Tomorrow is Labor Day in the USA. I was actually shocked to realize last week that the USA has a higher unemployment rate than many European nations. I grew up in the 1990s when we were conditioned to assume that Europe would always have higher structural unemployment for a variety of reasons. In any case, I decided to look at some employment-related data in Google Public Data Explorer. Below on the x-axis are the employment rates for a selected number of nations over time, and on the y-axis the employment rates for the 15-24 age group. The employment rate in the first case is simply the proportion in the age range 15-64 who are in employment. Note the change in the relationship of the two values over time. I’ve highlighted the USA, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, and Mexico, to show you their movement across the grid.

Let’s limit the x-axis to women only:

I think what you’re obviously seeing are two general trends: women entering the labor market and the transition from the single-income household to the two-income household, as well as a balance in the younger age brackets through the fact that many more youth are pursuing higher education. So the y-axis is more stable, as the shift toward females in the labor market is balanced by a higher proportion going to university. The changes in some nations like the Netherlands are really striking.

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If you’re American, you should be at a barbecue or something! So what podcasts do you listen to? The main talk show I listen to is Tom Ashbrook’s.

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The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on the rise of evangelical Protestantism among French Gyspies, and how that differentiates them from eastern European Roma in their anti-social tendencies:

The Gypsy Evangelicals in Chaumont, France counter any stereotype. They park some 6,000 white trailers in neat rows on the grassy runway of a World War I air base. It is a “city” brought from “the north, the south, the east, and the west,” as signs replete with biblical language affirm, anchored by a tent that holds 6,000 and atop of which flutter the flags of France, Belgium, the US, the EU, Germany, and the UK.

The gathering joins these Evangelicals, whose numbers and faith have swelled to some 145,000 of the 425,000 Gypsies in France. Their tight organization, work and family ethic, regard for civil law, and stress on education has made them the “go-to” Gypsy group for French authorities, and a point of pride in a larger Gypsy community that has long suffered a stigma of criminality, drugs, and brawls. Beyond that, they help stabilize and keep a vanishing Gypsy identity intact, analysts say, as economic and legal pressures in post-industrial Europe are atomizing a nomadic life.

Much of what is described reminded me of religion as depicted in Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, especially the section on Nigeria. In societies and cultures where “post-materialist” values have not become embedded background conditions religion serves as a critical social glue. Additionally, in a striking parallel with the French Gypsies non-Muslims in Africa and non-Muslims Southeast Asia have both taken to Christianity in large part because it is viewed as a way to align a community with an international order, and, preserve their ethnic identity in the face of assimilative pressures from the more established ethno-religious majority (e.g., Hausa, Malays, etc.).

Certainly the impact of evangelical Christianity on Gypsy culture seems analogous to the effect of Christianity and Islam among Third World migrants in Europe as a whole. Without religious foundations or assimilation into the broader secular national order these subcultures often become the seeds of broader social anomie without the strict moral framework which religion provides. But in some ways this is a “lesser of two evils proposition,” with reformist Muslim communities in a culturally Christian Europe being the most striking reminders that though religion may sharpen within group élan, it can also foster division across groups. At the end of the day do Europeans really want Roma to maintain their independence and distinctiveness as a subculture, even if some of their anti-social tendencies are mitigated through Protestant evangelicalism?

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Have a good Labor Day weekend!

Catholics and the Evolving Cosmos. And yet 35% of American Roman Catholics are Creationists according to the GSS.

23andMe kits at some discount, with a subscription to the “personal genome service” for at least 3 months. Normal complete edition is about $500, with the discount it’s about $300 + 3 X $5 = $315. The personal genome service doesn’t look like much value-add from what I can tell, just a way to get extra money out of you. I assume they’ve calculated that $5 is a small enough amount that many people won’t unsubscribe after 3 months.

Capsaicin Can Act as Co-Carcinogen, Study Finds; Chili Pepper Component Linked to Skin Cancer. The problem is with topical creams. I keep track of this stuff because I eat a lot of spicy food. On the balance it seems that it does more good than bad, so I’m pretty chilled out, so to speak.

Insight Offered Into Superstitious Behavior Thinking about death makes people less superstitious? Can you think of a better explanation of what’s going on here?

How Bankruptcy Can Rescue Students from the Debt Trap. Yeah, I think this should be an option. The median undergrad is graduating with around a little north of $20,000 in debt, but there are people way up the scale. It’s a skewed distribution. Too many people think of student loans as “free money.” Actually, it’s someone’s money. In fact, it’s your money, whether through direct federal loans and subsidizations, or through the big pool of capital drawing on pension and mutual funds.

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Sometimes in applied fields artistic license is constrained by the necessity of function to particular creative channels. Architecture comes to mind, at least before innovative technologies produced lighter and stronger materials, freeing up form from its straitjacket (whether this was a positive development is a matter of taste). But there’s only so much you can do with your palette when your palette is limited. This can be a bug, or it can be a feature. Science is not art, but in some ways at its heart it’s a story about the universe. The story can be in words or math, no matter, ultimately it’s the human attempt to map nature and make its subtle patterns comprehensible to us in plainer fashion. Some of the human biases in our quest are transparent. Why is there anthropology? A whole discipline devoted to the study of mankind and his nearest biological kin. We don’t peruse the patters with an objective and uninterested eye. We’re shaped by our presuppositions, as well as the constraints of the methods, and the results we have before us. The emergence of a theoretical evolutionary biology in the decades before the molecular revolution after World War II may have been in part simply a function of the fact that there were only so many results one could squeeze out of classical evolutionary genetic techniques, which relied on tracking only a limited set of phenotypes due to large effect mutations in breeding populations. With the rise of molecular evolution you saw the crystallization of theoretical frameworks, such as the neutral theory, to explain the burst of novel results.

Around the year 2000 something similar happened in historical population genetics. The analysis of mtDNA lineages, passed from mother to daughter, had matured, and techniques for typing the Y chromosome had started to catch up, so that a symmetry between the sexes could arise. “Mitochondrial Eve” was now paired with “Y chromosomal Adam.” Though mtDNA and Y lineages were only two direct lines of ancestry, because there was no recombination across much of their sequence it was easy to analyze them within the context of coalescent theory. In contrast, the genealogy of autosomal regions of the genome were confounded by recombination, which mixed & matched the variation in a manner which made reconstruction of past history far more difficult. So we had the technology to extract the genetic variation from mtDNA and the Y chromosome, and, we knew how to model their evolution. The two together produced a genetic time machine.

The result was a swelling of papers utilizing uniparental markers. You can see the chronology to some extent at the frequency of postings at Stanford’s Human Population Genetics Laboratory online repository. Another byproduct was the emergence of public intellectuals who filled the need which arose to interpret and communicate the findings to a lay audience. Four books are emblematic of the era, Bryan Sykes’ The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, Spencer Wells’ The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa, and Steven Olson’s Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. As a professional journalist Olson’s treatment was the odd one out, as much reportage as a personal interpretation. In contrast, Sykes, Wells, and Oppenheimer were making scholarly cases from their own vantage point. Oppenheimer and Wells also paired their books with television documentaries. Wells continues to remain in the public eye, he’s become a new sort of intellectual entrepreneur with the The Genographic Project. The age of uniparental markers then spawned careers and truisms. For example, the patterns of variation of mtDNA and Y chromosomes resulted in the consensus that ~75% of the ancestors of modern Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. The proportion of the ancestry contributed by Neolithic farmers decreased from southeast to northwest, converging upon zero in the far reaches of the British Isles and Norden.

This inference was made in large part based upon the contemporary patterns of genetic variation, by assigning modern haplogroups to putative ancient populations. To the left is a map of the frequency of haplogroup R1b, which is the most common Y chromosomal lineage in western Europe. The frequency is highest among the Basques, who were presumed to be the most pristine reservoir of the genetic substratum of Paleolithic Europe. The conception here was that the Basques were clearly indigenous to Iberia, they were already there before the arrival of outsiders such as the Celts, Phoenicians, and finally Romans (this has influenced modern Basque nationalism to some extent). Their non-Indo-European language was assumed to be a relic of many dialects which once existed before Indo-European swept over them. Using R1b, and other haplogroups at high frequency among the “indigenous peoples” of Europe, historical geneticists pegged the ancestral quanta of hypothetical prehistoric groups using these putative indigenes as modern references. But the inferences rested on assumptions, assumptions which couldn’t be directly tested. Until that is another methodological revolution arrived on the scene: the extraction of ancient DNA! These new waves of results, which came to the fore in the latter 2000s, have unsettled our preconceptions. It now seems that the past was likely more complex than we’d presumed, and the palimpsest of human genetic variation over time may have obscured and clouded our understanding of the map of what once was.

More recently some researches have gone back and looked at the variation within the R1b haplogroup, specifically the subclade which is very common in Western Europe, R1b1b2, and concluded that in fact it was most diverse in the eastern Mediterranean.  The most plausible inference to be made from this was that the R1b1b2 originated to the east, and spread to the west, rising in frequency due to genetic drift as populations went through bottlenecks and then rapidly expanded in size. Additionally, the last common ancestor of these lineages was on the order of ~10,000 years ago. This naturally upends the model which geneticists were confidently pushing forward in the early 2000s, shutting the door on debates as to the provenance of modern Europeans and their relationship to Ice Age hunter-gatherers. A follow up paper rebutted this new claim as to the origin and expansion of R1b1b2. What had been a stable and conventional area of historical population genetics has now been thrown into tumult, and researchers are looking more closely at the uniparental lineages which had had their time in the sun. Or so it seemed.

So with that background, a paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics steps into the “R1b controversy,” leaning to the side of those who argue for its origin more recently among Neolithic farmers. A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe:

The phylogenetic relationships of numerous branches within the core Y-chromosome haplogroup R-M207 support a West Asian origin of haplogroup R1b, its initial differentiation there followed by a rapid spread of one of its sub-clades carrying the M269 mutation to Europe. Here, we present phylogeographically resolved data for 2043 M269-derived Y-chromosomes from 118 West Asian and European populations assessed for the M412 SNP that largely separates the majority of Central and West European R1b lineages from those observed in Eastern Europe, the Circum-Uralic region, the Near East, the Caucasus and Pakistan. Within the M412 dichotomy, the major S116 sub-clade shows a frequency peak in the upper Danube basin and Paris area with declining frequency toward Italy, Iberia, Southern France and British Isles. Although this frequency pattern closely approximates the spread of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), Neolithic culture, an advent leading to a number of pre-historic cultural developments during the past 10 thousand years, more complex pre-Neolithic scenarios remain possible for the L23(xM412) components in Southeast Europe and elsewhere.

There’s aren’t incredibly novel techniques of analyses here. Rather, the confusion around R1b1b2 has prompted researchers to expand their population coverage and resequence the markers around the haplogroup. These phylogenetic trees are constructed by genealogies which are separated by mutational steps, with steps of daughter mutations down a particular branch and distinguishing various derived clades. The terminology can kind of get confusing, but R1b1b2 is equivalent to the M269 branch in this study. What they did was analyze the phylogenetic relationships of the branches of R1b1b2 and it sister clades, and plot their frequencies as a function of geography. Below are a set of figures which show the frequencies of various clades across Europe. The last figure has several panels because they’re all subclades, and of somewhat less interest to the big picture. The first figure has the various branches, so you can see how they relate before browsing the maps.

[View with PicLens]

Tree

M73

M269

L23

M412

L11

Other markers

M269 is really the one to focus on. It and its daughter branches are at the heart of the Paleolithic vs. Neolithic controversy. Compare the phylogenetic tree in the first image, and the distributions of the allele frequencies in the subsequent images. The Western European variants seem to be daughter branches from an ancestral variant which is found in Anatolia or thereabouts. The authors also confirm the coalescence back to the last common ancestor  ~10,000 years ago, though the methods have a bias toward inflating the value, so that’s an upper bound. They also used PCA analysis show how the haplogroup variation exhibited cluster patterns. The first panel has the haplogroups, with PC 1 separating the ancestral R1b variant from the daughters, and the second PC separating each daughter branch. The second panel inputs the various fractions of R1b haplogroups in populations. There’s an obvious recapitulation of the geographical map in the distribution of haplogroups.

