January, 2010

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23
Jan 10

Samoans and Football

I have observed that what sports a populations tends to be good at depends on what sports people in that population play when they are kids.

However, not everyone can be an professional athlete. There seems to be a heredity component to it.

For Samoans, they seem to disproportionately have the talents needed for football. Could it be in their genes?

There’s a small community that produces more players for the NFL than anyplace else in America. It isn’t in Texas, or Florida or Oklahoma. In fact, it’s as far from the foundations of football as you can get.

Call it “Football Island” – American Samoa, a rock in the distant South Pacific.

From an island of just 65,000 people, there are more than 30 players of Samoan descent in the NFL and more than 200 playing Division I college ball. That’s like 30 current NFL players coming out of Sparks, Nev., or Gastonia, N.C. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley traveled 8,000 miles to American Samoa and found a people and traditions so perfectly suited to America’s game – it’s as if they’d been waiting centuries for football to come ashore.
[...]
“[Somoans] [a]re soft spoken, they’re gentle,” he told Pelley of his players. “But when they put on their equipment, they just become monsters. And they just want to go out and hit and hit and hit.”

One 16-year-old player told Pelley he’s 6 feet 5 inches tall. Another, 17 years old, said he’s 6 foot 4 and a half.
[...]
[...] It’s estimated that a boy born to Samoan parents is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.

The Samoan people are big. [...]
[...]
“The combination of size, and ability and speed, you know, that’s kind of hard to find. Big dudes that can have nimble feet, you know, and are able to run and go sideline to sideline,” Peko said.
[...]
“What if there were 120 million Samoans, you know? How many Samoans would there then there be in the NFL?” Polamalu quipped.

“If there were 120 million Samoans, it might be the National Samoan Football League,” Pelley told the football star.

(Link)

UPDATE: There’s a video for this available. (H/T David Henderson)

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23
Jan 10

Humans minds adapted to purposes fitting the past

An interesting study that is evidence towards the human mind being adapted to purposes fitting the past.

The study showed modern Canadian minds have adaptations suited for a hunter-gather lifestyle. (Most people will assume that all humans share these same adaptations.)

“In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of children of various ages and estimate which deaths would create the greatest sense of loss in a parent. The results, plotted on a graph, show grief growing until just before adolescence and then beginning to drop. When this curve was compared with a curve showing changes in reproductive potential over the life cycle (a pattern calculated from Canadian demographic data), the correlation was fairly strong. But much stronger – nearly perfect, in fact – was the correlation between the grief curves of these modern Canadians and the reproductive-potential curve of a hunter-gatherer people, the !Kung of Africa. In other words, the pattern of changing grief was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict, given demographic realities in the ancestral environment… The first correlation was .64, the second an extremely high .92.”

(Robert Wright, summarizing: “Human Grief: Is Its Intensity Related to the Reproductive Value of the Deceased?” Crawford, C. B., Salter, B. E., and Lang, K.L. Ethology and Sociobiology10:297-307.)

(H/T TGGP, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky)

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23
Jan 10

Bill Clinton (re)defines the word “Terrorism”

Forgetting for a moment that “terrorism” is actually a tactic (and actually means something different from the way most politicians seem to be using it), people’s usage of the word “terrorism” has changed to mean something other than the “real” or “original” meaning.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton took a stab at defining what “terrorism” means….

Terror mean[s] killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders.

(Source) (Via)

The “who do not have state authority” part is actually a pretty important point. As when all the “terrorism” hysteria started years ago, groups such a police actually were terrorists under the original definition of the word “terrorist”.

The “authority” part is why taxation is not considered theft. And why a cop arresting someone and taking them away is not considered kidnapping an abduction. And why, in the past, lords who had forced sex (under primae noctis), were not considered rapists.

Of course, the usual caveats about this, that one need accept the notion of authority for arguments for such labeling to be cogent.

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21
Jan 10

Familial resemblance for physique: heritabilities for somatotype components

My personal experience suggests to me that there is a high degree of heritability for somatotypes. This study is interesting in that it tries to figure out just how heritable they are.

