What do science bloggers blog about? My study of the Wikio Top 100:

As a former scientist, I like evidence-based blogging so I needed a dataset to test my theory that ‘all top bloggers are biologists’. To get a randomish sample of big science bloggers, I did a dodgy analysis of the blogs in the Wikio Top 100 science bloggers ranking.

Here’s the breakdown of bio bloggers topicality:

The large number of neuroscience bloggers has always perplexed me. Any idea what’s going on there?

A minor note: could someone at Wikio update my blog’s address? I tried to do it let myself but it wouldn’t let me. Would be nice to get that before I drop off the list of top 20 science blogs.

Razib has an excellent post with information familiar to India-watchers: India is very diverse. In particular, it has a South which does well on levels of human development (and increasingly income as well); while the states in the “BIMARU” North perform abysmally on both economic and human development indicators. These kinds of disparities are frequently overlooked by commentators — both in India and elsewhere — who have as their primary analytical unit the nation-state.

Will Wilkinson has dubbed a related phenomenon the “UN Fallacy” — the error of assuming that two areas can be usefully compared simply because they are nation-states. So, for instance, you hear nonsense related to how “China has overtaken Japan.” Of course, on a per capita basis China remains poorer than El Salvador. Yet because the Chinese have aggregated themselves into a relatively large political unit, we think of the Chinese as “getting rich” and the Salvadorians as “poor.” We think of India as surging ahead, though it has more poor people than Africa.

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One of the issues with pre-modern trade is that international banking and communication as we understand it did not exist, and trust was a major problem across distance and time. This is why dispersed ethno-religious groups could be the vectors by which private trade occurred between civilizations, because there was a circle of trust which existed between these groups despite their particular residence. Jews are the most famous cases of this, but the pre-Islamic Silk Road saw a similar phenomenon with the Sogdians. In the modern world various ethno-religious groups from Gujarat whose traditional occupation is trade also maintain this link to the past of international commerce, which was embedded in kin and religious networks, not transnational corporate institutions.

A major way to establish fellow feeling and trust is religion. The Islamic scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta trekked from his native Morocco across the world of Islam, all the way to China. Notably throughout his travels he remained within the confines of a predominantly Muslim subculture. This made sense in regions where Islam was the religion of the majority, or of the minority which was in power (India), but even in China he found refuge among that region’s Islamic community (the presence of Muslims was important, because he could always offer up his services as an Islamic legal expert, though in some cases he was obviously drafted into the role). Ibn Battuta flourished in the 14th century, when Islam may have been ceding ground to Western Christendom (e.g., in Spain), but was waxing in the east, and in particular the Indian ocean basin. Already regions of maritime Southeast Asia such as Aceh were Muslim, and within the next three centuries all of what is today Indonesia would come under sway of rulers who were professing Muslims (with the minor exception of Bali).

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Update: Results so far….

Too harsh – 3.0%
About right – 15.0%
Not harsh enough, though he shouldn’t be ostracized – 26.0%
He should be ostracized from science – 56.0%

The editor of Cognition believes that Marc Hauser was guilty of fabrication in light of what he’s seen in the Harvard report on Hauser’s misconduct. Marc Hauser is on on leave, and will be supervised in his research in the future. But, he continues to teach extension courses. It doesn’t seem as if his work on human moral cognition is under a cloud. There are other researchers working in the same area who have been able to replicate his general findings. Rather, it seems that it was the work on cotton-top tamarins which is under scrutiny, in large part because Marc Hauser was the only one who was doing that sort of research on that organism.

In the end this is about a violation of trust. Alison Gopnik told Nicholas Wade that “It’s always a problem in science when we have to depend on one person.” Science is a famously a self-regulating culture. The system works because science is about something real, and scientists are constrained by the data. But, science is also a human enterprise so conscious and unconscious bias enters into the system. The question is whether the system works well enough that scientists trust their colleagues to report truthful results. If every scientist had to check in on every other scientist I suspect that the system would collapse because there aren’t enough labor hours to go around. Science is very competitive, and many people work many hours for only modest renumeration. Careers hang in the balance, and many are weeded out. People accept this because there is at least a perception of a minimal level of fairness. Finally, on a social scale the economic growth which our society depends on is driven in large part by scientific innovation. The culture of science is the engine upon whom billions depend.

My first thought about what has happened with Hauser is that he is “too big to fail.” He’s at Harvard, and, he has powerful friends. It reminds me of what a friend of mine told me about what occurred at a major tech corporation he had worked at. Apparently there had been an incompetent hire who lasted for years because no one wanted to take responsibility and fire him, because the very fact that managers actually hired him was a negative reflection on their discernment if someone eventually passed judgement on this individual. So there wasn’t an incentive to bite the bullet, and the incompetent employee was moved from department to department for years.

