When politics is entertaining, then only entertaining things become politics. So people devote their energy and attention to whatever conflict is the most entertaining, rather than useful.
In related news, a big chunk of my family still doesn’t have running water.
“The results of this study demonstrate that the timing of even moderate intensity light exposure is independently associated with BMI. Specifically, having a majority of the average daily light exposure above 500 lux (MLiT500) earlier in the day was associated with a lower BMI. In practical terms, for every hour later of MLiT500 in the day, there was a 1.28 unit increase in BMI. The complete regression model (MLiT500, age, gender, season, activity level, sleep duration and sleep midpoint) accounted for 34.7% of the variance in BMI. Of the variables we explored, MLiT500 contributed the largest portion of the variance (20%).”
From “Timing and Intensity of Light Correlate with Body Weight in Adults” by Kathryn J. Reid, Giovanni Santostasi, Kelly G. Baron, John Wilson, Joseph Kang, and Phyllis C. Zee.
My Facebook Feed is all full of articles/comments/posts about how the Waco Shootout shows just how differently the media deals with white gang violence than black gang violence.
Meanwhile, my Facebook Feed has zero articles/comments/posts about black gang violence.
So, I guess we deal with white gang violence by focusing on it, and black gang violence by ignoring it as much as possible.
In the interest of fairness, I will note that Asian gangs also exist, though Asians have a much lower overall crime rate than whites.
Just some observations, attempts at making sense of the world. I may be wrong. I admit that these are opinions, based on my experiences.
Liberals tend to believe that people are inherently good. Conservatives tend to believe that people are inherently bad. Liberals believe that evil is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to deviate from their inner badness. Conservatives believe that goodness is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to repress their inner badness.
Compare, for example, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” to, say, any liberal parent you’ve ever met.
Or compare the conservative reaction to ISIS (“Bomb them until they convert to Christianity or all die,”) to the liberal, “To defeat ISIS, we need more jobs for people in the Middle East.”
Liberals are generally more pleasant to be around, even if they are occasionally delusional.
In general, both sides tend to act like there exists one single, agreed-upon definition of what “good” is, even though a conversation with virtually any other human being on the face of this planet will quickly reveal that this is entirely untrue, as that other person holds forth that all sorts of horribly dumb ideas are good and that all of your best traits are really really bad.
Conservatives claim they know what “good” is because “God said so,” and anyone who doesn’t agree with them about what God says is Obviously Evil. It’s not much of a position, but at least you can defend it if you accept the initial premise.
Liberals think that everyone else sees “good” and “bad” the same way they do just because to do otherwise would meant that other people are doing things that liberals see as “bad” even without negative environmental effects, which blows the whole shebang out of the water. Which is really kind of annoying when someone really and truly doesn’t get that you actually do see XYZ as good rather than the result of some horrible trauma that made you do bad, though that’s still not as bad as conservatives dropping bombs on you.
Of course, in reality, most people try to do “good” as they themselves see it, moderated somewhat by their genetic inclinations and culture. The guys in ISIS really and truly do see themselves as good guys, while homeless people fret over the sin of stealing a shopping cart so they have a place to put their stuff.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all morality is relative, you can’t judge anyone else, etc. etc. I would say that our basic understanding of “good” and “evil” people/actions/behaviors is very specific to our own particular culture/subculture/immediate group of friends & family, and probably just isn’t a very meaningful way of understanding the actions of people outside of those groups.
So why do we still have bits of Neanderthal DNA hanging around after so many years? Of course it could just be random junk, but it’s more fun to think that it might be useful.
And the obvious useful thing for it to do is climate adaptation, since Neanderthals had been living in dark, cold, ice-age Europe for much longer than the newly-arrived h. Sapiens, and so might have had some adaptations to help deal with it.
Okay, so here is something related I was reading the other day, that I consider pretty interesting. So it looks like the people who live up on the Tibetan Plateau (like the Tibetans,) are really well-adapted to the altitude. No mean feat, considering that other populations who live at similar altitudes don’t seem to be as well-adjusted, despite living up there for similar lengths of time.
Well, now it appears that the Tibetans have actually been living in Tibet for waaaay longer than expected, because the original h. Sapiens who moved into Tibet intermarried with archaic hominids who had already lived there for hundreds of thousands of years, and so probably picked up their altitude adaptations from those guys.
BTW, “species” is a social construct and you probably shouldn’t bother with it here.
So what kind of useful stuff might we have picked up from Neanderthals?
