It is sometimes fashionable to assert that higher socioeconomic status whites are the sort who will impose integration on lower socioeconomic status whites, all the while sequestering themselves away. I assumed this was a rough reflection of reality. But after looking at the General Social Survey I am not sure that this chestnut of cynical wisdom has a basis in fact. Below are the proportions of non-Hispanic whites who have had a black friend or acquaintance over for dinner recently by educational attainment:
35% – Less than high school 36% – High school 47% – Junior College 45% – Bachelor 59% – Graduate
I thought this might have been a fluke, so I played around with the GSS’s multiple regression feature, using a logistic model. To my surprise socioeconomic status was positively associated with having a black person over for dinner, and age negatively associated. These two variables in fact tended to exhibit equal magnitude values in opposition, and always remained statistically significant. Just to clear, I created a variable Non-South vs. South below (being Southern increases likelihood of having had a black person over for dinner). All the individuals surveyed are non-Hispanic whites for the year 2000 and later. You can add and remove variables, but SEI and age tend to be rather stable, and statistically significant, throughout.
I highly recommend Åse Fixes Science, in light of our recent conversations about psychology. It’s a fascinating and important discipline, but it is hard to make heads or tails of it all.
A few weeks ago I met Chris Mooney for some drinks & snacks, and we talked about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. It was an interesting conversation. We have a long history, so it wasn’t as if we were strangers. I recall Chris from the late 1990s when we were both involved in the college “freethought” movement, and later when I followed his political journalism at The American Prospect. On the whole we’re on different political “teams,” though neither of us seems particularly enthusiastic “players,” so to speak (I think at this point I can disclose that when I emailed Chris a few times when he worked at TAPto object to items in a particular piece, I often found that he concurred with my specific objections). I assume that to push copies Chris had to make sure that the emphasis was on Republican and not conservative in the title for his new book (and also, it exhibits nice parallel to The Republican War on Science). For me this is unfortunate because I have a lot more sympathy for conservatism, than I do for Republicans. Of course that’s a trite thing to say. And bemoaning the state of party politics in the United States is as old as the origination of political coalitions over 200 years ago (remember, many of the Founders, including George Washington, opposed a party system, which they believed would produce unnecessary faction). But I am of the opinion that due to its sheer scale and diversity the United States of America may be poised for an age of sectional discord. A throwback to the first half of the 19th century in the first decades of the 21st. Sometimes “this time” is different.
What I do, as a historian, is take something apparently simple and make it more complicated. I wonder about how your curves, e.g., would be applied in real life. *Specific* couples, *particular* children–individuals, cases, persons, context.
I’m asking things like:
-What would your hypothetical psychopathic lovebirds do with that information?
Comfort is referring to this figure I generated, which shows the potential distribution of outcomes for two individuals who tend toward more psychopathy than the general population. It seems to me that this question is easily answered if simply replace “psychopathy” with “odds for heart disease.” Endophenotypes aren’t magical, they’re just sometimes hard to characterize. But once you get a good grip on them you can make standard quantitative genetic predictions. One of the points I wasn’t clear about in the chart is that I assume that the “trait” being measured is the tendency toward psychopathy as measured by a paper & pencil test in one’s youth. This does not entail that an individual in fact behaves like a psychopath. Rather, it simply implies that they’re odds of behaving like a psychopath as an adult are highly elevated. I can’t find the link, but there was a story (which I blogged) a few years ago about a scientist who was studying the peculiarities of psychopath brain structure…and found out that he himself exhibited the same morphology typical of a psychopath. The point is that changing the odds or loading the die does not entail that an outcome is determined.
For example, imagine that you have a long family history of alcoholism. You marry another person with the same history. This sort of thing is heritable, and you’ve just loaded the die for your children. How can you try and compensate? I can think of one simple strategy: convert to a cohesive religious group which bans alcohol consumption, such as Mormons or Salafi Islam. The key here is that the social group is the environment. One can’t likely change that given any environment one’s children are more likely to be alcoholics, but the basal odds are shifted a great deal if you go from being a Catholic to a Mormon.
