Microagressions, debunked

A warning against taking politically-inspired gobbledygook (whose only benefit is to bureaucrats and as a means of virtue signalling by do-gooders) seriously.

Perspectives on Psychological Science Vol 12, Issue 1, 2017

Microaggressions Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence

Scott O. Lilienfeld

The microaggression concept has recently galvanized public discussion and spread to numerous college campuses and businesses. I argue that the microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health. A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. More broadly, the MRP has been marked by an absence of connectivity to key domains of psychological science, including psychometrics, social cognition, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior genetics, and personality, health, and industrial-organizational psychology. Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field’s attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.

Link

74 loci associated with educational attainment

Other than the claim in the abstract that educational attainment is "mostly environmentally determined" (*), this seems like a very useful study, as it identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment and explores their interesting biology. 

The utility of this type of study does not consist so much in the ability to predict one's educational potential by looking at one's genotype (we're a long way off from that, and a traditional pencil-and-paper test will probably beat genetics for a long time to come). Rather, it helps move the culture forward, away from the polite ultra-egalitarianism of today's dominant worldview and towards a more scientific attitude concerning the limits of education. Such an attitude will necessarily acknowledge -whether it seems fair to us or not- that genes sometimes dictate that the smart but slothful kid should outperform his diligent but dull-witted peer.

It will certainly be very interesting to see what better methods or even larger sample sizes will bring in years to come.

(*) The heritability of educational attainment has been estimated to be 67-74% of Norwegian males of the 1940-1961 period. There is actually no "universal heritability" of a trait. In a third world country it may very well be that one's educational attainment is determined mostly by environmental effects such as whether you have access to a school within reasonable distance or to just enough food during development. In a modern country (like post-war Norway or a technologically advanced future utopia), environmental effects are expected to be minimal (as everyone will get the best of everything), and variation in educational attainment will simply be due to genes (+noise).

Nature (2016) doi:10.1038/nature17671

Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment 

Aysu Okbay et al.

Educational attainment is strongly influenced by social and other environmental factors, but genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals1. Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample1, 2 of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development. Our findings demonstrate that, even for a behavioural phenotype that is mostly environmentally determined, a well-powered GWAS identifies replicable associated genetic variants that suggest biologically relevant pathways. Because educational attainment is measured in large numbers of individuals, it will continue to be useful as a proxy phenotype in efforts to characterize the genetic influences of related phenotypes, including cognition and neuropsychiatric diseases.

Link

Stature/body mass index and socioeconomic status

BMJ 2016; 352 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i582 (Published 08 March 2016)

Height, body mass index, and socioeconomic status: mendelian randomisation study in UK Biobank 

Jessica Tyrrell, research fellow1 2, Samuel E Jones, associate research fellow1, Robin Beaumont, associate research fellow1, Christina M Astley, research fellow3 4, Rebecca Lovell, research fellow2, Hanieh Yaghootkar, research fellow1, Marcus Tuke, associate research fellow1, Katherine S Ruth, associate research fellow1, Rachel M Freathy, senior research fellow1, Joel N Hirschhorn, professor2 3 5, Andrew R Wood, research fellow1, Anna Murray, senior lecturer1, Michael N Weedon, associate professor1, Timothy M Frayling, professor1

Abstract

Objective To determine whether height and body mass index (BMI) have a causal role in five measures of socioeconomic status.

Design Mendelian randomisation study to test for causal effects of differences in stature and BMI on five measures of socioeconomic status. Mendelian randomisation exploits the fact that genotypes are randomly assigned at conception and thus not confounded by non-genetic factors.

Setting UK Biobank.

Participants 119 669 men and women of British ancestry, aged between 37 and 73 years.

Main outcome measures Age completed full time education, degree level education, job class, annual household income, and Townsend deprivation index.

Results In the UK Biobank study, shorter stature and higher BMI were observationally associated with several measures of lower socioeconomic status. The associations between shorter stature and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in men, and the associations between higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in women. For example, a 1 standard deviation (SD) higher BMI was associated with a £210 (€276; $300; 95% confidence interval £84 to £420; P=6×10−3) lower annual household income in men and a £1890 (£1680 to £2100; P=6×10−15) lower annual household income in women. Genetic analysis provided evidence that these associations were partly causal. A genetically determined 1 SD (6.3 cm) taller stature caused a 0.06 (0.02 to 0.09) year older age of completing full time education (P=0.01), a 1.12 (1.07 to 1.18) times higher odds of working in a skilled profession (P=6×10−7), and a £1130 (£680 to £1580) higher annual household income (P=4×10−8). Associations were stronger in men. A genetically determined 1 SD higher BMI (4.6 kg/m2) caused a £2940 (£1680 to £4200; P=1×10−5) lower annual household income and a 0.10 (0.04 to 0.16) SD (P=0.001) higher level of deprivation in women only.