What’s the moral of this story? I’m not going to get into the correlations they adduce between various archaeological groups and genetic lineages. That got us into trouble earlier as I implied. I don’t think the fine-grained results are solid enough that we should be taking that sort of interpretation too seriously. Rather, it’s telling us what we don’t know, and what we shouldn’t be clear on. I lean toward the proposition that R1b1b2 was brought by Neolithic farmers at this point, the paper which refuted that finding leaned strong on samples from Sardinia, which I suspect are more than not atypical and not representative (Sardinia tends to be an outlier on genetic plots because of its island isolation). But my confidence is hardly even modest at this point. There’s a lot we don’t know.

History begins in Sumeria with the written word ~5,000 years ago. But as history dawns agriculture was still new to Norden and the fringes of the Baltic and British Isles. By the time what the ancients called Thule came into some focus, after the fall of the Roman Empire, much had passed beyond our line of sight. The original geneticists and archaeologists who attempted to synthesize their disciplines and construct a plausible model of how Europeans and Europe in its linguistic, genetic, and cultural variation, came to be, followed the principle of parsimony. Cavalli-Sofrza, Ammerman, and Renfrew presented us with a model where Paleolithic Europeans, who hunted & gathered, and spoke non-Indo-European languages, were slowly replaced culturally, linguistically, and partially genetically, by Indo-Europeans who brought farming from the Middle East. This was the “demic diffusion” hypothesis. I don’t think anyone accepts this as likely at this point, at least in its total simplicity of explanatory power. We need to reconsider whether the Basques can even serve as models for Paleolithic European man anymore! It may be that the Basques themselves are culturally and genetically intrusive, bringing their language and folkways along Mediterranean shores with agriculture, eventually marginalizing the thin numbers of hunter-gatherers beyond the limes of their “civilization.” Additionally, we have to remember that there was history before history, that what we term prehistory is rich with many developments which are preserved only vaguely and in the mists of oral tradition (though that tradition rapidly decays in fidelity). The more recent expansion of the Bantu and Austronesian languages do not benefit from copious records, because they spread with preliterate societies. The expansion of Turkic and Indo-Iranian dialects can only be perceived in the outlines because these peoples were on the fringes of societies where writing was part of their culture. Europe’s shift to agriculture occurred over thousands of years, and those thousands of years were all preliterate. Stonehenge and the megaliths were constructed by societies which we can comprehend only through their most robust monuments. The stones speak to a complexity which genetics can not resolve. Sometimes admitting that you don’t know is an answer in and of itself.

Citation: Myres NM, Rootsi S, Lin AA, Järve M, King RJ, Kutuev I, Cabrera VM, Khusnutdinova EK, Pshenichnov A, Yunusbayev B, Balanovsky O, Balanovska E, Rudan P, Baldovic M, Herrera RJ, Chiaroni J, Di Cristofaro J, Villems R, Kivisild T, & Underhill PA (2010). A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe. European journal of human genetics : EJHG PMID: 20736979

Image Credit: Frédéric Vincent, Matthew Field, National Geographic, Wikimedia

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In broad brushes I agree with Daniel Larison:

One of the things that always bothered me about George Bush’s revolutionary rhetoric was how he identified the expansion of political freedom with God’s design for man, which makes God’s plan one of narrow political deliverance rather than deliverance from death. These claims that representative government and separation of powers have some grounding in Christianity bother me in a different way. Probably the most thoroughly Christianized state in the medieval world was Byzantium, but it retained a late Roman autocratic system of government for its entire existence, so what is the connection between political structures and Christianity? Because the experience of most of Christian history in most parts of the world does not fit this picture of Christianity as the foundation of modern constitutional government, these claims have to privilege the Christianity of certain parts of western Europe and North America as the norm when it was clearly the exception. Furthermore, the reason for privileging Christianity from these parts of the world becomes an expressly political one. In other words, the quality or acceptability of one’s Christianity becomes dependent on the extent to which it complements the political values of modern Western states. Tying the importance of Christianity to the instrumental claim that Christianity is necessary because it created or undergirded our political culture takes us closer to defending Christianity in terms of little more than “Christian-flavored civic religion.” Even if it were true, I’m not sure that Christians should want to make that argument.

