China 3.0

This report from the European Council on Foreign Relations aims to give Western readers a sense of the debate about China's future among its policy and intellectual elite. The funny thing about China is that even the elites have no idea where it's going. This is not unrelated to the mini-boom in real estate in large cities on the US west coast and in NYC. On the other hand, one of the economists in the survey writes confidently about continued 8% GDP growth rates and a Chinese economy in 2030 that will be twice as large as that of the US.

[ Mark Leonard: What does the new China think? ] ... The Chinese like to think of history progressing in 30-year cycles. They think of China 1.0 as the years of Mao Zedong, which lasted from 1949 to 1978, when China had a planned economy, a Leninist political system, and a foreign policy of spreading global revolution. China 2.0 was the China that began with Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and spanned a generation until the financial crisis of 2008. Deng’s economic policy – launched under the label of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – was defined by export-led growth backed up by “financial repression”. Deng’s political agenda was characterised by the quest for stability and elite consensus in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre. And his foreign-policy outlook was about creating a peaceful environment for China’s development by quietly amassing power and keeping a low profile.

Since the global financial meltdown of 2008, China has been facing a crisis of success as each of the three goals of Deng’s era – affluence, stability, and power – is seen as the source of new problems. François Godement has characterised it as a success trap: the incredible achievements of the past have built up a powerful constituency for each of the policies of the Deng era but sticking to them now runs the risk of being self-defeating. Incredible as it might seem, some intellectuals have started to talk of the Hu–Wen era, which delivered an average of 10 percent annual growth, as a “lost decade” because much-needed reforms were not made. China 3.0 will be defined by a quest for solutions to these three crises.

[ Zhao Jing -- "Michael Anti" ] ... smart censorship hasn’t stopped the Chinanet from developing into a genuine public sphere – a “battlefield” for public opinion and a nightmare for some Chinese officials. China’s 300 million microbloggers – equivalent to the entire population of the United States – constitute a powerful force. For example, the authorities’ attempt to cover up a train crash in Wenzhou in southern China in July 2011 caused huge anger among Chinese netizens. In the first five days after the train crash, 10 million people posted criticisms of the government on social media – something that had never happened before in China. This year, the former railways minister was sacked and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

... So why is Chinese social networking booming despite the censorship? Part of the reason is the Chinese language. Posts on Twitter and Twitter clones such as Weibo are limited to 140 characters. In English that comes to about 20 words or a sentence with a short link – in effect, a headline. But in Chinese you can write a whole paragraph or tell a whole story in 140 characters. One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. In some ways, Weibo (which means “microblog” in Chinese) is more like Facebook than Twitter. As far as the Chinese are concerned, if something is not on Weibo, it does not exist.

The Chinanet is changing the way people in China think and live. It has given the voiceless a channel to make their voices heard. In the past, China had a petition system – a remedy outside the judicial system that allowed ordinary people to bypass corrupt local officials and appeal directly to the central authorities. But if you have a lot of people going to Beijing, it increases the risk of a revolution. In recent years, many people going to Beijing have been sent back or even thrown into black jails. But now we have Weibo – an alternative way for people to petition the government from their mobile phones.

Some of these complaints are picked up by reporters, professors, or celebrities. The most popular microblogger in China, Yao Chen, has about 21 million followers – almost like a national television station. So, despite censorship, Weibo has given 300 million Chinese people a real chance to talk to each other every day. In fact, it’s the first time there has been a real public sphere in China.

See also Is there a China model? (“performance legitimacy”), and these arguments by venture capitalist and PRC apologist Eric X. Li:

TED blog: ...

1. Adaptability: Political scientists say that one-party systems are incapable of self-correction. Li counters this with the fact that the Party has self-corrected dramatically in the last 64 years, more than any other country in recent memory. The Party’s policies encompassed land collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, and Jiang Zemin opening Party membership to private businesspeople — “something unimaginable during Mao’s rule.” And the Party self-corrects in dramatic fashion. New rules get enacted to correct past mistakes, such as term limits with mandatory retirement rates. We also often hear that China is in dire need of political reform, but Li argues this is rhetoric — even if critics don’t see the reform they want to see, political reforms have never stopped. Chinese society is unrecognizable today as compared to 30 years ago. In fact, Li says, “I would venture to suggest that the Party is world’s leading expert in political reform.”

2. Meritocracy Another assumption is that one-party rule leads to a closed political system in which power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, leading to bad governance and corruption. Li argues that actually, the Party is one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world. Only one fifth of Politburo members come from privileged backgrounds, and in the Central Committee of more than 300, the percentage is even smaller. This is thanks to a body little known to Westerners — the Party’s Organization Department system that guides candidates through integrated career tracks for Chinese officials, recruiting college graduates into entry-level positions and promoting them through the ranks, including high officialdom — a process requiring up to three decades. While patronage plays a role, merit is the underlying driver, says Li. “Within this system,” Li says, “and this is not a put-down – merely a statement of fact: George W. Bush and Barack Obama, before running for president, would not have made small-county chief in China’s system.”

3. Legitimacy Westerners assume that multiparty elections with universal suffrage is the only source of legitimacy. When asked how the Party justifies legitimacy, Li asks, “How about competency?” He cites the fact that since 1949 when the Party took over, China was mired in civil war and foreign aggression, and its average life expectancy was 41. Today, it’s the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls of public attitudes suggest consistently that citizens are highly satisfied with how the country and nation are progressing. A Financial Times survey recently released suggests that 93% of China’s Generation Y are optimistic about their country’s future. Says Li: “If this isn’t legitimacy, I don’t know what is.” Contrast this, he suggests, to the dismal performance of many electoral democracies around the world: “Governments get elected and then fall below approval a few months later and stay there or fall until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of ‘elect and regret.’”

Of course, Li concedes the country faces enormous challenges: pollution, population, food safety, and on the political front, corruption, which is widespread and undermines moral legitimacy. But the argument that the one-party system causes corruption doesn’t hold water. According to the Transparency International index of corruption, China has recently ranked between 70 and 80 among 170 countries and moving up, while India, the largest electoral democracy in the world, is at 95 and dropping.

