Russia and America should be friends?

At West Hunter, Greg Cochran writes:

"the true strategic threat to both Russia and the United States is China (not the casbah, for God’s sake): the cowboys and the Cossacks should be friends."

This makes sense from an American nationalist viewpoint: superpower politics. It also makes long-term strategic sense for Russia, looking at their Siberian border with China.

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If super-intelligent, incredibly-prosocial and pleasantly-attractive aliens landed in, say, Australia with a view to world colonisation - should we be in favour? They sound nicer than us. Or should we be with Juan Rico: on the bounce and looking out for the interests of the human race, come what may. My species, right or wrong.

Amazon link

Frank Salter had a flawed and controversial book, "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration", out in 2006 arguing that:

"In modern Darwinian theory, bearing children is only one way to reproduce. Since we share genes with our families, ethnic groups, and the species as a whole, ethnocentrism and humanism can be adaptive."

But the average level of relatedness between random members of a genetically-homogeneous nation is about 1/128 (discussion here). This doesn't seem nearly enough to trigger any emotional feelings of kin solidarity, see here.

Nevertheless, there's plainly a measure of emotional solidarity underlying nationalism. It seems to work through shared cultural signifiers (appearance, dress, behaviour, speech patterns, interpersonal style, social conventions and ritual) rather than that you know your co-ethnics at an individual level and feel some nationalistic kin-warmth towards them. That emotional propensity seems also to have been selected for - you don't see it in other animals. It does, however, facilitate the building of empires, which are astonishingly good for your genes.

Hobbit devolution

Marginal Revolution resurrected this ancient article from Greg Cochran - a moral tale with a punchline.

Brief summary:

• Brains can go down as well as up because: evolution.
• Small populations accumulate rising mutational load - brains are a prime target.
• If there's a devolved ecological niche waiting in the wings, watch out!

The Tao of Immortality

Amazon link

If "A Wizard of Earthsea" is a boy's coming-of-age and "The Tombs of Atuan" is a girl's coming-of-age, then "The Farthest Shore" is a mature reflection on power, its limits and the deeper purposes of life.

The storyline concerns the disintegration of magic - a side effect of a maverick sorcerer, Cob, who develops a great spell to ensure his own immortality. Le Guin portrays this as the ultimate destabiliser of the balance of life, the harmony of all existence. Death-removed is stasis; death is the prerequisite for the renewal of life.

Very Taoist and emotionally satisfying, even a little convincing; but my inner skeptic has qualms.

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The modern theory of aging is that of senescence although controversies rage. But as Greg Cochran observes, in theory it should be fixable. In surveys, people seem to be split as to whether they would take up an offer of personal immortality.

If I was offered a course of treatment which rendered me immortal, I wouldn't be interested. I'm too stupid and slow at age 66: I see only voyeuristic tedium in millennia to come. But perhaps the salesman has an upgraded deal?

Perhaps my ageing, error-strewn DNA could be debugged and re-implanted somehow to make a quasi-clone. A new, vibrant baby-me, ready to start a new life without all those burdensome memories and bodily breakdowns. When I was such an infant, I'm sure that I was up for life .. so that would have to be a yes, then.

But why stop at cloning? Why not introduce some extra variety, explore new regions of the corporeal and psychological state-space? Sounds like an even better plan.

Oh, wait. You say we do that already?

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I think it's an open question as to whether a society which had genetically-engineered extremely-long life would have strategically greater reproductive success than current-lifespan societies. That is the issue at stake here.

One day some society will try it - and evolution will have another sub-species to test..

Diary: today's chronicle of failures

Jerry Pournelle's blog (on the sidebar to the right if you're in a PC browser, otherwise here) has a recurring theme where he details his struggles with recalcitrant Microsoft products and sundry other applications.

I felt his pain today. The laptop refused to connect to the scanner (Epson BX630FW). I tried all the usual stuff: restarted everything, reconnected all devices to the router, reinstalled the printer software, switched from WiFi to an Ethernet connection, ... .

Result: stuff prints but the scanner remains unrecognised. My best guess is that something in the printer/scanner has broken. The workaround is just to take pictures via the pretty good camera on my Nexus 6 phone - I'm in no hurry to replace the five year old Epson device.

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Work on the 'famous' chatbot has paused. Reason: I know how to do it and consequently I'm already bored.

The interesting hurdle was my bucket-list objective of getting a proper, FOL resolution theorem prover to work. Now that it does (gratifyingly high in Google searches), moving on to a planner has lost much of its appeal.

I suspect much of the power of a chatbot anyway is in the data (ie the data-fill), not the sophistication of the underlying architecture or algorithms. This makes me even less excited.

A deeper problem. A chatbot needs to interact with conversationalists and to learn. Minimally, this needs Internet access and engagement with a messaging platform such as Skype, Twitter or Facebook. But if you start from Common Lisp the integration problems look rather daunting and even expensive. I'm not enthused about shifting to Javascript or Python, where such integration would probably be easier.

So I'm awaiting some conceptual innovation sufficiently exciting to remotivate me. Something like cracking consciousness perhaps 😎 ...?

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My favourite article today: this meditation from Greg Cochran disinterred from 2013 and still completely relevant.

"... Syria was born for trouble. Although we all know that ethnic diversity is our strength, better than ice cream or unicorn poop, it appears that Syria (like much of the Middle East) has managed to acquire too much of a good thing. Paradoxical as it may seem, Syria is actually overly diverse.

