Links for September 2024
Links for September 2024
Ancient DNA, Overdoses, Miracles, Medicine, and Albion's Seeds
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Here’s the monthly roundup of interesting items.
Blog History
Say, what was in my links list from last September? Crime, cryptids, populism, and WVU in crisis. Also that month, a review of the pseudopatient study Suicide: Inside and Out and the first installment of Collective Violence in American History.
Genetic History
In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, Greg Cochrane and Henry Harpending argued that human evolution didn’t stop at the dawn of civilization — in fact, it sped up. The two main reasons for it to speed up were increasing population size — meaning more mutations — and that civilization resulted in a novel evolutionary environment with new selection pressures.
The study of ancient DNA bears this out. A new preprint presents evidence of recent natural selection for a number of traits based on changing gene frequencies. My understanding is that there was already evidence for this (like with estimates of how fast genes that allow adults to digest lactose spread through the population) but the new research picks up changes in far more genes.
From the abstract:
We present a method for detecting evidence of natural selection in ancient DNA time-series data that leverages an opportunity not utilized in previous scans: testing for a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14000 years and 6510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection.
Genes under positive selection — meaning they’ve increased in frequency over the ages — include:
A gene associated with gluten sensitivity and celiac’s disease. Why would this be getting more common? It only causes trouble when you have two copies of it, so it might be a case of heterozygote advantage — one copy gives a strong enough benefit, like disease immunity, that the trait succeeds despite a double dose of it being costly.
A gene that confers a degree of immunity to HIV-1, maybe because it also helped with immunity to some ancient version of the plague. Civilization is a cesspit of disease and its advent led to the selection for jock immune systems.
Genes that lead to lighter skin. Why did Europeans get paler? Something to do with Vitamin D? Sexual selection? A mere side-effect of something else?
Genes associated with greater intelligence, more years of schooling, and higher income. Consistent, among other things, with civilization being a more complicated game with for higher stakes, evolutionarily speaking.
For all things involving genetics and history, Razib Khan is a good source for parsing what it means and discussing methodological limitations. He’s also got a broader genetic history of Europe from 40,000 BC to the Bronze Age.
In other ancient DNA news, a team found evidence that a Neanderthal skeleton was from a small and isolated population that had diverged genetically from other Neanderthals in the region. The degree of divergence was such that this population might have gone 50,000 years without interbreeding with populations just ten days away by foot. Full journal article here. Also, Stone Age Herbalist posts on where this fits in with previous research on Neanderthal society:
Small groups seems to be the recurring theme throughout much of their history, which would put them at odds with the more socially flexible modern humans. Language divides, if they spoke something like a modern language, may have been huge given these time depths of isolation. How mentally flexible were they?
Oh, there’s also research claiming that having Neanderthal DNA makes us moderns susceptible to autism.
How about this picture: Neanderthals were individually quite smart problem-solvers, but not very social and much less inclined to mimic others. They would seem a bit spergy to the gregarious and conformist sapiens. They were not brutes, but nerds. Sapiens’ main advantage wasn’t brains as such, but that their greater sociality gave them bigger cooperative groups and speedier cultural evolution.
Maybe some of that nerd DNA was useful, and we can thank crossbreeding with Neanderthals for the obsessive focus of Isaac Newton. Or maybe all sapiens picked up was cold-weather adaptations. In any case, fascinating that the study of genes actually allows us to infer something about the social structure of long extinct species of people.
Regular History
Cremieux Recueil has a post on “The Ottoman Origins of Modernity.” Similar to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Cremieux argues that Protestantism was a dynamic force that helped produce the modern world by encouraging democracy, literacy, and industrialism. And it was only able to gain a foothold because the Ottoman threat to Europe forced prolonged periods of peace and cooperation among the European powers:
Protestantism was unlike [previous] heresies in two important ways: it survived and it prospered. But why? The traditional story is that the invention of the printing press (c. 1440) made it possible for Lutherans to avoid their predecessors’ fates. But I don’t believe that’s the right story. I think it’s no coincidence that the Lutherans survived and prospered when the Ottoman threat to Europe was larger than ever. Were it not for the fact that the Ottomans distracted the Habsburgs and the Church, Protestantism would have been like other Christian heresies: ultimately minor and suppressed.
In this telling, it was the defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto that paved the way for Europe’s bloody Thirty Years War — with the Ottoman pressure removed, the Protestant and Catholic powers could turn on one another.
The Behavior of God
Wars of religion might seem alien to modern Americans, given various indicators that religiosity has declined and is still declining. But according to Graphs About Religion, belief in religious miracles — such as diseases healed by divine intervention — has actually increased. The effect is driven by the shrinking number of religious people being more likely than religious people three decades ago to report belief in miracles:
For evangelicals, sure belief in miracles rose twenty percentage points between 1991 and 2018. For Black Protestants the increase was eighteen points, from 60% to 78%. For both Catholics and mainline Protestants, a definite belief in miracles hit its peak in the 2008 data but then receded a bit in the 2018 survey. However, each tradition has members who are more inclined toward miracles in 2018 compared to 1991.
