Stuff I was wrong about!

A friend of mine was talking about which public intellectuals change their mind, and which do not. It turns out most don’t seem to.

To be frank I don’t count myself as a public intellectual…but since some people have much looser criteria than I do, I thought I should review things I’ve changed my mind on since 2002 when I started writing on the internet.

– I used to think group selection was totally incoherent, but now think that is very useful in understanding cultural evolution, and perhaps in some other contexts. I probably fundamentally changed my mind between 2010 and 2015 when I looked more deeply at the cultural evolution literature.

– I no longer believe in a “cognitive great leap forward” 50,000 years ago in human evolution. I don’t know what I believe, but I think gradual and cumulative processes are probably more important, and the roots of human uniqueness as quite ancient. My views began to change around 2010, with evidence for archaic introgression.

– I am not sure I quite believe “Out of Africa” in as clear manner as I did in the 2000s. Everything is very muddled now.  Africa seems central to human evolution. But there are lots of specifics which are unclear to me.

– The neutral theory of molecular evolution was useful in its time, but I am much more of a selectionist now when it comes to genomic phenomena.

– My views in relation to religion were close to what was for a while termed the “New Atheism.” I don’t hold that view anymore. Around 2004 I moved away from this position and came to believe that the roots of religion were cognitive, and the social and cultural complexity required deeper analysis rather than plain dismissal.

– Connected to an earlier point (group selection), I think that some of the functionalist explanations of religious phenomena are probably not totally wrong. That is, religions may have adaptive value (I came around to this after 2010).

– On economics, I am far less of a neoliberal/libertarian than I used to be in the early 2000s. I would have laughed as “industrial policy” in 2005, but I’m not so sure in 2015. Rather than a new view on the right policies, I’m just uncertain about a lot. The neoliberal critiques of government direction and planning are persuasive to me, but 1999 did not usher in the age that we were expecting.

– The period between 2002 and 2004 made me much more skeptical of foreign intervention. Barring something major, I’ll probably be an isolationist for the rest of my life.

– I am far less sure that the liberal democratic consensus will persist in the American republic today than I was in 2015.

– Related to the last point, until the 2016 election I had assumed that the elites of both parties could keep a lid on populist energies. I was wrong.

– I was more bearish on Bangladeshi economic performance in the 2000s than what we see today (at current rates of growth Bangladesh may surpass India in per capita GDP in the late 2020s).

– I believed that the post-modernist fad would fade. I was wrong. Post-modernism isn’t talked of much today, because its general manner of analysis pervades our “discourse.”

– I would have been willing to bet a lot of money in 2002 that China would go through a major correction within the next 10-15 years. At some point, I will be right, but I think the robustness of the Chinese economy is greater than I would have guessed.

– I underestimated how “complex” complex traits were. I wasn’t totally wrong, but the factor was off.

– Like many people, I put too much credence in fMRI-based cognitive neuroscience. Should have ignored it.

– I was wrong about how much salience ‘racial politics’ would have in our public debate. The key here is debate and discussion. I think we’re arguably less racist as a country. But we are more conscious of racism.

– Did not guess that socialism would make a comeback. This relates to a misjudgment of how much elites knew and understood, and how much control they had.

– I accepted the stuff about the “Great Moderation.”  I specifically remember telling someone I knew all about it right before Lehman Brothers blew up.

– The “Frog Nazi” cultural moment ~2015-2016 was a total surprise to me. Inexplicable.

– Reading Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome transformed my views on this question. From agnosticism, I now believe that Rome did fall in a consequential and disruptive manner.

– Related to the above, I believe that some sort of complex ethical religious system was going to become dominant in the Roman Empire at some point. If Arbogast had won the Battle of Frigidus I think ultimately Christianity would still have become dominant within the empire (see the resistance to Buddhism in Tibet to envision a possible scenario).

– Migration and admixture in the Holocene are much more important for patterning of human population genetic variation than I would have thought.

– The north and south Chinese are much more similar genetically than I would have thought.

– I thought I would have stopped writing/blogging by now.

– I am far less of a certain Whig about human progress. I think regression is far more likely than I would have thought in 2002.

