hbd chick v. Francis Fukuyama

hbd chick has made an interesting response to my review in The American Conservative of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. First, another excerpt from my review:

William D. Hamilton’s math was popularized by Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 bombshell Sociobiology and by Richard Dawkins’s 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. (A more accurate title would have been The Dynastic Gene.) According to Fukuyama, however, political science has scandalously ignored the implications of these famous books. That’s true in general, although I have on my bookshelves academic works pointing out the fascinating political implications of kin selection by Pierre L. van den Berghe, Frank Salter, Tatu Vanhanen, and J.P. Rushton, none of whom Fukuyama cites. 

... Fukuyama is worried enough by this unpublicized but powerful line of logic that he tries to brush off the entire concept of ethnic nepotism: 

"Since virtually all human societies organized themselves tribally at one point, many people are tempted to believe that this is somehow a natural state of affairs or biologically driven. It is not obvious, however, why you should want to cooperate with a cousin four times removed rather than a familiar nonrelative just because you share one sixty-fourth of your genes with your cousin."

Indeed, it is “not obvious,” but Fukuyama’s challenge is hardly unanswerable. In arranged-marriage cultures, clans, tribes, and castes can perpetuate themselves indefinitely, making states typically either ineffective or tyrannical. For example, as I’m writing, Colonel Gaddafi has so far survived NATO aerial bombardment by rallying many Bedouin tribes to his banner. Even though most Libyan nomads have settled down, they’ve maintained tribalism as what anthropologist Stanley Kurtz calls their “social structure in reserve” precisely for violent times like these when you can only trust blood relations. 

In the West, in contrast, over the generations familiar nonrelatives—i.e., neighbors—tend to turn into relatives, or at least potential in-laws, because European cultures frequently permitted love marriages with the girl next door. Moreover, as Fukuyama notes, the Catholic Church discouraged even fourth-cousin marriages. The resulting broad but shallow regional blood ties help explain why Western cultures were able to organize politically on a territorial basis without always being looted by self-interested clans.

hbd chick expands my rebuttal to Fukuyama into a General Theory of the West:

No, being tribal is not necessarily the natural state of affairs, but it IS biologically driven. as is being non-tribal. 

Europeans used to be tribal, but that's because they used to marry their cousins, too, just like the afghanis or iraqis or saudis or libyans of today. the church put an end to all that and then some -- it also put an end to all sorts of endogamous practices like polygamy and marrying your dead brother's wife. first- and second-cousin marriage was banned in 506 a.d., and by the 11th century the church had banned marriage up to SIXTH cousins. 

This forced exogamy resulted in, as steve describes it, "broad but shallow regional blood ties." almost all of european (and western) history hinges on these loose genetic ties. the whole evolution of european societies from tribes to city-states (think of the venices and the hamburgs of europe) to the nationalistic movements -- this was made possible because extended family ties were continually loosened over centuries of european history (from the fall of rome onwards). the broadening of political structures (tribe, city-state, national-state) mirrors the underlying broadening of the genetic ties.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Heat

Here's an article about HP's plan for next generation computing built around memristors (dreamed up by Amy Chua's dad 40 years ago). The problem with the current architecture:

Today, computers constantly shuttle data back and forth among faster and slower memories. The systems keep frequently used data close to the processor and then move it to slower and more permanent storage when it is no longer needed for the ongoing calculations.

In this approach, the microprocessor is in the center of the computing universe, but in terms of energy costs, moving the information, first to be computed upon and then stored, dwarfs the energy used in the actual computing operation. ...

One reason is computing’s enormous energy appetite. A 10-petaflop supercomputer — scheduled to be built by I.B.M. next year — will consume 15 megawatts of power, roughly the electricity consumed by a city of 15,000 homes.

There are perhaps analogies here to the evolution of human intelligence. For millions of years, our predecessors' brains got larger, peaking with the Neanderthals. That suggests that bigger brains made us fitter.

