By now you have heard of the recent ancient DNA finding dating from ~40,000 years ago in Southeastern Europe. The individual is a representative of one of the first anatomically modern groups to arrive in Europe…sort of. It exhibits robust characteristics, and may have had some admixture from Neandertals. Now, thanks to ancient DNA, that’s confirmed:

Qiaomei Fu, a palaeogenomicist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told the meeting how she and her colleagues had sequenced DNA from a 40,000-year-old jawbone that represents some of the earliest modern-human remains in Europe. They estimate that 5–11% of the bone’s genome is Neanderthal, including large chunks of several chromosomes. (The genetic analysis also shows that the individual was a man). By analysing how lengths of DNA inherited from any one ancestor shorten with each generation, the team estimated that the man had a Neanderthal ancestor in the previous 4–6 generations. (The researchers declined to comment on the work because it has not yet been published in a journal).

Two major points. First, the admixture fraction is way higher than any modern population. This isn’t a fluke. Second, they must be seeing ancestry tract lengths to make this inference. Basically the Neandertal ancestry blocks have been chopped up, but only a finite number of times. This really one-ups talk of “Cherokee great-grandmothers”, that’s for sure.

So what about the earlier results that most of the admixture must have happened in the Middle East? There have been revisions to this model, with many researchers now suggesting that a second pulse might have occurred in eastern Eurasia. But, another possibility is that very little of the ancestry of the first modern Europeans remains in modern Europeans. That is, the later Paleolithic populations of Europe may have replaced the first settlers, just as they in their turn were replaced or assimilated. The landscape of Mesolithic/Neolithic Europe seems demographically complex, so I see no reason not to suspect that the same was the case for the period before the Last Glacial Maximum. There may have been several admixture events with Neandertals, but the “outriders” may have been left no traces in the modern human lineages. It may be that the human “phylogenetic bush” has been extremely pruned many times over, so that most “fossil ancestors” are simply dead ends.

Addendum: As usual, great piece in Nature too.

In a review for the new installment of Mad Max Dana Stevens in Slate writes:

The way the world ends, for Miller, is not in overpopulated high-tech megacities slicked with film-noir rain, but in something like the polar opposite. Miller’s nightmare of the future posits the planet as a parched desert landscape against which the world’s few remaining humans scratch out a meager, violent existence, equipped only with the salvaged remains of mid-20th-century technology. It’s that future that, 36 years after Mel Gibson first put the pedal to the metal as Max Rockatansy, is looking more like the one we may be leaving to our own survivors….

I understand this is a movie review, and that line was probably thrown in there for artistic effect. But facts matter, and there is no way that you justify the position that the world is more like that of Mad Max today than 40 years ago. Paul Ehrlich has definitely lost his bet, and even the peak oil worry has abated. The data show that a smaller proportion of the world’s population is undernourished and and poor. The total fertility rate is declining and life expectancy is increasing. Yes, the situation of the middle class in much of the developed world has been in relative stagnation by many metrics, but enormous increases in human well being have occurred throughout what was once termed the Third World.

The Right and Left have particular hobbyhorses. Young people today are more secular and tolerant of sexual diversity in lifestyles, but they are also less sexually promiscuous (we were blogging about this at Gene Expression seven years ago by the way). Similarly, despite worries about income inequality in the developed world, billions are rising out of poverty in places like China and India. Yes. Billions. Though environmental threats exist, the world is healthier and wealthier than it was a generation ago.

It’s not very important that Dana Stevens’ editor didn’t remove a rhetorical flourish which was just factually unfounded (though I it’s insulting to the people of places like the Sahel who suffered through privation a generation ago, and no longer do so). But, it does suggest a mental weakness that these sorts of slips get through, to influence the public, and continue to distort the perceptions of the way the world is. To prepare for the exigencies of the future we need to see the present clearly.

Long-time readers of my content know that about 10 years back I used to make fun of a book by two writers for The Economist, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World. It was a sexy thesis, but really it was meant to appeal to paranoid liberals who were scared, as well as reassure religious conservatives worried about “a secular age.” The basic idea was that religious views and values were ascendant again, not a totally crazy thesis on the face of it. The problem is that the data in some regions were already suggesting major changes in the direction of secularism, in particular in the United States. This change took most people by surprise unless they were looking closely. Samuel Huntington’s last book, Who Are We?, was written unfortunately in the late 1990s just before the release of multiple academic surveys which chronicled the rapid de-Christianization of vast swaths of the American populace. In it Huntington took for granted the thesis that America would become more, not less, Christian, as more Asian Americans converted to Christianity, and the Hispanic Catholic fraction increased (contrary to visible evangelical Asian-American Christians, this is the least religious of America’s ethnic groups, and Hispanics are secularizing very fast).

Even though the data are pretty clear, and were for a long time, people tend not to update. And timing is always an issue. For example, the last major wave of secularization in the USA happened in the late 1960s, before which Time Magazine published Religion: Revival’s Crest in 1963. In the early years of my blog I kept having to remind people of facts when they relied on impressions. In 2009 I corrected The New York Times’ John Tierny, who stated that “As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general move toward secularism as societies become richer and more educated. But you don’t see that trend in the United States, where church attendance is still robust….” I happen to know his email address and I sent him my post. He wasn’t convinced that I was right even then. I bet now he would admit that the data were robust.

I suspect that a new survey from Pew (very large sample sizes) is going to change resistance even from holdouts who don’t want to read the writing on the wall, America’s Changing Religious Landscape. The major “shock result”, which has been prefigured elsewhere, is that huge numbers of younger Americans are not religiously affiliated, and larger fractions are now admitting to being atheists and agnostics. The change over the generations has been enormous, going from a nation that’s over 85 percent Christian, to 70 percent Christian, mostly driven by defection. Before the 1990s religious adherence was a matter of social conformity. Far less today when 25 percent of the population does not have an affiliation, and even less so in regions where religious adherence may even be a subculture, rather than a norm. The fraction of the unaffiliated who are atheists and agnostics is also increasing, suggesting that the taboos around these terms are declining (I doubt I’d get as many shocked expressions saying I’m an atheist today in Red America as I did in the early 1990s).

What does this portend for the future? Over 1/3 of those born in the 1980s and 1990s have no religion. These are people who will be retiring in the 2040s and 2050s, the grandparents of that era. The trends, which are not guaranteed, mind you, indicate then that future generations may be even more secular, so that the electorate of that period may be extremely polarized in terms of religious culture (as the fractions of evangelicals is holding its own better than other Protestants and Catholics). This result was already evident in Robert D. Putnam’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which received far less attention than Bowling Alone. But it was an important finding. Basically, the association of religion and right-wing politics has been having a secularizing effect on non-right wing Americans, and making ostensibly right-wing individuals more religiously identified. In other words, socially binding cross-cutting institutions are unraveling.

I believe this is more important than the coming “white” minority of 2050. The reasons are manifold. In the early 2000s some Democratic strategists saw an emerging majority from the coalition of minorities. On the other side many on the Right feared the rising tides of color, implicitly or explicitly. Nearing the end of the Obama era we now see how this story did not turn out to be so neat, with one of the proponents of demography-as-Democratic-density now recanting. Obviously we need to be cautious about over-reaction. The white Protestant conservative demographic core of the modern Republican party, and American conservatism, is going to decline somewhat over the generations. But the basic thesis that all non-white populations will vote Democratic indefinitely for generations seems unfounded. And definitions matter. Many Americans of mixed backgrounds may be assumed by Left-liberals to take the black tack of hypodescent, but they may actually simply exhibit more flexible self-identities which do not disassociate them so much from the mainstream (people who are visibly white, but have non-white ancestry, do not react well to racism against non-whites for obvious reasons, but neither are they anti-white, and often identify as white).

In an America where racial boundaries are fuzzier and more malleable, the strictness enforced by social-cultural categories in theory may actually be appealing and bracing. This goes to the heart of genetic vs. cultural distance in variation. Genetic variation rapidly diminishes due to the constraints and conditions of biological inheritance. Cultural inheritance is theoretically more powerful and airtight. As the ethno-biological categories melt on the edges, religious-cultural ones may emerge to more fully demarcate various tribal-political coalitions. And this is part of the reason why religion may increase in salience, despite the rapid expansion of a non-religious population. Confessional politics may come to the United States in an explicit fashion with the decline of implicit normative convention.