– I accepted evolutionary psychology in a classical sense (massive modularity, etc.) in the early 2000s. Not sure that the full package is necessary.

– Did not anticipate electric vehicles and how much cheaper solar is getting.

If there is an overall theme, I think I was more optimistic about the future in 2002 than how the future has actually turned out. And I’m more pessimistic about the future in 2019 than I was in 2002 by a longshot.

What did you change your mind about?

6,500,000 words on Gene Expression

I installed a plugin that looked into the database to see how many words have been written on this weblog (this includes stuff from ScienceBlogs, Discover, and Unz, as I merged it all in). The total is 6.5 million words published. That’s about 65 400 page books (~100,000 words per book). The peak productivity was when this was an active group blog, between 2004 and 2010.

The average post has 482 words. But there are some huge ones. For example, this 9,000+ word post.

From the content to the creator

The science fiction writer S. M. Stirling has a problem with his series centered around the Domination alternative history because readers often confuse the narrative of the alternative history for the author’s endorsement of its arc and philosophy. You see, the novels and stories depict a world where a quasi-Nazi ghoulishly Nietzschean race termed the Draka eventually rise to conquer the whole world. Similarly, the fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson has had problems with readers who are curious why he has sympathetic atheist characters, despite he himself being a devout Mormon.

Obviously, some writers focus on what they know and have experienced. Jhumpa Lahiri comes to mind. She has said that she has no plans to delve beyond the purview of her West Bengali story arcs. But other writers like to explore viewpoints which are startlingly novel and at variance with those of themselves. This is probably particularly true of speculative fiction. Part of being human is the ability to do this with varying levels of fluency.

It is important in any case not to confuse the writer with what they are writing about.

Some of the same applies to what I talk about on this blog. This is clear and obvious when I’m considering the selection coefficient of a novel allele. But what about the Iranian regime?

  1. I am not personally a fan of the regime.
  2. I also believe it is important to describe it accurately and in its own terms.

Some of the latter is for instrumental reasons: if you are to defeat the enemy you must understand it. Even in the early 9/11 years, this was clear, but many people resisted this attempt, as emotions were quite raw. Islamist radicals were viewed in almost metaphysical terms, as forces of nature, evil essences of the universe. The reality though is that they are embodied creatures with needs, wants, and delusions, just like any other.

Ultimately I’m generally pretty frank with my views on a topic if I have them and want to express them. I’m not being cryptic. In some cases, I don’t want to interject my own personal views (which most can infer or know in any case). In other cases, I don’t have a strong opinion.

Blogging on an island as opposed to an archipelago

On a Twitter conversation it came up yesterday that a lot of people know each other from blogging in the 2000s. It was a different world back then, and the pond was much smaller. To my knowledge Derek Lowe is the only continuously active science blogger who has been at this longer than me (there are some, such as Dave Appell, who began blogging before me, but stopped for a while before starting up again). I’ve seen a lot of changes. Some good. Some perhaps not so good.

One major aspect is that blogging is no longer a conversation with many nodes. Rather, it’s a platform for individuals or networks to speak to their particular audience. I’m obviously part of this. I don’t subscribe to many blogs in my RSS feed. Basically I use Twitter to find blog posts. There are a few blogs I subscribe to, like Why Evolution Is True, but mostly I just wait until content shows up in my timeline.

And I’m not the only one. I have Google Analytics that go back very far. Below are referrals by site for equivalent periods in 2007, 2012, and 2017. I’ve standardized the top referral source (in pageviews) to 100.

2017, June – Aug
1twitter100
2mobile facebook38
3unz.com36
4facebook33
5feedly.com20
6slatestarcodex.com19
7razib.com11
8brownpundits.com9
9eurogenes.blogspot.com9
10vox.com6
2012, June – Aug
1reddit.com100
2stumbleupon.com60
3facebook.com49
4scienceblogs.com34
5gnxp.com31
6fark.com31
7pulsenews21
8twitter13
9digg.com12
10isteve.blogspot.com10
2007, June – Aug
1digg.com100
2reddit.com38
3slashdot.org20
4isteve.com19
5stumbleupon.com17
6scienceblogs.com11
7dilbertblog.typepad.com6
8instapundit.com4
9del.icio.us4
10buzzfeed.com3

I removed stuff like organic Google search, which I get a fair amount of. Additionally, I bolded all the sites where I am somehow involved in driving the traffic. So in 2017 I bolded Twitter because I have a big Twitter footprint that drives a lot of the traffic. I did not bold Facebook because I don’t use Facebook much to promote this website. Other people are sharing my posts. I separated mobile and non-mobile Facebook to show you that in 2017 mobile really matters.

