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.
Self-resemblance and attractiveness
"Authoritarianism" and happiness
Highlights
• Tests association between generalized authoritarianism and subjective well-being.
• Generalized authoritarianism is positively associated with subjective well-being.
• This relation was significant independent of basic personality dimensions.
• Suggests that authoritarianism may be “bad” for others but “good” for the self.Abstract
Although authoritarianism can negatively impact others (e.g., by predicting prejudiced intergroup attitudes), implications for the self are mixed and require clarification. Extending previous research, we examined the association between generalized authoritarianism (GA, indicated by right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation) and subjective well-being (SWB, indicated by positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction) by testing simultaneously the general-level association between GA and SWB as well as specific residual associations between GA and SWB components, independent of basic personality dimensions. We observed a significant general-level association between GA and SWB whereby heightened authoritarianism predicted greater SWB. No residual associations were found between specific GA and SWB components. Despite being “bad” for others, generalized authoritarianism may be “good” for the self.
Estimating and interpreting Fst: the impact of rare variants
In a pair of seminal papers, Sewall Wright and Gustave Malécot introduced FST as a measure of structure in natural populations. In the decades that followed, a number of papers provided differing definitions, estimation methods, and interpretations beyond Wright's. While this diversity in methods has enabled many studies in genetics, it has also introduced confusion about how to estimate FST from available data. Considering this confusion, wide variation in published estimates of FST for pairs of HapMap populations is a cause for concern. These estimates changed- in some cases more than two-fold- when comparing estimates from genotyping arrays to those from sequence data (1000 Genomes Project Consortium 2010; International HapMap 3 Consortium 2010). Indeed, changes in FST from sequencing data might be expected data due to population genetic factors affecting rare variants. While rare variants do influence the result, we show that this is largely through differences in estimation methods. Correcting for this yields estimates of FST that are much more concordant between sequence and genotype data. These differences relate to three specific issues: (1) estimating FST for a single SNP, (2) combining estimates of FST across multiple SNPs, and (3) selecting the set of SNPs used in the computation. Changes in each of these aspects of estimation may result in FST estimates that are highly divergent from one another. Here, we clarify these issues and propose solutions.
Genome-wide inference of ancestral recombination graphs
As the title indicates, our paper is about the problem of inferring an “ancestral recombination graph,” or ARG, from sequence data. This is a topic that may strike many readers as impenetrably obscure and technical, so I will first try to explain, in plain language, what the ARG describes and why it has so much potential to be useful in many kinds of genetic analysis. Then, I will tell the story of how I and members of my research group have become increasingly fascinated by this problem over the years, how we have struggled with it, and how we finally achieved the conceptual breakthrough that is described in our paper. As will become evident, Matt Rasmussen, a former postdoc in the group and lead author of our paper, was central in this achievement.
What is the ARG?
The ARG is an elegantly simple yet superbly rich data structure that describes the complete evolutionary history of a collection of genetic sequences drawn from individuals in one or more populations. It was invented in the mid 1990s by the mathematicians Bob Griffiths and Paul Marjoram. The ARG captures essentially all evolutionary information relevant for genetic analysis of such sequences. Statisticians say that it fully defines the “correlation structure” of the sequences, meaning that it explains most similarities and differences among the sequences in terms of their patterns of shared ancestry.
The ARG is something like a family tree, only richer, because it not only defines the relationships among individuals, but it also traces the histories of specific segments of DNA sequences. For example, if you were to replace your family tree with an ARG, you could tell exactly which pieces of your genome came from your eccentric great grandmother and which pieces you share with your charming, intelligent, and handsome third cousin. [. . .]
The significance of recombinations and coalescences comes from the fact that these are the two ways in which lineages can join or split over time. The best way to understand them is to think about the behavior of lineages as one looks backward in time. The graph is typically laid out with time on the vertical axis, so that the bottom of the graph represents the present time and each node is assigned a height above this baseline indicating the time before the present at which the associated event occurred. Therefore, to look backward in time, we look upward in the graph. As we do so, we see that recombination events cause a single lineage to split into two ancestral lineages (representing the two sequence fragments that were joined together by the recombination in forward time), and coalescence events cause two lineages to join into one. Therefore, recombination nodes have one edge coming in and two going out, and coalescence nodes have two edges coming in and one going out. One way of thinking about it is that, given a fragment of modern DNA, recombinations have the effect of increasing its set of ancestors, while coalescences have the effect of decreasing its set of ancestors. [. . .]
