Alaska Census changes, 2000 to 2010

Data time, people! Behold, tables:

 

Borough or Census area	2000 estimate	2010 estimate	% change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	6,551	5,588	-14.70%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	14,070	13,477	-4.21%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	6,146	5,559	-9.55%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	10,195	9,636	-5.48%
Kodiak Island Borough	13,913	13,592	-2.31%
Bristol Bay Borough	1,258	997	-20.75%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	1,823	1,631	-10.53%
Yakutat City and Borough	808	662	-18.07%
Dillingham Census Area	4,922	4,847	-1.52%
Denali Borough	1,893	1,826	-3.54%
Sitka City and Borough	8,835	8,881	0.52%
Aleutians West Census Area	5,465	5,561	1.76%
Haines Borough	2,392	2,508	4.85%
Nome Census Area	9,196	9,492	3.22%
Northwest Arctic Borough	7,208	7,523	4.37%
Wade Hampton Census Area	7,028	7,459	6.13%
Aleutians East Borough	2,697	3,141	16.46%
Juneau City and Borough	30,711	31,275	1.84%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	6,174	7,029	13.85%
Bethel Census Area	16,006	17,013	6.29%
North Slope Borough	7,385	9,430	27.69%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	49,691	55,400	11.49%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	82,840	97,581	17.79%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	59,322	88,995	50.02%
Anchorage Municipality	260,283	291,826	12.12%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	3,436	2,150	-14.79%
Skagway Municipality		968
Wrangell City and Borough	6,684	2,369	-21.11%
Petersburg Census Area		3,815
Statewide	626,932	710,231	13.29%

I have the table organized by the number of citizens gained or lost. Note that Hoonah/Skagway and Wrangell/Petersberg is reported differently between 2010 and 2000, so they take up two lines (Only one value in 2000 per either pair). What leaps out at me is most of the change comes from the MatSu - a wopping 50% change in population! Yikes! Fairbanks has also grown at an accelerated rate, but not nearly as much. I was wrong about the North Slope - it has a greater % change than the North West Borough. I was correct about the YK, but too conservative about the rate of growth since both major census districts topped 6% growth. I was too conservative about how horribly hard SE is getting hammered. Aside from Bristol Bay, the biggest percent changes were in SE. The biggest absolute change, though, was in the Yukon-Koyukuk area:

Borough or Census area	Absolute Change	Percent of State Change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	-963	-1.16%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	-593	-0.71%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	-587	-0.70%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	-559	-0.67%
Kodiak Island Borough	-321	-0.39%
Bristol Bay Borough	-261	-0.31%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	-192	-0.23%
Yakutat City and Borough	-146	-0.18%
Dillingham Census Area	-75	-0.09%
Denali Borough	-67	-0.08%
Sitka City and Borough	46	0.06%
Aleutians West Census Area	96	0.12%
Haines Borough	116	0.14%
Nome Census Area	296	0.36%
Northwest Arctic Borough	315	0.38%
Wade Hampton Census Area	431	0.52%
Aleutians East Borough	444	0.53%
Juneau City and Borough	564	0.68%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	855	1.03%
Bethel Census Area	1,007	1.21%
North Slope Borough	2,045	2.46%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	5,709	6.85%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	14,741	17.70%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	29,673	35.62%
Anchorage Municipality	31,543	37.87%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	-318	-0.38%
Skagway Municipality
Wrangell City and Borough	-500	-0.60%
Petersburg Census Area
Statewide	83,299	n/a

Anchorage had the greatest growth (Gold star for me) followed by MatSu and Fairbanks and the Kenai. Juneau, as I anticipated, remains essentially flat. I might have to double back on the Rural-to-Urban migration idea. There's 214 more rural residents than there were in 2010, which is a minuscule increase. Either there's more immigration than emigration, but elevated death to compensate, or births are higher than deaths, and there's a net emigration. The second scenario seems more likely.

Why didn't this show up in the school enrolment records in Anchorage? Well, it could be that people more likely to move don't have children yet, or maybe they're not all moving to Anchorage. Or, what I think is most likely - there's serious flaws in how we calculate enrolment in schools, where students from the bush are more likely to skip classes (true) and therefore not be reflected in the annual counts. This downward biases the enrolment numbers, and therefore funding, of schools with the students who need the most help.

