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Been too busy to read much, but Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, is out. I have read a little bit of Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy. A touch too over-dramatic and credulous in regards to colorful legends for my taste so far to be frank.
Two Neandertal preprints you might want to check out, The Strength of Selection Against Neanderthal Introgression and The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. If you haven’t checked out DNA.land, you should. Though not totally clear how it’s much different from openSNP.
Nathan Taylor has a post up, Homo naledi and the braided stream of humanity. It’s miscegenation all the way down. I can agree with it in its broadest strokes. On Facebook I posted a link to some stuff about selection for height in Europe, and a reader asked “what does this mean for white people?” My simple response was nothing, because for much of this period people who we would recognize as white didn’t really exist. The ancestral genetic elements which combine to produce most of the population of Europe did not cohere together into one population until ~4,000 years ago, give or take. And, the most recent data suggest that the pigmentation loci which result in the typical light complexion of Northern Europeans did not arrive at their current allele frequencies until sometime after this period.
This isn’t to make Europeans special. I think this sort of reality probably holds for most of the major world populations. A recent paper on the Ainu seem to confirm that they’re relatively basal in relation to other East Asian populations. My own suspicion though is that this is simply because a lot of groups were absorbed or demographically marginalized by expanding groups of farmers from the region between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers.
Halloween was fun. But boy is it way more regimented than when I was a kid. Trick-or-treating at stores in the afternoon and very early evening downtown seems to be edging out the old traversing blocks at night.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I hesitated to take that one. Your link to Amazon leads to the Kindle edition, which I can’t take (as I get ebooks from amazon.fr, not .com), and going to the hardcover edition seems to lose the sponsoring, otherwise I would have already purchased it.
I should be interested in some more discussion regarding your trick or treat experience. My daughters are in their forties, so I haven’t been trick or treating since the 70’s. Back then a parent would accompany those younger than say 6, and the older children would form packs of friends to loot the neighborhood. The looting didn’t start until it was really dark. That’s how I remember my trick or treats during the early 50’s. PS. The worst tricks were soap on car windows.
In discussing child raising with a Polish immigrant colleague (a mother) a few years ago, she commented about how regimented childhood was in America. She is a professional on an engineering faculty and lives in an upper class neighborhood (upper class by DOL defs. top 10%). In Poland, children had the same free range experience I had in rural Massachusetts.
The term “Yangzi River” feels a little funny to me. It looks like a product of the idea that for “oppressed cultures”, we have a responsibility to use their names for themselves (I don’t see a big movement to rename Germany). So “yangzi” “corrects” the old yang-tze to the more current hanyu pinyin which is generally used to transcribe chinese into the latin alphabet today (the chinese itself hasn’t changed).
But the actual chinese term for the river is something totally different — Chang Jiang (“the Long River”). It feels weird to wage a renaming campaign to change the english name of the river “to better reflect chinese” without actually referring to the chinese name at all. :/
as a point of fact, if you switched to the hardcover during that session i’d get some referral fees, if that’s what you were alluding to. not that it matters.
But the actual chinese term for the river is something totally different -- Chang Jiang ("the Long River"). It feels weird to wage a renaming campaign to change the english name of the river "to better reflect chinese" without actually referring to the chinese name at all. :/Replies: @Razib Khan
most of us don’t know chinese. i mean, i see your point. but i’m not going to right misr instead of egypt!
About the archaic admixture article. It states that species separated 4 million years can still interbreed. But aren’t there a number of papers showing that Neanderthal admixture could possibly cause fertility issues?
hybrid depression isn’t a 1/0 effect. in any case, the 4 million year varies by taxon. in mammals invasive vs. non-invasive placenta matter. in plants u can cross tens of millions of years.
I am about halfway through “The Secret of our Success” and am greatly enjoying it. Culture is surely the most notable item in the last frontier of topics yet to be well explained by science. Seeing Joe Henrich take a crack at it makes me think that its days in that frontier are numbered.
