Gene Expression

Berlin & butt rock  permlink

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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:00 AM • 0 Comments

Inequality & institutions  permlink

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Tom Rees, Income inequality drives church attendance:

...we find that attendance rates are particularly high in countries with more socioeconomic inequalities and fewer social welfare expenditure. This effect equally applies to both poor and rich people, which is in line with the idea that because of economic mobility and the possibility of unemployment in the (nearby) future also the more affluent population feels more insecure in countries with more inequalities and without a well-developed social welfare system.

We also see that people with a lower income and who are unemployed attend religious meetings more often, and we find an enduring effect of growing up in times of war. In summary, the results of our study suggest that personal and societal insecurities play a crucial role in explaining cross-national variation in religious attendance.

This isn't too surprising of a finding, it has cropped up elsewhere. It offers up avenues for naive theorizing about how the welfare state serves as a substitute for organized religion. As Tom notes institutional affiliation & attendance does not track religious belief perfectly; there is a tendency in many societies for those of higher socioeconomic status to exhibit more fidelity in terms of religious attendance & affiliation, but less in belief.

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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:37 AM • 3 Comments

John McWhorter on the Behe incident  permlink

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He addresses the Behe diavlog. Sort of. McWhorter states that he did not find the rebuttals to the arguments in Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution persuasive. Fair enough, but I would be curious as to what other books on evolution he has read (I think he mentioned Sean Carroll?). The math in something like John Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics is really not that hard (mostly algebra). One of the major problems I have with intelligent, open-minded people, who have looked into the "debate" and are not convinced about evolution is that they know the terms of the "argument" only in the context of responses to the talking points of the antagonists of evolutionary biology. The primary literature in the field is rich, and at the most basic level rather accessible. It would be as if one's knowledge of quantum physics was constrained by the lines of response to the nonsense in What the Bleep Do We Know!?.

Posted by Razib Khan at 2:44 AM • 7 Comments

Watch what you depict!  permlink

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No Islamic Landmarks Were Harmed in the Making of '2012' (via Unreligious Right):

The trailer for 2012 plays like a highlight reel of civilization falling apart all over the world, but it's religion that gets the brunt of Emmerich's digital pounding: A Buddhist temple gets hit by a tidal wave. The Sistine Chapel crumbles to pieces as a split tears right down the middle of Michelangeo's painting of God touching Adam's finger. St. Peter's Basilica rolls over onto a crowd of devoted worshipers. Rio de Janeiro's iconic Christ the Reedemer statue falls to earth as its wracked by shockwaves. The White House is even crushed by, of all things, an aircraft carrier. But eagle eyed fans of watching organized religion get its disaster porn comeuppance will have noticed that there are no Islamic landmarks on the CGI chopping block.

That wasn't always the plan, however. Emmerich explained to SCI FI Wire that he had originally hoped the Kaaba, one of the holiest sites in the Islamic religion, would join the visual wrath of 2012, but that his co-screenwriter Harald Kloser talked him out of it:

"Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit ... but my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element anyway in the film, so I kind of left it out."

Some of this is probably corporate concerns for distribution. Controversy and blasphemy of Christianity can result in more publicity and sales in Western countries. But in much of the world forbidden content might result in the banning of a film. Roland Emmerich does make really bad films, so I oppose censorship in this case out of principle and not pragmatism.

In other news, Arabs think the Arab world sucks* (Turks and Persians think their nations are crappy too):

Interestingly, Middle Eastern countries aren't that bad on the Human Development Index. Compare & contrast with Africa & South Asia for example. I wonder if the Asian satisfaction with where their live has to do with the perception that the 21st century is going to be the "Asian century."

* Though if you click through, you will note that many Muslims (and presumably Asians) would like to move to Saudi Arabia.

Posted by Razib Khan at 3:40 PM • 14 Comments

Unitary mindfulness in collective action  permlink

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In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated:

... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning variance between and within groups on cultural traits often shows far greater between group differences; consider variance in speech, within a tribe there are slight variations, but between tribes the accent variation may be strong enough to accurately assign any individual to the correct tribe by speech alone.

Additionally, in the comments Jason Malloy observes:

Altruistic people are cooperative, and being cooperative can lead to more children in a social species for a variety of reasons (e.g., religious people have more children and donate more to charity in the modern US).

Altruism is best understood in terms of individual differences within a population and evolutionary stable strategies. Clearly individuals differ in their pro-social tendencies, and the relative frequency of pro-social people within a population can shift given different conditions. I'm sure there are some environments where it's reproductively advantageous for 90% of people to be sociopaths.

As I noted the biggest problem for biological group selection is that groups are clumsy & lumbering organisms in an evolutionary sense. They don't reproduce fast, and may not exhibit enough distinctiveness to become a coherent unit of selection. Multicellular organisms face the problem of being slow to respond to evolutionary pressures in relation to their pathogens, ergo, sex. The nature of sexual process is also essential in mediating intragenomic competition and conflicts, the details of which serve as the core of Mark Ridley's book The Cooperative Gene.

Shifting the focus to human social entities, anyone who has worked in a large corporation can tell plenty of stories of how organizations fragment in interests on the level of subsidiaries, working groups and individuals. Nevertheless, corporations have become very common, and firms are able to coordinate collective action so as to flourish and succeed, at least for a time (like organisms, it does seem to me that firms grow, mature and eventually decline due to institutional sclerosis).

A recent paper in PNAS outlines the formal and empirical case for why group-level selection as a biological phenomenon for humans is likely far rarer than as a cultural dynamic. Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality:

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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:39 AM • 6 Comments

Democracy & Creationism in Turkey  permlink

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Another article on Creationism in Turkey:

To John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, however, the news could hardly be more encouraging.

"Why I'm so interested in seeing creationism succeed in Turkey is that evolution is an evil concept that has done such damage to society," said Morris, a Christian who has led several searches for Noah's Ark in eastern Turkey. Members of his group have addressed Turkish conferences numerous times.

...

After a decade in the trenches, Kence said he believes aggressive creationism "is part of a larger plan to convert people to a more conservative Islam."

The Islamic-oriented government, elected in 2002 and reelected in 2007, has telegraphed its views on evolution by adding doses of creationism to a required public school course on "Religion and Morals," proponents of evolution say. This year, the editor of one of the nation's prominent science journals, Science and Technology, was fired by government officials over her magazine's plans to put Darwin on its cover.

Without more longitudinal data it is hard to say, but I think this is wrong to view this a renaissance of Creationism driven purely by the government or outsiders. Turkey isn't becoming more religious, the majority of Turks who have always held to Islam as it is practiced in most of the Muslim world are becoming more assertive at the expense of the secular elite. Kemal Ataturk was an autocrat who leveraged his incredible victories against European powers in the wake of Word War I, which preserved the Turkish state from being cannibalized, into enough personal authority to wage a one man culture-war in which he was mostly victorious. But he's been dead for 70 years.

Americans should not be surprised at democratization shifting a political culture toward more religiosity. In the American republic expansion of suffrage to all white males resulted in a more evangelical religious political class. It is likely that the first five American presidents, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe would not be considered Christians by the American public today because of their personal beliefs (or lack thereof).* In many nations the anti-clerical and laicist faction tends draw strength from a segment of the elite which perceives itself as progressive or liberal in thought, at least before more widespread secularization percolates across the society.

* This is not to say that they themselves would have viewed themselves as non-Christians. John Adams for example was a Unitarian Christian in good standing. Thomas Jefferson seems have been the most personally dismissive of the claims orthodox Christianity, but he surely considered himself Christian insofar as he espoused the ethical message of the Christian gospels.

Posted by Razib Khan at 1:43 AM • 4 Comments

What does not kill the group, makes it stronger!  permlink

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I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth across generations in various societies. But in this case what is more relevant was a paper that Bowles published in Science last spring, Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?:

Since Darwin, intergroup hostilities have figured prominently in explanations of the evolution of human social behavior. Yet whether ancestral humans were largely "peaceful" or "warlike" remains controversial. I ask a more precise question: If more cooperative groups were more likely to prevail in conflicts with other groups, was the level of intergroup violence sufficient to influence the evolution of human social behavior? Using a model of the evolutionary impact of between-group competition and a new data set that combines archaeological evidence on causes of death during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene with ethnographic and historical reports on hunter-gatherer populations, I find that the estimated level of mortality in intergroup conflicts would have had substantial effects, allowing the proliferation of group-beneficial behaviors that were quite costly to the individual altruist.

The thesis presented in this paper is essential to The Faith Instinct because a central assertion in that book is that religious behavior emerged as an evolved trait in the context of intergroup competition. In short, war among hunter-gatherers. But let us set aside the relatively controversial issue of the evolution of religion, and focus on group selection among humans, and its possible role in the emergence of the trait of altruism.

David Sloan Wilson, who just recently joined ScienceBlogs, has written extensively on the topic of group selection (or, multilevel selection, though I will use the term group selection because that is what Bowles uses). It is a controversial topic in the context of evolutionary biology. The short sketch is that naive variants of group selection were in vogue until the 1960s, when a new wave of theorists tore down its theoretical basis and offered up alternative processes to explain social behavior. In more recent years David Sloan Wilson has been leading a campaign to return group selection, or more generally multilevel selection, to respectability. Others have always "kept the faith," but only begun to speak up more forcefully in its defense recently. Why only recently? In part because skeptics of selection above the level of the individual have always assented to its theoretical possibility, but diminished the likelihood of its realized probability. With the fleshing out of some empirical data which makes that probability more than speculation, the theoretical window for group selection may translate into something more substantive.

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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:34 AM • 10 Comments

Katz  permlink

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Posted by Razib Khan at 12:38 PM • 0 Comments

Best paper title I've seen in a while  permlink

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Cooperation and individuality among man-eating lions.

Posted by Razib Khan at 3:58 PM • 3 Comments

To crush your enemies, and steal their cattle for your sons!  permlink

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As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring.

To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents. Obviously you have to take into account sex, but if you use standard deviation units and control for gender it works fine. There is a close relationship here between the axes, though it is not perfect. In modern developed societies the heritability of height is ~0.8-0.9. That means that 80-90% of the variance of the trait within the population can be explained by the variance in genes within the population. On an individual level this would result a relatively good correspondence between parental and offspring heights. In terms of the scatterplot, as heritability approaches 1, the slope converges upon 1. As heritability approaches 0, the slope approaches zero. This makes graphical sense, insofar as slope of 0 indicates no ability to predict the value of Y (children) from X. It's just random noise.

Of course there is the problem of confounds in these sorts of studies. One has to control for environmental effects, interactions and correlations. The paper that I would like to put a spotlight on in fact focuses on these issues, and not so much on genetics, except in passing. But the general formalisms resemble those of quantitative genetics, and the issue under examination is heritability of wealth, and therefore the variance in well-being across generations which persists.

To the paper, Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies:

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Posted by Razib Khan at 10:49 AM • 6 Comments

William Gunn is looking for another job  permlink

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Early (2002) reader of Gene Expression, William Gunn, is leaving a biotech company in San Diego and is looking for another job. Here's his Linkedin.

Posted by Razib Khan at 12:52 AM • 0 Comments

Against multiculturalism (multireligionism)  permlink

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I rarely post much political commentary here, because it would add little value as I have nothing distinctive to say in that domain. At Secular Right I am wont to do data analysis because I think data is something that needs to be injected into political discussions and commentary. But in any case, today I put up an essay, Religious diversity & its discontents. In it I make clear my distaste for multiculturalism, so if you are a reader who would find such opinions to your distaste, I invite you not to click! My own opinion is that multiculturalism as it is presented is not a noble lie, but a silly one.

Posted by Razib Khan at 3:12 AM • 30 Comments

Andrew Gelman's "Applied Statistics"  permlink

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Andrew Gelman has started a new blog at ScienceBlogs, Applied Statistics. Someone should design him a header, perhaps a fancified Bayes' theorem?

