The Royal Family has a contract with Netflix. This contrived controversy is contracted to ensure that something interesting happens in the Royal Family with sufficient frequency to keep The Crown going through this period of Royal Dullness.

Nothing else to see here folks.

I’m not going to mention any names. All I’ll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work if blood was ever blue. What he said was not recorded in detail, but it was very much like this statement I found on the Internet:

… human blood is red as soon as it is oxygenated. Blue blood flows through veins back to the heart and lungs…..
[source: Some Guy on Yahoo Answers]

My friend was disturbed by this, as s/he had been teaching high school students for years that blood is not blue. Her understanding of the situation was that people thought blood was blue because standard anatomical drawings and models depict arteries as red and veins as blue, and because if you look at your veins they are blue. Obviously veins are not clear, but if you don’t think that out you might assume that you were seeing blue blood.

So another year goes by and the same thing happens again. Another visit to the operating theatre, another person asks about blue blood, another confirmation that blood is blue.

Now, I’ve seen both veins and arterial blood either seeping or gushing (respectively) out of various organisms, including humans and various other mammals, on a number of occasions. My grandmother used to spurt out blood now and then because of a condition she had. As I study hunting, I’ve observed lots of thrashing around blood spurting and seeping mammals. I’ve cut myself and I’ve donated blood. And so on.

I’ve never seen blue blood. I’ve seen darker red and lighter red blood. But never blue.

Now, going back to Yahoo Answers, which I am NOT recommending as a source for actual information, but which is a good source for what regular people sometimes think, we have the following three quotes:

Melissa says: When blood gets oxygen it turns red but in your veins it is blue just look at them.

Avondro says: Myth, it’s always red. It goes a darker red, purple-like (Some call it blue) when starved of Oxygen.

SS Agent Dick Wakka says: Somewhat true. Blood is very bright red when it is in the pulmonary vein in the lungs, when it is highly oxygenated. During it’s journey back to the heart after circulating through the body, it is a little blue when it is deoxygenated, but more of a maroon-blue mix. … This is the truth.

Agent Dick gives as a citation a “medical student.” Well, I’ve got a citation of a leading blood researcher at a major research institution that says blood is blue.

I think there are two things going on here, one having to do with physics and the other with culture.

The physical issue is about color. Is “purple” a kind of red, or is it a kind of blue? Beyond that, is blood that is “dark red” or “purple” really purple? Or is it dark red. See my point?

The cultural issue is that more surgeons and folks like that, for much of recent history, are males, and males are bad at color, on average. I’m not talking about color blindness, but rather, color indifference.

So here is what I think: If a person who says to themselves “Blood is blue in our veins” thinks either of the following:

… That blood is blue, like this:

… Or, that blood is “blue” in that you look at your veins and see blue, thus you are seeing your blue blood….

… Or, that you look at an anatomical chart and see the veins drawn in as blue, therefore the blood inside them is blue…

… then that person is laboring under a misconception.

If a person thinks that this “blue blood” is purple, then they may also be laboring under a misconception. The HTML Internet Purple looks like this:

(I know, it looks dark blue to me as well.)

And the Pantone purple looks like this:

(I’ve never seen blood that looks like this)

Pantone Dark Red looks like this:

… but not very much like the darker shades of blood that I’ve seen.

I think dark blood looks a little like this:

This color is 24% red, 2% green, 2% blue, but at a saturation of 92 with a color value of 24 and a hue of 0 degrees. Whatever that means.

(By the way if your computer’s video display is not set to a high value for number of colors shown, all of the above may look like only one or two colors. And, since all video screens are different, I might be seeing something different than you are…)

Anyway, the color that I personally think resembles blood in its darker state is not purple. It is red with a lot of darkness added to it. Or a lack of lightness, or whatever. But it is red.

Human, mammal, and many other organism’s blood is red. But finding out if this is “true” is like squeezing blood from a stone.

If you would like a PDF version of this post, for use in class, here it is.

Photo Credit: postbear via Compfight cc

Any questions?

But you knew that.

What you may not have been thinking when you woke up this morning, and you are forgiven since there are some other important things going on in this world, is that this is the approximate tenth anniversary of the end of Watt’s credibility, which also coincides with the end of Roger Pielke Sr’s credibility, and a few other related casualties of ill intentioned fake science.

I’m reminded of this fact by my friend Victor Venema, who woke up this morning with a blog post: The 10th anniversary of the still unpublished Watts et al. (2012) manuscript .

The object lesson from this anniversary: Science marches on while pesudoscience withers and dies.

That is probably true sometimes. But we have sequenced the entire human genome, so shouldn’t we know about all the genes? Well, yes and no. We may have a list of genes found in a sample of humans, but “The Human Genome” can consist of a single individual (though it does not) and miss variation between individuals, i.e., it may not be a record of all of the possible alleles (variants) of each gene. Also, beyond the scope of this discussion but worth mentioning, a “gene” is not a simple concept. Whether or not a gene is expressed, where, when, and exactly what product it produces is not entirely encoded in the gene itself, but rather, elsewhere in the genome, or not encoded at all, but rather, dependent on external, non-genetic factors. So that complicates things too. So, if there is a trait that you think must be genetic, but years of research have failed to find it, the existence of a human genome and the prior acquisition of a lot of genetic data does not necessarily mean that the genetic information that determines the trait in question is not there. You can continue to believe that the genetic code for the trait will eventually be found

Except when you can’t.