There are very ancient Christian communities, as well as Kurds (who aim for an independent Kurdish state, an idea that horrifies Turkey), but the real fight is between the Sunni Arabs (about 60 percent of the country) and the Alawites, who run the show and make up about 12 percent of the population. I’m sure that most of my readers are fully conversant with every detail of the history and practices of the various Muslim denominations,—just as our lawmakers are—but let me talk about the Alawites for a moment.

The Alawites have an esoteric religion, one in which their most important beliefs are kept secret from outsiders. Since those beliefs are only revealed through a long process of initiation, even most Alawites don’t know what they are.

We know some things, most of which don’t sound at all like Islam. Alawites drink wine: they celebrate Christmas and Easter. They reject to the call to prayer and the pilgrimage to Mecca. They have no places of worship. Women among the Alawites are not veiled, and enjoy greater freedom than among Sunnis or Shi’ites, but it seems that this is the case because they are believed to be soulless—they are never initiated into the mysteries. Alawites also seem to believe in reincarnation.

Traditionally, Alawites were considered non-Muslim and treated like dirt—worse than Christians or Jews. You can see how the Sunni majority might resent being ruled by them—indeed, it’s hard to imagine how that ever came to pass.

The roots of Alawite dominance go back to the French colonial era. Most Syrian Muslims opposed French rule and refused to serve in the local gendarmerie—but the Alawites did. After independence, the Alawites continued to enter the armed forces in large numbers, partly because they were poor as heretical church mice. At first, the highest ranks in the army were filled by Sunnis, but each coup led to the expulsion of Sunni generals on the wrong side, and there were many coups. The political struggles bred mutual suspicion among the Sunnis, but the Alawites stuck together. The Alawites were also overrepresented in the Baath party.

So, while the Baath party took over in 1963, the Alawites took over in 1966—and they haven’t let go yet.

The thing is, when you ride the tiger, you can’t let go. Although they have made efforts to build support outside their sect, through nationalist and redistributionist policies, the Alawite government has always faced violent opposition. They’ve put down full-scale revolts, most notably in Hama, 1982, where they leveled the city with artillery, killing tens of thousands. All that official violence means that they can’t afford to lose. Once the Alawites were despised, but now they’re hated. At this point, Peter W. Galbraith, former ambassador to Croatia, says “The next genocide in the world will likely be against the Alawites in Syria.” ...

The tone of the whole article is ironic and satirical. The comments - worth a look - confirm that Americans don't do irony.

"Reinhold says:

September 10, 2013 at 5:48 pm

Is this some kind of a troll? If not: proof that scientists are often brain-dead regarding politics."

A little later another commentator sadly remarks:

"Anonymous says:

September 11, 2013 at 8:49 pm

So far one out of seven people realized that the proposal is satire. That ratio is probably above average."

The standard procedure for Sunni Jihadis with Alawite captives is to behead them. If I hear the neocon-signposting phrase, "bombing his own people", one more time ... .

The Outstanding Leader is unwell ..

The BBC website reports:

"The half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been killed in Malaysia, South Korean and Malaysian sources say.

Kim Jong-nam, 45, is said to have been targeted at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. A source close to the Malaysian PM's office told the BBC that Mr Kim was killed in the city, saying his body was now undergoing an autopsy. Kim Jong-nam is the eldest son of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il."

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The US President Mr Trump says 'something will be done' about North Korea's somewhat provocative ballistic missile tests. Perhaps one imagines a pre-emptive strike on military facilities?

Easily done, but it's hard not to see the Chinese reacting badly.

Something a little more subtle is needed. Some virus, engineered to attach to cells expressing a certain genotype. Thanks to CRISPR, that kind of virus-editing seems quite practicable. A weaponised flu variant should do it.

How to get a copy of the Dear Leader's genome? You can go a long way with a half brother.

The other half of the mission is transportation. The US authorities should not be relying on a pandemic. A long range stealth-drone delivering a miniature RPV close to the OL should do it: something disposable and wasp-like.

Send a swarm: only way to be sure.

What are the chances the CIA has this mission design in front of the President as we speak?

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Greg Cochran was writing about jihadis, but the principle seems to apply.

President Trump

This morning's result confirms the overwhelming exasperation of ordinary folk with the liberal elite which has run the world so successfully over the last decades, and which continues to colonise the hectoring mainstream media (MSM).

Rod Liddle commented,

"If Trump wins, I wonder if the BBC will be as exultant as it was in 2008, when Obama won? Here’s a small bet – it won’t be. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s almost worth him winning for that alone. Oh, and for the Guardian’s tears."

The Brexit dynamic now looks more assured. Rod Liddle again:

"Take Brexit. Whether you were for Remain or Leave, we are leaving and need to secure the best possible future for our country, no? The Democrats have made it absolutely clear that in trade deals we are ‘at the back of the queue’. They were vehemently opposed to Brexit, a position made clear by Hillary Clinton herself, who also opposed any independent trade deal with the UK, worried that it might have an impact upon US jobs.

"There is no such problem with Trump – who not only cheered the Brexit result but has said that a trade deal with Britain would be near the top of his agenda. Whether a Remainer or a Leaver, then, it’s clear that Trump is better for Britain."

Greg Cochran put his finger on why the polls - as for Brexit - were so consistently and spectacularly wrong (here).

