The Intellectual History of the Court Jester Hypothesis in Evolution

Where did the term "the Court Jester Hypothesis" in evolutionary theory come from?

The "Court Jester hypothesis" terminology is a reaction and intended counterpart to the Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary theory.

The Red Queen hypothesis is a term coined by Leigh Van Valen in 1973 in a reference to the Lewis Carroll book "Through the Looking Glass," and refers in evolution theory to the arms race of evolutionary developments and counter-developments that cause co-evolving species to mutually drive each other to adapt.  There is dispute over how strongly evolution at the scale of speciation is driven by these competition between species, and how much it is driven instead by abiotic factors like meteor strikes and climate change.  But, there has been an artful metaphor to capture this distinction until recently.  As recently as 1985, the main alternative to the Red Queen hypothesis was called the "stability hypothesis" (coined by Stenseth and Maynard Smith in 1984).

These days, however, a number of researchers in evolution (such as Anthony Barnowsky, M.J. Benton, Thomas Ezard, Sergey Gravilets, and the team of J.B.C. Jackson and Douglas Erwin) have started to advance the term "Court Jester hypothesis" to describe the view that evolution at a macro scale is driven by abiotic factors more than the biotic competition called the Red Queen hypothesis.

The first reference that I can find in the literature to the "Court Jester" hypothesis, a term specifically coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis is in Anthony D. Barnosky, "Does evolution dance to the Red Queen or the Court Jester?", 3 Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology USA (1999). In a 2001 paper on the subject ("Distinguishing The Effects Of The Red Queen And Court Jester On Miocene Mammal Evolution In The Northern Rocky Mountains"), Barnosky uses the term without citation, suggesting that he is the one who coined it. Westfall and Millar attribute the term to him (citing the 2001 paper) in a paper of their own from 2004.  Benton also credits Barnosky with coining the phrase in a 2010 paper on the origins of biodiversity on land.

The Court Jester hypothesis builds upon the punctuated equalibrium theory of Gould (1972) by providing a primary mechanism for it. Table 1 in the 2001 paper by Barnosky appropriates for the Court Jester side of the debate the Stability hypothesis, Vrba's Habitat Theory (1992), Vrba's Turn-over pulse hypothesis (1985), Vrba's Traffic light hypothesis and Relay Model (1995), Gould's Tiers of Time (1985), Brett and Baird's Coordinated Statis (1995), and Graham and Lundelius' Coevolutionary Disequalibrium (184) theories. Give the profoundly not catchy quality of these earlier theories, it isn't hard to understand why the term "the Court Jester hypothesis" has had more staying power in the literature.

The 2001 paper, alas, does not spell out the metaphor underlying the "Court Jester" terminology and the 1999 presentation that apparently introduced the metaphor isn't easily available on line in full text. In the 2001 paper Barnosky states that the debate is over:

[W]hether this march of morphology and species compositions through time, so well documented not only for mammals but throughout the fossil record, is more strongly influenced by interactions among species (Red Queen hypotheses), or by random perturbations to the physical environment such as climate change, tectonic events, or even bolide impacts that change the ground rules for the biota (Court Jester hypotheses). . . . A class of alternative ideas, here termed Court Jester hypotheses, share the basic tenet that changes in the physical environment rather than biotic interactions themselves are the initiators of major changes in organisms and ecosystems. Some of the more prominent ideas are listed in Table 1. Court Jester hypotheses imply that events random in respect to the biota occasionally change the rules on the biotic playing field. Accelerated biotic response (relative to background rates) is the result.

Despite the fact that the Court Jester metaphor is coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis, the Jester reference, metaphorically, is not a direct reference to Through The Looking Glass, the Lewis Carroll book from which the Red Queen metaphor is derived, or the other Lewis Carroll book about Alice, Alice in Wonderland. There is no Court Jester in either book.

The best metaphorical sense I can find for the term is that it plays on the notion of both a Queen and a Jester being part of a royal court, and that is uses the term, "Court Jester" in the sense of its meaning in the Tarot, where the Court Jester is the symbol of death triumphing over all:

In Tarot, "The Fool" is the first card of the Major Arcana. The tarot depiction of the Fool includes a man (or less often, a woman) juggling unconcernedly or otherwise distracted, with a dog (sometimes cat) at his heels. The fool is in the act of unknowingly walking off the edge of a cliff, precipice or other high place. Another Tarot character is Death. In the Middle Ages, Death is often shown in Jester's garb because "The last laugh is reserved for death." Also, Death humbles everyone just as jesters make fun of everyone regardless of standing.

Alternately, the Court Jester terminology may be a metaphorical reference to the Joker card in a deck of cards that can upset the settled order, or alternatively a reference to the related notion that a Court Jester is a disinterested player that has no stake or interests in the impact of his actions on any of the competing parties (since this theory posits a natural, abiotic cause). As Wikipedia explains:

The position of the Joker playing card, as a wild card which has no fixed place in the hierarchy of King, Queen, Knave, etc. might be a remnant of the position of the court jester. This lack of any place in the hierarchy meant Kings could trust the counsel of the jesters, as they had no vested interest in any region, estate or church.

Barnowsky acknowledges in the 2001 paper that the Court Jester hypothesis is not necessary inconsistent with the Red Queen hypothesis: "Indeed, as Ned Johnson remarked (after listening to a lecture expressing these ideas), ‘‘Maybe it is time for the Court Jester to marry the Red Queen.’’ That is, perhaps the dichotomy between the two hypotheses is really a dichotomy of scale, and that as we look for ways to travel across biological levels, we will find ways to resolve the dichotomies."

