Tag Archives: Anthropology

AAPA and the March for Science

I am just back from the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in New Orleans. As always, it was great to catch up with colleagues and friends. I'm never quite sure about how I fit in to AAPA, but I certainly know a lot of people there (and, of course, I'm never quite sure about how I fit in to nearly any academic conference I attend!). I was struck by what seems like a pretty dramatic demographic shift from previous incarnations of AAPA. Overall, the assembled conference-goers seemed quite a bit younger. The image I have in my mind of AAPA is a bunch of stodgy old dudes wearing polyester-mix sport coats. Not so much this year. So much ink! There was even a bit more diversity, which is an encouraging sign for a field dedicated to the study of human diversity. I really appreciate that AAPA is taking an active part in changing its heretofore woeful diversity problem and I'm looking forward to seeing the payoff from the new IDEAS Workshop (thanks on that front to Ripan Malhi and Susan Antón for getting the grant to make the workshop happen).

I have to admit, I didn't see that many talks. This is kind of my idiom at scientific meetings. There are so many people to meet and talk to that it seems a bit wasteful to spend hour after hour listening to podium talks of, let's face it, rather mixed quality. However, I did spend a lot of time in the poster hall. I saw a number of really interesting posters. A couple that stand out in my memory: Saige Kelmelis, together with her advisor Jim Wood and my former student Mike Price, had a terrific poster describing the use of multi-state demographic models to infer the effect of leprosy on survival in medieval Denmark (lesioned skeletons had an overall increase in the estimated mortality hazard in excess of a factor of six!). Adam Reynolds at Emory, along with Paul Hooper and a bunch of co-authors, had a poster describing a dynamic-state model for herd management in Mongolia that looked really innovative (and left me with so many questions -- a good thing in a scientific conference). Alaina Schneider, a student in Herman Pontzer's lab, presented awesome work measuring the energetic costs of immune function in a mouse model. Emma Pomeroy of Liverpool John Moores University had a neat poster on the ancient origins of chronic disease risk in South Asian populations. That was one of those great ones where I knew nothing going in and felt like I actually learned something new after our chat.

I presented in one of the human biology sessions organized by Aaron Blackwell on some recent insights we've had into the statistical modeling of network data collected in the field using ethnographic methods. Be on the lookout for forthcoming discussion of ethnographic porcupines and how to deal with them. Current post-doc Ashley Hazel presented her great work on the epidemiological effects of isolation and mobility on HSV-2 infection among pastoralists of northern Namibia.  Ashely is also instrumental to the work that I presented and I'm excited about what should be coming out of our work in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future.

AAPA overlapped this year with Earth Day and the March for Science. In a statement of solidarity with this national movement, AAPA president Susan Antón and the conference organizers decided to cancel the standard plenary lecture and instead lend our support to the New Orleans satellite march.

I was an enthusiastic participant in the march, but I ended up having a bit of an adventure that I've come to think of as a metaphor for my own scientific career. Alan Rogers and I had gone to lunch at the House of Blues (quite a distance from the start of the march at Duncan Plaza). We got kind of lost in a wide-ranging conversation that included a discussion of fair productivity metrics for anthropologists to numerical calculation of eigenvalues to genetic algorithms to graph theory and Markov chains. At one point, Alan looked down at his watch and realized that we were late for the march. Having missed the  exodus from the conference hotel, we figured that we would just walk straight from the restaurant to the starting point of the march. The problem was, we thought that the march was starting from Jackson Square, not Duncan Plaza. I should have known that this wasn't right because Jackson Square is more or less ground-zero for New Orleans tourism. It fronts St. Louis Cathedral and is across Decatur Street from the world-famous home of late-night beignets, Café du Monde. Seems hard to imagine Decatur Street being shut down for a political march on a Saturday in April!

When we arrived at Jackson Square, it was obvious that we were in the wrong spot. A quick search on my phone under the shade of the trees in Jackson Square and we realized our mistake. Unfortunately, we were unable to figure out the route of the march, since by this time, it had almost certainly started. We guessed and headed out for Duncan Plaza, figuring we might manage to intercept the march if our guess was right. Well, our guess wasn't right. We walked the mile-and-a-half, didn't encounter the march en route, and found ourselves at an empty Duncan Plaza (having acquired a couple other stragglers we encountered on the way) with no evidence of which way the thousands of people had gone!

A bit dejected -- and very hot and sweaty -- we figured we'd just head back to the conference hotel and get a drink and cool off in the hotel bar. As we approached the Marriott, I said "hey, I think we found it." Alan , with a note of surprise in his voice over my seemingly terrible spatial cognition, said "yes, we're nearly at the hotel. Don't you know where we are?" I replied, "No, we found the march!" Sure enough, there they were, assembled in front of the Marriott, chanting, waving signs, and jamming out to the brass band which had accompanied the march.  Natalia Reagan captured a bit of the atmosphere in this tweet:

While it was a bit frustrating to miss much of the march, it was great to hang out with Alan while we comically tried to find a couple thousand of our closest friends as they marched, chanted, and made a whole lot of noise on the streets of a pretty small city, and I came to think of this as a pretty apt metaphor for my life as a scientist. I bumbled around, not entirely knowing what I was doing or where to look for an answer, mostly failing, but ultimately finding a modicum of success. That sounds like science to me. On this particular day, I enjoyed the great honor of bumbling around with one of my major scientific role models and fellow autodidact, Alan Rogers. We talked about a ridiculous array of technical and theoretical issues as we wandered, which is half the fun of science. Sure, maybe we felt a bit isolated from the field -- perhaps even wondering if we actually belonged. This, again, is pretty par for the course of doing interdisciplinary science for me. But in the end, we managed to find our way into the field again, enjoy a sense of connection with the community and the history of our discipline, and let our voices be heard on some of the central issues of our time.

AAA Post-Mortem

Well, it's been a long time and there are bunch of things I should really catch up on here. I spent last year on sabbatical in the very remote location, at least half a mile from my house, of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where I was working on various book manuscripts that seem to grow in number the more I write. Then there's the fact that I changed Earth Systems Science. This is a topic that clearly requires a bit of explication at some point, but now is not the time. I figured I'd break back into the blog by doing my semi-regular, highly-selective review of the American Anthropological Association meetings.

The meetings this year were in Minneapolis, which is a lovely city, but maybe not the best place for a conference that meets in mid-November. Apparently, the weather was beautiful for the first couple days. However, I had spent the beginning of the week in Atlanta at the meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (that was a very interesting meeting, but this post is about AAA). This meant that I had to fly in late Friday evening before my Saturday session. By this time, the weather had changed to something slightly more horrifying. While my flight seemed like a relatively long-haul (4.5 hours from SFO), we nonetheless flew in a regional jet. A storm had moved into the Twin Cities area by Friday afternoon and our little plane got tossed around quite a bit in our approach to MSP. In fact, we flew in a holding pattern for about an hour before the pilot came on intercom and said that we "we're going to try to land" Try? It was a white-knuckle landing in which we experienced more yaw than I care to remember. There are many reasons that I'm grateful that our try at landing was successful, and high among those is the fact that I didn't relish the thought of climbing back through that unsettled air if we had failed on our first pass.