But, that's navel gazing and guesswork. The real way to address this is to follow individuals, not counts of individuals. Census summaries we have access to can't show that that +1 person in the Kenai came from Juneau as opposed to Kansas. You need to do a more detailed breakdown than that to find those sorts of trends.

Finally, on the diversity front, diversity increased slightly (69% White to 66% White descent) mostly to an additional 1 percent more people of Asian descent, and a grab-bag of other.

There's a lot of information here, and I've barely played around with it. Hopefully, I'll get more time to dig deep into this well of information in the next little bit.

The Evolution of Mickey Mouse

A while back I wrote about neoteny in humans, and why most of us can't look at a bucket full of puppies without going "Aww!" It's all rooted in the evolution of the human brain, shaped by the millions of years something resembling Homo has been around. Jerry Coyne, author of the wonderful book "Why Evolution is True" (and author of a blog by the same name) gave his own take on the issue, which you can find here. I strongly recommend you give it a read! In it, he has a wonderful picture showing the neotenic evolution of Mickey Mouse. How could I not reproduce it here?

Notice how Mickey's characteristics keep changing. Gradually, he's become shorter snouted, thicker limbed, large headed and more squat. In short, more like a baby human's form. 'Generations' of drawings have been winnowed down to what we find the most visually appealing, and that turns out to be the most juvenilized version!

Three new genomes

There's been some exciting stuff in the last two weeks in terms of human genetics. This week, Nature has published two new complete human genomes, from southern Africa. Right now, sampling has been focused on Europe and Asia, which to be fair represents about half the human race right there. However, in terms of where human diversity is located, Europe, Asia, Australia and the North and South America are relatively homogeneous compared to the centre of human radiation, Africa. You can really see this when you take a glance at the number of unique polymophisms shared by various genomes sampled in these diagrams.

The areas that overlap show similarity, the areas that don't overlap show unique diversity.  Immediately what stands out to me is that the African samples have almost double the unique diversity that the other sampled genomes do. This is expected, but it really drives home how much we've been underestimating divergence. This is because we haven't been looking at that diversity before now - all our DNA diversity sites have been based off of European and Asian genomes. This is great for most of the work that has focused on Europe, Asia, and America, since it targets the applicable diversity. But because we haven't been looking at the African-European and the African-Asian big differences, it's underestimated divergence within Africa, and between Africa and other human populations.

Neat stuff. Very very neat. If I were to pick two places to study human genetics, I'd do it in Africa (super high diversity!) or the South Pacific (Lower diversity lets you study gene by environment effects).


The other thing that came out recently was also from Nature, which was the Genome of ancient remains (hair) from Greenland. This is one of the longest look backs we've had, and really tells us a bit about the last migration wave to North America. People in the Eskimo-Aleut language family are generally thought to be late comers to North America, which shouldn't be a massive shock, since most the areas Eskimo live weren't exactly habitable thirteen thousand years ago (They were covered by massive, mile thick ice sheets).

I've thrown up a figure from the Nature Paper. The paleo-Greenlander is labeled Saqqaq in this diagram. Each vertical bar represents one individual. The colours in that bar represent them being assigned to a population, so all the beige bars are 100%% beige population (Koryak), and the beige and yellow are half Beige population, and half yellow (Nganasan). You can see Saqqaq is closest to the modern Chukchi, though there's considerable noise in all the assignments (real data is messy!). More interestingly, if you look at modern east and west Greenlanders, they don't have some of the diversity he has, and they have a strong blue measure of admixture. That's diversity that it shares with Europe and pre-contact Americans.

This is cool because it really tells a story about how this group represented by Saqqaq made a massive journey in an incredibly short period of time. It also helps scientists pin down when that last migration wave came in, peopling the arctic, with better accuracy. It's also cool because we can tell a man 5.5kya was balding through looking at nothing more than his DNA. And it shows how incredibly fast humans adapted culturally to the arctic. The authors of the paper claim some small number of SNPs show that he had metabolic adaptations to cold climates, but I'm suspicious of the genetic effects they're claiming. Even granting them, Saqqaq's people still had to culturally adapt to a huge amount of environment that they'd never encountered before. It's like the first human to step foot out of Africa, only to discover how cold it can get at night, but a thousand fold more severe.