Footnote: Other Notable Evolutionary Theory Names

Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Bradshaw and Brook in 2009 dubbed a similar notion the "Chronus hypothesis" in opposition to the existing Gaia hypothesis, coined by James Lovelock in 1965 (personifying the collective biosphere of Earth as a single being named after the Greek "mother earth"), which more or less corresponds to the "stability hypothesis" of macroevolution, as it sees the Earth's ecosystem as fundamentally stable, while also acknowledging the similar previously advanced "Media hypothesis" of Peter Ward which argues that life itself carries a self-destructive seed within it that sooner or later manifests catastrophically. The Chronus hypothesis article lays out those metaphors:

Cronus (Κρόνος) was the patricidal (or patri-emasculating) youngest son of Gaia, the Earth mother. Cronus was also the leader of the first generation of Titans, the giant descendants of Gaia and Uranus, the sky father. Cronus was incited by his mother to kill Uranus for perceived crimes against Gaia's other descendants, and Cronus himself was overthrown by his own son, Zeus, and banished to Hades (Atsma 2009). Given the tumultuous and competitive life-and-death history of Cronus, we believe this metaphor better captures the processes of inter-species competition and mutualisms that our population analogy of speciation and extinction embodies. Under the Gaia model, self-regulation works to avoid extinction because it is akin to the loss of a body part (function is reduced), whereas under Cronus, extinction is part of the process of natural selection (providing restoration of function through subsequent diversification). . . .

[T]he sorceress Medea (Μήδεια) was the granddaughter of Helios the sun god and wife to Jason of the Argonauts who later killed her own sons as revenge for Jason's unfaithfulness (Atsma 2009). Instead of the self-regulating super-organism Gaia, Ward describes the Earth's mass extinctions as Medean events – large biodiversity loss driven by life itself (Ward 2009a). Arguing that the Gaia hypothesis cannot account for large shifts in the Earth's temperature over geological time, Medea describes how the massive flux of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane by the processes of plant, microbial and animal respiration was the very cause of such volatile conditions which lead to (at least some) mass extinctions (Ward 2009a,b). In essence, the Medean perspective describes a self-destructive, or anti-order component where life "seeks" to destroy itself, and it can do so on a massive scale due to amplifying feedbacks under certain circumstances (Ward 2009a,b). Modern human society might eventually merit the Medean soubriquet.

(This post was originally a comment at Razib's blog who alerted me to the existence of the term.)

READ MORE - The Intellectual History of the Court Jester Hypothesis in Evolution

What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Atkinson's Serial Founder Effect Hypothesis

Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has made headlines with his bold assertion that "the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

The Underlying Data

He reaches this conclusion by massaging data from three maps prepared by Ian Maddieson from secondary sources in the World Atlas of Language Structure.  The maps clearly show that phonemic diversity isn't random, but don't necessarily support Atkinson's hypothesis either.

The maps show the number of consonants, with bins of

Small 6-14 (91 languages) 
Moderately small 15-18 (121 languages)
Average 19-25 (182 languages)
Moderately large 26-33 (116 languages)
Large 33+ (53 languages),

vowels, with bins of

Small (2-4) (93 languages)
Average (5-6) (288 languages)
Large (7-14) (183 languages),

and tone systems, with bins of

No tones (307 languages)
Simple tone system (132 languages) 
Complex tone system (88 languages),

in 504 languages around the world.

The Problems With Aktinson's Hypothesis

Atkinson's hypothesizes about the time-depth of these relationships and their mechanism aren't very persuasive. 

Regional Trends Are Present

Clearly, each of these features exhibit strong regional trends. 

The Amazon is vowel rich, consonant poor and often has a tone system.  The Caucasian languages are short on vowels, rich in consonants and usually lack of tone system.  Indigenous Australian languages without exception are vowel poor, lack tone, and have few to a moderately large number of consonants.  Papuan languages tend to be tonal and consonant poor.

Many West African and East African and Southeast Asian languages have complex tone systems, large numbers of vowels, and moderately large inventories of consonants.  Many indigenous languages of the Pacific Coast in the Americas are vowel poor, have simple tone systems and and tend to have high numbers of consonants.

Europe, South Asia, and North Asia tend to lack tone, have moderate numbers of consonants, and have moderate to high numbers of vowels.

The Data Are Too Noisy To Represent A Serial Founder Effect

Gleaning a relatively clear serial founder effect from these relationships seems far fetched.  The data sets are simply too noisy for that.  One can see clusters where the phonemic features seem to coincide.  One can fairly infer that regional clusters of similar phonemic features have a common origin.  One can even fairly infer that some common reason may account for the fact that non-adjacent regional clusters are phonemically similar.

The Data Don't Closely Track Language Families

Certainly it is true that the features don't seem to track language families. 

For example, Uralic Saami language is consonant rich, while the nearby Uralic Finnish language is consonant poor.

The only New World languages definitively tied to the Old World are the Na-Dene languages and the Yenesian Ket language.  Central Siberian Ket is vowel rich, consonant poor, and lacks a tone system; Na-Dene languages tend to be vowel poor and consonant rich, and some of the Na-Dene languages have a tone system.  Whatever the total number of phonemes is in these related languages, the case that Na-Dene's phoneme set arose from phoneme loss from its parent language is implausible.  Its phoneme losses and gains seem to have counterbalanced each other.

Some Niger-Congo languages have complex tone systems, other than no tone systems at all.  Some Niger-Congo languages (particularly toward Nigeria) are consonant rich, others (particularly towards Ivory Coast and Liberia) are consonant poor.

Areal Effects Are Inconsistent

Indeed, a linguistic trait that follows strong regional patterns while not closely tracking language family relationships is pretty much the definition of an areal effect in linguistics. 

But the source of these areal effects is obscure and inconstant.

Sometimes, the areal effects cross immense linguistic relationship divides.  The phoneme set of Basque, which is more distant from the other languages of Europe than any other for many hundreds of miles, is quite similar to that of many nearby Indo-European languages.  Yet, the phoneme set of the Caucasian languages is dramatically different from those of any of its neighbors, although languages of the Caucasus mountains do seem to have phoneme set sizes similar to each other in some cases despite not being very closely related linguistically and together they are very different from that of neighboring languages.

