> denisovamixture may be insusceptible to this sort of explanation (???)

Or maybe just significantly less susceptible.

The two propositions highlighted by DK are consistent with one another – even if one is quantitatively much ‘more’ true than the other. And if they are both true, as seems to be the case, the implication is that Papuans have significantly more archaic derivation than other Eurasians (most likely) have. The upshot is that the latter truth was already implied by neandertable S48, lo these many months ago.

I’m not certain, but I suspect it was also clear, at that time, that this additional Papuan archaicness (over and above the probable archaicness of other Eurasians) was non-neanderthal in nature. If so, I’m sure Mr. Cochran probably realized it, and the only news for him today, then, is the source of the ‘just’-discovered admixture: denisovan. Although knowing him he may have also somehow figured out some time ago that it was probably denisovan.

Also, while the apparent neandermixture in Eurasians may also be somewhat susceptible to being alternatively explained by ancient population structure within Africa, the denisovamixture may be insusceptible to this sort of explanation (???). I am unsure about that.

I’ve heard also that Muslims way out East average rather non-‘Puritanical’ as well. Like, more apt to have a syncretic admixture of pre-Islamic beliefs.

> This is all self evident. It doesn’t threaten religious orthodoxy except in the most simple-minded way.

I quite disagree. I suspect it would be a very powerful experience to have a book of infallible truths from god about both the seen and the not-seen, all the more when it is extremely fine in terms of literary qualities. And certainly many religions are highly scriptural in both elite and common practice. Islam, I understand. Protestantism, and Judaism (at least Western), of course. I’m less certain about the rest.

I think heliocentrism was less antagonistic to the power of scriptures. It was one little thing – I mean, it’s big, but the planets don’t concern our lives (not in the old Christian West, anyway)… only our reveries. You could maybe imagine that a human instrument of god might have erred, or intentionally mis-transferred for reasons worthy or unworthy, the divine information about geocentrism (though I’m not actually sure whether it is in the Bible?). ‘Origin’ was different. Darwin brought it out long after Woehler had synthesized urea. This had not finished of the question of vitalism at all, but anti-vitalism had certainly been conceivable for decades before Darwin’s bombshell, and many a man had gotten in some practice in conceiving it. Thus it was possible thereafter to see the world as totally mechanical, “hot by agreement, cold by agreement; bitter by agreement, sweet by agreement; in reality, atoms and void.” Though certain cosmic questions did remain (and I think still remain), the scientific world-picture had suddenly become stunningly more ramified, expansive, and competitive.

Dudes, why bother with ‘progress’ against religion.

I’m thoroughly agnostic of course. But I tend to think religion is salutary. What do you guys think of the old Chesterton chestnut (possibly not actually said by Chesterton): “when a Man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing – he believes anything.”

When I look at the 20th century, that epigram rings rather true for me. Of course I realize that it’s not one of the more provable or falsifiable propositions about history. It is pretty subjective. So, how would ol PZ reply? My mom picked up Hitchens. I told her that if it doesn’t cover that question – and cover it quite deeply – it can’t be worth much.

I can also see, of course, that afterlife beliefs and nuclear ICBMs don’t really mix too much better than drinking and driving do. Whether the Iranian regime, say, is really as ultra-religious as some would claim, is debated I guess. What about the bizarro, uh, philosophy, of the North Korean regime – is it any safer than religious worldviews?

Have you guys ever seen these mind-blowing examples of convergent evolution, involving unrelated taxa?

http://drhoz.livejournal.com/74281.html

Wild, no? That one is relatively uninteresting, though, since some others are additionally Batesian mimics of wasps:
http://tolweb.org/Mantispidae/13138

The following two birds are not mimics. As far as we know. Maybe they lived together in the past, but today one is an African group and the other New World. They have similar habitats:

http://www.utahbirds.org/birdsofutah/BirdsS-Z/WesternMeadowlark.htm
http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=8667677

Two more highly unrelated birds:
http://nybirds.net/images/Chestnut-sided%20Warbler_edited-1.jpg

It’s almost creepy. Those two overlap in range, so maybe there is mimicry. One or a few highly poisonous/noxious birds are known, though that isn’t the only possible reason for aposematism or mimicry.

Willis Eschenbach does it for birds (because they are so visible) and concludes that only 129 species have gone extinct in the last 100 years or so.

Well, that’s over 1% of the ~9,500 full species. How much extinction is acceptable? Admittedly, a lot of those extinguished ones are flightless rails and other flightless birds of small islands that had never had predators before contact with feral animals, but a lot aren’t.

Also, I might round up the 129 by five or ten, because birds are still being discovered today.

It’s true that hunting, or being treated as a pest, took out the 7 or 8 full species of US/Canada birds that are gone outside Hawaii. In Hawaii it is certainly higher.

> My understanding of the current thought on Neandertal life is that it was one of interminable cultural stasis at very low densities. Hardly conditions conducive to increasing “sophistication.”

Well yeah, I’ve heard that they generally didn’t pick up (supposedly) superior sapiens sapiens tools during the contact. But there could be a lot of reasons for that, including perhaps that the neandertal tools were better in neandertal hands. Havin the hands!

> We like to tell ourselves that emigrating populations of humans are special and adventurous (see myths about what makes Americans apparently so awesome). It seems to me that in most animals (and people) emigration usually happens because you are pushed out by a more fit local group.

I do think founding Americans are a little different (I’m not one, myself). A lot of them came for religious reasons (to the north) and I’m told England was not that overcrowded from 1607 to whenever (though even so, there could still have been economic reasons to come here). But I wouldn’t necessarily call them awesome. They’re alright. I bet there would have been no Civil War if the Yankees had been of the same sub-ethnicity as the Rebs. If there were Yankees in the South they would have stamped out slavery themselves, and if there were SW English in the North, they wouldn’t have made war over it, or at least probably not. I would say that the founding New Englanders were selected for moralism, intransigence, and love of weird religions, relative to their ancestors in England.

As far as I know it is true that traveling out of Sub-Saharan Africa could potentially have been easy. It seems there are climatic changes that may have made movements in and out easy for hominids and animals, at certain times. Some think that the Sahara is a typical African savanna at some times, with all the big grazers and carnivores:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_pump_theory

To address Razib’s question, I do think the adneanderture would be trumpeted in a chauvinist age. However, it would take a relatively long time. The image of the lunkhead neanderthal would have to go away first.

I’ve heard, though, that often the Other is not depicted as inept, really. Rather, they are a sneaky, devious people, dishonorable, when We only want peace and trade. So maybe someone would say, too bad X people haven’t been infused with the simple, honest heritage of [archaic group Y].

The Japanese (well, the nationalists at least) would be glad if they had *any* unique admixture, since they don’t like the idea of being recent emigres from Korea. But maybe after another 100 years of peace, they won’t be as agitated about it. Perhaps, also, they will eventually point out to some unique SNPs. Anyway, regardless, they are certainly a distinct people, after 2,000 years.

> Whatever it involved, what is the evidence these things were absent from contemporaneous African populations?

Just archeology. Subject of course to the limitations of archeology. Other than the fact that bones always break down in most African forest soils (hence not a lot of forest ape fossils for us to look at), I wouldn’t know what the limitations are. I’m guessing there has been more digging for artifacts in Europe (but there may also be diminishing returns to doing large amounts). People look for coins and stuff with metal detection – illegal or restricted most places now, I think – some of the major archeological troves in Europe have been discovered by accident by laymen. And maybe some of the painted caves. Ancient coins are still being discovered in south Europe regularly, I think mostly by non-scholars. That’s why most of them are so cheap, though most of them are not too attractively made in the first place (the best Greek stuff is better than the Persian which is better than the Roman).