There are two separate ways in which people sort out which traits are assumed to be genetic from those that are assumed to be not genetic. Both are heuristic, one is valid, and one is not. Let’s start with the one that is valid.

Suppose, as before, there is a trait that is seemingly inherited in families in such a way that a genetic trait would be, in the time tested manner that with respect this trait “offspring resemble their parents” as Darwin noted. The next question you can ask is this: Is it biologically sensible that this trait is inherited genetically, or is there a better, obvious, non-genetic mode of inheritance? If the trait is a physical feature such as eye color, then we have a sensible biological explanation for the trait having to do with developmental process we know something about and a set of metabolic pathways that produce various molecules such as pigments. The idea that this trait is genetic is biologically sensible, so even if you can’t find any, or all, of the genetic determinants of this trait, you can figure they are out there somewhere. Suppose, though, that the trait is a behavioral one that we see people in real life learning. For example, what language a person speaks generally follows the same kind of inheritance pattern many clearly genetic traits follow. With respect to spoken language, most of the time, offspring resemble their parents. But, rather than there being a sensible biological explanation for this trait, there is a sensible cultural explanation for this trait, so we don’t even look for the genetic variants for “French” vs. “Mandarin” vs. “English.” We simply assume this is not genetic.

The second method, the incorrect one, is to work with an article of faith. Broadly speaking, and I oversimplify greatly here, there are two primary articles of faith that often inform people’s thinking, shaping their assumptions, about genetics. Both usually have to do with behavioral traits in humans, but this can apply to physical traits as well. One article of faith asserts that humans are born as a blank slate, and all of their behavioral characteristics, such as their personality, intelligence by one measure or another, and so on, are added by experience. The other is the inheritance assumption, that some or much of an individual’s personality, intelligence, etc is determined by genes. There is not necessarily a consistent logic behind either of these assumptions, though various schools of thinking will include, often, a logical framework. However, this method of coming to a conclusion about the genetics or lack thereof behind various traits relies on one important element regarding genetic systems: Ignorance. If you are a blank slatist, then the absence of a clear pathway from genes to behavior means that your hypothesis can’t be falsified. If you are a genetic determinist, then the lack of such a pathway can be attributed to ongoing ignorance about the genes. The former might then be expected to live in fear that a gene will be found for their favorite learned behavior, and the latter might be expected to to live in a state of hubris, firmly knowing and asserting a truth that is not yet known but someday will be.

My impression is that over time there are fewer and fewer pure genetic determinists out there, and few and fewer blank slatists. I think the reasons for that shift have little to do with increasing knowledge, and more to do with changes in how one plays the academic game of argument, but that is discussion for another time. There is a danger in that shift, though. In the absence of any useful research results, if blank slatists start to admit that there could be some sort of genetics behind behavior, and determinists start to admit that experience and learning can also play a role, then we are converging on an increasingly simplified view of what is really a very complicated process. We should be gaining more complex, nuanced, and better informed views of how behavior arises, not simpler ones. Probably.

Over the last few decades, there have been a few important changes in how we should view human behavior over generational time and variation in those behaviors within and across categories (gender, ethnicity, geography, etc.). In short, certain behavioral traits have shown, synchronically (lacking the perspective of change over time) patterns that look genetic. For example, some families seem to be extra smart. Some have suggested that some “races” are smarter than others (at another time we can discuss why there really are no races, but let’s use “race” here as a potentially valid sampling strategy, which it can be even if the underlying races are fictions). We also see assertions of behavioral differences between the primary sexes (male vs female).

These observations are really statements about variance. Two groups are different, but vary within. There is overlap in the trait (i.e., IQ) but the means vary. We can statistically test the validity of the asserted differences in means by examining the variance in each sample and seeing if the mean of one sample fall within the predicted range of the central tendency of the others. In other words, asserting that there is a statistical difference between two groups is a process that involves understanding the variance of the underlying population(s) and samples. So, the questions can all be reframed in this manner:

Is the variation we see in trait X across certain groups best explained by underlying corresponding variation in the genetic system, or by the variation found in some other cause?

People fight vigorously over the underlying cause of IQ differences between groups. Some say it is primarily genetic, some say it is primarily not genetic, but rather, related somehow to what has become known as “lived experience.” Over the last couple of decades, there have been many attempts to explain observed variation in IQ using socioeconomic status, diet, education, issues having to do with test making or testing procedures. All of these factors have been shown to explain differences between groups to a modest to large degree in several studies. In other words, if you want to explain variation in IQ using non-genetic explanations, you can have some real success.

The genetic explanation of variation in IQ has had success in one main area which is irrelevant. This is the fact that genetically determined developmental differences between people that affect function that are generally classified as disorders predict large IQ differences. But this set of effects is not related to the question being asked.

