linkfest – 05/14/13

Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice – “Our results show that factors unfolding or emerging during development contribute to individual differences in structural brain plasticity and behavior.” – the nuture side of nature-nuture. – see also Mice, Men, and Fate.

Mysterious Minoans Were European, DNA Finds – “[T]he research team analyzed DNA from ancient Minoan skeletons that were sealed in a cave in Crete’s Lassithi Plateau between 3,700 and 4,400 years ago…. The researchers found that the Minoan skeletons were genetically very similar to modern-day Europeans — and especially close to modern-day Cretans, particularly those from the Lassithi Plateau. They were also genetically similar to Neolithic Europeans, but distinct from Egyptian or Libyan populations.” see also dienekes.

Chinese project probes the genetics of genius – “Bid to unravel the secrets of brainpower faces scepticism.”

Dogs and Humans Evolved Together, Study Suggests – “[B]oth species underwent similar changes in genes responsible for digestion and metabolism, such as genes that code for cholesterol transport. Those changes could be due to a dramatic change in the proportion of animal versus plant-based foods that occurred in both at around the same time, the researchers said. The team also found co-evolution in several brain processes — for instance, in genes that affect the processing of the brain chemical serotonin. In humans, variations in these genes affect levels of aggression.”

How to spot a murderer’s brain – “Do your genes, rather than upbringing, determine whether you will become a criminal? Adrian Raine believed so – and breaking that taboo put him on collision course with the world of science.”

Clark/Frost Domestication – “Thinking about the response of the pacified and submission Roman population to barbarian invaders immediately brings to mind the response of contemporary North Americans and Atlantic Europeans to barbarian invaders. It reads just the same: ‘welcome new neighbor!’” – from henry harpending.

Ovulation and politics – “‘Ovulation led single women to become more liberal, less religious, and more likely to vote for Barack Obama. In contrast, ovulation led women in committed relationships to become more conservative, more religious, and more likely to vote for Mitt Romney.’” – from mr. mangan.

The Personality and Geography of the Entrepreneur – “German psychologists Martin Obschonka and colleagues…used Rentfrow’s [big five personality] data to create a measure of Entrepreneur-prone personality profile for the different states in America.” – another really cool post from staffan!

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’ – “A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen ‘ultraconserved words’ that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: ‘mother,’ ‘not,’ ‘what,’ ‘to hear’ and ‘man.’ It also contains surprises: ‘to flow,’ ‘ashes’ and ‘worm.’ The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a ‘proto-Eurasiatic’ language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.”

The Mating Advantage of Male Musicians: Women Find Guitars Sexy – “Studies from two countries suggest women are more attracted to a man if he’s holding a guitar.” – more science proving what everybody already knows! (~_^)

More men than women harassed in the military, often by other men – from the awesome epigone.

Redheads are at increased risk of skin cancer even if they DON’T spend time in the sun

Children with Autism Hypersensitive to Motion

Privacy protections: The genome hacker – “Yaniv Erlich shows how research participants can be identified from ‘anonymous’ DNA.”

Tajikistan to Ban Cousin Marriage – “Formal prohibition unlikely to stamp out widespread tradition.” – h/t anatoly!

Tutankhamun’s death and the birth of monotheism

bonus: USG Pushing Unconstitutional College Speech Codes – “The government which rules over Americans is trying to further reduce free speech on college campuses…. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, sees this new federal mandate as a threat to the ability to teach the truth about human nature.” – from parapundit.

bonus bonus: Could Lighning Come from Space? – that would be FRIGGIN’ AWESOME!!

bonus bonus bonus: from the u.k. – Former minister admits Labour deliberately engineered mass immigration and A fifth of murder and rape suspects born abroad, shock survey finds.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Immigrant workers undermine wage growth – “Immigrant workers, mainly from other Nordic countries, have a negative effect on the pay checks of Norwegian employees. Workers with minimal skills and little experience are the most vulnerable.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: First land animals kept their fish faces

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Genome shows macaw is one smart bird

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Study: Plants communicate with each other via underground fungi

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more knife control

gonna need more knife control … in china:

“Not Just Sandy Hook: China’s Terrifying Knife Attacks”

“In a grim coincidence, a 36-year-old man rampaged through a Chinese elementary school with a knife on Dec. 14, the very same day as the horrific attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which killed 20 students.

“The Chinese knife attack wounded 22 kids and an 85-year-old woman at Chenpeng village in the southern province of Guangxi. (Gun ownership is tightly controlled in China, where mass attacks usually involve men with a knife, cleaver, or machete….)”

see also: Newtown, Gun Control, And The MSM’s Continuing Ability To Shape The Narrative

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hatfields and mccoys

“A man has a right to defend his family.” – William Anderson ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield [Albion's Seed]

that’s ‘devil anse’ there in the second row — sitting down, second from the left, long beard and shotgun in his hand.

i haven’t seen the show (yet) about america’s most famous family feud in which something like eleven people were killed — i count 9 to 2 with the hatfields in the lead (i.e. nine mccoys dead and only two hatfields) — but judging from the traffic over the last two days, a lot of people have!

