If you haven’t, check out the Leigh Van Valen obituary in The New York Times. I hadn’t been aware of the breadth of his work, and the disciplinary range he showed over his career.

Jim Manzi has already posted on the warranted skepticism of DRD4 being reported in the press as the “liberal gene.” Here’s the original paper. The main issue I have is not with the original research, but the inevitable confusions in the media which always arise. First, we know that complex behavioral phenotypes such as religiosity and personality seem to be heritable. That is, a set of genetic variants within the population seems to track the variation in the trait (just as with I.Q.). But, it’s been a much longer haul to actually connect a specific genetic locus to said variation, though the dopamine related genes are always brought forward as candidates. Additionally, particularly when it comes to politics there’s the norm of reaction looming. One might grant that same genetic variation which predisposes Swedes in Sweden to being on the Left or the Right is operative among ethnic Swedes in Minnesota, but most of the difference is actually between population, and a function of the differing environmental milieus of the Upper Midwest and Scandinavia (though perhaps there were strong selection effects operating upon those who chose to leave Scandinavia for the USA). Finally, as with personality, there’s the problem of characterizing the phenotype in the first place in political orientation. Not insoluble in my opinion, but far less clear than something like height, or even intelligence.

The big picture is that variation on most complex behavioral traits has some upstream genetic correlates. And, we can get some sense of the magnitude (or lack thereof) of the effect in a given environment. But like fMRI the introduction of DNA probably adds more glitz than substance at this point. We’ve long known many traits which we think as purely reflective and environmental have a partial biological basis in disposition. Clearly an area to be continued….

For Congress, I think that the breakdown will be:

Senate – 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats

House – 240 Republicans, 195 Democrats

My reasoning? I just took FiveThirtyEight‘s numbers and shaded them a bit to the Republican side. There’s no point in making predictions unless you predict something novel and a bit off expectations. Additionally, since the readership here leans a little Left I am inclined to tweak you guys a bit and make the political Götterdämmerung even more terrifying, though I didn’t want to push my luck and give you an implausible value which you’d reject on the face of it.

Image Credit: Therealbs2002, Wikimedia Commons

The last 24 hours of the initial sample collection phase of the Dodecad Ancestry Project are upon us. So if you have raw 23andMe data, you got a day to send it in, if you’re of the following groups:

-Greeks (not necessarily from Greece: Cypriots, Pontic Greeks from the former USSR, North Epirotes, Griko speakers from Italy, -Muslim rumca speakers from Turkey, etc. are all accepted)
-People from the Balkans
-People from Anatolia
-People from the Caucasus
-Italians
-Non-Indo-European speakers from Europe (e.g., Finns, Hungarians, Basques)
-Scandinavians and Icelanders
-Iranians
-Armenians
-Jews from Italy, the Balkans, or Anatolia
-Assyrians
-Arabs

The point of the project is to get a better picture of genetic variation in Eurasia, especially in undersampled groups.

A reader pointed me to a second composite image of a “global human.” It is “a composite itself from four composite of Northwest European, South & West Asian, East Asian and African faces….” I was very taken aback by this face, because it was familiar: staring back at me is a younger variant of the faces of my maternal uncles! I asked a friend who has met my family their impression of the photo without a preface, and they immediately wondered if it was a stylized representation of one of my mother’s male relatives.

In the post below on the genetic history of India, or earlier when discussing the revisions of European prehistory, one general trend that is cropping up is that the future seems more complex and muddled than we’d presumed. This introduces the real possibility that in the foreseeable future we won’t be able to opine with any credibility about the nature of the pre-literate past, because our tools are good enough to falsify simple models, but not powerful enough to distinguish between the set of more complex models. In contrast, ten years ago when it came to the expansion of farming in Europe on offer we had simple and clear dichotomies; demic diffusion of Anatolian farmers vs. cultural diffusion of farming techniques along trade routes. Ten years ago when it came to India we are mooting the possibilities between elite transmission of Indo-European language, versus demographically significant migrations into South Asia bringing the Indo-Aryan dialects.

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Oren Harman, author of The Price of Altruism is on BHTV. Recommended.
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This week’s episode of South Park was OK, but I really loved this take off on a scene from A Clockwork Orange:

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A few days ago Dienekes opened up the Dodecad project to a wider range of Eurasians. I decided to send my 23andMe sample to Dienekes ASAP, and the results came back today. I’m DOD075. Dienekes also just put up an explanation of the 10 ancestral components he’s generating from ADMIXTURE (along with tree-like representations of their distances). Below I’ve placed myself in the more local context of populations to which I’m close to:

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1. First, a post from the past: Atheism, Heresy and Hesychasm. I used to post about religion a lot more, especially in the fall of 2006. That was back when ScienceBlogs was small enough and tight enough to have a back & forth discussion among the weblogs pretty easily. I also was working a lot of hours at my job at the time and that imposed a sort of tight discipline on me, I remember hustling off posts after work, before sleep, and on Saturday (into schedule queue).