First I’d like to interject that I still find declarations of “aha, we got this gene from Neanderthals and it does this!” to be speculative and prone to changing. All of the articles I’ve read tend to report the same list of stuff in a similar fashion, so I suspect they’re all workign off one or two sources, which makes everything doubly sketchy. So we’re going in here with a big “if” this is true…
Some of the results are fairly boring, like Neanderthal DNA affecting hair and skin. We already speculate that skin tone helps us deal with sunlight levels, so that’s sensible.
More interesting is the claim that Neanderthal DNA may predispose people to Type-2 Diabetes and depression.
Now why the hell would it do that? It’s probably not *just* random–after all, large stretches of DNA have little to no Neanderthal admixture at all, suggesting that genes in those spots just weren’t useful, so why would we have retained such apparently negative traits?
Maybe, like sickle cell anemia, these things actually have a positive function–at least in the right environments.
I read a fascinating theory a few years ago that Type 2 Diabetes and Seasonal Affective Disorder are actually just part of our bodies’ natural mechanisms for dealing with winter. Basically, you’re supposed to eat plants and get fat all summer long, while plants are available, and then by winter, your ability to absorb more glucose shuts down (there’s no point since the plants are all dead) and you switch over to burning ketones instead and eating an all-mammoth diet.
(Some groups, like the Inuit and Masai, historically [and may today still] survived on diets that included virtually no plants and so ran all of their cellular energy needs through the ketogenic instead of the glucose system.)
During this winter time, humans, like other animals, slowed down and semi-hibernated to save energy and because why the fuck not, it’s dark and no one has invented lightbulbs, yet.
By spring, you’ve lost a lot of weight, the plants come back, and so does your ability to use glucose.
This theory is laid out in the book Lights Out by T. S. Wiley, if you’re curious. I thought it was a really interesting book, but you might just think it’s all crank, I dunno.
Anyway, a big hole in Wiley’s plot is how we actually got this adaptation in the first place, since it’s a pretty complicated one and h. Sapiens hasn’t actually been living in places with winter for all that long. Wiley just claims that it’s a deep internal mechanism that animals have, which always struck me as kinda bunk because why would a species that evolved in Africa, from other animals in Africa, etc., probably going back for million upon millions of years, have some sort of complicated system like this still functional in its genome? A trait that is not undergoing positive selective pressure is probably going to become non-functional pretty quickly. But the theory was cool enough otherwise to ignore this bit, so I’ve kept it around.
Right, so here’s the (potential) answer: h. Sapiens didn’t have this adaptation hiding deep inside of them, Neanderthals had it. Neanderthals had been living in cold places for way, way longer than h. Sapiens, and by inter-breeding with them, we got to take advantage of a bunch of cold-weather adaptations they’d developed over that time frame–thus getting a jump-start on evolving to cope with the weather.
At any rate, if Wiley is correct, and SAD and Type-2 Diabetes are actually part of a dealing with winter complex that benefited our cold-weather ancestors, then that wold explain why these genes would have persisted over the years instead of being bred out.
An easy way to test this would be to compare rates of Type-2 Diabetes and SAD among African immigrants to Europe/other wintery latitudes, African Americans (who have a small amount of Euro admixture,) and Europeans. (Watching out, of course, for Vit D issues.) If the Euros have more SAD and Type-2 Diabetes than Africans living at the same latitude, then those would appear to be adaptations to the latitude. If the Africans have more, then my theory fails.
So I still haven’t tracked down anything I consider a good source on the percent of Neanderthal DNA in people from particular regions of Europe, and I should note that at this point, I consider pretty much *everything* in the field of Neanderthal DNA in modern homo Sapiens quite speculative and not nearly has solid as people make it ought to be. But it’s still really interesting stuff, so here goes. I’ll start with a little background information in case you haven’t been following along:
1. Modern people tend to have a little bit of archaic DNA from non-human hominins. Pretty much everyone outside of Africa (including African Americans and even some Africans) has Neanderthal DNA; folks down in Papua New Guinea also have Denisovan DNA (I can’t remember if people outside of PNG have Denisovan.) People in Africa, I hear, have their own admixture from whoever else was living down in Africa. Oh, and people in Tibet have admixture from the hominins who used to live in Tibet before them.
2. Interestingly, the Neanderthal DNA does not appear to be concentrated where you’d think it would be. Sure, Neanderthals themselves hung out primarily in Europe and the Middle East, but American Indians seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA, followed by East Asians. (I consider these findings especially speculative.)
