Two quick links that I think readers might find useful. First, a fascinating interview on NPR with a bee biologist. There’s a lot of interesting colorful detail (e.g., bees feeding on mammal tears), but the big thing which I appreciate is the balance between being sanguine and being overly alarmed by the phenomenon of “colony collapse.” Second, a Planet Money podcast, the case against patents. The point isn’t that one has to agree with the case against patents, but that patents are not part of our inalienable natural rights. It behooves us to examine now and then the utility in our world of the granting of patents, as well as the concept of intellectual property more broadly. Yes, it strikes many people as a crazy idea, but it’s surprisingly a common idea floated by economists.

The New York Times has a very long story about the nation of Qatar’s quest for soccer excellent. Reading the story was depressing. Is this what humanity has come to? There’s a lot of bellyaching about science in the Muslim world, but look no further than the priorities of the oil rich Gulf states. Qatar is going to spend $200 billion over a 10 year period on amenities for soccer because it is hosting the World Cup in 2022. Yes, the World Cup is a very big deal. But did you know that NASA’s budget for 2012 was less than 20 billion dollars. In other words Qatar could create its own rival to NASA if it wanted. But why would they?

This isn’t a plea for space science. But, it is an argument that human outcomes are contingent on human values. In the 19th century men of leisure such as Charles Darwin were scientists, because they could be. Today we have some men of wealth, such as Elon Musk, attempting to do great things (and likely failing, because bold ventures generally do fail). But by and large the priorities of plutocrats are more pedestrian. Posterity shall be the judge.

By now you may have read The New York Times story, How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent. It’s based on a meta-analysis, Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions. Obviously this finding is a rebuke to the vulgarization of the “10,000 hour rule” which was popularized after Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers: The Story of Success. There has been a veritable industry attacking and tearing down Gladwell. It’s just too easy. But nevertheless Gladwell is laughing all the way to the bank. He sells orders of magnitude more than his critics.

Why? As Steve Sailer notes people want “hard and fast” rules for human accomplishment. There’s two problems here. First, if a rule was hard & fast, and therefore could be implemented on a wide basis, then there wouldn’t be any advantage to any particular person. For example, if you could become a chess master by investing 10,000 hours of training, then you’d have many, many “chess masters.” All of a sudden being a chess master, by definition superior to other players, would not be predicted by the 10,000 hour investment.

Second, rather than getting into the details of what proportion of the variation in outcomes is responsible to genes vs. environment, the reality is that in many traits of interest for humans at the extreme excellent end of the spectrum there are many factors at work. And, much of basis for success is not reproducible, and can be chalked up to randomness (at least from our perspective). When people talking about the “environmental component” of variation one often presumes that this is the malleable/controllable aspect, but often a lot of random variation is collapsed into this fraction. Just because it’s genetic doesn’t mean we know the basis or the sequence of causal events which lead to an outcome.

Consider professional sports. This a field where the individuals are many standard deviations from the norm, and usually success is a combination of many factors, size, strength, speed, work ethic, etc. Even though having a parent who is a professional athlete increases your chance greatly of becoming a professional athlete (by orders of magnitude), most children of professional athletes do not have the talent to become professional athletes themselves. Michael Jordan’s sons were no better than college players of no particular distinction. And this is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time (or one of the greatest along with Wilt Chamberlain). It shows the limitations of prediction on an individual level when you are pushing the threshold of virtuosity to a very high setting.* Of course, that does not mean that grit and hard work can’t make someone a varsity basketball player. All things seem more reasonable when kept in perspective, but that doesn’t sell books or get you a gig at The New Yorker.

* Of course one might argue that Jordan should have selected a suitably athletic spouse. Interestingly Kobe Bryant has professional basketball players on both sides of the family.

Sad news, Cricket, who starred in so many posts on this blog, is no longer with us. She wandered in off the street in September of 2004. She was fixed and did not look like a long-time stray at all, so we suspect she was either lost or abandoned. In any case, she had a great nearly 10 year run with our family. The end came very quickly and was a shock to all of us.

