When perusing Asian groceries I occasionally run into cans of jackfruit. Or should I say “jackfruit,” because often what’s inside of the cans resembles jackfruit flavored wax. Real fresh jackfruit is soft and mushy. Unfortunately the preservation process turns canned jackfruit into a turgid and far less flavorful product. That being said, I recently purchased three different brands, and I found that Chaokoh brand wasn’t totally awful. I don’t know if I’d purchase it again, but I am considering it. It’s not real jackfruit by any means, but the flavor is stronger and the waxiness of the fruit flesh less pronounced.

Do readers have any experiences with canned jackfruit?

Image credit: Wikimedia

Meeting the Taino

In the comments below a few days ago someone expressed concern at the diminishing of genetic diversity due to the disappearance of indigenous populations. My response was bascally that it depends. The issue here is whether that disappearance is due to assimilation, or extinction. If a given population is genetically absorbed into another, obviously their genetic diversity is by and large maintained. What disappears are the specific genotypes, the combinations of gene pairs, which are distinctive to that given group. This is the same dynamic at the heart of the ‘disappearing blonde gene’ meme. Unless there is selection at the loci which encode or predispose one to blonde hair the ‘gene’ isn’t going anywhere. Rather, the implicit issue here is that blonde people are intermarrying with non-blonde people, and if the genetic variant has a recessive expression then the frequency of the trait will decrease. Populations with a high degree of homozygosity at the ‘blonde loci’ are distinctive in a very particular manner, but they’re no more or less ‘diverse’ than other populations which don’t manifest the same tendency.

A toy example will suffice. Take two populations, A and B, and one locus, 1, with two variants, X and x. Assume that the two populations are the same size. At locus 1 population A is 100% X, and population B is 100% x. In a diploid scenario then all the individuals in population A will be XX, and in B will be xx. When you add A + B you get a frequency of X of 0.5, and of x of 0.5 (since the two populations are balanced in size).

 

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Ruchira Paul points me to this peculiar article, Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’:

Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion.

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It’s been a while…what’s going on with Google+? I think we can conclude it isn’t a Facebook killer in anything like the medium term.  After moving away from Facebook I started posting again because almost all of my friends in “flesh space” simply don’t use Google+. Rather, Google+ has become a more elaborate extension of my twitter circle. I’ve got over 2,100 who’ve added me to their Google+ circles, and only 1,600 twitter followers. But I don’t do post much on Google+ at this point. For someone with my amount of time and interest two social networks seems optimal in terms of complements. That being said, as many have noted Google+ is more than just a social networking platform. Rather, it has to be understood as an extension of giving your whole suite of Google services an identity, specificity, and personality.

With all that said, Facebook is starting to get a little too busy for my taste. Does anyone else feel the same way? Mark Zuckerberg has known how much to “push it” for years, but my own suspicion is that he has to be very careful of a rapid implosion of usage due to feedback loops if he moves beyond a particular threshold.

Addendum: My various web offerings can be found at razib.com. Probably most relevant for you is the total feed.

One of the things I’m interested in is the perception by some that self-identified conservatives can mobilize better as a collective unit on the American political scene. To test that proposition I often poke around the General Social Survey. For example, it seems to be a common assumption among many liberals that women tend to be more supportive of abortion rights than men. This isn’t born out by the GSS data. There’s no sex difference. Until you correct for ideology. It turns out that among liberals women are more supportive of abortion rights…while among conservatives men are more supportive of abortion rights! If people socialize only with their own ideological subset then the perception of the relationship between sex and ideological opinions will differ a great deal.

Below I decided to attempt to ascertain differences between liberals and conservatives on “hot button” issues as a function of intelligence. I used WORDSUM to probe this. I classed those who scored 0-5 as dull, those who scored 6-8 as not dull, and those who scored 9 and 10 as smart. I also limited the sample to the year 2000 and later, and only non-Hispanic whites.

I’ll give you the results without comment.

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I have discussed the reality that many areas of psychology are susceptible enough to false positives that the ideological preferences of the researchers come to the fore. CBC Radio contacted me after that post, and I asked them to consider that in 1960 psychologists discussed the behavior of homosexuality as if it was a pathology. Is homosexuality no longer a pathology, or have we as a society changed our definitions? In any given discipline when confronted with the specter of false positives which happen to meet statistical significance there is the natural tendency to align the outcome so that it is socially and professionally optimized. That is, the results support your own ideological preferences, and, they reinforce your own career aspirations. Publishing preferred positive results furthers both these ends, even if at the end of the day many researchers may understand on a deep level the likelihood that a specific set of published results are not robust.