Erdos and Tao

Paul Erdos and Terence Tao in 1985. Tao would have been 10 years old or so. (From Tao's G+ feed.) Tao is possibly SMPY's most famous alumnus, although I am not 100% sure.

Erdos slang:

Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε))
Women were "bosses"
Men were "slaves"
People who stopped doing mathematics had "died"
People who physically died had "left"
Alcoholic drinks were "poison"
Music was "noise"
People who had married were "captured"
People who had divorced were "liberated"
To give a mathematical lecture was "to preach"
To give an oral exam to a student was "to torture" him/her.

Spy vs Spy

You'd have to be very naive to think that national intelligence agencies don't have dedicated hacking and information security penetration operations. In fact, if the US lacked this capability our spymasters would be derelict in their duty. Most of the complaining about foreign hacking or signals intelligence is just playing to (the dumb or naive part of) the domestic audience.

It was always amusing to play spot the Fed at Def Con ;-)

The manpower necessary to practice traditional SIGINT can be found in well-defined places -- you need people with CS, EE, Physics and Math backgrounds. For crypto you need very smart guys with math ability. But hacking/cracking involves a certain obsessive-compulsive personality component: you have to focus really hard on ugly bits of (often poorly designed) code and immerse yourself in the inelegant details. There's also an associated anti-authoritarian streak, which clashes with the nature of government service. So it's challenging for the spooks to recruit and retain hacker/cracker talent. The suits coexist uneasily with the "wild-type" found at places like Def Con. (Did I ever mention I almost accepted a summer job offer from the Institute for Defense Analysis after I graduated from Caltech? That's yet another story ...)

Here's something about TAO ("Tailored Access Operations"!), within the NSA.

Foreign Policy: ... By the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009, TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the U.S. intelligence community. "It's become an industry unto itself," a former NSA official said of TAO at the time. "They go places and get things that nobody else in the IC [intelligence community] can."

Given the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains, extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but very firmly warned by senior U.S. intelligence officials not to describe its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts. According to a senior U.S. defense official who is familiar with TAO's work, "The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO] the better."

The word among NSA officials is that if you want to get promoted or recognized, get a transfer to TAO as soon as you can. The current head of the NSA's SIGINT Directorate, Teresa Shea, 54, got her current job in large part because of the work she did as chief of TAO in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the unit earned plaudits for its ability to collect extremely hard-to-come-by information during the latter part of George W. Bush's administration. We do not know what the information was, but sources suggest that it must have been pretty important to propel Shea to her position today. But according to a recently retired NSA official, TAO "is the place to be right now."

There's no question that TAO has continued to grow in size and importance since Obama took office in 2009, which is indicative of its outsized role. In recent years, TAO's collection operations have expanded from Fort Meade to some of the agency's most important listening posts in the United States. There are now mini-TAO units operating at the huge NSA SIGINT intercept and processing centers at NSA Hawaii at Wahiawa on the island of Oahu; NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and NSA Texas at the Medina Annex outside San Antonio, Texas; and within the huge NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.

The problem is that TAO has become so large and produces so much valuable intelligence information that it has become virtually impossible to hide it anymore. The Chinese government is certainly aware of TAO's activities. The "mountains of data" statement by China's top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, is clearly an implied threat by Beijing to release this data. Thus it is unlikely that President Obama pressed President Xi too hard at the Sunnydale summit on the question of China's cyber-espionage activities. As any high-stakes poker player knows, you can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the table knows what cards you have in your hand.

The ratchet of power

I voted twice for Obama, and always despised Bush-Cheney. But I can't disagree with Cheney's remarks below.

New Yorker: After Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President but before he took the oath of office, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an exit interview to Rush Limbaugh. Under George W. Bush, Cheney was the architect, along with his legal counsel, David Addington, of a dramatic expansion of executive authority—a power grab that Obama criticized, fiercely, on the campaign trail, and promised to “reverse.” But when Limbaugh inquired about this criticism Cheney swatted it aside, saying, “My guess is that, once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, they will appreciate some of the things we’ve put in place.”

See also Making Alberto Gonzales Look Good.

If you can't fix it you've got to stand it

I have to give the Economist editors credit for the cojones to print a Brokeback Mountain cover with Obama and Xi: If you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

Compare the assumptions I made in some 2004 calculations to the widget below.

Horizons of truth

I'm putting these links and quotes here for my future reference. Sorry if this post seems disjointed and confusing. The first link below is a nice historical description of Paul Cohen and his work on the Continuum Hypothesis. Amusingly, Cohen once wrote

[Cohen:] ... Even if the formalist position is adopted, in actual thinking about mathematics one can have no intuition unless one assumes that models exist and that the structures are real.

So, let me say that I will ascribe to Skolem a view, not explicitly stated by him, that there is a reality to mathematics, but axioms cannot describe it. Indeed one goes further and says that there is no reason to think that any axiom system can adequately describe it.

[Kanamori:] Cohen then returned to the bedrock of number theory and gave as an example the twin primes conjecture as beyond the reach of proof. “Is it not very likely that, simply as a random set of numbers, the primes do satisfy the hypothesis, but there is no logical law that implies this?” [But weak twin primes has been proved!]

Cohen and Set Theory (Kanamori)
Skolem and pessimism about proof in mathematics (Cohen)
The discovery of forcing (Cohen)

Cohen on discovering Godel's Incompleteness Theorem as a graduate student. (From My interaction with Kurt Godel, reprinted in Cohen's Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis.)

... I still had a feeling of skepticism about Godel's work, but skepticism mixed with awe and admiration.

I can say my feeling was roughly this: How can someone thinking about logic in almost philosophical terms discover a result that had implications for Diophantine equations? ... I closed the book and tried to rediscover the proof, which I still feel is the best way to understand things. I totally capitulated. The Incompleteness Theorem was true, and Godel was far superior to me in understanding the nature of mathematics.