The American Radical Reformation tradition of evangelical Protestant Christianity is particularly prone to making really extreme conflations between Christianity and a specific concrete temporal order (or, at the other extreme reject the temporal order altogether as illegitimate) . I think it has to do with the sectarian and often parochial nature of American evangelical pastors, as opposed to more internationalist Roman Catholic clerics. This tendency is not necessarily good, or bad, as such. But it does lead to strange assertions of necessary entailments from Christian religious affiliation which would render most pre-modern Christians imperfectly Christian, and many non-Western Christians imperfectly Christian today (the attempts by American Protestants to convert Oriental Orthodox Christians in the Near East, traditions with a 2,000 year history, is a practical outcome of this mode of thinking). The Mormon church explicitly interjects Americocentrism into their religious system, taking these tendencies to their logical extreme, and arguably out of mainstream Christianity.

Interestingly, this way of thinking is not limited to Christians. I have observed American Muslims state that the United States is the most Islamic nation, the nation where Islam is practiced most freely and in its truest, pure, form. There were similar strands in 19th century Reform Judaism, which saw in America a nation where the Jewish religion could flourish without the impediments and historical baggage which had characterized Judaism in Europe, and so ushering in the Messianic era.

The common thread then is Americanism, not any particular religion.

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In my post on American fertility rates by racial group Mike Keesey asks: ‘It’d also be interesting to see what’s going on within “non-Hispanic whites”.’ One can explore this question in the GSS. Let’s look at ancestry group (e.g., German, French, etc.), religion, belief in God, political ideology, intelligence and education, for non-Hispanic whites. The data is limited to the 2000s, and I also constrained to those age 45 and up. Then I looked at the “CHILDS” variable, which asks the respondent how many children they have. Taking the mean of this value gives us a sense of the rank order in fertility. Note that this is not total fertility rate. That should be clear from the values being well above 2 in most cases. Additionally, I recombined some categories, so that “British” is the amalgamation of English, Scottish and Welsh ancestry. The “Irish” class almost certainly includes both Scotch-Irish (doing the regional and religious breakdown this seems obvious), and the Irish without modifiers. For intelligence I used “WORDSUM”. The variables I input into the GSS can be found at the bottom of the post so you can replicate.

I believe much of the difference among white non-Hispanics by ancestry is caused by other variables. In particular, the low values for Italians is probably a function of their disproportionately urban residence patterns in comparison to German Americans. Other white ethnic groups (the sample sizes were smaller for these constraints) with a strong urban bias show the same pattern.

To replicate, go to http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08.

Under “Analysis” at the top left select “Comparison of Means.”

Dependent: CHILDS

Row: WORDSUM(r:0-4″Low intelligence”;5-7″Average intelligence”;8-10″Above average intelligence”) DEGREE GOD(r:1-2″Atheist and Agnostic”;3″Higher Power”;4-6″Believe in God”) polviews(r:1-3″Liberal”;4″Moderate”;5-7″Conservative”) RELIG ETHNIC(r:2,11″German”;3,10″French”;7,9,19,26″Nordic”;14″Irish”;15″Italian”;8,24″British”)

German = Germany + Austria
French = France + French Canadian
Nordic = Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland
British = Scottish, English and Welsh

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Posting may be light, and/or I may skip link dumps, etc., around the Labor Day weekend. Mostly notifying you so you don’t ask if I’m still alive!

