A reader points me to a talk given by David Reich at the Center for Human Genetic Research 2013 Retreat. One of the issues Reich brought up is old, but perhaps worth reemphasizing: due to endogamy many South Asians carry a higher load of recessive ailments. This is not due to recent inbreeding (which is barred by custom in many South Asian groups, which enforce kin-level exogamy), but long term genetic isolation. Over time even a moderate sized population can be affected by drift. This was one of the major points in the 2009 paper Reconstructing Indian History, but not one particularly emphasized in the press follow up. A major implication is that a relatively simple public health measure for South Asians would be to marry outside of their jati. The social or genetic distance need not be great. But one generation of outbreeding should “mask” many of the deleterious alleles. If this model is correct one should be able to track decreases in morbidity within the American South Asian population, where there are many inter-caste and inter-regional marriages (yes, this is between people of putative high status, but this doesn’t matter).
Month: February 2013
Jared Diamond and the anthropologists
Note: An update on this post. I want to be clear that I think Jared Diamond is wrong on a lot of details, and many cultural anthropologists are rightly calling him out on that. But, they do a disservice to their message by politicizing their critique, and ascribing malevolence to all those who disagree with their normative presuppositions. Scholarship is hard enough without personalized politicization, and I stand by Jared Diamond’s right to be sincerely wrong without having his character assassinated. As the vehemence of my post suggests the only solution I can see to this ingrained tick among many cultural anthropologists is to drop the pretense of genteel discourse, and blast back at them with all the means at our disposal. Telling them to stick to facts nicely won’t do any good, these are trenchant critics of Social Darwinism who engage in the most bare-knuckle war of all-against-all when given any quarter. Coexistence in the academy is simply not possible with this particular culture, extirpation is the only long term ESS for the rest of us.
It’s happening again, another issue of Jared Diamond vs. the anthropologists. Part of this is surely personal. Diamond has been trading in glib and gloss for years, and profitably so, in both financial and fame terms. There is also a deep scholarly divide. Diamond’s way of viewing historical development is reminiscent of, if not equivalent to, materialism. That is, external material forces (geography) and broad macro-historical dynamics (the transition across modes of production) loom large in his thinking. In contrast, many cultural anthropologists disagree with this paradigm, and see it as outmoded, old fashioned, and false. Not that I can decrypt what they believe, because clarity is not something that seems to be valued by cultural anthropologists in most domains.
Facebook and Google: the $$RN
By now you will have seen the Facebook generated map of NFL fan distributions by county. The map itself is fascinating for two reasons. Substantively it illustrates the power of state lines and regionalism. The latter is not surprising, but I suspect that the former may be. The boundary between the territory of the Buffalo Bills and New York Giants may not surprise you, but it aligns almost perfectly with where people shift from saying “pop” to “soda.” On the other hand you have strange phenomenon such as northern Mississippi and Alabama’s attachment to a New Orleans team which is much more distant than the Tennessee Titans (granted, the Titans are relatively new).
But a deeper more “meta’ point is that some of the most cutting edge and data swollen social science now occurs in the private sector. Facebook and Google are obvious cases. But credit rating and marketing firms also have a very deep understanding of your behaviors, and how you should behave. I do think people should be somewhat concerned about his, but I also suspect that if a really blockbuster fact was discovered “in house,” it would leak soon enough.
Comments unleashed and readers unlurked
Looks like DISQUS has finally been enabled on this website. I know it doesn’t resolve all the issues that cropped up with the site transition, but for me it’s an excellent first step. I assume most of you know how DISQUS works. Basically if you have a Google, Yahoo!, Twitter or a Facebook account you can just login with that. Or, you can create your own DISQUS account.
Once again I have much greater control over comments. So I have to approve the first comment. And I can remove/ban people at my discretion. With these conditions met I will now again spend much more time in comments.
To kick it off I figured I would put up an “unlurk” post. If you want to tell readers/and or/me who you are, go ahead. It will also be a chance for regulars to allow me to approve their comment so that they don’t have to wait in the queue in the future.
Cuckoldry rates in Germany are ~1 percent
One of the quasi-facts which I often stumble upon is the idea that in 10 percent of cases paternity is misattributed. That is, the presumed father is cuckolded. I often encounter this “fact” in a biological context, where someone with an advanced degree in biology will relate how it turns out that there is a great deal of delicacy in situations of transplant matching because of this fact. When pressed on the provenance of this fact most demur. The reason people demur is that the factual basis of this assertion is very thin. In particular, very high estimates of cuckoldry come from databases of disputed paternity, which are obviously going to be a biased sample. A more thorough survey suggests that there is a wide variation in misattributed paternity across populations.