Google Trends: Across my interests some confirmation and some big surprises.

I knew Google Trends was “a thing”, but it had fallen off my radar. Until I wondered if Craigslist was going the way of Rich Text Format. That’s when I started playing with the 10 year trend lines.

I began with Craigslist and Wikipedia...

• Craigslist is looking post-peak
• Wikipedia looks ill, but given how embedded it is in iOS I wonder if that’s misleading.

Then I started looking at topics of special relevance to my life or interests. First I created a set of baselines to correct for decliniing interest in web search. I didn’t see any decline

• Cancer: rock steady, slight dip in 2009, slight trend since, may reflect demographics
• Angina: downward trend, but slight. This could reflect lessening interest in search, but it may also reflect recent data on lipid lowering agents and heart disease.
• Exercise: pretty steady
• Uber: just to show what something hot looks like. (Another: Bernie Sanders)

Things look pretty steady over the past 10 years, so I decided I could assume a flat baseline for my favorite topics.That’s when it got fascinating. 

• Inline skating (I do this) is dead and so is skateboarding
• Microsoft Excel is stable, but Google Sheets is way way up. Apple Numbers is doing a lot better than I expected.
• Special Needs has a slight downwards trend but Downs Syndrome has plummeted - perhaps due to America's eugenics program. I wonder if the fading of Downs syndrome is responsible for the modest decline in special needs searches.
• Cycling for exercise is somewhat down, with a nice seasonal spike pattern. Mountain biking has declined significantly.
• Cross Country Skiing varies (bet it’s snow depth) but seems constant at a low level
• CrossFit has probably peaked but is still popular.
• AI (artificial intelligence), much to my surprise, is way down.
• Growing use of searches on “Apple Quality” — probably not in a happy way (I’m betting this is Apple corp, not Apple fruit).
• Dementia is a slowly growing concern
• Backpacking is in a gentle decline
• Google seems to have flatlined and even Android is trending down, but Facebook has fallen off a cliff (hard to interpret, it’s so ubiquitous), Apple has slow growth but iPhone is only holding steady. Weirdly, Twitter looks rather like Facebook - not healthy at all.
• RSS. Sob.
• Health Informatics, my professional discipline, has had a big decline since 2004. It feels that way. SNOMED CT is in a lesser decline. On the other hand, family medicine is pretty stable (one weird 2011 peak) even as Geriatrics is in decline (WTF?)
• Carbon tax is off the radar and interest in global warming is way down. Be afraid.
• eBooks are post-peak - a failure to takeoff (I blame the DRM).

Some of these findings line up with my own expectations, but there were quite a few surprises. It’s illuminating to compare Excel to Google Sheets. The Downs Syndrome collapse is a marker for a dramatic social change — the world’s biggest eugenics program — that has gotten very little public comment. I didn’t think interest in AI would be in decline, and the Facebook/Twitter curves are quite surprising.

Suddenly I feel like Hari Seldon.

I’ll be back ...

See also:

• Research the past 200 years of memetic propagation: Google Books ngram viewer 12/2010

Beijing Genomics Institute - the second coming of eugenics

Via Funny Times [1], I came across allegations of a confident eugenics program (emphases mine):

NEWS of the WEIRD - Current News

Beijing Genomics Institute scientists are closing in on a technology to allow parents to choose, from several embryos, the one most likely to yield the smartest offspring. London’s Daily Mail (in January, referencing recent work in Wired, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker) explained that BGI will have identified high-potential mathematics genes (by mapping the cells of geniuses) so that researchers can search for those among a couple’s array of embryos...

… One Chinese researcher acknowledged the “controversial" nature of the work, "especially in the West," but added, "That's not the case in China."

Eugenics is more accepted in Asia and Eastern Europe than in the west, but eugenics acceptance is growing quickly here. On the other hand, “Funny Times” and “News of the Weird” are not exactly the New York Times.