In response to one of my posts someone characterizes a historian as having stated that “the Christianization of Europe as a culturally created event that needn’t have occurred.” The “standard model” in history (which has detractors*) is that in the 390s the Western Roman Empire underwent a traditionalist pagan religious-cultural revival, snuffed out by Theodosius the Great victory at Frigidus. But what if Arbogast had won? This might present us with an alternative history where paganism revives, and Christianity is reduced to a sect among sects. Some have made the case that this is in fact what occurred in China in the 9th century to Buddhism. Though Buddhism persisted as a religion in China, it no longer threatened to absorb the Chinese elite as partners a project of cultural hegemony. The fall of Buddhism as the religion of the elite in the 9th century led to the rise of Neo-Confucianism, which in various forms dominated Chinese high culture up to the fall of the Manchu dynasty (in their capacity as non-Chinese potentates  the Manchus did patronize Tibetan Buddhism).

And this fact gives us insight I think into the nature and fundamental basis of Christianization in Europe, and elsewhere. The book The Barbarian Conversion tells the story of the Christianization of the polities of northern Europe after the fall of Rome, the transformation of pagan tribal domains into Christian proto-nation-states. But one need not specify anything particular to Christianity, because many of the same dynamics which transformed the pagan tribal federations of northern Europe could also apply to Asia in relation to Buddhism.  The conversion to Christianity in northern Europe was often halting, with traditionalist reactions sometimes turning violent. The same phenomenon also accompanied Buddhism’s arrival in Tibet and Japan.

In China and India Buddhism ultimately did not capture the culture in a way that occurred in Burma or Tibet. But the indigenous response illustrates that the clock could never be rolled back in a cultural sense. Neo-Confucianism and Puranic Hinduism were fundamentally different from the variants of Confucianism and Hinduism which Buddhism had confronted and often marginalized. The native, older, traditions were transmuted into something different by the confrontation with Buddhism. If Christianity had been dethroned from its role at the center of the state in the late 4th century, then almost certain Roman traditionalism would have absorbed many of the ideological and ritual innovations of Christianity in relation to the older forms of religious worship. To some extent one can argue that the religious ferment in 6th century Iran, as Zoroastrianism was buffeted by reformist and revolutionary movements, illustrates exactly this impact of Christianity in late antiquity. The Persians at various times flirted with Christianity in various forms (Mesopotamia under Persian rule had very few Zoroastrians, and was likely majority Christianity), but settled on their primal religion. If the Arabs an Islam had not halted the process I suspect that Christian competition and cultural influence would have modulated Zoroastrianism, just as Buddhism reshaped Confucianism and Hinduism.

The broader point is that human cultural evolution is not totally contingent, but seems to fall into broad convergent patterns. All of the world’s “higher religions” exhibit broad similarities (e.g., synthesizing ritual, ethics, and metaphysics). Beginning with the Axial Age, the process of religious innovation seems to have ended a little over one thousand years later with the rise of Islam. One can think of this process as cultural ‘selective sweeps’ across a terrain rich with expansionary opportunities. But once the space was filled by higher religions one saw a sort of cultural equilibrium attained.

* Revisionist scholars who believe that the ‘pagan revival’ has been overblown or exaggerated.

Some recent research has just been published with the title Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable. My first thought honestly was “No shit? Of course.” My friend Jason Goldman has already done a very good write up at io9 if you want read about it and don’t have access to the paper. In commenting on the results Jason notes (and I agree with the general thrust here):

That isn’t a particularly surprising or novel statement on its own [that chimpanzee intelligence is heritable -Razib]. We already knew that genes have an important job when it comes to intelligence and cognition. But what’s useful is that we can assume chimpanzee intelligence isn’t influenced by factors like socioeconomic status, the quality of their school districts, or any of the dozens of other variables, both obvious and subtle, that influence human development. That means we can examine the “genetic” side of their intelligence more easily.

Of course chimpanzees vary in intelligence, and, that variation has a genetic component. Part of the issue here is human essentialism. Chimpanzees are less intelligent than the average human, and so are classed into a general category of the second-most-intelligent-ape, as if their variation is totally irrelevant (and for practical day to day purposes it is). Pound for pound chimpanzees are also much stronger than we are. But would anyone be surprised if chimps varied in strength as a function of their genes (controlled for sex)? I doubt it. The issue, if there is one, is that intelligence is perceived as the sine qua non of humanity.

Jason suggests that chimpanzees could serve to explore issues in relation to the development of intelligence and its dependence upon genes and environment. Perhaps, though I think if that is what you want to explore in animal models birds or outbred rodent lineages would be more cost effective. I’m pretty sure they’d exhibit heritable variation in general intelligence as well.

