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Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue:

In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]

They've called on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to put together a panel of experts across the biological and social sciences to come up with ways for researchers to shift away from the racial concept in genetics research.

"It's a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it's a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from," said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.

"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who worked on the Neanderthal genome but was not involved with the new paper. [. . .]

So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Pääbo said geography might be a better substitute in regions such as Europe to define "populations" from a genetic perspective. However, he added that, in North America, where the majority of the population has come from different parts of the world during the past 300 years, distinctions like "African Americans" or "European Americans" might still work as a proxy to suggest where a person's major ancestry originated.

Update: A commenter points to this previous contribution from Michael Yudell:

Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to categorize humans. The idea gained strength towards the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism towards Jewish religious beliefs, began to evolve into anti-Semitism. These blood kinship beliefs rationalized anti-Jewish hatred instead as the hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized, were considered a threat to Christendom by virtue of their ancestry because they could not prove purity of blood to the Inquisition.

But it's hard to imagine Yudell's ethnic neuroses could have anything to do with his totally non-tendentious (not to mention fresh, novel) advocacy for "Taking race out of human genetics". Who could disagree with his "simple goal", as stated in the concluding paragraph of his current paper: "to improve the scientific study of human difference and commonality" and "strengthen research by thinking more carefully about human genetic diversity". Please suppress any cognitive dissonance engendered by the second to last paragraph:

Phasing out racial terminology in biological sciences would send an important message to scientists and the public alike: Historical racial categories that are treated as natural and infused with notions of superiority and inferiority have no place in biology. We acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism and its biological effects, although fraught with challenges, remains necessary. Such research is important to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities in socioculturally defined groups.

Who would argue impartial, objective science is not synonymous with the promotion of minority grievance politics?

Group Size and Social Interaction: a Canada-US Comparison of Interracial Marriage

Group Size and Social Interaction: a Canada-US Comparison of Interracial Marriage (pdf)

Abstract: While black-white intermarriage is uncommon in the United States, blacks in Canada are just as likely to marry whites as to marry blacks. Asians, in contrast, are more likely to marry whites in the US than in Canada. We test the claim that high rates of interracial marriage are indicative of high levels of social integration against Peter Blau's "macrostructural" thesis that relative group size is the key to explaining differences in intermarriage rates across marriage markets. Using micro-data drawn from the American Community Survey and the Canadian Census, we demonstrate that the relative size of racial groups accounts for over two-thirds of the US-Canada difference in black-white unions and largely explains the cross-country difference in Asian-white unions. Under broadly similar social and economic conditions, a large enough difference in relative group size can become the predominant determinant of group differences in the prevalence of interracial unions.

Sewall Wright on race differences, group selection, and cultural selection among humans (1978)

[From Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 4: Variability Within and Among Natural Populations, pp. 439-457]

Racial Differentiation in Mankind

The existence of conspicuous diversity among human populations in physical appearance has been common knowledge at least since the time of ancient Egypt. The subject is discussed at length in numerous books on physical anthropology and need not be considered here in detail.

There is no question that all mankind constitutes a single species in view of the absence of any physiological bar to hybridization between the most diverse races or of any recognizable loss of vigor in the first or later generations.

There is also no question, however, that populations that have long inhabited widely separated parts of the world should, in general, be considered to be of different subspecies by the usual criterion that most individuals of such populations can be allocated correctly by inspection. It does not require a trained anthropologist to classify an array of Englishmen, West Africans, and Chinese with 100% accuracy by features, skin color, and type of hair in spite of so much variability within each of these groups that every individual can easily be distinguished from every other.

[. . .] It has been indicated earlier that such an evolutionary process as that of man is much more understandable if it occurred by the shifting balance process. Simultaneous sampling drive at thousands of sufficiently neutral loci provides different material in innumerable localities without appreciable cost, material that can give the basis for effective interdeme selection.

Was the population structure of primitive man favorable to this process? There have been a number of studies of the few remaining peoples at the hunting and gathering level of culture that bear on this matter. Birdsell (1972), in an intensive study of Australian aborigines in western Australia, has described their population structure. The primary territorial unit is the band, consisting of a group of related families. Marriage is exogamous but largely restricted to the tribe, a group of bands in which the same dialect is spoken. He estimates the average total number in a tribe to be about 500, with a breeding population of about 185 and an effective number of about 100. This is small enough for the building up of considerable differences among large areas at each nearly neutral polymorphic locus merely by sampling drift. There is thus the basis for operation of the shifting balance process. [. . .]

The actual process of interdeme selection may take different forms. At one extreme, the local appearance of a superior genetic system is followed by expansion of its territory accompanied by complete elimination of its neighbors until it occupies the entire range of the species. At the other extreme there is merely excess diffusion from the superior center. Neighboring populations are graded up until they reach the point (the crossing of a saddle in the surface of selective values) at which mass selection carries them autonomously to the new selective peak, or perhaps beyond, if they contribute something that improves on the latter. The locations of the population with the highest selective peak may shift from place to place in the course of time, as a group of neighboring populations step each other up to heights well above the general level.

Bigelow (1969) has emphasized the importance of tribal warfare in the operation of this process. A tribe that is generally successful because of superior intelligence, capacity for cooperation, and high frequency of the heroic virtues as well as physical prowess, tends to increase its territory and also to grade up what is left of the defeated group by hybridization. The process is illustrated by the incessant tribal warfare of the tribes of American Indians observed by the European settlers in America, in which some tribes such as the Iroquois expanded at the expense of their neighbors.

The heroic virtues, including willingness to sacrifice one's own life for the good of the tribe, are traits that can hardly be developed (insofar as they have a genetic basis) by purely individual selection. They may to some extent arise as a by-product of familial selection in which close relatives with heredities strongly correlated with that of an individual who gives his own life to save them. As noted earlier, the effectiveness of familial selection in general is testified to by the improvement of milk production in cattle and of egg production fowls, mainly by selection of males on the basis of the performance of close female relatives. The importance of this sort of intergroup selection in evolution has been emphasized as noted in chapter 7 by Hamilton. The increase in frequency of traits deleterious on the average to their possessors but beneficial to the deme may also, however, be increased by interdeme selection (referred to as intergroup selection in early articles) if the benefit to the deme sufficiently outweighs the damage to the individual. A more rigorous demonstration of this mode of evolution of "altruistic" characters as been given by Eshel (1972).

Not all interdeme selection in man has consisted of intertribal warfare. According to Birdsell, about 15% of marriage among Australian aborigines were intertribal; not enough as shown by the wide variability of gene frequencies to homogenize the whole population but enough to permit effective interdeme selection if exchange was asymmetrical, predominantly from the more to the less successful. That differences were not swamped was presumably due to the exchange being largely between neighboring tribes which differed little, as indicated by the semiclinal nature of the pattern of gene frequencies. The average effective immigration from the population as a whole, the m of formulas, was thus very much less than 0.15. [. . .]

Evolution Since the Origin of Agriculture [. . .]

We can form a better idea of the course of event than in any earlier period but the interpretation is confused by the exponential progress of a second evolutionary process, barely existent at all in any other animal, and little if any more rapid in the earlier history man than his biological evolution.

This is the evolution of culture with its line of transmission largely from speaker to listener, supplemented in the last three thousand years by transmission from writer to reader. It began to become of major importance with the origin of language, but during the hunting and gathering phase of human life the slow advance of culture is indicated by that in the fashioning of stone tools and weapons. It was probably accompanied by relatively rapid diffusion of knowledge of such advances as were made. The success of tribes thus probably depended to a greater extent on capabilities, determined by their genes, than on the possession of techniques not known to their neighbors.

The mode of evolution of culture is analogous to that of the genetic system. Invention is the analog of mutation. Diffusion of culture is the analog of gene flow. Cultural variation is continually subject to selection on the basis of utility. There is random cultural drift, exemplified by the breaking up of languages into dialects. Finally, the most favorable conditions for cultural advance is local isolation, providing the basis for simultaneous trial and error among many variants and the diffusion of the more successful ones in analogy with the shifting balance process in biological evolution. We think here of the multiple competing cultures in ancient Southwest Asia, the evolution of culture among the city states of ancient Greece, and in much divided Europe from the Dark Ages to modern times. The great empires of the ancient Southwest Asia of Alexander and of Rome constituted an overbalancing final phase in the process, giving widespread diffusion but less progress by trial and error.