"Social Desirability Bias

Posted on November 8, 2016 by gcochran9

"It must be strong today, something like 5 points.

"If so, you’ll be hearing calls for the end of the secret ballot."

On the Corbyn New Left

Matt Bolton (PhD student) explains (July 14th 2016) that:

"... the mainstream ‘socialist’ or ‘green-liberal’ left who are the main constituency of Corbynism ... are much closer in form to moral or religious crusades, or perhaps a charity appeal, than marxism or anarcho-syndicalism. They are defined by a complete lack of strategic thinking, and are utterly devoid of cunning."

Bolton thinks that the 200,000 who have paid their £25 and joined/supported Labour as Corbyn supporters are very low-quality material to build the movement:

"My own CLP doubled its membership during Corbyn’s leadership campaign, with 300 people signing up. In the past year, I would generously estimate that perhaps 10 of those 300 has had any concrete involvement with the party (going to meetings, canvassing, delivering leaflets, taking up positions in the local party, running for council).

"The local Momentum group has had a little more success in turnout, though the majority of people attending were already involved in other campaigns, and the most that has been organised has been a few fundraising socials and the odd pro-Corbyn demo.

"This indicates that Momentum will be most effective in areas which already have a wide range of activist groups and networks (ie places with a high density of population due to a strong local economy) but far less so in places further away from the urban centres of capital accumulation, where existing political activism is thin on the ground, if not non-existent.

"The point here is not to bash people for lack of activity — there are all sorts of reasons why participation might be difficult, from lack of time to the labyrinthine structure of the party rulebook, to the deeply, deeply dull nature of most political work. It is merely to say that simply pointing to the numbers of new members says nothing about the existence or quality of a ‘social movement’.

"For the vast majority of ‘new members’, joining the party was not a promise of future activity, but a gesture of general support — perhaps similar to signing a Change.org petition — for whatever they thought Corbyn as Labour leader symbolised."

Such pessimism. And all Bolton can advocate is that the left should

"... campaign for Proportional Representation. It is only by getting rid of the farcical imbalance of FPTP that a Corbynist-style party has any chance of power (even if only as a minor partner in a coalition), and it would be far more effective in concrete terms than the membership reaching a million.

"Corbyn himself has had little to say about this issue, but McDonnell and Clive Lewis have intimated that a deal with the SNP, Greens, Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru — and perhaps even UKIP — could be a possibility."

Trotsky and Lenin are spinning in their graves.

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Two days ago, Phil Burton-Cartledge took him to task for underestimating the potential dynamics of initially-naive popular movements.

"He argues that Corbynism is a simulacra of a social movement. It isn't a real one because the adherents Matt has encountered in his CLP and online do not match up to what activists in a proper movement looks like, such as the (relatively) politically sophisticated and hyper active supporters of Militant back in the day.

"In reality, how movements emerge are a process. Social movements are the purposeful, sustained mobilisation of large groups of people organising toward a series of political and/or social objectives. They never emerge fully formed and can in their early phases look like the remotest of primitive ancestors.

"Within days, St Petersburg peasants and workers went from clutching portraits of their beloved Tsar as they petitioned him to calling for his head as Russia almost tipped into revolution in 1905. The civil rights movement and its morphing into violent insurrection in parts of the northern US had its roots in the gospel, in pacifism, and a faith in American constitutionalism.

"How many activists have come into politics via beliefs in fairness, spirituality, conspiracy theory, and other ideas that at best partially reveal, and it worst obscure the realities of social life? The world over, millions have. And they always will.

"The movement of people coming into Labour are a work in progress, because we're all works in progress. The shouting on social media, the lack of sophistication with which some new comrades express themselves, the lapsing into semi-conspiratorial modes of thought, all are symptomatic of masses of new people getting drawn to politics.

"But among them there are future Labour ministers and perhaps even a Prime Minister who has got involved because of Jeremy Corbyn. "

Good Marxist points .. up to that last sentence. Lenin and Trotsky etc ...

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And finally, why is Corbyn so very popular?

Yesterday, Helen Lewis at the New Statesman published this insightful essay, "Explaining the love for Jeremy Corbyn", expressed in 11 succinct bullet points.

My short summary: he's a blankish canvas on which the disaffected middle-class project their own sense of entitlement and self-worth - powered by their alienation from the power and influence wielded by remote denizens of the inner bubble, which they naturally resent.

Perhaps I'm a little too harsh on her theses.

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There's a lot to like about the ethics, idealism and even the worldview of Marxism, as I tried to convey in my two previous posts:

1. Revolution back on the agenda?
2. Communism would be like - what?

Who wouldn't want to be a freedom fighter for the oppressed against distant and selfish elites who patronise from on high?

It's really unfortunate that the Marxist solution (the abolition of market mechanisms and total socialisation of politics and economics) flies in the face of real human nature, in all its evolved and genetically-endowed complexity.

The present generation of movement-activists may not be wholly aware that there was once a time when revolutionaries actually won, smashed the capitalist state and instituted the dictatorship of the proletariat. Putting in place a post-capitalist society was not easy (admittedly the communists at that time were faced with economic collapse and civil war).

Still, in 1922, five years after the proletarian revolution, the committed Bolshevik Leon Trotsky made this summing up to the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern, describing why 'War Communism' (extreme central planning) had to be replaced by the 'New Economic Policy', re-introducing market mechanisms.

