Race as a Social Construct

Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nahisi are thumping away at that old meme of "race as a social construct." Well, all our concepts are, you know. One point that is absolutely clear is that there are no magic lines which one can use to divide humans neatly into three, five, or twenty-seven clear and distinct races. At the same time, most of us can look at another of us and guess something about where most of our ancestors came from.

Populations differ on average, and differed more before the modern era started moving people around in large numbers. It's perfectly obvious that there are systematic differences, some of them easy to recognize, between populations that have lived in Europe or the Congo for six hundred years. Some of those differences will persist in those with some ancestry from one place or another that that have lived in another place for a couple of hundred years.

The fact that race is a social construct, with no absolute biological undepinning does not say anything about the fact that, for example, Americans with more African ancestry might or might not have more musical talent, or running speed, or various other attributes. Of course the ugly cousin in the corner is the nasty issue of IQ. I'm pretty sure that we don't know enough right now to say whether the differences in IQ noticed between populations are of social, genetic, or other origin. Eventually we will know something about the biology of IQ.

In the meantime, attempts at social engineering, say via. immigration policies that discriminate by race, are as pointless as they are invidious.

What is Watson's IQ?

Watson, the IBM Jeopardy champion and medical diagnosis expert, has shown that it can beat humans at a bunch of intellectual tasks. How about IQ tests? Probably IBM is too smart to tackle that problem, but my guess is that some amateur with a punier computer will do it in the not too distant future. Raven's progressive matrices, look out!

If nothing else that might make the race and IQ debate more irrelevant.

Brave New Genome

Something like 3500 Mendelian (single gene) genetic diseases have been discovered but the vast majority of our genetic diseases appear to be multi-genic. Something like 90 genes are known to be associated with Schizophrenia. Some of these involve proteins that have functions that can be directly linked to the brain. Four of them code subunits of a calcium channel protein, that is, a protein involved in the flow of ions into and out of cells, known to be active in nerve cells.

Elucidating the exact way each of these contribute to disease will take a while, but diseases are not the only area where modern genomic statistical analysis will elucidate genetic influence. Height, running speed, and adult IQ are all other areas known or strongly suspected to be under the control of multiple genes. Genomic analysis has developed powerful tools for discovering the function of identified genes, and investigators have gotten rather good at designing customized mice. The designer human will almost certainly be within reach in one or at most two decades.

This will present a temptation that will be difficult to resist. In the first place parents will want offspring that don't have any of the obvious disease causing genes. Once you start tampering with the genome, can you deny your child a slightly more athletic build, a prettier face, or a few more IQ points?

The Old Ones

It's a commonplace but rarely appreciated fact that our planet is being managed mainly for the convenience of a bunch of billion year-olds. These ancient ones have been around almost since the formation of the planet. They change very slowly, just a few little tweaks every million years or so. They are parasites of a sort, carrying on their business in fish, trees, people and even bacteria.

Of course if they were the sort to talk, they might say it differently. They might say that the bacteria, trees, and people are just convenient dwelling spaces they have devised for their accomodation. I'm writing, of course, about the society of DNA molecules, each of them a clone of a clone and descended in unbroken lineage from some first DNA molecule 3.5 billion years or so ago. With DNA clones though, there is little distinction between the copy and the original, since each new molecule incorporates half of the original and is a copy of it, so in effect each of those DNAs today *is* that original molecule.

I find it more than a little humbling to think that all our works - our art, our science, and our civilization are just the latest trick these little rascals have devised for their propagation.

They don't plan ahead, of course, and that could be their downfall. They have just one central trick, carrying around the instructions for constructing all the stuff they need for their survival. But now their latest invention has devised other kinds of memories and instruction sets, ones that could be more durable and versatile.

The ancient ones, too, may ultimately need to bow to our robot overlords.

Terror and Identity

The Boston marathon murderer allegedly left a message in the boat where he hid saying that his attack was in response to the war in Afghanistan. "An attack on any Muslim is an attack on all," he proclaimed. This notion of group solidarity is at the heart of the idea of gang, tribe, clan, and probably religion as well. This statement has sort of mirror image - "an attack by any Muslim is an attack by all."

The logical conclusion of this reasoning is war until the extermination of one group or another - or perhaps all groups but one. The evidence suggests that throughout most of human history war has been a major cause of human mortality, and that we evolved to compete in small groups with each other. That instinct to organize against each other is at the center of racial, religious, and national strife as well as the extremes of gang warfare and political partisanship.

If you sell an LED light as cheaper than its incandescent counterpart, both conservatives and liberals are more likely to buy it. If you add that it also helps conserve our resources liberals like it better and conservative like it less. If you give some teen aged summer campers red baseball caps and the rest blue ones, they will quickly evolve into warring tribes.

