Sophisticated Science Denial

For those of you who aren't Young Earth Creationists (as about 0.1% of scientists and 46% of American adults are) or Flat Earthers (as essentially no scientists and 10% of American adults are), but still want to ignore consensus physics with lots of independent sources of high precision observational evidence to back it up, this more sophisticated form of science denial, that only rolls back scientific knowledge by about 120 years, may be for you.

As an aside, note that denying that space-time is non-Euclidian, a broad, theory independent observation, is a considerably stronger form of science denial than the mere scientific field of inquiry into whether General Relativity, as formulated by Einstein more than a century ago, is precisely the correct set of equations or is only a very close approximation of reality that is subtly wrong (e.g., because it is classical rather than quantum). The latter doesn't deny scientific evidence. It merely explores the full range of the possible within the constraints of what we know from experiments and scientific observations.

The percentage of the general adult public in the United States who understands that space-time itself is non-Euclidian is probably pretty low. My high, probably overoptimistic, estimate would be that 10-20% of American adults (i.e. about half of four year college graduates plus or minus) understand this fact. I make this estimate even though non-Euclidian geometry is part of the standard high school math curriculum for college bound students, and high school geometry textbooks often mention general relativity as one of the motivations for it. Spherical Earth theory and evolution are taught in K-12 education too, but the absence of scientific worldviews in those subjects is still pretty high. 

In this case, of course, the issue is mostly just lack of knowledge, rather than actual science denial. You can't deny science knowledge you never knew about in the first place. In the same vein, you can't deny the existence of quantum tunneling, or quantum entanglement, or quarks (concepts that are often first formally introduced in intermediate level undergraduate science courses), unless you've learned about these scientific discoveries in the first place and then rejected their validity.

See also, a new study on the percentage of Gen X members who believe in evolution at different ages. The study is: 

Jon D. Miller, et al., "The acceptance of evolution: A developmental view of Generation X in the United States." Public Understanding of Science (2024). DOI: 10.1177/09636625241234815

The Long Term Impacts Of Islamic Occupation In Iberia

This paper makes that case that developing a merchant class in the Middle Ages was critical to the development of literacy and self-government, and that Islamic rule discouraged this from happening for different lengths of time in different parts of Iberia (basically on a north to south gradient).

We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. 

Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. 

We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.

Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, "Islam and human capital in historical Spain" 28 Journal of Economic Growth 225-257 (January 3, 2023).

Accurately Depicting The Internal Structure Of The Proton

Most common textbook and popular press illustrations of the internal structure of the proton get it wrong in light of the available evidence.  Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction, sets us straight. The middle illustration is preferred.

Replicating The 1849 Direct Measurement Of The Speed Of Light

The first decent direct measurement of the speed of light was made in 1849. 

A new paper provides step by step instructions on how to replicate that experiment with resources that would be available to most university physics programs as a widely accessible educational and public relations project for something that might otherwise seem much for difficult to pull off than it actually is in reality.

An Exceptional Opportunity At The Perimeter Institute

The Perimeter Institute is a real cutting edge center for innovative physics research that I have the greatest respect for as a likely source of world changing breakthroughs. Some readers of my blog may be well suited to the following opportunity (via 4gravitons whose author is employed there):

Perimeter’s PSI program is now accepting applications for 2017. It’s something I wish I knew about when I was an undergrad, for those interested in theoretical physics it can be an enormous jump-start to your career. Here’s their blurb: 

Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) is now accepting applications for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ unique 10-month Master’s program. Features of the program include: 

All student costs (tuition and living) are covered, removing financial and/or geographical barriers to entry.  

Students learn from world-leading theoretical physicists – resident Perimeter researchers and visiting scientists – within the inspiring environment of Perimeter Institute. 

Collaboration is valued over competition; deep understanding and creativity are valued over rote learning and examination. 

PSI recruits worldwide: 85 percent of students come from outside of Canada. 

PSI takes calculated risks, seeking extraordinary talent who may have non-traditional academic backgrounds but have demonstrated exceptional scientific aptitude. 

Apply online at http://perimeterinstitute.ca/apply. 

