October Pieces Of My Mind #3

Municipal cannon: -today it would be simple to solve it with DNA from epithelial cells mixed with the, erm, garbage.
-- -- -- -- --
Has Jrette discovered books by Catherine Webb yet?
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Tasmanian devil milk found to have compounds with antibacterial properties http://phys.org/news/2016-10-tasmanian-devil-compounds-antibacterial-pr…

Jrette sadly reads rather little these days. Lots of YouTube.

Helping Cousin E decode northern working-class English in the movie "This Is England".

It's true that they don't exactly use the Queen's English Oop North. I assume, however, that unlike certain Londoners, E is aware that there are parts of England between the M25 and the M62.

Project: reconstruct as much as possible of the Finnish language using only bilingual packaging in Swedish grocery stores.

That sounds like a bit of a challenge, considering that Finnish is Altaic rather than Indo-European.

When I was in Sweden I found that, between English and German, I could usually decipher the written language and get a general understanding of what it was saying. For instance, rökning forbjuden (compare German Rauchen verboten) means "no smoking". Or another example: Nedre Slottsgatan, a street in Uppsala near the hotel where I stayed and which passes Uppsala Castle on the downhill side, is literally Lower Castle Street (German neder meaning lower and schloß meaning castle; merely walking around was enough for me to deduce that gata(n) meant "street").

Anyone for a game?
http://www.unz.com/article/scrabble-spells-doom-for-the-racial-hypothes…
He fails to negate what has been clearly demonstrated - that intelligence is highly heritable on a population scale, i.e. smart parents tend to have smart kids, although there is regression to the mean; and no, it's not because intelligent parents play Mozart to their unborn infants or any of the other crackpot theories. My expectation is that what is in play is a complex interaction of genes and environment, as there is with behaviour, but we just don't know which environmental effects matter, other than the clearly obvious ones like nutrition, lack of disease, lack of parasites, etc., plus obviously reasonable access to educational materials. A bad dose of childhood measles can drop a kid's IQ by 5 points (yikes!), which the anti-vaxxers should give careful thought to (but then anti-vaxxers tend to be people who don't give careful thought to anything).

But I'm just about played out on psychometric testing and arguments about intelligence. It has become boring. When people dangle blame-game theories like Stereotype Threat which are unfalsifiable, it becomes a pointless exercise. And ultimately I don't really give a damn about modern populations or how many people with 160+ IQs there are. Terence Tao is an interesting enough guy, but I'm willing to listen to him talk about his fascination with prime numbers for only so long. I enjoyed hearing him say that he learned counting aged 2 from watching Sesame Street. I could have done with that - I got to watch Sesame Street for the first time when I was 18, which was a little late.

My adult daughter strenuously resists any attempt to recycle the few remaining childhood toys that she has managed to hold on to. It's understandable; they remind her of happy times during her childhood. She has no Dick Bruna baby books left - she ate them all. Literally. Clearly, they must have tasted a lot better than Dr Seuss books.

Jrette might be more amenable to eBooks, maybe. She might be like me - at her age, I had little time for fiction, but was deeply interested in non-fiction. If so, there is a wealth of good readable stuff available relatively cheaply in electronic format. If she is naturally a STEM type, like my daughter, then it's likely that she will grow bored with fiction and want to immerse herself in something real. If so, with the availability of eBooks, it's very easy, and a very worthwhile reading list can be suggested.

But you can learn a lot from YouTube. I have recently been watching the excellent BBC series Line of Fire. I have little interest or expertise in military strategies and tactics, but somehow the big historical battles hold some kind of horrifying attraction for me, and the expert analysts do impart quite a bit of understanding about military strategy in the process. You can learn a lot about human nature by learning about the Somme, which is an eloquent demonstration of human stupidity (well, the Germans weren't so stupid at the Somme, but ultimately they were for getting themselves into a massive war of attrition that they ultimately had no hope of winning, a mistake they did not learn from).

Since intelligence seems to have reached modern levels by the time of the exodus from Africa (although material culture lagged a bit) there is buggerall to find by testing and comparing different populations of h. sapiens sapiens.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Martin is standing next to T-1000, maybe.
-- -- -- --
Entymologists recently discovered an insect that is so though and mean, it hunts for spiders in their own webs. Yes, it is Australian.
-- -- -- -- --
Halloween: Scary facts.
"Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/31/the-podesta-email… ä

New species of extremely leggy millipede discovered in a cave in California http://phys.org/news/2016-10-species-extremely-leggy-millipede-cave.html
“200 poison glands, silk-secreting hairs, and 4 penises” –now I know what genes to add to my clones.
Throw in acid blood, and I am all set.

Whit stuff is falling from the sky.

Tpyo again, should be "White"

Entymologists: "Why does this bug have such a funny name?"

