The subtitle is How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution and the authors are Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I do think that such topics should receive open debate but, as with Greg Clark's book, I'm not convinced. There is plenty on dog breeding, lactose intolerance, Genghis Khan and his children, the difficulties of settling the Andean Highlands, and just-so stories about medieval Ashkenazi Jews. What's missing is a sense of what the hypothesis does not explain, what its limitations are, and also what exactly is being claimed beyond the particular cited examples. The stories of "lots of recent change overall" and "current groups differ" are jammed together but of course they are very different. Epigenetics don't receive much attention, even critically, and the lower levels of Ashkenazi social achievement before 1800 are dismissed quickly. It's fine and indeed correct to claim they were oppressed but that opens up many doors to explain many other observed correlations. The authors report that we have Neanderthal genes even though this seems to fly in the face of recent discoveries and more importantly the evidence that such interbreeding (if it occurred) mattered is extremely speculative. Perhaps the authors are right but the reader is not given the tools to see why their understanding is a superior one.
Razib liked this book (see the first Amazon review) and I suppose it is a good introduction to this point of view, but overall I didn't come away feeling I obtained a superior understanding of the issues.
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The mitochondrion is not the only place to seek Neanderthal ancestry. AR Templeton’s paper in Science 1996 May 31;272(5266):1363a is interesting reading, suggests interbreeding is a likely explanation. But both for this question and the for rate of human evolution, detailed knowledge of the human past is necessary for certain answers, and we do not have this knowledge.
I havent read the book, but there’s a subtext behind why these guys (and razib, Steve Sailer and gnxp folks) want desperately to believe in recent human evolution. They believe in large genetic differences between the races, and all used to believe in multi-regional evolution (that races evolved independently over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years). The latter view has been almost completely demolished by genetics – we now know almost all our genes come from relatively recent emigrants from Africa. So they are left with 2 hypotheses:
1. Recent human evolution caused large genetic differences among the races.
2. The Out-of-africa data is incorrect because it assumes our lack of genetic diversity is because of recent common ancestry, but really selection is widespread and all the genes we have looked at have actually been selected for and hence have low diversity.
This explains both why this gang is over-reacting to slim evidence, and also why their ideas are out of the mainstream. They may still be right of course, but usually (although not always) the scientific consensus is the right one.
What TGGP said. Here is the Hawks-Harpending paper he mentioned. I won’t likely read this book, but from Tyler’s description it seems full of speculation on why evolution has accelerated in the last 10,000 years. I don’t know if they are on to anything, but how do get around the obvious explanation? That is, evolution accelerated because civilization allowed for much greater population sizes, and population size itself is strongly correlated to evolution.
Come on, Tyler, you can do a better job of actually explaining what the book is about than that! You’re not as obtuse as you sound in this posting.
We all know that different environments select for different traits. And what bigger change in the human environment than the development of agriculture over the last 10,000 years? The simple rise in population due to agriculture increases the number of favorable mutations, which leads to their spread.
Moreover, this is a really fun, witty book.
Harpending and Cochran have a website at
http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
The “Deleted Scenes” of sections that didn’t make the final draft shows the quality of the book, since even this material that got left on the cutting room floor is so fascinating.
“Given that nearly all children live to childrearing age in advanced economies, it seems clear that evolution has either stopped or is going backwards for humans.”
Okay, but a huge fraction of children don’t live in advanced economies. Plus, there are sizable differences in how many children these children’s parents have. All this is a form of Darwinian selection.
but there’s a subtext behind why these guys (and razib, Steve Sailer and gnxp folks) want desperately to believe in recent human evolution. They believe in large genetic differences between the races, and all used to believe in multi-regional evolution (that races evolved independently over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years). The latter view has been almost completely demolished by genetics
Nice smear. You impute motives to some set of people without evidence (‘desperately want’? really?). You claim that they believe in ‘large genetic differences’; a more neutral assessment would be ‘significant’. And they *all* believe in multiregional evolution until recently? As far as I’m aware none of them championed it.