The strongest evidence for a genetic underpinning of IQ is probably the large scale racial model solidified years ago by J. Philippe Rushton. He demonstrated that there is a grouping of brain sizes by race, with Asians having the largest brains, Caucasians the second larges, and Blacks the smallest (these race terms are his). He then showed that these brain sizes correlated with IQ difference. The modern psychometric literature assumes a racial difference in IQs, and asserts that this difference is real, but does to by citing sources that then site sources that ultimately cite Rushton. Rushtons all the way down, as it were.

The problem with this is that Rushton’s analysis was bogus. The brain sizes were taken from such sources at hat sizes for army conscripts classified by race, with the hat sizes used to estimate brain size. The Black (African) brain got smaller because Rushton subtracted a factor from that estimate of brain size, using an archaic thick skulled African fossil to assume that Africans have very very thick skulls. Correspondingly, the Asians were assumed to have thin skulls, and thus, got larger brains. The IQ data is similarly adulterated. In one part of the study, Rushton needed an “African” (native) IQ value, so he used the results of a test administered by racist anthropologists commissioned by the Apartheid government of South Africa to prove the inferiority of Blacks. And so on. The bottom turtle in this edifice is a fake.

The range of variation across “racial” groups (or other groups) in modern IQ data is very small compared to the change in IQ measured or estimated over decades of time through the 20th century within a single large and diverse population (Americans). If IQ is genetically determined and a stable feature of behavior, then there has been more evolution of these genes over less than 100 years of time in the US than we see across any two groups of modern humans. That is impossible. Again, IQ does not behave nicely as a genetic trait.

The discovery of a gene or set of genes that would underly IQ has not happened. In some recent studies, IQ is assumed to be very complex and the result of many different genes, and there is some statistical evidence for this. But, there is a big problem there too. Any trait can be linked to a set of genetic variants if the set of genes is large enough. That is a statistical effect and it is not really a link. More like a party trick, or a con game. (In fact this method is a con you may have heard of. I send 10,000 people an email predicting that a certain stock will go up, another 10,000 people an email predicting it will go down. One or the other happens. I then send 5,000 of the people who got the “correct” prediction another prediction, and 5,000 of them the opposite prediction. Now, 2,500 people have gotten two correct predictions from me. I keep doing that until I’ve got several dozen people convinced I am a stock market genius, and I take their money.)

Generally speaking, many behavioral traits have been explained, in part and sometimes in large part, by factors that are not genetic, while at the same time, the hunt for the presumed underlying genes have come up empty. There was great optimism up through the 1990s that genetic underpinning of human behavior … genetic variation corresponding to behavioral variation … would be found. But even as early as 1993 this was being questioned. Here is a sidebar, reproduced in full, from a Scientific American article by John Horgan summarizing the work up to that time:

Behavioral Genetics: A lack of progress report (1993)

CRIME: Family, twin and adoption studies have suggested a heritability of 0 to more than 50 percent for predisposition to crime. … In the 1960s researchers reported an association between an extra Y chromosome and vio-lent crime in males. Follow-up studies found that association to be spurious. MANIC DEPRESSION: Twin and family studies indicate heritability of 60 to 80 percent for susceptibility to manic depression. In 1987 two groups reported locating different genes linked to manic depression, one in Amish families and the other in Israeli families. Both reports have been retracted. SCHIZOPHRENIA: Twin studies show heritability of 40 to 90 percent. In 1988 a group reported finding a gene linked to schizophrenia in British and Icelandic families. Other studies documented no linkage, and the initial claim has now been retracted. ALCOHOLISM: Twin and adoption studies suggest heritability ranging from 0 to 60 percent. In 1990 a group claimed to link a gene—one that produces a receptor for the neurotransmitter dopamine—with alcoholism. A recent re-view of the evidence concluded it does not support a link. INTELLIGENCE: Twin and adoption studies show a heritability of performance on intelligence tests of 20 to 80 percent. One group recently unveiled preliminary evidence for genetic markers for high intelligence (an IQ of 130 or higher). The study is unpublished. HOMOSEXUALITY: In 1991 a researcher cited anatomic differences be-tween the brains of heterosexual and homosexual males. Two recent twinstudies have found a heritability of roughly 50 percent for predisposition to male or female homosexuality. These reports have been disputed. Another group claims to have preliminary evidence fo genes linked to male homosexualty. The data have not been published.

This is from a study by Jay Joseph on the “Classical Twin Method in the Social and Behavioral Sciences”

The classical twin method assesses differences in behavioral trait resemblance between reared-together monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twin pairs. Twin method proponents argue that the greater behavioral trait resemblance of the former supports an important role for genetic factors in causing the trait. Many critics, on the other hand, argue that non-genetic factors plausibly explain these results…. In 2012, a team of researchers in political science using behavioral genetic methods performed a study based on twin data in an attempt to test the critics’ position, and concluded in favor of the validity of the twin method and its underlying monozygotic–dizygotic “equal environment assumption.” The author argues that this conclusion is not supported, because the investigators (1) framed their study in a way that guaranteed validation of the twin method, (2) put forward untenable redefinitions of the equal environment assumption, (3) used inadequate methods to assess twin environmental similarity and political ideology, (4) reached several conclusions that argue against the twin method’s validity, (5) overlooked previous evidence showing that monozygotic twin pairs experience strong levels of identify confusion and attachment, (6) mistakenly counted environmental effects on twins’ behavioral resemblance as genetic effects, and (7) conflated the potential yet differing roles of biological and genetic influences on twin resemblance. The author concludes that the study failed to support the equal environment assumption, and that genetic interpretations of twin method data in political science and the behavioral science fields should be rejected outright.