Culture is a powerful and under appreciated tool. I think this ancient DNA study drives that point home to me.

Corn Syrup ads?

Apparently, there's a series of ads out there by the Corn Syrup lobby, telling us all that there's absolutely nothing wrong with their product, no sir. Here's one of them.




Well, let me fill in what the other lady couldn't. I'm not an expert, but I worked with an expert who was conducting a study when I was back in Utah. I did a lot of lurn'n. To begin with, I was sceptical - I'm just a sceptical guy, in general. But gradually, the guy doing the study won me over with evidence.
So, here we go: What's wrong with HFCS? High Fructose Corn Syrup engages different metabolic pathways than other, more complex carbohydrates. It's metabolized differently, and has been linked to lower general health in mouse experiments. In human studies, there is evidence suggesting that linking comparable amounts of HFCS and other carbohydrates, people are more prone to obesity on the HFCS diets. Is HFCS the sole source of the obesity epidemic? No one claims that. However, it may be a large contributing factor. Complex carbohydrates are better for you.

And the idea that HFCS is 100% natural is absurd. It's refined. And even if it wasn't refined, being natural is no great boon. Ebola virus is natural, but you don't see people advocating contracting it.

About this ad campaign, I say this:

China and demographic consequences

From an article in Forbes.com: China might have problems being a dominant player unless it comes to terms with its ethnocentric problems.

These anxieties have the air of self-fulfilling prophecy. Given that many if not most Koreans prize ethnic homogeneity, migrant workers will remain on the margins of society. This, in turn, will fuel alienation and resentment among this class of permanent second-class citizens. And so South Korea's major cities could very well see the rise of segregated ethnic slums. It's worth noting that anti-foreigner sentiments are flourishing in a time when South Korea is experiencing rapid economic change, including a new social and economic inequality. Just as racism provided the basis for solidarity among whites in U.S. history, it could be playing a similar role in South Korea.

Next to China's race problem, South Korea's pales in significance. Earlier this year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a report that found that the current ratio of 16 retirees to 100 workers is set to double in the next 15 years. In absolute terms, the number of over-65s will go from 166 million to 342 million. Someone will have to care for them, and though China has relaxed its profoundly wrongheaded one-child policy, the reform has come too late to arrest rapid aging.

The bigger problem, almost paradoxically, is demographic. If China hadn't arrested it's development, they could have gone on as racist as they'd like with just a few institutionalized consequences. The same is true for very `developed` nations. Are we seeing a new form of source-sink dynamics among human populations? Certainly, some areas are more productive biologically than others, but the trend among nations has been to population stability, or even contraction. So I suppose it has to do with the rate that the source populations (i.e., poor, biologically productive nations) transition...

Humans, the runners

I won't complain about the weather today, or talk about Sarah's resignation. Instead, I want to talk about something Sarah Palin does. So does Obama. So does Justin Gatlin and... wait, who?

Running! When you think about animals that are good at running, we tend to think about cheetahs, gazelles, antelope and other things of that nature. Horses, definitely. But what about jackrabbits, and snowshoe hares? Sure! Jackrabbits actually have skulls that deform as they run, and contrary to popular belief, their ears are more used as levers to un-squish their skulls. That's rather neat, but not what I'm about to go on about.

Over the years, we've got a good grasp on what makes good runners, from

• spinal flection - the bending of the spine with each stride to shorten and lenghten the torso.
• reduced distal portions of limbs - since limbs are levers, and the lighter the end of limbs, the less mass that needs whipped around.
• ligified limbs - absorbing and re-releasing energy from each trot.
• generally long limbs - speed is a function of stride length times stride rate.

And there's a variety of other adaptations that appear evident between most running animals. We tend to call animals that run a lot "Cursorial animals." And the back of sugary cereals boxes are full of facts about how cheetahs can go XYZ fast, eat ABC gazelles per hour, and so on. As as side note, I hate that. I call it ADD biology - just little snippets without any depth that they throw at you one after another, before you get distracted by something new and shiny! Ooh! A tricycle!