I’m not sure how much artifact searching there has been in Africa – certainly a lot of searches for australopitheci and homos, but some of those habitats are desert now, and were lush back then.

miko, I think smarter makes sense, because these independent lineages were, probably, all getting more sophisticated in presumably separate genetic ways. Or at the very least, were a bit more likely increasing in sophistication than decreasing.

But, of course I agree that we aren’t remotely close to certainty.

Of course, it’s possible that very little sophistication, quantitatively, happened in the time that these lineages were separated.

We may not know anytime soon, or even ever. Most traits may involve even thousands of genes, as you know. It sounds odd when I hear someone suggest 10,000 genes might be involved in a trait. Just seems awfully high, though I don’t actually know in a good formal way if it is or isn’t. But, think of all the SNPs… 10 million? How many more are coming – could there be 100 million? If we assume they are randomly distributed, most will be noncoding but of course some of those could be cis-regulatory of transcription. And theory suggests that they will mostly be neutral…..ish. What are the odds that most of them are near-neutral rather than neutral? Since there are so many of them, which could work together to produce pheno traits, perhaps we should not necessarily say they are effectively neutral even if they make less than a 0.01% difference in a quantitative pheno trait. Or even 0.001%? I guess there are too many deeply-unknown variables for us to do the math really, and I’m hardly well read on the different architecture hypotheses.

jb, your comment is ironic, Harpending & Cochran made an assertion like the one you mention, in their recent book – and both have commented here.

There was an efflorescence in Europe many millennia before agriculture, when Europeans arrived there – maybe 30-40,000 years before present. The book suggested that introgression of neanderthal alleles might have been involved. The efflorescence, according to the book, involved “cave paintings, sculpture, jewelry, dramatically improved tools and weapons.” Plus long-distance trade.

We know that broadly, hominids have progressed to higher “encephalization quotients” (brain volume / body volume) over time, slowly. So it could be that neanderthals had an allele or two of their own that could contribute to intelligence, artistic culture, what have you.

Dienekes has pointed out, though, that Africans may be admixed with erectus, or, actually, he suggests that they could have neanderthal introgressions too, directly or indirectly; as I recall he thinks that the methods used so far would fail to identify neanderthal alleles that are present in both Africans and other Eurasians.

miko, nice 7th-grade girl impression. Caledonian’s clearly a worthwhile poster and he got boyeeez up in this blog. Initially I thought he was saying that counterfactuals are often inherently inane, and I was gonna return fire. I was mistaken, he’s saying something else: when you construct a counterfactual, you might assert a ceteris paribus, or you might just assume it and leave it unsaid. What he’s saying is that this ceteris paribus can often be inanely false in an overlookable way. I’m not sure that applies to Razib’s post very much, but it’s of considerable general interest.

While I can’t speak for our host of course, PZ traditionally is not exactly a huge authority on this blog, FYI. Don’t you know about how he posted that Professor Cochran was dumb, and got swarmed by vicious, uncritical GNXP fanboys? We stay on opposite sides of E. Main ever since. To me he’s far less interesting than, say, you, content-wise – not that his style is better. And while we’re on style, why say piss or shit repeatedly, it’s unpleasant to think about. Your rhetoric should make recourse to fine wines, cute girls, rare butterflies on silver pins, imported tofus and hummuses on toast, plummeting but tastefully selected stocks and bonds, graceful McMansions… you know, the finer things in life. Ah, you’ll go far.

> the phenotypic variance for “age at first birth” is much, much higher than that of height

Higher in what units?

I’ll tell you what else is an audacious claim. Wilson and Wilson saying that altruism in clonal bacteria (towards co-clonals cells) comes from group selection. Both workers are valuable guys. But the cooperation of 99.99% similar bacteria is not too different from the cooperation of my own cells. The cooperation of cells with the same genome (99.99%) is simply kin selection. The survival of a copy of me is just as good as the survival of me, in the great game, and a 99.99% accurate copy of me 99.99% as good as me. I fail to see how this even debatable.

99.99% is a conservative figure. A fascinating fact: something like 75% of newborn E coli cells have no mutations whatsoever.

So, EO Wilson has been erring about Hamiltonianism since way before the latest controversy. Again, a valuable worker, but on this one he’s in a dark wood wandering.

How Nowak got into this stuff, I don’t know, and generally I’m not smart enough to deal with his stuff. Nevertheless, I’m not gonna bet on antihamiltonianism being right, no matter who gets involved with it. I’m smart enough to deal pretty well with Hamiltonianism with reasonable certainty.

Probably a wise choice. The insect is arguably aposematic. I wonder if it’s a beetle, butterfly, or moth. It kind of looks like some kind of swallowtail butterfly, but I think the lack of a visible head fits that very poorly.

That living memory is fading. And it’s not like Japan is going to invade China now. With nuclear missiles and inverted age distributions, the time for that sort of thing is past.

Mr Snicker, I can see that you started the second of your generally-serviceable sentences in the third person, before dauntlessly positing a reflexive pronoun that disagrees with the subject. While this erratic sort of manner may be a commonplace today in the company of certain strata, I suppose I found it a bit upsetting momentarily to my rather refined and rather sensitive constitution.

> I predict it will confirm that she is a female of European descent.

LOL, I thought you were saying that the Newsweek writer believed she might be an XY female and part Armenian or something. I scanned it for like 30 seconds, then realized you meant something else.

Lol. Pfizer or Merck might, at least conceivably, prefer to develop a chronic treatment of Crohn’s disease rather than a single-treatment radical cure. Especially because, men not actually being homo economicus in practice, it might be hard for them to charge as much for the cure as they could charge for the lifetime of chronic treatment. Though they will certainly go for the cure if and when their competitors already have effective chronic treatments on the market (assuming no collusion).

But really, on the whole they pretty much totally want to know the truth, the whole truth about Crohn’s. What makes you think PepsiCo wants to know or disseminate any truths regarding nutrition?

As far as I know, few or no studies treat disease phenotypes quantitatively. So a variant simply correlates with a disease trait, or doesn’t. It cannot correlate linearly or non-linearly.

As for height, which is obviously a quantitative trait, I don’t know how they do the math up.

Albatross, what dude wants a mate who’s indifferent to sleeping with him. Some dude may wind up stuck with her anyway – but it won’t be a superior specimen of a man, it will be an inferior one. That makes all the difference.

What is dense, that idea that Australia has no problems, or the idea that some degree of struggle is part of the good life? The latter is a pretty venerable hypothesis; it might in fact be dense, but that is far from obvious or agreed-upon.

You define some categories of women who might be missed in counts of lesbians, which is well and good, but you don’t seem to have much justification for the quantities you assign to those categories. So I don’t think you are succeeding at all on that front.

Citing Kinsey does add info, but one ref can’t decisively close a question like this, which I’m sure has been studied countless times (the more studies get done, the wider the cumulative range of differing results will be), and which is obviously a bone of contention and then some. Often, in such a debate, each pole has 4 or so respectable empirical papers which are favorite cites, and which of course totally disprove the “enemy” papers (which in turn disprove them) — sometimes more like 15 papers on each side instead of four. Playing the game for some years, seeing this situation repeatedly, engenders cynicism.

