[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting the Edge Annual
Question â€" 2006.]

STEVEN PINKER
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate


Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents
and temperaments

The year 2005 saw several public appearances of what will I
predict will become the dangerous idea of the next decade: that
groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents
and temperaments.

* In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a
firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men
have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities
and life priorities.  


* In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an
op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom
that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to
be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may
be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But
patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups,
and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the
major races labeled by common sense. )


* In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist
Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population
geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews
have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that
their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this
evolutionary history.


* In September, political scientist Charles Murray published an
article in Commentary reiterating his argument from The Bell
Curve that average racial differences in intelligence are
intractable and partly genetic.


Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for
gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial
differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be
dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification,
and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have
been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis.
Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been
reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race
does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank
slate inscribed by parents). The underlying fear, that reports of
group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless.

The intellectual tools to defuse the danger are available. "Is"
does not imply "ought. " Group differences, when they exist,
pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution,
rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a
commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat
people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is
not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet
many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to
say nothing of the wider world community.

Advances in genetics and genomics will soon provide the ability
to test hypotheses about group differences rigorously. Perhaps
geneticists will forbear performing these tests, but one shouldn't
count on it. The tests could very well emerge as by-products of
research in biomedicine, genealogy, and deep history which no
one wants to stop.

The human genomic revolution has spawned an enormous
amount of commentary about the possible perils of cloning and
human genetic enhancement. I suspect that these are red
herrings. When people realize that cloning is just forgoing a
genetically mixed child for a twin of one parent, and is not the
resurrection of the soul or a source of replacement organs, no
one will want to do it. Likewise, when they realize that most
genes have costs as well as benefits (they may raise a child's IQ
but also predispose him to genetic disease), "designer babies"
will lose whatever appeal they have. But the prospect of genetic
tests of group differences in psychological traits is both more
likely and more incendiary, and is one that the current intellectual
community is ill-equipped to deal with.

GREGORY COCHRAN
Consultant in adaptive optics and an adjunct professor of
anthropology at the University of Utah

There is something new under the sun â€" us

Thucydides said that human nature was unchanging and thus
predictable â€" but he was probably wrong.  If you consider
natural selection operating in fast-changing human
environments, such stasis is most unlikely. We know of a
number of cases in which there has been rapid adaptive change
in humans; for example, most of the malaria-defense mutations
such as sickle cell are recent, just a few thousand years old. 
The lactase mutation that lets most adult Europeans digest ice
cream is not much older.

There is no magic principle that restricts human evolutionary
change to disease defenses and dietary adaptations: everything
is up for grabs.  Genes affecting personality, reproductive
strategies, cognition, are all able to change significantly over
few-millennia time scales if the environment favors such change
â€" and this includes the new environments we have made for
ourselves, things like new ways of making a living and new
social structures.  I would be astonished if the mix of personality
types favored among hunter-gatherers is "exactly" the same as
that favored among peasant farmers ruled by a Pharaoh.  In fact
they might be fairly different.

There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry
Harpending and I have, we think, made a strong case that
natural selection changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand
years or so, favoring certain kinds of cognitive abilities and
generating genetic diseases as a side effect.  Bruce Lahn's
team has found new variants of brain-development genes: one,
ASPM, appears to have risen to high frequency in Europe and the
Middle East in about six thousand years.  We don't yet know what
this new variant does, but it certainly could affect the human
psyche â€" and if it does, Thucydides was wrong.  We may not be
doomed to repeat the Sicilian expedition: on the other hand,
since we don't understand much yet about the changes that have
occurred, we might be even more doomed.  But at any rate, we
have almost certainly changed. There is something new under
the sun â€" us.
         
This concept opens strange doors.  If true, it means that the
people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably
fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed
â€" some, anyhow â€" over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different
about the human mind in ancient civilization.  On first reading,
Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but
Jaynes may have been on to something.
      
If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently
because of biological differences, history is never going to be the
same.


http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html

The accident happened during the construction of a railroad in
Vermont, in 1848, and it happened fast: A three-foot-long
tamping iron sparked an explosion, shot skyward and sailed
through the frontal cortex of the project's foreman, Phineas Gage.
Gage, famously, got a whole new personality, and students of
the brain got perhaps their most iconic case study. In
transforming Gage from the amiable and responsible person he
had been before the accident to the temperamental and bawdy
one he became after, the iron bar also drilled a hole in Cartesian
dualism, the intuitive distinction we all make between our minds
and our brains. As the foreman had the misfortune to
demonstrate, altering the physical brain can alter personality,
behavior, mood--virtually everything we think of as constituting
our essential (and incorporeal) self.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060109&s=schulz

By OLIVIA JUDSON
Published: January 1, 2006

IF chimpanzees observed New Year's Day, they would have
much to reflect on. In 2005, they joined humans, chickens and
mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on
an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete
genomes have been sequenced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01judson.html

[The quagga is one of the lamer extinct animals, IMO - JM]


"Reinhold Rau is one of the last of his breed. He was once part
of a team of seven taxidermists who, during the apartheid years
in South Africa, mounted mammals and birds for the
natural-history museum in Cape Town. You can still see his
work there. The leopard moving toward its prey on the third floor
is Rau's creation, as is the zebra fawn in a nearby glass case,
taking shelter under an adult. Rau loves his work - the stripping
of the animal's skin from the body, the construction of the mold
that replaces its flesh, the sleight of hand that brings about a
permanent version of the animal's old self. "Sometimes when
the schoolchildren come and see taxidermy, they almost faint,"
he told me recently in his accented English (he grew up in
Germany). "But it never had that effect on me.""

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01taxidermy.html

In medical research, nobody is convinced by a single
experiment.

A finding has to be reproducible to be believable. Only if different
scientists in different places do the same study and get the
same outcomes can physicians have confidence the finding is
actually true. Only then is it ready to be put into clinical practice.

Nevertheless, one of medicine's most overlooked problems is
the fact that some questions keep being asked over and over.
Repeated tests of the same diagnostic study or treatment are a
waste -- of time and money, and of volunteers' trust and
self-sacrifice. Unnecessary clinical trials may also cost lives.

http://tinyurl.com/ahkrp

Dec. 30, 2005 â€" Laughter is either genuine or consciously
feigned, according to a new analysis that details how laughter
has evolved over the past seven million years.

http://tinyurl.com/8jqht

A cheek swab by longevity specialist Elaine Chin could pinpoint
the illness that will one day end a patient's life. But, as CAROLYN
ABRAHAM reveals, the emerging form of DNA testing raises a
host of troubling questions

http://tinyurl.com/e3ngb

By re-enacting an evolutionary event that happened to wheat thousands of years
ago,
researchers are producing new plant varieties that could save lives in regions
where drought
causes food shortages.

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060102/full/060102-2.html

Logic is the loser in uncertain situations, says Roger Highfield

Investing money, changing jobs, getting married: all big decisions that can mark
a leap into
the unknown. Now, a new brain-imaging study finds that the higher the level of
uncertainty,
the more likely it is that emotion and gut insinct, not logic, will rule.

http://tinyurl.com/brj82

Weekend Edition - Sunday, January 1, 2006 · While debate rages in this country
over teaching
science and so-called "intelligent design," the Roman Catholic Church is in the
midst of a
renewed discussion over the compatibility of evolution and faith.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5078357

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily
gamboling masked
bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn't enough to make you
melt, then
maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras
and the
heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03cute.html

DOVER, Pa. - Dover's much-maligned school policy of presenting "intelligent
design" as an
alternative to evolution was officially relegated to the history books Tuesday
night.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10698535/

Can we bring back a long-extinct animal? A slide-show essay about the quagga.

http://www.slate.com/id/2132747/

Fossils of a stegodon and a host of other mammals found in a Thai rice field
could offer clues
to prehistoric animal and human migrations in Asia.



http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0103_060103_thai_fossils.html

Ever since John Stuart Mill identified Britain's Conservatives as "the stupid
party," it has been
fashionable for leftists to deride their political opponents as
anti-intellectual, backward-
thinking clods. The trope has figured prominently in recent American
presidential politics,
with candidates of the Democratic party posing, sometimes ostentatiously, as
defenders of
reason and all things scientific. Al Gore, known in some circles as the inventor
of the Internet,
preached tirelessly that the Republican refusal to combat climate change would
soon result in
global catastrophe. In 2004, John Edwards implied that paraplegics would soon be
able to
walk again—if not for George W. Bush's benighted policies on stem-cell research.
Unfortunately for Gore and Edwards, these admonitions did not impress the
electorate.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12101071_1

I have always maintained that extraterrestrials are probably landing
on earth daily, it's just that we don't recognize them as such. What I
mean is random strands of RNA, Viruses (Virii?), etc. carried by small
meteorites, that have been sucked in by the Earth's gravitational pull.

Now new research suggests that small nematodes can survive earth
rentry virtually unscathed - the implications of this of course are
that life on earth may have initially evolved extraterrestrially, and
also that mysterious disease outbreaks or plagues may too have an
extraterrestrial origin.

ABSTRACT:
"This is a very exciting result," said Catharine Conley, a biologist
at the NASA Ames Research Center and principal investigator on the
experiment. "It's the first demonstration that animals can survive a
re-entry event similar to what would be experienced inside a
meteorite. It shows directly that even complex small creatures
originating on one planet could survive landing on another without the
protection of a spacecraft."

http://news.com.com/2061-11204_3-6016657.html?tag=newsmap

The lesson of the Korean cloning scandal.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006, at 4:11 PM ET

When Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk announced last May that he had
cloned human embryos and derived stem-cell lines from them,
researchers and doctors all over the world thought we were on our way
to curing terrible diseases. By cloning an embryo from you, we could
grow tissues that would match you genetically and could repair
anything that broke down in your body.

http://www.slate.com/id/2133745/?nav=tap3

OVER THE last few years, due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many
commentators have discerned the emergence of a new American empire.
Some critics blame the Bush Administration, arguing that, but for Bush,
there would be no crisis over American "unilateralism" or "hegemony."
Others blame the end of the Cold War for "unleashing" America on the
world.


http://tinyurl.com/95n8m

How brain scans are reinventing the science of lie detection.
By Steve Silberman

Feature:
Don't Even Think About Lying
Plus:
The Cortex Cop
I'm flat on my back in a very loud machine, trying to keep my mind
quiet. It's not easy. The inside of an fMRI scanner is narrow and
dark, with only a sliver of the world visible in a tilted mirror above
my eyes. Despite a set of earplugs, I'm bathed in a dull roar
punctuated by a racket like a dryer full of sneakers.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying_pr.html

Home Office denies racial bias

James Randerson, science correspondent
Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian

The DNA profiles of nearly four in 10 black men in the UK are on the
police's national database - compared with fewer than one in 10 white
men, according to figures compiled by the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1678557,00.html

y CARL ZIMMER
Published: January 3, 2006

Why, Michael Lynch wants to know, don't we look like bacteria?

Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans and other living
species are descended from bacterialike ancestors. But before about
two billion years ago, human ancestors branched off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03zimm.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-01/cshl-wg010406.php

"It appears that TFRs might be the passive signatures of one or more
poorly understood mechanisms of gene regulation that operate in higher
organisms, suggesting a wider role for noncoding sequences than has
hitherto been appreciated."

[SciBlog] Near Ovulation, Your Cheatin' Heart Will Tell on You

New research from UCLA and the University of New Mexico suggests that
members of "the gentler sex" may have evolved to cheat on their mates
during the most fertile part of their cycle — but only when those
mates are less sexually attractive than other men.

"Women know they have attractions that come and go, but they probably
don't realize that these urges are tied to their cycle — as well as
our evolutionary past," said Martie G. Haselton, a UCLA researcher
and author of two new studies on the subject. "They just know that
suddenly one day they're attracted to their hunky neighbor or
handsome co-worker."

Men, meanwhile, seem to be aware on some level of this possibility
and appear to step up mate-guarding strategies when their wives or
girlfriends ovulate, even when neither is keeping track of the
woman's cycle, the research shows.

"It's not just that men are more jealous and possessive when their
partners ovulate, but they're also more attentive to their partners
and more giving to their needs," said collaborator Steven W.
Gangestad, a University of New Mexico psychologist.

"Although men are probably not aware of it, they behave as though
they're genuinely concerned about being cuckolded," Gangestad
continued. "It turns out that there's some basis for the fear...."

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/near_ovulation_your_cheatin_heart_will_
tell_on_you_9649

[SciBlog] Biologists and agricultural scientists work more than
everyone

Computer scientists and engineers work more than mathematicians or
psychologists do, and biologists and agricultural scientists work
more than everyone, says an NSF survey of the average work weeks of
doctoral scientists and engineers.

Also, the report said, when the worker's household includes non-adult
children, women declared shorter work weeks than did men who had the
same number of children. In households with no children, women and
men work equal numbers of hours.

Thomas B. Hoffer and Karen Grigorian, of the University of Chicago's
National Opinion Research Center, analyzed data from NSF's 2003
Survery of Doctorate Recipients taken for the reference week of Oct.
1 of that year. The survey looked at 530,962 doctorate holders
working in three broad sectors, including education, which was
primarily university level teaching and research, industry and
government. Educators averaged 50.6 hours of work for the week, while
those in industry averaged 47.6 hours. Those employed by federal,
state or local governments worked the fewest hours, averaging 45.2
per week.

As for the postdocs? They reported working 50.3 hours per week on
average -- "less than the nontenured tenure-track faculty, but more
than non-tenure track individuals, and not significantly different
from tenured faculty," the survey says.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/which_wonks_work_the_most_9647

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06302/

Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by
showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species
as sea levels rose and fell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/science/06cats.html

Freeman Dyson, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and other Cosmic
Thinkers on Camera.


http://meaningoflife.tv/

Female hormones circulating in the brain determine masculine behavior,
at least in mice. Estrogen--the quintessential female hormone
responsible for regulating the reproductive cycle--turns lady mice
into wannabe male mice when it is allowed to penetrate the brain
during development, according to new research.

http://tinyurl.com/8n3gy

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Published: January 8, 2006

Information Asymmetries: Our book "Freakonomics" includes a chapter
titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?"
This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept
known as information asymmetry, a state wherein one party to a
transaction has better information than another party. It is probably
obvious that real-estate agents typically have better information than
their clients. The Klan story was perhaps less obvious. We argued that
the Klan's secrecy - its rituals, made-up language, passwords and so
on - formed an information asymmetry that furthered its aim of
terrorizing blacks and others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08wwln_freakonomics.html

In a new take on hibernation, biologists now believe that mammals are
not the only ones who use the winter months to store up energy. Birds,
and even humans, may have the capacity to switch to standby mode.

http://tinyurl.com/8c5dd

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

Leon Kass sounds a warning about the perils of biotechnology.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007782