More SMBE 2013 abstracts
Demographic Inference and Whole Genome Scan for Positive Natural Selection in
Pygmies from Central Africa
PingHsun Hsieh1, Krishna R. Veeramah1, Joseph Lachance2, Sarah A. Tishkoff2, Jeff D. Wall3,
Michael F. Hammer1, Ryan N. Gutenkunst1
1University of Arizona; 2University of Pennsylvania; 3University of California, San Francisco
African Pygmies are hunter-gatherers residing mostly in Central African rainforests. Many
Pygmy populations have been influenced by neighboring Niger-Kordofanian speaking farmer
populations through socio-economic contacts, particularly since the extensive agriculture
expansion in sub-Saharan Africa beginning five thousand years ago (kya). This complex
demographic history must be controlled in order to find true signatures of adaptation to the high
temperature, high humidity, and pathogen and parasite-enriched rainforest habitat of pygmies.
We sequenced and obtained whole-genome sequences at >40X coverage for Baka pygmies
from Cameroon, Biaka pygmies from the Central African Republic, and Niger-Kordofanian
speaking Yoruba farmers from Nigeria. We used the model-based demographic inference tool
∂a∂i to infer the history of these populations. Our best-fit model suggests that the farmer and
pygmy ancestors diverged from each other 150 kya and remained isolated from each other until
40 kya. This divergence is more ancient than estimated by previous studies using fewer loci, but
is confirmed using PSMC, another demographic inference tool that uses different genomic
information from ∂a∂i. Interestingly, our analysis shows that models with bi-directional
asymmetric gene flow between farmers and pygmies are statistically better supported than
previously suggested models with a single wave of uni-directional migration from farmers to
pygmies. To identify possible targets of adaptation, we conducted a genomic scan using
complementary methods, including the frequency-spectrum based G2D test, the population
differentiation based XP-CLR test, and the haplotype based iHS test. We performed 10,000
simulations based on the above best-fit demographic model in order to assign the significance
to each reported target of natural selection. Preliminary results reveal that genes involved in cell
adhesion, cellular signaling, olfactory perception, and immunity were likely targeted by natural
selection in the pygmies or their recent ancestors.
Ascertainment bias (SNP arrays vs. whole genome sequencing)
Whole genome sequencing and SNP genotyping arrays can paint strikingly different pictures of demographic history and natural selection. This is because genotyping arrays contain biased sets of pre-ascertained SNPs. In this short review, we use comparisons between high-coverage whole genome sequences of African hunter-gatherers and data from genotyping arrays to highlight how SNP ascertainment bias distorts population genetic inferences. Sample sizes and the populations in which SNPs are discovered affect the characteristics of observed variants. We find that SNPs on genotyping arrays tend to be older and present in multiple populations. In addition, genotyping arrays cause allele frequency distributions to be shifted towards intermediate frequency alleles, and estimates of linkage disequilibrium are modified. Since population genetic analyses depend on allele frequencies, it is imperative that researchers are aware of the effects of SNP ascertainment bias. With this in mind, we describe multiple ways to correct for SNP ascertainment bias.
Paternal age and fitness in pre-industrial Finland (SMBE 2013)
Accumulation of Deleterious Mutations and Fitness in a Pre-industrial Human Population
Adam D. Hayward1, Virpi Lummaa1,2, Georgii A. Bazykin3,4 1University of Sheffield; 2Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; 3Institute for Information Transmission Problems; 4Moscow State University
Many of the mutations are detrimental to fitness, and each individual carries a burden of deleterious mutations that were accumulated over many generations. In humans, the number of de novo point mutations passed on to an offspring is strongly dependent on the father’s age. Here, we use extensive pedigree data on a pre-industrial Finnish population to get, for each individual, the ages of his or her male ascendants for up to three generations, and use this data as a proxy for the number of acquired mutations. Individuals whose fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers fathered their lineage at age of 20 were ~9% more likely to survive to adulthood than those with 40-year-old male ancestors. Among survivors to adulthood, older male ascendants were also associated with a reduced probability of getting married. These observations suggest that the deleterious mutations acquired from recent ancestors may be a substantial burden to fitness in humans.
Patterns of selection on Neanderthal alleles in modern humans
A Genome-Wide Map of Neandertal Ancestry Documents the Effects of Selection on Introgressing Neandertal Material
Sriram Sankararaman1,2, Swapan Mallick1,2, Svante Pääbo3, Nick Patterson2, David Reich1,2 1Harvard Medical School; 2Broad Institute; 3Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Analysis of archaic genomes has documented 1-4% gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of all non-Africans. As a first step to understanding the phenotypic impact of introgressed regions, we built a map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans, using data from all populations in Phase 1 of the 1000 genomes project, combined with a high coverage (50×) Neandertal genome.
• We identified Neandertal alleles that are at higher frequency than expected under a model of neutral evolution, and identify dozens of genomic locations in Europeans and East Asians at which the Neandertal alleles are the targets of positive selection. Interestingly, there is evidence for more extensive positive selection in East Asian than in European populations.
• We discovered many more large genomic regions that are deficient in Neandertal ancestry than expected by chance. These regions are about 10 Mb on average and about half are shared between the European and East Asian populations. These observations are consistent with a model in which these regions harbor hybrid incompatibility loci where Neandertal variants that introgressed into modern humans were rapidly selected away.
• There is variation in the Neandertal ancestry across chromosomes, with chromosome X being a desert (a third of the average) that contains only a few oases of Neandertal ancestry. This further supports the hypothesis of genetic incompatibility between Neandertals and modern humans, as hybrid incompatibility loci are known to concentrate on chromosome X.
• By piecing together the segments of confidently inferred Neandertal ancestry, we create a tiling path covering about 40% of the genome that allows us to infer Neandertal ancestry even at repetitive elements. We combine this with direct Neandertal sequence data to obtain a more complete Neandertal reference genome sequence.
The American Ruling Class (2005)
On "WASPs":
Lewis Lapham: Mike was still having trouble with the different meanings of the word class. Despite having gone to Yale, he suffered the pangs of social inadequacy. He associated the word class with New England ancestors, very old money, and the characters in a tale told by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But, he was willing to correct his examination paper.
Mike: Have the old families, I mean the WASPs, really disappeared, or are they just keeping their heads down?
Mike: How do you think that wealth, power is structured anymore?
Samuel Peabody: Well in my case, our case, wealth was rather dissipated by the time it got to my father, who was a clergyman. Groton was, as you know, founded by my grandfather. Much of the leadership of the country, especially in the 30s, were Groton graduates. I don't see that happening today. Isn't it interesting? Where does the leadership come from today? For my money, we're wandering. Where are we going? I don't know. Thinking about it I thought that after the Marshall Plan this country was at its peak. This was the finest moment. After that we've been going bump, bump, bump.
Lewis Lapham: If the country's wealth no longer rests in the exclusive hands of the Protestant social establishment, where then does one look for America's Class A stock? It occurred to me that Mike would profit from a meeting with a well-connected hedge fund manager.
On "merit":
Jack: But I'm still troubled by you calling it a ruling class. I mean, this is America, it's a democracy. People get where they're going based on merit.
Lewis Lapham: All ruling classes are based on merit, Jack. The principle was as true of Nazi Germany as it was of Louis XIV's France. The question is, how do you define merit? Of what does merit consist?
Mike: Right, because in the old monarchies, merit was born in the blood. The question is, where is it born in America?
On our "manufactured" elite:
Mike: I think I'm beginning to understand. The ruling class is still mostly male and mostly white; but outside of those few restrictions, just about anybody can make the grade.
Lewis Lapham: Americans are an inventive people, Mike. We manufacture our ruling elites, what we like to call the meritocracy, in the same way that we build SUVs or 747s. The members come and go, in power for a season or a generation, then replaced by new technology, fresh money.
Or, to plagiarize myself: If we're speaking of Davos types -- high-level politicians and bureaucrats, and upper management of large companies -- these people are predominantly drawn from middle/working class backgrounds. For the most part, they circulate into and out of this elite during their lifetimes. These types are frequently contemptible for sure, but blame the (as it happens, highly-democratized) system that trained and selected them for that, not "upper-class whites", which present international elites for the most part aren't.
Besides intelligence (which probably pretty much every elite in history has been selected on to one degree or another), present elites are selected for rootlessness, conformity, low fertility, etc.
So it's clear where I'm coming from: there will always be hierarchy and there will always be social mobility. But some forms of social organization will be better and some will be worse. The particular "meritocratic" system of selecting elites that grew up after WWII has been a disaster for America's ethnic core. Blame of "WASPs" or the "upper class" typically is misplaced.
