linkfest – 02/18/13

A Genetic Code for Genius? – more on the bgi project.

Genetic components of political preference – “[I]ndividuals tend to have a broad, evolution-based orientation toward being more conservative or liberal about various elements, such as protecting their in-group. That in-group orientation can translate into preferences on political issues such as reproductive rights, immigration, and war, as well as political behaviors such as voting behavior and political participation.”

Baby-making among non-whites by political orientation over time – from the awesome epigone.

Higher Levels of Neanderthal Ancestry in East Asians Than in Europeans (Wall et al. 2013) – @dienekes’.

Gildea (1992): A lost IQ study of transracially adopted Koreans – from jason malloy.

Unchanging Essence – “Shea says that no anthropologist in his right mind would think that existing cultural variation among humans had anything to do with genetic differences between existing populations. It will be interesting to discover the alleles that made him say that.” – heh. – from greg cochran.

Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain – “The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.” – via steve sailer.

Peter Turchin on the Big Picture – (on “cycles of inequality”) – from steve sailer.

Memory of chimps ‘far better than human’

Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam – “The sheer size of the country, combined with lax — and often corrupt — law enforcement, and a legal system that rarely favors first-hand accounts of traffic collisions has made dash cams all but a requirement for motorists. ‘You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,’ Aleksei Dozorov, a motorists’ rights activist in Russia told Radio Free Europe last year.”

Why Children Must Inherit Their Last Names from Their Father, Not Their Mother – from kanazawa.

Bacteria boost fixes symptoms of autism in mice – “[I]nfecting pregnant mice with molecules from a flu virus caused autism-like symptoms in their offspring. The pups were less social, squeaked less and displayed repetitive behaviours. They also had a ‘leaky’ gastrointestinal tract that allowed bacteria to move in and out of the lining. In addition, the bacteria present in their gut were significantly different from that found in mice without autism-like behaviour. Studies in humans have also identified links between gut bacteria and autism. For example, a 2011 study identified a significant lack of Bacteroides in children with autism.”

How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist – “He spent much of the past decade working on a memoir instead’ ‘Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists,’ which comes out this month.” – heh.

The Weird Irony at the Heart of the Napoleon Chagnon Affair – definitely all very weird.

bonus: The Pilgrims as Illegal Aliens – “Letting in immigrants means letting in your future rulers.”

bonus bonus: Illegal Immigrations and Black Unemployment – “It’s peculiar … that those who can usually be counted on to highlight any disparity between blacks and whites — whatever the reason and no matter how slight the disparity – have said not a word about the effect of illegal immigration on blacks.”

bonus bonus bonus: Sea slug loses penis after sex but grows another the next day – “Invertebrate may discard organ like a dirty needle to avoid carrying competitors’ sperm.” – ouch!

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Bronze Age beads that are worth their weight in gold: 4,000-year-old burial chest unearthed on Dartmoor ‘one of most significant historical finds in a century’

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Could the sea be conscious? Research reveals how tiny plankton behave like a marine ‘megamind’

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain? – “Scientists disagree on whether your seafood suffered.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Norway jails Rwandan for 21 years over role in 1994 genocide — “Similar cases against Rwandans have been brought in neighbouring Sweden, Finland and Denmark.” — nordic countries’ jurisdictions extend globally (perhaps even throughout the entire solar system?) — just thought you should know.

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ghost in the machine

there was a little discussion (starting here) in the recent linkfest comments about whether or not the brain runs on autopilot and what that means for concepts like responsibility and free will and all that.

benjamin libet was the first guy to experimentally document that the subconscious brain seems to decide upon an action before the conscious mind “decides” to do it. his experiment has been successfully repeated many times, most recently using a different methodology (but winding up with the same, or a similar, result — i.e. subconscious decides what to do first). the wikipedia page on the neuroscience of free will has some excellent descriptions of the experiments. from that page:

“One significant finding of modern studies is that a person’s brain seems to commit to certain decisions before the person becomes aware of having made them. Researchers have found delays of about half a second. With contemporary brain scanning technology, scientists in 2008 were able to predict with 60% accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made that choice…. It may be possible, then, that our intuitions about the role of our conscious ‘intentions’ have led us astray; it may be the case that we have confused correlation with causation by believing that conscious awareness necessarily causes the body’s movement. This possibility is bolstered by findings in neurostimulation, brain damage, but also research into introspection illusions.”

exactly.

given what we also know about all the cognitive biases that we humans have, along with the heritability of certain traits like religiosity and political persuasion — aspects of ourselves and our lives that we all just feel that we’ve really thought about and independently made up our minds about, even though … heh … the truth is that we’ve prolly just inherited a certain package of genes from our parents — all of these things make me distrust what our conscious minds tell us. the conscious mind, pardon the antropomorphism, wants us to feel that we’re making all the decisions, but that’s probably just a useful adaptation — an illusion of our neocortex, a more recently developed brain structure which has been jerry-rigged on top of more ancient brain structures.

as an hbd-ist, i would guess that probably some individuals have more “free will” than others — some people can probably use their conscious minds as more of a veto on automatic behaviors, for instance, although that that happens at all is by no means certain either. i would also guess that some populations have more “free will” than others, too.

see also: youarenotsosmart.com and Neuroscience, free will and determinism: ‘I’m just a machine’ and The human brain: turning our minds to the law and The uncomfortable truth about mind control: Is free will simply a myth?

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the looney left vs. the ridiculous right

re. where do political beliefs|ideologies come from…

here are some comments by everett young of washington university in st. louis “who studies and teaches about the psychology of political opinion formation”:

“I think if you look at the political science literature over the last few decades, the burden of proof has shifted dramatically onto those who would deny a psychology-ideology link. Even without Jost, the evidence has grown into somewhat of a mountain. And Alford, et al.’s findings on genetics are only controversial insofar as people don’t like them. The evidence for a genetics-ideology link is also overpowering, even if we haven’t mapped out exactly how it happens….

“Chris [Mooney, Discover blogger] is right that some model must be proposed to explain HOW a cognitively flexible (rigid) psychology produces liberal (conservative) opinion formation. However, Jost and others (including me) have done exactly that. I agree more with some researchers’ ideas than others’, however, I don’t think it can be said any longer that the default assumption, against which we are Quixotically tilting, is that there are no psychological differences between libs and cons. The psychological differences are well documented, and the hypothesis that they are the RESULT of ideology rather than the other way around is by far the less parsimonious, more strained one.”

yup. culture (including political ideology) has GOT to come from SOMEwhere. it can’t just appear out of the ether.

read the whole thing over @the intersection.

see also: neuropolitics.org.

update: see also -> violent DEMOCRATS swayed more by extreme political rhetoric…

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neuropolitics

speaking of the discovery of a ‘liberal gene‘ (drd4, a dopamine receptor gene) that was reported on the other week…

…charles brack, et. al., have been writing|theorizing|researching the neurology of liberalism vs. conservatism for a few years now on their site, neuropolitics.org. among other things, they’ve talked a lot about dopamine and its role in shaping our political sentiments.

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