"Failing a free market, the peasant would be unable to find his place in economic life, losing the incentive to improve and expand his crops. Only a mighty upsurge of state industry, enabling it to provide the peasant and agriculture with all its requirements, will prepare the soil for integrating the peasant into the general system of socialist economy.

"Technically this task will be solved with the aid of electrification, which will deal a mortal blow to the backwardness of rural life, the muzhik’s barbaric isolation, and the idiocy of village life. But the road to all this is through improving the economic life of our peasant-proprietor as he is today.

"The workers’ state can achieve this only through the market, which stimulates the personal and selfish interests of the petty proprietor. The initial gains are already at hand. This year the village will supply the workers’ state with more bread-grains as taxes in kind than were received by the state in the period of War Communism through confiscation of the grain surpluses.

"At the same time, agriculture is undoubtedly on its way up. The peasant is satisfied – and in the absence of normal relations between the proletariat and the peasantry, socialist development is impossible in our country."

The further history of the Soviet Union (and the other 'communist' states) confirmed that 'socialist man' was psychologically an impossibility both for peasants and, unfortunately, for workers, except in the heads of the most gullible and deluded Party cadres who were duly mocked by their contemporaries.*

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* The Trotskyists think it was Stalinism which killed their leader and marginalised their movement. Proximately they are right, but ultimately it was human nature itself which fatally undermined the revolutionary Marxist movement.

"What Is Orthodox Marxism?"

Amazon link

I first wrestled with "History and Class Consciousness" in my early twenties; it remains my favourite book of Marxist theory.

Georg Lukács was

"... a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

"As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).

"Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed to both support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism."

This morning I re-read "What Is Orthodox Marxism?", the first essay in the collection - and marvelled at the abstraction, erudition and sophistication of Lukács's thought.

It's slightly jolting to be reminded of just how conceptually deep Marxist theory actually is - not that you would know it from most professed 'Marxists'.

I considered writing a summary but found Phil Burton-Cartledge had done the job already- and much more diligently.

One feels that criticising Lukács without having immersed oneself in decades of study of the Western Marxism tradition would be like an arts journalist debating General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory with Stephen Hawking as a self-presumed equal (although that's happened).

Look, I buy into all this totality stuff, I like dialectical materialism and can accept that 'the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge'. But once we've done all that, destroyed capitalism and removed capitalist reification and alienation, what next? Lukács sees the full liberation of mankind.

For me, on a bad day, it's dramatically relaxed selection.

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.

Heritability, correlation and prediction

We're told that intelligence is 60-80% heritable, and that personality is 40-60% heritable. In some hand-wavy way, we know that heritability captures the nature side of the nature-nurture contribution to traits.

But what does heritability really mean? It's a rather slippery concept. We'll get there by stages.

1. The contribution of genes to a phenotype

Let's take height as our running example (pretty much the same heritability as intelligence). Let's take a person with height P (P stands for phenotype - the measured trait). P is measured in inches away from the population mean height.

How did a person get to be that height? Nature and nurture, right?

We assume that the alleles the person got from their father contributes X_father inches of height, X_mother counts the inches they received from their mother's alleles they inherited, and then there is a nurture - or environmental - term E inches. So their total height,

P = X_father + X_mother + E.

Note these are genetic additive effects: each additional allele is plausibly assumed to make its independent contribution into raising or lowering X a fraction. Dominance and epistatic effects are neglected in this simplified conceptual model (in a polygenic trait, they tend not to be large).

Since we're measuring deviations from the mean, the average values across the population of X_father, X_mother and E must all be zero. And so, therefore, must be the average value of P.

So without loss of generality, we assume X_father, X_mother and E are normally distributed random variables with mean zero and variances as follows:

Var(X_father) = V_additive/2    -- each parent provides half the additive genetic 'input'

Var(X_mother) = V_additive/2   -- each parent provides half the additive genetic 'input'

Var(E) = V_environment.

So what is Var(P), the variance of height as we observe it in the population?

Var(P) = Var(X_father) + Var(X_mother) + Var(E) +

        2Cov(X_father, X_mother) + 2Cov(X_father, E) + 2Cov(X_mother, E).

Messy, but if we assume X_father, X_mother and E are independent, their covariances are zero, so

Var(P) = Var(X_father) + Var(X_mother) + Var(E),

V_phenotype  = V_additive + V_environment

The fraction of the population phenotypic variation due to genetic, additive effects is then simply

h² = V_additive/V_phenotype = V_additive/(V_additive + V_environment).

This is the definition of heritability, h².

So if h² is 0.5, then 50% of the variance in the phenotype is genetic in origin (additive-genetic, that is) and 50% is environmental (everything else).

Note that the more you reduce environmental variance, for example making sure that everyone's well-fed, properly educated and not knocked about, the more genetic differences predominate .. and heritability goes up. Not what the SJWs really want to hear!

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2. Correlations

What is the correlation, ρ, between a parent and child for height?

If we have two random variables, A and B, the correlation between them is defined as follows:

ρ =  Cov(A,B)/√(Var(A) * Var(B)).

This is the standard definition.

In the case of one parent and their offspring, under some simplifying assumptions,

Cov(parent,offspring) = V_additive/2

- this takes a few lines to work out, setting most of the X_father, X_mother and E cross-terms to zero. It reflects the 50% of genetic material they have in common.

More obviously,

Var(parent) = Var(offspring) = V_phenotype,

So using the formula for ρ above,

ρ = (V_additive/2) / V_phenotype = h²/2.

