Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread – 08/02/2020

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane. I actually found out about this book via The New York Times, which reviewed this. Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, Haldane, along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright, was instrumental in fusing population genetics with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the English-speaking world. Fisher has a biography, R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, as does Wright, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology.

The three differed in various ways. But I think it is clear that Haldane was the most “interesting” when it came to his personal and political life. Perhaps most interesting from the viewpoint of moderns is that Haldane and Fisher were scientific confederates, despite the two being cultural and political opposites. For much of his life, Haldane was a Marxist, while Fisher was a conservative.

I’ve been reading Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World. It’s a good book. I think I’ll talk about the character of Luther at some point in a blog post. But I have also come to the conclusion that I need to stop reading books about the Reformation. I’ve been reading about this period since I was 20, and I think I have now reached a point where everything new is old, and unless I plan on becoming a scholar in this area (I don’t), I’m not going to be learning that pushes my insights on the margin.

The latest episode of The Insight is 90 minutes long, and all about Sundaland. Spencer covers a lot of the geology and biogeography, while I review again the new preprint on Denisovans, Hobbits, and the Luzon hominins. I encourage you guys to give this one a listen, as I’m quite proud of it. Spencer makes a prediction that will shock you! (well, perhaps not totally, but it’s worth a listen)

While you are at it, please consider rating the podcast on Apple (or Stitcher, I don’t know how it works on Spotify). We’ve kind of plateaued in the mid-2000s for a while. More listeners have been showing up since the Tides of History guest spot, but I get the sense they’re casual listeners.

I wrote a blog post, Humanity’s second “cradle” in Southeast Asia (those of you who follow my total content feed will have seen it).

‘Thanks for Flying SpaceX’: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit. A century from now SpaceX will be the biggest story from this time I bet.

Homicide Spike Hits Most Large U.S. Cities. Who is surprised?

Switching environments, synchronous sex, and the evolution of mating types.

Estimating Genetic Similarity Matrices using Phylogenies.

Distinguishing between recent balancing selection and incomplete sweep using deep neural networks.

How Italy Turned Around Its Coronavirus Calamity.

Impact of low-frequency coding variants on human facial shape.

Common variants contribute to intrinsic functional architecture of human brain.

Human Parental Relatedness through Time – Detecting Runs of Homozygosity in Ancient DNA.

21 thoughts on “Open Thread – 08/02/2020

  1. WRT to the Insight, Spencer is my issue there. The whole “Trump is a war criminal” and “Israelis deserve to die” kind of crosses a few lines for me.

    I get that people may have policy differences and all, but he seems to border on sociopathy.

  2. One thing about Luther that does seem to me to separate the wise might seem a bit from left field but does to me seem to be relevant is what some scholars have to say about the scatology that permeates his writings.

    I’ve read some biographies of him that attributed this feature of his writings to him writing his pamphlets while enduring bouts of constipation on the toilet.

    Or…

    Luther was the very first pamphleteer, in that he took advantage of the change in ‘media’ distribution enabled by the invention of the printing press, and that he wrote for not exactly mass audience, but a much bigger audience that could be reached via the written word than could be reached prior to the printing press, his audience was a ‘popular’ audience. Prior to that, ‘popular’ messaging had to be done, and was done, using the visual arts, like sculpture and painting, which couldn’t be ‘mass produced’, but if put in a public place, could be ‘mass distributed’. One thing that the written word can use that the visual arts really cannot is humor.

    One of the staples of English humor is making fun of the German sense of humor, general low browness versus English humor, which has more of on an emphasis on clever wordplay, often with learned allusions like Monty Python, than German humor does.

    It seems to me that really good discussions of Luther take into account that he was thought by his contemporaries to be riotously funny, and all the scatology in it was one of the reasons. If one leaves that out, like most discussions of him that I have read, written by English writers, generally do, one is missing a large part of his appeal to his contemporaries, and one is missing something really big about the Reformation.

  3. Homicide Spike Hits Most Large U.S. Cities. Who is surprised?

    Anyone who thought Black Lives Matter means black lives matter.

  4. The “second cradle” link doesn’t work for me; I’m getting a “The page isn’t redirecting properly” error.

  5. Did Spencer really say that Israelies deserve to die? Wow, horseshoe theory make so much sense.

  6. I really enjoyed the latest episode. Knew most things, but its good to get more into detail and refresh some aspects of it. I’m pretty sure “Denisovans” were just some kind of Homo erectus species/race, don’t see where they were hiding all along.
    But I doubt floresiensis would be a candidate, since its too much diverged and I actually think that on islands chances are higher one group was faster eliminated than on the mainland or larger islands for that matter. After the initial impact, there would have been, quite often, not too much left to reproduce with. In larger swaths of land, things might be different, since its much more difficult and not as necessary to beat the opponent down completely.

    I heard some a little bit annoying clicking sound from time to time. Don’t know if it was an action or a sound issue.

  7. @obs

    Denisovans would be more like a Heidelbergensis subgroup, though they might have had partial input from a source more divergent than Heidelbergensis, like Erectus.

  8. Latest podcast was great, and my wife enjoyed it as well. July was a very rich in information for The Insight.

  9. @DaThang: But where are the specimens?
    If looking at “Sinanthropus”, they were already more evolved with a higher cranial capacity. The later proposed findings might be archaic sapiens admixed imho.

  10. Priyamvada Gopal is doing one of her Facebook events where she rehashes Western Postcolonial and Postmodern views as some authentic Eastern perspectives.

    Meanwhile she runs down successful Asians, and even accused Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel of caste privilege, though they are broadly Baniya and she is a Brahmin!

  11. @obs The nuclear dna split between Denisovans and Neanderthals is about 640000 years while the split between non archaic modern humans and Neandersovans is about 800000 years. Meanwhile other erectus groups well distant from the rhodesiensis and heidelbergensis groups are divergent by well over a million years.

    I said in my first post that there might be input in Denisovans from this group but the main Denisovan ancestry is not as divergent.

  12. @DaThang: I know that, but just asking isn’t it possible that admixture between Neandertals and from the archaic sapiens lineage did result in the estimates? So that the main body of the “Denisovans” would still be Homo erectus, just with admixture?
    Where was that non-Neandertal and non-sapiens heidelbergensis-like people?
    My scenario means just a more even mixture between archaic Homo sapiens like, which might be close to heidelbergensis, and Homo erectus like “Sinanthropus”. I think without more samples one can’t say for sure, or is it possible to be that precise?

  13. If denisovans were mostly erectus with only some or even a minority neandersovan ancestry then the date of divergence from the nuclear dna would be much higher.

    For now I see the non-neandersovan input as a minority. Or at least with the known Denisovans. There might be undiscovered samples with more of the erectus level of divergent dna than the Neandersovans dna but the Denisovan sample dna that has been studied so far isn’t that.

  14. There are some novel takes out there on Luther that you may have missed. His mother’s maiden name was Lindemann (find that on Wiki and research the surname). He took advantage of new media to spread his message. His actions pitched Europe, especially Germany, into the bloody 30 years war — which of course started in Prague, disrupted Christianity and was very profitable for some. And, a blasphemous heretic, he was very well protected and lived to be an old man. Something else going here maybe? Since someone mentioned him, maybe look at Monty Python’s “Adventures of Martin Luther” for some more clues.

  15. Also good news, COVID seems to be killing the crass and carnivalesque trend in Indian weddings:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52892967

    Hopefully the diaspora learns that breaking out into Bollywood dance routines isn’t real life, sangheets are now becoming minor festivals, and that their money can be better spent on things than turning your wedding into a trip to the local theme park.

  16. Re; “Human Parental Relatedness through Time – Detecting Runs of Homozygosity in Ancient DNA” Shai Carmi gave a summary that the study indicated cousin marriage “ relatively rare (under 3%) ” (https://twitter.com/ShaiCarmi/status/1289081916910645254)

    One caveat of that would be that these are surviving and buried samples, so there may be some effect of higher mortality among cousin (or closer) reproductive / marriage groups, or more social stigma/lower status so different burial. But I think it’s a good first estimate.

