Religion and family breakup

I've been looking at coverage of the Gallup International Voice of the People 2005 poll and noted an interesting situation with regard to North America when compared to the rest of the world.

Sixty-one percent said a partner or family member has most influenced decisions about their life in the past year.
In Mexico, the figure is 88%. The lowest rating for family influence comes from North America (35%), where people report a wider range of influences, especially religious leaders (12%).

The result is even more impressive when charted graphically. North America is the sole region dragging the world average down with regard to family influence and also the region in which religious leaders had the most influence. Based on correlation, the rise of individualism and the breakdown of family influence have led to increased religiosity.

Europe is, by comparison, secular, and family has a strong influence on individual decisions; judging from the chart, it's approximately 63% in comparison to North America's 35%.

Cheap Predator knockoff or not?

Pakistan recently announced that it destroyed an al-Qaida base. Tucked in there was this little pertinent snippet.

The commander in charge of the operation said sophisticated equipment had been seized, including a small, Chinese-made remote controlled drone, which he said had been used by the militants to spy on army movements and positions in the area... An officer from the Signal Corps said the drone, believed to be the first of its kind found in Pakistan, was equipped with a sophisticated, wide-angle camera.

The version of the article out of Pakistan further says:

“The terrorists used the RPV (remotely-piloted vehicle) to check the position of security forces and attack them,” the general said, adding that the drone was capable of carrying weapons. A military officer from the army’s Signal Corps said the vehicle had a sophisticated, wide-angle camera to take pictures of targets on the ground.

Offhand, that description of the drone sounds like a clone of the USAF RQ-1 Predator UAV, but it doesn't look like one. Picture below copied from the Pakistani source without permission for the purposes of analysis.

Instead, it appears to be a repurposed remote-controlled hobby aircraft. If it was indeed used by militants, they didn't even bother camouflaging it, leaving it a bright, obvious yellow.

Seeking a mechanism for social selection

Continuing this line of inquiry, is it possible that these alleles hitched a ride with Nefertiti and Charlemagne? Consider the article "The Royal We" in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, mirrored here.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," [Joseph] Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago...
[Mark] Humphrys's Web page suggests that over many generations mating patterns may be much more random than expected. Social mobility accounts for part of the mixing—what Voltaire called the slippered feet going down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them.

Yet social mobility isn't random per se. There is abundant evidence that the distribution of wealth in a society follows a power law distribution. Combine that with the easily established fact that wealth has long been a criterion in mate selection. It's quite plausible that gene flow would be influenced in a manner analogous to that of scale-free networks.

Scale-free gene spread?

I'd blogged recently about this recent research. I've since run across more recent articles which clarify the opinion of the researchers.

From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9258970/:

For the microcephalin gene, the variation arose about 37,000 years ago, about the time period when art, music and tool-making were emerging, Lahn said. For ASPM, the variation arose about 5,800 years ago, roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities, he said.

From http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/09/08/hscout527858.html:

Lahn and his colleagues believe that, over time, human behavioral and cultural developments might go hand in hand with this type of genetic selection. The microcephalin mutation's first appearance coincided with the beginnings of man's development of art, music, religious practices, and complex tool-making techniques, the researchers point out. Similarly, the launch of the ASPM mutations occurred with the spread of agriculture, urban settlements, and the first record of written language.

The spread of the genes may also have followed the equivalent of preferential attachment in scale-free networks. The rise of human settlement would have increased the choices available with regard to mate selection; we do not pick our mates randomly. A power-law expansion may have given rise to early spread of the particular gene variants. If the social selection is strong enough, perhaps there doesn't need to be an actual advantage conferred by these particular alleles; they may be simply hitching a ride on a process of socially-induced evolution.

What if it doesn't code for intelligence?

There are some interesting results in studies of the genetics of the human brain. In particular, the population distribution of particular Microcephalin and ASPM gene variants raises an interesting problem.

First, the researchers sequenced the Microcephalin gene...
[One particular] distinctive mutation is now in the brains of about 70% of humans, and half of this group carry completely identical versions of the gene. The data suggests the mutation arose recently and spread quickly through the human species due to a selection pressure, rather than accumulating random changes through neutral genetic drift.
Analysing variation in the gene suggests the new Microcephalin variant arose between 60,000 and 14,000 years ago, with 37,000 years ago being the team's best estimate. The new mutation is also much more common among people from Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas than those from sub-Saharan Africa.
The team also sequenced the ASPM gene from the same original sample and again, among dozens of variants, found a defining mutation that alters the protein the gene codes for. Estimates are that the new variant of ASPM first appeared in humans somewhere between 14,000 and 500 years ago, with the best guess that it first arose 5,800 years ago. It is ... present in about a quarter of people alive today, and is more common in Europe and the Middle East than the rest of the world...
"The evidence for selection is compelling," says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Yet it remains unclear yet how these genes work in healthy people. Many researchers doubt there is any mechanism by which nature could be selecting for greater intelligence today, because they believe culture has effectively blocked the action that natural selection might have on our brains.
Lahn and his colleagues are now testing whether the new gene variants provide any cognitive advantage. Natural selection could have favoured bigger brains, faster thinking, different personalities, or lower susceptibility to neurological diseases, Lahn says. Or the effects might be counter-intuitive. "It could be advantageous to be dumber," Lahn says. "I highly doubt it, but it's possible."

What if the genes together code for increased social religiosity? The distribution and timing is in line with the rise and spread of monotheism. Old Testament accounts of genocidal tribal warfare suggest a social mechanism by which gene variants could have been spread aggressively in an expansionist manner. Cultural selection as an accelerated mechanism of natural selection.

Overzealous car technology

Toyota has developed a computer system which will nag the driver into paying attention to the road. There's one bit which I find disturbing.

The system flashes a light on the dashboard display and beeps when the eyes start to wander. If the driver still doesn't respond, brakes kick in, Toyota said Tuesday.

Surprising the driver by kicking in the brakes sounds like a recipe for accident creation rather than prevention.

National embarassment

According to this CNN report, Homeland Security has no clue what FEMA was doing.

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur...
Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.
Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Clearly, it was a mistake to roll FEMA into Homeland Security. The latter was so fixated on terrorist scenarios that it overspecialized, neglecting non-terrorist disaster scenarios.

When the Louisiana state authorities appealed for medical aid from FEMA, the first delivery they received was a shipment of drugs and equipment for use in the event of a chemical weapon attack.

Preparedness also means agility, being able to adapt quickly to new and expected scenarios. This did not happen.