My new favorite blog: The Scientific Fundamentalist

I just discovered the Scientific Fundamentalist blog at Psychology Today. It's  written by an evolutionary psychologist with a sensibility I find very amiable. Lately it has been dealing with aspects of IQ. I'd start here, where he states a hypothesis he follows up on in later posts.

(T)hat more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus our ancestors did not have, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values that existed in the ancestral environment.

It turns out I had blogged about this idea in February, and this is the guy that had the idea. In a series of posts following the one quoted, he explicates other aspects of it, such as "If Liberals Are More Intelligent than Conservatives, Why Are Liberals So Stupid?"

This is going to be a regular read for me.

Cultural epigenetics; where you live affects how you think

In reasoning about nature, kids who live where they see it think differently about animals than kids who don't. This study looked at urban kids in Chicago and rural European and American Indian kids in Wisconsin.

For decades, the consensus was that as young children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt an "anthropocentric" stance, favoring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals. ... The results were striking -- while young urban children revealed a human-centered pattern of reasoning, the rural European-American and Native American children did not.

The authors also talk about the different notions of "alive" in Indian and European cultures, but the difference in thinking they point to is rural vs. urban.

I wish I knew more about the actual study. I suppose I could find it.  I wonder if they just showed kids Tom and Jerry cartoons and then asked them if cats really dress like hep cats and chase mice with cleavers.

But it sounds to me like scaffolding. You bring what you have, and that affects how you receive what you encounter. It also sounds like a cultural version of Lamarckian evolution, where early experience changes the mind's phenotype. (You realize that I intend this as a metaphor, don't you?) That makes it a sort of cultural epigenetics. Stuff that happens to you because of where you live affects the way you think.

I was in junior high when I first discovered evolution by natural selection. I immediately understood it, and I immediately knew it was true. In high school civics class, I remember a discussion of Herbert Spencer. I wonder if they still study Spencer in 12th grade. Spencer's big idea was cultural Darwinism, by which he meant that fit people become rich, and unfit people become poor; that's how you tell fit from unfit.

I remember my mind wandering. I was applying natural selection to cultural phenomena, specifically fads. They come into existence more or less randomly, and the ones that fit our culture last, while the others die off. (The similarity of this idea to Dawkins' memes has not escaped me.) And this issue sounds a lot like my version of cultural Darwinism.

Imprinted genes work differently in different sexes

One interesting conflict is between moms and dads for what resources mom should give to baby in the womb.* Mom wants to balance the baby's growth against her own health. Dad wants the carrier of his own genes to get everything. He can always go get another woman if this one dies.

One tactic moms and dads use in this conflict is passing on imprinted genes,which are genes that convince the baby's genome they should be expressed rather than the one from the other parent. Of course, we've passed out of my area of actual expertise (assuming I have one) into stuff I've read some about. Anyway, this paper presented at a conference says they found evidence that imprinted genes are involved in controlling endocrine functions in the placenta, and that these might affect a child's (or at least a mouse's) health later in life, and some of it is gender specific already.

Female offspring of obese mothers had raised blood insulin levels, whilst male offspring did not. Male offspring did have alterations in the expression of liver genes important in lipid and glucocorticoid metabolism. ...

We have data showing that gene expression and DNA methylation are sexually dimorphic in male and female placentae under normal/control conditions. Surprisingly, in stressful conditions, such as a high fat diet or low calorie diet, or maternal overweight/obesity - the male and female placentae do not use the same strategies: they use different gene pathways and networks to cope with the stress.

Does this directly lead to different outcomes? It may lead to sex-dependent differences in the outcome of programming with long lasting effects. Alternatively, it may be that metaphorically speaking males climb the mountain taking the north face while females take the south face - but they ultimately reach the same peak after using these different paths."

I have nothing profound to say about this. It's another data point in the complicated way we develop.

*Two good books about this and related issues, from an evolutionary point of view, are Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, by Sarah Hrdy, and Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles by Robin Baker.