The Data Aren't A Close Fit To Pre-Historic Migration Patterns

The regions of phonemic similarity don't obviously track paths of deep pre-historic migration.  For example, if they did, we would expect continuity of phonemic trends from Africa to South Asia to Southeast Asia reflecting a Southern route migration.  Instead, we see similarities between Africa and Southeast Asia that are interrupted in South Asia.

Most Papuan languages have few consonants, but a couple of them which are not particularly closely related to each other, at odds with very nearby members of their respective language Trans-Papuan language genuses, have large inventories of consonants, and no Trans-Papuan languages have an intermediate number of consonants.  One imagines a scenario here in which one group intentionally develops a different phoneme set from their close linguistic neighbors in Papua New Guinea for no reason other than to make their language harder for their neighbors to acquire, thereby cementing group identity.

The Data Don't, and Shouldn't Reflect Deep Time Depth

Nor do they seem to obviously reflect linguistic time depth on the scale of tens of thousands of years.  All languages of the New World should have similar linguistic time depth, but show very distinct intra-American regional clusters in phonemic diversity.  Papua New Guinea and Australia were settled by modern humans at about the same time, but have dramatically different phonemic profiles. 

Semitic Hebrew is consonant poor, while Ethio-Semitic Tigre is moderately consonant rich, despite the fact that the languages diverged from each other within the last four thousand years.  The Semitic Arabic dialects spoken closest Israel, which are some of the closest linguistic relatives of Hebrew, are in between.

Irish and Hindi have large numbers of consonants and average numbers of vowels, while most Indo-European languages have average numbers of consonants and large numbers of vowels.  Yet, Irish and Hindi each probably branched off the related Indo-European languages with more typical Indo-European phoneme sets within the last four thousand years.  The Indo-European Hittite language had a particularly low number of vowels (just four) despite being attested at about the same time that Hindi and Irish diverged from their most closely related, but phonemically distinct Indo-European languages, possibly as a substrate influence from vowel poor non-Indo-European languages in Anatolia.

The number of phonemes in English has changed between Old English and contemporary spoken English, and isn't the same even for all dialects of American English, which started to diverge from British English and from each other only in the last few hundred years.

Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that phoneme change can take place in time frames of several centuries, while language family relationships can be pretty clear for periods of several millennia, at least.

The Overall Patterns Couldn't Have Been Produced By Serial Founder Effects

Serial founder effects are hard pressed to explain why the Amazon is consonant poor and vowel rich, by the North Pacific Coast of North America has languages that are rich in consonants and short in vowels, while both have a mix of simple tone systems and languages without tone systems.  Both groups of languages, presumably, have similar time depth and derive from populations that would have been close in space to each other and genetically similar about 17,000 years ago.

The trends also have an immense amount of noise in them.  The Tibeto-Burman Naxi language of Southwest China, for example, is consonant rich, vowel rich and has a complex tone system, giving it the greatest amount of phonemic diversity possible in the data set.  So does the Yulu language of Sudan (a Nilo-Saharan language), and the Nilo-Saharan Ngiti language of the Congo.   A serial founder effect shouldn't put any languages with maximal phoneme sets so distant from each other.

Simply put, the cline that Atkinson proposes isn't the kind of cline one would associate with a serial founder effect.  It is a vague general trend with tenuous foundations that is inconsistent with a serial founder effect.   Whatever accounts for variation between languages in phonemic diversity, it is not a serial founder effect.

There Are Patterns To Phonemic Diversity

The problem is a fascinating puzzle, but Atkinson seems to be largely barking up the wrong tree to explain it. 

Climate Zone And Phoneme Mix

For example, without going into the matter with any particular preconceptions, one would notice that tropical areas tend to have high levels of tonality and rich vowel sets, while temperate and desert areas have low levels of tonality.  One might explain that by concluding that tropical areas have a rich array of bird sounds that locals have an evolutionary fitness reason to learn (culturally) or have a genetic ability to distinguish (or both), and that a well developed capacity to distinguish sounds of these kinds for non-linguistic purposes makes it more natural for these societies to use these kinds of sounds linguistically among themselves.  Consonant frequency might be a factor that allows a language to have a sufficient number of words by compensating for a lack of ability to make different tones and vowel sounds.

Is this the correct hypothesis?  I surely don't know.  But, it is a better statistical match to the data than Atkinson's hypothesis and is plausible enough to make sense.

Contact and Isolation

Unusually high phoneme inventories might be a marker of high levels of inter-linguistic contact.  The Nilo-Saharans who have the highest phoneme inventories in Africa are situated betwixt Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo language speakers and may be borrowing phonemes from the areal influences of both.  The Naxi who have the highest phoneme inventories in Asia are situated between Tibeto-Burmese speakers who have one set of phonemes and Southeast Asian language speakers who have another one.  Likewise, the presence of click consonants in some Bantu languages, presumably because the population previously spoke a Khoisan language before shifting to a Bantu superstrate language, reflects the kind of phoneme gain that can take place from linguistic contact.

Unusually low phoneme inventories might be a market of prolonged population isolation with low population densities in places like Australia.  Phoneme inventories can also occur when language learners in a new superstrate language can't accurately reproduce all of the sounds in the superstrate language.  This may be what happened in the case of Hittite and other Indo-European Anatolian languages.  One also sees it when the Japanese borrow words from languages with more phonemes than its own language has into Japanese.

The number of phonemes in a language is really a matrix of a smaller number of options for sound making. One might, for example, appropriately think of tone systems as multipliers of the number of phonemes in a language, rather than mere additional phonemes. Perhaps the appropriate way to count is to look at the number of combined tone-vowel/consonant sounds in a language (also perhaps modulated by rhythm or otherwise), rather than examining phoneme differences in isolation. Perhaps there is a phoneme set size towards which languages trend when not artificially reduced by small isolated populations (Hawaiian is another famous example phoneme loss in addition to Australia, for possibly similar reasons) and when not artificially increased by phoneme sharing at the boundaries of phoneme regions.