Conclusions These data support evidence that height and BMI play an important partial role in determining several aspects of a person’s socioeconomic status, especially women’s BMI for income and deprivation and men’s height for education, income, and job class. These findings have important social and health implications, supporting evidence that overweight people, especially women, are at a disadvantage and that taller people, especially men, are at an advantage.

Link

Psychological differences in China predicted by rice/wheat agriculture

Science 9 May 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6184 pp. 603-608
DOI: 10.1126/science.1246850

Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture

T. Talhelm et al.

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

Link

Simulating three thousand years of history

There is a video in the press release for this paper showing how the simulation matches up with reality.

PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1308825110

War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies

Peter Turchin et al.

How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? Existing theories are usually formulated as verbal models and, as a result, do not yield sharply defined, quantitative predictions that could be unambiguously tested with data. Here we develop a cultural evolutionary model that predicts where and when the largest-scale complex societies arose in human history. The central premise of the model, which we test, is that costly institutions that enabled large human groups to function without splitting up evolved as a result of intense competition between societies—primarily warfare. Warfare intensity, in turn, depended on the spread of historically attested military technologies (e.g., chariots and cavalry) and on geographic factors (e.g., rugged landscape). The model was simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afroeurasian landmass and its predictions were tested against a large dataset documenting the spatiotemporal distribution of historical large-scale societies in Afroeurasia between 1,500 BCE and 1,500 CE. The model-predicted pattern of spread of large-scale societies was very similar to the observed one. Overall, the model explained 65% of variance in the data. An alternative model, omitting the effect of diffusing military technologies, explained only 16% of variance. Our results support theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggest a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.

Link

Why Europeans gained 11cm in height in a century

The paper's conclusion:

The main findings in this article can be summarized as follows. New data show that average male height in Europe increased by about 11 cm in the century from the 1870s—representing an unprecedented improvement in health status. In northern and middle European countries there was a distinct quickening in the pace of advance in the period spanning the two world wars and the Great Depression, which largely predates the modern medicine and national health services. In southern Europe height increased fastest in the postwar period. There is evidence of a concave health production function, but the effects of inequality are not robust. Education had a positive effect on height and family size a negative effect, consistent with the quality-quantity trade-off. The evidence suggests that improvements in the disease environment, as reflected in infant mortality, is the single most important factor driving the increase in height. This accounts for much of the acceleration during the transwar period. Social services and health systems made a modest contribution to the overall increase in height. One reason is that education and expenditure on social services seem to be substitutes. Transport infrastructure also contributed to health and height, especially in the prewar era. But a substantial part of the overall upwards trend in height is not explained—in the absence of infant mortality, about a half. There are other important factors that are not easily measured, including medical advances and practices, and especially better parental knowledge of the effects of nutrition and hygiene on children’s health.

Oxf. Econ. Pap. (2013)
doi: 10.1093/oep/gpt030

How have Europeans grown so tall?

Timothy J. Hatton

Increases in human stature are a key indicator of improvements in the average health of populations. In this article I present and analyse a new data set for the average height of adult male birth cohorts, from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980, in 15 European countries. In little more than a century average height increased by 11 cm—representing a dramatic improvement in health. Interestingly, there was some acceleration in the period spanning the two world wars and the Great Depression. The evidence suggests that the most important proximate source of increasing height was the improving disease environment as reflected by the fall in infant mortality. Rising income and education and falling family size had more modest effects. Improvements in health care are hard to identify, and the effects of welfare state spending seem to have been small.

Link

Inbreeding and cognitive ability

From the paper:

Our results show that within a representative UK population sample there was a weak nominally significant association between burden of autosomal runs of homozygosity and higher non-verbal cognitive ability. This nominal association with increased cognitive ability is counterintuitive when compared with the results from more extreme inbreeding based on pedigree information.1, 2, 3 A potential explanation for this direction of effect is that individuals with higher cognitive ability might show greater positive assortative mating, which would lead to increased homozygosity at loci for higher cognitive ability in their offspring. However, in a separate sample we showed that greater positive assortative mating was not associated with higher cognitive ability. While these findings seem to provide clear evidence against this hypothesis, it is possible that the genome-wide genetic findings reflect historical mating habits that no longer exist today. It should also be noted that there was a reduction in the standard deviations for spousal correlations in the increased cognitive ability groups by an average of 6% compared with the decreased cognitive ability group (see Table 3), which could reflect lesser genetic variability in the high ability couples or a ceiling effect on the cognitive tests. This lesser phenotypic variability at the high ability end would have a small effect in reducing the spouse correlations and potentially confound our analysis. 

