At The New Republic a writer is confused that a professor of Islamic Studies in Delaware would say this:

Along with the idea of God and prophets, the Quran is the thing that Muslims hold the dearest. My children have been listening to it since even before they were born. I use to recite it to them while they were still in the womb. Their children will be reciting it to them when they will be lowered in to their tomb. Believe me, there is nothing more precious to Muslims than the Quran, and watching people toss it into fire, will be horrifying. I would rather burn in fire myself, than watch a Quran burn.

I am amazed at how millions of Americans who are decent and honorable can watch this happen. No matter how ugly the act the Constitution permits this, is not an acceptable excuse. The Constitution does not permit this. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. For Muslims this is worse than torture.

This is kind of weird coming from someone with Western values, but totally in keeping with someone espousing values which are normal in the Muslim world. Muslims do revere the Koran and Muhammed in a manner which is hard to understand for someone with a Western background. Unfortunately for Muslims if they move to a majority non-Muslim Western society their values are simply out of step, and they need to adjust. American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?:

Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.

If they’re American, they’ll counter-protest. There are more options than sitting & watching and violence & intimidation. That’s one of the things which Western societies learned during and after the Englightenment.

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Human Meat Just Another Meal for Early Europeans? The argument about cannibalism always goes back and forth. It seems entirely plausible that at some point in our lineage’s history the consumption of conspecifics may not have been shocking, as the human cognitive toolkit had not evolved to the level of sophistication which makes cannibalism cross-culturally abhorrent. Now, you may object that cannibalism has been known among H. sapiens sapiens, but regular cannibalism generally is sanctified in some ritual fashion. The Aztecs for example seem to have consumed the human sacrifices to their gods. Cannibalism without ritual, as often occurred during pre-modern sieges of cities, emerges only in contexts of extreme deprivation.

The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’. White people are the “hook,” but there’s a lot in this post from OKCupid on the personals profiles of various ethnic groups, as well as religions. To the left is an analysis of profile sophistication in terms of prose by racial group. Asian and Indian males in particular should work on their prose on OKCupid, since they’re strongly disfavored as partners according to OKCupid’s past analysis. Though Latinos and black males aren’t doing much hotter in response rate, so that can’t be the total explanation. Rather, seems like the prose quality is a better reflection of mean years of education by ethnic group in the United States.

Being Attractive Brings Advantages: The Case of Parrot Species in Captivity. “We repeatedly confirmed significant, positive association between the perceived beauty and the size of worldwide zoo population. Moreover, the range size and body size appeared to be significant predictors of zoo population size.” Now you understand cats!

Primed for Reading. Richard Boyd reviews Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. I enjoyed Dehaene’s The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, so no doubt this will soon be in “in the stack.”

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly. To assert one is wrong is heroic. People who are wrong always go up in my estimation, because everyone is often wrong, but the human reflex is to deny error. That being said, it seems like the author of the article is reviewing a pro-pig manifesto. The plenitude of pigs in China, a region often at the Malthusian limit, is a good clue as to the animal’s efficiency at converting offal into meat.

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Sexual selection is, for lack of a better term, a sexy concept. Charles Darwin elaborated on the specific phenomenon of sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond endorsed Darwin’s thesis that sexual selection could explain the origin of human races, as each isolated population extended their own particular aesthetic preferences. More recently the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller put forward an entertaining, if speculative, battery of arguments in The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. It’s clearly the stuff of science that can sell.

Sexual selection itself comes in a variety of flavors. Perhaps the most counterintuitive one on first blush is the idea that many traits, such as antlers, are positively costly and exist only to signal robust health which can incur the cost without debility. The idea was outlined by Amotz Zahavi in The Handicap Principle in the 1970s. Initially dismissed by Richard Dawkins in the original edition of The Selfish Gene, Zahavi’s ideas have come into modest mainstream acceptance, and the second edition of Dawkins’ seminal work reflects a revised appraisal. This is really a subset of a “good genes” model of sexual selection, whereby females select from a range of males which would exhibit variance in mutational load. A more capricious and erratic form of sexual selection is “runaway,” which like genetic drift needs no rhyme or reason. Rather, arbitrary initial preferences can become coupled with heritable preference in a positive feedback loop which drives the mean phenotypic value of a population off the previous median, until natural selection enforces a countervailing pressure once the trait starts to become excessively maladaptive (e.g., imagine selection for longer and longer tail feathers until the ability of a bird to fly is inhibited).

But notwithstanding the inevitable press which the theory gets, and its centrality to several popular science books, the main action in the area of sexual selection is in the academic literature (contrast this with the aquatic ape hypothesis). Many of the verbal outlines of sexual selection are highly stylized, as economists might say. We are treated to images of stags with massive antlers facing off, elephant seals strutting their stuff, and beautifully plumaged birds gathering for a lek. Set next to this is a body of mathematically oriented models, short on color, long on Greek symbols.  But these formal models are valuable. Obviously there is a wide range of variation across species in terms of how sexual selection plays out (if it does so at all within a given species, sexual or asexual). The sexual dimorphism of elephant seals is not the norm against which all species are judged. To explore the variables which produce this pattern of difference one must analyze them in an algebraic fashion, where each can be manipulated in isolation so as to properly characterize its impact. So with that, a paper from The American Naturalist which purports to show how assortative mating could emerge in a sexual selective framework, Make love not war: when should less competitive males choose low-quality but defendable females?:

Male choosiness for mates is an underexplored mechanism of sexual selection. A few theoretical studies suggest that males may exhibit—but only under rare circumstances—a reversed male mate choice (RMMC; i.e., highly competitive males focus on the most fecund females, while the low‐quality males exclusively pair with less fecund mates to avoid being outcompeted by stronger rivals). Here we propose a new model to explore RMMC by relaxing some of the restrictive assumptions of the previous models and by considering an extended range of factors known to alter the strength of sexual selection (males’ investment in reproduction, difference of quality between females, operational sex ratio). Unexpectedly, we found that males exhibited a reversed mate choice under a wide range of circumstances. RMMC mostly occurs when the female encounter rate is high and males devote much of their time to breeding. This condition‐dependent strategy occurs even if there is no risk of injury during the male‐male contest or when the difference in quality between females is small. RMMC should thus be a widespread yet underestimated component of sexual selection and should largely contribute to the assortative pairing patterns observed in numerous taxa.