Birger@6 - What if you discover that iodine deficiency depresses measurable intelligence, and measurable intelligence correlates closely with the ability to solve complex problems? (Which is true, it does, and it does.) If you know that, you can take steps to rectify it in populations suffering from iodine deficiency. But you say there is no point in doing that.

All I can suggest is that you quit peering through your telescope and get back to trying to make a better spear thrower, and leave the more difficult stuff to people who understand why it might be important.

For those who enjoy reading sci-fi:
https://rsbakker.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/crash-space-tpb.pdf

And people wondered why the UK wanted to leave.
http://shanghaiist.com/2016/11/01/german_eu_commissioner_draws_flak_f.p…

While Oettinger's remarks were stupid, I doubt that this, or anything like it, had anything to do with anyone voting in favour of Brexit. UK politicians have made many even worse remarks, and that goes for those on both sides of the Brexit debate. Probably the main reason why Brexit won was that even those opposed to it had been using the EU as a scapegoat for years, often blaming unpopular legislation on the EU even if the EU had nothing to do with it. Dishonest? Yes, but easy to do with a badly informed electorate.

Oettinger is getting a lot of criticism for this and might very well lose his job over it. This shows that the system is works. It is worse when the jerks stay in power. Boris Johnson, anyone?

I was joking, Phillip. I must remember to be more obvious in future.

As evidence that I was joking, I will point out that on an infamous previous occasion, your namesake the husband of Queen Elizabeth II referred in public to "slitty eyed Chinese", when Hong Kong was still a British colony from which the British were suctioning an endless supply of money back to Blighty. Needless to say, he suffered no censure for it, and obviously did not lose his job over it.

Eric Lund #4: "That sounds like a bit of a challenge, considering that Finnish is Altaic rather than Indo-European."

Uralic, not Altaic. AFAIK, the "Altaic languages" hypothesis is nowadays discredited.

The bigger challenge is that the texts in packages are mostly names of industrial chemicals, usually derived from indoeuropean sources. You won't see much grammar there, and it is the grammar that makes Uralic languages so different.

John, why the venom? In the context of @5 it should be clear that my comment @6 was about racial *stereotyping*. And I have never questioned that intelligence depends on complex interactions between heritage and environment.

As for genetic conditions that may manifest as pathologies –including slower intellectual development- that is the realm of *medicine* and of course is a legitimate object of comparative research across populations.
My concern in relation to debates of intelligence is with the resurgence of vulgo-conservatives in (among other places) USA, and the nastiest forms of jingoism. Those who get paid to make those movements kosher (Fox News, far-right talk radio etc) cheerfully parrot beliefs that were disproved half a century ago. Republicans now say things that some years ago were in the realm of kooks like David Duke.
--
“Making a better spear-thrower” –Without a much better understanding of general intelligence and the genetic and environmental correlate it seems unlikely that the human brain will get much further in the near future. If the brain of late erectus was a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of 1937, the current human brain is like a late-war model, delivering twice the power, at the price of being rather unreliable.

When speaking of DNA..."Major investigation into root causes of cancer reveals how tobacco smoke mutates DNA and gives rise to more than a dozen types of tumour" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/dna-study-lays-bare-dev…

Gender gaps in math persist, with teachers underrating girls' math skills http://phys.org/news/2016-10-gender-gaps-math-persist-teachers.html

Ancestor missing at meeting, modified model & Melanesia mystery;
"People from Melanesia may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species" http://phys.org/news/2016-11-people-melanesia-genetic-evidence-previous…

Birger@20 - You might want to soft-pedal on that story.
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/no-one-knows-about-the-third-human-admixture-in…

You also might want to soft-pedal on the story @19 - whether there really is a 'gender gap' in mathematics has not been demonstrated conclusively, but if there is, it resides in the further reaches of the right hand tail of the distribution. Contrary to the claim in the story, most STEM professionals do not reside there. In Hong Kong, there is no gender gap in engineering, for example - you need to be good at mathematics to be a good engineer, but you don't need to be a mathematical genius. In fact, the 'gender gap' that people claim exists in the results of psychometric testing in America does not appear to occur in China. It is yet another case of people thinking that America is the whole world, or representative of the whole world, when it should be obvious even on casual inspection of the world's populations that it is not.

And so you agree that there is a point in doing comparative research across populations, despite having said there is "bugger all to find".

Australian Aboriginal people, in the absence of eye disease, have better eyesight than other people. It is not just better, it is 7 times better. This is absolutely not contentious among eye specialists and other medical practitioners in Australia. An Aboriginal person can see something on the horizon that a person of European ancestry needs binoculars to see. This looks very much like an evolutionary genetic adaptation to environment.

It also appears that Aboriginal people have better visual-spacial memory than other people. This is less easy to test and demonstrate than a simple test of eye sight, but it looks to be the case. Again, if this is real, and it appears so, it looks like a genetic adaptation.