Citing a few meta-reviews would be much more convincing, at least if they were reasonably consonant. Still, even meta-reviews can disagree, and if someone cites three agreeing ones, how do I know for sure that four others don’t exist which contradict the ones cited? The best 15-minute investigation would be to just try to dredge up *every* meta-review, using a neutral or balanced set of search terms (important), and read out just their bottom lines (and a little bit of the methods) to see if they almost all agree. If not, then 15 minutes just can’t do the job.

Any plans to set up the old open thread here on the new carrier? Here’s an off-topic find.

The renowned fieldwork evolutionist, Moller, has a new paper on the behavioral psychometrics, loosely speaking, of barn swallows. He says it is an almost completely novel kind of work. I read only the abstract:

[…] Brain mass of the barn swallow Hirundo rustica was strongly predicted by external head volume, explaining 99.5% of the variance, allowing for repeatable estimates of head volume as a reflection of brain size. […] In a 2 years study of 501 individual adult barn swallows, I showed that head volume differed between sexes and age classes, with yearlings having smaller and more variable heads than older individuals, and females having smaller and more variable heads than males. Large head volume was not a consequence of large body size, which was a poor predictor of head volume. Birds with large heads arrived early from spring migration, independent of sex and age, indicating that migratory performance may have an important cognitive component. Head volume significantly predicted capture date and recapture probability, suggesting that head volume is related to learning ability, although morphological traits such as wing length, aspect ratio and wing area were unimportant predictors. Intensity of defence of offspring increased with head volume in females, but not in males. Barn swallows with large heads aggregated in large colonies, suggesting that individuals with large heads were more common in socially complex environments. […]

Regression to the mean is partial, not total. Degree of meritocracy is nonzero at all times, though higher now than it once was.

Occam’s hair extensions, the finest in improbably lush, attractive hair customized so it’s right for you.

> so i don’t see support for endogamy there. in fact, some of the male forebears of the dynasty of wessex had celtic first names, suggesting that elite british males were integrated into the west saxon order.

Fools! If only had read Greg Clark, they would know they could probably have replaced the whole country if they stayed endogamous, thus maxing out their fitness.

Maybe such norms aren’t easy to enforce even if someone wants to, though. It must often go against the individual interest.

> i believe that the christian bias toward monogamy took a few generations to “take hold” in many of these barbarian european tribes, who were loosely polygynous quite often at the elite levels.

I’ve heard similar about the vikings, when they were first christianized, later on in history.

I’m sure the size of a foreign pinnacle-elite matters in itself. But what about endogamy. Perhaps Italy etc would have been very slowly germanized (genetically and culturally) if the Germanics there had remained endogamous? Is there any evidence that the Germanics did/didn’t remain endogamous in England, in Italy/etc?

This is a nugatory observation, but Reich is a co-author on an extremely visible paper making an empirical claim of admixture. So, why would he “round up” his prior probability of admixture? It’s more than plausible that he has in fact rounded down.

I mean, we don’t exactly expect an author on a visible and somewhat-controversial result to say in print, “I have always really known deep down that it was true; it is almost an article of faith with me, and bitter would be my remaining years on this earth if it were ever disproven. Yet I was able to be ruthlessly objective despite that.”

Razib, thanks for that info.

Just to let people know, Hawks has had a second post up, addressing (and arguing against) “alternate interpretations” such as were described here, at Dienekes’, and in Carl Zimmer’s post. If I feel competent to say anything after reading Hawks, I will.

Jason, the thing is, it’s apparently not mere introgression, at least not according to Hawks. Hawks’ impression (found on his blog) is that there is a bunch of neutral stuff in there, rather than just some positively-selected loci toting their linkage-disequilibrium blocs/haplotypes along with them. How he can discern this, I’m not sure.

Amazing that a 75% griz is so white. I guess the white allele must be dominant-negative.

Looks like everything I said was said better by Dienekes, and his commenters raised some interesting points.

Hmmmmmm. I’m finding the uniformity across Eurasia of the sequences of interest to be suspect. Of course I do grasp that proto-Eurasian moderns, just beginning their Eurasian dispersal, could have breed with neanderthals in Israel or wherever, giving all Eurasian moderns equal neanderthal ancestry.

But why didn’t moderns of Europe and SW Asia then breed with neanderthals again — many times, over the many millennia of contact? Therefore, why didn’t they end up much more neanderthal than E Asians or New Guineans did, since neanderthals aren’t attested outside Europe and SW Asia?

I adhere to the concept where taxa are good species if they are fated not to merge. If they have fertile hybrids, but the hybrids and even the backcrosses have sufficiently depressed fitness, then they ain’t gonna merge; instead, a preference fro own-taxon mating will evolve expeditiously.

In reality, they are never quite 100% fated to stay apart – it’s always probabilistic. It’s somewhat contingent upon ecological conditions, which could change arbitrarily at any moment. But if they’re highly likely to never fully merge, I’d call them good species. If wolves and coyotes are amalgamating in a way that looks like it will probably go all the way, I call them one species.

Of course, using my species concept, there can be a gray area where the probability of mergation/non-mergation is not 5/95, nor 95/5, but something closer to 50/50. This gray area is ugly, and the classical biological species concept doesn’t have a gray area. But ‘my’ concept (which I’d guess has been discussed a lot since before I was born) makes more sense on a large-scale diachronic view.

Heck, humans and chimps may even be interfertile, it has been speculated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee

To me the whole thing is like finding out some of my ancestors were extra-terrestrials — to exaggerate rather markedly. So it doesn’t matter much that it’s still unclear whether this ancestry has had any non-negligible effect on my phenotype/nature. I find it very strange and exciting, pretty much the most stunning science discovery of my time. It’s somewhat less cool than the moon landing (which I wasn’t alive for), but kind of comparable.

> there are still American Indians in the eastern United States.

Sure. But it’s still an illuminating analogy overall, that detail aside.

Also, there wouldn’t be any Amer-indians left, had Euro-Americans remained hostile, racialist, highly-fecund/expansionist, and fundamentally Malthusian — in a sense, “normal” — for thousands of years. So, the fundamental pattern has been disrupted to some extent by very novel, late-breaking cultural developments which have superimposed themselves. The analogy is still meaningful at the fundamental level.

This is one of those antipodes-of-“heard the learn’d astronomer” moments. I just walked five blocks to the pepsi machine, and I was shocked and amazed to observe some 400 of these neanderthal intergrades. Many of them carrying, or otherwise associated with, interesting artifacts. I’ll be submitting my data to PNAS first off.

> This is evident in the United States, until the late 20th century the majority of the ancestry of the white population of the republic descended from those who were counted in the 1790 census.

You meant 19th century rather than 20th, right?

> nicking it from the Neandertal by a bit of cross breeding would have been the easy way to get it – yet they got it the hard way instead, by independent mutation

The hard way might not have been so hard, though. I think at least some of the MCR1 alleles involved in this are total loss of function alleles. In general for any gene, there are a vast number of different possible mutations that will yield total loss of function, therefore such mutations are pretty abundant. There are countless different changes you can make in any machine that will completely stop the machine from working.

If you want something more precise, like you want MCR1 to change so that it functions precisely 34-38% as intensely, or has its expression go up exactly 2.1 to 2.2-fold after exposure to X amount of radiation in Y wavelength band, there will be only a few possible mutations that can do this. And you would probably have to wait around for quite a while, many generations, if you wanted them to crop up in your own (euro-sapiens) population. That’s the kind of allele that’d be more likely to be nicked from neanderthals (or from erectus if you are an early sapiens in Asia, etc).

