Challenges in evolution: male homosexuality

Richard Dawkins: Frequently Asked Questions

If a homosexuality gene lowers its own probability of being reproduced today, and yet still abounds in the population, that is a problem for commonsense as much as for Darwin's theory of evolution. And, intriguing as several of these theories may be, I have to conclude that it remains a problem.

This Dawkins FAQ page is fun reading, but I particularly enjoyed the discussion of how homosexuality fits with Darwinian selection. On reflection, though, I wasn't that impressed with Dawkins reasoning. He ought to have begun with an analysis of whether homosexuality was unique to homo sapiens, or whether it was also common among other primates, mammals, etc. It it's seen in other primates and also non-primates, then most of the explanations he advanced are unlikely to be true.

I'm inclined to the theory that there have been very substantial benefits to human and other animal societies from genes that, at least in some men, have the "unfortunate" (from the gene's perspective) additional effect of preventing reproduction. It's interesting to know this is an ongoing mystery however.

Electronic bill payment -- two routes, different motives

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Spending: Here's the Hook: Gifts for Online Bill Payers

This is a relatively dumb article. It talks about why vendors want their customers to pay online, but it entirely misses the more interesting story of bill payment handled by banks.

Online bill payment can be done two ways:

1. Vendor controls payment.
2. Bank controls payment.

Vendors want to get money as quickly as possible. They make money on mistakes that generate payments -- when the consumer misses the error.

Banks want to send money out at the last possible moment. They don't make money on a mistake that withholds payment -- there's no way the vendor will let that happen.

In this case the interests of the Bank are identical to the interests of the consumer. Check payment controlled by the bank is a fundamentally better solution. In addition it means a single system to learn and support.

Segregation today, segregation forever?

washingtonpost.com: Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds

Alabama voters decide to preserve segregation and poll taxes. On the other hand, they recently removed laws against miscegenation.

On careful reading, however, I can see why the good guys lost (again). The bill repealing segregation also sought to establish a right to public education. That could be the nose of the elephant -- after that might come the obligation to fund a public education. Then comes communism, or, worse, liberals and the teaching of natural selection.

Yay red states.

School Segregation Remains a State Law as Amendment Is Defeated

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2004

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- On that long-ago day of Alabama's great shame, Gov. George C. Wallace (D) stood in a schoolhouse door and declared that his state's constitution forbade black students to enroll at the University of Alabama...

...If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for "white and colored children" and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

..."There are people here who are still fighting the Civil War," said Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel and a retired school administrator. "They're holding on to things that are long since past. It's almost like a religion."

... The amendment had two main parts: the removal of the separate-schools language and the removal of a passage -- inserted in the 1950s in an attempt to counter the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated public schools -- that said Alabama's constitution does not guarantee a right to a public education. Leading opponents, such as Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles, said they did not object to removing the passage about separate schools for "white and colored children." But, employing an argument that was ridiculed by most of the state's newspapers and by legions of legal experts, Giles and others said guaranteeing a right to a public education would have opened a door for "rogue" federal judges to order the state to raise taxes to pay for improvements in its public school system.

The argument plays to Alabama's primal fear of federal control, a fear born of years of resentment over U.S. courts' ordering the desegregation of schools and the creation of black-majority legislative districts.

"Activists on the bench know no bounds," Giles said. "It's a trial lawyer's dream."

Giles was aided by a virtually unparalleled Alabama celebrity in his battle against the amendment, distributing testimonials from former chief justice Roy Moore, whose fame was sealed in 2003 when he defied a federal court order to remove a two-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. They were joined by former Moore aide Tom Parker, who handed out miniature Confederate flags this fall during his successful campaign for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court.

Arguing that the amendment could lead to higher taxes is a potent strategy in Alabama, which is one of the nation's most lightly taxed states and which resoundingly rejected a record $1.2 billion tax increase proposed last year by Gov. Bob Riley (R), a conservative, to pay for school improvements and lessen the tax burden on the poor. But many blacks view the Amendment 2 opponents' tax pitch as a smoke screen.