Although the proof was basically simple, when stripped to its essentials I felt that its discoverer was above me and other mere mortals in his ability to understand what mathematics -- and even human thought, for that matter -- really was. From that moment on, my regard for Godel was so high that I almost felt it would be beyond my wildest dreams to meet him and discover for myself how he thought about mathematics and the fount from which his deep intuition flowed. I could imagine myself as a clever mathematician solving difficult problems, but how could I emulate a result of the magnitude of the Incompleteness Theorem? There it stood, in splendid isolation and majesty, not allowing any kind of completion or addition because it answered the basic questions with such finality.

What is my attitude toward foundational work in mathematics, logic and set theory? the nature of proof and rigor? See this earlier post on the relation between physics and mathematics (GC = Gregory Chaitin).

... Let's recall David Deutsch's 1982 statement:

The reason why we find it possible to construct, say, electronic calculators, and indeed why we can perform mental arithmetic, cannot be found in mathematics or logic. The reason is that the laws of physics "happen" to permit the existence of physical models for the operations of arithmetic such as addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Does this apply to mathematics too? ...

GC: But mathematicians shouldn't think they can replace physicists: There's a beautiful little 1943 book on Experiment and Theory in Physics by Max Born where he decries the view that mathematics can enable us to discover how the world works by pure thought, without substantial input from experiment.

CC: What about set theory? Does this have anything to do with physics?

GC: I think so. I think it's reasonable to demand that set theory has to apply to our universe. In my opinion it's a fantasy to talk about infinities or Cantorian cardinals that are larger than what you have in your physical universe. And what's our universe actually like?

a finite universe?
discrete but infinite universe (ℵ0)?
universe with continuity and real numbers (ℵ1)?
universe with higher-order cardinals (≥ ℵ2)?
Does it really make sense to postulate higher-order infinities than you have in your physical universe? Does it make sense to believe in real numbers if our world is actually discrete? Does it make sense to believe in the set {0, 1, 2, ...} of all natural numbers if our world is really finite?

CC: Of course, we may never know if our universe is finite or not. And we may never know if at the bottom level the physical universe is discrete or continuous...

GC: Amazingly enough, Cris, there is some evidence that the world may be discrete, and even, in a way, two-dimensional. There's something called the holographic principle, and something else called the Bekenstein bound. These ideas come from trying to understand black holes using thermodynamics. The tentative conclusion is that any physical system only contains a finite number of bits of information, which in fact grows as the surface area of the physical system, not as the volume of the system as you might expect, whence the term ``holographic.'' ...

CC: We seem to have concluded that mathematics depends on physics, haven't we? But mathematics is the main tool to understand physics. Don't we have some kind of circularity?

GC: Yeah, that sounds very bad! But if math is actually, as Imre Lakatos termed it, quasi-empirical, then that's exactly what you'd expect. And as you know Cris, for years I've been arguing that information-theoretic incompleteness results inevitably push us in the direction of a quasi-empirical view of math, one in which math and physics are different, but maybe not as different as most people think. As Vladimir Arnold provocatively puts it, math and physics are the same, except that in math the experiments are a lot cheaper!

CC: In a sense the relationship between mathematics and physics looks similar to the relationship between meta-mathematics and mathematics. The incompleteness theorem puts a limit on what we can do in axiomatic mathematics, but its proof is built using a substantial amount of mathematics!

GC: What do you mean, Cris?

CC: Because mathematics is incomplete, but incompleteness is proved within mathematics, meta-mathematics is itself incomplete, so we have a kind of unending uncertainty in mathematics. This seems to be replicated in physics as well: Our understanding of physics comes through mathematics, but mathematics is as certain (or uncertain) as physics, because it depends on the physical laws of the universe where mathematics is done, so again we seem to have unending uncertainty. Furthermore, because physics is uncertain, you can derive a new form of uncertainty principle for mathematics itself...

GC: Well, I don't believe in absolute truth, in total certainty. Maybe it exists in the Platonic world of ideas, or in the mind of God---I guess that's why I became a mathematician---but I don't think it exists down here on Earth where we are. Ultimately, I think that that's what incompleteness forces us to do, to accept a spectrum, a continuum, of possible truth values, not just black and white absolute truth.

In other words, I think incompleteness means that we have to also accept heuristic proofs, the kinds of proofs that George Pólya liked, arguments that are rather convincing even if they are not totally rigorous, the kinds of proofs that physicists like. Jonathan Borwein and David Bailey talk a lot about the advantages of that kind of approach in their two-volume work on experimental mathematics. Sometimes the evidence is pretty convincing even if it's not a conventional proof. For example, if two real numbers calculated for thousands of digits look exactly alike...

CC: It's true, Greg, that even now, a century after Gödel's birth, incompleteness remains controversial. I just discovered two recent essays by important mathematicians, Paul Cohen and Jack Schwartz.* Have you seen these essays?

*P. J. Cohen, ``Skolem and pessimism about proof in mathematics,'' Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2005) 363, 2407-2418; J. T. Schwartz, ``Do the integers exist? The unknowability of arithmetic consistency,'' Comm. Pure & Appl. Math. (2005) LVIII, 1280-1286.

GC: No.

CC: Listen to what Cohen has to say:

``I believe that the vast majority of statements about the integers are totally and permanently beyond proof in any reasonable system.''

And according to Schwartz,

``truly comprehensive search for an inconsistency in any set of axioms is impossible.''

GC: Well, my current model of mathematics is that it's a living organism that develops and evolves, forever. That's a long way from the traditional Platonic view that mathematical truth is perfect, static and eternal.

CC: What about Einstein's famous statement that

``Insofar as mathematical theorems refer to reality, they are not sure, and insofar as they are sure, they do not refer to reality.''

Still valid?

GC: Or, slightly misquoting Pablo Picasso, theories are lies that help us to see the truth!

Weak Meat Strong Eat

弱肉強食

These characters mean "Weak Meat Strong Eat" -- the weak are meat for the strong. It's a Chinese (and Japanese) saying. Sometimes it is even translated as "Survival of the fittest"!

One of the repeated themes in Cloud Atlas is: The weak are meat the strong do eat.  David Mitchell, the author, lived in Japan for many years and has a Japanese wife. I suspect he learned this phrasing from the Japanese.