Once safely on the ground, I was able to take the lovely (and cheap!) light rail straight to downtown, about three blocks from the conference venue. I don't know what one calls the precipitation that was falling at this point (sleet? freezing rain? wintery mix?), but it was quite a shock for this adopted Californian.

The meeting was held in the Minneapolis Convention Center, a cavernous space that the 5,000 or so anthropologists didn't come close to filling. This gave the conference a bit of a ghost-town feeling. Adventitious encounters were minimal and I definitely saw far fewer anthropologists of different stripes than I have at past meetings. The registration process was surprisingly efficient (maybe because I was registering on what I thought was the last day and there wasn't much of a crowd). Rather than the standard canvas bag, we were given fluorescent green plastic (?) bags. I have actually wondered whether I hallucinated this, since I threw mine out immediately and have been completely unable to find a picture on one on the internets, but Rex over at Savage Minds has also commented on the bizarre bags (alas, I don't think they were soy fiber, Rex).

Then there were the conference badges. Not so much badges as they were bibs -- a bonus to the messy eaters in our midst! They were bright red (if you are lucky enough to be a AAA member) and were reminiscent of those travel wallets that are designed to fit a passport and shout "I'm a tourist, please harass me!" Too bad I left my fanny-pack at home. Once again, AAA astounds me with its tone-deaf marking of outsiders. Oh, you're not a member of our club? Then wear this other-colored bib to display your status for all to see! I've been to many different societies' conferences and AAA is the only one where I've experienced this practice.

If we're being perfectly honest here, I'm not big on conference talks. I generally try to minimize the number of attend. Let's face it, most conference talks are not great and when you have to submit your talk nine months before the conference, freshness of material tends not to be super high. I spend most of my time at conferences meeting with people: planning a paper with co-authors, strategizing with program officers, meeting with editors, catching up with former students, dining and drinking with colleagues I haven't seen in years. This is the really productive work of an academic conference. Nonetheless, I was curious what AAA had to offer. I found the online program so difficult to use that I gave up on even trying to find talks I wanted to see (this is another topic that Rex takes up hilariously -- I couldn't agree more on his review). This tool was clearly not designed by anyone who actually attends academic conferences. The more I use it to write this piece, the more comically dysfunctional I realize it is. Who thinks it's a good idea to hide the author names in a search result? See the screenshot below for an example of what gets returned from a search for Anthropology and Environment Society talks:

screenshot of online schedule search

I organized a session for the Evolutionary Anthropology Society entitled, "Evolutionary Anthropological Approaches to Inequality." It seemed to me that there is a group of human behavioral ecologists out there doing long-term ethnographic work, measuring economic and demographic variables, and thinking hard about how people adapt in a rapidly-changing world, and that these scholars might have some real insights into the mechanisms generating economic inequality. I was right.

One of my goals for this session was to beat the bushes for contributions from scholars other than the usual suspects. Don't get me wrong; I'm very fond of the usual suspects in EAS, but there is a lot of great work being done that is both relevant to our section's mission and engages different communities of scholars. I had some success recruiting different people in the initial call for papers. Unfortunately, when these new folks saw how much it costs to present a paper at AAA (the conference is very expensive, particularly when you adjust for the overall quality of the scientific program), they backed out. Fortunately, we had enough people still signed up that we were able to retain our session (apparently, you only need four speakers to stay on the program). When faced with a sparse session, the organizer has a few options: add a discussant, give speakers longer slots, open up a discussion. I decided to opt for yet another strategy. We wildcatted three late-breaking talks by junior researchers. Obviously, these talks didn't make the program (not sure that's much of a penalty though, given what a mess the program was), but it still gave the speakers the opportunity to present their research in front of a crowd of at least 50 (we had a great turn-out for the entire session).

The line-up for the session included a number of stars from EAS (well, and me):

  1. Paul Hooper (Emory), "If You Know What Feeds Hierarchy, then You Can Starve It"
  2. Siobhán Mattison (UNM), "Market Integration, Kinship, and Social Inequality Among the Mosuo of Southwest China"
  3. me (Stanford),"State-Dependence, Uncertainty, and the Economic Rationality of Poor People"
  4. Katie Starkweather (MPI), "Subsistence Strategies: Risk, Reward and Gender Roles for the Boat-Dwelling Shodagor of Bangladesh"

We missed Tamas David-Barrett, who had to deal with some emergent business back home. Our late-breaking talks were contributed by Elspeth Ready (Stanford), E'lana Jordan (Stanford), and Dave Nolin (Missouri). All were great. This was E'lana's debut, as she is just back from the field, and she killed it. Elspeth was, as ever, dazzling in her analytical sophistication and the general bad-assery of her fieldwork.

The other EAS session, "Finding Insights in the Field: Ethnographic Experience and the Scientific Process," organized by former student and current Omidyar post-doc at SFI, Elly Power, was also terrific. All the talks in this session were very good and the attendance was excellent. Naturally, I was particularly partial to the incredibly sophisticated analysis that Elly presented to close out this excellent session.

This has now happened enough times at AAA that it has tweaked that paranoid part of my brain. Our EAS session was scheduled at the same time as a great-looking session sponsored by Anthropology and the Environment Society called "Emergent Landscapes, Disturbance Ecology, and New Approaches in Ecological Anthropology." Friends and colleagues involved in this session included Mark Moritz (Ohio State), Steve Lansing (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Brian Codding (Utah), Sean Downey (Maryland), and Kathy Galvin (Colorado State), among others. This session would have been of great interest to many in EAS, but, unless you're Hermione Granger, you can only be in one session at a time. It was particularly frustrating because the editor for the new journal, Nature Human Behavior, also had to choose between sessions. These are constituencies who have natural affinities and we should work on getting them to coordinate somehow, AAA scheduling be damned.

Once again, there was apparently nothing newsworthy at AAA, as a Google news search turns up no hits from the actual meeting. This is a big difference between AAA and other major professional meetings, where new discoveries or novel analyses make their way into different quarters of the news media. The usual defensive response to this critique is that anthropology is more a humanities discipline (which, of course, is itself debatable) and, as such, doesn't lend itself to "discoveries" or press releases. I don't buy that. A similar search for the MLA, for example, turns up quite a few stories. I think it's something about which we should be concerned as a discipline. While I am heartened by some of the work I saw at AAA (or from which I was structurally blocked from seeing but about which I heard in conversations with speakers later that evening), I really wonder about the relevance of our discipline as a whole. In principle, I believe the world really needs anthropology -- perhaps now more than ever. But, in practice, I'm not sure what anthropologists are doing is what the world needs.

Among other things, I wonder if we really need to have meetings in convention centers. The public spaces seemed particularly sparse this year and many of the sessions I walked by looked like they had more speakers than audience members. I know it's hard, but maybe we need to conduct a bit of quality control. Of course, I should be careful what I ask for. Given the fact that EAS is not a powerful section of AAA, we would almost certainly lose, even though our sessions are very well attended. This may sound heretical, but maybe we should collect data on session attendance and factor that into which sessions get included. Surely, the number of people who actually attend a session is a better measure of interest than the number of people who belong to a given section. In my experience, both EAS, BAS, and Anthropology and the Environment would do quite well on that criterion, even if they are relatively small sections.

I will probably keep going to AAA, at least occasionally, not because I think it's a good conference in general. I will go because there is a core of great young researchers in EAS and I want to continue to support them, even if AAA is, at best, an uneasy home for them.

