Women are more beautiful, declares the headline in Times Online:

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.

Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.

I suspect this is not true. The short answer is that there are major evolutionary objections to the dynamic that is being described here. For readers who want to get into the scientific weeds (and view a nice headshot of Megan Fox), see my post at ScienceBlogs.

I hate to be the one to tell Robert Stacy McCain, but the fact that he points to really doesn’t resolve the question at hand. Speaking from past data.

Follow up to my post about domestic dogs’ ability to relate to human beings, it turns out that very young infants can read intent in a dog’s bark. This is not to say that humans have adapted to the needs of dogs (as I think dogs have adapted to humans). Rather, humans have innate cognitive reflexes in terms of how they relate to the world around them, and animals are naturally one of the more important aspects of natural phenomena. Contrary to the theories of Rene Descartes and some of the presuppositions of modern science, humans do not view animals as complex organic machines. We may not see them as peers, but neither do we believe that they are interchangeable with physical objects. It is therefore not surprising that modern industrial farming, whose basic logic is the same as resource driven industries in terms of squeezing more efficiencies in the process of extracting value, is careful to prevent too much publicity of the methods needed to reduce per unit price of their final product.

Below Patrick Ford points to a reasoned argument in regards to the rights of animals. Reason has some role to play in these questions, but I suspect not much, just as reason has little role to play in regards to human rights. I have had discussions with pro-life individuals who ask why we don’t eat fetus tissue if it is just tissue? And of course the classic film Soylent Green gives us another option. As David Hume long ago said, reason is a “slave of the passions.” The anti-slavery societies did not persuade through numbers and statistics, rather, they hooked into human emotions by printing stories which humanized the slaves so that the audience could identify with them. When it comes to moral foundations cognitive psychologists are catching up to this insight. Pigs may be as intelligent as dogs, but alas for pigs they don’t in general play the role of emotional partner. We don’t need to look at just expanding the moral calculus in the direction of whether dogs should be ascribed some basic dignity, the reality is that dogs and cats in the Western world live in a state of comfort and security superior to that of humans in much of the developing world. Can one reasonably assert that this is just? Ah, but reason is irrelevant to the question.

Am I a bad person for having spent more on the health care of my cat in one year than the median per capita income of many nations? I really don’t care if I’m a “bad” person or not.

Richard pointed me to a new study which suggests that domestic dogs exhibit an ability to understand human gestures at the level of a 2 year old. In contrast, chimpanzees are befuddled. Such comprehension is not trivial; infants are extremely good at manipulating and understanding adults, as any parent will tell you.  This particular finding is also not surprising, for several years ethologists have been reporting on the ability of domestic dogs to understand human facial expressions and manners. I stipulate domestic dogs because wolves, of which dogs are simply a specialized human-adapted morph, do not have these faculties. Like chimpanzees, wolves are more intelligent than domestic dogs. Domestics of all species are usually less intelligent than their wild forebears; after all, we do much of their thinking for them! The exceptions when it comes to relative dullness vis-a-vis wild canids are “working dogs,” such as border collies.

The take-home message here is that the mind is not an amorphous general mass. Rather, it exhibits domain-specific modularities. Language comes to mind immediately as a classic case and serves as a model for psychologists who wish to argue for massive modularity. The human ability to learn language quickly and easily is simply not an extension of our general intelligence. Those who lack this capability are pathologically deficient. In contrast, attempts to teach chimps and gorillas language suffer the problem that they seem unable to generalize syntax. This is not simply because of lack of intelligence; small children who are low in general intelligence have much greater powers in this domain than adult chimpanzees. Another example of a core human competency is facial recognition. Like language particular forms of brain damage can actually destroy the innate human ability to recognize faces immediately. It so happens that the ability to recognize humans visually is not restricted to humans, 90% of dogs are able to fix upon a photograph of their owner in a line-up. In contrast, only 50% of cats are able to complete this task.

This mosaic construction of our minds is almost certainly the result of the fact that evolution does not see beyond its nose. The problems which arise from this are documented entertainingly in Kluge, in which the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus outlines the various deficiencies of our suboptimal solutions to evolutionary pressures. But I come not to bury evolution but praise it, as the example of the domestic dog shows the power of natural selection to reshape a lineage in the eyes of its owner. In short dogs are ideally adapted to the ecology of Homo sapiens. Not only do they exhibit mammalian neoteny, which seems to trigger normal reflexes of affection and playfulness, but despite atrophying in many of the skills necessary to survive in the wild they’ve developed abilities to comprehend the mentality of another species.