I think it’s pretty cool. But you should name them in the form “Data Dump! (Wednesday).” When they are all named just “Data Dump,” I can’t tell which one is being referred to in the comments sidebar. One might be following the Wednesday dump’s comments very closely and not really care much about the Thursday dump.

The Ancien Regime created not only high and universalistic culture, but also, not-unrelatedly, large-scale systems of military self-defense. That was no small achievement, considering that they had little to build on: in the north of Europe there was no pre-existing High Civilization that could minimize the profuse petty local squabbles of its native tribalism. Those nobles built that High Civ themselves, with their own hands.

Which is not so say that the majority benefited. The suppression of profuse petty conflicts saved lives from Mars, but fed those savings to Starvation. It was a wash, on net for the peasants though certainly not for culture.

Our high-finance aristocrats may have built something too, nurturing hothouse orchids of complex economic production with their complex credit regimes. Some of what they pampered under glass has probably gone on to survive “in nature,” to the benefit of everyone. But some hasn’t. And they took much from the profits, to add fine appointments to baroque mansions. And now the universal credit junkiedom is too much to sustain, much like the over-prescription of ritalin that developed in parallel. Hoi polloi like myself have probably been “mildly plundered” on net. A simpler and more conservative way of economic life would have been somewhat better for us peasants. After all we are much less insulated from the intermittent vertigos of the roller coaster that “the Wise” have erected: and pain, not joy, is the “ground of existence.” The transient pains that happen in the fluctuations are more imminent than the delights of those same fluctuations: more pure, more effective, more awake, and more real. As pain has always been, so far, compared to pleasure.

Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_animals_described_in_the_21st_century

Some of those are elevations to species status of already-known taxa. But I’m pretty sure most aren’t. Fair number of new mammals and birds, certainly more than one hears about in the news. But yeah, not a lot.

There are also a lot of “lost” birds that have been detected only two or three times, sometimes at intervals of 50-80 years or whatever.

This possibly-new, possibly-rediscovered monkey is pretty cool. The old description that it may or may not correspond to, was by a guy who died in 1810:

“The Blond Capuchin (Cebus queirozi) was discovered near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2006. Some suspect that rather than a new species, however, it is a rediscovery of a monkey named Simia flavia, known only from a drawing by German taxonomist Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber.”

Pretty funny that it was hiding out near the gigantic city of Rio.

I wonder how scientists will change their views on theism (or the like) in the future. Suppose AI is never created, and indeed no real progress is made. Suppose other avenues of investigation into consciousness also make no progress. And that there is no major progress toward a totalizing “Theory of Everything” in physics that is able to “have predictive power for the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.”

Would scientists start to, ever so slightly, relinquish confidence in the ability of science to “explain everything?” Does the feeling that all is explained by science, rest partly on the fact that science has been so successful *recently*, and we therefore give it the benefit of the doubt as to whether it will eventually explain every last thing that any person could possibly consider yet-unexplained?

I guess what happens depends on how you define atheism. I once read an insightful argument about this. The author wanted to point out that many agnostics should consider themselves atheists. A scientific agnostic (as imagined by this author) has no positive evidence of the existence of leprechauns, yet he can certainly never disprove their existence completely, pushing the odds of their existence down to “absolute zero.” But he does not say he is “agnostic on leprechauns.” Technically, he is. But in that sense he is agnostic on all things. But the odds of leprechauns existing is so low that it is totally impragmatic to address it in any way. Likewise he should consider the odds of god existing to be, not absolutely zero, but absolutely negligible, and should not consider himself agnostic on god, or, pragmatically, consider there to be any chance at all that god exists.

I don’t see it that way, though. The mysteries I noted in my above post, such as qualia, intuitively open my mind to the possibility that god or some other transcendental power might exist. I wouldn’t necessarily say that qualia constitute “evidence” for this possibility. That word seems a little strong. But those mysteries do prod me in some way. In contrast, when it comes to leprechauns, there aren’t any mysteries out there that te existence of leprechauns could possibly shed any light on, the way I see it. So the existence of the divine seems more plausible to me than the existence of leprechauns.

I’m an agnostic, and not one that particularly verges on atheism, because I don’t think science explains the world very effectively. As far as I can tell, the anthropomorphic principle, plus the possibility of multiple regions or dimensions in the universe, can probably explain why the fundamental physical constants of our observable universe permit the complex matter structures necessary for our existence. But why does anything exist at all? I’m sure many philosophers consider this a malformed question, but is there anything to that position besides assertion of their intuition? My intuition may be about as good as theirs, and it seems like a well-formed question to me.

Next on the docket: awareness/qualia. Why and how do we have it? I am not too terribly resistant to the hypothesis that it is an epiphenomenon with no causal efficacy on matter whatsoever, though I do not necessarily believe that that is true. But I have a very hard time understanding why anyone thinks it could ’emerge’ from any known properties of matter. Therefore I consider it a big mystery, and really, one drop of recalcitrant mystery, in an otherwise-explicable world, equals a recalcitrantly mysterious world. I understand a lot about parts of the world, but I consider my degree of overall, systemic-holistic understanding of the world, to be pretty much zero. I don’t understand it at all.

On the other hand I am pretty thoroughly distrustful of religious intuitions, primarily because they are easy to explain, at least within the biological context: it’s trivially easy to see how they could be fitness-enhancing.

It looks like one can already test for cystic fibrosis during gestation, by amniocentesis:
http://www.ds-health.com/prenatal.htm

And it seems to be fairly routine:
http://pregnancy.wisertogether.com/learn-from-peers.php?id=29

I don’t know whether it’s common to abort cystic fibrosis embryos, though. But I suspect so. I know it’s common with down syndrome.

I see the Constitution authors as both rationalist-liberal and traditionalist, at the same time. There’s no doubt that they were sons of the “Enlightenment” (quite the loaded “propaganda”-like term!), and there’s no doubt that they created the most “Enlightened” state to date.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt that constitutionalism by its very nature is traditionalistic. A real demos-lover like Jefferson was somewhat cool to the Constitution, and it’s pretty clear to me, considering his “Earth Belongs to the Living” writings, that this wasn’t only because he wasn’t there in person to help write it (being in France at the time as ambassador). He, in a thorough-going rationalist-optimist way, considered it absurd that “the Dead” should ever “bind the Living” in any way. If he saw any function for tradition, it was the function of preventing a “regress” to monarchy.

I think Madison, in contrast, can be seen as fearing both the rise of a monarchy on one hand, and also, on the other, the rise of an assertive demos mis-guided by demagogues. But anyway, regardless of what any of them intended, the Constitution was meant to be changed only through the fairly difficult and inhibited process of constitutional amendment. Intentionally or no, this was a fairly conservative set-up which would limit the rate of departure from the ways of the fathers, in sharp contrast to pure or half-pure democracy. It would have preserved an Enlightenment tradition, based on works that had withstood the test of at least a little bit of time (the works of Locke and Montesquieu), based on longstanding English legal traditions, and based on the inherited mores of the contemporary elites (which were not pure-democratic or populist).

The notion of an Enlightened traditionalism seems a little bit ad hoc, a bit of a mixture of contrary impulses. It therefore doesn’t seem quite rational — at least not if we assume that our ratiocinative powers are very great, and that we will accordingly err rather little in trying to apprehend and judge how rational it is, despite our experience being limited to less than one lifetime.

But of course, what they intended (and what the people of the time ratified) is not what happened. Constitutionalism failed. What they created clearly was not departed from primarily through the conservative mechanism of constitutional amendment. It was departed from mostly by other means. Our government over two centuries has been half-constitutional at best.