Another clue about SIDS

Kids who die of SIDS have low levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin regulates things like breathing, heart rate, and sleep. 

I predict:

• We will find some gene or set of genes that determines the seratonin level in the gut and in the brain and nervous system (the two places serotonin is found).
• SIDS kids will have alleles that reduce serotonin production in the brain to a point where they die as infants.
• This will turn out to be a case like sickle-cell anemia, where one copy of a gene prevents some bad thing from  happening but two kills you.
• Within the lifetime of my offspring, we will begin to sequence the DNA of every child born in a hospital in the US and put it in a research database, to compare genetic and medical histories.
• We will develop a therapy to increase serotonin levels (medication, gene therapy) and give it to kids with the SIDS genes.
• This therapy will reduce SIDS to very low levels.
• We will find that the therapy has unintended consequences, as serotonin becomes overproduced in the gut in some kids receiving the therapy. (I hate to think that that would look like.)
• It will still be worth it not to have them die as infants.

Why do mothers raise sexist sons?

I've pondered this off and on for a long time. If little boys are raised almost entirely by their mothers rather than their fathers, why do so many turn out sexist?

Part of it must be the fact that parents are less important in forming opinions than peers, including sibs. The peers of Cain, Eve's first son, were wild animals, so maybe he got his ideas from baboons, and every male since has had that continued influence from its peer group. (Do I have to put irony marks around things like that? I thought not.) But parents do have some influence, so why does sexism exist?

I suspect sexism is as biologically based as religiosity or political orientation, or reading ability, or the number of brain cells, or alcoholism, or autism, or lying, or tameness, or sexual orientation, or liking to bet on long shots, schizophrenia, or lots of other behavioral characteristics. Why should a man's attitude toward women be less subject to biological influences than being politically liberal or conservative? The relationship between the sexes is pretty important for any animal.

So I expect that, over a period of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, males who were sexist were more successful at having surviving babies than sensitive men. And part of that is what the women wanted, and apparently still want. At least in the US, the males typically present themselves, and women say yes or no. One assumes that female selection is as big a part of human evolution as it is in other apes. So women are partly responsible for biological sexism's persistence by frequently mating with sexist men. It's a staple of fiction as well as life.

What brought this to mind is an article a couple of days ago in the LA Times. Some researchers looked at math ability and math attitudes at the beginning and end of the school year for 117 first and second graders and at the math anxiety level (not math ability) of their 7 teachers, all female. By the end of the school year, 20 of the 65 girls "subscribed to the math-is-for-boys stereotype"  and scored 5% lower on a test of counting shapes and doing simple addition and subtraction. Boys and the other 45 girls both scored the same.

So somehow the teachers transmitted their anxiety to some students (and one presumes, though I haven't looked at the actual study, that some of the newly anxious girls were in classes with confident teachers). I wonder what would happen if they did it with male teachers. Would math-anxious male teachers produce math-anxious boy students?

Speculative science to the rescue: I conjecture that the idea that math is a boy thing is related to the whole idea of gender roles, which is related to political orientation. I therefore predict that female math anxiety will turn out to be more common in conservative women than liberals. A prediction of that prediction would be that university math departments would have a mix of conservative and liberal men but mostly liberal women. I'll bet there's a dataset out there that would solve this.

But even if sexism and math-is-a-boy-thingism are biologically influenced, that doesn't mean we have to allow them in polite company. If baboons can change, humans can.

The evolutionary benefit of schizophrenia

A study described in Science Daily says that a gene that has been linked to schizophrenia and autism reduces the chance of getting some kinds of cancer. The gene is involved in neurodevelopment and has a number of alleles, several of which affected the risk of schizophrenia as well as general intelligence. They did it twice, with different test and control groups, and got the same result.

The clear evolutionary meaning of this is that, in the past, the mass of people with an increased risk of schizophrenia had more surviving babies than those with an increased risk of cancer. It reminds one of the link between sickle-cell anemia and malaria.

Evolution continues: Can the fashion industry keep up?