This shows that heritability is not the same as the correlation between a child and one of its parents.

In general, the correlation, ρ, on a trait between relatives is equal to the coefficient of relatedness times the heritability, ie ρ = rh².

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3. Predictions

If we know the height of both the parents, what's our best prediction of the height of their offspring? In our mind, we draw the best-fit regression line on the scatter-plot of parental-midpoint and offspring heights measured across the population.

If we centre the graph-axes at the mean values of the two populations (parental mid-point heights and offspring heights) then the regression line goes through the origin, with slope β. Then the equation of the regression line takes this simple form:

predicted-offspring-height = β * parental-midpoint-height

with both heights measured as inches in deviation from the respective means.

How do we compute β?

In this special case it turns out that β equals the heritability, so β  = h². *

This should remind you of the Breeder's Equation.

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Example: suppose the heritability of height is 0.673 and we know that one parent is 3 inches above the population mean while the other parent is 1 inch above the mean, what's the predicted (expected) height deviation from the mean for their child?

Answer: predicted-offspring-height = β * (3 + 1)/2 = 2h² = 1.35 inches.

Yes, the child has regressed towards the mean.

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This is problem 6.3 (p. 149) from 'Population Genetics: a concise guide' by John H. Gillespie, from which all the material above has been summarised.

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* In general, β = ρ * (σ_y/σ_x) where x is the independent variable.

Feeling black holes collide from close-up

As soon as I heard about that LIGO thing, first thing I thought of, what would it have felt like if you'd been there, maybe an AU away from those coalescing black holes?

Eventually the Internet got around to telling me.

"As I read the historic news, there’s one question that kept gnawing at me: how close would you need to have been to the merging black holes before you could, you know, feel the distortion of space?  I made a guess, [...] you’d need to be very close.

"Even if you were only as far from the black-hole cataclysm as the earth is from the sun, I get that you’d be stretched and squished by a mere ~50 nanometers (this interview with Jennifer Ouellette and Amber Stuver says 165 nanometers, but as a theoretical computer scientist, I try not to sweat factors of 3).

Even if you were 3000 miles from the black holes—New-York/LA distance—I get that the gravitational waves would only stretch and squish you by around a millimeter. Would you feel that? Not sure. At 300 miles, it would be maybe a centimeter—though presumably the linearized approximation is breaking down by that point.

[...]

"Now, the black holes themselves were orbiting about 200 miles from each other before they merged.  So, the distance at which you could safely feel their gravitational waves, isn’t too far from the distance at which they’d rip you to shreds and swallow you!

In summary, to stretch and squeeze spacetime by just a few hundred nanometers per meter, along the surface of a sphere whose radius equals our orbit around the sun, requires more watts of power than all the stars in the observable universe give off as starlight.

"People often say that the message of general relativity is that matter bends spacetime “as if it were a mattress.”  But they should add that the reason it took so long for humans to notice this, is that it’s a really friggin’ firm mattress, one that you need to bounce up and down on unbelievably hard before it quivers, and would probably never want to sleep on."

From Scott Aaronson's blog, a post appealingly titled "The universe has a high (but not infinite) Sleep Number", h/t SSC.

Victor Toth writes:

"A gravitational wave is like a passing tidal force. It squeezes you in one direction and stretches you in a perpendicular direction. If you are close enough to the source, you might feel this as a force. But the effect of gravitational waves is very weak. For your body to be stretched by one part in a thousand, you’d have to be about 15,000 kilometers from the coalescing black hole.

"At that distance, the gravitational acceleration would be more than 3.6 million g-s, which is rather unpleasant, to say the least. And even if you were in a freefalling orbit, there would be strong tidal forces, too, not enough to rip your body apart but certainly enough to make you feel very uncomfortable (about 0.25 g-forces over one meter.) So sensing a gravitational wave would be the least of your concerns.

"But then… you’d not really be sensing it anyway. You would be hearing it. Most of the gravitational wave power emitted by GW150914 was in the audio frequency range. A short chip rising in both pitch and amplitude. And the funny thing is… you would hear it, as the gravitational wave passed through your body, stretching every bit a little, including your eardrums."

---

I'm reading "The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality" by Dr Adam Perkins of King's College, London. He talks about the employment-resistant personality and how such people feature disproportionately on welfare. There they tend to have lots of children, both for increased benefits and because they're rather feckless, (A-, C-, in the five-factor jargon).

Amazon Link

Dr Perkins is worried about dysgenic consequences - plainly the potential is there - but how big is the effect? I'm waiting to see whether Dr Perkins gets quantitative, but if he does, he'll be using the Breeder's Equation.

Time for a quick review from West Hunter - this is the Breeder's Equation:

"R = h²S.

"R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, and h² is the narrow-sense heritability. This is the workhorse equation for quantitative genetics. The selective differential S, is the difference between the population mean and the mean of the parental population (some subset of the total population).

"For example, imagine a set of parents with IQs of 120, drawn from a population with an average IQ of 100. Suppose that the narrow-sense heritability (in that population, in that environment) is 0.5 . The average IQ of their children will be 110. That’s what is usually called regression to the mean.

"Do the same thing with a population whose average IQ is 85. We again choose parents with IQs of 120, and the narrow-sense heritability is still 0.5. The average IQ of their children will be 102.5 – they regress to a lower mean.

