With the current economic malaise in the developed economies and the rise of the “B.R.I.C.s” you hear a lot about “China” and “India.” There is often a tacit acknowledge that China and India are large diverse nations, but nevertheless in a few paragraphs they often get reduced to some very coarse generalizations. What’s worse is when you compare China and India to nations which simply aren’t on their scale. For example, over at Brown Pundits there is sometimes talk about India vs. Bangaldesh/Pakistan/Nepal/Sri Lanka. The problem is that the appropriate comparison are specific Indian states, not the whole nation. Uttar Pradesh, the largest Indian state in population, is actually in the same range as Bangladesh and Pakistan. Similarly, when comparing social metrics in Bangaldesh vs. India, one should focus on culturally similar regions, such as the state of West Bengal, not the sum average of India as a nation.

Similarly, we look at frenetic Chinese growth and worry about how they are “leaving us behind” (from an American perspective). But do take a step back to wonder how much the Chinese are leaving the Chinese behind?

Below are two charts which show the yawning chasm within these mega-nations on the scale of states (at a finer grain the variation is even greater). First a rank order of Chinese provinces by GDP PPP, with comparable nations interspersed within. PPP values shouldn’t be taken too literally, and the Chinese data seem to overestimate the values on a province level basis by 10-15%. But you get the general picture.

Read More

The Atlantic has a huge profile of E. O. Wilson up. The main course is his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. It seems to be an elaboration of some of the ideas in the infamous Martin Nowak paper which resulted in a huge counter-response from biologists. But this part was kind of fun:

Wilson defined sociobiology for me as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all organisms.” Gould savagely mocked both Wilson’s ideas and his supposed hubris in a 1986 essay titled “Cardboard Darwinism,” in The New York Review of Books, for seeking “to achieve the greatest reform in human thinking about human nature since Freud,” and Wilson still clearly bears a grudge.

“I believe Gould was a charlatan,” he told me. “I believe that he was … seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.” It is easy to imagine Wilson privately resenting Gould for another reason, as well—namely, for choosing Freud as a point of comparison rather than his own idol, Darwin, whom he calls “the greatest man in the world.”

If you read much of my stuff you know that I don’t think much of Gould, but I have to air stuff like this so that readers won’t keep citing the man as an authority. Though perhaps it is ironic that in the case of the evolution of sociality Wilson and Gould probably share more in common in their final conclusion than they do with the evolutionary mainstream.

1) Weird search query of the week: “hat is the difference between loose and tight magazine circulation”

2) Picture of a kitten that we fostered recently….

Read More

That’s what a reader below asks. To some extent I wondered this when Dan MacArthur and Ilana Fisher put their genotypes out there. They have a son, and so now you can generate a likely matrix of risks for Tobias MacArthur since you have his parents’ genotypes. Since he’s only a bit over a year old I doubt anyone could obtain his consent in the matter. But this is a far cry from putting Tobias’ genotype out there without asking him. I suspect that genetic counselors would want to gather together a lynch mob for the first parents that did this.

But then again, this is a quantitative issue, not a qualitative one. Genetic risks are by and large probabilistic even if you know someone’s genotype. Instead of having to generate a distribution of outcomes from their parents you have the specific pairs of alleles. So you get a more precise understanding, but it’s not necessarily a game changer. Additionally, there are parents who publish memoirs…and write blogs, where they divulge a lot of personal information about their children (explicitly and implicitly) without their consent. Again, the issue about genetics being different from other personal information seems to loom in the background here. In some ways it is different because it’s relatively fixed. You can’t just get a new genotype from the social security information, and your parents’ genotype isn’t going to change. But as readers have observed phenotype is already a rather good signal of genotype.

It’s been 10 months since Zack Ajmal first contacted me about the possibility of the Harappa Ancestry Project. I was of two minds. On the one hand I did think there was a major problem with undersampling some regions of South Asia. But, it seemed that the 1000 Genomes would fix that soon enough. As it turns out the 1000 Genomes has been a bit slower than I had anticipated (and I assume that the nixing of the Indian samples was a matter of politics not science). So I’m glad Zack started the project when he did.

At this point he’s hit the zone of diminishing marginal returns when it comes to participants. Looking through his samples he has a little over 100 non-founders of unadmixed South Asian ancestry (I’m not a founder because both my parents are in the database). I decided to prune the individuals down to this selection, and tack on a lot of his reference populations, with a bias toward South Asians, and see what I could find. I used his K = 11 ADMIXTURE run, since this seems maximally informative for South Asians. You can find the file here.

Read More

I thought of that when stumbling upon this story of Spanish babies being sold to adoptive parents, while the biological parents were told that the baby had died:

“The father of a friend of mine admitted to him that both he and I had been bought from a priest and a nun from Zaragoza after being born in the Miguel Servet hospital,” said Antonio Barroso, who discovered four years ago that he was adopted. DNA tests have proved that the people who raised him were not his real parents.