But that's a brute force solution.The usual argument is that big brains require too much food. (They also make us fall over more.) Now, it could be that as human population increased after the invention of agriculture, there were enough mutations to create more intelligence per cubic centimeter, just as there have been with computer chips.

That's certainly true, but I suspect the concomitant problem of not just getting enough energy in, but of getting enough energy out of the skull, of heat dispersal, also became a problem with this trend toward bigger brains. With a roughly spherical shape, as volume goes up, so does the volume to surface ratio.

Unfortunately, I've never seen anybody who actually knows what they are talking about consider this question of brains shedding heat. 

It could be that there is an ideal latitude at which the cost of keeping the brain warm is balanced by the cost of keeping the brain cool at lowest overall cost. In 1911, Yale Professor of Geography Ellsworth Huntington conducted a study of climate's effect on human achievement. He concluded that the ideal climate was roughly that of New Haven, Connecticut. In a recent article, Malcolm Gladwell had great fun with that: here we are, 100 years later, and we can see what a biased moron Huntington was! Proving how much things have changed in 100 years, Malcolm's article appeared in that glossy, ad-packed magazine, The Lagoser.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Perils of Diversity" by Byron M. Roth

I review the massive book on immigration discussed from the perspective of the human sciences in VDARE.com.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The complicated genetics of alcoholism

From the Wall Street Journal:

The strongest gene associations found to date involve the so-called Asian flush. Roughly 40% of people of East Asian descent carry one or two gene variations that rapidly convert alcohol into the chemical acetaldehyde, which causes nausea, rapid heart beat and a severe flush. It's a strong deterrent to drinking, much like the drug disulfiram, or Antabuse. "You don't even need a genetic test to detect it," says David Goldman, chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "If you have a dinner party and somebody has this variation, they'll turn red when they drink a glass of wine."

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have tentatively identified a similar "tipsy gene" that makes carriers feel inebriated after just one or two drinks. Between 10% and 20% of the population has this variation, which is also thought to protect against becoming alcohol-dependent.

Other people feel especially euphoric when they drink—probably due to variations in the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain's reward circuits. A variation in the DRD2 dopamine receptor gene was identified in 1990 and found in a large number of alcoholics as well as drug addicts and smokers, although later studies have been mixed.

Last month, researchers at the University of California-San Diego reported that people with the DRD2 variation tend to have friends with the same genetic marker. That would give them both a biological compunction to drink and social reinforcement, the authors noted in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like the Asian flush, some alcohol-related genes are particularly prevalent in certain ethnic or geographic groups. A recent study in Nature found that a rare variation in the HTR2b gene, linked to severe impulsiveness, is found almost exclusively in Finnish people. "Almost all these severely impulsive individuals are also alcoholic, and their worse impulsive problems occurred while they were drunk," says Dr. Goldman, the study's senior investigator. 

I have this theory that alcohol facilitates the evolution of non-impulsiveness.To get through life well, you need to be prudent much of the time, but you also need to take a chance on other people some times. So, social drinking allows women to lower their barriers when in selected company, like at an expensive nightclub or a wedding reception (that's the point behind the hit movie Wedding Crashers), men with their fellow soldiers, and for people in general to lower their barriers when with their coworkers or business associates for the purposes of bonding.

Separately, variations in two genes for receptor to neurotransmitter neuropeptide Y, associated with stress and severe withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, are common to about one-quarter of the population. Clearly, not all those people are severe alcoholics.

So much is still unknown that most experts don't advise consumers to use genetic-testing services to try to understand their risk for complex conditions like alcoholism.

"Even if you learn you have a protective version of some gene, you could still be vulnerable due to a gene we haven't discovered yet," says Dr. Goldman, who adds that anyone with a family history of alcoholism should definitely approach alcohol with caution.