As for the ‘gang overreacting to slim evidence’ I think it tells us something about you that you consider the evidence slim without reading the book.
I never believed in multi-regional evolution, and in fact mocked it. Henry is one of the people who helped develop the Out-of-Africa theory.
I argue that Neanderthal interbreeding likely occurred and was significant because A. the math says we would have easily picked up most of their favorable genes with just a few tens of matings over all time and B. people will fuck sheep, given the chance, let alone Neanderthals. Part A is obvious once you look at the population genetics, and in fact has been seen in natural populations. Part B is an experimental fact.
As for why evolution sped up over the Holocene, the past 10,000 year or so, it’s a combination of strong new selective pressures and increased population size (which results in more mutations): I’m reasonably familiar with the idea, since John Hawks and I came up with it.
The book sounds crazy from Tyler’s description. Well, not that crazy, I guess there have been lots of popular science books like that: lots of speculation, occasionally well-grounded, hardly ever referring to confirmed research results. Given the complexity of the issues, speculation like that is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
Hawks-Harpending is a cool paper. But it doesn’t imply that there are “interesting” differences between races, though. For now, the known differences that arose during the period of accelerated are mostly “chemical”: skin pigments that tune vitamin D synthesis, enzymes to digest lactose, and lots of things conferring resistance to specific diseases. Then there are the body shape differences for climate. It’s entirely possible that that’s it.
Tyler,
I realize you feel hurt by the derision your little post has elicited in the comments, but this is a watershed moment for you. You can continue to take the safe, popular route, but you will sacrifice the respect of the small number of people whose opinion will, in the long run, matter.
There are new, often regional versions of neurotransmitter receptors and transporters. There are new regional versions of genes involved in the hair cells of the inner ear, key to hearing. There are new regional forms of genes that affect axon growth, synapse formation, formation of the layers of the cerebral cortex, and overall brain growth.
The fundamental assumptions of contemporary intellectual discourse are
A. Humans evolved by the process of Darwinian selection.
B. Then, as some point way in the past, humans stopped evolving. The Darwinian process was over and done with. Nothing to see, folks, just move along now.
Cochran and Harpending’s book reviews the recent genome study evidence demolishing the second pillar of the reigning conventional wisdom, and provide a theoretical model for understanding why it is false.
That’s a major step forward in the human sciences.
In response, Tyler complains, “What’s missing is a sense of what the hypothesis does not explain…”
I suspect there were similar responses in 1859:, “Yes, Mr. Darwin, but what does your theory of natural selection _not_ explain?”
Well, we don’t know yet what the Cochran-Harpending theory does not explain, but, like Darwin’s theory, it just might explain a hell of a lot.
Which, I suspect, explains a lot about Tyler’s aversion to thinking hard about it.
For now, the known differences that arose during the period of accelerated are mostly “chemical”: skin pigments that tune vitamin D synthesis, enzymes to digest lactose, and lots of things conferring resistance to specific diseases. Then there are the body shape differences for climate. It’s entirely possible that that’s it.
Your list is pathetically inadequate. I haven’t enough familiarity with the history of the literature to say exactly when such an enumeration would have passed muster, but ‘sometime in the 1950s’ would be a reasonable guess (and even then we could have added to your list of morphological differences). A search of the modern literature would provide you with a hundred significant variations, but why do that when it challenges your preconceived notions?
As for the differences being mostly ‘chemical’, um yeah, what do you think drives the processes of bodily growth, metabolism, and everything else. Of course the differences are chemical (or as you would have it “chemical”).
And if the differences don’t seem interesting, I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder. But in this case I’m thinking that ‘interesting’ is just a code word for ‘not relevant to public policy’, in which case I can assure you that you are indulging in pure wishful thinking.
