100% white Cubans? Doubtful.

The benefit of understanding that individuals have different levels of intelligence is manifold. First, people can cease to have unrealistic expecations of themselves and others that lead to disapppointments and misplaced blame (for example, as already mentioned, blaming oppressive white populations for low levels of black acheivement, and perhaps relatively lower levels of gentile achievement on Jewish populations). Second, society can institute policies that will encourage more intelligent people to have more babies, and less intelligent people to have fewer babies. In my mind, that’s exremely important given the importance of intelligence to a well-functioning and liveable society. What people need to understand is that the effect of a growing group of less intelligent people is lower living standards for the entire society (some say this is already manifesting itself in the form of the financial crisis). Such a society may also tend to develop less nuanced and diplomatic foreign policy tools, becoming frighteningly irresponsible in its use of oh, say, nuclear weapons.

People who live in relatively rural areas tend to be more trusting than those who live in cities. (I have no cite for this). Perhaps the high trust nations have large populations of farmers, such as China, or relatively small or spread out populations for their land mass, such as Finland and Sweden.

As others have mentioned Carthage had a lot of colonies along the North African and Spanish coasts and the Greeks had at least one (at Emporium IIRC). It was trade conflicts between these colonies that got Rome involved in Spain.

That may or not be it. I’d guess not.

The way i look at it is if you imagined a large relief model of that map and covered it in red paint. Then, before it was dry, you got six buckets of white paint and you
– stood SE of Greece and threw one bucket roughly north-west
– stood S of Spain and threw one north-east
– stood south of Italy and threw one bucket north
– stood somewhere around Germany/Poland and threw three buckets roughly south-west, south and south-east,
then i think you’d roughly get your map colors with mountainous terrain blocking the flow and the remotest regions from where you threw the paint having the least overlay.

If farming didn’t spread by diffusion then there must be at least two waves from north africa/near-east, the paleolithic hunter-gatherers and the neolithic farmers (and possibly multiple waves). Assuming they pushed out the paleos through greater numbers they’d follow the sort of vectors you mention i.e. coastal first then up rivers then a circular expansion from colony sites everywhere non-mountainous leaving behind clumps of legacy population in places like the Pyrenees and Alps and in the remotest western edge.

Not sure how that fits.

I think there are two directions of intrusion. Some of the northern population folded back on the south in the same way the Bantus did to the Khoi and the north africans and Arabs did to the Bantus etc. This seems to be quite common.

Another point i just thought of that fits the map. When Caesar described Gaul he said there was a clear division into three visibly distinct groups: Gauls, Belgae and Vascones with the Vascones at the time being the mountain Basques plus a large extension along the south-west and west of modern France

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vascones

If you think of settlers following the path of least resistance coming from the near east then the expansion routes would be coastal first, followed (imo) by going up rivers. If you look at France in the context of mountains being road-blocks and rivers being the roads

then i think you can see a geographical reason for the distinctiveness of the Vascones and a possible correlation with your R1 map. There’s a narrow coastal zone along the south of France with the main way out of that zone (if you’re coming from the direction of the mediterranean) being north up the Rhone. If you then made a hop to the Loire near Lyon and follow it downstream (and its various tributaries upstream when you came to them) then i think it’s clear the Aquitanian basin and the Armorican Massif might have been among the last places settled whether it was neolithic intruding on paleo or later waves of neolithic intruding on earlier waves.

Last thought. There’s this idea of neolithic farmers replacing paleolithic hunter-gatherers and a possible second idea of multiple neolithic waves however i would have thought one of the candidates for a first wave wouldn’t be farmers but pastoralists.

I don’t know which of plants or animals is supposed to have come first in the near-east but either way, pastoralists have advantages of mobility and the ability to subsist off lower quality terrain, especially if they are not stopping long. Also, although they’d have a lower population density than farmers they’d still (i think?) have a higher one than hunter-gatherers so if they were pushing them off their terriotory they’d have the advantage of numbers.

So first wave pastoralists pushed into refuges by second wave farmers maybe? If so that might tie in with distributions of lactose tolerance with the first wave refuges having higher quantities followed by a dip among the surrounding neolithic farmers followed by a rise again among IE pastoralists.

“There is great danger in trying to align genetics with cultural identities centered on linguistic affiliations.”

I think that partly depends on the terrain. The more mountainous the terrain the more (potentially) ancient the genetics. A dozen separate invaders may have taken over the surrounding lowlands while the mountain people are still there simply because the terrain makes it harder to push people out (and possibly the terrain itself creates a type of culture that is hard to defeat).