Just as evolution applies to dogs, it certainly applies to humans, as outlined in The 10,000 Year Explosion. Dogs differ in intelligence due to their niches, and so humans most certainly do as well. Just as dogs have different personalities whether they are obnoxious lapdogs or sedate working dogs, so do humans. And as humans are the ecology in which dogs have adapted, so humans are the ecology in which humans have adapted. Like environmental ecologies contingent upon the vicissitudes of climate and geology, human ecologies are always a shifting matrix of needs and demands. Arguably the most powerful selective force in the past 10,000 years has been malaria, which arose in Africa within the last 5,000 years, and slowly spread north into the Mediterranean. Naturally it is no surprise that even in the few generations which blacks have lived in North America that some of the adaptations to malaria which had negative consequences, such as sickle cell, have diminished in frequency. There is no end of evolution, rather it is a constant and eternal race, as per the Red Queen Hypothesis. On the one hand evolution can be ingenious, turning wolves into ideal pets and helpmates (and in the process dumbing them down too!). Yet on the other hand many of evolution’s short-term projects are slapdash affairs offered up in a take it or leave fashion. I would hazard to offer that this reality is most evident in lapdogs such as the Pekingese, whose bizarre morphologies and insufferable behavior cater to the tastes of the perverse. Truly nature knows no decency aside from the whims of fitness.

I recently read something which conflated neoconservative foreign policy views with conservative foreign policy views. That sort of stuff irritates me, but the reality is that neoconservative foreign policy views are the mainstream among conservatives today. Is it surprising that conservative columnist Charlie Reese got called a “limousine liberal,” no thanks to his stances on foreign policy? But I was curious, what do the data say? The General Social Survey has a variable which asks:

Do you think it will be best for the future of this country if we take an active part in world affairs, or if we stay out of world affairs?

Here is a graph of those who believe that the US should take an “active” role in world affairs as a function of time by political orientation:

Now, as for conservatives broken down by intensity:

Finally, how does this break down for all conservatives when you look at other variables? Here’s a barplot:

1) The anti-interventionist tendency is a minority on both the Left and the Right.

2) Though today the Left is more anti-interventionist than the Right, most of the variation is within the two political coalitions, not between them.

3) Though anti-interventionism is a minority position among conservatives, it is not a vanishingly small one. But it seems that aside from Pat Buchanan among mainstream pundits the only “conservatives” who voice an anti-interventionist stance are libertarians. Why? A friend of mine who has made his career in movement conservatism chalks it up to the constraints placed upon Right-leaning think tanks by their funders, who tend to be hostile to the anti-interventionist and anti-globalist stream within modern American conservatism.

In Australian Outback, Efforts to Restrict Alcohol:
Since Halls Creek recently became the latest Aboriginal town in the Australian outback to restrict alcohol sales, its doctors and police officers have been getting more sleep thanks to a steep dropoff in nighttime brawls.

The scores of Aboriginal men and women who milled around the one liquor store in the afternoon and proceeded, at dusk, to the pub across town are now gone. Some have decamped for the nearest towns with full access to alcohol, hundreds of miles away across a flat, shrub-covered land where the monotony is broken up only by the occasional giant baobab tree and kangaroo roadkill.

In the 19th century per capita consumption of alcohol was much higher than it is today in the United States. The social disruption which were the consequences of these behaviors resulted in various temperance movements, driven by mass mobilization of women who bore the brunt of household violence fueled by alcohol. Though outright prohibition was a failure, over the decades a cultural change did occur in the United States so that consumption of alcohol decreased in quantity, as well as quality (away from hard liquors toward beers).

It is a fact that different cultures and peoples seem to have disparate responses toward alcohol.  Alcohol dehydrogenase related genes do vary from population to population, with the peoples of the Mediterranean generally exhibiting the biological profile which reduces the likelihood of extreme physiological responses. In contrast the populations of northern Europe have genetic profiles which would suggest that they would get drunk more easily with the same quantity of alcohol. Whether by coincidence or not it also happens to be that public drunkenness and excessive consumption is more acceptable in Norden than it is in southern Europe. On wonders as to the synergistic effects of genetic propensities and long winter nights in a place like Finland. But not coincidentally the Nordic nations have been also been on the forefront of taxing alcohol at extremely highly levels, so that there has been a noticeable shift in the frequency of alcohol related illnesses over the past century, easily evident when crossing the border between Finland and Russia. But these local responses to local problems run into the reality that the open borders of the European Union have fostered a boom in alcohol tourism.