    When I asked for individual sample breakdown on the BioRxiv page, the authors noted that they had meant to release that anyway and provided them (got to thank them for that!).

    Using those sample IDs and breaking down the dataset in terms of “close kin offspring” by different groups.

    Whole Dataset: Foraging; 17/240 total; 7%. Agriculture+Aceramic Farmer; 34/1133 total; 3%. Pastoralism; 3/345 total; 0.8%

    Eurasia, post 2500 BCE: Agriculture 14/730; 1.9%. Pastoralism: 3/268; 1.1%.

    Europe only, All Subsistence, post 2500 BCE: 9/629: 1.4%. Pakistan, Iron Age to Historical; 1/95; 1.05%.

    Using the figures from Schulz and Henrich’s 2019 paper to put that into context of some reported rates today (taking the figure from here, as seemed like a good version of it – https://www.sciencenews.org/article/medieval-catholic-church-may-have-helped-spark-western-individualism)… See here: https://imgur.com/a/p99BLcy

    Higher than the very lowest of the reported rates by “Western Church” societies, but far lower than the intercept of where Schulz and Henrich’s correlations would estimate the expected value for states with no centuries under the medieval church, which is a fairly high 15%(!). The averages for large scale pastoralist/agricultural Eurasian societies, Bronze Age and later, samples overwhelmingly before Medieval Catholic church, place at least reproductive rates within the bounds of marriage rates in their present day “Western Church” societies…

    All that said, I’m not sure the close-kin offspring inference data is really even the most interesting part of the paper. The windows that RoH would provides into the predicted demographic size of past societies are really interesting. For example “the Americas … recent, sustained small effective population sizes” except Andes *but* “the dataset does not include individuals from other early centers of agriculture in the Americas, e.g. Central Mexico, eastern North America”. They also note a more gradual change in RoH in Andes than over agricultural regions in Eurasia. It would be great, if all went well ethics wise, to sample some groups of ancient North American Native Americans over time, to really tackle problems of how large Native American populations really were and whether there is a sudden impact of introduction of crops at Cahokia. Likewise, some indications of small population size and low densities among steppe groups (less crowd disease due to “social distancing”? lol).

  17. Patrick Wyman thinks that Luther was the indispensable man of the reformation.

    I think that the reformation was a political circumstance that found Luther. There were many reforming theologians. Peter Waldo (1140-1205), John Wycliff (1320-1384), Jan Hus (1372-1415), Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), all foreshadowed Luther’s theology. Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) was a contemporary in a different political context (Zurich).

    Luther’s luck was that the Elector of Saxony was willing to take on Emperor Charles V and protect Luther from condemnation by the Diet of Worms. Luther played his hand as well as he could, but he had a hand to play.

  18. When you say that Wyman is technological determinist, you mean the press, right?

    In the 2019-11-14 episode, “Was the Protestant Reformation Inevitable?” Wyman says that it made a difference that Luther was more reckless and better at using the press. Not just the first person to think to use the press, but better at it than his contemporaries, like Zwingli and Erasmus, who could have learned from him. So he concludes that without him Western Christianity would been reformed without fracturing.

    Many people look at lists like WS gave and reach the technological determination that sparks were common and the difference was that the press fanned the flames. But the sparks didn’t all die out. Before the press, Jan Hus created a church that lasted 200 years. If the 30 Years War is part of the Reformation, then the Hussites are not mere precursors, but full-fledged members of the Reformation. Why don’t we start the clock with Hus?

    If I start the clock with Hus, then I don’t think the press is so important. But I might take a social or economic determinist view, which might be what WS is saying; and that might rest on a technological determinism, but other technologies.

  19. Razib, what do you see in Carl Zha’s twitter account? I looked at it to learn a little more about China, but he’s just pings my troll-dar so much that I don’t know what to believe.

  20. But a year earlier, in the 2018-12-20 episode, “The Reformation, Live from Boston,” he took a determinist position, that schism was inevitable and Luther just sped things up by a few decades.

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