The Ash Twins Blog

According to an article in today’s NYTimes,

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials, including at least once with President Bush’s former top strategist, Karl Rove, to discuss ways that the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas…

Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Mr. Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II.

“They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda,” she said. “Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us.”

David Barstow’s case study on Pentagon Military Analyst General Barry R. McCaffrey features the following anecdote:

In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”

General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.

As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.

General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.

In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.

That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”

The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”

General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist…

Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.

CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)

On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.

Another great NYTimes book review, this time by Steve Jones on The Superorganism, a new tome on the social insects: wasps, bees, ants, and termites.

Hölldobler and Wilson’s central conceit is that a colony is a single animal raised to a higher level. Each insect is a cell, its castes are organs, its queens are its genitals, the wasps that stung me are an equivalent of an immune system. In the same way, the foragers are eyes and ears, and the colony’s rules of development determine its shape and size. The hive has no brain, but the iron laws of cooperation give the impression of planning. Teamwork pays; in a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans…

A few simple rules produce what appears to be intelligence, but is in fact entirely mindless. Individuals are automatons. An ant stumbles on a tasty item and brings a piece back to the nest, wandering as it does and leaving a trail of scent. A second ant tracks that pathway back to the source, making random swerves of its own. A third, a fourth, and so on do the same, until soon the busy creatures converge on the shortest possible route, marked by a highway of pheromones. This phenomenon has some useful applications for the social animals who study it. Computer scientists fill their machines with virtual ants and task them with finding their way through a maze, leaving a coded signal as they pass until the fastest route emerges. That same logic helps plan efficient phone networks and the best use of the gates at J.F.K. In the phone system each message leaves a digital “pheromone” as it passes through a node, and the fastest track soon emerges. Swarm intelligence does wondrous things

Swarm sex is even more remarkable… the sting-less male’s only job is to inseminate females, who sting and sting again in defense of their nest. The queen herself packs a punch, although most of the time she is too busy to do much damage. Among the leaf-cutter ants, “Earth’s ultimate superorganisms,” with their uniquely intricate societies, a single queen may produce as many as 200 million female (and sterile) offspring in her lifespan of 10 to 15 years, together with a few males, whose only job is to replenish the sperm supply…

The world of superorganisms varies from that of the relatively primitive “dawn ants” of Australia, which live in groups of a hundred or so separated only into sexual and asexual kinds, to the leaf-cutters, found only in the New World, who cultivate fungal gardens and have millions of workers, divided into a diversity of castes, in a single colony. The whole place buzzes with information, passed on with chemical cues, taps and strokes, dances and displays…

[A]nyone interested in what real biology — the study of life, rather than of chemistry — is up to nowadays could do no better than read this volume.

Garrison Keillor’s review of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers striking excerpts in its discussion of thanatophobia, the fear of death:

The Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie, . . . a tragedy with a happy ending,” and yet [Barnes] misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the sculptures of Donatello — “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Barnes is not comforted by the contemporary religion of therapy, the “secular modern heaven of self-­fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, . . . the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.”

So Barnes turns toward the strict regime of science and here is little comfort indeed. We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won’t care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.” Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of “self” — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. “The ‘I’ of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.” Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope…

“There is no separation between ‘us’ and the universe.” We are simply matter, stuff. “Individualism — the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists — has led to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience.”

Read more >> Options >>

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.showContent&view=fulltext&format=HTML&id=2002-10827-010

Excerpt:

Parks and Floyd (1995)… found from their samples of Internet users that people feel personal relationships they form on the Internet are close, meaningful, and rewarding. More recently, in a 2-year longitudinal study of randomly selected Internet newsgroup participants, McKenna et al. (2002) found not only that 84% of the participants reported their Internet relationships as being as close, important, and real as their non-Internet relationships but also that these relationships remained remarkably stable over time. Indeed, compared with studies of romantic relationships begun in a traditional face-to-face setting (Attridge, Berscheid, & Simpson, 1995; Hill, Rubin, & Peplau, 1976; Kirkpatrick & Davis, 1994), considerably fewer of the romantic relationships that formed initially over the Internet dissolved, and the majority were reported as having become even closer and more intimate. Nonromantic relationships fared equally well.