the mccoys are/were scotch-irish and hatfield is an anglo-saxon name, probably from up yorkshire way. in Albion’s Seed, david hackett fischer describes how the settlers of appalachia were scotch-irish, or came from the border areas between england and scotland, and all had a unique culture with a long history based on extended families and clans and traditions of cattle raiding and battles between clans, traditions that they brought to the united states with them. from Albion’s Seed [links added by me]:

“Backcountry Family Ways: Border Ideas of Clan and Kin

“From the perspective of an individual within this culture, the structure of the family tended to be a set of concentric rings, in which the outermost circles were thicker and stronger than among other English-speaking people. Beyond the nuclear core, beyond even the extended circle, there were two rings which were unique to this culture. One was called the derbfine. It encompassed all kin within the span of four generations. For many centuries, the laws of North Britain and Ireland had recognized the derbfine as a unit which defined the descent of property and power. It not only connected one nuclear family to another, but also joined one generation to the next.

“Beyond the derbfine lay a larger ring of kinship which was called the clan in North Britain. We think of clans today mainly in connection with the Scottish Highlands. But they also existed in the lowlands, northern Ireland and England’s border counties where they were a highly effective adaptation to a world of violence and chronic insecurity.

“The clans of the border were not precisely the same as those of the Scottish Highlands, and very different from the Victorian contrivances of our own time. They had no formal councils, tartans, sporrans, bonnets or septs. But they were clannish in the most fundamental sense: a group of related families who lived near to one another, were conscious of a common identity, carried the same surname, claimed descent from common ancestors and banded together when danger threatened.

“Some of these border clans were very formidable. The Armstrongs, one of the largest clans on the Cumbrian border in the sixteenth century, were reputed to be able to field 3,000 mounted men, and were much feared by their neighbors. The Grahams held thirteen towers on the western border in 1552, and bid defiance to their foes. The Rutherfords and Halls were so violent that royal officials in 1598 ordered no quarter to be given to anyone of those names. The Johnston-Johnson clan adorned their houses with the flayed skins of their enemies the Maxwells in a blood feud that continued for many generations.

“These North British border clans tended to settle together in the American backcountry….”
_____

i posted previously on how the border clans probably praciticed some form of inbreeding or endogamous mating (like the irish perhaps) and that that’s why they were clannish in nature. hackett fischer backs me up on that with an example from northern england — and inbreeding/endogamous mating certainly happened in appalachia:

“In many cases the husband and wife both came from the same clan. In the Cumbrian parish of Hawkshead, for example, both the bride and groom bore the same last names in 25 percent of all marriages from 1568 to 1704. Marriages in the backcountry, like those on the borders, also occurred very frequently between kin….

“These clans fostered an exceptionally strong sense of loyalty, which a modern sociologist has called ‘amoral familism,’ from the ethical perspective of his own historical moment. In its own time and place, it was not amoral at all, but a moral order of another kind, which recognized a special sense of obligation to kin. That imperative was a way of dealing with a world where violence and disorder were endemic. Long after it had lost its reason for being, family loyalty retained its power in the American backcountry.

“An example was the persistence of the family feud, which continued for many centuries in the southern highlands. These feuds flowed from the fact that families in the borderlands and back-country were given moral properties which belonged mainly to individuals in other English-speaking cultures. Chief among them were the attributes of honor and shame. When one man forfeited honor in the backcountry, the entire clan was diminished by his loss. When one woman was seduced and abandoned, all her ‘menfolk’ shared the humiliation. The feuds of the border and the backcountry rose mainly from this fact. When ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield was asked to explain why he had murdered so many McCoys, he answered simply, ‘A man has a right to defend his family.’ And when he spoke of his family, he meant all Hatfields and their kin. This backcountry folkway was strikingly similar to the customs of the borderers.

“Historians of a materialist persuasion have suggested that the feud was a modern invention in the southern highlands. One has called it a ‘response to industrialism.’ Another has interpreted it as the product of changes in the means of production. These modern processes would indeed provide many occasions for feuds. But they were not the cause of the feuding itself, which had deeper cultural roots. Other historians have argued that southern feuds were mainly a legacy of the Civil War. But feuds occurred in the backcountry before 1861. They were part of the brutal violence of the American Revolution in the backcountry. Strong continuities in family feuding may be traced from the borders of North Britain to the American backcountry — a pattern that persisted throughout the southern highlands even into the twentieth century.“
_____

people become clannish or tribal when they marry/mate closely repeatedly over generations. if you want to understand, and perhaps get rid of, clans and family feuds and killings in the name of family honor, then you have to understand/get rid of the close marriages.

an interesting note about the mccoy clan (via wikipedia):

“Hatfield-McCoy feud blamed on ‘rage’ disease

“Rare, genetic condition may have fueled violent tempers across generations

“The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

“Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other ‘fight or flight’ stress hormones.

“No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan’s notorious behavior….

“Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.

“The small, bubbly-looking orange adrenal gland sits atop each kidney and makes adrenaline and substances called catecholamines. Too much can cause high blood pressure, pounding headaches, heart palpitations, facial flushing, nausea and vomiting. There is no cure for the disease, but removing the tumors before they turn cancerous can improve survival.

“Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their kin. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, ‘Smallwood’ McCoy.

“‘When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper,’ she said….”

previously: “culture” of honor and traditional family systems in medieval britain and ireland and start here

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tipping point reached

Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans….

“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.

answer: you don’t. ’cause you can’t.

Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype….

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civicness in the u.s. by sex

curt suggested that the apparent east-west divide in civicness in the u.s. has something to do with gender, i.e. more “selfish” techie guys on the west coast, more social chicks on the east coast. maybe. i’m digging around in the world values survey to see if i can find out.

first — civicness in the u.s. by sex. data taken from the 1995 and 2006 waves, the two years that americans were asked, “are you or are you not an active member of such-and-such a voluntary organization?” — or words to that effect (you can check out the exact questions on the world values survey site).

turns out, women are slightly more likely than the u.s. average to be active members of voluntary associations, while american men are slightly less likely than average to be so:

men score above average in being active members of: sports/recreation groups, political parties, professional organizations and labor unions.

women score above average in being active members of: well, put it this way — there are a LOT of church ladies! women are also above average in being active members of charities/humanitarian organizations, art/music/educational groups and environmental groups.

in the previous post on civicness in the u.s. by region, i only looked at the data from 1999. since then, i’ve discovered that the 2006 data is available by region, so i’m gonna go back and look at civicness by region in the u.s. again and look at the 1999 and 2006 waves together. the more data the better, right? then i’ll take a look at any differences between the genders between the different regions.

previously: civic societies and civic societies ii and civicness in the u.s. (by region) and civicness in the u.s. by race

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civicness in the u.s. (by region)

it looks like this (sorry, i’ve only got the lower 48 here):

the lighter the shading the greater the civicness; the darker the shading, the least civicness.

heh. i’m going to enjoy this all weekend. the pacific northwest — where all those sanctimonious swpls live up there in portland and seattle — they are the LEAST civic people in the nation. heh!

mind you, the numbers for each of the regions are not all that different. americans are generally pretty civic-minded. here are the averages for all of the civic behaviors considered (listed separately below):

West North Central = 24.41%
New England = 23.54%
Rocky Mountain States = 23.31%
South Atlantic = 23.28%
East North Central = 22.38%
Mid-Atlantic States = 22.21%
West South Central = 20.63%
East South Central = 20.53%
California = 18.81%
Northwest = 16.39%

the data are taken from the world values survey 1999. i used the 1999 survey because it’s possible to break down the results by regions for that year. civicness, once again, is determined by membership or activity in various volunteer organizations. in other waves of the survey, the data is broken down by active and inactive membership; unfortunately, for 1999, it’s only broken down into member or non-member. so, all the figures you see here are the percentages of respondents who answered that they were, indeed, a member of such-and-such a volunteer group (including the elusive “other”). i used the same 1999 wave for my germany/poland post if you want to compare and contrast.

here are all the results for different volunteer group types broken down by u.s. region. the pacific northwest is only above the national average in three instances: professional group, labor union, and third world development/human rights. the first two are decidedly self-centered; the last one is, let’s face it, pretty trendy. most of the time, washington state and oregon are at the bottom of the list along with california. they’re even at the bottom of the political parties/groups category. waaaay at the bottom!

ok. here we go…

previously: civic societies and civic societies ii and “civicness” in germany and poland and civicness in poland – redux

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religious affiliation of international migrants

from pew (pew! pew!): Faith on the Move.

nearly three-quarters of all immigrants in the u.s. today (er, well, 2010) are christians (that’s ’cause we’ve got so many mexicans):

39% of immigrants in the e.u. originating from outside the e.u. are muslim:

one-quarter of all jews in the world today have migrated to a new country (a lot of them to israel):

“Of the seven groups considered in this study, Jews have by far the highest level of migration, in percentage terms. About one-quarter of Jews alive today (25%) have left the country in which they were born and now live somewhere else. The proportions of Christians (5%) and Muslims (4%) who have migrated across borders also exceed the global average of 3%.”

370,000 foreign-born jews live in the united states.

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democracy and military takeover

heh. here’s a good one! again, from the world values survey, 2005-2008:

Many things may be desirable, but not all of them are essential characteristics of democracy. Please tell me for each of the following things how essential you think it is as a characteristic of democracy. Use this scale where 1 means *not at all an essential characteristic of democracy* and 10 means it definitely is *an essential characteristic of democracy*: The army takes over when government is incompetent.

here are the 10s:

5.3% of americans think that an ESSENTIAL characteristic of democracy is that the army should take over when the government is incompetent?! wtf?? that’s about 5% too many, afaiac. (at least we scored better than burkina faso, tho.)

southerners (not texans) and folks in the nw think this way more than those in other parts of the country. you southerners — you’re always causing trouble! (~_^)

btw. there’s something wrong with the data from sweden — there are no figures for responses three through nine, so i wouldn’t believe that 17% number.

previously: dēmos kratos and democracy and civil rights and democracy and the redistribution of wealth and libyans on democracy: meh and what egyptians want

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