Goodhart's Law: ' When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. Universities optimise for grades instead of knowledge. Politicians seek popularity, not the public good. Tomatoes are bred into heavy, flavorless sacks of water. Soviet Nail factories, when instructed to produce a certain number of nails per month, produced tiny, useless nails. Science is no different.Description of the documentary:
Alison Gopnik: Natural ingroup biases are "evil"
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.Moral Puzzles That Tots Struggle With (Zazes, Flurps and the Moral World of Kids):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.
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?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?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.
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.
Genealogy / genetic genealogy conference free live stream
The Southern California Genealogical Society announces its schedule of live-streamed sessions of the 2013 Southern California Genealogy Jamboree. The "JamboSTREAM" webcast is free to viewers and is made available through the gracious support of Ancestry.com. [. . .]Sessions to be live streamed include:
Friday, June 7 [. . .]
4:30 PM to 6:00 PM
FR022: DNA Panel Discussion - Hear it from the Experts.
CeCe Moore; Alice Fairhurst; Ken Chanine PhD; Joanna Mountain PhD; Bennett Greenspan
Co-Sponsored by International Society of Genetic Genealogy
The "Kill Whitey" experiment and morally-retarded leftists
Perhaps most revealing is what Pizarro calls the “Kill Whitey” study. This was a footbridge problem — two variations on a footbridge problem in one, actually — that the team presented to 238 California undergrads. The undergrads were of mixed race, ethnicity and political leanings. Before they faced the problem, 87 percent of them said they did not consider race or nationality a relevant factor in moral decisions. Here the paper‘s (.pdf) description of the problem they faced:
"fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict"
This paper studies the political economy of fertility. I particularly ask whether fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict.1 There are at least two reasons why the answer could be affirmative. First, individuals in diverse societies tend to vote for co-ethnic political candidates, who then reward them with transfers, jobs, or local public goods (Young 1976, Bates 1981). Fertility should therefore increase an ethnic group’s voting power and gains from political office. Second, if ethnic groups allocate society’s resources via conflict or bargaining in the shadow of conflict (Horowitz 2000, Collier and Hoeffler 2004), then fertility might increase their combat strength.2 Importantly, however, these redistributive gains to fertility should mainly be present where weak institutions erode the security of property rights.
To further explore these issues, this paper presents a simple model of redistributive ethnic conflict with endogenous fertility. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies with high ethnic diversity and/or weak institutions have higher fertility rates. I conclude that high fertility may have political roots.
Opportunity costs, intelligence, and criminality
Hernstein and Murray (1994) famously argued that the division of labor in modern society is determined by individual differences in cognitive ability. This paper shows that differences in cognitive ability can also determine the division of labor in poor urban areas. We estimate the effect of IQ on time-to-first gang participation with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Results from both the NLSY97 and PHDCN indicate that low-IQ is a robust predictor of gang participation. There are two plausible explanations of this main finding: (1) low-IQ individuals may have comparative advantage in violence as their opportunity costs of engaging in legal activities are low and (2) gangs may prefer low-IQ individuals as a way to reduce agency costs. We find strong evidence in support of the hypothesis that persons with lower IQs have comparative advantage in criminal activity in the PHDCN dataset. HighlightsRelated posts:► This paper shows that cognitive ability can determine the division of labor in poor urban areas. ► We estimate the effect of IQ on time-to-first gang participation with data from U.S. data. ► Results indicate low-IQ is a robust predictor of gang participation. ► A person's relative IQ, with respect to one's neighborhood peers, determines gang participation.
Watching Half Sigma and his commenters
"I read the paper, understood most of it, but was basically lost trying to understand the graphs. (It's true that my math and science foundation is fairly weak.)"
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates"Well when I was 17, I didn’t realize that my parents were poor and stupid."
-- Half Sigma
Background: Half Sigma was born to lower-middle-class Staten Island Jewish parents and blames the American class system for his failure at life. At some point he read Paul Fussell's 1983 book Class, decided this made him an expert on the subject, and started mixing up dated observations from Fussell with his own observations of the people he perceives to be his social superiors in present-day Manhattan.
Fussell could not have been any clearer on who he put in his "Top out-of-sight" category: "The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely."
This class, as described by Fussell, barely exists today. The proportion of the richest Americans (or their children) with any particular connection to the mid-20th century or earlier American upper class is small and continually shrinking.