Winter Anthropology Colloquium, Part 2

We had the second of our speakers in the winter anthropology colloquium Friday. Daniel Nettle came on Friday. Daniel's talk was co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Daniel is a human behavioral ecologist with extremely broad interests and a penchant for using HBE as a tool for studying social inequality and human health. Somehow, we'd never met before. I'm glad that's been taken care of now. Of the dozens of things that Daniel could have talked about, he chose to talk about his ethnographic project in Newcastle on Tyne.

Given my interests in demography and epidemiology, I've seen lots of talks on social deprivation, inequality, neighborhood effects, etc., but Daniel's talk showed a refreshing creativity. A large fraction of the data he presented came from deceptively simple ethological methods. I think that there is a lot that both the methods and theory of behavioral ecology and ethology have to offer studies of social inequality and health. Of course, I'm not alone in this belief. Mhairi Gibson (my collaborator in Uganda) and David Lawson (this week's speaker!) published a terrific  book last year on the application of HBE to applied problems.

Much of the work Daniel's work in this area is published in open-access journals (e.g., here and here). I'm intrigued by the relatively new journal, PeerJ, where he has published a number of papers now, and am planning to submit something there soon.

The flyer for Daniel's talk:

Nettle_Talk

Winter Anthropology Colloquium, Part 1

I am organizing the colloquium for the Stanford Anthropology department this winter. I believe it may be the first time that a faculty member for the Ecology and Environment group has organized the colloquium since the Blessed Event that merged departments back in 2008 (though I'm not certain of that). There have been a few scheduling glitches, as it seems winter quarter 2015 has the highest density of talks I've yet encountered in 11 years at Stanford, but we're off to a great start. Our first speaker came all the way from the UK to speak to us about social dilemmas and cooperation. Shakti Lamba is an ESRC Research Fellow and Lecturer in Human Behavioural Ecology in the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter.

Shakti talked about her very exciting work on behavioral norms. She uses a variety of methods, including ethnography, experimental games, and advanced statistical techniques to understand the nature of variation in cooperative norms within and between populations (see, e.g., papers here or here for examples of her work). I generally have mixed feelings about experimental games, but I think there is a small cadre of anthropologists, including Shakti and Drew Gerkey, among others, who use them as a tool for eliciting much richer behavioral and social observations than do most field researchers (whether or not they use experimental games!). I was impressed by the sophistication of her approach, her keen experimental design, and the excellent population thinking that it entails. However, I was most impressed with her coolness and eloquence under some pretty heated questioning from a number of senior faculty members who simply misunderstand evolutionary process.  Looking forward to seeing more of her work, especially forthcoming longitudinal research with Alex Alvergne, in the future!

Here is the poster for her talk:

Lamba_Talk

Something Newsworthy From the AAAs!

About this time of the year, I generally do a re-cap of the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. However, I didn't attend AAAs this year for the first time in five years, so I don't have much to report. Anthropologists' annual awkwardly-timed professional ritual just went down in Washington DC and I thought I would see if anything newsworthy came of it. Doing a Google news search with a variety of permutations of the association name (American Anthropological Association in quotes and not, AAA, etc.) and other keywords (Washington, annual, meeting, 2014, etc.), I managed to find one or two things. As I (and others) have noted before, the AAA meetings don't attract a lot of press. New discoveries or items of broad public interest are apparently not generally discussed at AAA. This year, the most notable item in a news search is the rejection of a resolution to boycott Israel over what the resolution referred to as “Israel’s ongoing, systematic, and widespread violations of Palestinian academic freedom and human rights.”

One other item popped up which actually resembles something newsworthy on the scholarly front (as opposed to the business of the association).  Kari Lyderson at the Crux writes about a movement to bring anthropological expertise to bear on the ongoing Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in West Africa. Sharon Abramowitz, a terrific medical anthropologist at the University of Florida, has helped to found an initiative called the Ebola Emergency Response Initiative, the aim of which is to provide social and cultural expertise to help with control of the EVD epidemic. This is good news and exactly the sort of thing I would like to see more of at AAA. There are many ways that improved cultural understanding by medical personnel and public health practitioners could help to bring this epidemic under control – a point that anthropologist/human behavioral ecologist Barry Hewlett been making for years now. These are issues we've thought about a bit here and that my Ph.D. student Gene Richardson is actively working on in Sierra Leone right now.

On Genetics and Human Behavioral Biology

Nicholas Wade, former science reporter for the New York Times has written a book, A Troublesome Inheritance, in which he argues that large-scale societal differences (e.g., the existence of capitalist democracies in the West or of paternalistic, authoritarian political systems in Asia) may be attributable to small genetic differences that were fixed at a population level through the action of natural selection since the emergence of anatomically modern humans and their subsequent dispersal from Africa. The fixation of these gene variants happened because the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa (homes of the major "racial" groups) differed in systematic ways. David Dobbs recently reviewed it in the Sunday Review of Books, which prompted a kind of amicus brief letter-to-the-editor from over 120 population geneticists, affirming that Wade's writing misrepresents the current science of genetics. A full list of the signatories of this letter can be found here. It is a veritable who's who of contemporary population genetics.

As you might imagine, A Troublesome Inheritance has been quite controversial. A great deal has already been written on this book, both in formal publications and in the science (and economics) blogging ecosystem. To name just a few, Greg Laden, my old homie and fellow TF for Irv DeVore's famous Harvard class, Science B-29, Human Behavioral Biology, wrote a brief review here for American Scientist. Columbia statistician and political scientist, Andrew Gelman, wrote a review for Slate.com. Notre Dame professor and frequent contributor of popular work on human evolution, Agustin Fuentes, wrote a critique for Huffington Post, while UNC-C anthropology professor Jonathan Marks wrote a critique for the American Anthropological Association blog, which also appears in HuffPo.

Honestly, I think that Wade's book is so scientifically weak and ideological (despite his protestations that science should be apolitical) that it is likely to have a very short half-life in contemporary discourse on human diversity and science more broadly. In fact, I have advocated to the editorial boards of professional societies to which I belong not to do anything special about this book since I'm confident it will be soon forgotten for its sheer scientific mediocrity. I find it interesting that the great majority of the people who like the book seem not to be scientists but comment on Wade's "bravery" for spurning "political correctness" and the like. There are substantial parallels here to public debate over climate change or vaccination: the professional conclusions of the scientists who actually work on the topic only matter when they correspond with the social, political, or economic interests of the parties engaging in the debate. What do geneticists know about genetics anyway? So, it is with some hesitancy that I write about it, but my colleagues' letter has reminded me of a larger beef I have with the contemporary state of human evolutionary studies. This beef boils down to the fact that most contemporary students of human evolutionary biology know next to nothing about genetics. I've actually encountered a number of leading figures in human behavioral biology who maintain an outright hostility toward genetics. This is a topic that my colleague Charles Roseman and I have grumbled about for a few years now. We keep threatening to do something about it, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet. Perhaps this is a humble start...

This state of affairs is extremely problematic since genetics is the material cause (in the Aristotelean sense) or one of the mechanistic causes (in the Tinbergian sense) of much of the diversity of life. If we are going to make a scientific claim that some observed trait is the result of natural selection, we should be able to have a sense for how such a trait could evolve in the first place. The standard excuse for ignoring genetics in the adaptive analysis of a trait of interest is what Alan Grafen termed the "phenotypic gambit." The basic idea behind the phenotypic gambit is that natural selection is strong enough to overcome whatever constraints may be acting on it. The phenotypic gambit is a powerful idea and it has yielded some productive work in behavioral ecology. I use it. However, a complete evolutionary explanation of a trait's existence needs to consider all levels of explanation. In modern terms, and as nicely outlined a letter by Randolph Nesse, we need to answer questions about mechanism, ontogeny, phylogeny, and function. Explanations relying on the phenotypic gambit only address the functional question (i.e., fitness, or what Tinbergen called the "survival value" of the trait).

I could go on about this for a long time, so I will limit myself to three points: (1) complex traits will generally not be created by a single gene, (2) heritability and the response to selection are regularly misunderstood and misapplied, (3) we need to think about the strength of selection and the constancy of selective regimes when making statements about the adaptive evolution of specific traits.

First, we need to get over the whole one-gene thing. Among other things, the types of adaptive arguments that are made particularly for recent human behavioral innovations are simply highly implausible for single genes. There are a variety of formulae for calculating the time to fixation of advantageous alleles that depend on the particulars of the system (e.g., details about dominance, initial frequency, mutation rate). Using the approximation that the number of generations that it takes for the fixation of a highly advantageous allele with selection coefficient s is simply twice the natural logarithm of s divided by s, we can calculate the expected time to fixation for an advantageous allele. With a (very) substantial average selection coefficient of s=0.05 (think of lopping of 5% of the population each generation), the time to fixation of such a highly advantageous allele is about 120 generations generations. That's over 3,000 years for humans. This is interesting, of course, because it makes the type of recent evolution the John Hawks or Henry Harpending have discussed more than plausible. It makes it hard to imagine how the large changes in presumably complex behavioral complexes in historical time suggested by authors such as Wade or Gregory Clark, author of Farewell to Alms (which I actually find a fascinating book), pretty implausible.

In addition to the population-genetic implausibility of single-locus evolutionary models, complex traits are polygenic, meaning that they are constructed from multiple genes, each of which typically has a small effect. Now, this doesn't even address the issue of epigenetics, where genotype-environment interactions profoundly shape gene expression and can produce fundamentally different phenotypes in the absence of significant genetic difference, but that's another post. In many ways, this is good news for people who study whole organisms in a naturalistic context (like human behavioral ecologists!) because it means that we can work with quantitatively-measured trait values and apply regression models to understanding their dynamics. In short, the math is easier though, admittedly, the statistics can be pretty tricky. Further good news: there are lots of people who would probably be happy to collaborate and there are plenty of training opportunities in quantitative genetics through short courses, etc.

The masterful review paper that Marc Feldman and Dick Lewontin wrote for Science in 1975 amid the controversy surrounding Arthur Jensen's work on the genetics of intelligence, and its implications for racial educational achievement differentials, still applies. Heritability is a systematically misunderstood concept and its misuse seems to surface in policy debates approximately every twenty years. Heritability, in the strict sense, is a ratio of the total phenotypic variance that is attributable to additive genetic variance (i.e., the variance contributed by the mean effect of different alleles). Because total variance of the phenotype is in the denominator of this ratio, heritability is very much a population-specific measure. If a population has low total phenotypic variance because of a uniformly positive environment, for instance, there is more potential for a greater fraction of the total variance to be due to additive genetic variance. Think, for example, about children's intelligence (as measured through psychometric tests) in a wealthy community with an excellent school district where most parents are college-educated and therefore have the motivation to guide their children to high scholastic achievement, the resources to supplement their children's school instruction (e.g., hiring tutors or sending kids to enrichment programs), and the study skills and knowledge base to help their children with homework, etc. I have used this example in prior post. Given the relative uniformity of the environment, more of the variation in test scores may be attributable to additive genetic contributions and heritability would be higher than it would be in a more heterogeneous population. This is a hypothetical example, but it illustrates the rather constrained meaning of heritability and the problems associated with its application to cross-population comparisons. It is also suggestive of the problem of effect sizes of different contributions to phenotypic variance. The potential for environmental variance to swamp real additive genetic variance is quite large. What's a better predictor of life expectancy: having a genetic predisposition to high longevity or living in a neighborhood with a high homicide rate or a endemic cholera in the drinking water supply?

Heritability essentially measures the potential response to selection, everything else being equal. The so-called Breeder's Equation (Lush 1937) states that the change in a single quantitative phenotype (e.g., height) from one generation to the next is equal to the product of heritability and the force of selection. If there is lots of additive variability in a trait but not much selective advantage to it, the change in the mean phenotype will be small. Similarly, even if selection is very strong, the phenotype will not change much if the amount of additive variance is low. A famous, but frequently misunderstood result, known as Fisher's Fundamental Theorem shows that the change in fitness is directly proportional to variance in fitness. This is really just a special case of the breeder's equation, as shown in great detail in Lynch and Walsh's textbook (and their online draft chapter 6) or in Steve Frank's terrific book, in which the trait we care about is fitness itself. An important implication of Fisher's theorem is that selection should deplete variance in fitness -- and this makes sense if we think of selection as truncating a distribution. A corollary of Fisher's theorem is that traits which are highly correlated with fitness should not have high heritability. Oops. Does this mean that intelligence, with its putatively very high heritabilities is not important for fitness?

Everything in the last paragraph applies to the case where we are only considering a single trait. When we consider the joint response of two or more traits to selection, we must account for correlations between traits (technically, additive genetic covariances between the traits). Sometimes these covariances will be positive; sometimes they will be negative. When the additive genetic covariance between two traits is negative, it means that selection to increase the mean of one will reduce the mean of the other. In their fundamental (1983) paper, my Imperial College colleague Russ Lande and Steven Arnold generalized the breeder's equation to the multivariate case. The response to selection becomes a balancing act between the different force of selection, additive genetic variance, and additive genetic covariance for all the traits. Indeed, this is where constraints come from (or it's at least one place). Suppose there are two traits (1 and 2) that share a negative covariance. Further suppose that the force of selection is positive for both but is stronger on trait 1 than it is on trait 2. Depending on the amount of genetic variance present, this could mean that the mean of trait 2 will not change or even that the mean could decrease from one generation to the next.

The work of Lande and Arnold (and many others) has spawned a huge literature on evolvability (something that Charles has moved into and that we have some nascent collaborative work on in the area of human life-history evolution). This work is very important for understanding things like the evolution of human psychology. Consider the hypothesis, popular in evolutionary psychology, that the mind is divided into a large number of specific problem-solving "modules," each of which is the product of natural selection on the outcome of the problem-solving. How do you create so many of these "organs" in a relatively short time frame? Humans last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos around five million years ago and most likely human ancestors until about 1.8 million years ago seem awfully ape-like (and therefore probably not carrying around anything like the human mental toolkit in their heads). One of the key processes responsible for the creation of complex phenotypes is known as modularity (which is a bit confusing since this is also the term that evolutionary psychologists use for these mental organs!) and one of the fundamental mechanisms by which modularity is achieved is through the duplication of sets of genes responsible for existing structures. These duplicated "modules" are less constrained because of their redundancy and can evolve to form new structures. However, the fact that modules are duplicated means that they should experience substantial genetic correlation with their ancestral modules. This makes me skeptical that the diversity of hypothetical structures posited by the massive modularity hypothesis could be constructed by directional selection on each module. There is just bound to be too much correlation in the system to permit it to move in a fine-tuned way toward to phenotypic optimum for each module.