... This is not the first time that Steele has tangled with Alabama's constitution, a gigantic document that has more than 740 amendments and more than 310,000 words, making it the world's longest, at nearly 40 times the length of the U.S. Constitution. Four years ago, voters repealed a constitutional amendment banning interracial marriage.

... Yet the constitution, with its racist past and its racist present, only grows. On Nov. 2, it was amended three times -- numbers 743, 744 and 745.

Giles has said he would support taking out the passage about separate schools for "white and colored children" as long as the part about not guaranteeing a right to an education is kept.

Conflagration -- the european invasion of the americas

The New York Times > Opinion > Charles Mann: Unnatural Abundance is an astounding NYT essay by Charles C. Mann, author of the forthcoming "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus." The key observations are that, from an ecological perspective, the native american peoples were but one of large number of native "species" annihilated by the european invaders, and that those invaders that as much microbe and plant as human.

He doesn't mention dogs. There were dogs in the americas before the european invasion, but we know from recent gene studies that none survived. It would be interesting to know what killed them all. I suspect it was a pathogen that european dogs had adapted to.

Why were the microbial attacks so one sided? Europeans has spent hundreds of years in cesspools of festering disease -- cities. Plagues were commonplace. European immune systems were well tuned to the a wide range of pathogens. Native americans, living in a far healthier environment, had none of these adaptations. (I wonder how the anti-evolutionists explain the death of the native americans -- do they thing God did it?) Even to this day, euros are relatively resistant to HIV.

The essay sheds new light on how the Pilgrims survived. It had always seemed strange that such an ill-planned expedition should survive a northern winter. It turns out the plague had prepared their rations. I doubt Mrs. Cheney (famed for her campaign to teach mythology in place of history) would approve.

November 25, 2004
Unnatural Abundance
By CHARLES C. MANN

... Until the arrival of the Mayflower, continental drift had kept apart North America and Europe for hundreds of millions of years. Plymouth Colony (and its less successful predecessor in Jamestown) reunited the continents. Ecosystems that had evolved separately for millennia collided. The ensuing biological tumult - plants exploding over the landscape, animal species spiking in population or going extinct...

In a phenomenon known as "ecological release," imported species can run wild because their natural predators have not come along with them. Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves into biological Attilas in the Americas, sweeping through vast areas so fast that the first English colonists who pushed into Kentucky found both species waiting for them. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with such fervor that by the 18th century, the historian Alfred Crosby writes, farmers feared that the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach trees.

South America was just as badly hit. Endive and spinach escaped from colonial gardens and grew into impassable, six-foot thickets on the Peruvian coast; thousands of feet higher, mint overwhelmed Andean valleys. In the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, the voyaging Charles Darwin discovered hundreds of square miles strangled by feral artichoke. "Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can live," he observed.

... Wheat, following bluegrass and clover, occupied huge swathes of the Midwestern savanna. Meanwhile, corn conquered Africa, Asia and central Europe. Corn so thrived in 16th- and 17th-century Africa, Dr. Crosby has argued, that it sustained a population explosion that let Europeans take millions of Africans for slaves without emptying the continent.

... Soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed 90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants - at least 30 million people, and possibly 100 million, according to most recent estimates.

Four years before the Pilgrims' arrival, shipwrecked French sailors accidentally unleashed an epidemic, possibly viral hepatitis, on Cape Cod, which then swept through New England. The Pilgrims moved into an Indian village, Patuxet, that had been emptied by disease; they survived the first winter only after digging up food caches in victims' houses and graves...

... American Indians were ambitious, sophisticated landscape managers. In South America, they drained vast areas of wetland; scattered networks of raised agricultural fields in Bolivia, Colombia and the Guianas; and converted much of Amazonia into an "anthropogenic" forest - a mix of gardens, orchards and agricultural forests. Visitors to the Andes still gawp at the Indian terraces that carpet the highlands - more than 2,000 square miles of them in Peru alone, according to the geographer William M. Denevan, most of them at more than 9,000 feet.