With respect to psychiatric disorders, from the same author:

The psychiatric genetics ?eld is currently undergoing a crisis due to the decades-long failure to uncover the genes believed to cause the major psychiatric disorders. Since 2009, leading researchers have explained these negative results on the basis of the ‘‘missing heritability’’ argument, which holds that more effective research methods must be developed to uncover presumed missing genes. According to the author, problems with the missing heritability argument include genetic determinist beliefs, a reliance on twin research, the use of heritability estimates, and the failure to seriously consider the possibility that presumed genes do not exist. The author concludes that decades of negative results support a ?nding that genes for the major psychiatric disorders do not appear to exist, and that research attention should be directed away from attempts to uncover ‘‘missing heritability’’ and toward environmental factors and a reassessment of previous genetic interpretations of psychiatric family, twin, and adoption studies.

And from researcher Tim Crow:

A substantial body of research literature, identified by nine out of ten papers on genetics in the recent ISI research front on schizophrenia, claims to have established associations between aspects of the disease and sequence variation in specific candidate genes. These candidatures have proven unreplicated in large sibling pair linkage surveys and a targeted association study. Even if the case for an association be regarded as a lucky guess (assuming one gene in 30 000 was guessed right) the large linkage and association studies provide no evidence of sequence variation relating to psychosis at any of these gene loci. Thus this body of work must be regarded as an indicator of the extent to which the ‘eye of faith’ is able to discern meaning in complex data when none is present.

I could go on. There have been further criticisms of the twin studies, for example. The most interesting, potentially, of these studies was on twins reared apart, more or less separated at birth. Commonalities among such individuals would be strong evidence for a genetic underpinning, because these individuals were raised in completely different environments so there would be no chance of a learned or cultural component other than a general background effect of having been raised n the same planet, or in the same country. Right? Well, no. Twins separated at birth were mostly twins that were not all that separated. After all, where do researchers actually find twins truly and distantly separated at birth, especially in the days when people seeking birth parents had hardly become a thing yet? Many of these twins, probably the vast majority, were separated only in the sense that they were raised by different members of the same family, or separately by divorced parents. Many were raised in the same neighborhood or often, the same house. My brother and I are not twins, but we were “raised apart” by the criteria of the twin studies because my family was distributed among the rooms of a two family residence, so technically he and I had bedrooms at different addresses.

In sum, it is easier to find sociological, cultural, or environmental explanations for variation in human abilities, intelligence, or personality traits. The seeming inheritance by family of some of these traits may well be a combination of something genetic and something experiential or cultural, but when looking for the actual underlying causes, genetics has repeatedly come up wanting while environmental explanations do a good job of addressing a fairly large part of the variation we see. Models of race based differences are so poorly done, and are often highly politically motivated, that they should never be trusted. That scientific ship sailed a long time ago.

Maybe the blank slate theory isn’t so bad after all. It does not imply that just anything can happen when making a human being out of a sperm and an egg. After all, it is a blank slate and not a blank whatever. But it is probably not true that some people’s lived experiences are written on slate, while others on white boards, and still others on smart boards, even if there are some people who I’m sure assume that they were.

Selected references:

Horgan, John. 1992. Eugenics Revisited. Scientific American. June.
Joseph, J. (2011). The Crumbling Pillars of Behavioral Genetics. GeneWatch, 24 (6),4–7. Web page
Joseph, J. (2012). The “Missing Heritability” of Psychiatric Disorders: Elusive Genes or Non-Existent Genes? Applied Developmental Science, 16(2), 65–83. doi:10.1080/10888691.2012.667343
Joseph, J. (2013). The Use of the Classical Twin Method in the Social and Behavioral Sciences : The Fallacy Continues, 34(1), 1–40.
Lewontin, R. Human Diversity. 2000, Scientific American Library.
Marks, J. (2008) Race: Past, Present, and Future. In: Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by B. Koenig, S. Lee, and S. Richardson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 21–38. PDF
Marks, J. (2008) Race across the physical-cultural divide in American anthropology. In: A New History of Anthropology, edited by H. Kuklick. New York: Blackwell, pp. 242–258. PDF
Tizard, B. (1974). IQ and Race. Nature, 247, (5349), 316.

Other posts of interest:

• How to get rid of spiders in your house
• Why is your poop green?
• How many cells are there in the human body?
• Is there really a plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire?
• How long is a human generation?
• Is blog ever really blue?
• How to not get caught plagiarizing
• The origin of the domestic chicken
• What are the three necessary and sufficient conditions of Natural Selection?
• How do I get rid of foot fungus?
• Which is better, Tap Water or Bottled Water?
• Has Global Warming stopped?

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.

How long is a generation, you ask?