> I saw an awesome nature show about bamboo forests that do this

Oh yeah, I saw that too. Saw it online. I’m pretty sure it was on NOVA, so anyone can watch it for free by searching ‘rats’ or whatever at their website.

Speaking of 17-year periodicity, I wonder if the strategy of the 17-year locusts in Northern America doesn’t have some of the same significance, though it could have other functions too. (Maybe the 17-year cicadas merely have a niche where they feed on low-density foods? If not, I wonder why they have such a different strategy from cicadas with far shorter cycles — how much does glutting predators benefit you re intraspecific competition, and how much re interspecific competion against related taxa?)

Some trees also hold back their energy, producing coordinated bumper crops only once in four or more years. As with the fish, it’s “safety in numbers”: with the bumper crop they glut seed predators, who leave much of the seed lying on the ground; with spare crops they starve those predators and reduce their population. I wonder if American Indians managed to defeat this strategy by storing acorns and the like. Perhaps it’s even the case that the bumper crop / spare crop strategy was a good deal more successful, and thus more marked, before humans reached the Americas.

> unless your “originalism” is a false conceit, which his is.

Fair enough. I don’t have the knowledge of him that’d let me dispute this.

> his late-20th century social conservativism

I’d let this go, except that in context of our ‘ad hoc’ debate it seems to maybe imply that you find recent social conservatism to be ad hoc, or at least non-traditional. Maybe that’s not what you meant. But I don’t think recent social conservatism differs that much from the very old social conservatism tradition. It has merely chilled out a little bit since the days when Bostoners got all exercised the moment they noticed that a significant number of people in town weren’t going to church regularly. The tradition hasn’t really changed in essence.

Tradition itself necessarily seems somewhat ad hoc when you score it on a rationalist standard. Its validity (according to its own account) comes much more from long experience. It could even be described as empiricist as opposed to rationalist. (Which is not to deny that empirical findings play some role in liberalism too.) Traditionalism would suggest that a purely rationalist order would be great, if only the ratiocination could be carried out by a perfect mind. Traditionalism would argue that real rationalist reform, devised by real people (whose nature traditionalism is a little pessimistic about), tends, in contrast, to err to such a degree that only a rather limited rate of revision of the ways of the fathers is desirable. When change is fairly slow, there is time for errors to be corrected.

But, I hardly deny that the world has changed kind of a lot in the last two centuries. So the optimal rate of departure from the ways of the fathers is probably somewhat higher in the industrial age than it was in 1500.

x

I guess I can’t argue with referring to originalism as “originalism.” But ad hoc? Non-originalism seems a lot more ad hoc.

> Wouldn’t arguing that it is be akin to asserting that his familial environment had/has no impact on the expression of his genes?

Wearing underwear is much akin in purpose to wearing a T-shirt. Yet when I sought to take my underwear off by pulling it up over the top of my head, horrible all at once was my sorrow on that account, O my Friends and only Brothers, though I held steadfast in the attempt; yea, long indeed came the wails out of my mouth, and hot was the tear on my cheek, and none from among the many could comfort me. Him that hath ears, let him think on these solemn words.

Now, I would admit that while WWI may have looked rational in 1914 (from a certain perspective), Hitler’s little world-conquest project seems nutty. He took on a battle against a quite superior economic base – and the whole thing is even zanier when you realize that the dramatic early success of the blitzkrieg wasn’t even expected on the day when he launched the war!

But I think what happened there was very very contingent. Hitler was a probably a true wild man, a sort that comes to power not too regularly. I think there are grounds for hoping that events like this are really rare.

There’s one big upside to a massive project of conversion to nuclear energy. It would obviously cause a massive decline in consumption. But because there would be excellent investment opportunities, and a surfeit of economic action, perhaps we wouldn’t shift to a Great Depression like equilibirum of unused economic capacity. Orthodoxy seems to state that that’s what happened in the Great Depression: that regardless of whether FDR helped or hurt matters, there was a bad equilibrium where investors didn’t want to take any significant risks, because a single investor’s risk-taking won’t pay off in context of all the other investors avoiding serious activity. Bit of a collective action problem, I guess. According to my shallow knowledge, the main piece of evidence for this non-use of capacity is that consumption didn’t decline at all even when the US war economy was activated as we entered WWII. There was enough human capital and other capital sitting around that we could instantly take on the great war-project without impacting consumption. I vaguely recall, though, that there might have once been a scholar on EconTalk who challenged this notion of what happened.

I think WWI, or ” World War ‘Home by Christmas’ “, was pretty different from the future facing us. People seem to have expected it to be like one of the relatively tractable ‘Happy Age of War’ wars that came between Westphalia and 1914. And in her fear of a rising Russia, Germany had a rationale for touching off WWI — evil, yes, but still rational. Perhaps even not so terribly evil, if the forecast of a tractable war had been accurate — which of course it wasn’t.

At least, “home by Christmas” seems to be the received understanding of what people imagined in 1914. Maybe there are revisionist takes on that, I don’t know. My knowledge is still under construction.

Today, in contrast, I think it’s obvious how ultra-destructive a Sino-Western war would be. Wars between ICBM powers have thus far been limited proxy wars with really quite limited stakes in the very-grand scheme of things. I think people will be exceedingly eager not to go outside those bounds. If the oil supply runs short, it’s not inconceivable someone might try to conquer the Mideast. (Perhaps the US is already sort of doing that.) I don’t think this is just, but it’s pretty obvious that it might happen anyway. But I think that if it does, the equal powers (China, the West, and Russia sort of) will work out a plan to share the booty. Anything else would be blisteringly irrational. They can’t fight a MAD nuclear war. And they very probably can’t fight a non-proxy war where Americans and Chinese shoot at each other directly — because that risks a MAD nuclear war. I think everyone would much prefer even a terrible depression, such as might come about if there were a sudden need to convert all of civilization to nuclear energy.

One bright note is that serious, great-power wars will continue to not make any sense. I hope I won’t have to eat these words one day — we shouldn’t count on an absence of cataclysmic wars. But it’s pretty clear at least that they make no sense, even if the prize at stake were all the oil in the Mideast (our modern version of “all the tea in China”).

> They were assuming that “a rising tide would raise all boats”, but that didn’t happen.

Yeah. I’m pessimistic about the idea that comparative advantage will assure that there is always employment for the least skilled and least intelligent. And as we all know, the latter are hardly the only ones whose boat hasn’t been lifted lately. However, once China is rich in 10-15 years, some light manufacturing may move back to the West. That’s one note of optimism. The global economy will be more balanced then. Especially if India plateaus (or “chills out” to a mature ~3% growth per annum) about the same time — perhaps at an income of about US$11,000 per capita (or higher if there are big technological advanced by then).

A big question is global warming (if it’s true). The West can solve its own carbon problem (at great cost) with, at worst, nuclear power and electric vehicles. But what if China and India just don’t care that much about it? The US might have to subsidize nuclearization for them, causing great economic pain. Or maybe we will just solve the temperature problem cheaply with geoengineering — and just permit the surface ocean waters to acidify. I’m not saying I want that, but it might happen.

> Both Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman have been reconsidering their opinions of globalization. Contrary to what you might think, liberals with memories are very suspicious of the guy. He himself has said that he was living in a theoretical dream world when Bush came into office, and if the Times had known how he’d turn out, they wouldn’t have hired him.

‘The guy’ = ‘he’ = whom? And what ideas are liberals skeptical of?

