For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.
The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.
Not too surprising. But here’s a question: does anyone out there have problems writing by hand, period? I do so little on pen/pencil & paper* that I have been noticing some strangeness in my non-signature writing. Usually when I have to send a letter where I have to write out the address, or perhaps to write something on a card. A lot of our day to day tasks are implicit/subconscious. Our “reflexes” emerge through repetition. But what happens when “basic” tasks become exceptional events? I’ve probably gotten much better at typing with my fingers on my smartphone’s screen at this point than printing out letters. As for cursive, don’t even go there….
* Supermarket shopping lists are now a constantly updated Google Doc which I access in my smart phone.
My friend Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection is going solo and joining the crew at Wired Science Blogs. Since I have otherfriendsthere the RSS addition will be natural. They better take care of her there. I know from first hand experience that the editors in these digs pay attention to the needs of the bloggers. In any case, Sheril has been someone with whom I’ve had extremely positive interactions with every since we shared space on ScienceBlogs, so I’m definitely excited for her and will keep an eye on what she’s up to. You should too!
Via the Demography Matters blog, Russian birthrate seems to have recovered:
By 2009, the official TFR had risen to 1.537, 1.417 in urban areas and 1.900 in rural areas. Both urban and rural TFRs rose by about the same amount from 2000 to 2009, about 0.330. Vital statistics for 2010 were just released by the national statistics office, GOSKOMSTAT, also known as ROSTAT. The birth rate continues to rise but not as sharply in the past two years as it did in 2007 and 2008. One must wonder if the slower increase in the past two years suggests the birth rate revival may be running out of steam or that it may be due to the global recession. But natural decrease is now but one-fourth of what is was in 2000 and that is a truly dramatic turnaround. The TFR can be estimated at about 1.56 for 2010 although we must wait for the official TFR when it is released later this year. Births for January 2011 have also been released and those are down slightly from January 2010, 131,454 from 132,371. One month hardly defines a trend but I thought I’d pass that along.
This is still below replacement, but is substantially higher than the estimates from 2000, when the birth rate per woman bottomed out to roughly 1.2. At the time, everyone was extrapolating a near-certain birth spiral.
This brings to mind an article from Nature from a couple of years ago that argued that fertility follows a “J” curve with respect to human development. The graph plots fertility against human development (HDI) by country in two time periods:
That is, rather than fertility declining irreversibly with higher levels of development (which is what one might have thought in 1975, or in Russia through the 1990s); it appears that fertility seems to recover a bit at the highest levels of development. This doesn’t apply to all countries — Japan and Italy may have been left behind — but partially explains the relatively high fertility rate of, say, native-born Americans. Explaining the drop in fertility with rising development is easy; explaining the subsequent rise is a little tougher. I see two basic options:
1) It’s important that the measure here is HDI, as opposed to GDP/capital. What’s crucial is the level of female empowerment. Where women have the option to work and raise children, they frequently do so. Where they cannot as easily (Germany for instance, where a substantial cohort of women remain childless and attached to the workforce), women are simply forced to choose. It’s no coincidence that countries like Japan or Italy see plummeting fertility even at high levels of income.
2) This represents the optimal parenting strategy across income ranges. At Malthusian levels of income, additional income is spent on more children. As incomes rise, families start to face a “quantity/quality” tradeoff that leads to them invest more in fewer children. At yet higher levels of income, families are able to invest fully in multiple children.
It’ll be worth seeing whether some of the low-fertility countries out there today — particularly in Southern/Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia — recover. At some point, many countries will also start maxing out their HDI, and we’ll need another indicator. Perhaps people are reading Selfish Reasons to Have Children.
I’m more a connoisseur of the trailers of summer films than a viewer of them. But I notice that a new Conan film is coming out, after years of delays which I was blissfully ignorant of. But honestly this is not a franchise I’d have thought would be up for a “reboot,” but here we are. I have never read more than one of Robert E. Howard’s stories, but the two 1980s films which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger I’ve watched half a dozen times each. They’re campy and silly, but generally fun if your tastes run toward juvenile, or, you are a juvenile. But the trailer for the new edition makes it seem overly serious, without the budgetary sizzle to render it palatable. Below is the trailer for the 2011 film, along with those for the two earlier ones.
Judging by some of the amusing search queries I find every Friday people have a wide range of tastes and fetishes when it comes to pornography. From what I can tell the realized phenotypic interval in mate choice is less varied and eye-opening, but exists nonetheless. Why? Is there a rhyme or reason, or is it simply random chance and the necessity of the biological clock ticking? These are not issues which aren’t discussed or mooted thoroughly regularly. The popular science literature is littered with hypotheses from social and evolutionary psychology. How else could you have a books such as The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature and Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. This is sexy science by definition. Not Physics Letters.
There are three broad issues which have interested me in the domain of attraction and evolution. First, what is the character of cultural universals of beauty rooted in biological preferences? Second, what is the character of cultural variation in beauty rooted in contingencies or local conditions? And third, what are the genetic and non-genetic factors in individual mate preference? In this post I’ll focus on the last. Not to put a fine point on it: are you born with a “type,” or is your “type” a matter of chance and necessity after you are born? An interesting twist on the second issue is that one phenomenon which falls into the “not born” but biological category is the process of sexual imprinting. For example, you may exhibit attraction to individuals who resemble your opposite sex parent.* The clear connection to the presumed “Oedipus complex” of this probably explains it prominence.
Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with Haldane’s rule, explains three facts:
– The lack of Neandertal Y chromosomal lineages in modern humans.
– The lack of Neandertal mtDNA lineages in modern humans.
– The probable existence of Neandertal autosomal ancestry in modern humans.
If you don’t know, Haldane’s rule basically suggests that there’s going to be some sort of breakdown in the heterogametic sex. In humans females are homogametic, XX, and males are heterogametic, XY. The breakdown need not be death (or spontaneous abortion). It could be sterility (e.g., some mutation or genetic incompatibility which results in the malfunctioning of the flagella of sperm would do it).
So you have a scenario where only Neandertal males are interbreeding with the intrusive groups from the south. The hybrids from these pairings would then lack Neandertal mtDNA, since mtDNA is passed only from mothers. But the male offspring would have Neandertal Y chromosomes. This is where Haldane’s rule kicks in: these males in their turn would not reproduce. Therefore only the female hybrids would pass on their genes. These females obviously don’t pass on a Y chromosome. And, they would pass on their non-Neandertal mother’s mtDNA.
Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations are equally distant. This is obviously wrong on the face of it if you look at any genetic distance measures. West Eurasians, even those without recent Sub-Saharan African admixture (e.g., North Europeans) are closer than East Eurasians, who are often closer than Oceanians and Amerindians. One explanation I offered is that these latter groups were subject to greater genetic drift through a series of population bottlenecks. In this framework the number of generations until the last common ancestor with Sub-Saharan Africans for all groups outside of Africa should be about the same, but due to evolutionary factors such as more extreme genetic drift or different selective pressures some non-African groups had diverged more from Africans than others in terms of their genetic state. In other words, the most genetically divergent groups in relation to Africans did not diverge any earlier, but simply diverged more rapidly.
Dienekes Pontikos disagreed with such a simple explanation. He argued that admixture or gene flow between Africans and non-African groups since the last common ancestor could explain the differences. I am now of the opinion that Dienekes may have been right. My own confidence in the “serial bottleneck” hypothesis as the primary explanation for the nature of relationships of the phylogenetic tree of human populations is shaky at best. Why my errors of inference?
There were two major issues at work in my misjudgments of the arc of the past and the topology of the present. In the latter instance I saw plenty of phylogenetic trees which illustrated clearly the variation in genetic distance from Africans for various non-African groups. Why didn’t I internalize those visual representations? It was I think the power of the “Out of Africa” (OoA) with replacement paradigm. Even by the summer of 2010 I had come to reject it in its strong form, due to the evidence of admixture with Neanderthals, and rumors of other events which were born out to be true with the publishing of the Denisovan results. But to a first approximation the clean and simple OoA was still looming so large in my mind that I made the incorrect inference, whereby all non-Africans are viewed simply as a branch of Africans without any particular differentiation in relation to their ancestral population. Secondarily, I also was still impacted by the idea that most of the genetic variation you see in the world around us has its roots tens of thousands of years ago. By this, I mean that the phylogeographic patterns of 25,000 years in the past would map on well to the phylogeographic patterns of the present. This assumption is what drove a lot of phylogeography in the early aughts, because the chain of causation could be reversed, and inferences about the past were made from patterns of the present. My own confidence in this model had already been perturbed when I made my errors, but it still held some sort of sway in my head implicitly I believe. It is one thing to move on from old models explicitly, but another thing to remove the furniture from your cognitive basement and attic.
I have moved further from my preconceptions between then and now. It took a while to sink in, but I’m getting there. A cognitive “paradigm shift” if you will. In particular I am more open to the idea of substantive back migration to Africa, as well as secondary migrations out of Africa. A new paper in Genome Research is out which adds some interesting details to this bigger discussion, and seems to weigh in further against my tentative hypothesis that serial bottlenecks and genetic drift can explain variation in distance to Africans of various non-African groups. Human population dispersal “Out of Africa” estimated from linkage disequilibrium and allele frequencies of SNPs:
There was a reference to complex pre-Cambrian life in a book I’m reading, Kraken, and it made me double-check Wikipedia’s Cambrian explosion entry. Lacking total clarity, I decided to read a new paper which was published in Nature, Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes. The Cambrian explosion is pegged to ~500 million years ago, but these data indicate a freshwater ecosystem which predates ~1 billion years before the present. Also, there was weird stuff in the discussion which startled me:
…Early eukaryotes were clearly capable of diversifying within non-marine habitats, not just in marine settings as has been generally assumed. This idea directly supports phylogenomic studies which find that the cyanobacteria evolved first in freshwater habitats and later migrated into marine settings….
Cyanobacteria are the ubiquitous blue-green algae which were’t familiar with. New Scientist has some quotes from paleontologists who seem to think that this paper is credible. There’s a good and a bad to this. The good, I’ll have to read up on this area which I’m so fuzzy about in terms of details. The bad is that it slices my finite time pie even more.
I’m not particularly a fan of Werner Herzog films, but I think I might check out his new documentary on Upper Paleolithic art, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Chauvet Cave in France is the subject of the film, which is in 3-D. In media appearances Herzog has claimed that the cave was sealed for 20,000 years before being discovered in 1994. To maintain its pristine character it is closed to the public, so the filmmakers clearly had to jump a lot of hoops to get their footage. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is opening in limited release this Friday, but from what I can tell that basically means it is showing at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, period. So I’ll have to wait for it when it goes nationwide.
My friend Holden Karnofsky has a review of the Greg Mortenson affair over at the The GiveWell Blog:
There has been a lot of coverage of the scandals around the Central Asia Institute. The founder has been accused of fabricating inspiring stories, as well as of spending less than half of the millions of dollars he’s raised on building schools.
In a sense this doesn’t indicate impressive foresight on our part: nearly all charities we examine do not receive recommendations or distinctions, so it’s not as though we spotted the fabrications and financial mismanagement ourselves. Yet in the bigger picture, I see this incident as a vindication of our approach to giving: it’s a reminder that you shouldn’t give charities the benefit of the doubt.