I just looked up the original Half Sigma "top out-of-sight" post, and his confusion is even deeper than I remembered:
(Please note that this was a post from June of 2012 -- not 1952.)The top out-of-sight upper class
A few days ago I threw out the idea that the country is run by WASPs, which I think is rather misleading and over-simplistic. It’s probably more accurate that there are several different power groups in the United States. The two most obvious power groups are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
There's no ambiguity about who Fussell classes as "top out-of-sight". It's not any Manhattan yuppie/hipster/"bobo" who went to private schools and who Half Sigma could see himself crossing paths with. It is, in caricature, the stock mid-20th century estate-dwelling upper class of popular imagination (which, again, increasingly no longer exists).Searching for other power groups, one of the obvious power groups is the highest social class in the country. And to know what the highest class is, we turn to the late Paul Fussell’s book Class, and we find out that the highest class is what Fussell calls the “top out-of-sight upper class.” Fussell, unfortunately, doesn’t say much about this class, probably because he doesn’t know that much about them. The primary difference he talks about is that the regular upper class live in showy mansions and make their wealth known to the lower classes. The top out-of-sight upper class hides from public exposure.
In the movie Born Rich, directed by Jamie Johnson (which I previously blogged about), one of the important things he mentioned about his class of people is that they like their privacy and they were very opposed to him making a documentary about them. So Paul Fussell got the out-of-sight part right, although out-of-sight means that they are non-obvious rather than that you literally can never see them. The top out-of-sight is more often hiding in plain sight rather than on a private island off the coast of Maine. They might summer at such a place, although there are probably more of them summering on Nantucket.
I have personally met people from the top out-of-sight upper class, and maybe you have to. They are not rock stars, and because they are often hiding in plain sight, they are actually a lot easier to meet than upper class people who are more likely to have gatekeepers to restrict access to them. Imagine the unlikelihood of having a conversation with Donald Trump. But there are many top out-of-sight upper class people living in Manhattan who you can talk to easily enough, although they won’t be interested in being your friend for the same reason you (a middle to upper middle class person) wouldn’t want to be friends with a prole.
So now I will fill in some of the gaps of this class. Of course, I don’t have much personal knowledge, so I am mostly making educated guesses.
And, yes, the "out-of-sight" part was meant literally -- referring to the houses, not the people. Half Sigma fails even at basic reading comprehension. Fussell:
No one whose money, no matter how copious, comes from his own work--film stars are an example--can be a member of the top-out-of-sight class, even if the size of his income and the extravagance of his expenditure permit him to simulate identity with it. Inheritance--"old money" in the vulgar phrase--is the indispensable principle defining the top three classes, and it's best if the money's been in the family for three or four generations. There are subtle local ways to ascertain how long the money's been there. Touring middle America, the British traveler Jonathan Raban came upon the girl Sally, who informed him that "New Money says Missouri; Old Money says Missoura.""When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be "discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth." From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideaways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. [. . .]
The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate.
HGP10 Symposium - The Genomics Landscape a Decade after the Human Genome Project
April 25, 2013: A commemorative all-day symposium, in Kirschstein Auditorium, Natcher Conference Center, featured a group of speakers. The event, The Genomics Landscape a Decade after the Human Genome Project,looked at the accomplishments of the decade with an eye to what is on the horizon. The date of the symposium was significant, occurring in the month that the HGP was announced 10 years ago, and coinciding with the date 60 years ago when James Watson and Francis Crick's article describing DNA's double-helical structure was published. The symposium is timed with both historic achievements in mind.
The $1,000 Genome, the $1,000,000 Interpretation - Kevin Davies
African Integrative Genomics: Implications for Human Origins - Sarah Tishkoff
Progress Since the Human Genome Project
Whole Genome Sequencing in Newborn Screening - Jeff Botkin
Annotating and Understanding Genomes - Ewan Birney
The complete list of talks is available here (with slides).
Another dent in the Rosalind Franklin myth
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In this article, I (the author) followed multiple sources in referring to 'Photo 51' as the work of Rosalind Franklin. However, medical geneticist Jim Lupski raised a query about the accuracy of the attribution, having received correspondence from Jim Watson which mentioned in passing that Ray Gosling had taken the photo.Note that Gosling was originally Wilkins' graduate student. The two were taking X-ray photographs of DNA before Franklin ever became involved. Additional background:I put the query to Gosling, who confirms that he was indeed 'Photo 51' photographer:
'It was part of the program that Rosalind and I were carrying out to check the effect of the humidity on the crystallization of DNA. This was the 51st of that program, and I was the one who took that particular diffraction pattern.'