Classes of Phonemes May Be The Most Suitable Level Of Analysis

Consonant and vowel count may be a poor measure in any case.  Many of the outlier cases in consonant number involve an entire classes of consonants or vowels found in one area, but not another, rather than individual phonemes. 

A lack of frictive consonants is a major factor in the low number of consonants found in Australia, Papuan languages, and low consonant languages of the Americas. 

High consonant count African languages are often notable for including labial-velar consonants (found elsewhere only in a small number of Papuan languages), and high vowel count in African languages are often notable for including a distinction between nasalized and non-nasalized vowels (otherwise found mostly in the Americas and sporadically elsewhere). The high consonant count in the Caucasian languages is largely attributable to the pharyngeal consonants used there, in some Afro-Asiatic languages, and in few other places.  Click consonants are also found only in one small, regional subset of Africans.

In contrast, distribution of the "th" sound is sporadic (and a poor fit for a serial founder effect).

Most of the cases of the losses of click sounds, labial-velar consonants, frictive consonants and perhaps even pharyngeal consonants and nasalized vowels, from parent languages that included them, might very well fit a serial founder effect model, since the distribution of these phonemic divergences are consistent with that model, while the distribution of the presence or absence of a "th" sound, linguistic tone systems and some kinds of vowel number variation may not. 

But, at any rate, the analysis probably needs to be conducted on a class of phoneme by class of phoneme basis, rather than on a total consonant set basis to make much sense as a phylogenetic tree.  Clearly, there were at least as many cases of independent phonemic invention in particular regions as there were cases of independent invention of plant and animal domestication complexes, and some kinds of phonemic invention (and linguistic invention generally) seem more prone to independent invention than others.

READ MORE - What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Regional Differences In Neanderthal Admixture

The amount of Neanderthal admixture shown in Eurasian DNA analysis is similar (1%-4%) for all Eurasians, but there is a definite patttern in which the Neanderthal genes found in Europeans and those found in the Chinese are different.  Indeed, it looks like the Neanderthal genes found in South Asians may be different from either of the others.

There are basically two ways this could happen. 

One is that we are seeing founder effects from small groups that broke away from a common Eurasian source population that had a certain amount of Neanderthal admixture which was common to the entire Eurasian source population.  This would have had to have happened quite early, as the East Asian branch of modern Eurasians breaks away from the West Eurasian branch no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.

The other is that there was population structure in the proto-European, proto-South Asian and proto-East Asian source populations, each of which had separate admixture events with Neanderthals that were similar in magnitude because the admixture process was similar in each case.  This population structure, however, would need to have been present somewhere in the range where Neanderthals were present to admix with these separate founder populations.  The admixture of Neanderthals with East Asian founder populations would have to have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Southwest Asia, and again no earlier than about 45,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Any admixture, of course, would have had to have taken place by about 30,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, when the Neanderthals went extinct.

READ MORE - Regional Differences In Neanderthal Admixture

Homo Erectus Era In India Dated UPDATED

Current research in India therefore indicates that the Acheulean industry ranges from 1.5 million years ago to 120,000 years[.]

From here.

Generally speaking, Archeulean industry (which basically amounts to a certain kind of ancient stone tools), is associated with archaic hominins and most prominently, with Homo Erectus. It follows "the more primitive Oldowan technology some 1.8 million years ago" associated with Homo habilis, and is found in a period often called the Lower Paleolithic.

Acheulean tools were not made by fully modern humans that is, Homo sapiens although the early or non-modern (transitional) Homo sapiens idaltu did use Late Acheulean tools as did proto-Neanderthal species. Most notably however it is Homo ergaster (sometimes called early Homo erectus), whose assemblages are almost exclusively Acheulean, who used the technique. Later, the related species Homo heidelbergensis also used it extensively.

The 1.5 million years ago date suggests that Homo Erectus, or a similarly sophisticated hominin arrived in India within 300,000 years after this species of hominin evolved in Africa.

If the dating is upheld, the implication is that ancestors, such as Homo erectus, reached India at an early stage. . . . we opine that these Late Acheulean industries were probably made by an archaic, but somewhat bigger brained ancestor, such as Homo heidelbergensis.

While there is evidence of overlap between archaic hominin populations and modern humans, and even genetic evidence of admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans and between Denisovians and modern humans, the evidence also seems to suggest in the Neanderthal case that the period over overlap was not very long, probably not more than a few thousand years, or perhaps ten thousands years at the outside with a moving boundary in which the hominin species overlapped. There is also no good reason to think that overlaps of different human species, the Denisovians perhaps in Southeast Asia, or Homo floresiensis found in Flores about 20,000 years ago, was much longer. Likewise, there is no evidence of a long period of overlap between Neanderthals and the archaic hominins that preceded them in Europe.

The implication is that Neanderthals and/or modern humans first took hold in South Asia and replaced the hominins associated with Archeulean industry at that point in time sometime in the vicinity of 120,000 to 140,000 years ago, give or take ten or twenty thousand years. This provides an independent line of evidence to support an oldest possible date for an Out of Africa event for modern humans. The presence of Archeulean industry in South Asia 140,000 years ago makes the presence of modern humans in India or anywhere to the East of this point on the coastal route more than 150,000 years ago.

In fact, we don't see that. While we see Java man which might be Homo Eretus or something similar about 1.9 million years ago in Indonesia, the oldest skeletons claimed to be modern human anywhere outside of Africa are about 100,000 years old (including skeletons in China and the Levant), and there are direct signs of modern humans in India around 75,000 years ago. This coincides reasonably closely with the timing of the demise of Archeulean industry in South Asia. Indeed, at this point, it isn't even entirely clear that there was an overlap from the archaeology, although it is hard to see what could have wiped out archaic hominins in Asia other than a new species of hominin that replaced them in their ecological niche.

