So how do you tell that fall is arriving in California? Sunset arrives earlier. Real explanation from a friend who is a California native. In any case, in my few spare minutes I’ve been reading Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. Probably would not recommend for a novice, and to be honest the author is a little prolix. But it’s a nice complement to more general works such as When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, where the ‘eastern interlude’ received some attention, but probably far less than warranted in relation to how significant it is to world history. One aspect of of Lost Enlightenment which a general audience would benefit from is that it emphasizes just how important and disproportionate Iranian speaking intellectuals from Turan were during Islam’s Golden Age in terms of reach and influence. Many of the thinkers that one might assume are Arab because they wrote in Arabic turn out to be ethnically Iranian, and from the further reaches out of the Iranian world, beyond Persia proper.

I do feel a little guilty that I’ve not finished off Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. The problem is that I’m in broad agreement and in overall familiarity with the ideas and theses presented within Stewart’s work. Historical perspective matters, and it was Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval which brought home to me just how metaphysically radical the Founders were in their time. I had read The Godless Constitution years before, and it seems clear that the relative thinness of religious character in the founding documents of early American republic was no inadvertent lacunae. But Winik’s treatment brought home just how strange it was for a polity to arise without any imprimatur of religious sanctity. Stewart’s work is timely, insofar as the ideas of charlatans such as David Barton have received wide attention, but aside from the threads of connection with the ancients such as Lucretius it isn’t fundamentally a new story. It has long been known, as far back as the accusations against Thomas Jefferson of being an infidel.

Finally, I now have Armand Leroi’s The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. I’m excited to read this, because since Mutants I have felt that Armand is a writer of science on the same level as Richard Dawkins. It turns out that we’re interested in the same things, and I actually am highly sympathetic with the subheading of his latest book, but the fact is that Armand just writes well. I can recommend this book without even reading it, and I’m looking forward to reading it in a few settings next week, when I’m going to try and take some time off from the inter-webs and my various adult professional obligations.

A new piece in Slate, Life Is Random: Biologists now realize that “nature vs. nurture” misses the importance of noise, makes a point which I’ve long been making: a lot of “environmental variation” is actually random, basically “noise”. I’d probably take issue with emphasis of the thesis, as I don’t quite think that the understanding of the role of noise in biology is quite so novel as the author makes it out to be. The headline does not help, though that probably can’t be attributed to the writer. Anyone who has worked in biology is well aware that many of the processes we attempt to understand are just really hard to tackle because of the overwhelming background noise against which we’re trying to pick up signal. Jim Manzi would term this “high causal density.” Social scientists have the same problem.

But it’s the last paragraph which really jumped out at me as notable:

Genetic determinism is the view that our genes make us who we are. Popular articles abound describing genes for daredevilishness, creativity, empathy, even being a Republican. Futurists and science-fiction authors predict that genetic engineering will someday allow designer children, built to order, with whatever smarts, looks, and personalities their parents prefer. But biology’s new recognition of the role of noise in development gives us one more reason to think that this simply isn’t going to happen. Gene mapping can’t tell you whether or not your kid will be a skydiver or a conservative, because gene expression is a far more complex phenomenon than biologists long imagined. Even if we can get the genes right, and somehow completely control environments, there will always be noise to make life richly unpredictable.

As I said above I’d take issue with the style of the exposition, as it makes the discovery of noise far more sensational and amazing to contemporary biologists than it is. But much of the substance, down to the illustration of randomness via elegans, I’m wholly on board with. But the author of the Slate piece leaves us with a very different moral than I usually do. She seems positively desirous of the rich creativity energy which noise injects into the developmental process. For me, on the contrary, the power of noise to mess with our expectations means that you have to emphasize even more those variables which have some understanding of. Genes.

Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans has finally be published in journal, Nature. This is important as a validation and confirmation of the strange results which were reported therein. One simple finding which I haven’t commented on in too much detail is how clearly Europe as a biogeographic entity is distinct from the Near East genetically. Arguably, it’s more than a cultural construct. Europeans share descent in part from an ancient lineage which dates to the late Pleistocene, and is not shared with those outside Europe (haplogroup I-M70 in Y chromosomes). To an extent this isn’t totally surprising, as water barriers are often incredibly good at allow for populations to drift apart due to lack of reoccurring gene flow (even ones as narrow as the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosporus). On the other hand there is arguably more continuum with populations in Northeast Asia, though much of that is relatively recent in vintage (e.g., many of the Central Asian Turkic groups occupy a position between west and east Eurasia, but they are relatively recent admixtures).

Finally, this paper leaves a lot of unanswered questions, which I suspect will be answered soon:

Several questions will be important to address in future ancient DNA work. One question concerns where and when the Near Eastern farmers mixed with European hunter-gatherers to produce the EEF. A second question concerns how the ancestors of present-day Europeans first acquired their ANE ancestry. Discontinuity in central Europe during the late Neolithic (~4,500 years ago) associated with the appearance of mtDNA types absent in earlier farmers and hunter-gatherers raises the possibility that ANE ancestry may have also appeared at this time. Finally, it will be important to study ancient genome sequences from the Near East to provide insights into the history of the basal Eurasians.

One thing to note about “basal Eurasians” is that they claim that it shares “drift” with all other non-Africans. This implies that they were not post-Out-of-Africa migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, but shared in a common Out-of-Africa history with the other populations of the world. I hope that deeper study of non-European populations might be able to get us a better sense of where basal Eurasians shake out.

Recently Sam Harris rebuked President Obama’s assertion that the Islamic State is “not Islamic.” And also that “No religion condones the killing of innocents.” To not put too fine a point on it, these statements are either false or meaningless. I applaud Harris as far as it goes, as he is willing to unashamedly rip the veil off the sophistry which dominates much of our public discourse. But in many ways Sam Harris is to atheists what Thomas Frank is to liberals. He is sincere, but his power is in rhetoric rather than analysis.

On the face of it the Islamic State is clearly about Islam. Islam is in its name, and they gesture toward many of the traditions and tropes of that religion. But to reduce the Islamic State to something as vague and expansive as being due to Islam is not particular informative or insightful. This sort of civilizational-culturalist explanation resembles the aether in its formless ability to reshape itself to any phenomena. A key fact which I think is essential in attempting to understand the nature of the Islamic State is that ex-Baathist officers and functionaries have been essential in the operation of the nascent state. This is interesting because Baathism was notionally a secular ideology, co-founded by an Arab of Christian background. But one thing I have read is that even non-Islamist Sunni insurgents in Iraq in the aughts became progressively more religious in their orientation. The eventual absorption of this element into the Islamic State is then an evolutionary process of slow co-option of a marginalized component.

If the function of the Islamic State as a state, as opposed to a diffuse terrorist network, is contingent upon the resurrection of the old Baathist power elite, then one can posit the hypothesis that its emergence was contingent upon the total dispossession of that elite after 2003. Clearly the Sunni Arab hegemony of the Baathist period was not sustainable, but the total dissolution of all the old institutions, and the marginalization of stakeholders, was not inevitable. A falling back to old, atavist, identities by these officers is not entirely surprising. Consider the ethnic nature of most prison gangs. These men on the run, stripped of all material comforts, naturally were drawn to a less concrete, more ‘aspirational,’ ideology.

I took the above photo at the Met in New York. What did you think when you saw the image initially? You can read about the detailed meaning of the statue, but the short explanation is that it’s a Native American girl who stumbles upon a cross. Before 2010 the pose wouldn’t trigger any strong connotations associated with popular culture, but today it does.

Discuss anything.

When I was watching Boyhood I assumed that some moron would point out that the protagonist’s social milieu was overwhelmingly white. And it’s out: Not Everyone’s Boyhood. Many of my friends have a hard time accepting I identify as conservative, but reading stuff like this makes it clear why I’m conservative, I feel like puking over this sort of critique because I think it’s totally dishonest. I feel confident that most of the white writers at The Atlantic, where the piece was published, had white childhoods, with white friends. If you look at the General Social Survey, and I have, around 50 percent of white liberals haven’t had a black person over for dinner in the last few years. And there was the media buzz recently about the fact that white people have white social networks. A clear case of “no shit” social science.

That is all fine. The writer of the piece on Boyhood is someone named Imran Siddequee, who is I’m sure working hard to make a career as a race hustler. And that’s good as far as it goes. If you majored in the humanities you have to make a living somehow. Not to be racist, but what really bothers me is the amen chorus of white liberals who deconstruct and denounce all manner of cultural production for its lack of “diversity”, but who live lives as populated by white people as the protagonist of Boyhood. As it happens I have a lot of white friends, and sometimes on Facebook you see wedding photos. Most of my friends are liberal, though not all, and one thing that is salient is that these wedding parties and attendees are mighty white. Even in California, where half the population is non-Hispanic white, good white liberals seem to be inviting only white people to their seminal life events.

So I’m proposing the “wedding test” to see if you really walk the walk on diversity and all that. You don’t have to marry someone of another race, I know that’s going too far for most people (recalling the Reihan Salam column in Slate where comments analogized same race preference to sexual orientation). But if diversity is really something you value, presumably that will be reflected in the few hundred people you invite to your wedding party. Change starts at home, if you can’t diversify your personal life, perhaps you should get off your high horse about how we need “more diversity in field X.”

Gary Marcus’ The Birth of the Mind keyed me in to the fact that claims of neural plasticity often also suggest that the brain can not completely compensate for alterations structure. This was relevant in his discussion of mental modularity, but it is something to keep in mind whenever you encounter “amazing” instances of people who survive damage to their brain. A case in point, Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain:

… woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she’d had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn’t walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Yes, a case of the adaptability of the brain. But she still has problems walking steadily, and that’s not a trivial matter for an “upright ape.” The structures of our brains are not coincidence, which can be discarded without consequence.

If you’ve been reading this weblog this headline in Science won’t be surprising, Three-part ancestry for Europeans. The writer, Anne Gibbons, draws up stuff which has been out for a long time (e.g., Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans). But she also has taken the temperature of researchers in terms of where the results are going, as obviously there are hunches and inferences the scientists are making which are not publication worthy, yet. From the article:

How do you make a modern European? For years, the favored recipe was this: Start with DNA from a hunter-gatherer whose ancestors lived in Europe 45,000 years ago, then add genes from an early farmer who migrated to the continent about 9000 years ago. An extensive study of ancient DNA now points to a third ingredient for most Europeans: blood from an Asian nomad who blew into central Europe perhaps only about 4000 or 5000 years ago. This third major lineage originated somewhere in northwestern Asia, perhaps on the steppes of western Asia or in Eastern Europe.

…

Previous studies have also found some genetic ties between Europeans and Native Americans, notes population geneticist Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide in Australia, a co-author on the new study, a draft of which is available on a biology preprint server. Thanks to these ancient Eurasians, “someone with northern European ancestry is more closely related to Native Americans than southern Europeans are,” says Pontus Skoglund, a postdoc at Harvard who analyzed DNA from the Swedish skeletons but was not a co-author.

In their talks, Haak and Krause each proposed that the late influx of these “ghost” Eurasians might be related to what’s known archaeologically as the Corded Ware culture of nomadic herders, who imprinted twisted cord or rope onto their pottery. These nomadic pastoralists herded their cattle east from the steppes north of the Black Sea and occupied large areas of northeast and central Europe by 2500 B.C.E.

So now we have a name, the Corded Ware. This is not archaeologically entirely surprising, though what little I know has been gleaned from Wikipedia. Those more versed in this domain can now offer their own interpretations of the implications, but I’m rather sure that the geneticists are confident about their results if they’re floating it about, and have probably cross-checked with some archaeologists. I do think though that we know have a sense of why R1a is so frequent across much of Europe. It doesn’t show up in the ancient DNA, but probably came with Corded Ware.

The new paper in PNAS, Common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance identified using the proxy-phenotype method, has resulted in a fair amount of reaction. One of the major things that people grasp onto is that the effects of the variants in question are extremely smaller (here’s an FAQ for the current paper). Each variant is associated with a 0.3 increment or decrement in IQ, where the average IQ is 100 and the standard deviation is ~15 points. These results are not surprising, as the problems with earlier attempts to fix upon a genetic region which explains a great deal of variation in intelligence in the normal range have not been successful (i.e., they fail replication, so probably just a false positive). Taking these results at face value many have wondered what the big deal is, as the associations here have such a small impact.

First, a small effect does not preclude important practical consequences. The locus HMGCR has been implicated in variation in cholesterol levels at 0.1 standard deviation, but that is the locus that statins target. Does this mean that we can make a “genius pill” in the future? I’m moderately skeptical, and obviously there are major ethical issues with this. But, this sort of research shows that it may be possible, and in this big wide world of ours knowledge is hard to keep under control. As a normative matter I’m in the always better to know category for almost everything. So big surprise I have no issues with this line of research.

There is a second issue of more practical relevance, and that is that many people wish to reject a heritable component for intelligence. To be clear it is robust science that intelligence is 0.3 to 0.7 heritable. That means that 30 to 70 percent of the variation in intelligence in the population is due to variation in genes. Because the trait is highly polygenic, on the order of thousands of loci controlling variation in intelligence, it is difficult to pick any particular signal. But very few scientists are under the illusion that intelligence is not at least moderately heritable. A good analogy here is height, which is highly heritable, and controlled by many genes of small effect (the genetic architecture here is moderately more tractable from what I can tell). But for many people, especially in the public, they “need a gene.” It makes the abstract, ratio of additive genetic variance over total phenotypic variance, concrete.

But I find it more interesting that some are spinning this as a support for the low heritability of IQ, and the importance of environment. Personally I wish for my children that environment was less important, not more. The reason is simple: in a behaviour genetic sense we really don’t know what we’re talking about when we say “environment.” The Invisible Gorilla has a lot of illustrations on how tools and techniques which make us “smarter” really don’t work (or, their efficacy has not been scientifically validated). The same for infants and children. Obviously malnutrition and abuse are going to cause problems in relation to development, but the sort of “enriching” activities and practices de rigueur among upper middle class parents probably are irrelevant to the final outcome of the trait in question (this is clear when you look at the high level of variation cross-culturally, with some “best practices” being contradictory, but the results are the same nonetheless).

The best way to think about it is that “environment” is just noise in your model. It is the genetic component you can control, or at least use to predict. Though heritability is a population wide statistic, it has some relevance for individuals. The mid-parent value of a trait for the parents can help you gauge your expectations for your offspring. When you standardize for sex the height of parents can tell you whether to expect tall or short offspring. This is not guaranteed, as there is a high standard deviation around the expected value, even for a highly heritable trait like height (the correlation between full-siblings for height is ~0.50). But, it does load the die. The correlation of IQ between full-siblings is also on the order of ~0.50. Remember here that environment, the noise parameter, changes your expected value. Since this isn’t heritable it drives the phenotype of the offspring back to the population mean. If IQ is less heritable, say 0.30, then if you and your spouse are deviated away from the mean, you can expect your children to regress back to the population mean, since they won’t inherit the magic mix of factors which resulted in high IQ. In contrast, if IQ is heritable on the order of 0.70, then you can update your expectations so that your children will be more likely to resemble you, assuming you are deviated from the norm.

Perhaps I’m a narcissist, but I want my children to be like me in cognitive profile. It makes it easier for me to understand where they are coming from. If I thought that I could as a parent control the environmental outcomes with a high degree of certainty I might be more sanguine about low heritability, but that’s not my hunch about this trait. Low heritability of intelligence to me connotes a flight back to mediocrity and a total lack of control. High heritability in contrast allows one to reclaim control, because you choose your spouse and you have a sense of their realized phenotype. Obviously this is conditional on where you stand on the distribution. So I emphasize the “I.” But many people at the higher end of the IQ distribution seem to want lower heritability, because they perceive that they can control outcomes through manipulation of environment. I’m not confident of this at all. Sometimes flighty academic abstractions can have real consequences in the choices we make in this world. This is one.