The Intellectual History of the Court Jester Hypothesis in Evolution

Where did the term "the Court Jester Hypothesis" in evolutionary theory come from?

The "Court Jester hypothesis" terminology is a reaction and intended counterpart to the Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary theory.

The Red Queen hypothesis is a term coined by Leigh Van Valen in 1973 in a reference to the Lewis Carroll book "Through the Looking Glass," and refers in evolution theory to the arms race of evolutionary developments and counter-developments that cause co-evolving species to mutually drive each other to adapt.  There is dispute over how strongly evolution at the scale of speciation is driven by these competition between species, and how much it is driven instead by abiotic factors like meteor strikes and climate change.  But, there has been an artful metaphor to capture this distinction until recently.  As recently as 1985, the main alternative to the Red Queen hypothesis was called the "stability hypothesis" (coined by Stenseth and Maynard Smith in 1984).

These days, however, a number of researchers in evolution (such as Anthony Barnowsky, M.J. Benton, Thomas Ezard, Sergey Gravilets, and the team of J.B.C. Jackson and Douglas Erwin) have started to advance the term "Court Jester hypothesis" to describe the view that evolution at a macro scale is driven by abiotic factors more than the biotic competition called the Red Queen hypothesis.

The first reference that I can find in the literature to the "Court Jester" hypothesis, a term specifically coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis is in Anthony D. Barnosky, "Does evolution dance to the Red Queen or the Court Jester?", 3 Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology USA (1999). In a 2001 paper on the subject ("Distinguishing The Effects Of The Red Queen And Court Jester On Miocene Mammal Evolution In The Northern Rocky Mountains"), Barnosky uses the term without citation, suggesting that he is the one who coined it. Westfall and Millar attribute the term to him (citing the 2001 paper) in a paper of their own from 2004.  Benton also credits Barnosky with coining the phrase in a 2010 paper on the origins of biodiversity on land.

The Court Jester hypothesis builds upon the punctuated equalibrium theory of Gould (1972) by providing a primary mechanism for it. Table 1 in the 2001 paper by Barnosky appropriates for the Court Jester side of the debate the Stability hypothesis, Vrba's Habitat Theory (1992), Vrba's Turn-over pulse hypothesis (1985), Vrba's Traffic light hypothesis and Relay Model (1995), Gould's Tiers of Time (1985), Brett and Baird's Coordinated Statis (1995), and Graham and Lundelius' Coevolutionary Disequalibrium (184) theories. Give the profoundly not catchy quality of these earlier theories, it isn't hard to understand why the term "the Court Jester hypothesis" has had more staying power in the literature.

The 2001 paper, alas, does not spell out the metaphor underlying the "Court Jester" terminology and the 1999 presentation that apparently introduced the metaphor isn't easily available on line in full text. In the 2001 paper Barnosky states that the debate is over:

[W]hether this march of morphology and species compositions through time, so well documented not only for mammals but throughout the fossil record, is more strongly influenced by interactions among species (Red Queen hypotheses), or by random perturbations to the physical environment such as climate change, tectonic events, or even bolide impacts that change the ground rules for the biota (Court Jester hypotheses). . . . A class of alternative ideas, here termed Court Jester hypotheses, share the basic tenet that changes in the physical environment rather than biotic interactions themselves are the initiators of major changes in organisms and ecosystems. Some of the more prominent ideas are listed in Table 1. Court Jester hypotheses imply that events random in respect to the biota occasionally change the rules on the biotic playing field. Accelerated biotic response (relative to background rates) is the result.

Despite the fact that the Court Jester metaphor is coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis, the Jester reference, metaphorically, is not a direct reference to Through The Looking Glass, the Lewis Carroll book from which the Red Queen metaphor is derived, or the other Lewis Carroll book about Alice, Alice in Wonderland. There is no Court Jester in either book.

The best metaphorical sense I can find for the term is that it plays on the notion of both a Queen and a Jester being part of a royal court, and that is uses the term, "Court Jester" in the sense of its meaning in the Tarot, where the Court Jester is the symbol of death triumphing over all:

In Tarot, "The Fool" is the first card of the Major Arcana. The tarot depiction of the Fool includes a man (or less often, a woman) juggling unconcernedly or otherwise distracted, with a dog (sometimes cat) at his heels. The fool is in the act of unknowingly walking off the edge of a cliff, precipice or other high place. Another Tarot character is Death. In the Middle Ages, Death is often shown in Jester's garb because "The last laugh is reserved for death." Also, Death humbles everyone just as jesters make fun of everyone regardless of standing.

Alternately, the Court Jester terminology may be a metaphorical reference to the Joker card in a deck of cards that can upset the settled order, or alternatively a reference to the related notion that a Court Jester is a disinterested player that has no stake or interests in the impact of his actions on any of the competing parties (since this theory posits a natural, abiotic cause). As Wikipedia explains:

The position of the Joker playing card, as a wild card which has no fixed place in the hierarchy of King, Queen, Knave, etc. might be a remnant of the position of the court jester. This lack of any place in the hierarchy meant Kings could trust the counsel of the jesters, as they had no vested interest in any region, estate or church.

Barnowsky acknowledges in the 2001 paper that the Court Jester hypothesis is not necessary inconsistent with the Red Queen hypothesis: "Indeed, as Ned Johnson remarked (after listening to a lecture expressing these ideas), ‘‘Maybe it is time for the Court Jester to marry the Red Queen.’’ That is, perhaps the dichotomy between the two hypotheses is really a dichotomy of scale, and that as we look for ways to travel across biological levels, we will find ways to resolve the dichotomies."

Footnote: Other Notable Evolutionary Theory Names

Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Bradshaw and Brook in 2009 dubbed a similar notion the "Chronus hypothesis" in opposition to the existing Gaia hypothesis, coined by James Lovelock in 1965 (personifying the collective biosphere of Earth as a single being named after the Greek "mother earth"), which more or less corresponds to the "stability hypothesis" of macroevolution, as it sees the Earth's ecosystem as fundamentally stable, while also acknowledging the similar previously advanced "Media hypothesis" of Peter Ward which argues that life itself carries a self-destructive seed within it that sooner or later manifests catastrophically. The Chronus hypothesis article lays out those metaphors:

Cronus (Κρόνος) was the patricidal (or patri-emasculating) youngest son of Gaia, the Earth mother. Cronus was also the leader of the first generation of Titans, the giant descendants of Gaia and Uranus, the sky father. Cronus was incited by his mother to kill Uranus for perceived crimes against Gaia's other descendants, and Cronus himself was overthrown by his own son, Zeus, and banished to Hades (Atsma 2009). Given the tumultuous and competitive life-and-death history of Cronus, we believe this metaphor better captures the processes of inter-species competition and mutualisms that our population analogy of speciation and extinction embodies. Under the Gaia model, self-regulation works to avoid extinction because it is akin to the loss of a body part (function is reduced), whereas under Cronus, extinction is part of the process of natural selection (providing restoration of function through subsequent diversification). . . .

[T]he sorceress Medea (Μήδεια) was the granddaughter of Helios the sun god and wife to Jason of the Argonauts who later killed her own sons as revenge for Jason's unfaithfulness (Atsma 2009). Instead of the self-regulating super-organism Gaia, Ward describes the Earth's mass extinctions as Medean events – large biodiversity loss driven by life itself (Ward 2009a). Arguing that the Gaia hypothesis cannot account for large shifts in the Earth's temperature over geological time, Medea describes how the massive flux of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane by the processes of plant, microbial and animal respiration was the very cause of such volatile conditions which lead to (at least some) mass extinctions (Ward 2009a,b). In essence, the Medean perspective describes a self-destructive, or anti-order component where life "seeks" to destroy itself, and it can do so on a massive scale due to amplifying feedbacks under certain circumstances (Ward 2009a,b). Modern human society might eventually merit the Medean soubriquet.

(This post was originally a comment at Razib's blog who alerted me to the existence of the term.)

The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

Hunter-gatherer populations from before the introduction of farming and herding of domesticated plants and animals to Western Europe makes up about 15% of the Western European maternal gene pool (represented in individual with mtDNA haplogroups U5a, U5b1, V and 3H).  The finding is based upon both ancient DNA samples and mutation rate dating of mtDNA haplogroups.

This study doesn't estimate the Y-DNA contribution of European hunter-gatherer populations to the current Western European gene pool, but generally speaking, the patriline contributions of indigeneous men are similar to that of indigenous women or smaller.  Thus, probably less than 15% of the total gene pool in Western Europe is traceable to pre-Neolithic hunter-gathers.  By comparison, the non-African has 1% to 4% Neanderthal admixture. 

Thus, even though there have been anatomically modern humans in Europe for about 30,000 years, and there were Neanderthals in Europe (who co-existed with modern humans in Europe for what may have been as much as a few thousand years) for a couple of hundred thousand years or so before that, about five-sixths of the Western European gene pool is attributable to population expansions of farmers and herders into the area in the last seven thousand years or so, although some of this "Neolithic wave" of population expansion may actually have been an Epi-paleolithic population that arrived in the region a few thousand years earlier and relied on fishing for food (and perhaps cultivation of non-domesticated plants) prior to the establishment of a truly Neolithic form of food production, converted culturally to becoming farmers, and then expanded in population.

Moreover, the hunter-gather population prior to the last glacial maximum in Europe around 20,000 years ago probably retreated to Southern refugia as the ice sheet advanced, only to return as the ice sheet retreated afterwards.  There was not necessarily identity between pre-LGM and post-LGM modern human populations of Europe.  The second wave of hunter-gatherer expansion into Europe could have been heavily infused with ethnically different people from SW Asia, for example.

The cultural connections of Western Europeans to the Mesolithic ancestors are probably even more shallow than their genetic ties to them.

In all likelihood, all of the languages of the Mesolithic human hunter-gatherers of Europe are extinct.  If the Basque language is a Neolithic arrival (ca. 5,000 BCE in Iberia), and the Indo-European languages did indeed arrive in Western Europe only after this non-Indo-European substrate population had filled the region, and the Uralic languages of Northern and Eastern Europe arrived sometime after animals were domesticated in that area (probably after 6,000 BCE), then none of the extant languages of Europe can trace its origins directly to the Mesolithic peoples of Western Europe. 

Uralic language speaking people have the highest frequencies of mtDNA haplogroup types associated with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and were among the last to adopt full fledged farming as a means of food production in Europe, so it is possible that these languages might be a remote ancestors of an Eastern branch of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe (which culturally and ethnically would have extended well into Siberian Asia), but there is no really strong evidence to support the description of Uralic languages as indigeneous back to the Mesolithic, rather than an intrusion that replaced prior languages during a Neolithic expansion.

Also, not all of the recent arrivals to Western Europe are associated with the first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe.  The first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe appears to be strongly identified with the Neolithic Megalithic culture, popularly identified with Stonehenge although it appears to have origins in Portugal and to have stretched along most of the Atlantic Coast of Europe and the British Isles.  This culture appears to have evolved mostly culturally rather than through population replacement into the early Bronze Age.  Linguistically, it is common to associate with wave of expansion with a family of non-Indo-European languages that would have included the Basque language, which would have served the source of a "vasconic substrate" in Western Europe, upon which Indo-European languages of the area imposed themselves.  There is likewise no good reason to suspect that the Caucasian languages pre-date the Neolithic revolution.

This first Neolithic wave, it was followed by at least two main waves of Indo-European expansions in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age which resulted in language shift, disrupted the local culture, and probably left a distinguishable genetic trace in contemporary Western European populations.  The first wave of Indo-Europeans in Western Europe would have been Celtic or proto-Celtic and would have run its course, bringing all but a few pockets of Western Europe into the Celtic cultural sphere in the period from about 1250 BCE when Indo-Europeans first started to arrive, until about 500 BCE when they had largely asserted control even in the British Isles.

Several centuries after Celtic peoples consolidated control in Western Europe, the Romans would have arrived on the scene and conquered most of the same territory, only to lose its grip on those territories after the cultural transformation had already taken place when the Western Roman empire fell (one common date used to identify this moment is 476 CE, although the process happened in stages, rather than all at once).  Christianity largely replaced Indo-European and non-Indo-European during the late Roman Empire and centuries of evangelization of areas beyond the boundary of the former Roman Empire during the Middle Ages that followed.  Today, pagan folk culture, often incorporated into Christian rites, myths or secular rites, is all that remains, this often goes unrecognized as such, and these traces may be Indo-European rather than from the previous non-Indo-European cultural layer.  While there are some relict pagan practice among the Mari of Russia and the Alevi of Turkey and Basque folklore (none of which are Indo-European linguistically), in Western Europe, all of the remaining pagans of "neo-pagan" having reinvented the dead religion from the vestiges of earlier days that they have been able to recover. 

Iberia saw some demographic input from North Africa in the Middle Ages during its hundreds of years of Moorish occupation (on top of demographic inputs going both ways across the Straight of Gibralter dated to before the Neolithic revolution), but the populations genetic traces of the Middle Ages and early modern period in Western Europe were mostly internal to Europe (e.g. Viking invasions of coastal areas).  There were also minor diasporic Jewish and Gypsy population migrations to Western Europe in that time period. 

In Western Europe, the languages that descend from the Celtic languages are currently in a marginal position (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh are the principal surviving Celtic languages and English is the dominant language in almost all of the areas where these languages are spoken with very few people being monolinguistic in Celtic).  The predominant Indo-European languages of Western Europe are descendants of the Latin of the Roman Empire or are part of the Indo-European Germanic language family.

This experience appears to be typical of other parts of the world in Africa and in Asia that have developed agriculture.  While population replacement of hunter-gather populations may not have been complete, the lion's share of the modern population arrives from relatively late arrivals.

Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

The race to bethe mayor of Denver has lost its highest polling female candidate, city council woman at large Carol Boigon, who in turn endorsed Michael Hancock. 

It isn't obvious, however, that many voters will be swayed by her endorsement of her city council ally.  He needs a boost in support if he is to displace Romer or Meijia, who are currently on track to make it to a runoff election in a race where no candidate is likely to win majority support in the first round.

Chris Romer, James Meijia, Michael Hancock and Doug Linkhart, in that order, are the strongest polling candidates remaining in what is now a nine way race for Mayor.  Boigon had been polling in fifth place with 8% support.  It isn't obvious whom supporters of eliminated candidates would support in a second round runoff election. 

Theresa Spahn, who was polling even more weakly than Boigon before Boigon dropped out of the race is the only woman left in the running, and may pick up Boigon supporters who would like to have a female Mayor.  Also running, but very unlikely to either win or even make it into the second round of voting are: Danny F. Lopez, Jeff Peckman, Kenneth Simpson, and Thomas Wolf.

Some people have characterized this race as a Romer v. not Romer race, but it isn't obvious that this is the case. Strategic voters who recognize that their favorite candidate is unlikely to make a runoff election may choose to vote for Meija or Hancock to influence who makes it into a runoff election.


The race looks likely to track the election that ultimately put Hickenlooper in office the first time around, with African-American plurality precincts likely to favor Hancock, Hispanic plurality precincts likely to favor Mejia and white plurality precincts likely to favor Romer.

Republicans in Denver have been most public in supporting Romer and Hancock in this official non-partisan race, although the momentum of Republican support appears to have swung towards Romer.  Linkhart is the most prominent progressive leaning social liberal in the race who has devoted much of his efforts while in office towards developing a less punitive and less expensive stance on criminal justice issues.

I hope to find time for another post on this race before votes are cast that sums up the key points that distinguish each of the mayoral candidates, as I will need to do that in any case before voting myself.
Ballots in the all mail election are already in the hands of voters, and they must be received by May 3.

Race and Federal Sentencing

[I]f one looks closely at only those offenses in which 1000 or more cases were sentenced in FY 2010, one sees that in all but one notable instance, the percentage of offenders who were white is below 50%.  For drug trafficking offenses, for example, only 26% of sentenced offenders were white; for firearm offenses, only 29% of sentenced offenders were white; for fraud offenses, only 47% of sentenced offenders were white.  But for child pornography offenses, a full 89% of sentenced offenders in FY 2010 were white.

From here.

About 10% of immigration offenders are white (a category that makes up a third of the docket), while another third of the docket is made up of drug offenses.  The total federal criminal docket with a race coded defendant has about 75,000 sentenced offenders per year (about 10% of criminal defendants were not statistically coded for race).

Some of this result is due to disaggregation of white collar crimes.  Other majority white offender federal offenses (with less than 1,000 cases per year) are (with percentage white and total number of sentenced offenders of all races shown):

* antitrust (85%, n=13)
* gambling/lottery (77%, n=75)
* environmental/wildlife (77%, n=124)
* food and drug (72%, n=67)
* tax (66%, n=655)
* civil rights (67%, n=58)
* embezzlement (59%, n=404)
* arson (59%, n=75)
* other miscellaneous offenses (53%, n=1288)
* simple drug possession (51%, n=282)
* auto theft (51%, n=91)

The top offenses for which the 20,796 white offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1.  Drug Trafficing 6,087
2.  Fraud 3,200
3.  Immigration 2,500
4.  Firearms 2,293
5.  Child Pornography 1,665
6.  Larceny 659
7.  Robbery 479

The top offenses for which the 36,293 Hispanic offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1. Immigration 21,009
2. Drug Trafficking 10,378
3. Fraud 1,190
4. Money Laundering 307

The top offenses for which the 15,613 black offenders were sentenced in federal court were:

1. Drug Trafficking 6,169
2. Firearms 3,961
3. Immigration 463
4. Robbery 428
5. Larceny 422

A large share of the offenders sentenced in federal court for certain offenses were of "other race" despite the fact that this category makes up just 3.6%, most of which is attributable to Native Americans on Indian reservations where state courts do not have jurisdiction over many serious crimes.  These offenses include: murder, manslaughter, sexual abuse, assault, arson, burglary and breaking and entering.

The Rise of Television Due To Its Demise

I don't watch much broadcast television or cable television.  Indeed, I haven't since I was in high school and for a little while after I graduated from law school and before I had a sustained full time job working for a law firm, with a small handful of exceptions.  Most television is and always was crap.

But, as broadcast TV has mostly gone down market looking for the lowest common denominator, there has also been a notable strata of really quality TV series on non-free TV stations like Showtime and HBO, and to a lesser extent on other stations.  The multiplicity of channels has made it more attractive to dominate the niche of intelligent (and often affluent) TV watchers in the context of an advertising environment where no one channel commands much of the total market share, rather trying to win high ratings by maximizing the number of demographics to which a show will appeal at the cost of dumbing it down.

The true revolution in TV, however, has come with the availablility of whole series of TV programs on DVD, Tivo, or via live streaming from netflix.  This is, for TV, what the transition from serial magazine publishing a la Dickens, to novel publishing was when it happened a hundred and fifty years ago or so.  It is now possible to sit down and watch a ten hours season of a television series the same way that you can sit down and read a novel for ten hours -- uninterrupted by commercials, when you want to, in sequential order, for as long as it retains your interest.  The knowledge that this is possible also makes it less important for television episodes to have stand alone plots - longer story arcs are now feasible since the lion's share of the audience will no longer be seeing the episodes as re-runs in more or less random order.

There had been attempts to achieve this effect with mini-series, but the production values were still low due to low budgets,  the total duration, while longer than a movie wasn't that long, and they still needed to appeal to broad audiences with undiscriminating fare.

Movies, which tend to hover at an hour and forty-five minutes, plus or minus about twenty minutes, almost aways had higher production values than television for the entire period during the 20th century during which they co-existed and were the only mass produced theater form that could count on keeping the bulk of its audience for the entire work.  But, the 21st century has brought us movie quality productions in a television format that are seven or more times as long as a movie and far more involved.  An entire TV series will have a novel length script.  A movie has a script a bit longer than a typical short story, but shorter than a typical novella.

As blogger Amber Taylor, writing in the Atlantic, accurately describes the current state of affairs:  "television, not motion pictures, is now where truly sweeping, complex stories are being told."

Movies and television still aren't plays and novels, whose authors we revere.  In both of these visual media, the director and producers are kings and the script writer, or often, a whole team of scriptwriters turning out episodes faster than any one writer can churn them out, are often secondary players, whose initial drafts are mere suggestions to be freely modified and ad libbed around in the course of filming.  But, we do finally seem to be giving quality script writing a little more respect.

The revolution isn't really in the production values; it is in the story telling.  Japanese anime and manga have far lower production values than American comic books and animated features.  But, American comic books tend to have never ending rambling story lines with a narrow scope of issues that they address by comparison to the superior story telling and broad reach of their Asian counterparts.  Latin and Asian telenovellas, despite low production costs, have carefully crafted, thoughtful season length story lines that earn them their name, rather than the multi-decade abominations that are American soap operas, or the plotless meanderings that are American sitcoms and run of the mill dramas. 

Yet, somewhere along the line, mostly in the last decade or two, somebody in New York and Hollywood decided that a minority of well paying prime time viewers deserved to be told stories with some real wit and coherence.  Somebody finally figured out that it makes no sense to spend multi-millions on A list actors and special effects and scenery and costumes, if all they are going to do is act out mediocre scripts in performances filmed with mediocre cinematography.

After a generation in which American writers were convinced that good writing was about everything but plot (a sentiment widely shared by all of my high school and college english teachers), plot has regained its rightful place as the foundational skeleton upon which everything else must be built, and it is again legitimate to discuss the issues posed by the story itself, as opposed to the metastory of its authorship and technique.

WIMPs Very Weakly Interacting Or Not So Massive

Sean at Cosmic Variance summarizes the latest findings of the Xenon 100 experiment's effort to directly observe dark matter better than any other account that I've seen so far.

What Is Dark Matter?

Dark matter is a hypothetical collection of non-luminous, non-baryonic matter particles that can explain why objects we observe with telescopes don't behave the way that they would if matter were distributed proportionately to the matter we can see with telescopes and only gravity as we understand it with Newton's law and General Relativity, governed them.  Plain vanilla ordinary matter doesn't behave in ways that could explain all the the dark matter that we infer exists from the way that objects in our telescopes behave.

There are various proposals for what kind of particle dark matter might be, with WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) being among the most popular. 

The First Round of Xenon 100 Results

Xenon 100 was an experiment designed to directly detect WIMPS, but so far, it hasn't seen any.  Instead, it has ruled out a large swath of properties that hypothetical WIMPs could have that would have caused them to be detected by this experiment.

Here we see the usual 2-dimensional dark matter parameter space: mass of the particle is along the horizontal axis, while its cross-section with ordinary matter is along the vertical axis. Anything above the blue lines is now excluded. . . . That grey blob in the bottom right is a set of predictions from a restricted class of supersymmetric models (taking into account recent LHC limits).

The closer you get to the bottom of the chart, the more weakly interacting a particle is (a bit like a neutrino which is also very weakly interacting).  The closer you get to the left of the chart, the less mass it has.

The chart shows that a massive particle must be very weakly interacting to fit the data, while a very light particle could still be reasonably strongly interacting, given the experimental data.  CoGeNT and DAMA were experiments looking for fairly light, somewhat strongly interacting dark matter particles.  Xenon 100 covered a much larger range to potential dark matter particles.

The kind of SUSY motivated WIMP proposed by Buckmueller, et al. with a mass on the order of 150-250 GeV and very lower levels of interaction with normal matter is not ruled out by Xenon 100, nor are more strongly interacting particles with masses of under 6 GeV.  But, the Buckmueller proposal will be threatened as the Xenon 100 data set gets larger over the next year or two.

The Difficulties and Attractions of Lower Mass WIMPs

The lighter a proposed WIMP is, the harder it is to come up with a particle creation theory that explains how there could be so many of them in the universe, despite the fact that we haven't observed them yet.  The lighter a particle is, the more prone it is to be created in a high energy particle accelerator experiment.  Yet, already observed weakly interacting particles, like the three types of neutrinos known to exist, with their currently estimated masses, produced in the ways that we are aware that they can be produced, don't seem to be large enough to account for the quantity of dark matter that astronomy tells us should be out there if gravity works the way that we think that it does.

We have observed lots of ordinary standard model particles with masses in the range from 0.0005 GeV to 91 GeV (the electron, the up quark, the down quark, the muon, strange quark, charm quark, the tau, bottom quark, the W particle, and the Z particle), and in a few cases we have observed a particle that is strongly interacting and strongly theoretically motivated, the top quark, with a mass of about 168-192 GeV.  Thus, while it wouldn't be impossible for a weakly interacting light dark matter particle to be missed, that particle would have to have some pretty unusual properties to escape even indirect detection as a result of missing matter in high energy particle physics experiments that have been conducted so far.  So, detecting a not all that weakly interacting light dark matter particle with a mass of less than 10 GeV or so, is less plausible that the chart would suggest.  We have no reason to think that any particle of that type that is electro-magnetically charged or interacts with the strong nuclear force exists and we have good reason to be highly skeptical that any particle of that type heavier than a tau neutrino that interacts with the weak nuclear force exists.

A discovery like that would be a bit like discovering a new species of insect in Washington Park.  Not impossible if you looked at it in some way that nobody had previously considered, but unlikely given how carefully and regularly that plot of real estate has been examined, sometimes by people with considerable expertise who admittedly weren't really looking for it in particular.

The most strongly theoretically motivated hypothetical particle with properties that would fit the light end of the mass range is the "sterile neutrino" (a heavish neutrino that differs from ordinary neutrinos in that it doesn't interact with the weak nuclear force as regular neutrinos do, perhaps because it is "right handed").  The latest conference on neutrino physics provided indications from a couple of lines of evidence that there might actually be more than the three known flavours of neutrino in existence (perhaps four or five), boosting the attractiveness of this kind of dark matter candidate.  But, none of the hints that there are more kinds of neutrinos out there so far are definitive enough to proclaim that they have been discovered.

None of the experiments in place to directly observe dark matter could detect a weakly interacting dark matter particle that is this light, and has properties that have caused it to evade detection so far in high energy physics experiements.  This kind of particle will become one of the most likely dark matter candidate by process of elimination if the Xenon 100 experiment fails to find any sign of heavier WIMPS before it is ended.

Heavy SUSY WIMPs Considered

The alternative of a heavy SUSY dark matter particle is attractive because SUSY predicts lots of additional particles, the lightest of which would be expected to be stable, and some of which wouldn't be strongly interacting with ordinary matter.  One of the more common proposals for a lightest supersymmetric particle is called the neutralino, by SUSY predictions are rather fuzzy about the precise masses of the particles it predicts, even though it predicts their other properties very exactly.  Several other SUSY predicted particles are also candidates for a lightest supersymmetric particle.  A heavy SUSY dark matter particle is also attractive because if it is heavy enough, current experiments wouldn't have detected it enough because they didn't have enough energy to create one or observe its indirect effects.

Both the large hadron collider (LHC) and Xenon 100 have a good chance of finding a heavy SUSY dark matter particle of the kind suggested by Buckmueller, et al. in the next few years if one is out there to be found.  If no particle is observed in the hypothesized mass and cross-section range in the next few years in these two experiments, SUSY itself becomes harder and harder to justify as an experimentally plausible extension of the Standard Model, because some of the phenomena that SUSY exists to make neater and tidier are mass scale dependent, yet also have to be heavier than anything that we've produced in high energy physics experiements so far so as not to contradict existing experimental data.

A heavy SUSY WIMP so close to being discovered or disproved, in part, because it would be similar in mass to the long sought after Higgs boson that the LHC was designed to discover (although probably a bit heavier).  Metaphorically, this means that it is on the fringe of a part of the universe upon which we are shining the brightest spotlight that humanity has ever had to look for something else that should be in the same vicinity.

SUSY is just a theory motivated by the ugliness of the Standard Model, but the Higgs boson is something we currently assume to make the Standard Model, which we used every day to make detailed and superaccurate predictions work.  It is the only missing piece of an already tremendously successful theory of physics.

If a SUSY WIMP isn't found, we have to conjure up some other way source of dark matter effects and have to give more credibility to the possiblity that the laws of physics are fundamentally ugly and arbitrary.  If a Higgs isn't found, we have to rewrite the laws of physics we use today.  We should have much better answers to both of those questions before my tweens go to college.

What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Atkinson's Serial Founder Effect Hypothesis

Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has made headlines with his bold assertion that "the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

The Underlying Data

He reaches this conclusion by massaging data from three maps prepared by Ian Maddieson from secondary sources in the World Atlas of Language Structure.  The maps clearly show that phonemic diversity isn't random, but don't necessarily support Atkinson's hypothesis either.

The maps show the number of consonants, with bins of

Small 6-14 (91 languages) 
Moderately small 15-18 (121 languages)
Average 19-25 (182 languages)
Moderately large 26-33 (116 languages)
Large 33+ (53 languages),

vowels, with bins of

Small (2-4) (93 languages)
Average (5-6) (288 languages)
Large (7-14) (183 languages),

and tone systems, with bins of

No tones (307 languages)
Simple tone system (132 languages) 
Complex tone system (88 languages),

in 504 languages around the world.

The Problems With Aktinson's Hypothesis

Atkinson's hypothesizes about the time-depth of these relationships and their mechanism aren't very persuasive. 

Regional Trends Are Present

Clearly, each of these features exhibit strong regional trends. 

The Amazon is vowel rich, consonant poor and often has a tone system.  The Caucasian languages are short on vowels, rich in consonants and usually lack of tone system.  Indigenous Australian languages without exception are vowel poor, lack tone, and have few to a moderately large number of consonants.  Papuan languages tend to be tonal and consonant poor.

Many West African and East African and Southeast Asian languages have complex tone systems, large numbers of vowels, and moderately large inventories of consonants.  Many indigenous languages of the Pacific Coast in the Americas are vowel poor, have simple tone systems and and tend to have high numbers of consonants.

Europe, South Asia, and North Asia tend to lack tone, have moderate numbers of consonants, and have moderate to high numbers of vowels.

The Data Are Too Noisy To Represent A Serial Founder Effect

Gleaning a relatively clear serial founder effect from these relationships seems far fetched.  The data sets are simply too noisy for that.  One can see clusters where the phonemic features seem to coincide.  One can fairly infer that regional clusters of similar phonemic features have a common origin.  One can even fairly infer that some common reason may account for the fact that non-adjacent regional clusters are phonemically similar.

The Data Don't Closely Track Language Families

Certainly it is true that the features don't seem to track language families. 

For example, Uralic Saami language is consonant rich, while the nearby Uralic Finnish language is consonant poor.

The only New World languages definitively tied to the Old World are the Na-Dene languages and the Yenesian Ket language.  Central Siberian Ket is vowel rich, consonant poor, and lacks a tone system; Na-Dene languages tend to be vowel poor and consonant rich, and some of the Na-Dene languages have a tone system.  Whatever the total number of phonemes is in these related languages, the case that Na-Dene's phoneme set arose from phoneme loss from its parent language is implausible.  Its phoneme losses and gains seem to have counterbalanced each other.

Some Niger-Congo languages have complex tone systems, other than no tone systems at all.  Some Niger-Congo languages (particularly toward Nigeria) are consonant rich, others (particularly towards Ivory Coast and Liberia) are consonant poor.

Areal Effects Are Inconsistent

Indeed, a linguistic trait that follows strong regional patterns while not closely tracking language family relationships is pretty much the definition of an areal effect in linguistics. 

But the source of these areal effects is obscure and inconstant.

Sometimes, the areal effects cross immense linguistic relationship divides.  The phoneme set of Basque, which is more distant from the other languages of Europe than any other for many hundreds of miles, is quite similar to that of many nearby Indo-European languages.  Yet, the phoneme set of the Caucasian languages is dramatically different from those of any of its neighbors, although languages of the Caucasus mountains do seem to have phoneme set sizes similar to each other in some cases despite not being very closely related linguistically and together they are very different from that of neighboring languages.

The Data Aren't A Close Fit To Pre-Historic Migration Patterns

The regions of phonemic similarity don't obviously track paths of deep pre-historic migration.  For example, if they did, we would expect continuity of phonemic trends from Africa to South Asia to Southeast Asia reflecting a Southern route migration.  Instead, we see similarities between Africa and Southeast Asia that are interrupted in South Asia.

Most Papuan languages have few consonants, but a couple of them which are not particularly closely related to each other, at odds with very nearby members of their respective language Trans-Papuan language genuses, have large inventories of consonants, and no Trans-Papuan languages have an intermediate number of consonants.  One imagines a scenario here in which one group intentionally develops a different phoneme set from their close linguistic neighbors in Papua New Guinea for no reason other than to make their language harder for their neighbors to acquire, thereby cementing group identity.

The Data Don't, and Shouldn't Reflect Deep Time Depth

Nor do they seem to obviously reflect linguistic time depth on the scale of tens of thousands of years.  All languages of the New World should have similar linguistic time depth, but show very distinct intra-American regional clusters in phonemic diversity.  Papua New Guinea and Australia were settled by modern humans at about the same time, but have dramatically different phonemic profiles. 

Semitic Hebrew is consonant poor, while Ethio-Semitic Tigre is moderately consonant rich, despite the fact that the languages diverged from each other within the last four thousand years.  The Semitic Arabic dialects spoken closest Israel, which are some of the closest linguistic relatives of Hebrew, are in between.

Irish and Hindi have large numbers of consonants and average numbers of vowels, while most Indo-European languages have average numbers of consonants and large numbers of vowels.  Yet, Irish and Hindi each probably branched off the related Indo-European languages with more typical Indo-European phoneme sets within the last four thousand years.  The Indo-European Hittite language had a particularly low number of vowels (just four) despite being attested at about the same time that Hindi and Irish diverged from their most closely related, but phonemically distinct Indo-European languages, possibly as a substrate influence from vowel poor non-Indo-European languages in Anatolia.

The number of phonemes in English has changed between Old English and contemporary spoken English, and isn't the same even for all dialects of American English, which started to diverge from British English and from each other only in the last few hundred years.

Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that phoneme change can take place in time frames of several centuries, while language family relationships can be pretty clear for periods of several millennia, at least.

The Overall Patterns Couldn't Have Been Produced By Serial Founder Effects

Serial founder effects are hard pressed to explain why the Amazon is consonant poor and vowel rich, by the North Pacific Coast of North America has languages that are rich in consonants and short in vowels, while both have a mix of simple tone systems and languages without tone systems.  Both groups of languages, presumably, have similar time depth and derive from populations that would have been close in space to each other and genetically similar about 17,000 years ago.

The trends also have an immense amount of noise in them.  The Tibeto-Burman Naxi language of Southwest China, for example, is consonant rich, vowel rich and has a complex tone system, giving it the greatest amount of phonemic diversity possible in the data set.  So does the Yulu language of Sudan (a Nilo-Saharan language), and the Nilo-Saharan Ngiti language of the Congo.   A serial founder effect shouldn't put any languages with maximal phoneme sets so distant from each other.

Simply put, the cline that Atkinson proposes isn't the kind of cline one would associate with a serial founder effect.  It is a vague general trend with tenuous foundations that is inconsistent with a serial founder effect.   Whatever accounts for variation between languages in phonemic diversity, it is not a serial founder effect.

There Are Patterns To Phonemic Diversity

The problem is a fascinating puzzle, but Atkinson seems to be largely barking up the wrong tree to explain it. 

Climate Zone And Phoneme Mix

For example, without going into the matter with any particular preconceptions, one would notice that tropical areas tend to have high levels of tonality and rich vowel sets, while temperate and desert areas have low levels of tonality.  One might explain that by concluding that tropical areas have a rich array of bird sounds that locals have an evolutionary fitness reason to learn (culturally) or have a genetic ability to distinguish (or both), and that a well developed capacity to distinguish sounds of these kinds for non-linguistic purposes makes it more natural for these societies to use these kinds of sounds linguistically among themselves.  Consonant frequency might be a factor that allows a language to have a sufficient number of words by compensating for a lack of ability to make different tones and vowel sounds.

Is this the correct hypothesis?  I surely don't know.  But, it is a better statistical match to the data than Atkinson's hypothesis and is plausible enough to make sense.

Contact and Isolation

Unusually high phoneme inventories might be a marker of high levels of inter-linguistic contact.  The Nilo-Saharans who have the highest phoneme inventories in Africa are situated betwixt Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo language speakers and may be borrowing phonemes from the areal influences of both.  The Naxi who have the highest phoneme inventories in Asia are situated between Tibeto-Burmese speakers who have one set of phonemes and Southeast Asian language speakers who have another one.  Likewise, the presence of click consonants in some Bantu languages, presumably because the population previously spoke a Khoisan language before shifting to a Bantu superstrate language, reflects the kind of phoneme gain that can take place from linguistic contact.

Unusually low phoneme inventories might be a market of prolonged population isolation with low population densities in places like Australia.  Phoneme inventories can also occur when language learners in a new superstrate language can't accurately reproduce all of the sounds in the superstrate language.  This may be what happened in the case of Hittite and other Indo-European Anatolian languages.  One also sees it when the Japanese borrow words from languages with more phonemes than its own language has into Japanese.

The number of phonemes in a language is really a matrix of a smaller number of options for sound making. One might, for example, appropriately think of tone systems as multipliers of the number of phonemes in a language, rather than mere additional phonemes. Perhaps the appropriate way to count is to look at the number of combined tone-vowel/consonant sounds in a language (also perhaps modulated by rhythm or otherwise), rather than examining phoneme differences in isolation. Perhaps there is a phoneme set size towards which languages trend when not artificially reduced by small isolated populations (Hawaiian is another famous example phoneme loss in addition to Australia, for possibly similar reasons) and when not artificially increased by phoneme sharing at the boundaries of phoneme regions.

Classes of Phonemes May Be The Most Suitable Level Of Analysis

Consonant and vowel count may be a poor measure in any case.  Many of the outlier cases in consonant number involve an entire classes of consonants or vowels found in one area, but not another, rather than individual phonemes. 

A lack of frictive consonants is a major factor in the low number of consonants found in Australia, Papuan languages, and low consonant languages of the Americas. 

High consonant count African languages are often notable for including labial-velar consonants (found elsewhere only in a small number of Papuan languages), and high vowel count in African languages are often notable for including a distinction between nasalized and non-nasalized vowels (otherwise found mostly in the Americas and sporadically elsewhere). The high consonant count in the Caucasian languages is largely attributable to the pharyngeal consonants used there, in some Afro-Asiatic languages, and in few other places.  Click consonants are also found only in one small, regional subset of Africans.

In contrast, distribution of the "th" sound is sporadic (and a poor fit for a serial founder effect).

Most of the cases of the losses of click sounds, labial-velar consonants, frictive consonants and perhaps even pharyngeal consonants and nasalized vowels, from parent languages that included them, might very well fit a serial founder effect model, since the distribution of these phonemic divergences are consistent with that model, while the distribution of the presence or absence of a "th" sound, linguistic tone systems and some kinds of vowel number variation may not. 

But, at any rate, the analysis probably needs to be conducted on a class of phoneme by class of phoneme basis, rather than on a total consonant set basis to make much sense as a phylogenetic tree.  Clearly, there were at least as many cases of independent phonemic invention in particular regions as there were cases of independent invention of plant and animal domestication complexes, and some kinds of phonemic invention (and linguistic invention generally) seem more prone to independent invention than others.

Denver Clerk and Recorder Election Just Got Easier

There are four candidates listed by the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office election division as running in Denver's all mail in ballot municipal election in which ballots go out in the mail today and are due back on May 3, 2011. They are: Tom Downey, Sarah McCarthy, Jacob Werther, and Debra Johnson.

I won't be voting for Tom Downey or Jacob Werther for Clerk and Recorder. Why?

Tom Downey is in running on the strength of his ties to Scott Gessler, our current Republican Colorado Secretary of State, who has repeated made negative headlines in his brief tenure of office, and also made headlines during the campaign for his less than stellar work as an election lawyer, as well as his endorsements from other Republicans. Gessler has been a stern advocate for gutting campaign finance laws, disenfranchising voters without a solid factual basis, holding onto excess departmental funds that the rest of the state's budget needs, and not working full time at the job he was elected to carry out. While Mr. Downey was hired by Bernie Buescher and merely retained by his new boss, Scott Gessler (he runs the Business Division), he does not have the political good sense that his position requires. If he doesn't know that Gessler's endorsement is toxic, he deserves to pay for that mistake by losing my vote.

I had already ruled out Jacob Werther on the basis of the criticism that Dan Willis, a reliable straight shooter in this area with personal knowledge of the candidates.  He has identified Werther as a man who comes across as an unbalanced conspiracy theorist, or at the very least, as someone who jumps to suspicions of wrong doing without having facts to back up his suspicions.

This leaves two candidates still in the running for me: Debra Johnson and Sarah McCarthy.

Johnson is the appointed city clerk of Aurora whose only drawback seems to be a complaint filed against her by the Downey campaign related to campaign finance filings that seems to be related to technical problems with Denver's e-filing system  Her experience, character and lack of eagerness to associate herself with people who exemplify everything that is wrong in election administration in Colorado recommend her over either of the two men in the race. The fact that she is supported by Pam Bennett, whom I know from working with her in the Democratic Party of Denver to be a level headed and sensible person also speaks well to her suitability for the office.

I don't yet know much about Sarah McCarthy's qualification for this office, other than what can be found on her campaign webpage, which deserves kudos for being bilingual. She has IT expertise, has been active in civic affairs, and has a background of involvement with the eminently respectable League of Women Voters. She currently leads a small non-profit organization and has a long history of responsible public sector and non-profit experience.

Of the two, Johnson has the more directly relevant government experience and the stronger campaign, so, at least in the first round, I will be voting for her. I believe that voting for Johnson is the best way to increase the likelihood that neither Downey nor Werther get the job. If both Johnson and McCarthy both make it into the final round, I can look more closely at the two to evaluate each of them on the merits, as I believe that either could probably do the job competently. But, for now, the most important priority is to prevent a runoff between Downey and Werther, and I believe that Johnson is more likely to succeed in doing this than McCarthy.

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

Maoism in India Linked To Neo-Feudalism

In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned by individuals, much as it is in most of the United States. In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned communally by villages in what amounts to a localized form of communism. In yet other parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned the landlords with large land holdings that is worked by landless peasants, in what amounts to a neo-feudal system.

While territorial boundary tensions in the general vicinity of Kashmir, and religous/ethnic conflicts between Hindus and Muslims capture most of the press about political violence in India, a third major source of political violence in India is an ongoing insurgency by Naxalites, who are usually described as Maoist are highly concentrated in parts of India that have historically had neo-feudal land tenure.

Thus, what seems from abroad to be revolution in support of discredited communist ideology, looks locally like an economic struggle that had already been largely resolved in Europe when Adam Smith and Karl Marx were defining the boundaries of the political economy debate there. Maoists in India are addressing legitimate grievances that the developed world is so far removed from that it is has largely forgotten them.

The United States experienced a similar struggle, but we didn't conceptualize it as an issue of land reform. We called the effort to dismantle a system largely build around ownership of large farms worked by landless workers abolition and dealt with it by ending slavery rather than with government sponsored land reform. Emancipation happened; 40 acres and a mule did not. A wave of reconstruction era bank foreclosures did a little to disaggregate plantation land holdings, but mostly the mechanization of agriculture and rise of an industrial economy made land ownership less economically relevant than it had been.

The implication of this fact, of course, is that the solution to the long running Maoist insurgencies in India may be to address the land tenure concerns that a fueling those insurgencies, and for outsider forces in India's policy environment to not so easily conflate an anti-feudal movement with anti-capitalist sentiment. This understanding of the movement helps makes sense of otherwise mysterious phenomena like the large contigent of pro-business Maoists in nearby Nepal's recent democratic elections.

In the words of a 1972 speech by Pope Paul VI, "If you want peace, work for justice."

How Old Are The Indo-European Languages?

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson in their article in Nature in 2003 looked at the amount of lexical differences between the various living and extinct Indo-European languages and concluded that the language family was about 8,000 years old. Robin J. Ryder and Geoff K. Nicholls in an article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics) for January 2011 reproduced the same result, with similar data and a more refined version of the same model that addressed some of the methodological objections to the Gray and Atkinson study.

These dates are wrong. We can conclude that these dates are wrong because we have more sources of data than the models rely upon that strongly support a contrary result. Their models produce the wrong estimates of the age of the Indo-European language family because the models that they use make simplifying assumptions that have a material effect on the result. This post explains why these two studies (they aren't really independent as the later study uses data and methods that overlap the first) are wrong and why "the Kurgan theory [of Marija Gimbutas] that the spread started between 6000 and 6500BP" is a more accurate estimate.

Both studies use essentially the same inputs - a list of common words for particular things from as many Indo-European languages as possible, living and dead, and some estimates of the time period during which those word lists were valid. They then estimate the rate that languages change their vocabulary based on examples of languages that are known to have changed to certain degrees in known time periods.

The degree of similarity between languages in lexicon produces presumed relationships between the languages that closely mirror what we believe to be true by other means. The branches of the tree are essentially the same.

The number of years before present that any given two languages have a presumed common ancestor in these models is essentially a highly massaged way of describing the degree to which they are lexically similar. The fewer words a pair of languages have in common, the more distant the model presumes their common ancestor to be.

In some circumstances, specifically, when languages are already differentiated from each other and only have neighboring languages influencing their evolution that don't interact heavily and are from related language families, this assumption is reasonable. But, in critical situations it is not. In real life, languages exhibit punctuated evolution. They change rapidly when they first differentiate and when they co-exist with or are in close regular proximity to very different languages, while changing slowly when isolated.

The model is wrong because it fails to account for these facts, both of which produce more rapid language change than would result from the mere prolonged random linguistic drift of a language in isolation or near isolation. Put another way, the age estimates produced by these models is the oldest age that could be expected in an environment in which there is no real linguistic competition from other language families and one starts with a single common language, something that is a good description of the groups of languages used to estimate the rates of language change used in the model. But, there are circumstances in the history of the Indo-European languages whose lexical differences from each other are driving the old estimate for a proto-Indo-European language that would have sped up the rate of language change at critical junctures. Those circumstances, in fact, look quite similar to the circumstances where the model fails to produce accurate age estimates for languages with known ages.

Atkinson recognized this was a problem, and in a 2008 study fit the data to a more complex model that attempted to determine how much language change was attributable to change in the formative period of a language, and how much language change was due to random drift. In the Indo-European languages, Atkinson's effort determined that about 21% of language change was due to language formation effects, a result that neatly produces an estimated age of proto-Indo-European of about 6600 years BP, a match within the margin of error with the most widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European language origins.

What makes the evidence for the Kurgan hypothesis such much more plausible than the estimates produced by the two statistical estimates?

The Kurgan hypothesis looks at the earliest known cultures to speak Indo-European languages - the Indo-Aryans of India who composed the Vedic Sanskrit epics from which Hindo and other Indo-Aryan languages are known to descend, the ancient Persian authors of the early Indo-Iranian Avestia, the Mycenians who replaced the Minoans and the Pelagasians who spoke non-Indo-European languages, the Hittites in Anatolia whose language led to the extinction of the Hattic and Hurrian languages there, the Mittani who spoke an Indo-European language with Indo-Aryan affinities, the Tocharians who spoke an Indo-European language in the Tarim basin until well into the 1st millenium CE, the Celts, and the earliest Italic language speakers in Italy. Archaeology and physical anthropology (i.e. similarity of bones) and more recently genetics (of populations and ancient DNA) are then used to identify which archaeological cultures appear to be in continuity with each other, and which appear to represent a break from prior archaeological cultures. Periods in which there is continuity in archaeological culture are presumed to represent periods of relative linguistic continuity. Periods in which there is discontinuity in archaeological culture or a historical record of a language transition are deemed to be periods of relative linguistic change. By this means predecessor cultures are assigned to Indo-European and non-Indo-European categories. Cultural continuity of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages are traced back until a juncture of all of the source in which words that have a common origin in distant branches of the language family were present. The cultures themselves are dated using carbon dating, tree rings, and other methods of dating archaeological strata.

Boundary Dates For Indo-European Cultures

This method provides some minimum ages of Indo-European languages.

Cultural practices like cremation which Vedic epics attest to being adopted around the time that the Indo-Aryans arrive in India appear around 3911 BP. A contemporaneous Akkadian historical record establishes that the Hittites conquered their second city state in 3765 BP and that before that date the Hittites ruled a single city (they would go on to rule almost all of Anatolia and the Northern Levant). Cremation starts to appear on the Pannonian plain and along some locations on the mid-Danube River basin around 4000 BP. From 3561 BCE- 3471 BP a Sanskrit speaking, Indo-Aryan god worshipping elite establishes itself in Mitanni empire in Northeast Mesopotamia.

Tarim basin mummies that remain similar in physical type which is physically and genetically similar to peoples of the same time period on the European steppe start to appear around 3811 BP and continue to have a similar appearance until about 1200 BP. J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair in "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West." (2000), suggest in a step critical to fixing an earliest possible proto-Indo-European date that, as Wikipedia paraphrases them:

[T]he Tocharian languages were introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north. The Afanasevo culture (c. 5500–4500 BP) displays cultural and genetic connections with the Indo-European-associated cultures of the Central Asian steppe yet predates the specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture (c. 4000–2900 BP) enough to isolate the Tocharian languages from Indo-Iranian linguistic innovations like satemization.

This provides an archaeologically supported date for a possible split of the Tocharian language from the other Indo-European languages of no earlier than 5500 BP, and supports the Kurgan hypothesis because, per the Wikipedia article on the Afanasevo culture, this is an early and extreme eastern outlier culture whose "burials bear a remarkable resemblance to those much further west in the Yamna culture [5200 BP to 4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], the Sredny Stog culture [6500-5500 BP "just north of the Sea of Azov between the Dnieper and the Don."], the Catacomb culture [4800-4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], Poltavka culture [4700—4100 BP of the middle Volga River], and the Corded Ware Culture [5000–4350 BP aka the Battle Axe culture or Single Grave culture]."

The oldest Corded Ware sites are in Poland, and it is found in much of Russia and the Baltic sea area. It reaches the "Danubian and Nordic areas of western Germany" around 4400 BP and might be Indo-European or might be one of the last pre-Indo-European layers in part because, "In places a continuity between Funnel Beaker and Corded Ware can be demonstrated, whereas in other areas Corded Ware heralds a new culture and physical type." Also, specific origins much later in time have been identified for the Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic languages. For example, the beginning of late Nordic Bronze Age in Southern Scandinavia around 2110 BP is a moment of major cultural upheaval when cremation begins to appear in Southern Scandinavia, many metal objects related to horses are found and there seems to be a strong coincidence with the appearance of the Germanic languages. The main expansion of the Slavic languages takes place around 1400 BP, after the fall of the Roman empire from the Southwest edge of the Slavic language speaking areas today.

So, if the Corded Ware culture was Indo-European, it may not have left Indo-European linguistic traces in much the same way that Indo-European Celtic languages left very little trace in France, Spain and Portugal were Celtic was replaced by Roman which was replaced by Romance languages.

Given the timing of the Afanasevo culture whose Indo-European identity can be inferred reasonably reliably despite a lack of direct linguistic evidence, the Tocharian branch of Indo-European languages must break off from the Sredny Stog culture, since all of the others are too recent to be a source for it, and the Sredny Stog culture becomes a strong candidate for the proto-Indo-European culture. (Gray estimates this date to be 6900 BP, which is about 1400 years too early.)

There is cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim culture in the Southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan which flourished from roughly 4211 BP and 3611 BP that conducted chariot burials, engaged in copper mining and metallurgy, and was, according to ancient DNA genetically at least 90% West Eurasian on both the maternal and paternal sides in which at least 60% of the individuals overall had light hair and blue or green eyes. There is also cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Andronovo culture which invented the spoke-wheeled chariot which is strongly associated with the Indo-Iranians around 4010 BP. Some genetic traits that are more common in high caste Indo-Aryan language speakers are believed to have West Eurasian origins.

The Urnfield culture emerges around the time of several collapses and upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Levant around the time of the Urnfield origins:

* end of the Mycenean culture with a conventional date of ca. 3200 BP
* destruction of Troy VI ca. 3200 BP
* Battles of Ramses III against the Sea Peoples, 3206-3211 BP
* end of the Hittite empire 3190 BP
* settlement of the Philistines in Palestine ca. 3180 BP

The Urnfield culture is found in Central Europe and Eastern France and Northern Italy and is commonly seen as an Indo-European cultural sucessor to the Bronze Age Indo-European cultures and a cultural predecessor to the Hallstatt culture from the 8th to 6th centuries BC (European Early Iron Age) and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture associated with the Celts. The late Urnfield culture probably gave rise to the Italic languages, which are closely related to Celtic as well, and may even have also been a source for the Germanic languages. The late Urnfield culture at its greatest extent reached far Northeastern Iberia. (Indo-European) Greek colonies were established in Iberia ca. 2710 BP.

Boundary Dates For Non-Indo-European Cultures

There are also ancient cultures we know did not speak Indo-European languages. Sumerian was a literary non-Indo-European language attested in writing from 5500 BP to 4200 BP in Mesopotamia (Iraq), until about 4015 BP when the Semitic Akkadian language was spoken, after which the Kassite empire from the mountains to the East where a Hurrian language (a non-Indo-European, non-Afro-Asiatic language related to the languages of the North Caucuses) was imposed, until it was defeated in the North by the Mittani and later by the Hittites.

We also have continous literary records of the Egyptians in Coptic from about 5000 BP until well past 3000 BP, at times through the South Levant, and of Semitic languages being spoken in the North Levant prior to their arrival in Sumeria. We also know that the Semitic languages and Coptic are part of the same language family.

Thus, there were no Indo-European languages spoken South of Anatolia prior to the Mittani for a prolonged period of time during which Indo-European languages prior to those first know to the historical record or the cultures that spoke them were in existence. Prior to the arrival of the Mittani, the people of that region in the mountains to the East of Mesopotamia spoke a non-Indo-European language.

We know that from roughly 4110 BP to 3465 BP that Linear A script used by speakers of non-Indo-European Minoan language, which was probably related to the pre-Indo-European Etruscan (Tuscany), Rhaetic (roughly speaking Venice), and Lemnian (a Greek island) languages. We also know that the Pelagasians who inhabited mainland Greece immediately prior to the arrival of the Mycenians (who spoke ancient Greek) spoke a non-Indo-European language.

The non-Indo-European Elamite language is attested in writing in Persia from 3511 BP to 2342 BP, and a system of proto-writing that appears to be in cultural continuity with it was used from 5100 BP or so.

The Hattic language was spoken for an indeterminate period prior to the emergence of the Hittite empire as the predominant language of North Central Anatolia and shows some similarities to the languages of the Caucusas Mountains. The non-Indo-European Kaskians regularly invade Hittite territory from the East coast of the Sea of Maramara and the adjacent Anatolian plains which the Hittites never manage to control ca. 3661 BP until they are defeated by an Assyrian king ca. 3160 BP.

There is cultural continuity between the Harappans of the Indus River Valley and the Sumerians. The Harappans used Sumerian crops very shortly after they were found in Sumeria, engaged in regular trade with Sumeria for thousands of years and had a linguistic minority district in Sumerian port cities, and used a system of symbolic seals similar to those used by the Vinca culture of the Balkans and the Sumerians. The Indus River Valley culture shows remarkable continuity and unity for about 4000 years until its collapse not long before the appearance of the Indo-Aryans ca. 3900 BP.

Since we know very little about what the Harappan language was like, and it was relatively isolated from the rest of the food producing world for so long, it would be possible to see it as the proto-Indo-European homeland rather than Central Asia. But, in that hypothesis it is hard to explain why so many genetic markers typical of Pakistanis (e.g. Y-DNA haplogroup L) are not found in many other Indo-Europeans at any frequency.

Prior to the Urnfield and Greek influences arriving in Iberia it appears that non-Indo-European language speakers, some of whom spoke Vasconic languages related to Basque lived in Iberia. These peoples (or at least some of them) based on place named and archaeological continuity appear to have been part of a common Atlantic megalithic culture that coicided with the Neolithic revolution in the Atlantic region.

Implications

In the period immediately following 4000 BP, which also coincides with the worst short term drought since agriculture was invented in the Middle East that also appears to have extended to the Indus River Valley, Indo-European peoples appear on the scene from Greece to Anatolia to the Balkans to Central Asia to North India to the Tarim Basin. There is rough consensus on the timing, ethnic identity and location of Indo-European language speakers in all periods after then outside of Northern and Eastern Europe where there is some dispute over whether particular cultures were or were not Indo-European language speakers.

Before that point in time, the Indo-Europeans were pretty much confined to the Eastern European and Central Asian steppe where they would have been distinguished by the horse culture and would have been predominantly herders in juxtaposition to their Old European farmer neighbors to the West.

Lexical analysis suggests an age of Proto-Indo-European based on an counterfactual assumption of gradual random linguistic drift of 8000 BP which coincides with the earliest LBK Neolithic expansion into Eastern Europe out of someplace in the vicinity of Anatolia and the Balkans. The Kurgan hypothesis sees cultural connections between the earliest likely Indo-European language speakers and the Early Kurgan (burial mound) culture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia of ca. 6500 to 6000 BCE, while placing the LBK farmers and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture [7500 BP to 4750 BP], of "Old Europe" in cultural continuity with the non-Indo-European language speaking people of pre-Hittite Anatolia and of Sumeria and the Levant. In an Anatolian hypothesis, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture would have to be Indo-European and would have to have somehow extended its influence all of teh way to India with technologies like chariots that it did not possess, and the non-Indo-European language cultures that the Indo-Europeans displaced are hard to explain.

The uniform rate of linguistic change hypothesis would suggest that it took about 4000 years for the Indo-European languages to diversify to the extent observed in 4000 BP. The Kurgan hypothesis suggests that this happened much more rapidly, over about 2000 to 2500 years, probably due to an increased rate of language change as daughter languages distinguished themselves from each other, due to founder effects, and as a result of coming into intimate intense contact with competing non-Indo-European langauges as they expanded.

What a mere statistical model based on word comparisons between languages fails to provide that the Kurgan hypothesis does is to provide a step by step chain of cultures that could bring Indo-European languages to the places that they ultimately end up, and reasons (including domestication of the horse and development of the chariot and in the case of the Hittites, a monopoly on iron production coinciding with climate based weakness in neighboring cultures) that they were able to expand their linguistic reach.

Obama's Deficit Reduction Proposal

President Obama called for cutting the nation’s combined budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. . . . The president vowed not to extend tax cuts for the wealthy or to dismantle the government-run health care systems for the elderly and poor. . . . Among his proposals is a “debt fail-safe” mechanism that would force lawmakers into much more severe action if the deficit has not contracted significantly by 2014. The provision would impose across-the-board cuts on most government programs, officials said. . . . there would be $3 in spending cuts and interest savings in the president’s proposals for every $1 that comes from increased tax revenue. . . . "we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.” He said people like him “don’t need a tax cut,” and added, “Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare, or by cutting kids from Head Start, or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn’t be here without.” . . . Along with allowing the lowered tax rates to expire, Mr. Obama suggested limiting itemized deductions for the top 2 percent of taxpayers. . . . Rather than change Medicare to a voucher program, Mr. Obama proposes broad reforms that he says would save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 12 years and more than $1 trillion in the following decade. In the speech, the president embraced some of the proposals of his own debt commission, including $770 billion worth of cuts in nonsecurity related spending by 2023. Cuts to defense programs would be increased to nearly $400 billion over the next 12 years, officials said. The president stayed away from proposing changes to Social Security, saying that it was not a significant piece of the country’s deficit problem.

From here

A look at the details shows a proposal that allocates deficit reductions by category, is big on cutting "fraud, waste and abuse," and with some notable exceptions, particularly in the area of health care cost reductions, is short on specifics, but big on having a process to get the job done.

The White House offers more details here:

the President is calling for:

•A debt failsafe that will ensure that our nation’s debt is on a declining path as a share of our economy. If by 2014, budget projections do not show that the debt-to-GDP ratio has stabilized and is declining in the second half of the decade, the failsafe will trigger an across the board spending reduction, including on spending through the tax code.
•The trigger will ensure that deficits as a share of the economy average no more than 2.8% of GDP in the second half of the decade.
•Consistent with prior fiscal enforcement mechanisms put in place by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton, the trigger should not apply to Social Security, low-income programs, or benefits for Medicare enrollees.
•The trigger should also include a mechanism to ensure that it does not exacerbate an economic downturn or interfere with our nation’s ability to respond to a national security emergency.

Discretionary non-defense spending would be cut $200 billion over 10 years ($20 billion per year) in addition to $400 billion ($40 billion per year) in the President's budget, and would cut $770 billion over 12 years.

Defense spending would be cut by $400 billion by 2023 ($33.3 billion per year) by "pushing harder to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. . . .(The President will make decisions on specific cuts after working with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on the comprehensive review.) . . . in addition to the savings generated from ramping-down overseas contingency operations."

Health care cost reductions in projected Medicare and Medicaid spending over the next twelve years is to be reduced by $40 billion per year on average ($34 billion per year on average in the first ten years), by a variety of means. A blue ribbon commission would be given the power to implement cost savings proposals when health care cost inflation is above a target unless an alternative is developed by Congress.

•Building on the Affordable Care Act, the President is proposing additional reforms to Medicare and Medicaid designed to strengthen these critical programs by reducing waste, increasing accountability, promoting efficiency, and improving the quality of care, without shifting the cost of care to our seniors or people with disabilities.
• . . . This framework includes . . . an amount sufficient to fully pay to reform the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) physician payment formula while still reducing the deficit.

The President’s framework proposes specific reforms to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid over the long term, including: . . .

The President’s framework would strengthen the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) created by the Affordable Care Act. . . . Under the Affordable Care Act, IPAB analyzes the drivers of excessive and unnecessary Medicare cost growth. When Medicare growth per beneficiary exceeds growth in nominal GDP per capita plus 1 percent, IPAB recommends to Congress policies to reduce the rate of growth to meet that target, while not harming beneficiaries’ access to needed services. Congress must consider IPAB’s recommendations or, if it disagrees, enact policies that achieve equivalent savings. If neither acts, then the Secretary of Health and Human Services would have to develop and implement a proposal to achieve the savings target.
•Set a new target of Medicare growth per beneficiary growing with GDP per capita plus 0.5 percent. This is consistent both with the reductions in projected Medicare spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed and the additional reforms the President is proposing.
•Give IPAB additional tools to improve the quality of care while reducing costs, including allowing it to promote value-based benefit designs that promote proven services like prevention without shifting costs to seniors.
•Give IPAB additional enforcement mechanisms such as an automatic sequester as a backstop for IPAB, Congress, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

. . . Under current law, States face a patchwork of different Federal payment contributions for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The President’s framework would replace the current complicated Federal matching formulas with a single matching rate for all program spending that rewards States for efficiency and automatically increases if a recession forces enrollment and State costs to rise.

. . . The President also supports reform of Medicaid to incentivize more efficient, higher quality, care for high-cost beneficiaries, including those who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare. These nine million beneficiaries comprise 15 percent of Medicaid enrollment but consume nearly 40 percent of total Medicaid spending.

. . . . Together with employers, States, hospitals, physicians and nurses, the Administration has launched a new public-private partnership called Partnership for Patients that will help improve the quality, safety and affordability of health care for all Americans. The two goals of this new Partnership are: preventing patients from getting injured or sicker while they are in the hospital and helping patients heal without complication. Achieving the initiative’s goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients will recover from illness without a preventable complication, reducing costs by up to $50 billion in Medicare and billions more in Medicaid over the next 10 years.

. . .. limit excessive payments for prescription drugs by leveraging Medicare’s purchasing power – similar to what was called for by the bipartisan Fiscal Commission. It would speed up the availability of generic biologics, and prohibit brand-name companies from entering into “pay for delay” agreements with generic companies. And, it would implement Medicaid management of high prescribers and users of prescription drugs.

. . . clamp down on States’ use of provider taxes to lower their own spending while not providing additional health services through Medicaid; recover erroneous payments from Medicare Advantage; establish upper limits on Medicaid payments for durable medical equipment; and take other actions to improve program integrity.

Non-health care mandatory spending would be cut by $360 billion over 12 years ($30 billion per year) through "measures to reform agricultural subsidies, shore up the federal pension insurance system, restore solvency to the federal unemployment insurance trust fund, and enact anti-fraud measures. . . . The Fiscal Commission and other bipartisan efforts have put forward additional proposals that should be considered as part of a comprehensive deficit reduction effort to meet this target. Reforms to mandatory programs should protect and strengthen the safety net for low-income families and other vulnerable Americans."

A key piece of the plan is tax increases:

He also supports efforts to build on the Fiscal Commission’s goal of reducing tax expenditures so that there is enough savings to both lower rates and lower the deficit. Reform should be designed to ask more of those who can afford it while protecting the middle class and promoting economic growth. . . . the President is continuing his effort to reform our outdated corporate tax code to enhance our economic competitiveness and encourage investment in the United States. By eliminating loopholes, reducing distortions and leveling the playing field in our corporate tax code, we can use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years without adding to the deficit.

He does not include Social Security in the package:

The President does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near-term deficit problems or is currently in crisis. . . . The President in the State of the Union laid out his principles for Social Security reform which he believes should form the basis for bipartisan negotiations that could proceed in parallel to deficit negotiations:

•Strengthen retirement security for the low-income and vulnerable; maintain robust disability and survivors’ benefits.
•No privatization or weakening of the Social Security system; reform must strengthen Social Security and restore long-term solvency.
•No current beneficiary should see the basic benefit reduced; nor will we accept an approach that slashes benefits for future generations.

Analysis

The President is a bit light on taxes to close the deficit gap (a 50-50 split between taxes and spending cuts, rather than a 25-75 split would have been better). The defense cuts are overly modest, because they are arbitrary and don't spell out cost saving changes in the scope of our missions and procurement approaches. The non-discertionary savings cuts seem fairly high given the many rounds of cuts that they have been subjected to already. The "other mandatory spending" cuts seem appropriate.

The cuts to health care are about right in magnitude but assume cuts are possible in spending without really demonstrating that it is possible to sensibly bend the curve on health care cost inflation, leaving that problem to experts who may have little more of an idea about how to do it than the politicians do.

Thumbs up:
* Repeal of Bush Tax Cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year.
* Reducing tax expenditures.
* "reform agricultural subsidies, shore up the federal pension insurance system, restore solvency to the federal unemployment insurance trust fund, and enact anti-fraud measures."
* "clamp down on States’ use of provider taxes to lower their own spending while not providing additional health services through Medicaid; recover erroneous payments from Medicare Advantage"
* "limit excessive payments for prescription drugs by leveraging Medicare’s purchasing power. . . speed up the availability of generic biologics, and prohibit brand-name companies from entering into “pay for delay” agreements with generic companies. And, it would implement Medicaid management of high prescribers and users of prescription drugs."
* Defense spending cuts.

Neither Here Nor There:
* "incentivize more efficient, higher quality, care for high-cost beneficiaries, including those who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare." But how?
* "launched a new public-private partnership called Partnership for Patients that will help improve the quality, safety and affordability of health care for all Americans." How will this happen?
* "IPAB recommends to Congress policies to reduce the rate of growth to meet that target, while not harming beneficiaries’ access to needed services." What can they recommend that would meet that standard?
* Discretionary non-defense spending cuts. Where?

Thumbs down:
* Lowering corporate income tax rates.
* Limiting itemized deductions based on AGI.