iran and compared them with sequences from strains from other locations. H. pylori from Iran are similar to others isolated from Western Eurasia and can be placed in the previously described HpEurope population. Despite the location of Iran at the crossroads of Eurasia, we found no evidence that the region been a major source of ancestry for strains across the continent. On a smaller scale, we found genetic affinities between the H. pylori isolated from particular Iranian populations and strains from Turks, Uzbeks, Palestinians and Israelis, reflecting documented historical contacts over the past two thousand years.

Nothing that surprising, geography and ethnicity predict a lot of the H. pylori pattern of variation. Iranian Arabs are closer to the populations of the Levant than other Iranians. Those groups in Northwest and Northeast Iran seem similar to populations just over the border in Turkey and Uzbekistan. Finally, one of the local strains found was in Yazd, a notoriously isolated city (which explains the large Zoroastrian population, which persisted in out of the way locales). Though Yazd is near the geographic center of Iran, it is embedded within the vast agriculturally marginal lands of the center.

This geographic pattern has been used to explain particular patterns of genetic variation which make eastern and western Iran distinctive. Even if you imagine that Iranians descend from several pure ancient populations, Turks and Persians by and large, the fact that settlement is concentrated around the periphery will have long term effects on genetic variation due to gene flow. And yet while genes may change ineluctably, cultural variation seems to often be very sensitive to top-down dynamics. Even if the Persian-speakers of western Iran begin to resemble their Arab neighbors genetically because of a small, but consistent, flow of genes between the two groups, that does not entail the emergence of an Arabo-Persian hybrid language (though Arabic and Persian have influenced each other a great deal, though perhaps more from the former to the latter). That is because of the different natures of linguistic and genetic transmission.

Adding patterns of variation of genes of organisms which may be shaped by cultural habits or intercourse is another twist, which gives us a window into how humans interacted and behaved in the past. The concordance of genetic variation of the cattle and people of Tuscany in a surprising manner reinforced the plausibility of each via the common hypothesis which could explain the pattern. Or consider this paper from several years back: Genetic Analysis of Lice Supports Direct Contact between Modern and Archaic Humans.

When examining the dispersal of Pleistocene hominins, one of the more fascinating debates concern the patterns of biological and technological evolution in East Asia and other regions of the Old World. One suggestion emerging from palaeoanthropological research places a demarcation between these two regions in the form of a geographical division known as the Movius Line. Specifically, the suggestions that initially led to the Movius Line were based on observations of differing technological patterns, namely: the lack of Acheulean handaxes and the Levallois core traditions in East Asia.

Since Hallam L. Movius’ initial proposal, the recent discovery of handaxes within East Asia have led to suggestions that the Movius Line is in fact obsolete. Suggesting this may not in fact be the case is a recent paper by Stephen Lycett & Christopher Norton, which highlights three central points coming from a growing body of research: 1) “several morphometric analyses have identified statistically significant differences between the attributes of specific biface assemblages from east and west of the Movius Line”; 2) “The number of sites from which handaxes have been recovered in East Asia tend to be geographically sparse compared with many regions west of the Movius Line”;  3) “‘handaxe’  specimens  tend only  to comprise a  small percentage of the total number of artefacts recovered, a situation that  contrasts  with  many  classic  Acheulean  sites  in  western portions of the Old World, where bifacial handaxes may dominate assemblages in large numbers”.

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Not only do Dolphins have the ability to use marine sponges as foraging tools, they now also emit Chi according to a BBC article:

Humans do seem to feel a sense of kinship with dolphins, intelligent, playful, talkative creatures that they are. And separate research shows people feel the benefit from getting up close and personal with dolphins, says Dr Dobbs. This is because dolphins are thought to emanate “chi” – the essential life force in Chinese medicine – and the basis of various therapies for clinical depression, autism and brain damage.

I’m eagerly awaiting the discovery that Dolphins rearrange the ocean floor according to the principles of feng shui.

Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough have written a great article on the evolution of symbolic language. I’m mentioning it because they make two particularly interesting points. First point:

Language is in effect an emergent function, not some prior function that just required fine-tuning. Our inherited (“instinctive”) vocalizations, such as laughter, shrieks of fright, and cries of anguish, are under localized, mostly subcortical, neurological control, as are analogous instinctive vocalizations in other animals. By contrast, language depends on a widely dispersed constellation of cortical systems. Each system is also found in other primate brains, where they engage in other functions; their collective recruitment for language was apparently driven by the fact that their previously evolved functions overlapped with particular processing demands necessitated by language. Old structures came to perform unprecedented new tricks.

Using their own interpretations of previous research into birdsong, they also claim a relaxation of selection pressures may have played a role in the emergence of human language:

This reduction of emotional and contextual constraint on sound production opens the door for numerous other influences to play a role, allowing many more brain systems to participate in vocal behavior, including socially acquired auditory experience. In fact, such freedom from constraint is an essential precondition for being able to correlate learned vocal behaviors with the wide diversity of objects, events, properties, and relationships that language is capable of referring to. Hence an evolutionary de-differentiation process, while clearly not the whole story, may be a part of the story for symbolic language evolution.

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