The punch first culture

Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a nice write-up in Nature, Methods: Face up to false positives:

Few principles are more depressingly familiar to the veteran scientist: the more surprising a result seems to be, the less likely it is to be true. We cannot know whether, or why, this principle was overlooked in any specific study. However, more generally, in a world in which unexpected results can lead to high-impact publication, acclaim and headlines in The New York Times, it is easy to understand how there might be an overwhelming temptation to move from discovery to manuscript submission without performing the necessary data checks.

This is not just an issue in genomics. I’ve discussed it before as being a major problem in psychology. Though the infamous centenarian study will do nothing for the careers of the scientists involved, I do wonder what the effects of publishing large numbers of false positive results in science are on an individuals’ career when it isn’t so inexpertly executed (i.e., in this particular case the technical errors were so glaring that the authors should never have submitted their findings). I wonder because apparently major newspapers are now running with stories which they know are highly likely to be exaggerations or misrepresentation to induce pageviews, and then subsequently ‘correcting’ them. More specifically, the number of corrections has been rising rapidly.

Hindus earn like Episcopalians, vote like Puerto Ricans

A few years ago I pointed out that as among American whites religious affiliation was often the best predictor of voting patterns among Asian Americans. The Republican party is for all practical purposes the white Christian party, but the minority of Asian Americans who are conservative Protestants are quite congenial to the Republicans. Their common religion transcends the racial gap. It is also no surprise that the two most prominent Indian American politicians who are Republicans are both avowed Christians (converts). It is unlikely that a non-Christian Indian could achieve national prominence as Republican; they would have two strikes against them, their race and their religion.

Pew’s new report on Asian American religiosity, Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths, highlights this well. American Hindus are stridently partisan Democrats. In contrast, evangelical Asian Americans leaned toward John McCain even in 2008 (though not as much as white evangelicals). People have made comparisons between Indian Americans and Jews before, and in some ways this is facile, but when it comes to socioeconomic status and politics the similarities are striking. Like Jews, American Hindus are well off and well educated. And like Jews they are strongly Democratic. 48 percent of Hindus live in families with incomes of $100,000 or above, and 57 percent have some graduate education. The respective value for all Americans are 16 and 12 percent. This seems to confirm Andrew Gelman’s supposition that it is among high income groups that cultural identity markers are particular relevant.

No vindication of Joseph Greenberg?

A reader pointed me to this critique of Nick Wades’ telling in The New York Times Reports that the recent Reich et al. paper on Native Americans is a vindication of Joseph Greenberg’s ideas on the languages of the Americas. 90-Year-Old Consensus:

Nicholas Wade’s reported the Reich et al. research in the New York Times (July 11, 2012). Wade treats it as a vindication of a three-way genetic (historical linguistic) distinction among languages of the Americas proposed in Joseph Greenberg’s (1987) book of the same name, although Reich et al. do not cite it in their paper in Nature. (The only reference to Greenberg by Reich et al. is to a paper coauthored with Turner and Zegura and published in 1986 as one of the proponents of the three-way split.) The “vindication” here is entirely Wade’s. The bottom line is that this three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. That’s essentially the three-way distinction that is constantly credited to Greenberg. We know of many major linguistic families among the “everything else”, worked out painstakingly through well-established methods, but don’t know how the “everything else” language families are connected to each other on a large-scale level.

Let me add that I am skeptical when someone says that a biological genetic grouping corroborates a historical linguistic grouping or vice versa for a simple reason: genetic material and language are transmitted by different mechanisms (I’ll skip my usual joke about this), so in principle a one-to-one correspondence should be surprising.

First, when I first heard about Greenberg’s system in the late 1990s I chatted up a few people who were involved in the linguistics of Native Americans on the issue. They thought he was full of it, but, they were also pretty much opposed to imposing any real coarse structure on Native American languages, including the model which is claimed to be pretty well known above. My sample could be very unrepresentative. I’ll let readers who know more weigh in (note that I’m skeptical of classifying all the “First American” languages into one group after 15,000 years, even assuming they derive from a common ancestor).

On the other hand, the author caricatures the paper which he discusses by suggesting a “one-to-one correspondence.” In fact, the two non-First American groups are genetic, but not linguistic, hybrids. Additionally, the argument that cultural and genetic transmission differ is specious. Certainly it is true, but the two are also correlated due to the effect of culture and language on marriage networks. This seems common sense, but many social scientists in my experience seem to recoil from any disciplinary integration with genetics, and so totally distinguish the character of cultural heritability and genetic heritability.