The title is accessible and charming, but the paper is dense on mathematical formula and computational esoterica. It screams “trust me with my parameters!” But reality is a complex and manifold thing, and it may be that to model it one must go beyond elegant simplicity. As noted in the above abstract sexual selection models are often spare. That’s the beauty of a model, you remove all you can from the reconstruction of reality until you start losing the aspects of reality which you’re trying to understand and predict. I am not totally familiar with the sexual selection literature, so the first table is helpful insofar as it gives a sense of the scope of previous models which this paper is an extension of, and to some extent rejoinder to.

The main parameters to focus on in this study are the quality of the males and females, the competition between males, and the cost of mating. All the parameters checked off for the current study relate to these broad classes; density for example would increase competition, as would shifting the sex ratio. This being a model of the “mating game” rather than all the phenomena which might occur in the life history of individuals in a species, it is constrained in a somewhat peculiar manner. Males have a specific finite lifetime, and can enter into a serial set of relationships. These relationships are of finite length naturally, and, a particular fraction of the lifetime of a given male, though that fraction may vary within the model. Additionally, males have to engage in “pre-copulatory guarding” before gaining a reproductive payoff. Basically, the male can not mate for a period of time after pairing up with a female. During this guarding period the male may have to fend off suitors, so there is a risk that the investment is all for naught. This is the dimension where the quality of both male and female come into play. For example, low quality males are not good defenders, and high quality females will attract a lot of attention. There are also factors such as predation risk while seeking a partner, which one must do if one loses one’s current partner to a superior male, or, one is initially unpaired and is deciding whether to reject to accept the offers of pairing up with a female.

Frankly, the model outlined in the paper is convoluted, and it probably says something that they have to nest a lot of the details into the supplements. Table 2 has all the parameters of interest.

As you can see some of the parameters have a few discrete values. Some of these are obviously continuous variables in reality, but for the purposes of modeling you have to simplify, especially if you’re going to do something computationally intensive. They ran the “game” of interactions over several different variations of the parameters, and noted how males varied in their evolutionarily stable strategy. Below are three figures which illustrate the response topographies of males of high and low quality to females of high and low quality, with number of interactions on the y-axis (the axis projecting “away” from your viewpoint perspective), and “rejection index” on the z-axis (vertical). High quality males are in the top panels, low quality males in the bottom panels, high quality females in the left panels, and finally, low quality females in the right panels. Each figure has a different parameter varied on the x-axis, as per the labels.

[View with PicLens]

Time Invested Varied

Fecundity Difference Between Females

Sex Ratio

The rejection index is such that below 0 denotes acceptance and above rejection. In the first figure the variable is the time invested in each reproductive event, ranging from 1% to 50% of the male’s lifetime. In this situation high quality males accept high quality females, and reject low quality females, invariably. But low quality males are more accepting of low quality females as the time invested increases, and tend to reject high quality females. Why? High quality females would likely attract attention from high quality males, against whom the low quality males could not compete successfully. In the mating game pairing up with a high quality female would be a low payoff action, as the probability of keeping such a female and reproducing is low. The logic is inverted for low quality females, who would attract less attention from other males. Granted, these females are less fecund, but low fecundity is better than no fecundity from the perspective of the low quality male.

The second figure varies fecundity ratio between the high and low quality females, from 5% to 100%. In the second case there’s no difference in fecundity between the two classes, and that explains panel B, where the high quality males drop sharply into acceptance territory for low quality females as the x-axis verges to 100%.  For low quality males the picture is different, as they begin to reject much more quickly once the ratio difference starts to converge. Observe however the effect of the y-axis, number of female interactions assuming one is not guarding a mate. As the number of these interactions increases the rejection threshold keeps dropping as low quality males become less and less inclined to guard high quality males. This has to be because the greater the number of interactions which freelance males have, presumably the greater the number of competitive interactions whereby these males may “steal” a female from a male who is guarding one.

Finally, the last set of figures focuses on “operational sex ratio,” OSR. The OSR ranges from 0.2, female-biased, to 2.4, male-based. When there is a deficit of females high quality males will begin to accept pairings with low quality females, as is clear in panel B of the third figure. This makes rational sense in an environment of “scarcity.” The behavior of low quality males is more peculiar. In a situation of extreme female surplus their behavior converges upon that of high quality males: they reject low quality females, and accept high quality ones. As the sex ratio verges toward 1 the low quality males begin to reject high quality females and accept low quality ones. It seems that balanced mating ratios result in optimal trait matching, at least in terms of genetic quality, in the context of male competition for females (i.e., low quality males may prefer high quality females, but that is not an optimal decision because the likelihood of a payoff is low). But as the sex ratio verges toward a male surplus there are no good options for low quality males; the high quality females will reject them, because there are high quality males galore for them to select from, and the low quality females are now acceptable to high quality males, who will win them in the competition with low quality males.