People in western Europe developed lactose tolerance in adulthood, as did people in north-western Africa and people in northern India. This occurred really quite recently in human evolutionary history; only within the past few thousand years.

People in Africa and southern Europe have developed resistance to malaria. The downside is that homozygotes suffer sickle cell anaemia. It looks very much to me like people in southern China might also have developed resistance to malaria, in areas where malaria was endemic. I have some circumstantial evidence to support it.

Cantonese people suffer naso-pharyngeal cancer at very much higher frequency than all other people. Someone will tell me that Cantonese is a language group. Yes, it is, but until very recently language groups in China were endogamous. The environmental trigger appears to be salted fish, but clearly Cantonese people have a much greater genetic disposition to developing the cancer. No one knows why, but it would be a good thing to know. In the mean time, Cantonese people are well advised to undergo much more frequent testing for this cancer than other people need to.

These are all examples that demonstrate that human evolution has not stopped since humans migrated out of Africa. On the contrary, with the explosion of human populations that started with agriculture in the Neolithic, it is self-evident that evolution has been speeding up, simply because the more people there are, the more novel mutations there are. Most of these mutations are deleterious, but a lot of them are trivially so, they don't result in pathologies. But some do. And occasionally, a novel mutation arises that is favourable.

I absolutely don't give a damn what Fox News or some bunch of people in America try to make out of all of this. They are all morons who are incapable of understanding it. My interest is with valid scientific enquiry and the objective evaluation of facts.

The objective fact that the brains of Aboriginal people show somewhat different structure to the brains of people of European ancestry, which might explain some of their extraordinary abilities resulting from environmental adaptation, should be enough to demonstrate to you that your engine analogy is not even wrong.

"it seems unlikely that the human brain will get much further in the near future"

The reason I say the engine analogy is not even wrong is that you seem to have a mental model of modern human evolution as some kind of linear 'upward' progression - more 'modern' is better than more 'primitive'. The newer engine performs somewhat better than the older engine, but is unreliable (i.e. more variation). It is not a valid model.

That is not the way that evolution works at all. Evolution results mostly from random mutations, which are not 'directional' at all, except in some adaptive sense.

I previously posted a piece where John Hawks, the noted palæoanthropologist, talks about how human brains have been shrinking in size since the Neolithic. No one knows why or what it means, but it does not suggest any such linear 'upward' progression. There is nothing to show that more 'modern' brains are somehow superior in performance to more 'primitive' brains. The well known Flynn effect is now known to be due to the elimination of environmental factors that suppress general intelligence, as measured by psychometric testing. In modern developed countries, the Flynn effect has now stopped happening. In less developed countries, it still has a long way to run.

By proposing your engine analogy, you are playing into the hands of those who continue to believe in the 19th Century anthropologists' idea of the 'ascent of man', where some 'races' are more 'highly evolved' than others, and therefore somehow better; the old 'white, yellow, red, black' categorisation. Even Charles Darwin concluded that model is moronic bullshit, and he lived in the 19th Century.

Evolution just does not work that way, and Darwin knew it, from sailing around the world.

If I put you into the Western Desert region of Australia and leave you to fend for yourself, you will not remain alive beyond 3 days, unless you are lucky enough to be found by a group of Aboriginal people, who will know how to keep you alive. Those people, subjected to psychometric testing, will show a mean IQ of 65. But in their environment, it is not they who are the helpless idiots incapable of keeping themselves alive.

Put those same Aboriginal people in any modern Australian city, and it is entirely predictable that within a short space of time, they will get themselves into some kind of serious trouble, whereas you will survive quite comfortably, even if you have no money.

There is no directionality implied in evolved adaptation. European explorers who first tried to enter and explore subSaharan Africa did notably badly. The African environments are pretty hostile to humans, in terms of diseases and parasites, but particularly so to people who have gone on evolving outside of Africa.

I won't continue with this, because it's boring and obvious, or should be. But please don't quote Fox News to me again. I seriously do not give a shit what some moron on Fox News might say about something.

If you feel some hesitation about clicking on the link to the piece by Razib Khan on his doubts about a third unknown archaic human ancestor of Melanesians, given that the Unz site has been labelled by some as 'crackpot', and if it will make you feel any better, Razib has already responded to the question "Will you vote for Trump?" by saying "No."

Why that should colour people's perception of his take on that particular scientific issue is not that clear to me, but just in case it does, that was his answer.

http://phys.org/news/2016-11-aboriginal-people-inhabited-wa-midwest.html

This is of somewhat more interest to me, and a source of reflected pride, ridiculously so, because although my Aboriginal ancestor was Amangu and from this region, that ancestry is so strongly attenuated that it is meaningless. It took me a very long time and a lot of searching to establish to my satisfaction that she even existed.