This is not an attempt at a serious analysis but rather a further example of the *possible* influence of terrain.

Relief map

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&biw=1600&bih=703&q=relief+map+afghanistan&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x38d16eb6f8ff026d:0xf3b5460dbe96da78,Afghanistan&gl=uk&t=p&ei=zC0TTuqKIIWYhQfA_sjlDQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ8gEwAA

If you imagined, just for the sake of argument, a Dravidian base across all of now Afghanistan and Pakistan and two flows coming in both following the line of least resistance, a Persian one in the south flowing west to east and then up to Quetta when they hit the mountains and a Turkic one flowing north to south along the lowland in the west of Afghanistan and then east to Kandahar.

You’d end up with a band of terriotory west of somewhere like Chaman where these Turkic and Iranian forces would conflict.

If the outcome of that conflict was a stalemate along that Chaman line then the Turkic influence would spread up to Kabul creating a kind of U shape of influence Herat-Kandahar-Kabul while the Iranian influence would flow through the Quetta pass and down south again making an upside down U shape Mand-Quetta-Hyderabad.

The southern section of mountainous would be surrounded by Iranian influence and sealed from Turkic influences. The large northern bloc would be surrounded by Turkic influence and sealed from Iranian influences. The central bloc of mountains would have influences from all sides but not surrounded by a single one.

Again, not saying this is accurate or anything and you need to know the history and the genetics etc but i think when you’re looking at parahistory via genetics then looking at terrain in a path of least resistance way might provide some early theories which can then by tested against the genetic evidence.

“In pre-modern societies individuals tended to marry those close to them geographically. Even if cousin marriage was not normally practiced, over time clusters of villages would form networks of de facto consanguinity.”

I’m wondering if changes from the extreme ends of the endogamy-exogamy spectrum could be very dramatic. If the human norm, through geography, poor transport etc, was very high consanquinity then the first few generations of greater exogamy might show very large drops with continuing but diminishing returns on later generations.

It could potentially work the other way too, for example take an initially relatively exogamous population in a steel town which closes down and the people there decay into an underclass. One aspect of the welfare underclass is the collapse of marriage and monogamy with women having children from multiple fathers and no-one really knowing who they’re related too, or rather it becoming too complicated to calculate except in the closest degrees.

Effectively after a few generations like this (and generations in these kind of contexts are closer to 15 years than 25) everyone living within each segment of those kind of closed environment is having children with (at least) cousins. People from that kind of background do seem to be getting shorter but i put it down to nutrition.

So i wonder if the percentage change in consanquinity when first moving from either of the two extremes could be dramatic.

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“Height ~ Genetic endowment + Environmental contingencies – Incest decrement”

Removing a decrement by greater exogamy sounds more plausible on the face, especially if some of those trial populations in Poland were from once very remote and rural populations.

If it’s true and if the above point re dramatic percentage changes in the first few generations is also true then given some of the dramatic changes post-WWII there ought to be examples of this all over the place (outside the original industrial nations) particularly among what you might call the new elite i.e. not the old aristocracy but the newly emergent larger middle class in places like India and China. If the above is true they ought to be getting taller with possibly larger jumps among the first few generations – although difficult to separate this out from nutrition.

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There’s a tie-in here with the idea of aristocratic in-breeding. Although the peasants existed in much greater numbers in total each village’s marrying pool may have been quite small as a product of an inability to travel. So although the aristocracy had smaller total numbers their marrying pool might actually have been much larger.

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Another thought that comes to mind is a possible connection to the Flynn effect.

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“That seems dubious. One of the tallest peoples of the world live in the Dinaric Alps. Not the most accessible place.”

If this is a general rule, and maybe it isn’t, then one possible cause for exceptions would be peoples who had developed in one environment getting pushed into mountains by invaders.

Another possibility might be particular diets outweighing any in-breeding effect i.e. a diet unusually high in protein. Maybe the Dinaric Alpine people live exclusively on milk?

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“And Africans, who are perhaps the same height as Euros”

Are they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height

From Post from the past:

“1) Random dispensation of altruism
2) Nonrandom dispensation by reference to kin
3) Nonrandom dispensation by reference to the altruistic tendencies of the recipient
The second scenario is Hamiltonian, and can be ignored. The first scenario is clearly one in which altruistic tendencies simply cannot spread because non-altruists can “free ride” upon the good will of altruists, who make no attempt to combat this behavior.”

I wonder if irrational altruism can survive (and possibly increase).

Say the premises are
1) A trait Empathy exists that causes distress at distress so it *makes* people do things to get rid of the distress
2) In terms of child-mortality the optimal case is for a mother is to have 2x amount of this trait (on average)
3) Males may not originally have needed this but get x amount anyway simply through their mother’s genes.

