What advice would people give to someone who struggles with delaying gratification?

At its core, this is a question about habits, specifically, how to lose harmful habits and how to make beneficial ones. Requires focus, discipline and persistence. To do what? To invest the time and energy necessary to accurately diagnose the three essential parts of a habit, namely, it's cue, reward and routine. A few years back, Charles Duhigg came up with this comprehensive infographic to help deconstruct habits.

As the graphic explains, accurate diagnosis is necessary and requires time, energy and interest to experiment. Experimentation in turn is necessary to uncover the cue and reward system underlying a harmful habit.

A crucial idea is Keystone Habit, i.e., the power of some habits to trigger a chain reaction of other habits. An ecological concept that finds its place in anything from healthy microbiota to sociology, implicit in keystone is the notion that some habits are simply more powerful than others. Thus, the process of deconstructing habits involves as well identifying those that are keystone. Unsurprisingly, willpower or self-discipline is a core keystone habit. 

For e.g., some weight-loss studies showed that forcing oneself to form the new habit of keeping and logging entries in a food journal, i.e., a food log, turned out to have unexpected benefits. For many participants a once-weekly exercise even became daily and helped them notice previously undiscerned patterns in their behavior, plan healthier menus and make more conscious decisions about eating healthier food. Though Duhigg wrote an entire book on the Power of Habit, his New York Times article on the same topic is sufficient to get the idea: How Companies Learn Your Secrets

 

Obviously an obstacle in the quest to change habits, cognitive dissonance is another necessary factor to consider. It arises from different systems we have for assigning value. Thus, diagnosing the source of conflict between different valuation systems with respect to a harmful habit, say, habitual unhealthy snacking, is also necessary (see figures below from Rangel, Antonio, Colin Camerer, and P. Read Montague. "A framework for studying the neurobiology of value-based decision making." Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9.7 (2008): 545-556. http://worthylab.tamu.edu/Course...).

Other tips that could help include

• Starting with baby steps, i.e., scaling down the scale of change one seeks, something not so easy to do since the ego often demands or seeks a much more ambitious scope. However, though difficult, setting realistic goals is necessary.
• Not giving up immediately at the first sign of setback.
• Being patient with and forgiving of oneself.

Finally, any number of tips and tricks aren't going to do the trick by themselves. Habit is the result of many, largely unconscious, decision making processes. Intellectually deconstructing them can be relatively easy, even fun. Emotionally engaging with the process is the hard part. Unless engaged in the process both intellectually and emotionally, habit changing is likely to fail.

https://www.quora.com/What-advice-would-people-give-to-someone-who-struggles-with-delaying-gratification/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Why are research papers on things that have no practical benefit for society funded by the government? This topic came up in reference to how an ideal government should function.

Ideal government. Ideal for whom? One person's meat is famously another person's poison.

Averaging <5%, R&D is a minuscule part of government expenditure
It's misleading to debate government spending on research in general, and on so-called 'frivolous' research in particular without considering the total amount of government spending. Governments spend a lot of money on lots of things. What proportion is on R&D? Minuscule. That's as true in the US (2.85% of 2011 GDP spent on R&D) as it is in India (0.76% of 2007 GDP spent on R&D) (see table below), where the already meager amount the government spends on R&D is only decreasing, not increasing. By and large, governments, especially the larger, wealthier ones tend to spend astronomical amounts on stockpiling weapons and munitions even when millions of their citizens don't get enough to eat. Scope and scale of arguably frivolous public funded R&D literally fades into insignificance when examined from this perspective.

 
As for everyone having the basic necessities, is there even one country to have succeeded in this endeavor? With its share of the poor and homeless, even the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, the US, is unable to ensure that every one of its citizens has the basic necessities. Should its government should stop funding basic R&D? That's tortured logic or more accurately, torturing logic.

Practical benefits of science are typically unforeseeable
How to assess the value of government-funded research? Is it only that which yields immediate practical use? We'd then have to include German Nobel prize winner, Fritz Haber, whose weaponization of chlorine gas was of obvious immediate practical benefit to his country's government during the First World War. Rather than laudable, the point of this inglorious and downright shameful example is to highlight the folly of focusing exclusively on foreseeable practical benefits of public funded R&D.

History also teaches that many things of immediate practical benefit turn out be long-term banes. Developed accidentally by Allied industrial chemists trying to help their side win the Second World War, the self-evident practical benefits of plastics such as polyethylene meant that the post-WWII human took to using it in unprecedented numbers and in arguably all aspects of life. Emblematic of long-term bane, toxic chemicals such as BPA (bisphenol-A) and phytoestrogens leaching from plastics cause long-term damage to the health of not just humans but other life forms as well while plastic refuse is quite literally choking ocean life itself to death as a vast toxic plastic landmass builds on the Pacific Ocean.

Thus immediate, foreseeable practical outcome alone is an inadequate benchmark to judge the value of public funded R&D. OTOH, public funded R&D has several, largely invisible long-term benefits to society. At the very least, it helps establish research infrastructure and culture, i.e., a scientific temper among its populace. An invaluable common good, can't put a price on scientific temper. It also provides stable, gainful, long-term employment to many. Even if their scientific output is middling, their consumption helps the country's economy. Educated people are also more likely to invest in their children's education. Predicated on the way in which social networks operate, this in turn further helps embed scientific temper within the larger society.

Another self-evident truth to consider is that smart people are unlikely to waste their talent and time on research projects that they find unfulfilling. If public funded R&D is indeed disproportionately spent on fruitless fishing expeditions, it's more likely to be the output of careerist scientists, and as we explored already, there's value to be mined from their ranks as well.

As for highly abstract notions with no foreseeable practical benefit, what could be more emblematic of that than Quantum mechanics? Its calling card, casual defiance of Newtonian mechanics, the very stuff of woolly-headed dreaminess. And yet from lasers and transistors to cancer diagnostics (MRI; Magnetic Resonance Imaging), a long line of practically unforeseen practical benefits have ensued from it over the past century.

Since innovation isn't a command function, the wild card of serendipity weaves the necessary magic
Practicalities aside, is innovation even a command function? Even a cursory look at the history of science leads to incontrovertibly conclude no. Rather, innovation through the ages shares the common thread of serendipity.

According to Royston M. Roberts, after reading the fairy tale adventures of 'The Three Princes of Serendip' (i.e., Serendib or Ceylon or Sri Lanka), who 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...', Horace Walpole coined this word in a letter to his friend Sir Horace Mann, 1st Baronet in 1754 to explain the basis of his own accidental discoveries (Amazon.com: Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science (9780471602033): Royston M. Roberts: Books). The list of serendipitous discoveries is legendary, legion and grows by the day. From X-rays and Quinine to Penicillin and Velcro to Oral Contraceptives and Viagra.

However, serendipity is not synonymous with accident. As Pasteur famously said, 'chance favors only the prepared mind'. Thus, innovation can't be ordered into existence nor can one stumble into it by accident. Yet many of the most important discoveries were the product of serendipity, which is accidental discovery but not accident. What gives? Insatiable curiosity, and breadth and depth of knowledge certainly seem to be the common mainstays among these famous examples. What else?