In Europe, the Archeulean industry was followed by the Mousterian industry of the Middle Stone Age associated mostly, but not entirely, with Neanderthals:

Mousterian tools that have been found in Europe were made by Neanderthals and date from between 300,000 BP and 30,000 BP (from Layer 2A dated 330 ± 5 ka, (OIS) 9 at Pradayrol, France). In Northern Africa and the Near East they were also produced by anatomically modern humans. In the Levant for example, assemblages produced by Neanderthals are indistinguishable from those produced by Qafzeh type modern humans. It may be an example of acculturation of modern humans by Neanderthals because the culture after 130,000 years reached the Levant from Europe (the first Mousterian industry appears there 200,000 BP) and the modern Qafzeh type humans appear in the Levant another 100,000 years later. It was superseded by the Châtelperronian industry around 35,000-29,000 BP.

One of the oldest stone industries associated with modern humans is the Aterian from about 82,000 years ago "in the region around the Atlas Mountains and the northern Sahara. The industry was probably created by modern humans (Homo sapiens), albeit of an early type, as shown by the few skeletal remains known so far from sites on the Moroccan Atlantic coast extending to Egypt."

There is no evidence, however, that the Neanderthal range range reached as far as South Asia:

It appears incorrect, based on present research and known fossil finds, to refer to any fossil outside Europe or Western and Central Asia as a true Neanderthal. True Neanderthals had a known range that possibly extended as far east as the Altai Mountains, but not farther to the east or south, and apparently not into Africa. At any rate, in Africa the land immediately south of the Neanderthal range was possessed by "modern" H. sap., since at least 160,000 years before the present.

The Shanidar site in Iran (also here) is one of the most easternmost Neanderthal sites yet discovered, although this could be simply a product of preservation conditions. A 2010 academic paper argues that there is "evidence of human occupation in Lower Sindh (Pakistan) during the Middle Pleistocene, which is demonstrated by the recovery of chipped stone assemblages with evident Levallois characteristics." This could have been either early modern humans or Neanderthals, and is the part of India most closely adjacent to the known Neanderthal range.

According to the few absolute dates so far available, Middle Palaeolithic complexes are represented in the region since roughly 150 ky, while the Late (Upper) Palaeolithic ones make their appearance at least just after 40 ky from the present, although the dispersal of modern individuals, following a coastal route, is suggested to have taken place some 10 ky before. The problem related to the makers of the Middle Palaeolithic tools is still debated, mainly because of the absence of fossil human remains of this period in the entire Subcontinent.

One of the most important issues consists of the south-easternmost spread of the Neanderthal Levalloisian assemblages that is so far badly defined. Although typical Levalloisian Mousterian industries are known from south-eastern Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and former Soviet Central Asia, characteristic Levalloisian assemblages are almost unknown in the Indian Subcontinent, except for a few surface sites in Lower Sindh and the Indus Valley, which have been discussed in a recent paper. Furthermore the more recent studies seem to support the impression that “the early Middle Palaeolithic (or Middle Stone Age) of India and Nepal probably developed indigenously”, which suggests the existence of a distinctive boundary between the west and the east marked by the axis of Indus river valley.

Thus, the archaeology simultaneous puts what might very well have been a Neanderthal presence in the Indus River Valley and seems to argue against their presence elsewhere in South Asia. Very crudely speaking, there were probably Neanderthals at some point in Pakistan, but not in India, Bangladesh, or Nepal.

The implication seems to be that in most of India the first modern humans would have encountered Homo heidelbergensis, or some similar species of hominin, when they first arrived, and that this South Asian hominin was sufficiently successful to prevent Neanderthals from encroaching upon their range.

This matters a lot as we try to decipher the meaning of the fact that modern humans have an average of about 1-4% Neanderthal ancestry, as determined by comparing ancient Neanderthal DNA with modern Eurasian DNA and identifying genes found in Eurasians and Neanderthals but not in Africans as Neanderthal source genes. The plot thickens as we learn that Melanesians apparently have about 4% Denisovian genes (based on a similar comparison with ancient DNA found in a Central Asian cave) on top of their Neanderthal inheritance, and that the Neanderthal genes found in Chinese people are mostly different ones than the Neanderthal genes found in Europeans.

Of course, a wild card is that some of what appear to be Neanderthal genes in some or all modern humans may be genes from some other kind of archaic hominin that shared those genes with Neanderthals. Indeed, it isn't even clear if the distinct pattern of Neanderthal genes in China and Europe respectively are due to founder effects after admiture while part of a common population, or separate admixture events.

Still, these facts, taken together, greatly narrow the scenarios in which Neanderthal admixture which seems clear to have taken place, happened. Let's review them, all of which seem to be a pretty solid footing:

* Neanderthals never had a range further east than Pakistan.
* Neanderthals never made it into Africa.
* Neanderthals were present in the Levant and Europe and Persia and Central Asia when modern human proto-Eurasians left Africa starting around 100,000 years ago.
* Neanderthals went extinct 22,000 to 30,000 years ago (the younger date is the most recent Mousterian find, the older date is the youngest skeletal remains).
* Modern human started to migrate along the Southern Route around 100,000 years ago or so.
* The Chinese have their roots overwhelmingly peoples who took a Southern route out of Africa, as the genetic evidence overwhelmingly indicates, although this may have involved multiple waves of migration.
* Modern humans did not reach Europe any earlier than about 50,000 years ago, and redating of the oldest modern human remains in Europe suggest that it could have been less than 30,000 years ago.
* Modern humans appear to have been absent from the Levant from 75,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago.
* Papuans and Australian aboriginal ancestors reached their respective lands around 45,000 to 50,000 years ago and had about 4% Neanderthal admixture at that point.
* A significant portion of modern European genetics has its sources in waves of migration to Europe from outside Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 20,000 years ago, after the Neanderthals were extinct.