"You can think of it this way. In the first case, the parents have 20 extra IQ points. On average, 50% of those points are due to additive genetic factors, while the other 50% is is the product of good environmental luck. By the way, when we say ‘environmental” we mean “something other than additive genetics”. It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects – the way in which you raise your kids – contributes much to this ‘environmental’ variance, at least for adult IQ. In fact we know what it’s not, but not much about what it is, although it must include factors like test error and being hit on the head.

"The kids get the good additive genes, but have average ‘environmental’ luck – so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away

"The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half of which are from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

"The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on an uninhabited but friendly island, they would presumably get around to mating eventually – and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial."

Dysgenics too: as personality has similar heritability to intelligence (0.5), still mulling over the application of this to the profligate underclass ...

You might also want to take a look at this.

Hive Mind: to buy or not to buy?

I've mentioned this before. Here's an extract from the blurb at the book's Amazon page.

"... Over the last few decades, economists and psychologists have quietly documented the many ways in which a person's IQ matters. But, research suggests that a nation's IQ matters so much more.

"As Garett Jones argues in "Hive Mind," modest differences in national IQ can explain most cross-country inequalities. Whereas IQ scores do a moderately good job of predicting individual wages, information processing power, and brain size, a country's average score is a much stronger bellwether of its overall prosperity.

"... Jones argues that intelligence and cognitive skill are significantly more important on a national level than on an individual one because they have "positive spillovers." On average, people who do better on standardized tests are more patient, more cooperative, and have better memories. As a result, these qualities and others necessary to take on the complexity of a modern economy become more prevalent in a society as national test scores rise.

"What's more, when we are surrounded by slightly more patient, informed, and cooperative neighbors we take on these qualities a bit more ourselves. ... "

According to the Wikipedia article, the average IQ for sub-Saharan Africa is 82. For ethnic Europeans the average IQ is 100 and for East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) the figure is 105. It's not hard to get significant correlations between such disparate national IQ figures and levels of economic development.

The validity of IQ as a predictor of achievement in very diverse milieux has been empirically verified time and time again so in a sense, what Hive Mind is talking about is hardly very new. This could be a reason not to buy it.

Greg Cochran reviewed it and said some nice things - quite rare from curmudgeon-central! Apparently Jones is quite a good writer too. So why not buy it?

The Hive Mind reviews on Amazon are quite amusing. Most of them are from Garett Jones's colleagues at GMU - as befits academics, they can't just summarise the book and say they like it, they have to write not-so-mini essays! Consider this review from colleague Timothy J. Groseclose, from which I quote this excerpt:

"Jones constructs an example, which I call “the parable of the vases.” In a moment I’ll explain the details of the example, but first let me briefly discuss its importance. The example has significantly affected my thinking, and it is one of the highlights of the book. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the parable ranks as one of the all-time great examples in economics. Although it is not quite as insightful and important as Ronald Coase’s crops-near-the-train-track example (which illustrates the efficiency of property rights), I believe it is approximately as insightful and important as: (i) Adam Smith’s pin-factory example (which illustrates the benefits of division of labor) and (ii) Friedrich Hayek’s example of an entrepreneur knowing about an unused ship (which illustrates the value of particular, versus general, knowledge).

"The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and A2, are highly skilled - specifically no matter which task to which they are assigned they are guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2, are less skilled - specifically, for either task each has a 50% probability of breaking the vase.

"Now suppose you are worker A1. If you team up with A2, you produce a vase every attempt. However, if you team up with B1 or B2, then only 50% of your attempts will produce a vase. Thus, your productivity is higher when you team up with A2 than with one of the B workers. Something similar happens with the B workers. They are more productive when they are paired with an A worker than with a fellow B worker.

"So far, everything I’ve said is probably pretty intuitive. But here’s what’s not so intuitive. Suppose you’re the manager of the vase company and you want to produce as many vases as possible. Are you better off by (i) pairing A1 with A2 and B1 with B2, or (ii) pairing A1 with one of the B workers and A2 with the other B worker?

"If you do the math, it’s clear that the first strategy works best. Here, the team with two A workers produces a vase with 100% probability, and the team with the two B workers produces a vase with 25% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces 1.25 vases per time period. With the second strategy, both teams produce a vase with 50% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces only one vase per time period.

"The example illustrates how workers’ productivity is often interdependent—specifically, how your own productivity increases when your co-workers are skilled.

"The example generates an even more remarkable implication. It says that, if you are a manager of a company (or the central planner of an entire economy), then your optimal strategy is to clump your best workers together on the same project rather than spreading them out amongst your less-able workers.

"The parable has some interesting implications for immigration policy. Namely, it suggests that Ann Coulter and Donald Trump may be more correct than they realize. Coulter and Trump, when arguing for more restrictions on immigration, most often invoke political and cultural reasons - e.g. they note that more immigrants will cause crime to increase or cause the U.S. to adopt more left-wing policies. The parable of the vases, however, provides an economic reason: Specifically, when the U.S. allows more low-skilled immigrants into the country, it can lower the productivity of native workers.

"Perhaps more profound is the following implication. Immigration opponents usually make their argument from an own-country perspective. E.g. Trump and Coulter usually focus on the fact that a more open-borders policy hurts American natives. They rarely discuss the fact that such a policy helps potential immigrants. Related, they do not consider the net effect - that is, whether the costs to American natives are greater than the benefits to potential immigrants. The parable-of-the-vases example, however, takes a worldly perspective, not U.S.-centric perspective, and it suggests that the net benefits are negative.