Much of this is common sense. The mapping between formal quantitative model and verbal description is rather good. We know intuitively that in a context of male surplus it is the low quality males who will be shafted, and that low quality females will become valuable. You can offer up anecdote from engineering universities, or the army, or cite historical examples such as frontier societies with male-biased sex ratios. In modern day Punjab men import wives from poorer regions of eastern South Asia because of a sex-ratio imbalance. But here is where numbers are of the essence, as quantitative models show you how shifting the variates shifts the response. There has been some concern in relation to “bare branches”, men who can not marry in Asia, and its possible impact on societal stability. But one must keep in mind the exact proportion of bare branches within a society when predicting instability due to manic competition for women. Formal models can give us a better guide as to thresholds which should concern us.

Ultimately papers like this need to be validated by experiment and observation. But they’re useful toolkits, sharpeners of thought and conceptualization. It’s hard to test, verify, and refute, if you don’t pose the question and make a prediction in a clear and distinct manner.

Citation: Venner S, Bernstein C, Dray S, & Bel-Venner MC (2010). Make love not war: when should less competitive males choose low-quality but defendable females? The American naturalist, 175 (6), 650-61 PMID: 20415532

Image Credit: BS Thurner Hof, Kristin Dos Santos

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OK. You know that there have been floods in Pakistan which have displaced ~20 million. No worries, there’s still time to for suicide bombings aimed at killing Pakistani Shia (the Shia believe that the the descendants of Ali are the rightful heirs to the leadership with Islam). Well, this is a long standing conflict. No excusing it, but evil people will take any opportunity to cause havoc. On a more trivial, but still creepy, note, Punjab govt goes after Hindu mythology cartoons:

Even though Indian TV channels are currently off-air in Pakistan, several cable operators are broadcasting Indian content to meet the demands of their clientele.

A meeting of the committee was held in Lahore, which discussed ways to get these cartoons banned in Pakistan.

Deeba, who attended the meeting, told The Express Tribune that participants had discussed “cartoons which glorified mythology characters such as Hanuman had a bad impact on the minds of the young children.

She said that “these cartoons were in contradiction with the teachings of Islam and young kids could not differentiate between what’s true and what’s not so these should be banned.”

This is a nuclear armed Islamic state.

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I analyzed some GSS data over at Discover. The commenters were only cursorily engaging the data, and I don’t have much patience for long rhetorical back and forths which are already predetermined as to the nature of the conclusions of the principals (also, no one was offering any data themselves, and I get kind of exhausted at having to be the one who is expected to leg-work while others hold forth with their awesome analyses). But in all honesty my standards are lower for the comments here since I don’t vet/read them nearly as closely, so if you guys want to argue the results, go ahead.

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Big brains attributed to mother’s care. Interesting that the correlation between various characteristics and brain size is highly sensitive to the taxa you include in your scatter plot. Marsupials seem to be substantially different from placental mammals, while primates are different from placentals as a whole. Throwing all the mammalian taxa into the analysis results in maternal care being a robust predictor, but that conclusion seems less interesting than the contingencies of the residuals.

First Irish Genome Sequenced. The paper is open access, and can be found on the Genome Biology website. Nothing too surprising, though interesting to note that they uncovered ~10% more SNPs by performing a deeper read of one individual’s genome. This sort of thing is breathing down HapMap3’s neck, and that’s a good thing for the accumulation of human knowledge.

Young Japanese Seek Second, and Third, Jobs. This quote struck me: “The Japanese economy is not just stagnant, it’s in retreat,” he said. “When people believe the future is going to be better than the present, they are happy. But if they think that the future holds no hope, then they become unhappy. It’s that unhappiness that people are trying to negate with side jobs.” In the human past the future was not necessarily seen as bright. With a world wide demographic transition Japan’s cultural trends may presage what is to come. That being said, it isn’t as if the Japanese are stuck in the Malthusian trap. They just lack the sort of dynamism which youth bulges bring.

Whewell’s Ghost. A new history of science weblog. Some familiar names are contributors. I’ll be watching.

More on Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography. Follow up to Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography. I agree with the caution about throwing too many statistical techniques at this sort of question at this stage of the game.

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A few weeks ago there were a bunch of stories on how white the audience was at Glenn Beck’s rally. That’s empirically true, and the Tea Party movement as a whole is overwhelmingly white. So is the American conservative movement. This in a nation which is ~65% white in a colloquial sense (i.e., white Hispanics are excluded from the class of “white”). It makes one’s eyebrows go up I suppose when you see a very unrepresentative set of people. But what irritates me about media observation of this statistical reality is that the elite media is also disproportionately white. Much of the elite media and the up & coming pundit class reside in a majority black city, but if you check out their Facebook photos or flickr accounts you would be totally surprised at the fact that they reside in a “Chocolate City.” Why are the social circles of elite media types, liberal or conservative, not representative of the city in which they reside? There are pretty clear reasons of confounds of class and socioeconomic affinity with race. The demographics of one’s social circle don’t necessarily lead one to prima facie accusations of bias, rather, they’re embedded in a set of causal assumptions and conditionals. So, from a liberal perspective the whiteness of the SWPL milieu is situational, while that of the right-wing milieu is essential. The demographics of conservative political movements themselves are interpreted through a particular historical frame of racism for most liberals implicitly. In contrast, the white demographics of elite liberals, including the Netroots, are often “contextualized” as emerging out of a whole range of historical and social processes, which if not just in and of themselves, are structural factors which elite white liberals are not responsible for and are attempting to change.

It seems a pretty robust social science finding that white liberals have less racialist sentiment than white conservatives. My main beef, as a non-white conservative, is that a quantitative difference of degree gets collapsed into a qualitative difference of kind. Transforming a quantitative variable into a dichotomous categorical one totally changes the inferences one makes from facts. The whiteness of conservative movements and classes then entails the casting of particular aspersions, while the whiteness of liberal movements and classes tends to go under the radar as having a sociological cause out of the control of white liberals.

