Affinity Fraud

I have long felt that the extreme gullibility of many religious people leaves them wide open to exploitation by fraudsters who pretend to share their faith.  Well, today I found out that this kind of fraud is so widespread that it actually has a name: affinity fraud.  A definition from wisegeek.com:

Affinity fraud refers to different scams perpetuated on a group of people who are specifically connected to each other by race, religious background, occupation, family, gender or age.  The person or people perpetuating affinity fraud exploit these connections, and in using the commonalities of a particular group, create a scheme that will be most appealing to that group.  The end goal of the criminal is to steal money from participants, and it's an unfortunate and frequent occurrence in many parts of the world.

The term is often used in relation to financial investments.  A search on Google will reveal many sites giving more details (such as here and here).   From these sites you might get the impression that it is a relatively new phenomenon but I suspect that affinity fraud must be as old as religion itself.

Wood Duck

A wood duck (Aix sponsa) on the large lake in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK. Photo taken on 2007-11-03.

Chance Linkage is the Main Source of Change in Human Genes

I have not really being paying attention to the discussion of the paper Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution by John Hawkes et al.  However, I was struck by this which comes at the end of one of Hawkes' blog posts about the paper:

... the most widespread source of change in human genes is chance linkage to a relatively small number of selected sites.

That is, most of the genes that have changed in recent human evolution have done so, not because they were beneficial, but because they were located on a chromosome near to a gene that was beneficial.  This seems to me to be quite an important point.  I think I might go back and read the original paper.

New Words

A couple of new words (well, new to me), via my daughter:

• Monobrow - a pair of eyebrows that join up; a person with such eyebrows
• Luvvage - love (Eg: "luvvage, xxx" on a Christmas card)

Monobrow is already quite common, there is even a wikipedia page devoted to it and its synonym, Unibrow.

Lotteries are for Losers

Ever since the UK National Lottery started, I have viewed it as a sort of voluntary tax on stupidity and unfounded wishful thinking.  By stupidity, I mean gullibilty and ignorance of basic mathematics and probability theory.  It seems to me that lotteries foster a sort of learned helplessness in which people give up on trying to forge their own success and, instead, sit back and wait for it to come to them.  Surely not the sort of thing that a government should be encouraging.