Tracing the sources I came across an article I read a year ago on Zhao Bowen, a young genius who dropped out to join China’s prestigious Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI)…

Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies | Science | WIRED

… Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college….

Hmmm. I suppose “closing in” is only a bit of a stretch on “within a decade” - within allowable parameters of a comic news site. So it’s not surprising the BGI web site doesn’t yet have an explicit page on embryo selection (termination of the inadequate) for higher IQ.

It’s an interesting site to browse though. The English and Japanese pages feature Euro models — including an array of Aryan blondes. (They don’t know you’re not supposed to use blondes in eugenics programs.) I couldn’t find any retail services on the Chinese site — that’s curious. Maybe wealthy Chinese like to use English language web sites?

BGI does market one screening test that sounds ominous on first glance …

Genetic Testing for Reproductive Health | BGI Health

… Hearing impairment is a common disease in which the congenital form accounts for approximately 60% of the cases. Conventional hearing tests exhibit low coverage and low accuracy. Genetic Testing for hearing impairment allows timely and accurate identification of newborns or adults carrying the susceptibility genes of hearing impairment and late-onset hearing loss…

Except they claim this is “neonatal” testing. China might be (for the moment) good with selective abortion, but infanticide is another matter.  Their most suspicious publicly available page shows in my browser with an IP address rather than a text url:

Preimplantation Genetic Screening/Diagnosis (PGS/PGD) | BGI Health

… Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) detects and avoids the transfer of embryos with genetic abnormalities with the aim of increasing the IVF pregnancy and delivery rates…

… reduce the risk of miscarriage increasing the likelihood of success which benefits the patients emotionally and can help them to avoid costly efforts for repeat in vitro fertilization attempts should failure occur

…. Rigghhhtt. This one is winking so hard it’s gonna sprain an eyelid.

The second eugenics age is well underway.

[1] Comic relief for commie collectivists. It’s always funnier when the GOP is in power.

Reconciliation May 2011: The posts I won't get to

Reconciliation for May 2011 ...

• Elderly Drivers Fail a Test (NYT) and Some Older Workers, Pressured to Quit, Fight Back (NYT): Why raising the retirement age won't work. Our brains don't last.
• The Blind Use The Visual Cortex To Process Sound (SciAm): I've long wondered about how we evolved the ability to read -- to convert images into sounds. It seems an unnatural use of the brain, even for an animal that must have been good at sign language. Given these latest findings, the ability to read may be just another manifestation of astonishing brain plasticity.
• The Early Days of Eugenics: 1911 SciAm article on Eugenics. "The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to Huxley. "We are sorry for you," he is reported to have said; "we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate."
• Medicaid a Big Deal Too | Talking Points Memo: The real budget problem is not social security or medicare or medicaid. The real problem is that our bodies outlive our brains. Demographers knew this day was coming back in the 1970s. That's when we should have invested in slowing the onset of dementia.
• Third Depression Watch - NYT: The good news is that Krugman is no longer talking about the Great Recession. The bad news is that he's talking about the 2nd Long Depression. (See also: Leonhardt, 2008)
• Frothy Real Estate in Manhattan: $5.5 million apartment
• Reassessing The Cost Of The Post-9/11 Era, Post Bin Laden (Froomkin): Was bin Laden the most successful investor in history? With our help he turned mere millions into a successful trillion dollar attack on America.
• Jann Wenner is my hero - Cringely and The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone: Corporate control of American media - more than you think
• Software Reviewing as it Should Be Done - James Fallows and Zeoli on Tinderbox: A quixotic effort to push the boundaries of Xanadu, but not a word about data lock.
• Inequality Rising Across the Developed World - NYT Rampell: Not only America.
• Quote of the Week, Last Week Edition - Jeffrey Goldberg: Obama's famous quote on birthers, spoken while he was secretly leading the bin Laden hit.

Sparta and the disturbing flexibility of human culture

I remember a cartoon of Spartan life that I learned as a child. I don't recall thinking about it much further until this week's IOT programme on Sparta.