To explore the quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, difference between white non-Hispanics of varied political stripes I decided to look at the GSS data set. There are a variety of questions on racial issues, though I focused on the ones related to white opinions/attitudes/relations with blacks since they are more numerous. For example, in 1974 23% of white liberals and 36% of white conservatives favored a law banning interracial marriage. In 2002 the values were 8% and 13% respectively. In both cases you can see that white conservatives have more racialist feeling, but the difference is not dichotomous, but one of degree. Below is a table of responses to a set of questions by white non-Hispanics in the 2000s. I broke out the data set by liberal and conservative, and Democrat and Republican. Additionally, in addition to the raw frequencies I also calculated absolute and relative differences between liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans.

To replicate:

Row: RACMAR  MARBLK ACQFMBLK  RACHOME  BLKSIMP   TRTBLACK ACQBLACK   DISCAFF       ACQNHBLK    RACPRES MOSTCOM ACQVABLK ACQWKBLK

Column: POLVIEWS(r:1-3″Liberal”;5-7″Conservative”)  PARTYID(r:0-2″Democrat”;4-6″Republican”)

Selection Filters: RACE(1) HISPANIC(1)

For those who don’t know the GSS URL: http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08

The question of Hispanic or non-Hispanic status was only asked starting in the year 2000, so  the data are all constrained to the aughts. I know tables are kind of hard to read, but I wasn’t sure as to the best way to visualize the results. But if someone wants to try, or has some ideas, here’s the data as a csv.

I’ll let readers engage in interpretation, but be warned that if it’s obvious you didn’t read the table your comment may not be published, or, I’ll just delete it. The only thing I want to add is that it isn’t a surprise that the political party division is narrower than the ideological one. Republicans are the conservative party, but there are wealthy social liberals within the party, while Democrats have some downscale socially conservative types.

Note: Sample sizes are small in some of the cases above, so don’t necessarily draw too much of an inference if the absolute value difference is marginal. That’s why I looked at a lot of questions.

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One of the more popular posts on this weblog (going by StumbleUpon and search engine referrers) focuses on genetic variation in Europe as a function of geography. In some ways the results are common sense; populations closer to each other are more genetically related. Why not? Historically people have married their neighbors and so gene flow is often well modeled as isolation by distance. The scientific rationale for these studies is to smoke out population stratification in medical genetics research programs which attempt to find associations between genes and particular diseases. By population stratification I mean the fact that different populations will naturally have different gene frequencies, and if those populations exhibit different frequencies of the disease/trait under investigation then one may have to deal with spurious correlations. If, for example, your study population includes many people of African and European descent, presumably cautious researchers would immediately by aware of this problem and attempt to take it into account. But what about populations which are genetically closer, or whose genetic difference may not be so well manifest in physical characteristics which might clue you in to the issue of stratification?

That’s why the sorts of results which might seem common sense in the aggregate are useful. One can ask questions as to the genetic closeness of Irish and English, or Irish and Spanish, in a rigorous sense. In the United States research programs which are constrained to white cases and controls may hide population stratification because of the ethnic diversity of the American population. A primary motivation for studies of Jewish genetics are the cluster of “Jewish diseases” which are common within that population. In our age it is fashionable to focus on what binds us together as a species, but genetic differences matter a great deal. Ask the parents of multiracial children who require bone marrow transplants.

A new paper in Human Heredity examines a large sample of five European populations, and goes over the between population allele frequency differences with a fine tooth comb. Genetic Differences between Five European Populations:

We sought to examine the magnitude of the differences in SNP allele frequencies between five European populations (Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Bulgaria and Portugal) and to identify the loci with the greatest differences…We found 40,593 SNPs which are genome-wide significantly…The largest differences clustered in gene ontology categories for immunity and pigmentation. Some of the top loci span genes that have already been reported as highly stratified: genes for hair color and pigmentation (HERC2, EXOC2, IRF4), the LCT gene, genes involved in NAD metabolism, and in immunity (HLA and the Toll-like receptor genes TLR10, TLR1, TLR6). However, several genes have not previously been reported as stratified within European populations, indicating that they might also have provided selective advantages: several zinc finger genes, two genes involved in glutathione synthesis or function, and most intriguingly, FOXP2, implicated in speech development. Conclusion: Our analysis demonstrates that many SNPs show genome-wide significant differences within European populations and the magnitude of the differences correlate with the geographical distance. At least some of these differences are due to the selective advantage of polymorphisms within these loci

They looked at ~350,000 SNPs across the five populations. The sample sizes were pretty large: 1,129 individuals from Bulgaria, 1,142 from Ireland, 656 from Scotland, 620 from Sweden, and 563 from Portugal. In the supplements they had a figure where they displayed the genetic variation on the two largest principal components for their sample and color-coded by region of origin. Next to this they transposed the PCA onto a map of Europe.

This confirms previous findings that the largest component of variation in Europe is north-south (at least evaluating to the west of a particular geographical cutoff), with a secondary east-west dimension. But the focus of the paper wasn’t really phylogenetic relationships between the populations as such, but the patterns of genetic differences across them. Table 1 shows the population to population differences in SNPs. Rescaled here means that the results were rescaled for sample size, which differed between populations, along with the value after a Bonferroni correction.

The pairwise differences are what you’d expect from the PCA. Most of the between population difference is probably due to history; populations random walk into their own gene frequencies through isolation by distance. But there’s more to the story than that, as is clear in table 2.