Apparently, Sailor* can’t help it that not everyone is as enthusiastic about this book (or any book that emphasizes racial differences) as he is. The ONLY reason why someone might not share his opinion on issues concerning races is because they are just being political correct.
*I know it’s spelled as Sailer but I like it when people misspell it.
Tyler,
The Neanderthal thesis does NOT fly in the face of your mitochondrial DNA link. Mitochondrial DNA is passed on in a direct maternal line, while other (non-Y chromosome) DNA goes to both male and female children. With a small amount of interbreeding we wouldn’t expect a random sample of mitochondrial DNA to be Neanderthal, UNLESS Neanderthal mitochondria gave a competitive advantage. However, any Neanderthal genes that DID provide a competitive advantage would sweep through the population: they (and immediately adjacent genes) would become common, while other Neanderthal DNA (including mitochondria) would remain vanishingly rare in the human gene pool.
“The calculation is an adaptation of the hypergeometric distribution, originally developed by Rudyard Kipling.”
Dr. Cochran,
Would you mind explicating this for those of us in the back of the class?
Thanks.
” ‘The calculation is an adaptation of the hypergeometric distribution, originally developed by Rudyard Kipling.’
Dr. Cochran,
Would you mind explicating this for those of us in the back of the class? ”
I think Cochran was mocking the “just so story” comment in the review.
Von
“”People, go get upset over whatever but I already know this area a bit.”
Prove it.”
Seconded. It seems you are familiar with some of the conclusions, but don’t have a firm grip on the math and biology, as illustrated by the non sequitur Wired link.
The thing about the Ashkenazi bit is that it doesn’t provide any evidence of actual physical evolution (for intelligence) taking place on a limited time scale. It can all be cultural selection — Judaism is a highly literary religion (people of the book), over time people with high verbal intelligence stick in the religion and others don’t. Perhaps this issue is dealt with in the book; I know people sometimes have arguments for conflating the two forms of evolution.
The authors report that we have Neanderthal genes even though this seems to fly in the face of recent discoveries and more importantly the evidence that such interbreeding (if it occurred) mattered is extremely speculative.
That’s only true if you know nothing about population genetics, and don’t bother to read the population genetics in the book you’ve read.
Obviously for now we don’t have great evidence that human – Neanderthal mating happened, or that it was common. And the authors say so.
But the key point is that it would only take a handful of matings to introduce advantageous forms of a gene from Neanderthals into humans. Each new allele favored by selection has a probability of fixing equal to 2*s, where s is the selective advantage. (Basically, how many more offspring to people produce who have it vs. do not have it.)
Much of what the Neanderthals gave us could have been useless, and so not subject to selection, and so not having the above fixation probability. But if it was useful, it would fit into the above. Moreover, it would be true for every instance where Neanderthals contributed their forms of genes into our genepool.
As far as I recall from the book, they do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to show that it wouldn’t take very many matings for at least a few of their forms of a gene to stand a fighting chance of fixing in humans.
Here’s an analogy that an Open Borders enthusiast will get: it wouldn’t take many “cultural interbreeding” actions — where people observe what the other group does — for a good bit of culture to spread from one group to another. So if some type of Mexican food tastes great, we don’t need common Mexican – Anglo encounters for it to take hold in America. Just a handful of exposures, and it’ll stand a good chance at becoming a popular fast food, like tacos (or whatever).
For most of the time, Mexicans may be interacting culturally with one another — speaking Spanish, watching Spanish-language TV, listening to Mexican music — and ditto for Anglos. And a lot of what Mexicans have to offer wouldn’t get far at all.
But despite that, we have a few things that are incredibly frequent in Anglo culture now: tacos, Spanish loanwords like “adios,” and so on.
