My attitude toward most cultural anthropologists is similar to Jerry Coyne’s sentiment toward theologians. So I’m going to share two examples of why I have these feelings, without commenting.
First, here’s a transcript of This American Life’s Doppelgänger:
In Slate there is an important piece up, The Early Education Racket, which attempts to reassure upper middle striving types that it isn’t the end of the world if their children don’t get into the right preschool. It is important because there are many people out there with lots of money (or perhaps more accurately, just enough money) and no common sense. Though the author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, offers that she’s not “making a Bell Curve argument here,” the general thesis that there are diminishing returns to inputs on childhood environment is well known to anyone with a familiarity with behavior genetics. Here’s a piece in Psychology Today from 1993, So Long, Superparents:The limits of parental influence: Why good parentsneed not attempt superhuman feats:
Now comes the insult. “Good enough” parents do the child-rearing job just as well as superparents, claim psychologists Sandra Scarr, Ph.D., and David Rowe, Ph.D. Middle-class parenting styles vary significantly, but the kids all turn out okay regardless of most differences, say the respective University of Virginia and Arizona professors.
Abusive and neglectful parents crank out problem kids who later become delinquent adults. But as long as kids get parental warmth, care, and encouragement to develop their talents, they have an equal shot at success in school and work. What really counts is the emotional and physical security parents can provide.
People pay a lot of attention to nuances in parenting style-how much parents hug their kids in public, whether or not they buy their kids an abacus. But they should pay more attention to genes, says Rowe. Inheritance is more important than many realize.
If you are doubtful of this, I recommend you read The Nurture Assumption. This book was published in 1999, and Steve Pinker reported on the results in The Blank Slate a few years later, where I first encountered the thesis. The basic insight, that parental home environment seems to have minimal predictive power in explaining variation in outcomes, is still not very well known. The two primary issues to keep in mind are:
In the near future one of my projects is revising and expanding the “PHYLO” pedigree file which I put up a week ago. Basically I want there to be a public data set which has a modest number of SNPs useful for phylogenetic analysis (100-200,000) with a wide population coverage. Additionally, I am going to do a few things like rename the family ids to populations, and also release it with scripts to help in running Admixture (for example, shell scripts which will automate replication and later analysis of replicates). Finally, I’m planning on running ~50 replicates of K = 2 to K = 20 with 10-fold cross-validation (yes, this is will take a while) to get a good sense of the “best” K’s. The reality is that most people probably are only interested in the “most informative” K, +/- 1, so there’s no need for everyone to run K = 2 to K = 20. The time saved should be used on running replicates, and then CLUMPP to merge the results.
Over at David Dobbs’ weblog Laura Hercher has a guest post up with the heading The Case for Selective Paternalism in Genetic Testing. Here are some relevant sections:
Which brings me back to this issue of paternalism. I agree that it makes no sense to put up obstacles for inquisitive and motivated individuals who wish to query their genome for information, however laced with uncertainty or peril. But forgive us if our first thoughts are often about how to help (yes, and to protect) the patients we see, in the medical setting. Science literacy is rare. The desire to use web-based tools to analyze their own DNA sequence is vanishingly rare. And a sentence like “Your risk of type II diabetes is decreased by the allele that you carry, in a gene that accounts for an estimated 1.5% of the heritability of the disease” is regularly interpreted as “You will not get type II diabetes.” So we worry about the effect that getting this information may have on the people who live where the sky is blue and the sun is yellow. Sue us.
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So, yes – more information, not less, is the way of the future, for so many reasons. But I will throw in a plea for understanding that sometimes the opposition is not merely protecting an information fiefdom, but responding to their own previous experience. Sometimes, I get a little protective. I guess that’s paternalism. I plead guilty – guilty, with an explanation.
The above figure is from a paper which leaves me somewhat befuddled, Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia. The authors ran several hundred thousand SNPs through treemix, and generated the above graph which leads one to the conclusion that there has been significant gene flow from Indian populations to Australia. More precisely, from Dravidian populations to the Aboriginal peoples of Northern Australia. In plain English the authors found the tree which was the best fit to the data, and then they improved it by by adding migration across branches which were the poorest fits.
