And more productive. FiveThirtyEight has a nice meme-buster post, US Manufacturing Is Not Dead. This was known to me, but Tom Schaller has all the charts put together nice.
Here’s industrial output:

The labor force engaged in producing durable goods:

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Ends today. Last Chance to Contribute to 2010 Singularity Research Challenge!:

Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.

Since ~1/3 of readers of GNXP are sympathetic to transhumanism I thought it might be worthwhile to post this….

Check out Dr. Dan MacArthur’s assessment of the Pacific Biosciences presentation at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference. Also check out Genetic Inferences take on AGBT (yes, they’re really original with catchy blog names at the Sanger Institute!). In any case, a friend of mine was raving about Pacific Biosciences a few months ago, so I assumed it would blow up soon.

The Genetics of Human Adaptation: Hard Sweeps, Soft Sweeps, and Polygenic Adaptation:

There has long been interest in understanding the genetic basis of human adaptation. To what extent are phenotypic differences among human populations driven by natural selection? With the recent arrival of large genome-wide data sets on human variation, there is now unprecedented opportunity for progress on this type of question. Several lines of evidence argue for an important role of positive selection in shaping human variation and differences among populations. These include studies of comparative morphology and physiology, as well as population genetic studies of candidate loci and genome-wide data. However, the data also suggest that it is unusual for strong selection to drive new mutations rapidly to fixation in particular populations (the ‘hard sweep’ model). We argue, instead, for alternatives to the hard sweep model: in particular, polygenic adaptation could allow rapid adaptation while not producing classical signatures of selective sweeps. We close by discussing some of the likely opportunities for progress in the field.

The whole review is well written & open access, so I would recommend just reading the whole thing. I would though add that obviously population and quantitative genetics complement each other because they approach the same phenomenon from opposite ends. Additionally, one of the major criticisms of Charles Darwin’s original work was its heavy reliance on domesticated lineages which had been subject to artificial selection on quantitative traits. I suspect in many ways humans are themselves “self-domesticated,” and the protean nature of the selection regimes shaped by rapidly changing culture makes it more likely than not that we adapt through tweaking standing genetic variation.
Citation: The Genetics of Human Adaptation: Hard Sweeps, Soft Sweeps, and Polygenic Adaptation, Pritchard, Jonathan K.; Pickrell, Joseph K.; Coop, Graham, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.055

It’s on.

For a hot-button issue which is arguably the social lodestar for American culture-wars people make a lot of unfounded assertions and assumptions about abortion. For example, poking around the GSS data set it’s pretty evident that there isn’t a sex difference in regards to the legal status of abortion. What I have found is that there may be an intensity difference between men an women among the educated pro-choice segment of the population, which might give pro-choice women the impression that there is a general difference (as people tend to extrapolate inordinately from their social milieu).
What about race? One of the occasionally resurrected talking points from conservative Republicans is that black Americans should be targeted because their social values are more aligned with the Republican party. You do see some of this when it comes to gay marriage, though I judge the difference to be relatively modest. But a new story in The New York Times made me wonder about abortion, To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case:

For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.
So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.
Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.

The black abortion rate is eye-popping:

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US routs Finland 6-1, will play for hockey gold. It’s really not even fair; this is a nation which was oppressed by Swedes for nearly a thousand years. I really hope those losers beat Slovakia so we can face them for the gold. Most of the time we don’t have to think about them, except in the areas of humor and hockey.

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Social Cognition in Dogs, or How did Fido get so smart?. This you know:

Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you’re pointing to (whether it’s a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well.
Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than primates (including our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees) and better than their nearest cousins, wild wolves.

But there are two explanations for how/why dogs are better than primates at this task:

And so it was that biological anthropologist Brian Hare, director of the of Duke University Canine Cognition Center wondered: did dogs get so smart because of direct selection for this ability during the domestication of dogs, or did this apparent intelligence evolve, in a sense, by accident, because of selection against fear and aggression?

I didn’t even consider that it would be anything except for direct selection. In any case, read the whole post for a run-down of the paper, but here’s the blogger’s conclusion:

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Citing shame, danger, one Madoff seeks name change:

Stephanie Madoff, who is married to Madoff’s son Mark, has asked New York Supreme Court for permission to change her last name to Morgan and also, according to local media reports, made similar requests for her two young children.

Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, Yes, We Have a PhD Glut… Which is interesting, because it isn’t has if getting a doctorate is financially lucrative. Though getting a medical doctorate is financially lucrative. Perhaps the medical profession has the right idea, control labor supply?* Right idea for medical doctors at least….
* At least the medical profession hasn’t opened the floodgate and enabled the overproduction of those with MDs who will never practice the profession and so be saddled with a lot of debt, which is the case with the legal profession (and for those who do pass the bar and enter into the legal profession, there’s a two-tiered pay scale).