A horrible "natural experiment"

Spanish Baby-Snatching Victims Seek Answers and Justice:

Most of these stolen children were entrusted to the care of Catholics loyal to the regime. The aim behind this was to rid an entire people of the “Marxist gene,” at least according to the theories of Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, the national psychiatrist of Francoist Spain, that were widespread at the time.

More accurately it should be Marxist meme. But it brings up the question of looking into the correlation between the traits of biological parents and their long-lost children.

Via Dispatches From Turtle Island.

Rousseau vs. Descartes & incest


Greta Scacchi, cousin-lover

There has been some discussion in the comments why the posts on inbreeding are getting so much attention. I think this is a milder form of the same sort of curiosity about why young males have a fascination with pornography: we are obsessed with sex. This is not an arbitrary fascination, nor is it a loss of innocence which may have been avoided. Sex is our raison d’etre as sexual organisms. Evolutionary psychology gets a bad reputation for positing adaptive explanations for everything under the sun, from dancing to migraines. But, if there is anything which is the target of adaptive constraint and selective pressures, it is the suite of traits which relate to sex and mating in a direction fashion. It is sometimes stated that sex is about power, but the bigger reality is that power is about sex.

But reducing human behavior purely to one explanatory framework is too reductive even for me. An individualist framework where singular males and females operate as evolutionary versions of rational H. economicus, always optimizing fitness through subterfuge and inducement, leaves something to be desired in characterizing the true rich tapestry of human behavior. And this tapestry is not arbitrary; rather, its general shape and topography is anchored by particular innate parameters.

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Open thread 7/25/2012

I need to rationalize my process of modulating the stream of comments I get. Toward that end I am going to be posting an “open thread” once every week (I’ve scheduled the next month already). If you have the urge to leave an off-topic comment on a post immediately, just put it here. You can of course contact me, but I understand that is often suboptimal, insofar as you may wish for input from other readers. Because this option is available I am inclined to simply delete off-topic comments more aggressively now, with repeated violations resulting in banning.

The nature of the restrictions of the comments are relatively loose on this post. You should maintain some decorum as usual. But you can post links, ask me or other readers questions, etc.

On the effects of effective population

Nathaniel Pearson has an eminently readable post up on human effective population sizes. If you don’t know the importance of harmonic means in this domain, worth a read. He finishes though with an issue of practical importance, the proliferation of individually deleterious alleles at the large census sizes we see us today:

Along the way, our changing population size may shape public health in complex ways. In particular, a key question will be what happens to the likely sizable subset of newly arisen rare variants that pose health risks to people who carry them. As our population continues to skyrocket, more such variants will come into our midst.

At the same time, continued population growth should ultimately help natural selection purge such variants more efficiently than it can in a small population (where chance dominates the fate of variants, harmful or not).

But, to the extent that our future population growth itself depends on further advances in healthcare, we’ll also be altering the regime of such natural selection, ideally relaxing it in ways that help people live healthier lives no matter what variants they carry in their genomes.

As Mark Ridley observed in The Cooperative Gene natural operates in utero as well. Even assuming that natural selection is not purging deleterious alleles with great efficiency today, high human miscarriage rates are going to serve as a counterbalance to better healthcare for the genetically less fit.*

* On the order of ~50% of pregnancies miscarry, with the majority being cryptic, as women may not have known that fertilization occurred due to failure of implantation or problems in the first month).

Is inbreeding like asexuality?

The standard argument for why there is aversion to incest among humans as matter of innate disposition is the Westermarck effect, which is a model where aversion to mating emerges if you are raised with an individual of the opposite sex. Some basic illustrations are sketched out in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. But some comments below make me wonder if there is are alternative explanations. Robin Fox has made the claim, repeated in many places, that cousin marriage was ubiquitous in the human past:

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Comments on internet publications, what to do?

This is probably relevant if you have a blog or run a webzine of some sort. It’ll be much more abstract if you are a commenter, and can’t relate concretely to weirdo creeps who persistently spam your comments and contact you via email. In relation to bloggingheads.tv my own two primary complaints from my experience on that web-show:

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