MQ,
Actually, they do present evidence (it’s in the original paper I linked above, too) that most Ashkenazi were in cognitively more demanding fields like finance, and that richer ones had a big advantage in surviving children (seen in wills and the like). But regardless, differential emigration/outmarriage would still result in the physical evolution of the ethnic group of Ashkenazi Jews, so that we would wind up with real, physical, genetic differences predisposing the people who identify as Ashkenazi Jews to greater IQ, and particularly verbal ability.
Imagine that I am breeding cattle for greater milk production. In Scenario 1, I only allow the most productive cows in each generation to breed. In Scenario 2, I drop the less productive cows of each generation on an island. In both scenarios I wind up with a population with different biological characteristics for enhanced milk production. I don’t quite understand what you mean by ‘physical evolution.’
Looks like Tyler is committing some crimethink here. I guess some uncomfortable truths just can’t be faced straight on. Burn him!
Kentan speaks of “any book that emphasizes racial differences”
I don’t see any emphasis of race differences in the book–they hardly mention them.
Von
Never mind the above comment – I see if you hit previous you see the older comments. Sorry. I take the insult back.
I think someone may need to learn how to go from page 1 to page 2 of the comment thread.
Always interesting to see the form that hallucinations take.
Please cut the insults for our host, folks. Particularly if you are going to accuse Tyler of censorship in a comment box *directly below the link to the previous page of comments.*
Steve Sailer’s point about paging the comments is a good one. Several people on overcomingbias.com have complained about theirs also, but at least their blog provider doesn’t start a new page until it reaches 50 posts. A bigger problem with marginal revolution’s comments is that a link (like the one Sailer has) goes directly to the **last** page of comments which is really disconcerting and irritating.
Not being a scientist nor well-read in the field discussed, I am not sure what is being contended in any of these arguments about the Cochran and Harpending book. I think I understand that the authors’ assertion that evolution of humans is advancing more than the mainstream scientists believe (interesting word, believe, in a scientific context) it is or should, is annoying to the currently accepted wisdom. I think there is an implicit (perhaps explicit) assertion by the authors that there are non-PC difference among humans due to different rates of evolution, depending on factors such as whether a given set of people has urbanized. Perhaps I will learn more as this conversation goes on.
A thing that occurs to me is that long ago, cats, dogs, cattle and other non-humans collaborated with humans (and vice versa) to form social groupings for beneficial purposes, although rather one-sided against the cattle. I wonder if the evolution of these animals has had any interesting development alongside humans? I am not stating the question well, so perhaps a more informed reader can guide me in this.
Best wishes,
Ron Pavellas
http://pavellas.blogspot.com
Colugo says “perhaps they can tell us what they make of this article” referring to a recent Hofer et al. paper. I would point folks to John Hawks’ discussion on his blog: what this article calls “large” differences in fact correspond to average Fst values of (what we think is) the neutral genome. Hawks points out that an allele with a frequency of 30% in one population and 70% in another (a large difference according to Hofer et al.) corresponds to an Fst of 16%, about the human average. So this is IMHO a paper that there was no reason to write.
What is the difference between the Coon and Wolpoff models? People _repeat_ over and over that Coon denied gene flow among regions, but he clear as a bell in the first few pages of his book that there must have been gene flow.
Henry
Ron Pavellas asks “I wonder if the evolution of these animals has had any interesting development alongside humans”
We point out a number of interesting parallels in our book. One great example is a myostatin mutation in beef cattle that causes grotesque muscle overgrowth. This would have been deadly in the wild but with veterinarians these animals can be born, and they are valuable because they have a lot more meat. There are some mutations in one of the bone morphogenetic proteins and their receptors that cause twinning in sheep. In the wild twins would never have made it but under domestication these mutants have been favored.
I don’t see a picture of a myostatin mutant bull in our book but there is a picture of whippets on p. 219 with the same mutations. Whippets with one copy of the mutant are faster and win races but whippets with two copies (bully whippets) have muscle spasms and are poor racers. Same principle…
Henry
Ricardo says “As to the interbreeding with Neanderthals hypothesis, I think both sides should ask themselves what the falsifiable hypothesis is and what would it take to falsify it”
Yes, absolutely, of course. But it is non-trivial to come up with interesting and plausible hypotheses too. (These are also called speculations and just-so stories.) The reason to throw this one out is that it could explain why the northern arm of the modern human expansion led to the so-called creative explosion of the Upper Paleolithic while nothing like that ever happened in the southern arm. This is an old and interesting problem in anthropology but one that is never discussed in public because of PC run amok. FOXP2 is a good candidate for a gene stolen from archaic humans.
This is not my own favorite hypothesis about the creative explosion. I suspect that the people of the northern arm got into an ecological situation where men could work very little and otherwise parasitize women (like Northwest Coast Indians or Plains Indians after the horse) while people of the southern arm were in an ecology where men had to work to help feed the children (like Bushmen or Great Basin Shoshone.) One sees elaboration of art and technology in the former kinds of human societies, not so much in the latter.
Henry
Coon’s model had some races transitioning to more modern grades sooner with others lagging, therefore living races represent different evolutionary stages. Wolpoff’s model has a single interconnected but globally distributed species (since erectus) evolving in tandem on different continents.
(Anyone else read that goofy book Race by James Baker?)
Between allelic surfing and hitchhiking, it seems possible that the signal of recent positive selection can be overestimated in a rapidly migrating and expanding species.
Tyler’s link on Neanderthal mitochonria DNA blows out of the water the idea he knows what he’s talking about.
He’s still a preening pansy. =)
It seems every few weeks there are documentaries on my TV that mention the skeletons of Neanderthal-Cro Magnon crossbreeds found first in Portugal (the most recent, 23-25,000 ya), but also now in east-Central Europe from 30-40,000 years ago, around the time modern humans first entered Europe. It looks like any hypothesis there was _no_ interbreeding has already been falsified.
It does remain possible that these crossbreeds did not contribute anything to our current gene pool though, eg if they were never accepted into modern-human groups. I think this is unlikely, but not impossible.
henry harpending at Jan 23, 2009 12:50:40 AM:
For anyone else intrigued by this aside, here’s Nicholas Wade’s 10/18/07 NYT piece on the recovery of the Neanderthal FOXP2 sequence:
Neanderthals May Have Had Gene for Speech.
Wade is also the author of Before The Dawn (2006), a survey of human doings from “Out of Africa” to the invention of writing. That book should be a good companion to “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” which the comments (if not Tyler’s review) make me look forward to reading.
The 2007 article by Johannes Krause et al. describing the Paabo lab’s work on FOXP2 is at the Current Biology website. The language-enabling form of FOXP2 is shared by modern humans and, they show, by Neanderthals, but not by chimpanzees and other living primates.
In contrast to Harpending’s remark, Krause et al. suggest that the language-enabling sequence was already fixed hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the ancestors of Neanderthals and homo sapiens diverged. If correct, FOXP2 wouldn’t be a candidate for a gene to have swept through modern human populations as a result of inter-species mating.
“The PC-ness of an idea has nothing to do with whether it is correct. Most racial ideas that are now not-PC were well-accepted only a few generations ago.”
You slip from “PC” to “well-accepted.” Were environmentalist ideas subject to active persecution when they were not yet well-accepted?
Compare two views: creationism (whether under the banner of ID or not), and the belief in average genetically-based IQ differences between self-identified races (e.g. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf ). No one is afraid of of creationists doing research to support their claims, since it is well-established that they are false, and when the Templeton Foundation offered grants to do such research, there were no creationist takers. Scientists can write clear and well-supported rebuttals of all the creationist claims. The only concern is with attempts to force this false view into science classrooms. This is a view that is not well-accepted, but there is no PC thought police attempting to prevent it from getting its fair shot.