You can see that over the years I’ve had to drive more and more of the traffic. I never posted my posts to Reddit. But for Twitter I push all my own content.

Open Thread, 06/05/2017

Just a plug for Elements of Evolutionary Genetics by Charlesworth & Charlesworth. These are two great evolutionary geneticists, and we’re lucky to have a “core dump” from them on hand (for those for whom Elements is too spendy, John Maynard Smith’s Evolutionary Genetics is usually available used more cheaply, though it will be a touch out of date).

The curious thing is that there is so much science that is tacit and implicit, that the passing of each generation of scholars means that hidden reaches of knowledge are passing away. This is the flip side of the idea of progress being made through the death of older scholars and the acceptance of novel (and more right) paradigms.

Both Charlesworths are authors on a new paper (along with Nick Barton) in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, The sources of adaptive variation. Here’s the abstract:

The role of natural selection in the evolution of adaptive phenotypes has undergone constant probing by evolutionary biologists, employing both theoretical and empirical approaches. As Darwin noted, natural selection can act together with other processes, including random changes in the frequencies of phenotypic differences that are not under strong selection, and changes in the environment, which may reflect evolutionary changes in the organisms themselves. As understanding of genetics developed after 1900, the new genetic discoveries were incorporated into evolutionary biology. The resulting general principles were summarized by Julian Huxley in his 1942 book Evolution: the modern synthesis. Here, we examine how recent advances in genetics, developmental biology and molecular biology, including epigenetics, relate to today’s understanding of the evolution of adaptations. We illustrate how careful genetic studies have repeatedly shown that apparently puzzling results in a wide diversity of organisms involve processes that are consistent with neo-Darwinism. They do not support important roles in adaptation for processes such as directed mutation or the inheritance of acquired characters, and therefore no radical revision of our understanding of the mechanism of adaptive evolution is needed.

Another riposte to the EES. Entirely unsurprising that these authors and this venue would offer criticism to a reframing of the field of evolutionary biology. But it gets to the heart of the reality that this is going to be an argument that will be resolved through publication of new papers, not books or long popular science articles. The footprint of the EES in evolutionary biology popular science is heavier than within evolutionary biology itself.

The prominent medical genomicist Dan MacArthur stated yesterday:

Not to be churlish, but let me clarify judging by the numbers of people Dan followed there were conservatives and libertarians he followed, he just didn’t, and doesn’t, know who they are. Also, there were several people he followed with center-right or libertarian views as a point of fact. I know because because I’m open about my right-wing views, and these people feel and felt comfortable telling me (privately) that they don’t agree with the vocal Left-liberalism which is pervasive in the political atmosphere on science twitter. Though most science twitter people don’t post much about politics, if they do, a substantial proportion are “social justice” oriented. That’s tolerable for most people because most scientists are on the Left side of the political spectrum.

My tendency to post right-wing political stuff into the feeds of scientists is annoying for many (or as some would say “problematic), but I don’t care. I know I speak for a substantial minority in the aggregate, and in some cases the majority (in terms of the latter, what I mean is that though most scientists are liberal, most are not on that far Left, though they may fear being attacked by the far Left and so are careful not to enter into any public dissent when that contingent starts to get a little out of control).

In a curious inversion with the norm I guess, my Twitter timeline is balanced politically. If anything, it’s more liberal than not. I don’t know what it would be to be in a political silo. I hear it feels good. Then again, I enjoy 300,000 scoville unit hot sauces.

Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs. Educational attainment and unibrows. Yeah. One thing: “An open question in human evolution is the importance of polygenic adaptation.” This is literally true, but I think it is pretty obvious that the latest work is suggesting there has been a lot of it.