Also, as a new parent, one thing that I have realized is that behavior genetic understanding of human nature is very useful, it tells us that “attachment parenting” is pretty much crazy. Really more of costly signalling for upper middle class couples than anything else (though less crazy than the 18th century French middle class craze for country wet-nurses which resulted in incredibly high infant mortality rates). Being raised in a Romanian orphanage fucks you up. Your parents, not so much. The “nature vs. nurture” debates are going to continue indefinitely. But parents are will continue to matter less on a day to day level than they think in relation to the outcomes of their children. You can get to set the ground-rules, but there’s no way you will dictate the game.
The special “Human Conflict” issue of Science seems free if you register. No time to read it now, but there’s a lot of interesting looking articles. (via Dienekes)
John Hawks already discussed the Keinan and Clark paper in Science, Recent Explosive Human Population Growth Has Resulted in an Excess of Rare Genetic Variants. To borrow a critique, much of human genomics up to this point has been WEIRD. A reanalysis of the same finite population sets, over and over. No longer. Soon thousands upon thousands of whole genomes will come online, and innumerable rare alleles will start filling the background in. The ultimate end point of this will be when whole families have 100X coverage, and a set of unique mutational variants to each individual within the family unit will become known.
Ed Yong has a piece in Nature on the problems of confirmation bias and replication in psychology. Yong notes that “It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results.” The way this has been explained to me is that you perform an experiment, get a p-value of > 0.05 (significance). You know that your hunch is warranted, so just modulate the experiment, and hope that the p-value comes in at < 0.05, and you have publishable results! Obviously this is not just a problem in psychology; John Ioannidis has famously focused on medicine. But here’s a chart which shows that positive results are particular prevalent in psychology:
A few days ago Nathaniel Comfort pointed me to this post, Genetic determinism round-up. If you are curious go read Comfort’s whole post. I honestly didn’t enjoy it very much, I think I got what he was saying, but there were all sorts of circumlocutions around the overall message. But I agree one one thing in particular: an emphasis on concrete and specific genes for traits is a motif in science journalism that can be very frustrating, and often misleading. Nevertheless, that’s not the only story. I believe our current culture greatly underestimates the power of genetics in shaping broader social patterns.
How can these be reconciled? Do not genes and genetics go together? The resolution is a simple one: when you speak of 1,000 genes, you speak of no genes. You can’t list 1,000 genes in prose, even if you know them. But using standard quantitative and behavior genetic means one can apportion variation in the population of a trait to variation in genes. 1,000 genes added together can be of great effect. The newest findings in genomics are reinforcing assertions of non-trivial heritability of many complex traits, though rendering problematic attributing that heritability to a specific set of genes.
For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told in print that ‘Hitler would certainly have been very pleased’ by your work can’t be pleasant. But that’s what happened in 2010 to Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, when he and his colleagues published a study showing that Jews in three different geographical areas had certain collections of genes that made them more biologically similar to one another than they were to non-Jews in the same regions. The work also showed that Jews around the world could trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago; that meant, however, that certain genetic signatures could be used to identify Jews, indicating that Jews share a common biological identity beyond their religious affiliation—which is what inspired the Hitler crack.
I don’t plan on reading Legacy because I already read the paper which it is based on, Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. It is now open access, so you can read it too. As implied in the article in The Tablet the biggest finding in this paper is that most of the world’s Jewry seem to share tracts of the genome which are ‘identical by descent’ (IBD). You don’t have to be a geneticist to intuit that being IBD implies relatively recent and elevated shared descent from a common set of ancestors. In particular the authors were looking for segments of the genome where individuals shared the same sequence of genetic markers. Very long sequences indicate a relatively recent common ancestor, while many short ones suggest more distant but numerous common ancestors.
Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of Men Like That, a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote
…
This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.