When Carl Djerassi was hired in 1949 to lead a research team at Syntex, 'an oral contraceptive was not in anyone's plans' (Amazon.com: Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science (9780471602033): Royston M. Roberts: Books). An ancillary goal of his team was to synthesize a molecule that could mimic the biological effect of estradiol, a female hormone used for treating puberty- and menopause-related disorders. Instead they accidentally ended up synthesizing one that mimicked progesterone. Progesterone, of course, is 'nature's contraceptive' since it inhibits ovulation during pregnancy. Thus, the first oral contraceptive resulted from serendipity, not from a utilitarian command directive from management on high. Freeing womanhood, indeed society itself, from the drudgery and curse of unplanned pregnancy, it can be argued that woman's liberation itself may not have been possible without the serendipitous oral contraceptive.

Djerassi's team's goal was synthetic estradiol. Rigidly sticking to their programmatic goal would have dictated throwing the artificial progesterone in the trash. A prepared mind means to be able to accurately appraise the value of accidental discoveries, as Dejrassi's team did. This isn't something programmable by a rationally designed utilitarian system. Rather it's inculcated within a larger cultural framework that values curiosity and the capacity to synthesize knowledge from information, and that imbues an intuitive sense of value.

I recently read an article on Rajaram Bhapkar. Much like the indomitable Dashrath Manjhi, made famous in a recent Bollywood film, who connected his village with the outside world through his own backbreaking labor, Bhapkar built roads in the craggy hillsides surrounding his village on his own initiative. The astonishing innovation? 'On a particularly challenging downhill road from Khandoba mandir, Bhapkar asked a few engineers for help. When they refused, he turned to two donkeys. He filled two bags with gravel and pierced holes in them, tied them to the donkeys and sent them downhill. He then constructed the road on the trail left by the gravel. “Now, structural engineers visit and tell me it is a marvel and ask who is the engineer behind it. I point to the donkeys,” said Bhapkar, with a laugh (Mountain man and donkeys). That's ingenuity of the highest order. Not a degree from Harvard or MIT or IIT but sheer undeniable native ingenuity.

As long as human societies continue to throw up the Rajaram Bhapkars in our midst, innovations will remain reliable engines. That's a takeaway for sure. Role of governments? Innovation not being a command function, it would suffice if governments are able to rein in the addictive and hypnotic hold of political expedience and power long enough to engender a culture that stably values and upholds scientific temper within its midst, come what may.



https://www.quora.com/Why-are-research-papers-on-things-that-have-no-practical-benefit-for-society-funded-by-the-government/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What questions can I expect to recieve at a science congress? I submited a poster to a medical student congress and my topic is ECG changes in long-term cannabis users (I did an ecg on 40 young adults to see the long term effects of cannabis consumption). What kind of questions might the board ask me after my presentation? I'm nervous.

Nervousness presenting data in front of peers and experts. Especially experts. They know so much more. No way to know everything about the subject or all the answers to all the possible questions the experts could ask. Seems like a surefire recipe for public embarrassment. Starting out in science where data and poster presentations are par for the course, these kinds of non-productive ruminations are commonplace. Since I'm not an expert on heart physiology, ECG, cannabis and its effects on physiology, I can't provide a list of possible questions about your poster. However, I'm going to suggest a way to approach your predicament that empowers you during your poster presentation and relieves the nervousness. In fact it's an empowering way to approach poster and data presentations in general so the particulars are moot anyway.

In hindsight, spending time trying to think of all the possible questions someone might ask and trying to prepare adequate responses is a waste of time. A realization that was an epiphany for me showed me why. The epiphany was that no one can know work I did as well as me. When we present data from work we did, we are the best experts on it simply because we did it. We know everything about it A to Z in a way no one else possibly could.

If there is one thing you could take away from this answer, I hope it would be that no one at that congress or anywhere else for that matter could possibly know as much about the work in your poster as you do. You did the ECG on those subjects, you know all the little details that went into that work because you did them.

Yes, this is a psychological tool to feel self-confident when presenting in front of an expert audience but one that's rooted in fact. It's just a fact that's not easily self-evident, that the person who does a piece of work is the world's greatest expert on that piece of work simply because they did it.

If it helps, you could also think of your study and the wider world it belongs in in terms of the microcosm and macrocosm, respectively. The microcosm? Something on which you are the expert and no one else, what you did, why you did it, even the mistakes you made and the limitations of the study. The macrocosm? The implications, the past studies that led to your study, heart physiology, the ECG technique, cannabis and its effects on physiology. The macrocosm is where the experts and their pesky questions enter the picture. You likely know some of that macrocosm but not all and likely some experts at that medical student congress will know more, and that's the source of your nervousness. But hopefully, now your nervousness will be tempered by the fact that even those experts can't compete with you in the domain in which you alone will be the expert at that poster presentation, the microcosm, the work you did.

This approach relieves the mind of all that pressure of performance, replacing non-productive rumination with productive focus. Now, even if you don't know all possible questions and their answers, instead of being only a source of embarrassment to turn away from with all haste, an unanticipated question during your poster presentation becomes an opportunity to engage with the asker. More than anything else, it allows the mind to enter the scene open to engagement rather than anticipating to flee, and that makes all the difference.

https://www.quora.com/What-questions-can-I-expect-to-recieve-at-a-science-congress/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Do western drug companies test more dangerous drugs on the poor in India, and should they be held accountable?

Doubtless, regardless of their location, badly run clinical trials are anathema, delaying development of much-needed treatments and cures, shaking public confidence in biomedical research, and eroding public trust in the biopharmaceutical enterprise.

Who's accountable for clinical trial mishaps in India?

Let's not forget that a clinical trial in India typically has multiple partners, only one or few of whom may be a foreign entity funding the trial, be it a pharma company or a non-profit. When a clinical trial goes wrong, who's responsible? Only the foreign entity? If someone answers yes, they also have to explain why, something impossible to do. OTOH, vilifying only the foreign partner(s), one of the many entities involved in a clinical trial, certainly makes for some easy poutrage. For example, in the case in question, the Phase V HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) vaccine trials consisted not of dangerous drugs, as the question sensationally asserts, but rather of two HPV vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, approved for use in many countries years ago, with the former approved in 121 countries as of 2011 (1). As well, it wasn't sponsored by a western drug company but by PATH (global health organization), a non-profit that over the years has become the largest beneficiary of public health funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. So with the predictable misinformation out of the way, let's examine global clinical trial responsibility through this trial's lens.

Typically, foreign drug companies can't conduct clinical trials directly. They need local partners, for legal, logistical, operational and cultural reasons, partners such as ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research), DCGI (Drug Controller General of India), state and central governments, different ministries, public health departments, etc., who know the local laws, rules, regulations and language, and most importantly know and/or oversee the local infrastructure. Thus emerges a daisy chain of partners with different expertise and priorities. Issue is whether each of these partners is equally well-versed in conducting clinical trials.