Trade-offs matter for the evolution of phenotypes. While I suspect that very few human evolutionary biologists would argue with that, I think that we generally fall short of considering the impact of trade-offs for adaptive optima. The multivariate breeders' equation of Lande and Arnold gives us an important (though incomplete) tool for looking at these trade-offs mechanistically. A few authors have done this. The example that comes immediately to mind is Virpi Luumaa and her research group, who have done some outstanding work on the quantitative genetics of human life histories using Finnish historical records.

My third, and last (for now), point addresses the constancy of selection. This is related to the concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), central to the reasoning of evolutionary psychology. A few years back, I wrote quite a longish piece on this topic and its attendant problems. Note that when we use population-genetic models like the one we discussed above for the expected time to fixation of an advantageous allele, the selection coefficient s is the average value of that coefficient over time. In reality, it will fluctuate, just as the demography of the population selection is working on will vary. Variation in vital rates can have huge impacts on demographic outcomes, as my Stanford colleague Shripad Tuljapurkar has spent a career showing. It can also have enormous effects on population-genetic outcomes, which shouldn't be too surprising since it's the population of individuals which is governed by the demography that is passing genetic material from on generation to the next!

When I read accounts of rapid selection that rely heavily on EEA-type environments or the type of generalizations found in the second half of Wade's book (e.g., Asians live in paternalistic, autocratic societies), my constant-environment alarm bells start to sound. I worry that we are essentializing societies. One of the all-time classic works of British Social Anthropology is Sir Edmund Leach's groundbreaking Political systems of Highland Burma. Leach found that the social systems of northern Burma were far more fluid than anthropologists of the time typically thought was the case. One of the key results is that there was a great deal of interchange between the two major social systems in northern Burma, the Kachin and and Shan. Interestingly, the Shan, who occupied lowland valleys, practiced wet-rice agriculture, and whose social systems were highly stratified were seen by western observers as being more "civilized" than the Kachin, who occupied the hills, practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, and had much more egalitarian social relations. Leach (1954: 264) writes, "within the general Kachin-Shan complex we have, I claim, a number of unstable sub-systems. Particular communities are capable of changing from one sub-system into another." Yale anthropologist/political scientist James Scott has extended Leach's analysis in his recent book, The Art of Not Being Governed, and suggested that the fluid mode of social organization, where people alternate between hierarchical agrarian states, and marginal tribes depending on political, historical, and ecological vicissitudes is, in fact, the norm for the societies of Southeast Asia.

The clear implication of this work for our present discussion is that a single lineage may find some of its members struggling for existence in hierarchical states where the type of docility that Wade suggests should be advantageous would be beneficial, while descendants just a generation or two distant might find themselves in egalitarian societies where physical dominance, initiative, and energy might be more likely to determine evolutionary success. I don't mean to imply that these generalizations regarding personality-type and evolutionary success are necessarily supported by evidence. The key here is that the social milieux of successive generations could be radically different if the models of Leach and Scott are right (and the evidence brought to bear by Scott is impressive and leads me to think that the models are right). At the very least, this will reduce the average selection differential on the putative genes for personality types that are adapted to particular socio-political environments. More likely, I suspect, it will establish quite different selective regimes -- say, for behavioral flexibility through strong genotype-environment interactions!

These are some of the big issues regarding genetics and the evolution of human behavior that have been bothering me recently. I'm not sure how we go about fixing this problem, but a great place to start is by fostering more collaborations between geneticists and behavioral biologists. Of course, this would be predicated on behavioral biologists' motivation to fully understand the origin and maintenance of phenotypes and I worry that the institutional incentives for this are not in place.

AAA Recap, 2013

I guess it's that time of the year. You know, when I recap, in my bittersweet way, the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association? I am an anthropologist, yes, but I am deeply torn in my feelings for my discipline, my department, and my flagship (?) professional organization. The question mark arises because I am also a physical anthropologist and a demographer, so an argument can be made that my flagship professional organization is actually AAPA or PAA, but there is something about the unmarked category that is AAA. It's supposed to represent anthropologists, broadly construed. I honestly don't think that it does a very good job at this, but the reasons behind that are complex and I've only allocated myself a bit of time to blog since I'm desperately trying to catch up from all the travel I've done recently.

The meeting this year was in Chicago, which is a pretty amazing town. I stayed in the the Blackstone Renaissance Hotel, which was recently renovated in a lovely Art Deco theme. We did Chicago stuff. Tube steaks were eaten, the quantity of cheese that can be crammed into a deep-dish pizza was marveled at, beer was drunk.

AAA is a pretty bizarre scene. For starters, it's at the weirdest time. It seems like the peculiar timing of AAA during November must be disruptive for just about every academic anthropology department, particularly because it is nearly a week-long endeavor. It seems that the life in an American university carries on just fine without the anthropologists around for a week in the middle of the Fall term, thank you very much. A couple innovations this year struck me as particularly incongruous, given the content of much current scholarship in anthropology. First, anyone who registered for the meeting as a non-member was given a yellow badge holder to mark them as outsiders. This seemed a bit gratuitous. I'm not sure what's gained from such marking -- they already pay a substantially higher rate for the privilege of attending, do they also need to be shamed for their lack of faith? Second, in the hall outside the main bunch of conference rooms, there was a television that played a loop of anthropologists talking about how important anthropology is. This struck me as unnecessarily propagandistic and it's not at all clear to me who the target audience for this performance was. Presumably, those of us who were there already think that anthropology is a worthwhile endeavor. Seems to me that it's the rest of the world we need to convince. Once again, there appears to be almost nothing considered newsworthy to emerge from this meeting of 6,000+ scholars with the exception of a paper on the similarities in street-scanning behaviors by police and fashion scouts.

Another strange feature of AAAs is that computers, cables, remotes, laser-pointers, etc. were not provided in the conference rooms but needed to be provided by the session chairs. This is the first time I've experienced this in years at a major conference and it definitely slowed us down quite a bit at the start of our session. I'm not sure what was going on with that. Maybe the budget to pay for AV services was already spent on the fancy video production that reminded us how important we all are?

This year, I organized and chaired a session, which was sponsored by EAS, on social network analysis in evolutionary anthropology. Unfortunately for the EAS party-goers from the previous night, the session ran at 08:00 on Saturday morning. Despite this challenge, the room was packed and the audience generally seemed into it. We had great talks by Stanford's own Elly Power and Ashley Hazel. Elly talked about her amazing dissertation research on using social capital to understand costly displays of religious devotion in southern India. Ashley talked about her dissertation work in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment on mobility and the changing landscape of STI risk in Kaokoland, northern Namibia. David Nolin, one of our discipline's most talented young methodologists, presented a very clever test of generalized reciprocity using dichotomous exchange data from his work in Lamalera in Indonesia. Ben Hannowell, yet another talented methodologist to come out of the WSU/UW IGERT program, discussed his collaborative work with Zack Almquist on inferring dominance structure from tournament graphs. The always marvelous Rebecca Sear talked about her recent synthetic work on the effects of kin on fertility (kinship, of course, is the classic application of networks in anthropology since genealogies are just special cases of graphs). John Ziker presented a network-based approach to understanding food sharing and reciprocity from his terrific ethnographic work in Siberia. I closed out the talks with my own combination history of anthropological (and ethological) contributions to social network analysis and pep talk to encourage anthropologists to be confident about their methods and have the courage to innovate new ones the way people like John Barnes or Clyde Mitchell or Elizabeth Bott or Kim Romney or Russ Bernard did!