In contrast, people are terrified of research into group differences in behavioral genetics, harassing researchers, using explicit double standards in reviewing publications, refusing to fund experiments, etc, etc. These tactics of PC are used because the evidence for the despised view is so much stronger than is generally admitted, and counterarguments so much weaker, that an actual discussion on the merits would favor belief in group differences. Instead, we get ad hominem attacks and other attempts to change the subject.
Creationists have a long history of retreat, as new evidence invariably weakens their case. In contrast, Jensen et al regularly make unpopular predictions that turn out to be right, but that their opponents cannot explain in a coherent framework. New evidence, e.g. MRI, twin studies, transracial adoption studies, DNA, etc, keeps supporting them.
Most of the relevant experts (when surveyed anonymously) think that Jensen is right (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyderman_and_Rothman_(study)), but also hold a low opinion of him for making the truth public.
In these circumstances, PC does have something to do with our assessment of correctness: it tells us that we are getting a biased picture of the evidence, that experiments or data that would have strengthened one side are not being done or published, and that deferral to public interpretations of the literature (where one view is rewarded and the other punished for non-scientific reasons) is unwarranted (as opposed to the examination of the literature itself, correcting for publication bias, etc).
Ron is interested in his lactose intolerance and his carrier state for alpha-thalassemia. The frequency of tolerance declines a lot as one goes south in Europe, down to a gene frequency of 25% or so. If I had to guess I would say something like a lot of Greek ancestry. Of course I already knew that
.
Henry
Randall Parker: I don’t doubt that nature selection has been important since the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens and that it increased since the adoption of agriculture. The question is by how much. Just maybe it’s way less than Harpending, Cochran, and Hawks think.
Utilitarian: Isn’t it possible that transracial adoption studies are detecting differential prenatal developmental programming rather than genetic differences? You don’t know otherwise until we have transuterine studies.
I think Cochran is right that there was probably limited human-neadertal hybridization; it requires less special pleading than the purist Out of Africa models. However, all factions in the neandertal and modern human origins & evolution debates have been indulging in rampant speculation for a long time. There is a lot of inference about Neandertal cognitive abilities based on the presence or absence of certain archaeological features, and, as usual, way too much is being assumed. Same with anatomically modern humans, various stone age “revolutions” etc. (See: Mithen, Binford, Dibble, Richard Klein, Bruce Lahn…) They’re good yarns, but that’s all most of these models are.
One of the tedious parts of this debate is all the “well poisoning.” Individuals may disagree without either being scared of being politically incorrect (although they might be) or a racist (although they might be). What’s really sad is that this tone makes it into the scientific papers on the subject, where it has no place.
Greg,
Could additional heterozygosity from the hybrid European-Middle Eastern nature of the Ashkenazi population counterbalance/mask diminished heterozygosity from genetic drift in the measures in question?
Henry: Regarding earlier comments, the idea that “race” is an arbitrary concept entailing the arbitrary groupings within a continuous population is better illustrated by Novembre et al. 2008 in Nature. They find that genetic differences are consistent with a diffusion model, not distinct groups.
Greg: The point of the Risch et al. (2003) reference was to point out that the rhetoric on these claims, from both sides, makes it sound like these conclusions are not debated.
Technically, it is more parsimonious to assume that drift caused the high allele frequencies compared to selection acting on all those loci, which all happen to affect the same character. Fewer assumptions are being made in the former; but parsimony is only a guideline. It is not evidence.
Regarding your carefully worded statement, “very detailed genetic information shows no sign of any bottleneck affecting nuclear genes among the Ashkenazim”: The reference to nuclear genes is intended to counter the data of Behar et al. (2006) using mitochondrial DNA.
Hammer et al. (2000) and Olshen et al. (2008) conclude that data from the Y-chromosome and high-density polymorphism sequencing that the Ashkenazi did experience a bottleneck. Now, we can argue over whether their conclusions are correct, but saying that there is “no sign” is overstating the case.
It’s revealing to compare the intellectual quality of Tyler’s original post to that of the comments by Tyler’s critics.