As noted by the authors genes in specific categories or classes are overrepresented among those with large between population differences. In particular, they focus on genes related to immune function and pigmentation. The reason for variation on the former is relatively straightforward, research on patterns of natural selection in the human genome have long pinpointed loci implicated in immune function as having been particularly shaped by this evolutionary genetic parameter, no doubt because disease resistance has a major impact on reproductive fitness. Additionally, it seems likely that immune related function is constantly being buffeted by selection because of the prominence of frequency dependent dynamics. As for pigmentation, it has also shown up as a major target of natural selection in many of the more recent papers, and it’s a trait whose genetic architecture we have a reasonably good grasp of now.  They also found that the NAD synthetase 1 gene was stratified. They note that this impacts metabolism and has been found to have a relationship to the disease pellagra. Loci related to diet also seem to be disproportionately affected by natural selection, and that stands to reason as the shift to agriculture was relatively recent and many populations may still be going through transients (e.g., gluten sensitivity). The densities and diets of European populations even today vary a great deal. Italy is about an order of magnitude more dense in population than Sweden, and this has likely been the case for many millennia due to differences in primary agricultural productivity. Finally, the authors observe that FOXP2 is also stratified. This is the famous “language gene,” which regularly makes press every few years. The short of it is that FOXP2 seems to be involved in complex vocalization, and been subject to selection in tetrapod lineages where vocal ability is pronounced (birds, humans, etc.). They don’t make much of the variation in the paper, but it seemed warranted to note that the gene had popped up in their tests.

The authors freely admit that their findings are provisional:

Our paper focuses on the top 11 loci and suggests plausible mechanisms for most of them. However, the total number of genome-wide significant SNPs is 150,000 and the top hits clustered in several GO categories. We cannot judge which ones are due to the effects of selection or to other mechanisms. We present a full list of genes with the best and median p values for SNPs within them (separately for the full sample and for controls only), so that others can make use of this information in future studies…

Citation: Moskvina V, Smith M, Ivanov D, Blackwood D, Stclair D, Hultman C, Toncheva D, Gill M, Corvin A, O’Dushlaine C, Morris DW, Wray NR, Sullivan P, Pato C, Pato MT, Sklar P, Purcell S, Holmans P, O’Donovan MC, Owen MJ, & Kirov G (2010). Genetic Differences between Five European Populations. Human heredity, 70 (2), 141-149 PMID: 20616560

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Happy Labor Day!

Price’s First Equation. An in-depth review of the Price Equation. First installment of several.

DNA fingerprinting pioneer discovers role of key genetic catalyst for human diversity. The strange behavior of PRDM9 could be thought of as a factor in the second term of the Price Equation.

Resentment Simmers in Western Chinese Region. “It used to be that state-owned enterprises had Han-only hiring policies, but these days they are more subtle,” said Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist who studies the job market in Xinjiang. “They reject you after you’ve gone in for the interview and they’ve seen your face.” This indicates that straightforward racism is a problem here. Many Uighurs, including Ilham Tohti, do not have a conventional East Asian appearance. One way to check for racism is to note if Hui are treated any differently. Though Muslim, Hui don’t look much different from the Han (after generations of intermarriage the Hui are genetically no different than the Han of their region, though there is a residual proportion of West and Central Asian genes within them).

Accepted Notion of Mars as Lifeless Is Challenged. Sometimes physical scientists need to chill out in the aspersions they cast toward social scientists. It’s kind of bizarre that people are still arguing about the interpretation of these results.

Housing Woes Bring New Cry: Let Market Fall. This is a intergenerational issue. Because of that I’d bet that the government won’t allow “shock therapy.” Politicians’ first rule: don’t piss off old people.

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On the face of it Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam is a book whose content is summed up accurately by the title. The author recounts her experiences in various African and Asian lands which straddle the tenth parallel north of the equator: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. It is a story told through personal narrative, the author’s, and the numerous people who are themselves embedded in larger forces welling up from below and descending from above. One can accurately describe The Tenth Parallel as a travelogue. But it is also a time machine, as Griswold surveys worlds which are a clear simulacrum of those which we know only through works of history; empires of faith, the lands of God’s platoons. As such, The Tenth Parallel is also a narrative which describes an alien world of ideas, outside of our conventional categories and classes. Many of the preconceptions and expectations which we bring to the table are “not even wrong” in the lands Griswold traverses, and what has been learned must sometimes be unlearned. This is not Newtonian Mechanics, where a cold and objective eye surveys the terrain and reports back positions and trajectories across space and time. An awareness of the author’s viewpoint is critical, while the viewpoint of her sources are plain. Finally, your own presuppositions and experiences as a reader shape the ultimate “take home” message which Eliza Griswold stitches together across her disparate sojourns.

As for the author, she is informs you about the details of her background repeatedly. Judging a book by its “cover” you see a young white Christian woman tasked to report on the turmoil in the lands of black and brown folk, many of whom are not Christian themselves, and many of whom are ardently Christian. But Griswold’s vantage point is more nuanced, she is the daughter of Frank Griswold, a prominent cleric in the Episcopal Church of America, who was a participant in the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion. This event has come close to rending asunder the Anglican Communion, of which the second largest district is covered by the Church of Nigeria (though arguably Nigeria has more practicing Anglicans than Britain, the largest district). In many ways in terms of core values I suspect that Muslims and Christians in Nigeria share more with each other than they do with Eliza Griswold. Her meetings with Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, always seem fraught with tension because it is as if Eliza Griswold’s very being serves as a witness for the liberal mainline Protestant tradition in the face of the muscular and unsubtle evangelical Protestant Christianity she observes all around her. The author’s own subjective viewpoint as a liberal Christian (at a minimum culturally, she published no precise statement of faith) interweaves with the story she tells much more subtly in most contexts than it does when she engages with Graham and his coterie. It is as if they bring with them an awareness of American culture wars and to some extent force Griswold to play her part. The author’s peculiar perspective is always there and should never be forgotten. It does not take much reading between the lines to infer that Eliza Griswold is not sympathetic to the methods of Western evangelical Protestants who believe it is their Great Commission to bring the whole world to their own faith. This is not a conclusion which is “wrong” or “right” in a conventional sense, but derived from a set of values, which the reader may or may not share.

The bigger canvas on which The Tenth Parallel is painted is is the idea of the 10/40 Window. This is the broad swath of the World Island between the tenth and fortieth parallels north latitude. These are the lands of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and traditional Chinese religion. The vast majority of the world’s non-Christians reside in this zone, and in the past generation Western evangelicals have focused their efforts on spreading their message from Morocco to China. All of the specific conflicts explored in The Tenth Parallel can be viewed through a 10/40 lens, though Griswold is obviously surveying the world of Islam more specifically.

The author emphasizes that the conflict between Islam and Christianity in these lands is often an old one, and she illustrates this point by retelling the story of the first age of global muscular evangelical Christianity, that of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But even that is simply a later episode of a millennial story. Globalization is often conceived of in terms of economic factors of production moving across borders, but in the pre-modern world it was more often ideas which spanned political units of organization. The expense of moving goods and services across civilizational boundaries meant that such international commerce was restricted to high-value luxuries. But ideas could flow easily because they were theoretically weightless for each marginal unit of meme.

Prior to the rise of Islam there was a Buddhist Age in Asia. From the south of India, to Transoxiana, to Japan, Buddhists traveled via the Silk Road. The monk Kumārajīva, who was instrumental in translating many Buddhist texts into Chinese, was reputedly the son of an Indian Brahmin and a Tocharian princess, a native of the Silk Road city of Kucha. In the 7th century the young Anglo-Saxon Christian Church was headed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, who was born in Anatolia, lived under Persian rule, and finally fled the Islamic conquests. The Christians of South India have a long history of communion and connection with Middle Eastern Christianity, first the Persian Church, and later the Syrian Orthodox Church. The current phase of religious globalization is far less of a departure from the norm than the current age of mass migration, economic specialization, and the movement of commodities and manufactured goods.

In fact the ultimate roots of the story in The Tenth Parallel go back to the Axial Age, over 2,000 years ago, with the emergence of what we used to term “higher religions,” forms of supernatural belief which are embedded in institutions, have philosophical scaffolding, and are formalized and flexible enough to move across tribal boundaries in a coherent manner so as to maintain their integrity of identity. That is, religious ideas don’t simply transfer across groups, religious systems do. In our more sensitive age these are referred to as world religions, or organized religion. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are exemplars. In the past Judaism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism all had variants which transcended tribal boundaries, though these are traditions which have more or less re-tribalized themselves of late. These tribe-transcending religious systems have served to smooth the paths of travelers who could appeal to the solidarity of belief and practice across differences of ethnicity or geographical origin. The lives of Ibn Battuta and Xuanzang both attest to this. Without the charity and hospitality of co-religionists they would never have been able to complete their treks. But what brings us together can also divide, and the boundaries between world religions are often fraught with misunderstanding and incommensurability of religious foundations. Quantitative historian Peter Turchin terms the regions where world religions meet “meta-ethnic frontiers.”

Meta-ethnic frontiers are a touchy subject today. “Right thinking people” tend to dismiss the importance of the concept, it being too associated with Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. They reject the idea of the clash of civilizations, and assume that the book which gave rise to the term aligns with their preconceptions of the central argument. Most of the criticisms of Samuel Huntington’s work, imperfect and yet thought provoking, are of a kind where I strongly suspect that the critic hasn’t read the original, but rather is engaging n^th hand expositions of the thesis. Many of the enthusiastic exponents of the clash thesis also have clearly not read Huntington’s work, which warns against neoconservative enthusiasms and suggests the necessity of a practical modus vivendi in a multipolar world riven with fissures of values. Macrohistory is generally slotted into one’s ideological preference, in large part because the principals in the discussion aren’t genuinely interested in academic issues but are looking for rhetorical devices. Academics can themselves get caught up in the game. Consider, Historian challenges assumptions about religious conflicts:

Associate professor of history Brian Catlos has spent years researching how Christians, Muslims, and Jews interact.

…

“Where my research and data leads, though not intentionally, is to debunk the notion of a conflict of civilizations–a conflict between groups of people who identify themselves as Christians, Jews, or Muslims and who articulate their struggle as a result of ideology and national identity,” said Catlos. “Rather what’s really behind history and contemporary human affairs is the interest of relatively small groups who often interact without regard to ideologies, national, or religious boundaries.”

…

Catlos observed that engaging in this type of historical research is his way of testing common assertions that there is a fundamental and irresolvable conflict between Christian and Muslim, or Jewish and Muslim, cultures. He points out that throughout history, there has been a widespread phenomenon of elites interacting with whoever will serve them best.

Such grand “common assertions” are propounded by people who are stupid. The stupidity can at the root be due to ideological preference (i.e., they know that reality varies with their ideology, but they ignore reality), ignorance, or simple lack of cognitive ability which would allow for the ability to construct models with greater subtly and nuance. It’s just as ridiculous as the inverted narratives which presuppose that religious conflicts are simply aberrations against a long history of interfaith amity. The “interfaith” movement as we understand it today is to a great extent a product of a historical moment. In particular, its roots lay in the ecumenical strand within liberal Protestantism, which eventually expanded to Christianity more generally, and finally to all world religions.

