So I wrote this great (by my standards, anyway,) post, and then there was a glitch and it disappeared. Totes frustrating.
So while I re-write it, here’s an Open Thread / Links post. Feel free to chit-chat, ask questions, whatever. Just keep things civil or whatever.
Some things I’ve been reading:
1. The incredible story of one couple’s trip across the Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. (I actually read this a while ago, but have been meaning to recommend it.) Story is notable in several ways:
A. The raw descriptions of what life is actually like in the heart of the DRC, where even Coca Cola can’t go because there are no roads.
B. The perspectives on what has happened since the end of colonialism (basically, the collapse or outright destruction of colonial infrastructure like roads and buildings):
“We also pass a ruin of what once must have been a grand building. The walls are marked with logos from a Belgian University. This must have once been some scientific study centre of sorts.”
C. It was the first thing I’d read in about a decade that gave an actually positive impression of religion.
2. Real History of the World, which is kind of like my blog, but devoted to the conspiracy theory that all human life began in Africa and then spread out from there to the rest of the world. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “Isn’t that, like, the accepted scientific consensus on the origins of humanity?” Why yes, yes it is. But Real History of the World thinks that “they” (“albinos”) are trying to keep you from knowing that.
Their site is part actually accurate, part inaccurate (jfc, “Black Celts” are not black-skinned people, they are Welsh people with dark hair like Catherine Zeta-Jones:
This is what the old books mean by “Black Celts”)
and part insight into the irrational paranoia of people who hate you.
This website is a good demonstration, btw, why I don’t believe conspiracy theories.
Still from Rhianna’s music video about torturing a white woman for money
“Yes, there are images of a woman being kidnapped, held hostage, and even hung upside down from the ceiling while topless. These are the kinds of images we see a lot in violent revenge films. They can be upsetting and harmful. I didn’t like seeing them here. But they’re also not the entire story.
Let me tell you what I see when I watch this video: I see a black woman putting her own well-being above the well-being of a white woman. …
if a white woman has to suffer some so that she, a black woman, can survive, so be it. After all, white women have been surviving on our suffering for hundreds of years.” –Black Girl Dangerous (Her bold, not mine.)
Feminists declaring themselves “allies” with people who beat, rape, and murder women is, of course, as much a betrayal of feminism’s goals as Anarchist communities getting taken over by Marxists.
Rushton lays out an impressive array of data in support of his theory that different branches of the human family tree (whites, blacks, and Asians,) mature at different rates (eg, different gestation lengths) and have different r/k reproduction strategies.
On a similar note, “Multiplication is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children is actually an anti-racist book. I only read the first few pages before I had to leave the bookstore, but the author had some interesting, Rushton-supporting information about cross-cultural infant development rates, including early crawling in African infants.
Abortion and birth control are important tools in the ultimate human thriving toolkit.
Unless you want to eliminate all the robots and go back to agricultural labor (which is not going to get you an interstellar society,) you will have to deal, somehow, with all of the humans who don’t have the chops to survive in society. Letting people starve in the streets is inhumane and inspires people to fund large social welfare states, which may have negative long-term effects.
Historically, death rates were very high, especially infant mortality. My great-great grandparents lost over half of their 16 children before the age of five; such was normal.
As I believe I have mentioned before, there is nothing like a parenting forum to convince you that parents are idiots. Unfortunately, a very large percentage of people become parents because they are too dumb not to.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who tried to reassure me that this was not a problem. “Don’t worry,” they said. “Dumb people have always had more kids than smart people.”
“No,” I said. “No no no. Dumb people did not historically have more kids than smart people.” History was brutal; 20-50% infant mortality was the norm, and people who did a better job taking care of and providing for their children had more children who made it to adulthood than those who didn’t.
No one in their right mind wants to simply eliminate all maternal and childhood medical care (and hygiene) so we can return to the age of high infant mortality. There are far better solutions than giving everyone Smallpox and seeing who makes it. But you also do not want a situation where the primary barrier to reproduction is actually intelligence.
The obvious solution is free IUDs for everyone. Globally. The long-term planners will get theirs removed when they’re ready to have children, and the short term planners will be able to go about their business without making “oopsies.” People who want 18 children will still be able to have 18 children, but people who don’t have the resources to support children don’t have to have any.
Abortion also plays an important role in the maintenance of modern society. Ideally, free abundant birth control would eliminate most of the need for abortion, but there will always be mistakes, medical complications, and non-viable fetuses of various sorts. Eliminate these earlier, not later.
These are not the children of intelligent, healthy, well-adjusted people who have some weird phobia of childbirth. These are fetuses with health problems and fetuses whose parents don’t have the resources, mentally or physically, to take care of them. The apple does not fall far from the tree, and genetically, those children will inherit their parents’ traits. If you are not volunteering to raise those fetuses (and their fetuses) yourself, then I think you should give some serious thought to who you think will.
After all is said and done, I don’t care what Planned Parenthood does with aborted fetuses, so long as they’re disposed of hygienically. They’re already dead, for goodness sakes.
Disclaimer time: I am not a doctor. I am not a psychologist/psychiatrist. If you have a mental illness/disorder/concerns, take them up with a trained professional who knows what they’re talking about. For the love of god, DO NOT make medical/mental health decisions based on my speculative babbling about what might have been useful to our ancestors.
Carrying on…
Americans are an anxious people.
According to the Kim Foundation (I don’t actually know who they are, but they are the first hit that comes up when you Google “Percent Americans with anxiety,”) about 18% of us have some form of anxiety disorder, such as, “panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and phobias.”
