Three articles which illustrate the difficulty of the sort of science which tackles what Jim Manzi would term phenomena characterized by high causal density. First, the simplest one is the report that extrapolating from some mouse models to human biological systems may be problematic. Anyone who has talked to human geneticists who use mouse models is aware that these inbred lineages can be somewhat particular and specific. Order the wrong mice, and all of your experimental designs might be for naught. So the result is not surprising, but it seems useful to have it documented in such a concrete fashion (though this has been reported in the media before).

Second, a long piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the problems in replicating ground breaking research in the area of priming. This may be a case of a robust result which turns out to fade into irrelevance as time passes, and illustrates the fundamental problems of attempting to do sciences on humans; we’re diverse and protean. I think the jury’s out on this, and we’ll wait and see. Fortunately this probably won’t be an issue we’ll be debating in 10 years, as replications will start to occur, or, they won’t.

Finally, a moderately scathing review in The Wall Street Journal  of the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Here’s the final paragraph:

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In light of my two jeremiads against cultural anthropology, some readers may be curious if I have any positive vision, in the sense of any alternative model. To get a sense of my own orientation, Explaining Culture by Dan Sperber and The Origin and Evolution of Cultures by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd would be sufficient (Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust has been highly influential in my thought, but it is a rather dense work whose central topic may not be of interest to everyone). If books are not to your liking, see the resources at the Culture and Cognition Institute. Just to be explicit, an understanding of evolution or genetics is not necessary to gain a first order understanding of the nature of the phenomenon of human culture, but cognition is. When I say cognition, I mean the cognitive revolution and its rivals. An anthropology which binds disparate aggregate social phenomena and explains the variation which we see to any satisfaction must be rooted in what we know of the science of the mind.

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By this time I’m sure you’ve encountered articles about the reconstructed last common ancestor of all placental mammals. Greg Mayer at Why Evolution is True has an excellent review of the implications, along with a link to a moderately skeptical piece by Anne Yoder in Science. Yoder’s piece is titled Fossils vs. Clocks, while the original paper is The Placental Mammal Ancestor and the Post–K-Pg Radiation of Placentals. The results clearly support the “Explosive Model” in the figure to the left for the origination of placentals. That might prompt the thought: “isn’t this what we knew all along?”

The standard story for the last generation in the popular imagination is that a massive asteroid impact was the direct cause of the extinction of all dinosaurs  (and of course a host of other groups) except the lineage which we now term birds. And yet it turns out that there is actually some debate about this, though at least in some form it seems likely that the impact is going to be important (see this Brian Switek piece for exploration of this issue, and the general opinion of the scientific literature as of now). The second aspect to focus on is timing. Contrary to the intuition of many, over the past 20 years molecular phylogenetics has inferred a very definite (on the order of tens of millions of years) pre-K-T boundary coalescence for the common ancestors of the disinct mammalian lineages. A plausible explanation for this is that these lineages diversified through allopatry, as the Mesozoic supercontinent fragmented. Morphological diversification of these mammalian lineages also may have occurred after the K-T event.

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The W. D. Hamilton biography, Nature’s Oracle finally has a publication date. Amazon says March 1st, and other places say April 1st (For the USA). I don’t care much either way, I pre-ordered. Now it would be nice if more academic books were available in Kindl format though. I’m not anticipating the “physical pleasure” of have it shipped to me when I could just get it emailed to me on the day of its release.

Imagined in the 1920s.

Jonathan Eisen and Michael Eisen both have posts up about the suicide of their father, and its relation to the recent death of Aaron Swartz. Like many people I was depressed when I heard what had happened. I never met Swartz, nor had any interactions with him online. In terms of specifics our views differed on a range of issues. But, I admired his ferocity, intensity, and clear and obvious genuine commitment to the life of the mind. Whatever disagreements we may have with Swartz’s specific commitments, I suspect many people strive to throw themselves into their passions with the follow through that Swartz exhibited. Swartz’s suicide has made me reflect on the role of the institutional academy in our society, and what ends it pursues. But my thoughts are inchoate, so I leave you with the links to the Eisens’ posts, who can draw upon more relevant personal experiences.

Haldane’s Sieve points me to a new pre-print, Genetic draft, selective interference, and population genetics of rapid adaptation. Though mathematical, it’s eminently readable, and I commend it to anyone who has a passing interest in evolutionary genetics. As I am still digesting it I won’t say much more, aside from the fact that it seems to imply the proposition that neutral models of genetic variation and history may not suffice in many cases as a map of reality. This is important because these neutral models are often the null background against which one tests other alternative hypotheses.

For more background, see my old post on “genetic draft”. Also, the author has made available scripts to explore some of the models.

My post below on Jared Diamond and his cultural anthropological critics has attracted a fair amount of attention (e.g., see the Twitter re-tweets of the post). But first I’d like to admit that I think it was wrong in its specific thrust. Though I’ve seen Stephen Corry of Survival International referred to as an anthropologist, he’s certainly not an academic. Corry is an explicit and open advocate, as is Jonathan Mazower. The Guardian piece which I linked to also was not entirely clear on this point. In other words, the example in that article was not particularly relevant to my broader thesis. But overall my position remains unchanged, because The Guardian was not presented as evidence, but an illustration of a trend which I have long commented upon. Many of the academics who re-tweeted my post focused on the assertion that “cultural anthropology has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover.” Those who agree with my position understand exactly why I would say this.

For example, here is a portion of Armand Leroi’s comment:

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I find the photo above of John Quincy Adams striking because it is of a man who was born in 1767. The era of the Revolutionary War is one of paintings (albeit, not contemporary ones). And yet here we look upon the face of an old man who was alive and self-aware during that period, and who grew into adult when the Founders still flourished. The photograph is of poor quality and lacking in color. Arguably it transmits less precise detail of the features of John Quincy Adams than a painted portrait, but photographs capture something ineffable (or more accurately they replicate physical details which we are unable to elucidate verbally, but which are recognized by our innate cognitive system). John Quincy Adams is long dead, but the verisimilitude of the image brings him back to life in some way due to the reflexes awakened in my brain. I see the man, so the man must be.

The power of photographic technology should make us wary of those claims that science and technology drain the wonder from the world by making the mysterious comprehensible, and the numinous prosaic. Our lives are magical, we simply don’t know it.

My daughter has four grandparents. Genetically she is a little over 25 percent her paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, and a little under 25 percent her maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother.* Why? Because she is 50 percent genetically identical by descent with her mother and likewise with her father. This is all rather straightforward. But what about culturally?

With biological heredity we can speak of genes, the substrate by which inheritance occurs. With culture memes have been far less fruitful as anything more than an illustration, as opposed to the basis of a formal system of logic and analysis. Nevertheless, we can describe with relative clarity many aspects of culture as a trait or phenotype. And this is important. Recall that evolutionary process was characterized by Charles Darwin despite lacking a satisfying theory of inheritance.

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