Widespread signatures of negative selection in the genetic architecture of human complex traits.

The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins.

Open Thread, 05/14/2017

I’ve been working on some issues related to the website. Of most relevance for readers, https:// formatting should now no longer be broken. Also, please mention it if you get a 503 in the comments. Some people probably still get them, but they should be rare (I can track hourly hits, and there hasn’t been a systemwide drop in traffic since April 22nd; basically I have a script running which pings the site for 503s and reboots Varnish if it gets them).

I also know that the MySQL database locks up sometimes. There is a script to restart it but looks like it can take at least one minute. I had one that ran more consistently but it doesn’t seem to be working.

There has only been one update on my newsletter, but if the site goes down it’s probably best just to sign up for that if you care (when it goes down for a while people email me, which is fine, but responding to emails can get tedious).

When people ask me about textbooks on population genetics, I can rattle off many because I own many and have a sense of all of them. In contrast, for evolution the only text I have is Futumya’s. Does anyone have experience with the Ridley or Bergstrom and Dugatkin texts?

Science is by its nature subject to silos. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Evolutionary geneticists don’t really know too much more about paleontology than the average person. I have a pretty good grasp of what’s going on human population genomics, and perhaps mammalian population genomics, but outside of that not so much.

Speaking of Lee Dugatkin, his new book, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) is out. I don’t have time to read it now, but as I have said he’s a good writer.

As some of you may know I’m taking a one week sabbatical from social media (I’ll be back on Thursday), which consists of Twitter and Facebook.(also, I’m not missing it to be honest). That means that there are things that need to be said which need an outlet. So I put up a post on Henry Wallace over at Secular Right. An op-ed in The New York Times by Wallace’s grandson hailing is grandfather’s prophetic prediction of American fascism doesn’t mention that he was notorious for not understanding the threat of Communism in his time (and literally being deceived by Potemkin villages in 1944). Also, Brown Pundits might make a comeback as a group blog soon.

If you subscribe to my total content RSS feed I do try and push stuff on other blogs/publications into that.

I may start writing again outside of the purviews of this weblog. But, I think more and more it is critical to control your own means of production. Much of the web-only content at high profile sites like The New Republic from the 2000s is not accessible because of reconstitutions of their archives.

And of course, relying on Twitter or YouTube as sole distribution channels has problems. Twitter as a solo-play is I think probably not going to work. I think it could work if they kept their ambitions and aims in check, but the combination of the public stock markets and the egos of their executives means that they’ll swing for the fences. Probably they will get acquired in the next 5 years, after which who knows what the new owners will do? Just because the name Twitter will be around in 2030 doesn’t mean you’ll recognize it (go check out MySpace some time).

As far YouTube is concerned, I think for now YouTube’s content is safe, but people who are trying to make a living off it have been whipsawed by changes in policies in advertising revenues. Diversification is key.

Over at Secular Right Dain has a post up, Anti-SJW Sentiment in China. The full article is fascinating, The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult. I will say that amoral atomization often gives way to moral revivals, so don’t expect China’s John Galt moment to last too long.

A note on comments. I notice that some people say things like “I don’t want to presume….” That’s good. One of the most annoying things about having a blog with a reasonable amount of content is that socially deficient individuals think they can start drawing conclusions about your life or situation from what you make visible. For most of this blog’s history I actually hid much of my non-blog life. When my daughter was born and I wanted to talk about her genetics obviously I had to put a bit more into the public. But it’s always good not to infer too much about people who you read. They tell you on a need-to-know basis unless their lives are their brand (here’s an example, an anonymous regular commenter once left comments talking about aspects of my personal life I’d rather not have in comments; this person remains carefully anonymous themselves. This is the kind of shit I never forget and why I have some contempt for many, though not all, commenters).

A problem as a person who is not liberal on the internet that I encounter is “lib-splaining.” Basically, since I am not liberal and they are liberal (or to the Left of center for Europeans), the prior assumption is that they can explain to me how evolution, genetics, Islam, or many aspects of history work. If they are not stupid, they immediately realize the error of their ways, though the Dunning-Kruger effect is something I confront in that the duller the person the more difficult it is to explain to them that I’m not as ignorant as they might think (this is one of the things that annoys me about Twitter).