My favorite sub-plot in Cloud Atlas is the Orison of Sonmi 451. Hmm... what is psychogenomics? (See also Dune.)

Cloud Atlas: ... sourced his supply of psychogenomics theses from an obscure tech institute in Baikal. The original author of my x-postgrad’s work was a production zone immigrant named Yusouf Suleiman. Xtremists were killing genomicists in Siberia at that time, and Suleiman and three of his professors were blown up by a car bomb. Baikal being Baikal, Suleiman’s research languished in obscurity for ten years until it was sold on. The agent liaised with contacts at Papa Song Corp to instream Suleiman’s ascension neuro-formula to our Soap. Yoona939 was the prime specimen; I was a modified backup. If all that sounds unlikely, Hae-Joo added, I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unxpected places.

Some video of Suleiman (identified by caption) appears in the movie in the scene in which Hae-Joo educates Sonmi about fabricants and genetic engineering. Suleiman is lecturing in front of a board covered with equations -- no snail shells in sight.

Morgan Freeman on physics and physicists

Freeman is the host of the Science Channel show Through the Wormhole. (Thanks to a dude at PIMCO for sending me this video :-)




I think I'm the only physicist on the show who actually went through a wormhole -- in a VW bug, no less :-)

All that is left is the wind in the pines

The FT's Asia editor has lunch with Japan scholar Donald Keene (shown above with Yukio Mishima and Hiroshi Akutagawa). Keene has a keen intelligence and fine literary and historical sensibilities. He recently became a Japanese citizen at the age of 89. I highly recommend his memoir Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. See also Japanese Diaries and Yukio Mishima. (Via Gwern.)

Financial Times: ... I steer Keene back more than 70 years to when, as an 18-year-old, he came across a translation of The Tale of Genji in the Astor Hotel in New York. At the time, Keene was studying French and Greek literature at Columbia University, having won a scholarship to study there at the age of 16. He bought the book because, at 59 cents, the epic story, written 1,100 years ago, contained more words per dollar than any book in the store. That was how the love affair began.

... “He was an extraordinary person,” says Keene, who knew Mishima well. They had met, symbolically enough, outside Tokyo’s Kabuki-za theatre in 1954, and had gone to see plays together. Keene had translated one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays.

“He died, as you know, at the age of 45, leaving at least 45 stacked volumes of novels, plays, criticism, poetry.” Mishima slit his belly after leading a failed, and farcical, coup to restore the emperor’s power but Keene thinks he committed suicide because he was passed over for the Nobel Prize. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima had written Keene a letter with the line, “I envy the athletes who know if they are first, second or third.” Keene says: “That was all he said but I knew exactly what he meant.” The irony was that Kawabata, who did win the Nobel Prize, also committed suicide because of the pressure of living up to his new reputation.

As our coffee arrives, I mention the writer Jun Takami (1907-1965), one of whose plays ends with the line, “All that is left is the wind in the pines.” Keene gives me an ecstatic look. “Yes, it’s the most marvellous end to any play. There’s nothing on the stage at all, nothing but the pine.” He shakes his head at the sadness and the beauty. “Oh, what a stroke of genius that was. I think of it now and I’ve got shivers going down my spine.”

One passage in Takami’s diaries was written in 1944 during the wartime bombing of Tokyo when he was trying to get his mother to safety in the countryside. At Ueno station “everybody is quiet, everybody’s just moving slowly and no one is trying to get ahead of anybody else,” says Keene. “And Takami thought, ‘I want to live with these people. I want to die with these people’. And that is what I [Keene] thought in January, when I was in hospital. ‘I want to live with these people. I want to die with these people.’”

Keene is in a kind of reverie by now, lost in the personal and literary wanderings of a lifetime. “I knew Takami Jun,” he says, using the Japanese name order. “He was a very elegant man. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a white suit and he was surrounded by about seven or eight young women. And he was smiling.” Keene’s eyes are moist. He is staring past me or through me. The restaurant is still quite empty but Keene has flooded it with the memories of people, mostly long dead. He stands to leave and is helped up the narrow stairs to the city above. Down in the basement, I am left at the empty table. There is nothing, not even the wind in the pines.

Lore

This is a beautiful but difficult movie. You can watch it right now on Google Play. Interview with director Cate Shortland.

See also Bitter Defeat.

The genetics of humanness

Roughly speaking, modern humans differ from chimpanzees with probability 0.01 at a particular base in the genome, from neanderthals with probability 0.003, and from each other with probability 0.001 (this final number varies by about 15% depending on ancestral population). The neanderthal research is particularly interesting in that we will eventually be able to determine the specific genetic changes that make modern humans different (smarter?) than neanderthals. Certain regions in the genome, known as HARs (Human Accelerated Regions) are conserved in mammals such as mice, dogs, chimpanzees, even neanderthals, but show rapid recent changes in humans. It's reasonable to suspect that these regions are doing interesting things ...

See also this recent paper: Analysis of Human Accelerated DNA Regions Using Archaic Hominin Genomes (PLoS).

First GWAS hits for cognitive ability

This is NOT the BGI Cognitive Genomics project, it's the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. Their main phenotype is educational attainment, but they also have Swedish conscript scores for cognitive ability. IIUC the largest effect size is smaller than that for the corresponding height loci (1/4.5 as big in units of population SD; 1/20 as big in units of variance), which suggests that cognitive ability will be harder than, but perhaps not qualitatively different from, height. The results also support the conclusion from SNP-based heritability estimates that a significant fraction of total genetic variance is due to common variants. I expect we will find that both common and rare (mutational load) variants contribute to variation in cognitive ability.

GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment (Science)

A genome-wide association study of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent SNPs are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate. Estimated effects sizes are small (R2 ≈ 0.02%), approximately 1 month of schooling per allele. A linear polygenic score from all measured SNPs accounts for ≈ 2% of the variance in both educational attainment and cognitive function. Genes in the region of the loci have previously been associated with health, cognitive, and central nervous system phenotypes, and bioinformatics analyses suggest the involvement of the anterior caudate nucleus. These findings provide promising candidate SNPs for follow-up work, and our effect size estimates can anchor power analyses in social-science genetics.