There has undoubtedly always been a considerable but incomplete correlation between the two kinds of evolution. The state of the culture has been to a considerable extent an index of the rank of populations genetically in the distinctive human line of evolutionary advance, and reciprocally the demands of culture have been the primary selective agent in this advance in its later stages. Aspects of culture are continually being borrowed, but whether such borrowings are effectively integrated into the existent culture to form new peaks (as most conspicuously in the recent period in Japan), or are adopted only superficially and to the detriment of the previous culture, is also an index of genetic capability.

The treatment of either the genetic capabilities or the cultures of peoples as if they could be ranked on single scales is, of course, a gross simplification. If the multiple genetic aspects of mental ability could be measured more independently of culture than is the case, it would no doubt be found that each local race has its own unique combination of favorable qualities. At present only IQ seems to have a repeatability that permits evaluation of the contributions of genetic and nongenetic variabilities to its variability, discussed in the previous chapter, and this only within a particular culture.

On the other hand there have probably always been wide differences among the peoples of the world in average intellectual ability and cultural level from the standpoint of progress toward the situation in civilized man. This was presumably related to the environmental conditions. Men could not endure the northern winters without fire, the use of which is documented by hearths found in France dating back over half a million years and somewhat later in Hungary and in China but only about one-tenth as far back in Africa (Campbell 1974).

The capacity to anticipate and plan for the future is a mental attribute which would be favored under northern conditions and selected for insofar as it has a genetic basis. This would presumably have come to be more advanced in the temperate zone than in the tropics. [. . .]

Linguistic evidence indicates the establishment of an important center of diffusion in east-central Europe some 5,000 years ago from which wave after wave peoples moved in all directions. The Hittites carried an Indo-European language of the western (centum) type into Asia Minor and established an empire some 4,000 years ago. A thousand years later the Iranians, who had moved east into what is now southern Russia and Turkestan, brought an Indo-European language of the eastern (satem) type into the original cultural center and later established the Persian Empire. They also carried another Aryan dialect to India. Other tribes moving south from the east-central European center reached Greece in several waves which, after mixing with the indigenous people, produced classical Greek civilization.

Other waves moved to the southwest into Italy, giving rise to Latin and other Italic languages; to the west, giving rise to Celtic languages in what is now southern Germany, France, and the British Isles; and to the northwest into what is not northern Germany and Scandinavia, to give rise, in much altered form, to the Germanic languages. Subsequent migrations greatly expanded the areas occupied by derivatives of Latin and Germanic branches at the expense in Europe of the Celtic. All the tribal migrations were undoubtedly accompanied by much intermixture with indigenous peoples, but the diffusion of language also undoubtedly implies considerable gene flow.

[. . .] The history of Europe, especially western Europe, was thus prevailingly one of inflow of genes up to the relatively recent period in which it itself became a center of massive outflow.

Related posts:

• Sewall Wright on Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship (1922)
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans
• More from Hamilton on kin recognition and intergroup hostility
• R. A. Fisher on group selection in humans
• James Neel and early human population structure
• Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
• More ancient DNA evidence of Indo-European mass migrations
• C. S. Coon on the endocrine system and racial differences in temperament

Sewall Wright on Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship (1922)

JayMan continues to misunderstand basic population genetics, and continues to respond to people who point this out to him by sticking his fingers in his ears and reiterating his misunderstandings:

@johan stavers:

coefficient of relationship is flawed, if a man fathers a child with his sister his child is more than 50% related, this extends to niece/nephew mating and therefore logically also to mating within ethnicity or even nation

No, coefficient of relationship is perfectly fine.

I attempt yet again to get across to JayMan that the table of coefficients of relationship he looked up on wikipedia in no way proves that "unrelated" members of a given race share no kinship relative to members of other races (if JayMan were correct, of course, observable racial differences would not exist; JayMan inadvertently assesses his own level of knowledge in an unrelated twitter comment: "according to people who don't know science, there's no such thing as race."). Sewall Wright explicitly noted in the 1922 paper in which he defined coefficients of relationship that values like ".50 for brothers" hold "in a random stock" and that individuals belonging to an "inbred subline" will share relatedness relative to the general population.

JayMan, the fact that the table of "coefficients of relationship" on wikipedia is not valid for the purpose you're attempting to use it is not some subtle issue that's open to debate, but a point that follows directly from the definitions of the relevant terms.

Thus, if we can calculate the percentage of homozygosis which would follow on the average from a given system of mating, we can at once form the most. natural coefficient of inbreeding. The writer3 has recently pointed out a method of calculating this percentage of honmozygosis which is applicable to the irregular systems of mating found in actual pedigrees as well as to regular systems. This method, it may be said. gives results widely different from Pearl's coefficient, in many cases even as regards the relative degree of inbreeding of two animals.

Taking the typical case in which there are an equal number of dominant. and recessive genes (A and a) in the population, the random-bred stock will be composed of 25 per cent. AA, 50 per cent. Aa and 25 per cent. aa. Close inbreeding will tend to convert the proportions to 50 per cent. AA, 50 per cent. aa, a change from 50 per cent. homozygosis to 100 per cent. homozygosis. For a natural coefficient of inbreeding, we want a scale which runs from 0 to 1, while the percentage of homozygosis is running from, 50 per cent. to 100 per cent. The formula. 2h-1, where h is the proportion of complete homozygosis, gives the required value. This can also be written 1-2p where p is the proportion of heterozygosis. In the above-mentioned paper it was shown that the coefficient of correlation between uniting egg and sperm is expressed by this same formula, f 1-2p. We can thus obtain the coefficient of inbreeding fb for a given individual B, by the use of the methods there out- lined.

The symbol r_bc, for the coefficient of the correlation between B and C, may be used as a coefficient of relationship. It has the value 0 in the case of two random individuals, .50 for brothers in a random stock and approaches 1.00 for individuals belonging to a closely inbred subline of the general population. [. . .]

If an individual is inbred, his sire and dam are connected in the pedigree by lines of descent from a common ancestor or ancestors. The coefficient of inbreeding is obtained by a summation of coefficients for every line by which the parents are connected, each line tracing back from the sire to a common ancestor and thence forward to the dam, and passing through no individual more than once. The same ancestor may of course be involved in more than one line.

Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship
Sewall Wright
The American Naturalist
Vol. 56, No. 645 (Jul. - Aug., 1922), pp. 330-338
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2456273

Go ask Greg Cochran about this if comprehension continues to elude you.

From Wright's 1943 paper on "Isolation by distance" (pdf):

Study of statistical differences among local populations is an important line of attack on the evolutionary problem. While such differences can only rarely represent first steps toward speciation in the sense of the splitting of the species, they are important for the evolution of the species as a whole. They provide a possible basis for intergroup selection of genetic systems, a process that provides a more effective mechanism for adaptive advance of the species as a whole than does the mass selection which is all that can occur under panmixia. [. . .]

THE INBREEDING COEFFICIENT

Departures from panmixia may be expressed in terms of the average inbreeding coefficient of individuals, relative to the total population under consideration. This coefficient has been defined as the correlation between uniting gametes with respect to the gene complex as an additive system. It has been shown that its value can be found for any pedigree by finding all paths by which one may trace back from the egg to a common ancestor (A) and thence forward to the sperm along a wholly different path. [. . .]

The inbreeding, measured by F, may be of either of two extreme sorts: sporadic mating of close relatives with no tendency to break the population into subgroups, and division into partially isolated subgroups, within each of which there is random mating. The latter is the case in which we are primarily interested here.

Sewall Wright, incidentally, was of New England Puritan stock.

Reply to RCB on the evolution and adaptiveness of ethnocentric altruism

Continued from this discussion.

"you are unable to explain to a competent person why you believe what you believe."

I'm trying to be patient here, but I don't know how much better I can explain this. You either get it, or you don't. If you don't, you're not as competent as you believe; you either don't really understand the basic concepts we're talking about or have mental blocks when it comes to applying them to humans, and this is something you need to deal with yourself.

No matter how many times I explain this, you don't want to get it. Your starting point is that Salter can't be right; so when I explain to you how your reasoning is flawed, regardless of how many times we go through this or how many times I address a particular objection, your response is just to throw out additional confused reasoning, often forgetting things you previously agreed I was correct on and switching back to objections that have already been addressed.