Henrich starts with the proposition that nobody, even modern hunter-gatherers in Africa living in the very environment where our species evolved, could survive long without the cultural armor that has allowed their society to make effective use of its environment. (As he sardonically puts it, “If not for surviving as hunter-gatherers in Africa, what is our species good for?”) Simply putting even highly motivated people (e.g. lost European explorers) in an environment quite unfamiliar to them shows this clearly. From this well-articulated idea that cultural learning is the only thing now keeping our species going, Henrich develops ideas about how it has shaped our evolution for at least the past million years–from our eyes and throats to sweat glands, arm shape, and Achilles’ heels. Our leaning on culture has also pushed us to seek out “prestigious” individuals who are deep in knowledge–Henrich believes that prestige is a form of social status that is unique to our species, which exists alongside dominance, which we inherited from our ape ancestors. This means our vaunted intellect is actually more intended for being good at picking up and storing information learned from others–the human mind is no disembodied reasoner, explaining why humans so easily fall prey to various logical fallacies and make irrational decisions (Henrich leaves various comments implying he has a beef with economists on this front).
Another refreshing thing about the book is the lack of bad ideas or time wasted taking potshots in eternal academic debates. Henrich has no problem admitting high rates of warfare among hunter-gatherers, that both learning and genes work together to create phenotypes that can reproduce themselves, that modern small-scale societies are at best a highly imperfect guide to the Paleolithic, and so on. He has clearly constructed his theories such that they need not change much depending on which side of such debates turns out to be more true.
There are fewer surprises here if you have followed the cultural evolution literature for the last few years (especially Henrich’s own academic papers, to which he refers extensively), but this is the single best book for exploring the most important things that that literature has to say about our species and its evolution. Most of the previous books released concerning CE (such as “Cultural Evolution” by Mesoudi) have been about elucidating the techniques used by the researchers as opposed to building large theories about the importance of culture. Therefore, “The Secret of our Success” should be seen as a milestone of the field.
I hope you’ll read and review it soon, Razib!
The Domesday Book of 1086 records 36 deer parks in England and many more were built later. There are some parks, like Windsor, established by Wilhelm the Conqueror, that have had deer in them for almost a thousand years. Windsor Park is more like a forest, but deer parks were much smaller meaning that deer lived in closer quarters with humans.
I wonder at which point animals living in this kind of managed conditions could be called domesticated?
The fallow deer I’ve seen in Richmond Park were pretty indifferent to my presence and the cars passing nearby, so some taming took place. Given that they are isolated from other populations there should be some genetic drifting as well.
Are you able to see this taming in their genome by comparing their genes with that of fallow deer living in the wild ?
Razib,
This is more of a personal political question that I wonder if you would be willing to divulge your viewpoint. Steve Sailer has sometimes suggested that due to irrevocable HBD principles, the hereditary intelligent group in a society should, as a whole, be obligated to act in a noblisse oblige fashion towards their less intelligent counterparts, i.e. such as creating universal healthcare. What are your thoughts on the logic behind that? Do you agree or disagree with that assumption?
This is more of a personal political question that I wonder if you would be willing to divulge your viewpoint. Steve Sailer has sometimes suggested that due to irrevocable HBD principles, the hereditary intelligent group in a society should, as a whole, be obligated to act in a noblisse oblige fashion towards their less intelligent counterparts, i.e. such as creating universal healthcare. What are your thoughts on the logic behind that? Do you agree or disagree with that assumption?Replies: @Razib Khan
i don’t know if that view has anything necessarily to HBD. simple rawlsian logic works with that. i don’t have a major issue with universal health care in principle.
I live in a nice suburb near Oakland. We got a *lot* of kids trick-or-treating. My wife took our daughters (ages 6 & 8½) around; I handed out candy. In past years, and to some extent this year, there were parents bringing their kids from Oakland to trick-or-treat in our city. A friend of mine in a sketchy part of Vallejo reported zero kids all night, but people in safer areas (other than near UC Berkeley campus) reported lots. Most of the kids that came to my door were between 6 and 14, but there were some older kids (and a few who might have been over 18), and early in the evening, lots of little kids.
The tricks are gone – they were dying out when I was a kid in what became the 925 in the late 70s and early 80s. People either hand out candy, or they turn out their lights and don’t answer the door. Kids don’t hassle people who turn out the lights.
Costumes are better than when I was a kid, and often the parents get involved, even as they wait at the sidewalk while the kids come up the stairs to the door. Some store-bought costumes, but some really creative, high-effort ones, too, and everything in-between. Very few “sexy” costumes – I think those are more for parties.
One change I’ve noticed is that everyone buys a mix of candies, and usually lets the kids pick which ones they want. When I was a kid, most people bought a bunch of one kind, or changed candy when one ran out.