An additional 10% of us have mood disorders, eg, “major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, and bipolar disorder.”
There’s a lot of interesting data in this graph. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out, when I say, “Women,” I am referring primarily to “white women,” but remember that no group is entirely lacking in crazy.
Also, the graphs for mood disorders:
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute, those numbers don’t add up!”
They don’t have to add up. You can get diagnosed with two things at once. Or five. It just depends on how often you go pester the shrinks.
It’s no secret that women are kind of crazy, but I still find the numbers a little shocking. According to the Huffington Post, 25% of women are on psychiatric drugs of some sort. The article also claims that, “One in four women is on antidepressants,” so I guess 100% of women taking psychiatric drugs are on anti-depressants, or the math got fucked up somewhere.
Why do 22-25% of women feel so bad that they need psychiatric medication just to deal with their lives? (Not to mention 15% of men.)
Some quick possibilities:
1. Shrinks are handing out pills like crazy, whether patients are actually mentally ill or not, because who wouldn’t like to be happier and better-adjusted?
2. Something about modern life makes people (especially white women) very anxious.
3. Highly anxious people are a side effect of low infant mortality + the baby boom expanding the class of parents.
4. Anxiety/depression are actually adaptive, and so we are supposed to feel this way.
5. Some combination of all of the above.
Personally, I lean toward #5.
Now, a quick aside: I don’t really like feelings. Oh, sure, I’m okay with the good ones. Happiness, love, joy, enthusiasm, sure, I like those. But the rest of the feelings I could generally do without. I especially dislike other people’s emotions. “I am having a sad,” translates all too quickly into, “I am yelling at you.” So, as I stated at the beginning, if you think you need help handling your emotions, or the people around you think you do, please consider getting help. You don’t have to live in pain.
That said, I think anxiety is supposed to serve some purpose that modern conditions have gotten out of whack.
Stress in a personal relationship such as marriage
Financial stress
Stress from an emotional trauma such as the death of a loved one
Stress from a serious medical illness
Side effect of drugs, legal or otherwise
Medical symptom, eg, low oxygen
The last three I consider perfectly rational biological responses–it’s very understandable that someone who can’t breathe feels anxious. But other than coffee, I doubt these are seriously affecting the overall anxiety rates.
That leaves us with “stress,” (which is basically a synonym for “anxiety”) from pretty much every part of life. Almost 20% of women cannot cope with work/school/relationships/finances without medication. It is tempting, therefore, to think that our entire modern lifestyle, from large, dense cities to two-income households could not exist without medicating women into not freaking out.
But why would they freak out in the first place?
Biochemically, “stress” is the feeling of your body responding to threatening or potentially threatening situations via your “fight or flight” response. In nature, fight or flight is very useful: it prepares you to run for your life or fight to the death. According to Wikipedia, Fight or Flight works like this:
The reaction begins in the amygdala, which triggers a neural response in the hypothalamus. The initial reaction is followed by activation of the pituitary gland and secretion of the hormone ACTH. The adrenal gland is activated almost simultaneously and releases the neurotransmitter epinephrine. The release of chemical messengers results in the production of the hormone cortisol, which increases blood pressure, blood sugar, and suppresses the immune system. The initial response and subsequent reactions are triggered in an effort to create a boost of energy. This boost of energy is activated by epinephrine binding to liver cells and the subsequent production of glucose. Additionally, the circulation of cortisol functions to turn fatty acids into available energy, which prepares muscles throughout the body for response. Catecholamine hormones, such as adrenaline (epinephrine) or noradrenaline (norepinephrine), facilitate immediate physical reactions associated with a preparation for violent muscular action.
The basolateral amygdala has been linked to conditioned fear and disgust learning, while the central amygdala has been linked to conditioned fear learning. … liberals had elevated amydalar responses to the viewing of a political commercial about nuclear war. …
Hart et al. (2000) selected an equal number of blacks and whites, repeatedly showing them pictures of white and black faces while performing fMRI. They noted: “across all subjects, we observed significantly greater…BOLD signal in the amygdala to outgroup vs ingroup faces, but only during later stimulus presentations. …
Further, Phelps found that activation in the left amygdala and right amygdala (all the way to the insular cortex) were correlated with a negative bias towards black faces on the Implicit Association Test.”
Last time I took an implicit association test, it told me that I prefer fat people over skinny and blacks over whites. I don’t know why everyone else fails these things.
… the only region that was activated in both the Implicit Association and Startle Eyeblink tests was the left-superior amygdala. … Phelps noted: “the region in the amygdala most strongly correlated with negative evaluation [of black faces] was the left-superior amygdala”.
… Richeson et al. (2003) performed an fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function, and uncovered a critical findings with regards to racial prejudice: it is inhibited by right hemispheric neural networks such as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate. Richeson’s findings of a right-hemispheric network that inhibits racial prejudice shows the push-pull mechanism of the amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, especially on the right side.
… Cunningham used two different exposure periods: an subconscious exposure of 30 milliseconds; and, a conscious exposure of 525 milliseconds. During the subconscious exposure, which was not long enough for most of the subjects to even be aware of the black and white face photos, Cunningham found the right amygdala to be activated in the black minus white condition, … Longer presentations of racial stimuli favor activation in the left amygdala, at least according to Phelps.
But with the 525 millisecond presentation, the amygdala’s racial responsiveness was inhibited, meaning it didn’t take very long for another area in the brain to assume control. And that region was located predominately in the right hemisphere, confirming the work of Richeson. Cunningham noted: “the regions Richeson et al. identified as underlying the control of prejudice were nearly identical to the regions identified in this study as being associated with modulation of automatic evaluations”.