Applications are due by February 1, 2017.

Euler's Formula

Woit's blog has a nice textbook section format set of materials on Euler's formula (e.g. e^ipi=-1) for use in a Calculus II class that also does a good job of explaining some of the identities of the trig functions.

Oliver Heaviside

Lubos has a wonderful biography of Oliver Heaviside, a self-taught man from a humble condition who was the source of many of the words and much of the modern notation we use to describe classical electromagnetism (e.g. the standard form of Maxwell's equations), in addition to inventing many electromagnetic devices.

He was born on May 18, 1850, succeeding again and again despite the circumstances arrayed against him.

English May Have Norweigan Roots

The linguistic orthodoxy that sees Old English as a direct descendant of Old Frisian and later dialects of English as descendants of Old English of the Angles and Saxons that arrived in Britain in the 5th century C.E., even as new loan words were incorporated from Old Norse and following the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE, French and Latin. 

But, two academic linguists, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo and Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic disagree. 

They are now claiming that Middle English (traditionally designed as the dialect of English spoken in Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE) and subsequent dialects were descendants of the Old Norse language, and that this language replaced the Old English language that arrived in the 5th century CE in the roughly two and a half centuries before the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE.  Old Norse is more similar to Middle English and subsequent languages grammatically, even though Middle English had heavy lexical borrowing (i.e. lots of loan words) from Old English during this transitional period.

"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. He points out that Old English and Modern English are two very different languages. Why?

"We believe it is because Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English," he says.

The 'cohabitation' between the British and the Scandinavians was largely hostile. Both fought for political hegemony. The descendants of the Vikings gained control of the eastern and northern parts of the country. The Danelaw was under the control of Scandinavian chiefs for half a century [ed. according to Wikipedia Danish mass migration became around 880 CE, Danelaw proper was in place from 886 CE to 954 CE, and this followed by rule by Scandinavian monarch again from 1016 CE until 1044 CE when Edward the Confessor returned the throne to non-Scandinavian rule until the Normans defeated him.]

Like most colonists, the Scandinavian-speaking inhabitants found no reason to switch to the language of the country they had arrived in. 

"One especially important, geographic point in our study is that the East Midlands region, where the spoken language later developed into Modern English, coincides almost exactly with the densely populated, southern part of the Danelaw," says the professor.  

The language adopted many words from the Danelaw's inhabitants who were of Norwegian and Danish descent. For example, all the lexical words in this sentence are Scandinavian: He took the knife and cut the steak. Only he, the and and come from Old English. 

"What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true – the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them," says Faarlund. 

Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong. 

The researchers believe that Old English already had 90 per cent of these concepts in its own vocabulary.  

But the Scandinavian element was not limited to the vocabulary, which is normal when languages come into contact with each other. Even though a massive number of new words are on their way into a language, it nevertheless retains its own grammar. This is almost a universal law. 

"But in England grammatical words and morphemes - in other words the smallest abstract, meaningful linguistic unit - were also adopted from Scandinavian and survive in English to this day." 

The two researchers show that the sentence structure in Middle English - and thus also Modern English - is Scandinavian and not Western Germanic. 

"It is highly irregular to borrow the syntax and structure from one language and use it in another language. In our days the Norwegians are borrowing words from English, and many people are concerned about this. However, the Norwegian word structure is totally unaffected by English. It remains the same. The same goes for the structure in English: it is virtually unaffected by Old English." . . .

"We can show that wherever English differs syntactically from the other Western Germanic languages -- German, Dutch, Frisian -- it has the same structure as the Scandinavian languages."

From here.

This hypothesis suggests that the transition from "early Old English" to "late Old English" ca. 900 CE, rather than Norman Conquest, really marks the transition from Old English, an Anglo-Saxon West Germanic language, to Middle English, a North Germanic Scandinavian language.

In their theory, Anglo-Saxon derived West Germanic Old English endured for about 450 years rather than 700 years.  As the Wikipedia article on Old English notes, the preceding Celtic language of the region was more or less completely displaced in a process that started with Old English.

Traditionally, and following the Anglo-Saxon preference prevalent in the nineteenth century, many maintain that the influence of Brythonic Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian.

The displacement of the Celtic languages that were dominant for a far longer period of time prior to the arrival of Old English, than Old English had been in use as of 800 CE, may have cleared the way for an easier language shift to another language that was still in the Germanic language family four and a half centuries later.

Another reason to suspect language shift from Anglo-Saxon Old English to an Old Norse derived Middle English is that many of the toponymn in the region are Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon.  Toponyns are often thought to be among the most resiliant evidence of a language that would not replace older usages unless the language shift was particularly complete.  Toponymns are like words relavant to words in daily usage for existing concepts that are less prone to be borrowed than are word for newly acquired ideas expressed in a language (e.g. words for imported products or technologies).

The authors argue that this is one of the reason that Scandinavians have such an easy time learning to speak English as a second language relative to speakers of other languages.

For what it is worth, I find their proposal, despite the fact that it contradicts long time linguistic orthodoxy, to be very convincing both as a matter of linguistics and as a fit to a historically documented narrative. 

As a native speaker of English with roughly equal parts German and Swedish speaking Finnish descent who is aware of relatives living in both places, who has virtually no ability to speak or write or read either language, and as someone who has read Old and Middle English works and is familiar with the history of the period from his education, I am arguably in a position to be a relatively neutral evaluator of this claim (free of nationalistic bias).

In the larger scheme of language evolution, this thesis is yet another data point to suggest that something like Newton's second law of motion (i.e. inertia) applies to languages as well.  Rather than changing over time mostly due to random linguistic drift within a particular culture, a far larger share of language change than has historically been appreciated happens for specific historical reasons involving colliding cultures.  Transitions like the transition between Old English and Middle English happen not simply due to the passage of time, but because a distinct superstrate culture imposed new linguistic standards on the general population.

This analysis also illustrates the point that it pays to be skeptical of extremely deep cultural legacies.  Britain received a major cultural reboot from the Norwegians just 1200 years ago that wiped away much of its cultural legacy from the early Middle Ages, Roman Period, iron age, bronze age, and earlier Neolithic eras.

This linguistic claim also implies a larger cultural claim.  The cultural legacy of the English people may be more Scandinavian than German and Dutch, and the strong Anglo-Saxon cultural influences on English culture (relative to Scandinavian influences) may be an ahistorical myth.

In the context of American culture, the Yankee culture sourced to the English Midlands according to Fischer's Albion's Seed and adopted regionally by Scandinavian immigrants may have in fact itself have been the most Scandinavian of English regional cultures to make it to the new world in the first place.  Hence, similarity due to common cultural origins between English and Scandinavian immigrants, rather than similarity due to transmission of local regional culture to new immigrants, may be important in the cultural formation of these parts of the United States' cultural heritage.

Notably, many "grammar myths" which are commonly viewed as prescriptive rules of formal modern English grammar, but are not in fact observed in literature and other writing and speaking by educated native English language speakers in formal settings, involve situations where Norweigan and English grammar differ from West Germanic and Latin grammatical rules.

The university's press release did not reference a new publication by these linguists that has made this case.

UPDATE November 29, 2012: 

The researchers conclusions don't change the mainstream classification of English as a Germanic language. They merely reassigns English from one of the two surviving subfamilies of the Germanic languages to the other one. 

The linguistic structure of the Germanic languages is outlined below for context.  I also distinguish some neighboring non-Germanic language and describe their place in the overall classification scheme for languages. 

Old Norse

As Maju notes in the comments and as can be discerned from the link in the text above, "Old Norse" is the language ancestral to Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, i.e. to all Northern Germanic languages.  It also influenced many other languages and is ancestral to both Middle English and modern English if the researchers discussed above are correct.  Modern Icelandic is the modern language that has changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years.  As Wikipedia explains in its article on Old Norse:

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300.

Proto-Norse developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century 

The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, dǫnsk tunga ("Danish tongue". . .). Today Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish), and although distinct languages there is still considerable mutual intelligibility.
 

West Germanic Languages

All of the other living Germanic languages belong to the West Germanic language family, the most notable representatives of which are German, Dutch, Frisian, Luxembourgish and Pennsylvania German (spoken by the Amish), Yiddish and Afrikaans.  The Angles and Saxons who invaded England in the 5th century were speakers of a West Germanic language which is most similar to the modern Friscian language.

East Germanic Languages

There was once an East Germanic language family, but all of the languages in that language family are now extinct.  "The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period [ca. 400 CE to 800 CE]. The Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated by their respective neighbors by about the 7th century [CE], with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the 18th century." Another extinc Germanic language may also have belonged to the East Germanic family.  "The 6th-century Lombardic language . . . may be a variety originally either Northern or Eastern, before being assimilated by West Germanic as the Lombards settled at the Elbe."

Germanic Languages In General

All of the Germanic languages are descendants of the "Proto-Germanic [language] (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. . . . common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age." (Personally, I suspect that the pre-Proto-Germanic speakers arrived only around 1100 BCE in the late Nordic Bronze Age, rather than around 1700 BCE when the early Nordic Bronze Age begins.)

Proto-Germanic was a written language starting around the 2nd century CE when a runic script was used.  Prior to about 750 BCE, the Germanic languages were spoken in an area roughly corresponding to modern Denmark and southern coastal Norway and Sweden.  It only expanded into the modern boundaries of the Netherlands, German and other Germanic language speaking countries later on, reaching something fairly close to the current extent of Germanic languages in continental Europe by the 1st century CE.

Non-Germanic Languages In The Region and the Indo-European Languages Generally

The Non-Indo-European Languages Of Europe

All of the languages of Europe except Basque (a language isolate), Maltese (a derivative of Arabic) and the Uralic languages are part of the larger Indo-European language family.

The national language of the Scandinavian country of Finland is not a descendant of Old Norse and is not even Germanic or Indo-European.  It is a member of the Uralic language family, the indigeneous language family of some of Northern Europe's last indigenous hunter-gatherers that also includes the Estonian and Hungarian languages.   The Hungarian language is notable because this Uralic language is the result of language shift by a small Uralic language speaking elite that has left almost no genetic trace in the Hungarian population.

Baltic and Slavic Languages

The languages of Russia, Ukraine, Czeck Republican, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Serbo-Croatian, in contrast, are Slavic languages.  This Indo-European language family existed in the form of a single proto-language until about 500 CE (about the time that the Western Roman Empire collapsed), and then expanded from the general vicinity of the Balkans, replacing previous Indo-European and Uralic languages in the areas where Slavic languages are spoken now.  They were differentiated into multiple distinct languages starting in the 7th century CE.

The languages of Lithuania and Latvia (and the now-extinct Old Prussian languages) are part of the Indo-European family of Baltic languages.

"All Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE."

Romance and Celtic Languages

Many of the other major languages of Europe (e.g. French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian) are Romance language, i.e. languages descended from dialects of Latin that became distinct languages after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE.  The Romance languages  are part of a larger Italic language family that also includes a number of extinct languages of the Italian pennisula.  The Italic language family probably arrived on the Italian Pennisula from Central Europe sometime in the vicinity of Bronze Age collapse (i.e. about 1200 BCE).

The Celtic languages  (e.g. Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, the Irish language, Bretton, Cornish and Manx)  are more closely related to the Romance languages than any other living languages and the two language families combined are a genetic subfamily of Indo-European languages.  Celtic languages were once spoken in territories that are now part of France, Spain, Portugal.  The subdivisions of the Celtic languages started to emerge sometime between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE.  The language of the late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of central Europe through about 1250 BCE was probably Proto-Celtic.  The Iron Age Hallstatt culture was definitely Celtic.

These languages are often lumped together as part of a larger Italo-Celtic language family, perhaps with a proto-language in the Urnfield culture of its immediate predecessor.

Other Indo-European Language Families

The other living Indo-European language families are the Hellenic languages (i.e. a few Greek languages and many extinct languages), Armenian, Albanian, and Indo-Iranian.  The Indo-European language family also includes the extinct Anatolian (e.g. Hittite), Tocharian and Paleo-Balkan language families.  The Indo-Iranian languages are made up of: 

* the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia (and nowhere else except by recent migrants, by Balinese Hindu priests, and by the people colloquially described as gypsies) except in the Southern Indian areas where only Dravidian languages are spoken,
* the Iranian languages of Iran and neighboring areas the most widely spoken of which are Persian (75 million speakers), Pashto (50 million speakers), Kurdish (32 million speakers), Balochi (15 million speakers) and Lori (2.3 million speakers), and
* the Nuristani languages of about 130,000 mountain people of Eastern Afganistan and neighboring Pakistan.

Albanian is considered to have evolved from an extinct Paleo-Balkan language, usually taken to be either Illyrian or Thracian.  While Armenian is not a Hellenic language, it is more closely related to Greek than any other living language.

Indo-European Language Expansion

Indo-European languages arrived in Western Europe only in the Iron Age or perhaps a century or two earlier in some cases.  Prior to around 2500 BCE, in my view, which is generally in line with the leading Kurgan hypothesis (the field has many competing hypothesizes about Indo-European linguistic origins), the Indo-European languages were probably absent from the Tarim Basin, from South Asia, from Anatolia, from Greece, and from Armenia.  They were confined to the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

My personal and informed, but non-expert, opinion is that prior to Bronze Age collapse there was a copper age language expansion effected by the Bell Beaker civilization and its cultural descendants of languages that were part of the same language family as Basque, all of which (except Basque) were routed starting around the time of Bronze Age collapse by Indo-European languages.  This copper age expansion probably caused the extinction of most of the pre-Copper Age languages of Western Europe and roughly corresponds with the geographic area where Y-DNA haplogroup R1b is common in modern European populations.

 

 

Issues Worth Examining

Usually I discuss new findings in science. Today, I'll identify a number of issues that science has, nearly has, and may have the tools to answer, but have not yet been resolved.

1. Is there any archaeological evidence of Sumerian or Egyptian cultural influence to the north of the Aegean and Anatolia and the Mediterranean Coast?

We know that the area north of the Aegean and Anatolia, particularly the Balkans, was a stopping off point for the further Neolithic settlement of Europe by farmers and herders the earliest of which is the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK). There is a "fan" of population genetic influence (e.g. Y-DNA haplogroup E) that appears to be North African in origin that extends well into the Balkans. There are multiple eras when this could have arrived: early Neolithic, during the Greek silver and golden ages, during the Roman era, during the Byzantine era, as part of Slavic expansion, or under the Ottoman Empire. But, population movements in the region after the LBK and prior to any potential Greek influence are obscure.

The Egyptian and Sumerian empires are not known to have ever extended beyond Southern Anatolia and perhaps a few fringe Aegean islands in recorded history.

There are some suggestive cave paintings in the Caspian Sea that would seem to show Egyptian style boats at a time when the Egyptians would have had that kind of boat. There is some evidence of fairly sophisticated canal system connecting the Black and Caspian Seas at some point in history. There have also been some suggestions of a Sumerian linguistic influence on some or all Uralic languages.

As one of the earliest loci of Indo-European language speakers, these traces would have to be quite early. Also, Egyptian record keeping and Sumerian records, to my knowledge, do not document these kinds of expeditions, but these records were hardly comprehensive, particularly in the earlier eras.

Finding such a link, or definitively ruling it out, would be helpful either way in piecing together chains of causation in prehistory.

2. The sporadic v. familial model in evaluating the etiology of IQ.

Considerable research has been devoted to the causes of mental retardation, particularly where it arises without a family history of it, and considerable research has been devoted to establishing that IQ, in general, has a strong hereditary component that can be discerned from familial similarities in IQ at different degrees of relatedness.

One area that probably deserves more research is to examine "sporadic" instances of high IQ. In other words, what can we learn about the nature of IQ from looking genetically and from a nurture perspective at very high IQ people with much lower IQ parents. Are these mostly cases of parents who had good genes that were suppressed by bad environments that were not shared by the child? Are these cases of new mutations in the child that were not present in the parent? Are these cases of recessive genes that did not express in either parent? Are these casees of exceptionally good parenting choices? Are these cases of inaccurately assigned paternity? Or what?

3. Where does South Asian Y-DNA haplogroup T come from?

Areas more or less similar to the proto-Dravidian area of South Asia, and also certain tribal groups in Eastern South Asia, have high concentrations of Y-DNA haplogroup T. What kind detailed subtyping of these haplogroups tell us about where they fit in the phylogeny of Y-DNA haplogroup T and whether these Y-DNA types are autochronous or have some specific geographic origin elsewhere? What can study of these haplogroups tell us about time that this haplogroup emerged in that location?

It does not appear to have origins in Pakistan and is centered on the Eastern side of South Asia with a stark discontinuity between it and the Northwest. If it is part of either an Ancesteral North Indian or Ancestral South Indian genetic package at all, it is a part of the Ancestral South Indian genetic package that is not associated with Harappan or Indo-Aryan influence. Yet, ASI is often seen as indigeneous to the subcontinent, while Y-DNA haplogroup T has clear affinities to the European/West Asian/Northern and Eastern African region (i.e. "Western influence.") It could be that autosomal analysis is conflating Western influence via Harappan and Indo-Aryan populations and Western influence associated with Y-DNA haplogroup T associated with a separate, distinct and earlier migration, since the two Western influences may be closer genetically to each other than they ANI and ASI are to each other.

My intuition is that detailed study will show origins of the South Asian subtypes in phylogenies rooted in Southern Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somolia, and that an appropriately chosen mutation rate aging methodology will be consistent with the South Asian Neolithic and proto-Dravidian language, suggesting that migrants from South Asia were instrumental in this historical events. But, population genetics can shed much better light on the question. Detailed phylogenies of Y-DNA haplogroup T have been done, but they did not extend to South Asian samples, so study of those samples is a final step necessary to prove or disprove the hypothesis that Y-DNA haplogroup T men were instrumental in the formative period of Dravidan culture.

4. What distinguishes socioeconomically successful people who are similar in IQ, have only a high school education and have similar socioeconomic status to begin with?

A junior high school or high school teacher in a low income neighborhood has a great many students of the same socioeconomic status, and whatever environmental influences out there impact IQ have already transpired for the most part. These teachers have the hand that they have been dealt and so do their students at that point.

Lots of studies show education and IQ as pivotal for success in low socioeconomic status kids. But, what about the kids for whom earning a college degree is not a realistic option given their mediocre academic performance to date, even if they are able to stick it out and graduate from high school?

What choices and factors distinguish the winners and losers in life, in terms of socioeconomic success, once these parameters are set?

Insufficient good research looks at this issue which is a practical concern to a very large numbers of teachers, mentors, and kids. Good research on this point could provide an empirical basis to enhance middle school and high school curriculums for a group of students who often simply receive a watered down version of a college preparatory curriculum directed towards an educational trajectory that they are very unlikely to follow with success.

A great deal of effort has been devoted to researching how to improve academic performance, but despite study after study that shows that very little consistently improves academic performance in a consistent way once variables like socioeconomic class and past academic performance and IQ are controlled for, despite herculean efforts to find approaches that do, perhaps at least a little more research should be devoted not to improving the academic performance of these academically mediocre kids, but to accept for a moment that some kids, indeed a great many kids, are going to be academically mediocre, and to figure out in a way that accepts this as a given, what their best options in life are and what choices are most important to their lifetime prosperity.

Also, to the extent that there are inborn personality traits that have an impact on this result (something shown in high IQ individuals already by the Termain study, for example), what can we say about optimal approaches for kids with different personalities profiles?

Perhaps some of these lessons can be replicated.

5. What distinguishes misdemeanor recidivists?

Felony recidivism is heavily studied.

Misdemeanor recidivision (and misdemeanor sentencing in general) is not. We need more basic information about who misdemeanor recividists are, how differential treatment of them in the criminal justice system can impact crime rates and criminal justice system resources, how authorized sentences differ from imposed sentences by offense type, offender type, and aggravating circumstances, and how discretion in the criminal justice system is exercised both in bond matters and plea bargaining and sentencing in misdemeanor criminal matters.