A major dynamic that many people of any ideology seem to have is a narrowness of view that occludes many major patterns for me. One problem is that few people know much history beyond a narrow subset of regions or periods. For the stereotypical conservative one might encounter assertions such as “America is the greatest nation in the history of the world” (what does that even mean?). The reasons offered for this tend to be…well, problematic. E.g., America is always on the side of freedom. Arguably, even if tendentiously, this was not even true of the Founding! (the revolutionary side was diverse, I would suggest that the New England partisans were people who we moderns would easily identify with, but the grandees of the Tidewater less so).

For liberals the problem tends to crop up when they are speaking cross-culturally. It usually turns out that these people only know a shallow sketch of even Western history, and no non-Western history, so they don’t have any basis to make any comparisons. Part of this is the abomination which is post-colonial theory, which has replaced the need for facts with a broad-overarching Manichean vision of the world.

One place I wish everyone would start out with is to study the history of China. There are several reasons why this is important. First, much of the human past is a history of China. One can not understand the history of the world without the history of China. One can not understand Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, without understanding China. Second, one can not understanding today’s China without understanding the China of the past, and one can not understand the 21st century without understanding China.

I will make some concrete recommendations. In sequence of order chronologically, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing. I think all these books are both scholarly, and accessible to the lay audience. The Han dynasty surveys usually distill what you need to know from the earlier periods (and the Shang dynasty is really the purview of archeology and not history).

Some of you may want a gentler introduction. John Keay’s China: A History would fit the bill. But please don’t stop at Keay. It is more a primer, and won’t give you much depth. John King Fairbanks’ China: A New History is good for depth, but it focuses way too much on recent events. I have a soft spot for A History of Chinese Civilization by Jaques Gernet, but it’s not that easy to always find a copy that is not priced outrageously (I read it as an undergrad via a library copy).

It is hard to ignore when one reads Chinese history that there are both clear similarities and obvious differences in relation to the West. For example, the analogy between the Kangxi Emperor and Marcus Aurelius jumps out at you, despite 1,500 years of space and the geographical-cultural chasm (one could argue that Marcus Aurelius is a bit idealized, while we know a great deal about the Kangxi Emperor from documents). A contrast is the role of religion in Chinese history. Though religion is important, the dominant recurring theme of subjugation of religious passions and concerns to that of public order and life was a revelation to Enlightenment intellectuals, who saw in China a “better way.”

Which brings me to a thought, would readers be interested in a “book club” format? I’ve had friends do this before on their blogs, and it’s worked out. But we’d need enough buy in. I’d put up a post once a week, perhaps every Sunday, and others would jump in.

Accumulation And Functional Architecture Of Deleterious Genetic Variants During The Extinction Of Wrangel Island Mammoths. If this was going to happen, it was going to happen to this population.

Blatant hypocrisy: Milo Yiannopouos now part of demonstration to cancel a graduation speaker. The fundamental issue, which I alluded to earlier this week, is that it may not be that the center can hold. Once the far Left began utilizing tools of speech suppression, which has been the norm throughout human history, it wasn’t going to be limited to them. Old fashioned liberals, generally older white men, are exactly correct about what will happen. It doesn’t matter, because norm-based group are so segregated the campus Left won’t back down and put away the ticking time bombs it’s been blackmailing the administration of universities with. Perhaps they know that everyone is going to jump off the cliff together, but it doesn’t matter.

Inferring Genetic Interactions From Comparative Fitness Data. There were some. Interactions that is.

One may have noticed that I’ve switched over to linking to biorxiv more and more. I also am forgetting to say “preprint” instead of “paper.” I think this presages a shift toward post-publication review. The future is finally almost here.

Phenotypic heterogeneity promotes adaptive evolution.

Also, Scireader seems back up.

This is the week you should be reading the Bell Beaker blog.

Coalescent theory. Do you know what it is? If not, you probably should if you are interested in population genetics.

