On the "The Nurture of Nature"

Peter Frost has an interesting post, "The Nurture of Nature", where he writes about gene-culture coevolution, particularly over the last 1,000 years. This is an active topic and Frost is responding to some recent criticisms. He's convincing.

I added this comment.

"Rather than talking in general terms about gene-culture coevolution, we should think about the optimal psychological traits for specific modes of production.

The feudal mode of production would seem to select for traits such as: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity - these are conservative dimensions in Haidt's phenomenological Moral Foundations Theory.

Capitalism's ideal psychological profile seems to be atomised prosociality, reflecting the transactional character of production relations. Thus agreeableness and fairness, those classic liberal virtues.

Conscientiousness and docility in the lower classes seems a transhistorical universal.

As regards post-capitalist socialism, the level of species-wide altruism and general dovishness seemingly required seems beyond the limits of current population variation - and unstable to boot. But perhaps something will be engineered .. ."

The modern Panopticon

Janice Turner from The Times today interviews Maria Miller, the (Conservative) Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee.

The article: "How do you solve a problem like men in women’s changing rooms, Maria?"

"Maria Miller gathers up her handbag and makes to leave: “I don’t think I’m happy about this. I think I’ve finished . . . I didn’t realise this was such a stitch-up.”

I’ve been questioning Ms Miller about a report on transgender rights she produced last year as chairwoman of the women and equalities committee. ...

"The heart of the controversy is the view, espoused by Ms Miller’s report, that switching gender should instead merely be a matter of “self-definition”. A man need only “declare” that he is a woman. Your gender is what you feel it to be: there would be no requirement even to take female hormones or have surgery — about 70 per cent of trans women still have intact male genitals — or even “present” as a woman to be legally female. ...

"Furthermore, if the law changes, “gender identity” is likely to become a protected characteristic under equalities legislation: ie if you deny a person is a woman or a man when they claim to be, you are guilty of discrimination or hate crime. ...

"Take this scenario: a man enters a female communal changing area, removes his clothes while women get undressed. Now they have a right to ask him to leave. Under gender self-definition, if he said “I identify as a woman” he would be entitled to stay. This, I stress, is unlikely to be a trans woman — many who use women’s changing rooms every day with discretion and no fuss — but could be a sexual predator exploiting the loophole. (There have been a growing number of cases in the US, including a man in Seattle using women’s pool facilities claiming “the law has changed, I have a right to be here”.) Does Ms Miller not see why women fear a conflict of rights? ...

"I show her a photograph of a bearded, male-born American called Danielle Muscato who dresses in men’s suits and ties, has made no attempt to transition but nonetheless “identifies as female” and insists on living in a women’s homeless shelter. On International Women’s Day he tweeted: “Some women have penises. If you’re bothered by this, you can suck my dick.” ...

"In Toronto, Christopher Hambrook claimed to be a trans woman to access a refuge then raped residents."

“These spaces carry out a risk assessment before individuals are allowed to use them and those that pose a risk to safety are not necessarily one gender.”

"But 90 per cent of violent crime and 98 per cent of sexual crime is committed by men. Trans women, such as Davina Ayrton, who raped a 15-year-old girl, have been convicted of offences seldom committed by natal females. Would self-identification mean these crimes would be registered as committed by women, skewing the figures? ...

"Sport is another problematic area: self-identification could destroy women’s competitions, allowing former-men with greater musculature and testosterone to dominate. In New Zealand a weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, has broken national records; in Canada the mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq dominated for years."

“Those are already issues that professional bodies have to deal with. And again that is something which needs to be looked at in significant detail.”

"I ask her about school sports. In Connecticut Andraya Yearwood, a male-bodied, moustachioed 15-year-old trans girl, has won state championships although she would have finished last in the boys’ competition. Does Ms Miller think this fair to the girl athletes?"

“Well, I think it’s a bit of a difficult one to answer because boys are not going through gender reassignment when they’re at school.”

"But what would you say to the girls who lost?"

“It’s a very difficult one to answer . . .”

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Walking along a country lane this morning I discussed this with Clare.

"This thing could run a long way. For example, I could claim to be a toddler and demand the right to join an infant play area. If someone objected that I'm a sixty six year old male, could they be open to the accusation of hate crime?"

"Don't worry," she said, "No-one can hear you here."

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Would you like to know more?

The mediaeval belief that God saw all thoughts & actions was a powerful force for conformity.*

In a more secular age, it's good to know that our technology will soon step into the breach.

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* Part II .. and related (SSC).

Our ancestors were not like us

At some level this is obvious; we're so much more squeamish. No more public executions, mass-spectacle bear-baiting or routine Game of Thrones-style interpersonal violence.

At least not in the enlightened west.

Greg Clark's "Genetically Capitalist?", which I cited in passing in an earlier post, has something to say about all this:

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"In the Malthusian era on average every woman could have only two surviving offspring. But these two had to be selected by some mechanism from the average of 5 children each woman had in the pre-industrial era.

"And as long as mothers and fathers varied in their characteristics this survival process favored some types of individuals over others. The Darwinian struggle that has shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution, but continued indeed right up to 1800. " (p. 16).

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" Genetically modern English males are 50-100% Anglo-Saxon, despite the fact that Anglo-Saxon migrants to England in the fifth century AD are now believed to have constituted no more than 0.5% to 10% of the population.

"Thus economic orientation had a dynamic of its own in the static Malthusian economy. Middle class values, and economic orientation, were most likely being spread through reproductive advantage across all sections of stable agrarian societies. " (p. 35).

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"What were societies like at the dawn of the settled agrarian era with the Neolithic Revolution of c. 8,000 BC?

