Here’s an article from Canada on the debate about whether hybridization should be discouraged. I understand the impulse toward preserving nature as it is, but the drive for presumed purity seems almost fetishistic. Consider this sentence: ” Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?” What does “genetically pure” mean in a deep sense here? We know what it means instrumentally for the purposes of conservation genetics, but the way people talk about pristine lineages makes it seem an almost ethical concern.

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I just stumbled onto two amusing articles, Ancient legends once walked among early humans?, and The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago is no surprise. The second is a letter from a folklorist:

Sir, The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago (report, Mar 25) does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of “wild people” inhabiting the region. The evidence stretches from Herodotus to the present day. The Russian historian Boris Porshnev suggested that they are relict Neanderthals, although the lack of evidence of material culture suggests a type closer to Home erectus.

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We have some data that in fact older generations were more sexually promiscuous, contrary to the moral panic perpetually ascendant. As a follow up to my previous post, there is some scholarship which suggests that misattributed paternity rates have been declining. Recent decline in nonpaternity rates: a cross-temporal meta-analysis:

Nonpaternity (i.e., discrepant biological versus social fatherhood) affects many issues of interests to psychologists, including familial dynamics, interpersonal relationships, sexuality, and fertility, and therefore represents an important topic for psychological research. The advent of modern contraceptive methods, particularly the market launch of the birth-control pill in the early 1960s and its increased use ever since, should have affected rates of nonpaternity (i.e., discrepant genetic and social fatherhood). This cross-temporal meta-analysis investigated whether there has been a recent decline in nonpaternity rates in the western industrialized nations. The eligible database comprised 32 published samples unbiased towards nonpaternity for which nonoverlapping data from more than 24,000 subjects from nine (mostly Anglo-Saxon heritage) countries with primarily Caucasian populations are reported. Publication years ranged from 1932 to 1999, and estimated years of the reported nonpaternity events (i.e., the temporal occurrence of nonpaternity) ranged from 1895 to 1993. In support of the hypothesis, weighted meta-regression models showed a significant decrease (r = -.41) of log-transformed nonpaternity rates with publication years and also a decrease, albeit not significant (r = -.17), with estimated years of nonpaternity events. These results transform into an estimated absolute decline in untransformed nonpaternity rates of 0.83% and 0.91% per decade, respectively. Across studies, the mean (and median) nonpaternity rate was 3.1% (2.1%). This estimate is consistent with estimates of 2 to 3% from recent reviews on the topic that were based on fewer primary studies. This estimate also rebuts the beliefs and hearsay data widespread among both the public and researchers which contend nonpaternity rates in modern populations might be as high as about 10%.

I don’t have academic access, so I can’t say much more than that (if someone wants to email me the paper, contactgnxp -at – gmail -dot- com will work). Obviously I don’t think this is implausible on the face it; the “good old days” were often a lot less “good” than we remember (or what our elders remember and tell us).

Addendum: If you are from the cuckold enthusiast community, yes, I am aware that your perspective on whether the good old days were good may differ….

An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear vary, but 10% is a low bound. People are generally not convinced when I point out that this would mean that nearly 30% of paternal grandfathers are not paternal grandfathers. Most of my scientist acquaintances fancy up the myth by suggesting that they received this datum from research on family groups (where you have to take into account the error introduced by paternity misattribution) or organ matching for purposes of donation.

Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has some informal survey data which she presents in an article in The Los Angeles Times:

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Here

A few days ago on Twitter I wondered if economists had calculated the costs of the world having a diversity of languages, instead of one language. The logic is that unintelligibility naturally throws up barriers to communication, and the flow of ideas and labor. This is one reason why the European Union necessarily has less labor mobility than the United States all things equal, the vast majority of Americans can understand each other to a very high level of clarity, while Europeans can attain this only within their nations. Even in societies where English is widely understood the level fluency variance and lack of uniform idiom may produce a suboptimal lingua franca across these English semi-fluent societies.

But Christopher Burd challenged me on this. He suggested that semi-permeability across cultures may actually be a feature, not a bug. As an example he offered the relative isolation of the Russian academic community, and so its insulation from the orthodoxies of English-speaking linguistics, allowed for the wider acceptance of heterodox models such as the Nostratic superfamily. I asked Burd if he was making an analogy to the shifting balance theory, and he stated that he was.
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I have expressed some skepticism at the idea that in the year 2050 the United States of America will perceive itself as a majority-minority nation; that is, non-Hispanic whites will be be a minority. This projection is repeated and asserted so often that it’s a plausible background assumption when you’re making a model of the American future. But there are other factors which make this a shakier inference from current trends. A new article in The New York Times which has nothing to do with racial identity as such is a good tell as to the other factor at work, Plea to Obama Led to an Immigrant’s Arrest:

he letter appealing to President Obama was written in frustration in January, by a woman who saw her family reflected in his. She was a white United States citizen married to an African man, and the couple — college-educated professionals in Manhattan — were stymied in their long legal battle to keep him in the country.

One of the principals is introduced as white, but later on, you learn:

“I’ve been feeling very confused and ashamed as an American citizen,” she said, evoking her family’s eclectic immigrant origins.

Her father, an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, is the son of Scottish immigrants; her mother’s family were refugees from North Korea; her stepmother is Chinese; and her sister’s husband is Egyptian.

If her mother is one of the tiny minority of white European-descended Koreans, she happens to be one of those who also has a Korean first name (it isn’t too hard to find these data on the internet). In other words, The New York Times felt that it was permissible for the purposes of this article to frame one of the individuals profiled as white despite the fact that more precisely she’s Eurasian as is clear within the text of the article itself (she may also have identified herself as white to the reporter). I am not sure that she would have been defined as white if her husband was not an African immigrant, as for narrative purposes that is probably a better contrast effect. But imagine if her mother’s family were black immigrants from Jamaica: The New York Times would not define her as white I would hazard in that case.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

From Ruchira Paul, who analyzes her own friend network. One issue which I think is relevant is that many people have several Facebook accounts for several different purposes. It’s an interesting window into the psychology of different individuals, as some seem happy to go along with Facebook’s preference of a unitary identity, while others resist it and suborn the intent with Facebook itself.

Subprime for Students – Why does so much federal money go to for-profit schools—and what happens when the system crashes? Steve Eisman, a Cassandra of the subprime meltdown in real estate, is now focused on the student loan & grant racket in the for-profit education industry. I have nothing against competition forcing the relatively static higher education complex to evolve. In fact I favor it. But with massive government subsidies with minimal oversight being directed toward higher education the market is producing entities which emerge not to provide a genuine service to potential students, but to capture as much of the cash flow from the feds as possible. Barring elimination of government subsidies more aggressive oversight seems the only avenue of correcting the problems in this sector.

Is Google Docs Destined To Be a Revolutionary or Footnote?. First, Google Docs lacks some of the power for presentations which desktop office packages have. Second, the flakiness of internet connections means that many people won’t use it for ‘mission critical’ tasks yet. But I assume that over the next ten years you will start to see a shift from desktop applications to web applications even in office productivity software.

Do Not Log-Transform Count Data, Bitches! R gives you no excuse.

The Essence of Pleasure. Human flourishing is more than “doing the sums.”

Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber. Eric Michael Johnson presents a powerful case. Though do note that in general Dan Sperber, the target of Johnson’s critique, views the overall research program he’s criticizing positively.

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