This issue is not endemic to social sciences alone. I have already admitted this issue in medical sciences, where there is a lot of money at stake. But it crops up in more theoretical biology as well. In the early 20th century Charles Davenport’s research which suggested the inferiority of hybrids between human races was in keeping with the ideological preferences of the era. In our age Armand Leroi extols the beauty of hybrids, who have masked their genetic load through heterozygosity (a nations like Britain which once had a public norm against ‘mongrelization’ now promote racial intermarriage in the dominant media!). There are a priori biological rationales for both positions, hybrid breakdown and vigor (for humans from what I have heard and seen there seems to be very little evidence overall for either once you control for the deleterious consequences of inbreeding). In 1900 and in 2000 there are very different and opposing social preferences on this issue (as opposed to individual preferences). The empirical distribution of outcomes will vary in any given set of cases, so researchers are incentivized to seek the results which align well with social expectations. (here’s an example of heightened fatality due to mixing genetic backgrounds; it seems the exception rather than the rule).

Thinking about all this made me reread James F. Crow’s Unequal by nature: a geneticist’s perspective on human differences. Crow is arguably the most eminent living population geneticist (see my interview from 2006). Born in 1916, he has seen much come and go. For those of us who wonder how anyone could accept ideas which seem shocking or unbelievable today, I suspect Crow could give an answer. He was there. In any case, on an editorial note I think the essay should have been titled “Different by nature.” Inequality tends to connote a rank order of superiority or inferiority, though in the context of the essay the title is obviously accurate. Here is the most important section:

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The New York Times has an obit. But if you don’t know who she is, really just read the Wikipedia entry.

I’ve gotten way behind on my RSS…though I caught up a bit over Thanksgiving.

West Hunter. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending’s blog.

Eurasian Sensation. Liberal Eurasian Australian blogger.

Matt Yglesias moved to Slate. This means that his salary is coming in large part from a firm which he has excoriated in the past. (Slate is owned by The Washington Post Company)

Rod Dreher is now at The American Conservative.

Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters. “Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics.” I think it is possible to earn a Ph.D. in physics with an average I.Q., but only from institutions like Razib-Khan’s-Internet-University, where you pay me $100 for me to send you a printout which purports to give you a Ph.D. in physics. In fact, if someone who is a Ph.D. in physics can send me their G.R.E. scores where they score less than a 550 on the mathematics section, and are willing to go public with this fact (so we can check their scholarly achievements and validate the quality of the institution), I will shell out $250 to this individual. Let’s set the date of expiration for 12/26, so I can budget this expense.

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In the middle years of the last decade there were many papers which came out which reported many ‘hard’ selective sweeps reshaping the human genome. By this, I mean that you had a novel mutation arise against the genetic background, and positive selection rapidly increased the frequency of that mutation. Because of the power and rapidity of the sweep many of the flanking regions of the genome would “hitchhike” along, generating long homogenized regions of linkage disequilibrium. If that’s a little dense for you, just understand that very strong selective events tend to result in disorder and distinctiveness in the local genomic region.

But the late aughts and the early years of the teens are shaping up give us a more subtle picture. Instead of classic hard sweeps, researchers are suggesting that there may also be many ‘soft’ sweeps, where selection draws upon the well of standing genic variation. Instead of a novel trait becoming prominent, one tail of the distribution would rise in frequency. The ‘problem’ with this model is that it’s not as tractable as the earlier one of hard sweeps, and selection on quantitative traits with many loci of small effect is more difficult to detect. Its effect on the genome is more subtle and understated, which means that statistical tests often lack the power to grasp onto the underlying dynamics. Naturally this means that there is an extension of statistical techniques to ever greater degrees of sophistication. A new paper in PLoS Genetics attempting to tease apart the various potential selective pressures in the human genome is reflective of that tendency. Signatures of Environmental Genetic Adaptation Pinpoint Pathogens as the Main Selective Pressure through Human Evolution:

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Some ethologists should try and get some research funded to model the “scramble” for “patchy resources” that occurs at Walmart on Black Friday.

(NSFW)