Though obviously there seems to be selection for larger brains in the primate lineage, and perhaps in chordates in general, over hundreds of millions of years, I think it’s a huge step (which I would dispute) to suggest that intelligence itself is evolutionarily favored over shorter time scales (i.e., one can perhaps argue evolutionary success accrues to the brain in a macroevolutionary sense, but far less in a microevolutionary scale of operation). I bet a lot of the evolutionary action is in what cognitive psychologists would term “domain specific cognitive capacities.” E.g., our ability to learn and speak language with complex syntax, which is a human universal. In contrast there may not be that much selection in a directional sense for “domain general cognition.” From a population genetic perspective this would explain why there’s so much heritable variation in intelligence. Strong directional selection tends to purge that variation. The best evidence indicate that most of that variation is due to effects from many genes (on the order of thousands), and I doubt that chimpanzee-human comparative genomics will yield much fruit here.

The jihadi movement in northern Iraq and Syria which is now in the news is wont to put up a black flag. This is a common feature of jihadi movements since at least the year 2000. It’s a phenomenon which has me wondering, because the black flag was the banner of the Abbasids, the second dynasty of caliphs, while most of the jihadi movements take as their inspiration an earlier epoch of pre-dynastic rulers. On the surface this seems a curiosity, but if you read Hugh Kennedy’s When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World you also know that the rise of the Abbasids was driven in part by a deep rage against the earlier Ummayads by the Shia. Some of the Abbasid rulers were in fact relatively sympathetic to the Shia cause, though ultimately the Abbasid period was when what we now think of as Sunni Islam began to crystallize in a coherent positive fashion as something distinct from the sectarian minorities within Islam. All this matters because short term raison d’etre of the Islamic State, and what distinguishes it from Al Qaeda, is that it has put the Shia-Sunni conflict front and center, and the black flag has been associated with Shia movements for over a thousand years now.

To some extent this is trivial. But, it shows the sorts of patterns and connections you can draw upon if you have at your disposal a few seemingly disparate facts. Which brings me the point of this post, a friend asked me via email yesterday what books he should read to understand Islam, and Muslims, a bit more. After 9/11 many Americans went and read the Koran to understand Islam. It’s a relatively short book compared to the Bible, so that’s doable. But it also makes as much sense as reading the New Testament to understand Christianity. If that does make sense to you, and some evangelical Protestants would say that it does, then by all means. But many would argue that you don’t really understand how Christianity as a phenomena manifests itself in the world by just reading the New Testament. But a more appropriate analogy would be reading the Hebrew Bible to understand Judaism. That is because like Judaism, Islam is a religion where much of the intellectual work has gone into defining and extending the body of religious law which regulates life. Judaism as it exists today makes no sense without the Talmud,* which is a far greater body of work in volume than the Bible, and pertains much more precisely to behavior in a day to day sense. Similarly, Islam is much more defined by the Hadith than the Koran in relation to how Muslims live and practice.

 Obviously I’m not going to recommend that every non-Muslim read the Hadiths. For practical introductions to Islam John L. Esposito’s oeuvre is probably at the top of the list. Anti-Islamic critics have charged Esposito with being too respectful of his subject of study, but I don’t think that’s a problem as long as you know that going in. After reading Esposito, I would suggest Hugh Kennedy’s two works which introduce Islam’s first two ruling houses, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In and When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty. Like Esposito, Kennedy tends to not directly challenge the standard Islamic narrative, despite not being a Muslim himself. But, one of the central planks of the narrative which has been percolating into the public discourse in the West, and which Kennedy’s works tend to undermine, is the conception that the Sunni-Shia conflict as we understand it today is primal and goes back to the days after the death of Muhammad in the 7th century. Though it may have roots in that period it is quite clear from what I have read that a more precise picture must integrate the centuries of dialogue, debate, and conflict, up until the 10th century, when the Sunni faction as we’d recognize it had emerged. To cap off a survey of traditionalist scholars with a counterpoint, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World,** is probably a must. Much of this work is likely wrong, but it is wrong in a very provocative way which makes you reconsider your assumptions. I do think one reality you can take away from this though is that the first century of Islam is an area where we have far less clarity than you might think before exploring the topic. I suspect much of this is due to the fact that our understanding of antiquity is tied to three particular instances of literary reproduction between 800 and 1000, one in the Abbasid House of Wisdom, another during the Carolingian Renaissance, and finally the efforts sponsored by the Byzantine ruler Constantine VII. These translation and copying efforts did have particular agendas, and just the Carolingian scholars would give you a biased picture of post-Roman barbarian states and rulers which preceded the Pippinids, so the Abbasids were not going to commission a view of Islamic history not to their liking.