Spartan culture is as alien to modern American life as the sacrificial cultures of the Aztecs, but it endured for hundreds of years. Men did not live with women. Children were removed from their mothers at age 7 and raised in a harsh military environment including routine sexual abuse. Contrary to some stories, it appears they did not routinely visit their mothers after that time.

The Spartans practiced active eugenics, exposing unwanted children (though some were apparently rescued by others). They enslaved, oppressed, tortured and murdered their "Helot" kin for centuries. Spartan women, paradoxically, may have had more freedom and a better life then Spartan men. Birth rates were low -- perhaps the earliest evidence that educating women leads to lower birth rates (aka "demographic transition").

This culture was not a passing thing. It appears to have been stable for centuries. Presumably, humans could do it again.

Update 11/22/09: On reflection, if you could get past losing your male children at aged 7, this might not have been such a bad arrangement for Spartan women. Exercise, education, freedom, limited exposure to Spartan men ...

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In Our Time - The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth

In the 2003 In Our Time explored the cultural history of war: BBC - Radio 4 - The Art of War.

During the programme, one of the guests mentions Karl Pearson an early 20th century social Darwinist and "Professor of Eugenics" [1]. Pearson praised war as the engine of racial fitness and national progress. If not for war, it was said in Pearson's time, "the weak shall inherit the earth" [2].

These memes are with us still, though in the west they are rarely explicit.

[1] Those of us who did med school stats may remember the "Pearson distribution". Same guy.

[2] It's not clear from the discussion if the phrase came from Pearson, but I suspect it was a common usage of the time. Not for the first time I wish there were more IOT transcripts. The "After Our Time" wiki has @50 IOT transcripts, but the blog and wiki was only active for a few months in 2007. Among those few transcripts, incidentally, are early programmes that have been lost, including one featuring Stephen Jay Gould.

Update Feb 17, 2010: The Lost Episodes are now online.

The best next generation?

My generation gave the world Bill Clinton and George Bush.

The first was, and is, a brilliant man with deep flaws. The second is flawed to the bone.

Obama is effectively post-boomer. It couldn't happen soon enough. It's time for us boomers to quietly shuffle off onto our icebergs.

That's good news, but maybe there's even better news ahead (emphases mine) ...

Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich

... Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you're so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you're sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.

This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever -- and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don't roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 -- the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That's an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.

These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward....

To borrow a very tired phrase, Generation Equality has skin in the game. If civilization endures they have a reasonable shot at a 100 year lifespan.

They'll see the arctic melt, they'll live with rising sea levels, they'll see the end of oil, they'll see human genetic modification and post-modern eugenics, they'll see America become a normal nation (we hope), they'll live in a world of ubiquitous machine translation of English, Chinese, Sanskrit, Spanish and a dozen other languages, they'll see the salvation of Africa (or else).

I sure hope they don't see artificial sentience, but they could.

It's all yours GenE. I'll help however I can, but probably the most I can achieve is to neutralize the more harmful members of my generation.

Enlightenment 2.0 is up to you.

Yes, you do want a mongrel

Humanity should be brought up before the Canine High Tribunal ..

Pedigree dogs plagued by disease

... Scientists at Imperial College, London, recently found that pugs in the UK are so inbred that although there are 10,000 of them, it is the equivalent of just 50 distinct individuals...

We should treat our symbiotes with more respect. I don't expect breeders to reform themselves, so we really ought to be adopting mongrels.

Problem is, in Dog City USA mongrels are darned hard to find. There just aren't that many fertile females available these days, and the boys don't get to wander free.

The demand for mongrel pups here is so great that two years ago we had to register for notification across 10,000 square miles -- and to call within hours of a birth notice.

Maybe it's time for breeders to start breeding long lifespan mongrel dogs ...

DNA samples of poorly behaved children

This is as inevitable as the rising sun ...