"For example, it suggests the following: Suppose you were the secretary general of the U.N. - someone who is interested in the total economic output of the entire world, not just the output of the U.S. If so, then the parable-of-the-vases example implies that you would want the world’s smartest people to clump in only one or a few countries. You’d want the U.S. to restrict immigration from low-IQ countries because it increases the world’s economic output, not just the U.S.’s. As far as I’m aware, the people who favor more restrictive immigration policies - including Coulter and Trump - have never made this argument."

His rather gushing review is exactly how you write as an academic for whom the scales have just fallen from the eyes!

On balance, I think I ought to buy it, if only to provide a review not from George Mason University.

---

Update: here is my review.

Castle Hill/Maesbury Castle on a cold Sunday afternoon

We first visited Maesbury Castle (Castle Hill) - just outside Wells on the Old Frome Road - in October, (I wrote about it here). On a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon Alex, Clare and myself visited again.

Clare and Alex on the Neolithic camp ramparts

The author in a chill wind

Glastonbury Tor in the far distance

Afterwards in the Crown, Wells market square

I was waiting for someone to review "Hive Mind" by Garett Jones, and finally Greg Cochran has done so here (comments are worth reading, too).

I don't think I will be buying it.

The decline of fitness

Back to the gym this morning for the first time in twelve days. Weak as a kitten: my mother could have done better.

A television reviewer compared the current BBC production of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell unfavourably (nothing much happens) to the 'scintillating' novel by Susanna Clarke.

As someone who tried to read that lethargic, pedestrian work and died of boredom halfway through, I can confirm that the BBC have got this exactly right. (I am told it improves).

It's now been more than 18 hours and the recycled laptop upstairs is still downloading my entire DropBox dataset (54 GB) ... . At least Vista seems to have ceased its endless appetite for updates. Now if I could only get Chrome to install rather than hanging and dying ... .

Are you interested in the following thoughts?

"Reproduction has two parts, mating and parenting. This allocation is the stuff of life history theory. The allocation problem is complicated by the presence of two sexes that are designed differently. This is especially so in mammals: internal gestation, mammary glands, and prolonged immaturity indicate of the commitment of females to bear the brunt of reproductive effort. Fish, for example, are not engineered in this way. In fish species where males mouth brood, mama fish is free to shed some eggs and abandon dad and the kids to continue her partying unimpeded.

"Humans exhibit a diversity of strategy “choices” that are solutions to the allocation problem between mating and parenting. Males can devote most of their effort to mating effort, usually involving competition with other males. Male commitment to parenting effort is not common in mammals but there are familiar examples like beavers, coyotes, gibbons, and some humans. In the jargon the polar strategies of male mammals are called “cad” and “dad” strategies.

"Females have a more restricted set of strategy choices because of their engineered commitment to parenting. At one extreme a human female can seek a dadly male who provides resources like food and protection to their joint offspring. At the other extreme, a human female can pay little or no attention to her mate choice, instead letting the guys work things out. In the jargon these female alternatives are called “coy” and “fast”."

If so, you can read more here. West Hunter seems to be doing the heavy lifting for sociobiology these days.

"The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" - Robert L. Trivers

Way too many people still waste everyone's time by falsely averring that the existence of altruism is a challenge and a puzzle to evolutionists. I re-read Robert Trivers classic paper: "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" and share with you the following observations.

1. This is a model of how to write a paradigm-changing paper. It's an easy read, conceptually clear and comprehensive. You owe it to yourself to click on the link and give it a try.


2. In a sense, it's a statement of the blindingly obvious, particularly when Trivers discusses human altruism and the psychological mechanisms underlying it (friendship, dislike, gratitude, moralistic aggression, sympathy). It is, however, a testament to the systematic confusion and obfuscation of prior intellectual elites that Trivers had to restate and reframe the obvious to clear away an edifice of tendentious, muddle-headed thinking. On second thoughts, you may delete the word 'prior' above: an evolutionist's work is truly never done.


3. Trivers suggested that the arms race between altruists and cheaters (doves vs. hawks if you like) is so complex, with strategies and counter-strategies and counter-counter-strategies, that it may have been a major driver for human-level intelligence. I'm not sure this intriguing idea has really been explored to date.

Trivers' first case study- 'Altruistic Behaviour in Cleaning Symbioses' - carefully removes issues of kin-selection and inclusive fitness by considering between-species altruism. He then considers the puzzling case of bird alarm calls (which seem to put the calling bird in special danger) and shows that a bird warning non-kin still has a selective advantage over the cheating non-warner. Finally we get to the human condition, where his apparently commonplace observations are subtly situated within a carefully-argued evolutionary framework.

Going forwards, there has to be scope for a genetic level of analysis based on GWAS research. Is altruism normally distributed (many genes of small effect)? Is there evidence of multi-modal distributions based on distinct evolutionarily stable strategies (crudely, sociopaths vs. the prosocial)?

For evidence that people's natural instincts and inclinations do not naturally align with Darwinian thinking, review these comments at West Hunter.

"Ancestral Journeys" by Jean Manco

"Amusing review you wrote on your blog about Ancestors."

"What?"

"That great tome you've been reading for days now. I read your review. It made me laugh."

"I haven't written a review yet."  (Baffled).