The Anthropology Prof. at UWA is Peter Veth, who is known to me. He has been doing some very good work on ancient Aboriginal rock art. I knew his parents very well (his father was my German teacher at school and claimed to be able to speak 16 languages) and I knew him quite well as a child. I have to say he showed no particular early promise that I could see, but he has clearly found his niche and has turned out to be a fine anthropologist, and there are just not many of those around.

John@22: Here is what I think is the key point in the story Birger linked @19:

Research also revealed disparities in teacher perceptions of students, with teachers rating the math skills of girls lower than those of similarly behaving and performing boys. Public perceptions - particularly those of teachers - are important for students, as they can act as self-fulfilling prophecies.

IOW, the observed differences are not necessarily due to differences in innate ability (as your own observations in Hong Kong bear out), but rather that certain teachers think that girls can't do math, and inevitably some of the girls in those classrooms will believe it. And it is an observational fact that such teachers do exist in the US.

Recently I had occasion to talk to a female high school student who is studying calculus and physics on a level normally associated in the US with first-year university students. Her physics teacher is one of those teachers who thinks girls can't do physics, and she feels compelled to compensate by trying to get the top grade in the class (she is the only female student in that class). Calculus class isn't as bad--that teacher is a woman--but there is only one other female student in that class; most of her friends who aren't in the class tell her they thought they couldn't do the work.

This is just one student at one school, and fortunately she does not believe the stereotype, but she is hardly alone in facing this kind of gender discrimination.

Eric@25 - In America. And Australia. It's not universal.

When my daughter began university in Australia, she was astonished by the hostility that female STEM students faced from male engineering students. She had never experienced that kind of stark outright hatred of female science students in Hong Kong. Nothing like it. At school in Hong Kong she had male mathematics and science teachers who treated the girls exactly the same as male students - and some of those teachers were 'foreigners', not Chinese. One was English, another was a New Zealander. I don't recall the others.

The many stories about female students being badly treated by teachers and other students is a very good illustration of the concept of stereotype threat. If teachers have decided all women are bad at math, their accomplishments will be viewed unfavourably and unfairly. The same applies to black students in (for instance) USA.

Brains: ”Unreliable” referred to the (as yet unknown) genes for schizophrenia, which also appears to be common in famlilies that have produced many members with genius-level intelligence. Presumably –but this is a guess- the genes stay in the gene pool since they allow unusual brain connections to be made.
If you are lucky, you get clever. If the environmental and social factors are unfavorable, you are out of luck and suffer the fate of the hapless professor in “A Beautiful Mind”. Most of us are mediocre, but unlikely to get psychotic.

Of course, the genes for schizophrenia may have been around since erectus but they did not have fetal DNA screening, a process that is likely to cull these genes once they are identified. When parents play it safe, there will be less disease, but also less diversity.
I hope such pathologies can instead be prevented by medication of at-risk individuals before they get sick, but if you are a parent you will not take any chances with your future children just to make future humanity more interesting.

John, you seem determined to interpret any statement I make in the most unfavourable way possible, which is a case of behaviour similar to that of those teachers.

I cannot insert a hundred caveats to avoid every misunderstanding, I could state that the snow falling outside if of the normal variety, not of the high-pressure -high density ice crystal form common inside Neptune but it would clutter up the blog.

"Study finds female scientists collaborate differently"
An indication of a negative cultural milieu
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-female-faculty-underrepresented-genomics.h…
-- -- -- --
Martin, where did you find the Leonard Cohen lookalike?

Birger@27 - At the risk of making an unfavourable interpretation, the data do not support what you are saying here. There is no evidence that people with mental pathologies are any more highly represented among families that produce children of very high intelligence than among the general population. Unlike skin colour, which is controlled by a few genes of very strong effect, inherited intelligence, like height, is very highly polygenic. You do not wreck the whole system by tweaking a few genes of very small effect. Terence Tao has one brother who is an autistic savant, and people point to such prominent, visible examples, but he is only a sample of one. People happen to notice highly intelligent people who suffer mental illness because they are noticeable. But in very many other cases, it doesn't happen.

I said stereotype threat is unfalsifiable, which is the case. It works if people believe it, and doesn't work if people don't, as in the case illustrated by Eric@25. Of course, if you do not feel confident, then you will do less well than if you feel confident. If you disbelieve the 'negative cultural milieu', it doesn't happen.

@28 - Again, you are exporting an American case study to the world. Take a look at any group of Malaysian civil engineers - pretty soon, unless you are blind, you will spot the fact that a fair number of them are wearing head scarves. That's a clue.

I came fairly close to failing my first year at university, despite constantly slaving my guts out for the whole year. I was drowning in work. Almost 2/3 of all enrolees did fail, and got kicked out, but I managed to scrape through, exhausted. I was interviewed by the 'student advisor' in the engineering school, who told me, in very unpleasant tones, not to come back for second year, because I had 'no chance of passing'.