Short Answer: 25 years, but a generation ago it was 20 years.

Long answer: It depends on what you mean by generation.

In US-biased Western culture there is a Biological Generation, the Dynamic Generation, the somewhat different Familial Generation, what is sometimes called a Cultural Generation but that should really be called a Societal Generation, and then there is the Designated Generation and finally, the Historical-Long Generation. You will find some of these terms identified on genealogical web sites, Teh Wiki and elsewhere, and some of them are introduced here. (References provided below.)

More broadly speaking, humans have identifiable meaningful generation-related terminology and cultural concepts in many but not all societies, and when it does occur, it is more common to find the concept in age-graded societies or societies in which marriage arrangements are fairly strictly enforced (or at least strongly hoped for) by the ascending generation.

A Biological Generation

A Dynamic Generation

Those methods of reckoning generations have to do with the relationship between people. Another reason to reckon generations is either to do demographic (or economic) analysis or to test and analyze genealogies. For this you want to know how long a dynamic generation (or a biological one) usually is. For instance, a genealogist wants to know this: From the point of view of some long-dead relative, is the time span between the birth date of a grandparent and the birth date of a great grand child … thus, the span of time of four complete generations … reasonable? If such a span is 200 years, that means that an average of 50 years time passed from birth of a person to that person giving birth to the person in line. Implausible. If the total span is 40 years, that means ten year olds were having babies (on average). Also implausible. Either way, some part of the hypothetical genealogy is messed up and it’s back to the church records, vital statistics, and Mormon database for you. This is a Familial Generation.

In the “old days” (whenever that was) people often used the value 20 to represent Familial Generations. So, a person born on the first day of a century may well have had a great great great grandparent born around the beginning of the previous century. Today, with lager age at first birth for women being the rule, we tend to see 25 years as the recommended estimate for Familial Generations.

A Cultural or Societal Generation

• Lost 1914
• Greatest 1923
• Silent 1935
• Baby Boom (Boomers) 1955
• Generation X 1968
• Generation Y 1975
• Generation Z or I 1992

(See comments below for people fighting about these names and dates. I accept Teh Wiki as the final word on this, so I take this list as perfectly accurate and complete.)

Several things are noticed in this list. The first three relate to major historical events (World Wars, the Great Depression) while the later ones are vague, stupid, and obviously little more than lame attempts by people who wish they were part of a generation to name themselves. This leads to the X and Y generations to be floating in broader time ranges (see Teh Wiki) and very arguable. The Z generation is clearly an afterthought. I assume everyone was so focused on the Millennium that they forget to be in a generation for a decade or so, and then had to catch up.

Some of the more primitively sexy and exotic tribal cultures of the world of the world have a strict age grading system. This is where individuals are in a specific age-defined stratum, and there are several strata. Often there are different age-grades for males and females, and often there are more age-grades for males than females. Individuals of a particular age grade always X and never Y (fill in cultural prescriptions for X and cultural proscriptions for Y). The Pokot of East Africa are one example. These age grades can be termed Designated Generations and include not only groups like the Pokot but also Americans who have very strongly age-graded designations.

Check out our new science podcast, Ikonokast.
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Among the Pokot males of a certain age wear a certain hairdo. Males of a certain generation get married. All the important things you can do or not do are defined by one’s age grade. As young men age they want to move to the next age grade, and often take serious risks to do so. In one Pokot group, the boys of one age grade would typically wear the hairdos of the Ascending Generation. Males in the Ascending Generation would then beat the crap out of them. When the beatings became too common and severe (sometimes deadly) the Ascending Generation of the Ascending Generation (the “Elders”) would declare that it is time for everyone to move up one generation, and a ceremony would be held.

In that particular group the ceremony applied to many different villages, and representatives from each village had to bring to the major chief’s village one head of cattle. The cattle were all slaughtered and the fresh meat laid out on racks to be guarded from lions and hyenas overnight by the chief, alone. If any of the meat was taken by predators, the chief was fired and a new chief appointed, everyone was sent home and were required to return with a fresh head of cattle, and the ceremony was re-started with the new chief. But I digress.

The Historical-Long Generation is my own invention. This is the period of time that is just short enough for a person to have a conversation with another person about shared memories where those memories are separated in time by the maximum amount possible for our species. Let me explain further:

Just today, the last surviving US veteran of World War I died. When I was a kid, I went to (or marched in) parades in which there were lots of veterans. Most vets in the parade were of World War II. Korea was not ever represented. The Viet Nam Vets were busy in Viet Nam being Viet Nam soldiers, so they were not in the parades. But World War I was represented by the grandpas and there were a lot of them.

And, leading all of the veterans in the parade was this one guy who looked quite dead, eyes closed, not apparently breathing, wearing a 19th century Slouch Hat and covered with a blanket and slumped in wheel chair pushed by members of the VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary, and he was the only remaining veteran in town of the Spanish-American War. I know he was not in fact dead because he was in the parade several years in a row. That war was in 1898, and the parades I remember must have been from the mid 1960s. I assume he was a drummer boy, perhaps 10 or 11 at the time of the war. The last surviving vets from Civil War were similar: Boys who served in the military as aides or drummers. The point is, one could argue that a historical-long generation is about a century, because that old guy and I share involvement in an event … marching in those parades … that link two memories, the parade and the war, which were about 100 years apart.

