Autism Exists Because Math is a Recently Evolved Ability

This is a theory.

We know mathematics is a recently evolved ability–all human groups can talk and compose stories, (even groups without written language,) but many groups do not even have words for numbers over three.

Out of the 200,000 years or so that anatomically modern humans have been around, no one bothered to invent written numbers until about 6,000 years ago; algebra didn’t really take off until about 1,000 years ago; calculus was invented about 400 years ago.

The ability to do any kind of abstract mathematics beyond the four basic operations is most likely a very newly acquired human skill–selection for higher math ability would have been virtually impossible prior to the invention of math, after all.

The thing about newly acquired skills is that evolution tends not to have worked out all of the kinks, yet. Things your ancestors have done consistently (including your parents) for the last 100,000 years will probably involve some decent genetic code. Things your ancestors did for millions of years will involve even better code. Things humans have been doing for only 400 years will probably involve some very kludgey code that might have some shitty side effects. Avoiding malaria comes immediately to mind–sickle cell anemia might help you avoid malaria, but it’s a pretty crappy adaptation overall. By contrast, animals have had circulatory systems for a long time; the code that builds circulatory systems is pretty solid.

Since math is a recently acquired skill, we’d expect at least some of the genes that makes people better at math to be a little, well, wonky.

It is probably no coincidence that people with extremely high math abilities have a reputation for being total weirdos, while people with very high verbal abilities–say, published authors–are regarded as pretty normal.

There are a few obvious ways to make people better at a particular task. You could take some neural real estate away from other tasks and assign it to the one you want. We know we can do this “environmentally,” (Phantom Limb Syndrome appears to be caused by the missing limb’s brain area being re-purposed for other tasks, such that when you do those other tasks, your brain simultaneously registers the activity as information coming from the limb); it seems reasonable that some sort of coding could do it genetically. Alternatively, you could increase neural speed or density or something. Or perhaps the overall size of the brain.

Each of these possibilities could also have some negative side effects–bigger brains kill mothers; re-purposing mental real estate could leave you unable to do some other function, like fine-motor control or talking.

Autism appears to basically do some set of these things (it seems to increase neural density, at least.) People with a small amount of autistic traits end up better at math than they would be otherwise. People with too many, though, suffer negative side effects–like struggling with verbal tasks. (It’s no particular surprise that autistic people tend to come from families with high math ability.) Autism is probably another mental trait that makes sense in a Sickle Cell Anemia sense.

A Structural Proposal

I have read that people are capable of maintaining about 150 relationships with other humans. This therefore seems like a reasonable maximum size for human organizations — churches, businesses, towns, etc. For maximum trustiness, perhaps all humans should live in communities of 150, which could then reasonably organize for their own self-interest, well-being and happiness.

But humans seem to desire to live in slightly bigger communities, and to network between much larger groups of people. So how to manage it?

First, each community of 150 could appoint one person to go to a meta-council of 150 people from 150 other communities.

That would be kind of pressing our meta-council members, but they would probably be able to maintain close relationships with enough of their constituents and enough of their fellow meta-council members to effectively represent their areas and cooperate with each other for regional benefits. This allows for the governing of 22,500 people, or a small city. (For comparison, the island of Palau has about 21,000 people; a few other small island nations have similar population sizes.)

The meta-meta level seems difficult to achieve, as we’re already asking people to effectively have 300 contacts, and anyone appointed to a meta-meta council would really have their primary interests back in their 150 member community, and so would do a bad job of representing the interests of everyone else in their 22,500 meta-community. (This is precisely the problem of Congress.)

The meta-meta level might be doable on a basic referendum level–that is, if the meta-meta councilors simply represent the majority views of their meta-regions in a system that does not require them to interact with or convince each other. This would allow for the administration of about 3.4 million people–a large city or small country. (By comparison, Iceland has 330,000 people; Lithuania has 2.9 million, and New Zealand has 4.6 million.)

However, we might be able to organize a few more people into our system by taking advantage of some sort of network effects at the bottom level. Perhaps instead of including all 150 people in our community in a community council, we utilize 150 heads of households (each household can appoint whoever it wants to the council). If we estimate about 4 people per household, then the basic community has 600 people, the meta-community has 90,000, and the meta-meta community has 13.5 million. (Belgium has 11.2 million people.)