Clueless extremists may want to point and shout "Eugenics!" at these researchers, but I wouldn't recommend it. Sample author affiliations below -- no sinister Chinese institutions as far as I can tell  ;-)

1 Department of Applied Economics, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
2 Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam 3000 CA, The Netherlands.
3 Queensland Institute of Medical Research, 300 Herston Road, Brisbane, Queensland 4006, Australia.
4 Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309–0447, USA.
5 University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, The University of Queensland, Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, Queensland 4102, Australia.

...

125 Centre for Medical Systems Biology, Leiden University Medical Center, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands.
126 Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
127 Center for Experimental Social Science, Department of Economics, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA.
128 Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
129 Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm 102 15, Sweden.

I expect the future of this kind of research to look like earlier GWAS, with steady accumulation of hits now that we have passed the statistical power threshold.

Related: Myopia GWAS results (Nature Genetics).

Note Added: I've been asked by several people whether this is a discouraging result. If effect sizes are so small, won't it take enormous sample sizes to detect specific alleles accounting for a big chunk of total genetic variance? There is some relevant discussion in the supplement to the paper (see figure S22 and section 7). The answer to the question really depends on the correlation between g and years of education (most of the data these researchers had access to specified educational attainment as the phenotype, with no direct measurement of g). If, for example, the correlation is 0.5, and it is actually g that is driving the effect on years of education, then the corresponding g effect size for these alleles is (1/0.5)^2 or 4 times larger in variance units. This makes the g effect size in variance units about 5 times smaller than for the corresponding largest height locus. However, if the correlation is only 0.25, the g effect is about as big as the largest height locus. Having looked at correlations between SAT and college GPA, I'd guess that 0.5 is too large, but on the other hand in the Swedish sample for which they have both g and years of education the correlation is 0.46. Using 0.5 as the correct correlation, the minimal sample size with actual g data to detect these rs alleles is (see Fig S22) in the 20-50k range. I'd guess that, worst case, the sample size requirements are still less than an order of magnitude larger for g than for height. However, one can't be very confident of any guess because of the uncertainties discussed above, and because we've only seen the first few alleles.

Long term investing

Will it move the needle? Perhaps.

New Yorker: ... This week, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, invoked Rhodes’s gift as the inspiration behind a large new scholarship for study not in America but in China. He is hoping that familiarity with the world’s rising superpower will blunt growing American anxiety about changes in status. “Anger can lead to trade problems, and ultimately to military confrontation,” he told me. “We had to find a way to stop or ameliorate that situation.” The scholarship will draw two hundred students a year to a one-year English-language master’s program at a dedicated new college inside Tsinghua University. Twenty per cent of the winners will be from China, forty-five per cent from America, and the remainder from elsewhere. Schwarzman is giving a hundred million of a personal fortune estimated at $6.5 billion, and raising another two hundred million largely from blue-chip companies with big investments in China, to create an endowment that the Times calls “one of the largest single gifts to education in the world and one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever in China.”

[Schwarzman:] ... I sat down with President Chen and I said to him, “If we do this, what I really want to do is construct a program that that has the same prestige as the Rhodes, because those are the students that I’m aiming for.” In 1902, going to Oxford was sine qua non. J. P. Morgan worked in London after he graduated from college, because that’s what you did. And then he came back to the States.

But the world has certainly changed, and one of the things that was really driving me to do this is that I could see the negative attitudes that people had toward China were bubbling. The financial crisis, where growth rates in Europe went to zero or worse— everything went down; jobs in the United States have been very slow to come back. By the same token, in China they’re growing, at that point, nine per cent a year. And meanwhile the West is quite damaged and remains damaged from a job-creation point of view.

And I was convinced that that would create frustration in the West, and frustration would lead to anger, and that anger can lead to trade problems, and ultimately to military confrontation. And if China was going to grow at two to three times the [rate of] so-called developed countries, that within two decades, if those trends continue, they’d go from the No. 2 economy in the world to the No. 1, and whatever problems you are seeing today in these areas of frustration would be that much greater. And at a certain point, it seemed logical to me that you’d start to have some really bad things with a much higher probability of occurring. We had to find a way to stop or ameliorate that situation.

And I looked at this idea, this type of program, as a way to produce people who would have that kind of understanding of China that they wouldn’t have had, as they go back to their regular lives—to observe what’s happening in China and interpret it to their constituencies and their industries and their world. This network, at maturity, will be ten thousand kids; some will be seventy-five years old, but that’s a lot of people, spread around the world at a very high level. And so they can react to China, interpret what they’re doing. They can tell the Chinese that they’ve overdone it in certain cases, and they can also form their own global network to deal with other issues, whether they’re global or bilateral, because they’ll know people who are, I guess you would say, more kindred souls, who have a shared experience. So that’s what’s behind this.

When I met with Stephen Smale recently he said the undergraduate math students at Beida (Beijing University) and Tsinghua were the strongest group he knew of in the world today. See also Tsinghua uber alles.

Inter-universal Geometer Mochizuki

Mathematics certainly does not lack for eccentric geniuses. Mochizuki homepage. See these slides from his "pedagogical" lecture Invitation to Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory  :-)

The Paradox of the Proof: ... The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.”

This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.

“Looking at it, you feel a bit like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space,” wrote Ellenberg on his blog.

“It’s very, very weird,” says Columbia University professor Johan de Jong, who works in a related field of mathematics.

Mochizuki had created so many new mathematical tools and brought together so many disparate strands of mathematics that his paper was populated with vocabulary that nobody could understand. It was totally novel, and totally mystifying.

As Tufts professor Moon Duchin put it: “He’s really created his own world.”

It was going to take a while before anyone would be able to understand Mochizuki’s work, let alone judge whether or not his proof was right. In the ensuing months, the papers weighed like a rock in the math community. A handful of people approached it and began examining it. Others tried, then gave up. Some ignored it entirely, preferring to observe from a distance. As for the man himself, the man who had claimed to solve one of mathematics’ biggest problems, there was not a sound.