Further testifying to the importance and depth of these relationships formed over the Internet, the majority of the participants were not content with having these relationships exist solely in the virtual realm but instead were motivated to bring them into their real lives, with more than 50% meeting their close Internet friends and romantic partners in person…

McKenna and Bargh (1998) studied individuals with stigmatized aspects of identity to test whether models of social identity transformation based on offline group membership (e.g., Deaux, 1996) would hold for online group membership… [T]he more that Internet members participated in the group, the more they incorporated the previously taboo aspect of identity into their self-concept, as measured both by self-reports of their acceptance of this aspect as a direct result of group participation and by behaviors such as “coming out” about this aspect for the first time to non-Internet family and friends… In fact, more than 40% of the respondents in both studies eventually disclosed this previously secret aspect to family and friends for the first time, as a direct result of their Internet group activities…

Postmes et al. (1999) demonstrated that communication patterns within e-mail groups differed significantly in content and form, illustrating that different norms developed within each group and were maintained over time. As e-mail messages exchanged within groups became more prototypical in content, messages sent to members of out-groups differed significantly from the in-group prototype. In other words, norms were developed within the different groups that influenced the use of paralanguage in e-mails to other group members but did not influence behavior in messages to individuals who were not part of the group…

Research has found that in first-time encounters, an individual will be liked better by his or her interaction partner if the encounter takes place in an internet chat room than if the two partners meet face-to-face instead (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons, 2002; McKenna et al., 2002). This greater liking continued to hold, and indeed increased, after the interaction partners met a second time, face-to-face. Thus, meeting in person enhanced feelings of liking for Internet partners, whereas no such increase in liking occurred for those who met in person on both occasions. Providing an even stronger test of this effect was a condition in which participants met the same person over the Internet and face-to-face but did not know that it was the same person. They were told that they would be interacting with two different people, one of whom they would meet in an Internet chat room and the other they would talk with in person. In actuality, they talked with the same partner both times. Even though participants did not realize this, they reported liking that person significantly more after chatting with him or her on the Internet than after meeting face-to-face…

In a study comparing Internet and face-to-face interactions, Green and McKenna (2002) preselected individuals scoring at the high and low extremes of Leary’s (1983) Interaction Anxiousness Scale and randomly assigned them to interact in small groups. Anxious individuals in the face-to-face condition reported feeling a great deal of anxiety, shyness, and discomfort during the interaction. Their anxious counterparts who interacted in an Internet chat room, however, not only reported feeling significantly less shy, anxious, and uncomfortable, but had self-reports on these measures that were nearly identical to those of nonanxious individuals in the face-to-face condition. In other words, when a socially anxious individual takes part in a group discussion on the Internet, he or she will feel as comfortable, outgoing, and anxiety-free as nonanxious individuals typically feel in face-to-face discussions. Furthermore, anxious individuals were perceived as outgoing, likable, and confident by other group members on the Internet, in stark contrast to the negative ratings they received on these measures by face-to-face group members…

Socially anxious individuals have been found to respond more slowly and less consistently than nonanxious individuals in group settings (Cervin, 1956), to engage in opinion shifts more readily (Kogan & Wallach, 1967), and to be better satisfied with the group’s performance than nonanxious individuals (Zander & Wulff, 1966). Their anxiety may inhibit them from introducing relevant ideas and suggestions to the group and from taking an active role. When interacting in groups on the Internet, however, these individuals appear to function as do nonanxious individuals. Indeed, behaving and being perceived and treated as a confident and nonanxious individual by others in the virtual world may enable anxious individuals to become more confident and less anxious in the offline world as well. McKenna et al. (in press) found that after two years of active participation with others via the Internet, reported levels of social anxiety experienced in offline interactions significantly decreased for participants…

Recent relational models of the self (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Chen & Andersen, 1999) posit that just as one incorporates important social group identities into one’s self-concept, so too will one incorporate one’s important relationships. An individual is thus likely to be motivated to bring important virtual relationships into his or her everyday life. Indeed, such real-world meetings between virtual friends are becoming increasingly common. In a study of nearly 600 newsgroup participants, McKenna et al. (in press) found that in 1997 slightly more than 50% of the respondents had taken the step of getting together with their closest Internet friend in person. Two years later, that number had increased to 73% of the participants. Meetings take place not only between dyadic friendship pairs, however. Large and small real-world gatherings of virtual group members also take place, where members travel across countries and continents to attend “MUD gatherings,” “knitting circles,” and countless other group “socials” to mingle in the flesh with their fellow group members…

This interesting article by Nick Haslam presents a model of dehumanization:

Uniquely human (UH) characteristics define the boundary that separates humans from the  related category of animals, but humanness may also be understood noncomparatively as the features that are typical of or central to humans. These normative or fundamental characteristics might be referred to as human nature (HN)…

If there are two distinct senses of humanness, then two distinct forms of dehumanization should occur when the respective properties are denied to others… When UH characteristics are denied to others, they should in principle be seen as lacking in refinement, civility, moral sensibility, and higher cognition. They should therefore be perceived as coarse, uncultured, lacking in self-control, and unintelligent. Their behavior should be seen as less cognitively mediated than the behavior of others, and thus more driven by motives, appetites, and instincts. As UH characteristics are seen as later developing (Haslam et al., 2005), their denial may
be associated with a view of others as childlike, immature, or backward. Similarly, if UH characteristics are understood to have a moral dimension, people denied them should be seen as immoral or amoral (i.e., prone to violate the moral code or lacking it altogether).

Stated baldly, ifpeople are perceived as lacking what distinguishes humans from animals, they should be seen implicitly or explicitly as animal-like. This proposed “animalistic” form of dehumanization therefore resembles infra-humanization (Leyens et al., 2003) but applies
broadly to UH characteristics beyond secondary emotions, may involve explicit comparisons of others to animals, and may not be limited to intergroup contexts. UH characteristics might be denied in interpersonal (self vs. other) comparisons and relationships, rather than on the basis of outgroup membership.

When HN is denied to others, they should be seen as lacking in emotionality, warmth, cognitive openness, individual agency, and, because HN is essentialized,
depth. As others are seen as lacking emotion and warmth they will be perceived as inert and cold. Denying them cognitive openness (e.g., curiosity, flexibility) will give them the appearance of rigidity, and denying them individual agency represents them as interchangeable (fungible) and passive, their behavior caused rather than propelled by personal will. Because they are denied deep-seated characteristics, people denied HN should be represented in ways that emphasize relatively superficial attributes.

This combination of attributed characteristics-inertness, coldness, rigidity, fungibility, and lack of agency-represents a view of others as object- or automaton-like. This form of dehumanization can therefore be described as mechanistic. The animalistic form ofdehumanization rests on a direct contrast between humans and animals, but in the mechanistic form, although the relevant sense of humanness is noncomparative (HN), humans can be contrasted with machines. The shared, typical, or core properties of humanness are also those that distinguish us from automata.

This trichotomy of humans, animals, and machines has been elaborated in previous work (Sheehan & Sosna, 1991; Wolfe, 1993), but not explicitly in work on dehumanization. In early support for its relevance, Loughnan and Haslam (2005) used the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001) to demonstrate that social categories may be differentially associated with the two senses of humanness, and with animals or automata, in the manner proposed. We predicted that artists would be seen as imaginative and spirited (high HN) but lacking restraint and civility (low UH), and hence implicitly associated with animals, whereas businesspeople would be seen as rational and self-controlled (high UH) but unemotional, hardhearted, and conforming (low HN), and hence associated with automata. As predicted, the GNAT indicated that artists were associated with HN traits more than UH traits and with animal-related more than automaton-related stimuli. In contrast, businesspeople were associated more strongly with automata and UH traits. Finally, UH traits were less associated with animals than with automata, and HN traits less with automata than with animals. By implication, social groups that are not normally objects of prejudice may be subtly dehumanized in two distinct ways, implicitly likened to unrefined animals or soulless machines.

SUNY political scientist and former provost Peter Salins presents evidence in an NYTimes op-ed today that SAT scores are better predictors of college graduation than high school GPA’s:

In the 1990s, several SUNY campuses chose to raise their admissions standards by requiring higher SAT scores, while others opted to keep them unchanged. With respect to high school grades, all SUNY campuses consider applicants’ grade-point averages in decisions, but among the total pool of applicants across the state system, those averages have remained fairly consistent over time.

Thus, by comparing graduation rates at SUNY campuses that raised the SAT admissions bar with those that didn’t, we have a controlled experiment of sorts that can fairly conclusively tell us whether SAT scores were accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree.

The short answer is: yes, they were. Consider the changes in admissions profiles and six-year graduation rates of the classes entering in 1997 and 2001 at SUNY’s 16 baccalaureate institutions. Among this group, nine campuses raised the emphasis they put on the SAT after 1997. This group included two prestigious research universities (Buffalo and Stony Brook) and seven smaller, regional colleges (Brockport, Cortland, New Paltz, Old Westbury, Oneonta, Potsdam and Purchase).

Among the campuses that raised selectivity, the average incoming student’s SAT score increased 4.5 percent (at Cortland) to 13.3 percent (Old Westbury), while high school grade-point averages increased only 2.4 percent to 3.7 percent — a gain in grades almost identical to that at campuses that did not raise their SAT cutoff.

Yet when we look at the graduation rates of those incoming classes, we find remarkable improvements at the increasingly selective campuses. These ranged from 10 percent (at Stony Brook, where the six-year graduation rate went to 59.2 percent from 53.8 percent) to 95 percent (at Old Westbury, which went to 35.9 percent from 18.4 percent).

Most revealingly, graduation rates actually declined at the seven SUNY campuses that did not raise their cutoffs and whose entering students’ SAT scores from 1997 to 2001 were stable or rose only modestly. Even at Binghamton, always the most selective of SUNY’s research universities, the graduation rate declined by 2.8 percent.

I missed this NYTimes article from October:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/us/29judges.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

After a group of doctors challenged a South Dakota law forcing them to inform women that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being” — using exactly that language — President Bush’s appointees to the federal appeals courts took control.

A federal trial judge, stating that whether a fetus is human life is a matter of debate, had blocked the state from enforcing the 2005 law as a likely violation of doctors’ First Amendment rights. And an appeals court panel had upheld the injunction.

But this past June, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted 7 to 4 to overrule those decisions and allow the statute to take immediate effect. The majority argued that it is objectively true that human life begins at conception, and that the state can force doctors to say so.

Mr. Bush had appointed six of the seven judges in the conservative majority…

[Bush] appointed more than a third of the federal judiciary expected to be serving when he leaves office, a lifetime-tenured force that will influence society for decades and that represents one of his most enduring accomplishments. While a two-term president typically leaves his stamp on the appeals courts — Bill Clinton appointed 65 judges, Mr. Bush 61 — Mr. Bush’s judges were among the youngest ever nominated and are poised to have an unusually strong impact.

Jane Hamsher offers a meticulous account of a long line of outrages perpetrated by Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman:

http://firedoglake.com/2008/11/10/the-case-against-lieberman/

An excerpt:

Let’s skip lightly over Lieberman’s part in the culture wars, his sanctimonious rebuke of President Clinton on the floor of the Senate at the start of the impeachment charade, and his critical role as part of the so-called “Gang of 14” breaking Democratic resistance to putting Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. Let’s jump straight to Lieberman’s December 6, 2005 speech where he rebuked his party:

It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.

The NYTimes has two worthwhile articles about genetics on two consecutive days. The first, “The Rest of the Genome,” discusses non-DNA inheritance:

…several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA…

Scientists discovered that when a cell produces an RNA transcript, it cuts out huge chunks and saves only a few small remnants. (The parts of DNA that the cell copies are called exons; the parts cast aside are introns.) Vast stretches of noncoding DNA also lie between these protein-coding regions. The 21,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome make up just 1.2 percent of that genome.

One of the biggest of these projects is an effort called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or Encode for short. Hundreds of scientists are carrying out a coordinated set of experiments to determine the function of every piece of DNA in the human genome…

Encode’s results reveal the genome to be full of genes that are deeply weird, at least by the traditional standard of what a gene is supposed to be…

A single so-called gene, for example, can make more than one protein. In a process known as alternative splicing, a cell can select different combinations of exons to make different transcripts… Several studies now show that almost all genes are being spliced. The Encode team estimates that the average protein-coding region produces 5.7 different transcripts. Different kinds of cells appear to produce different transcripts from the same gene.

Even weirder, cells often toss exons into transcripts from other genes. Those exons may come from distant locations, even from different chromosomes…

…the genome is also organized in another way, one that brings into question how important genes are in heredity. Our DNA is studded with millions of proteins and other molecules, which determine which genes can produce transcripts and which cannot. New cells inherit those molecules along with DNA. In other words, heredity can flow through a second channel…

All of the molecules that hang onto DNA, collectively known as epigenetic marks, are essential for cells to take their final form in the body. As an embryo matures, epigenetic marks in different cells are altered, and as a result they develop into different tissues. Once the final pattern of epigenetic marks is laid down, it clings stubbornly to cells. When cells divide, their descendants carry the same set of marks…

When an embryo begins to develop, the epigenetic marks that have accumulated on both parents’ DNA are stripped away. The cells add a fresh set of epigenetic marks in the same pattern that its parents had when they were embryos.

This process turns out to be very delicate. If an embryo experiences certain kinds of stress, it may fail to lay down the right epigenetic marks.

In 1944, for example, the Netherlands suffered a brutal famine. Scientists at the University of Leiden recently studied 60 people who were conceived during that time. In October, the researchers reported that today they still have fewer epigenetic marks than their siblings. They suggest that during the 1944 famine, pregnant mothers could not supply their children with the raw ingredients for epigenetic marks…

… Matthew Amway of Washington State University and his colleagues found that exposing pregnant rats to a chemical for killing fungus disrupted the epigenetic marks in the sperm of male embryos. The embryos developed into adult rats that suffered from defective sperm and other disorders, like cancer. The males passed down their altered epigenetic marks to their own offspring, which passed them down to yet another generation.

Last year Dr. Amway and his colleagues documented an even more surprising effect of the chemical. Female rats exposed in the womb avoided mating with exposed male rats. The scientists found this preference lasted at least three generations…

…RNA guides, like the RNA molecules in ribosomes, do not fit the classical concept of the gene. Instead of giving rise to a protein, these RNA molecules immediately start to carry out their own task in the cell…

Although only 1.2 percent of the human genome encodes proteins, the Encode scientists estimate that a staggering 93 percent of the genome produces RNA transcripts…

Only about 4 percent of the noncoding DNA in the human genome shows signs of having experienced strong natural selection. Some of those segments may encode RNA molecules that have an important job in the cell. Some of them may contain stretches of DNA that control neighboring genes. Dr. Haussler suspects that most of the rest serve no function.

“Most of it is baggage being dragged along,” he said…

Mutations can make it impossible for a cell to make a protein from a gene. Scientists refer to such a disabled piece of DNA as a pseudogene. Dr. Gerstein and his colleagues estimate that there are 10,000 to 20,000 pseudogenes in the human genome. Most of them are effectively dead, but a few of them may still make RNA molecules that serve an important function. Dr. Gerstein nicknames these functioning pseudogenes “the undead.”…

Much of the baggage in the genome comes not from dead genes, however, but from invading viruses. Viruses repeatedly infected our distant ancestors, adding their DNA to the genetic material passed down from generation to generation. Once these viruses invaded our genomes, they sometimes made new copies of themselves, and the copies were pasted in other spots in the genome. Over many generations, they mutated and lost their ability to move.

“Our genome is littered with the rotting carcasses of these little viruses that have made their home in our genome for millions of years,” Dr. Haussler said…

Yet some of these invaders have evolved into useful forms. Some stretches of virus DNA have evolved to make RNA genes that our cells use. Other stretches have evolved into sites where our proteins can attach and switch on nearby genes. “They provide the raw material for innovation,” Dr. Haussler said.

The second piece, “In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition,” presents an innovative theory of autistic and schizophrenic symptoms:

Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.

The idea of inter-gene competition is familiar to geneticists, but identifying autism solely with the sperm and schizophrenia solely with the egg struck me as totally implausible. The article later presents the following as evidentiary support for the theory:

Those with the genetic disorder called Angelman, or “happy puppet,” syndrome practically dance through the day, have difficulty communicating and are demanding of caregivers. Those born with a genetic problem known as Prader-Willi syndrome are placid, compliant and as youngsters low maintenance.

Yet these two disorders, which turn up in about one of 10,000 newborns, stem from disruptions of the same genetic region on chromosome 15. If the father’s genes dominate in this location, the child develops Angelman syndrome; if the mother’s do, the result is Prader-Willi syndrome, as Dr. Haig and others have noted. The former is associated with autism, and the latter with mood problems and psychosis — just as the new theory predicts.

I am skeptical of this apparent correlation between which parent’s genes “dominate” and autistic/schizophrenic symptoms. It is unclear from the article whether this means dominance/recessiveness or something else. It might make sense on some intuitive folk-psychology level, but it is just wholly implausible to infer this mechanism from the intuition that autistm is maleness and schizophrenia is femaleness.