The benefit of the ethnocentric altruism alleles comes from between-group selection, not within-group selection. Even in the first generation, an allele for ethnocentric altruism can potentially boost its odds of representation in future generations by, for example, reducing the chance of extinction of the group it's found in (whether by contributing to avoiding defeat and extermination by rival groups in an ancestral environment, or resisting replacement-level immigration in the modern world).

It makes no difference whether there is enough between-group relative to within-group competition at modern scales to maintain or grow this sort of variation in the long run (and certainly Hamilton speculated that self-sacrificing altruism would be found at higher levels in tribal people than in the long-civilized). In a particular instance of intergroup competition of the sort we're discussing, ethnocentric altruism alleles attuned to Hamilton's rule would by definition be adaptive.

This will always be true, regardless of scale, and regardless of how often the group is actually faced with the threat of intergroup competition. In the face of such a threat, the alleles (ones that enhance group competitiveness in a generalized fashion and are sensitive to cost, benefit, and relatedness) will be adaptive.

Your argument is somewhat analogous to claiming sickle-cell alleles can't be adaptive (or even exist in the first place!) in a malarial environment because their frequency would not increase in the long run in the absence of malaria. Even if malaria is nearly wiped out and the frequency of sickle-cell alleles begins to decline, this does not prove that if a mosquito with malaria does land on you you'd be better off not having a sickle-cell allele.

"Yes, the behaviors are polygenic. But all genes have to start at low frequency, and you have not explained how they get to high frequency"

Again: positive selection will come from intergroup competition. If your argument is that all relevant variants would be snuffed out immediately, leaving no variation on which group-level selection could act, this is of course absurd. Yet again: we're talking about very large numbers of weakly-selected variants, and a large surface on which new mutations can arise.

Crow and Aoki modeled group selection for polygenic behavioral traits. Again, it boils down to Hamilton's rule.

Group selection for a polygenic behavioral trait: a differential proliferation model [pdf]

Group selection for a polygenic behavioral trait: estimating the degree of population subdivision [pdf]

Our general approach is to use molecular markers, which are selected very weakly at most, as neutral indicators of population structure. G_ST gives us an appropriate description of the relevant aspect of the structure. By using Eq. 3 we can state the maximum value of cost/benefit of a quantitative trait if that trait is to increase in average value or frequency in the population. G_ST describes the present structure of the population; it does not tell us how it got that way. If this value has been roughly stable in the past, we could expect that traits with c/b up to this value would have increased in the population, assuming of course that such traits exist and have heritability greater than zero.

Empirically, ethnocentrism exists, and no doubt has since before we were humans. Empirically, ethnocentrism has heritability greater than zero.

• Nature, nurture, and ethnocentrism in the Minnesota Twin Study [pdf]

• Common Heritable Effects Underpin Concerns Over Norm Maintenance and In-Group Favoritism: Evidence From Genetic Analyses of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Traditionalism [pdf]

• Genetic evidence for multiple biological mechanisms underlying in-group favoritism [pdf]

Your issue is with reality, not with Salter or me.

"Of course, ethnic altruist genes could be maladaptive relics of the past, when groups were small. But Salter says they are adaptive now."

Again, see above.

And Salter never claims we are well-adapted to ethnic competition in the modern world. If he'd believed that to be the case, he would have had little reason to write the book. From the introduction:

On Genetic Interests is an attempt to answer the empirical question: How would an individual behave in order to be adaptive in the modern world? I adopt the neo-Darwinian meaning of adaptive, which is to maximize the survival chances of one’s genes. I begin by describing humans as an evolved species and thus as creatures for whom genetic continuity consists of personal reproduction or reproduction of kin. [. . .]

Humans can no longer rely on their instincts

There is nothing immutable or necessarily perfect about adaptations or the understanding, appetites and preferences they organize. Natural selection is constrained by evolutionary history and environment. It shapes bodies and behaviours in small increments by modifying existing species. Much in nature is badly designed, if one examines it from an engineer’s viewpoint. [. . .]

Like adaptations that advance them, proximate interests can be imperfect in promoting genetic interests. The main problem is the slowness of natural selection compared to the rapidity of technological and social change since the Neolithic. The inertia of adaptations can cause them to continue to promote proximate interests that no longer serve fitness. For most of humans’ evolutionary history, adaptations tracked slow-moving environmental change, including technological advances. In the species’ distant hominid and pre-hominid past, proximate interests that reduced an actor’s fitness were valued less and less as the genes that coded for such valuation failed to reproduce. For this reason, at most moments in time proximate interests have correlated with ultimate interests because the environment has changed so slowly that physiology and behaviour could keep track with it. Proximate and ultimate interests have been in equilibrium except where rapid changes in environment occurred. The equilibrium applying to humans has been upset in recent generations, so that we can no longer rely on subjectively designated proximate interests to serve our ultimate interest. We must rely more on science to perceive the causal links between the things we value and formulate synthetic goals based on that rational appraisal.

Proximate interests, often reflected in consciously held values, have become increasingly fallible guides to ultimate interests because modern humans live in a rapidly changing world. Humans evolved in small bands consisting of a few families, sometimes grouped into tribes numbering in the hundreds. For most of their evolutionary history humans made a living by hunting and gathering in largely natural environments. They lacked formal organization and hierarchy. Adults coordinated activities by negotiating simple demographic role specializations — by age and sex — on an egalitarian basis with familiar band members. Most information was common. Humans now live in societies numbering in the millions where the great majority of interactants are strangers or acquaintances. They make their living through a great diversity of occupations resulting in radical asymmetries in information. They live and work in largely man-made urban environments. They are formally organized into states administered by extended hierarchies of rank and resources actuated by authoritative commands, impersonal contracts enforced by the state authority, and powerful forms of indoctrination performed by universal education, centralized media and entertainment.

However, to the extent we are able to correctly reason about what would be adaptive in the context of intergroup competition, and act in accordance with this, we have the equivalent of our generalized ethnocentric altruism alleles.

Related:

• JayMan continues to talk about things he doesn't understand
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans
• On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, And Humanity In An Age Of Mass Migration (pdf) by Frank Salter

David Agus: inbred retard?

Discussing a recent study (Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations) that found an effect for runs of homozygosity on height and IQ within populations, Greg Cochran notes:

Some retards (British papers) have been spinning this as saying that there are big benefits to mixed-race marriage. Untrue: to avoid lots of ROH (runs of homozygosity), just marry someone who isn’t from the same isolated population as you. We’re talking outside the valley or across the river : intercontinental travel is not necessary. Now there might be a degree of hybrid vigor in some distant crosses (currently unclear) – but likely not enough to compensate for someone coming from a group that has low trait values. Marry a Pygmy and your kids are going to be short. Marry someone from a population whose average IQ is below 90 (much of the world) and your kids will on average be less smart.

CBS medical contributor David Agus (who, wikipedia informs us, "graduated cum laude in molecular biology from Princeton University and received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1991") promotes this misinterpretation of the study in a segment on CBS This Morning:

Do kids from mixed genetic backgrounds have an advantage?

Additionally, although one would hope someone who majored in molecular biology at Princeton and co-founded a personal genomics company would know that any benefits from outcrossing will fully accrue in the first generation, Agus gleefully urges the viewer to imagine how much "taller and smarter" children will be if "people of different backgrounds" continue interbreeding generation after generation.

It's a pretty interesting study that tells us a lot because this is really the first couple generations where people of different backgrounds are having children and if this happens in one, one generation children are 1.2 cm shorter, think of if this continues to happen, so, taller and smarter.

Curiously, Agus, the grandson of a rabbi, married a pre-Connie Chung daughter of Maury Povich. That is, Agus chose to mate with a member of the same rather inbred narrow ethnic group as himself. But I'm sure now that he's aware of this study (confused though he may be about it) and excited about the eugenic prospects of racial mixing, he's urged his own children to marry Africans, with that same gleeful look in his eyes.

It’s Sunday night, and Agus is at Jerusalem’s Mamilla Hotel. He just arrived for the Global Forum, a gathering of 70 of the world’s thinkers hosted by Israel’s National Library, to discuss how the People of the Book can use their ancient lore for contemporary needs.

It was Shimon Peres, the honorary chairman of the event, who convinced Agus to attend. Agus and Peres are friends – though he’s not the nonagenarian’s doctor – and the two meet every six months or so. This time, Agus will be discussing Maimonides at the National Library, from the perspective of what he, Agus, believes.