Posted by Razib Khan at 8:01 PM • 3 Comments

Mosque offended by alcohol & roast pig...in New York City  permlink

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Spotted Piglet Hiccups: Boozy Breslin Clashes With Mosque:

The much-hyped, soon-to-open Breslin restaurant, situated in the 12-story Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th, is giving members of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street some agita. "Five times a day, there's a hundred cabs on the street--the good news is you can always get a cab," co-owner Ken Friedman told the Transom the other evening. He said some mosque visitors "object to seeing people drink alcohol."

After the recent FergusStock, a festival during which famed British chef Fergus Henderson cooked whole pigs for a rapt crowd of New York chefs and foodies, Mr. Friedman said the mosque's leaders called a meeting with the hotel. "They said, 'Can you move the bar?'" he said. "And I laughed. And the guy said, 'Oh, you think that's funny?' And I said, 'Yeah, that is funny, that is really funny, because we're not going to move the bar just because you discovered we're serving booze.' Can you name one restaurant in New York that doesn't serve booze?"

Mr. Friedman and his partner, Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield, did agree to nix plans for a dive bar in a townhouse next door, but as for the restaurant, "I said, 'This is the United States of America and we'll do whatever the fuck we want.'" He said the mosque had suggested it couldn't control the behavior of "a few bad eggs"; i.e., "we could get a brick through our window." Mr. Friedman said he made the police aware of this threat.

If you move to a country that is 98% "kuffar" STFU is all I have to say. As Muslims like to remind us there are 1.5 billion of them, but despite being adherents of the One True Religion countries dominated by Muslims tend to kind of suck-ass. Therefore, they queue up to immigrate to countries where the majority is non-Muslim. But they expect to carry on as usual, as evident by some Muslim cab drivers refusing to pick up those who've had alcohol, or people with seeing eye dogs (because Muslims consider dogs unclean, though this is true of Hindus too last I checked).

This dovetails with the issues I pointed to in "On Offense". Muslims, and for that matter Mormons, many Hindus, etc., would naturally find inebriation with alcohol offensive and disrespectful, especially around a religious center. If a Mongolian beef establishment opened up across from a Hindu temple I think one might wonder as to the sensitivity of this sort of behavior as well. But how many sets of norms can we accommodate before we go get bogged down in norm tracking? In much of India Hindus and Muslims avoid consumption of pork and beef as a form of reciprocal sensitivity* (though I think this is easy in part because so many Hindu elites are vegetarian, period). I understand where food taboos come from, it is taboo to eat dolphin or dog in the United States. But any given society needs to have some semblance of restraint and common norms on boundaries, or we'll become like those Hasidic Jewish sects where people are vegetarian because they don't trust anyone to be properly kosher. A whole society of Hasidic Jews is not viable.

Note: Some Europeans find Muslim animal sacrifice and male circumcision offensive. Of course Muslim react naturally with their catchall accusation of Islamophobia, and haven't had to modify their own practices yet.

* One thing I never understood about this is why Muslims would care that non-Muslims ate pork. Unlike Hindus Muslims don't venerate the pig.

H/T Anna

Posted by Razib Khan at 5:58 PM • 31 Comments

Bernie Madoff only squandered $21 billion  permlink

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In a piece that outlines SEC follies:

In fact, Mr. Madoff said in the jailhouse interview that, on two occasions, he was certain it was only a matter of days or even hours before he would be caught. The first time, in 2004, he assumed the investigators would check his clearinghouse account. He said he was "astonished" that they did not, and theorized that they might have decided against doing so because of his stature in the industry.

"I'm very proud of the role I played in the industry," he said. "Of course I destroyed that now."

In Mr. Madoff's second close call in 2006, investigators actually asked for his clearinghouse account number on a Friday afternoon, but then never followed up. He said he firmly expected the following Monday would bring the curtain down on his crime. Again, nothing happened. He recalled thinking at the time: "After all this, I got away lucky."

His investors did not. According to estimates by a court-appointed trustee who is liquidating his estate, Mr. Madoff's crime cost thousands of victims at least $21 billion in cash losses, part of the $64.8 billion in paper wealth that vanished when his scheme collapsed.

Posted by Razib Khan at 4:24 PM • 1 Comments