One thing you don't find on the back of Admiral Crunch boxes, Arch-Duke Chocula, or Cookie crud, are humans as some pretty phenomenal runners. And why should we? After all how many humans do you see going 100 km/hr without being on a snowmachine or something else. First, we need to know not all running is equal. There are various types of movement, including trotting, or endurance running, and galloping, or sprinting.

The difference between them is one of oxygen consumption. In endurance running, oxygen consumption increases with speed. In sprinting, oxygen consumption no longer increases, and the body begins to enter into an oxygen deficit. If you think back (or forward!) to your highschool biology, you understand that endurance running is aerobic, while sprinting is anaerobic. Many species that can engage in other gaits have separate gaits for walking, trotting and galloping, but humans really only have separate gaits for walking and trotting, and our galloping is a modification of our trot.

Clearly, our sprint is nothing spectacular, but what about the rest of our running range? In our aerobic portion of our running range - the thing that we could quite plausably do all day, we find this:
This is a figure from Bramble and Lieberman 2004, and I'd draw your attention to the left half of it. You see that the human endurance running range far exceeds that of your typical quadruped of the same size. Even the average human 'light jogging' speed is close to an average four legged critter's trot-gallop transition. Even when you look at ponies, which are undboubtably good runners, a human trot can easily outpace their own, forcing them to enter into oxygen debt while the human is still doing quite nicely.

Adam Summers summed up the finding quite nicely when he said,

Where we excel is endurance running. Moreover, we run long distances at fast speeds: many joggers do a mile in seven-and-a-half minutes, and top male marathoners can string five-minute miles together for more than two hours. A quadruped of similar weight, about 150 pounds, prefers to run a mile at a trot, which takes nine-and-a-half minutes, and would have to break into a gallop to keep pace with a good recreational jogger. That same recreational jogger could keep up with the preferred trotting speed of a thousand-pound horse.

"But!" people protested, "What are the adaptations to running? Can you really just prove humans are cursorial mammals, and this isn't just some by-product of us being good bipedal walkers?" Yes, we can! But that will come in a later post. Now, I'll just let you all get comfortable with the idea that while a cheetah can break off into a sprint and go fast, you could probably keep running long after it had collapsed from exhaustion. Take that, cheetahs.


Cited:
Bramble, D. M. and D. E. Lieberman (2004) Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 432: 345-352.
Cheetah image from Wikimedia, rights reserved.

Genetic Bottlenecks

I'm not mucking with wolf systematics this week, not even a peek, as I'm focusing on another data set. I pushed out a manuscript to its completed first draft, and I'm starting to work on a second manuscript that unexpectedly grew out of the first. Re-reading one of my lab's papers turned out to be a good idea, as it's refreshed my thinking on Bottlenecks. And Bottlenecks are exactly what I want to discuss. .
No, Dave, not that kind of bottleneck

A bottleneck is when a population goes through an event that greatly reduces its size. I typically think of a bottleneck as being reduced to 10% of the pre-bottleneck population or less, but there's no hard, fast rules on what constitutes a bottleneck. Bottlenecks can occur from a variety of factors, but most frequently it's climate change that forces animals through them. Often, we find bottlenecks in species that were forced into refuges where they can survive, like Tahrs into the high mountains in a warm period, or Dall Sheep into foothills during glacial periods. Because the amount of space in the refugium (that's the fancy pants term for `refuge`) is limiting, the population is greatly reduced.

It's worth saying that these bottlenecks through refugia (pl. of refugium... I hate biologist-speak) are really important, evolutionarily. Because competition for resources is so high, animals tend to be come very well adapted to what they do. Anyone who doesn't doesn't leave behind as many kids, and are quickly outbred by their more successful cousins. But if bottlenecks are too tight, they can leave a species floundering on the shoals, because they've lost too much of their diversity, and too much of their capacity to adapt.

Here's a hand drawn figure!
This is what happens normally through time. The squiggly lines represent lineages, and the width of the tube represents the total population number. Since we frequently trace these with mtDNA (see my glossary to the right!), it represents the unbroken chain of female descendants. If you go back to your mother's great grandmother's grandmother, perhaps her sister had some children, but those children didn't have any children. Those would be a terminated lineage, represented by the little spurs that go out, but don't make it to the end of the tube. They stop early.

That's normal `lineage sorting,` as we call it. It doesn't require someone to have no children. It could be no female children, or no male children, or it could be that they didn't pass on the trait we're following. In a easy, simple example, if a tall female has children with a short male, but doesn't give any of the genes that made her tall to her children, they'll all be short. The lineage of descendants with the `tall` gene is broken, at that point. In our example, we start with three lineages, two of which are represented at the end. But each of the two lineages that made it has branched out, forming new spikes that persist. Some of them will go away, some of them will make up the successful families of tomorrow.

Here's what it looks like in a bottleneck
You can see that a lot of the lineages went away through the bottleneck. Only 1 of the 3 founding lines made it to the end. Compare this to the normal situation, where many more lineages persist. Because of the fewer surviving lineages, less diversity is passed on to the offspring, and the population at modern day is more alike itself (more monotypic) than those who didn't go through the bottle neck. By measuring the variability, we can look back and see which groups went through bottlenecks, and which didn't.

Warning: Dumb joke coming up.
So when I say I'm dating a bottleneck, it doesn't mean I'm going to a bar.

Some species that have gone through bottlenecks include Moose, Cheetahs, Galapagos Finches, some populations of Koalas, Northern Elephant Seals, and humans. At some point, the ancestral human population was reduced to around 15,000 people (possibly due to a volcano, I read?) which is part of why almost every human is closer related to every other human on earth than two random mallards, or caribou would be.

Your standards may vary.

Danger! Human stuff! Remember my disclaimer! Don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy!

It shouldn't come as a controversial that our behaviour is different in winter. We sleep more, we're less energetic, we've got slightly larger appetites, etc. Previous studies had shown that humans also experience shifts in hormone levels. Do seasonal fluctuations in men's hormone correspond to changes in mate choice?

Two Polish researchers, a place with something that passes for a proper winter, decided to put this question to the test. They showed over a hundred men of varying backgrounds computer-generated pictures of females of varying attractiveness, and had the respondents record scores for various attributes (e.g., `facial attractiveness,` `body shape,` etc.). They repeated this in the summer with the same pictures, and took the same measurements.

They found that in the winter, males tended to rate females as being more attractive than they did the same attributes in the summer. This held true for all attributes except for facial attractiveness, which remained constant between seasons.

The authors, being perception researchers, ascribed a different mechanism to this - They suggest that seasonally, your exposure to body types vary. In the summer, males are exposed to more female bodies than in the winter. Though I'm not sure I agree with their hypothesis, I've an anecdote to illustrate this. I was waiting at ADFG for the winter antlerless permits, like the idiot I was. There were a great number of people in line during that -40 snap we had, and you got to talking to stave off boredom (and to take your mind off the cold we were standing in for hours and hours). I spend quite the while talking to someone named Red (the third Red I've met, not counting people called Kavirliq).

Well, fastforward a bit to when it's only -20°C, and a partner and I were going down a mountain when one of our Snowmachines got stuck. We're trying to get it unstuck, when Red and a few others come down the trail behind us. They graciously help us dig it out of the mess we got stuck on... but I couldn't help but notice that Red wasn't a male, like I'd assumed before. She wasn't wearing all her heavy winter gear, and so you could quite distinctly notice she was a her, albeit a tall "her" with a lower voice, but otherwise unquestionably female. You just couldn't tell before, because all the clothes.

Now this is an extreme example. Most of the time, you interact with people indoors, and they're not wearing carharts, a parka, a face mask, a trapper's hat, musher's mitts and bunnyboots. But humans do tend to wear long sleeves and pants, along with looser fitting garments and bulkier clothes in the winter. This is to contrast with Summer, when it's shorts and T-shirts all around. The authors argue chronic exposure to one setting or the other is what leads to acclimatization, and therefore varying the threshold of `what is attractive.` My own thinking runs more toward seasonal fluctuations of hormone titres, but I've minimal evidence to support this.

Citation:

Perception. 2008;37(7):1079-85.

Men's attraction to women's bodies changes seasonally.
Pawlowski B, Sorokowski P.