I realized that my post on David Attenborough simply presumed you know who the man is. The reality is who he is is less critical than what he’s done. If you haven’t seen it, you need to see The Living Planet. Or you can read the book of the same name.

Since John Hawks already hit it I don’t have much to add about the dog-starch-adaptation-paper in Nature, The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet. I’m impressed at the yield from the sample sizes that they had, but as John alludes to this area of study has huge possibilities. The authors suggest that agriculture catalyzed domestication. That’s fair enough, and carefully stated I’d say, because the Amerindians seem to have brought domestic dogs to the New World long before agriculture. In other words, the “domestication” event was probably a multi-layered affair. Looking through the supporting information it’s obvious that the domestics were almost all Western breeds. As the search for adaptive variants expands to other lineages we might be in for surprises in terms of the signatures of selection as they vary across the dogs.

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Recently David Attenborough made the news because he expressed some old fashioned population alarmism. I say old fashioned because we’ve come a long way since Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was published. It’s been 44 year since the original edition, and it hasn’t aged well. Not only is the world healthier and wealthier than it’s ever been, but population growth is likely to taper off in a stabilization by the mid-21st century. If there are resource scarcity issues it won’t be because of human numbers, it will be because of the unsustainability of per capita consumption. And that doesn’t take into account technological change and innovation. Agricultural inputs aren’t static.

The real issue here is one of values. It probably is difficult to not have reduced biodiversity as humans have to exploit more and more of the world to maintain their lifestyles. A “population bomb” in the sense of the impending end of civilization is probably not a good medium term (i.e., ~50 years) prediction. But for large to medium sized non-human organisms we are a bomb or plague. The irony here is that a concern for the environment is to a great extent a post-materialist value, which emerges in the wake of the affluence which may be the greatest threat to biodiversity….

Over at ScienceDaily there is a report on a new paper on affirmative action and academia, Understanding the Impact of Affirmative Action Bans in Different Graduate Fields of Study. The paper is gated, but the regression model used really doesn’t seem to do much more than confirm intuition. The descriptive details are more interesting and straightforward.

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Well, I don’t have as much time for these anymore…but here it goes….

Haldane’s Sieve. A must if you are interested in evolutionary/population genetics/genomics (not that you can keep up with it all, but interesting for a taste). Since it only posts on pre-prints you don’t need academic access to get into the academic literature.

Human Varieties. A blog which discusses relatively taboo topics such as psychometrics (well, OK, topics which are taboo so long as you don’t have children who are entering elementary school, at which point you examine average test scores with the same acuity as Alfred Binet).

Reaction Norm. He’s been hibernating for a few weeks. Perhaps he’s found a job?

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead: New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. Obvious why it’s important.

Lead and Crime. Jim Manzi’s response.

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The above is a graph which illustrates phylogenetic relationships using the TreeMix package. It is from the paper I alluded to yesterday. The paper, DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China,  is open access, so everyone should be able to read it. Its mtDNA analysis shows that the Tianyuan sample, from the region of Beijing and dating to ~40,000 years B.P., is a basal clade in haplogroup B, which is common in eastern Eurasia and the New World. This is a satisfying result insofar as the understanding in relation to this haplogroup is that it diversified ~50,000 years B.P. There is very strong support in these data for the proposition that Tianyuan forms a distinct clade with the populations you see above, as opposed to western Eurasians. This is important because this sample seems to date with relatively good precision to 40,000 years B.P., supporting the archaeological contention that modern humans were already diversifying into western and eastern lineages 40-50,000 years ago. In contrast statistical genomic inferences tend toward a lower date for divergence. We can be moderately confident at this point that some aspect of the west-east divergence predates subsequent later gene flow events, which might lead to confusing archaeology-blind methods.

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Over the past decade or so much of the reconstruction of the human genetic past has occurred through inferences generated from variation of extant human beings. In more plain English the patterns of genetic variation of modern populations have been used to map out the patterns of the past. There are serious difficulties with these sorts of inferences. For example you generate a huge number of potential phylogenetic trees and zero in on the “most probable tree” (or, the distribution of trees). But at the end of the day these inferences are only as good as your assumptions.

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One of my resolutions for the New Year was to read two books on approximately the same period and place in sequence, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, and Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Despite a very general similarity of topicality it would be misleading to characterize these two books as complementary, or with one as a sequel to the other. Rather, they use explicitly different methods and espouse implicitly alternative norms in generating a map of the past. As I have explored in depth Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome is to a great extent a materialist reading which reasserts the contention that civilization as we understand it did truly collapse in a precipitous and discontinuous manner with the fall of Rome. In other words, in all things that matter the year 400 was much closer to the year 300 than it was to the year 500. But it is critical to qualify what “matters.” As an archaeologist with a penchant for economic history Ward-Perkins’ materialist narrative might be reduced down to a metric, such as productivity per person as a function of time. In such a frame the preponderance of evidence does suggest that there was collapse in the Western Roman Empire in the years between 400 and 500. But specific frame is not something that we can take for granted. Peter Brown, the author of Through the Eye of a Needle might object that there is more to man than matter alone. A major distinction between the years 400 and 500, as opposed to 300, is that in the first quarter of the 4th century the Roman Emperors starting with Constantine began to show special favor to the Christian religion, which by 400 was on the way to being the exclusive official faith of the Empire, a process which was complete by 500. The Rome of 300 was indisputably a pagan one. That of 400 arguably Christian, and 500 most definitely Christian.

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It looks like law school applications are finally declining precipitously. The specific issue here is that it’s not necessarily easy to leverage a non-elite law school degree into a lucrative career (see the bimodal distribution of law school graduate pay) which makes servicing student loans (which can not be wiped out by bankruptcy) manageable. This is layered on top of the fact that many non-elite law schools seem to have been engaged in de facto marketing fraud in cooking-the-books on the prospects of their graduates for years. There have been many who have criticized Paul Campos of The Law School Scam, but I have plenty of anecdata to support his assertions in a qualitative sense. If you lack quantitative skills but have above average, but not stellar, verbal skills then loading up on $100,000+ debt in law school is not a path to riches (assuming you lack connections and are not on track to simply take over your family firm).

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With the turning of the New Year I hadn’t noticed that The Wheel of Time is finally over, as Brandon Sanderson’s A Memory of Light was published. Is it a spoiler to divulge that apparently “the Good Guys” won? You can read a fun review at io9. Like many people I lost interest in the books back in the mid-1990s, but I’ve kept track of the series as a cultural phenomenon. In case you don’t get why this is interesting or of note, this enormous fantasy series spanned 14 books. The original author, Robert Jordan, died in 2007, leaving the series unfinished. A younger author, Brandon Sanderson, was commissioned to complete it. At that point it was a total narrative disaster area, so it was almost more interesting to see if Sanderson could revive the series from its somnolence. From the reviews it seems he did, though he could never rewind it back to to the verve of its early books. I feel that the reality that many people kept slogging through the series despite the fact that came to detest the characters (especially the “braid-tugging” ones) and become exhausted by the lack of plot development a classic illustration of a sunk cost fallacy.