Deep Ancestry

I started a deep ancestry post over a month ago, trying to summarise the radically new stuff we have learned over the last 10-15 years.  It was based on a David Reich interview, and couple of people Razib interviewed, plus a long argument an Indian nationalist was having on Substack that I tried to research, because it seemed so counter to what else I was reading.

I gave up.  It was 1000 words written, plus a dozen two-sentence clusters that I wanted to expand on, and I had no confidence I was getting it right. 

John Hawks, who is an actual expert, addresses the issue in a recent post of his own. Modern humans evolved from an 80-20 mixture of two deep streams. This is not so much Neanderthals and Denisovans, but their precursors, and the admixtures that went into them. Here's what I think you need going in: the 80 is obviously most of who we are, the 20 contains more of what makes us different from Homo erectus and the others. Secondly, over this length of time in the hundreds of thousands of years, 80% of our current genetics does not mean that was 80% of our ancestors in those years.  Variations of us that had significant advantages of cognitive fitness might be only 2% of the quantity (of gggggrandparents) of a widespread population, but eventually have an outsize influence. But they would still be highly vulnerable, and the superior disease immunity of a more primitive population would still be hugely important. 80-20 is only a starting point for discussion.

Next, being able to copy tool and technology use is easier than inventing it. The super-bright may have sprung up and died off many times because of disease, while the more primitive hung on because they could at least copy better their technology before they passed into the night. Wiping out a tribe doesn't mean you can't notice they have fishing weirs.

Our ancestors eliminated the people who built Stonehenge, which set civilisation back a thousand years, but that's how ancestry works.  Neanderthals had a greater variety of the same tools, suggesting that they were more creative/intelligent than us, but also that they had to reinvent things from scratch more often. Homo sapiens copied the Neanderthals, shared information more efficiently, interbred with them enough to get their best immunity genes, and left them literally in the dust.

Anyway, John Hawks.  Great summary, much better than what I could have given you. 

 

 

Famine in Gaza

 Turns out there is none after all. And this is from UNICEF, who were the ones who declared the famine last year. 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” he said, adding that it sometimes felt like he was the only one reading the IPC’s reports. 

Daycare Barely Matters

There are wild claims left and right about daycare helping the whole country and economy versus damaging children to the point of trauma. What have we learned to expect around here about the effects of childhood interventions? Yes, you there in the back? Correct. They seldom matter in the long run. 

Does Daycare Damage Children's Brains? 

Pitch Clock

It is unlikely I will ever be a worship leader again. It is one of those things I do just well enough to hold the fort until an actual talented person shows up.  Such versatility is necessary in a small congregation but in a larger one there is always a better choice than the jack-of-all-trades.

See?  I have already gotten distracted and gone down a side street and I am barely started. So if I were ever a worship leader again, yes, I would need a pitch clock. 

 

The Escape Artist

ACX gives a prize for best book review every year, publishing the top entries on the site.  I chose one that looked good, The Escape Artist, about Walter Rosenberg, one of the very few Jews to escape from Auschwitz. Escapes are usually gripping, but this one is set apart because it is not as morally clear and neat as nearly all others. The last part of the book is demoralising, as Walter has escaped with detailed eyewitness testimony about the death camp, but he cannot get much of anyone to believe him or do anything about it. The reviewer speculates who the actual villain is in this tale and concludes that for Walter, human nature is the ultimate villain and problem. It's an odd conclusion but it is rather compelling how he gets there. 

Pluto

 You'll have to rip Pluto as a planet from my cold, dead fingers.* I think the reasoning of these people makes sense. Ben pointed out years ago when we visited the Boston Museum of Science (which had a planetarium program my brother designed) that you could look at the floor markings in the Astronomy exhibit and tell where they had removed Pluto. 

Pluto is the 8th planet for a lot of its circuit, because of its elliptical orbit. 

*During the 250th, I saw a FB post that read "You will have to take the July 4th fireworks from my cold, dead fingers. Which are lying right over there across the street." 