Brian Catlos’ book, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300, does refute a simple narrative of religious conflict, but, I do not believe it refutes a complex narrative of religious conflict. It is plainly wrong to assert that in every case a Muslim sides with a Muslim, and a Christian sides with a Christian. Reality is not carved out of such stark simplicities, else all scholarly endeavors would have transformed themselves into physics. There are exceptions even in cases where meta-ethnic solidarity was in clear evidence. In 1683 the Habsburg monarchy managed to obtain the support of many of the German princes who owed notional fealty to them and the crown of Poland in their battle against the Ottomans. Much of the rest of Christian European sentiment was on the side of the Hapsburgs, a fact which is notable because of the relatively recency of the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants in Germany. This set of conflicts had polarized elite opinion on the continent and in the British Isles. But by the 1680s the tide had turned and Europe wearied of internecine divides in the face of the Ottoman attack. The unanimity was such that France was vilified in some circles because of its tacit alliance with the Ottomans, despite the fact that the French relationship with the Ottomans stretched back centuries. This was to a very large extent a religious war in the minds of many despite the fact that it could also be interpreted in a more conventional framework of how geopolitical conflicts emerge out of structural parameters.

But there were Christians who traveled with the advancing Ottomans to batter themselves against the walls of Christendom. When it came to the Eastern Orthodox, who had long been Ottoman subjects, and had little necessary affinity for Western Christianity, this may seem somewhat unsurprising. But there were Protestants who fought for the Ottomans. Protestants such as Thököly Imre fomented the conflict, and supported the Ottomans, against their fellow Christians. But the historical context of this alliance makes it entirely comprehensible why these Protestants had little fellow feeling for their Roman Catholic brethren. For decades the Austrian Habsburgs had persecuted Protestants and slowly re-Catholicized their domains by means soft and hard (on the soft side, inducements so that prominent Protestant families would return to the Roman fold, on the hard side a choice between expulsion or conversion in the towns). A grand Christian front against Islam was all well and good in the abstract, but for Hungarian Protestants their proximate existence as a people was dependent on a Muslim shield against their aspirant overlords, who they knew would have reimposed Catholicism upon them. The present day religious map of Hungary reflects these historical accidents. Culturally about ~25% of Hungarians are of Protestant origin, and they are concentrated in the eastern regions of the Magyar lands which were not re-Catholicized because they were under Ottoman hegemony. In contrast, what was Royal Hungary, became overwhelmingly Catholic thanks to the success of the Hapsburgs and their confederates in grinding down the Protestant majority to triviality.

What is important is not to deny systematic biases and long term trends when you average out the seemingly random set of alliances which emerge between peoples and individuals based on immediate contingencies. It could be that in most cases alliances between polities don’t line up neatly on civilizational or confessional lines, but, over centuries non-trivial systematic biases matter. They matter insofar as the Reconquesta succeeded despite the infighting between Christian potentates. The rivalries were put aside at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. Over most of Iberia’s history in these centuries because of geographical proximity it may have been that most of the conflict was between Muslims and Muslims, Christians and Christians. But when evaluating on a civilizational scale if these lower level conflicts “average out,” then the systematic biases which track meta-ethnic identities can be highly significant. In the course of a few years it is ridiculous to speak in civilizational terms, but in the course of centuries it is precisely the boundaries of civilizations which wax and wane.

These intergenerational ebbs and flows of affinity, ideology and identity, are at the heart of Eliza Griswold’s narrative. In the early 20th century black Africa was operationally a “pagan” continent. Muslims and Christians were thin on the ground, generally restricted to narrow elites. The vast populace still adhered to their traditional tribal religions. As an example, Senegal, which is ~90% Muslim today, was probably only minority Muslim in 1900. Though it has arguably been part of the Dar-ul-Islam for a thousand years the peoples to the south of the Senegal river were only lightly touched by Islamic civilization. In the 20th century modernization, the rise of mass culture and communication, has produced a much deeper Islamicization in African societies where organized religion had previously been a feature of narrow urban elites. But as Eliza Griswold notes the Muslims were not the only ones at the march in Africa. European Christians saw in the “Dark Continent” a treasure trove of souls to be won, so that today Africa is split between Muslims and Christians, with Sub-Saharan Africa being majority Christian. Only in enclaves in coastal West African nations does traditional religion manifest in the public sphere, organizing itself as Vodun. Elsewhere the God of Abraham reigns supreme.

Africa’s adherence to world religions has resulted in the believers aligning themselves with international concerns. Griswold points to this when observing that the religiously split city of Kaduna has Christian neighborhoods with the names Haifa, Jerusalem, and Television, while the Muslim neighborhoods are Baghdad and Afghanistan. What has Kaduna to do with Jerusalem? In concrete terms not much, but symbolically a great deal, and for humans symbolism has concrete consequences. The story Griswold tells throughout The Tenth Parallel is the integration of local concerns and tensions with global dynamics. In Nigeria Islam is closely connected to the Hausa and Fulani identities, while many of the southern ethnic groups are staunchly Christian (though many of the Yoruba have converted to Islam as well). Islam has a long history in Nigeria’s north, and clearly the southerners associate it with the past depredations of Muslim states. In Islamic law it is not legal for Muslims to enslave Muslims (though there are a fair number of “work arounds”), so the fact that West African Muslims were on the border of the Dar-ul-Islam meant that they had a ready export to the rest of the Muslim world in the form of black slaves. Long before Europeans were purchasing Africans “sold down the river,” African Muslims were selling slaves across the Sahara. With the rise to dominance of Christianity in southern Nigeria there was now an organized rival to Islam as meta-ethnic identity. A meta-ethnic frontier had come into being in central Nigeria.

