After a little thought, I’ve decided to cancel the “Membership” option for this weblog. It just wasn’t working in terms of the time/energy it took to keep the tech working on an independent platform, and I didn’t really like gating posts anyway. If you really want to support this weblog, I have a Patreon account, but it’s pretty clear that I don’t write this blog for the money (though I make a non-trivial sum on Amazon referrals).
Honestly, who makes money on writing except for a few incumbents who are extracting rents (and perhaps people who write and ghost-write shlock like self-help and romance)?
I’ve canceled everyone’s recurring subscription. If you get charged again, just email me.
You might notice that I haven’t posted something since the last open thread. This happens really rarely. But the reality is I’ve been busy with stuff like family and doing work which actually makes me money. Happens. May happen more in the future, to be frank. If there is another Razib out there blogging about what I’m blogging about, tell me and I’ll retire from the field for sure!
Jerry Muller’s Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, which I read in the late 1990s, was the work which definitely shaped my alignment with the political Right. With that in mind, I thought I’d give his newest book, The Tyranny of Metrics, a shot.
Some discussion on what’s been big in evolutionary biology in the last generation. My obviously biased thoughts:
so what r big evolutionary things over last generation in your opinion? spending 10 seconds on it i’d say
– comeback of natural selection on genome-wide scale
– exploring speciation dynamics using genomes
— Razib🥥 Khan (@razibkhan) August 26, 2019
I do post on Twitter now and then. But mostly I lurk. And, it’s sad to see so many people behave like 14-year olds. But I think it’s just a feature of the platform. End it, don’t mend it.
The Rug Rat Race. Lyman Stone is disputing the data but this preprint argues that the current craze for full-court parenting dates to the mid-90s.
Poll: Bernie, Warren surge to tie Biden atop Democratic field. For what it’s worth, my money is on Warren. Though only modestly confident.
Senescence: Still an Unsolved Problem of Biology.
How the 1619 Project Rehabilitates the ‘King Cotton’ Thesis. The New York Times took a minority and very tendentious position in economic history and presented it to the general public as if it was the mainstream consensus. Many liberal commentators are quite aware of this reality, and so when you listen to them comment on the series you see how they are engaging in circumlocutions. It’s sad. Also, the series is written like the United States of America is the only country with a history in the world, and that the world before 1619 did not exist.
Can natural selection favour indiscriminate spite? W. D. Hamilton would be interested in this preprint.
Sexual antagonism leads to a mosaic of X–autosome conflict.
How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation.
Late Jomon male and female genome sequences from the Funadomari site in Hokkaido, Japan.
Assortative mating by population of origin in a mechanistic model of admixture.
NSF graduate fellowships disproportionately go to students at a few top schools. It’s called the Pareto principle.
Convergent genomic signatures of high altitude adaptation among domestic mammals.
The Truth About Faster Internet: It’s Not Worth It.
Does meiotic drive alter male mate preference?
Detecting selection from linked sites using an F-model.
What are you reading?
Reading Imperial China by FW Mote.
Lots of people on the internet are seeking recurring crowdfunding, but so far I’ve only regarded your decade+ worth of free high quality output as worth some backpayment on my part. I’ve also contributed to the funds specifically for book reviews by Greg Cochran, but those are one-time payments.
I don’t read as many books as I used to. I just finished Robin Hanson’s “The Age of Em” after using up most of the possible extensions at the library, and I’m still procrastinating on organizing my thoughts into a blog post. I blog even less frequently than you despite having fewer demands on my time, so perhaps you should feel better in comparison.
“If there is another Razib out there blogging about what I’m blogging about, tell me and I’ll retire from the field for sure!”
You are sui generis my man.
Reading “From the Holy Mountain” by Dalrymple. Interesting to look at this text from the perspective of ~ 25 years, and I had to chuckle at his relief on getting into Syria after the tumult of SE Turkey. How things have changed.