Civilization depends on being able to tame the tribal (or clan) monster within. The trouble is that it doesn't take very many Tsarnaevs too set off a fatal religious war.

MOOC News

a "great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness unescapable. I often dream of it." Faramir to Eowyn in the LOTR.

Those who see the coming of the MOOC as the stroke of doom might see that dark wave in Georgia Tech's announcement of a planned online Masters degree in Computer Science, delivered by MOOC, via Udacity. Now online degrees aren't a novelty. Arizona State, a couple of notches below GA Tech on the academic heap, offers some 60 of them, including an MS in electrical engineering, and the for profit University of Phoenix has been in the business for a few decades.

What is new in the MOOC world are the economies of scale stemming from a lot of the work being done by robots. The Ga Tech MS is supposed to be priced under $7000. For comparison, by my computation, tuition alone for ASU's BA in Art History (now there's a marketable skill) would run about $60,000.

Other people who have to be seeing the competition gaining on them have to be Coursera and edX. The founders of Udacity are hard chargers from Google and Stanford, so they need to be taken very seriously. In the meantime, how about schools that offer nothing but the priviledge of being exposed to their faculty? Yale and Princeton are too stingy to even give you an acknowledgement of course attendance, much less a certificate.

Put up or shut up time is coming to higher ed.

Data Wars: Climate

I recently got to argue with a bunch of old friends and former colleagues about climate. It seems that they had formed a little group of climate warriors who would meet for breakfast and the bashing of the conventional climate wisdom. One point of physics they were confused on was the surface temperature of Venus. the guru of their group, a retired meteorologist and meteorological researcher, was convince that the thickness of the atmosphere and the gas law alone could explain the temperature at the surface. Of course they also didn't know that Venus, despite being only 2/3 of our distance from the Sun, absorbed less solar radiation than Earth.

Heat is transported in the atmosphere through three mechanisms: conduction, convection, and radiation. Most of the heat energy we get from the sun is absorbed at the surface, and since we know that the planet has been at roughly the same temperature for billions of years, essentially all of that absorbed energy is returned to space. Space is too empty to carry away heat by conduction or convection, so that all that energy the planet absorbs is reradiated into space. The absorption of solar energy, as I mentioned, takes place at the surface, but most of the reradiated energy is emitted from a region near the top of the troposphere. That fact, and the processes that mediate it, is responsible for greenhouse warming. If the atmosphere were transparent to infrared radiation the re-radiation would take place from the surface, and the planet would be a lot colder than it is.

The lower part of the Earth’s atmosphere, the troposphere, has a temperature structure that is dominated by convective processes. That fact is due to it being relatively opaque to infrared radiation – when radiation transport is efficient it dominates convection since light moves a lot faster than molecules. The dominance of convection produces the well known decreasing temperature with altitude, with a rate of decrease that tends to approach but only locally exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate – that is the lapse rate achieved by transporting a parcel of atmosphere adiabatically to higher altitude.

It’s this low atmosphere dominance of convection over radiation that creates the troposphere, and when the density of absorbing gases gets small enough, radiation dominates and convection halts. Note that putting more absorbing gases into the atmosphere tends to increase the depth of the troposphere, since it increases the height at which radiation dominates.

Once we appreciate this point, we can see why Venus has such a thick troposphere. Of course it is the thick atmosphere, about 90 times as massive as that of Earth that makes it possible, but it is the opacity due to that thick atmosphere which is responsible for the thickness of the convecting zone. An equally massive atmosphere of much smaller opacity would lead to a lower tropopause and surface temperature.

A Sad Transition

Boy genius to middle-aged nut job. Sad but true.

Credential

Credential, meaning something signifying worthy of faith or belief, is a word with a distinguished heritage, likely derived from the Proto-Indo-European word for "heart", "to believe," or "put one's heart." As everyone knows, except perhaps a few liberal arts profs, awarding credentials is one of the primary businesses of higher and other education. Students, parents, and legislatures put their faith, money, and heart into education so that their children and society generally, will be enriched by achieving these credentials.

Coursera, the biggest MOOC, has just made a major move into continuing education for educators. This is an opportune time, I suspect, since they hope to take advantage of the big move to the Common Core standard. Teachers are one of the principal consumers of continuing education, so this is a big business area especially for State universities. Teachers are big consumers of continuing education since they pay is closely tied to post graduate education. If school districts and States will sanction Coursera's classes for teacher credit, teachers will flock to them. Expect a big push in that direction, and a big pushback from schools afraid of being passed by.