"Based on observation of modern forager and shifting cultivation societies we expect that the early agriculturalists were impulsive, violent, innumerate, illiterate, and lazy. Ethnographies of such groups emphasize high rates of time preference, high levels of interpersonal violence, and low work inputs.

"Abstract reasoning abilities were limited. " (p. 53).

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Before agriculture and pastoralism, all of hunter-gatherer humanity was like this; it was civilisation that made us genetically-modern (see, for example, the last paragraph here).

The late Henry Harpending summarised and extended Clark's ideas in this instructive post which extended the analysis to the collapse of the Roman Empire and some contemporary events.

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It's an interesting idea of Peter Frost's (the Roman Empire link above) that by the fifth century the Pax Romana had altered the genetic distribution of its citizens making them over-welcoming to the Barbarians, militarily incompetent, and .. Christian.

The paper doesn't do the selection-rate maths. It's interesting to consider whether we can get enough data - I have in mind an exercise something like the (in)famous 'Amish Quotient'.

What we really need is whole-genome sequencing of representative samples of Roman Citizens and contemporary Barbarians.

That, plus a decoding map identifying those prosocial alleles underpinning 'human domestication'.

It will come.

The genetics of intelligence - early results

Refer to text below to understand this

A somewhat overlooked paper: "Factor Analysis of Population Allele Frequencies as a Simple, Novel Method of Detecting Signals of Recent Polygenic Selection: The Example of Educational Attainment and IQ" available here.

This is how Peter Frost summarises the paper.

"We know that human intellectual capacity has risen through small incremental changes at very many genes, probably hundreds if not thousands. Have these changes been the same in all populations?

"Davide Piffer (2013) has tried to answer this question by using a small subset of these genes. He began with seven SNPs whose different alleles are associated with differences in performance on PISA or IQ tests. Then, for fifty human populations, he looked up the prevalence of each allele that seems to increase performance. Finally, for each population, he calculated the average prevalence of these alleles at all seven genes.

"The average prevalence was 39% among East Asians, 36% among Europeans, 32% among Amerindians, 24% among Melanesians and Papuan-New Guineans, and 16% among sub-Saharan Africans. The lowest scores were among San Bushmen (6%) and Mbuti Pygmies (5%). A related finding is that all but one of the alleles are specific to humans and not shared with ancestral primates.

"Yes, he was using a small subset of genes that influence intellectual capacity. But you don't need a big number to get the big picture. If you dip your hand into a barrel of differently colored jelly beans, the colors you see in your hand will match well enough what's in the barrel. In any case, if the same trend holds up with a subset of 50 or so genes, it will be hard to say it's all due to chance."

The alleles which Piffer frequency-analysed differentially code for things like:

"... the regulation of neuronal morphology in neurons, including hippocampal neurons and developing brains"

"... neuronal excitability, synaptic plasticity and feedback regulation of acetylcholine release."

Ten or so SNPs don't determine very much of a person's intelligence, which depends upon the actions of hundreds or thousands of genes as well as environmental effects. But even a small sample - if representative and correlated - can be quite predictive, as Piffer explains.

"As the effect size of each SNP is typically very low (around 0.1%), even 10 SNPs would not account for more than 1% of the variance in IQ or educational attainment scores across populations. The likely explanation for why the effect size for the 10 SNPs at a cross population level detected in this study is so high (around 80%), is that the alleles are not randomly distributed across human races, so that the combined frequency of a few alleles predicts the frequencies of many other alleles affecting the same phenotype. This inflates the correlation with the phenotype well beyond anything that would be explainable by the modest effect sizes of the examined SNPs.

"This is nothing more than the principle applied to psychometric instruments, such as IQ tests or personality scales, where a handful of items produce a reliable score, precisely because these items represent an underlying, latent factor and are thus correlated among each other. Even reliable psychometric scales are usually composed of around 10 items, equal to the number of SNPs examined in the present study, which in turn showed good internal reliability (Cronbach’s α= 0.84).

"A model based on random evolution or genetic drift alone cannot account for such a pattern."

The particular SNPs used in the study are listed in the tables at the back of the paper. I was naturally interested in checking which of these SNPs are analysed by 23andMe. It turns out that about half are. So in the graphic above you see the 'good for intelligence' SNPs in the first column, the gene name (where available) in the second and the chromosome it's on (from 23andMe) in the third. The fourth column is the specific nucleotide which marks this as a 'good-for-intelligence' allele, and the fifth is the database where the source-data came from (refer to the paper for details). The final column is my own genotype at these alleles, as downloaded from 23andMe.

Here is an Excel workbook for you to try yourself. Hint: download your 23andMe results and load into an Excel spreadsheet; then search on the rs SNP identifiers.

There are sixteen alleles (2 x 8) which are both 'good' and available from 23andMe. Of these 16, you will see that I have 7 'good' ones, so my personal 'frequency' is 7/16 = 0.44. This sounds terrible, but in fact the European average frequency for these 'good alleles' is 35.5% and the East Asian (Chinese, Japanese) average frequency is 39.1. This number of alleles is too small to be a good estimator of anyone's overall IQ though.

The message of Piffer's paper is that, as humans radiated out of Africa, a rising tide of natural selection drove novel alleles coding for increased intelligence to higher and higher population frequencies. This emerges clearly from the  SNPs analysed in the paper, and is by hypothesis true for the rest too. It appears that selection for higher intelligence has been more, rather than less, intense over the last 10,000 years - possibly reflecting the cognitive demands of agrarian, pastoral and yet more complex modern civilisations.

More to come, undoubtedly as the larger scale GWAS studies begin to deliver.