Here is where I get speculative:
When we meet another human, we automatically assess whether they are a threat or not. If we know them well or they look like someone we know (and like), they go into the “not a threat” category. If they don’t look familiar, they go into the “might be a threat” box, and your body begins preparing to run/fight for your life.
Your brain makes this assessment subconsciously and begins preparing your fight or flight response before your conscious networks have even kicked in. Your conscious networks appear to be trying to override your unconscious ones–perhaps by just rationally evaluating potential threat, or perhaps by yelling at your amygdala to stop being so racist.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this mental push-pull between the amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex created more stress.
Men seem to cope better than women with stress and aggression. They have a naturally higher aggression “set point” due to being descended from the men who killed all the other men. Aggression has historically been a winning strategy for men, but not women. Aggressive women, historically, were more likely to kill their own children or, if pregnant, get their children killed by someone else. Being the smallest, weakest person around makes aggression a losing strategy.
Personal anecdote time: In my younger, dumber days, I was a lot more aggressive than I am now. Not so much in real life, because men are bigger than me and I’m not dumb. But in the relative safety of the internet, certainly. Then I got pregnant. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand aggression. I remember watching a YouTube video of police aggression. My heart started racing. My palms were sweating. I was reacting as though the aggression were in the same room with me, not a recording on a little screen of something that happened hundreds of miles away. After that, I stopped watching TV News and stopped fighting with random strangers on the internet. I couldn’t take them anymore.
Aggression is useful for finding mates, because it gets people out of the house and helps them talk to each other. Sometimes it also results in punching.
Pregnant women have no need for aggression. They have already found a mate, and now they need to keep him. (Mates are very useful for bringing you food during that healing period after birth.) Further, pregnant women need to protect their fetuses (and later, babies.) The mother needs aggression only to save her own life or her child’s life.
School, work, corporations, and daily city life all involve being constantly around hundreds if not thousands of unrelated people. And as you probably already know, trust and diversity are negatively correlated. (Or just read the book.)
Corporations are stressful because they’re full of aggressive men, who interrupt more, take credit for other people’s accomplishments, are noisy, and use their physical size to intimidate each other. Women respond to this in a variety of ways you’re already familiar with, including the consumption of large quantities of Xanax to keep them from freaking out and having a meltdown every time a strange man gets into an elevator with them.
Anxiety exists because it helped our ancestors avoid dangerous situations, but modern life basically requires spending high amounts of time in anxiety-inducing situations. Some people eventually learn not to freak out and suppress their instincts, but for many people, repeated stimulus exposure only makes things worse.
But aside from preparing people to flee or fight, I suspect that anxiety serves another purpose: it forces women to do whatever it takes to remain part of the group, the tribe, because the tribe is survival, and outside the tribe is nothing but the howling wind and empty, barren waste. Female survival and evolutionary success has not historically depended on dominating the tribe, but on not getting kicked out.
Anxiety does not manifest itself as a rational response. Someone else does something wrong, you tell them not to, and afterward, you feel anxious. Objectively, you are in the right. The other person did something wrong. But your emotions tell a different story. Your emotions say that you are wrong. This is because you are not at peace with your tribe, with your friend or family member.
Or let us suppose that you say something innocently, even helpfully to another person, and they take it the wrong way and become angry and yell at you. Afterwards, do you feel mad at them? Or do you just feel unhappy that they are feeling so unhappy?
Okay, maybe not you, my faithful reader. You probably aren’t female.
Anxiety is one of those things that I suspect is good in moderation. A bit of concern for safety makes people pay attention as they go about their business. Double-checking that the locks are locked and the stove is off before going to bed could save your life. Being willing to put aside hurt feelings and make amends with others makes life more pleasant, and is probably crucial to living in large communities. Taken in excess, any of these behaviors becomes debilitating–the person develops agoraphobia, OCD, or pathological unwillingness to stick up for themselves.
A small amount of anxiety may also be useful in getting people to pay attention to little details. It’s making sure that all of the is are dotted and ts are crossed that makes sure airplanes stay in the air, after all.
Peter Frost has laid out a series of posts onguilt, and by contrast, shame. Now, here I must make a confession: I lack an intuitive sense of the distinction he is drawing between guilt and shame, or perhaps just lack sufficient exposure to “shame cultures” to really get it. Regardless, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to suspect that “guilt” and “anxiety” may be deeply linked.
Frost proposes that, “Pervasive feelings of guilt are part of a behavioral package that enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to complex social environments where kinship is less important and where rules of correct behavior must be obeyed with a minimum of surveillance.”
While most commentator posit the European guilt complex arose in response to specific events, eg, the Holocaust, Frost traces it back to a much earlier time, citing, for example, Aelfric of Eynsham, an English abbot born in 955:
He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002, p. 80)
And The Song of Beowulf:
That was sorrow to the good man’s soul, greatest of griefs to the heart. The wise man thought that, breaking established law, he had bitterly angered God, the Lord everlasting. His breast was troubled within by dark thoughts, as was not his wont.
(Personally, I’ve always thought Grendel was a metaphor for plague, and Beowulf plunging into the lake represents a human sacrifice by drowning/throwing the sacrificed victim into the lake to appease the gods, but I am really not an Anglo Saxon culture expert.)