Postscript:

Some of you may wonder as the Americo-centric focus of this post, especially light of another recent Pew survey which highlights religion’s international robustness, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 (as well as books I’ve blogged such as The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?). First, international projections are dicier than national ones. More variables are on the move. You can’t predict easily the rapid secularization you saw in Quebec in the 1960s, in the United States in the past 15 years, or, the glimmers of change on the horizon in the Arab world. Second, what happens in the developed world matters more. The huge numbers of African Christians will result in change. But, Catholicism will still be based out of Rome, and intellectual currents out of Western Christianity will likely shape Sub-Saharan African Christianity more than the reverse. Philip Jenkins in his work celebrating African Christianity nonetheless observes that over time indigenous religious traditions begin to align themselves with world-normative practices, often to standards established in Western societies.

Update: Preview clip is online. Click “domesticating animals”. End update

There are different opinions on whether domestication as a process can give you insight into evolutionary processes. The divergence goes back to the beginning of evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin was an optimist, a country gentlemen who spent much of is life in rural England. Alfred Wallace on the other hand seemed to focus more on natural selection in the wild, raw and unconstrained. A week ago at the Biology of Genomes Conference Alex Cagan presented research on broad convergences of the evolutionary genomics of tame and domestic lineages in mammals, Tameness is in the genes:

Cagan and colleagues examined DNA in Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) that had been bred for 70 generations to be either tame or aggressive toward humans. Docility was associated with genetic changes in 1,880 genes in the rats. American minks (Neovison vison) bred for tameness over 15 generations had tameness-associated variants in 525 genes, including 82 that were also changed in the rats.

Some people on Twitter joked that this was a trivial finding, as we’ve long known that domestication is a heritable process mediated via quantitative genetics. But the interesting aspect of this research is that it seems that the same pathways lead back to the same broad set of genetic families. In other words, selection does not operate over an infinitely malleable and plastic genome over the medium-term evolutionary time scale. Not world-shaking, but critical to get a fix upon (definitely not surprising in light of how Hox genes and opsins have been known to evolve over and over).

I bring this up now because on tonight’s episode of Through the Wormhome, titled Are We Here for a Reason?, I’m interviewed in the third segment, where I give my opinions on domestication and its relevance toward evolution and the human future. This follows up my small role in the PNAS paper from last fall, Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication. As my current professional interests are still fixed upon this area of evolutionary genomics, expect to hear more from me!

As for the logistics of the show, it’s on The Science Channel, a Discovery cable property. For those without a television it seems that you’ll find it online soon enough. I have seen a preview, and it’s pretty good. I’m flattered to be on after Richard Lenski. The production values are good, I’m hoping that people will learn something. Please do remember that a lot of filming was reduced down to 5-10 minutes. It is amusing to see where they inserted graphs; that’s usually where I got a little too nerdy and technical, even though the director kept trying to get me under control.

P.S. I had a cold that day, for the record.

Been pretty busy around here. But I want to point out that our old friend Armand Leroi, author of Mutants and The Lagoon, is out with a new paper, The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. It’s open access, and has gotten a lot of press already, but I do think it’s an important result to ruminate upon. I give a lot of thought to theoretical models of cultural evolution derived from evolutionary theory, but it’s obviously important to bridge these with empirical patterns as well.

In other news, a few people in the comments below are asking about my post in regards to Julia Galef’s comment about Dawkins. One thing some readers may not know is that I’m personally pretty well acquainted with many of the “rationalist” crowd who live around Berkeley. As in, they are my personal friends more or less. That should give you some sense how open minded these people are to heterodox ideas. It’s hard to escape the bounds of group conformity, but my experience is that for various reasons (often innate) these are people who are generally bound less to that tendency than is the norm in the broader culture. Take that how you want to take it.

Finally, any interesting papers and books would be appreciated. This is an open thread, but it seems that unless I make an explicit call people don’t think to contribute.

The below is ~2 minutes from Julia Galef. Not really about Richard Dawkins per se. I’m thinking on this. Strikes me as important.

Perhaps Charles Darwin was wrong about how species originated? This shouldn’t be so surprising. If you read The Origin of Species you’ll be struck by how much Darwin got wrong, and, how much he got right. As a fully grown adult with some knowledge of evolution re-reading Darwin in the original confirmed for me what a genius he was. The man was writing over 150 years ago in a pre-genetic era. Not only did he not have molecular phylogenetics, but he didn’t even have a proper theory of inheritance! It’s a miracle Charles Darwin got so much right. It’s no sin that he missed the mark even on the big questions.

With that I have to admit it’s awkward when people ask me about big picture evolutionary questions (as opposed to, for example, the rate of new mutations in humans), as unfortunately I’m not very well versed in macroevolution. Much of what I know about speciation in particular I know from Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr’s mid-2000s book Speciation. It’s true that both are population geneticists by training, so that might give me a biased view, so I’ve also read Stephen Jay Gould’s books (e.g, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory). But with Gould it’s hard to tell when he’s transmitting consensus, and when’s presenting his own heterodox views, unless you engage in very close reading. Simon Conway Morris wrote The Crucible of Creation specifically to rebut what he felt were Gould’s misrepresentation of his research in Wonderful Life (by the way, I feel that Gould’s literary style is best suited to essay format; in books he’s interminable).

A new open access paper in MBE, Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification, concludes that speciation is a clocklike and neutral process. As you can see from the figure above it looks as if ~2 million years is some major peak when it comes to the point at which lineages which are species converge in terms of their last ancestral populations. First, it seems clear that they’re using the biological species concept. Second, their mechanism is totally unoriginal. Rather than positive selection due to exogenous natural pressures (think Darwin’s finches, though he himself gave a lot of thought to sexual selection as the driver of speciation) the authors indicate that neutral mutational differences between diverged populations eventually lead to genetic incompabilities. This was an idea that was part of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis, so we’re talking about modulating weights, not overturning of the established order. This is an active area of research in population genetics today, see Emergent speciation by multiple Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities. It’s not crazy on the face of it as a hypothesis.

But it’s a whole different thing to generalize about the tree of life. Quanta Magazine has a collection of responses from researchers in the field, A Surprise for Evolution in Giant Tree of Life: Researchers build the world’s largest evolutionary tree and conclude that species arise because of chance mutations — not natural selection. I think the title is misleading for the general audience, as this isn’t a novel thesis at all, but the piece itself is more evenhanded. As noted within phylogenetics is a highly statistical enterprise. Leibniz’s famous injunction “let us calculate” is a bit more complicated when you have biased data to put into your inference generation machine. Obviously the authors couldn’t sample extinct lineages, as noted by some in the Quanta piece. They try to account for this, but the devil is in the details. Overall a ~2 million year figure invariant across arthropods and vertebrates strikes me as strange, and likely a statistical artifact if I had to put money on it (or perhaps low effective population size lineages exhibit more build up of neutral alleles producing genetic incompabilities, while large Ne groups are more impacted by positive diversifying selection, when it comes to speciation?).

Time will tell. This is not the final answer, and my passing acquaintance with this field suggests that a “first look” often does not hold up because people are missing part of this very big picture. The whole tree of life is a big thing to tackle when it comes to generalization. But, I am optimistic that this generation shall not pass before we have enough sequence across the tips of the tree and computational power to analyze it to come to more robust conclusions.

Citation: S. Blair Hedges, Julie Marin, Michael Suleski, Madeline Paymer, and Sudhir Kumar, Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification, Mol Biol Evol (2015) 32 (4): 835-845 first published online March 3, 2015 doi:10.1093/molbev/msv037

Addendum: I should note also that natural selection itself is somewhat stochastic over short enough time intervals. Don’t know if that would produce neutrality in speciation over the long term.

Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a “Muhammad drawing contest”?

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) May 4, 2015

In the wake of the events in Garland a few days ago the above tweet by a reporter at The New York Times has garnered a fair amount of attention. It’s really hard for some (including me frankly) to not see this as “victim-blaming.” Free speech is a very special and distinctive liberty, in particular the liberty to speak in public without censure in a manner which assaults the basis of what is holy and sacred. In much of the world this particular absolutism, neigh, idolatry, of freedom of thought even unto the bounds of blasphemy and hatred that is adhered to in the United States thanks to our Bill of Rights is viewed as strange and offensive. The insights of classical liberal thinkers were strange and novel in their time, but they captured our imagination. We put freedom of conscience first and foremost not because that is how it has always been, but it is how we believe it should be. Conscience even for the devil himself!

To some extent there are aspects of incommensurability here. The right to blaspheme is relatively new in the history of the world, and especially in a multicultural world. Many Muslims who don’t understand how one could insult their religion often get confused when it’s pointed to them that their own religion is based in large part on invective against other faiths (e.g., ‘idolaters’). One person’s insult is another person’s fact. This rational critical position “outside” of society is abnormal in human psychology, which is embedded in all sorts of cultural and social presuppositions.

But in any case, with all that in mind, I was curious about attitudes toward speech in the GSS. There are a series of questions which exhibit the form:

If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?

In this case, a Muslim cleric who preaches hatred of the United States. Other questions refer to racists, atheists, militarists, homosexuals, and communists. Basically, these questions get at whether respondents would tolerate public expression of views which they might personally find objectionable. Look at the trend line over the years it is generally heartening:

The question about Muslim clerics only began to be asked in 2008, so I didn’t put it above. But, I was curious about how it related to a question about whether to let a racist speak in your community. Below are some demographic cross-tabs:

Demographic	Allow Muslim cleric to speak	Allow racist to speak
Extremely liberal	62	66
Liberal	52	64
Slightly liberal	49	58
Moderate	39	57
Slightly conservative	44	61
Conservative	40	61
Extremely conservative	34	60
Strong Democrat	42	57
Democrat	38	56
Lean Democrat	50	57
Independent	37	56
Lean Republican	46	66
Republican	41	62
Strong Republican	40	62
No HS diploma	18	41
HS diploma	37	56
Junior college	45	61
Bachelor	60	72
Graduate	65	74
Wordsum 0	11	31
Wordsum 1	20	43
Wordsum 2	19	37
Wordsum 3	23	49
Wordsum 4	28	56
Wordsum 5	31	54
Wordsum 6	39	54
Wordsum 7	48	62
Wordsum 8	60	70
Wordsum 9	68	81
Wordsum 10	85	88

In case you are curious the correlation between the two trends across these demographics is 0.95. To the left is a scatter plot which shows the pattern (click to enlarge). I was pretty shocked how nearly monotonic the tendency for the more intelligent (Wordsum is the score on a 0 to 10 vocab test which has a 0.71 correlation with general intelligence) to be more supportive of free speech is. Note that extreme liberals are more supportive of free speech even for racists than conservatives, though there isn’t much social difference at this point (I’m not surprised by the lack of partisan differences, which are much less segregated by social values than ideological identification).

Next I wanted to relate how the two attitudes toward speech related. Below you see the first two set of cross-tabs with marginals on the rows and columns. So the first set shows what percentage of those who would allow a Muslim cleric to speak would also allow a racist to speak. The second set shows what percentage of those who would allow a racist to speak would also allow a Muslim cleric to speak. In both cases the top left and bottom right are the “consistent” positions. Finally, I decided to look at attitudes by demographic again, this time broken down by both positions on speech with the marginals for the column. That means that every row shows the percentage of those who would allow a racist to speak who would also allow a Muslim cleric to speak, and those who wouldn’t allow a racist to speak who would also allow a Muslim cleric to speak.

		Allow racist	Don’t allow racist	Total
	Allow Muslim cleric	88	12	100
	Don’t allow Muslim cleric	38	62	100
		Allow racist	Don’t allow racist
	Allow Muslim cleric	63	13
	Don’t allow Muslim cleric	37	87
	Total	100	100
		Allow racist	Don’t allow racist
Allow Muslim cleric to speak	Extremely liberal	81	27
	Liberal	71	17
	Slightly liberal	70	21
	Moderate	60	12
	Slightly conservative	63	15
	Conservative	61	8
	Extremely conservative	53	3
	Wordsum 0-4	40	10
	Wordsum 5	48	13
	Wordsum 6	63	9
	Wordsum 7	70	12
	Wordsum 8	79	17
	Wordsum 9	77	27
	Wordsum 10	92	32

 

The consistent free speech position gets stronger as you get more liberal, and, as you get more intelligent. But it is interesting that the position where you won’t allow a racist to speak but you will allow a Muslim cleric to speak gets more frequent among liberals and the very intelligent. This, I believe, explains some of the rumblings and equivocation about free speech absolutism. These are a minority, but they are vocal. In contrast, though there are hardcore civil libertarians on the Right, it is almost certainly true that many conservatives who support the right to blaspheme Islam are less willing to stand up for the right to blaspheme the flag of the United States (e.g., allow someone to defecate on it, for example).

One major caveat that needs to placed here is that traditionally the elites of this country have been more defensive about free speech than the populace as a whole. That’s probably because the elites are worried more about power plays by their rivals. Ultimately politically oriented free speech is important for those with ambition and aspirations.

The New York Times has a painful write-up of what a humanities conference is like, The Conference Manifesto. My question is pretty straightforward: is this really representative? E.g., reading line-by-line from papers? Readers with experience as asked to weight in.

A few years ago when I reviewed The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, I joked that it was the anti-Malcolm Gladwell manifesto. The joke was only half serious. Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons presented in their book serious arguments which weren’t sexy and offered no easy shortcuts. As such it is no surprise that Gladwell is still rolling in the money, while Chabris and Simons are respected academics, though not public intellectuals on the same magnitude (the irony is that arguably they are intellectuals in a more substantive way than their famous bête noire). A more egregious individual when it comes to science popularizing than Gladwell was Jonah Lehrer (not surprising that Jonah was somewhat of a protege of Gladwell). Aside from the admitted fabrications, Chabris has been long pointing out that Lehrer seems to purposely misrepresent or misunderstand the process of science, taking isolated studies and stitching them together to support novel and counter-intuitive theses which might sell copies of books (it was ironic that he wrote a long piece for The New Yorker on problems with replication).

The fact that you shouldn’t hinge your perception about the validity of a hypothesis on one study isn’t an issue for most scientists. They know how science works. It’s a noisy process, with lots of fits and starts, and consensus emerges slowly, and is periodically overturned or extended. There’s a reason that John Ioannidis’ Why Most Published Research Findings Are False is highly cited. There are thousands and thousands of studies published every year. If you want, you can search through the stack and find “peer reviewed research” to support nearly any proposition. The issue isn’t whether there are scholars willing to support your position, but what the scholarly consensus is, if there is one.

All this came to mind when I saw this blog post, A Trick For Higher SAT scores? Unfortunately no. The short of it is that a few years ago the author read Thinking, Fast and Slow, from Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner. He reported with excitement results from a study which primed individuals to focus more with less clear fonts, and therefore increased their cognitive performance substantially. The reason why this study’s results are important is obvious to anyone, increasing median cognitive performance is a social good (this is why we put iodine in salt to combat cretinism).

Though Kanheman is a great scholar, most people are not going to know about this study from him. Rather, Malcolm Gladwell used the study in David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants to illustrate one of his points. Unfortunately Gladwell is a big deal for many people. Though I quite liked The Tipping Point when it came out, over the years I’ve come to see that Gladwell is less a communicator of scholarship than a storyteller who sells intellectually-themed yarns. Gladwall hasn’t seen a sample size that dissuades him from reporting enthusiastically on a result with a marginally significant p-value, so long as it supports one of his story arcs.

Three years on the author of the blog post, and one of the original authors of the paper, have a follow up publication where they report that there is no effect at all from the priming with less clear fonts. The sample size of the original study was 40. The follow up, 7,000 total (they pooled multiple studies). The author of the blog post ends on a down note:

I expect that the false story as presented by Professor Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell will persist for decades. Millions of people have read these false accounts. The message is simple, powerful, and important. Thus, even though the message is wrong, I expect it will have considerable momentum (or meme-mentum to paraphrase Richard Dawkins).

Probably descriptively correct. But you can do something about it. Be the asshole at the party to point out that the “latest research” your friend has read in the current issue of The New Yorker is most likely to be crap, especially if it is both counter-intuitive and supports your group’s normative priors. (yes, I am usually that asshole in real life too)

Note: the reason I say irrelevant, rather than false or wrong, is that a lot of research is trivial improvement on an already established consensus if when the results are robust.