True North, Strong and Debt Free

I found an interesting statistic recently: of all the G8 nations, Canada has the strongest fiscal balance. Canada had the largest surplus as a proportion of GDP in 2004, and is projected to do so again in 2005 and 2006:

Fiscal Balance in 2004 for G8 Nations
	Balance
Nation	(%GDP)
Canada	+1.1
France	-3.7
Germany	-3.9
Italy	-2.9
Japan	-6.5
Russia	n/a
United Kingdom	-3.2
United States	-4.4

In fact, of all the nations that the OECD publishes this statistic for, only Finland (+2.3) and Norway (+8.2!) surpass Canada's fiscal vigor.

I am concerned that an election to test Canada's current minority Liberal Party government will result in a jaded electorate ousting the scandal-marred Liberals in favor of the Conservatives. Conservative leader Stephen Harper is trading on a dubious moral authority platform; even more dubious is his fiscal platform which promises more military, less taxation, and a laxity in the Canada Health Act. Compare this with Bush's conservative fiscal platform which plunged his nation further into debt than it's ever been, and converted long-running surpluses under Clinton into record budget shortfalls (see Update: New Canafornida).

Be very afraid.

Nifty Device

The DVX-POD. A 20 gig portable media player that can rip to its drive directly from a video source, playback photos, mp3s, and video, and does so elegantly on a 7", 720x480 display. I'm in techno-luv.

Yum.

Homo economicus

In the pages of the Economist (April 9, 2005), I learned of an interesting theory which posits that the success of early Homo sapiens versus competing hominids, notably Homo neandertalensis, may be a consequence of economic superiority.

The article refers to a paper appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, a journal I must confess I have never read before or even heard of. In the paper, Jason Shogren and his colleagues contend that trade and specialization helped early modern humans (their oxymoron, not mine) "overcome potential biological deficiencies." Shogren cites the discovery of complex living quarters--suggesting specialization--and imported materials in early Homo sapiens settlements as evidence.

The paper is provocative because, as its authors note, "Our paper shows explicitly how culture may be a part of evolutionary and extinction processes." It also makes the interesting point that specialization is observed in other animals, such as the extreme examples of specialization in insects like ants, termites, and bees. While this specialization may confer little advantage to the survival of the indivdual worker bee or soldier ant, the success of the collective--and therefore of the specialist's genetically identical sibs--is promoted. The analogy to early humans is that by contributing to his tribe's success, the specialist reaps an evolutionary advantage because his genetic material is propagated by relations in his tribe.

Unfortunately, I could find links to the full-text of neither the Economist article, nor the JEBO article. But the links to the abstracts of these articles are enclosed below:

• "Homo economicus?", the Economist, April 9, 2005
  
• "How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: an economic theory of Neanderthal extinction", the Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, in press

I have located a draft version of this paper posted online at Michigan State University's site, the institution where co-author Richard Horan teaches.

Here's a great post on the topic at Tech Central Station. And a blurb from the New Scientist.

Bridging Spermists and Ovists

I read an essay by Richard Dawkins recently that gave me pause ("An early flowering of genetics"). Dawkins, the most gifted and persuasive proponent of natural selection since Charles Darwin, reports of Darwin's nascent notions of heredity revealed in his correspondence. The essay by Dawkins appeared as the foreword of Darwin's Descent of Man, and again in an anthology of essays titled A Devil's Chaplain.

Darwin recognized the biggest shortcoming of his theory was that it failed to provide a mechanism for the transmission of heritable traits. But in Dawkins' essay, we learn that Darwin indeed had some insights about that mechanism. He understood that heredity must preserve the variation in traits expressed by progenitors of the next generation. If not, his theory of natural selection would fail. More importantly, competing "blending" theories of heredity contradicted the observation that successive generations of organisms do not become monotonous intermediate forms of the varied ancestral population.

Coincidentally, Darwin at one point argued for a "particulate" theory of heredity citing his experiments with pea plants as evidence. Again, this anticipates Gregor Mendel, the cleric-botanist (only in the Victorian era!) who elucidated the particulate theory of heredity decades later in classic, exhaustive experiments on pea plants in his monastery.

The essay is a wonderful illustration of the depth of Darwin's insight. Dawkins points out that Darwin was nevertheless a product of his time, and revisits some of Darwin's jarring biases and pronouncements on race, as if to expose Darwin's fallibility. Perhaps to set himself apart from darwin's bias, Dawkins curiously advocates for the abolition of the concept of race, arguing that more variation exists within races than between them.

The point was also made in Scientific American a couple of years ago in an article entitled "Does Race Exist?". The argument strikes me as dubious since the physical traits which evolve in certain areas function to confer a selective advantage in some cases (skin color, eyelash length, body habitus), or are culturally selected (lip shape, rump size) and these must co-segregate with other medically important genetic loci. I concede that race is getting tougher to accurately identify in places like Europe, North Africa, and North America, where racial blending has been fairly extensive. I also concede that except for some genetically uniform populations, the concept of race is not useful medically. In more stable populations, such as North Korea, Sri Lanka, or Mongolia for example, the genetic traits that account for race are not mere illusions.

You do not have to claim that race does not exist to passionately defend freedom from prejudice.

Hiatus

Yes, after a long hiatus, I have returned to the blogosphere. It's been difficult to return. You know how it is: you want to return with something worthwhile, earth-shattering; a fitting culmination of your pensive absence. A Life-Altering Post. Perhaps only your life, but preferably everyone else's.

And as the dust continues to gather on your blog, your next post must be all the more cosmic.

I've decided, "Screw that," and have posted just this little message to say I'm back.

Good to be back.