I have an even better memory. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on Januray 1st, 1863. When that happened, a toddler who’s last name was Alexander and who was born as a slave in the Carolina’s became free. Later, his family moved to Albany, New York. In around 1968 or 1969, my father asked me to accompany our congressman, Representative Samuel A. Stratton (famous for introducing the bill to give us Monday Holidays, I am told) to an old tenement building in “Teh Ghetto” and bring him up to the third floor to meet Mr. Alexander, the now old former infant slave. I did so, and we all chatted for a while. I was about ten, and Mr. Alexander was closer to 110. He had memories of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that were similar to my memories of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Vague, mostly about the aftermath and not the event so much, but seemingly real. We shared memories that were a century apart in time, and in this case, interestingly parallel.

So, the Historical-Long generation is a century. If you meet me and shake my hand, you are shaking a hand that has shaken the hand of a man who was an American slave. Meaningless, yet profound.

Fox, Robin.Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Lutz, Catherine. Reading National Geographic

Teh Wiki. Generation.

Teh Wiki List of generations.

The idea is to blame single mothers for crime. They, being single mothers, would do a lousy job of raising their offspring, who would then grow up and be criminals. There is a racist undertone to this, with a twist. There are those who would like to blame non-white people for all the crime, and this is a version of that. The same racist “science” that underscores the link between melanin in one’s skin and criminal behavior also purports that there is a link between melanin in one’s skin and all the things that lead to single motherhood, from promiscuity to a tendency to not follow social rules to, amazingly, a shorter gestation period which would, I assume, allow single mothers to produce more offspring than might otherwise be possible.

Anyway, there are those who remember the link being made, and here is what the data for violent crime in the US looked like at the time:

Nice relationship there. All else being equal one would want to look at these two variables and see if there is anything to the argument. We KNOW the two variables are related, because otherwise, why would anyone put them on the same graph!@!?? And, once they are on that graph they are perfectly correlated. One small thing that would need to work out is the fact that the criminals are probably not infants, but I’m sure that the time lag thing is just a detail.

Anyway, now, time has passed since that correlation seemed to be explanatory of high crime rates. Has anything changed since then? Let’s look at the data, updated:

Well, now that we see the whole data set, one might wonder why single motherhood rate was not correlated to crime rate prior to 1970. Maybe that’s the time lag thing. It turns out, in fact, that of the 50 years shown on this graph, the correlation seems to work for only about half the time.

Single mothers, you are off the hook. FOR NOW!

I recently asked on major social networking platforms, “Did Donald Trump Commit Treason,” and got two well argued and often detailed answers: “Yes!” and “No!”

Then, I read On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law by Carlton F.W. Larson.* I discovered that both positions are wrong. And right.

Ultimately, it can not be argued that Donald Trump violated the treason clause of the US Constitution in his dealings with Russia, even if the worst that has been suggested is true. (Larson’s book came out before 1/6, so it is silent on the events of that day.) When people in the US use the term “treason” in a sentence like “Trump committed treason, lock him up!” they are (inadvertently, most of the time) referring to the Treason Clause in Article II, Section 3, of the US Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

First, I’d like to point out the use of the plural in referring to “The United States.” This is how the United States were/was referred to prior to the US Civil War. After the war, it would have been “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against it.” But I digress.

Some of this is obvious, some of it not, but I learned from Larson’s book that treason must involve giving aid to an enemy of the US, in the sense that we are in a state of war. However, we have been and are now at war with multiple entities with no formal declaration of war, and haven’t been since World War II. Why war has not been declared since then is a bit mysterious, but I hear it is because it would make the US a war criminal country, since it is against convention of international law to go to war against anyone. But again I digress.

The point is, if someone adhered to (helped) the Hanoi government during the US period of involvement in the Viet Nam war, that act would be considered aiding a country at war with us, because everybody understand that a war is a war even if Congress has not declared it.

But, there are enemies, to which Larson and other legal experts apply the highly technical legal term “frienemies,” that are countries with whom we are not getting along at all, but avoid using the “w” word because we would all die in nuclear holocaust. Such as Russia. Trump did not commit treason in his dealings with Russia not because there is no declared war with Russia, but because we don’t want to openly admit we are in some sense at war with Russia. A treason charge against Trump for aiding Russia by the US Attorney General would be tantamount to declaring war against Russia, and then, we would all die in the nuclear holocaust.

If you think that Trump still could be considered to have committed treason against the United States by aiding Russia, then you would be absolutely correct. Maybe. But if you think that the US can or should charge Trump with treason based on his dealings with Russia, then you would be absolutely wrong, but NOT because we are not technically at war with Russia (see above) but because we won’t admit to being in a state of hostility against Russia. (By the way, if you want body counts, you can have body counts. Many have died in the cold war, Russia had seen to the killings of US soldiers, putting Trump in place as US President to disrupt our country has resulted in countless excess Covid-19 deaths, and so on and so forth).