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A very special note: I endorse Christie Wilcox for 2010 Blogging Scholarship.

A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing. This paper is getting a lot of play. A taste of things to come from the 1000 Genomes Project. It’s OA, so check it out.

Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher. I think Marc Hauser will be an emeritus professor by the time the case involving his alleged misconduct is resolved.

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Paul Conroy sent me a link to a Dutch article which purports to illustrate what the average human male’s face looks like. From what I can gather this is a weighted average by population. Click through and tell me what you think. Seems plausible enough to me.

The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were a branch of a broader West Eurasian cluster of peoples, albeit more distant from the core Middle Eastern-North-African-European-Caucasian clade. The older physical anthropological literature would have asserted that South Asians were predominantly Caucasoid, but with a Australoid element admixed in at varying proportions as a function of geography and caste. To put it more concretely, and I think accurately, a large degree of South Asian physical variety can be defined along the spectrum between A. R. Rahman and Nawaz Sharif. The regional and caste truisms are only correlations. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was a Tamil Brahmin, but experienced anti-black racism in the United States. I think that is reasonable in light of his appearance.

This rough & ready mainstream understanding, supporting by classical genetic markers, was overturned in the early years of the 21st century. One line of thought argued that South Asians were much more distinctive from the broader Western Eurasian cluster of peoples. Representative of this body of work is a paper like The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists both in Indian tribal and caste populations. These researchers tended to start with the female lineages, mtDNA, and then supplement that with Y lineages, the paternal descent. A separate line of evidence, generally drawn from Y chromosomal results, indicated that there were deep connections between the people of India and those of Central Eurasia, in particular via the R1a haplogroup. Additionally, one aspect of the first set of results which was very surprising was that it actually placed South Asians closer to East, not West, Eurasians. But by the end of the aughts the uniparental studies had been supplemented by a range of results produced from SNP-chips, which looked at hundreds of thousands of genetic variants. These studies seemed to support the older view of South Asians being closer to West Eurasians than East Eurasians. Finally last year a paper came out which posited that almost all South Asian populations were actually an ancient stabilized hybrid between two groups, a European-like population, “Ancient North Indians” (ANI), and another group which is no longer present in unadmixed form, “Ancient South Indians” (ASI), of whom the Andaman Islanders are distant relatives. Though there was a slight bias toward ANI as a whole, the fraction of ASI increased as one went southeast, and down the caste ladder. The distinctive “South Asian” ancestral group in other words then may actually be conceived of as a compound of these two elements; an admixture of the native substrate against a European-like genetic background.

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My blog post prompted this response:

He notes research hypothesizing a link between high latitudes and the dry earwax gene, and also research that suggests that the dry earwax gene, something that would seem to have little selective impact, may be linked to the same gene that regulates body odor. Low body odor might conceivably confer the 1% per generation selective advantage that would appear to be necessary to account for the current mix of those genes over the 50,000 years the distinction between Asia and the rest of the world is appeared to have evolved.

People can interpret results however they want, it’s a free country. In fact I do so all the time. But I want to enter into the record that I’m skeptical of this particular model of negative selection against stinkiness.

In Mideast House of Cards, U.S. Views Lebanon as Shaky. Some of the problems here are structural demographics. The institutions of Lebanon’s democracy were formed when Maronite Christians were the plural majority, followed by Sunni Muslims, then Shia Muslims, and finally minorities such as the Greek Orthodox and Druze. Today the likely plural majority are the Shia, followed by the Sunnis and Maronites. Add on top of this the fact that the Shia tend to be poorer, and, have an invested international backer in Iran. The connection between the Iranian Shia and the Lebanese Shia has traditionally been closer than between the Iranian Shia and the Iraqi Shia.

Saudi Border With Yemen Is Still Inviting for Al Qaeda. Interesting coincidence that I posted on this issue last week. I think my libertarian friends such as Will Wilkinson and Bryan Caplan will get their wish for relatively open borders in the 21st century as a matter of pure probable prediction (there will be exceptions, I suspect Japan may be one). The future will be something more like the United Arab Emirates, though I hope we’ll be able to effect some humanitarianism on the margins, as well as mitigate the popularity of ugly modernist mega-structures.

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