In the slavery question, it seems to have been a curious inversion in the standard left-wing position about the connection between slavery and capitalism; some decades ago, at least in the hard left, the conventional position was that slavery was incompatible with capitalism, and that the 19th century abolitionism was motivated, not by humanitarian reasons, but by the economical interests of the capitalist class (in high school, me and other student had a big argument with our History teacher – a fellow traveler of the Portuguese Communist Party – because we said that slavery could be compatible with capitalism and she insisted that it can’t; of course, this was in Portugal, but I think the traditional position of the marxist left in the USA was similar). There was even a typical “militant” film of the 1960s propagating this vision, “Queimada”, from Gilles Pontecorvo (“Gentlemen, let me ask you a question. Now, my metaphor may seem a trifle impertinent, but I think it’s very much to the point. Which do you prefer – or should I say, which do you find more convenient – a wife, or one of these mulatto girls? No, no, please don’t misunderstand: I am talking strictly in terms of economics. What is the cost of the product? What is the product yield? The product, in this case, being love – uh, purely physical love, since sentiments obviously play no part in economics. Quite. Now, a wife must be provided with a home, with food, with dresses, with medical attention, etc, etc. You’re obliged to keep her a whole lifetime even when she’s grown old and perhaps a trifle unproductive. And then, of course, if you have the bad luck to survive her, you have to pay for the funeral! It’s true, isn’t it? Gentlemen, I know it’s amusing, but those are the facts, aren’t they? Now with a prostitute, on the other hand, it’s quite a different matter, isn’t it? You see, there’s no need to lodge her or feed her, certainly no need to dress her or to bury her, thank God. She’s yours only when you need her, you pay her only for that service, and you pay her by the hour! Which, gentlemen, is more important – and more convenient: a slave or a paid worker?”).
Now, apparently the tide has changed, and now the dominant line in the left is to say that slavery is the root of American capitalism.
The NYT article really shows to me why it is important that mass education include at least the basic economic history facts of modern growth and explain which theories do not work.
The NYT crowd will at least circumlocute when confronted directly as wrong by experts (self image as solidly factual centrists, “the meritocracy” and “the adults in the room” can hardly allow much else!). But in wider social groupings, without a solid base of mass education from neutral institutions, my experience is the flawed economic history of Gunder-Frank and Baptiste and of Lenin will dominate without question simply as they allow people to feel and sound smart and edgy and because it’s easy to paint dissenters as “imperial apologists” or “slavery apologists”.
And it matters as a lot of bad policy and politics is downstream of bad economic history – the current farrago is mostly about (bad) economic history recruited to back reparations and “social justice” while Marx can be summed up (not exclusively perhaps but he can) as an economic historian with some fairly bad economic historical ideas.
(Truncated from a longer response, including lots of unnecessary sideswiping at the NYT that I have with regret redacted!).
Dr. Johnson would like a word with you.
Reading the new book ‘Chaos’ on the Manson murders, whether the conventional story is accurate etc. Not entirely convincing so far but a good read.
The Nature article on debunking the ubiquity of scale-free networks looks very interesting, though I haven’t looked carefully at their method to see how reasonable it is. It would be interesting to apply the same kind of analysis to
supposed appearances of the Pareto principle, such as that suggested by RK.
Related to a comment upstream: I read From the Holy Mountain a number of years ago, so don’t remember so very much. But a few things stuck. 1) Dalrymple notes the anxiety under which Syrian Christians live: After Assad, the deluge. For now, some combination of Shia militias and the Russian airforce seems to be holding it back. 2) Dalrymple found Jewish American settlers very distasteful. 3) I myself visited Mar Saba not so long ago, but unlike Dalrymple, I was shown around not by a “Greek brigand”, but rather by a low-key, quiet spoken Russian. Someday I hope to go back for a longer visit.
Recently I finished Taleb’s Skin in the Game, where there are some comments about the enduring popularity of Russian autocrats among Orthodox Christians in the Middle East. Choice quote: Catherine the Great was the last tsar with balls.
Aside about economic history, related to comments upstream: I haven’t read much Marxist literature, but from what I can tell, the old school Marxists saw capitalism as inevitable stage of historical development, which is why the Revolution was expected to start in Western Europe, not Russia. In particular, slavery had ended too recently in Russia.
@Matt
My impression is that The Project’s primary objective is to be a cultural and identity uplift for black Americans. What is wrong with that? Cultural issues “must” play some part in creating and sustaining the disparities that we see between black Americans and other Americans.
We are in an age of fiat history, scholarship and “facts.” If the “real” history, scholarship and facts cannot withstand and survive partisan presentations, what good are they?
Jerry Muller is a very interesting man who I know
personally. My politics are substantially to his left
but two years ago I heard a remarkable lecture by Jerry on
the history of multicultural societies and how rarely they
have worked, which sure got me thinking.
A depressing fact: in the mid sixties the standard mantra on
the left showing how well multicultural societies could work was
Lebanon. I need say no more.
A depressing fact: in the mid sixties the standard mantra on
the left showing how well multicultural societies could work was
Lebanon.
in the 1980s my elementary school actually watched a short-film on exactly this topic. it was dated from the 1960s. the teacher explained it was interesting anthropology but not relevant anymore
@Nick
the history of multicultural societies and how rarely they
have worked
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this only applies to modern nation-states with democratic governance. Autocratic states could avoid this issue. The Middle east itself is (or at least was until modern times) littered with pockets of ethnic and religious minorities. They may have been subject to discrimination and jizya, but lived nevertheless. Other examples include the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Roman Empires.
I’m certainly not arguing in favor of autocratic states (I consider myself libertarian), but this factor must be acknowledged. I’m also a religious minority — so I favor tolerance for some multiculturalism.
I think that the crux of the problem is a large re-distributive government which various groups seek to control to maximize patronage. This creates competition between interest groups for democratic dominance and hence conflict.
Groups don’t just want to maximize possession of material things. They also want honor, respect–prestige in its broadest sense. They want to live where the air that they breathe assures them that they are right, and better than others who are wrong. There is always a temptation to use the powers that be to try to assure that.
“We don’t want your kind here” can apply to Jews in depression Germany, blacks in southern hotels, or conservatives in college campuses.
I don’t think it’s very useful to invoke the Pareto Principle. Why should it apply in a particular case? There is an obvious mechanistic explanation for why NSF GRF are concentrated. Namely, grad admission is filtering on the same criteria as the fellowship. I am, frankly, shocked that 14% of fellowships go outside R1. No test is perfect, but this is applying the same test at the same time. Does this make a power law prediction? I don’t know, but is such specificity useful?
If 5% of fellows were MIT undergrads, that would be pretty damning. That would be saying that grad admission doesn’t know anything beyond undergrad admission.
The whole point of designations like R1 and prizes are to indicate that some people are better than others. Of course those will correlate. Even if the professors at R1 weren’t any better at research than professors at R2, they are, by definition, better at getting grant funding. They are the people who can afford to hire grad students.
re: the 1619 Project: Matt Yglesias, who wrote 1 or 2 favorable reviews of the books in the “New History of Capitalism” genre that argue that slave-based cotton is the essential component for American economic hegemony, but has reversed his support for this thesis. I don’t know how broadly he has professed this (I heard it on the Weeds podcast), but feel its worth pointing out that the economic component of the Project is archaic as it is being popularized.
My impression is that Yglesias was entranced by the quantitative claims, which tended to support progressive views, but a second waive of economic historians raised a lot of red flags. But part of his rethinking he said was taking a step back and realizing that the King Cotton theory that the entire U.S. economy would tank without its slave-based cotton was rebuked by manufacturing growth following the Civil War. From a worldlier view, every economy based on plantation slavery shrank in the face of abolition.
pd shaw, even someone with a cursory knowledge of the lit like me is aware it’s a very minority position. the nytimes presenting it as a majority position is propagandistic.
I followed this stuff a few years ago, but hadn’t read anything in a while. Last I had read, a few books had been published, followed by takedowns. So when the Project came out I wondered if there had been a third round. Yglesias’ comments meant to me there wasn’t any effective third round.
The Weeds Podcast asserted the Project was best understood as an experiment on what if America was founded by the introduction of slavery and what would that case be? The implicit problem is that some of those claims (economic) are weaker than others (social and political). It’s hard for me not to believe that the economic claims have resonance to the NY Times readership because of a reparations claim to be made.
First Razib: I had no problem contributing to your account, and I am sorry you discontinued it. Perhaps you could set up a tip jar for us grateful types.
2. 1619. I read about it and said: “Huh?” So that’s the reason the South lost the Civil War and was an economic backwater for three generations. Even today, the plantation states still trail the standings in per capita income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
It is sort of like the books that looked at the history of the world through one product, like cod or salt. Amusing, but not important.
It is beyond debate that slavery was a key institution of the early republic. And for 42 of the republic’s first 48 years, the President was a planter. But, that institution crashed and burned in the Civil War, and the republic that was re-founded then was very different than its predecessor.
Yes, race has been a central political issue since the end of the Civil War. But, it is basically over. The fact that certain political actors want to shout racism about everything shows that it was a powerful issue, but it is losing its grip.