Finally, to understand mainstream Islamic scholarship which nevertheless attempts to be relevant to Western non-Muslims, you probably need to read Tariq Ramadan. He has the virtues of being an orthodox Sunni who operates with the standard currency of Islam, but still exhibits fluency in the Western conceptual architecture which we take for granted. Additionally he will make up any deficit in metaphysics that one might perceive in the above list of works. Personally I don’t think that religious metaphysics really explain much of interest to those outside a given religious tradition (e.g., Muslims get nothing from understanding Trinitarian theology, and an atheist gains nothing from two hundred ways of defining tawhid), but others disagree.

* Jews who do not root their Judaism in the Talmud, such as Reform Jews, act in opposition and rejection of this tradition, not independent of it.

** If you don’t have access to a college library, there are other revisionist books which are affordable that you can find.

I fancy myself a relatively aware observer of the social scene, but I have to say that the graph to the left startled me somewhat. In less than my lifetime the modal young mother in the United States has gone from being married to unmarried. The effect is ameliorated by the rise in co-habitation, but we have to keep in mind that co-habitation tends to be a looser, and often more ephemeral relationship, than marriage.

But does this matter? I’ve asserted before that families don’t matter as much as you’d think, that marriage is not a panacea for long term social ills which play out in individual lives. Well first, there’s the short term experienced aspect. Even if children can bounce back from a less stable childhood better than you’d think, they still have to experience that instability during many years when they could have been in less stressed circumstances. We’re leaving utility on the table. But the bigger issue is that social statistics are often indicators of deeper underlying dynamics which we perceive but darkly.

Across the political spectrum there are particular and specific panics over a given set of phenomena. Generally conservatives worry about morality and social cohesion, and liberals fret over economic inequality. Though I have personal political views, and suspect that policy can affect change on the margins, I’d be willing to bet broader social dynamics are going to exhibit an internal inertia which all the political theater will not be able to change. The social cohesion which American conservatives yearn for is unlikely to come back due to basic demographics; only 50 percent of births today are to non-Hispanic whites, who themselves are divided by religion, class, and politics. Though some assimilation to a white identity will occur over the long term through intermarriage, in the medium term we’ll have greater multiculturalism. Liberals can change the economic inequality statistic through redistribution, but that doesn’t seem to build up long term human capital. Sweden has reduced poverty and improved the quality of life of immigrants through redistribution, but they remain situated in a social position predicted by their initial human capital (e.g., the children of well educated political refugees from Iran and Chile tend to flourish and assimilate, those of Somali nomads fleeing civil war, not so much).

Where does that leave us? If I had to make a prediction, the American future is going to be more like Brazil. If conservatives are ascendant then there will be attempt to create a myth of national unity to overcome the centrifugal pressures. If liberals are ascendant there will be economic policies to level differences. Likely these two visions will alternate periodically in a stable democracy. But neither will be able to change the reality of a diverse and segregated United States across a variety of metrics.* This isn’t entirely an exotic or novel development, recall the 19th century period of sectionalism.

These data illustrate that reality for me personally. I’m a married “young” father of two in my 30s. I don’t really know people who have children in their early 20s or teens. If you read the full Census report you see that only 1 percent of these women giving birth at a young age have a bachelor’s degree or higher, so that stands to reason. In earlier periods the dynamic above would be sharply racialized in the public imagination, but the data are more nuanced than you’d think. Only 1 percent of these mothers are of Asian background, which one expects. But 43 percent are non-Hispanic white women, not that much lower than the 50 percent of all births. As Charles Murray documents in Coming Apart white America is itself breaking down into its constituent elements, defined by region and class.

As for my children, whose parents are middle class and college educated, the future has bright possibilities. But all the choices I make are going to be geared toward making sure that they are not at the American median, because unlike in decades past that median is not going to be quite so congenial and prosperous. As long as they move in a college educated world where parents are married I’ll be happy, as they can select from an appropriate menu of outcomes which will result in personal flourishing. The key is not to move down in the social pecking order, as therein lies a diminishing of expectations. And this last fact I think explains the panic and frantic aspect of middle class parenting in America today. You always worry that the kids won’t be alright if they aren’t in the top 25%.

* Diversity and segregation not just racially, as we’re wont to think, but economically and socio-politically.

About five years ago when I read Charles Darwins’ The Origin of Species as an adult with some comprehension of biology on a deeper level I was struck by how original and fertile the text was. Years earlier Geoffrey Miller had said in The Mating Mind that it was very useful to read Darwin’s original works, because there is a great deal which doesn’t need to be reinvented. Often Darwin had anticipated many objections, or, his mind had gone down paths which are today very fertile areas of research. I hadn’t thought of that assertion until reading Darwin in the original, but it struck me as exactly right. A few weeks ago I wrote something about species concepts. Well, today I stumbled onto this quote from Origin:

Some few naturalists maintain that animals never present varieties; but then these same naturalists rank the slightest difference as of specific value; and when the same identical form is met with in two distant countries, or in two geological formations, they believe that two distinct species are hidden under the same dress. The term species thus comes to be a mere useless abstraction, implying and assuming a separate act of creation. It is certain that many forms, considered by highly competent judges to be varieties, resemble species so complete in character, that they have been thus ranked by other highly competent judges. But to discuss whether they ought to be called species or varieties, before any definition of these terms has been generally accepted, is vainly to beat the air.

Well played sir! Obviously the context is very different, but some of the arguments are quite general. Darwin was attempting to get to the heart of the matter, and that’s why we remember him and far less the myriad other thinkers of that era.

It’s curious to me that the Coke and Pepsi of America’s print media, The New York Times and The Washington Post, seem to be giving voice to the reality that democracy is not a magic elixir whereby people no longer “suck.” Titled In Myanmar, the Euphoria of Reform Loses Its Glow and U.S. wanted Burma to model democratic change, but it’s not turning out that way, the two pieces highlight the ugly realities of democratic populism. Though these articles are usually bracketed as Muslim-Buddhist conflict, this is only the tip of the iceberg that is the palimpsest of modern Burma.

First, it is important to note that Muslim-Buddhist conflict has several layers. The ethnic cleansing which is occurring to the Rohingya people of Arakan is actually more properly modeled as a racial-ethnic dynamic than a religious one. Physically and linguistically these people are part of the continuum of Bengali populations of South Asia, not the Tibeto-Burman, Tai, and Mon-Khmer peoples of the rest of Burma. Buddhist chauvinists have claimed that this population is a product of the British colonial people, and therefore is not indigenous to Burma, and should be expelled. From what I have gleaned it does seem quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the vast majority of the Rohingya arrived only in the past century or so, from the southeast of Bengal. This does not justify the quasi-exterminationist stance of Buddhists, but it places in proper context the feeling of Buddhist Rakhines of Arakan that they are being dispossessed by aliens. Of course the Rohingya themselves dispute this assertion, attempting to tie themselves to older long settled Muslim populations in Burma. This is an important point, in that in Burma being Muslim does not mean that one is Rohingya. There is a large Muslim population which is ethnically and racially much less distinct from the broader Burmese population, and these are accepted as native to the country. This is why the recent violence in Mandalay can be termed specifically religious, rather than ethnic, because the Muslims of Mandaly differ from the Burmese majority in that city primarily based upon their religion.

The world’s media has noted that Aung San Suu Kyi has been silent or relatively muted on the ethnic and religious violence roiling her country. They have also alluded to the troubling possibility that democratic opening of the country has stoked nationalism and ethnic division. Troubling because the standard Western assumption is that democracy, giving power of the people, is all for the good. But what you see in Burma is that when you give people voice and allow them to organize, sometimes they have a mind of their own. Though the Burmese junta has not been reticent about using conflict in the past to reinforce its rule, it seems unlikely that the neo-liberalizing regime would think that populist chauvinism would be “good for business.” Rather, atavistic popular self-consciousness is being voiced sincerely by the people, the “people” in this case the dominant Theravada Buddhist Bamar majority of the nation. If one is aware of the history of nationalism, and of Burma’s particular history, this phenomenon should not be surprising at all. Mass democracy has been suspiciously correlated with the demand to ‘cleanse’ the nation time & again.

Addendum: Though Burma is relatively diverse, not all diversity is created the same. The Mon people have been the Greeks to the Bamar majority’s role as Romans. As Theravada Buddhists the Mon have been assimilating to Bamar identity over the past few centuries. The Shan of the eastern highlands are ethnic Tai who are relatively late arrivals. But, they converted from Mahayana Buddhism to Theravada. In contrast many Karen and almost all the Kachin are Christian, which alienates them from the Bamar. Finally, you have the case of the Rohingya, who are not only religiously distinct, but are racially very different from the other Burmese ethnic groups, explaining their role as the most extreme pariahs in modern Burma.