With decades of experience under its belt, the foreign pharma or non-profit entity knows or should know how to conduct clinical trials. OTOH, the local partners may typically not be as well-versed, especially in crucial details such as importance of informed consent, and need for careful monitoring and reporting of adverse events. These weren't learned by clinical trial professionals in one smooth, fell swoop either. Countries well-versed in conducting clinical trials today went through their share of the learning curve, unfortunately often at the expense of hapless trial participants. *, **, ***, ****.

What about the responsibilities of the local partners? Each trial partner has a stake in ensuring that clinical trials uphold the highest standards of ethics and medical care, all of which which begs the question why they would be or ever become badly run in the first place. As clinical trials increasingly globalize, hiccups are inevitable because the core issue is culture clash. From all accounts, this was the situation with this Indian clinical trial. How well trial partners communicate across their daisy chain, particularly in plugging crucial knowledge gaps with respect to risks and risk assessments, is key. Not sufficient to explain what to do when and how but also why. If the local partner on the ground pays lip service to informed consent or adverse outcome monitoring, it's not just a question of who's responsible but also why it turned out that way. This is where cultural differences weigh in. Maybe the foreign trial partner explained what adequately but not why. So, who's responsible? Everyone involved, not just the foreign entity. Investigations revealed the trial in question had a two-fold problem (2, 3).

1. Informed consent, a cornerstone of clinical trials. Medicine already walks a tightrope between patient autonomy and welfare. Life itself doesn't come with a risk-free guarantee so it's unrealistic to expect medicine, let alone experimental medicine, to do so. This is only accentuated in a clinical trial, where the risks of a possible drug/intervention remain largely unknown. After all, one of the purposes of clinical trials is to reveal such risks. Clinical trial participants need to understand these risks as fully as they can, understand that their participation comes with inherent risks. Sometimes those risks may be minor such as local, temporary injection site reactions yet they range all the way to life-threatening. Comprehensively explaining these risks is the purpose of informed consent. Since this trial involved minors, parents/guardians were required to give informed consent. Instead in thousands of cases, teachers and school principals were found to have signed them, even when the children concerned had parents/guardians.

2. Adverse effect, another cornerstone of clinical trials. One of the purposes of clinical trials is to carefully monitor and assess harmful effects of any drugs/interventions. Perhaps nowhere else is the phrase, 'safety in numbers' more appropriate than in medicine. More people assessed for a drug/vaccine's safety during its journey to approval through the clinical trial process, more robust the data that underpin its safety profile. Investigations revealed this particular trial had paid lip-service to monitoring and recording adverse events.

As an entity well-versed in clinical trials, PATH, the foreign non-profit that conducted this trial had no excuse whatsoever for the lapses in informed consent and adverse effect monitoring. What about the local partners though, ICMR, DCGI, the state governments of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh where these trials were held, the schools the girl participants were recruited from? After all, as we proceed lower down the daisy chain, don't we also come closer to increasing personal responsibility for the welfare of minors? Thus, in this case, ICMR and DCGI also bear responsibility at the national level while the local governments, and local departments of education, public health and child health bear responsibility at the local level. Public scrutiny of clinical trial mishaps is a public good only when it's accurate and impartial.

Other open questions which remain unanswered:

• Did PATH adequately train and monitor the ground staff, especially on the issues of informed consent and adverse event monitoring?
• Did ICMR and DCGI monitor and ensure that PATH adequately trained the ground staff?
• Who monitored the ground staff during the course of the trial? Was it PATH, ICMR, DCGI, local public health department? Was the monitoring responsibility clearly delineated and did it have checks and balances?
• What kind of recording and monitoring systems were in place to ensure participant safety?

More entities involved, more difficult to identify and assign blame. Be it an individual or group, taking responsibility when things go wrong is often akin to the proverbial flying pig. Yet mishaps like this trial offer an opportunity to examine and improve the global clinical trial blueprint, especially the weak links in the chain the open questions reveal. Finally, when it comes to accountability, it's not just a question of who but also how. With respect to how, monetary fines could be imposed on the foreign entity. What about the local partners? Reprimand or fire local and/or senior officials? Obviously, when it comes to global clinical trials, more productive to develop processes for accountability ahead of time, not impose them ad-hoc in a haphazard and reactionary manner. In particular, potential legal redressals need to be developed proactively.

Potential benefits of clinical trials to countries like India

Self-righteous indignation can easily create a fog that obscures sound thinking. Clinical trials are hugely expensive. A more pragmatic approach shows that basing them in countries like India could be a common good from multiple standpoints,

1. Drug companies save costs substantially. Less it costs to bring a drug to market, lower the drug company needs to price it to recuperate R&D costs. In other words, drug companies lose the fig leaf of high R&D costs in pricing new drugs outrageously.

2. Historically, drugs approved post-WW II were largely tested on white men. That's hardly representative of the global human population. By basing clinical trials in countries like India, the diversity of population tested increases, theoretically improving drug efficacy and safety profile data.

3. Conducting clinical trials in countries like India can be an opportunity for meaningful technology transfer. As life expectancy increases globally, healthcare consumes increasing proportions of countries' wealth and infrastructure. Need for more novel drugs and therapies is becoming more, not less, inevitable. In turn, conducting more clinical trials to develop them becomes more, not less, inevitable. Makes it all the more worthwhile for a country like India to thoroughly learn how to conduct them properly, rigorously and ethically.

4. Conducting clinical trials is and should be considered an opportunity for a country to use as leverage to bargain to gain better access and price to drugs and therapies, both old and novel, for its population. 

* Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Why is informed consent important in clinical trials?

** Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Is it true that Bill Gates faced trial in India for illegally testing tribal children with vaccines?

** Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Should we have an international forum to resolve clinical trial mishaps?

**** Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Do you believe placebos are morally permissible? Why or why not?

Bibliography

1. Haupt, Richard M., and Heather L. Sings. "The efficacy and safety of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus 6/11/16/18 vaccine Gardasil." Journal of Adolescent Health 49.5 (2011): 467-475.

2. Final Report of the Committee appointed by the Govt. of India, (vide notification No. V.25011/160/2010 - HR dated 15th April, 2010,) to enquire into“Alleged irregularities in the conduct of studies  using Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine” by PATH in India, Feb 15, 2011. http://icmr.nic.in/final/HPV%20P...

3. PARLIAMENT OF  INDIA RAJYASABHA  DEPARTMENT-RELATED PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE SEVENTY-SECOND REPORT On ALLEGED IRREGULARITIES IN THE CONDUCT OF STUDIES USING HUMAN PAPILLOMA VIRUS (HPV) VACCINE BY PATH IN INDIA (DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH RESEARCH, MINISTRY OF HEALTH AND FAMILY WELFARE) (Presented to the Rajya Sabha on 30th August, 2013) (Laid on the Table of Lok Sabha on 30th August, 2013). http://www.preventdisease.com/ne...

https://www.quora.com/Do-western-drug-companies-test-more-dangerous-drugs-on-the-poor-in-India-and-should-they-be-held-accountable/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Intelligence: How can we make memorization more fun?