Thanks to Jim Lupski for bringing the inaccuracy to my attention, to Ray Gosling for providing further information, and to Jim Watson for confirming that this was his understanding of events.
Wilkins began using optical spectroscopy to study DNA in the late 1940s. In 1950 he and Gosling obtained the first clearly crystalline X-ray diffraction patterns from DNA fibres, and Alec Stokes suggested that the patterns indicated that DNA was helical (spiral) in structure. [source]
Franklin's fellowship proposal called for her to work on x-ray diffraction studies of proteins in solution. However, there was a shift in research priorities after Maurice Wilkins, the assistant director of Randall's lab, began working with an unusually pure sample of DNA obtained from Rudolf Signer. Excited about the possibilities, Wilkins suggested to Randall that Franklin's expertise might be better applied to this promising DNA research. Randall agreed; he wrote to Franklin in November 1950, explaining the change of plan, and stated that she and graduate student Raymond Gosling would be the only staff doing crystallographic studies of DNA. Randall did not mention Wilkins' serious interest in DNA, nor did he tell Wilkins the details of the letter. These omissions soon generated misunderstandings between Wilkins and Franklin--Franklin assumed that the x-ray diffraction studies of DNA would be her project alone; Wilkins assumed that she was joining the loosely organized research team ("Randall's Circus") at the biophysics lab, as the expert on crystallography. When Wilkins continued working on DNA and suggested that he and Franklin collaborate, she resented what she regarded as interference. [source]
Rosalind Franklin has become such a symbolic figure that it is now hard to separate facts from myths. However, in the rush to see Franklin as wronged, it needs to be recalled that Wilkins was a senior independent scientist, had laid a lot of groundwork for the DNA work, and had obtained the actual DNA samples Franklin went on to take x-ray pictures of. All this was then essentially taken off him by the unit head (Randall) and given to Franklin. So it could be argued with a good deal of justification that the DNA project at King's was very much Wilkins' baby, and would not have existed for Franklin to take forward without years of Wilkins' groundwork. [source]
“To think that Rosy had all the 3D data for 9 months & wouldn’t fit a helix to it and there was I taking her word for it that the data was anti-helical. Christ,” Dr. Wilkins wrote, musing on how close he might have come to making the discovery himself. [source]
Population genetics notes and lectures
Genome 562 - Population Genetics - Joe Felsenstein
Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics - a draft text - Joe Felsenstein
Population Genetics notes - Graham Coop
Population genetics teaching resources - Graham Coop
Lecture notes in population genetics - Kent Holsinger
The Progress of Genetics From the 1930s to Today - James Crow (2010)
Introduction to Population Genetics - Lynn Jorde (2012)
"More Genomes From Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human Groups"
From the detailed genomes of both Neandertals and Denisovans, Pääbo and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that 17% of the Denisovan DNA was from the local Neandertals. And the comparison revealed another surprise: Four percent of the Denisovan genome comes from yet another, more ancient, human—"something unknown," Pääbo reported. "Getting better coverage and more genomes, you can start to see the networks of interactions in a world long ago," says David Kingsley, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.John Hawks: New Denisova and Neandertal DNA results reportedWith all the interbreeding, "it's more a network than a tree," points out Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. Pääbo hesitates to call Denisovans a distinct species, and the picture is getting more complicated with each new genome.
Now, we may be learning that the Denisovan genome itself represents different ancestral groups -- not only a more ancient "something unknown" population, but substantially the local Neandertals. That kind of mixture is not the population history described by papers on the Denisova genome so far. And a third Denisovan mtDNA from one of the third molars at the site is substantially different from the other two, pointing to greater mtDNA diversity within the Denisovan population than now known from either Neandertals or living people.Related posts:What does it mean? I don't think there's a contradiction here in the data. What this shows is that the methods applied to the data have been too simplistic. The methods will come to a result, but that result may not fit the data as well as a population model with more complexity. Looking only at one kind of comparison -- as the Li and Durbin model applied to the Denisova genome by Meyer and colleagues last year [1] -- will probably not give a result that describes the true population history. We need to keep our minds open to more complex population histories that may be more consistent with other sources of data, including archaeological and fossil information.