Genetic variants were found to have a slight (though significant) reduction in minor allele frequency across the genome in individuals in the top quartile of general cognitive ability compared with those in the bottom quartile (means of 21823 and 21824), which in turn could lead to increased homozygosity by chance. This could indicate that these individuals descend from subtly different ancestral populations that experienced loss of variation. This difference in ancestry may be correlated with either genetic variants for improved cognitive ability, or with social or environmental backgrounds that lead to higher cognitive ability, though our analysis of FROH corrected for socio-economic status and population stratification. Another potential explanation is that the reduced minor allele frequency in the high cognitive ability is reflective of the less frequent allele being deleterious due to selection against it. As a result, these high-functioning individuals could benefit from having more major alleles at fixation and a reduced burden of rarer deleterious variants. 

Overall, these results highlight the importance of understanding mating habits, such as inbreeding and assortative mating, when investigating the genetic architecture of complex traits such as cognitive ability. The results certainly suggest that there is no large effect of FROH on reduced cognitive ability, the expected direction of effect. The nominally significant associations found in this study may even suggest that in the case of non-verbal cognitive ability, beneficial associations with homozygosity at specific loci might outweigh the negative effects of genome-wide inbreeding and that the relationship between inbreeding and cognitive ability may be more complicated than previously thought.

European Journal of Human Genetics , (17 July 2013) | doi:10.1038/ejhg.2013.155

Genome-wide estimates of inbreeding in unrelated individuals and their association with cognitive ability

Robert A Power et al.

The consequence of reduced cognitive ability from inbreeding has long been investigated, mainly restricted to cousin–cousin marriages. Molecular genetic techniques now allow us to test the relationship between increased ancestral inbreeding and cognitive ability in a population of traditionally unrelated individuals. In a representative UK sample of 2329 individuals, we used genome-wide SNP data to estimate the percentage of the genome covered by runs of homozygous SNPs (ROH). This was tested for association with general cognitive ability, as well as measures of verbal and non-verbal ability. Further, association was tested between these traits and specific ROH. Burden of ROH was not associated with cognitive ability after correction for multiple testing, although burden of ROH was nominally associated with increased non-verbal cognitive ability (P=0.03). Moreover, although no individual ROH was significantly associated with cognitive ability, there was a significant bias towards increased cognitive ability in carriers of ROH (P=0.002). A potential explanation for these results is increased positive assortative mating in spouses with higher cognitive ability, although we found no evidence in support of this hypothesis in a separate sample. Reduced minor allele frequency across the genome was associated with higher cognitive ability, which could contribute to an apparent increase in ROH. This may reflect minor alleles being more likely to be deleterious.

Link

Interesting commentary on the Morton/Gould affair

Interesting commentary by the author of a 1988 undergraduate thesis that revolved around re-measuring part of Morton's skulls and concluding (contra Gould) that Morton's measurements were accurate.

I haven't read it fully (it is in four parts), but here is the concluding paragraph from part 4:

In the final analysis, the Morton-Gould Affair, which has been popularized as a diagnostic example of the role of unconscious bias in science, is simply a case of two over-eager scholars jumping to conclusions based on a small amount of data. It is unfortunate that the discussion of Morton’s work has occupied so much energy over the past 30 years, when a more important issue is Gould’s historically inaccurate misrepresentation of Blumenbach’s work, which unlike Morton’s was a foundational element of modern physical anthropology and public policy regarding racial variation that still impacts us today. A proper representation of Blumenbach’s theories and an accurate translation of his major Latin publications into modern English and German are long overdue and would be of great benefit to science and society at large.

Should be interesting reading for anyone fascinated by the history of ideas.

Menopause is caused by male preference for younger women (or is it?)

My own half-baked idea is that because humans have longer childhoods and are very dependent on their mothers during their childhoods, there's an advantage to live past their reproductive years.

If a couple of women cease reproduction at 40 but one of them dies at 40 and the other at 50, there's a greater probability that the latter's offspring will survive and reproduce themselves.

So, increasing the gap between menopause and death increases the chances of success for offspring (because their mother lives longer to support them into adulthood). As childbirth becomes ever more dangerous (because of normal aging process) it "pays more" to stay alive and raise the kids already born than to gain more kids, at the risk of losing the ones you already have.

PLoS Comput Biol 9(6): e1003092. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003092

Mate Choice and the Origin of Menopause

Richard A. Morton et al.