A friend asked about the politics of people who read me. It’s pretty diverse. With a sample size of 426 you see the breakdown. I assumed that most of the “neither Left nor Right” would be libertarian. But that’s not true at all; only 1/3 of those are libertarian.  The rest are all over the place. On social issues the readers tilt more toward the moderate Left, while on economic issues toward the moderate Right (though less strongly on economic issues).

No big surprises.

One of the worst things about Austin is that people talk about how they love goat cheese in public. Not cool.

Anyone want to guess how many “sessions” on Google Analytics I’ve had over the past 15 years? I have a good idea from some of the sites I’ve contributed too (blog only, I don’t count The New York Times).

‘Will & Grace’ Revival Could Be Extended. They called it the “end of creativity.”

The whole culture of “playdates” is really weird. Does it exist outside of the middle to upper middle class? Why do kids need adult supervision when playing?

Am I the only one who thinks that the Engineers in the Alien series are very similar to Pak Protectors?

Open Thread, May 7th 2017

I read some of Wendy Doniger’s translation of the The Rig Veda. It’s about ~10% of the hymns in the whole work, but the author claims they’re the more important and evocative ones. There is a reasonable amount of commentary as well.

Two things so far. First, little similarities between Indo-European mythologies I was not aware of, such as the relationship between Indra and his father and Zeus and his father. Second, the Vedic Aryans were truly barbarians. I do not say that in a pejorative sense, but simply descriptive in that these are people who are outside of the gates of civilization. They were most def most total bros.

Reading some of Richard Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence (I got a review copy, though I forgot I’d gotten a Kindle edition earlier). It is a short work, and though I haven’t gotten much through it it reminds me somewhat of Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All that Matters. The main difference is that there is more of a focus on neuroscience.

Psychometrics, like the cognitive anthropology of religion, is a field I take some interest in, but mostly I’ve gotten what I want out of it and do not follow it closely anymore. That being said, I thought I would bring up an issue in relation to intelligence tests.

It is common to assert among many, including many biologists I know, that intelligence testing only measures how well you can take a test. This is false. It is well known that intelligence testing robustly predicts later academic performance to a reasonable degree of correlation. Of course a correlation of 0.50 can be highly significant, and also have lots of exceptions. But that is not a rebuttal, because no psychometrician would assert that their instrument is a perfect predictor, in large part because they also agree that academic performance has other major dimensions, such as conscientiousness, which are not accounted for by these tests.

Probably the major issue that highly educated people do not account for is range restriction. The issue is simple, but often overlooked. One of the professors I TAed for once explained to a class his graduate school did a survey and the correspondence between GRE score and grades to later scientific achievement was low to nonexistent. I asked him what university he went to. He said Stanford, and I immediately pointed out to him that Stanford graduate students are not a typical sample. He grasped what I was getting at because as a biologist he understands range restriction in other contexts, and we did not engage in a debate on this issue any further.

An interesting chart from the book, derived from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, illustrates that standardized tests are highly predictive, even when you move many sigmas from the mean. Below are results for mathematically gifted 13 year olds and their outcomes as a function of their result on the math SAT at that age:

Remember that a math score of 450 for a 13 year old is not that bad. So the kids in the 700 range are truly exceptional.

To me the regional differences in voting in France are fascinating. I suppose I’ll get the raw data and look at some point myself. More rural de-industrialized areas went for Le Pen, as did the far south, which has long had tensions with its Muslim population (and where the pied-noir population tended to settle; randomly I just found out that the actress Eva Green has a Sephardic Jewish pied-noir mother).

For a while several readers have complained that the archives are incomplete. There are two reasons for this.

One reason is that they were from RSS feeds and so in some cases the source website did not show the whole post. This leads to a cutting off of most of the content. The second reason is that about six months ago I mistakenly removed several years of posts on the aggregator website, so there was a major gap between 2013 and later.

Thankfully Ron Unz’s IT guy had formatted a version of the websites that put them into MySQL files. Because of different versions of WordPress it has taken about a week tinkering here and there, but the full archives are now online (see to the right). Please note that some of the older ones are going to be wonky because of CMS changes (e.g., going from blogger to movable type to blogger to WordPress).

Aside from reader demand one reason I set the archives up is that my archives are pretty valuable for Google. The archives went live overnight and Google has already been hitting them as Analytics tells me that organic search has shot way up.