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters:

... British police want to collect DNA samples from children as young as five who 'exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life'. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers argued that since some schools already take pupils' fingerprints, the collection and permanent storage of DNA samples was the logical next step. And of course, if anyone argues that branding naughty five-year-olds as lifelong criminals will stigmatize them, the proposed solution will be to take samples from all children.'...

More from the original Guardian article:

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'...

Since black American males are over-represented in prisons, a future US version of this UK proposal could use the cord blood of all pigmented children*.

Or maybe we'll just do some SNP profiling of cord blood. People like Craig Venter, who exposed his oppositional-defiant traits when he published his entire DNA sequence, would be definitely entered in the registry. Why, we could probably have locked him up long before he sequenced (a version of) the human genome.

We could brand 'em too, or make them wear some distinctive clothing. That way we'd all be warned of their dangerous nature. We could watch 'em day and night, so the first time they blinked we'd pounce and lock 'em up. Then we'd lock up the siblings, because you just never know.

Or maybe we'll turn aside before we go over the abyss? Nahhhhh.

* Note -- this is what's known as satire. I am not actually in favor of this proposal. Just to be clear.

Getting comfortable with harvesting your clone

Many science fiction stories and movies have featured clones created as backup organ donors.

Just saying (emphases mine) ...

Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells - washingtonpost.com

Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.

Creation of the embryos -- grown from cells taken from the company's chief executive and one of its investors -- also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies...

...Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman's womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.

No one knows whether those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.

"It's unethical and it's illegal, and we hope no one else does it either," said Samuel H. Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew J. French, the firm's chief scientific officer.

The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."...

...Asked what it was like to look at embryos that were replicas of himself, Wood said: "I have to admit, it's a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way.

We knew this was coming a few months ago.

Just tissues of course. We'd never let the clone develop any further -- say to a more advanced stage of tissue differentiation. That would be unethical ...

In a related article (no link, sorry) I read that a similar experiment went forward because a survey of the public showed they were quite comfortable with the protocol.

So where's the religious right when you want them? Well, I fear they were brought down by the appeal of modern eugenics. The elimination of Downs syndrome requires abortion -- and that was too great a temptation to be resisted. I think they've slunk away.

How do I know this will go all the way?

Well, if my 6 yo needed a heart tissue patch, I'm not all sure I wouldn't authorize a differentiated clone ...

Outsourcing surrogacy - and what comes next

FuturePundit: Pregnancy Surrogacy Outsourced To India. No surprises, unfortunately.

I'm tagging this one as "organ trade", though I suspect there will be eugenic implications as well. Some of the newborns, after all, will be defective. Will the contractors, produces, directors, egg and sperm donors necessarily accept defective units?

The surrogate mothers will suffer the usual lifespan reduction and disability associated with human pregnancy.

Come the clones

I used to think that one good feature of the religious right was that they might slow the day we harvest clones for organs.

Then came the eugenics revolution and the end of Downs syndrome. Emily is convinced there's a causal relationship between the rise of 21st century eugenics and the collapse of the GOP's anti-abortion movement. (Oh, you didn't notice it had collapsed? It has.)

Next came the American embrace of torture. At least 50% of Americans, in most polls, are just fine with torture.

Now this:

Monkey Embryos Cloned for Stem Cells - washingtonpost.com

...Researchers in Oregon reported yesterday that they had created the world's first fully formed, cloned monkey embryos and harvested batches of stem cells from them...

If it works in monkeys it will work in us.

So now we have our stem cell source. Next up will be to let the clone produce differentiated tissues that we have a use for. Then it will be early organs.

I knew I'd miss the religious right.

Greens and Grays and IQ

James D. Watson appears to be a member of the Bell Curve club. He's also very old, and I suspect his own IQ is nowhere near where it once was.

Whatever the cause of Watson's opinion, the topic has lead to the usual questions about the genetics of "whatever it is that IQ tests test". I read the NYT response as relatively cautious about the influence of post-natal environment on IQ. It could be read as acknowledging that IQ is largely determined by genes and the intrauterine environment, with very little other environmental influence. I think that is roughly the current scientific consensus.

I've written about this before; it's a fascinating if unsettling topic. Ashkenazi Jews and South Koreans seem to be unusually good at clever things, and for the former there's even some suggestive genes to inspect.

But what of it?

Let us assume the human race was divided into Greens and Grays, and that Greens scored 20 points higher on IQ tests than the Grays. This would translate into lots of Green wealth and power.

What would the Greens then owe the Grays? What do the strong owe the less strong? That, to me, is the more important question.

I, of course, am a good commie. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Adjusted for human limitations of course.

Schizophrenia and autism: evolutionary disorders?

I was thinking this morning, as I often do, of brain and mind, evolution, schizophrenia, and autism (more autism related posts), particularly in the context of a recent post about the perplexing prevalence of schizophrenia and a model of autism genetics involving spontaneous mutation, female non-expression, and inheritance in the male.

The pieces of the puzzle seem to fit together. If I were to read the minds of the researchers in these domains, I suspect they're beginning to think of autism and schizophrenia as examples of an entirely new class of illness - "evolutionary disorders". These are a class of disorders that arise in an organ, in this case the brain, that is undergoing rapid evolutionary change with a high mutation rate and a lot of suboptimal experiments.

I used to think that human evolution more or less ended with the invention of fire, at least that's what I recall from my high school essays [1]. Now we know that the human brain and human gut (they're very closely related systems) have undergone major adaptive changes within the past 15,000 years. It's increasingly plausible, but I don't think it's been proven, that these are systems predisposed to high mutation rates [2].

Systems predisposed to high mutation rates are going to produce a lot of "suboptimal" results, and a few significant improvements. This is what may account for the perplexing prevalence of two syndromes, autism and schizophrenia, that share similar traits:

• no obvious adaptive advantages
• common
• ill-defined and probably multiple underlying pathophysiologies
• complex genetic variability -- many different identified mutations and a suspicion that the disorders may arise from interacting protein networks.
  

I wonder if, should we look for them, we would identify similar "evolutionary disorders" in other animals undergoing rapid adaptive changes in some phenotype. Maybe that would explain all those odd-colored squirrels we see ...

[1] I've been fascinated by human evolution forever. Even as a child I didn't care for the traditional eugenics that is increasingly commonplace today, so I then advocated the encouragement of inter-ethnic marriage to dilute "bad" genes -- until we could directly engineer germ cell lines. Hey, it was a long time ago ...

[2] I think the theory here is that mutation rates can be selected for, so when "rapid change" is advantageous there is selection for "genomic creativity" over "genomic conservation". I think that's the mechanism that's supposed to underlie "punctuated equilibrium", but I'm not a biologist. I just write to learn ...

Update 5/6/2010: Yes, they're evolutionary disorders. In 2010 the term "evolutionary disorder" has a lot of hits, but I may have been one of the first users of it in this context.

Williams syndrome: infantile colic, dorsal/ventral balance, patterning genes and genetic determinism

The NYT has a long article on Williams syndrome. There's a lot in there, as noted by "bestyoucanbe" (emphases mine):

Be the Best You can Be: Williams syndrome: the NYT Magazine review

Williams syndrome has some features in common with autism, but it is, scientifically, much easier to study. For one thing it's much better defined than autism; persons with "Williams syndrome" resemble one another more more closely than persons with "autism". For another, we have a reasonable understanding of the gene injury involved, and we can expect to match up the gene products with the "phenotype" (behaviors)...

....Williams syndrome is fairly well characterized because of the physics of our chromosomes. The defect involves a patch that is prone to being "wrongly ripped", but the absence is not lethal. It is very likely that some of these genes are injured in other ways, or they vary in other ways. Persons with these variations won't have Williams syndrome, but they will have some characteristics of Williams syndrome. Some of those characteristics will have adaptive advantages, some won't. Something to remember when conversing with a "normal" person who's very talkative, doesn't seem to know when to pause for breath, and isn't very good at abstract thought ...