Effective, long-term organization beyond this size probably becomes very difficult (unless you are okay with dictatorship, and even that can fail miserably at organizing things).

Predictive value: If my train of thought is correct, communities of <14 million should generally be stable, high-trust, efficient, and effectively democratic in nature. Communities of >14 million should generally be low trust, unstable, inefficient, or undemocratic.

 

A quick glance at a list of countries by size indicates that there are a bunch of small, poorly-run countries, which may contradict the theory. Perhaps badly run countries break up into pieces until they find an organizational level they can function on.

Here is a list of countries by interpersonal trust. (Unfortunately, this dataset seems to lack many of the tiny countries. Anyone else got a better dataset?) The top scorers–countries where most people reported trusting most of their neighbors, were:

New Zealand: trust level 102.2, population 4.6 mill

Vietnam: trust level 104.1, population 91.5 mill, not democratic

Saudi Arabia: trust level 105.8, population 31.5 mill, not democratic

Switzerland: trust level 107.4, population 8.2 mill

Finland: trust level 117.5, population 5.5 mill

China: trust level 120.9, population 1.4 billion, not democratic

Denmark: trust level 131.9, population 5.7 mill

Sweden: trust level 134.5, population 9.8 mill

Norway: trust level 148, population 5.2 mill

So, it’s a small set of countries and the small ones generally aren’t in the dataset, but the democratic, high-trust countries are all between 4 and 10 million people. The larger high-trust countries are all not democracies.

The worst scorers (countries where fewer than 1 in 10 people said they thought most people were trustworthy):

Trinidad and Tobago: trust level 7.9, population 1.3 mill

Cape Verde: trust level 9, population 500 thousand

Rwanda: trust level 10.2, population 11 mill

Turkey: trust level 10.2, population 78 mill

Botswana: trust level 12.3, population 2 mill

Malawi: trust level 14.9, population 16 mill

Cambodia: trust level 15.6, population 15.4 mill

Indonesia: trust level 16.9, population 255 mill

Brazil: trust level 17.5, population 204.3 mill

Malaysia: trust level 17.7, population 30.6 mill

Looks like unpleasant countries can come in any size.

 

I’d love it if someone made a scaterplot of size vs. trust, with democracies in blue and non-democracies in red.😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, DNA: What is it good for?

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.

Species is a Social Construct: Or my Grandfather’s Totally Badass Dog

Coydogs, Wyoming

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.”

Genetic Aristotelian Moderation

I suspect a lot of genetic traits (being that many involve the complex interaction of many different genes) are such that having a little bit of the trait is advantageous, but having too much (or conversely, too little) is negative.

A few obvious examples:

Aggression: too much, and you go to jail. Historically, prison conditions were awful enough in the West that this likely exerted an upper bound on the population’s criminality by eliminating violent people from the gene pool.

But too little, and you get taken advantage of. You can’t compete in job interviews, get promoted, make friends, or ask people out on dates. Aggressive people take your stuff, and you can’t protect against them.

From getting jobs to getting mates to not being mugged, a little bit of aggression is clearly a good thing.

Intelligence: High IQ is tremendously mal-adaptive in modern society. (This may always have been true.) The upper end of the IQ curve basically does not have children. (On both micro and macro levels.) I’m not prepared to say whether this is a bug or a feature.

But, low IQ appears to also maladaptive. This was certainly true historically in the West, where extremely high death rates and intense resource competition left the dumber members of society with few surviving offspring. Dumb people just have trouble accomplishing the things necessary for raising lots of children.

Somewhat above average IQ appears to be the most adaptive, at least in the present and possibly historically.

Height: Really tall men have health problems and die young. Really short men are considered undateable and so don’t have children. So the pressure is to be tall, but not too tall.

(Speculatively) Depression: Too much depression, and you commit suicide. Not enough, and you’re a happy-go-lucky person who drops out of school and punches people. Just enough, and you work hard, stay true to your spouse, don’t get into fights, and manage to do all of the boring stuff required by Western society. (Note: this could have changed in the past hundred years.)