Evan,
I think you are quite right. I don’t have the link, but I recall that Razib (and others) have pointed out the fact that the USA still produces a large amount of manufactured goods, especially ‘durable goods’ (long-lasting manufactured goods, as opposed to the relatively more-disposable goods that constitute a lot of China’s exports). Durable goods include things like refrigerators and washing machines.

Even steel, which is a raw manufacture rather than a final consumer product, is still produced in great volume by the US. What has declined steeply is the amount of *employment* pertaining to steel production. As this post by Cosma Shazili shows, steel is still produced roughly in ‘same as it ever was’ quantities by the US. But productivity per employee has increased a lot, and the number of employees has declined accordingly. So: a similar amount of concrete, physical goods. A much greater productivity per employee. And therefore less employment in this sector. Which is exactly as you said. I’m merely amplifying your post, not adding anything fundamental to it.

Well now, ah’d git me one them im-mune studs. Cross ‘t with thirty fly bitchiz captured from “geographically and ecologically diverse locations”. An then cross the lot of the female issue with a second immune stud, case it’s one them “polygenic traits”. An so on.
You reckon?

I truly loathe comment threading. How often, with threading, is it worth it to make sure youve seen every comment on a given post? Rarely. So, you miss some of what youd like to see.

Your blog doesnt suck

This is despite conscious attempts to shift it youngward. Thats the case recently, at least.

Actually, its true that there are some ill homeless people dying in the streets, but thats kind of a special exception to what I meant. After all the bulk of the ill ones probably includes only about two syndromes, namely major depression or light psychosis. And maybe PTSD. The other 5 zillion diseases in the world arent really much overrepresented on the mean streets.

I am pretty sure the same trope (tripe?) is used in the healthcare debate. But I am not certain, because I am not certain the real situation makes the tripe quite as tripe-ish. 
 
What I mean is that people (David Brooks) write about the “terror” of possibly getting some severe illness when you are uninsured. I’m pretty sure you have to come down to a certain threshold of wealth and income before you can receive Medicaid in the USA, but I’m sure the threshold in question would be *extremely* non-grueling by any halfway-thoughtful standard. 
 
Can anyone confirm or deny that my picture is correct? I definitely havent noticed sick people dying in the streets, but is there any odd, rare way that you would really get a raw deal — in a sense where having to live on some amount like 35k a year “just because you happened to get sick” does *not* qualify as raw?

> Social-service agencies and quasi-Marxist politicians require “hunger” to exist in America. Therefore it will be found. 
 
What we *really* need is some interminable marxist guerrillas like the FARC, then we would have a level of squalor that would need no exaggeration.

Better to keep our taboos and our laws. Not so much because of occasional one-shot inbreeding; rather because of the possibility of widespread inbreeding, or less-widespread but multi-generational inbreeding.

This just seems nutty. Is the brit tradition staving off some sort of nastiness that we are experiencing here in the states — is there an actual trade-off here, and not just in theory but in reality? 
 
What could be more fundamentally arguable than just this sort of topic? Everyone knows that disagreeing MDs and PhDs quite typically aim some serious invective at each other when their research disagrees, though usually in their own odd style. I just cant imagine carefully mincing words before daring to publish about this — or wringing my hands for a year afterward. The sociology and psychology of this sort of bunk medicine — why it still persists without evidence — are essential topics in the market of ideas. I would expect that you would need to take on every facet of the the thing polemically if you actually wanted to change the minds of some of these alt-med patients who have, in logical rigor, as little instinct as training.

> Swedes work shorter hours but are more productive per hour, and as a result earn less. I regard this as good. 
 
Not in these data, at least, which I happened to be looking at last week. From wikipedia — however these data are poorly sourced, there, from what I can tell. They are expressed at purchasing power parity.  
 
Note that Norway is a semi oil state. Remove it and the USA beats the next-best, France, by ~5%.  
 
Rank ? Country ? GDP (PPP) per hour 2008 ? 
1 United States 36.88 
2 Norway 36.38 
3 France 35.01 
4 Luxembourg 34.84 
5 Belgium 34.22 
6 Netherlands 33.69 
7 Trinidad and Tobago 32.43 
8 United Kingdom 32.10 
9 Austria 31.78 
10 Ireland 30.28 
11 Sweden 30.13 
12 Germany 29.74 
13 Finland 29.27 
14 Denmark 29.25 
15 Italy 29.14 
16 Australia 28.55 
17 Canada 27.85 
18 Switzerland 27.13 
19 Hong Kong 25.63 
20 Japan 25.56 
21 Iceland 25.29 
22 Spain 23.24 
23 Estonia 21.70 
24 Taiwan 21.53 
25 New Zealand 20.77 
26 Singapore 19.85 
27 Greece 19.69 
28 Slovenia 19.31 
29 Cyprus 18.52 
30 South Korea 18.50

I find this argument difficult.  
 
Anyway, there has also been question about why very large animals dont suffer more from cancer. Armand Leroi considers this a serious paradox and in commented in Nature News about someone’s theoretic paper on the subject. I’m not sure I believe the theory. I wonder if whales dont just form fewer significant tumors in the first place, by just spending more energy day by day on antitumor defense. But its hard to see how you would find out; youre not going to MRI a blue whale.

Yup. I usually admire (or envy) what you write toto, but TGGP is right. Hanson’s got sack, and knows biases. He also seems like he has successfully programmed himself to actually enjoy changing his mind when warranted.

Thorfinn’s point seems formidable.  
 
One thing about Berlin is that it has 50-100+ times less homeless per capita than Washington DC or Frisco/Berkeley, or even Missoula Montana. This is by my own observations. London seemed to have a lot too, but I only dropped in there for 20 hours. 
 
In Berlin I had a month U-bahn pass, and walked and rode all around all day, west and east, suburbs, everywhere, for two weeks — I only saw one homeless or begger, an old lady.  
 
I think I have heard that this difference may be due partly to the semi-PC, also rather Szasz-ish “de-institutionalization” which I have heard was done under Reagan. It was not hard to find claims about this on google, including claims that there were 5x more people institutionalized c 1950 then there are now (with near 2x as many adults here in the USA today). But I had a hard time finding people that would point at this as the cause of the difference from Berlin. Also, it seems only a minority of USA homeless are mentally ill, at least officially, which may make it harder for de-institutionalization to explain most of our difference from Berlin.  
 
NB, Berlin doesnt seem to have high cost of living, a puacity of rich people that might give away cahs, or other characteristics that might cause homeless to flee it. Far as I can tell.

What about the Yanomamo, their land is poor for farms yet its ecology is not at all spare or marginal. On the other hand, they have had light agriculture since before direct contact with europeans, and there is dispute about their hunter or agri status prior to Columbus. Are there any peoples who are like this, but with better hunter-gatherer cred? Maybe not.
Even if they have long been doing light agri, Yanomamo do have the presumably primitive group size of ~50-150. But that might not count for anything in the present considerations.
Just as a note, Yanomamo village territories are far larger than their gardens, and the site of the gardening is frequently altered. Thats why they do OK farming the Amazona soil, which is said to have few nutrients because most of them are in the rainforest vegetation.

Pretty funny, but maybe they are pulling a mercantilist move with their economic policies, as I have heard suggested in some quarters. Even if mercantilism is not beneficial normally, maybe it is beneficial when there are many rich countries in the world, and you lead the one large country that has yet to even approach its economic potential, and you are wholly liberated from the bad policies of Mao that caused this situation. Its not implausible that few would notice this possibility, because it makes no sense unless you hold the non-PC belief that China has way more economic potential than almost all other poor countries.

Frog, to clarify myself, obviously not all impractical- or apractical-seeming cultural differences are fitness-enhancing. I suspect only that some are, perhaps rather few.