First, let's examine the question's premise a bit. Should memorization be fun and is fun generalizable? For e.g., bungee jumping is surely fun for some but unlikely to be fun for someone deathly scared of heights. Another related issue is whether making memorization fun makes it more effective. After all, when the outcome, i.e., the study subject, is inherently uninteresting to a pupil, there's only so much that process could contribute. Any number of mnemonic tools, tricks and now even apps like Memrise (1, 2) claim to have cracked the code for effective memorization. However, an age-old tradition steeped in hidebound conservatism and which has remained seemingly unchanged for thousands of years probably has them all beat when it comes to 1) effectiveness, 2) absence of fun, and 3) applicability to everyone, not just those innately endowed with superior memory abilities.

Non-fun memorization can be exceptionally effective

Wouldn't an unbroken oral memorization tradition conservatively estimated to have lasted ~3000 years suggest exceptional effectiveness? Rote memorization involving elaborate mnemonic techniques, Vedic chant, including traditional face-to-face oral training, this cultural peculiarity of the Indian sub-continent provides durable, empirical data that memorization needn't be fun to be effective and long-lasting.

Conservatively estimated to have originated in the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age India, the Vedas have been passed down for ~3000 years in an unbroken tradition, largely orally in the initial millenia.

What's this memorization process? Starting at a young age, typically between 9 and 12 years of age, children, mainly boys, train in memorizing Vedic texts daily for 8 to 10 hours for ~ 7 years in Vedic Patashalas (Vedic Pandit Training Schools). Each of these texts contains 40,000 to 100,000 words apiece. The process involves learning the exact intonation and accompanying hand gestures. In this manner, the initial 7 years of training totals ~20,000 hours.

Effective, nay stupendous, non-fun memorization is possible even without pre-selection for innate memory ability

All well and good but what makes this rote memorization process even more compelling is participants aren't selected using any selection process or entrance exam that tests for innate memory or recitation abilities. For example, in a 2015 peer-reviewed study (3) published in the journal NeuroImage, none of the trainee Pandits tested came from 'traditional family lineages of reciters'. Even more remarkable, the Vedic Patashala dropout rate is reportedly a low 5%.

The study (3), a collaboration between the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, and the National Brain Research Centre, Haryana, India, 'conducted structural analysis of gray matter density, cortical thickness, local gyrification, and white matter structure, relative to matched controls', and 'found massive gray matter density and cortical thickness increases in Pandit brains in language, memory and visual systems, including i) bilateral lateral temporal cortices and ii) the anterior cingulate cortex and the hippocampus, regions associated with long and short-term memory’ (3).

Albeit in the narrow sphere of rote memorization of extremely specialized material, the continuing existence of both process (a specific oral learning tradition) and product (the Vedas) is proof positive that this training system's very effective. All the more remarkable considering it's survived the entire gamut of historical vagaries, wars, invasions, famines, colonization and the like. As the authors of the study (3) state, 'while the ability of Yajurveda Pandits to perform large-scale, precise oral memorization and recitation of Vedic Sanskrit texts may, prima facie, appear extraordinary or bordering on impossible, textual memorization and recitation are in fact standard practice in traditional Sanskrit education in India...while the Pandit's memorization capacity may appear unique to graduates of a Western educational system, it is one of several memorization-related study traditions current in the Indian subcontinent'.

What could explain the success of such a presumably non-fun memorization program?

1) A group activity (see picture below from 5), i.e., shared commitment and sacrifice of time and effort, may help better engage the mind in the learning process.

2) Discipline and practice as in every day for several hours per day. In this regard, the process is uncannily similar to the process of spatial memorization techniques revealed in the famous London Taxi Driver study (4), which found the phenomenal memorization capacity of the archetypal London taxi driver involved learning not just expert spatial navigation but also 'rote memorization of a large volume of preset verbal sequences' (3), i.e., ~30,000 street and place names 'in 320 set sequences totaling ~120,000 words, with part-time training over ~3 to 5 years' (3). In fact, the 2015 Vedic Pandit trainee study (3) found similar hippocampal differences to those reported in the London taxi driver study, i.e., generalizable memorization principles are at work in two different processes, textual versus textual-spatial, in two different cultures.

3) The student's not alone. His teacher, the guru, is equally invested in the student's learning. Let's recall this is an oral learning tradition. It requires Guru-Shishya (teacher-student) face-to-face training.

4) Continuous practice. Once trained, most students go on to become either Vedic teachers themselves or priests.  In any case, they continue at least ~3 hours of daily recitation. This continuing practice ensures memorized material's retained over time.

This memorization system offers some general principles for effective memorization, namely, having a partner/partners who participate(s) in the learning process, and more importantly a teacher who's evidently heavily invested in the student's learning, and regular practice, something that requires discipline more than fun. The former, having a partner, may be helpful for topics/subjects engaging little by way of innate interest, for e.g., memorizing just for tests and exams.

More importantly, given its unbroken lineage of thousands of years and therefore unparalleled success in rote memorization, the Vedic memorization process offers the world a unique test-bed. Modern scientific investigation should research it to deconstruct its processes and thereby make its general memorization principles and practices available for the benefit of all.

Bibliography

1. BBC News, David Robson, May 1, 2015. How to supercharge the way you learn

2. BBC News, David Robson, March 7, 2014. How to learn like a memory champion

3. Hartzell, James F., et al. "Brains of verbal memory specialists show anatomical differences in language, memory and visual systems." NeuroImage (2015). http://ac.els-cdn.com/S105381191...

4. Maguire, Eleanor A., et al. "Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97.8 (2000): 4398-4403. http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8...

5. The Hindu, Suganthy Krishnamachari. October 8, 2015. http://www.thehindu.com/features...

https://www.quora.com/Intelligence/How-can-we-make-memorization-more-fun/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

How economically advanced are the slums in India? What kinds of products do they produce?

'How economically advanced are the slums in India?'
Advanced is a loaded word in general and especially so in the context of slums. Generally, we're taught to denigrate slums and look down on people who live there. The truth is, in the face of both governmental inertia and societal apathy, slums develop out of necessity and are a veritable bee-hive of economic activity and resourcefulness, the likes of which are unprecedented in all other social strata and endeavors. Not only that, over time, the economic activity of slums becomes the very life blood of not only cities in which they exist but through the inexorable process of globalization, its tentacles feed every part of global economic activity. Nowhere is this truism clearer than in Dharavi, the sprawling slum at the heart of Mumbai, India's most populous city, and its financial and entertainment capital.

Dharavi's location: very economically advanced

• To its north, the Mahim-Sion link road
• To its south-west, the central railway line
• To its south, the western railway line
• Close proximity to Mumbai's newest, swankiest business district, the Bandra Kurla Complex.
• Thus, Dharavi is surrounded by 4 railway stations, several bus-lines, and is close to both international and domestic airports of Mumbai (1).
• Location-wise it doesn't get better than this (see figures below from 2, 3, 4), especially for swamp land that a little more than a century back was deemed worthless, and thus ignored and neglected by governments.
• Total area? ~550 acres (~175 hectares), i.e., smaller than New York's Central Park, but with an estimated, astounding density of ~18000 people per acre in some areas, i.e., 6 to 8X more dense than Manhattan.
• Even densities of up to 336, 643 have been measured in some areas of Dharavi (5).