(The free riders in this case are babies – which is a group benefit.)

4) Either way the standard amount of this trait is x
5) If this trait is passed down like height or IQ or whatever then maybe it is passed down with a bell curve type distribution. The bulk of the population have the trait in an amount around the mid-point x, a minority have a lot less and a minority have a lot more

So basically a mechanism designed to provide potential mothers with 2x of this trait (on average) leads to outliers, people with levels of empathy which are too high for the original purpose which through causing distress at distress *makes* them do things which aren’t in their rational interest.

Now diving into rivers with no thought of reciprocity maybe ought to lead to excessive amounts of this trait being bred out but not if there were accidental compensating advantages like, for example, if people like this were seen as more attractive so 4 in 20 drown and 16 in 20 have on average 1.25 more kids than other people.

(This could be reinforced by an elite that wanted to reward certain behavior to act as an example.)

Also if people with excessive amounts of this trait (from an individual game theory point of view) were also particularly co-operative then, if they can find others who are the same, the co-operativeness benefit of a combination of 2+ individuals who were this way might partially balance out the negatives.

(Conmen generally have to be nomadic and focused on short-term gain and portable property. Altruists can stay put and focus on long-term improvements to base capital.)

So a trait, empathy, originally specifically designed to *reinforce* free-riding in a specific context (babies) which leads to irrational altruism through excessive amounts of this trait in certain individuals which despite that might be able to replicate long-term because of accidental compensating advantages.

“One of the most straightforward, sensible and very easy to test explanations for [a large proportion of] homosexuality can be found here”

http://www.welmer.org/2008/07/14/the-chimera-hypothesis-homosexuality-and-plural-pregnancy/

Interesting theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemartin

The things you learn when you follow links.

“The best known one is the Yaoi migration into Japan, yet modern Japanese are at least 50% pre-Yaoi. So good for the massive population replacements that leaves no trace of whatever was there before.”

Replacement by invasion, especially in ancient times, might have dramatically different effects on the male and female lines of descent.

“Self-identified Cockneys. Are they pure English or did living in a cosmopolitan port city have much impact on them?”

I guess there were lots of small impacts but i don’t think there were many big impacts before the 60s apart from a sizeable Irish component after the famine. I doubt they’d be much different from a Nascar crowd with maybe 5% more Irish. White southerners look pretty much the same when you adjust for sun, tattoos and weight (although that last element is getting the same way now) so i don’t think it would tell you much.

“White southerners for whom Nascar is emblematic come from the Borderlands, most via Ulster with very little intermarriage. The gene pool is probably very different from Cockneys.”

Yeah right.

My theory, admittedly based on minimal evidence except that i like it, is the Milky Bar Kid theory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YayqNv_RcE4&feature=related

One layer of neolithic population got pushed into marginal terrain in the north-west by later arrivals. Then either because the arable part of their agricultural package was less effective in that terriotory or because they needed to prioritize animals for winter heat they became dependent on cattle and especially milk.

(Cows producing milk and heat during the winter whereas fields don’t.)

A fairly dramatic extinction event ensued that weeded out the lactose intolerant and the population regrew from that base but physically bigger because milk is just so great. This group then pushed back out from their circular refuge centred somewhere around Oslo, merging perhaps with the more asia-tinged Indo-Europeans coming from the east.

Separately i find it interesting that the germanic tribes changed from infantry-based to cavalry-based between Caesar’s time and the fall of Rome c400 years later. Or rather the Caesar-era tribes (and the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians in the later period) were predominantly infantry-based whereas the Goths and Franks etc had somehow morphed into what was effectively a european version of steppe lancers on heavier horses.

“we1” (the morally superior subset of “we”) saying they think “we2” (the morally inferior subset of “we”) are worse in every way than “them” makes we1 feel morally superior.

I think the dominant language outside the home would be the critical factor.

If the invasive males are only in enough numbers to replace the native elite then the children would be bilingual but most of their conversations would be in the mother tongue and the invader’s language might peter out over a few generations. If the invaders replaced say 60%+ of the native males then again the children would be bilingual but the bulk of the conversations would be in the invader’s tongue.

Put another way, if you divide the population into
Aristocracy
Sergeants, Merchants and Stewards
Peasants
then if the invaders just replace the aristocracy they have to learn the native language. If they replace both the aristocracy and the sergeants and stewards then they don’t.

I think the Norman conquest of England is an example of the first and the Anglo-Saxon invasion an example of the second.

Religon might follow the lower threshold because it’s more a matter of elite emulation whereas language is a mixture of elite emulation and practicality.

Also, it makes me think the varying proportions of maternal and paternal DNA across different sites may be more relevant than the whole in discovering prehistory through genetics.

Also that the oldest still-existing DNA in a geographic region will be paternal DNA in the least desirable real estate *if* it matches the female DNA or the female DNA in the same real estate otherwise.

In European terms that might be North Wales or the remoter parts of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany. North wales in particular because although the language is Celtic there is a distinctive physical type there which is shortish, darkish, curly brown hair, brown eyes – (i always assumed they were the basis for Tolkein’s hobbits) – which is quite distinctive.

Too many comments but anyway…

If one standard pattern where a population was seemingly completely replaced was:

1) Whole-population colony settles at the mouth of a river. Mostly maternal incomer DNA with some native.

2) Male-only or male-majority conquest groups expanding radially from original colony replacing native males on a village by village basis but *only* within a distance that can be militarily supported by the original colony. All or mostly all native maternal DNA. Incomer language remains dominant however because still linked to main site.

3) Whole-population offshoot colony from the original (now with some maternal native DNA) settles upriver a few miles. A bit more native maternal admixture

4) Repeat of the radial male-only conquest groups again within support distance of the new colony.

Rinse and repeat.

If so then a pre-historic expansion might still be visible in some places by a plot of the proportion of incomer and native maternal DNA i.e if native maternal DNA was dark blue and incomer light blue the initial colony would stand out and the various daughter colonies also as they gradually shaded from lighter blue to darker blue along the path(s) of expansion.

“To me I think the biggest effect on violence ends up being civil engineering projects like good sewage treatment, good transportation systems etc. It’s an indirect effect but I’d lay good odds swamps any other effect.”

Easily tested by moving a load of Japanese to a swamp somewhere. No doubt they’d immediately start slaughtering each other.

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“if you think a process that in England was mostly completed in a couple of
generations (second half of 17th century) could have been caused by genetic
change”

Transportation. Natural selection on speed.

@RogerBi
“There’s probably more to be learned from the variety and sharp contrasts of the Asian and African examples of language replacement.”

No doubt. My point was simply they’re two known examples of invasions of the same place where one led to language replacement and one didn’t. The one that didn’t is known to have been elite replacement only. The other is less clear cut but there must have been a difference of some kind because it did lead to language replacement.

"Why is this shift to globalism stronger in South Korea than in other East Asian countries? The likeliest answer is the country’s special relationship with the United States."

Elite emulation of a hostile elite.

Completely off-topic but possibly related to some of your research.

Reading around the financial crisis i keep coming across commenst relating to the attractiveness of Christine Lagarde at the IMF which seems unusual given the grey hair

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8788223/Christine-Lagarde-IMF-may-need-billions-in-extra-funding.html

However it made me wonder if very white hair could trick the brain and partly mimic the effect of blonde hair simply because of the lightness?

“it is a function which operates upon the inputs.”

If someone notices people getting sick a lot after eating shellfish and decides that is bad for the group then they can try and stop people with rational argument or force or they can simply say “God said so.”

This cultural rule will work on those susceptible and if the rule has fitness benefits then over time it will select for people who are susceptible.

So if one believes culture-based selection has been a critical component of the more recent part of human evolution then given that culture-based rules have so often been tied to religion a critical factor in human evolution may not so much be the religions in themselves but the human ability to be religious.

I’d guess the components of that ability are tied up in the sort of things some of your recent posts have addressed.

In terms of social heirarchy there’s actually two heirarchies, blue-collar and white-collar, one on top of the other. The people at the top of the blue-collar heirarchy i.e electrician level, have been assortatively mating on g since forever.

“Wouldn’t that require proving that morality or altruism was some sort of survival trait?”

I think there’s at least three possible answers to that.

1. It was a survival trait early on for some reason and that selected for susceptibility. Once the bulk of the population are susceptible it can be manipulated at which point it could become physically maladaptive but culturally adaptive e.g a religion might develop that requires an unhealthy behaviour but not conforming to the religion leads to being shunned which in survival terms is worse. Once a religion is established with punishments for non-conforming which effect an individual’s survival and reproduction chances it doesn’t have to make sense any more. It’s effectively part of the environment.

2. Group cohesion might be the benefit regardless of the details of the religion. One group might think x is right and y is wrong and another might think x is wrong and y is right but as long as 95% of each groups *agree* with their group’s morality it helps glue the group together and that’s what provides the survival benefit.