The overlap between Neanderthal range and the Southern route of migration out of Africa is pretty narrow, fixing a time and place where Neanderthal admixture with proto-East Asians could have happened to a region limited to the Arabian Pennisula, Anatolia, Persia, or the Indus River Valley sometime between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. While this is somewhat vague and subject to caveats, it does narrow the scope of what could have happened a great deal.

Moreover, given that we know modern humans were present in India at the time of the Toba explosion around 75,000 years ago, and if we can assume continuity between those modern humans and subsequent ones in terms of levels of Neanderthal admixture (this is "the big if"), then the time frame for Neanderthal admixture may be 75,000 years ago to 100,000 years ago, in the same region, before rather than during or after the time period in which modern humans appear to have retreated from or gone extinct in the Levant.

In contrast, the admixture events that gave rise to Neanderthal admixture in Europeans are not nearly so constrained. This could have happened as late as about 30,000 years ago or as early as about 100,000 years ago in either Europe or any of the places it could have happened for the East Asian populations.

It would be interesting to see which Neanderthal genes are most common in South Asians, and if there is a cline similar to the ANI/ASI cline in those genes.

UPDATE (3-28-2011):

John Hawks has more to add to this story:

The "Homo heidelbergensis" model is in such utter disarray right now, I'm not sure many paleoanthropologists have realized the full extent of the problems. You should know that I don't believe in Homo heidelbergensis, never have. A couple of months ago, I was discussing some of the issues about mutation rate estimation with a very prominent geneticist, and the conversation turned to Homo heidelbergensis. What a shock the Denisova sequence should have been to those itching to see a H. heidelbergensis incursion into Asia!

READ MORE - Homo Erectus Era In India Dated UPDATED

Pre-Clovis Strata In New World Definitively Dated

A Texas archaeological dig has cleanly established the existence of a human settlement from around 15,500 to 13,200 years ago. This is about two thousand years earlier than the distinctive Clovis culture strata that is found across North America, and about a thousand years older than the oldest archaeological remains found in South America. This age is consistent with an entry of the earliest hominins to the Americas via the Beringian land bridge (where Alaska and its Aleutian Islands are today) and an expansion beyond Beringia when glacial melt would have opened a passage to the continental interior.

This site is notable because its dating is particularly "clean", because it clearly pre-dates the Clovis sites, and because it is in the interior of North America. It had seemed possible before this find, that earlier pre-Clovis sites fit a pattern that could have arguably been confined to the Pacific Coast of the Americas and their near vicinity, rather than also including the interior of the Americas and Eastern Coasts.

Open Question: Why do the earliest skeletons in the Americas seem to look different from later skeletons in the Americas?

The new find does not have bones, so ancient DNA and physical anthropology describing the people who inhabited the earliest strata of settlements in the Americas is not possible from this site. Some of the oldest skeletons in the Americas are from people who would have looked physically very different from modern Native Americans in all eras starting a few thousand years later, and somewhat similar to the very oldest East Asian skeletons. It isn't clear if the differences between the oldest skeletons and the later ones in physical type are a case of population replacement, human evolution as a result of new conditions, or factors like disease that could produce a few fluke skeletons that have been misinterpreted as seemingly belonging to a different racial type.

It is clear from genetic evidence that the vast majority of Native American genes found today have their origin in a pretty small population that expanded almost everywhere at about the same time when humans first emerged onto the continent from Beringia. The biggest divide in Native American genetics seems to suggest, however, that the genetic mix in the Native American groups that settled the North American interior is somewhat different than the genetic mix in the Native American groups that settled the Pacific Coast. It isn't clear if this was a product of random founder effects, or if there was some degree of population structure in the Beringian source population for the Americas.

It also isn't clear if there were one or more subsequent waves of people who arrived from Asia, perhaps by boat or perhaps in separate waves of migration that were closely spaced in time (the Na-Dene are often seen as a candidate population that could have given rise to the genetic difference between North America and South America), outside of the circumpolar region, that had a minor but detectable impact of Native American population genetics.

Finally, we can't rule out the possibility that the wave of humans arriving in the New World via the Beringian land bridge initially included modern humans from Asia of both an "archaic race" (paleoindians) and a more "modern race" and that the archaic modern humans vanished due to some combination of failure to adapt to the New World, conflict between the two populations that they lost, and admixture to the point where they were diluted into invisibility in modern Native American gene pools.

The plausiblity of a scenario with a "lost race" that inhabited the Americas as the same time as the ancestors of modern Native Americans is enhanced by the fact that we know that at least two other human populations, the Vikings, and a paleo-Eskimo population that arrived after the closing of the Beringian land bridge and then were replaced by the Eskimos, arrived in the Americans only the disappear without leaving a notable genetic trace in contemporary Native American populations.

Open Question: When did human first arrive in America?

The new find does, however, help us to bette calibrate the amount of genetic mutation that is observed in the Americas in indigeneous populations to a time of divergence.

That task is complicated by the fact that we don't know how much time the proto-Native Americans spent as a genetically distinct population in Beringia and Northest Asia before entering into the interior of the Americas. In particular, it isn't entirely clear if the proto-Native American population was drawn from pre-Last Glacial Maximum populations of Northeast Asia, post-Last Glacial Maximum populations of Northeast Asia, or a mix of the two. In one scenario, there was a population that entered Beringia, was trapped their by ice in both directions for many thousands of years, and then expanded out afterwards (Beringia's weather would have been mild for its lattitude due to ocean currents and prevailing winds). In another scenario, the stayover of the proto-Native Americans in Beringia en route to the Americas would have been relatively brief.

But, in all of the scenarios not ruled out by contrary genetic evidence or other evidence, the proto-Native American population would have been in a bottleneck situation in Beringia for some period of time before rapidly expanding out into virgin territory across all parts of North America and South America. So, timing of the "breakout" into the Americas can still be inferred by the amount of genetic diversity in different regions of the Americas, without knowing too much about how long that population was in the Americas. And, in theory, one can look at the amount of genetic differences between all American populations and plausible source populations in Asia, to estimate the age of the most recent common ancestor of the two populations. By subtracting the apparent expansion date of the Native American popluations of about 15,000 years ago, from the apparent age of the most recent common ancestor of the Asia souce populations and the American populations, it ought to be possible to estimate how long a distinct proto-Native American population was genetically isolated either in Berginia itself or in some territory in Northeast Asia.

In practice, this isn't so easy, because the margin of error in dating the oldest human habitation sites discovered (roughly plus or minus 900 years) and the margin of error in estimating divergence times based on genetic evidence (roughly plus or minus a few thousand years) in large in relationship to the probable length of the time that this population was isolated pre-expansion, which is a few hundred years at the low end of theoretical expectation (i.e. about 14,500 years ago) and about seven thousand years at the high end of theoretical expectation (i.e. about 22,000 years ago).

Open Question: Where there pre-land bridge or post-land bridge waves of human migration to the Americas?

When glaciers melted, the land bridge between Asia and the Americas was submerged, effectively isolating the Americas from the rest of the world until the arrival of Columbus in 1492, with a handful of very limited exceptions:
* some circumpolar Eskimo and paleo-Eskimo interchange between North America and Siberia,
* a brief and failed interlude of Viking efforts to colonize a few places on the North Atlantic coast of North America about a thousand years ago, and
* a probable brief episode of contact (but not population exchange) between the Austronesians and the South Americans on the Pacific Coast that brough the kumara (a kind of South American origin yam) and some associated names for it that are used in South American languages, to the Polynesians sometime in the last two thousand years or so.

It isn't clear what lasting cultural impact, if any, this brief episode of Polynesian-South American contact had on the South Americans. There are musical similarites between South American music and the musics of some cultures in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, and this is one time that this musical culture could have arrived, but the music of Polynesian cultures does not share the traits found in both Southeast Asia and Melanesia on one hand, and South America on the other, so music as a cultural impact seems unlikely.

The circumpolar contacts are the only known contracts between the Americas and the rest of the world between the closing of the Beringian land bridge and 1492 CE, that are known to have had a genetic impact on modern Native American populations.

There are a couple of New World sites that claim much older ages (ca. 30,000 years ago), but there is considerable dispute over the methodology used to establish those dates from cinders that may or may not have had human origins and whose dating may or may not be reliable. If there were populations in the Americas that old, one also has to explain why modern humans expanding into the virgin territories of the Americas did not show the signs found in all other cases where that happened: megafauna extinction, widespread population expansion leaving archaeological traces, etc., yet did leave isolated traces at very far flung sites. And, one also has to presume a level of sea faring expertise greater than was known to be available in any candidate populations around that time. And, one has to explain the lack of the distinct population genetic signatures you would expect from that population.

Obviously, new discoveries can only push earliest Native American populations further back in time, but the knowledge we have of ancient climate and the timing of megafauna extinctions widely believed to be related to the arrival of humans in the Americas strongly disfavors a scenario in which humans arrived very much earlier. Even the sites with archaic modern human physical anthropology are quite close in time (within a few thousand years) of the sites with modern human physical anthropology quite simmilar to modern populations.

READ MORE - Pre-Clovis Strata In New World Definitively Dated

Modern Continental Drift Rates

For future reference, continental drift in active faults like East Africa's Rift Valley or North America's Pacific Coast is on the order of ten to thirty feet per century; one hundred to three hundred feet per thousand years; about three hundred meters to a kilometer per per ten thousand years; and two to six miles overall since modern humans left Africa. In that time frame, the direction of fault movement has been essentially unchanged. (Links misplaced before I made this post.) The human impact of volcanos and earthquakes is generallly going to be more significant impacts of geological activity than continental drift in this time frame.

This isn't so small that it is entirely irrelevant in the time frame of hominin evolution, but is largely overshadowed by more dramatic changes in this time frame in sea levels and global climate.

READ MORE - Modern Continental Drift Rates

Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

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Monday Miscellany

* Last week, Glendale's animal rights terrorist, thirty-four year old Walter Edmund Bond, got five years in prison for burning down the sheepskin factory (and a $1.2 million restitution judgment together with three years of supervised release) following a guilty plea, despite the fact that he was utterly unapologetic and taunted the victims as he spoke prior to receiving his sentence. No physical injuries to people were caused by this or her other fires, but the business, which was not insured, was destroyed.

"In a society that honors money over life, I am honored to be a prisoner of war," Bond said. As Bond raged in the heavily guarded courtroom — at one point saying he wanted Livaditis to "choke on everything you earned" — a member of Livaditis' family cried in the audience. . . . [He] told Judge Christine Arguello that he has no remorse for the fire, which he has said he lit under the banner of the radical Animal Liberation Front, or ALF. . . . [The judge said] he would face additional prison time if he didn't keep up with restitution payments. Bond told Arguello he would not willingly make the payments. . . . Bond also has prior arson convictions that had nothing to do with animal-rights issues. Holloway said Bond was convicted in Iowa in 1996 for lighting a pentagram on fire inside a church convicted again in 1997 in Iowa for setting fire to a building, an incident that killed a family's pet. . . .

Bond's speech today stood in contrast to statements his lawyer made on his behalf last month in a court filing seeking to get Bond a reduced sentence of less than four years. In that filing, attorney Edward Harris wrote that Bond had renounced "burning the businesses of those who offend his principles. . . . Mr. Bond ... now believes that the better course of action is to limit his advocacy to speech and writing," Harris wrote.

That sentiment was not evident during Bond's speech, as he called affiliating with the ALF, "the proudest and most powerful thing I have ever done." Bond, who has identified himself at times in online writings as "ALF Lone Wolf," addressed part of his speech to "my vegan sisters and brothers" and encouraged them to keep up their campaign.