The New York Times has an article attempting to clarify complex political tensions cross-linked with religious identity (or not), In an Iraqi City, the Real Ballot Contest Is for Shiite Leadership. The author, Anthony Shadid, states:

The contest bears down on one of the unanswered questions in Iraq’s tortured narrative of invasion, occupation, war and recovery. The country today stands as the only Arab state in which Shiite Muslims rule. Nasiriya is a stage, rendered small, where several Shiite currents, from street movements to venerable parties, are now vying for ascendancy.

That’s not really true. The Alawites of Syria dominate that Sunni-majority nation arguably with as tight a fist as the Sunni Arabs dominated Baath-era Iraq, or the Sunni royal family of Bahrain dominates that island nation. The Alawites are Shia, or at least identify as such. They’ve long had a tacit alliance with Iran, and the Iranian regime’s lack of support for the Sunni Islamists of Hama, who were massacred by Hafez Assad’s army in 1982, reputedly had a lot to do with Sunni rejection of Iran as a leader for worldwide Islamic revivalism. Throughout the 1980s Baathist Syria was aligned against Baathist Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, in keeping with Syria’s traditional pro-Iranian tilt (Syria also is a secondary patron of Hezbollah).
In any case, this is all relatively academic, except for the fact that Syria borders on Iraq, has millions of Iraqi refugees, and likely served as a base for Iraqi insurgents. How does the fact that Syria is dominated by a heterdox Shia sect which rules a Sunni majority influence its relationship to Iraq? That’s for you to explore. I just think it is worth pointing out this error, because if The New York Times can get basic facts retrievable from Wikipedia wrong how much should you trust it when it comes to the political dynamics of an obscure Iraqi city?*
* Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future is worth reading, as he outlines the network of Shia religious movements which span Iran to Lebanon, and now have come into stark relief with the emergence of a “Shia arc” of Iran, Iraq, Syria (Shia dominated) and Lebanon (Hezbollah becoming operational king-makers).

Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent:

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values (for children, marriage, family, and friends). The analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Study 1) and the General Social Surveys (Study 2) show that adolescent and adult intelligence significantly increases adult liberalism, atheism, and men’s (but not women’s) value on sexual exclusivity.

I don’t have access to the paper, but ScienceDaily reports the values. For the NLSY, which surveys teens:
Very liberal IQ = 106
Very conservative IQ = 95
Atheist IQ = 103
Very religious IQ = 97

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Arboreality has allowed for the evolution of increased longevity in mammals:

The evolutionary theory of aging predicts that species will experience delayed senescence and increased longevity when rates of extrinsic mortality are reduced. It has long been recognized that birds and bats are characterized by lower rates of extrinsic mortality and greater longevities than nonvolant endotherms, presumably because flight reduces exposure to terrestrial predators, disease, and environmental hazards. Like flight, arboreality may act to reduce extrinsic mortality, delay senescence, and increase longevity and has been suggested as an explanation for the long lifespans of primates. However, this hypothesis has yet to be tested in mammals in general. We analyze a large dataset of mammalian longevity records to test whether arboreal mammals are characterized by greater longevities than terrestrial mammals. Here, we show that arboreal mammals are longer lived than terrestrial mammals at common body sizes, independent of phylogeny. Subclade analyses demonstrate that this trend holds true in nearly every mammalian subgroup, with two notable exceptions–metatherians (marsupials) and euarchontans (primates and their close relatives). These subgroups are unique in that each has experienced a long and persistent arboreal evolutionary history, with subsequent transitions to terrestriality occurring multiple times within each group. In all other clades examined, terrestriality appears to be the primitive condition, and species that become arboreal tend to experience increased longevity, often independently in multiple lineages within each clade. Adoption of an arboreal lifestyle may have allowed for increased longevity in these lineages and in primates in general. Overall, these results confirm the fundamental predictions of the evolutionary theory of aging.

The same logic probably explains the long lifespans of tortises. Until humans showed up their shells were pretty good at insulating them from the risks of predation.
Citation: Milena R. Shattuck and Scott A. Williams, Arboreality has allowed for the evolution of increased longevity in mammals, doi:10.1073/pnas.0911439107

Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable:

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.

In other words, the strength of face recognition does not seem to track other intelligence test results much at all (including tests which measure verbal and visual memory). Rather, it seems to be a domain-specific competency, rather than emerging out of general intelligence. And, the variation in face recognition ability is highly heritable.
What’s going on here? A reasonable guess for me is that the ability to recognize many, many, different faces isn’t something that came up for most of human history. Even in a pre-modern village you’d see the same people over and over. By contrast, if you work in sales you probably need to juggle a lot of faces & names to be successful.
Remember that if a quantitative trait is highly heritable then by definition that means that directional selection wasn’t operating to drive genes to fixation so that the population was monomorphic in trait value. In English that means if there was a huge benefit to being able to recognize hundreds of faces very well in the past, then we would be able to recognize hundreds of faces very well to the same extent. As it is the strongly for face recognition has to be more complex, with the direct selection applicable being some sort of balancing selection.
Citation: Jeremy B. Wilmer, Laura Germine, Christopher F. Chabris, Garga Chatterjee, Mark Williams, Eric Loken, Ken Nakayama, and Bradley Duchaine, Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable, doi:10.1073/pnas.0913053107