Above the Rio Grande, Indians' principal land-management tool was fire, used to create and maintain open, game-friendly forests and grazing lands. Native pyromania created a third or more of the Midwestern prairie; fire kept Eastern forests so open that the first European colonists reported being able to ride through the woods in carriages. In California, Oregon, Texas and a hundred other places, Indian burning governed the conditions under which other species thrived or failed.

When disease carried away native societies, the torches went out. Trees and underbrush erupted in ways that had not been seen for millennia, filling in areas kept open by Indian axes and Indian fire. "Almost wherever the European went, forests followed," wrote the ecological historian Stephen Pyne. Far from destroying wilderness, in other words, European settlers created it - only it was a peculiar, unprecedented kind of wilderness, shot through with European invaders and characterized by population outbreaks from species that had formerly been uncommon...

...Other researchers have made similar arguments for bison, elk and moose. All were kept down by Indians - the big mammals by hunting, the pigeon because Indians both ate it and competed with it for the nuts on which it depended. The huge herds and flocks seen by Europeans were evidence not of American bounty but of Indian absence...

Electronic Arts: The Inside Story

ea_spouse

This got a lot of commentary on Slashdot as well. Electronic Arts has a curious approach to human resources. It's stupid in several dimensions and probably illegal. Never mind morality.

Reminds me of a science fiction short story by Vernor Vinge. I suspect now that story was based on EA.

The first to survive rabies

The New York Times > National > Girl Is First to Survive Rabies Without a Shot

Dr. Willoughby said he had tried to induce the coma in part because evidence suggested that rabies did not permanently damage any brain structure. Instead, death comes because the virus seems to cause temporary dysfunction of brain centers that control critical functions like breathing and swallowing.

---

An astounding win. Compared to this the Red Sox victory was plebian. We are all waiting eagerly for the journal report. I suspect NEJM will bag it.

Minneapolis church makes international news -- for its lefty politics

Economist.com | Churches and politics

THE next time you are in Minneapolis, you may like to visit St Joan of Arc church. Its weekend masses are packed; the congregation has doubled to 4,000 households in the past 12 years; the median age of its members is much lower than that of most other churches. It sends do-gooders to a sister parish in Guatemala, and professional musicians often stop by to jam at mass. This liberal Roman Catholic church hit a bump recently when conservative critics complained to Rome about some of its practices, including an open door for homosexuals. The bishop tried to intervene, but met a wall of protest from parishioners. St Joan's pastor, Father George Wertin, says that he is mindful of the church's teaching, but remains committed to inclusiveness and social justice.

---

Wow, Minneapolis makes the international news -- thanks to Joan of Arc church. We've been going primarily for the children's mass; the only place we've been that works for our family. At JofA no-one gives us a second look -- we're quite prosaic there. Now if we can just keep the bishop at bay. I doubt this bit of fame will help ...

Kristof on the 'Left Behind' books

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Apocalypse (Almost) Now

Not Kristof's best column, because he missed the point. Yes, the Left Behind books are nasty and virulent, but it's also true that one can (selectively) read the Bible that way. As religious extremists are fond of pointing out, there are a lot of places in the Bible where "God" is nasty as all get out. That's the God of a some literate barbarians -- the early Israelis.

Things quiet down as the Israelis focus more on spirtuality and less on destroying their enemies. Christ is a real aberration though. I just don't see the continuity between the Old Testament and the teachings of Christ. There's a legacy for sure, but Christ is really a revolutionary. (Paul does yet a third version; a fusion really that provides the right formula for longterm success. Paul is a reactionary zealot -- and a pragmatist.

Bottom line, the Left Behind folks are very much in the spirit of the Old Testament. I'd say they aren't Christian though, more like Yahwhites. Kristof's right when he says they're religious extremists, but wrong to think they're not true to the spirit of a part of the Bible. The Bible is massively inconsistent.