... There's a lot here. For example, the incidental comment on infantile colic made my eyebrows jump. Does Williams offer clues to one of the most puzzling and common disorders of infancy -- the mysterious disorder we call "colic"?!

The "dorsal" and "vental" regions remind me of the "left" and "right" hemisphere of the 1980s. Just like "left" and "right" hemispheres the "dorsal" areas sound more "male" and the "ventral" sound more female. One wonders how they morph during adolescence. As to dorsal/ventral balance (and SAT score balance) being rare; I suspect it's not so much that a "balance" is rare but rather that there's a comparatively flat normal distribution -- any point in the curve is 'rare'.

The "patterning genes" are also likely to feature in many stories over the next few years, as we learn how they influence talents and preferences. Sociopaths, of course, are of great interest to all of us these days ...

There are a few predictable outcomes of this research in the our evolving world. One is that, like Downs syndrome, Williams syndrome will become very rare over the next twenty years. The other is expectation is that we will learn how to tweak the dorsal/ventral balance; we'll misuse this knowledge somehow.

Race returns as ancestry, this time with better brains from China

A few years ago race was on the ropes, but it's back and looking as though it will persist, though possibly with a new name. The base "genetic clusters" (races) are:

• Africans
• Australian aborigines
• East Asians
• American Indians
• Caucasians (Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent)

(The "genetic cluster" breakdown in the graphic that accompanies the article is incomplete, the above list was taken from the article)

Not only is race back, but so are race-specific mutations affecting brain development. DAB1 is said to be "Chinese only", but I suspect the researchers are using "Chinese" as a proxy for "east asian". Anyway, the mutation sounds suspiciously like an upgrade:

Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally - New York Times

Another puzzle is presented by selected genes involved in brain function, which occur in different populations and could presumably be responses to behavioral challenges encountered since people left the ancestral homeland in Africa.

But some genes have more than one role, and some of these brain-related genes could have been selected for other properties.

Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.

He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.

Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.

Variants of two genes involved in hearing have become universal, one in Chinese, the other in Europeans...

... A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect “serial founder effects,” Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from...

... The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups....

... David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said that the term “race” was scientifically inexact and that he preferred “ancestry"...

Ethnicity reflects your cultural identity, so that word is clear enough. I think "ancestry" is too vague -- Japanese and Koreans may feel they have very different "ancestry" (and in a sense they do), but they're not two "races". I think we're stuck with race for now.

So what year will we start tweaking human brains with the "best" (heh, heh) upgrades? I'm guessing 2040, because it will probably be pretty hard to get right.

Sachs Reith 2007 - Lecture Four - Social engineering

From Jeffrey Sachs' 4th Reith Lecture on alleviating poverty in Africa ...

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 - Lecture 4: Economic Solidarity for a Crowded Planet:

.. .The fourth challenge, excessive population growth, is similarly susceptible of practical and proven solutions. Fertility rates in rural Africa are still around 6 children or more. This is understandable, if disastrous. Poor families are worried about the high rates of child mortality, and compensate by having large families. Poor families lack access to contraception and family planning. Girls often are deprived of even a basic education, because the family cannot afford it, and are instead forced into early marriage rather than encouraged to stay in school. And the value placed on mothers' time is very low, in part because agricultural productivity is itself so low. With few opportunities to earn remunerative income, mothers are pushed - often by their husbands or the community - to have more children.

Yet, as shown by countless countries around the world, fertility rates will fall rapidly, and on a voluntary basis, if an orderly effort is led by government with adequate resources. Investments in child survival, contraceptive availability, schooling of children, especially girls, and higher farm productivity, can result in a voluntary decline in total fertility from around six to perhaps three or lower within a single decade. But these things will not happen by themselves. They require resources, which impoverished Africa lacks...

Ahhh. I have thought so much and so long about this very topic. The story of that would take far too long to tell, so instead I shall tell a story from the year 2015. It has been 3 years since the Zorgonians first landed their saucers at the UN ...

... No more disease. Our children shall live centuries. Zorgonian technologies will allow us unlimited energy production with no greenhouse gas emissions. It is all we have dreamed of, and yet ...

... The Zorgonians have not demanded any price, but already we can see that we must change to fit their complex world. We cannot interpret their alien emotions, but it is clear they have little patience or interest in our religious traditions. They are suggesting a program of aggressive eugenics; in their world there is no tolerance for the weak or the slow. Bleeding heart liberal or NASCAR fan -- neither win the favor of these alien peoples. To run with this pack, we must abandon all but the strong.

They offer us devices that will extend our mind and reason, but those who use them seem so different, so uninterested in the things we love and treasure ....

... Is their gift worth the price?

I trust the analogy is obvious. A wonderful prize offered, but a prize with a Faustian price. African peoples who accept Sach's agenda will be transformed, and they know that well. To us the transformation is worth the prize -- we don't particularly care for genital mutilation anyway. The recipient's opinions will vary.

When I was a 1st year medical student in 1982, still reeling from the the complex adventures of a year in Asia studying fertility programs, I wrote a long and garbled paper on social engineering for a McGill medical school elective course (my first use of a word processor by the way). It was clear, even back in 1982, that dramatic fertility transitions were associated with radical changes in social structures. Women, in particular, rose quickly. Many men saw their power base shrink. Mating preferences changed. Traditions were being destroyed, new social structures were emerging. Why not face this fact, I thought, and think about how to deliberately engineer the transition to technocentric modernity? There must be many ways to covertly destroy a social order and rebuild a new one....

My poor medical anthropology elective course supervisor nearly died, and my medical career almost ended before it began. I might as well have written a paper for Opus Dei advocating sainthood for Satan. I'm not quite sure how I survived.

I was a naive idiot. Also young. And yet, 25 years later, the reality has not changed. I hope and pray Africa will emerge from poverty, undergo a demographic transition, and flourish in a technocentric world. The price, however, will be high.

The end of Down syndrome and the rise of the modern eugenics movement

Down syndrome will become very rare within US schools by 2020.

Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus - New York Times

...About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion...

90%. We may be sure that abortion will not go away in the US, though it may lose public funding.

Since Trisomy 21 is not a rare cause of cognitive disability, this will slightly reduce special education costs in the US starting 6 years from today.

The Times article describes people with Down syndrome advocating against the diagnostic test. This is similar to deaf persons arguing against the use of acoustic nerve prostheses. Whatever social noises we may make, abortion is a pretty clear statement of honest perception. I don't think the advocacy will change the numbers, and I don't think our modern eugenics movement will stop with Downs syndrome. Many less disabling disorders will be also aborted. If we devise gene testing for dyslexia or Asperger's ...

I have personal reasons to both understand and empathize with those who campaign against the abortion of children of Down syndrome. Much that is good and joyful will be lost to parents and to society. The neurotypicals who will instead be born will, I suspect, produce greater harm than the Down children who will never be.

Remember, it won't stop with Down syndrome. We will have our eugenics movement, for better and for worse.

Update 5/11/07: Steven Levitt, the well known economist and writer (Freakonomics), has a poignant comment on this topic. He's not asserting a position, he is speaking a truth. I would not have chosen the life I now live, but I would not undo it either.

Canada and immigration: the undiscovered laboratory

My limited recollection is that between 1950 and 1980 the province/nation of Quebec switched from a theocratic government, devout Catholicism, an average family size of over 5 children, and economic dominance by an ethnic minority (anglo-english) to a secular government, a secular society, an average birthrate of about 1.7, and the relatively silent emigration of that ethnic minority (including me).

That's a rather impressive amount of social transformation, and yet I suspect it's not well studied. Canada is the "dog" of sociology -- a remarkable species that has been falsely assumed to be "ordinary".