I have noticed in studying maps of different waves of human migrations that where one wave follows another, the first wave ends up way out in the fringes. Take, for example, the parts of Europe where people speak Celtic languages. Celtic languages were once widespread in Europe, covering France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, and a few other places, like possibly a town in Turkey. Today, Celtic languages are spoken in isolated pockets on the outer costs of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. There are a few other isolated spots on the mainland coast where the languages persisted until fairly recently. Germanic peoples invaded all of these countries, taking them over and imposing their languages, until the Celtic languages are only left at the fringes, in places protected by their isolation.
So, likewise, perhaps Europe itself, being closer to Africa, had more invasions and so ended up with less Neanderthal DNA than the Americas, which were really bloody hard to invade.
There are a lot of other ways one group could get more Neanderthal DNA than another.
3. So how Neanderthal are you? On average, I believe non-African people have about 2.5% Neanderthal DNA.
For perspective, you have 32 great-great-great grandparents, who were probably born around 150 years ago, and 64 great-great-great-great grandparents, whom we’ll just neatly say were born around 170 years ago.
1/32 = 3.1%, so you’d expect to receive about 3.1% of your DNA from each of your 3xGreat Grandparents. 1/64 = 1.6%, so you get about 1.6% from each of your 4X Great Grandparents. So that’s where the average person’s Neanderthal contribution is–it’s like having one Neanderthal ancestor from the mid 1800s.
A lot of people claim to be ethnically Irish based on less.
4. I suspect Europe’s Neanderthal hotspot is Sardinia.
Speculations later.
Despite my cold, unfeeling, atheist heart, I’ve always had a soft spot for religions.
And since many religions encourage their followers to convert as many people as possible, the point of this thread is to give you a chance to try.
Here are the rules: You post the best argument you can for why I should follow your religion, preferably in under a billion words. I will attempt to make a thorough and polite response.
You may recommend your favorite book on the subject, but please understand that I probably won’t have time to read it. Oh! Also, my computer is old and Youtube makes it crash, so no videos.
Also, please understand that my most likely answer is, “Sorry, I remain unconvinced.”
You guys are also free to try to convert each other, so long as everyone remains civil.🙂
(I’m gonna figure out how to put a link to this thread on the sidebar, so it doesn’t get lost.)
Now go!
My grandfather was a badass kind of guy, so of course his dogs were awesome, too.
He lived in a part of the country where coyotes were still a problem for livestock producers (it’s always a bummer when your favorite chicken gets eaten,) so he got this German Shepherd.
The German Shepherd proceeded to kill all the male coyotes in the area.
The next spring, we kept spotting half-German Shepherd, half-coyote pups.
Unlike mules, coydogs are fertile, and can continue making more generations of coydogs–or whatever they happen to mate with. In fact, it appears that most species of the Canis genus–various wolves, domestic dogs, dingoes, coyotes, and some jackals–can interbreed. Foxes and other less-closely related members of the family Canidae, however, cannot breed with canids–they have different numbers of chromosomes, which makes the genetics not really work.
(This is what is up with mule, btw. Horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes.)
The history of different canid species actually gets kinda complicated when you look at the inter-species mixing. According to the Wikipedia:
“…melanistic coyotes have been shown to have inherited their black pelts from dogs likely brought to North America through the Bering Land Bridge 12,000 to 14,000 years ago by the ancestors of the America’s indigenous people.”
” Northern Canada’s Aboriginal populations were mating coyotes and wolves to their sled dogs in order to produce more resilient animals as late as the early 20th century.”
(Well that explains the wolf admixture in National Geographic’s article on dog genetics! I’ve been wondering about that.)
“Some 15% of 10,000 coyotes taken annually in Illinois for their fur during the early 1980s may have been coydogs based on cranial measurements… Of 379 wild canid skulls taken in Ohio from 1982 to 1988, 10 (2.6%) were found to be coydogs.”
From the article on coyotes:
“Coyotes have hybridized with wolves to varying degrees, particularly in the Eastern United States and Canada. The so-called “eastern coyote” of northeastern North America has been confirmed to be of mixed wolf-coyote parentage, and probably originated in the aftermath of the extermination of wolves in the northeast, thus allowing coyotes to colonize former wolf ranges and mix with remnant wolf populations.”