A very brief history of Dharavi explains why its location is now so economically advanced

• Predating the current city of Mumbai, in the late 17th century, local Koli fishermen lived in the swamp lands near the Mithi River.
• Recognizing the great potential of a natural harbor, in 1534 the Portuguese captured seven separate islands, the as-yet-non-existent Mumbai, which became a wedding gift to England's Charles II in 1662.
• Promising 'free settlement, freedom of religion and unregulated trade', the British East India Company encouraged internal migration to stock the growing city with the labor necessary to feed its global trade from this vital port city (1).
• Starting in the 1800s, the city of Mumbai began reclaiming land to accommodate its increasing population. Over time, the reclaimed land in the swampy areas near Mahim river became Dharavi (3).
• The government back then considered Dharavi unfit for inhabitation.
• Swamp land near-impossible to build on, inconveniently far from the then city center, deemed of no interest.
• For a century, impoverished migrants from all over India seeking economic opportunity in the booming port city had little choice but to settle in places like Dharavi.
• It was 'unregulated, available and free of cost' (1).
• As the city of Mumbai grew further north from its southern base, communities labeled undesirable were forcibly evicted to the then city edges, i.e., nearer to Dharavi.
• The impoverished migrants provided a ready supply of cheap labor and conveniently in return, the city, government, employers needed to provide little in terms of services.
• Not housing, not stable employment, nor health care, let alone investment in terms of insurance and pensions.
• New migrants and the original inhabitants, the Kolis, developed the land themselves, without any government support.
• Over time, families and relatives of pioneer migrants came to settle and Dharavi's population grew in distinct patterns of caste, religion and occupation.
• As the then city proper South Mumbai boomed, those unable to afford housing there also gravitated towards Dharavi.
• Historically, the colonial overlords lived in the wealthier South Mumbai and that old class divide still brands the city even as it consumes its neighboring environs in its insatiable appetite for growth (see figure below from 6).
• In the process and over time, Mumbai's growth around and beyond the previously shunned and derided Dharavi has today made it one of the most monetarily valuable and coveted real estates in the world.

• Eventually, with the city council being forced to recognize Dharavi as part of Mumbai's central municipality (7), a few public toilets and water taps were installed.
• With this denominational change, Dharavi residents earned at least a modicum of respect.
• Estimated anywhere from half a million to a million in number, they'd become important vote banks for local politicians.
• Ever since, they exist in a constant tussle between their original no man's land identity limned in sheer pluck and ingenuity, and the western-oriented dreams of politicians, city planners and Mumbai's middle class who aspire to live in a 'world-class' city, whatever that means.
• Already there's a pattern to note. Cities attract two types of migrants, those considered desirable and the rest, undesirable.
• The former tend to be the affluent or middle class while the latter are typically the rural impoverished who leave ancestral homes for better economic opportunities in cities, often in desperation.
• Historically, cities and their governments didn't care about the latter migrants so didn't prepare for them, welcome them or even accommodate them in a civilized and methodical manner.
• Dharavi serves as a convenient poster-child for this process. Today comprising ~80 neighborhoods, ~1 million inhabitants and ~100,000 microenterprises, migrants living there include potters from Gujarat, leather tanners from Tamil Nadu, embroidery specialists from Uttar Pradesh, and many others.
• By and large, they are either Muslims or Hindu lower castes including the so-called untouchables.
• They may have left their ancestral land behind but they brought with them the specialized knowledge pertaining to family trades, culture and practices. These formed the bedrock of Dharavi's economic activity.
• Sign of chameleon-like adaptability, today recycling is one of Dharavi's major economic activities.
• Unencumbered with environmental, factory or labor regulations makes Dharavi's labor and production costs low, at the expense of health, safety and longevity.
• Current cottage industries in Dharavi include large-scale recycling, leather tanneries, metal work, wood work, machinery manufacturing, printing, garment finishing, and shoe, luggage and jewelry manufacture (8).

'What kinds of products do they produce?'

Dharavi's recycling business

Dharavi is estimated to recycle ~80% of Mumbai's plastic, numbers estimated to be far higher than those in the UK (9; see figures below from 4, 10, 11). As the world's ninth most populous city, this is no mean feat.

Dharavi's potteries (figures from 11, 12, 13, 14).

From hand embroidery to leather goods to goat intestines that will eventually end up as surgical thread (see figures below from 4, 11, 15), Dharavi's economy is complex, mulifaceted, just like the migrants who've made it their home.

Dharavi is already organically exporting its microenterprise, mixed-use space economic model to other slums

Dharavi's staggering complexity, ingenuity and industriousness begs the question, what's a slum?

 

What is a slum?

Apparently, the word slum was first used to describe dense, impoverished and unsanitary housing of 1820s London (16). The UN's attempt to define slum, 'Slums are neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly poor. Slums range from high-density, squalid central city tenements to spontaneous squatter settlements without legal recognition or rights, sprawling at the edge of cities' leaves much to be desired and unsatisfactory when applied to Dharavi. A more detailed attempt captures key slum attributes, with the worst ones having all of them (16):

• 'Lack of basic services: Inadequate access to safe water sources and sanitation facilities is the most significant feature. It is sometimes supplemented by absence of electricity, waste collection systems, surfaced roads, rainwater drainage and street lighting.
• Substandard housing or illegal and inadequate building structures: Houses are often constructed with non-permanent materials. Given local conditions concerning climate and location, these materials may be unsuitable for housing.
• Overcrowding and high density: A majority of the slum dwelling units suffer from high occupancy and the living space per inhabitant is scarce.
• Unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations: Due to lack of basic services, such as sewage, waste and pollution management, unhealthy living conditions occur. Buildings may also be constructed on hazardous or unsuitable land.
• Insecure tenure: Lack of formal documents entitling settlers to occupy land bring about an insecurity in residential status.
• Poverty and social exclusion: As a cause and consequence of slum conditions; income and capability poverty restrain human and economical development.
• Minimum settlement size: A single household cannot be referred to as a slum since the term constitutes a precinct.'

Is Dharavi a slum?

• Strictly using the UN's more detailed yardstick, no doubt Dharavi is a slum (see figure from 17 on the left). But the reality is far more nuanced and murky.
• Even a straightforward survey of Dharavi's inhabitants puts paid to the notion of ranks of the desperately impoverished belonging to the lowest rungs of society.
• As Mumbai grew upward, around and beyond Dharavi, reaching out to and encompassing its  erstwhile suburbs, its perennial, desperate housing shortage drove new waves of Dharavi migrants, from blue collar workers like carpenters and electricians to white collar workers such as engineers, graphic designers and even those in the civil service such as clerks and police, all pulled to Dharavi by a common thread, affordable housing (see figure below from 18 on the right).
• For example, a study showed that 'in Mumbai in May 2006 we had 4,426 Police Constables (13 more than there were a year earlier) and 81 Police Inspectors living in slums: officers of the law who are illegal residents of the city' (14).
• According to Krishna Pujari, who organizes a controversial slum tour through Dharavi, 'All sorts of people live in Dharavi. MNC [multinational corporation] workers, BPO [business process outsourcing] workers, 60 percent of our police force' (10).