Obesity doesn't compare to smoking

The New York Times > Health > Data on Deaths From Obesity Is Inflated, U.S. Agency Says

They messed up the numbers. Turns out obesity isn't great for you, but it's not in the same league as smoking. Since weight gain is common with smoking cessation this wasn't merely an academic distinction.

In addition to less dangerous than smoking, obesity mortality is concentrated towards the upper end of life, so years-lost are far less than for smoking.

Gmail - has a handle on spam

Gmail - Inbox

Very little spam gets through the gmail spam filters now. The number in my Spam box is falling. I decided not to empty that box, because:

1. Google doesn't provide an easy way to empty it.
2. I've hunch they weight their spam filters based on what's left in the Spam box. It's what I'd do.

So they've got a handle on the problem now. Yay for them!

Update: The spam folder has dropped from about 1500 entries to about 200. Gmail's antispam technology has really kicked in. I get almost no spam.

BBC portrayal of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Hunting 'Satan' in Falluja hell

The BBC are a reasonably neutral source of information. This is a fundamentally sympathetic portrayal of a marine regiment, a regiment that accounted for 20% of the US soldiers lost in the battle for Fallujah. The Colonel of this regiment gaines some infamy for describing the enemy as Satan; this fills out the image in a different direction.

There are stories of very brave men* who died well and with little note. This journalist found very few civilians, but he found a 10 year old fighter.

* I write of "men" here. One of my neighbor's, a man I don't know, has a daughter who's a lieutenant in the marines. The sign he puts by his house tells us she's lost two of her men in Fallujah. So there is at least one woman marine fighting in Fallujah.

Phone Phishing (spam): coming soon to the elderly and the vulnerable

Net phone customers brace for 'VoIP spam' | Tech News on ZDNet

It's not just Net phones. Lately our home phone, which is not VOIP, has been getting phishing calls. Non-native english speakers who want to let me know that the Feds want to give me $10,000.00. (Hush money from GWB? I think not.)

With VOIP to voice linkages it's cost effective to set up a virtual phone bank across south Asia, China, and perhaps sub-saharan africa. If 10,000 callers were to participate in a pyramid-like phone phishing scheme, and each were to make 400 calls a day, that's 4 million calls a day. A call every few months -- assuming no automation. If the initial call is automated (screen out the able minded, avoid recordings, etc) it would be easy to scale to hit ever phone in the US every day.

Laws? You must be joking.

How well does phishing work? I've read that the hit rate is 1/40,000 for email. That's enough to provide a relatively small number of desperate and/or immoral people with a superb income. Who falls for these shemes? Do the math. Far more than 1/40,000 people have early dementia, schizophrenia, pyschosis, and a range of cognitive disabilities. They are frail, vulnerable, soft meat for these scum sucking vultures. (Ok, so I'm mad.)

The email route does limit the population of vulnerable persons. The phone route provides far better pickings; the equivalent of a valley full of fat deer to a hungry tiger.

We will come to miss the days that long distance phone service cost a lot of money.

Armageddon? No, more like stagflation

BostonHerald.com - Business: Economic `Armageddon' predicted

The 'A' word is major hype, on reading the article it's clear Roach has a tendency to hyperbole. What he describes is more like the stagflation of the 1970s, or perhaps something similar to Japan's prolonged slump. He thinks it most likely we'll muddle throught somehow, probably with higher inflation.

The Economist has made much the same warning for a while, as has Krugman and DeLong. DeLong has frequently pointed out that current 30 year Treasury rates are insane, and only make sense for buyers who expect to lose money but figure it's worthwile to keep the US running (eg. China). Bush could have acted to make this less likely, but he chose power. I'd love to know what Warren Buffett thinks of this.