After schmoozing for a bit post-session, I headed over to the Saturday EAS session on methodological advances in experimental games. While I didn't see all the talks, the ones I saw were pretty cool. In general, I have mixed feelings about experimental economic games. There are lots of results and some fairly convincing stories to go along with some of the results. However, absent of context, I really wonder what they are measuring and, if they are indeed measuring something, whether it is actually interesting. This session made some real progress in dealing with this question and I think it really highlighted the comparative advantage of anthropologists in the multi-disciplinary landscape of twenty-first century behavioral science. While economists such as Loewenstein (1999) might lament the fact that there is no way to play context-less games and that this jeopardizes the validity and generality of such experimental games, anthropologists are experts in thinking specifically about context and its effect on behavior. Furthermore, anthropologists are still the go-to researchers for providing contextual diversity. In this session, we heard about experimental games played in Bolivia, Siberia, Fiji, and on the streets of Las Vegas. One talk in this session that particularly impressed me was given by Drew Gerkey, who is currently a post-doc at SESYNC in Annapolis, Maryland (and soon to be an assistant professor at Oregon State University -- Go Beavs!). I was at SESYNC earlier in the week and got a chance to talk pretty extensively with him about this work. Drew makes the point that seems obvious now that I've heard (a sign of an important idea) that, in the evolution of cooperation literature, the counterfactual scenario to cooperation is frequently untenable. One does not simply go it alone when one is a hunter/fisher in Siberia. Drew also designed a number of very clever experimental games that fit the types of social dilemmas faced by his Siberian interlocutors. Very nice work indeed.

In addition to the sessions I attended, it was nice to see and chat with various smart, fun people I know who sometimes find their way to AAAs. I missed my partner in crime from last year's AAA, Charles Roseman, who left the day I arrived, probably too bloated from the binge on Chicago's amazing food he no doubt shared with Fernando Armstron-Fumero to be of much use to anyone. However, I got to see Siobhan Mattison, Brooke Scelza, Brian Wood, Rick Bribiescas, Mary Shenk, Aaron Blackwell, Pete Kirby and, briefly, Shauna Burnsilver and Dan Hruschka. Despite my general misgivings about the conference, it is nice to have an excuse to see so many cool people in one place at one time.

Should You Get a Ph.D.?

I wrote this as a long email to a list this week and, based on the feedback I've received, I thought it would be worthwhile posting it here. This is a topic to which I have given a lot of thought over the years, starting as a fellowships tutor at Harvard during my own grad school years and, more recently, as an undergraduate advisor and resident fellow at Stanford. While the specific context that elicited this essay was whether getting a Ph.D. in anthropology is worth the cost given uncertain job prospects, I think that the approach applies more generally.

Choosing to go to grad school is a decision that is fraught with uncertainty and a degree of risk. There are plenty of nightmare stories to go around about great teachers/scholars who get trapped in an exploitative cycle of perpetual adjuncting. However, a Ph.D. can also be a platform from which to launch a productive and rewarding career both within the academy and outside of it. Here are some of the issues that I think any student approaching a Ph.D., especially in anthropology, should consider:

(1) Are you passionate about research and communication of your research? For better or worse, the rewards within the academy accrue to research and publication. Some professional schools have made substantial progress in developing teaching (and clinical) tracks for faculty that reward teaching and other applied work, but this is typically not the case in disciplines housed in colleges of arts & sciences, as anthropology typically is. You need the passion for your research question to get you through the inherent tedium of research and the many obstacles to successful publication. A commitment to research does not mean giving up on teaching or other activities (such as organizational or other applied work). The NSF career awards, for example, require applicants to coherently weave their research interests with their teaching. However, research requires a commitment and, based on my rather unscientific sample, it seems that the people who are most productive in research are the people who are really driven to answer questions and are committed to publishing not because they want the professional rewards, but because they care about communication of their results. You have to be willing to write at night when you're exhausted after you've put kids to bed and your grading is done. You have to write on weekends, etc. A passion for answering questions goes beyond a fascination with ideas, a love of social theory, or a commitment to education. There is a certain obsessive quality to the top researchers -- answering questions and communicating your results becomes almost a compulsion. This is what helps you deal with the inevitable (and frequent) obstacles and allows you to succeed.

(2) Are you enrolling in a program that will pay for your Ph.D.? Given all the vagaries of the faculty job market, you do not want to go into debt doing a Ph.D. The financial details of different Ph.D. programs have become more critical than ever. Make sure you are informed! Ph.D. programs should pay their students' tuition and a livable wage since Ph.D. students perform vital services for research universities. These services include the obvious things like teaching and doing the grunt work of research assistants but includes some less obvious, but perhaps more important, things like providing prestige to their institutions. The Ph.D. graduates of an institution are the people who go on to get prestigious jobs and write important works and garner fancy awards and societal recognition that reflect positively on their mother institution. It is difficult to over-state the importance of prestige for the functioning of the top research universities and Ph.D. students play a fundamental role in constructing this prestige. Many programs will pay for a Ph.D., but they are very competitive, as you can imagine. Big grad factories that provide little in the way of resources to their students -- either financial or human capital investments -- do no one any favors.

(3) If you choose to matriculate in a Ph.D. program, take advantage of the opportunity to gain some concrete (and portable!) research skills. Anthropologists have developed some really amazing methodologies that can be applied broadly. I think that anthropologists sometimes have an inferiority complex about our methods. It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear our students say that anthropologists don't have methods! To get a sense of the potentially far-reaching impact of methodological innovation in anthropology, check out the many students of Kim Romney and Russ Bernard as just two examples. Ethnography is a very trendy idea in industry now. Having a slightly more tangible skill in addition (e.g., survey design, statistics, GIS, the use of qualitative analysis software like Atlas.ti or NVivo, social network analysis) improves not only your academic job prospects but your ability to secure a job in an NGO or industry.

(4) Communicate with people outside of your small disciplinary circle. The ability to communicate across disciplines increases the number of job opportunities both within the academy and without. With an anthropology Ph.D., you may expect a job in an anthropology department. However, if you are able to communicate with a wider audience and, crucially, convince people why your research is important, you might be able to land a job in a department of environmental studies or ethnic studies or women's studies or urban studies or community health or ... you get the idea. The academy of the future is far more interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity places a premium on the ability to communicate across traditional disciplinary lines. Talk to people outside your department, write journalistic pieces for local media outlets, or even write a blog. I'm continually surprised how many people with whom I make professional connections who know me from the blog I write in about four times a year!

(5) Are you mobile and flexible? Many people who get sucked into the vicious cycle of perpetual adjunct teaching get that way because they are tied to a specific geographic location because of partner, family, or other obligations. There are good graduate programs all over the country and there are actually jobs but many would require you to move to some place you might not have considered. This includes overseas. Sometimes you take a job that may not be your ideal if it provides you an opportunity to get the work done that then allows you to trade up. If you are constrained to remain in a very specific geographic location, I would think twice about matriculating in a Ph.D. program.

I suspect that this is a step in the professional development process where we lose a lot of outstanding potential first-gen faculty. Mobility and flexibility are easier if you are an upper-middle-class grad who has been financially buffered by your parents and, importantly, when your social support derives from a mobile nuclear family. I think there are many ways that modern professionals resemble hunter-gatherers more than their more recent agricultural forebears and the key commonality is mobility and flexibility: emphasis on the nuclear family as the unit of production, bilateral kinship, high logistical and residential mobility, an ethos emphasizing individuality over group identity. Hunter-gatherers follow prey across a landscape while professionals follow job opportunities. People who are tied to a locality, whether for livelihood-based reasons or persistent social ties, will find this type of flexibility more difficult.

Getting a Ph.D. can pay off, both intellectually and professionally but it takes some planning and, frankly, quite a bit of luck if you're going to make it in the academy. What is less up to luck is the fallback. Have a fallback plan; think strategically. It won't hurt your chances within the academy and, in fact, will probably help. There are great opportunities for anthropology Ph.D.s with excellent research and communication skills. I have former students who work for major conservation NGOs (e.g., WCS, WWF) and public health organizations, and who have even started green businesses. I have friends who have gone into industry and done very well. Sapient and Olson, for example, are two companies I know that get major input from anthropologists and anthropological methodologies. Anthropological insights and, yes, methodologies are in demand if you are willing to look outside of the usual channels for employment for anthropologists.

It's easy to get depressed by the academic job market (and many other job markets for that matter). However, with a little bit of planning and flexibility, getting a Ph.D. in anthropology (or any discipline really) can be an excellent ticket to a rewarding career both within and outside of the academy.

On Anthropological Sciences and the AAA

I guess the time has rolled around again for my annual navel-gaze regarding my discipline, my place within it, and its future. Two strangely interwoven events have conspired to make me particularly philosophical as we enter into the winter holidays. First, I am in the middle of a visit by my friend, colleague, and former student, Charles Roseman, now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The second is that the American Anthropological Association meetings just went down in San Francisco and this always induces an odd sense of shock and subsequent introspection.

Charles graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropological Sciences (once a highly ranked department according the the National Research Council) in 2005. He was awarded tenure at UIUC, a leading department for biological anthropology, this past year and has come back to The Farm to collaborate with me on our top-secret sleeper project of the past seven years. We've made some serious progress on this project since he arrived and maybe I'll be able to write about that soon too.

The annual AAA meeting is one  that I never attended until about four years ago, coinciding with what we sometimes refer to as "the blessed event," the remarrying of the two Stanford Anthropology departments. It's actually a bit of coincidence that I started attending AAAs the same year that we merged but it has largely been business of the new Department of Anthropology that has kept me going back – largely to serve on job search committees. This year, I had two responsibilities that drew me to the AAAs. The first was the editorial board meeting for American Anthropologist, the flagship publication of the association.  I joined the editorial board this year and it seemed a good idea to go and get a feel for what is happening with the journal and where it is likely to head over the next couple years.

My other primary responsibility was chairing a session that was organized by two of my Ph.D. students, Yeon Jung Yu and Shannon Randolph. In addition to Yeon and Shannon, my Ph.D. student Alejandro Feged also presented work from his dissertation research.  All three of these students were actually accepted into Anthsci and are part of the last cohort of students to leave Stanford still knowing the two-department system.

It was a great pleasure to sit in the audience and watch Yeon, Shannon, and Alejandro dazzle the audience with their sophisticated methods, beautiful images, and accounts of impressive, extended -- and often hardcore -- fieldwork. For her dissertation research, Yeon worked for two years with commercial sex workers in southern China, attempting to understand how women get recruited into sex work and how social relations facilitate their ability to survive and even thrive in a world that is quite hostile to them. Her talk was incredibly professional and theoretically sophisticated. For her dissertation research, Shannon worked in the markets of Yaoundé, Cameroon, trying to understand the motivations for consumption of wild bushmeat. Shannon was able to share with the audience her innovative approaches to collecting data (over 4,000 price points, among other things) on a grey-market activity that people are not especially eager to discuss, especially in the market itself. Alejandro did his dissertation research in the Colombian Amazon, where he investigated the human ecology of malaria in this highly endemic region. His talk demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about malaria ecology in this region -- namely, that the people most at risk for infection are adult men who spend the most time in the forest -- is simply incorrect for some indidenous popualtions and his time-budget analyses made a convincing case for the behavioral basis of this violation of expectations. This was a pretty heterogeneous collection of talks but they shared the commonality of a very strong methodological basis to the research.

At at time when many anthropologists express legitimate concerns over their professional prospects, I have enormous confidence in this crop of students, all three of whom are regularly asked to do consulting for government and/or non-govermental organizations because of their subject knowledge and methodological expertise. Anthsci graduates -- there weren't that many of them since the department existed for less than 10 years -- have done very well in the profession overall. I will list just a couple here whose work I knew well because I was on their committees or their work was generally in my area

In addition to these grad students, I think that it's important to note the success of the post-docs who worked either in Anthsci or with former Anthsci faculty on projects that started before the merger. Some of these outstanding people include:

In a discipline that is lukewarm at best on the even very notion of methodology, I suspect that students with strong methodological skills -- in addition to the expected theoretical sophistication and critical thinking (note that these skills do not actually trade-off) -- enjoy a distinct comparative advantage when entering a less-than-ideal job market. Of course, I don't mean to imply that Anthsci didn't have its share of graduates who leave the field out of frustration or lack of opportunity or who get stuck in the vicious cycle of adjunct teaching. But this accounting gives me hope. It gives me hope for my both my current and future students and it gives me hope for the field. Maybe I'll even go to AAAs again next year...

AAPA 2012 Run-Down

I am done with this year's American Association of Physical Anthropologists annual meeting in Portland. Alas, I am not yet home as I had a scheduling snafu with Alaska Airlines yesterday and there was literally not a single seat on a flight to any airport in the Bay Area. So, I hung out in PDX for the night, where my sister-in-law is finishing up her MD/MPH at OHSU. Staying an extra night allowed me to have dinner at what is probably my favorite pizzaria on the West Coast, Bella Faccia on Alberta Ave in Northheast (Howie's in Palo Alto is a close second). I also had a lovely breakfast of rissotto cakes and poached eggs at Petite Provance, also on Alberta. All in all, a fantastic couple days' worth of food.
It was great to get a chance to catch up with old friends and colleagues and meet new ones. This is really what professional meetings are about. I had a chance to spend time with Charles Roseman, Rick Bribiescas, Josh Snodgrass, Nelson Ting, and Frances White. I also had very nice, if too brief, chats with Connie Mulligan, Lorena Madrigal, Larry Sugiyama, Greg Blomquist, Zarin Machanda, Melissa Emery Thompson, Cheryl Knott, and Chris Kuzawa.
I only go to the AAPAs every couple of years. Given the interdisciplinarity of my work and interests, I struggle to find a "home" professional meeting. Sometimes I feel like it's PAA; sometimes Sunbelt; sometimes AAPA/HBA.  One thing I can say for certain is that it is not AAA, my semi-annual experience in ethnographic surreality. Such a peculiar discipline anthropology is. Part of the reason I don't go to AAPAs all that often is that I rarely find all that much interesting there. There are a few really fantastic people working in the field but most of the talks I find stupifyingly boring. I'm just not that interested in teeth. I suppose this is true for any professional meeting, so I shouldn't be too hard on AAPA -- I'm also not that interested in contraceptive uptake, social media/online networks, or governmentality, apparently the modal topics in my competing meetings. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity and quality of talks I saw at AAPA this year.
In my session alone, I saw really terrific and interesting talks by Steve Leigh and Connie Milligan. Steve spoke on the comparative gut microbiomes of primates and Connie presented early results on the modification of gene expression through methylation of infants born to women who experienced extreme psychosocial and physical trauma in eastern Congo. Really important stuff. It also struck me that you'd probably only see these types of talks at the AAPAs.
There were a lot of young people at this meeting -- a greater fraction than I remember from past meetings.  Maybe it was the draw of hipster Portland with its great beer, great food, and general atmosphere of grooviness. Maybe there really are lots and lots of young physical anthropologists being trained these days. I must admit that I had mixed feelings about this thought as I looked out over the vast ocean of twenty-something faces in the hotel bar Saturday night. On the one hand, it's great that people are being trained to do good work in physical anthropology. On the other hand, I worry about the ability of our discipline, which shows no signs of stopping with the charade that somehow anthropology is really akin to literary criticism, to absorb this many new Ph.D.s from (one of) the scientific wings of modern anthropology.
Two of the talks immediately before me in my session were, in fact, by young scientists and they were great. Andrew Paquette, from Northern Arizona University, gave a talk on the evolutionary history of Southeast Asian Ovalocytosis (SAO), a twenty-seven base pair deletion in the eleventh exon of the SLC4A1 gene that confers strong protection against infection with Plasmodium falciparum, the most dangerous form of malaria. Turns out this mutation, which has its geographic epicenter in Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia, is surprisingly ancient. Lots more to come from this, I'm sure. Margaux Keller, from Temple, gave a fantastic talk on finding some of the missing heritability in Parkinson's disease. Missing heritability of complex disease phenotypes is a major topic in genetic epidemiology and Margaux and her colleagues applied Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analysis to eight cohorts of case-control studies of PD. Their results substantially increase (i.e., by a factor of 10!) the fraction of total phenotypic variance in PD explained by straight-up genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In addition to the excellent scientific content of her presentation, I was struck by the very nice and original visual aesthetic of her slides.
I spoke on my recent work on the quantiative genetics of life-history traits.  With Statistics grad student Philip Labo, I've been doing some pretty serious number-crunching to examine the heritabilities of and (more interestingly) genetic correlations between human life-history characters. Good results that should be seeing some more light soon (including at PAA next month!).

I am done with this year's American Association of Physical Anthropologists annual meeting in Portland. Alas, I am not yet home as I had a scheduling snafu with Alaska Airlines yesterday and there was literally not a single seat on a flight to any airport in the Bay Area. So, I hung out in PDX for the night, where my sister-in-law is finishing up her MD/MPH at OHSU. Staying an extra night allowed me to have dinner at what is probably my favorite pizzeria on the West Coast, Bella Faccia on Alberta Ave in Northeast (Howie's in Palo Alto is a close second). I also had a lovely breakfast of risotto cakes and poached eggs at La Petite Provence, also on Alberta. All in all, a fantastic couple days' worth of food.

It was great to get a chance to catch up with old friends and colleagues and meet new ones. This is really what professional meetings are about. I had a chance to spend time with Charles Roseman, Rick Bribiescas, Josh Snodgrass, my EID buddy Nelson Ting, Kirstin Sterner, and Frances White. I also had very nice, if too brief, chats with Connie Mulligan, Lorena Madrigal, Larry Sugiyama, Greg Blomquist, Zarin Machanda, Melissa Emery Thompson, Cheryl Knott, Andy Marshall, and Chris Kuzawa.

I only go to the AAPAs every couple of years. Given the interdisciplinarity of my work and interests, I struggle to find a "home" professional meeting. Sometimes I feel like it's PAA; sometimes Sunbelt; sometimes AAPA/HBA.  One thing I can say for certain is that it is not AAA, my semi-annual experience in ethnographic surreality. Such a peculiar discipline anthropology is. Part of the reason I don't go to AAPAs all that often is that I rarely find all that much interesting there. There are a few really fantastic people working in the field, but most of the talks I find stupifyingly boring. I'm just not that interested in teeth. I suppose this is true for any professional meeting, so I shouldn't be too hard on AAPA -- I'm also not especially interested in contraceptive uptake, social media/online networks, or governmentality, apparently the modal topics in my competing meetings. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity and quality of talks I saw at AAPA this year.

In my session alone, I saw really terrific and interesting talks by Steve Leigh and Connie Mulligan. Steve spoke on the comparative gut microbiomes of primates and Connie presented early results on the modification of gene expression through methylation of infants born to women who experienced extreme psychosocial and physical trauma in eastern Congo. Really important stuff. It also struck me that you'd probably only see these types of talks at the AAPAs.

There were a lot of young people at this meeting -- a greater fraction than I remember from past meetings.  Maybe it was the draw of hipster Portland with its great beer, great food, and general atmosphere of grooviness. Maybe there really are lots and lots of young physical anthropologists being trained these days. I must admit that I had mixed feelings about this thought as I looked out over the vast river of twenty-something faces pouring into the hotel bar Saturday night. On the one hand, it's great that people are being trained to do good work in physical anthropology. On the other hand, I worry about the ability of our discipline, which shows no signs of stopping with the charade that somehow anthropology is really akin to literary criticism, to absorb this many new Ph.D.s from (one of) the scientific wings of modern anthropology.

Two of the talks immediately before me in my session were, in fact, by young scientists and they were great. Andrew Paquette, from Northern Arizona University, gave a talk on the evolutionary history of Southeast Asian Ovalocytosis (SAO), a twenty-seven base pair deletion in the eleventh exon of the SLC4A1 gene that confers strong protection against infection with Plasmodium falciparum, the most dangerous form of malaria. Turns out this mutation, which has its geographic epicenter in Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia, is surprisingly ancient. Lots more to come from this, I'm sure. Margaux Keller, from Temple, gave a fantastic talk on finding some of the missing heritability in Parkinson's disease. Missing heritability of complex disease phenotypes is a major topic in genetic epidemiology and Margaux and her colleagues applied Genome-Wide Complex Trait Analysis to eight cohorts of case-control studies of PD. Their results substantially increase (i.e., by a factor of 10!) the fraction of total phenotypic variance in PD explained compared to straight-up genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In addition to the excellent scientific content of her presentation, I was struck by the very nice and original visual aesthetic of her slides.

I spoke on my recent work on the quantitative genetics of life-history traits.  With Statistics grad student Philip Labo, I've been doing some pretty serious number-crunching to examine the heritabilities of and (more interestingly) genetic correlations between human life-history characters. Good results that should be seeing some more light soon (including at PAA next month!).