In Dharavi, lack of modern amenities equals lack of basic dignity

• Lack of proper water supply, sewage systems, toilet facilities makes cholera, malaria, typhoid, dengue common in Dharavi.
• Unregulated, toxic industries (tanneries, paints, plastic recycling) further contribute to chronic diseases.
• In Dharavi's leather accessories manufacture, 15 to 17 hour days are common, including 2 to 3 hour breaks for lunch and dinner. Only ~1% of these enterprises and workers have access to on-premise toilet facilities (8).
• Such callousness reveals an unpleasant though essential truth. Querying the use of the word slum is far from an exercise in semantics. It holds a mirror to our values. Inconsiderate, superficial, unthinking, uncaring? Sure, slum’s fine. Introspect and probe? Slum’s revealed as yet another way to shun and otherize.
• By now, copious news coverage and sociological research confirms that, lack of public or private investment notwithstanding, Dharavi generates valuable economic output for Mumbai and beyond.

In terms of its economic output, quite unlike modern, organized labor with entrenched long commutes and other environmentally unsustainable practices such as high-rise sleeper/bedroom communities, strip malls, colossal car showrooms, etc, it's not just a question of what but also how.

• Much of Dharavi is mixed-use space, i.e., living and working quarters cheek by jowl.
• Small-scale microenterprises, with most businesses employing 20 or less.
• The recycling aspect of Dharavi's economy makes it even more avant-garde.
• Whatever is intended by the use of the phrase 'economically advanced', Dharavi far outpaces conventional notions of sustainable economic development.
• Enlightened politicians and city planners, if such species do exist, could see in this aspect of Dharavi an economy of the future, the much-vaunted, eminently desirable Circular economy.
• Desirable because other than abandoning a wantonly destroyed Mother Earth to take to permanent space stations or colonizing Mars or some such science fiction fantasy a la WALL-E, sustainable economic development is the only way out for humans and for Mother Earth.
• From such a perspective, instead of looking to teach down to, Dharavi becomes a place to learn from.
• A natural experiment in urbanology, what Dharavi lacks is the modicum of dignity that non-slum dwellers take for granted, clean running water at home, hygienic sewage drainage, indoor toilets, basic health care, job safety and security, and regulated pay.
• As for what it takes to make a sustainable living-working space in the 21st century, Dharavi's natural experiment already points us the way ahead. If that isn't economically advanced, I don't know what is.

Bibliography

1. Page on bekon.lth.se
2. Eriksson, Charlotta. "Dharavi: Space, time, human condition towards a theory on unplanned settlements." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash...
3. Page on artdurnev.com
4. Page on yimg.com
5. Echanove, Matias, and Rahul Srivastava. "The High-Rise and the Slum: Speculative Urban Development in Mumbai." (2012): 789-813. Page on berkeley.edu
6. Mumbai case study
7. Engqvist, Jonatan Habib, and Maria Lantz. Dharavi: documenting informalities. Royal University College of Fine Arts, 2008.
8. Page on nceuis.nic.in
9. Waste not, want not in the &#163;700m slum
10. 404 page - Motherland Magazine
11. National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com
12. Page on comm-dev.org
13. Megha Gupta's Dharavimarket.com aims to sell products by Dharavi's craftspeople across the world - The Economic Times
14. Page on udri.org
15. http://kaustuv.net/projects/MIRG...
16. http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss...
17. Dyson, Peter. "Slum tourism: representing and interpreting ‘reality’ in Dharavi, Mumbai." Tourism Geographies 14.2 (2012): 254-274.
18. Larsson, Emma, and Maja Nilsson. "Towards sustainable sanitation in slum areas: A field study in Mumbai." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash...

https://www.quora.com/How-economically-advanced-are-the-slums-in-India-What-kinds-of-products-do-they-produce/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

When was inbreeding historically understood to cause defects in offspring?

• This is one of those tricky subjects where on the one hand, it would seem that clear, compelling scientific evidence would be readily available, and, OTOH, entrenched societal stigma makes human inbreeding a particularly thorny subject for methodical, scientifically rigorous studies. In short, it's not that data is surprisingly hard to find. Rather, rigorously and appropriately controlled studies are hard to come by.
• It's also important to parse human inbreeding into socially acceptable versus unacceptable. Socially acceptable? Marriages between cousins and uncles-nieces are common, indeed preferred, in many parts of the world, viz., North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia (1, 2; see figure below for estimates).

Unsurprisingly, data on the socially acceptable form of inbreeding is more voluminous.

• For e.g., first-cousin marriages and marriages between girls and their maternal uncles are longstanding traditions in South India (the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana) (3, 4, 5). 
• In the US, state level control determines whether first cousin marriages are legal or not, with criminal and civil sanctions in 8 and 22 states, respectively  (see figure below from 6; also 7, 8).
• OTOH, Europe has largely left consanguineous unions unlegislated.

In Written Historical Record

• In both Plato's Laws (dialogue) (9) and Xenophon's Memorabilia (Xenophon) (10), Socrates is quoted to mention 'unwritten laws' legislated by the gods. These laws couldn't be disobeyed without natural penalties.
• Socrates describes the incest taboo as one of these unwritten laws since it had a greater likelihood of producing defective offspring.
• Problem is these treatises don't mention why the taboo arose in the first place, i.e., no observed data on health of offspring from incestuous unions compared to non-incestuous ones.

Physical Evidence from Archaeology and Historical Census data

• Early 20th century genealogies of the 18th and 19th dynasty Egyptian kings (pre-332 B.C.) are unhelpful since they show 
  
  • No evidence of reduced reproductive capacity.
  • Little/no recorded proof of physical or possible mental defects in the mummies of royal brother-sister offspring (11).
• OTOH, in Roman Egypt, 19.6% and 3.9% of marriages in the city of Arsinoe were between brother-sister and siblings, respectively (12). This data comes from the census of Egypt held every 14 years during Roman rule. Each household was required to file a return listing all its members, their names, ages and kinship affiliation. While only a tiny fraction of the millions of papyrus census filings have survived, 300 have been published and subjected to demographic analysis.
• Pharoaonic Egypt believed that brother-sister unions strengthened the royal bloodline.
• Recent research reveals incest occurred outside the ruling classes as well (13, 14).
• These historical data don't support the idea that prehistoric or historic human may have observed greater birth defects from inbreeding and thereby instituted incest taboo as a cultural norm.

Edvard Westermarck: first hailed then ridiculed and now, a century later, finally vindicated?
The beginning, 1890 -1921.