Tonics

I remember the place, but it was on the other side of town and we only passed it on the way to my great aunt's in Bedford. It was at what is now Second Street Plaza, near KC's Rib Shack. The photo is from the collection of John Patrick Jordan, who has a FB page of Manchester history. "Relishes and other condiments are provided by Heinz."

I post this to draw your attention to the sign on the left.  It says "Tonics," a very common word for sodas in 1941, left over from the early years of soft drinks in New England when they were marketed as health tonics.  I think it was my mother's preferred term when I was young but not later, so I can't be sure. The last person I knew who still said it died this year at 89.  There must still be a few. 

And yes, we said "bubbler" for a water fountain, which was only in New England and a small area of Wisconsin where the factory for the Bubbler brand name was.  

Fantasy Football Advice

Pick a basic ranking that you like.  Then when listening to other podcasts or reading other articles, raise the ones they are rating as hot ten spots - about one round higher. After about a month, you will have raised everyone ten spots. Hilbert's Paradox as applied to fantasy football.

I jest, but it actually makes some sense. Evaluators are looking at what will most likely happen if everything goes right. But everything goes right for only a limited number of people, in football and in life. If the quarterback who loves tight ends takes over after the third game, and if your TE's ACL heals properly, and if the new playcaller does what he did in Tampa Bay, then the TE12 will very likely become the TE4.

Men try very hard not to let their children think this way about life decisions, but every August demonstrate that they secretly hope the opposite. It's fair, really.  It's called fantasy for a reason. In this world your guy never gets injured but the other team loses key players. I once checked the win totals for NBA projections of the final standings and thought it was a mistake that the number of wins for the teams exceeded the number of losses by over 10%. But Upon Further Review, I saw this was sensible. We already know that our team is screwed if a star player goes out for the season.  That's not informative. We want to know how good the team could be if things go at least reasonably well.

Yes it's a terrible business strategy or military strategy. But it is the only worthwhile initial strategy for love. Reality can (and should) intrude later.

 

Move Everyone Up Ten Slots

Okay, maybe five slots.  But the middle distances are amazing worldwide this year, and there is more than one American in the hunt. 

 

Treating Drug Addiction

 I have been at many positions on this topic, There’s an Effective Way to Treat Drug Addiction—but You May Not Like It , but I will say that I have liked Sally Satel's reasoning in general, and I agree that reward systems tend to be effective.

There are at least two questions here, what is good for the individual and what works. I am mostly interested in the latter when it comes to public policy. This spiritual condition of an individual is the most important consideration, but that doesn't mean that the government should have anything to do with it. There is a difference between a government allowing virtue to flourish and trying to make it happen.

I have no need to punish or avoid punishing the offender. I think advocates in both directions overestimate how much effect it has. Punishing does not do half the good nor half the harm people think it does. This is why we have coaches, teachers, and leaders, because some people need to be treated gently and others need to be kicked in the butt - general rules have too many exceptions.

The answer may come from a proven nonmedical remedy. A Stanford team’s examination of 157 clinical trials of treatments for cocaine, including both psychotherapy and medications, found little clinical benefit with one notable exception: contingency management, a program that leverages motivational incentives, or “carrots,” to help shift an addict’s behavior. According to the Stanford analysis, these methods more than doubled the odds of someone testing negative for cocaine.

Methamphetamine — despite its reputation as being more addictive than cocaine and certainly more damaging to the brain — was shown to be similarly responsive to contingency management.

 Nothing works all the time, some things work more often than others.

Finding New Heresies

This one took me a minute.  I followed the wrong cue, that it was an attractive sports car, and jumped to a wrong conclusion.  It took me a while to start over and see it correctly.

But it is something many of us have said for years, including people who comment here. Chiliastic fellows arise, but lose their grip and slide over into Montanism; Bahai turns out to be Manichaeist dualism when you pick it apart.  