But I’m curious what readers think. Below is a survey asking what you think of the magnitude of Marc Hauser’s punishment in relation to his infractions. I’ll update the results at the top of this post every day for a week.
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Last weekend I mentioned a paper, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans, which had the best coverage of disparate African populations we’ve seen so far. The map to the left shows the various ancestral population clusters inferred from the samples they had. Really the only failing is that they didn’t have samples from Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Unfortunately, that’s not totally trivial. These are regions which were effected by the Bantu Expansion, with southern Angola in particular still having remnants of Khoisan language speakers which likely attest to the pre-Bantu populations. Luckily for us innovation and scientific ingenuity are such that minor questions can quickly be answered because of how cheap the basic methods have become. A new paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics tackles Mozambique in particular, and discerns a heretofore unknown possible population cluster. A genomic analysis identifies a novel component in the genetic structure of sub-Saharan African populations:

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I am currently reading Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. The first half of the book is about Africa, and much of that is given to religious conflict in Nigeria. Africa’s most populous nation happens to be split down the middle religiously, with a Muslim north and a Christian south, meeting in the “Middle Belt” to contest. Griswold describes a very competitive religious marketplace.

One thing I was curious about though: are the religious conflicts in Nigeria simply due to coalitional fissures, or deep substantive divergences which track the religious differences? To illustrate, if Muslims and Christians share a village, then Christians who slaughter pigs in public places because pork is their primary protein source will likely have tensions with Muslims, who as a matter of substance object to pig slaughter which might pollute the landscape (this is a problem in parts of Southeast Asia where Muslims live downstream from Christians). In contrast, if you have economic difficulties in a region, and it is fractured ethnically or religiously, trivial tensions may quickly exploded into violence. In other words, in the second case religion is just a “quick & dirty” coalitional marker around which inevitable conflicts are going to swirl (in Mauritius Muslim Indo-Mauritians play a “wild card” role between Christian Creoles and Hindu Indo-Mauritians, despite greater substantive religious affinity with the Christians and greater cultural and racial affinity with the Hindus).

To answer this question I looked at the World Values Survey. For Nigeria there was data from 1995 and 2000, so I combined them to increase my sample size. Additionally, I wanted to focus on the Yoruba ethnic group, which is religiously divided between Muslims and Christians. In the WVS the religious categories actually break down further among the Christians, and I selected Pentecostals and Protestants for the Yoruba because of the large N for these groups, along with Muslims. Additionally, I selected Hausa Muslims as a comparison. The Hausa are an overwhelmingly Muslim northern ethnic group, while the Yoruba are a religiously pluralistic southern group (the Igbo of the southeast are as Christian as the Hausa are Muslim).

Please note that the survey was taken during a period of military rule by Hausa strongmen. I included only a subset of questions. You can follow to link to do your own queries.

Mus = Muslim, Pent = Pentecostal, Prot = Protestant. Some cells for Pentecostals are missing because for some questions all Protestants were aggregated together.

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Have a good weekend.

The ratio of human X chromosome to autosome diversity is positively correlated with genetic distance from genes. This is in my RSS, but not on the Nature site, so here’s the snip I have: “The ratio of X-linked to autosomal diversity was estimated from an analysis of six human genome sequences and found to deviate from the expected value of 0.75. However, the direction of this deviation depends on whether a particular sequence is close to or far from the nearest gene. This pattern may be explained by stronger locally acting selection on X-linked genes compared with autosomal genes, combined with larger effective population sizes for females than for males.” Looks interesting.

Journal: Hauser fabricated data. Scientists can be “too big fail” it seems.

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Over the past decade evolutionary geneticist Mike Lynch has been articulating a model of genome complexity which relies on stochastic factors as the primary motive force by which genome size increases. The argument is articulated in a 2003 paper, and further elaborated in his book The Origins of Genome Architecture. There are several moving parts in the thesis, some of which require a rather fine-grained understanding of the biophysical structural complexity of the genome, the nature of Mendelian inheritance as a process, and finally, population genetics. But the core of the model is simple: there is an inverse relationship between long term effective population size and genome complexity. Low individual numbers ~ large values in terms of base pairs and counts of genetic elements such as introns.

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The idea that our genes can affect many of the traits that define us as individuals, including our personality, intelligence, talents and interests is one that some people find hard to accept. That this is the case is very clearly and dramatically demonstrated, however, by a number of genetic conditions, which have characteristic profiles of psychological traits. Genetic effects include influences on perception, sometimes quite profound, and other times remarkably selective. A recent study suggests that differences in perception in two conditions, synaesthesia and Williams syndrome, may share some unexpected similarities.

Williams syndrome is a genomic disorder caused by deletion of a specific segment of chromosome 7. Due to the presence of a number of repeated sequences, this region is prone to errors during replication that can result in deletion of the intervening stretch of the chromosome, which contains approximately 28 genes. The disorder is characterised by typical facial morphology, heart defects and a remarkably consistent profile of cognitive and personality traits. These include mild intellectual disability, with relative strength in language and extreme deficits in visuospatial abilities (including being able to perceive the relationships of objects in 3D space and to construct and mentally manipulate 3D representations). Williams patients are also highly social – often to the point of being over-friendly – empathetic and very talkative. This behaviour may belie a high level of anxiety, however.

One of the most remarkable features of Williams syndrome is the strong attraction of patients for music. Many show a strong interest in music from an early age and greater emotional responses to music. They are also more likely to play a musical instrument, some using music to reduce anxiety. A recent study from Elisabeth Dykens and colleagues adds a new twist to this story. They found in a neuroimaging experiment that in addition to activating the auditory cortex, music also stimulates visual activity and perceptions in Williams patients. In fact, this is not specific to music – non-musical sounds had the same or even stronger effects.

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