In my personal opinion, the so-called “insurrection” was treasonous, even in the narrowly defined Constitutional sense. Why? It was an attempt to put an unelected dictator at the head of government, using a violent attack on a major US governmental facility. But with whom are we at war you ask? Well, the group of terrorists who carried out that attack. According to the legal arguments discussed in Larson’s book, the major terrorist groups such as ISIS and the US are functionally at war. A person who aids ISIS can be considered committing treason, if certain other things are in place.

But wait, hold on. If these insurrectionists are “at war” with the US, then they are not really committing treason, they are in essence soldiers. They can’t even be charged with criminal activity and would have to be treated as prisoners of war. That would require their immediate release because hostilities are over. But, what about those who aided them but were not with them? What about those guys??? Treason would apply.

But what does the Civil War say about this? The southern soldiers and generals who were captured during the war were treated as prisoners of war, yet the North never considered the southern states as separate. The northern legal attitude towards the south, in the eyes of Europe was (ideally) “this is not a war between belligerents so don’t aid or recognize the south.” Yet southerners were treated as soldiers. This contradiction was sometimes the focus of much attention at the time, and sometimes ignored. It never, however, went way. So, when the war ended, why weren’t the generals and soldiers and such charged with treason? Because it wasn’t really a war? No. Mainly because of the terms of surrender supplied by General Grant, and the political approach preferred by Lincoln. But what about Jefferson Davis? Why was he not charged with Treason? For that, I’ll let you read the book.

Clearly, little is clear. And, to me, one of the most interesting things about Carlton Larson’s treatment of treason is the degree to which relevant legal arguments are made, to help define treason, in settings where there was never a successful (or in some cases, even unsuccessful) prosecution. One would think that treason law would emerge as a combination of what the US Constitution says and what high court decisions include. Well, there is some of that. But a large amount of the legal conversation, opinions that help us to understand treason law in the US at the Federal level, come from decisions made, in some cases to NOT pursue a case, by US attorneys or other prosecutors, and by lower court judges wrestling with the problem.

In some cases, a treason charge was not made, or failed in court, because of the “two witness” rule or for some other technicality. But, the legally framed conversation that happened among the participants still informs us of what treason might or might not be. Not mentioned above is the idea that the treasonous person must be a citizen of the United States. Turns out, that is not strictly true. Why? Read the book. This part is really fascinating. Generally speaking, the most common outcome of a possible consideration of treason, in US history, has been to not make that charge because it is so difficult. The second most common outcome, possibly (I did not keep count) is to fail in court for similar reasons.

And, I should note, that Larson affirms that very few US Federal treason cases have been brought, and among those that were, few have succeed, because the requirements of the provision are intentionally hard to meet.

I discovered an interesting Reality vs. Wikipedia rip in the chronosynclastic continuum. According to treason expert Larson, only one person in the US has ever been put to death on a Federal treason charge, and he was not a US citizen, and did not commit treason, it was not really in the US but in a recently acquired territory, and perhaps he was not even tried in what would ultimately be considered a legal court. Nonetheless, he was hung by the neck until dead after being convicted of treason. Larson notes that nearly all discussions of treason don’t mention him, and I checked Wikipedia: Hipolito Salazar is not mentioned. However, there is a second person that Larson is mum about who was executed for Treason in the US under apparent Federal authority: William Mumford. Wikipedia says he is the only person so executed, and gives details. I suspect Mumford doesn’t count because he was tried and convicted under Martial Law by a military tribunal, which would be different than being charged with Treason under US jurisdiction and Article II, Section 3, Clause 1. If so, I say, “stand there in your wrongness and be wrong, Wikipedia!” One can argue forever as to whether Mumford was legitimately convicted of this or that law. The statement was made that he was charged and hereby convinced of Treason and he was then executed, right or wrong. But if the law that applied was not Articla II, Section 3, Clause 1, then he does not count, while Salazar does count.

In On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law Carlton F.W. Larson, a widely recognized expert on Treason law, describes and analyses every case of treason, or almost case of treason, or case of almost treason, in the US (and several cases outside that purview). The history of treason law, also covered in detail, is full of interesting (and sometimes necessary) contradictions. The origin and history of the Constitutional article itself is fascinating.

So the other day, a neighbors house was entered by hooligans, things stolen, and when the neighbors returned (they were out) they found that lots of their stuff had been trashed. Right there in broad daylight. Do you think that the perpetrators should be charged with robbery? If you have a degree in Facebook Law, you will probably swoop in on that statement and say, “why, no, it is not robbery, burglary! They can’t be charged with robbery. Burglary!” But you would be wrong in some states. What you call burglary by you is, in some states, called “housebreaking” if it happens during the day, and this happened during the day. Gotcha.

Treason is a little like that. The concept is centuries old. Most or all US states have treason laws and they vary. As noted above, the definition of Treason is not easy, since it relies on citizenship and a state of war, and also, an understanding of what “helping” the enemy was. All three of these things are tricky concepts.

I think that if you read this book, and you see someone say “so and so should be charged with treason” your immediate response will no longer be (if it was before) either “right, obviously!” or “no, that would be insurrection!”