“There are cases that are accompanied by proof in the form of DNA tests and others that are simply mothers who suspect that their babies were stolen,” said lawyer Enrique Vila, who represents the National Association of Irregular Adoptions. “We think it was an organised mafia.”

Some of the people who want to expose this practice in terms of its magnitude are trying to make the case for coordinated international DNA databases (some of the babies were sent abroad). That’s not possible now, but in 10 years in may be. To ascertain relatedness is actually rather easy, but by that point many people in the developed world will have their full genomes. At that point we’ll also get a better sense of the scale of cuckoldry (I suspect that the frequency is less than people assume). More disturbingly we’ll also get a better understanding of the prevalence of incest.

All of this ties back I think to the issues about how exposing your genetic information to the public impacts your family. I don’t necessarily think at a discussion of these issues is useless or unwarranted, but, I do hope that we can prioritize our concerns, because there’s going to be a lot to talk about….

My post from last week, Relative angels and absolute demons, got a lot of circulation. Interestingly I received several emails from self-described lurkers who asked me for recommendations on world history, with a particular thought to rectify deficiencies in non-European history. These were people who were not looking for exceedingly abstruse monographs. Below are some suggestions….

Read More

I recently noted that the SDA Archive has an American Community Survey interface. The ACS has huge sample sizes because the US government can afford to do extensive surveys. And naturally you find some really interesting facts. For example, there’s a variable which tells you about the presence of grandchildren in the household. In some nations this wouldn’t be a big deal, but in the USA it is not too common. You can also look at this by state, which is what I did. Then I compared the total proportion to those limited with college degrees or higher. No surprise, those with college degrees tended to be less likely to have grandchildren living at home…. But can you guess which state has the highest proportion of grandchildren living at home? And which states deviate from the trendline? Surprises to me….

Read More

Humans seem to have a strong bias toward narratives. We like stories. This is obvious when you read sports columns. Most of the time there’s really no substantive value-add. If you want substance, just check box scores. But we want a story. So sports columnists give us a story. Usually something mildly counter-intuitive, general platitudes and conventional wisdom with just a twist. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, no one cares. How many people remember Bill Walton talking about how Shawn Bradley was a better basketball player than Shaquille O’Neil?

Much the same applies to political punditry. There was no point in speculating whether Rick Perry would, or wouldn’t, do well as an aspirant nominee of the Republican party for the presidency. We’d know sooner or later. I really got tired of Texas pundits like Eric Greider going on about how we shouldn’t underestimate him. Aside from the fact that he was smart enough to be an air force officer, everything else implies that he’s not too sharp, validated especially by his recent debate performances. But we wanted a story, so there was a demand for pundits from Texas talking Perry’s prospects up. Now we have pundits like Ross Douthat echoing the line that Mitt Romney is inevitable as the nominee. Great. But remember when Ross and Matt Yglesias simply couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Hillary Clinton wasn’t the nominee in December of 2007? I do.

So we love stories. That’s a human universal. As human beings we have particular cognitive orientations which are general across our species. Our facility for language for example. An appreciation of art and other cultural productions which don’t seem to have immediate utility. But there is also variation. Our tastes differ. But sometimes we forget that. I thought of that when reading this piece in Slate, For the Love of Science Fiction. The author begins “…I disdained science fiction for many years, considering it too short on humanity and too long on pointless technical specs.” There is definitely going to be a mention of Ursula K. Le Guin. The author concludes:

Read More

Fascinating, Orbital cycles, Australian lake levels, and the arrival of aborigines:

But the other big feature is that the lake-filling events that occurred after 50,000 years ago were much smaller than those which occurred before. Climactically, the conditions 10,000 years ago should have been the same as the conditions 115,000 years ago. But the lake was only a fraction of the size. The authors find no natural causes which can explain this. So they suggest that the aridity starting around 50,000 years ago is related to the reduction in forest and increase in grasslands which occurred at this time. This vegetation change was a result of a huge increase in the frequency of fire in central Australia, which allowed fire-adapted plants to prosper at the expense of moisture-retaining forest. The increase in fire at this time is generally associated with the arrival of the first people on the Australian continent. It is known that of Australia’s megafauna went extinct at this time, but Magee et al. (2004) show that even the tropical rains were effected by human migration, with drastic changes to the continent’s largest river basin.

If you read some of the academic literature on fire ecology you have a hard time not coming to the conclusion that modern humans terraformed the planet Earth! The hallmark of modern H. sapiens seems to be extinction of large organisms, a propensity to go where no hominin has gone before, and copious utilization of the “red flower.”