... When Mochizuki posted his papers, the math community had much reason to be enthusiastic. They were excited not just because someone had claimed to prove an important conjecture, but because of who that someone was.

Mochizuki was known to be brilliant. Born in Tokyo, he moved to New York with his parents, Kiichi and Anne Mochizuki, when he was 5 years old. He left home for high school, attending Philips Exeter Academy, a selective prep school in New Hampshire. There, he whipped through his academics with lightning speed, graduating after two years, at age 16, with advanced placements in mathematics, physics, American and European history, and Latin.

Then Mochizuki enrolled at Princeton University where, again, he finished ahead of his peers, earning his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in three years and moving quickly onto his Ph.D, which he received at age 23. After lecturing at Harvard University for two years, he returned to Japan, joining the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University. In 2002, he became a full professor at the unusually young age of 33. His early papers were widely acknowledged to be very good work.

Academic prowess is not the only characteristic that set Mochizuki apart from his peers. His friend, Oxford professor Minhyong Kim, says that Mochizuki’s most outstanding characteristic is his intense focus on work.

“Even among many mathematicians I’ve known, he seems to have an extremely high tolerance for just sitting and doing mathematics for long, long hours,” says Kim.

Mochizuki and Kim met in the early 1990s, when Mochizuki was still an undergraduate student at Princeton. Kim, on exchange from Yale University, recalls Mochizuki making his way through the works of French mathematician Alexander Grothedieck, whose books on algebraic and arithmetic geometry are a must-read for any mathematician in the field.

“Most of us gradually come to understand [Grothendieck’s works] over many years, after dipping into it here and there,” said Kim. “It adds up to thousands and thousands of pages.”

But not Mochizuki.

“Mochizuki…just read them from beginning to end sitting at his desk,” recalls Kim. “He started this process when he was still an undergraduate, and within a few years, he was just completely done.” ...

In other news, "unheralded" mathematician Yitang Zhang proves the (weak) twin primes conjecture. Remarks by his PhD supervisor at Purdue; Zhang was reputed to be one of the top mathematics students in his class at Beijing University, so, despite his difficult career path, he was not exactly an unknown quantity.

I have only limited interest in number theory (for some reason it just does not get me excited), but unlimited admiration for people like Mochizuki and Zhang (and Perelman and so on). I think someone once described Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem as a "triumph of the human spirit" -- I could not agree more!

Sisu: Mikko Salo documentary

Documentary on Crossfit athlete Mikko Salo. His resting heart rate is 31 bpm! See also here.

Great deadlift / burpee metcon @34min. Compare to lullaby :-)

Wikipedia: Sisu is a Finnish term loosely translated into English as strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any other language. Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture. However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain an action against the odds. Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu. It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter.

See Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

Next (and Next Next) Generation DNA Sequencing Methods

This is from 2012 but seems to cover most of the Next Gen platforms currently in use (for some reason he skips over the Complete Genomics slide). There seems to have been a slight plateau recently in the sequencing cost curve; I wonder whether when the next jump will happen ... The conventional wisdom is that the bioinformatics costs now dominate the sequencing cost but I think that can be fixed using existing computing technology (i.e., it is more predictable than a big breakthrough in molecular method).

Does anyone know of a comparable talk that is a bit more recent?

A hockey coach?!?

The last post, entitled To the brainy, the spoils, linked to an Economist article about management consulting. It would appear that in the public sector, the highest paid employees tend to work in a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system. (Via UOMatters)

To the brainy, the spoils

Economist: ... Big trends that befuddle clients mean big money for clever consultants. Barack Obama’s gazillion-page health reform has boosted health-care consulting; firms would rather pay up than read the blasted thing. The Dodd-Frank financial reform has done the same for financial-sector work. Energy and technology are hot, too.

Companies are reluctant to talk about their use of consultants, and consultancies are relentlessly tight-lipped. Bain is said to use code-names for clients even in internal discussions. Such secrecy makes this a hard industry to analyse.

It also lets stereotypes flourish. McKinseyites are said to be “vainies” (who come and lecture clients on the McKinsey way). BCG people are “brainies” (who spout academic theory). And the “Bainies” have a reputation for throwing bodies at delivering quick bottom-line results for clients. ...

See here for discussion of hiring practices at what I refer to as "soft-elite" firms such as consultancies.

...

4) In Rivera's research school prestige was the number one signal used by soft elite firms in evaluating prospective hires. Extracurricular activities came in second, but this is probably just a way to differentiate between applicants who have already been filtered using school prestige.

5) It is odd that the soft firms, which market themselves to clients as being super-smart repositories of brainpower (of course this is largely a fiction; see point 3 above), would rely so heavily on university admissions committees. They effectively outsource a big chunk of due diligence on their most important investment (human capital) to a group of people whose judgement they somehow trust, but perhaps without detailed understanding. When I was on the faculty at Yale I knew people in admissions and it's not clear to me that they were the best able to spot potential in 18 year olds. In studies of expert performance admissions people are less good at predicting UG GPA than a simple algorithm. (The "algorithm" is simply a weighted sum of SAT and HS GPA!)

But this doesn't matter if the success of HYPS grads becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once soft elite firms and large parts of the rest of society (in particular, clients) have accepted the idea that elite universities should be trusted to do the filtering, these schools will automatically produce large numbers of successful alumni -- the imprimatur itself has value. The outsourcing of human capital filtering is more dangerous for hard elite firms, with their more objective criteria: if they find that Yale grads aren't actually any good at pricing derivatives, writing code or designing chips, then they'll have to adopt a different filter. Fortunately, since even the dumbed down SAT is still pretty g loaded, hard elite firms can be confident that the lion's share of top talent is at elite universities.