Yeah, the aztec sacral torture seems like terror would be at least one of its functions. So maybe cannibalism too.

> However, analyzing culture as a selective filter of the same kind as evolutionary selection is just, well, silly. Culture transmits massively horizontally and is mutable on a second to second basis; even hypothesizing that a fitness function is optimized at that level was abandoned as unworkable
Frog, Ive felt that way sometimes too, but I’m not certain its right. Traditions were certainly more rigid in the past (though not necessarily rigid enough that you are wrong). Maybe theres even a biological reason for this, like maybe if you are not well fed you adhere to tradition more strongly.

Is there good evidence for the oft-circulated belief that medieval aristocrats were fat, rather than “overweight” or lean? Aristocrats from other societies? 
 
How about evidence that obese people today are anhedonic compared to thin people, and/or have lower general impulse control as measured by lab psychology? Do they have markers of that, such as a higher rate of drug addiction?

> Cannibalism is a controversial topic.
Yeah, about half my friends are always arguing with the other half about whether it would be cool to give it a try.
(Just kidding, I know what youre really saying.)

The de Tocque-ster says the early yanks elected great men because of the nation’s duress. Once in less peril, their anti-elitist jealousy led them to elect “a dude they could have a beer with.”

Well, I do spend more energy on biologic causes of things, because I think theyre underrated, just like non-PC beliefs. But it has to lead to some degree of bias; I believe that bias counteracts the biases of society, leading to a net bias of zero, but I could be wrong. The only way to be really objective is to spend equal effort reading both sides, otherwise you inevitably know how to “operate” the arguments of your side more skillfully even though you may be at least acquainted with all the arguments of the other side. Eventually I do hope to have more or less equal facility with both sides of all controversies on which I feel decided. 
 
Always burden of proof comes up eventually in these sort of arguments. Plausibility, absent any direct evidence, more or less equals coherence and simplicity (both taken a priori), times precedentedness. All the ideas we discussed are rather coherent and rather well precedented. Do they differ in plausiblity *enough* that a burden of proof exists? I say no, you say yes. There are actually two variables in our disagreement, both of which we might disagree upon by subtle or not-so-subtle quantitative degrees. (The first can be altered or clarified empirically, and the second cant be.) First variable, just what is the prior probability (probability based on current knowledge) of your view being correct? Second variable, what probability of your view being correct, would suffice to lay a burden of proof on all other views? Neither of us will probably be willing to state a numerical value (or a distribution of numerical values) for either of these variables, yet we go on believing that we probably have different numerical values for these variables, which are not equally justifiable. 
 
But I am still right about the whole thing, of course, despite my awareness of these nasty little niceties of epistemology — of course the values of those variables dont suffice to make your view “all but proved”, or suffice even to lay a “burden of proof” in the common sense. 
 
One precedent for the germ view, which you might not know, is interesting because the absence of a germ can cause disease, and so can its presence. This is Helicobacter pylori; it was present in virtually all people primordially and we are probably adapted to its presence. Its absence increases the odds of esophageal cancer. Its presence (rarely) causes stomach cancer and of course most cases of duodenal ulcer. Everyone has it in poor nations but it is more like 50% in rich ones. I’m not sure if this is due to hygeine; probably not, though I dont know if its ever been studied. More likely it is due to accidental eradication by antibiotic use. (If you actually want to have a high chance of eradicating it you will need a short multi-drug therapy, but the more common single-antibiotic therapies might eradicate it 10 or 30% of the time.) 
 
Of course, most antibiotics were invented in the 30s-50s, so this is not a particularly great theory for the obesity epidemic. But in principle the presence or absence of an infectious agent might still be the cause. 
 
Personally I have a moderately bad belly but I am quite unfatted otherwise, an interesting example of hormones (probably) affecting adiposity.

I’m not sure if I remembered to paste my link — here it is: 
 
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/03/tom_naughton_an.html

Spike et al, you might be interested in one of my comments on this 2blow thread — it is the sixth comment. Tom Naughton replies to me in the last comment. 
 
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/03/tom_naughton_an.html 
 
I think you can see my point. If beef and white pasta (AKA normal pasta) provoke the same insulin secretion per kilocalorie — actually, white pasta provokes *less* — then why talk about insulin, or carbs? If you simply take out potatoes, then the “carb foods” in this paper are *less* insulinogenic than the “protein foods.” As wikipedia will tell you, protein too provokes insulin secretion.  
 
Of course, one food group in that experiment *is* much more insulinogenic, and thats the sugar foods. But not the complex carb foods. 
 
Is my paper just wrong? That could certainly be. I did scrutinize it’s methods and deductions, but I havent read any other papers on the subject. 
 
You can see that Tom Naughton told me to look to *other* diet-responding hormones; he suggests that glucagon is more brought on by meats and has some anti-insulin sort of properties. But Taubes *does* focus on insulin quite a lot. I dont have his book but I have looked at one of the insulin-focused chapters online, and he does speak of it like its the real deal. But again, if this paper is right, I would lower my insulin by going from beef to white pasta, not vice versa. So if low carbs is really the thing (as opposed to low simple carbs, that is sugars), then there would seem to be no reason to mention insulin levels at all. 
 
In brief at least one of these things must be true: 
 
1. insulin doesnt matter for obesity 
2. complex carbs dont matter for obesity, only sugars do 
3. “my” paper is wrong

> Does it seem more likely to you that obesity, like broken arms, is an broad effect that can be the result of a range of causes, or that it’s a specific disease with a single cause, like smallpox? Do we really need a double-blind study to answer this question? 
 
Why is obesity necessarily more like bone breaks than it is like smallpox? It does *seem* that way, but why? Is that just superficial? Is it totally impossible that a single infectious cause could be at work in obesity, making it thus more like smallpox? Infectious disease doesnt have to be “classical”; it need not be communicable in the narrow sense at all. If everyone is infected with the agent, but it rarely causes the disease, then the disease may not be communicable at all. One type of herpes encephalitis is more or less caused by mutation in a certain immune system disease. Of course having that herpes virus is also a cause of this encephalitis, but practically everyone has it, so it *doesnt* at all cause the *difference* between the encephalitis patients and healthy normals. There are lots of examples like this, yet people still write in journals that Alzheimers, being non-communicable, could not possibly be caused by Chlamydia pneumoniae. 
 
Also, perhaps we are really talking about the epidemic, not obesity proper. An epidemic of bone breaks, where their prevalence rose say 10x over a few decades, might have a single cause, even though there are several ways bones can be broken. For example, a dictator could come to power and force everyone to play full-contact football without pads, to be executed if they lose a game. Or a new or newly-virulent infection could arise which lowers the bone density of almost everyone.  
 
 
> To put it otherwise, we know the cause of obesity with certainty: eating more calories than are burned. But there are a very large number of reasons why people will either eat too many calories or not burn enough calories. 
 
The second sentence above is what I disagree with. How do you know? People get fatter on mean after marrying, at least according to common belief, but maybe the disorder is not fatness itself, but rather a *tendency* to have an imbalanced energy flux and get fat, a tendency which is somewhat suppressible. This tendency could be scientifically well-defined, because it could theoretically be measured by experiment at any time, if we take the person and marry them off, or do something else to them that makes them suppress their tendency less than before. A bad cold causes a tendency to be inactive, but I will still go to the store if I run out of food. Or marriage might cause an obesity-causing hormonal change which is the cause of all cases of obesity; thus marriage would be just one upstream cause that leads to the “true cause.” Anti-depressants that cause obesity might also be, in all cases, upstream of the same true cause.  
 