Now another experiment is playing out. Canada is a wealthy nation with, compared (only) to the US, a relatively even standard of living with limited pockets of severe poverty and a relatively intact social safety net. That may be why it has a birth rate similar to Italy, Japan, or Denmark -- very low (of course then one might ask why evolution allows relative wealth and prosperity to end reproduction!). Unlike Japan, which seems destined to slowly fade away (Korea's birth rate is too low to provide immigrants and every other nation is too "foreign"), Canada has returned to its historic roots as a nation of immigration.

There's one key difference, however, between Canadian immigration and the US model. Canada has been aggressively managing its immigration stream, with an almost "eugenic" policy of selecting the most economically productive immigrants. This is why I believe Canada will not have a social security crisis. More below ...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Canada: Census: Immigration critical to Canada

OTTAWA (CP) — Two-thirds of Canada’s population growth over the past five years was fuelled by immigrant newcomers...

The country is on track to becoming 100 per cent dependent on immigration for growth...

... That point won’t be reached until after 2030, when the peak of the baby boomers born in the 1950s and early ‘60s reach the end of their lifespans.

... Canada’s net migration, per capita, is among the highest in the world. According to the OECD, Canada’s net migration of 6.5 migrants per 1,000...

Canada’s influx offsets a flacid national birthrate of about 1.5 kids per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and just below the OECD average.

The United States, by way of example, accepts only 4.4 immigrants per thousand but has a fertility rate 25 per cent higher than Canada.

... A candidate for the ADQ in the Quebec provincial election was dumped by his party on the weekend after telling a weekly newspaper that native Quebecers need to “boost their birth rate, otherwise the ethnics will swamp us.”

... Ontario’s population... increased 6.6 per cent...

...Newfoundland, meanwhile, is on a three-census slide and has seen its population fall to a level not seen since the late 1960s.

Quebec’s population climbed 4.3 percent ... another slight decline in the French-speaking province’s overall share of the Canadian population. [jf: see comment below]

With the federal government poised to bring down a budget next Monday that is expected to reconfigure equalization payments to the provinces and address a so-called fiscal imbalance in the federation, population shifts are of critical importance.

... The census shows that Toronto remains Canada’s biggest metropolitan area, with 5.1 million people.

Montreal, at 3.6 million, and Vancouver at 2.1, were next among megalopoli...

About 35 per cent of Canada’s total population lives in these three metropolitan regions — and they attract more than 80 per cent of immigrant newcomers.

There's a lot here. The writer was careful to steer clear of the extremely sensitive, but inescapable, conclusion that Quebec's "ethnic Quebecois" population is in steep decline, with a birth rate, I suspect, comparable to Japan. Newfoundland is emptying out, rather like North Dakota and much of the American plains states. The nation is becoming very urban, though one should note that all of Canada's cities would fit into a single anonymous urban center in central China.

Canada is one heck of a laboratory. A future US president might learn from this.

Eugenics - the real thing now.

Saletan's article says it well. We've made a de facto peace with eugenics, it will become an increasingly large part of our lives over the next 40 to 50 years.

I don't think any student of humanity doubted that we'd travel this road. It's simply too hard to resist. Of course Lincoln would not have made the cut.

Eugenics, take II

It's been a while since the heyday of European eugenics, but these days that ancient spirit is rising almost everwhere. Among the community of persons with genetic disorders, tests that allow quicker and faster abortions raise the specter of extinction ...

The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World - New York Times

.... One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.

Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.

As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion...

I would expect China to pioneer in this area, I think a magazine article on eugenics in China would be absolutely fascinating.

Americans may think that the evangelical movement will stop abortion in America. Wrong. The fear of a 'defective' child will keep abortion alive and well among all Americans who can afford it. Medical abortion rates do not differ significantly between evangelical fundamentalists and secular Americans of a similar socio-economic class. That datum predicts that abortion will remain available in America (though it may not be covered by medicaid) and that the new eugenics movement will stay with us. We shall all be ubermensch one (very sad) day ...