But first he had to go back and read some of the good doctor’s words. It’s been a long time since Agus studied Maimonides at Philadelphia’s Akiba Hebrew Academy. What he found resonated. [. . .]

Now Agus combines teaching, research and patient work, along with spending a lot of time at places like the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival and TEDMED – TED for the health field. He’s also at the CBS studio at 4 a.m., several mornings per week.

“You get a passion to change things, and I decided I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable on camera,” said Agus, who calls himself an introvert by nature. “I need to be a role model and it’s awkward, but you have to do it, over and over again. I get to talk to four million people every morning on CBS. I can just talk, I can call a spade a spade. I look at my patients losing their lives on a daily basis, so I’ve got nothing to lose.”

[Steve Jobs’ ex-doctor is in, and he’s quoting Maimonides. http://www.timesofisrael.com/steve-jobs-ex-doctor-is-in-and-hes-quoting-maimonides/]

Self-reported vs. genetic ancestry in a large US cohort

Characterizing Race/Ethnicity and Genetic Ancestry for 100,000 Subjects in the Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) Cohort (free full text; supplementary material)

Using genome-wide genotypes, we characterized the genetic structure of 103,006 participants in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California multi-ethnic Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) Cohort and analyzed the relationship to self-reported race/ethnicity. Participants endorsed any of 23 race/ethnicity/nationality categories, which were collapsed into 7 major race/ethnicity groups. By self-report the cohort is 80.8% white and 19.2% minority; 93.8% endorsed a single race/ethnicity group, while 6.2% endorsed two or more. PC and admixture analyses were generally consistent with prior studies. Approximately 17% of subjects had genetic ancestry from more than one continent, and 12% were genetically admixed considering only non-adjacent geographical origins. Self-reported whites were spread on a continuum along the first two PCs, indicating extensive mixing among European nationalities. Self-identified East Asian nationalities correlated with genetic clustering, consistent with extensive endogamy. Individuals of mixed East Asian-European genetic ancestry were easily identified; we also observed a modest amount of European genetic ancestry in individuals self-identified as Filipinos. Self-reported African Americans and Latinos showed extensive European and African genetic ancestry, and Native American genetic ancestry for the latter. Among 3,741 genetically-identified parent-child pairs, 93% were concordant for self-reported race/ethnicity; among 2,018 genetically-identified full-sib pairs, 96% were concordant; the lower rate for parent-child pairs was largely due to inter-marriage. The parent-child pairs revealed a trend towards increasing exogamy over time; the presence in the cohort of individuals endorsing multiple race/ethnicity categories, creates interesting challenges and future opportunities for genetic epidemiologic studies. [. . .]

The initial analysis showed, as expected, a clear Ashkenazi cluster and a larger cluster depicting the northwest-southeast European cline (Price et al. 2008; Tian et al. 2008c).

In this Northern California sample, less than 1% of the self-identified "European/West Asian" group showed evidence of Amerindian ancestry, and less than half a percent showed evidence of black admixture.

As expected, all individuals who self-identified as European/West Asian had evidence of European/West Asian genetic ancestry. The next largest genetic ancestry component in this group was South Asian (4.3%), primarily attributable to individuals of West Asian ethnicity. Because there is a continuum of genetic ancestry from Europe to West Asia, Central/ South Asia to East Asia, genetic overlap exists for individuals whose national origins are geographically between these divisions (Li et al. 2008). Nearly 1% of this group also had evidence of Native American genetic ancestry, while a smaller fraction had evidence of African or East Asian genetic ancestry (0.3% and 0.4%, respectively). Nearly all individuals (99.7%) self-reporting African/African American race/ethnicity had evidence of African genetic ancestry; 91% also had evidence of European genetic ancestry, consistent with broad European admixture among African Americans. Native American and East Asian genetic ancestry occurred in this group at a similar low level as observed in the Europeans/West Asians (1.3% and 0.5%, respectively). Among self-reported East Asians, all had evidence of East Asian genetic ancestry; a sizeable proportion (21.7%) also had evidence of Pacific Islander genetic ancestry, but this likely represents difficulty in differentiating East Asian and Pacific Islander genetic ancestry. A modest subgroup (3.4%) had evidence of European/West Asian genetic ancestry (majority are self-reported Filipinos), while small proportions had evidence of African or Native American genetic ancestry (0.1% and 0.5%, respectively). Among the Latinos, nearly all had evidence of European/West Asian genetic ancestry; a similar high proportion (94.2%) had evidence of Native American genetic ancestry, and an additional 27.7% had evidence of African ancestry. A substantial number of self-reported Pacific Islanders had evidence of East Asian genetic ancestry (91.3%) in addition to Pacific Islander genetic ancestry (66.3%); these results are again likely due to close genetic similarity between East Asians and Pacific Islanders. There is also evidence of substantial European/West Asian and South Asian genetic ancestry in this group (57.6% and 26.1%, respectively). The former reflects a high rate of European admixture among some self-reported Pacific Islander groups, while the latter likely reflects Fijians of Indian origin.

Variation and signatures of selection on the human face

Variation and signatures of selection on the human face. [Open access]

J Hum Evol. 2014 Oct;75:143-52

Authors: Guo J, Tan J, Yang Y, Zhou H, Hu S, Hashan A, Bahaxar N, Xu S, Weaver TD, Jin L, Stoneking M, Tang K

Abstract

There has been much debate about why humans throughout the world differ in facial form. Previous studies of human skull morphology found levels of among-population differentiation that were comparable to those of neutral genetic markers, suggesting that genetic drift (neutral processes) played an important role in influencing facial differentiation. However, variation in soft-tissue morphology has not been studied in detail. In this study, we analyzed high-resolution 3D images of soft-tissue facial form in four Eurasian populations: Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uyghur and Europeans. A novel method was used to establish a high-density alignment across all of the faces, allowing facial diversity to be examined at an unprecedented resolution. These data exhibit signatures of population structure and history. However, among-population differentiation was higher for soft-tissue facial form than for genome-wide genetic loci, and high-resolution analyses reveal that the nose, brow area and cheekbones exhibit particularly strong signals of differentiation (Qst estimates: 0.3-0.8) between Europeans and Han Chinese. Our results suggest that local adaptation and/or sexual selection have been important in shaping human soft-tissue facial morphology. [. . .]

The Qpc values found in the nose and brow area between Europeans and Han Chinese approach the high differentiation reported for skin pigmentation (Relethford, 2004b). This suggests that strong local adaptation may have shaped these facial features (Myles et al., 2007). For the nose, strong correlations have been found between the nasal index and temperature/humidity, supporting climate adaptation as the major selective force (Thomson and Buxton, 1923, Davies, 1932, Weiner, 1954, Wolpoff, 1968, Hiernaux and Froment, 1976, Crognier, 1981 and Franciscus and Long, 1991). Models simulating airflow dynamics demonstrated that bigger nasal volumes, narrower shapes and downwardly pointing nares might enhance the airflow exposure of the mucosa and thereby facilitate the heating and humidification of the air (Churchill et al., 2004). The European nose shape thus may have resulted from adaptation to a colder climate. The relatively enlarged brow area in Europeans has also been noted previously (Russell et al., 1985). It has been argued that brow area size is positively correlated with the magnitude of the mechanical stresses resulting from mastication, so brow area shape differentiation (SOM, Fig. S11) could be the result of dietary differences (Russell et al., 1985). Adaptation to specific diets (Hubbe et al., 2009) and climate adaptation (Coon et al., 1950) have been hypothesized to explain the expanded zygomatics in Asians.

In addition to natural selection, sexual selection may also have played a major role in shaping interpopulation variation in the human face. Selective mate choice based on facial appearance in humans is well documented as a universal condition in global populations (Wells et al., 2009). However, whether and to what extent sexual selection shaped human facial morphology has rarely been investigated. Fisher's runaway sexual selection model suggests that a positive feedback loop composed of an arbitrary trait involving appearance, and the accidental preference of this trait in the opposite sex, could initiate a powerful sexual selection process (Fisher, 1958). It is therefore possible that some of the strong differentiation signals involving the soft-tissue facial form may have resulted from sexual selection. Further studies that combine high-resolution 3D face analysis, studies of human behavior, and genetic analyses are necessary to delineate the possible roles of local adaptation versus sexual selection in explaining the relatively large between-population differentiation that we find for soft-tissues of the human face.