Human menopause is an unsolved evolutionary puzzle, and relationships among the factors that produced it remain understood poorly. Classic theory, involving a one-sex (female) model of human demography, suggests that genes imparting deleterious effects on post-reproductive survival will accumulate. Thus, a ‘death barrier’ should emerge beyond the maximum age for female reproduction. Under this scenario, few women would experience menopause (decreased fertility with continued survival) because few would survive much longer than they reproduced. However, no death barrier is observed in human populations. Subsequent theoretical research has shown that two-sex models, including male fertility at older ages, avoid the death barrier. Here we use a stochastic, two-sex computational model implemented by computer simulation to show how male mating preference for younger females could lead to the accumulation of mutations deleterious to female fertility and thus produce a menopausal period. Our model requires neither the initial assumption of a decline in older female fertility nor the effects of inclusive fitness through which older, non-reproducing women assist in the reproductive efforts of younger women. Our model helps to explain why such effects, observed in many societies, may be insufficient factors in elucidating the origin of menopause.

Link

Coevolution of farming and private property rights

PNAS May 28, 2013 vol. 110 no. 22

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Samuel Bowles, and Jung-Kyoo Choi

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter–gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required—secure individual claims to the products of one’s labor—were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers—crops, dwellings, and animals—could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.

Link

Orbital prefrontal cortex and social competence

Related article in Scientific American.

Neuropsychologia Volume 48, Issue 12, October 2010, Pages 3554–3562

Orbital prefrontal cortex volume correlates with social cognitive competence

Joanne L. Powell

Intentionality, or Theory of Mind, is the ability to explain and predict the behaviour of others by attributing to them intentions and mental states and is hypothesised to be one of several social cognitive mechanisms which have impacted upon brain size evolution. Though the brain activity associated with processing this type of information has been studied extensively, the neuroanatomical correlates of these abilities, e.g. whether subjects who perform better have greater volume of associated brain regions, remain to be investigated. Because social abilities of this type appear to have evolved relatively recently, and because the prefrontal cortex (PFC) was the last brain region to develop both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, we hypothesised a relationship between PFC volume and intentional competence. To test this, we estimated the volume of four regional prefrontal subfields in each cerebral hemisphere, in 40 healthy adult humans by applying stereological methods on T1-weighted magnetic resonance images. Our results reveal a significant linear relationship between intentionality score and volume of orbital PFC (p = 0.01). Since this region is known to be involved in the processing of social information our findings support the hypothesis that brain size evolution is, at least in part, the result of social cognitive mechanisms supporting social cohesion.

Link

Children of lesbians fare worse than children of heterosexual parents

From a related article in Slate by the author:

The rapid pace at which the overall academic discourse surrounding gay and lesbian parents’ comparative competence has swung—from the wide acknowledgement of challenges to “no differences” to more capable than mom and pop families—is notable, and frankly a bit suspect. Scientific truths are seldom reversed in a decade. By comparison, studies of adoption—a common method by which many same-sex couples (but even more heterosexual ones) become parents—have repeatedly and consistently revealed important and wide-ranging differences, on average, between adopted children and biological ones. The differences have been so pervasive and consistent that adoption experts now emphasize that “acknowledgement of difference” is critical for both parents and clinicians when working with adopted children and teens. This ought to give social scientists studying gay-parenting outcomes pause—rather than lockstep unanimity. After all, many children of gay and lesbian couples are adopted. 

... 

The basic results call into question simplistic notions of “no differences,” at least with the generation that is out of the house. On 25 of 40 different outcomes evaluated, the children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships fare quite differently than those in stable, biologically-intact mom-and-pop families, displaying numbers more comparable to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents. Even after including controls for age, race, gender, and things like being bullied as a youth, or the gay-friendliness of the state in which they live, such respondents were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things. Why such dramatic differences? I can only speculate, since the data are not poised to pinpoint causes. One notable theme among the adult children of same-sex parents, however, is household instability, and plenty of it. The children of fathers who have had same-sex relationships fare a bit better, but they seldom reported living with their father for very long, and never with his partner for more than three years.

...

So why did this study come up with such different results than previous work in the field? And why should one study alter so much previous sentiment? Basically, better methods. When it comes to assessing how children of gay parents are faring, the careful methods and random sampling approach found in demography has not often been employed by scholars studying this issue, due in part—to be sure—to the challenges in locating and surveying small minorities randomly. In its place, the scholarly community has often been treated to small, nonrandom “convenience” studies of mostly white, well-educated lesbian parents, including plenty of data-collection efforts in which participants knew that they were contributing to important studies with potentially substantial political consequences, elevating the probability of something akin to the “Hawthorne Effect.” This is hardly an optimal environment for collecting unbiased data (and to their credit, many of the researchers admitted these challenges). I’m not claiming that all the previous research on this subject is bunk. But small or nonrandom studies shouldn’t be the gold standard for research, all the more so when we’re dealing with a topic so weighted with public interest and significance.