Primary objective: To examine familial resemblance in the Heath-Carter anthropometric somatotype in a sample of 328 participants from 103 nuclear families in Northern Ontario (Canada). Methods and procedures: The three somatotype components (endomorphy, mesomorphy, ectomorphy) were subjected to principal components analysis and the resulting first principal component (PC1) was used as an additional index of physique. The four phenotypes were adjusted for age, sex and generation effects, while each of the three somatotype components was further adjusted for the effects of the other two components using regression procedures. A familial correlation model was fit to the data and used to estimate the degree of familial resemblance in somatotype. Main outcome and results: For all somatotype variables, the most parsimonious model was one in which there was no spouse resemblance and no sex or generation effects in the familial correlations. Maximal heritabilities were 56%, 68%, 56% and 64% for endomorphy, mesomorphy, ectomorphy and PC1, respectively, indicating significant familial resemblance for the Heath-Carter anthropometric somatotype. Further, the pattern of familial correlations suggests the role of genetic factors in explaining variation in human physique. Conclusions: In general, a pattern of no spouse but significant parent-child correlations implicates the role of genes on human physique, provided that mating is random with regard to these traits.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link)

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20
Jan 10

R1b1b2 map

From European man perhaps a Middle Eastern farmer…

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20
Jan 10

Brain Structure Correlated With Video Game Success

It looks like that by measuring 3 structures of a person’s brain, you can predict how well they will perform at video games.

Remember that correlation is not causation, but it would not be surprising that different kinds of brains, and I’d assume different kinds of intellectual abilities, would make one better at various kinds of video games. Although my impression is that certain kinds of mental “activities” can build/develop your “mental muscles”. But that some people will get more out of these “activities” than others.

The MSNBC article says…

Does playing video games improve your brain? Or do bigger brains make it easier to learn video games?

My guess would be that people are born with certain kinds of brains. And that certain kinds of brains can give certain natural mental talents. But that playing video games can help develop their mental talents even further. (Similar to how people can be born mesomorphs and naturally have muscles and be able to put on muscles easily. But weight lifting at the gym can make their muscles even bigger and stronger.)

The article goes on to say…

Psychologists say they can predict how well you’ll do on a video game by looking at the size of just three little structures inside your brain. If those structures are bigger, you’ll probably catch on more quickly and do better.

But don’t start bragging about how gamers are naturally brainier just yet. The psychologists have more puzzles to solve before they level up.

“We’re really at the tip of the iceberg in understanding how all this gets put together,” said the University of Pittsburgh’s Kirk Erickson, the study’s principal author.

The 3 structures in the brain thy are talking about are the caudate nucleus, putamen, and nucleus accumbens. (The hippocampus showed no linkage.)

The article later says…

Past research has shown that expert gamers tend to outperform novices on basic measures of attention and perception. Some studies have suggested that video-game training can help novices bridge the gap – while others indicated that the novices couldn’t catch up after more than 20 hours of training.

Another quote…

[R]esearchers behind the latest study stress that brain structures aren’t set in stone. “We know that’s not true for a lot of nuclei in the brain,” Kramer said. “We know that exercise can increase the volume of the nuclei.”

I’d assume some people will get more out of exercise than others.

I guess my mother may have been correct in claiming that video games help exercise kids minds, and build their “mental muscles”.

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19
Jan 10

Face Recognition: Another Cognitive Ability Separate From IQ

Recognizing faces is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it. Some people are unable to recognize even their closest friends (a condition called prosopagnosia), while others have a near-photographic memory for large numbers of faces. Now a twin study by collaborators at MIT and in Beijing shows that face recognition is heritable, and that it is inherited separately from general intelligence or IQ.

This finding plays into a long-standing debate on the nature of mind and intelligence. The prevailing generalist theory, upon which the concept of IQ is based, holds that if people are smart in one area they tend to be smart in other areas, so if you are good in math you are also more likely to be good at literature and history. IQ is strongly influenced by heredity, suggesting the existence of “generalist genes” for cognition.

Yet some cognitive abilities seem distinct from overall IQ, as happens when a person who is brilliant with numbers or music is tone-deaf socially or linguistically. Also, many specialized cognitive skills, including recognizing faces, appear to be localized to specialized brain regions. Such evidence supports a modularity hypothesis, in which the mind is like a Swiss Army knife — a general-purpose tool with special-purpose devices.

[...] “That is, some cognitive abilities, like face recognition, are shaped by specialist genes rather than generalist genes.”

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link)

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19
Jan 10

Dog Genetics and Domestication

Interesting study on the genetics of dogs. The comparisons they are making with dog domestication and recent evolution in humans is interesting.

Although domestication of dogs began over 14,000 years ago [...] the spectacular diversity among breeds is thought to have originated during the past few centuries through intense artificial selection of and strict breeding for desired characteristics. [E]ffort[s] [are underway] to map canine genome regions that show signs of recent selection and that contain genes that are prime candidates for further investigation. Those genes are being examined for their possible roles in the most conspicuous variations among dog breeds: size, coat color and texture, behavior, physiology, and skeleton structure.

The researchers performed the largest genome-wide scan to date for targets of selection in purebred dogs. The genomes came from 275 unrelated dogs representing 10 breeds that were very unlike each other. The breeds were: Beagle, Border Collie, Brittany, Dachshund, German Shepherd, Greyhound, Jack Russell Terrier, Labrador Retriever, Shar-Pei, and Standard Poodle.

The study was conducted, the researchers said, because the canine genome, the product of centuries of strong selection, contains many important lessons about the genetic architecture of physical and behavioral variations and the mechanisms of rapid, short-term evolution. The findings, the researchers said, “provide a detailed glimpse into the genetic legacy of centuries of breeding practices.”
[...]
Their list of most differentiated regions of the dog genome included five genes already linked to hallmark traits of certain breeds: one for small size, one for short limbs like those in Dachshunds and other stubby-legged dogs, and three for coats.
[...]
A major impetus behind studying dog genomics, the researchers pointed out, is its potential to advance knowledge about the genetic basis of human form variations and of differences in disease susceptibility among people. In many cases, the researchers said, it may be easier to locate the genetic targets of selection in dogs, and then map these to related regions in the human genome. Scientists are intrigued by the possibility that recent selection may have affected genome regions common to both human and dog lineages.

“This research has shown that artificial selection in dogs has acted on many of the same genes as natural selection in humans, and that many of these genes are regulators of gene activity,” [...]

The researchers also said that a better understanding of artificial selection in dogs may reveal the molecular mechanisms of rapid, short-term evolution. Future work, they hope, may uncover the gene activities responsible for shaping the incredible diversity among the world’s dogs.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link)

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16
Jan 10

Women Seem More Sexually Attractive To Their Male Date When They Mimic Them

An interesting study from Nicolas Gueacuteguen. Seems women who subtly mimic the words and body language of their dates will seem more sexually attractive to their males dates.

Mimicry and seduction: An evaluation in a courtship context

Author: Nicolas Gueacuteguen
[...]

Abstract

Recent studies have found that mimicking the verbal and nonverbal behavior of strangers enhances their liking of the individual who mimicked them. An experiment was carried out in two bars during six sessions of speed dating for which young women confederates volunteered to mimic or not some verbal expressions and nonverbal behaviors of a man for 5 minutes. Data revealed that the men evaluated the dating interaction more positively when the woman mimicked them, and that mimicry was associated with a higher evaluation score of the relation and the sexual attractiveness of the woman. Mimicry appears to influence perceptions of physical attributes in addition to personal and social attributes.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link)

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16
Jan 10

Tessa Savicki Forcibly Sterilized

(Forced) eugenical thought has been bubbling closer and closer to the Zeitgeist for some time now. And has even gone mainstream, once again.

Here’s another example of it….

Tessa Savicki wanted to take control of her reproductive life. On December 19th, 2006, Savicki instructed doctors to insert an IUD after she delivered her ninth child. Instead, the doctors elected to forcibly sterilize her on the operating table.
[...]
What would motivate doctors to do this? The article explains her circumstances:

Savicki has nine children from several men, is unemployed and relies on public assistance for two of the four children who live with her. She receives supplemental security income, or SSI, for a disability, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she said. Her mother has custody of three of her children. Two of her children are no longer minors.

There are currently over 950 comments on the article, and the first few pages are generally uniform condemnations of “welfare queens” and praise for the doctors’ actions.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Link)

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