Frost pushes back the potential beginnings of guilt culture even further, to the semi-sedentary Scandinavian/Baltic hunter-gatherer/fishing communities of 8,500 years ago. He suggests that in this environment, guilt made people cooperate, Prisoner’s Dilemma-style, and community sanctions against defectors ensured that they stayed a low enough percent of the population that they couldn’t take advantage of the folks who felt a lot of guilt. Quoting Frost:
What is to stop some individuals from exploiting the guilt proneness of others while feeling no guilt themselves? This free-rider dilemma may have been resolved in part by identifying such individuals and ostracizing them. It may also be that these semi-sedentary communities were conducive to evolution of altruistic behavior, as described by Maynard Smith’s haystack model (Wikipedia, 2013). According to this model, guilt-prone individuals are at a disadvantage within any one community and will thus become fewer and fewer with each generation. If, however, a community has a high proportion of guilt-prone individuals, it will have an advantage over other communities and thus expand in numbers at their expense. And if these communities disperse and regroup on a regular basis, the overall proportion of guilt-prone individuals will increase over time. …
There is an obvious issue that arises if a guilt-ridden society suddenly obtains a large number of individuals who don’t buy into the whole guilt complex.
… it was the hunter-fisher-gatherers of the North Sea and the Baltic who led the way to behavioral modernity, i.e., individualism, reduced emphasis on kinship, and the market as the main organizing principle of social and economic life. Their mode of subsistence was not wiped out by agriculture, unless one sees fishing as a kind of farming. They not only survived, but also went on to create what we now call the Western World. Not bad for a bunch of losers.
The guilt complex is obviously deep in Christianity. My researches so far have not revealed a similar guilt complex in other religions, though to be fair, Hinduism is vast and well beyond my understanding. IMO, some Christians take this guilt to an unhealthy level:
Some members of strict monastic orders, and some members of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, practice mild self-flagellation using an instrument called a “discipline”, a cattail whip usually made of knotted cords, which is flung over the shoulders repeatedly during private prayer. Pope John Paul II took the discipline regularly.
The Wikipedia page on Flagellantism, a Medieval Religious movement, deserves reading in its own right, but I will try to quote a representative bit here:
The 11th-century zealot Dominicus Loricatus repeated the entire Psalter twenty times in one week, accompanying each psalm with a hundred lash-strokes to his back. … The movement did not have a central doctrine or overall leaders, but a popular passion for the movement occurred all over Europe in separate outbreaks. … The prime cause of the Perugia episode is unclear, but it followed an outbreak of an epidemic and chroniclers report how the mania spread throughout almost all the people of the city. Thousands of citizens gathered in great processions, singing and with crosses and banners, they marched throughout the city whipping themselves. … The movement spread across Northern Italy, up to 10,000 strong groups processing in Modena, Bologna, Reggio and Parma …
The German and Low Countries movement … established their camps in fields near towns and held their rituals twice a day. The ritual began with the reading of a letter, claimed to have been delivered by an angel and justifying the Flagellants’ activities. Next the followers would fall to their knees and scourge themselves, gesturing with their free hands to indicate their sin and striking themselves rhythmically to songs, known as Geisslerlieder, until blood flowed. Sometimes the blood was soaked up in rags and treated as a holy relic. … some towns began to notice that sometimes Flagellants brought plague to towns where it had not yet surfaced. Therefore later they were denied entry. They responded with increased physical penance.
The anchorites were early hermits/monks who were literally walled into tiny rooms they never left for the rest of their lives:
Medieval illustration of anchorite cell
Maybe if Xanax had existed in Medieval Europe, people would have been less prone to walling themselves up in churches.
Note that self-flagellation and anchoritism are not rational responses to life in Medieval Europe–not only do they not solve problems like the Black Death, they may have exacerbated them. They are extreme emotional responses to overwhelming feelings of guilt and anxiety.
Properly balanced, guilt and anxiety can prompt people to treat each other fairly and be attentive in their work. Unbalanced, the individual (or society,) becomes unhinged. They start demanding that their own societies be destroyed because they they must have done something wrong to have more advanced tech than other societies, or groveling for forgiveness for things they didn’t even do:
White woman begs forgiveness for slavery
Anxiety and guilt have their good sides. Society probably couldn’t exist without them. But they have to be in balance.
A recent study–the Minneapolis Somali Autism Spectrum Disorder Project–reviewed the diagnosis paperwork to make sure the autism diagnoses were accurate, and concluded that they are. They did not go interviewing kids in search of symptoms, just looked at the records of people who’d already been diagnosed.
According to the NY Times, “But the Somali children were less likely than the whites to be “high-functioning” and more likely to have I.Q.s below 70. (The average I.Q. score is 100.) The study offered no explanation of the statistics.”
Well that one seems obvious: average Somali IQ is probably below 70.
Also, “While some children back home had the same problems children everywhere do, parents said, autism was so unfamiliar that there was no Somali word for it until “otismo” was coined in Minnesota.”
You might think it’s just something in the Minneapolis water supply, but another study, this one from Sweden, found something similar:
Children of migrant parents were at increased risk of low-functioning autism (odds ratio (OR) = 1.5, 95% CI 1.3-1.7); this risk was highest when parents migrated from regions with a low human development index, and peaked when migration occurred around pregnancy (OR = 2.3, 95% CI 1.7-3.0). A decreased risk of high-functioning autism was observed in children of migrant parents, regardless of area of origin or timing of migration. … Environmental factors associated with migration may contribute to the development of autism presenting with comorbid intellectual disability, especially when acting in utero. High- and low-functioning autism may have partly different aetiologies, and should be studied separately.
So what’s up with white kids with autism? Did they get screwed by migration, too?
