It could turn around. Fewer women will mean that your daughter will be able to choose from a pool of single men and perhaps choose the richest one. If your family is poor, it can benefit from this.
I think India should be more concerned about its overpopulation than about single men, if anything having skewed sex ratios will help her reduce overpopulation in the long term.
Rich men may find it difficult (socially) to chose a bride below their social class/caste and traditionally the daughter's parents have to pay the hefty dowry. But either way, it's generally the choice of the parents and not the bride or groom.
>Women in India are sometimes permitted, even encouraged, to “marry up” into a higher income bracket or caste, so richer men find it easier to get a bride.
The original article says that Detroit has gone through economic changes and he is just pointing out that it has gone through demographic changes as well. I don't think he needs to add any comments to it, the link speaks for itself
Reading this thread, the historical demographic trends were very interesting. Do you think they are irrelevant? If so, please explain why.
Very interesting that from at least the 1850s right up until the 1930s more than a third of the population were immigrants. I would say most of these were from Canada, based on my own study of immigration patterns and knowing it was extremely easy to immigrate from Canada to the US during that period.
Also very interesting that population peaked in the 1950s even though the American auto industry did not go into decline until the 1960s.
> Reading this thread, the historical demographic trends were very interesting. Do you think they are irrelevant? If so, please explain why.
I'll bite. I don't find skin color particularly interesting, nor am I interested in it as a demographic distinction. I think skin color is used as a proxy indicator for things like culture, class, and income. I believe this is generally for expediency's sake (i.e. it is easy to measure and observe).
Ignoring the expediency benefits, I think the focus on skin color and comments such as yours perpetuate the distinction's hold on our global psyche, to our global detriment.
I'm torn on this issue. Socioeconomic class is of towering importance, and has been neglected in favor of pure race for far too long; but racism is very real, and remains a potent force worldwide. It is counter-productive, I think, to look through either lens exclusively.
At least with education, There is a strong correlation between race and education, namely blacks are less likely to be well-educated than whites. Connect that with income and you are not only seeing a drop in population, but very likely a steep drop in overall tax revenue necessary for Detroit to rebuild itself.
I admire Japanese culture, it's a shame that with their extremely low birth rate they might eventually disappear. This is not an exaggeration, the current rate just has to continue as it is for a few more decades and there is no reason to believe it will change.
The birth rate is below replacement level, in fact it's almost nearly 1 which means that the population halves every generation. At least you are lucky and your politicians don't flood your country with immigrants making sure that your culture and gene pool stay intact.
I heard they settle quite densely on their island, though. Perhaps the carrying capacity of the island has pretty much maxed out? It seems they eat through the oceans of the whole world to feed everybody, too.
Just saying - who knows, maybe the birthrate would change if there was more space/less people. For example it could mean food and space for living would become cheaper, so having children would become cheaper, too.
God, I wish people would post a reply explaining why they downvoted something. I don't even know what my crime is here.
EDIT: It was nice of someone to upvote me back, but I still don't understand what caused the downvote in the first place. I certainly wasn't trying to be controversial.
Just take the current price, and extrapolate. Not more than a few years for researchers. I don't know how retail will develop, since there may be regulations and other overheads.
For my friends in systems biology it's now almost cheaper to just send their microbes in for sequencing than doing their own gel electrophoresis.
(If you want to read around in Wikipedia, also have a look at Southern blots and Western blots, and DNA microarrays.)
I found all of it interesting, but I'm a bio geek. I'm also planning to have kids with my fiancé so it's also cool because of that.
Some highlights:
Both my fiancé and I are carriers for a mild form of Hemochromatosis, so we have a 1/4 chance of having a kid with it.
I am a little bit Asian! That's probably the Jewish ancestry. My fiancé thought he had a black ancestor but it turns out was 100% European. My best friend, whose father had always told her that her grandmother was Native American, found out he was lying to her (which did not surprise but did disappoint her.) Also the heat map of where your mitochondria are from is fun; it confirmed what I knew already but it was still really cool to see that the first migration of my maternal line out of Greece was with my grandmother.
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Part of what makes 23andme so fun is you get to learn a lot about biology from the framework of your own genes. Each SNP they report on has a bunch of information associated with it. It's only boring if you aren't interested in biology.
That sounds cool. Can they tell you from which European ethnic groups you come from too? How specific are they about this? Do they say French, German, etc...? Or do they say South of France Celtic, Germanic tribe from the North and so on?
Right now the only categories where they give you your percentage and paint your genome accordingly are European, Asian, and African.
The cool thing about 23andme though is that they're always rolling out new stuff. There is a separate, more detailed ancestry break-down in their "labs" (a part of the website for experimental stuff) but it's not very good. Part of the problem is that there isn't enough research pinning down large swaths of the genome to more specific areas. So what 23andme does is use user reported data- which is problematic due to globalization and limited by people's knowledge.
The only other things that are good and can really pin down geography are your mitochondrial DNA, like I mentioned, and the Y chromosome.
Aaaah, not very useful for me then. I live in Europe and doubt that I have any Asian or African ancestry. Maybe some Middle-Eastern or Sephardic Jew but I guess that falls in the same race as Europeans so they won't be able to tell me. $260 was going to be a big investment for me, I will wait until they can tell the difference between early Europe's ethnic groups: Celts, Germanic tribes, Iberians, Basques, "Roman", etc... They need to study people living in Europe in kind of isolated communities, remote mountains or whatever, then they will be able to tell the difference.
Even if we can't measure it, what makes it so hard to believe that intelligence is inheritable? Is height inheritable? Yes. Is eye color inheritable? Yes. Is skin color inheritable? Yes. Is physical strength....? Yes. Why wouldn't a human characteristic that has provided one of the biggest advantages through evolution not be inheritable too?
The author isn't saying that intelligence isn't heritable. He just showed that we can measure heritability in things that don't exist (the sum of a persons weight and height in some units) as well as things that exist like their actual weight and height. Therefore, the fact that g is heritable doesn't mean that its a thing that exists.
Except I think the author would point out that there isn't just _one_ heritability for things like height because height would be much more heritable in environments where everyone has adequate nutrition as opposed to in environments where nutrition was a matter of luck, for instance.
All of this assumes a certain philosophical veiwpoint on what it means to "really exist" which I don't agree with, but which I do recognize as coherent.
What if we postulate a general factor "b" that correlates with a superior body, is that inheritable? It's not that certain characteristics of the brain aren't inheritable, it's that "intelligence" is very diffuse and hard to define.
It's not even so clear that what many of us would call intelligence is mainly an evolutionary advantage, either.
The example of the German monozygotic twins Otto and Ewald, both well nourished but sportsmen who pursued different sports, show that physique is exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences even between two individuals who share a genome and a prenatal environment in the same mother's womb. Take a look at the photos.
AFTER EDIT: I'm asked in a reply below what my point was, and it's partly to point out that the term "heritable" means something far, far different from "determined by genes." There are whole books
by professional geneticists, medical doctors, and psychologists patiently refuting the confusion in most popular literature about what "heritability" means, but the main point in this thread is that Shalizi is correct, and many psychologists are wrong, about what heritability figures mean in relation to IQ.
Not really sure what your point is there. It's natural two people with virtually identical genes subjected to vastly different training would have different body-types. It's also natural that two people with vastly different genes would respond differently to virtually identical training.
Is height entirely inherited? No, diet makes extraordinary differences. Is physical strength entirely inherited? No, exercise builds muscle.
There are of course factors on both sides, but for mental / physical strength I'll happily argue for landing waaaay towards the what-you-do-with-it, not-what-you-have side.
Where I live you honestly can't say that diet stunts people's growth. That would apply in places where food isn't readily available, but certainly not in the western world. From looking at people I know I can tell you too, that the differences in muscle size is more related to how much muscle they had before going to the gym than how much time they spend there.
Can you start going to the gym and get stronger than your friends who don't go? No. Out of 10 friends maybe you'll pass 1 or 2 of them in strength, but that's it. That is what I have seen but I'd say it is pretty far from what you suggest.
Can you start going to the gym and get stronger than your friends who don't go? No.
Presumably your circle of friends consists of people who are already physically active. Even so, I doubt your assessment concerning strength training. Looking at the people around me, I'm guessing fewer than 5% (not 80%) of them are up to 100 pushups [http://www.hundredpushups.com/]
You presume a) everyone has access to healthy food as kids, and b) strength training is nearly ineffective.
What, you forgot about the massive population of poor the world has, western included? Or how many in the western world eat crap, because it's easier than making things for ourselves? Height is largely determined by what your parents feed you, once you're able to be on your own you're essentially fully grown. I know a decent number of people whose parents were either relatively poor, and they subsisted on mac & cheese frequently, or were largely idiots when it came to food and raising kids. And many of them are noticeably shorter than average. My wife, for instance, is just barely over 5 feet, and her family-then-single-father fell into both categories until he joined the military.
As to the second... I have absolutely no idea where you get that idea from. Maybe everyone around you weight-trains outside of the gym frequently, or you've never done so for an extended period of time? You're absolutely nuts, though.
It wasn't about me, I've been doing sports my whole life but never tried weight lifting. Before I spend my time writing a reply, please answer this question. Do you think that if we all lived in the same environment, had the same diet, did as much physical exercise and all other variables were the same except our genes, we wouldn't see a difference of 1 foot between people or a difference of pounds of muscle mass? And more related to the article, we wouldn't see a difference in intelligence?
Foot between heights: assuming identical diets, absolutely. Different people metabolize and absorb things differently. Assuming ideal diets for everyone, I'd bet a foot would be near the limits.
Muscle mass, depends significantly on how much exercise. Some respond to it differently than others, so some would be more muscular with light exercise while others would be more with heavier. A difference though, yes; if somewhere near the middle, accounting for height / overall body build, a moderate amount of difference, but not a whole lot.
Intelligence, barring physical defects, I don't know. People certainly seem to have specialties, especially if you consider some of the "greats" of history as nigh-savants, but measuring an overall intelligence of a person is a nightmarishly subjective task. Very broad statement: not much of a difference. A lot of specialists are severely lacking in communication skills, a lot of artists in engineering, etc, and those deficiencies would have to be factored in.
At the end of the day, I'd bet we're all pretty darn similar. But I do lean significantly towards the nurture-over-nature side of the argument; do nothing, and you become a blob, regardless of your biology. It happens to animals too. There are, of course, some differences, but you have an incredible amount of control over what you make of you.
Yes, I think that might be it. Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence any side can put on the table. Genetics will advance a lot in the coming years, so that might put an end to the debate and that ideology will be shattered. If that same ideology impedes that we study heritability in the West, I'm sure China will still study it.
The model has been around for a while - you should give it a go! Your execution will be different and could be more successful. You'll learn a ton in the process too.
I think India should be more concerned about its overpopulation than about single men, if anything having skewed sex ratios will help her reduce overpopulation in the long term.