Obviously feeling distressed by this, I sought guidance from a student counsellor at the Student Guild. He turned out to be an excellent guy who really knew his stuff. He pulled out the results of the psychometric testing I had been put through when I enrolled. He told me that I was 'within the top 1% of the population' in intelligence and should be scoring straight As every year - the problem was that I was working too hard, but not organising my time well, and he told me how to get organised, and take some time off now and again to relax and recover, and get some sleep occasionally.

So I did go back for second year, and I knocked the ball out of the park. And I continued to knock the ball out of the park in the third and fourth years, and I was 1 of only 20 from the original 196 I had enrolled with who graduated.

The 'student advisor' in the engineering school looked displeased by the obvious massive failure of his prediction, something I took quiet satisfaction from. I didn't bother to confront him and tell him he had nearly derailed my whole career. I didn't need to; he obviously knew.

All you have to do is believe.

Berger, to back up what I have said, I have had the opportunity, in a volunteer capacity over a period of more than a decade, to spend a fair bit of time in psychiatric hospitals; talking to inmates, including a lot of schizophrenics, listening to their complaints and requests (usually, in the case of schizos, to be allowed out and to live in the care of their families), discussing their cases with the psychiatrists who were treating them, and communicating the patients' requests to the psychiatrists and asking them to consider whether the patients' requests to be let out of (let's be honest) a place of detention. The psychiatrists' concern was, of course, not that most schizophrenics are likely to go around attacking people, because they don't; their concern is that a lot of schizophrenics commit suicide. Really a lot.

Overwhelmingly, in terms of actual numbers, those schizos I have talked to personally are not people of very high intelligence or people who come from very high intelligence families. In my direct observation of sample sizes large enough to be significant, in a place (Hong Kong) which has a high mean IQ and a lot of highly intelligent people, there is no demonstrable link, in terms of numbers, between very high intelligence and mental pathologies like schizophrenia.

My observation on this was recently confirmed by a lot of other commenters on another Blog when we were discussing this very subject. Some of those commenters were people working in the field of mental illness. Most highly intelligent people, and their siblings, are not crazy. Schizophrenia does not correlate with any particular group, in terms of intelligence.

This is not me intending to be venomous, or trying to make an unfavourable interpretation of what you said. This is me pointing out to you that the impression you have gained, from watching a film or wherever else you have got it, is erroneous. There is no observable link between very high intelligence and mental pathologies. There are some notable historical cases, but they are cases that have naturally drawn people's attention - for one thing, because people make movies about them. As a sample, they do not demonstrate any link, because there are very many more people exhibiting mental pathologies that no one talks about because they do not come from backgrounds of very high intelligence, and are therefore 'uninteresting'.

Most people of very high intelligence live quiet, unassuming, perfectly normal lives, tucked away in occupations that make use of their exceptional abilities, that do not come to any public attention.

Without wishing to be venomous, I need to point out to you that you have fallen into the trap of confirmation bias. You see a trend because you expect to see it, when no such trend exists.

It is a critical thinking failure. I mean that in the kindest way possible.

Sorry, I meant: "...asking them to consider whether the patients’ requests to be let out of (let’s be honest) a place of detention could be entertained."

"Their concern is that a lot of schizophrenics commit suicide. Really a lot."
Yes. Their lives often bemome so full of anxiety and misery that they choose this option (if "choose" is the right word).

And it is to your credit that you volunteered, the environment in those clinics is bleak.
Medication has a spotty record, depending on the individual it can help manage the symptoms but often at the cost of strong side effects. And those side effects often make patiens quit the medication without consulting with a doctor, leading to them crash-landing in a clinic after a long period of relatively normal life.

"There are some notable historical cases, but they are cases that have naturally drawn people’s attention"

My source waa a piece in Nature ca 15 years ago, referring to a number of British families..

There are other possible reasons for the genes not being eliminated -schizophrenia often set in in the early twenties, allowing the genes to be passed on.
That would be similar to the way in which two inheritable lethal diseases in Västerbotten county has been passed on.

In about 36 hours, the horror of the18-month US election campaign will be over. We can finally concentrate on Aleppo, greenhouse warming and ......no, who am I kidding? The Donald will go on and on about voter fraud, presumably perpetrated by darkies from Mexico. And he just provided a classy ad where he named four evil democrats,. Three of them just happened to be Jewish.
-- -- -- -- --

Here is something more cuddly:
"Karin Nyman: My mother Astrid Lindgren, and the night I named Pippi Longstocking" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/07/karin-nyman-my-mother-ast… (that would be 75 years ago now)

Middle Stone Age ochre processing tools reveal cultural and behavioural complexity http://phys.org/news/2016-11-middle-stone-age-ochre-tools.html
-- -- -- -- --
Not much of the material culture will survive for 40 000 years, wether you are in the Arctic or a tropical climate. What we need is a 2000-pound lump of amber...

no, who am I kidding? The Donald will go on and on about voter fraud, presumably perpetrated by darkies from Mexico.