• In Europe and North America, first-cousin marriages were commonplace until the mid-19th century.
• Starting in the 1850s, scientists and physicians in Europe and North America began to debate the biological effects of close kin marriage (15). 
• Charles Darwin's marriage to his 1st cousin, Emma Wedgwood, yielded 10 children. By lobbying Sir John Lubbock, he tried to persuade the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland that the 1871 census should assess the prevalence of 1st cousin marriages. Unsurprisingly, his argument was predicated on sound science, 'When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man' (16). After all, we need robust data before we can conclude benefit or harm of a practice, don't we?
• However, the culture of the time prevailed against any such effort. The stated objections are telling signposts of the profound difficulty in inculcating scientific temper in society, a difficulty that stubbornly persists to this day.
• For example, one committee member, Gathorne Hardy stated, 'he did not see the desirability of holding up families where such marriages had taken place, and the children being anatomised for the benefit of science' (17).
• A generation later, Darwin's son G.H. Darwin managed to extract such data anyway by cleverly performing surname analysis to assess prevalence of first-cousin marriages (18, 19).
• Then in 1889, Finnish sociologist Edvard Westermarck became internationally famous when he published his colossal 3-volume survey, The History of Human Marriage.
• Analyzing the biological data available at that time, he concluded that inbreeding produced high rates of infant mortality, and mental and physical defects (20).
• Westermarck argued that harmful consequences of inbreeding selected for an innate aversion to sex with childhood associates.
• Thus, for Westermarck, observed harms of incest didn't create the cultural taboo against incest.
• Rather, natural selection naturally and inextricably linked the two.
• In modern re-telling, cohabitation during formative years creates mutual de-eroticization in co-socialized children. In simpler words, growing up together inculcates sexual aversion.

The barren years, 1934-1962.

• Shockingly, from the turn of the 20th century until the 1960s, Westermarck's ideas were actively derided and shunned by a literal who's who of 20th century biology, anthropology and psychology. This, even though early supporters of his ideas included the likes of Edward Burnett Tylor and Alfred Russel Wallace.
• Problem for Westermarck was that he wasn't only a Darwinian but also a steadfast empiricist. Thus, for him incest's biology, psychology and culture were inseparable.
• In the first instance, many simply didn't believe that close inbreeding was harmful.
  
  • Lord Raglan accused Westermarck of arguing inbreeding is harmful 'in the face of all the evidence' (21).
  • Bronisław Malinowski argued 'biologists are in agreement that there is no detrimental effect produced upon the species by incestuous unions' (22).
  • Robert Briffault wrote 'there is not in the records of breeding from domesticated animals a single fact . . . which indicates, much less evidences, that inbreeding, even the closest, is itself productive of evil effects' (23).
  • The final nail in Westermarck's coffin came from Sigmund Freud. In an essay titled Totem and Taboo (1910), Freud challenged the Westermarck hypothesis saying, 'the earliest sexual excitations of youthful human beings are invariably of an incestuous character'. He thus argued that the incest taboo only existed to keep this natural propensity at bay.
  • Later luminaries such as Leslie White in 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1950 and David Aberle in 1956 continued denying that close inbreeding is injurious.
• Second, through much of the 20th century, Westermarck's ideas were actively shunned in favor of those advocated by Freud and Levi-Strauss, i.e., that humans lacked sexual imprinting so cultural taboo of incest became necessary.
  
  • Coined by Konrad Lorenz, sexual imprinting is the notion that many animal species avoid mating with close kin such as siblings.
  • In other words, the prevailing Freudian idea implied that a priori early human developed cultural taboo around incest based on rational observation of its harmful effects, i.e., greater chances of defective offspring.
  • It's interesting to speculate why Freud's take on the reason for the incest taboo prevailed for almost a century. Hill Gates claims (24) it's due to anthropology's 'embrace... of Freud's Oedipus complex', i.e., the narrative that humans need to repress their selfish sexual desires to fully realize their potential.
  • In other words, our need to believe, contrary to copious evidence, that our rationality triumphs. Against such a dramatic narrative arc, what chance for Westermarck's hypothesis that early life association inhibits sexual attraction? After all, it's positively anticlimactic. 
• Problem is the Freudian idea prevailed in absence, not because, of incontrovertible scientific evidence.

The tide reverses, 1962-Present.

• Starting in the 1960s, a slow tide of studies revived Westermarck's ideas for two reasons,
• One, studies showed close inbreeding is injurious.
  
  • For e.g., studies from Norway (25), Turkey (26), Israel (27), Pakistan (28) showed that compared to unrelated parents, children of first cousins had twice the population baseline probability of congenital malformation and/or genetic diseases.

• Two, sexual imprinting exists in humans. Now called the Westermarck effect.
  
  • In 1962, Robin Fox wrote that the notion of sex among people who'd experienced close bodily contact as children ranged from disgusting to unthinkable to indifferent (29).
  • In 1964, Yonina Talmon studied sexual relations among community-reared children in two Israeli Kibbutz. Neither biologically related nor denied permission to marry, nonetheless, they didn't do so because they didn't feel sexual attraction towards one another (30). Joseph Shepher's 1971 follow-up study (31) confirmed Talmon's findings. 

• In turn-of-20th century Taiwan, 3 types of marriages were practiced.
  
  • In 'major marriage', the bride and groom's parents arranged the marriage, and typically bride and groom didn't meet until the day of marriage.
  • In 'uxorilocal marriage', the groom and bride's parents arranged the marriage, typically bride and groom didn't meet until the day of marriage, and the couple lived with the wife's family.
  • In 'minor marriage', the sim-pua (little bride), aged from a few days of age to 4 years old, was betrothed in infancy and raised with her future husband in his house. Post-puberty, they were married (saq-cue-tui or 'pushing together') in their mid-teens. 
  • Westermarck's hypothesis would predict that early association would create sexual aversion, despite the prevailing cultural norm.
  • Indeed, the Stanford anthropologist, Arthur Wolf, found minor marriage couples had much higher divorce and adultery rates, and fewer children per year (32).
  • Taking advantage of the meticulous demographic records the Japanese government kept during their occupation of Taiwan between 1895 and 1945, Wolf collected and analyzed the adoptions, births, deaths, divorces and marriages among the island's inhabitants, i.e., data on >14000 women from 26 villages and 2 towns.
  • Using fertility, divorces and extramarital affairs as proxies for sexual inhibition and aversion, he found that extramarital affairs were 16.5% for women whose marriages were arranged by their and the groom's parents but 37.7% for women from minor marriages.
  • Wolf was also able to rule out competing hypotheses such as health disparities between women in minor versus arranged marriages.

Data from Incest (copulation with parents, offspring, siblings)

• Problem is two-fold
  
  • Few studies exist (see figure below from 6 using data adapted from 33).
  • They're plagued with design flaws that engender confirmation bias and thus preclude firm conclusions about the data. These include
    
    • Incestuous mothers tend to be very young; published studies didn't/couldn't adequately control for that.
    • Incest group typically comprises greater physical and mental handicaps.
    • For e.g., the 1971 Czech study by Seemanova (see table below) had 141 females in the incestuous group. Of these, 20 were intellectually handicapped and, in addition, 2 each were deaf-mutes, had congenital syphilis or were epileptics. In addition, two others were deaf-mutes and three were schizophrenic. OTOH, in the control group of 46 mothers, only 2 were intellectually handicapped (one additionally a deaf-mute), and 2 other deaf-mutes.
    • Same gap exists in the fathers as well. Of 138 fathers in incestuous pairings, 8 intellectually handicapped, 13 chronic alcoholics, 2 with syphilis, and 4 suicides. OTOH, the nonincestuous group of 52 fathers had none who were intellectually handicapped, 2 chronic alcoholics and 1 with polydactyly.

• OTOH, the data is clearer and cleaner in animal studies.
  
