The Possibility of C19 as a Lab Escape

Alina Chan of the Broad Institute (MIT, Harvard) doesn't think it is likely that Covid is the result of a lab escape.  However, as she thinks it is possible, and when she discoverd some evidence that its structure is not fully consonant with an animal-to-human jump for the virus, she got a lot of attention fast, both positive and negative. The linked article can give you a summary. The short take is that with a novel virus, mutations that improve transmissability are usually the first things one sees, as even small increases in ability to spread are advantageous for the virus. But the early samples of SARS-2 seem to be a little further up the line. Curious.

Her first point is that the division into either-or answers misses a lot. To merely raise the question of origins, even when most of the scientific energy has gone into finding a vaccine or cure, has had people accuse her of being a conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, irresponsible reporters from the skeptic side have put forth her statements as showing that there is great evidence that the disease was a Chinese lab error, or even a bioweapon. She points out there is a continuum.  If the lab was sending lots of researchers out to bat caves, food markets, and remote farms to collect samples and expose themselves to possible mutations, then that would be an entirely natural development of the virus - but it's spread might be largely due to the lab's involvement. Similarly, if they were looking at a sample, focusing on a particular site and tweaking something, just to see what it changes in terms of the organism's behavior, you might accidentally but not maliciously make it slightly more transmissable or more dangerous. That is, it already had the ability to infect humans, but you just made that a little more likely. A further possibility is mixing and matching genes between different viruses. I guess that isn't considered all that odd now. Scares the bejeesus out of me, but maybe it's a mostly safe intervention.

On any of these, it would suggest that the virus existed in some less-harmful form earlier than the currently discovered version.  Think of it as a pre-covid or proto-covid. That would at least be a plausible explanations why this odd data of Covid existing "too early" that occasionally shows up might be so. 

You can see why lots of people would have interest. Even if it was unintentional, all the research was being done responsibly, and this was just an unfortunate accident, the PRC would not want this to be known. Also, if this is a common technique and considered necessary even by researchers unrelated to anything Chinese, they might be unwilling to have this be generally known, because it would invite regulation by governments, which they know in advance is likely to be stupid.  The interview with Chan I listened to was from January, and she and the interviewer both agreed that the possible lab origin theory is not being slammed down without a hearing quite so much anymore, and thought it possible that because the idea might have helped Trump, now that the election is over many scientists might be less-opposed to the investigation.  That's ugly, and unprovable, but fits my prejudices pretty well.

Chan has also had colleagues tell her to her face that she is just attention-seeking. That seems unprofessional.  I thought she was pretty convincing she has not liked the attention she has gotten from this, from many sides, and has wondered how life would have been different if she had never gone on this project. She is originally Canadian, brought up in Singapore, and is pleasant but I don't think she scares easily. Her stated goal is to learn of the origins because she is curious, and we need to know about origins if we are entering a pandemic world where one of these shows up every five to ten years.

If there is only a 5% chance it's true, it's worth looking into, right to the bottom.

Changing Assumptions

I can't source the study, as it was referred to rather darkly as one that had attracted heat, but with the promise that more is coming over the next few years, but I will explain it because it says something about the changes in my assumptions over the years. 

The study was in cognitive genomics, so you might already guess where the controversies might arise. In the last two decades there has been enormous work done discovering Mendelian Disorders, single-gene mutations that have deleterious effects. A researcher looking at larger genomic data noticed something odd.  There were occasional people with a Mendelian disorder related to IQ who nonetheless had average IQ scores. Pulling them out for further studies, along with their parents and siblings, he found that they had two parents of 130+ IQ, with siblings clustering around that higher range rather than the national average. The children had IQs two standard deviation below their parents, which in ordinary circumstances would result in children with deficits, requiring special attention at school. But with these parents...

My assumption 35+ years ago would have been that it was the good educational environment of those parents - reading to the child, proper nutrition and attention, better schools. That would still be the assumption of many people, and news stories about such research would leap to that conclusion as well.  In fact, you can get into some trouble if you reach any other conclusion. Ask Charles Murray about that. 

But among those who are studying this more closely, the idea of mutational load , more commonly associated with studies of immune diseases, is quietly coming into favor. The researcher anticipated that and dug deeper. The assumption that those IQ 130+ parents consistently provided good, nurturing environments was not entirely solid. As soon as we say that out load we all recognise that of course that was a terrible assumption.  We have a prejudice in that direction, but once held up to the light we all think of specific examples of contentious divorces, alcohol or drug abuse, entire irresponsibility of high-IQ* individuals, or terrible circumstances involving accidents or tragedies that send a child to another place to be brought up. 

The researcher thought this was powerful evidence that the lack of negative mutational load was somewhat protective, even against serious cognitive deficits. Apparently he has gotten some pushback at his own university from "other departments" - hmm, I have a short list what those might be - about the implications of this, so he is waiting until he has more results before inviting that amount of misery on himself.

My assumption has reversed. I am in no way a researcher or an expert in anything near this field, though I know well more than average. When I heard about the Mendelian Disorders related to IQ still resulting in average intelligence, I now think "What else is happening genetically?"

*See, this is why "smart" means something else, that has some overlap with IQ but is not synonymous.

Emerald Ash Borer

The Emerald Ash Borer has been threatening to establish in NH for the past decade. I first became aware of the invasive beetle while walking on a back road in the southwestern portion of the state, noticing odd purple boxes well up in the trees.  I learned they were there for detection, and as yet, none had been found in NH.

When it first showed up, it was not in some border town, but well into central NH in a state park.  Meaning that it had arrived on someone's firewood from another state. It is the very typical human attitude to regard small chances as zero chance - especially when it will cost you a few bucks to buy firewood near the park here. We have a dozen excuses.  We are sure we won't be doing any harm. And then we do.

I saw the damage they do to the ash, called "blonding" over near my son's house today.  He and his neighbors are suddenly going to have to take out a dozen trees, and we don't know how extensive this is. I took one look at the result and said "that tree's not going to make it." I saw more - none of them will make it, you can see on sight. There are efforts to slow the spread in the hopes of identifying some solution in time, but thus far the loss of most North American species of ash looks inevitable. I like ashes and will be sad to see them go. I had two large ones at my first house. They are very good firewood, splitting easily and even usable green in a pinch. Ash wood wet and ash wood dry, a king shall warm his slippers by. Ash is used for baseball bats, for flooring, for canoe paddles.

The tree has been important culturally, in myth and legend. Now it looks like it is going away.

A Lot of Ruin In A University

Adam Smith observed that there "is a lot of ruin in a nation," meaning that once an institution is in place, it has inertia, continuity, a lot of hidden strengths before it finally falls. It does fall eventually, following the rule that Milton Friedman laid down that "things that cannot go on forever, won't." Yet they do hang on remarkably long, don't they?  I have been hearing since the 1980s that the deficit and national debt will send America under eventually, and I do believe this is true.  I am not intending in any way to suggest this is wrong.  When that day comes, all of us will say "I told you so" and feel smug even as we are scrambling to find wood to burn. But we only believe that intermittently, else we would have stormed Washington in a real riot years before this one, violently kicking out not only the slightly-more-offending Democrats, but Donald Trump and his trillion dollar payouts.  In fact, kicking out anyone back to...I don't know, Calvin Coolidge? But we haven't, so perhaps we only 20% believed it.  Enough to be arrogant, not enough to take action.

Universities are on the ropes.  They have been held aloft financially by government largess for what? 20 years, 40 years, 60 years? This is unsustainable, and state legislatures, which have significant conservative elements even in liberal states, will not continue to fund this idiocy at State U much longer, not this bite-the-hand-that-feeds-them attitude toward America and the free market and business and capitalism. 

Except they have, since 1980 anyway, as I will relate shortly.

There have been predictions of the collapse of higher education, increasing in the last few years. Every year, these institutions deliver a less-valuable product at a slightly-higher price. It adds up (and also subtracts down, if you take my meaning). We are now a credential society rather than a meritocracy. Many schools on the margin have taken devastating blows from Covid. There will be continued uh.... consolidation going forward. 

Yet as with a nation, so too with a college. The current system will hang on for a long while, because some schools have such an enormous cushion that they can do just about anything, and the principal of previous alumni gifts, increasing even at low returns, plus rent-seeking from government programs, added to parents' money in search of prestige and advantage, added to the real academic benefit that still manages to work its way through, will stretch out the lifespan another year, another decade, another...century?  Yes, maybe.  The others will go under and only people directly connected will care. 

So long as credentialism rules are there are government subsidies, something like the present system will survive. It is under pressure and it will change, but don't expect to see a different world anytime soon, however many people come up with bright ideas how to fix everything.There will therefore be no pressure to stop moving left and enforcing that on others. There will be fewer positions and more people to stab you in the back.

An anecdote: My stepfather became a trustee of New Hampshire College of Accounting and Commerce in the late 1960s. My high-falutin' liberal arts friends and I looked down on this as a mere business college and called NHCAC "Cac." I did pipe down after my mother married the guy in 1966.  I was obnoxious, but not crazy. (Spoiler alert:  It became New Hampshire College and then Southern NH University, one of the largest online colleges in the world. Yeah, that one you see the TV ads for.) He later became CEO of a very solid, cautious mutual fund, David L Babson.  He was on the NH State Republican Committee in the 60s and 70s. Archetype country-club conservative. I was liberal, but not quite communist.  I learned in the early 80s that multiple professors in the Human Services wing were open Marxists.  I sat down and described this to him, figuring that I was his inside source, telling him information that was being hidden from the board. He shrugged.  He knew.  That was how those departments ran.  You couldn't get top professors who weren't Marxists. He wanted NHC to be a top college.

Well, knock me over with a feather. All that only to note how far back this goes, even with conservatives supposedly at the helm.

Spinning

A very young man of our acquaintance has taken up spinning.  Not in the cloth handiwork sense, but in the turning round and round until one falls over, preferably face upward and looking at a summer sky version of spinning. He hit his head, which of course caused parental concern. Parents can put up with a lot of weird or dumb stuff, so long as it doesn't involve hitting your head hard on an unforgiving surface.  In this case, I was always on grass where my mother was not watching, while he was trying this hobby out on a floor, in moderately close proximity to an observant mother. He has Aspergery loading on both sides of the family, BTW, with strong examples of using this superpower for good. We are already deeply fond of him here.

I had forgotten this, but I recall doing this a lot.  I have never seen it tied to autism spectrum kids, but it seems similar to other stereotypic movements, like rocking.  These are usually designated as "purposeless." This is untrue.  They feel cool, and are way cheaper than drugs and wear off in less than a minute. I regarded kids (I'm sorry, I meant "boys" - I don't recall this being a female problem) that were huffing gasoline or airplane glue as unthoughtful crowd-followers. You can regulate your dosage of spinning and falling on grass easily. I would advocate just sending him outside, but there is a pond and lots of rocks, so maybe not quite yet.

Opposite Game

Britain did something interesting in trying to assess racism.  It tried to look hard at data. We know what the result was: Britain is no longer a racist society, though it is a society that has racism. I don't know of any recent comprehensive report on America, but I have read a fair bit of the data, and my general impression is that something similar could be said here. 

Most of the racial conversation coming off the left, and some from the right and other points of the compass will make reference to needing to have an honest conversation about race. When that phrase is used, I can usually identify within ten seconds that the opposite is more true.  The speaker is seeking to avoid, not have, an honest conversation about race. This can most readily be assessed by looking at the misrepresentation of the positions of their opposition. If you cannot state your opponent's view accurately, then you are lying either to yourself or to us.

There is a more extreme version of this in the Middle East. There are a thousand oppressed peoples in the world that one could feel hurt for and resolve to help them out in some way. The Palestinians are not anywhere near the top of that list by any objective measure.  Therefore, anyone focusing on them as central victims is not trying to reduce oppression, but trying to avoid reducing oppression, by putting resources in unimportant areas. 

A good reminder to oneself is always Perhaps the opposite is also true.

Eyewitness Vs Dictation

Fundamentalists treat the scriptures as if the words were dictated by God directly to the ears of a chosen scribe, who recorded them exactly. If you pay attention, there are in fact sections of Isaiah that are like this, and other sections of various books. It's usually pretty easy to tell, because God says explicitly "write down these words" or some such.

But most sections fall better into the category of "eyewitness account." If you look at Mark 1:5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. I don't think the entire population of Jerusalem or the Judean countryside went out to see John the Baptist.  I'm betting a few people stayed behind. Just a guess. It was a figure of speech from an eyewitness.  "Oh, everyone was going out to listen to John in those days.  He was all anyone could talk about for the whole year." My faith is not harmed in the slightest by this.

Nor is anyone else's.  If you go look at fundamentalist studies of Mark, they breeze right by this - as they should. Yet in other sections they will insist that accounts are to be taken literally, as if God had dictated word for word. 

Allowing this much flexibility, in and of itself, opens the door to close examination of every other verse, and Lord knows that people will come up with wild interpretations on their own. Yet there is no other choice. We are told to trust in the Holy Spirit and that there is no private interpretation, so some others must be consulted. That's about it.  Yet that is an enormous amount.

All Things Must Pass

 I looked at a lot of things and settled on this. Fun nostalgia for me.

I find it touching that they carry Dhani, who is not actually very good (from my observation here and in other places during this concert. He is better than I am, but that's damning with faint praise). I understand he is creative and talented, just not technically proficient.

Terrance Laird Again

He is very good, and getting better. I am betting he takes over the NCAA record this year, as you will notice that in this race he actually had a slow start.

Temptation

In modern Christianity, especially at the denominational, seminary, and publication level, those advocating for social justice point to the abolition of slavery as the great victory of the church for justice in society. It's hard to argue with that. It was a battle largely fought and won by Christians, with William Wilberforce of England and the Quakers, Congregationalists, and many Methodists in America being the most frequent mentions.  Students willing to go deeper can find Catholics dating back to the 2nd C speaking against the practice, though more as something to be discouraged among Christians than made illegal.  Ideas like that were gradually introduced later. Abolition seems an unarguable good, even if it is not the only possible good in the world.

There have been other causes taken up by the church with a definite eye toward establishing justice in the societies where they lived.  Educating women, conditions for prisoners, and the centuries of feeding the poor and attempting to provide medical care or comfort to the disabled or dying. But slavery has been the big-ticket item all concerned with justice point to.  

I was saying aloud to a friend that it seems the more recent causes are more ambiguous and difficult to achieve and one of my own cliches occurred to me: When there is a great problem, the first solution picks off the low-hanging fruit and solves, 50, 70, 90% of the problem. After that there is increasing effort for lesser returns. I suddenly wondered if getting involved with Abolitionism was not a Christian opportunity, but the bait, the temptation to turning aside from the Church's main goal.  View in that way, it looks an awful lot like Satan'[s third temptation of Jesus, doesn't it.  Was it that same temptation, offered by the Devil this time to the Church - and we swallowed the hook?  It's a chilling thought that clear ggood could disguise evil in that way.  Except that is what spiritual temptation means, isn't it?  Some desire to do good, as Gandalf feels for possession of the One Ring that carries an addictive poison that is ultimately fatal?

Abolition is ultimately not a mercy or charity issue, nor one that has eternal consequences, after all.

Any idea that is this new I don't offer as any claim that it is true. But I do offer up that it might be true, for your contemplation.

Tattoos in prehistory

Archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf (with Lars Krutak) has a book Ancient Ink about the history of tattooing, and a number of related books about tattooing in general in an international and historical perspective.  I heard an interview with him, and he is frustrated that most of the popular "History of Tattooing" sites and essays are inaccurate, perpetuating myths.  I'm not feeling a deep responsibility to mythbust about tattooing narratives, but a few things did interest me, so I will pass them along.

In archeological finds, tattoos are expressive of group or status identities, not individuality. They identified you with a clan or a particular ancestor, with a profession or military unit. The ancestor tattoos were often in places unlikely to be visible to the general public, suggesting that they had a mystical or ceremonial value rather than a demonstrative one. The meanings were negative as often as positive, marking one as a slave, defeated tribe, or criminal. That's quite different than the modern application of decoration for personal expression.  However, I notice that tattoos commemorating deceased relatives are still common. 

Even with improved modern archaeological techniques for detecting tattoos, there are great holes in the data, and we do not know what the practices are of the majority of ancient societies were. However, a generalisation is emerging that more mobile societies were more likely to tattoo themselves. A moments reflection reveals this makes sense.  If you are in one place, you can express your values and that of your clan in buildings and other built structures such as walls or megaliths. But if you are more frequently on the move, you use your body which is portable to express your relationship to the universe, to gods, to ancestors, to tribes.

I wondered in passing whether being more mobile created interest in tattooing and piercing in our own day. Sailors enlisted to "see the world," and were notorious for tattoos, as is the military is in general. But settled modern tribes and individuals also tattoo, so I wouldn't push that too far.

Because palettes of  paints have been found more frequently among the funerary goods of those cultures of known tattooing (or their predecessors and successors, figuring those would be good bets), recent investigators have had a new thought what is up with that. While body paints could be cosmetic, to look better, it is not a new idea that some of them might be ceremonial. But why paints for the dead?  If they needed ceremonial body paint or piercing, then paint them. Yet now that seasonality, and different roles for different times of the year and different ceremonies have come up as possible understandings, paints could have a third meaning, as temporary identifiers of role or status.  Urulu might paint over the winter, not so much to portray a wolf ceremonially, but to be a wolf, to embody a wolf for the tribe. Yet in spring he has to stop that.  He becomes a brewer, a hunter, a fisherman. When they bury him, they figure he might need to become a wolf again in the afterlife, an ancestor working for the good of the tribe.  And he will need the right paint for that. An interesting support for that idea is the strong tendency in many cultures to bury a person with more ceremonial goods that are not associated with death than those goods representative of everyday function (though those occur frequently as well).

Cold in Nome

My son and his family are in the midst of -12 in Nome, with 2 feet of snow still on the ground. We will be meeting them outside of Anchorage in the first week of May, the weather is projected to be chilly by NH standards, but I imagine they will find it a relief.

Jonah Chesterton Wyman

Some commenter whose identity I am protecting asked if I have been writing Jonah Goldberg's recent columns.  I don't think so.  While he is on my list of "yeah, I should get around to reading what he is saying," he's not on the top of that list, so I mostly don't know what he's writing.  But this one I definitely agree with, and he mentions Chesterton's Fence, so I pass it along to you.

Radicalism is the purest expression of ingratitude, because it starts from the premise that nothing that currently exists is worth saving; everything is corrupted by the evils of the past. 

He goes on to chastise those who say that the media or the intrusion on rights "has never been this bad." He is spot on. Can you buy Playboy in your town? Will you go to jail for a couple of joints in your pocket? Can Jews or (gasp!) women join the country club? Can you put your ideas out before the whole world for years for the price of a computer and an internet connection? Goldberg is concerned with the new media powers and what they might do, as am I. But lots of newspapers in the 70s refused to give Nixon the opportunity to reply to criticisms - and this was in an age when there were mostly lock-step newspapers, 3 networks, and a few popular magazines. Reagan did a lot to break the back of that by buying time to speak to the American people on network TV.

Where Are the Females?

My wife is trying to identify birds at our new home.  She had a "home list" from our other house, and has a "lifetime list" of birds wherever she has traveled, including a very mixed set of ducks on a backwater of the Danube when we were in Budapest, and some rare finds from our visit to Tromso, Norway. But this is new.  Even though it is the same town, it is a different niche, and we have only been here one year, as opposed to 33 years at the other house. She wants her list to grow.

Yet when she looks at a bird and has some suspicions, it is frustrating to her when she goes looking at her bird books.  She has many of those, I'm just sayin'. The illustrations feature the varied and sometimes dramatic appearances of the males, with no picture of the females, which are rather obviously 50% of the population of any species. I know the males have the more interesting plumage. Peacocks have entered popular culture, but the word peahens draws quizzical looks. But still...

I told her she should contact some feminist organisation to get on this.  It might distract those women into doing something that has actual benefit to society, or at least birdwatching society. And it might make my wife happy, which is a plus for me.

War on Sensemaking, V

The video James recommended is marvelous, as far as I've gone, about 30 minutes.  As there is a "V" there, I assume there is a I-IV, though I haven't seen them.

 

I've been saying these things for a long time, but he says it much better, and with broader perspective and better support.  For example, when he says that the George Floyd incident was merely a trigger, and something was going to set off violence, I had thought this myself, but I dared not say it because I couldn't think of supporting evidence - and I have to have at least something in support to post, even when I am largely blue-skying or thinking out loud.  I was think more along the lines that being cooped up by Covid was the water building up behind the dam, which was worse for liberals because they couldn't even complain that loudly, as it was their "side" who was imposing things and they felt obligated to support that.  As you see, that's a plausible idea, but what did I have to support it?

Schmactenberger ties it to unemployment as an historical driver of unrest. That rang true immediately, even more than "being cooped up." The latter might be a powerful additional force, especially for those who have jobs.  If you personally don't have a job or other clear role in society, then your automatic conclusion is "Something is wrong with this system." From the outside that looks like suspect logic, but all of us in that situation would have strong incentives to see things that way. But being cooped up might be even more powerful among the employed group, who don't have some obvious reason to kick about the "society," and thus decide to signal that you feel sorry for people who have it worse.  That is a mix of kindly and selfish motives.  

I will note one further thing.  He contrasts QAnon and Antifa and their unreasoning tribalism rather evenhandedly. In his contrast between the two existential visions (this was just before the election) he makes similar evenhanded statements about the left and right entering the election with suspicion that the future of the Republic is at stake, and the other side is preparing to steal the election. I think from his further statements that he does not think those are quite equal, but he wants to bend over backwards to be fair, and I think that is admirable and worthy. But I will say quite openly that even if the idea that the Deep State is trying to pivot us to China is over-the-top, there is a lot more evidence for that extreme idea than the belief that Donald Trump is trying to install a tyranny with a  family dynasty. Other than the seemingly capable Jared Kushner having an important job, I see no evidence for the latter. Ann Coulter said she's going to miss President Kushner - okay, a little bit fair - but what else you got for family dynasty?

Update: I forgot. An enormously important point he hits early is that training in the ability to argue either side of a proposition is educationally necessary. Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we required advocates to demonstrate their understanding of their opponents' position? Mr. President, can you summarize Mr. Biden's position on trade with China, and then say why you think this wrong? It still works even if the opponent is incoherent. Well, Mr. Biden said on the one hand last March that he favors "X," but recently he has said "Y," so I'm not quite sure.  But I think he leans toward greater engagement with Chinese companies and less public criticism of their government.  Here's why I think that would be disastrous.

Further Update:  The presenter has some odd and unevidenced ideas (Neurohacker) which I do not subscribe to.

Population Replacement in Prehistoric Britain

Just a little overview and myth-busting. Most tribes have a continuity belief, that their people have always been there, or were there first. When DNA was extracted from Cheddar Man, he was found to come from the rare mtDNA Haplogroup U5, and as there were people nearby with U5, including the local schoolmaster, the news sources put it about that this was a remarkable example of 9,000 years of continuity in that spot. Brian Sykes was looking for drama, perhaps, but it ends up being misleading in that regard. 

U5, along with U4, and U2, were common in the first group to resettle northern Europe after the glaciers retreated about 10,000 BC. These were the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), and the strongest remains of their genetic signature is now among Finns, Estonians, and Sami people, though not common even there. Doggerland was still above ground for the next 3-4000 years, so Britain was not isolated from the continent in those days.  There is now some thought that Doggerland may have persisted as a land bridge, though a less hospitable place to live, for even longer, with a remarkable date of 3800 BC suggested. Still, it was sparsely settled. These were not easy places to live.

Farming started spreading out of the Levant about 7000BC but did not reach Britain until around 4000BC. These were the Early European Farmers (EEF), and they almost completely replaced WHG peoples in a few centuries - more than 90% turnover. When one population "outcompetes" another that thoroughly, some violence is assumed. However, both populations were usually violent with each other before contact, and we needn't assume it was uniform invasion and genocide. They would have had different tools and ways of surviving on the land and may have lived near each other for long periods, not needing the same space. But when famine or natural disaster hits, one tribe is going to be better placed than the others to survive. If climate is changing or a region has been overfished, overhunted, or overfarmed then such advantages are intensified. Even in good times, if the women of one tribe average four children surviving to adulthood while the next tribe over averages two, that will make a large difference in a hundred years, and an overwhelming one in three hundred. 

At the time we are living we measure success by what is happening to ourselves personally, or perhaps our clan. In most times and places we would call what the men's lives are like as more successful, even with the dangers. Yet if we measure success by genetic continuity, of sending something of yourself down through history, women's success is enormous.  Men's genetic lines die out all the time, through warfare, the dangers of hunting and fishing, or being left out in polygamous societies. Women's lines persist, even after conquest. Not all of these matings would be violent or unwelcome, just survival choices. They might be unattractive lives of slavery, but humans have generally accepted that over the death alternative. So mtDNA lines can hang around a long time, well after any semblance of a tribe has disappeared. Yet even those can die out.

If your tribe is on the receiving end of the violence, it doesn't much matter whether it is by a tribe that separated from yours a hundred years ago that speaks your language or new arrivals that split off from your ancestors 40,000 years whose language is unrecognisable. If modern experience, such as the Taino vs the Caribs, or Wampanoags vs the Narragansetts, or many resentful tribes subdued by the Aztecs is a natural trend, the invaders may have been welcomed for their trade and help against long-held enemies, but regretting the short-sighted welcome sooner or later.

So EEF shows up and WHG - which is Cheddar Man's group - almost disappears in the genetic signature. EEF prospers and builds Stonehenge, first as a circular ditch with a circle of small stones or perhaps timber henges in it, but eventually the dramatic structure with bluestones that we see today.  Just as they were finishing up, they get outcompeted as well by another group of hunter-gatherers, the Beaker culture, and are invisible by 2000BC. It has been controversial how much of Beaker is Corded Ware, and how much both owe genetically to the Yamnaya*, which we would call the Eurasian Steppe people, a branch of Indo-Europeans. Migration vs cultural diffusion remains an issue on the continent, but genetic research reveals that there is no question that large numbers of people moved, not just some technologies adopted, nor an elite governing a large population while remaining separate.  They replaced EEF within a few centuries, upward of 90%.  Interestingly, they continued to use Stonehenge. My thought is that if your gods are sky and earth, impressive cursus and megalithic monuments are going to look just fine for your purposes, especially if you have seen your neighbors putting them to use for a few generations. 

Replacement of males is usually more thorough, and the quicker it happens the more likely it is to be a result of war. It also means they likely killed the male children as well.

You will note that this is the second 90+% population turnover since Cheddar's day. The odds are growing slimmer that the current schoolmaster in Cheddar Gorge is any kind of close relative of the fossil find. While EEF had replaced WHG on the continent as well, it was less thorough, and the Beaker people subsequently replacing EEF was less entire as well.  Women passing on U5 mtDNA were not common, but there were many more outside Britain than in. The schoolmaster's female uniparental line was more likely to have come in after, even as late as the Viking invasions. It was not mentioned at the time, but he wasn't even born in the town to begin with. It was all a nice piece of theater based on some real data.

*The pendulum has swung back and forth as to how much of Corded Ware was Eurasian Steppe invaders, with some recent research suggesting that they were themselves invaded, not the aggressive ones - as if any peoples of that time can be counted on as examples of non-aggression. However, Nick Patterson has hinted that research just about to come out is going to push the pendulum back, that some Corded Ware DNA is related to steppe pastoralists far to the East. They are thus more likely to be Yamnaya themselves.

Vindication

From the text at Lyman Stone's tweet about a new study about lockdowns. 

 Q: How important are lockdowns for reducing COVID transmission? 

A: Most prior literature has overestimated their importance by failing to sufficiently model *voluntary* social distancing.

And, the study behind it.

YESS! I have been saying for a year that people are attributing both positive and negative effects to "lockdowns" that are actually voluntary measures, citing Sweden as an example.  To digress on that topic, with a Tevye "One the one hand...on the other hand..." set of arguments:  Sweden has done much, much worse than the other Scandinavian countries, which are their only natural comps.  People who said a year ago how great Sweden's policies were have that against them.  On the other hand, Sweden had an enormous amount of voluntary masking, closing, distancing, etc - much more than you could get out of even the most liberal, socialist state in the US. (That is a quiz, yes.  answer below.) Also, Sweden does have some differences from Norway, Finland, etc. It also has great nursing homes, and sends people to them more readily, and this blew up in their faces WRT Covid. Furthermore, it has many immigrant populations.  Nothing like America and Canada, but still way up there by the standards of all those other countries in the world who call us xenophobic and racist. Most of the New Swedes, including the Arab populations I feared might be difficult to get on board with precautions, did quite well in becoming very Swedish and falling into neat rows and obeying "suggestions" nicely, even though Sweden was officially open, because restrictive measures were not required. You have to understand that the meanings of voluntary and required are different in Europe, and doubly so in Scandinavia.

But not the Somalis.  You have to dig hard to find this in the Swedish news, but that group of immigrants wore few masks and those poorly, met daily in cafes and each other's houses, believed that only white people could get covid and were a disproportionate spreading influence. The Swedes are the wokest country on earth, but they aren't stupid, and they developed strategies and workarounds to contain the Somali contagion, all quietly restrictive but not announced by the human service agencies who had to go in and work with that group. It worked, and while they had a huge initial spike of deaths, settled everything down, given time.  It is not from herd immunity, as they actually haven't got that much. So Sweden is not a comp for Denmark, the US, Vietnam, nothing. It's an outlier from everything.

So generalise that for a moment before proceeding.  Think of Michigan or California or South Dakota. What are the unusual factors of each? The disease came from China and that dwarfs everything else. The ornaments on that particular Christmas tree vary greatly from there.  Compare with caution.

I have no studies, BTW, proving that my theory that  internal and external interaction are important, but the states with the lowest death rates are Hawaii (gee, islands and an ocean around them), Alaska (hmm, one moderate-sized city and two small ones, plus wide expanses that can only be reached by plane and snow machine), Vermont (has a capital city of 7,000 people, no contact with anyone), and Maine (largely-empty outpost in the farthest NE corner).  Now look at the states with most death per million. Funny, ain't it?

So, if you are on Twitter (I am not) you should probably stop coming to see what I am writing and go read Lyman Stone instead. He hits a lot of the same topics I do, but he actually does his research rather than just shoots from the hip like I do.  I will miss you, but I think it's a net good for society. You will get much less about linguistics and ancestral humans and genetics, but he covers a lot of cool stuff. A free-market data nerd who used to be a Lutheran missionary somewhere in the Far East, who is quite cheerful even when telling you stuff you hate. AEI, NBER, going for PhD in statistics at McGill. I have linked to him only about Covid, but you should visit and see what else he has got going over there. Amazing, really.

Next, look at some implications.  Covid-positive rates increased 3% among parents when schools reopened. As that group has a low death rate anyway, no big deal, right?  Except among those grandmothers who live with them, or the many grandmas in poorer communities who are actually the primary caregivers for school children.  Is a 3% increase for Nana's risk important, or something we just sigh over and wish it were not so? That is truly an opinion question, but it is different from the opinion questions we have become focused on. Mask-haters pretend there's no difference.  Mask-lovers assure us we will all be throwing ourselves off cliffs if we relax our grip now. Please look at Nana and tell me what you think.

We are just now entering an age where there will be enormous natural-experiment data on Covid, as the states took different approaches, had different exposures to the disease at different times, had different methods of reporting - some of them less honest than others - had stark differences between voluntary and mandated masking, closing, and distancing, different levels of interaction both internally and externally. What am I overlooking here?  Everyone, everyone is cherry-picking data to show that masks really work or they don't, light lockdown states have similar disease rates to strict ones or they don't, that children are being deeply damaged or that this is not that different than the widely various pressures that kids got exposed to over the last...200,000 years, and is good for the pampered bastards. Hesitate over any evidence you think is solid until you run it through a couple of filters, especially including "Wait a minute, who benefits from my believing this?"

...and something for everyone about vaccines. New vaccines for HIV and cancer are being developed based on the Covid-19 vaccines.  This is of interest to libertarians, because it demonstrates the possible loss in other fields of medicine due to overregulation of vaccine research (imagine a vaccine for cancer...), making a powerful argument for Opportunity Costs; for conspiracy theorists, it is soft evidence (always good enough for that crew, but in this case it bears examination) that Covid was a human-created infection rather that bat-soup created, based off some of the HIV profile that went awry in one of their labs, which wasn't specifically working on biological weapons, but, you know, if we should happen to find something useful..; And - is the opinion of experts better than guesses? Nate Silver's got that for you! No! But only for a limited time frame! 

You can spin that whatever way you like - and you will, you will - whether you are a mask advocate, school opening advocate, anti-lockdown advocate. But mostly, it's vindication for ME, albeit at a moderate level. 

So that brings me to the other thing I have been saying since the beginning but maybe no one is listening for more than a moment or two. You have lost your focus on China as the source. Liberals have for the obvious socialism reasons that have been true throughout my lifetime, plus any short-term gains for electoral advantage and reinforcement of their desperate world-view; but also conservatives, who cannot stop talking about how unfair the upper-class media is to Trump and DeSantis, or their own anger at governors who aren't doing what they are just sure is right, or the waffling of the (always overcautious - how did you miss that the last fifty years?) CDC, or how much they just don't like wearing masks and being told what to do. But if you can't do it on your own, do you need to be told what to do, Junior?. It's CHINA. Whether intentionally or because their culture or food practices create  disease is interesting but can wait for the data.  For now, you have lost focus. Restaurants often hover at the edge with low margin changes in market.  Many already fail.  Even without a single governor issuing an order about how many can be at a gathering, some would have voluntarily said "I won't endanger my beloved employees. My life's work is in the toilet and they now don't have jobs, but I can't risk killing them." Other restaurants or other service-heavy businesses would have seen enough decrease in commerce that they would have had to close. Much has not been mandated.

I seemingly can't go to a conservative site that doesn't attribute all this economic damage to the lockdowns, the government-mandated closures and restrictions.  They will acknowledge in theory, "Oh yeah, sure, yeah it's the disease that has been the main driver.  And the disease comes from China.  And I am brave and not afraid to say that to ANYBODY, dammit, because I am not PC, and don't think that any comment against the PRC means I am anti-Asian!" Except they never do actually say it unless someone grabs them by the shirt collar and forces them up against the wall - as I am doing here - and says "What is the real cause of this?" Conservatives have been shamefully negligent in this area since March 2020, behaving like the liberals I left in the 1980s because everything was played only for partisan advantage, not reality.

Have you had enough yet?  No, you haven't.

The disease created all our problems. What everyone did to cope with that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, and once things were in motion, agencies and governors and media outlets doubled-down on what they had previously decided, not because they wanted to control you or make you bend the knee, or alternatively not because they were succumbing to political pressure and were cowardly, but because this is human nature, which is doubly true for politicians and bureaucrats trying to protect their jobs, and even more often, because they still believe their original decision was correct and have a hard time getting off that, even with data.  Everyone has priors.

You know that.  We've been covering confirmation bias and prior beliefs and the difficulty in seeing another POV when your children's dinner depends on yours being right for fifteen years here.  Not to mention the fact that you might be wrong about all of this, Jasper. You might continue to insist you were right for fifty years into the future - also human nature and confirmation bias - but you might just be wrong. Imagine that.

So. Government lockdowns were a minor part, some effective, some not, all accompanied by many stupid people mouthing off.  Vindication for me.  Next up. China has always been the problem. Focusing on the local effects is like the children who blame the custodial parent for the divorce and the fact that they live in a worse place, when it was the other parent who had the affair and abandoned the family and doesn't show up when they promised.

*Vermont. Please.  If you didn't get that, switch to reading about dog breeds or something.  I suppose if you said Washington DC, which is technically not a state but included in statistical lists, I give you a pass, but with a squint.

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Interpreting Archaeological Finds

David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries was a hoot when it came out, sending up the overinterpretations that archaeologists placed on the objects they found in 4022 when excavating an American motel from our era. I look around my house and sometimes wonder what interpretation people could put on my objects.  He have Romanian Easter Eggs, similar to the Psyanky of Ukraine*, which we picked up in the late 90s. They have traditionally had deep religious meaning, as each egg was decorated by hand with a specific recipient in mind, and the symbols represented prayers that were being said as the egg was produced. Very little of this is left, as tourists love the stuff and it is a cottage industry out in the villages to produce eggs year-round to make some cash money. That might not be apparent to a researcher.

Even less apparent might be why there are a bowl full of them in a house in NH. Is this a Romanian family?  Are these trade goods? Status items? Do they have any religious significance?

They have a little religious significance to us.  We use them more often as Christmas ornaments, and as they are older, I will briefly reflect every year when I see them that any of them might have been made with original purpose, for an individual. If so, they were shorted a few prayers so I throw up a few vague ones on their behalf.  It couldn't hurt. But such are the problems anthropologists have, trying to figure out What was this for and what does it mean? Was this weapon ever used, or did the culture just perpetuate the wearing of axes to honor the ancestors and look tough themselves?  

Update: The Hutsuls of Ukraine and Romania "believe that the fate of the world depends upon the pysanka. As long as the egg writing custom continues, the world will exist. If, for any reason, this custom is abandoned, evil––in the shape of a horrible serpent who is forever chained to a cliff–– will overrun the world." I have never met any Hutsuls, but they are still there. Elie Wiesel mentions them in Night.

What a Word Really Means

 I keep mentally arguing with that woman Douglas2/Unknown referred to in his comment under Transcending One's Era, he had known who believed that any use of the word "man" to mean "human," not only in our era, but in previous generations, signified a person who was intentionally excluding women from his formulation as unimportant. He noted what an effective insulator this was against listening to what anyone writing before last Tuesday had to say. 

When properly applied, teaching that dogma is as effective as burning the library of Alexandria -- the best knowledge of those who preceded us is effectively lost, even if the books and words are still right there in front of us.

Hers is an extreme example of what many others fall into that is not only bad linguistics, but in the end, bad thinking. I had a woman tell me once that she wanted to get Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary for her homeschooled children so that they would be able to look up what a word "really" means. For all of us, what a word "really" means is how we use it, and this will be close to two concepts: what our current group of communications understands as the meaning, intersecting with what we were taught in school and early adulthood is proper usage. That latter includes its own difficulties. I started school over 60 years ago, was taught by older teachers, in New England, with heavy influence of older well-read women who were conscious of their immigrant background and the importance of proper speech to rise in American intellectual society. That idea of "proper" English thus carries a lot of baggage that is 150 years old, not to mention regional bias.

A favorite example I have used before: If you were to go to some distant tribe to learn their language and make a dictionary of it, taking a full year and trying to be thorough, you would eventually be directed to a remote group, possibly older, who spoke what some would call a "pure" form of the language and others would call an "old-fashioned" version. Some of the mainstream people might even have grown up among them and regard them fondly. So you would innocently go to speak to these people, armed with your near-complete notes, ready for publication.  But a couple of old guys and old wives would tell you that your dictionary is wrong, and they would tell you why "Anca doesn't really mean cart, but the wheels on the cart, because it comes from the word anga, meaning 'axle.' That new slang term of calling a cart anca comes from the Teoni people downstream who say it that way.  That's not a proper was to say 'cart' in our language." You would nod politely, reflect on this interesting aspect of language change, and ignore their input entirely. What the word means is what the four thousand people in the villages understand it to mean, not what some relics who are kicking off soon think.

So too with us. Language changes underneath us at all times. I am personally in favor of retaining older usages as long as possible, to keep them current so that current children can understand what previous generations meant with as little difficulty as possible. I am reading The Fellowship of the Ring to my 13 y/o granddaughter and occasionally have to explain a word, though I minimise this in order to maintain the narrative flow. 

A word in a document "really" means what it meant to the community that received it, or even what the author thought it meant to that community. That is usually an unnecessary refinement of the definition, but occasionally matters. What the word has morphed into since that time is interesting, and may shed some light on the meaning, but is largely irrelevant.  This works in reverse as well.  What a word now means is what the community of hearers understands it to mean.  What it used to mean, or what we think it "should" mean, might be misleading. Most frequently, a meaning will be added to a word, sometimes humorously, sometimes with angry political meaning, sometime invisibly, which older speakers will declare "doesn't mean that." Racism has acquired new meanings. It is wise to recognise that when attempting to understand others.  However, that does not mean the older meaning has been destroyed.  That collection of sounds used to have one meaning, now it has two, and you are well within your rights to use the term as you see fit. Just know your audience.  You may have to say "I am using fantastic in the older sense because it captures my shadings of meaning more exactly."  And it is fair to say that "the newer usages of marginalised and racist aren't that helpful." The newer version doesn't get to be what the word "really" means either.

A quick summary of how words change.

Update: My understanding is that Antonin Scalia was and Clarence Thomas is very sticky about this. What the meaning of a word or phrase at the time it was written into the Constitution (or an Amendment) is key. The meanings the words took on later, even meanings that lawyers subsequently settled on in the 19th C, are distractions.  I have read arguments that some strict constructionists actually aren't, following language myths and preferred understandings of today, but I don't think that holds against those two justices.

Indian Farmer Protests

I know nothing, of course.  I heard a podcast on Razib Khan's Brown Pundits about the topic and was able to pick up a few things that intersected with my own knowledge.  The site and the podcast are a refreshing difference from the appeal-to-the-popular American press.  The writers and podcasters are Western, usually American, of Asian descent. They have an ability to interpret for people like me some of the events going on in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Arab world etc.

Razib and Mukunda Raghavan interviewed the economist Abhinav Prakash of Delhi University about one of the new causes of the International Left, the farmer protests in India. Prakesh is conservative by Indian standards, though he and Razib laughingly note that the Indian right-wing is more socialist than the American left-wing. Prakash says he is a neoliberal, but I can't tell if he means a Milton Friedman/Reagan/Thatcher sort or one of the newer meanings, nor what it means in the context of a (weirdly) socialist country like India. Prakash was involved in a controversy last year in which leftist students from his alma mater Jawaharial Nehru University accused him of being a nazi. He is puzzled by the response of the Western press and Western liberals to the issue, because the farmers who are protesting are not the poor farmers, but the richer ones, who have been receiving price supports for particular crops and thus grow those exclusively, which is bad for the national economy and bad for the environment. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been instituting economic reforms urged on India by liberal institutions such as the IMP and the WTO, he has opened up economic choices for the poorest castes, including the Dalits, he is trying to bring the Green Revolution to southern India (it has been strongest in the north in the Punjab region, now wealthier - I had not known that) - what's not to like? he wonders. India went very socialist in the 60s under Indira Gandhi and Nehru and is just now introducing market reforms long known in Europe.

Razib explained it to him that they think Modi is a nazi, and they are therefore on the side of anyone who opposes him. "Ah yes, I understand now.  This is making it clear for me." Prakash's accent makes it harder to listen to, and another source noted that he has a stutter - which I did not pick up - and the names are unfamiliar, so you will likely have to double back if you are listening. Khan and Ragahavan returned frequently to questions of class and caste with the disclaimer that they didn't think so, but knew that their listeners might be trying to understand the issues in those terms. Prakash stated generally not, but the prosperous farmers in the north are heavily Jat, so it ties in indirectly. He saw regional politics as more the issue, as the Punjab farmers are much closer to Delhi and have always had outsize influence and are now more capable to blockading Delhi than the southern farmers, who likely have the better claim.

If any of you know more, or know why this is all wrong, please feel free.