I’ve moved …

… to The Netherlands! I’m now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, as part of a new research group called Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture. 

The academic blog-urge has dwindled this last year; it seems to take a focussed person* to keep a blog going for more than 18 months or so. So now seems like as good a time as any to put Culture Evolves into permanent hiatus.Our group is just in the start-up phase, but once we’ve got our full contingent we’ll have a group website – blogging options yet to be decided.

 

* Or an anonymous one who thus has loads of indiscreet stories to tell!

The recreational habits of (life) scientists

[This post has been lurking about since, oops, May, so I thought I better put it out there!]

I’m sure everyone has favourite inductive hypotheses about the world that they mull over as potential research questions–if only they weren’t so utterly trivial. Besides, I usually only notice the confirmatory evidence for mine.

The co-incidence of a single case supporting both my pet hypotheses about the recreational habits of scientists came to my notice today: a life scientist who was both a musician and a rock-climber*.

Previous conversations with colleagues have usually revealed that most biologists (broadly construed) think there seem to be more-than-average numbers of musicians in science. The science/music overlap is one of my pet hobbies, and many popular accounts touch on this relationship as possibly having something to do with a certain kind of brain processing. Okay, whatever, personally I think the causation factor is an objectively defined measure of “cool” or “awesome”. But there’s no statistical evidence–least not that I can find–that musicians are overrepresented in the subset of humans who call themselves scientists, compared to, say, landscape gardeners or art historians. Controlling for age and socioeconomics and all that demographic stuff.

My other inductive hypothesis is that life scientists, especially those working in cultural evolution, seem to be rock-climbers more often than chance might predict. This might be a case of cultural transmission though, because rock-climbing is something that you generally have to be introduced to in a social context, seeing as how it is useful to have someone on the other end of the rope.

Data enabling proper testing of these hypotheses would require more effort than random conversations at the pub, so for the moment, the assertions go unverified.

* And who wasn’t me. Although I haven’t been climbing for so long I doubt I still qualify.

[Photo from mr_o's flickrstream]

simon says … hooray!

My friend and colleague Simon Greenhill handed in his PhD thesis today. Having read bits of it, seen the results of other bits of it, and generally parasitised off his hard work in creating and maintaining the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, I feel quite certain it’ll be a bestseller.

But seriously: congratulations, Simon, bloody great job!

JPS online!

That’s the Journal of the Polynesian Society, if you were wondering.

It’s been a sad wrench for me at UCL, browsing the e-journals list of our library and always feeling a little empty spot in my heart right here:

The Society is only up to the 1930s, but seeing as the really good ethnographic stuff is mostly pre-1950, it’s a goldmine already.

JPS is one of my favourite journals. It’s regional, obviously, but its coverage within the Oceania remit is a real four-field anthropology, with history, sociology, economics, and geography as well. When I was an undergraduate nerd and used to actually go to the library and read journals I would invariably find at least one or two articles in JPS worth a read. They always seemed chatty and fascinating, especially the dusty ones.

Darwin married his cousin: a lesson on cultural diversity

From Sunday’s Observer, Split over health risk to cousins who marry:

A major medical row will erupt this month when scientists and health experts hold two key meetings to discuss the controversial subject of marriages between cousins and their impact on health in Britain.

Really? I love the clairvoyance afforded to newspaper journalists. They obviously also considered that by Monday morning this article hadn’t made waves enough, as the title has been changed to “Row over health risk”.

Some researchers and politicians say inter-cousin unions, which are highly prevalent among British Pakistanis, have led to a striking rise in the incidence of rare recessive disorders, many of them fatal, in areas such as Bradford. The trend has led to calls for cousin marriages to be banned.

The reasonable science in this piece, as usual, follows after the experiential, moral-panic-related anecdote from an MP, who, despite any obvious medical qualifications, says that:

‘I also know of several sets of parents in my constituency who are cousins and whose children are severely disabled. I have no doubt that the mothers and fathers being closely related to each is a key factor.’

“Striking rise”. “No doubt”. And my favourite:

“you have a child with your cousin, the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem”.

That last from an environment MP, who is presumably drawing this conclusion from an episode of the X-Files.

The voice of reason comes from Aamra Darr, who has written sensibly on the topic of cousin marriage amongst British Pakistanis before. She points out that cousin marriage is one of many diverse
marriage patterns adopted by people for a variety of reasons, but more importantly, the risks of genetic problems with offspring are identifiable and manageable. Genetic knowledge is useful.

The unilateral prescription of social norms by one group in a multicultural society, based on thin-edge emotional judgments and ignorance about cultural diversity – this is not useful. It is also just dumb. Around the world, marriage to cousins is more often permitted (or preferred!) than it is not. Here are some data.

The blue section (not even a third) contains those societies in which marriage to first or second cousins is NOT permitted. The other two allow some form of marriage to cousins, with the red slice indicating the percentage who allow first cousin marriages. These figures are from the Ethnographic Atlas, which contains information about 1267 ethnographically described societies. Some 243 societies had missing data for this category, but ~1000 is a good sample of the world’s cultural diversity.

An argument for––or against––cousin marriage does not gain any moral weight from these numbers. The existence of such cultural diversity, however, begs the question to those who are opposing cousin marriage on genetic grounds: where is your evidence for large-scale, worldwide problems with recessive heritable disorders arising from cousin marriages? Though there are no direct data, one might argue that if at least a third of human societies can maintain such a marriage preference, it implies that any genetic problems are not so severe as to be cumulatively damaging for all individuals. And that is another point: just because a social group permits cousin marriage, it does not follow that every individual in the group marries their cousin. Population thinking seems to be very hard for many people to grasp.

It appears to me that there is not much science going on with any “call” for banning cousin marriage, but something more like prejudicial gut-reactions combined with availability heuristics. That’s just speculation, however.

But I’m still confused about that major medical row. What was the point there?

 
With thanks to Aamra Darr for a clarification.

Job opportunity

Nine month teaching fellowship in Biological Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

The position is in a joint Archaeology/Anthropology department and will provide sabbatical cover for Dr Mhairi Gibson.

Deadline for applications May 16th. Apply through the link above.

science and design are both about communication

Mike Dickison’s blog Pictures of Numbers is fab. It’s all about clear, simple, effective data visualisation for scientists. Three posts that I thought were particularly useful were:

Better Axes: improving readability, increasing the information content and decreasing the clutter in your graphs.

Fixing Excel’s Charts: Surgery for the annoying defaults that Excel has, and how you can actually get an effective and high-impact piece of data presentation out of the poor maligned piece of microsoftery. [I spent a fair bit of time mucking about with building custom templates for graphs while I was writing my thesis, and they're really worth the time investment.]

Maps for Scientists: Two posts, one about choosing maps and one about using them. Both sensible and aimed at presenting and highlighting the right types of geographical information.

His tip list is also a good reference, as are the handouts on his workshops & handouts pages. 

My colleagues are probably bored to tears when I bang on about design and science, so it is great to see a kindred scientist out there. 

on sex and suicide bombing

David Lawson, Kesson Magid and I have just published On Sex and Suicide Bombing: An evaluation of Kanazawa’s ‘Evolutionary Psychological Imagination’. This is a critique of Satoshi Kanazawa’s 2007 paper: “The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim.”

Many objections to evolutionary psychology are ideological or political. This is not the case in our paper: nothing makes me (and my co-authors) froth at the mouth more than bad science. We say:

The beauty of the scientific method is that it allows us to ask, and sometimes answer, tough questions.
Addressing the tough questions without the transparency afforded by the scientific method is not brave: it is simply cavalier.

Kanazawa’s paper is full of bad science. We are not the first to criticise him on such grounds, but it bears repeating that when there are controversial and sensitive issues at stake, we beholden to demand a high standard of scholarship and science.

blue is not better than white, and metaphor is unhelpful

The blue-beats-white winning bias in judo as reported in 2006 appears to have been confounded by a number of factors, and there is no bias after all. So say Dijkstra & Preenen in Proceedings B:

A study by Rowe et al. reported a winning bias for judo athletes wearing a blue outfit relative to those wearing a white one during the 2004 Olympics. It was suggested that blue is associated with a higher likelihood of winning through differential effects of colour on opponent visibility and/or an intimidating effect on the opponent. However, we argue that there is no colour effect on winning in judo. We show that alternative factors, namely allocation biases, asymmetries in prior experience and differences in recovery time are possible confounding factors in the analysis of Rowe et al. After controlling for these factors, we found no difference in blue and white wins. We further analysed contest outcomes of 71 other major judo tournaments and also found no winning bias. Our findings have implications for sports policy makers: they suggest that a white–blue outfit pairing ensures an equal level of play.

I love negative results. They’re a complete bummer if it was your darling positive result in the first place, but they provide the clearest demonstration of how science works. The red-wins bias reported in 2006 appears to be still (pardon the pun) in play!

From the realms of philosophy of biology, an interesting article by Bjorn Brunnander about intentional language in evolutionary discourse. Is the trade-off between the efficiency-and-power of metaphorical shorthand, and the misconceptions it produces (the never-ending of conflation of proximate and ultimate), actually producing more problems than it solves?

Many evolutionists today argue for the need to make evolutionary theory an integrated part of psychology and the social sciences. If this is the agenda it should be in the interests of these thinkers to worry about factors that affect the probability of successful communication across boundaries. The track record of communication of evolutionary thinking is not altogether impressive. This is commonly recognised by evolutionists themselves, as shown by presentations of ‘popular misunderstandings’. The fact that some recurring misconceptions are clearly what we would expect to find if processing of the intentional shorthand was unreliable should make us lift questions about efficiency of exposition above the realm of rather effortless rationalisation.

Is the language of intentional psychology an efficient tool for evolutionists?(doi)

too many ideas, not enough blog

I have been blog-blocked since before December last year and need to make a concerted effort to move beyond it. Part of the problem has been journalistic–I’ve not wanted to write about anything that isn’t (a) news and (b) an exclusive. Considering the proliferation of science blogs, and considering that I too like to read multiple perspectives on different issues, I have no idea why that block took over my brain.

So, onwards.

There’s a real tension in talking about your work and your ideas in a public forum. I have three or four ideas for future projects that I feel quite excited about. One is really relevant to what I’m doing at the moment and is just waiting for me to get my head around some genetics. One is a sortof logical extension of the types of cultural phylogenetic work I do, and I have a masters student potentially interested in getting that strand of thinking out of the abstract and into real work. Another is a similar sort of project that I’d like to write a grant about in the future but I need to do some hardcore networking as it would encroach on other people’s databases. And the final one is totally left-field and while it’s evolutionary anthropology, it has nothing to do with phylogenies, the Pacific, and is only marginally kinship related.

I think it’d help me to articulate thoughts about these ideas, leave me some brain space for the other work I’m doing at the moment. But with most of them I do feel like I’ve actually had original and important ideas, and the urge to be discrete and cautious is winning out.

Still, the aspect of competition is motivating.