Income and Human Mating Patterns

I've been reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which seems to be a good popular presentation of evolutionary psychology. Two points occurred to me.

1. Wright argues that monogamy tends to be associated with societies that are either very poor, so a man cannot support two families, or have fairly even income distributions, so that half of one man is almost always worth less than all of another from the woman's standpoint.

It occurs to me that the first point is also relevant to women's choice between their two alternative mating strategies, long term and short term. The long term strategy is to pair up with the most desirable man she can get and jointly produce and rear children. The short term strategy is to get pregnant by the most desirable man she can and then rear the child herself. There seems to be good evidence that both women and men are equipped for their roles in both strategies, with different preferences among potential mates according to which is being followed.

In a very poor society, the short term strategy is not viable because a woman cannot afford to bring up a child by herself–it's long term or nothing. So we would expect that rising incomes would be associated with an increasing number of women choosing the short term strategy. That, allowing for substantial time lags in social institutions, might help explain the large changes in observed behavior in developed societies over the past fifty years ago.

2. Wright cites anthropological evidence that dowry, payments by the bride's family to the groom, is almost always associated with socially enforced monogamy. His explanation is that without enforced monogamy, the very desirable--most obviously the wealthy--man can trade half of himself for all of a bride. If he can't do that, he trades all of himself for all of a bride plus some cash. (My summary of Wright's analysis, not his)

I think he is missing something. As I argued long ago in my Price Theory chapter on love and marriage, polygyny, by letting some men bid for more than one wife, bids up the price of a wife on the marriage market. If women own themselves the result is more favorable terms in marriage. If their husbands own them the result is higher bride price or lower dowry, since a dowry (ignoring lots of complications) is a negative bride price. Enforced monogamy lowers the price of a wife not merely to the man who would otherwise have had two wives but to all men, hence makes bride price less likely and dowry more likely.

More Help Need: Louis Freeh's half hour

I'm trying to source a statement I make in the book I'm finishing up, but I don't remember where I saw it. It's something by Louis Freeh, back when he was the director of the FBI, to the effect that what they really needed was the ability to decrypt any message in half an hour.

Does any reader of this blog know if I am remembering correctly, and if so have a source for the quote?

Loaded Dice: Professor Altemeyer's response

Some time back, I had a post taking issue with research on "right wing authoritarianism" by Robert Altemeyer contained in a webbed book of his. Eventually someone called Professor Altemeyer's attention to the post and he responded in a comment. Since people are unlikely to notice an exchange in the comment section of an old post, I'm shifting the discussion to a new one.

My central complaint was that he had first defined RWA in a fashion that purported to be politically neutral, with "right wing" having to do with attitude to established authority not with whether one voted for Republicans or Democrats, and then biased his test in a way that would consistently make individuals on the political right look more authoritarian than they were and individuals on the left look less. I don't think his response adequately deals with that complaint, but perhaps if I explain why he can show me that I am mistaken.

To quote from my previous post, describing the 20 questions on whose answers Professor Altemeyer based his measure of how right wing authoritarian the responder was:

What is almost immediately obvious if you read the questions is that they aren't testing for RWA as the author defines it but for a combination of that and right/left political views. When the question is of the form "people who campaigned for unpopular causes X, Y and Z were good," X, Y and Z just happen to be causes more popular on the left than on the right. When the question is of the form "We should follow authority X," X just happens to be a source of authority, such as the church, more popular on the right than on the left. No questions about people who campaigned for unpopular right wing causes or about deferring to sources of authority popular on the left.

Professor Altemeyer responds:

"When one is measuring submission to established authority in a society, one has to mention those authorities, their views, etc. in the items."

That, of course, is true. But it doesn't answer my objection, which is about the particular authorities you selected. As I pointed out in the longer discussion in the Usenet thread, one could easily enough replace your questions with others in which the authority was one popular with the left and unpopular on the right, or the unpopular cause one popular on the right and not the left.

Suppose, for instance, that one of the questions asked whether a worker should be willing to cross a picket line and go to work if he disagreed with the decision to call a strike. Labor unions are established authorities, so someone who disagrees is demonstrating RWA as the book defines it. But I predict that that question would have shown people on the left more RWA and people on the right less than the corresponding question you used.

Similarly, if instead of asking how the responder felt about "those who challenged the law and the majority's view by protesting for women's abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer" you asked about those who challenged the law and the majority view by picketing abortion clinics--abortion is, after all, legal, and has been for decades--or about those who challenged the majority view by home schooling their children in order to give them a proper religious education, you would have gotten a rather different pattern of responses.

My complaint isn't that you are not measuring authoritarianism--I'm a libertarian, and I indeed came out with a fairly low score on the test. It is that you are measuring a combination of authoritarianism and right wing political beliefs. Given the bias built into your test, if a right winger and a left winger are equally authoritarian, the right winger will get a higher score. That is a fatal fault in a test which you use to justify the claim:

"In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives,"

You can't justify such a claim using a test which is in part testing for political conservatism.

Professor Altemeyer in his response points me at footnote 7, which deals with ambiguity and bias in the questions. So far as I can tell, it is irrelevant to my point. If his test produces a score which is, say, .6 a measure of authoritarianism and .4 a measure of political belief, the results could be internally consistent and still produce a biased result. That would be less true if my criticism applied to only a few questions, since answers on them would correlate poorly with answers on the rest of the test. But in fact, as I point out in the Usenet thread, a majority of the twenty questions are politically biased, measure political beliefs as well as authoritarianism. He has come up with an internally consistent set of questions, all right, but they are measuring the wrong thing. Indeed, given that he was discarding questions that didn't correlate well with the rest of the test, if he had put in one of mine (see below) where the political bias was reversed, he would have concluded that it was a bad question and discarded it.

Let me try to put a series of questions to Professor Altemeyer, to see if we can identify what we disagree about:

1. Is it true that, in defining "right wing authoritarianism," you claim that you are not using "right wing" in a political sense?

2. Is it true that, in your list of questions, the authorities you choose to test submission to are consistently authorities more popular with the right than the left and the anti-authoritarian causes you test approval of are consistently ones more popular with the left than the right–so consistently that there is not a single question that goes the other way?

3. Do you agree that such a set of questions will consistently show a higher level of RWA for people on the right than for people on the left, actual degree of authoritarianism held constant?

4. Do you agree that if all the above points are correct, your results cannot justify your conclusion that people on the right are more authoritarian than people on the left?

For your entertainment, here is a list of alternative questions that one would use to replace some of yours if one wished to reverse the political bias; it's from one of my usenet posts in the thread on this subject.

23: When a union calls a strike, workers should decide for themselves whether it is justified and cross picket lines to go to work if they think it is not.

24. Our country desperately needs a decisive leader who will overcome special interest politics and break the political power of big corporations in order to do what is good for the common people.

25. Fundamentalist Christians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.

(Incidentally, the original of that, with "gays and lesbians," is another question where someone who actually thinks about it clearly will give just the opposite of the pattern the author assumes. Gays are not just as healthy as the rest of us--they have a much higher rate of AIDS. So "strongly agree" on that question means "say the politically correct thing even when I know perfectly well it is false." Which sounds like authoritarianism.)

26. It is always better to trust the consensus of the scientific community on issues such as global warming, rather than to listen to the ignorant sceptics in our society who are trying to create doubt in people's minds.

27. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority's view by pushing for the abolition of affirmative action, for laws allowing ordinary citizens to carry firearms for self defense, for school voucher programs to let parents get their kids out of the trap of failing public schools.

A secondary objection that I offered to the list of 20 questions was that on two of them, one mentioned in my initial post, another in the Usenet discussion, the answer of a thoughtful respondent would go the wrong way–the non-authoritarian would give what is supposed to be the authoritarian answer. In each case, the reason is that the "non-authoritarian" answer is wrong. We have no reason to believe that atheists are "every bit as" virtuous as church goers–they might be more virtuous, they might be less. We have very good reasons to believe that gays are not as healthy as non-gays, given the existence of AIDS.

Professor Altemeyer responds:

"Is someone who strongly agrees with Item 6 showing authoritarian submission to a sub-group of skeptics? Possibly. But I doubt it. Atheists and agnostics have a pretty strong streak of individualism running through them--which is one of the reasons they are non-believers in a believing society."

The question isn't whether atheists are authoritarians. The question is whether some version of the idea "you aren't supposed to say that some groups of people are better than others" is common in our society. The answer is that it is, and it is the only reason I can see why someone who actually thought about those two questions would give what is supposed to be the "non-authoritarian" answers to them. Would you agree that someone who gives an answer he knows is wrong in conformity to that sort of social pressure is demonstrating what you call "right wing authoritarianism?"

Finally, let me thank Professor Altemeyer for his courteous response to my post. He didn't even complain that I should have told him I was criticizing him online–although if he had I would have responded that I have so far been unable to locate an email address for him, and snailmail and the telephone are so 20th century. My email address, in case he wants to shift part of the discussion to email, is ddfr@daviddfriedman.com. But I hope he will also respond here.

Why Teach Evolution

Apropos of some arguments about home schooling, vouchers, Christian fundamentalists, and related issues that I've been having online, it occurs to me that there are four different reasons to teach the theory of evolution as part of K-12 education:

1. It undermines religious belief. More precisely, it provides a convincing rebuttal to the watchmaker argument for the existence of God, which is one of the more persuasive arguments for that conclusion.

2. It is intellectually interesting.

3. It is useful for teaching other things, mainly biology.

4. Understanding it is useful to most students for making sense of the world around them and making decisions relevant to their lives.

The first seems to me a good reason for parents to teach their children about evolution but a suspect reason to teach it in the public schools; under a system of separation of church and state, the government shouldn't be going out of its way to attack religion any more than it should be going out of its way to promote it.

The second is a good reason but not a very strong one, given that there are lots of intellectually interesting things that could be taught, many of which, given limited amounts of time, won't be.

The third is a good reason but again not a very strong one; high school students don't learn much biology and most of what they learn could probably be taught without explaining the underlying logic of why organisms are as they are.

The fourth, I think, is the best reason of all--but the fourth depends on actually teaching the implications of evolution, which is unlikely to happen in public (or most private) schools. To take the most obvious one, evolution implies that we are "as if designed" for reproductive success. Males and females play strikingly different roles in reproduction. Hence evolutionary theory strongly suggests that males and females should have lots of differences--not merely reproductive machinery but distribution of abilities, behavioral patterns, and the like. That prediction is strongly supported by empirical evidence. For a good popular account, see Wright The Moral Animal. But it is an implication inconsistent with a good deal of modern ideology, most obviously the main--but not only--strain of modern feminism.

There are quite a lot of other implications for our species. For instance, theory suggests and evidence supports a pattern for species such as ours, with pair mating and offspring that require substantial care, of monogamy tempered by adultery, with good evolutionary reasons for both the monogamy and the adultery.

While there are surely some people who find none of the implications offensive--myself, for instance--I doubt they make up even a large minority of the population. Hence we are unlikely to see the parts of evolutionary theory most useful to ordinary people--its implications for understanding our own species--taught.

Lott, Lambert, guns, and the Merced killings

A number of years ago, John Lott gave a talk at my university which included some particularly striking evidence of both the downside of gun control and media bias on the subject, involving the murder of two children in Merced, California. By his account, their sister, an experienced shooter, made it to the room where the family guns were, could not get at them because they were locked up due to the state's safe storage law, instead went for a neighbor--with the result that her brother and sister were killed. These facts appeared in the local paper, but the part relevant to gun control was cut from the stories in the national media.

The account was sufficiently striking that I thought it worth checking. I found the original story in the local paper. There was no mention of the locked family guns. I reported this to John, who I have known for many years, and was disappointed to later hear that he was still using the story.

Recently, the issue resurfaced on a blog, set off by a post by my son, with comments by both Tim Lambert, an online critic of John's work, John, and me. According to John he had sent me the information supporting his account, as well as webbing it on his site; while that may well be true, I never got it. Checking the information on John's site, along with the discussion of the case on Tim Lambert's site, I found:

There are indeed two stories in the Fresno Bee that mention gun control in the context of the killing, both cited and linked to on John Lott's web page. The earlier is on August 26th, three days after it happened, and quotes the children's great-uncle. It says that there was a gun, but it was "locked away and hidden." The later is August 31, and says that "Carpenter also said he had a gun at his house that he kept locked away from his children because he feared government laws." (Carpenter is the children' father)

I believe what I had found and reported to John about was the original story, probably from the day after the killing, which did not have the gun control references. However:

1. Neither later story is consistent with the most striking detail in Lott's version, in which Jessica ran for where the family guns were stored but they were locked up tight. Both refer to one gun, the earlier version says it was hidden, there is no evidence that Jessica either knew where it was or could get to it. A more detailed account by Richard Poe that I found while googling--he interviewed both the great uncle and the children's mother--makes it clear that the gun was at the other end of the house from the room Jessica locked herself into and from which she climbed out a window to get help. According to that version, the gun wasn't locked up, merely kept on a high shelf unloaded. My guess is that that version is correct; the August 31 story, which refers to the gun being locked up, gives only an indirect quote of the father.

2. The first mention of the existence of the gun that Lott cites, by the great-uncle, is in a story published in the local paper on the 26th. The one account of the killing I could find that was based on a wire service version was from the 25th. So when John objected that the national media were cutting out the anti-gun control element of the story in the local paper, he was apparently objecting to the AP not citing a local story that had not yet been published.

Putting it all together, I conclude that the Merced murders provide evidence against gun control laws, but weaker evidence than John Lott (and Vin Suprynowicz, from whom I think John got the original story) claim. Even without safe storage laws, the parents of small children--one of them was nine, I don't know if she was the youngest--would be likely to keep firearms unloaded and on a high shelf or otherwise out of easy reach. Even if the Carpenter gun had been kept loaded and in easy reach, it isn't clear whether Jessica could have gotten to it.

The case does not, contrary to John's claim, provide clear evidence of media bias. The AP story did not remove evidence of the evils of gun control from the local story that was presumably its source, because the evidence wasn't in the local paper until after the AP story went out. That conclusion might change if it turns out that there are later stories in the national media, based on later wire service versions, but I didn't find any and would be mildly surprised to find national stories on a local killing still appearing three or four days after the event.

Interested readers should check out (at least) John's version and Tim Lambert's, both linked to above--and should be glad to live at a time when one can actually get both sides of such a controversy, and a good deal of the relevant evidence, with a few clicks.

Immigration and Terrorism

Politicians concerned about immigration, in particular illegal immigration to the U.S., routinely link the issue with control of terrorism; most recently, Rudy Giuliani did so in the context of a foiled terrorism plot in the U.K. His version would make some sense if he were actually proposing that the U.S. exclude Muslim immigrants; they are, after all, more likely recruits to Al Quaeda than immigrants of other religions.

But he isn't proposing that, and neither is anyone else. As they surely all know, illegal immigrants to the U.S. are typically from Latin America or East Asia, not places with large Muslim populations. Increasing their numbers may be a good or bad thing, but it isn't going to promote terrorism.

The remaining argument, always left vague, is "control of our borders." Presumably the theory is that an Al Queda operative is going to fly into Mexico, get himself smuggled across the Rio Grande, take a bus to Washington D.C. and blow something up. Why he should go to all that trouble when the U.S. has over fifty million legal foreign visitors a year is never explained. Does anyone believe that our customs agents can spot the terrorist needle in that haystack?

Am I missing a real argument for linking the two issues, or am I correct in suspecting that it's pure demagoguery?

Why No Built-in Paternity Testing?

My previous attempt to use this blog as a tool for open source assistance in my current writing project was a great success; I have incorporated results from the query in my previous post into the draft of Future Imperfect. So I decided to try again.

Pair mated species, such as humans and many birds, follow a mating pattern of monogamy tempered by adultery. The female pairs with the best male who will pair with her then, given the opportunity, gets pregnant by the (genetically) best male available. Males spend time and effort attempting to engage in extra-pair copulations while preventing their mates from doing so.

A simple solution to the problem faced by males, and one now provided by modern technology, is paternity testing. If a male can tell which of his mate's children he fathered he can decline to help support the others, giving his mate a strong incentive not to cheat on him. My question is why that solution was not long ago implemented by Darwinian evolution. Why do males in such species not have some way of identifying their offspring?

One possible answer is that here, as elsewhere in evolutionary biology, we have an arms race. It is in the interest of males for them to be able to identify children born by their mates to other males but in the interest of females for them not to be able to do so; more precisely, it is in the interest of the female to be able to fool the male into thinking that another male's children are his. It is not clear to me why the females could be expected to win this particular conflict, but perhaps there are reasons that have not occurred to me.

Can anyone point me at relevant literature? Offer plausible answers?

Wanted: Stories on Open Source Crime Control

Over the years, I've come across a number of news stories describing successful efforts by victims, typically of fraud, to use the internet to contact each other, identify the guilty party, and bring him to the attention of law enforcement. I seem to have saved only one such story, however, and would like more for a discussion I'm putting in Future Imperfect. Can anyone offer examples and links?

Global Warming, Depletable Resources, Inconsistent Beliefs

A recent post on FuturePundit cites some interesting calculations by CalTech professor Dave Rutledge. Using the estimation approach on which current, widespread concerns about running out of petroleum are based, he finds that the IPCC global warming calculations overestimate future hydrocarbon burning by a factor of at least three or four--because the hydrocarbons are not there to be burned.

We have here two different arguments leading to the same conclusion and believed, on the whole, by the same people. One argument is that we are running out of hydrocarbons and should therefore reduce our use of hydrocarbons, reduce energy consumption and switch to alternative energy sources. The other argument is that we are, by burning hydrocarbons, increasing the amount of CO2 in the air and warming the planet, and we should therefore reduce our use of hydrocarbons, reduce energy consumption, and switch to alternative energy sources.

Both arguments claim, with some justification, to be based on scientific calculations. Both are, on the whole, believed by the same people. But, if Rutledge is right, the two sets of calculations are inconsistent with each other. Nobody who believes one ought to believe the other.

Which may reflect the fact that, once you know what conclusion you want to reach, there is always some way of getting there.

Blocking Spam: An Idea

Consider a firm filtering out spam for a million customers. One way of identifying spam is to look for messages received by multiple customers. If ten thousand people receive identical messages, it is a pretty safe bet that they are all spam.

One problem with doing this is privacy; the customers do not want someone else to be reading their mail. The comparison would, of course, be done by computer, but once the message has been sent to the spam filtering company, the customer has no way of knowing who, other than a computer, is looking at it.

There is a simple solution to the problem. Instead of forwarding your email to the filtering company, forward a hash of your email. Your own computer applies a one way hash function to each message, calculating from it a long number. If the number is long enough, the probability that two different messages will hash to the same number becomes vanishingly small. But a twenty digit number still contains much less information than a hundred word email, so there is no way of reversing the process and deducing the message from its hash. Forward the hash to the spam filtering company--doing that not only protects your privacy, it also takes a lot less bandwidth than forwarding the email. Get back information on whether or not it matches the hash of messages received by many other customers, and junk or read the email accordingly.

Have I just reinvented the wheel? Is anyone currently using some variant of this approach?

Love Drugs and the Future of Marriage

There is considerable evidence that both falling in love and long term attachment are associated with the levels of various chemicals in the brain. Suppose we learn enough about the process to be able to control it artificially. What might the results be and should we approve?

A couple fall in love and get married. To properly regulate their emotions thereafter, they get a prescription for a few months of "being in love" drugs and use them to enjoy their honeymoon and the beginning of their marriage. Being in love is too intense an emotion for the long term, so they then switch to the "long term attachment" prescription. Later, as their schedules permit, they temporarily switch back in order to experience a second, third, fourth honeymoon.

That is, however, only the first step in the social changes made possible by the new technology. Currently, falling in love is usually a necessary step in the process that leads to marriage. But should it be? It is not at all obvious that the person you fall in love with is the best candidate for a long term relationship—a point made long ago by defenders of the old system of having parents choose mates for their children. Our emotions, after all, are driven by processes generated by Darwinian selection in a very different environment and "designed" not for our happiness but for reproductive success—the interest not of us but of our genes.

The new drugs provide a new option—choice of mate not by either our parents or our hormones but by our reason. You employ some suitable search strategy to find a woman who is well suited to be your wife and will think you well suited to be her husband. Once the marriage contract is signed, the final step in the ceremony is for both of you to take your love drugs. You look deep into her eyes ... .

Subjectively Right, Objectively Wrong: A Moral Question

What are the moral implications of an act that is subjectively justified—within the actor's rights given what he reasonably believes the facts to be—but objectively wrong?

Suppose, for example, I correctly believe someone is trying to kill me. You, a stranger, take some entirely innocent act which I reasonably interpret as the beginning of an assassination attempt. I attack you, injure you, and then discover my mistake. What ought to happen to me?

The answer that fits my intuition—I think I could justify it in terms of the economic analysis of law, but that isn't the approach I'm interested in at the moment—is that I am guilty of a tort but not a crime. I have injured you and so owe compensation but did not intend to violate your rights and so do not deserve punishment.

Now, to make the question more interesting, replace me by the government. You are arrested for a murder you did not commit, convicted on convincing evidence, and jailed awaiting execution. The only way in which you can save your life is by escaping, killing a guard in the process; you do so. A month later—after you would have been executed if you had not escaped—someone else confesses to the murder, providing absolutely convincing evidence of your innocence. What now is your status? Are you a murderer because you killed a guard? Or are you innocent on grounds of self defense, with perhaps a claim against the government for false imprisonment?

The government and the guard were subjectively innocent, since they reasonably believed you were a murderer and so deserved to be executed (I'm not interested, at the moment, in whether capital punishment itself is morally justified—it just makes the example simpler). But they were objectively guilty, since in fact you were not a murderer and they were thus attempting to kill you when you did not deserved to be killed. You are both subjectively and objectively innocent of killing someone without justification, since they were in fact trying to kill you and you had no other way of defending yourself—unless their subjective innocence makes their actions morally correct.

Do other people agree with my intuition—that you are innocent, the government and its agents liable to you for damages but not deserving of punishment? If not, do you have a different approach to such situations, preferably one that applies to both private and state actors?

Cells Need to Talk to Each Other

It seems clear that both aging and cancer are at least in part due to the accumulation of mutations in individual cells. Seen in the abstract, in terms of information, this is surprising. Our genetic information, after all, is massively redundant; mutations aside and ignoring a few special cases, every cell contains a copy of the same genotype. All a cell has to do in order to identify a particular sequence as a mutation is to check with two or three of its neighbors and see if they have it.

This suggests a possible strategy for life extension. Once our technology is good enough—not, unfortunately, any time soon—create some mechanism to exploit the redundancy, some way of identifying mutations by majority vote and eliminating them.