The damage Donald Trump has done to US politics and society will take a long time to repair. Many lines have been crossed, with (so far) little or no consequence to those who cross those lines. I am hoping, but not confident, that there will be no major incidents at polling places tomorrow.

But one hopeful sign is that many people who, because of their ethnic origins, correctly view a Trump presidency as an existential threat have been encouraged to fight against that outcome by voting. Some, perhaps even most, pollsters have not been accounting for this group voting in such numbers (which, to be fair, is unprecedented, but so is having a major party candidate as unqualified as Trump). I expect Clinton to win. The Senate is still up for grabs: the Democrats need to pick up a net four seats to gain control. They look likely to hold their one vulnerable seat in this class (the open seat in Nevada) and are almost certain to pick up a seat in Illinois (the one Obama won in 2004). The other competitive races this year (all currently held by Republicans) are (alphabetically) Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

#28 Birger: They were playing Cohen in the used book store, and then when I sat down to have tea & cake they were playing him at the café too. (-;

Woohoo! I have received a personal invitation to attend a lecture session by a panel of experts on human genomics. Great!

There's only one catch - it's in New York. And I'm not :(

"Little is currently known about the genetic history of ancient Europeans before the advent of agriculture ~8,500 years ago. Here we have analysed genome-wide data from 51 modern
humans remains that span around 40,000 years of Eurasian prehistory. Over this time, the proportion of Neanderthal DNA decreased from 3–6% to around 2%, consistent with natural
selection against Neanderthal variants in modern humans. Whereas the earliest modern humans in Europe did not contribute substantially to present-day Europeans, all individuals between ~37,000 and ~14,000 years ago descended from a single founder population which forms part of the ancestry of present-day Europeans. A ~35,000-year-old individual from northwest Europe represents an early branch of this founder population which was then displaced across a broad region, before reappearing in southwest Europe during the last ice age ~19,000 years ago. During the major warming period after ~14,000 years ago, a new genetic component related to present-day Near Easterners appears in Europe. These results document how population turnover and migration have been
recurring themes of European pre-history." - Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute.

The other abstracts are here: http://www.shh.mpg.de/274624/abstracts_hd_conference_final1.pdf

John, so you will be meeting The Svante and his colleagues? That is great!
-
(CoughRemember to get autographs before they are awarded the you-know-whatCough)
-
Arabia and migrations -a naive view might be that historic inhabitans of the peninsula would have strong similarities with those who made the main crossing event from Africa to eurasia, but everyone have been evolving since then.
And X number of ther migrations will have passed throgh.
-
If it was possible to find several burials dating from the actual migration -maybe in "the empty quarter"- and compare it with burials in the levant, there could be the shadow of a chance to reconstruct details of the migration..
I suppose ground-penetrating radar cannot see far through sand?

I’m with her. http://xkcd.com/1756/
-- -- -- --
US election put into perspective by British Toblerone crisis http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/us-election-put-into-perspec…

Early poll results from New Hampshire (via WMTW in Portland: Trump leads Clinton 32-25, with 4 votes for Johnson and 6 for other candidates.

A quirk in New Hampshire law allows towns to hold Election Day voting at midnight EST (05:00 UTC, 06:00 in Europe). This year three towns did so: Dixville Notch, Harts Location, and Millsfield.

I should clarify the above post by saying that the early voting municipalities are by their nature very small communities and are not representative of New Hampshire or the US generally. I expect a much stronger vote for Clinton in my town, but that is not representative either: it's one of the most heavily Democratic towns in the state.

Birger@39 - No, I won't be going.

The title of the event is "Are you your genome?." My answer is no, you are not your genome.

"Identity politics" is very destructive. Every person is an individual, not some constructed "identity" derived from genes. Discrimination and prejudice happen all the time, everywhere, and going in all directions. You can only win in the discrimination game by rising above it and declining to play the game; by insisting on being a unique, complex individual, but not some 'identity' badge that you walk around wearing. Don't let people put you in a box with a label. Certainly don't put yourself in a box with a label. And don't identify with some tribe or other - the moment you do that, you have set yourself against all the other tribes. So don't have one.

Mostly, epigentics do not happen. Perhaps surprisingly (or not), malnutrition does - it can take three generations for its effects to be eliminated. Some diseases are notably transmitted from pregnant women to their children. Some pathologies are notably wholly genetic and inherited. But most environmental insults are not transmitted genetically from one generation to the next.

Behaviour is partly heritable, but you can change behaviour, without risking harm. Personality is pretty fixed, and it can be dangerous to try to change your basic personality, but people can and do control and change behaviour all the time. Actors could never act if behaviour was not controllable. You don't have to be a victim to whatever you might have inherited. Humans can learn to behave in better ways, and do it all the time.

Medically, the answer is "yes" up to a point. But increasingly, the major environmental trigger in many diseases and conditions is found to be lifestyle factors. Genetic testing is useful in finding out conditions that a person might be susceptible to, in that they can adjust lifestyle factors to avoid undesirable outcomes.

Outside of certain pathologies, people do not have to be victims to their 'genetic inheritance'. They can alter life outcomes, both behaviourally and with other lifestyle factors. If you know that you could be susceptible to Type 2 Diabetes, for example, you can prevent it happening to you through lifestyle adjustments.

My wife is calling the election for Trump, with a look of abject horror on her face.

I told her to look on the bright side - if he does manage to win, the price of gold should go up.

#44 - 'Genetic determinism' - that's the expression I was searching for. Bad stuff. Don't believe in it.

Birger@39 - The consensus seems to be converging on a single Out Of Africa event around 70,000 years ago by a group of modern humans small enough to represent a population bottleneck for non-sub-Saharan Africans. (There is evidence of earlier migrations of modern humans out of Africa into the Middle East, but they appear not to have survived - but there is some weird, and contestable, evidence of modern human fossils in China dating much earlier. My thinking is that this is almost certainly erroneous, either misattribution of small fossil evidence like teeth (with no DNA testing) to modern humans just based on morphology, or erroneous dating) but there is still a strong school in China in favour of regional hybridisation there - apparently fully 40% of Chinese anthropologists still favour this model. This is almost certainly wrong, with strong evidence that modern Chinese descend mostly from the same OAA group as everyone else.)

But after humans got to Australia, so within the past 50,000 years, there has been further mixing between Africans and Eurasians (i.e. not present in Aboriginal Australians). And there is clear evidence of back-migration of Eurasians into Africa. You only have to look at Ethiopians to know that, but it also shows up in the Maasai and other groups.

And there was definitely genetic substructure in Africa before the OAA event.

Plus regional interbreeding with archaic humans, obviously - all OAA-descended people have some Neanderthal ancestry, about 2%; and Melanesians have some Denisovan ancestry also (although now represented as a lower % of Melanesian genomes than previously estimated - more like 2% than 6%); the jury is still out on a third, as yet unknown, archaic human in Melanesians, until the evidence and methods are presented in print and subjected to peer review. People make statistical errors all the time with this stuff. (The claimed Indian ancestry in an Aboriginal Australian was almost immediately shown to be a false inference resulting from erroneous statistical interpretation after publication of the paper.)

Plus there is evidence of possibly widespread interbreeding of Africans with an as yet unidentified archaic human in Africa, maybe within the past 50,000 years.

If all of that seems confusing, well, I'm certainly confused.

Human lineage is definitely not the old simple linear model of humans exiting Africa and then spreading out rapidly to populate the world. They did do that, interrupted by the LGM, but modern human ancestry is much more like a grid than a simple linear model.

Birger@39

"Arabia and migrations -a naive view might be that historic inhabitans of the peninsula would have strong similarities with those who made the main crossing event from Africa to eurasia, but everyone have been evolving since then."

Plus population migrations. Consider just the expansion of Turkic-speaking people out of Central Asia, which is a certainty because it happened within (written) historic time - very recent. The people who migrated from Anatolia into Europe during the Neolithic were not genetically the same as the people living in the Near and Middle East today. Population dynamics in that area have been much more erm dynamic than the naive assumption.

The group which migrated OOA would very likely have looked like sub-Saharan Africans at the time; or one group of sub-Saharan Africans (not Pygmies or San, obviously - the San appear to have diverged away from other modern humans within Africa as early as 150,000 years ago, and to have remained geographically isolated for a long period before coming into contact again.)

It is known for a certainty that the original European Hunter Gatherers who repopulated Eastern Europe after the LGM had dark skin - they all appear to have descended from one small group which took refuge in southern Europe during the LGM.

"Death in the fifth and sixth centuries AD can be best considered a ritualized transition rather than a biological event."
https://www.academia.edu/464486/Mortuary_practices_in_early_Anglo-Saxon…

Erm, no, I'm pretty sure they were biological events.

And right on cue, all the stock markets are crashing, and gold has started to go up.

My wife is calling the election for Trump, with a look of abject horror on her face.

She is entirely right to be terrified. A man who is so easily baited on Twitter will gain control of a nuclear arsenal. And he doesn't understand why using these weapons (other than as retaliation for a first strike) is a Bad Idea.

Bad enough that he's likely to take the US down. What's worse is that he is likely to take at least one other country down in the process, and there is a significant risk that China will be that country. (There are other candidates, too, but China is the one he's most likely to start a trade war with.)

And right on cue, all the stock markets are crashing, and gold has started to go up.

According to the BBC, as of 1803Z the Nikkei was down more than 5%, but the FTSE 100 was up about 1%, and after an overnight crash in the futures the American markets are up, the Dow by about 0.9% and NASDAQ by about 0.7%.