"Well, it was on the screen."

(Enlightenment).

 "It was Greg Cochran's review you read, on his blog 'West Hunter'. I was reviewing it before writing my own thoughts."

I am of course immensely flattered that my wife might believe that a review by such an eminent population geneticist, polymath and all-round smart person could possibly have been written by myself. In her defence, she's not fantastically up on genetics or the deep history of Europe. She's right about the quality of the writing though: here's what Gregory Cochran had to say.

"Jean Manco has a new book out on the peopling of Europe, Ancestral Journeys.  The general picture is that Europeans arise from three main groups: the Mesolithic hunters (Hyperboreans),  Levantine farmers, and Indo-Europeans off the steppe.   It’s a decent synthesis of archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence. I suspect that her general thesis is in the right ball park:  surely not correct in every detail, but right about the double population replacement.

"It is a refreshing  antidote to previous accounts based on the pots-not-people fad that originated back in the 1960s, like so many other bad things.  Once upon a time, when the world was young, archaeologists would find a significant transition in artifact types, see a simultaneous change in skeletons,  and deduce that new tenants had arrived, for example with advent of the Bell Beaker culture.  This became unfashionable: archaeologists were taught to think that invasions  and Völkerwanderungs were never the explanation, even though history records many events of this kind.

"I suppose the work Franz Boas  published back in 1912, falsely claiming that environment controlled skull shape rather than genetics, had something to do with it.  And surely some archaeologists  went overboard with migration, suggesting that New Coke cans were a sign of barbarian takeover.  The usual explanation though, is that archaeologists began to find the idea of prehistoric population replacement [of course you know that means war - war means fighting, and fighting means killing] distasteful and concluded that therefore it must not have happened.  Which meant that they were total loons, but that seems to happen a lot.

"But the book could be better. Jean Manco relies fairly heavily on mtDNA and Y-chromosome studies, and they are not the most reliable evidence.  Not because the molecular geneticists are screwing up the sequencing, although there must sometimes be undetected contamination, but because mtDNA and Y-chromosomes are each single loci with an effective population size four times smaller than autosomal genes.  They are more affected by drift, and drift can deceive you.  Moreover, in some cases selection might affect the historical trajectory of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes,  which would add to the confusion. Now to be fair, we have more ancient mtDNA results than autosomal DNA,  and there is more published data on mtDNA and Y-chromosome than autosomal DNA in existing populations.  This situation is rapidly improving.

"Autosomal DNA has zillions of loci and a larger effective population size.  Most of it is neutral.  That’s what you want, for investigating past mixing and movement  – and autosomal DNA yields interesting hints using publicly available data and software.  For example, using the program ADMIXTURE, you find a West Asian-like component in almost all Europeans (from Spain to Russia, and at about the same level) – but not in Sardinians or Basques. Which must be telling us something.

"In addition, she’s not bloody-minded enough. She thinks that a fair fraction of the big population turnovers involved migrants moving into areas that had been abandoned by the previous owners. I can imagine that happening in a few cases.  Maybe the Greenlanders, living in an extremely marginal country for their kind of dairy farming, mostly left and/or died out  before the Eskimos showed up.  That is, in my dreams, because we know that the two groups fought. The Greenlanders may have been in trouble, but they didn’t just fall -  Eskimos pushed. The European colonization of the New World is closer, since there was a dramatic population collapse from the newly introduced Eurasian and African diseases, but even then there was a fair amount of fighting. I’m sure that there were serious epidemics in European prehistory, but  it seems unlikely they compared with the impact of the simultaneous arrival of  bubonic plague, diphtheria, leprosy, malaria, measles,  typhoid, and whooping cough on the Amerindians (with yellow fever and cholera for dessert).

"I mean, when the first farmers were settling Britain, about 4000 BC, they built ditched and palisaded enclosures.   Some of these camps are littered with human bones – so, naturally, Brian Fagan, in a popular prehistory textbook, suggests that ”perhaps these camps were places where the dead were exposed for months before their bones were deposited in nearby communal burials”!  We also find thousands of flint arrowheads in extensive investigations of some of these enclosures, concentrated along the palisade and especially at the gates.  Sounds a lot like Fort Apache, to me.

"There are some new and fascinating results about European prehistory that beg to be incorporated in a revised version of this book, for example the stuff about how the Hyperboreans contributed to the ancestry of modern European and Amerindians, but that info is so new that she could not possibly have incorporated it. Not her fault at all.

"Read it."

I'd classify "Ancestral Journeys" as a semi-popular book. Jean Manco's mastery of the details of populations and their movements across Europe, North Africa and the Near East across a time period stretching from 46,000 years ago to the early mediaeval is truly staggering - she seems to have absorbed and synthesised hundreds of sources. Somehow the clarity of her thinking and the organisation of her material saves the reader from being totally lost in the details.

The study of deep history is a fusion of archaeology, linguistics and genetics with the genetics becoming more important as more DNA samples - ancient and modern - are sequenced. What does this genetic information actually mean? The reader will need to internalise the historical evolution and mutation of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA to understand the resulting haplogroup trees which drive historical analysis.

Evolutionary Tree of Y-DNA haplogroups (from Wikipedia)

If you've not had a course in population genetics then you will be hitting Wikipedia hard (you could do worse than start here and follow the links to grasp the genetic concepts underpinning this book).

Trivia point: Jean Marco is based just up the road from where we live, in Bristol.