Social Science Research Volume 41, Issue 4, July 2012, Pages 752–770

How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study

Mark Regnerus

The New Family Structures Study (NFSS) is a social-science data-collection project that fielded a survey to a large, random sample of American young adults (ages 18–39) who were raised in different types of family arrangements. In this debut article of the NFSS, I compare how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when compared with six other family-of-origin types. The results reveal numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents. The results are typically robust in multivariate contexts as well, suggesting far greater diversity in lesbian-parent household experiences than convenience-sample studies of lesbian families have revealed. The NFSS proves to be an illuminating, versatile dataset that can assist family scholars in understanding the long reach of family structure and transitions.

Link

Petty identity politics indeed, or, holding a grudge is no excuse for anti-science

Living Anthropologically takes issue with my contention that the "big hole" in genetic sampling of Native groups in the US is due to "petty identity politics contra science":

1. Contemporary Native Americans have very good reasons to not participate in these studies of earliest Americans. 

Just like in “Battle of the Bones”–which attempts to make a science-versus-creationism argument for studying Native American remains–people take this “paucity of samples from North America” as an opportunity to bash contemporary Native Americans for opting out of these studies. Dienekes blog asks if this is “Petty identity politics contra science?” and commenters on various articles condemn Native groups for this supposedly “petty” refusal. 

For many years I’ve been showing the BBC production, Bones of Contention: Native American Archaeology for Introduction to Anthropology. Produced in 1995, this film is even older than “Battle of the Bones,” but it takes a BBC perspective to give a fairer presentation of U.S. politics and Native issues. What this film at least makes clear–and seems lost on so many–is that Native Americans have plenty of good reasons to still be suspicious of genetic investigation. 

Genocide. Treaty abrogation. Children sent to boarding school to be stripped of language and identity. Contemporary inequalities. The fact that every time I assign “Battle of the Bones” and screen Bones of Contention, some students openly snicker or rant about Native Americans holding back science. It’s one of the factors that went undiscussed in that re-study of Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man–how did Morton get all those skulls anyway?
Petty identity politics indeed.

In my opinion that is a lot of hooey to justify the unjustifiable. I won't argue about the veracity or details of this version of history, but surely native Americans from the US were not especially mistreated compared to other people colonized by Europeans?

I mean, there are now samples from Native Australians, East Indians, Sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans from all over the Americas except the US. Why don't all these people not "hold a grudge" for their bad treatment at the hands of Europeans, but, apparently, are perfectly willing to participate in genetic research if it's explained to them how they might learn more about their ancestors from it?

And, why limit ourselves to people colonized by Europeans? Surely, Slavs, for example, have a lot of things to say about German Rassenkunde scientists belittling them, studying their skulls to "prove" they are an inferior race, and hatching up and executing plans for their annihilation. So, why do the Russians give the Denisova fingerbone to ze Max Planck folks to study, or allow them to study ancient DNA from all over their territory?

Scour the literature for a while, and you'll find plenty of (modern) Germans studying Jews, and Jews studying pretty much everybody, including many not-so-friendly Muslim populations. You'll find Russians too, studying all the subjugated ethnic groups of their former Empire, and plenty of Han Chinese scientists studying some of the 57 ethnic groups of their country. You'll find Serbs and Turks forgetting about the Battle of Kosovo or the Balkan Wars to participate in joint research about the origins of the Neolithic. You'll find Roma and Saami being studied by their native European "oppressors."

And, how about those African Americans whose ancestors were dragged across the Atlantic in chains, and forced to work as slaves, surely they have as good a reason, if not better, to be suspicious of being made an object of study by people outside their community? But, last time I checked, there were plenty of studies on that population, informing them about the sources of their African ancestors and the timing and extent of admixture with their European ones.

In short: you'll find plenty of groups with historical or even contemporary sources of conflict setting aside their differences in the interest of science.

The anti-scientific attitude of certain Native American groups cannot be ascribed to a history of oppression or conflict with the ancestors of the scientists wishing to study them. And, indeed, if Native Americans were once oppressed by the Palefaces, why don't they let themselves be studied by Chinese or Japanese researchers, or indeed by their own scientists: there are Native American geneticists after all!

There are two answers to this question:

• The cultural relativist nonsense about science being a "white man's way of knowing" that is of no use to Native groups who already know who their ancestors were.
• "petty identity politics" indeed.