"Looking at your family history is simpler, cheaper and at the moment, gives you more information than a genetic test," says Dr. Edenberg. He also stresses that DNA is never destiny when human behavior is involved. "You can carry all kinds of genes, and if you manage to push away the glass or the bottle, you won't have an alcoholism problem."

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Harpending on NFL Linemen

Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples goes looking for the places that produce the best NFL linemen:

For West Coast programs that can afford the steep airfare, the best bet is to cast their nets even further west into the Pacific. Hawaii produced five NFL linemen, and tiny American Samoa (population: 67,190) produced six. Those who can't afford the flights to paradise may want to check closer to home in Salt Lake City, a metro area that produced five NFL linemen -- including former Oregon great Haloti Ngata. Like Ngata, three of the other future NFL linemen who grew up in Utah are of Polynesian descent. Salt Lake City has a high Polynesian population because the Mormon church does extensive missionary work in the Pacific islands, and many families have relocated from the islands to Salt Lake City, where the church is headquartered.

SI VAULT: How Samoa became Eden for recruiters

Anthropology may help explain why so many good linemen developed in certain areas. Many of the linemen from west of the Rockies are of Polynesian descent. Polynesian cultures tend to produce large men capable of generating massive amounts of force. And with good reason. "Big, fast males sound like what ought to come out of centuries or millennia of social systems where there is direct male-to-male violence, but not where there are standoff weapons used in war like bows and arrows," University of Utah anthropology professor Henry Harpending wrote in an e-mail. "There was certainly this kind of violence on Polynesian islands, which were demographic pressure cookers."

Harpending is one of the authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which argues that, contrary to popular belief, the advent of advanced societies didn't stop human evolution but actually kicked it into a higher gear. In a phone interview, Harpending called the development of the Polynesian islands "a unique experiment in human history."

"They were fighting for land," Harpending said. "There just wasn't enough arable land in most places. The records and the archaeology both show that there was just a lot of warfare, violence, turnover of chiefs."

Harpending wrote that it might be more difficult to explain the anthropological reasons for the explosion of players in the South without knowing more specifics about their ancestries. Most would be classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as black, and Harpending said most black Americans are descended from ancestors who lived in the tropical regions of central Africa. He wrote that throughout history, most violence in those areas tended to be "hand-to-hand," which would have produced large, fast, muscular males through natural selection. Like the Polynesians, ancient people in central Africa never favored the bow-and-arrow as a hunting or warfare tool. Harpending said archaeological evidence from central Africa shows the ancient residents preferred spears and bludgeoning instruments. In other words, the biggest and strongest would have survived the fighting to reproduce. "Bows and arrows kept the distance between people," Harpending said. "It decreased the premium on being big and strong

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Out of Africa, with Benefits"

Here's that big new science story I teased a couple of days ago. By Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea. 

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA. 

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them.  ...

Next, the researchers looked for evidence of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa, Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.

“The correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and Bougainville genomes. ...

Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of these ancient genomes.”  

If the genomes of New Guineans come almost 5% from non-modern humans, then the obvious next step is to test the genomes of Australian Aborigines, who are last in line in the original Southern, Indian Ocean shoreline route Out of Africa. However, there are a lot of regulatory barriers against testing Aborigines, perhaps out of fear that scientists will find something like this. After all, Aborigines look a little archaic, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if their genes turn out to be a little archaic.

It was lucky that the first findings of non-modern human ancestry involved Europeans, or it would have been hard to get up the political courage to publish this.

So, the Out of Africa model of evolution of the current human race turns out to be mostly, but not wholly, correct. Greg Cochran calls the new model "Out of Africa, with Benefits:" modern humans picked up useful genes from older human types, and not all of those inheritances spread equally to the entire current human race, probably in part because they aren't equally useful in all environments.

Here's an FAQ by John Hawks. And here are comments by Dienekes.

By the way, here's an interesting 2006 article on Nick Patterson, one of the scientists involved. He's had successful three careers, first as British and American government cryptologist, then as a quant for James H. Simons' hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and now as a genome researcher.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer