Science « Isegoria

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered gases

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

Nanotechnology researchers based at Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials claim to have found a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders, which could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport:

Mechanochemistry is a relatively recently coined term, referring to chemical reactions that are triggered by mechanical forces as opposed to heat, light, or electric potential differences. In this case, the mechanical force is supplied by ball milling – a low-energy grinding process in which a cylinder containing steel balls is rotated such that the balls roll up the side, then drop back down again, crushing and rolling over the material inside.

The team has demonstrated that grinding certain amounts of certain powders with precise pressure levels of certain gases can trigger a mechanochemical reaction that absorbs the gas into the powder and stores it there, giving you what’s essentially a solid-state storage medium that can hold the gases safely at room temperature until they’re needed. The gases can be released as required, by heating the powder up to a certain point.

[…]

This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that’s needed today. “Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process,” says Chen. “Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that’s how they separate them out.”

[…]

“The energy consumed by a 20-hour milling process is US$0.32,” reads the paper. “The ball-milling gas adsorption process is estimated to consume 76.8 KJ/s to separate 1,000 liters (220 gal) of olefin/paraffin mixture, which is two orders less than that of the cryogenic distillation process.”

[…]

Chen tells us the powder can store a hydrogen weight percentage of around 6.5%. “Every one gram of material will store about 0.065 grams of hydrogen,” he says. “That’s already above the 5% target set by the US Department of Energy. And in terms of volume, for every one gram of powder, we wish to store around 50 liters (13.2 gal) of hydrogen in there.”

Indeed, should the team prove these numbers, they’d represent an instant doubling of the best current solid-state hydrogen storage mass fractions, which, according to Air Liquide, can only manage 2-3%.

Posted in Science, Technology | 5 Comments »

The sort of Life Support System required to nourish a generation ship to fly through space for millennia is beyond our current capabilities

Monday, November 21st, 2022

No life support system miracles are required to keep humans alive on Mars in the near future, Casey Handmer’s argues:

A common criticism of ambitious space exploration plans, such as building cities on Mars, is that life support systems (LSS) are inadequate to keep humans alive, ergo the whole idea is pointless. As an example, the space shuttle LSS could operate for about two weeks. The ISS LSS operates indefinitely but requires regular replenishment of stores launched from Earth, and regular and intense maintenance. Finally, all closed loop LSS, both conceptual and built, are incredibly complex pieces of machinery, and complexity tends to be at odds with reliability. The general consensus is that the sort of LSS required to nourish a generation ship to fly through space for millennia is beyond our current capabilities.

No matter how big the rocket, supplies launched to Mars are finite and will eventually be exhausted. These supplies include both bulk materials like oxygen or nitrogen, and replacement parts for machinery. This doesn’t bode well. Indeed, much of the dramatic tension in The Martian is due precisely to the challenges of getting a NASA-quality LSS to keep someone alive for much longer than originally intended.

[…]

On Earth, we breath a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, with bits of argon, water vapor, CO2, and other stuff mixed in. The LSS has to scrub CO2, regenerate oxygen, condense water vapor evaporated by our moist lungs, and filter out contaminants that are toxic, such as ozone and hydrazine.

With breathing gas sorted out, humans also drink water, consume food, and excrete waste. For extended habitation, these needs also need to be addressed by the LSS.

On Earth, these various elemental and chemical cycles are produced, and buffered by, the immensely large natural environment. I don’t think anyone thinks that a compact biological regeneration system is adequate to meet the needs of a growing city on Mars. Biosphere 2 had a really good go at this and failed for a variety of reasons. One major one was complexity. If the LSS depends on the good will of tonnes of microbes, most of which are undescribed by science, it is very easy to have a bad day.

The alternative is a physical/chemical system. Much simpler, it employs a glorified air conditioning system to process the air and recycle/sanitize waste products. Something like this exists on every spacecraft, and submarine, ever built. The difficulty arises when a simple, robust machine that is 90% efficient is asked to perform at 99.999% efficiency.

[…]

Once on the surface, there is an entire planet of atoms ready to harvest. Rocky planets such as the Earth or Mars are, to a physicist, a giant pile of iron atoms encapsulated by a giant pile of oxygen atoms, with other stuff in the gaps. Nearly all rocks, plus water, contain more oxygen than any other element. The Moon and Mars have a lot of water if one knows where to look. Nitrogen is another issue but does exist in the Martian atmosphere. The upshot is that the LSS on Mars doesn’t have to be closed loop. It can depend on constant air mining or environmental extraction to make up for losses, leaks, and inefficiencies. The machinery can be relatively simple, robust, and easy to maintain. The ISS LSS is, after all, 1980s technology at best.

Posted in Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship

Thursday, October 27th, 2022

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West, James Lee suggests:

It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies — especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior — no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.

Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.

Posted in Policy, Science | 7 Comments »

This machine-feeding regimen was just about as close as one can get to a diet with zero reward value and zero variety

Monday, October 24th, 2022

In The Hungry Brain, neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet references a 1965 study in which volunteers received all their food from a “feeding machine” that pumped a “liquid formula diet” through a “dispensing syringe-type pump which delivers a predetermined volume of formula through the mouthpiece.”

What happens to food intake and adiposity when researchers dramatically restrict food reward? In 1965, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published a very unusual study that unintentionally addressed this question. …

The “system” in question was a machine that dispensed liquid food through a straw at the press of a button—7.4 milliliters per press, to be exact (see figure 15). Volunteers were given access to the machine and allowed to consume as much of the liquid diet as they wanted, but no other food. Since they were in a hospital setting, the researchers could be confident that the volunteers ate nothing else. The liquid food supplied adequate levels of all nutrients, yet it was bland, completely lacking in variety, and almost totally devoid of all normal food cues.

[…]

The researchers first fed two lean people using the machine—one for sixteen days and the other for nine. Without requiring any guidance, both lean volunteers consumed their typical calorie intake and maintained a stable weight during this period.

Next, the researchers did the same experiment with two “grossly obese” volunteers weighing approximately four hundred pounds. Again, they were asked to “obtain food from the machine whenever hungry.” Over the course of the first eighteen days, the first (male) volunteer consumed a meager 275 calories per day—less than 10 percent of his usual calorie intake. The second (female) volunteer consumed a ridiculously low 144 calories per day over the course of twelve days, losing twenty-three pounds. The investigators remarked that an additional three volunteers with obesity “showed a similar inhibition of calorie intake when fed by machine.”

The first volunteer continued eating bland food from the machine for a total of seventy days, losing approximately seventy pounds. After that, he was sent home with the formula and instructed to drink 400 calories of it per day, which he did for an additional 185 days, after which he had lost two hundred pounds —precisely half his body weight. The researchers remarked that “during all this time weight was steadily lost and the patient never complained of hunger.” This is truly a starvation-level calorie intake, and to eat it continuously for 255 days without hunger suggests that something rather interesting was happening in this man’s body. Further studies from the same group and others supported the idea that a bland liquid diet leads people to eat fewer calories and lose excess fat.

This machine-feeding regimen was just about as close as one can get to a diet with zero reward value and zero variety. Although the food contained sugar, fat, and protein, it contained little odor or texture with which to associate them. In people with obesity, this diet caused an impressive spontaneous reduction of calorie intake and rapid fat loss, without hunger. Yet, strangely, lean people maintained weight on this regimen rather than becoming underweight. This suggests that people with obesity may be more sensitive to the impact of food reward on calorie intake.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 2 Comments »

Environmental contamination by artificial, human-synthesized compounds fits this picture very well, and no other account does

Sunday, October 23rd, 2022

Only one theory can account for all of the available evidence about the obesity epidemic: it is caused by one or more environmental contaminants:

We know that this is biologically plausible because there are many compounds that reliably cause people to gain weight, sometimes a lot of weight.

[…]

We need a theory that can account for all of the mysteries we reviewed earlier. Another way to put this is to say that, based on the evidence, we’re looking for a factor that:

Changed over the last hundred years

With a major shift around 1980

And whatever it is, there is more of it every year

It doesn’t affect people living nonindustrialized lives, regardless of diet

But it does affect lab animals, wild animals, and animals living in zoos

It has something to do with palatable human snackfoods, unrelated to nutritional value

It differs in its intensity by altitude for some reason

And it appears to have nothing to do with our diets

Environmental contamination by artificial, human-synthesized compounds fits this picture very well, and no other account does.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 8 Comments »

We see a similar pattern of results in humans

Saturday, October 22nd, 2022

It used to be that if researchers needed obese rats for a study, they would just add fat to normal rodent chow, but it turns out that it takes a long time for rats to become obese on this diet:

A breakthrough occurred one day when a graduate student happened to put a rat onto a bench where another student had left a half-finished bowl of Froot Loops. Rats are usually cautious around new foods, but in this case the rat wandered over and began scarfing down the brightly-colored cereal. The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.

Sure enough, on this diet the rats gained weight at unprecedented speed. All this despite the fact that the high-fat and cafeteria diets have similar nutritional profiles, including very similar fat/kcal percentages, around 45%. In both diets, rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight. Something is making them eat more. “Palatable human food is the most effective way to cause a normal rat to spontaneously overeat and become obese,” says neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet in The Hungry Brain, “and its fattening effect cannot be attributed solely to its fat or sugar content.”

Rodents eating diets that are only high in fat or only high in carbohydrates don’t gain nearly as much weight as rodents eating the cafeteria diet. And this isn’t limited to lab rats. Raccoons and monkeys quickly grow fat on human food as well.

We see a similar pattern of results in humans.

Posted in Animals, Fitness, Science | 1 Comment »

Students with recent suicidal thoughts had higher levels of bacteria associated with periodontal disease

Monday, October 17th, 2022

Controlling for the influence of other factors known to impact mental health, such as diet and sleep, the researchers found that students with recent suicidal thoughts had higher levels of bacteria associated with periodontal disease and other inflammatory health conditions:

The study analyzed saliva collected from nearly 500 undergraduate students taking classes in the microbiology and cell science department at UF. These students also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, which is used to screen for depression symptoms and asks respondents to share if they have had thoughts of suicide within the last two weeks. Those who reported recent suicidal ideation were referred to on-campus mental health services.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

When people get richer, they get more resilient

Friday, October 14th, 2022

We are incessantly told about disasters — heat waves, floods, wildfires, and storms — when people have become much, much safer from all these weather events over the past century:

In the 1920s, around half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade the death toll averaged around 18,000. This year, like both 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.

Weather-fixated television news would make us think disasters are all getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, about 4.5 per cent of the land area of the world burned every year. Over the last century, this declined to about 3.2 per cent In the last two decades, satellites show even further decline: in 2021 just 2.5 per cent burned. This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that by the end of the century, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning.

And despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters — mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines — damage costs are actually declining, not increasing, as a per cent of GDP.

But it’s not only weather disasters that are getting less damaging despite dire predictions. A decade ago, environmentalists loudly declared that Australia’s magnificent Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead, killed by bleaching caused by climate change. The Guardian newspaper even published an obituary. This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover seen since records began in 1985. The good-news report got a fraction of the attention the bad news did.

Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears even featured in Al Gore’s terrifying movie An Inconvenient Truth. But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing — from somewhere between five and 10,000 polar bears in the 1960s up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news, however. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.

Posted in Animals, Economics, Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

Scientific authority is one of the foundations of power in our society

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Scientific authority is one of the foundations of power in our society, Samo Burja notes:

Consider a scientific study demonstrating a new medicine to be safe and efficacious. An FDA official can use this study to justify the medicine’s approval, and a doctor can use it to justify a patient’s treatment plan. The study has this legitimacy even when incorrect.

In contrast, even if a blog post by a detail-oriented self-experimenter contained accurate facts, those facts would not have the same legitimacy: a doctor may be sued for malpractice or the FDA may spark public outcry if they based their decisions on reports of this sort. The blog itself would also risk demonetization for violating terms of service, which usually as a matter of policy favors particular “authoritative” sources.

Intellectual authority is too useful to power centers to be ignored:

It will be deployed, one way or another. Social engineers have used it to guide behavior, loyalties, and flows of resources for all of recorded history, and likely long before as well. The most impressive example is the Catholic Church, which built its authority on the interpretation of religious matters, synthesizing human psychology, law, and metaphysics. The state church of the Roman Empire outlived the empire by many centuries. By the 11th century, Church authority was sufficient to organize and pursue political aims at the highest level. It was sufficient to force the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to kneel for three days as a blizzard raged, waiting for the Pope’s forgiveness. Few military and political victories are as clear. The Pope was revealed to be more powerful than kings.

The power of the Pope didn’t rest primarily in his wealth, armies, or charisma. Rather it rested on a claim of final authority in matters of theology, a field considered as or even more prestigious than cosmology is today. This can be compared to the transnational influence of contemporary academia on policy and credibility.

Such exercises of power weren’t completely unopposed. Today it is often forgotten that Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses and debates such as that at the Diet of Worms were first a challenge of intellectual authority, and only consequently a political struggle. The centuries-long consequences of the Protestant Reformation are myriad, but one of them is the negative connotation of the word “authority” in the English-speaking West. Protestant pamphlets had harsh and at times vulgar critiques of Papal “authority.” Merely making a word carry a negative connotation didn’t stop Protestant nations such as England or Sweden from creating their own state churches with much the same structure as the Catholic Church. Their new institutional authority was then a transformation of the old, using much the same social technology, rather than a revolution.

Inheritance of such authority shows some surprising patterns. The Anglican Church would famously have its own dissenters who ended up settling in the North American colonies. America’s Ivy League universities run on a bequeathment of intellectual authority which they first acquired as divinity schools serving different denominations of the many experiments in theocracy that made up the initial English colonies of the region. Harvard’s founding curriculum conformed to the tenets of Puritanism and used the University of Cambridge as its model. Amusingly, the enterprising Massachusetts colonists decided to rename the colony of Newtowne to Cambridge a mere two years after Harvard’s founding. Few attempts to bootstrap intellectual authority by associating with a good name are quite as brazen!

Many know that the University of Pennsylvania served the Quakers of Pennsylvania, since the colony and consequently the university was named after its founder, the Quaker thinker William Penn. But fewer know Yale was founded as a school for Congregationalist ministers and that Princeton was founded because of Yale professors and students who disagreed with prevalent Congregationalist views. The intellectual authority of modern academia can be traced back to an era when theology was the basis of its intellectual authority. Today, theology has nothing to do with it and the authority has been re-justified on new grounds. This shows that intellectual authority can be inherited by institutions even as they change the intellectual justification of that authority.

That such jumps are possible allows for interesting use of social technology, such as the King of Sweden bestowing credibility on physicists through the Nobel Prize or Elon Musk ensuring that non-technical employees at his companies listen to engineers through designing the right kind of performance art. Different types of intellectual authority are easily conflated for both good and bad. This also explains why we see uncritical belief in those who wear the trappings of science without doing science itself. When medicine suffered a worse reputation than science in the 19th century, doctors adapted by starting to wear white lab coats. This trick in particular continues to work in the present day.

Intellectual golden ages occur when new intellectual authority is achievable for those at the frontiers of knowledge. This feat of social engineering that legitimizes illegible but intellectually productive individuals is then upstream of material incentives, which is why a merely independently wealthy person cannot just throw money at any new scientific field or institution and expect it to grow in legitimacy. It ultimately rests on political authority. The most powerful individuals in a society must lend their legitimacy to the most promising scientific minds and retract it only when they fail as scientists, rather than as political players. The society in which science can not just exist, but flourish, is one where powerful individuals can elevate people with crazy new ideas on a whim.

The dreams of automating scientific progress with vast and well-funded bureaucracies have evidently failed. This is because bureaucracies are only as dynamic as the live players who pilot them. Without a live player at the helm who is a powerful individual in control of the bureaucracy, the existing distribution of legitimacy is just frozen in place, and more funding works only to keep it more frozen rather than to drive scientific progress forward. Powerful individuals will not always make the right bets on crazy new ideas and the crazy people who come up with them, but individuals have a chance to make the right bets, whereas bureaucracies can only pretend to make them. Outsourcing science to vast and well-funded bureaucracies then gives us the impression of intense work on the cutting edge of science, but without any of the substance.

The solution is not just to grant more funding and legitimacy to individual scientists rather than scientific bureaucracies, but to remind powerful individuals, and especially those with sovereign authority, that if they don’t grant this legitimacy, no one else will. Science lives or dies on personal endorsement by powerful patrons. Only the most powerful individuals in society can afford to endorse the right immature and speculative ideas, which is where all good ideas begin their life cycle.

Posted in Policy, Science | 6 Comments »

World’s first cloned arctic wolf is now 100 days old

Friday, September 30th, 2022

Chinese researchers have created the world’s first cloned arctic wolf, and it is now 100 days old:

Scottish scientists proved back in 1996 that it was possible to clone a mammal using a cell from an adult animal. Possible — but not easy. Dolly the sheep was the only successful clone in their 277 attempts.

Cloning is still a challenging process — fewer than 25 animal species have been cloned to date, so the first successful cloning of a species is still newsworthy 25+ years after Dolly’s birth.

The journey to creating the first cloned Arctic wolf began in 2020, when researchers at Sinogene Biotechnology, a Beijing-based biotech, teamed up with the polar theme park Harbin Polarland.

Using skin cells donated by Maya, an arctic wolf housed at Harbin Polarland, Sinogene created 137 embryos using female dogs’ eggs. They then transferred 85 of the embryos into 7 beagle surrogates.

In July 2022, one of those beagles gave birth to a healthy cloned Arctic wolf, also named Maya.

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

It’s our innate evolved form of government

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Erik Hoel describes the gossip trap:

Given that humans have been around for 200,000 years, why did civilization take so long to get started? Why were we stuck in prehistory for so long?

[…]

If we imagine being transported back to 50,000 BC, what would we expect to find? In the end, we have to give a metaphor to current life of how things were organized: a follower of Rousseau would expect Burning Man, a follower of Hobbes might expect to find a bunch of warring gangs, the Davids might expect to find the deliberation of a town council full of Kandiaronks.

But perhaps small groups of humans less than the Dunbar number were organized by none of these, since they didn’t need to be—instead, they could be organized via raw social power. That is, you don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people.

After all, who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans — it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors. So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.

I know the high school metaphor sounds crazy, but given that any metaphor we’re going to give will fail, I think this one possibly fails less than the others. After all, the central message of The Dawn of Everything is that prehistorical people were just people, with all the weirdness, politicking, cultural hilarity and differentness this implies. But, unlike what the Davids seem to want, most people aren’t Kandiaronk — he was exceptional. Most people are not exceptional. They are…well, like the people you remember from high school. So if we take the heart of the message of The Dawn of Everything seriously, perhaps entering a new tribe in Africa at 50,000 BC would not involve a bunch of mysterious rituals in the jungle enacted by solemn actors with dirt smeared across their faces. Maybe it was a bit more like the infamous lunch table scene from the movie Mean Girls (I encourage you to watch), with some minor surface alterations, like clothes (picture beads and furs instead).

[…]

What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power.

[…]

But it never seems to strike Dunbar or others that living under a dominion of raw social power, with few to little formal powers anywhere, would be hellish to a citizen of the 21st century (which is why I say the closest analog is high

My mother used to quote Eleanor Roosevelt all the time:

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

A “gossip trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives — it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.

And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization — at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.

[…]

Of course we gravitate to cancel culture — it’s our innate evolved form of government.

Arnold Kling keeps saying that the smart phone and social media smash together the intimate world and the remote world:

In the intimate world, gossip is the strong social force. In the remote world, institutions with their formal roles are supposed to be the strong social force. But modern technology has weakened formal roles, and we are falling back on gossip.

Posted in Policy, Science | 5 Comments »

It’s amazing to live in a society that often pretends these differences are not real

Thursday, September 22nd, 2022

What if we just looked at what men and women actually talk about in private?, Emil Kirkegaard asks:

We see that the male topics include politics, war/sports/gaming/weapons/death/killing, swearing, music (especially metal/rock), work/science, metals. Women’s topics are much more mundane. There’s a lot of expression of emotions, especially positive. There’s a lot of family talk shown by all the terms of human relationships (sister, daughter, nephew, brother, boyfriend etc.). Of interests, the main thing we see is food (cooking), and some shopping. In fact, it is surprisingly devoid of any abstract interests, I am surprised there are not more words related to clothing and child-rearing.

Overall we see that results are consistent across studies that men and women are interested in and talk about quite different things. It’s amazing to live in a society that often pretends these differences are not real.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Posted in Policy, Science | 4 Comments »

The Industrial Revolution kicked off the fertility transition

Wednesday, September 21st, 2022

It is ironic that our species, which is defined by our big brains, is evolving to become stupid, George Francis says:

Countless articles of scientific research have found the less intelligent to be having more surviving offspring and breeding faster than the intelligent. The problem was noticed by Darwin and his contemporaries, yet it has mostly been ignored throughout the 20th century. Recently it has had a small yet significant revival with the cult classic book At our Wits’ End, and large genetic databases showing intelligence decline. It has even been featured in the Telegraph.

[…]

The famous studies of dysgenics in the UK biobank show there is selection against intelligence but don’t attempt to quantify its size. The famous Icelandic study shows dysgenics but only attempts to measure its effect on years in education, not intelligence itself.

[…]

The Industrial Revolution kicked off the fertility transition. Countries that became rich were able to prevent starvation and improve health so the number of surviving children skyrocketed. Then with the advent of contraception, abortion and enjoyable alternatives to raising children, fertility plummeted. Many of the poorer, less intelligent countries started this process later meaning that as the natives of smart countries shrink in their population, the low IQ countries are still rapidly expanding.

[…]

My favourite estimate of the rate of dysgenics comes from Woodley’s calculation in At Our Wits’ End. He takes the Icelandic estimate for the rate of dysgenics on the educational attainment (years in education) polygenic score, adjusts it for the higher heritability of intelligence (about 80% heritable) and estimates a 0.8 IQ point decline per decade. That’s a lot. My guess is that this is an overestimate. Education attainment correlates negatively with fertility because it captures both the effect of intelligence and the effect of education, creating an overestimate. On the other hand, years in education is less heritable than IQ, causing the unaltered Icelandic estimate of about 0.3 IQ points to be an underestimate.

This is tricky, so let’s be cautious, split the difference and round up. IQ is falling by 0.6 points a decade.

In 1950 the average genotypic IQ was around 93.6. If you are not a high school graduate you need an IQ of 93 to join the US military. In 1950 something like half of the world’s population was too dumb to be in a professional army. Currently, the global average IQ is around 85 and by the end of the century, it will be 74. Then only an elite fraction would be capable of even being part of a professional army.

Average global IQ of 74 — dysgenics is a big problem! Let’s try and narrow it down a bit more. In Francis and Kirkegaard (forthcoming) we estimate that each national IQ point is associated with a 7.8% increase in GDP per capita. We also estimate the economic effects of dysgenics in that paper slightly differently, but with similar results. Let’s imagine the world is one country with an average IQ of 74 in 2100 and an average IQ of 85 as of 2020. The maths works out as a difference of logs at [exp((74–85)*7.8%) –1] = –58%. The effect of this dysgenic decline will be to cut GDP in half! And of course, that doesn’t even begin to consider the intangible factors GDP doesn’t necessarily include: low crime, social trust, science, culture and the arts.

Climate change is currently predicted to cost us a whopping 4% of world GDP by 2050. My numbers imply dysgenics will cost us 30% of GDP by 2050.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling, who says, “Have a nice day.”)

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

The results confirmed the integrity of the self-described ancestry of these individuals

Saturday, September 17th, 2022

Numerous human population genetic studies have come to the identical conclusion, that genetic differentiation is greatest when defined on a continental basis:

The results are the same irrespective of the type of genetic markers employed, be they classical systems [5], restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) [6], microsatellites [7,8,9,10,11], or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) [12]. For example, studying 14 indigenous populations from 5 continents with 30 microsatellite loci, Bowcock et al. [7] observed that the 14 populations clustered into the five continental groups, as depicted in Figure 1.

The African branch included three sub-Saharan populations, CAR pygmies, Zaire pygmies, and the Lisongo; the Caucasian branch included Northern Europeans and Northern Italians; the Pacific Islander branch included Melanesians, New Guineans and Australians; the East Asian branch included Chinese, Japanese and Cambodians; and the Native American branch included Mayans from Mexico and the Surui and Karitiana from the Amazon basin. The identical diagram has since been derived by others, using a similar or greater number of microsatellite markers and individuals [8,9]. More recently, a survey of 3,899 SNPs in 313 genes based on US populations (Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics) once again provided distinct and non-overlapping clustering of the Caucasian, African-American and Asian samples [12]: “The results confirmed the integrity of the self-described ancestry of these individuals”. Hispanics, who represent a recently admixed group between Native American, Caucasian and African, did not form a distinct subgroup, but clustered variously with the other groups. A previous cluster analysis based on a much smaller number of SNPs led to a similar conclusion: “A tree relating 144 individuals from 12 human groups of Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania, inferred from an average of 75 DNA polymorphisms/individual, is remarkable in that most individuals cluster with other members of their regional group” [13]. Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry – namely African, Caucasian (Europe and Middle East), Asian, Pacific Islander (for example, Australian, New Guinean and Melanesian), and Native American.