I ran across this at Gene Expression. Some researchers looked at data from two generations of people in the Framingham Heart Study.

We found that natural selection is acting to cause slow, gradual evolutionary change. The descendants of these women are predicted to be on average slightly shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause later than they would in the absence of evolution. Selection is tending to lengthen the reproductive period at both ends.

 It's sure working on me. I'm a good deal shorter and stouter than I used to be.

Of course, this means we will be needing different clothes for our shorter, stouter bodies. (Also already true.) I assume the fashion industry will make the newer clothes but change the sizes so women can still get into the same size dress, no matter how big it is.

Characterizing conservatives and liberals

I've talked several times about my belief that many personality traits, including religiosity and conservatism/liberalism are biologically based. Some combination of genetics, epigenetics, and peer influence molds our physical brains to where our minds either do or do not believe in god and do or do not believe in government welfare to poor people.

This morning I may have had an epiphany (unless it's just mental heartburn). I was reading one of the several political blogs I read regularly, and it was quoting some conservative woman saying she was under attack by the media, and some conservative man saying he was under attack by the liberals. It's not by any means original that modern conservatives, certainly the ones who become politicians or TV personalities, are characterized by believing (or at least by saying) they are under attack. They are easily offended. 

And it occurred to me that this could be the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals (understanding that, as I said before, conservatives vary among themselves, so let's say the difference between genetic conservatives and genetic liberals) is the fear of attack (and reacting to an attack) versus expansiveness. 

If it's genetic, then having both conservatives and liberals was probably advantageous during during the period the two types evolved. I speculate that, during the period when we were more often prey than predator, liberals were the ones who found new food supplies and invented the tools, and conservatives were the ones who made sure the food didn't rot and that we weren't killed by lions. Later, the liberals were the ones who traded with other groups and brought in foreign technology, and conservatives were the ones who made sure the walls were solid and the foreign technology was sharp. Within a family, when the issue of whether to share food with other families came up, maybe liberals thought they had plenty to share, and conservatives were more concerned about running out.

What one would need to do is relate this allegedly fundamental characteristic to modern political issues, cases where the differences between conservatives and liberals amount to fear of attack (and fighting back) or not.

Fiscal conservatism is easy. Liberals think we have enough money do do everything we need to do, and conservatives think if we spend too much now, it will damage our economy and be hard to pay back later. The extreme version, common now, is a refusal to consider any new taxes for anything, period, and if we propose to expand Healthy Families, that is said to be a step toward destroying their America.

The recent health care debate would seem to fit into this, too, but it's hard to say how much of the rhetoric was serious and how much just made up to hurt Obama based on corporate interests and the madness of crowds. What does fit is that conservatives, at least the ones on TV, assert they are being attacked by proposals to offer health insurance to more people. One hears people paid to opine on TV say that their country is being taken away from them. 

I see the same difference in when and how to use military force, when and how often to use the filibuster, how to fight terrorists, and how to react to global warming. This last one is odd. You'd expect conservatives to be up in arms about this threat, but they claim they are being lied to (attacked?), instead, by liberal scientists who want to destroy our way of life. 

I need to think more about this and to relate it to Jane Jacobs. That's going to be a long post, so I've been putting it off, but she posits a way to divide people into two groups that makes sense to me and seems to have application to modern politics.

The virus in everybody's brain

We know that mitochondria (the little things in cells that turn sugar into something other parts of the cell can burn directly, were originally separate creatures that merged with one of our (and pretty much everything's) prokaryote ancestors.

Now it seems that "8% of human genetic material comes from" bornaviruses (BDV) that invaded one or some of our more recent ancestors. They've found them in all sorts of mammals and birds.

What's more, BDV lives only in the brain and infects only neurons. So if I'm reading this right, 8% of our chromosomes consists of a virus that lives only in the brain.

Researchers said, "These data yield a testable hypothesis for the alleged, but still controversial, causative association of BDV infection with schizophrenia and mood disorders."