There is one thing that Minneapolis and Sweden do have in common: lack of sunlight. Somalis may be particularly at risk of Vitamin D deficit, or some other disorder caused by differences in the night-day cycle at different latitudes.
But again, whites have similar rates of autism despite having had thousands of years to adjust to high-latitude winters, while African Americans, who ought to be more similar to the Somalis in their winter/light adaptions, have much lower rates.
In fact, I can’t really think of anything that whites in Minnesota and Somalis in Minnesota might have in common that they wouldn’t also have in common with African Americans in Minnesota. Or Sweden.
The obvious solution is that Somali autism might just be caused by totally different stuff than white autism. Perhaps migration itself caused the high Somali autism rates, or the stress and trauma of war and dislocation. Or it could have something to do with the Somali preference for cousin marriage, but perhaps the autistic kids never got noticed back in Somalia because of high infant mortality rates.
A friend recently attended their 20th highschool reunion, the sort of event that makes one feel very old. Worse, three of their classmates have already died.
I thought that sounded way statistically unlikely, especially given the group’s demographics, but I ran the numbers, and it turns out that it’s only a little unlikely. Given the small N, we’re probably talking about random chance making the class unlucky rather than a particular propensity for death, but it’s unfortunate either way.
Highschool reunions are also a great (by which I mean depressing) opportunity to see who has aged the most. Some classmates look hardly older than the last time you saw them, while others look like they got hit by a semi full of old. Hopefully not you, of course.
In “Quantification of biological aging in young adults,” Belsky et al confirm what I’ve long suspected: that different people age at radically different rates, not just emotionally/mentally, but also biologically.
From the abstract: “We studied aging in 954 young humans, the Dunedin Study birth cohort, tracking multiple biomarkers across three time points spanning their third and fourth decades of life. We developed and validated two methods by which aging can be measured in young adults, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal. Our longitudinal measure allows quantification of the pace of coordinated physiological deterioration across multiple organ systems (e.g., pulmonary, periodontal, cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, and immune function). We applied these methods to assess biological aging in young humans who had not yet developed age-related diseases. Young individuals of the same chronological age varied in their “biological aging” (declining integrity of multiple organ systems). Already, before midlife, individuals who were aging more rapidly were less physically able, showed cognitive decline and brain aging, self-reported worse health, and looked older.” (bold mine.)
” We scaled the Pace of Aging so that the central tendency in the cohort indicates 1 y of physiological change for every one chronological year. On this scale, cohort members ranged in their Pace of Aging from near 0 y of physiological change per chronological year to nearly 3 y of physiological change per chronological year.”
“Study members with advanced Biological Age performed less well on objective tests of
physical functioning at age 38 than biologically younger peers (Fig. 5). They had more difficulty with balance and motor tests (for unipedal stance test of balance, r = −0.22, P < 0.001; for grooved pegboard test of fine motor coordination, r = −0.13, P < 0.001), and they were not as strong (grip strength test, r = −0.19, P < 0.001).”
“Study members with older Biological Ages had poorer cognitive functioning at midlife (r = −0.17, P < 0.001). Moreover, this difference in cognitive functioning reflected actual cognitive decline over the
years. When we compared age-38 IQ test scores to baseline test scores from childhood, study members with older Biological Age showed a decline in cognitive performance net of their baseline
level (r = −0.09, P = 0.010).”
“Neurologists have also begun to use high-resolution 2D photographs of the retina to evaluate age-related loss of integrity of blood vessels within the brain. Retinal and cerebral small vessels
share embryological origin and physiological features, making retinal vasculature a noninvasive indicator of the state of the brain’s microvasculature (32). Retinal microvascular abnormalities are associated with age-related brain pathology, including stroke and dementia (33–35) … study members with advanced Biological Age had older retinal vessels (narrower arterioles, r = −0.20, P < 0.001; wider venules, r = 0.17, P < 0.001).”
“… these biologically older study members were perceived to be older by independent observers.”
“Based on Pace of Aging analysis, we estimate that roughly 1/2 of the difference in Biological Age
observed at chronological age 38 had accumulated over the past 12 y.”
“… our analysis was limited to a single cohort, and one that lacked ethnic minority populations. Replication in other cohorts is needed, in particular in samples including sufficient numbers of ethnic minority individuals to test the “weathering hypothesis” that the stresses of ethnic minority status accelerate aging.”
“Three Dunedin Study members had Pace of Aging less than zero, appearing to grow physiologically younger during their thirties.”
While I suspect measurement error is at play, I’d still like to know what those guys did.
“Today, the Sierra Club announced its support for an equitable path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“The Sierra Club Board of Directors, made up of elected volunteer leaders, has unanimously adopted the position:
“‘Currently at least 11 million people live in in the U.S. in the shadows of our society. Many of them work in jobs that expose them to dangerous conditions, chemicals and pesticides, and many more of them live in areas with disproportionate levels of toxic air, water, and soil pollution. To protect clean air and water and prevent the disruption of our climate, we must ensure that those who are most disenfranchised and most threatened by pollution within our borders have the voice to fight polluters and advocate for climate solutions without fear.
“‘… America’s undocumented population should be able to earn legalization and a timely pathway to citizenship, with all the rights to fully participate in our democracy, including influencing environmental and climate policies. ‘”
Here, you might need this:
Normally I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve heard enough people on the left lately explicitly saying that their organizations favor increased immigration because they believe those immigrants will vote Democrat/otherwise support their organizations that I’m starting to think that “import voters” is actually a Democratic strategy.
Which is cheating, BTW.
(Also, the Republican leadership wants more immigrants to keep wages down. Both sides are terrible.)
As logic goes, this is dumbass logic.
1. If the problem is that illegal immigrants can’t protest unhealthy work conditions without getting deported, then this is a good argument in favor of preventing illegal immigration, not encouraging more of it.
2. What makes them think Hispanic immigrants are suddenly going to start advocating for environmental protections, anyway? (I mean, do I have to drag out statistics here to prove that tree-hugging hippies are overwhelmingly white?)
Mexican citizens in their own country created one of the most polluted cities in the world:
Mexico City
Mexico city manages to top the list of the world’s most polluted major cities:
Somehow, I don’t think lack of legal citizenship is the issue.
3. Population growth is one of the worst possible things you can promote if you give a shit about the environment. The Sierra Club used to understand this, back when their official policy favored population stabilization.
In other words, the Sierra Club is now explicitly advocating policies that result in environmental destruction.
Ultimately, I actually think the “they’ll vote for us!” justification is just that: a flimsy justification for doing what they want to do anyway, whether it actually squares with their other goals or not.
Which is to say, I don’t actually think the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors is delusional enough to think that increasing immigration will actually help the environment. Rather, I think the Board consists of liberals who buy into the pro-unlimited immigration propaganda that moving anywhere you want is a basic human right, and are especially interested in proving how much they love POCs, despite (or perhaps because of) working for one of the most overwhelmingly white organizations in the US. But since unfettered immigration => population growth is actually bad for the environment, some justification must be made to reconcile the two positions.
But aside from a few people placidly saying they’re concerned about global warming, and a few people vocally responding, where is our leadership on the issue?
Al Gore seems to have had some things to say on the environment, but since he lost the Supreme Court vote, the Democratic base has turned increasingly toward more “people” oriented issues like racism, immigration, and gay marriage. And the kinds of people who care deeply about immigration, racism, and gay marriage may not happen to overlap with the kinds of people who think we should give serious thought to long-term global sustainability.
“I got into an argument with a friend of mine who is a person of color. They were mad at me because I feel very passionately about protecting the ocean and they said that made me a bad person because I should only care about is social justice. I do care about social justice and I stand up to racism where I can, but how do I reply to that?”
From the response:
“Is client change real? Hell yeah! Is the ocean becoming a mass of plastic? Of course. But right in front of you is your friends pain.”
It’s almost like people who tend toward high time discounting don’t understand the logic of people with low time discounting.
“Since I don’t know you I also want to make sure to offer up that white people have a horrible track record of racism when discussing climate change. I am not saying this is you personally, just the system that we have created around climate issues has become its own thing and often is very racist in its approach. The way people talk about “food deserts” for example (which are almost always lower income communities of color) implies that there is not a food culture in those communities.”
Remember, if you’re concerned about the availability of fresh food in inner city communities, you’re a racist.
BTW, the presence or absence of a grocery store in downtown Detroit is not an environmental issue.
“One of the tricks here though is to keep fighting for climate justice and protecting the oceans while not ignoring your friend, and people of color, here on land. All of this shit is interconnected. The same system that is oppressing people is oppressing the ocean. … If we center black lives in our work then we will have to discuss climate issues, and the ocean. Listen to your friend and maybe what they are saying is that this type of centering in your work around oceans is needed. Maybe it is their not so subtle way of saying that they feel ignored in the larger climate and ocean movement?”
Candy Crush, Bejeweled, Farmville, and many other games are exceedingly dumb ways to pass your time–and yet, chances are you’ve played some version of them anyway. People have, collectively, spent millions of potentially-productive hours on such games. Even more amazingly, people have spent millions of dollars in actual money on these games.
These games work because they’re addictive. Click the screen a few times, and corn appears! Wow! So you click the screen again, hoping more corn will appear. But as you “progress” through the game, each level becomes harder, takes longer, or requires more clicks. Next thing you know, you’re pulling out your phone at family functions to check on your fake corn instead of socializing with your cousins, or getting mugged on the subway because you were too busy swiping candies to pay attention to your surroundings.
Our career tracks have become far too similar.
I had the luck to catch up with a friend recently during a rare moment of down time. Way back in highschool, she decided to dedicate her life to one of those careers that shows a true commitment to helping others. Her adulthood, so far: 4 years of college; 4 years of grad school; 4 years of training; 2 years in a specialization program. By the time she has any hope of even being geographically settled instead of moving every few years, assuming she can get a job that will let her settle, she’ll be in her mid to late 30s. By the time she’s paid off her education debt, she’ll be in her 50s. Whether she wants kids or not, the question is practically moot.
It’s like the Farmville of real life, only instead of crops, you harvest degrees and grants and papers and fellowships.
Why pursue such a track? Yes, obviously, because she’s passionately committed to helping others, which is what she does. But also because our system requires and rewards such behavior.
There is absolutely no damn reason a JD or MD requires 4 years of college in addition to the programs themselves. There is no damn reason not to expedite a new doctor or lawyer or scientist or pretty much anyone else’s path to geographic and income stability.
When we ask why smart people don’t have more children, a big reason is that smart people are up to their eyeballs in debt, working 12 (or 24!) hour days, and constantly moving in hopes of finally getting enough points on their resumes to score a permanent job.
Fuck, people struggle just to get volunteer jobs.
Meanwhile, compare our friend to an Amish farmer. The work is hard. Back-breaking, sweaty, sometimes disgusting. If you’re unlucky, you could get trampled by a cow or something.
