Open Thread, 5/17/2014
RSS
Search Text Case Sensitive Exact Words Include Comments
List of Bookmarks
Probably going to take a reader survey soon. Seems like I’ll have to build up a ‘casual’ reader base again since I moved from Discover, though the core has stayed….
Follow @razibkhan
• Category: Science • Tags: Open Thread
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCYcHz2k5x0&feature=youtu.be
Everyone needs to listen to this on repeat and stare at the wall – after a while you get some good daydreams.
Question for Razib: how to you view other humans? Do you view them as robot-like beings who don’t know that they have no free will and can’t escape their genetic profile or do you see them as more “human” than that?
Razib, I was wondering if you had any book recommendations on Islamic history in the last 500-800 years. I am particularly interested in learning about how the Islamic world fell into its current (frankly) backward state. Pretty much all I’ve found are very simplistic or highly politicized explanations. Could you tell me of anything good you’ve found?
So I thought I had posted this before but it didn’t show up, I meant to put it on one of your open threads. I’ve got a proposal for something that ought to be seriously studied. I had a couple ideas about human behavior that have not been examined in the relevant literature but one is clearly most compelling. It’s actually shocking given how extraordinarily commonplace this behavioural distinction seems to be in human. The trait would be mouthbreathing.
As in, all the obvious evidence indicates that mouthbreathing must be an innate biological trait much like handedness or sexuality. Furthermore the most probable cause by far is likewise genetics rather than the alternative hypotheses of hormonal/developmental/epigenetics/disease and toxins/something else for these traits.
It’s such a clear thing that could be looked into by geneticists, as nowadays we have the DNA sequencing tools and an attempt to find a “gene for mouthbreathing,” a plausible result, could be undertaken immediately. Unfortunately, nobody has surveyed people or made phenotypic observations on any genetic dataset I know of so maybe an effort would have to start mostly from scratch. In the general literature, despite countless potential medical science results that could follow, there doesn’t seem to be much prior work on the topic at all. Of course there’s dentistry but only studied in the sense of domain specific medical treatment, unusual conditions, and it is hard to get even any good information on general population prevalence, even entirely unconnected to genetics or evolution.
There is only a little general population research out there, things like this in Portuguese, for goodness’ sake!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20414610
At least with this study one can reinforce the message that’s so clear it could be emblazoned by the gods on a mountainside, from the proportions by gender. Completely not a learned or cultural trait.
What’s also very interesting is that what everyone thinks they know points to mouthbreathing being at clearly different commonness between population groups. For one thing, as colloquially discussed it seems to me almost entirely a class and cultural distinction and really only pointed out about white people. Admittedly that’s not against would be expected, because even a culturally manufactured stereotype might avoid uncomfortable discussions on race regardless of the actual underlying distribution of a trait. It could be that the trait really is endemic to ancestral white European or at least Western Eurasians populations, a nonobvious but significant hypothesis, if non-mouthbreathers were the ones out of Africa a mutation had to arise somewhere. Several nice-sounding hypotheses are almost certainly wrong, it probably was not a trait that evolved tens of thousands of years ago among some hunter gatherers but then stagnated with no further selection to maintain split levels among modern populations. A good study might find there is either a RAO divide or there isn’t, and conventional wisdom is wrong about non-mouthbreathers as a cultural thing in either case. For population differences there is basically no real scientific data for us to work with yet. This needs to be looked into!
It seems possible to me that non-mouthbreathers don’t actually exist the way people think about them. Maybe all children are the same way and we haven’t been observant enough. Given universal commensense biology constraints, all humans share the same respiratory system, and of course people breathe through their mouths when they have to regardless. Put any modern people under strenuous exercise conditions like on a soccer field and they seem to all breathe with the same function. It could just be humans really do share the same trait from ancient hunter gatherers and recent cultural superstitions only distorted that. Folk wisdom counts for nothing, as with this issue it’s just as with left-handed children who even not that long ago were punished and forced to used their right hands anyway. That’s given the lack of studies outside of abnormal medical contexts, social desirability bias and deluded, unobjective self-reporting by laypeople. Though if we are certain that both mouthbreathers and non-mouthbreathers do exist, granted the most likely scenario, (and even internet anecdotes here help, informal survey could establish a consensus) looking for the genetic difference between the two groups would be noteworthy. And if it turns out the non-mouthbreathers have the derived and not ancestral gene(s), still all the better and amazing to actually find out. (That would be enormously interesting for the study of other traits like human noses and sexual selection hypotheses.)
A host of possible gene complex relationships could exist and we don’t even know which ancestral populations might clearly share an allele. There’s the small but real chance a specific genetic variant could be readily found. Again, shocking that mouthbreating as a behavior isn’t studied when evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have looked at, say, human altitude adaptations in known populations like Peruvian Indians and Tibetians, including nasal structure. Yet when huge proportions of at least some population groups of humans display a different behaviour in breathing, not just morphology, we have a blank canvas.
Razib,
I’ve been following the painfully dull debate over the scientific validity of the term “race”, which seems to me to be an endless and undecidable time waster. However, I really respect you and admire your blog, so I thought I might run a two thoughts I had by you.
The first is that in the United States and Canada races might have much better defined biological groupings, because the main racial populations come from a couple widely separated locations. These would be Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia (not counting whatever “Hispanics” are). Since relatively small numbers come from Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, we do not see any kind of smooth natural “spectrum” you would see back in the old world, which developed over millennia. Of course there are admixtures here, but these are still typically mixes from previously very genetically separate populations. The result of this is that there are indeed natural discontinuities between racial groupings in the US.