If one can think of a better explanation, I'm willing to listen. But, please, no more of that "oppressed people mistrusting Western scientists" tripe.

Broad-faced men more co-operative in inter-group conflict

rom the press release:

The researchers gave University of St Andrews students money to play a game in groups where they could either benefit themselves and free-ride on the cooperation of others or they could risk their money to benefit their group. Half of the students were told that the outcomes of the game would be compared between St Andrews students, the other half that they would be compared with a rival university. The prediction was that the wider faced men would respond to the rivalry in the second condition and sacrifice their money for their own group.

The results of the study confirmed their hypotheses and turned the typical associations with facial width on their head: the more robust looking, wider faced men in the study were more self-sacrificing than other men.

"It was surprising that our predictions were confirmed," reports Dr. Stirrat. "When we mentioned Edinburgh University, our St Andrews participants with wider faces were more cooperative than the other men. When we didn't mention the rivalry, they were less cooperative than other men."

Related links between wide faces and aggression, trustworthiness, company performance and unethical behavior.

Psychological Science doi: 10.1177/0956797611435133

Face Structure Predicts Cooperation Men With Wider Faces Are More Generous to Their In-Group When Out-Group Competition Is Salient

M. Stirrat and D. I. Perrett

Male facial width-to-height ratio appears to correlate with antisocial tendencies, such as aggression, exploitation, cheating, and deception. We present evidence that male facial width-to-height ratio is also associated with a stereotypically male prosocial tendency: to increase cooperation with other in-group members during intergroup competition. We found that men who had wider faces, compared with men who had narrower faces, showed more self-sacrificing cooperation to help their group members when there was competition with another group. We propose that this finding makes sense given the evolutionary functions of social helpfulness and aggression.

Link

RIP matrilocal egalitarian early European farmers

It seems that Marija Gimbutas' feminist Old Europe fantasy is collapsing like a house of cards.

Michael Balter covers this in Science:

The results of the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that men who were buried with adzes—thought to be an indication of higher social status—were more likely to have grown up on loess soils than men who were buried without adzes.
...
A similarly striking pattern was seen when the team looked at the female skeletons, which made up 153 of the total 311 individuals analyzed. The variation in strontium ratios for females was significantly greater than for males, suggesting that a greater number of females than males had grown up in non-fertile areas.
...
The team came to two main conclusions: First, some males had greater access to fertile soils than others, probably because they were the sons of farmers who had inherited access to the best land. And second, LBK societies were "patrilocal," meaning that males tended to stay put in one place while females moved in from other areas to mate with them.

From the press release:

Professor Bentley said: "Our results, along with archaeobotanical studies that indicate the earliest farmers of Neolithic Germany had a system of land tenure, suggest that the origins of differential access to land can be traced back to an early part of the Neolithic era, rather than only to later prehistory when inequality and intergenerational wealth transfers are more clearly evidenced in burials and material culture. 

"It seems the Neolithic era introduced heritable property (land and livestock) into Europe and that wealth inequality got underway when this happened. After that, of course, there was no looking back: through the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Industrial era wealth inequality increased but the 'seeds' of inequality were sown way back in the Neolithic."

PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1113710109

Community differentiation and kinship among Europe’s first farmers

R. Alexander Bentley et al.

Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely populated societies that developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present the earliest, statistically significant evidence for such differentiation among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe. By using strontium isotopic data from more than 300 early Neolithic human skeletons, we find significantly less variance in geographic signatures among males than we find among females, and less variance among burials with ground stone adzes than burials without such adzes. From this, in context with other available evidence, we infer differential land use in early Neolithic central Europe within a patrilocal kinship system.

Link

Should incestuous marriages be allowed?

German incest couple lose European Court case

A brother and sister from Germany who had an incestuous relationship, arguing they had the right to a family life, have lost their European court case.

Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski had four children together, two of whom are described as disabled.

The European Court of Human Rights said Germany was entitled to ban incest.

Stuebing, who was convicted of incest and spent three years in prison, did not meet his natural sister until he tracked down his family as an adult.

He had been adopted as a child and only made contact with his natural relatives in his 20s.

The siblings grew close after their mother died.

Three of their four children are now looked after in care.

The couple insist that their love is no different to any other.

Of course, I applaud the decision of the ECHR, but I take a rather different view on the justification of it.