But there are no degrees. You don’t have to go to school to learn how to milk a cow and plow a field; your parents taught you that. There’s very little in the way of career advancement. You’ve been doing farm labor since you were four or so, and you’re likely to continue doing it until you die. You know you’ll probably have a job next year, how much money your crops will bring in, and if you need a new barn, your family will probably pitch in and help you out.
And the Amish have a lot of children. According to the Wikipedia, there were 5,000 Amish in 1920, and there were 290,000 Amish in 2014–and that’s not counting all of the ex-Amish who’ve left the faith over the years.
The same is true for people who aren’t Amish, but who face similarly limited career opportunities. If you can’t advance, you focus your energies elsewhere. If your phone dies because you forgot to charge it, you might be forced to actually interact with the people around you or read a goddamn book for a change.
I like having doctors. I like scientists. I can even stomach the thought of having some lawyers for certain purposes, like helping people fill out their wills. But we have to expedite the process.
While researching the previous post, I came across a claim that the Pygmies are retarded due to having IQs around 55.
No, the Pygmies are not retarded.
If you’ve already read Two Kinds of Dumb, you already know why, and don’t need to continue on. But if you’ve just wandered in, here’s the quick and dirty version:
An actual diagnosis of mental retardation requires not only a low IQ score (I think the bar is 75 but could be 70, I forget,) but also major life impairments. That is, the person must be unable to do, unsupervised, the normal things people do to function, like hold down a job, get dressed, or feed themselves.
While I don’t know the exact IQs of the pygmies, all of the evidence I’ve seen suggest that the average is probably pretty low. For starters, books are heavy, so hunter-gatherers tend not to carry them around, which has a real impact on the average hunter-gather’s ability to read. Second, hunter-gatherers tend not to conduct much trade, so they tend not to need much in the way of mathematics. Some groups don’t even have words for numbers over three. Such groups tend to score lousily on math tests.
I’ve searched high and low for whether or not Pygmy languages contain words for numbers over 3, and come up with nada. But I think Pymies tend to use a lot of words from other languages/be multi-lingual, so if the Pygmies are speaking some other language they picked up from an agricultural tribe, the language could easily have a full suite of number words whether the Pygmies had any interest in numbers or not.
Third, given neither books nor maths in Pygmy history, it’s unlikely that there’s been any selective pressure on the Pygmies to adapt to readin’ and ‘rithmetic.
Fourth, there is a pretty strong correlation between IQ scores and technological complexity. You don’t have to think of IQ as “intelligence” if you don’t want to, but whatever it is, it is necessary for building technologically complex societies. If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is your thing, then you don’t need much in the way of IQ.
And fifth, their heads are kind of small. Unfortunately, brains have to go somewhere, and this poses a limit on grey matter.
That said, Pygmies are perfectly functional in their environment. They can hunt and gather their own food, carry on some trade with their neighbors, build their own houses, make their own clothes, get dressed, cook, take care of their children (one Wikipedia article claims that one Pygmy group has some of the highest level of fatherly involvement in child-rearing in the world,) are bi- and tri-lingual, and otherwise conduct their lives.
If you and I got dropped in the rainforest, we’d probably die within three or four days.
To over-simplify, mental retardation is generally caused by some form of traumatic brain injury, say, by getting dropped on your head as a child, eating lead, or being born with an extra chromosome. These injuries change your IQ from what it should have been, and cause a general loss of brain functioning.
If you live in a society where the average IQ is 100, then the average person you meet with a 50 IQ is most likely someone who suffered a traumatic injury.
However, if you live in a society where the average IQ is 50, this is the normal, um-injured IQ of people in your society. It just means that people in your society are bad at reading and math, not that they were all dropped on their heads as infants and cannot care for themselves.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “what if Pygmy low IQ is caused by malnutrition? After all, they ARE pretty short.”
Doubtful. There’s no reason to think that Pygmies would have been more malnourished than all of their neighbors for thousands of years (we have records going back that far.) Also, their height is genetic (see studies on Pygmy genetics,) not due to malnutrition. According to Westhunter, an average-heighted person would have to starve to death twice before mere malnourishment would make them as short as a pygmy.
Are Pygmies human?
I’ve also come across this question during my research, so I think it bears addressing.
Look, the term “human” is a social construct. So is the whole concept of “species.” You can come up with a personal definition of “human,” if you feel like it, that doesn’t include the Pygmies. Certainly their neighbors, who rape, murder, eat, and enslave the Pygmies (and sometimes evict them to make more room for gorillas,) do not regard the Pygmies as human. Personally, I look down on the Pygmies’ neighbors for their despicable behavior toward the Pygmies, rather than look down on the Pygmies for their stature and lifestyle.
Practically speaking, people only declare other groups of people “not humans” in order to justify killing them. I have no desire to kill the Pygmies; it seems more pleasant to me to live in a world where Pygmies exist, while still recognizing them as one of the most genetically distinct groups on Earth.
3. They appear to have split off from the rest of humanity and have been relatively isolated for longer than almost anyone else on Earth.
4. They’re getting wiped out by their neighbors, so we’d better learn about them now.
First, Who are the Pygmies?
“Pygmy” does not refer (as far as we know) to one specific ethnic group, but to the members of any ethnic group in which adult men are, on average, 4’11” or shorter. In practice, people tend to only use the word Pygmy to refer to certain African groups; there are short-statured groups found outside of Africa, but we’ll discuss them in another post.