In the Philippines, Malaysia Indonesia and Sudan, Griswold observes repeatedly the intricate dance between ethnicity, history, and religion. In both Indonesia and Malaysia non-Muslim ethnic minorities adhere to Christianity as a way to preserve their distinctive identity and particular history in the face of the assimilative power of the dominant Islamic culture of maritime Southeast Asia. Though outside the purview of The Tenth Parallel the same dynamic is operative in non-Muslim mainland Southeast Asia. Karens in Burma, Montongards in Vietnam, and Hmong in northern Thailand, view adherence to the Buddhism of the ethnic majority of these nations as a step toward assimilation and loss of ethnic identity. Though Christianity is just as alien in nature to the shamanic spiritual traditions of these peoples as Buddhism, it serves as a distinctive ethnic marker in regions where affiliation to the two religions tracks ethnicity perfectly. And, it also allies the Christian minorities with a powerful civilizational international.

In eastern Indonesia the Christian Ambonese, converted during the period of Dutch rule before Islam had swept so far east, were often partisans of the colonial regime against the efforts of the predominantly Muslim independenc movement. The case of the Ambonese points to a general resentment of the majority culture in many regions impacted by European colonialism. It seems plausible that without European involvement many of the “hill tribes” of eastern India and Southeast Asia would eventually have been assimilated into the ethno-religious mainstream, as many of their predecessors had been. In the process though they would have lost their identity, the cost of social harmony being conformity and homogenization. Whether the perpetuation of ethno-cultural distinctiveness through the alignment of particular groups with different meta-ethnic world religious identities is good or bad is strongly conditioned upon your own specific viewpoint. But in The Tenth Parallel Eliza Griswold shows that from Africa to Southeast Asia the general dynamic is similar. The cleavages shake out in a familiar form, despite the local origins of the conflicts.

Of course despite the subtitle there’s more to religious conflict than that between religions. There is also the conflict within religions. Eliza Griswold’s clear discomfort with the image which evangelical Protestants were projecting to the Muslim world of Christianity is an instance of that. But so is the strife which emerges within and across the sects of Islam. The standard model posits the rise of a Fundamentalist Islam at war with local Sufi traditions. There is a great deal to this story, as far as it goes. But there is a precision and clarity with Fundamentalist Islam, which is really often world normative Islam shifted toward a Saudi Salafi tinge, which does not exist with “moderate Islam” or “Sufi Islam.” By its very nature locally inflected Islam is diverse, and can’t be bracketed under a catchall term on any substantive grounds except to point to its negation of Salafi or reformist Islam. The rise of internationalist Salafi Islams is another case of cultural globalization, and its roots go back centuries. Several hundred years ago many regions of the Islamic world, confronting European powers on the rise, or declining Islamic orders such as that of the Ottomans, entered into a period of reform which gave birth to fundamentalisms of various flavors. The Deobandi movement in India, the Wahhabis of Arabia, and the Fulani jihad may all be considered instantiations of a broader international pattern. Pushing against this were a diverse array of local Islams, many of which lacked the coherency of the reformists who claimed to be bringing Islam back to its first principles. The success of the local Islams varied. In Arabia the Wahhabis allied with the House of Saud and eventually rode the latter’s victories to religious supremacy in most of the peninsula. The Wahhabi ascendancy has been marked by a physical destruction of monuments to rival Islamic traditions, as well as the despised position of Shia within the kingdom. In South Asia the fundamentalist reformists have not swept all before them, as the numerical preponderance of other traditions attests to, though arguably in in Pakistan they have influence out of proportion to their numbers. In Indonesia and Malaysia the fundamentalists are a small minority among the Muslim majority, which varies in its adherence to world normative Islam in any case.

And yet how much should we make of this division within Islam, or those within Christianity? In both Malaysia and Indonesia the governments encourage conversion to Islam by the remaining groups not aligned with a world religion. Despite her conflicts with fundamentalists in her own religion Eliza Griswold did in the end agree to pray with Franklin Graham. There are wheels within wheels. Focusing on one specific wheel, one layer of the dynamic, does not deny that that wheel and dynamic may be nested within others, and that others may be nested within it. The frictions and conflicts on the tenth parallel play out on multiple hierarchical levels. Individuals have their own interests, as do ethnic groups, and finally meta-ethnic groups. Modern Westerners tend to have a methodological individualistic bias, and so reduce group actions to an aggregate of the material incentives and preferences of groups of individuals. This is far too pat and simple. But how to define interests and a meta-ethnic group, a religion, can be easily problematized. As I noted above it is highly likely that the Nigerians killing each other over ethno-religious differences share much more in values and outlook with each other than they do with Westerners. But human conflict often hinges on symbolic markers and issues. One can muse in the vein of “War, what is it good for?”, but at the end of the day war is. Similarly, as an atheist I do not believe that there is a God in fact, but the fact of the beliefs of others that God is is highly consequential. It is less important what the real Islam or Christianity is, than what Islam or Christianity is for the people at any specific place and time. By and large in a world characterized by economic growth driven by non-zero sum interactions violent physical conflict produces absolute losers on all sides. But the heuristics and biases research tells us that quite often people care less about the height of the hill than their own peak position atop it. What Eliza Griswold documents in The Tenth Parallel is of great interest precisely because it puts the spotlight on the individual psychology of people who are caught up in eternal macrohistorical dynamics, processes which we’ve only begun to see as destructive for the aims of greater human wealth and health in the last few centuries.

Addendum: I believe that anyone who finds The Tenth Parallel of interest would benefit from reading some of Philip Jenkins and Peter Turchin’s works.

Image Credit: Wikimedia, Antonin Kratochvil

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