Ghana’s unique African-Hindu temple. In some ways this seems to replicate the non-congregational model found in India, whereby locals seem to be patronizing the temple for its “services” is a non-exclusive fashion.
Why won’t those &$*%#@ bloggers go away? Scott Sumner’s response to a criticism of the “econosphere” from a professional economist. I doubt that engineers worry about engineering bloggers talking about stuff they don’t know about. Economics is hard, but many of us who are not averse to giving due respect to professionals who have a real understanding of how the world works have shifted our assessment on the empirics of late. The econosphere would disappear in its current critical form if economists either toned down their pretensions, or actually showed us the money.
To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand the role pornography is playing in our culture, I can’t see any reason that this won’t get worse, because all of these men who started watching pornography young are going to want more and more. Pornographers themselves say they’re having trouble keeping up with what fans want because they want it so hardcore.
Where is this going to end? I don’t know. What will an 11-year-old boy want 10, 20, or 30 years from now? Nobody knows. The truth is we’ve never brought up a generation of males with hardcore pornography. No one can really say what’s going to happen. What we do know, from how images and media affect people, is that it’s going to increasingly shape the way men think about sex, sexuality, and relationships.
Really interesting trailer for a movie which is premised on a “secret history” where a group of Nazis flee to the far side of the moon at the end of World War II, and are returning imminently in the near future from their exile.
Wired has the back story of how this group of film makers generated broad-based funding for their project. Of course they’re Finnish….
North America’s First Peoples More Genetically Diverse Than Thought, Mitochondrial Genome Analysis Reveals. The paper is free to all. Remember that this is just mtDNA, the maternal lineage. This area seems a bit confused now. The standard simple model, which is barely even a ‘stylized fact’ at this point, is that a group of Siberians arrived ~12,000 years ago and this founder population to led to all that has come after. For about twenty years geneticists have been claiming to see more time depth, but that’s confused by the possibility that they have been looking at evolutionary dynamics in Berengia, not North America.
In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity. So was there an alternative to austerity for Ireland alone? Can such a small nation pump growth with deficit spending if its larger neighbors are all beating the drum for austerity? Seems like they’re soldiering on and making the best of a bad situation.
The Triumphant Decline of the WASP. Noah Feldman basically concedes that WASPs are the world’s least primitive population. Of course that does not entail fitness of genes or memes.
Morning Edition has a strange story today about the exploration of one neuroscientist of his own family’s history, specifically its psychological and neurological quirks. To not put too fine a point on it, the scientist in question finds out that he has a history of violence in his family, and, that he carries a genetic variant implicated in violent behavior under particular conditions, as well as telling neurological patterns found among psychopaths. Here’s the relevant section:
Born to be a slave in Niger. This a story from 2005, but from what I gather nothing has really changed in much of the Sahel since then. Slavery is particularly pernicious in Mauritania, where the racialized aspect is pretty straightforward.
In the post below on Bryan Caplan’s arguments for why one should have more children there was an “interesting” comment:
As if we’re harmless little creatures at one with our environment and put no toll on the balance of nature around us. Funny how we humans act like mindless rabbits and lemmings and put the sole unintelligent directive of our DNA as the mouth of god. Men most interestingly in power or self described intellectuals after sitting around picking belly lint and jerking off in praise of their penises find clever monkey justifications (patriarchal religions mostly) for more more more babies and women must be subservient to male sexual needs and demands of more babies. See a huge male god said so.
Funny how women mostly never jump on the soapbox bandwagon of wanting to pop out tons of kids, just male spermatozoa fed rants formed by the human male organism to insist his natural inclination is the word of gawd. If you can’t use holy massive penised Jehovah to instill this dreck then dream up socio-biological propaganda for the atheist hip guys needing a good shagging with their female cohorts.
Ignoring the weirdness of much the comment, is it true that men are more pro-natalist than women? I have shown that there seems to be a trend within the last 10 years of preference for larger families. What’s the sex breakdown for this?
The correlation between men and women is 0.65 year-to-year in their mean for ideal number of children. About 43% of the variance of the trend over the years can be predicted from one sex to the other. Is there is a systematic difference? Here’s a chart:
1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common
2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing
Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon:
I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the general ppoulation. In other words, as more women attain advanced degrees the pool of those women become less atypical vis-a-vis the general population
A few months ago I was thinking a fair amount about the Neandertals. One issue which became more stark to me due to that particular finding, that a few percent of the human genome seems to have derived from Neandertal populations, is the reality that genetic distinctiveness can persist long after cultural coherency is no longer a reality. That made me reconsider one of the facts of contemporary scholarship, that the Amerindian populations of the two most populous nations of the New World, the United States of America and Brazil, have disappeared or been totally marginalized demographically.
I’ve observed before it looks like that about 15-20% of the ancestry of the Argentine population is Amerindian, despite the nation’s proud identity as a European settler offshoot (i.e., more like the United States or Australia, than Mexico, which has an explicit hybrid identity). But I realized that Brazil was perhaps the bigger catch.
Only 0.4% of Brazilians identify as Amerindian. That’s about 700,000 people. But we know that a substantial number of white, brown and black Brazilians have Amerindian ancestry. Assuming for argument’s sake that the 700,000 Amerindians have undiluted indigenous ancestry, how much of the distinctive Amerindian genome in modern Brazil is to be found in this segment of the population?
There was a paper which came out in an obscure Brazilian journal last year which can help answer this question, DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians. For the purposes of the paper they needed to find a small number of ancestrally informative markers which would allow them to partition the ancestries of the individuals in their data set into European, African, and Amerindian, segments. Luckily these are three very distinctive populations. They cross-checked the utility of their markers against the HGDP data set. In other words the precision and accuracy of the 40 markers they selected should be assessed by how well they can distinguish these three “pure” populations. Their Brazilian subjects consisted of self-identified whites from various regions, as well as black men from Sao Paulo. Brazil’s racial taxonomy has a brown (pardo) category which is large, but judging from the very high proportion of African ancestry among the blacks in their sample I don’t think they included self-identified mixed-race people in that group (some scholars lump mixed and black Brazilians together into the black category).
There will be an interesting presentation tomorrow at the European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology. Basically the researcher is going to present on a method for predicting when a woman will hit menopause. This part from the press release is the important bit:
“The results from our study could enable us to make a more realistic assessment of women’s reproductive status many years before they reach menopause. For example, if a 20-year-old woman has a concentration of serum AMH of 2.8 ng/ml [nanograms per millilitre], we estimate that she will become menopausal between 35-38 years old. To the best of our knowledge this is the first prediction of age at menopause that has resulted from a population-based cohort study. We believe that our estimates of ages at menopause based on AMH levels are of sufficient validity to guide medical practitioners in their day-to-day practice, so that they can help women with their family planning.”
I highly recommend this discussion between Paul Bloom & Robert Wright. The topic under consideration is the psychology of pleasure, as reviewed in Bloom’s new book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. You can also find out about Bloom’s ideas in this exchange in Slate. The essentialism examined in Descarte’s Baby is being taken for another spin, though with a more precise focus. The bottom line is that pleasure is often contingent on more than proximate empirical sensory input; it depends on what you perceive to be the essence of the object of pleasure, even its history (or more crassly, its price). This truth may make the calculation project of the utilitarian heirs of Gottfried Leibniz pragmatically impossible.
Dave Weigel of The Washington Post has resigned over his juvenile postings on an e-list. Basically the postings allowed for Weigel’s mask to slip, and showed him to be a vulgar and immature young man in some contexts. That’s no different from many of us in the proper context. The e-list is now defunct because of this information break.
Someone like Dave Weigel, a reporter who has to make a public pretense toward objectivity, and a somewhat public person, is atypical. But I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. People who know me in “real life” know that nothing they say to me will ever show up on this blog; it’s private, and my day to day interactions almost never intersect with the topicality here. If I want to introduce an idea or concept that someone else familiarized me with I will ask if I can do so, and credit them if they request. But that’s the nature of this blog, which draws more upon the scientific literature or reader feedback. Other outlets blur the line between private & public more explicitly, and if you meet someone with such an outlet, watch what you say, watch what you do. I’ve been on private e-lists where people say things that in public that could really compromise them. I’ve even gotten into disputes with people who were taking one stand in public which I knew could be easily undercut if I “exposed” what they’d said in private.
In the short term by breaking down barriers to information flow the internet is going to result in people retrenching to the narrowest and most trusted circles to “let their hair down.” In the long term I think we might have to reconceptualize what we think of as private or public. Soon enough a whole host of data on anyone you meet will be available on demand. And your data will also be available to them.
Group Solidarity and Survival. For what it’s worth, I think group solidarity was critical for human survival and flourishing. I suspect it was responsible for the secular increase in cranial capacity for most of hominin history.
Trust and Prosperity. This issue is not salient unless you move. There is a difference in trust even within the United States; rural Vermont vs. downtown Boston. The explanation for this difference is straightforward, but there are probably more subtle differences between societies. On an individual level I wonder at the aggregate decrement in productivity and energy due to having to “track” very vigilantly whenever you’re in a public place in a low-trust situation or society.
There are very few books which would attempt to connect the experiences of the 1st century British who lived through Roman conquest with the French under the Vichy regime in World War II. The The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall by Timothy Parsons attempts to do just that. As John Emerson observed the subtitle is obnoxious; all states fall, not just empires. But in the author’s defense usually they are not the ones who decide upon the title, rather the publishers look for sentences which are catchy and can move some units. A grand explanation of why empires fall may appeal to the average reader. A disparate collection of descriptions of the imperial experience, filtered through a prism strongly shaped by 20th century perceptions and models of colonialism, perhaps not. The latter is what the The Rule of Empires is. The author is a professor of 20th century African social history, and the specter of the European colonialism of the Dark Continent haunts even the chapters on Roman Britain or Umayyad Spain. Though Parsons’ sympathy with the subjugated is obvious he restrains himself enough so that tiresome polemic does not interfere excessively with the collation of fact or the attempt to engage in objective analysis. Unfortunately the project of a grand theory of the rise and fall of empires, or more accurately the colonized experience, falls short of its goals. I was totally unpersuaded that the fall of Napoleonic Italy, Roman Britain, or British Kenya, were united in any deep way by inevitable social or institutional forces of history which thread together all empires. Though there are many interesting facts on display, it does seem to me that the author falls into a tendency to transform all imperialists into 20th century British, and all subjects into 20th century Kikuyu. The most recent imperial adventures serve as the models, or the skeleton, around which the grand theory is built, and that only distracts from the specific chapters which are rich with specific detail.
Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
A few months ago I was thinking a fair amount about the 
Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