Steve said “It’s revealing to compare the intellectual quality…..”
I thought the review was pretty interesting. Granted, a few things like the Neanderthal mtDNA and the epigenetics were wild shots from outer space, but his main point, that he just didn’t learn much, is worth thinking about.
I think Greg Clark’s book is wonderful, but while I was reading it I often wished I could grab his shoulders, shake him, yell at him “just write a logistic equation!”. Economist talk about rents, production, utility, and such just goes right past me. I can make no sense of it at all, never could.
Maybe Cowen is in my position, mirror-imaged?
Henry
Josh said “The PC-ness of an idea has nothing to do with whether it is correct. Most racial ideas that are now not-PC were well-accepted only a few generations ago.”
I think it does: the PC SOBs almost always get it wrong. Take a look at
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/blackwell_david.html
for a story that will make your blood boil. When I lecture about this my students worry that I will collapse from apoplexy. At the beginning of WWII we gathered the best this country could come up with to save civilization, and there was David Blackwell right in the thick of it, 22 years old, right off the farm in Illinois.
But Blackwell spent WWII teaching arithmetic at swamp state teacher’s college somewhere in Mississippi because the President of Princeton University decreed that a Negro could not be fellow at Princeton. How many American soldiers died because of that arse-kissing glad-hander who was not fit to carry pencils around for David Blackwell? Note that it was the administration at Princeton, not the greatest collection of mathematicians and physicists the world had ever seen, not John von Neumann nor Richard Feynmann, who said that a Negro had to leave, it was the administration.
The same spirit of PC that sent David Blackwell to the hinterlands has destroyed the US urban public school system (read about the judiciary and the Kansas City school system): IMHO true believers ought to be led right to some rathole and sent down it.
Henry
Henry: I have to respectfully disagree. One cannot use a non-scientific metric to evaluate ideas. In science, we cannot use the fact that someone was wrong 9 times to automatically dismiss their tenth idea. Using the status of an idea as being PC or not-PC, is a terrible way to evaluate ideas.
Dubious: Track records and prior plausibility can be included in any analysis based on a Bayesian framework for incorporating prior information. Publication bias can be very difficult to evaluate depending on the criterion that is biased. Few people actively perceive their own work as being low quality. As a result, failure to publish can be blamed on external factors, which may or may not be the case. The best bet is to evaluate studies individually. If it is outside or in your field, the best thing to do is listen to the opinions of several disagreeing experts, which generally is not that hard to find.
On the particular subject being discussed here, the use PC/not-PC rhetoric to condemn/defend positions has extended to the literature. It has been argued that such questions should not be asked because they are dangerous. On the other hand, “martyr” defenses have been used suggesting that such inquiries are being repressed not for valid scientific reasons (e.g., plausibility, practicality, quality of the research program proposed, or utility of potential findings), but because the questions are viewed as being inappropriate or not PC. Neither of these external, emotional approaches contributes productively to the development of our knowledge.
A good rule of thumb is that, when anyone in any field makes a completely definitive, authoritative statement, they are probably being a bit deceptive.
Josh at 10:56 AM: “One cannot use a non-scientific metric to evaluate ideas. In science, we cannot use the fact that someone was wrong 9 times to automatically dismiss their tenth idea. Using the status of an idea as being PC or not-PC, is a terrible way to evaluate ideas.”
Josh at 11:57 AM: “A good rule of thumb is that, when anyone in any field makes a completely definitive, authoritative statement, they are probably being a bit deceptive.”
“Why would you wish to be associated with such a freakshow?”
I don’t know who any of them are except Phil Rushton, and there’s nothing wrong with Phil except that he is a grouch. I also don’t know what the BNP is. I find the topic of the meeting pretty interesting.
The level of insanity from the AAA seems to have gone way down in recent years too.
Henry
Pincher: Thank god, at least someone hasn’t lost their sense of humor.
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