Sickle Cell Anemia: I don’t think I need to explain this one.

(Also speculative) Tay Sach’s: Tay Sach’s is a horrible neurological disease that shows up in populations with evidence of very high recent pressure to increase IQ, such as Ashkenazim (one of the worlds’ highest IQ groups) and Quebecois. There is therefore speculation that in its heterozygous form, Tay Sach’s may enhance neural development, instead of killing you hideously.

Cats are Cuckoos

“Cats win at Evolution,” (from Cave People and Stuff,) is a great article about the evolution of cats from primate-predator to primate-parasite.

A quote:

“The domestic cat – aka Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus – is the same size as a human infant.  Its mew sounds very similar to the cry of a newborn human baby.  It has a round face with big eyes, like a human infant.  The domestic cat has gone down the same evolutionary route as the cuckoo, only much further.  Its entire life-cycle involves imitating baby humans and being coddled, fed and protected as though it were a human infant.”

Fabulous post. Go read it all.

EvolutionistX Manifesto

1. Evolution is real. Incentives are real. Math is real. Their laws are as iron-clad as gravity’s and enforced with the furor of the Old Testament god. Disobey, and you will be eliminated.

2. Whatever you incentivize, you will get. Whatever you don’t incentivize, you will not get. Create systems that people can cheat, and you create cheaters. If criminals have more children than non-criminals, then the future will be full of criminals. Create systems that reward trust and competence, and you will end up with a high trust, competent system.

3. Society is created by people, through the constant interaction of the basic traits of the people in it and the incentives of its systems.

4. Morality is basically an evolved mental/social toolkit to compel you to act in your genetic self-interest. Morality does not always function properly in evolutionary novel situations, can be hijacked, and does not function similarly or properly in everyone, but people are generally capable of using morality to good ends when dealing with people in their trust networks.

Therefore:

5. Whatever you think is wrong with the world, articulate it clearly, attempt to falsify your beliefs, and then look for practical, real-world solutions. This is called science, and it is one of our greatest tools.

6. Create high-trust networks with trustworthy people. A high trust system is one where you can be nice to people without fear of them defecting. (Call your grandma. Help a friend going through a rough time. Don’t gossip.) High trust is one of the key ingredients necessary for everything you consider nice in this world.

7. Do not do/allow/tolerate things/people that destroy trust networks. Do not trust the untrustworthy nor act untrustworthy to the trusting.

8. Reward competency. Society is completely dependent on competent people doing boring work, like making sure water purification plants work and food gets to the grocery store.

9. Rewarding other traits in place of competency destroys competency.

10. If you think competent people are being unjustly excluded, find better ways to determine competency–don’t just try to reward people from the excluded pools, as there is no guarantee that this will lead to hiring competent people. If you select leaders for some other trait (say, religiosity,) you’ll end up with incompetent leaders.

11. Act in reality. The internet is great for research, but kinda sucks for hugs. Donating $5 to competent charities will do more good than anything you can hashtag on Twitter. When you need a friend, nothing beats someone who will come over to your house and have a cup of tea.

12. Respond to life with Aristotelian moderation: If a lightbulb breaks, don’t ignore it and don’t weep over it. Just change the lightbulb. If someone wrongs you, don’t tell yourself you deserved it and don’t escalate into a screaming demon. Just defend yourself and be ready to listen to the other person if they have an explanation.

Guilt is a Thing inside of You

Guilt does not care whether you deserve to feel guilty or not. It does not care about right and wrong. Guilt is just an evolved mechanism to make you feel like shit if you threaten the stability of your own place in the social order. Guilt forces you to forget everything and grovel on your hands and knees until you are accepted back into your clan, not because your clan is good or right or just, but because outside the clan lies nothing–wilderness, lions, and death.

Memes and Transmission Pathways

From, Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is)

(Because watching other people say that thing you were saying and be like ‘omg I was saying that’ and then they give it their own twist and you are like ‘oh yes I see where this is going and it gets back to the morality model’ and then the joy at how much fun it is.)

(Guys guys we are talking about memes, okay. And the big question brought up by the part I quoted is, of course, What are the long-term effects of changing transmission pathways?)

