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This week my theme is the search for one’s ancestors and the surprising places it can take us: The founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland (Joshua Dorsey Warfield). Have you ever wondered about the people whose names are reflected in local places (Scaggsville), roads (Snowden River Parkway), and neighborhoods (Shipley’s Grant)? This is one of the (if not the) ur-texts of genealogy in Howard County: “At the beginning of this new century we are going to the garrets, bringing out the portraits of our forefathers, brushing off the dust,—putting them into new frames and handing them down to our children. Search the records for their good deeds.” See also the Howard County Genealogical Society.1 Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (PBS). Genealogy gets the reality show treatment, complete with the requisite dramatic reveals at the conclusion of each episode: “Working closely with leading US genealogists . . . and ancestry experts from around the world, Gates and his production team comb through family stories to discover unknown histories and relatives the guests never knew existed. When paper trails end for each story, the team turns to top geneticists and DNA diagnosticians . . . to analyze each participant’s genetic code, tracing their bloodlines and occasionally debunking their long-held notions and beliefs.” You can view all the episodes online; I watched the one with Cory Booker and John Lewis, which has an especially moving narrative involving Lewis’s ancestors. “DNA Testing for Genealogy—Getting Started, Part One” (CeCe Moore). If your relative who keeps the family history starts talking about SNPs, haplotypes, and mitochondrial DNA, now you’ll know why: “Interest in DNA testing for genealogy has reached an all-time high thanks to its increasing sophistication and the resulting visibility in the media. . . . As a result, many family history enthusiasts have expressed their desire to venture into the fascinating world of genetic genealogy, but don’t know where to start. If you are one of these people, then I am writing this for you.”2 ”About the Genographic Project” (National Geographic Society). The National Geographic Society continues its tradition of making the exotic familiar: “We have developed a cutting-edge new test kit, called Geno 2.0, that enables members of the public to participate in the Genographic Project while learning fascinating insights about their own ancestry. . . . Included in the markers we will test for is a subset that scientists have recently determined to be from our hominin cousins, Neanderthals and the newly discovered Denisovans. . . . With Geno 2.0, you will learn if you have any Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA in your genome.” “Neandertals Live!” (John Hawks). Hawks is an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prolific blogger. Here he reacts to the announcement of the sequencing of the Neandertal genome and the evidence that some (not all) humans have Neandertal ancestry: “These scientists have given an immense gift to humanity. I’ve been comparing it to the pictures of Earth that came back from Apollo 8. The Neandertal genome gives us a picture of ourselves, from the outside looking in. We can see, and now learn about, the essential genetic changes that make us human—the things that made our emergence as a global species possible.” Hawks also has some things to say about the Denisovans.3 “‘Bigfoot’ DNA Sequenced In Upcoming Genetics Study” (Dr. Melba Ketchum and associates). Perennially frustrated Sasquatch hunters want to join the genome sequencing archaic human interbreeding fun: “The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch [mitochondrial DNA] is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch [nuclear DNA] is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.” However they didn’t release the actual genome data, so for now this remains just a tease, the scientific equivalent of Finding Bigfoot.4 The Warfield book is in the public domain, so I’ve pointed to the free downloadable copy in the Internet Archive. You can also find versions in various formats at Amazon or elsewhere; some of these may feature cleaner conversions of the text. ↩︎ ...

This week my theme is the urban-rural divide in US politics, both present and past: “The Real Republican Adversary? Population Density” (Dave Troy). A Baltimore entrepreneur looks at how population density is associated with (and influences?) Americans’ political choices and beliefs: “98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney. . . . At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic.” His conclusion: “Density is efficient. Density produces maximum economic output. An America that is not built fundamentally on density and efficiency is not competitive or sustainable. And a Republican party that requires America to grow inefficiently will become extinct.” See also Tim de Chant’s “How population density affected the 2012 presidential election” for (somewhat confusing) paired maps showing population density vs. Obama’s and Romney’s vote totals.1 “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities” (Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West). Providing some scientific underpinnings to Dave Troy’s arguments for cities and higher-density living, Geoffrey West and his colleagues claim that the growth of cities exhibits mathematical regularities and in particular that cities foster increases in innovation at a rate greater than would be expected by looking at their rate of population growth: “Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, β, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have β ≈1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display β ≈0.8 <1 (economies of scale).” For a less math-heavy discussion of these ideas see the Edge interview with West. “Agenda 21 and You” [PDF] (John Birch Society). One present-day conservative response to calls for higher-density living and “sustainable development”: “The American dream of the beautiful house, big front and back yard, white picket fence, and one to two cars, is to be replaced with the United Nations’ Agenda 21 vision of living in small urban dwelling[s]. . . . As rural areas become less populated, they will become off-limits for people, but not animals and plants, such as weeds. Over time, plants and animals will move in and take over. Grass will grow uncut and grow creeping into sidewalks. . . . These once lively and prosperous communities will become ‘open space.’” “Cross of Gold” (William Jennings Bryan). In 1896 the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee advocates on behalf of rural America: [We] say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—the pioneers away out there [pointing to the west], who rear their children near to Nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead—these people, as we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. . . . I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”2 ...

I’m going to try to post more frequently, and one good way to do that is with link posts. The first of this week’s themes is the future of the Republican party. The following articles represent two competing schools of opinion: “we’re fine, it’s our message that needs work” vs. “we need to rethink our party and its policies.” As a Democrat I’m biased, but my bet is on Ponnuru and not Rubin: ...

Recently my fellow HoCo blogger Tom Coale strongly recommended voting against Maryland Question 5, the state ballot question asking voters to approve or reject the US Congressional redistricting measure created by the Democratic party-dominated Maryland state legislature. As noted in a Baltimore Sun story on reaction to the measure, it was designed to ensure that all eight Congressional districts in Maryland have enough Democratic voters to ensure election of Democratic candidates to the US House of Representatives, and in particular to try to keep a Republican candidate from winning Congressional District 5 in Western Maryland. ...

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog and thought it interesting: Michael Chabon’s interview at Salon where he talks about his new book Telegraph Avenue and name-checks Jim Rouse, Columbia (where he grew up), and Barack Obama: I’ve been engaged in this process, since I maybe turned 40, of reconnecting through my fiction, with parts of myself—my upbringing, my heritage, whatever it may be—that had great importance, that I had somehow lost or abandoned or forgotten or set aside. . . . [The] last remaining key element of my biography that I had wandered from, and in some ways the most painful to me—which took me a while to get around to facing—was black people, and their relative visibility or invisibility in my life, in sort of Ellisonian terms. I grew up in Columbia, Md., which during the 10 or 11 years my family lived there tried and to a fair degree succeeded to be a very racially integrated, economically integrated, place where all were welcome. ...

In part 1 of this series I referenced the paper “The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress,” a review of years of research on genetic influences on political attitudes, and discussed the general concept of heritability. In part 2 I discussed some of the findings referenced in the paper. In this third and final part I discuss some of the implications of these findings. First and foremost is that if political attitudes are in fact significantly genetically influenced then political differences among people are inevitable. We will never convince our political opponents to agree with our positions starting from our own moral intuitions. It’s likely that the best we can do instead is to manage our political differences within a framework like representative democracy (“the worst form of government, except for all the others”) that can provide some assurance that the public good will be advanced, that winners of political contests will need to come back again to the voters at some point, and that losers of those contests will have another chance to be winners.1 ...

In part 1 of this series I referenced the paper “The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress,” a review of years of research on genetic influences on political attitudes, and discussed the general concept of heritability. Now let’s get to the interesting stuff, namely the findings discussed in the paper. Let’s start with the opposite ends of the spectrum. Per figure 1 in the paper (see Razib Khan’s post for a more readable version) some of the most heritable traits include having an interest in politics, voting and otherwise participating in politics, identifying as liberal or conservative, and political knowledge and sophistication in general. On the other hand the least heritable trait was party affiliation, which appeared to be much more influenced by one’s family and other shared environment. How can we reconcile this? ...

How do we come by our political attitudes? Are some people “born conservatives” (or liberals)? Why do we identify as Democrats vs. Republicans vs. independents? For an interesting take on this question see the recent scientific paper “The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress,” which I found via a blog post by Razib Khan (who offers some commentary of his own). Personal genomics, genetics, and related topics are personal interests of mine, as is politics (in a more general as opposed to strictly partisan sense), so the intersection of these areas is definitely a blog-worthy topic for me.1 ...

If you could vote on exactly how Howard County spends $10M (just over 1% of its operating budget), would you take advantage of the opportunity? What if you could vote on how the county spends $100M? This thought was prompted by a blog post touching on “participatory budgeting,” a movement that started in Brazil and has since spread to other jurisdictions in Latin America and elsewhere. To quote from the PB home site, ...

I’m interrupting my blogging hiatus again to point you to an important report that I think everyone interested in Howard County and Maryland politics should read: Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Election Preparedness. There’s been a lot of controversy about alleged voter fraud, with calls for voter ID cards and the like. I have my thoughts on that general topic, but for this post I’ll simply note that this report deals with a related but somewhat separate issue, namely potential problems in the counting of votes and in confirming that votes are actually counted correctly. (Related because counting votes properly is a key technique in detecting certain types of fraud, separate in that the concern here is not with verifying that people are eligible to vote, but rather with problems that can occur at the point of voting and afterward.) ...