Racial and ethnic variation in penis size, pt. 2: the actual data

Here is most of the relevant published data I know of (but keep in mind the issues touched on in the previous post):

My impression:

• While there are probably some real differences between populations, differences among different Caucasoid and Negroid populations, at least, appear to be greater than any overall differences between macroraces. I don't find this surprising, since if we looked at, say, height, the same would probably be true.
• I'm not convinced the data support any difference between Northern Europeans and West Africans, and if differences exist, they are relatively minor.
• To the extent we can say anything about intra-Caucasoid differences, there appears to be a trend of declining penis size from Northern/western Europe towards SE Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia.
• Reported values for East Asia do appear to tend toward the low end among worldwide populations.

Related posts:

• Racial and ethnic variation in penis size, pt. 1: some background
• "Oversized" Penile Length In The Black People; Myth Or Reality
• Rushton and genital size: one more time
• Can racial differences in circulating testosterone explain racial differences in crime?

Racial and ethnic variation in penis size, pt. 1: some background

A few years ago, a "World Penis Size Map" [1] citing a website containing largely made-up numbers [2] entered widespread circulation. Despite being an obvious and inept hoax, it has continued to take in various people, including the press, some economist [3], and Richard Lynn [4]. I started writing up a post at the time, but never bothered to finish it.

Most recently, a presenter at the 2015 London Conference on Intelligence has attempted to defend this hoax data, claiming:

• Lynn (2013) attempted to resolve the controversy by obtaining data from the World Penis Website, which listed average national penis lengths based on various sources. Using this, Lynn extended Rushton?s model, based on this, to other races, and found that their average penis sizes differed as Differential K would predict.
• This paper was ridiculed, most notably by a psychologist blogger called Scott McGreal, who pointed out various minor mistakes on the World Penis Website, insisting all its contents was suspect and not properly reviewed
• As I am researching a book that extends Rushton?s theory to 12 races, I was very interested in Lynn?s penis data. It occurred to me that we can test the validity of Lynn?s national penis lengths by seeing if they correlated with other national measures androgen in the expected direction.

But the website does not just feature a few "minor mistakes". Most of the data is simply made up. One can't "validate" made-up numbers by attempting to correlate them with other putative markers of androgen exposure.

R. A. Fisher on group selection in humans

Fisher, who's been called "the most important geneticist of the 20th century", like Hamilton saw a significant role for group selection in human evolution.

A.W.F. Edwards once confusedly mentioned "a passage new to the 1958 edition, where Fisher stresses the theme of the book, that it is individual, not group, selection that drives evolution", but the passage in question says nothing of the kind. The short section added to the 1958 edition of The genetical theory of natural selection is headed "'The benefit of the species'". In it, Fisher clearly acknowledges multiple levels of selection, and explicitly includes "co-operative communities" along with individuals as units of selection. Fisher is plainly responding to "good of the species" arguments, and merely points out that selection at the level of species or higher must, for empirical reasons, be relatively unimportant compared to selection on individuals:

There would, however, be some warrant on historical grounds for saying that the term Natural Selection should include not only the selective survival of individuals of the same species, but of mutually competing species of the same genus or family. The relative unimportance of this as an evolutionary factor would seem to follow decisively from the small number of closely related species which in fact do come into competition, as compared to the number of individuals in the same species; and from the vastly greater duration of the species compared to the individual. Any characters ascribed to interspecific selection should of course characterize, not species, but whole genera or families, and it may be doubted if it would be possible to point to any such character, with the possible exception, as suggested in Chapter VI, of sexuality itself, which could be interpreted as evolved for the specific rather than for the individual advantage. [p. 50]

Fisher obviously includes humans among those capable of forming "co-operative communities", as is clear from discussion elsewhere in the book:

The only animal societies in which co-operation is sufficiently highly developed to justify comparison with civilized men are those of the social insects.

Fisher has an entire chapter on social selection in humans, unaltered in the 1958 edition, in which he speculates about selection for traits like heroism in a landscape of intertribal competition, Fisher's conception of early human society being not unlike those of W. D. Hamilton and James Neel.

Note that while in this chapter Fisher emphasizes intratribal social selection favoring the kindreds of heroes, this sort of selection only makes sense in the context of intergroup competition; and in contrasting "selection on whole groups" -- which Fisher does not dismiss but which he notes will tend to be slow -- and selection on kindreds, Fisher is not at odds with people like Hamilton or Neel, who envision tribes expanding, fissioning along lines of kinship, absorbing other tribes, etc. The latter situation -- as opposed to one in which only unmixing platonic groups compete -- is exactly the one we would most expect to favor generalized adaptations for kin recognition and ethnocentrism, which in the modern world might quite adaptively be deployed in the context of interracial conflict (regardless of how difficult Cochran finds it to think generally about the issue).

It is necessary to emphasize this unity of culture because, unlike civilized societies having comparable unity, barbarian peoples recognize private, or more properly tribal war as a normal means for avenging and checking crime. The obligation to avenge a kinsman was felt extremely keenly as a moral duty, to shirk which would be incompatible with self-respect or an easy conscience, or, in Wilfred Blunt 's forcible phrase as 'almost a physical necessity'. The existence of this obligation requires that the tribes of kinsmen to which it applies shall be somewhat sharply defined, and with this obligation follows, of course, the obligation to pay, and the right to share, blood money, or to share in booty. A certain degree of economic communism thus characterizes these kindred groups, so that there is little exaggeration in saying that the economic and the military units in such societies are made to coincide. This is at least a convenient form in which to express the contrast with all civilized societies, in which the interests of the economic unit, consisting of a single individual and his dependents, may differ widely from those of the military unit, consisting of the entire nation to which he belongs. The interests of the kindred group as a whole, whose rights to life and property can only be safeguarded by military preparedness, are of course, in the first degree, founded upon military strength, and consequently, among other qualities, upon the fertility of its members.

More from Hamilton on kin recognition and intergroup hostility

Hamilton, who's been called "the greatest mathematical biologist of the last half of the 20th century", believed group selection "may be a really appropriate term for many human situations". See also Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans and Robert Axelrod on the evolution of ethnocentrism.

Some excerpts from "Selection of selfish and altruistic behavior in some extreme models":

RECOGNITION OF RELATIVES

Galton 36 stated that cows that have dropped out of a moving herd in order to calve will attempt to fight off predators, although a solitary condition is one which usually causes great terror. This phenomenon, of course, is well known with many normally timid species and as an aspect of parental care it is easily understood even in the classical models of natural selection. But the case can also be viewed as conditional altruism encouraged by a particular kind of assortation of like genotype s; the mother and offspring have half their genes in common by direct replication.

Other cases of relationship may be viewed in the same way. The relatives of an individual can be considered to carry his genes in a statistically diluted state with the dilution depending in a definite way on the structure of the relationship (see Part I of the paper in Chapter 2). Distant relationships are obviously more dilute. Indeed, the required precise measure of relationship corresponds more or less to the vague popular notion of 'blood' similarity.

Robert Axelrod on the evolution of ethnocentrism

The evolution of ethnocentrism (pdf):

Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of attitudes and behaviors, typically including in-group favoritism. Empirical evidence suggests that a predisposition to favor in-groups can be easily triggered by even arbitrary group distinctions and that preferential cooperation within groups occurs even when it is individually costly. The authors study the emergence and robustness of ethnocentric behaviors of in-group favoritism, using an agent-based evolutionary model. They show that such behaviors can become wide spread under a broad range of conditions and can support very high levels of cooperation, even in one move prisoner's dilemma games. When cooperation is especially costly to individuals, the authors show how ethnocentrism itself can be necessary to sustain cooperation.

Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of discriminatory attitudes and behaviors (Sumner 1906; Le Vine and Campbell 1972). The attitudes include seeing one's own group (the in-group) as virtuous and superior, one's own standards of value as uni versal, and out-groups as contemptible and inferior. Behaviors associated with ethno centrism include cooperative relations within the group and the absence of cooperative relations with out-groups (LeVine and Campbell 1972). Ethnocentric behaviors are based on group boundaries that are typically defined by one or more observable characteristics (such as language, accent, physical features, or religion) regarded as indicating common descent (Sumner 1906; Hirschfeld 1996; Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides 2001). Such behaviors often also have a strong territorial component (Sumner 1906). Ethnocentrism has been implicated not only in ethnic conflict (Brewer 1979; Chirot and Seligman 2001), instability of democratic institutions (Rabushka and Shepsle 1972), and war (van der Dennen 1995) but also in consumer choice (Klein and Ettenson 1999) and voting (Kinder 1998). Although ethnocentrism is sometimes used to refer to a wide range of discriminatory behaviors, we will focus on ethnocentric behavior defined as in-group favoritism.

Ethnocentrism is generally thought to involve substantial cognitive ability in indi viduals (Sumner 1906; Simmel 1955; Sherif and Sherif 1956; Sherif 1966; LeVine and Campbell 1972; Hewstone, Rubin, and Willis 2002) and to be based on complex social and cultural inputs. While such factors certainly play a role in much ethnocentric behavior, extensive empirical evidence from psychology suggests the prevalence of a strong individual predisposition toward bias in favor of in-groups, which can be observed even when cognition is minimal and social input very abstract. [. . .]

The main result of the simulation is that the ethnocentric strategy becomes common even though, unlike previous models,3 favoritism toward similar others is not built into the model. In the final 100 periods of ten 2,000-period runs, 76 percent of the agents have the ethnocentric strategy, compared to 25 percent if selection had been neutral (Table 1, row a). This result shows that in-group favoritism based on simple tags and local interactions can overcome egoism and dominate a population even in the absence of reciprocity and reputation and even when "cheaters" need to be suppressed. Not only is ethnocentrism the dominant strategy, but cooperation (donation) is also the dominant behavioral choice: fully 74 percent of interactions are cooperative (Table 1, row a). Cooperation is common because the dominance of ethnocentric strategies is combined with a tendency for neighbors to have the same tag.

The emergence and dominance of the ethnocentric strategy is not a "knife-edge" phenomenon. In fact, its dominance is robust under a wide range of parameters and variations in the model. When any of the following parameters are either halved or doubled, at least two-thirds of strategies are ethnocentric: cost of helping, lattice width, number of groups, immigration rate, mutation rate, and duration of the run (see the sensitivity analysis in Table 1). The ethnocentric strategy becomes just as dominant even when the simulation starts with a full lattice consisting only of egoists, and no immigration is allowed. Another check for robustness is a variant of the model in which an agent can distinguish all four colors, rather than just distinguish ing between its own color and all other colors. Again, the results are very similar, with 80 percent ethnocentric strategies. Surprisingly, the results are also not very sensitive to the possibility that an agent will occasionally misperceive whether the ther agent in the interaction has the same color. Even when agents make this mis take 10 percent of the time, the population evolves to be more than two-thirds ethnocentric. This resistance of in-group favoritism to noise is quite a contrast to studies of reciprocity in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. The tit-for-tat strategy, for example, requires the addition of generosity or contrition to be effective in the face of even rare misperceptions (Molander 1985; Wu and Axelrod 1995).

Examining the dynamics of the model reveals how the ethnocentric strategy becomes so common and how "cheaters" are suppressed by ethnocentrics of a dif ferent color. In the early periods of a run, the scattered immigrants create regions of similar agents (Figure la). Colonies of those willing to cooperate with their own color will tend to grow faster, but over time, they face free riding by egoists who arise by mutation. Egoists who free ride cannot be suppressed by ethnocentrics of the same color and therefore tend to erode cooperative regions. Once the space is nearly full, another dynamic is added as regions with different attributes expand until they are adjacent to each other. These dynamics can be analyzed in terms of regions of contiguous agents having the same color and strategy (Figure lb). The most important aspect of regional dynamics is that an ethnocentric region will tend to expand at the expense of a region of a different color using any one of the other three strategies (Figure 2). In this way, free riding is controlled?egoists of any one color are suppressed by ethnocentric agents of different colors.

A remarkable result is that the ability to discriminate between the in-group and the out-groups can actually promote cooperation. As long as agents can distinguish their own color from other colors, even doubling the cost of cooperation sustains a cooperation level of 56 percent. However, when agents are unable to distinguish their own color from others, cooperation in the doubled-cost case falls to 14 percent. Therefore, as the cost of giving help increases, the ability to distinguish between in group and out-group members can be essential for the maintenance of cooperation in "austere" environments. In fact, the ability to distinguish between groups can be regarded as a basis for social capital within a group (Coleman 1990; Putnam 2000).

[RA Hammond, R Axelrod. The evolution of ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006.]

Altruism via kin-selection strategies that rely on arbitrary tags with which they coevolve (pdf):

We show with an evolutionary model how contingent altruism can be sustained even when arbitrary heritable indicators of relatedness, called ‘‘tags’’, coevolve with the strategies gov- erning behavior. Discrimination based on tags is not assumed, but rather evolves endogenously in a viscous population (i.e., local reproduction and local interaction) and is selected for even when phenotypic matching is very coarse-grained. We also show how to extend Hamilton’s rule to establish the conditions under which kin recognition can support discrim- inating altruism even when coevolution causes the reliability of indicators of relatedness to vary with each individual’s evolving social environment. [. . .]

The resulting agent-based model is based on a model previously developed to study ethnocentrism in humans (Ax- elrod and Hammond 2003). The present model is not meant to be a literal representation of biological processes. Instead, our model is designed to illuminate the consequences of the fact that kin discrimination typically entails coevolution of three things: the strategies governing behavior, the reliability of the tags on which the behavior may be conditioned, and the population structure that determines who interacts with whom. [. . .]

The algebraic method above is the first published analysis of selection for kin recognition with simultaneous variation at the indicator and altruistic loci. This method helps us un- derstand the conditions under which kin recognition can sup- port discriminating altruism even when the reliability of in- dicators of kinship depends on the individual’s social envi- ronment.

The value of being able to distinguish tags can be under- stood in terms of inclusive fitness theory that takes into ac- count the degree of relatedness between two agents (Hamilton 1964; Lacy and Sherman 1983; Riolo et al. 2001). While proximity alone can be an indication of relatedness, being able to distinguish among heritable tags, as in the armpit effect (Dawkins 1982; Hauber and Sherman 2000; Hauber et al. 2000; Mateo and Johnson 2000; Isles et al. 2001), allows a still better indication of relatedness, for example among sessile cnidarians (Grosberg and Quinn 1989; Grafen 1990). The discriminatory abilities required for the armpit effect are likely to be widespread. The self-recognition required for multicellularity provides them from intimate contact, and the need to distinguish conspecifics for mating provides them more generally for animals. In both cases, a hardwired com- parison known as the green beard effect (Hamilton 1964; Dawkins 1976; Haig 1996; Grafen 1998; Keller and Ross 1998) would seriously slow evolution and make speciation almost impossible.

Viscosity is ubiquitous because few populations complete- ly mix from one generation to the next. Hamilton (1964) believed that simple viscosity was a widespread sufficient cause of fairly weak altruism, and various models have found that viscosity can indeed foster cooperation (Getty 1987; Pol- lock 1989; Nowak and May 1992; Nakamaru et al. 1997). However, this general claim is now considered doubtful. The balance between increased relatedness and increased com- petition between neighbors may tilt toward or away from cooperation (Taylor 1992; Wilson et al. 1992; West et al. 2002). Taylor and Irwin (2000) have suggested that with overlapping generations, and with altruism dispensed as ben- efits to fecundity, there is a tendency for population viscosity to support altruism. The 15.6% cooperation found in our model with one tag is on the one hand more than zero, sup- porting Taylor and Irwin, but on the other hand is rather limited. Adding observable tags shows that proximity can sustain cooperation based on contingent altruism, even if the very correlation of tags and relatedness evolves. By putting both the matching and the altruism under explicit genetic control, the model shows how altruism conditional on heritable tags can evolve despite substantial costs of cooperation. Thus, the present model, which combines viscosity, the armpit effect, and endogenous use of discrimination in a genetically explicit way, creates a very general expectation of widespread, and not necessarily weak, conditional altruism in nature.

[R Axelrod, RA Hammond, A Grafen. Altruism via kin-selection strategies that rely on arbitrary tags with which they coevolve.]

And some related work:

Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies.

[Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz. The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7]

Related: Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans

Remedial population genetics for Greg Cochran

From Graham Coop's population genetics notes:

1.4 Inbreeding

We can define an inbred individual as an individual whose parents are more closely related to each other than two random individuals drawn from some reference population. [. . .]

1.6 Summarizing population structure

We defined inbreeding as having parents that are more closely related to each other than two individuals drawn at random from some reference population. The question that natu- rally arises is: Which reference population should we use? While I might not look inbred in comparison to allele frequencies in the United Kingdom (UK), where I am from, my parents certainly are not two individuals drawn at random from the world-wide population. If we estimated my inbreeding coefficient F using allele frequencies within the UK, it would be close to zero, but would likely be larger if we used world-wide frequencies. This is because there is a somewhat lower level of expected heterozygosity within the UK than in the human population across the world as a whole.

Wright (1943, 1951) developed a set of ‘F-statistics’ (also called ‘fixation indices’) that formalize the idea of inbreeding with respect to different levels of population structure. He defined F XY as the correlation between random gametes, drawn from the same level X, relative to level Y.

[. . .] the reduction in heterozygosity within individuals compared to that expected in the total population can be decomposed to the reduction in heterozygosity of individuals com- pared to the subpopulation, and the reduction in heterozygosity from the total population to that in the subpopulation.

Kinship coefficients and Ethnic Genetic Interests (JayMan embarrassing himself again)

Contra the White Nationalists, there’s no such thing as “ethnic genetic interests.”

JayMan supports the above JayMan assertion by linking to another JayMan comment, which sees JayMan copy-and-pasting from Wikipedia a table of inbreeding coefficients by degree of relationship, and asserting the table:

…demonstrates why “ethnic genetic interests” do not exist.

Let that sink in. "HBD" hobbyist JayMan sees coefficients of relationship near zero, and asserts (without being fully aware of what he's asserting) that this means I don't share any particular genetic relatedness with my third cousin relative to a tribesman from New Guinea or a triracial from Jamaica.

This is of course not what an inbreeding coefficient near zero indicates:

The solution to the problem posed in Figure 5.1 will be easy if we can calculate the inbreeding coefficient f H of individual H. The inbreeding coefficient of an individual is the probability that the two gene copies present at a locus in that individual are identical by descent, relative to an appropriate base population. Two genes are identical by descent if, and only if, they are descended from the same individual gene copy. Now of course we must stop somewhere as we trace back the ancestry of the two genes. Otherwise any two gene copies would be certain of being identical by descent, provided that life has a monophyletic origin. The function of the base population is to set the context of the problem. In the base population, all gene copies are assumed not to be identical by descent. [Joe Felsenstein. Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics.]

I'm not much more closely related to my third cousin than to a random member of the approximately-random-breeding population from which we both spring. I am genetically markedly more similar to my third cousin (and any other Northwestern European) than I am to someone like JayMan. This is the essence of "ethnic genetic interests".

From Henry Harpending's appendix to Frank Salter's book:

The coefficient of kinship between two diploid organisms describes their overall genetic similarity to each other relative to some base population. For example, kinship between parent and offspring of 1/4 describes gene sharing in excess of random sharing in a random mating population. In a subdivided population the statistic Fst describes gene sharing within subdivisions in the same way. Since Fst among human populations on a world scale is reliably 10 to 15%, kinship between two individuals of the same human population is equivalent to kinship between grandparent and grandchild or between half siblings. The widespread assertion that this is small and insignificant should be reexamined.

Note also that debates about group selection ultimately have no bearing on the reality of ethnic genetic interests, the existence of which is inarguable. When people from the population I belong to are replaced with members of genetically distant populations, this represents a loss of inclusive fitness for me, and one I see no reason to tolerate, irrespective of how strongly selection has operated at the level of groups in the past.

EthnicMuse's race and testosterone "meta-analysis"

A commenter asks:

What do you think of this website and his analysis of testosterone levels in different racial groups?

https://ethnicmuse.wordpress.com/tag/testosterone/

"EthnicMuse" is attempting to aggregate numbers that can't be aggregated, and the results lack face validity. T levels as measured by different techniques and/or at different laboratories are not in general directly intercomparable.

Clinicians are being presented with normal male reference ranges for serum T from these automated platforms that have low end clinical limits down to 170–200 ng/dl (5.9–6.9 nmol/liter) and upper range limits of 700–800 ng/dl (24.3– 27.7 nmol/liter). These stated reference ranges provided by the manufacturer are significantly lower than the 300-1000 ng/dl (10.4–34.7 nmol/liter) reference range referred to in numerous publications over the past 30 yr based on tradi- tional RIA methods with or without the chromatography step as well as some research techniques employed by in- ternal recovery standards to correct for procedural losses (5).

External quality control programs such as that provided by the College of American Pathologists allow laboratories to compare results with other laboratories using the same method or kit reagents. As shown in Table 1, the median value of a quality control sample (Y-04,2002) varied between 215 and 348 ng/dl (7.5 and 12.0 nmol/liter) among methods with coefficients of variation among laboratories using the same method or instrument ranging between 5.1% and 22.7%. The median average for this sample from all methods was 297 ng/dl (10.3 nmol/liter) and results were as low as 160 or as high as 508 ng/dl (5.5 to 17.6 nmol/liter). These results span the hypogonadal to eugonadal range.

[Measurement of Total Serum Testosterone in Adult Men: Comparison of Current Laboratory Methods Versus Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry]

Differences that are to be expected between different assays and different laboratories, apart from any other factors, would likely swamp any anticipated racial differences in circulating testosterone levels. Between-study differences in collection times, sample handling, age and health condition of subjects, and so on, add further noise.

I see that EM is at least vaguely aware of these issues, but he rationalizes publishing his "meta-analysis" as follows:

One cannot and should not compare different testosterone studies with different measurement methods. However, for the race-realist purpose of aggregating data, there is nothing inherently wrong with what the PDF file lists. If JP Rushton can use a few studies and make wild claims which are then used by the Internet-o-sphere, using 150 independent peer-reviewed sources with large samples is much more scientific than anything similar from the race realist community. [. . .]

Age differences will affect the results but healthy males should have negligible decreases. Assuming a 0.4% annual decline from 5000 pg/ml after age 40, a man at 80 should have 4275 pg/mL, less than a 15% difference if my spreadsheet math is correct. It would have been better to normalize for age. So while the tabled rankings is flawed, the point is that the entire issue is flawed as there is no standard measuring method in the first place. That race realists routinely use flawed data should be the issue but …

That blindly aggregating data from disparate studies (which in this realm I've never seen anyone other than EM attempt) is nonsensical does not mean all attempts at comparing circulating testosterone levels between races are "flawed". It means that if one wants to attempt such comparisons, one should focus on studies in which a single set of researchers, using standardized methods, publish results for multiple ethnic groups.

EM is aware, for example, of a study (pdf) in which blood samples from Swedes and Koreans "were analyzed in the same laboratory using the same assay". The result (in EM's words): "the Swedes had 25% more T than the Koreans in this study". I've seen other studies showing lower or similar levels of testosterone in East Asians compared to whites (and none showing anything like the 10% higher testosterone in East Asians asserted by EM). But EM apparently did not like where the data pointed (thus his version of "meta-analysis", in which valid data is swamped with garbage).

Self-resemblance and attractiveness

Is Beauty in the Face of the Beholder?

Opposing forces influence assortative mating so that one seeks a similar mate while at the same time avoiding inbreeding with close relatives. Thus, mate choice may be a balancing of phenotypic similarity and dissimilarity between partners. In the present study, we assessed the role of resemblance to Self’s facial traits in judgments of physical attractiveness. Participants chose the most attractive face image of their romantic partner among several variants, where the faces were morphed so as to include only 22% of another face. Participants distinctly preferred a “Self-based morph” (i.e., their partner’s face with a small amount of Self’s face blended into it) to other morphed images. The Self-based morph was also preferred to the morph of their partner’s face blended with the partner’s same-sex “prototype”, although the latter face was (“objectively”) judged more attractive by other individuals. When ranking morphs differing in level of amalgamation (i.e., 11% vs. 22% vs. 33%) of another face, the 22% was chosen consistently as the preferred morph and, in particular, when Self was blended in the partner’s face. A forced-choice signal-detection paradigm showed that the effect of self-resemblance operated at an unconscious level, since the same participants were unable to detect the presence of their own faces in the above morphs. We concluded that individuals, if given the opportunity, seek to promote “positive assortment” for Self’s phenotype, especially when the level of similarity approaches an optimal point that is similar to Self without causing a conscious acknowledgment of the similarity. [. . .]