An excerpt from Lauren Rivera's article on elite firm hiring:

... In addition to such an intelligence-based perspective on university admissions, evaluators frequently adopted an instrumental and unconstrained view of university enrollment, perceiving that students typically “go to the best school they got into” (lawyer, Hispanic, male). Consequently, in the minds of evaluators, prestige rankings provided a quick way to sort candidates by “brainpower.” When sorting the “mock” resumes, an investment banking recruiter (white, female) charged with screening resumes at her firm revealed how such assumptions played out in application review. She remarked, “Her [Sarah's] grades are lower but she went to Harvard so she's definitely well-endowed in the brain category…Jonathan… went to Princeton, so he clearly didn’t get the short end of the stick in terms of smarts.” This halo effect of school prestige, combined with the prevalent belief that the daily work performed within professional service firms was “not rocket science” (see Rivera, 2010a) gave evaluators confidence that the possession of an elite credential was a sufficient signal of a candidate's ability to perform the analytical capacities of the job. Even in the quantitatively rigorous field of consulting [HA HA HA], a junior partner (white, male) asserted, “I’ve come to the stage where I trust that if the person has gone to Wharton, they can do math.”

By contrast, failure to attend an “elite” school, as conceptualized by evaluators, was an indicator of intellectual failure, regardless of a student's grades or standardized test scores. Many evaluators believed that high achieving students at lesser ranked institutions “didn’t get in to a good school,” must have “slipped up,” or otherwise warranted a “question mark” around their analytical abilities. ...

Nature News: Chinese project probes the genetics of genius

This article is mostly correct -- see my comments below in [[ brackets ]]. As usual the Chinese connection is emphasized in the title, even though Plomin (Kings College London) is the more experienced researcher in this area, and most of our DNA samples come from US citizens.

To clarify, my main motivation for understanding the genetics of cognition derives from the observation that the human brain, the most complex object we know of in the universe, is produced from a genetic code of only gigabits in length. How, exactly, this works is one of the greatest scientific mysteries. Genomic selection and other "spin-offs" from this research are of secondary interest.

Nature News: The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts. Plunging into an area that is littered with failures and riven with controversy, the researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 of these high-fliers in an ambitious project to find the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence.

[[ SMPY qualifiers scored at the 1 in 10k level on the math portion of the SAT. Due to the positive correlation between M and V they almost all have V scores in the top half of one percent. ]]

The project, which was launched in August 2012 and is slated to begin data analysis in the next few months, has spawned wild accusations of eugenics plots, as well as more measured objections by social scientists who view such research as a distraction from pressing societal issues. Some geneticists, however, take issue with the study for a different reason. They say that it is highly unlikely to find anything of interest — because the sample size is too small and intelligence is too complex.

Earlier large studies with the same goal have failed. But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample will give them an edge, because it should be enriched with bits of DNA that confer effects on intelligence. “An exceptional person gets you an order of magnitude more statistical power than if you took random people from the population — I’d say we have a fighting chance,” says Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist from Michigan State University in East Lansing, who acts as a scientific adviser to BGI and is one of the project’s leaders.

“If they think they’re likely to get much useful data out of this study, they’re almost certainly wrong,” says Daniel MacArthur, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is not against intelligence studies in principle, despite the visceral reactions they provoke in some people. “Studying intelligence is useful for understanding cognitive function, or diseases” that affect it, he says. But he questions whether the study will work.

[[ Not exactly sure what Dan means by "useful data" here. It's true that we don't anticipate getting more than a few genome-wide significant hits from a GWAS analysis. We may get zero! ]]

... Both Plomin and Hsu are passionate enough to take a shot, although their goals differ. Hsu is focused on the genetic basis of extreme intelligence. “My primary interest is why Einstein or Hawking is different from a normal person,” he says. Plomin is sequencing high-performers as a way of homing in on genes that affect intelligence in the broader population. If enough of these are discovered, he thinks that it may be possible to predict someone’s intelligence from an early age, and to offer help to children who are at risk of learning disabilities.

[[ This may give the false impression that it's a different genetic mechanism that gives rise to "extreme" intelligence as opposed to normal variation. ]]

Publicity around the project has spawned some extreme reactions. An article published in March entitled ‘China is Engineering Genius Babies’ in the US arts and culture magazine VICE branded the study “a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project” that will allow parents to predict the IQs of embryos and selectively breed ever-smarter children. (“That’s nuts,” says Hsu.) “Intelligence does push a lot of buttons. It’s like waving a red flag to a bull,” says Plomin. He argues that there is nothing wrong with using genetic information as the basis of educational interventions. “I’m interested in predicting learning problems early rather than waiting until kids get to school and then fail,” he says. ...

NGS, GATK and all that

This is a nice introduction to the nuts and bolts of next-generation sequencing. Slides. Related talks from a workshop on GATK (Broad Institute's Genome Analysis Tool Kit).

Dennett and Intuition Pumps

At the bookstore today I spent some time looking at Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett's new book. I highly recommend his Darwin's Dangerous Idea, discussed earlier here. I'm not a big fan of Dennett's work on free will and determinism (for my views, see this old post and also here), but we seem to share the same opinion of John Searle's Chinese Room.

For more Dennett, see this Stanford Humanities Center lecture (iTunes video).

NYTimes: ... The new book, largely adapted from previous writings, is also a lively primer on the radical answers Mr. Dennett has elaborated to the big questions in his nearly five decades in philosophy, delivered to a popular audience in books like “Consciousness Explained” (1991), “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995) and “Freedom Evolves.”

The mind? A collection of computerlike information processes, which happen to take place in carbon-based rather than silicon-based hardware.

The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams.

The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”

If he hadn’t grown up in an academic family, Mr. Dennett likes to say, he probably would’ve been an engineer. From his beginnings in the philosophical hothouses of early 1960s Harvard and Oxford, he had a feeling of being out of step joined by a precocious self-confidence.

As an undergraduate, he transferred from Wesleyan University to Harvard so he could study with the great logician W. V. O. Quine and explain to him why he was wrong. “Sheer sophomoric overconfidence,” Mr. Dennett recalled.

As a doctoral student at Oxford, then the center of the philosophical universe, he studied with the eminent natural-language philosopher Gilbert Ryle but increasingly found himself drawn to a more scientific view of the mind.

“I vividly recall sitting with my landlord’s son, a medical student, and asking him, ‘What is the brain made of?’ ” Mr. Dennett said. “He drew me a simple picture of a neuron, and pretty soon I was off to the races.”

In 1969, Mr. Dennett began keeping his “Philosophical Lexicon,” a dictionary of cheeky pseudo-terms playing on the names of mostly 20th-century philosophers, including himself. (“dennett: an artificial enzyme used to curdle the milk of human intentionality.”) Today, his impatience with the imaginary games philosophers play — “chmess” instead of chess, he calls it — and his preference for the company of scientists lead some to question if he’s still a philosopher at all.

“I’m still proud to call myself a philosopher, but I’m not their kind of philosopher, that’s for sure,” he said. The new book reflects Mr. Dennett’s unflagging love of the fight, including some harsh whacks at longtime nemeses like the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — accused of practicing a genus of dirty intellectual tricks Mr. Dennett calls “goulding” — that some early reviewers have already called out as unsporting. (Mr. Gould died in 2002.)

Mr. Dennett also devotes a long section to a rebuttal of the famous Chinese Room thought experiment, developed by 30 years ago by the philosopher John Searle, another old antagonist, as a riposte to Mr. Dennett’s claim that computers could fully mimic consciousness.

Clinging to the idea that the mind is more than just the brain, Mr. Dennett said, is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific.”

Research Drives America

Mysteries of the universe: Upstream Color

A new film from Shane Carruth, the director of Primer. I haven't seen it yet but am looking forward to it. Carruth has chosen an independent distribution strategy, so you can watch it right now, e.g., on Amazon or streamed from other sources. Here's a picture of Carruth at Sci Foo back in 2008. When we parted company he was on his way to talk to Steven Soderbergh to start fundraising for his next film. It's been 9 years since Primer was released! Carruth has chosen a difficult path in life ...

Rotten Tomatoes:

It presents us with a glimpse of the vastness of existence, of our inner nature, and of nature without that is as equally dreadful, enveloping, and terrifying as it is beautiful.

Sci-fi might have been too familiar a word, for what may induce a kind of hallucinatory melancholy in its viewers.

Carruth may be something that the movies haven't yet seen, perhaps the first great realization of the democratization of filmmaking that digital technology and the Internet promised.

New Yorker: ... “Upstream Color” is different. Although its story is meticulously conceived and covers a much broader span of action and group of characters, it conveys a sense of having been invented spontaneously by means of the camera, as if Carruth were discovering the story in real time rather than realizing it as planned. The difference—the advance—involves more than aesthetic pleasure or even existential risk; it’s a crucial deepening of Carruth’s ideas, which are among the most philosophically sophisticated in the contemporary cinema. He works in a distinctive mode: science-fiction with overtones of transcendence. His distinctive visual style is one of spiritual impressionism, similar to that of Terrence Malick’s agile, luminous rapture—but Carruth’s images are harder-edged, more confrontational, and, above all, non-religious. Where Malick’s images are tactile, Carruth’s are physical; where Malick’s are metaphysical, Carruth’s are diaphysical—he doesn’t sanctify the mystery but reveals it through hidden realms of the material world. Carruth fulfills the basic premise of science-fiction, to tether the impossible to rational explanations—but the impossible results that he seeks to explain are of the sort that are commonly taken to be religious. His subject is identity—the hazy border zone where the mental shifts, by means of self-consciousness and other, perhaps vaguer biochemical processes, into some higher essence of selfhood that is ordinarily called the soul.

Soderbergh on Hollywood: In my view, in this business which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races. I think if I were going to run a studio I’d just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I would call Shane Carruth or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and I’d bring them in and go, ok, what do you want to do? What are the things you’re interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I’d go: O.K., look, I’m going to let you make three movies over five years, I’m going to give you this much money in production costs, I’m going to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.

Exercise response

Positive for most people, but with a lot of genetic variation. Interestingly, a fraction of the population (about 10%) can have a negative health or fitness response to training (see @40 min or so in the video). This professor's company claims to be able to predict exercise response by looking at about 30 gene variants. The talk also has some interesting results concerning high intensity training.

NYTimes: ... That original research, published in a landmark 2010 study, looked into the genetics of why some people respond to endurance exercise so robustly, while others do not. Some lucky men and women take up jogging, for example, and quickly become much more aerobically fit. Others complete the same program and develop little if any additional endurance, as measured by increases in their VO12 max, or their body’s ability to consume and distribute oxygen to laboring muscles.

For the 2010 study, Dr. Timmons and his colleagues genotyped muscle tissue from several groups of volunteers who had completed 6 to 20 weeks of endurance training. They found that about 30 variations in how genes were expressed had a significant effect on how fit people became. The new test looks for those genetic markers in people’s DNA. ...

Nasty, brutish and short?

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — "Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.", Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

Not only has natural selection not stopped since the advent of civilization, it has changed in subtle ways.

The Scientist: In 1974, the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) set up clinics in two rural villages in Gambia’s West Kiang district, offering free medical care to locals. The effect was dramatic. Thanks to good health care, better infrastructure, and accessible contraception, the villagers started living longer and having fewer children.

Over a short time, the district went through a modern-day demographic transition—a well-known fall in birth and death rates typically seen when human societies move to industrialized economies—causing natural selection to act upon the population in noticeably altered ways, according to a study published today (April 25) in Current Biology.

Alexandre Courtiol from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and Ian Rickard from Durham University found that before 1974, shorter, fatter women had the highest relative fitness—measured by the number of descendants they leave behind. But since the clinic was built, selection pressures have flip-flopped so that taller, thinner women now have the advantage.

Their results are the latest to challenge the idea that modern humans have stopped evolving due to industrialization and medical advances. Although the team did not find any actual changes in gene frequencies—the gold standard for demonstrating evolution has taken place—“the paper illustrates that natural selection persists in contemporary human populations,” said Jacob Moorad, an evolutionary biologist from Duke University who was not involved in the study. “And this force for evolutionary change is fluid.” ...