This is important. I am frankly disturbed how social media drives much of the traffic to this website. Facebook is pretty opaque; you don’t know who the referral is from and what they’re saying. Twitter, I’m not sure Twitter will be around much longer (I think most of the Twitter referral is at least from me).The days of getting links from other blogs are pretty much gone from what I can tell (and to be honest, I don’t link to other blogs much because I don’t 8read other blogs much anymore)

Google is in many ways a monopoly, but it’s another pipeline to get traffic and have some visibility. More is better.

In the near future I think a lot of ‘media’ is going to disaggregate. We’ve seen many prominent bloggers become the media or join the media. That’s fine, but at some point in the next decade or so I wonder if the media landscape will thin out even more than it has today.

Scientific blogging is in many ways on a downswing. Many scientists go straight to Twitter. There are problems with this. In relation to the epistasis paper in  Science I mentioned earlier, here is a bloggy behind the scenes from the first author. The authors tweets are much harder to follow and may not be around years from now.

You have probably heard about the controversy around Rebeca Tuvel, This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like. The problem is with the “academics.” The rank-and-file students are much more tolerant. And it’s not all of the academia. Frankly it is those fields populated by style, posing, and signaling, rather than substance. I think this will take care of itself. These people burn witches for fun and profit. Once it’s less fun, and there’s no profit, they’ll move on.

Is there any reason the public funds should support this behavior:

Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public. In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?

The worst thing for Tuvel is that she now truly knows what craven cretins her colleagues and peers are.

Just curious if readers are finding many 503’s? I think I finally tweaked the varnish restart script appropriately so that this doesn’t happen much, though I’m worried about comments.

Just a quick shout out to those who are using Amazon link to buy stuff. Looks like more people are using this option.

King James asserted that “No Bishop, No King.” I think this was wrong. But what follows from what? That is the question. What if we all agree that truth is not the goal, but social harmony is. What follows from that?  I have some ideas. More for later….

Hope the Wonder Woman movie isn’t ruined by DC’s kiss of death.

Open Thread, 05/01/2017


The survey suggests that 14% of my readers (or at least 14% of the 425 people who responded to the survey) consider themselves geneticists in some fashion. Above you see all the types of geneticists read this weblog. Remember that people can, and did, check more than one box. Not surprisingly, 75% of people who said they are “genomicists” also stated they were “computational biologists.”

In terms of knowledge, only 50% of geneticists who read this weblog could recall Hamilton’s Rule or the rate of substitution in a neutral model. Somewhat surprising to me, but only one out of three geneticists reading consider themselves a population geneticist so it is not entirely unreasonable.

If you have read me for a long time you know I’m a fan of alternative history, and alternative history fiction (some of you have followed me from USENET from those groups).

Though I think Harry Turtldove has gotten a little hackish recently (too much quantity, not enough quality), his older stuff is good. Agent of Byzantium in particular is good, not taking the easy way out of later books, which basically dress up events from our timeline in somewhat different garb. For the mainstream science fiction reader Years of Rice and Salt is probably what they are most familiar with, though I think it’s a little overrated. The Uchronia website has a good list of books and works, but I thought I’d pass something else along I found on Twitter, Clash of Eagles, which is volume 1 of a trilogy. Too bad I don’t have much time to read fiction…it looks like there’s some really good work being produced today.

A question in the comments below, isn’t 2007’s Principles of Population Genetics a bit on the old side? I don’t think this is a big issue. But if you want a more recent book, 2013’s An Introduction to Population Genetics: Theory and Applications is more what you are looking for I guess. Here is the publisher introduction:

“A text for a one-semester course in population genetics. It introduces students to classical population genetics (in terms of allele and haplotype frequencies) and modern population genetics (in terms of coalescent theory). It presents numerous applications of population genetic methods to practical problems, including testing for natural selection, detecting genetic hitchhiking and inferring the history of populations.

Basically the reason this book exists, in my opinion, is that older works don’t explore in much detail genomic applications of population genetic theory. And that’s the main reason you would be unsatisfied with an older work, because it doesn’t grapple with genome-wide data, because that was not a major concern when population genetics was being developed as a field. Even a book that was published in 2007 just isn’t really going to be up to date when it comes to genomics, because 2017 is so much further along.

