Just reading this article in Slate, How To Throw an Election:

On paper, that’s what Sudan’s 21-year civil war was all about. More than 2 million people died in that terrible religious-themed conflict between the Muslim, Arab-led north and the pagan and Christian black south. In reality, almost no one in the south bought the unity line except their charismatic (and autocratic) leader, John Garang. Garang, a favorite of the West, negotiated Sudan’s 2005 peace treaty, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, that finally ended the war. The document was essentially written to ensure he would be elected Sudan’s first black president.

How is it that the current president of Sudan (picture to the left) isn’t black, but Barack Hussein Obama is black? I’m in the category of people who think the world “race” has some utility and maps onto real patterns of human variation, but sometimes it’s just funny. The distinction between the Arabs of Sudan and blacks of Sudan is kind of weird, because Arab is not a race, and Arabs can be of any race theoretically (there are even Arabs in Yemen’s Hadhramaut who have a lot of Malaysian ancestry because of international trade), though generally they are of the olive persuasion. Perhaps the Sudanese Arab elite wouldn’t want to be identified as black because that isn’t particularly prestigious, but they’d certainly be identified as such in other Arab countries. Anwar Sadat was the subject of some racist attitudes within Egyptian society because of his Sudanese ancestry (his mother was Nubian) and his dark skin.

Anyway, my amusement was mostly the fact that they went with this text, and, added a picture of a man who most Americans would identify as black but noted implicitly that he wasn’t black. American journalists are generally punctilious about following the rule of hyodescent when it comes to Americans, even when those individuals object to this framing, such as Tiger Woods (who is twice as Asian ancestrally as he is black). But I guess in an international context they will bend more. It reminded me of stories that Afro-Arabs were often allowed to stay at “whites only” facilities in the USA when segregation was the norm because they were foreign.

Note: Hypodescent isn’t just an American issue. There are controversies about a new biopic of Alexandre Dumas where he is played by Gérard Depardieu. Some people wanted a non-white actor cast because Dumas’ mother was mixed-race. But of course Dumas was mostly white, and he seems to basically have looked like a white guy. France of the 19th century was not the American South of the 19th century, and a drop of black blood did not make you persona non grate within white society. If you want real accuracy, perhaps cast Wentworth Miller as a young Dumas, he’s a white-looking mixed-race actor.

Image Credit: Slate & Whitehouse.gov

Adaptation, Plasticity, and Extinction in a Changing Environment: Towards a Predictive Theory. It’s beneficial to have a little give.

Enculturation and Wall Street. Rich, irrational herds? I think you can’t ignore the Magnetar strategy either. What may be rational for a firm or individual may result in the shrinking of the aggregate pie.

Peppers May Increase Energy Expenditure in People Trying to Lose Weight. No wonder so many people who like bland food are fat.

Y chromosomes of Northwest China. No surprise if you’ve read Empires of the Silk Road.

Crossing the Wallace Line. Patterns across species.

I listened today to an interview with Stephen Prothero, which outlined the argument in his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University, and he certainly brings some heft to this argument. Not having read the book, but listening to his talking points in interview and discussion, he seems to have a problem as an empirical matter with the contention regularly made in interfaith circles that all religions fundamentally point to the same truth. The metaphor that Houston Smith used whereby religions are separate paths to the same mountain top is referred to repeatedly. Prothero suggests that this universalistic model denies the deep reality of sectarian difference in belief, practice and outlook, and tends to be favored by those of liberal bent at ease with multiculturalism. He also notes that the foundation of common unity can be traced back to the perennial philosophy. This philosophy lay at the heart of the Traditionalist School, of which Smith was arguably a member, as was Julius Evola. So the tendency that Prothero is putting into focus is not necessarily associated with liberalism, though in the American context it is because of the Right’s capture by low church anti-elitist elements.
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Mirrored from http://wiringthebrain.blogspot.com

The question of what makes each of us the persons we are has occupied philosophers, writers and daydreamers for millennia but has been open to scientific inquiry over a far shorter time. The answer clearly lies in the brain and, somehow, in how it is “wired” (whether that refers to the amount or type of connections between different brain areas or to differences in how circuits function). But differences in brain wiring could be either innate or due to experience or environmental effects. This has been famously framed, by Galton originally, as a clash of nature versus nurture. The inspiration for this phrase may have come from Shakepseare’s The Tempest, in which Prospero refers to Caliban as a “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick”. That line encapsulates the notion of an innate character that is resistant to extrinsic influences, especially efforts to change aspects of a person’s personality – an idea which anyone who has children may find easy to relate to.

While neurology and neuroscience have offered direct evidence that differences in the brain affect behaviour, it is behavioural genetics that is typically seen as having contributed most directly to the nature-nurture debate. Twin and adoption studies, the mainstays of behavioural genetics, have demonstrated very conclusively that many aspects of personality, behaviour or other psychological traits are highly heritable – that is, a large proportion of the variance in the trait across the population is attributable to differences in genes.

The logic of the twin studies is usually the inverse of the statement above – to look at people who share various proportions of their genes and see how similar they are to each other. These generally show that monozygotic (“identical”) twins are far more similar to each other for most psychological traits than dizogytic (“fraternal”) twins. Also, adoptive children tend to resemble their biological relatives for psychological traits and are hardly more similar to their adoptive family members than they would be to any stranger in the street.
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Angst on the Aegean. Like many Third World countries Greece is characterized by familialism and rampant corruption typical of a low trust society (more on the familialism). Except thanks to geography Hellenes are like a boat being lifted by the rising tide of the dynamic economies of other European nations (the reason Mexico has a GDP PPP per capita of $15,000 and Colombia $9,000 probably has something to do the former’s more favorable location). Greek culture and government seems trapped in a particularly unfortunate equilibrium, and the buck stops soon. I have mooted that perhaps many nations in this position might benefit from the importation of a Suomalaiset bureaucratic class to “shock” the society to another state where virtuous circles of trust may arise. Such a mandarin caste would be congenitally incapable of eye contact, minimizing the ability to weasel out bribes.

Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs. I’d probably watch this show if I owned a TV.

The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places. Since this is a Carl Zimmer piece of course it’s worth reading. Turns out that there are many interesting insights one can glean from the tree of life which are of general import.

Lady Bugs to the Rescue in the Galapagos: Biocontrol of Insect Pest Is a Major Success, Entomologists Say. “Non-native species” become useful agents of “biocontrol” in the right context!

Ethnic Differences in Precursors of Type 2 Diabetes Apparent at an Early Age. It’s hard to be brown. Brown like me, not Gordon Brown, or faux brown.

“Save A Mother”: An Appeal. My friend Ruchira Paul is trying to raise money for a charity focused on Indian rural maternal health after she got to know the doctor who heads it. You can find out more here.

A few weeks ago I reviewed a paper on the the genetics of the Cape Coloured population. Within it there was a refrence to another paper, Deconstructing Jaco: genetic heritage of an Afrikaner. The title refers to the author himself. It was an analysis of his own pedigree going back to the 17th century, along with his mtDNA, his father’s mtDNA, and his Y lineage. The genetics is a bit thin, but the pedigree information is of Scandinavian quality from what I can tell. Praised the records of the Reformed Church!

The author’s utilizes an inversion of the typical method whereby a survey of a population may give some insight into individuals within that population. Rather, he leverages the thorough church records of his Afrikaner community, and his local roots, to paint a picture of his own ancestry. Then he compares the results to those of the community as a whole. Though an N of 1 certainly has limits it seems that the author concludes that he is relatively representative because some of the statistics that emerge out of pedigree analysis seem to fall in line with what genealogists working with the whole community have found. Additionally, it is clearly that he has deep roots within the historic Afrikaner nation, so assuming random mating and little population substructure, inferences from his pedigree may have some general utility.

Afrikaners apparently have some peculiarities genetically which has made them of some interest to scientists. It turns out that they seem to exhibit high frequencies of classical Mendelian diseases, a hallmark of inbreeding or population bottlenecks. This aligns well with the thesis that Afrikaners are the descendants of a small group of founders who arrived in the 17th century and entered into a long phase of demographic expansion, which culminated with their long Trek into the veld to escape English domination as well as perpetuate their practice of slavery (James Michner’s The Covenant is a fictionalization of this). As I have observed before the primacy of the “first settler” seems to loom large in the minds of demographers.

J. M. Greef, the author of the above paper, seems to refute this simple story in his own genealogy, though not the core aspect of the importance of the first founders. First the abstract:
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It’s on reduced marine predator size and how it effects the distribution of biomass. Remember you can find it on iTunes under “ResearchBlogCast.” Next week I pick the paper….

Last week I was emphasizing the fact that someone from Max Planck seemed to really be positive about the University of New Mexico research which indicates that there has been “archaic” admixture into the modern human lineage derived from Out-of-Africa. This was curious because Svante Pääbo is at the Max Planck Institute, and he’s reconstructing the Neandertal genome. I wasn’t going to do more than hint at rumors, so I’ll point to Thomas Mailund (after linking to posts on the topic of admixture or not) :

I really look forward to reading the Neandertal paper and see what it has to say about gene flow between us and Neandertals. A few month ago, while I visited his group in Leipzig, Svante Pääbo actually promised to show me the draft, but it never happened. In Ohio in February I talked to one of the authors on the paper and he wouldn’t reveal anything… I guess I just have to wait and can only hope that it won’t be too long.

Remember that I didn’t say anything, Thomas Mailund did. Though he wasn’t explicit either, so whatever conclusions you draw are your own. But perhaps a reminder that when people are talking about things in public that might seem curious or a bit farther than the evidence warrants, it may be an issue of you not knowing what they know.

How do non-genic polymorphisms influence disease risk? It might be gene expression and regulation.

Law tackles U.K. caste discrimination. Britain’s doing a great job assimilating at brown people with their ‘authentic’ barbaric traditions, isn’t it? (of all religions) Viva la multibarbarism!

Why Belief in God Is Not Innate. I think the author is trying too hard, playing shell games with various types of non-Christianity. Unfortunately this area is dominated by pro and anti religious polemicists who wish to promote a strong and exclusive form of their prediction.

Complexity and Diversity. Frequency dependence is critical in maintaining variation on the intra and inter species level. Economists aren’t the only ones who need to move beyond equilibrium thinking.

Liars’ Brains Wired Differently. I think many of you will click this, so I’ll let the title speak for itself.

I heard an interview on the radio by the author of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The study focused on elite universities. I decided to poke around and see what I could find. The chart on probability of acceptance by SAT score broken down by race has no surprises.

Equalizing standardized test scores I assume everyone knows that at elite universities there’s an Asian penalty, and blacks and Hispanics tend to get a bonus, with whites as a reference population in the middle. The author warned though that looking at standardized test scores may not indicate any discrimination against Asians, as it didn’t include in other “soft” aspects of the application such as leadership, which Asians naturally must lack because of their conformist and collectivist nature (OK, I added the last part!). But the class chart was more interesting to me….
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