Quote:
“How Transmission Pathways Matter

In my outline, I mentioned that the transmission pathway – vertical or horizontal – matters a great deal for the content and friendliness of transmitted cultural items.

In biology, there is already support for this model. Parasitic entities like bacteria that are limited to vertical transmission – transmission from parent to child only – quickly evolve into benign symbiosis with the host, because their own fitness is dependent on the fitness of the host entity. But parasitic entities that may accomplish horizontal transmission are not so constrained, and may be much more virulent, extracting high fitness costs from the host. (See, e.g., An empirical study of the evolution of virulence under both horizontal and vertical transmission, by Stewart, Logsdon, and Kelley, 2005, for experimental evidence involving corn and a corn pathogen.)

As indicated in an earlier section, ancient cultural data is very tree-like, indicating that the role of horizontal transmission has been minimal. However, the memetic technologies of modernity – from book printing to the internet – increased the role of horizontal transmission. I have previously written that the modern limited fertility pattern was likely transmitted horizontally, through Western-style education and status competition by limiting fertility (in The history of fertility transitions and the new memeplex, Sarah Perry, 2014). The transmission of this new “memeplex” was only sustainable by horizontal transmission; while it increases the individual well-being of “infected carriers,” it certainly decreases their evolutionary fitness. …”

Okay, right. So your meme-mitochondria will most likely protect you from dying, but don’t much give a shit if you end up killing people who are not-you or at least don’t share your genes. And meme-viruses will try to get you to not kill society at large (which is busy propagating them,) but don’t particularly care if they kill you.

Reflections:

1. Will modern mass-media destroy itself by accidentally destroying the people that use it? Can mass-media be a stable, long-term part of the human cultural/technological toolkit?

2. Does modern mass-media create an actually different moral meme-environment from the vast majority of the human past? Is this good/bad/neutral?

3. Will we evolve to be adapted to this meme-environment, say, by people who believe that Western Education is Sin kidnapping girls, selling them as brides, and then massively out-breeding people who “Lean In”?

Increased gender dimorphism = lower IQ?

The short version of this is if you could measure the relative gender dimorphism of people–say, by comparing siblings–and compare that to their IQ, I wager the more androgynous people would come out smarter.

This began with Jayman’s Pioneer Hypothesis, which basically posits that frontier or pioneer environments will select for a certain suite of traits like aggressiveness and early menarche–that is, traits that allow them to quickly take over and fill up the land.

Based on this initial theory, I hypothesized that East Germany was settled later than West Germany–which turns out to be actually true. I was pretty stoked about that.

Anyway, earlier menarche => lower IQ, (I’m pretty sure this is well-documented) as shortening childhood = shortening the period of time your brain has to develop.

Raising the age of menarche gives your brain more time to develop. In environments where family formation has historically been difficult, ie, very densely populated areas with little free land available where people might have to wait for their relatives to die before they can get their own farm, have likely evolved people who hit menarche later (after all, there’s no need for early menarche in such an environment. See also: cave fish losing pigment because it’s not useful.) The opposite side of this coin is later menopause, but since these folks have lower fertility overall, I don’t think that’s a big factor.

Anyway, later menarche => more time for brains to develop => higher IQ.

I suppose the speculative part here is that late menarche populations are more androgynous and early menarche populations are less androgynous. This probably wouldn’t hold for all populations, but anecdotal experience with Americans seems consistent–eg, MIT students seem highly androgynous, while dumb people from elsewhere seem much more dimorphic. Actually, many of the extremely high-IQ people I’ve known have been trans*, as opposed to none of the dumb ones. Among dumb people, it seems perfectly normal for women to socialize in all-female groups, especially for activities like shopping and discussing celebrity gossip, while men find it normal to socialize in all-male groups, especially for activities like watching other grown men play keep-away (sports), drinking beer, and playing poker. (To be fair, though, I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience in the world of the dumb.)

Historically pioneer and historically densely settled populations probably end up with different notions of what is “normal” dimorphism, leading to lots of disputes as each side claims that their experiences are normal, and not realizing that the other sides’ experiences are normal for them, too.