The second is that, since most social constructionists have already ceded the point that genotype varies significantly throughout the world (as a “spectrum”), this means that they implicitly accept that biology matters when discussing “race”. To see this, we must entertain for a moment that race is indeed a construct with no (significant) biological meaning, and was falsely crafted from the natural “spectrum” of humanity. We then decide that we would attempt to “fix” this unjust and oppressive grouping by redistribution of wealth and privilege. However, how would we then know where the natural average of the arbitrarily chosen grouping (“race”) would lie? We would have to consult the natural spectrum of variation in traits which would take genetics!
Let me know what you think of these two ideas, and please point me to resources if you know they have already been studied by others. Thanks!
So the replication of Shih et al. on stereotype threat is out. They had samples of Asian women and primed either nothing, Asian identity or female identity, with the predicted means in a math task being F < N < A.
I don't know what to call it – they did two studies, because a reviewer suggested a (to me implausible) moderator, but both were underpowered when using the effect sizes from meta-analysis (see my original comment http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/07/open-thread-7142013/#comment-963102975).
Unfortunately the authors don't acknowledge this but simply call their replication high-powered (their sample is rougly three times the size of the original study which itself can only be called a fishing expedition).
So, the first study sort of replicated it, but it's not resounding (ie. effects are small if anything, a lot of people were not aware of the relevant stereotypes and the manipulation did not produce conscious effects), the second one does not replicate the original results. They did not do a mini-meta-analysis.
What do you say? The papers are available here:
https://osf.io/e4nxu/
scroll to Gibson et al. and Moon & Roeder (right after).
We might also want to wait for the rejoinders and comments: https://twitter.com/lakens/status/468433279730081792
There is also a study in there that doesn’t replicate subtle stereotype activation primes (i.e. this study). By and large social psychology looks to be in a sorry state.
what do you judge i owe you? have some meetings today so can’t look right now.
Have you read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood? I know you’re crazy busy, but it’s sort of a genetics/surveillance state horror story.
It captures the sense of future America fracturing into gated compound fiefdoms, protected by the totalitarian police state. Reminiscent of the survivors in Dawn of the Dead, stuck in the shopping mall – the protagonists are sequestered in the Compounds, afraid to venture out into the increasingly terrifying Plebelands.
As the real world revelations unfolded, they translated into increasing surveillance and dread in Atwood’s second and third books. Everything is being watched. Kinda like when Greenwald had to leave his phone in the other room because the NSA could switch it on remotely.
@Yudi
It is difficult to find a good, reasonable brief, comprehensive global history. Most good treatments are specific to a single region and/or a single historical era.
If your interest is primarily in the fall, rather than the rise, you can cut your research scope in half and start sometime around the 17th century in early colonial India. The story through the 16th century or so is one of expansion and consolidation, albeit with gradual balkanization. The Islamic world was more “advanced” than Europe at least until the Renaissance which received a fair amount of classical scholarship through Islamic sources.
The Ottoman Empire’s decline really doesn’t pick up in earnest until about the mid-19th century, however, and a lot of current Middle Eastern politics can be summed up as the ongoing process of Ottoman succession in the wake of the final dismantling of that empire after WWI.
Do you view them as robot-like beings who don’t know that they have no free will and can’t escape their genetic profile or do you see them as more “human” than that?
more human. but probably spend less time viewing other humans than the normal human.
Pretty much all I’ve found are very simplistic or highly politicized explanations.
yes, pretty much. the only thing you can do is read widely and be able to develop your own sensors for that sort of thing. you can find the good out of the bad that way.
The first is that in the United States and Canada races might have much better defined biological groupings, because the main racial populations come from a couple widely separated locations.
basically.
Since relatively small numbers come from Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, we do not see any kind of smooth natural “spectrum” you would see back in the old world, which developed over millennia.
but really i don’t think there’s a smooth spectrum. i.e., i’m not a clinalist. the zone around india shifts to east asian genes and phenotypes pretty quickly. the sahara serves as a major break. yes, there are in-between populations, but aside from the horn of africa they are very very thin in numbers (tuareg to fulani).
since most social constructionists have already ceded the point that genotype varies significantly throughout the world
i don’t grant they have. most of them confuse low-medium Fst, and also think that only .1% of the variance is between races, etc. etc.
Have you read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood?
no. i’ll check it out.
The Islamic world was more “advanced” than Europe at least until the Renaissance which received a fair amount of classical scholarship through Islamic sources.
i disagree with this. it seems likely that parity of some sort was probably attained by the 1200s and the aristotelian renaissance and the smashing of the mashriq world by the mongols.
also, the transmission of classical scholarship through the islamic world was significant, but it neglects the fact that *humanistic* ancient wisdom is mostly due to byzantine transmission which arrived in italy. english-speaking sources emphasize the stuff that went to france (paris) via spain, and therefore muslims.
I might be mistaken, but I’ve a vague and hazy recollection of a comment you left on your old blog years ago. If I’m remembering it is correctly, and I might not be and could be plain wrong here in my recollection, you mentioned there was a research team that was pressured to shut down because the planned work was geared toward investigating the intersection of race, crime and genetics, or it was just just crime and genetics. Do you have any recollection of this or what that situation was about?
Best,
just genetics and crime. this field has come and gone a few times, usually ushered out by political winds. i can’t find the post, but it linked to an article about it.
“more human. but probably spend less time viewing other humans than the normal human.”
interesting, maybe it’s context based. i’d bet of you spent more time around avg./dumb people like me you’d notice our robotic nature more. could be that i’m biased but most seem so base level and predictable it’s scary. guess the smart have a way of transcending or masking those restrictions better. better at abstract thinking…
“Avoid boring people.” – Jason Derulo
Since this is an “Opean Thread”, I think this is the best place to post this. My friend just did an MDS plot, and I think the output is pretty cool:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vEDdpZDjUpWU81Z3pEMUdyeEE/edit?usp=sharing