One part rings very true to me -- the debt trap. I've been surprised lately, when speaking to friends of mine with good incomes, how many are in significant debt. Many have run up large debts paying for high tuition private schools for their children -- from preschool to graduate school. Others have spent fortunes on homes, following traditional advice to "live in one's investment" and in response to the NASDAQ crash of the 00s.

If we do hit something like this, it wouldn't be restricted to the US. It would take down the world, and it could plunge China into bloody chaos. Our best hope may be a more sedate stagflation -- and hope China forges ahead and drags us along. I do note some prescient friends of mine started betting on inflation about a year ago. I admit I've been hedging my own bets.

Of course if one believes a true meltdown lies ahead, it would be better to invest in friends, medications, tools, and shelter. I don't give that kind of outcome more than a 5-10% chance in the near term.

Economic `Armageddon' predicted
By Brett Arends/ On State Street
Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.

Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.

His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic `armageddon'.

Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, ``it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.''

Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.''

The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants.

The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded.

Less a case of ``Armageddon,'' maybe, than of a ``Perfect Storm.''

Roach marshalled alarming facts to support his argument.

To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.

That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.

Sustainable? Hardly.

Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.

Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.

Today the figure is 85 percent.

Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.

Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet.

You don't have to ask a Wall Street economist to know this, of course. Watch people wielding their credit cards this Christmas.

Roach's analysis isn't entirely new. But recent events give it extra force.

The dollar is hitting fresh lows against currencies from the yen to the euro.

Its parachute failed to open over the weekend, when a meeting of the world's top finance ministers produced no promise of concerted intervention.

It has farther to fall, especially against Asian currencies, analysts agree.

The Fed chairman was drawn to warn on the dollar, and interest rates, on Friday.

Roach could not be reached for comment yesterday. A source who heard the presentation concluded that a ``spectacular wave of bankruptcies'' is possible.

Smart people downtown agree with much of the analysis. It is undeniable that America is living in a ``debt bubble'' of record proportions.

But they argue there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms.

Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade.

It may be the only way out of the trap.

Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.

You wouldn't want to hold 30-year Treasuries, which today yield just 4.83 percent.

Toffler: of Future Shock fame

William Gibson

'Today, the technologies of deception are developing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Which means we can use a television camera, plus special effects, plus computers, etc. to falsify reality so perfectly that nobody can tell the difference. And the consequences of that eventually could be a society in which nobody believes, everybody knows that seeing is not believing, and nobody believes anything. With the exception of a small minority that decides to believe one thing fanatically. And that's a dangerous social/cultural situation.

One of the consequences of living through a period like this, which is in fact a revolutionary period, is that the entire structure of society and the processes of change become nonlinear. And nonlinearity I think is defined almost by the statement that 'small inputs can have large consequences.' While large inputs can sometimes have very small consequences. That also means in a political sense that very small groups can, under a given set of circumstances, achieve power. And that is a very threatening idea for anything remotely resembling what we believe to be democracy. So we're going into a period, I think, of high turbulence and considerable danger, along with enormous possibilities.'

--interview with Alvin Toffler, in Modulations: A History of Electronic Music

Eerie. I'd wondered where Toffler went after the Future Shock books I read as a child. In retrospect the shocks he described were only the merest hints of times to come. As too our shocks shall seem but minor things ...

As goes deception and verification, so goes offensive and defensive weapons.

Body and Soul: Hunger in Iraq

Body and Soul: Hunger:

A woman who'd sworn off blogging post-election is stirred to write again -- by the starvation of Iraqi children. A consequence of our discount-conquest -- an invasion without the forces to provide security, a conquest designed around GWB's electoral calendar and electoral needs.

I left a comment:

Imagine if one were to create a website composed entirely of pictures of these children. Someone in Iraq would have to provide the pictures. A gallery of hundreds or thousands of pictures. Whatever we could get.

Once a week each of us prints out one of the pictures and mails it to the only people with any power:

Tom DeLay
George Bush
Bill Frist

That's all. One picture a week. With or without a comment.