But ultimately genomics isn’t really necessary to understand population genetics. Kimura and Crow’s Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, written in the late 1960s, would be more than sufficient I would think (though I do have to say that An Introduction to Population Genetics is very good about integrating a coalescent framework into one’s thinking, which is obviously not the case with older texts).

I think I figured out the way to resolve the 503 error problem (more precisely, I figured out how to set up the script that checks for 503 errors and restarts varnish if it’s giving 503 errors). I’m also working on restoring the full archives of my content (have to get the MySQL tables working in my database for this weblog).

Lee Alan Dugatkin’s How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution is out. I’ve enjoyed three of the author’s books, The Imitation Factor: Evolution Beyond The Gene, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness, and Game Theory and Animal Behavior. He’s a great writer, and an accomplished scientist, so I’m sure How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) will be good.

King James asserted “No bishop, no king.” I would say, “no science, no liberal democracy.” Not that I think science is the root cause of liberal democracy, I think the two emerge from a particular view of the world and how to engage it and talk about it. The decline in scientific discourse then won’t cause the decline of liberal democracy, but will signal the diminishing of the fuel which fires both. More on that later.

I said this on Twitter because I think this might be a serious idea:

People are saying I should read something “out of the norm.” I used to do that more often in the past. For example, I read The World Beyond the Hill – Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence. Though I guess it was literary analysis and history of a genre which I found interesting. But what specific books should I read? I’ll pick one and get back to you with my opinions….

The Evolution Of Covert Signaling. Rule-of-thumb, if it has Richard McElreath on the author list, it’s worth reading.

My request for readers to buy things from Amazon through the links on this website has been modestly successful. I didn’t make a “record” amount of money, but I did notice more “random” things than usual, which suggests to me that I pushed more revenue through that avenue than would be otherwise expected.

If winning is all that matters, then there are no rules in the game.

Now and then I wonder why I’m still blogging all these years later. I don’t make much income off it. If I wanted to be “famous” I would have been much more careful about what I said over the years. Part of it is that I get some interesting comments from readers who aren’t stupid, unlike most humans, who are basically the literal definition of vacuous. But part of it is that I don’t quite see anyone else saying some of the things I say or occupying the same space. So here I am. For now. If someone else is occupying the same space…, tell me and I’ll perhaps retire.

Why do you read me and who are you

The first time I tried to get through Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, I gave up because it seemed so pretentious and impenetrable. My curiosity was piqued by the fact that the subtitle alluded to evolution, and I was interested in evolutionary psychology. But though In Gods We Trust does talk somewhat about the evolutionary origins of religion, fundamentally it’s a work of cognitive anthropology.

Because I did not know about this field, its lexicon struck me as totally opaque, and there seemed something almost Post-Modern and French about Atran’s prose. Actually though this perception made some sense, Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Larry Hirschfeld actually came up with the naturalistic paradigm in anthropology while meeting at Sperber’s home in Paris in the early 1980s.

I did end up reading In Gods We Trust front to back a year after I initially tackled it, along with some other books on religion from this perspective (e.g., Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer). Up until 2007 or so I would write extensively on cognitive anthropology and religion, but I got what I wanted to in terms of insight after period and do not write much on this topic (in 2006 I actually got invited to a conference with a press pass on the topic of religion and evolution, my interests had become so well known in this domain).

So I was surprised to see this comment:

I’ll give it a go. I tried starting with Principles of Population Genetics but found it heavy going (Ive only been reading here for a few years and mainly got into it for the posts about religion, but the genetics stuff is quite interesting)

I suppose I still write about religion enough that that might hook some people. Though honestly I don’t have anything original to say…it’s just that much of mainstream commentary strikes me as totally dumb and uninformed.

But that prompts me. Consider this an “unlurk” thread. Two questions:

1) Why do you read me? (and implicitly, what should I write about more?)

2) Tell me anything about yourself that you think would be of interest to me or other readers (some of you are not anonymous, so I know those who are lawyers in Colorado or engineers in Australia; that sort of thing)