Regulation of marriage is central to the moral and legal codes of almost all human societies. Different societies limit marriage in diverse ways:

1. Age (young people are generally disallowed from marrying, and early marriage has become legally and socially more difficult in much of the world)
2. Sex (people of opposing sex may marry, although recently some societies have allowed same-sex marriage)
3. Number (some societies demand exclusivity, while others allow for husbands to marry multiple wives, or more commonly for women to take multiple husbands)
4. Relation (marriage between close relatives are often prohibited, (almost) universally for parent-offspring or sibling marriage; on the other hand cousin or uncle-niece marriage is prohibited in some societies, or encouraged in others)
5. Race (there were formerly legal prohibitions of inter-racial marriage, and there are societies in which such marriages are often frowned upon still)
6. Religion (some belief systems do not require that partners be of the same religion, while others do so)
7. Social status (marriage across class or caste lines was formerly prohibited either legally or socially, and is still often uncommon)
8. Former marriage status (divorce and re-marriage sometimes prohibited, provisions for widowhood, etc.)

It is clear that society has deemed the institution of marriage to be an important one, and this is why it has imposed so many legal and social rules upon it. In recent years, the trend has been one towards laissez-faire in the regulation of human affairs. This has been most evident in the case of same sex "marriage", whose advocates actively frame the question in terms of the "rights" of consenting persons.

If the matter is that of constitutional or other "rights", then the state oversteps its role in preventing two consenting persons from entering into the institution of marriage. Those who hold to this view, however, often promote the "right" to marriage of their own particular interest group (mostly of the homosexual community), but downplay similar claims to marriage of other groups (e.g., prohibition against polygamy, incest, young marriage, etc.)

There is a different line of thought, which frames the question of marriage in utilitarian terms. Marriage is seen as promoting child-rearing, family stability, engendering close social ties, and promoting the well-being and happiness of individuals. Again, those who hold to this view propose that their particular form of marriage is useful, while opposing certain forms of marriage for its adverse effects (e.g., the costs associated with invalids born of incestuous marriages, or increased expenditure when economic benefits are extended to new forms of marriage).

When the moral compass of a society atrophies, then its most fundamental institutions become the playing ground of lawyers and economists. Of course, this is a perfectly valid point of view -if one thinks that lawyers and economists, rather than ethicists and priests- make the better judges of what is to be allowed.

Proponents of the modern, secular, and democratic way of doing things will argue that it is an improvement for the rules to be made in the context of Constitutional Law, Democratic Choice, and Economic Expediency.

But, we must not forget that their chosen framework of accepted behavior is not as sure-footed as they may think, because what else is Democracy than the idea that the many are right over the few? What else is adherence to a Constitution than the faith in the idea that what men voted for generations ago should guide the behavior of the living? And, what else is Economics, other than the idea that human prosperity revolves around the maximization of some economic quantity?

To conclude: questions such as "should incestuous marriage be allowed?" force us all to think about who decides the "should."

Facial attractiveness and interracial marriage

The data:

From the paper:

The results of the experiment demonstrated that there are robust differences in the relative perceived attractiveness of different racial groups. Further, these differences are affected by the gender of the person being rated. Among males, Black faces were rated as the most attractive followed by White faces and then Asian faces. For the females, Asian faces were seen as the most attractive followed by White and then Black faces. The same pattern was found regardless of the ethnicity of the person doing the ratings.

Whatever the perceptions of attractiveness, it seems that people still tend to marry within their own races. For example, in the UK 0.24% of white females marry black males, and the corresponding percentage for the US is 0.56%. Since blacks make up roughly 1/10 of the population in the US, then if race was not an issue, we'd expect white females to marry black males about 10% of the time; the empirical figure is about ~20 times lower.

So, what this study shows is that while intra-racial marriage is still the norm, black males have an easier time overcoming the racial barrier compared to black females, and Asian females compared to Asian males.

The paper does not seem to present any facial attractiveness data, although it does present an analysis to discount an alternative hypothesis based on stature differences. According to that hypothesis, Asian females outmarry more easily than Asian males because Asians are shorter, and women tend to marry taller men than themselves.

PLoS ONE 7(2): e31703. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031703


A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage

Michael B. Lewis


Abstract 
Background
In the US and UK, more Black men are married to White women than vice versa and there are more White men married to Asian women than vice versa. Models of interracial marriage, based on the exchange of racial status for other capital, cannot explain these asymmetries. A new explanation is offered based on the relative perceived facial attractiveness of the different race-by-gender groups.

Method and Findings
This explanation was tested using a survey of perceived facial attractiveness. This found that Black males are perceived as more attractive than White or East Asian males whereas among females, it is the East Asians that are perceived as most attractive on average.

Conclusions
Incorporating these attractiveness patterns into the model of marriage decisions produces asymmetries in interracial marriage similar to those in the observed data in terms of direction and relative size. This model does not require differences in status between races nor different strategies based on gender. Predictions are also generated regarding the relative attractiveness of those engaging in interracial marriage.