Immunity under natural selection. Focusing on three of the genes which showed signatures of selection in the HapMap 3 paper. It’s interesting to note that only a generation ago many scholars were spending time debating about the adaptive value of blood group antigens and the like because so little was known about the impact of natural selection on the genome (since genomics as such didn’t really exist). Now the swell of results requires labor hours to filter.

Y Chromosomal Variation Tracks the Evolution of Mating Systems in Chimpanzee and Bonobo. Basically, common chimpanzees exhibit more “sperm competition” than bonobos. I think this is a case where common chimpanzees are the outgroup to bonobos and humans. It also puts the spotlight on the necessary nuance in traits like “polyandry.” Imported from human mating systems, they don’t necessarily inform very well for our primate cousins.

The Crystal Ball’s Labor Day Predictions. High probability of Republicans winning the House, modest probability of them winning the Senate. Notes that the two are not independent probabilities. Assuming that the Republicans win the House, the probability of them winning the Senate goes up. 100% probability that the “pundits” are going to discuss the “Death of the Democratic Party” for a few months.

Quants merge with humans. There’s a lot of money to be made in the business of money, so where there’s a will, there’s always a way. The Cowles’ Commission’s finding that stock market newsletters 1) are not effective 2) but will continue to be produced, illustrates the power of human psychology within the context of the rational market.

Burger King Has Suitors From Brazil. Another indication of Brazil’s “ascension graphic.” I still don’t get why Russia is in the list of BRICs. Its demographics look like Japan.

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Update: Also see breakdowns among non-Hispanic white ancestry groups.

The really sad events around the Discovery Channel hostage situation, and the subsequent death of James Lee, made me wonder a little bit about total fertility rates. Lee seems to have had sentiments very similar to some of the anti-humanists within the Deep Ecology movement. Unlike the mainstream Left these elements of Deep Ecology are greatly concerned about the high fertility rates of non-developed societies and of the immigrants from those societies in a proximate sense (that is, the fertility is of a concern foremost because of the direct immediate environmental footprint, rather than a symptom of broader societal underdevelopment). I’ve probed the international differences in total fertility rates before, but what about in the United States? You probably won’t be surprised which segment of the population has the highest fertility, but what about the lowest? The US Census Bureau tracks these sorts of things in detail. So according to the Census Bureau the TFR’s in 2008 were:

2.09 – All races
1.84 – Non-Hispanic white
2.11 – Non-Hispanic black
1.84 – American Indian, Native Alaskan
2.06 – Asian & Pacific Islander
2.99 – Hispanic

Yes, Native Americans have the same TFR as non-Hispanic whites! Total surprise to me. The profile in relation to within wedlock and out-of-wedlock differs between the groups a fair amount. Here are the percents born to unmarried mothers:

40.6% – All races
28.6% – Non-Hispanic white
72.3% – Non-Hispanic black
65.8% – American Indian, Native Alaskan
16.9% – Asian & Pacific Islander
52.5% – Hispanic

So Native Americans combine low total fertility with a high proportion of out-of-wedlock births. I actually found births per 1,000 trend lines broken down by Hispanic ethnic group. There’s an interesting pattern here:

As you can see, the “high Hispanic fertility rate” is really the high Mexican American fertility rate. Cuban Americans have fertility below non-Hispanic whites (Cuba’s TFR is 1.6, though Cuban Americans are highly unrepresentative of Cuba demographically and culturally somewhat isolated from the island), and Puerto Ricans seem to track black Americans. The latter aligns with the sociology I’ve seen that indicates American Puerto Ricans share many norms and vital stats with the blacks next to whom they settled in Manhattan (Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico have a TFR which is the same as non-Hispanic whites). Interestingly, the Native and non-Hispanic white fertility has only converged in the last generation or so. One issue to consider is that there’s been a large increase in the number of Americans identifying as Native American since the 1980s, so this may have altered the fertility simply because of a change in the demographic composition of those who identify as Native American. Another point is that Mexican Americans have a TFR which is much higher than in Mexico, which is now around ~2 (though if you look up the data, you’ll see some underdeveloped southern Mexican states are around ~3).

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