If they don’t knock it off and find something appealing to say, they will continue to suffer inexplicable losses.
1619 Project
If you read the Times Insider piece they very clearly state their objectives. Nikole Hannah-Jones clearly states that this is a project by blacks and for blacks (I think there was only one contributor that was not black). Whites are invited and welcomed to read, but only if they draw the proper conclusions.
“As much as I hope white readers will read it and have their minds blown, I hope that black people will read it, and feel a sense of ownership over this country and a sense of pride in our resilience,” Ms. Hannah-Jones said. “I hope to reframe the way we see ourselves in America.”
And if you read her essay you can see that she has moved from rejection and embarrassment of her father’s patriotism that he explicitly expressed by flying the American flag to this:
“I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.”
Michelle Obama is not the only black American that is not proud of America, not glad that she is an American. I think that it is a good thing for America when American blacks claim ownership in a piece of America. When they express patriotism and a claim of ownership that is impervious to any assault by any person or group.
Reading:
Year of Living Dangerously
Don Camillo’s Dilemma (comic short stories about a priest in rural postwar Italy)
Loss and Gain (autobiographical novel by John Henry Newman)
Bio of Marcel Lefebvre
Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution
I have a library hold on the sequel to Three Body Problem and am eagerly awaiting that.
The poll showing Warren and Sanders even with Biden is a major outlier. The others have him substantially ahead. Biden is probably taking the nomination.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primaries/democratic/national/
“Research Finds Genetic Links to Same-Sex Behavior: A broad study found five genetic markers, but experts caution that environmental factors also play a role” By Brianna Abbott on Aug. 29, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/research-finds-genetic-links-to-same-sex-behavior-11567101661
“Same-sex sexual behavior has genetic underpinnings but no single gene is associated with it, according to a broad study of more than 470,000 people. An international team of researchers found five genetic markers linked to whether someone has ever had sex with a person of the same sex, according to the paper published online Thursday in the journal Science.”
* * *
In the new report, a team of researchers conducted a genome-wide association study using genomic data from 408,995 people in the UK Biobank and 68,527 participants from the genetic-testing company 23andMe Inc. Participants reported whether they had ever had sex with someone of the same sex, and the researchers analyzed the data to determine if there were any genetic variants—single differences in the genetic code, like an A rather than a C—associated with the behavior.
Taking into account the entire contribution of genetic markers that may play a role, the researchers estimated that genetic variation could account for up to 8% to 25% of same-sex sexual behavior in the population studied. But when the researchers pooled all of the identified markers to create a score for an individual person, the genetic variation explained less than 1%, making it practically impossible to predict a person’s sexual orientation or behavior based on his or her genome.
* * *
In anticipation of publishing the study, the researchers created a website called Genetics of Sexual Behavior to help communicate their results. They worked with several advocacy and alliance groups, such as Sense about Science and GLAAD, before the study’s publication and received feedback on the science and about how to best communicate the findings. The authors then rewrote sections of the paper to highlight the paper’s focus on behavior rather than a person’s identity or orientation.
“This new study provides even more evidence that being gay or lesbian is a natural part of human life, a conclusion that has been drawn by researchers and scientists time and again,” said Zeke Stokes, the GLAAD chief programs officer. “This new research also reconfirms the long established understanding that there is no conclusive degree to which nature or nurture influence how a gay or lesbian person behaves.”
* * *
In this context, I don’t think that 1% is very different than nothing.
But, the conclusion raises a question in the eternal nature vs nurture debate. If the genetic influence is so small, is the answer that “Born This Way” is just not so? Or is the Transgender theory that there are things that are both unlearned and uninherited a viable place to stand? Are there things that are nurtured that cannot be unlearned?
Between conception (“genetic influence”) and birth (“Born This Way”), there is nine months of prenatal development. Lots of things can happen in that time that don’t fall under what people usually think of as “nature” or “nurture”. For example, women who don’t realize they are pregnant and continue to take birth control pills for the first several months of pregnancy, thus exposing the fetus to abnormal levels of important hormones, often have “queer” daughters.
Roger Sweeny: Citation?
I wish I had one. It seems to be becoming conventional wisdom that “I’m an X trapped inside a Y body” occurs because the physical sex program runs considerably earlier in prenatal development than the mental sex program and sometimes the latter doesn’t match the former.
Conventional wisdom is always wrong.