Obviously the whole paper is not going to rest on the above graph. They performed some clustering analysis on the data, which you’ll recognize. PCA and Admixture:
Someone named Dan Slater recently wrote a book, Love in the Time of Algorithms, and has an op-ed out titled Darwin Was Wrong About Dating. The piece is littered with generally unpersuasive refutations of the relevance of a Darwinian framework in understanding the evolutionary origins of human behavior. I say this while granting that I have come to find much evolutionary theorizing somewhat shoddy. But that’s true for much of science, and scholarship more generally. It just so happens that evolutionary psychology has social and political relevance, while other fields do not. Wrong science does not negate the importance of an evolutionary framework.
John Hawks, Online communication biases upon the public perception of science:
Anyone who reads comments sections following news articles surely will have noticed the rotten wealth of trolls and other idiots who inhabit such forums. I thought about Brossard and Scheufele’s piece again today when I read a post by Dan Conover at Xark: “Why I shut down comments”. The post reflects on how blog communities have changed since the early days of blogging in 2005. This timeframe has coincided with the growth of social media of other types, such as Facebook and Twitter, which have given many people a closed community for sharing comments and perspectives with like-minded folks. Conover observes that the trolls and spam are more persistent, causing a rapid degradation of the value of comment sections of many blogs.
This isn’t of course universal. Many blogs continue to have rich and varied comment sections with their posts, and some (like mine) never had any comments at all….
To which Chris Mims graciously observes:
In my earlier posts where I gave a short intro to using Plink I distributed a data set termed PHLYO. One thing I did not mention is that I’ve also been running it on Admixture. But here’s an important point: I ran the data set 10 times from K = 2 to K = 15. Why? Because the algorithm produces somewhat different results on each run (if you use a different seed, which you should), and I wanted to not be biased by one particular result. Additionally, I also turned on cross-validation error, which gives me a better sense of which K’s to trust. But after I select the K which I want to visualize which replicate run will I then use to generate the bar plots? I won’t pick any specific one. Rather, I’ll merge them together with an off-the-shelf algorithm. Additionally, I also want to sort the individuals by their modal population cluster.
This sounds rather convoluted, and it is somewhat. I have a pipeline that I use, but it’s not too user friendly. One of my projects is to clean it up, document it, and publish it online. Though if you have your own pipeline all ready to go, please post it in the comments with a link! The general steps are as follows for me:
1) Convert Admixture Q files into Structure format, transform family identifications to numeric values, and generate a file with family identification and numeral pairs
2) Merge the results across runs using Clumpp
3) Sort the individual results within populations
4) The use Distruct to produce an output file
Before I show you the resultant bar plot, here are the cross-validation results with standard deviation ticks:
After last week’s post on e-books I started reading some of the interactions that Nicholas Carr was having with others. This post, which mostly consists of exchanges between Carr and Clay Shirky has to be read to believed. Shirky’s comment “as usual your remarks defy a simple reply” encapsulates my own reaction to Carr. The more I read from him the less persuaded and the more skeptical I become of his contentions. Carr deploys analogies like a lawyer holding forth to a dull jury in classic cinematic fashion. Upon further inspection the point is often facile, but there is a superficial gleam of plausibility which might convince those not so mentally endowed and eager to swallow the tendentious propositions whole.
Over at Scientific American Christie Wilcox has a post up with the provocative title, People With Brown Eyes Appear More Trustworthy, But That’s Not The Whole Story, which reports on a new PLoS ONE paper, Trustworthy-Looking Face Meets Brown Eyes. Like Christie I would enjoy illustrating this post with my own trustworthy and youthful brown eyed visage, but I worry that my mien is a bit on the sly side! In any case, what of the paper? Wilcox reviews the salient points of the results. In short, the issue here is that brown eyed men seem to have more ‘trustworthy faces’ than blue eyed men. When the eyes were digitally manipulated it turned out that color had no influence on perception. Rather, it was the correlation between eye color and facial proportion which which was driving the initial association. Christie finishes:
Given the importance of trust in human interactions, from friendships to business partnerships or even romance, these findings pose some interesting evolutionary questions. Why would certain face shapes seem more dangerous? Why would blue-eyed face shapes persist, even when they are not deemed as trustworthy? Are our behaviors linked to our bodies in ways we have yet to understand? There are no easy answers. Face shape and other morphological traits are partially based in genetics, but also partially to environmental factors like hormone levels in the womb during development. In seeking to understand how we perceive trust, we can learn more about the interplay between physiology and behavior as well as our own evolutionary history.