Imbalanced energy budget might just be like the fact that the bone bends (before it breaks), thus overcoming the electrostatic affinities of its atoms. Though the bone does indeed bend, and it bends in every case, the more fundamental cause of the break is that great force was applied. Great force, too, applies in every case. This force caused the bending, and then the break. The most fundamental cause is that which is furthest upstream in the causal chain yet still applies to all cases, and still is a sine qua non for all cases.  
 
We cant really say whether such a cause exists in obesity unless we know the full causal chain for every case. Denying that such a cause could exist, at this point, is putting the cart before the horse.

> it’s even more obvious that there isn’t going to be a single factor 
 
Strong evidence for this = ? This assertion comes up a lot in disease bio, without evidence. Its perfectly plausible of course, but so is the contrary.

Heres a much longer time curve for US cars per capita. It was 0.3 in 1950. Scroll down to the graph. 
 
However, I’m not sure the automobile thing fits so great. This CDC graph makes it look like the epidemic is a creature of 1980-present. Or at least, prevalances were flat in the 60s and 70s though information from before is not given. 
 
Naturally, cars per capita is not a perfect inverse index of miles walked, let alone all low-grade high-volume exercise. Many kinds of manufacturing jobs, for example, should be an important source of such exercise. Cooking would be too low-grade to count, I suppose, or at best marginal. Construction or painting would certainly count bigtime. One could do occupational epidemiology on this; one could even combine it with dietary epidemiology to look at lower-carbing, active people, in case there might be synergic effects.

Agnostic, your claim that vegetable matter is new seems to be at variance with almost all other sources. So is your claim that game is “lean but not that lean.” Most sources typically say things like “extremely lean.” 
 
One idea about obesity which I have heard hypothesized, though I know if there is any direct evidence for or against it, is low-grade exercise. People in 1950, like everyone prior to them including hunter-gatherers, walked a great deal but didnt necessarily often “work out” at high intensity as we understand it today. Evidence for this is simply that there were only 0.41 cars per person in the USA in 1960 (data from 1950 would actually be more interesting). I understand that there is limited evidence for sustained weight loss via “exercise” (jogging, playing tennis or team sports other than baseball, or otherwise “working out”).  
 
Obviously the above might combine with an effect from carbs.

Orion, yes, I definitely dont disagree with that group mechanism you mentioned. Learning about that was one thing that moved me farther away from the religious end of agnosticism.  
 
Last time religion and fitness came up I mentioned supernatural excuses for waging war on your enemies, eg the Yanomamo. The fitness enhancement from this has a group component and an individual component. Everyone benefits, but those most prone to moral guilt and universalism benefit more. 
 
I suppose the same might apply in some non-war situations, such as divine law justifying those who have the office of punishing. Also, witchcraft allegations within societies (mostly seen between enemy societies in Yanomamo) seem to be widespread in humans.

> Religion doesn’t make sense on the individual level, because it doesn’t have a selection advantage there (in fact it may be deleterious) 
 
Ever worry bout dyin? Think there might of been a time people worried about it more?

Might the proto-ashkenazim have all gone to some particular corner of Italy in the diaspora, being or becoming a fairly elite group that christian women would marry with, even if they had to convert? In a more xenophobic time it woulda been particularly sensible for them to all move to the same place, as e.g. Hmong immigrants today all move to Minnesota and Detroit. And naturally high-Openness cosmopolitan elites would be more likely to move to the enemy homeland, and would perhaps ease the conversion of gentile wives by tolerating a measure of christian syncretism. The fall of the empire might turn them more conservative, making them cleave to their faith and, importantly, endogamy, in a millieu that would have become more particularist and more volatile.  
 
I dont know much history of the empire, so I cant really judge this idea as plausible or implausible.

toto, I would guess people just didnt quite see it. They would think of “scurrilous Persian customs infecting Alexander” or “terrible western ideas going around” but not necessarily think of the memes evolving, maybe? 
 
And then, you think of great thinkers or artists being influenced by older ideas, and changing them. They definitely evolve and who could doubt that. Yet one is focused on the thinkers themselves as agents, one would perhaps not see them as hosts, or think see that the ideas are “the same” through their changes, preserved over all the changes, as we are presumably “the same” as some african erectines by virtue of them being on our lineage, we just happen to not be identical to them anymore.  
 
One thing thats disanalogous to “real” evolution, and may make the analogy hard to see, is that ideas can recombine outside their “species” and outside their genus, family, order. Aspects of marxism (universalist on its own terms) can combine with localism and traditionalism. The aesthetic classicism of Goethe can form part of the classicalist strand in german fascism via Nietzsche, and turn back from politics into art as an influence (passing through the barrel of a gun) on nazi-era fine painting. Art (and “science”) follow political ideas also in the case of bolshevism. In these things there are no sound taxa, at least no monophyletic ones. Naturally you are aware of all this but my point is that it could have obscured the analogy in times prior to Dawkins.

> There is something unnatural about having rule against touching cute, furry things.
It might sometimes be partly about giving people a stupid rule just to see who will break it and who will follow it.

David, what Toto says applies not only to tumors, though, but also to microbes – which of course have lineages that go on indefinitely. Cooperation between clonal cells or virions with almost perfect sequence identity has been put forward as a group-selected trait. Like Toto, I blush to hear such things because it just seems totally obvious that this is kin selection.  
 
At any rate, I see Toto’s cancer example as valid, anyway. Most tumors may not live very long, but our lineages won’t last forever either. I don’t see a qualitative difference.

This is priceless:
“I think this is a really relevant convention,” CU alumnus and metaphysical student Matt Chambers said.
It sounds just like something someone would say at a super-hip Silicon Valley trade show.

JSJ, who knows, but I would imagine this person probably became mildly organically psychotic. Chasing psychic healers of the fair sex could reflect prodromal abnormalities, even if he wasn’t full blown at that moment.

Ig, negatory. Protein was the more popular option prior to Oswald Avery’s experiment in ’44.
DNA was widely considered too simple in structure to provide the genetic code. This was really pretty daft. Today I doubt this would happen because we are so cognizant that all objective information can be expressed using only two symbols.
I seem to recall that Avery’s result using bacterial transformation was not highly convincing to all people, and that the Hershey-Chase phage experiment in ’52 was important in making Avery’s finding into a universal assumption. This experiment showed that T2 phage infected E coli using only DNA. The phage virion also contains protein, which remains non-covalently bound to the outer surface of the bacterium, and could be sheared off by Hershey and Chase using a kitchen blender to generate strong fluid turbulance.

To my taste, one of the most convincing things in psychometrica is the relationship of /g/ to the complexity, and speed of resolution, of EEG waveforms evoked by banal stimuli such as repeated clicking sounds. As discussed in Jensen’s book. As I recall, they do something like 120 clicks over two minutes. You can stop consciously reacting to the clicks, of course, but obviously your brain continues to react every time, in order to provide (do?) the aural qualia, and decide subconsciously that the salience of the stimulus is low.
Higher /g/ people have a more complex waveform that resolves faster. This finding is very like the /g/-related morphological white matter differences on MRI – but cooler.
Awfully tempting is the proposal that there is noise and error, on a neural level, when you try to think, which is amplified as the thought unfolds by structural imperfections detracting from /g/ (mildly deleterious mutations?). Some wrong neurons fire, and the error propagates. And if you are not smart enough to think that particular thought, the noise overwhelms the signal while you are trying to go through with it.