Current psychological research on human attractiveness has replaced the relativistic belief that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” with a universalistic one. [. . .]

However, the opposition between the relativistic and the universalistic perspectives may only be apparent, since one can posit the coexistence of an early, developmental, “imprinting” for physical traits of close con-specifics (typically, family members but also Self) as another universal mechanism that accounts for kin recognition as well as having an impact on mating preferences [5]. Indeed, face recognition mechanisms are heritable [6] and humans may be born with a schematic knowledge of the human face, which is then modified or filled out through exposure to human faces early in life. Thus, on one hand, a facial attribute like averageness would be based on a lifetime exposure to a large number of other con-specifics [7], so that one would expect that individuals within the same social group would tend to share a very similar (or seemingly “universal”) sense of what is the human average appearance. On the other hand, an imprinting mechanism, based on early experience, would lead to the opposite effect of establishing idiosyncratic “ideals” of beauty that may differ considerably between individuals. Thus, the coexistence of general learning mechanisms and mechanisms of kin recognition should shape ideals of facial (or bodily) aesthetics that are to a great deal consistent across many individuals but contain some elements that are unique to each individual.

Alison Gopnik: Natural ingroup biases are "evil"

In Children, Bias Blooms Chillingly Early (How Early Do We Learn Racial 'Us and Them'?)

Are human beings born good and corrupted by society or born bad and redeemed by civilization? Lately, goodness has been on a roll, scientifically speaking. It turns out that even 1-year-olds already sympathize with the distress of others and go out of their way to help them.

But the most recent work suggests that the origins of evil may be only a little later than the origins of good.

Our impulse to love and help the members of our own group is matched by an impulse to hate and fear the members of other groups. In "Gulliver's Travels," Swift described a vicious conflict between the Big-Enders, who ate their eggs with the big end up, and the Little-Enders, who started from the little end. Historically, largely arbitrary group differences (Catholic vs. Protestant, Hutu vs. Tutsi) have led to persecution and even genocide.

When and why does this particular human evil arise? A raft of new studies shows that even 5-year-olds discriminate between what psychologists call in-groups and out-groups. Moreover, children actually seem to learn subtle aspects of discrimination in early childhood. [. . .]

The adults were more likely to say that angry faces were black. Even people who would hotly deny any racial prejudice unconsciously associate other racial groups with anger.

But what about the innocent kids? Even 3- and 4-year-olds were more likely to say that angry faces were black. In fact, younger children were just as prejudiced as older children and adults.

Is this just something about white attitudes toward black people? They did the same experiment with white and Asian faces. Although Asians aren't stereotypically angry, children also associated Asian faces with anger. Then the researchers tested Asian children in Taiwan with exactly the same white and Asian faces. The Asian children were more likely to think that angry faces were white. They also associated the out-group with anger, but for them the out-group was white.

Was this discrimination the result of some universal, innate tendency or were preschoolers subtly learning about discrimination? For black children, white people are the out-group. But, surprisingly, black children (and adults) were the only ones to show no bias at all; they categorized the white and black faces in the same way. The researchers suggest that this may be because black children pick up conflicting signals—they know that they belong to the black group, but they also know that the white group has higher status.

These findings show the deep roots of group conflict. But the last study also suggests that somehow children also quickly learn about how groups are related to each other.

Moral Puzzles That Tots Struggle With (Zazes, Flurps and the Moral World of Kids):

Here's a question. There are two groups, Zazes and Flurps. A Zaz hits somebody. Who do you think it was, another Zaz or a Flurp?

It's depressing, but you have to admit that it's more likely that the Zaz hit the Flurp. That's an understandable reaction for an experienced, world-weary reader of The Wall Street Journal. But here's something even more depressing—4-year-olds give the same answer.

In my last column, I talked about some disturbing new research showing that preschoolers are already unconsciously biased against other racial groups. Where does this bias come from? [. . .]

In 2012 she asked young children about the Zazes and Flurps. Even 4-year-olds predicted that people would be more likely to harm someone from another group than from their own group. So children aren't just biased against other racial groups: They also assume that everybody else will be biased against other groups. And this extends beyond race, gender and religion to the arbitrary realm of Zazes and Flurps. [. . .]

But in the new study, Dr. Rhodes asked similar moral questions about the Zazes and Flurps. The 4-year-olds said it would always be wrong for Zazes to hurt the feelings of others in their group. But if teachers decided that Zazes could hurt Flurps' feelings, then it would be OK to do so. Intrinsic moral obligations only extended to members of their own group.

The 4-year-olds demonstrate the deep roots of an ethical tension that has divided philosophers for centuries. We feel that our moral principles should be universal, but we simultaneously feel that there is something special about our obligations to our own group, whether it's a family, clan or country.

"You've got to be taught before it's too late / Before you are 6 or 7 or 8 / To hate all the people your relatives hate," wrote Oscar Hammerstein. Actually, though, it seems that you don't have to be taught to prefer your own group—you can pick that up fine by yourself. But we do have to teach our children how to widen the moral circle, and to extend their natural compassion and care even to the Flurps.

Here's a question. There are two groups, Gopniks and Ellsworths. A Gopnik tells somebody "we do have to teach our children how to widen the moral circle, and to extend their natural compassion and care even to other groups". Do you think she was asking the Gopniks to extend their "natural compassion and care" even to the Ellsworths, or do you think she was lecturing at the Ellsworths?

Larry Gopnik: And... what happened to the goy?
Rabbi Nachtner: The goy? Who cares?

Or, if you prefer non-fiction, Alison's brother Adam has a heartwarming essay about how he learned to look past "impaled Iranians" to find humor in the Book of Esther and learn the true meaning of Purim.

"Rabbi," I began, "I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways." I don't know; that's how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn't make head or tail of the Book of Esther.

"It's a spoof, a burlesque, really," he almost mumbled. He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. "This is a Christian Bible," he said, genuinely puzzled. [. . .]

It's a light book with a serious message. [. . .] Esther is the comic book, a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit." [. . .]

"It is?" I said.

"Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated--a court Jew, really. It's a book for court Jews. [. . .] The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together--the writer obviously knows that the king is a bit of idiot--but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before or even after. [. . .] This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city and how they struggle to do the righteous thing."

I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews...I had been assigned to burlesque it when the text was preburlesqued, as jeans might be preshrunk.

We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred years ago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. ["chief councillor, Haman, decides to start a pogrom against the Jews, for all the usual reasons: They are tight and clannish and obey only themselves."] In the end, the rabbi gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)

We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, "Why not? What have you got to lose?" [. . .]

In the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing masks, although this made them look less festive than vaguely embarrassed, as though they were worried about being seen by their friends. I had forgotten the look and feel of a New York benefit [. . .]

What did I tell them? Well, I did the "New York as Persia, Donald and Ivana" bit ["Ahasuerus was Donald Trump: dumb as an ox, rich, lecherous, easily put out, and living in a gaudy apartment."], and then I did a bit I'd made up that afternoon on Haman. That got a modest laugh, and, encouraged, I went on to do the "man goes to see a rabbi" bit. I said that, once I'd thought of transposing the story to New York, I had gotten stuck on Moredecai. Who could Mordecai be in the modern city? I had gone to see a rabbi, and the rabbi had told me that the Book of Esther was in part a spoof, a burlesque: a comedy in which worldly people took risks and did unworldly things, and that Mordecai, if he was anyone, was us--the assimilated court and city Jews. And this was sort of amazing to me [. . .] But I saw now that there was a connection between a certain kind of comedy, the comedy of assimilation, and a certain kind of courage, the courage to use your proximity to power, bought at the price of losing your "identity," to save your kinsmen. The real moral center of the story, I saw now, lay in the tiny, heartbreaking, and in many ways comic moment when Esther--trayf-eating, dim-witted, overdressed, sexy Esther--appears before the king, who hasn't found her particularly sexy lately. [. . .] But she did, and the Jews were saved, for once. [. . .]

Though I am not strangely exhilarated by my experience as a Purimspieler, I did find something significant in the Book of Esther, and I am certainly glad I did it. [. . .] Even if it was too late to be an everyday, starting Jew, one could still be, so to speak, Jewish in the clutch.