” In 2011, an analysis of 48,000 SNP chips in the genomes of various wolf and coyote populations revealed that the eastern wolf …and the red wolf… both previously labeled as species distinct from the gray wolf, are in fact products of varying degrees of wolf-coyote hybridization. The wolf-coyote admixture resulting in the development of the eastern wolf may have occurred on the order of 600–900 years ago between gray wolves and a now extinct pre-Columbian coyote population. The eastern wolf has since backcrossed extensively with parent gray wolf populations. The red wolf may have originated later, approximately 287–430 years ago, when much of the southeastern U.S. was being converted to agriculture and predators were targeted for extermination. During this period, declining local wolf populations would have been forced to mate with coyotes, with the resulting hybrids backcrossing to coyotes as the wolves disappeared, to the extent that ~75–80% of the modern red wolf’s genome is of coyote derivation.“
And jackals:
“…since 1975, Russian scientists have bred quarter jackal hybrids, initially from jackals and Lapponian Herder reindeer herding dogs, called Sulimov dogs in order to take advantage of the jackal’s superior olfactory abilities combined with the Lapponian Herder’s resistance to cold. They are owned by Aeroflot – Russian Airlines and trained as sniffer dogs for use in airports. According to the breed’s creator, first-generation hybrid pups could only be produced by male dogs and female jackals, as male jackals refused to mate with female dogs.”
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
If you spend enough time, well, virtually anywhere, you’re bound to come across a seemingly rational, intelligent person who sees different patterns than you do.
I suppose that’s what falsifiability is for.
I’ve been trying for a while to figure out when atheism became mainstream in the West. Sometimes I answer, “Around the end of the English Civil War,” (1650) and sometimes I answer, “Late 1980s/early 1990s.”
Medieval Europeans seem to have been pretty solidly Christian–probably about as Christian as modern Muslims are Muslim.
Modern Westerners are highly atheistic–even many of the “Christians”. So what happened?
I speculate that the upper classes in France, Britain, and the Colonies (and probably that-which-would-become-Germany and a few other places I’m less familiar with, like the Netherlands,) were largely atheistic by the 1700s. Look at the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers, the behavior of the French nobility, the English distrust of any kind of religious “enthusiasm,” German bishops actively encouraging Jewish settlement in their cities and attempting to protect the Jews from angry peasant mobs, various laws outlawing or greatly limiting religious power passed during the French Revolution, the deism of the Founding Fathers, etc.
By contrast, the lower classes in NW Europe and especially America retained their belief for far longer–a few isolated pockets of belief surviving even into the present. For example, see the Pilgrims, the Counter-Revolution in the Vendee, maybe German peasants, televangelists in the 80s, blue laws, and Appalachian snake handlers in the ’50s, etc.
So how did that happen? I propose that the upper class and lower class followed different evolutionary trajectories (due to different conditions), with strong religiosity basically already selected out by the 1700s, meaning the relevant selection period is roughly 500-1700, not post-1700s.
During this time, the dominant religion was Catholicism, and Catholicism has generally forbade its priests, monks, nuns, etc., from getting married and having children since somewhere abouts the 300s or 400s. (With varying levels of success.)
Who got to be an official member of the Church hierarchy? Members of the upper class. Peasants couldn’t afford to do jobs that didn’t involve growing food, and upper class people weren’t going to accept peasants as religious authorities with power over their eternal souls, anyway. Many (perhaps most) of the people who joined the church were compelled at least in part by economic necessity–lack of arable land and strict inheritance laws meant that a family’s younger sons and daughters would not have the resources for marriage and family formation, anyway, and so these excess children were shunted off to monasteries.
There was another option for younger sons: the army. (Not such a good option for younger daughters.) Folks in the army probably did have children; you can imagine the details.
So we can imagine that, given the option between the army and the Church, those among the upper class with more devote inclinations probably chose the Church. And given a few hundred years of your most devote people leaving no children (and little genetic inflow from the lower classes,) the net result would be a general decrease in the % of genes in your population that contribute to a highly religious outlook.
(This assumes, of course, that religiosity can be selected for. I assume it can.)
Since the lower classes cannot join the Church, we should see much more religiosity among them. (Other factors affected the lower classes, just not this one.) If anything, one might speculate that religiosity may have increased reproductive success for the lower classes, where it could have inspired family-friendly values like honesty, hard work, fidelity, not being a drunkard, etc. A hard-working, moderately devout young man or woman may have been seen as a better potential spouse by the folks arranging marriages than a non-devout person.
Religiosity probably persisted in the US for longer than in Europe because:
1. More religious people tended to move from Europe to America, leaving Europe less religious and America more;
2. The beneficial effects of being a devout person who could raise lots of children were enhanced by the availability of abundant natural resources, allowing these people to raise even more children. NW Europe has had very little new land opened up in the past thousand years, limiting everybody’s expansion. The European lower classes historically did not reproduce themselves (horrific levels of disease and malnutrition will do that to you), being gradually replaced by downwardly-mobile upper classes. (There are probably regions in which the lower classes did survive, of course;)
3. By the time we’re talking about America, we’re talking about Protestant denominations rather than Catholicism, and Protestants generally allow their clergy to marry.