The principle African Pygmies are the Aka, Baka, Mbuti, and Twa. (Some countries and groups use different name; I am not an expert on Pygmies, so I’m sure there is much I’ve missed.) The Mbuti are probably the shortest, with an average height under 4’6″. There are about 250,000 to 600,000 Pygmies, scattered about the Congo rainforest:
We’ve known for a while that the Pygmies–especially the Mbuti Pygmies–and their more southerly neighbors, the San, appear to be the most genetically divergent people on Earth:
Average age of SNPs in different populations, from West Hunter
You might have to squint, but the Pygmies and San are on the far right.
In normal English, what does this mean? Here is my understanding:
There are parts of your (our) genome where random mutations won’t generally kill you. Random mutations tend, therefore, to accumulate there. Since have some pretty decent estimates for how often random mutations occur, comparing the mutations in two different populations lets us estimate how long ago they split. For example, let’s suppose you get one random mutation per hundred years, and we’re comparing two populations that split 300 years ago and haven’t seen each other since. Population A should have gotten 3 mutations during that 300 years, and Population B should have gotten 3 mutations. So if we look at a third population, C, and find that they have 5 mutations that they don’t share with A or B, then we conclude that C split off from some ancestral population 500 years ago. We can reconstruct this as: 600 years ago, there was a group called ABC, but 500 years ago, it split into Group AB and Group C. 300 years ago, Group AB split into Group A and Group B.
Anatomically Modern Humans (that is, Homo Sapiens Sapiens,) according to our best estimates, emerged around 200,000 years ago in central Africa. We’re used to talking about the Out of Africa event, when humans started wandering around the rest of the globe, but it looks like the first major migration event might have been toward the south:
Map of early diversification of modern humans according to mitochondrial population genetics, from Wikipedia
Those guys who went south (Pygmies, Bushmen aka San,) look like they’ve been isolated down there for an awfully long time–much longer than, say, the Australian Aborigines, who got to Australia about 50,000 years ago.
“Our two best-fit models both suggest ancient divergence between the ancestors of the farmers and Pygmies, 90,000 or 150,000 years ago. We also find that bi-directional asymmetric gene-flow is statistically better supported than a single pulse of unidirectional gene flow from farmers to Pygmies, as previously suggested.”
That’s a long time ago!
(“Bi-directional asymmetric gene-flow” means that they have occasionally inter-married, but not equal numbers of men and women.)
BUT, and this is where I get speculative and may be saying things that a real scientist would tell me are just dumb, what if the Pygmies (and San) actually split off more recently, and just picked up some archaic hominin DNA on their way south?
It’s not so far-fetched an idea. Everyone outside of Sub-Sharan Africa seems to have some Neanderthal DNA, picked up around the time their ancestors left Africa (Northern Africa has had a lot of mixing with non-African populations over the years, so I assume North Africans have Neanderthal DNA, too.) Melanesians (eg, guys from Papua New Guinea and a bunch of tiny Pacific Islands,) and Australian Aborigines are about 4%-6% Denisovan, but it looks like no one else is. Wikipedia article on archaic admixture.
Less is known about potential hominin admixture in Sub-Saharan populations. This may just be because we’ve sequenced far more European genomes and all sorts of remains tend to rot really quickly in the rainforest, making it hard to uncover any archaic DNA to compare modern humans to. However, I can’t help but think that few scientists wanted to be the guy who announced archaic hominin admixture in Sub-Saharan Africans before it was announced in Europeans. That seems like the kind of finding that could quickly get your department defunded, not to mention a lot of people mad at you and a ton of nonsense on the internet.
But with archaic admixture showing up all over the place, no one need worry about the political implications anymore, and science can get on with its business.
So, anyway, what if, on their way into the rainforest, the Pygmies’ ancestors encountered–and bred with–some other group of archaic hominins? (No, not chimps or gorillas–they have a different number of chromosomes than we do, so you couldn’t get viable offspring with them, similar to how mules are infertile.) They would have been more like Neandearthals, though obviously probably shorter.
It seems to me that a more recent divergence from other human groups + archaic admixture could result in a similar number of different genetic mutations as a much more ancient divergence + no admixture.
It also seems like you could have a third scenario: Pygmies (and San) have experienced recent selective pressure on parts of their genomes that no one else has. Maybe the parts of the genome that for everyone else have been just been accumulating random mutations have been important for the recent evolution of the San and Pygmy peoples, and so they’ve been accumulating changes faster than everyone else.
At any rate, the Pygmies are still genetically unique among humans.
Unfortunately, the Pygmies are not doing so well. The Batwa got kicked out of their homes in order to make a gorilla reserve. As hunter gatherers with no title deeds to the land they lived on, the government (Uganda) didn’t bother to give them new land or homes. In other words, the Batwa Pygmies were treated worse than the gorillas. (Today, some NGOs have helped the Batwa get new land and set them up as a living ethno-theme park for tourists, which I guess isn’t the worst fate in the world.)
The Bantus (who, despite living in Africa, are probably more closely related to Koreans than Pygmies,) use the Pygmies as slaves.
The Congolese (Democratic Republic of the Congo) have been literally eating the Pygmies, especially the Mbuti Pygmies, whom they regard as sub-human. Astoundingly, one of the reasons cited for genocidal cannibalism is that they want to open up Pygmy lands for mineral exploitation.
70,000 Pygmies have been killed in the civil wars in the DRC and Rwanda.
While I caution against idolizing the Pygmy villages as non-violent Edens (I have no idea what their violence rates are, but past experience suggests that it’s probably actually pretty high,) at least they aren’t cannibals. The Pygmies are smaller than everyone else and have only stone-age technology, so they tend to get defeated easily.
Pretty soon, there might not be any Pygmies left to talk about.
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