Donald Trump committed treason in his dealings with Russia, according to me (but Larson says no) but he can’t be charged with Treason because we are not at a sufficient state of war with Russia. Both yes and no are valid answers to the question posed above, in my opinion. Not only is the answer “yes and no” more correct as a response to the question, it is a heck of a lot more interesting, if you bother to find out why. And to do so, read On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law.

While you are waiting for the book to arrive, have a look at: Treason, the Death Penalty, and American Identity also by Carlton F.W. Larson.

I do exactly the same thing, but instead of just any creationist, I target public school administrators who are soft on science, and instead of a fossil I just yell, “Dover!”

Nobody wants to get Dovered.

Dover was the US Federal court decision that found that science class can not teach religion, that creationism is a form of religion, affirmed that so called creation science is just another form of creationism, and specifically determined that “Intelligent Design” is just more creationism.

Dover is to the teaching of evolutionary biology what Rove v. Wade is to reproductive rights, plus or minus. Plus, in the sense that Dover may well be an even more solid decision (though not at SCOUTS, never got to SCOTUS because it was so solid). Minus in the sense that it restricts an activity that can still go on at low level if we are not careful.

The point is, the 15th anniversary of the Dover decision is coming up. The National Center for Science Education, under the directorship of my friend Genie Scott, coordinated the Dover win, and has produced “Rembering Kitzmiller v Dover” for your perusal. For a deepre dive, see Laura Lebo’s book The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma V. Darwin in Small-town America.

“cdesign proponentsists” = smoking gun

^^ look it up ^^^

I have the impression that people who have been taken in by anti-vax thinking, but only to some degree, who are not acolytes of that cult, get the stick when push comes to shove. They think about their health, their children, and they make the right choice. Certainly, it does not go the other way. Add this to the fact that a) the most refusing population out there is the US population, and in the US the refusal (as well as the acceptance, by the way) of the vaccine is almost entirely political, and we can guess that much of the “no, no” really means “ok, whatever.”

Yet another factor is the reporting. Whenever a poll has an undecided middle, or a weak “yes” or “no” element, it is possible to report the poll in a biased matter, even if the poll itself isn’t biased. This is clearly what happens when we see “X% say nope” without mentioning that a number equal to a third or fourth of that said “I don’t know, whatever.”

Here are some data for three polls that address this topic.

An April 2020 survey in seven European countries, with 7,662 respondents showed that 81.1% of the population were indifferent or willing to be vaccinated. (73.9 were explicitly willing.)

A Pew Research Center poll in mid September of Americans compared May and September. This September poll was taken at the height of cynicism about the Trump regime’s handling of Coronavirus, just before Trump himself got the virus. In this poll, 49% of all respondents said “no” (to some degree) to the vaccine (“I don’t know” was not a choice in this survey), with 56% of Republicans preferring to not be vaccinated, and 42% of Democrats preferring not.

The May survey showed those numbers at 27% for the whole survey, and 34% and 21% for Republicans vs. Democrats, respectively.

The September poll is probably the one most cited by those who prefer to be alarmed, but it actually underscores the likelihood that people will get the the shot at much higher numbers. A waft from 27% to 49% over four months indicates that the pollsters are not sampling what the questions indicate they are sampling. There is a huge amount of elasticity in what people say. Also, the fact that this survey had no room for “I don’t really have an opinion” forced people into a category. Given the high degree of politicization of the disease, which mainly consists of many Republicans preferring to appear to be reject science (in order to make lefty big city elite academics cringe) or Democrats rejecting a vaccine they see likely to be yet another Jared Kushner scam, the best numbers, among these, in my opinion are optimistic. In May, before the politicization occurred to a great degree, 72% of Americans said yes to the disease, but only 11% felt strongly about no. That conforms with the other surveys.

A survey reported in late October and published in Nature, across 19 countries, showed that 82% were indifferent or preferred the shot (61.4% were willing, the rest indifferent). Of those who seemed not to want the shot, only 9.8% felt strongly that way.

My friend, scientist Roderiko Kampen, recently suggesting, while agreeing that resistance to the vaccine will diminish over time, to “never underestimate human stupidity. Nothing is stable or ‘normal’ now, every single day some butterfly may flap the global hurricane. Humanity has thoroughly outlived its stay and is now beginning to meet that cool adversary – i.e. my great friend – called reality.” I agree. There will be pockets of resistance that will prove troublesome, and lives will be taken and illness spread because of resistance to science. But, ultimately, most people are going to get the shot, and at some point, schools are going require Covid-19 vaccination alongside the already required vaccinations in order to attend.

Look, people endlessly complain about TSA, and they complain more about TSA and the equivilant agencies around the world, the modern security systems at airports, even more than they complained about the totally fake ineffective security that was prevalent before 9/11, especially in the US. But they still get on the plane with a some sense of security. Covid-19 is worse than terrorism, by the numbers. We are having, in the US, a 9/11 level event every single day as I write this. The vaccine is the way out of this plague. People are going to get vaccinated. I would even go one step further. Anti-vax will always be with us. It is an industry, and anti-anti-vax is also an industry. But a movement (or, really, scam) designed to hamper the fight against this pandemic will get weaker, not stronger, over the next year.