Oh, boy. The brain roils, and not just the virus part. By this time, the viruses are assimilated, so it's not really viruses we're talking about but chunks of human DNA that were inserted by a virus a long time ago. It's not like we can take antiviral medication to get rid of it.

And it's not like we would want to. It is probably a net benefit to us. I mean, the mitochondrial invasion was a huge success for eukaryota ever since. Maybe the reason the virus was able to naturalize in our brain, so to speak, is that those who had it had more babies, evolution 101. 

We  might, however, find a way to unexpress parts of it, if it turns out to be related to mental illnesses. And that's a cool conjectural prospect for down the line.

Golden ratio found in nature for the first time

A couple of weeks ago, I expressed some doubt about a theory by Adrian Bejan that lots of things can be explained by thinking of them as stuff flowing through a system. I said then,

In the case of the golden ratio, he says the human brain, like that of other animals, has evolved to scan horizontally more efficiently than vertically (since we are more likely to be attacked by predators from the front, back or side than jumped on from a cliff). And he says the golden ratio (for a height of 1, a width of 1.618) is the easiest for people to scan, so we find it most pleasing. In terms of constructal theory, the golden ratio provides the fastest cognition flow in the brain.

In general, I'm sympathetic to arguments involving evolutionary influences on cognition and brain structure, but this just sounds crazy.

So I guess I should note a recent Science Daily article about researchers who have found the golden ratio in nature for the first time. They tuned this quantum mechanical thing to a series of resonant frequencies, and the "notes" turned out to be in the golden ratio to each other.

When applying a magnetic field at right angles to an aligned spin the magnetic chain will transform into a new state called quantum critical, which can be thought of as a quantum version of a fractal pattern. Prof. Alan Tennant, the leader of the Berlin group, explains "The system reaches a quantum uncertain -- or a Schrödinger cat state. This is what we did in our experiments with cobalt niobate. We have tuned the system exactly in order to turn it quantum critical."

By tuning the system and artificially introducing more quantum uncertainty the researchers observed that the chain of atoms acts like a nanoscale guitar string. Dr. Radu Coldea from Oxford University, who is the principal author of the paper and drove the international project from its inception a decade ago until the present, explains: "Here the tension comes from the interaction between spins causing them to magnetically resonate. For these interactions we found a series (scale) of resonant notes: The first two notes show a perfect relationship with each other. Their frequencies (pitch) are in the ratio of 1.618…, which is the golden ratio famous from art and architecture." Radu Coldea is convinced that this is no coincidence. "It reflects a beautiful property of the quantum system -- a hidden symmetry. Actually quite a special one called E8 by mathematicians, and this is its first observation in a material," he explains.

Baboons, foxes, and domesticating humans away from war

I just heard the coolest radio show I've ever heard on NPR, cooler than the giant pool of money. It's from Radiolab and discusses how to tell if a change is transient or permanent, with a central question of whether it is possible ever to eliminate war among humans. Radiolab tells several stories.

The first is about baboons. The way baboon troops operate is that around puberty, males get antsy and leave the troop for another one. There they are shown a mix of hazing and ignoring. In general, females cooperate with each other, and males fight each other. It's the way baboons are. Except in one place.

A tourist lodge was built and then expanded near one baboon troop's range. They dug a big hole on the periphery, and every morning at 9 a.m., a tractor dumped a load of garbage, leftover food from the dining room and kitchen. Free baboon food. The nearest baboons moved in, and instead of getting up at daybreak to forage, they began sleeping in the trees around the dump and rolling out about 2 minutes to 9.

A troop next door found out, and the biggest males would go over and grab food. They got beat up by the resident baboons, of course, but they did get some food for themselves, which they did not share with the lower ranking baboons of their own tribe.

Then one day the meat was contaminated with tuberculosis, and in weeks, the big, aggressive males all died. The remaining males were less aggressive and groomed each other, unheard of in baboonology. What's more, as their young males left the tribe and other males arrived, the newly arrived males were treated better than they usually are, and the non-aggressive social structure has continued 20 years and counting.

The second was about a transgendered woman who is mayor in a tiny town in Oregon.