  • Mother-son incest is rare in Rhesus macaques (34). 
  • Incest is rare in other primates, mammals, birds, amphibians and even insects (35).
  • In fact, incest is uncommon throughout the animal kingdom (36, 37), rare exceptions being eusocial mammals such as naked mole rats (38).

Irony dictates it's appropriate to end with Freud's Oedipus complex.

• Separated at birth from his mother, Jocasta, Oedipus ends up bolstering rather than demolishing Westermarck's hypothesis.
• After all, early separation undermines natural adaptation for incest avoidance.
• More recent government data also supports this idea, again ironically because the goal of the bureaucratic intervention in this instance was something else entirely.
• In 1975, Britain enacted the Access to Birth Records Act.
• This Act enables adopted persons >18 years of age to trace their biological kin.
• Maurice Greenberg and Roland Littlewood studied reunited kin (39).
  
  • They estimate >50% of reunited kin experience strong sexual feelings.
  • They also suggest incest may be frequent.
• While there are many similar anecdotal reports in the literature, Anaïs Nin's experience with her father, Joaquín Nin (40), is one of the most famous examples that supports Westermarck's hypothesis that early association (attachment?) is essential in engendering incest aversion.

Also, the all-important caveat: Science hasn't yet uncovered the all-important how as in how early life association and incest aversion mechanistically intersect at the biological (genetic/epigenetic) level, i.e., how genetic selection shapes incest aversion over time and how early life association mediates this effect.

Bibliography

1. Bittles, Alan Holland. "Empirical estimates of the global prevalence of consanguineous marriage in contemporary societies." (1998). Page on murdoch.edu.au
2. Bittles A.H. and Black M.L. (2015). Global Patterns & Tables of Consanguinity. Main Page - ConsangWiki - Consang.net
3. Kapadia, Kanaiyalal Motilal. Marriage and family in India. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1966, p117-137.
4. Nilakanta Sastri, K. A. A history of South India from prehistoric times to the fall of Vijayanagara. Delhi, 1975, p66.
5. Bittles, Alan H., J. Michael Coble, and N. Appaji Rao. "Trends in consanguineous marriage in Karnataka, South India, 1980–89." Journal of biosocial science 25.01 (1993): 111-116.
6. Chapter 2. Genetic Aspects of Inbreeding and Incest. Alan Bittles. pp. 38-60 in Wolf, Arthur P. Inbreeding, incest, and the incest taboo: The state of knowledge at the turn of the century. Stanford University Press, 2005.
7. M. Ottenheimer, “Lewis Henry Morgan and the prohibition of cousin marriage in the United States,” Journal of Family History, vol. 15 (1990), pp. 325–34.
8. M. Ottenheimer, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 19–41.
9. Plato, Laws, trans. Thomas Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 838a–39b.
10. Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV.iv.19–23.
11. M. A. Ruffer, “On the physical effects of consanguineous marriages in the royal families of Ancient Egypt,” in Studies in the Paleopathology of Egypt, ed. L. R. Moodie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), pp. 322–66.
12. Scheidel, Walter. "Brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt." Journal of biosocial science 29.03 (1997): 361-371. Page on researchgate.net
13. Hopkins, Keith. "Brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt." Comparative Studies in Society and History 22.03 (1980): 303-354.
14. Scheidel, Walter. "Brother-sister and parent-child marriage outside royal families in ancient Egypt and Iran: a challenge to the sociobiological view of incest avoidance?." Ethology and Sociobiology 17.5 (1996): 319-340.
15. A. H. Bittles, “The basis of Western attitudes towards consanguineous marriage,” Development Medicine and Child Neurology, vol. 45 (2003), pp. 135–38.
16. C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1871. p. 403.
17. HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationary Office), Parliamentary Debates, Third Series (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1870), pp. 1006–10.
18. G. H. Darwin, “Marriages between first cousins in England and Wales and their effects,” Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. 38 (1875), pp. 153–84.
19. G. H. Darwin, “Note on the marriage of first cousins,” Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. 38 (1875), pp. 344–48.
20. Westermarck, Edward. The history of human marriage. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1921. pp. 224–36.
21. Lord Raglan, Jocasta’s Crime (London, 1933), p. 16.
22. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London,1927), p. 243.
23. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (London, 1927), vol. 1, p. 215.
24. Gates, Hill. "Refining the Incest Taboo." Wolf and Durham (2005) 139 (2005): 60.
25. Stoltenberg, Camilla, et al. "Influence of consanguinity and maternal education on risk of stillbirth and infant death in Norway, 1967–1993." American journal of epidemiology 148.5 (1998): 452-459. Influence of Consanguinity and Maternal Education on Risk of Stillbirth and Infant Death in Norway, 1967-1993
26. Demirel, S., et al. "The frequency of consanguinity in Konya, Turkey, and its medical effects." Genetic counseling (Geneva, Switzerland) 8.4 (1996): 295-301.
27. Jaber, Lutfi, et al. "Marked parental consanguinity as a cause for increased major malformations in an Israeli Arab community." American journal of medical genetics 44.1 (1992): 1-6.
28. Hussain, R. "The impact of consanguinity and inbreeding on perinatal mortality in Karachi, Pakistan." Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology 12.4 (1998): 370-82.
29. Fox, J. Robin. "Sibling incest." British journal of sociology (1962): 128-150.
30. Talmon, Yonina. "Mate selection in collective settlements." American Sociological Review (1964): 491-508.
31. Shepher, Joseph. "Mate selection among second generation kibbutz adolescents and adults: Incest avoidance and negative imprinting." Archives of sexual behavior 1.4 (1971): 293-307.
32. Wolf, Arthur P. Sexual attraction and childhood association: a Chinese brief for Edward Westermarck. Stanford University Press, 1995.
33. C O. Carter, “Risk to offspring of incest,” The Lancet, vol. 289 (1967), p. 436.
34. Sade, Donald Stone. "Inhibition of son-mother mating among free-ranging rhesus monkeys." Science and Psychoanalysis, vol. 12 (1968): 18-38.
35. Chapter 3. Inbreeding Avoidance in Primates, Anne Pusey, pp.61-75 in Wolf, Arthur P. Inbreeding, incest, and the incest taboo: The state of knowledge at the turn of the century. Stanford University Press, 2005.
36. Ågren, Greta. "Incest avoidance and bonding between siblings in gerbils." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 14.3 (1984): 161-169.
37. Gavish, Leah, Joyce E. Hofmann, and Lowell L. Getz. "Sibling recognition in the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster." Animal Behaviour 32.2 (1984): 362-366.
38. Reeve, Hudson K., et al. "DNA" fingerprinting" reveals high levels of inbreeding in colonies of the eusocial naked mole-rat." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87.7 (1990): 2496-2500. Page on pnas.org
39. Greenberg, Maurice, and Roland Littlewood. "Post‐adoption incest and phenotypic matching: Experience, personal meanings and biosocial implications." British journal of medical psychology 68.1 (1995): 29-44.
40. Deirdre Bair, Anaïs Nin: A Biography (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1995.

https://www.quora.com/When-was-inbreeding-historically-understood-to-cause-defects-in-offspring/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala