Studies have generated a range of rates of "non-paternity events". There's an article with more details in this month's The Atlantic (subscription required):
"When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can't help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold."
"Non-paternity rates appear to be substantially lower in some populations. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which is based in Salt Lake City, now has a genetic and genealogical database covering almost 100,000 volunteers, with an overrepresentation of people interested in genealogy. The non-paternity rate for a representative sample of its father-son pairs is less than 2 percent. But other reputed non-paternity rates are higher than the canonical numbers. One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
A large fraction of the Asian nationals who earn their PhDs in the US stay in the US, so it's not clear that it makes sense to ignore these students. For instance, 10 year stay rates for Chinese nationals who earned their PhDs in the US are over 90% (see http://scienceweek.com/2004/sc040730-6.htm); China is the largest source of non-US-citizen PhDs earned in the US.
If you insist, though, here's the data:
PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences and engineering in 2003: 15,669
PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences in 2003: 13,506
...is that Mitt has bogus information. The US graduated 25,258 science and engineering PhDs in 2003 and has been generating comparable numbers for over a decade. 25,258 > 24,900. If you just restrict yourself to science PhDs, the number is still ~20,000 PhDs per year in the US.
>Hence I posit that: Decreasing the cost of engineering and chemists will do nothing to increase the United States' >competitiveness in these scientific endeavors
Yes, this is precisely the problem. There is plenty of evidence in the labor market economics literature that shows that career prospects influence students' choice of undergraduate major and decision to go to grad school. See, for example, http://www.phds.org/reading/freeman/index.html -- when science careers pay well compared to other options for smart people (say, law or business), then more undergrads pursue science careers. When science careers fare badly, some students choose other options. Money isn't the deciding factor for all (or even most) students; rather, there is a pool of "swing voters" who are on the fence, and they are the ones most subject to economic influences.
Universities do a great job of making sure the PhDs they crank out know their stuff; they do a mediocre job of preparing them to be effective as professors (some places do a great job, most do not), and a lousy job of preparing people to enter the real world. A better prescription than bribing undergrads to do something they would not otherwise choose to do would be to try to create some hybrid MBA / science PhD programs that crank out people who know how to take all the promising research work to market. Make science a good road to wealth and you won't have this problem.
It sounds like these XML mail header tags will help my mail from getting routed straight to/dev/null, and I would be happy to provide my Congressperson's staffers with an easy way to verify that I am indeed a constituent. I did a google search for more information, but did not turn up anything. Is the spec an open one? Or do I have to send my mail through a consortium member to have my e-voice heard?
Greener munitions and fuel have the potential benefit of substantially reducing the costs of weapons training, testing, storage, and disposal. The military currently spends huge amounts of money cleaning up toxic waste at bases and test ranges. If you're spending your defense budget keeping old weapons toxins out of the ground water and paying out medical expenses of soldiers exposed to low level radiation or chemical toxins, you're not going to have much left for actual defense. The effectiveness and efficiency of the military is a function of its entire end-to-end set of tasks and expenses, not just on its ability to procure weapons.
Keeping your genes in the pool requires not just that you survive, but also that you reproduce. The factors that determine how organisms choose their mates are powerful drivers of how a species evolves.
For example, male peacocks have tails that are a pretty strong impediment to survival. A bird has to consume a lot of resources to grow the thing, and I would imagine a huge tail is tough to lug around through the woods. Suppose for whatever reason that some set of female birds develops a preference for males with large tails. Those males get to reproduce more, so more large tail genes end up in the pool. Since females with the preference mate with the large-tailed males, they are likely to pass on this preference, since their male progeny produce lots of offspring. The result is a positive feedback loop, and you end up with animals having all sorts of strange features that don't necessarily have much to do with survival. (It's currently believed that the tail is a signalling device that gives female birds an idea of how healthy the male is, so the tail isn't a complete waste)
The point is, although economic prosperity and health care advances have reduced the impact of a lot of the forces of natural selection in many parts of the world, sexual selection will continue to drive human evolution. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley has a fascinating discussion on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Studies have generated a range of rates of "non-paternity events". There's an article with more details in this month's The Atlantic (subscription required):
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/paternity
From the article:
"When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can't help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold."
"Non-paternity rates appear to be substantially lower in some populations. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which is based in Salt Lake City, now has a genetic and genealogical database covering almost 100,000 volunteers, with an overrepresentation of people interested in genealogy. The non-paternity rate for a representative sample of its father-son pairs is less than 2 percent. But other reputed non-paternity rates are higher than the canonical numbers. One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."
A large fraction of the Asian nationals who earn their PhDs in the US stay in the US, so it's not clear that it makes sense to ignore these students. For instance, 10 year stay rates for Chinese nationals who earned their PhDs in the US are over 90% (see http://scienceweek.com/2004/sc040730-6.htm); China is the largest source of non-US-citizen PhDs earned in the US.
If you insist, though, here's the data:
PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences and engineering in 2003: 15,669
PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences in 2003: 13,506
Still way more than 4400.
...is that Mitt has bogus information. The US graduated 25,258 science and engineering PhDs in 2003 and has been generating comparable numbers for over a decade. 25,258 > 24,900. If you just restrict yourself to science PhDs, the number is still ~20,000 PhDs per year in the US.
See for yourself: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05300/dst.htm
>Hence I posit that: Decreasing the cost of engineering and chemists will do nothing to increase the United States'
>competitiveness in these scientific endeavors
Yes, this is precisely the problem. There is plenty of evidence in the labor market economics literature that shows that career prospects influence students' choice of undergraduate major and decision to go to grad school. See, for example, http://www.phds.org/reading/freeman/index.html -- when science careers pay well compared to other options for smart people (say, law or business), then more undergrads pursue science careers. When science careers fare badly, some students choose other options. Money isn't the deciding factor for all (or even most) students; rather, there is a pool of "swing voters" who are on the fence, and they are the ones most subject to economic influences.
Universities do a great job of making sure the PhDs they crank out know their stuff; they do a mediocre job of preparing them to be effective as professors (some places do a great job, most do not), and a lousy job of preparing people to enter the real world. A better prescription than bribing undergrads to do something they would not otherwise choose to do would be to try to create some hybrid MBA / science PhD programs that crank out people who know how to take all the promising research work to market. Make science a good road to wealth and you won't have this problem.
It sounds like these XML mail header tags will help my mail from getting routed straight to /dev/null, and I would be happy to provide my Congressperson's staffers with an easy way to verify that I am indeed a constituent. I did a google search for more information, but did not turn up anything. Is the spec an open one? Or do I have to send my mail through a consortium member to have my e-voice heard?
Greener munitions and fuel have the potential benefit of substantially reducing the costs of weapons training, testing, storage, and disposal. The military currently spends huge amounts of money cleaning up toxic waste at bases and test ranges. If you're spending your defense budget keeping old weapons toxins out of the ground water and paying out medical expenses of soldiers exposed to low level radiation or chemical toxins, you're not going to have much left for actual defense. The effectiveness and efficiency of the military is a function of its entire end-to-end set of tasks and expenses, not just on its ability to procure weapons.
For example, male peacocks have tails that are a pretty strong impediment to survival. A bird has to consume a lot of resources to grow the thing, and I would imagine a huge tail is tough to lug around through the woods. Suppose for whatever reason that some set of female birds develops a preference for males with large tails. Those males get to reproduce more, so more large tail genes end up in the pool. Since females with the preference mate with the large-tailed males, they are likely to pass on this preference, since their male progeny produce lots of offspring. The result is a positive feedback loop, and you end up with animals having all sorts of strange features that don't necessarily have much to do with survival. (It's currently believed that the tail is a signalling device that gives female birds an idea of how healthy the male is, so the tail isn't a complete waste)
The point is, although economic prosperity and health care advances have reduced the impact of a lot of the forces of natural selection in many parts of the world, sexual selection will continue to drive human evolution. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley has a fascinating discussion on the subject.
2.718