Later they talked about the fox breeding experiment in Russia, that I've talked about before, where selecting for tame foxes meant selecting for low adrenaline, and other things like thin bones, smaller teeth, variegated coat, and floppy ears followed, because they are all mediated by adrenaline, so cutting adrenaline changed all those things. But then they applied the lessons to humans.

This is conjecture, but let's suppose that when people became able to hunt and gather in cooperation, this meant that they were able to cooperate to kill an alpha male if he was too much of a bully. Baboons have to let the big guy rule, because they don't know how to fight together. But humans do and can kill one big guy. The question is whether this selection for less aggression by killing the aggressor has other adrenaline-mediated effects. Compared with our ancestors, modern humans have thinner bones, less hair, and smaller teeth, so it's plausible that the same selective pressure is occurring when we either kill crooks and murderers or put them in jail, where they breed less than free-range low-lifes do.

If this is true, then we are domesticating ourselves by our power of cooperation, and there is no particular reason it can't continue. We might, one day, end war. How about that. Something hopeful on New Year's. Happy new year.

For your new year's present to yourself, sit and listen to it.

Golden ratio explained evolutionarily?

Sometimes it's not obvious at first sight whether someone with a new idea is a crank or a visionary. So it is with me and Adrian Bejan, who is professor of mechanical engineering at Duke. I came across him in Science Daily. Behan has an idea he calls constructal theory. (His website; Wikipedia; I wonder if Behan wrote the wiki article.)

As I understand it after maybe half an hour of looking into it, constructal theory says lots of stuff can be thought of in terms of flow of something through a system. He says it is a general law of such systems that they evolve to make the flow easier and larger. He says this explains rivers, the increasing size and speed of athletes, human cognition, the history of human travel, and the golden ratio (allegedly the design basis of the great pyramid of Gaza). Read the PDF at the link for explanations of how this works.)

In the case of the golden ratio, he says the human brain, like that of other animals, has evolved to scan horizontally more efficiently than vertically (since we are more likely to be attacked by predators from the front, back or side than jumped on from a cliff). And he says the golden ratio (for a height of 1, a width of 1.618) is the easiest for people to scan, so we find it most pleasing. In terms of constructal theory, the golden ratio provides the fastest cognition flow in the brain.

In general, I'm sympathetic to arguments involving evolutionary influences on cognition and brain structure, but this just sounds crazy. Of course, virtual particles also sound crazy to me, but people who do physics for a living assure me they are real. So for now I'll put it in the section of my brain where I keep things I don't know whether to believe, so I can call it up if I run across something relevant to it.

How we differ from Baboons and chimps

This is an extremely interesting 32-minute lecture by Robert Sapolsky, who is a neurobiologist and baboonologist at Stanford, on how people differ from apes. In short, nearly everything we think of that is unique about us has come from ape precursers, but we just go off the deep end with it.

I leave him when he finds one area of actual uniqueness, which he frames in a Christian manner, the persistence of faith in the face of the impossible and the ability to simultaneously believe in contradictory things. Then he goes off the deep end himself, saying humans (which he seems to conflate with Christians, though I'm sure he doesn't really) believe in some stuff just because it is impossible, and that a moral imperative derives from it. If that's true, I suppose it is as biologically determined as religiosity, but I don't seem to have that allele.

I could believe there is a uniquely human ability to believe contradictory things (just as I could believe chimps do it, too), but I see no need to Christianize it or to derive a moral imperative from it. One day I'll post about where I think morals come from, but I deny any moral imperative from God, Kant, or the universe.

The lecture starts at 5:00 minutes. I came across it on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Chimps are more right-handed for slinging bull than poop

A study published in Cortex and described in Science Daily says chimps show a stronger right-handedness for gestures than for manual tasks.

As one of the authors said, "this finding provides additional support to the idea that speech evolved initially from a gestural communicative system in our ancestors. Moreover, gestural communication in apes shares some key features with human language, such as intentionality, referential properties and flexibility of learning and use".