Consider a boiling-off model where secularly inclined people tend to leave religion altogether, and those who remain are the relatively more religious — and then though mutual influence amplify one another’s faith even further.
Sociologist Donald Black might have said that God had receded from some social locations, but He had become more active in others. What about the social geometry of God explains this?
The Behavior of Overdoses
There’s good news about opioid overdoses in America: After years of rising, fatal overdoses began to decline. But Charles Fain Lehmann cautions against too much optimism. One thing that’s going on, he thinks, is that the shift to more dangerous synthetic drugs has already played out in Eastern hotspots (West Virginia, Ohio) but hasn’t yet fully taken off in the West: “The fact that some hot spot states experienced the decline earlier further suggests that there’s some local maximum—although not necessarily a global one.”
He also thinks the recent drop is in part a consequence of the sudden spike in deaths that started during the Summer of Love:
What appears to have happened in 2020 is a large and sustained surge in deaths—a big increase in the rate at which people drop out of the pool. But, to put it in somewhat morbid terms, if a person died in 2020/21, he wasn’t “available” to die in 2023/24. A big burst in drug ODs, caused by some exogenous shock, should be followed by a return to the baseline rate, simply by virtue of this dynamic. What this implies, moreover, is that the decline we’re seeing is “paid for” by deaths we saw earlier—many of those people who “should be” dying now are already dead. And we’re trending back towards the baseline—which is, of course, a long-run exponential increase.
On X, David Hines attributes the decline in overdose fatalities to: “combination of narcan and drug dealers finally realizing that cutting with fentanyl kills too many customers.”
Many people of my generation, growing up at the tail end of the War on Drugs, learned the lesson that our elementary school anti-drug education was exaggerated. But as Lehman notes, “the drug supply is getting weirder.”
As the cartels that produce for the U.S. market get better at sourcing and synthesizing different additives, the diversity of substances will only grow. In some cases, like xylazine, additional weirdness may yield reductions in overdose deaths. In other cases, like the nitazenes, it might increase it.
Be careful, kids.
Confounded Race Research
I have this example (taken from Bradley Campbell way back in grad school) that I use in my methodology class to show the importance of control variables. I give the kids a fake crosstabulation showing that the more fire trucks respond to a fire, the greater the damage (in dollars) caused by the fire. I then claim this shows that more fire trucks cause the damage to be worse — and wait for someone to point out we need to control for severity of the fire. Of course they dispatch more trucks to the fires that are most severe in the first place.
In 2020 there was a study making the rounds showing worse outcomes for black babies treated by white doctors. Many took it as evidence that black babies are safer with black doctors and endangered by white ones. But, as many others pointed out, the obvious potential confounder is severity of the ailment: Maybe the kind of specialists called in for the sickest babies were disproportionately white.
Sure enough, a new analysis reports that the original study did not control for very low birth weight. Black babies are more likely to have very low birth weight, and white doctors are more likely to treat black babies of very low birth weight. Controlling for birth weight, Cremieux notes on X, did two things: Made the model fit better, and eliminated the effect of doctor/patient racial similarity on outcomes.
Cremieux, who did an earlier piece on evidence that the original study was p-hacked, adds: “We have to ask ourselves why the original study didn't control for birthweight. One sentence in the original paper suggests the authors knew it was a potential issue, but they still failed to control for it.”
Free Black Thought’s take: “Classic 2020: it was as if they wanted you to think black people and white people couldn't live together.”
I actually find it plausible that social distance between physician and patient affects the behavior of medicine, but this particular research should have smelt funny to you.
American Nations
Arnold Kling writes “In Praise of Liberal Quakerism.” They have “a pretty good track record, especially from a libertarian perspective.”
At Virginia Gentry, the essay “What Is a Southerner?” notes that they are a fusion of Borderers and Cavaliers.
On X, Martin Skold has a thread on the Puritan Yankee origins of liberal pro-outgroup bias, and how it clashes with the mores of Quakers, Cavaliers, Greater Appalachia, and New France.
If you don’t know what I’m referring to, start with this Scott Alexander review of Albion’s Seed.
Close to Home
Grad school wasn’t the most pleasant or healthy time of my life. But one good thing about my experience at UVA was exposure to impressive intellects and strong personalities — in hindsight, some of the last vestiges of Old Weird Academia. One of these remarkable people was Rae Lesser Blumberg. She was a person of substance with a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the world. I’m sad to hear that now she has fallen on hard times. See her son’s Go Fund Me for details.
Closer still — nay, inside the home: I mentioned last month that my wife recently escaped from academia. Her new career coaching business is focused on something she was trying to do informally within the strictures of her old job: Prepare students for the job market. What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t include a link for her coaching business here? For limited time, WVU students get a discount.
Thanks for reading!
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