While I was on blogging hiatus single motherhood and the whole Dan Quayle flap came back into the news. Here’s Mitt Romney:

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family.

The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%. But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor. Culture matters.

I’ve been ragging on the cultural Left on this weblog recently because of the delusions that those of this bent simply won’t let go of in the quest for utopian egalitarianism. But one aspect of the American cultural and political scene is that Left and Right often operate with similar presuppositions, only weighting the emphasis differently. While the cultural Left puts the focus on nearly infinite possibilities of individual self-actualization, the cultural Right has backed itself into a corner of individual moral perfectionism which borders on the farcical.

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Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:

2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified over 100 regions in which the frequency of Neandertal ancestry is extremely unlikely under a model of neutral evolution. The highest frequency region on chromosome 4 has a frequency of Neandertal ancestry of about 85% in Europe and overlaps CLOCK, a key gene in Circadian function in mammals. The high frequency, Neandertal-derived variant is specific to Europeans; it is not very common in East Asians. This gene has been found in other selection scans in Eurasian populations, but has never before been linked to Neandertal gene flow

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Prompted by a comment below I was curious as to the correlation between intelligence and income. To indicate intelligence I used the GSS’s WORDSUM variable, which has a ~0.70 correlation with IQ. For income, I used REALINC, which is indexed to 1986 values (so it is inflation adjusted) and aggregates the household income. Finally, I limited my sample to non-Hispanic whites over the age of 30 (for what it’s worth, this choice also limited the data set to respondents from the year 2000 and later).

The results don’t get at the commenter’s assertions, because 10 out of 10 on WORDSUM does not imply that you’re that smart really. But the trendline is suggestive. Note that aggregated 0-4 because the sample size at the lower values is small indeed.

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Dienekes has summaries up of human-related abstracts of Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution 2012.

1) Remember these are not papers, and some of the abstracts may never become papers, at least in recognizable form

2) Speaking of which, Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations:

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In the comments:

And yes, species concepts are much more fuzzy in many cases. Were mice to hold their own Olympics, they might well have learned (if slightly furry) discussions about whether musculus/domesticus/castaneus should compete in the same events, and if so, which events molossinus or other hybrid individuals should compete in. As humans, we dodge that bullet by having no closely enough related species to confuse the issue. The difference between us and a chimp is well defined. If Neanderthals were still around, that would be a different matter.

What happens is a nation (e.g., China?) reconstructs a Neandertal individual from the sequence in the public domain as well as segments from living human beings. Do they get to compete as power-lifters? This might seem like a crazy question, but I’m not totally unconvinced that it will be just academic within our lifetime. Genetic modification is likely to become ubiquitous within a generation.

Image credit: Wikipedia

My post below elicited this response:

Here are a couple of cases which seem to defy easy classification.
A “chimera”. This is a person who has cells derived from two zygotes. It can happen if two fertilized eggs merge very early in development. The individual may appear entirely normal (there may be chimeras reading this who are unaware of their condition); but the cells in their body will come from two quite distinct origins. If the original zygotes were male and female, then the adult individual will have some cells in their body with the XY (male) chromosomes, and others with the XX (female) chromosomes. There may be no external sexual ambiguity as long as the sex organs all come from the one lineage; in general all kinds of sexual ambiguity might arise.

Second case; more common (though still unusual) is where an individual is genetically of one gender, and phenotypically of the other. This can be either an XX individual who develops with external male genitalia; or XY who develops with female genitalia. This is usually caused (I think) by excess or deficit of the appropriate hormones during fetal development.

For most people, gender is unambiguous. But there is no sharp dividing line or easy way of classifying that covers all individuals.

The examples I’m considering are entirely independent of psychology or choice. They are real physical conditions in which the conventional physical basis for determining gender becomes ambiguous.

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After ragging on Chris Hayes for a week I decided to check out the conversation above between Hayes and Mike Konzal about his new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. As Mike suggested the book does seem more nuanced in its take than the piece in The Nation which highlighted the role of high-stakes testing at Hunter College High School. In the conversation above Hayes supports his suppositions that test-prep was excluding blacks and Latinos by asserting that that is what the teachers themselves believe. I wouldn’t dismiss this out of hand, but it certainly isn’t enough to make me accept that portion of Hayes’ argument. People have all sorts of weird misconceptions.

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The New York Times has an article up on a new I.O.C. ruling on who can compete as a woman. Basically they look at testosterone levels. This seems a different tack than cases where women were banned from competing as women because they had a male karytoptype (AIS). This article came on my radar because I had already read this op-ed from about a week ago, You Say You’re a Woman? That Should Be Enough. This sentence jumped out at me:

Second, when it comes to sex, sports authorities should acknowledge that while science can offer evidence, it cannot dictate what evidence we should use. Scientifically, there is no clear or objective way to draw a bright line between male and female.

What do people think of this assertion? I’m aware of intersex individuals. But if we start to assert that dioecy is just a “social construct” then let’s revisit species concepts. I’m sure there are some farmers and loggers who might assert that one can’t draw objective bright lines between populations. Distinctions between male and female in most species is much more clear and distinct than various taxonomic categories.

In the further interests of putting quantitative data out their instead of vague impressions, I noticed two GSS variables which might be of interest. One queries the impression of effect on the environment of genetically modified crops. The second asks about whether science does more harm than good. The latter question exhibited almost no year to year variation of note, so I just threw them in a pot together. But for the environment and genetically modified crop question I show responses for the year 2000 and 2010. As you can see there is a modest difference in regards to the first where liberals are more skeptical.

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Educational Realist elaborates on some of the concerns I have had with Chris Hayes’ ballyhooed piece on the failure of elites:

Hayes is correct about one thing, though: the elites are locking out the hoi polloi from highest-level institutions. But it takes a real ignorance to pretend that the rich are doing this because of over-reliance on test scores or test prep, as opposed to buying their way in, using their powerful networks to only hire from the “right” schools, and the fuzzy math of the “holistic” evaluation process. Give me test scores any day.

ER also observes that in fact minorities, and in particular Asians, make use of test prep:

Use of Test-Prep Courses and Gains, by Race and Ethnicity

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