West Hunter

It’s under selection all over the place: Europe, Ethiopia, and now among the Bushmen. The advantage can’t be more vitamin D, nor is it associated with agriculture. It does have other effects. Next, the haplotype is very long, yet has been around a long time. Shouldn’t be like that. I was talking with Razib Khan about this a while back: could be that there is more than one active site on the haplotype? Epistatic? That you need at least two changes to get the positive effect, whatever it is? So recombined haplotypes that don’t hold both sites are not favored?

There is reason to believe that Australo-Melanesians used to occupy a much larger area than they do today. Let’s define them by their genetic affinity to that odd genetic trace in Amazonian Amerindians: those related include Papuans, Aboriginal Australians, Andaman Islanders ( closest), and Negrito groups in Southeast Asia and the Philippines.

Skeletal evidence says that they used to occupy all of Southeast Asia (probably at least as far north as southern China, fairly recently), and have been largely replaced by people from further north over the past few thousand years. Same is the case for the Philippines & most of Indonesia.

In fact, even further north than that: a skeleton from Tianyuan cave, not far from Beijing, shows the same genetic trace. From about 40,000 years ago. So it’s more plausible that there was a potential source population in a more geographically felicitous area ( for settling the New World) at the proper time ( ~20k BC).

Looking at recombination (roloff) should tell us approximately how long ago the admixture occurred. I would hope to see rare mtDNA haplotypes in those Amazonian Indians – Y chromosomes, considerably less likely. I would expect to see a few alleles from the Australo-Melanesians favored by selection in South America. By analogy with what we’ve seen with archaic admixture, stuff like HLA would seem likely.

It’s clear that zero gravity is bad for you. What about low (nonzero) gravity: say 0.376 or 0.166 of Earth gravity? The only way I can see to find out would be raising mice, long-term, in a centrifuge on the ISS. Has this been done?

In the days of old many kids didn’t make it to adulthood: say 40% among hunter-gatherers. To a a degree, this was caused by genetic load. High mortality purged some of that genetic load, especially to the extent that selection took the form of truncation selection. This process kept mutational load in equilibrium.

In the past century or two, this mortality has become much lower – so this form of selection has become weaker. Mutational load must be increasing. How fast? We will probably know quite soon, from sequencing recent and contemporary individuals. We’ll probably have a handle on the phenotypic impact as well.

In the meantime, we can get a rough idea of the impact of relaxed selection by looking at pioneers, populations that have expanded rapidly in the past few centuries. Some of those populations had a much higher fraction of kids survive than the typical long-term human average: in New England, after he first few years, something like 75% of kids made it to adulthood. This went on for a long time, something like a couple of hundred years – which is why 20,000 Puritan settlers have around twenty million descendants today. Similar things happened with the Quebecois. We know that this relaxed selection among pioneer types left a higher burden of Mendelian disease – not incredibly high, but higher than in similar groups that didn’t undergo a rapid expansion.

How much did this drop IQ? Can’t have been much.

The most effective health interventions are mostly cheap and generally available. Vaccinations, clean water, antibiotics – none are very expensive. The trend is for expensive treatments (usually aimed at illness fairly late in life) to also be relatively ineffective, in terms of benefits. There are some exceptions: drugs against HIV work but are fairly expensive (around $20-25 k a year), while there are a few cases where an expensive treatment actually cures a disease, like hepatitis C ($100 k). Those are the on-patent costs, not the marginal costs.

Mostly, death is ultimately caused by aging, and we can’t do much about it – an inevitable consequence of the evolutionary theory of senescence.

Money is not a panacea: The average lifespan of a billionaire is only about three years longer than average, and I’d bet that most of that is due to innate qualities of billionaires rather than special secret clinics and goat glands.

Then again, the evolutionary theory of senescence is not fundamental in the same sense that thermodynamics is. In principle you could stop aging, or reverse it – you can decrease entropy (locally) with enthalpy. Bowhead whales.

What if you could buy an extra year of youth for a million bucks (real cost). Clearly this country ( or any country) can’t afford that for everyone. Some people could: and I think it would stick in many people’s craw. Even worse if they do it by harvesting the pineal glands of children and using them to manufacture a waxy nodule that forfends age.

This is something like the days of old, pre-industrial times. Back then, the expensive, effective life-extender was food in a famine year.

I was not surprised by the recent Congressional baseball shooting. The threat is ongoing. This means that we may need enhanced security for political figures – which raises the question of using doubles. Obviously, the more doppelgangers running around kissing babies and cutting ribbons, the less likely that a shooter will hit the actual President or Chief Justice or whatever.

But once you’re using doubles, there’s always the temptation to get more mileage out of them. Why not hire a double that can pull off a decent stump speech? Of course, you have to be careful: it has to look as if the true original could have been there, could have made that speech.

But there’s always that temptation… so when the Prez gives a speech in New York followed by one in LA three hours later – well, he’s the POTUS. He could have taken a supersonic military jet. It’s possible. And when you notice that he’s tweeting 20 hours a day – well, Edison didn’t need much sleep.

Eventually he doesn’t bother: a speech in London is followed an hour later by one in Washington. Even with an SR-71, that’s undoable. Next, simultaneous appearance in two places. Three places. Five places. Tweeting 24/7. Eventually, speeches in stereo, all the while denying that anything unusual is happening. in much the same way that McDonald’s official position is that there is (and can be) only one Ronald McDonald.

The doppelgangers are sharing real-time experiences thru WI-FI: rather like Tines. And like Tines, there’s no reason that the presidential swarm can’t continue indefinitely, even as members age and are occasionally shot. The show must go on, rather like Menudo.

For Trump, this scheme has the added benefit of subjecting many of his least favorite people to death by adrenal exhaustion.

Generally, sub-Saharan Africans have low scores on IQ tests, educational assessment tests like PISA, etc.

Does that mean that all Africans are the same? No. Could some population in Africa do considerably better, say more like Europeans or East Asians?

Sure: there’s no law of physics that would make it impossible. If local selection pushed in that direction, it could happen.

Has it happened? Maybe on a sub-national,tribal scale. Not on a national scale: every country in sub-Saharan Africa does poorly.

Occasionally I hear people talk about Africa’s great genetic variety. It exists: the genetic difference between Bushmen and Bantu is bigger than the difference between Bantu and Finns. A couple of thousand years ago, before the Bantu had arrived in South Africa & mixed with the Bushmen, it was even bigger: looking at ancient DNA from those unmixed Bushmen, looks as if they split off from the rest of the human race at least a quarter of a million years ago. Well before anything that looks like behavioral modernity, by any definition. Half as divergent as Neanderthals.

But the most divergent populations are small. There are fewer than 100,000 Bushmen, on the order of a million Pygmies, around 1000 Hadza. Most people in Africa are Bantu or related populations: next after that are Nilotic peoples.