Link

Shortage of female math geniuses not due to "stereotype threat"

Men are over-represented at the high end of math performance: there are more male math geniuses than female ones.

A theory that was proposed to explain that fact is that of stereotype threat. According to this theory, there is a stereotype in society that "women are bad in math"; women internalize this stereotype and lose confidence about their math abilities, and so they tend to perform sub-optimally in math tests, hence rendering the idea of "women are bad in math" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This new study demonstrates that much of the literature that has accumulated around the idea of a "stereotype threat" can be relegated to the trash bin, and those who hope that fighting the stereotype will lead to more females joining the mathematical elite have their work cut out for them.

A video on the topic by the first author:






Review of General Psychology, Jan 16 , 2012, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0026617

Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement?

Stoet, Gijsbert; Geary David C.

Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions.

Link

Does capitalism reduce fitness? (part II)

Rasmus Nielsen responds to my commentary of his students' ‘rEvolutionary Biologists say: Capitalism Reduces Fitness!’ sign and the blog post associated with it:

Dienekes was shocked by this travesty and decided to make a blog post about it. To my surprise his outrage was not about the social conditions in West Oakland but rather about the loose use of fitness employed in the blog. He took the statement by my students and postdocs literally and pointed out that if you include all the different components of fitness, and not just viability, there is in fact no good scientific evidence that the absolute fitness of individuals growing up in capitalist societies is reduced.

I largely ignore economics and politics in this blog, not because I have no interest in them, but because this is an anthropology blog. And, while I'm sure social conditions in West Oakland may be in great need of improvement, it's not my business to improve them; apparently there are plenty of kind souls working toward that goal already.

It is one thing to hold a political opinion as an individual and another to link that opinion to one's scientific discipline. An electrical engineer, a medical doctor, and a biologist may think that capitalism is a terrible or wonderful system, but if they attempted to link that opinion with electrical engineering, medicine, or biology, I would like to see the evidence for it.

The people in question explicitly linked their political opinions with evolutionary biology, both by ascribing those opinion to "rEvolutionary biologists" and by explicitly linking their dismissal of capitalism to fitness, a central concept in evolutionary biology.

Dr. Nielsen continues:

Most of the students and postdocs in my group are from Europe, and many have not been here for long. They have perhaps not quite gotten use to American political discourse and may not express themselves in a way that most Americans find convincing. But at least they haven’t quite lost their sense of empathy and care for other people. I figure that if I keep them here, in an American academic environment, for a couple of years more they will get cured of that problem and will be able to concentrate fully on their research careers without getting distracted by the economic and social problems they encounter in the neighborhoods around campus on their commute from and to work. If I push them hard, the may even eventually end up getting real jobs and move up in the East Oakland hills. They will then never have to worry about the problems in West Oakland again, and can spend all their time making sure they include all components of fitness when making blog posts.

Last time I checked, both East Oakland and West Oakland, and indeed the entire United States have a capitalist economy. If someone cares why people in West Oakland have a different life expectancy than those in East Oakland, they must seek the explanation elsewhere, and not in their common economic system. If they wanted to examine the influence of capitalism on life expectancy, they could, perhaps, compare South vs. North Korea, two countries with similar populations, that also happen to have a difference in life expectancy of about 10 years, with capitalist South Koreans outliving non-capitalist North Koreans.

Does capitalism reduce fitness?

I was much surprised to find this blog post on my feed today:

nielsen lab, occupy, and berkeley protests

I don't have much to say about the Occupy movement itself. People can differ in their opinions about the causes of the current economic malaise, and to argue about them. But, I will comment on a point:

We’ve thus been taking part in multiple ‘Occupy’ activities, starting the first meeting of Occupy Oakland in mid-October, marches in SF, and the Nov 2 Oakland general strike. This was a great moment – young and old, blue and white collar workers walked and rejoiced together the whole day. Our sign said ‘rEvolutionary Biologists say: Capitalism Reduces Fitness!’

Well, it’s the objective truth. An flyer distributed in the demonstration was pointing out that an African-American boy born in West Oakland has 15 shorter life expectancy than someone born up in the hills. If that’s not reduction in fitness, what is?

A reduction of life expectancy by 15 years is not evidence of reduction of fitness. Fitness is measured in offspring, it is not measured in years lived. African countries, for example, have very high population growth rates, and very low life expectancies. That is fitness. Fitness is not a comfortable long life, but having lots of babies and living long enough to ensure their survival as independent entities.

It is strange that evolutionary biologists from a top institution would make such a simple mistake. Perhaps public spending is not the best way to advance science and education?