Contra and Contra-Contra

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its many subcategories are the dominant therapies now.  Whether you go to a "counselor," a "therapist," or any of the trendier titles for professional-who-helps-you-fix-stuff, you will most likely receive some version of CBT. There are exceptions. There are still a few people who go to some descendant of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy, and trauma therapies in particular may have more physical interventions like EMDR or mindfulness meditation. (You can find lists of literally hundreds of types of therapy, but these fifteen are a good quick summary: Different Types of Individual Therapy and Their Evidence-Based Results. More than enough, really.)

Despite its ubiquity and longevity, CBT remains controversial. I have never been a therapist, though anyone in mental health is sometimes put in a position of intervening in a way that sure looks like some kind of therapy, even if you can't call it that. It is unlikely I would ever be good add it, no matter how much training and experience I had.  I am much too interventionist rather than letting people come to their own conclusions in their own time.

Here is a pretty good debate between people of good will who simply disagree strongly about whether CBT deserves its reputation or not.  Contra CBT by Josh Zlatkus over at Living Fossils.  The most scientific psychotherapy doesn’t understand science.   Josh believes evolutionary psychology should be more of a foundation of current therapies.  That is where I ran across him.

False Advertising #1: CBT is the therapy of reason. (Final paragraph: This is the recurring problem: CBT sees the inaccurate output but often misses the functional process. It pronounces defects before understanding design. For a therapy whose central promise is to improve how clients think, that is no small problem. In answer to one of the client’s most basic questions—“Why do I think this way?”—CBT’s answer all too often seems to be: “Don’t worry about that. Just think this other way instead.”) 

There are three parts to this.  It will take you a while, but it is very readable.

In answer there is Contra Contra CBT  by Unorthodox Psychotherapist, which will be in 3 parts though only two are completed.

If therapy would deactivate fear responses, there would be many more accidents. As I like to say: “People with too much fear end up in therapy; people with too little end up in the emergency room.” Emotions are adaptive, and fear is of vital importance. However, being adaptive in origin or average for the species does not make a response accurate or harmless for the individual. Evolution does not care about happiness for its own sake. Fear belongs to a regulatory system, and like fever, cough, and vomiting, regulatory systems can become disordered. When that happens, the system designed to protect a person from real danger can escalate and confine them to their home, as is the case with agoraphobia. 

The dueling summaries are about as good an introduction as you could get. I doubt that an entire Introduction to Psychotherapy full-semester course would be better. 

Unforgettable

 

Banned For 100 Years

I was surprised that a new comment was not accepted at "Matriarchal Blessing" on Substack even though I had liked the original post and said so. The reply rules told me not to be insulting.  I didn't think I was. 

The update is that at least some of my comments remain up and I have lots of people liking them. Go figure 

From "The Long Game"

 A Race With No Finish Line Some nuance to the discussion of selection, of a principle that was discovered fifty years ago and resisted at first. Parasites and hosts co-evolve in a dynamic and asymetric situation.

 Imagine you have a rare MHC variant. Circulating parasites have not yet adapted to evade this particular variant, so you are going to benefit from that relative rarity. This fitness advantage enables the variant to become more common - those with the variant will have more offspring - so then the parasites adapt to avoid this variant. The variant is now less useful and the advantage moves to whatever variants are rare. No variant remains useful for long, and the set of effective variants keeps changing. This is called frequency dependent selection.

Data Centers

The linked post is about both the effect of data centers and the limits of persuasion. Can the Truth Convince People to Like Data Centers? by Cremieux Recueil

 The unique thing in this poll was that the pollsters sought to see if they could change people’s views. They wanted to test if they could unravel people’s misinformed views about data center harms by telling them the truth. Unfortunately, people don’t tend to believe the truth, even when you present it to them directly: they don’t think data centers generate tax revenues, that they make AI more widely available, that they create high-paying jobs, power modern business applications, or—critically—that they actually don’t use very much water.

Medical Breakthroughs in 2025

From regular columnist Saloni Dattani at Works in Progress.  Some rare conditions, some common ones, plus a little historical review of what medicine was in 1950.