For me, investment-wise, the question is when do I pull the trigger to sell my US Treasury mutual fund. It's been good to me over the 20 years or so I have owned it, but with Trump threatening to default on the US Government debt (which is his SOP with regard to his private debts; that's why American banks won't do business with him) I expect the interest rate to start rising soon (which lowers the value of existing bonds).

The other thing that happened during the election was this:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37921376

The markets will recover after they get over the panic of discovering that all of the polls had badly misled them. But the issue then will become heightened unpredictability and hence more market volatility.

Yes, a trade war with China looks highly probable. He doesn't realise that will cause a recession in America.

Eric - bear in mind that China is still holding a huge amount in US Treasury Bonds. In 2008, Clinton went cap in hand to the Chinese leadership to plead with them to buy more US Treasuries, so they did.

Eric, don't forget that the vast majority of people who try to time the American stock market lose money over the long term. There is just too much randomness in the system, and too many other people pouring over the data and trying to find a way to make money from it. The price of property in big Canadian cities has been going up much faster than inflation for twenty years now, and people in suits with Economics or Business degrees have been warning that it will have to come down, but meanwhile some of the people who ignored them have gotten rich because it has not come down =yet= (and if they invest their gains in a range of different things, they may still be rich afterwards).

If Trump's advisors cannot hold him back from doing something terminally stupid, I assume this will bring Chinese economical hegemony a decade earlier than expected.

But since Trump has a notoriously short attention span, I assume most governing will be done by his team...which will be appointed for qualities only vaguely associated with competence (as defined by the majority outside the white house).

The Daily Mash: “Being an utter cock no barrier to success” http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/being-an-utter-cock-no-barri… “Donald Trump’s election success has been hailed as a victory by the cock, arsehole and bellend communities, who have for centuries struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream society.”
-- -- -- -- -- - -- --
It is a good thing I do not really like alcohol or I would get plastered for a week.

Sean @ 54 - The worst thing is very rapid and large electronic trades triggered automatically by preset levels, leading potentially to very large unpredictable fluctuations in markets which happen faster than any small investor can react to. Basically, my reading of this is that no investor should invest in any stock market unless he is prepared for the possibility that he could lose his total investment. For someone looking for a secure steady income from investment, the world has been a very difficult place ever since 2008.

Birger @ 55 - We are certainly hoping so :)

Most Mainland Chinese analysts that I have read so far see the Trump win as a positive for the Chinese economy - which is counterintuitive given what he said he would do to China pre-election. But at least one thing favourable to China is that the Trans Pacific Partnership, from which China was excluded, is now almost certainly dead in the water. That is one thing he said he would do pre-election that he can kill stone dead single handedly as soon as he takes office, without needing any advisors. So everyone is now assuming that the TPP is dead, gone, off the table. That alone would make China happy.

Birger - I actually promised to drop this, but this is worth noting.

High range IQ test designer, Paul Cooijmans, claims from his test data that the higher the IQ, the fewer mental problems that are manifested.

I didn't find that, I picked it up from a commenter on another Blog where the same issue was being discussed.

Massive outpouring of stuff here: http://paulcooijmans.com/ Fill your boots - I probably won't bother to read most of it. Or even any of it, though I did find the piece on body language mildly diverting. It's one of my pet hates, and he basically confirms what I have always thought.

Now I'll drop it.

He's well off the mark on human evolution, by the way, got his dates all mixed up, and thinks farming was discovered in Europe contemporaneously with other regions (duh!) so take what he says with a grain of salt. He is mildly interesting on some things, though.

which will be appointed for qualities only vaguely associated with competence (as defined by the majority outside the white house).

This is one of the things I find most frightening: while it isn't entirely clear what Trump's political agenda will be, it is clear what VP-elect Pence and the Republican Congressional leadership want. It's an agenda based on what they claim (through a highly selective interpretation of the Bible which treats the words written in red as though they were errors) are Christian principles, regardless of what the US Constitution says about freedom of religion and equal protection. It's a highly nativist agenda opposed to the notion of birthright citizenship (which is again explicitly stated in the Constitution and explicitly upheld by the Supreme Court, who held in the 19th century that because he was born in the US, the Chinese Exclusion Act did not apply to Mr. Wong Kai Ark). Worst of all, it is an ideology which does not care about facts--many of them insist that the Earth is about 6000 years old and that global warming is not happening.

It is not possible to debate with these people. Shunning them is the only rational response. The New York Times could have, and should have, nipped Trump's candidacy in the bud--he's from New York, so they knew perfectly well who he was, and the notion that he could come anywhere close to winning the Presidency, never mind actually winning it, should have horrified them to the point of preventing it. Instead they reported on Clinton's non-scandals.

Eric @ 60 - Moving the discussion to the new thread.