But the rollback of localism in Europe pales in comparison to the paradoxes for a universal liberal vision which confronts one in the case of indigenous communities embedded within Western nations. In The 10,000 year explosion the authors made the case that the spread of agriculture resulted in a biological revolution. Peoples who have had long experience with agriculture have adapted very directly to the selective pressures, in particular in their relationship to what they eat. In Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity the ecologist Gary Nabhan shows the limitations of looking at food as a commodity which can be easily exchanged between populations as if there is a common currency with the same values.

Though gustatory concerns are clearly primal, the issues which they highlight have more abstract philosophical ramifications. A liberal order where all are equal under the law presumes a certain level of interchangeability between individuals and peoples. Though equality before the law does not entail equality in all characters, the nature of the differences in the latter have long been under debate or unspecified. Current findings from the human sciences are changing this state, specifying the very differences which have long loomed on the margins of egalitarian assumptions. In regards to alcohol as a descriptive matter it seems likely that a laissez-faire regime would have radically different consequences among Australian Aborigines and Sicilians. As it happens the city of Adelaide has a very large Italian population, and so in South Australia you have a jurisdiction where both groups are impacted by the same laws. Total prohibition may increase the life span of Australian Aborigines, but marginally decrease that of Italian Australians. The most extreme case of the conflict between universal liberal equality and reality occurs in the Andaman Islanders, where the isolated native populations have been physically separated from the Indian settlers. The rationale behind the separation was to prevent the extinction of the Andaman Islander tribes in the face of the pathologies of agriculture and modern man, of which they were innocent. But one casualty of such action is the innocent assumption that a universal order entails universal bliss.

Well, since she’s resigning as governor of Alaska, perhaps she could relocate to South Carolina and contest the 2010 race? After the Vanity Fair hit-piece and the interview with Runner’s World I wouldn’t have expected her to withdraw from the fight to establish herself as a public figure. Nevertheless, in the wake of the whole Mark Sanford fiasco I think many people are going to be a lot more cautious about giving pols a benefit of the doubt when it comes to erratic or confusing behavior. I’m sure there’s more to come….

Heather Mac Donald expresses some frustration at Mark Sanford’s antics the past week. Here’s what he told the Associated Press:

In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die “knowing that I had met my soul mate.” He also said he had “crossed the lines” with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage, but not as far as he did with his mistress.

“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” he said. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

This is just too much information, and is unbecoming. We’ve all had difficult break ups. It’s distressing, and one isn’t always in one’s right mind, but if you have a job or classes life continues. If Sanford keeps talking up Maria Belen Chapur as his “soul mate” in the public record he’s undermining any reasonable chance of reconciliation with his wife. But you don’t always do the reasonable thing after a difficult break up.

Kevin Gutzman alludes to genetic evidence pointing to a strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’ children. Why strong likelihood as opposed to 100% certainty? The genetic test in question focused on the Y chromosome, which is passed exclusively through males, and Jefferson naturally shared his Y chromosome with his brother. So it is certain that some of the descendants of Sally Hemings derive from the Jefferson lineage, but not necessarily Thomas Jefferson. But there’s a way to establish full certainty: obtain a sample of Thomas Jefferson and Randolph Jefferson’s genetic material from the family burial ground. Genetic material has been obtained from 40,000 year old Neandertal finds, so I presume that men buried ~200 years ago would be a relatively easier. The goal would be to compare the total Y sequence of the Jeffersons and the Hemings who are presumably descended from them. For “government work” brothers do share identical Y chromosomes passed down from their fathers, but, every human has a unique suite of new mutations which are distinctive. So there should be identifying genetic mutations on the Y chromosome which can be used to separate the putative descendants of Thomas and Randolph Jefferson.

On a broader note, this principle means that many people do in fact have good evidence of their descent from one particular man centuries in the past, Lord Somerled. We also now have circumstantial evidence now in relation to the putative descendants of Genghis Khan and Muhammad (through Ali and Fatima). One point to keep in mind in relation to the lines of Hemings who were eliminated from descent from the Jeffersons: a fraction of individuals in any given patrilineage are often of another paternity. So there might have been an interruption of the line. In rare surnames there is often a pattern whereby ~50% of the men are descendants from the same man (what one would expect), but ~50% are descendants of hundreds of other men. This is evidence of the “interruption” process over the generations.