About a dozen of Bond's supporters sat in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing. . . After the hearing, many of the activists, some of whom traveled from across the country to attend, said they supported Bond's statement.

The willingness of federal prosecutors to accept such a lenient plea bargain may have something to do with the fact that he faces two more counts in Utah that will add to the total time served before his release. This conviction will impact his criminal history for the next convictions under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. U.S. Attorneys in Utah will also, no doubt, consider his statements at this sentencing in considering what plea agreements they are willing to reach with him.

Still, it is hard to imagine someone who claimed that he did this in the name of Islam, instead of animal rights, receiving a similarly light sentence. When someone who is deeply repentant can be sentenced to 30 years in prison for sending $3,500 to an Islamic organization that engaged in both terrorist and non-terrorist activities funded by petty fraud under a law that had never before been enforced, it is hard to see why someone with a prior criminal arson record he burns down a shop and has no remorse for the act should receive a lighter sentence.

* There seems to be some evidence that fructose (one type of dietary sugar) encourages obesity more the glucose (another type of dietary sugar).

* Genetic evidence has led biologists to reclassify a few species of worms called Acoels and Xenoturbella, that had previously been seen as a missing link between invertebrates with radial symmetry (anemones, jellyfish and sponges, for example) that use the same body opening to ingest food and excrete waste, and animals with bilateral symmetry that have a separate mouth and anus (earthworms, snails, insects, sea urchins and vertebrates, for example), since these worms have bilateral symmetry but a single body opening to ingest food and excrete waste. The genetic evidence suggests that rather than being a missing link, the Acoels had an ancestor that has bilateral symmetry and both a mouth and anus, but lost the anus in later convergent evolution. They turn out to be more closely related to the vertebrates and sea urchins than to other bilateral animals by several different genetic measures.

* Old teeth found at an archeological site in Israel suggest that there may have been modern humans in the Levant much earlier than prior finds have indicated, perhaps even shortly after the evolution of modern humans in Africa:

Excavated at Qesem cave, a pre-historic site that was uncovered in 2000, the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern humans, Homo sapiens, which have been found at other sites is Israel, such as Oafzeh and Skhul -- but they're a lot older than any previously discovered remains.

"The Qesem teeth come from a time period between 200,000 -- 400,000 years ago when human remains from the Middle East are very scarce," Quam said. "We have numerous remains of Neandertals and Homo sapiens from more recent times, that is around 60,00 -- 150,000 years ago, but fossils from earlier time periods are rare. So these teeth are providing us with some new information about who the earlier occupants of this region were as well as their potential evolutionary relationships with the later fossils from this same region."

Teeth are the prime sources for ancient DNA because the enamel shields them from outside conditions, leaving open the possibility that it might be possible to analyze the DNA of hominins much older than any other ancient DNA ever recovered. Even results limited to mtDNA could shed light on whether the modern humans finds in the Levant are ancestral to modern Eurasian, or a "dead end" as their apparent absence from the Levant for tens of thousands of year suggests might be the case. But, the rare teeth have value whole, and the ancient DNA inside could easy be degraded and provide no useful information, so the decision on whether scientists should try to analyze them in destructive testing for ancient DNA is a difficult one.

* One feature that is surprising absent from library cataloging software (at least in Denver) and online book purchasing sites (like Amazon) is an easy way to bring up all of the books and other media that are part of the same series and arrange them in order. This is particularly annoying when several volumns of a series are written by different authors (common in non-fiction and sometimes seen in tribute works to deceased authors). Even more annoying, however, is the effort of publishers like Little, Brown and Company's paperback offerings, where I have seen it done, to deliberately obscure the fact that a book which is one of the middle books of a series has books that come before it in the series on the book cover. I understand the desire to sell more books, but in general have a low opinion of marketing approaches that seek to capitalize on consumer ignorance rather than by letting them know more about the product.

* Marginal Revolution is a blog that is increasingly attracting my attention as a source of interesting and timely tidbits. So is Truth on the Market (which is more academic).

* Most recently, the latter blog brings the sad news that Borders, I book store that I saw rise from its humble beginnings as a wonderful independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan while I was in law school, is going bankrupt. Borders was acquired by Detroit area based Kmart to revive its Walden Books chain, one that I liked to describe as a book store for people who don't really like books that based on shopping malls. The book stores were spun off from Kmart, which went bankrupt and was merged in the same group with Sears, another retail chain that had jumped the shark but had valuable real estate holdings. Borders was a delightful book store, but expanded too fast with non-bookstore exeecutives, failed to gain a strong foothold into the online world, and tried to hard to meld a chain oriented towards intellectuals and one oriented towards non-intellectuals that was ill fated. I personally think that the role of a lack of online initiatives at Borders which has been played as a "death of books" scenario distorts what really went wrong with Borders, which can just as easily be understood as a lesson in the limits of the economies of scale.

* The Democratic Leadership Council (and its deceptively named think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute), a conservative leaning organization within the Democratic Party, is dead. It has run out of money and is suspending its operations. While the DLC has been more Clintonian than outright Blue Dog conservative, it has earned a great deal of ire from the progressive elements in the Democratic party anyway. The 2012 election was a blow to its core constitutency, as right leaning Democrats favored Republicans over Democrats, although the Democratic party still has a much bigger tend than the Republicans politically at the moment. Also, the DLC has simply lacked much of a coherent vision.

* Arizona is talking about bringing counterclaims in the federal suit to invalidate its anti-immigration law on pre-emption grounds alleging that Arizona has incurred fiscal harms as a result of non-enforcement of federal law by federal officials. The claim is frivilous as a matter of law and a nearly identical suit was promptly defeated in the courts in Colorado when Attorney General Suthers was directed by the legislature in a special session to bring such a suit. But, the political grandstanding continues to outweigh the legal good judgment of the officials making the legal move.

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