3. Yes, but it might not be morality or altruism initially. Initially it might simply be belief in supernatural agency e.g luck. Being *mildly* superstitious might be adaptive e.g a stone age hunter who believes in his lucky pebble might be calmer and more cool-headed than if he didn’t.

I think Diamond describes and argues for what he wants to describe and argue for pretty well. There is a politial agenda to the book but the flaws are mostly in what he chooses to leave out rather than what he puts in (imo).

I’d say afro hair might have some kind of heatsink effect e.g

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&cp=9&gs_id=o&xhr=t&q=heatsinks&biw=1092&bih=637&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&wrapid=tljp1317638092534012&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

straight hair otherwise

some curly hair from afro admixture e.g

otherwise curly hair as another european “dependent sexual selection for novel traits”

If curly hair in Europe is an afro legacy then might it be associated with DNA from the earliest waves of settlement?

@Emil
“I can’t think of much benefit from hair colors.”

One of the interesting things about sexual selection is the amount of effort people put into trying to stop it.

Mating or marriage can be decided in two very distinct ways:
1) Based on individual characteristics and personal attraction between two individuals
2) Arranged by families and not based on sexual selection at all

The farming cultures all seem to have favoured arranged marriages with little or no consideration for the personal attraction of the two individuals concerned. This makes sense if an individual’s instinctive idea of mating-attractiveness evolved around what made a successful hunter-gatherer while a family’s idea of marriage-attractiveness was based on what made a successful farmer.

@rimon
“As a person with very thick, dark curly hair who has spent time in the Middle East..what evolutionary purpose this kind of hair serves in such a hot climate!”

Maybe it’s simply transitional i.e the first stage of moving away from tropical hair?

Maybe it’s all sexual selection once away from the tropics?

If the mating-attractiveness of males from an individual female’s point of view is partially hardwired to be those traits that would be good for a successful hunter-gatherer while the same male’s marriage-attractiveness from the point of view of the female’s family would revolve around traits that would make for a good farmer then you could see how a conflict could develop after the transition to agriculture.

The same might be true for female’s in some ways but for those traits that are hard-wired to be attractive because they signal fertility and reproductive advantage the family of the male would be looking for the same things as the male would himself if given a choice. So where the family is choosing mates, if there is any element of sexual selection in the choice, it is likely to be directed more at females i.e a pretty girl with good hips might be as attractive to the male’s family as to the male.

From the family’s point of view it’s a bit like stock-breeding.

So if there’s anything related to straighter hair that signals reproductive advantage in females then maybe once away from the tropics it gets selected for?

“The idea that humans are intrinsically fallen is religious in origin”

So male stags headbutt each other during the rutting season because they’re religious?

This book will be like “The End of History,” written just before everything goes into reverse.@@@

Messed up first comment.

@@@

“The idea that humans are intrinsically fallen is religious in origin”

So male stags headbutt each other during the rutting season because they’re religious?

@@@

I think his first trend is true – violence has been partly bred out of populations with the transition from hunter-gather to urbanized living proportional to how long those populations have been urbanized – although what happens when the US can no longer afford all those prisons?

I think his second trend is the same as the first. It was clans, tribes, city-states and nation-states gradually extending the claim to a monopoly of internal violence that led to the violent hunter-gatherer traits being bred out through cultural and criminal sanction.

However the rest is conditional on the mixture of emulation of and coercion from western hegemony which is collapsing as we speak. The inability of the USA to fund their military hegemony will lead to a massive buildup of national military power across the globe to fill the void. Enlightenment values will retreat when the emulation factor is reduced and there’s no western money pushing them.

This book will be like “The End of History,” written just before everything goes into reverse.

“Modern humans are notably not very sexually dimorphic.”

Academics, maybe. The modern humans i deal with every day are very sexually dimorphic and the young stags butt heads every day.

Either way it doesn’t change the point. Logically either humans are inherently violent and external forces make them less so or they’re inherently peaceful and external forces make them violent. The concept of being “fallen” only makes sense if applied to the first case.

A theory that violent traits were adaptive for hunter-gatherers and the frequency of those traits has been progressively reduced over time among urbanized populations through cultural pressure has nothing to do with religion.

toto
“Er… The first cities were in the Near East, right?”

Yes. Africa last. In very broad terms you could relate propensity to violent crime i.e frequency of traits that predispose to violent crime in a population, to length of urbanization and get some kind of relation like for example 50% drop in frequency of x per 1000 years. Following that process through would allow you to broadly predict violent crime rates in any town very simply as a function of numbers times historical region of origin.

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sandgroper
“or will we just get on with making stuff up?”

We’ll carry on making stuff up, or rather the politically correct will carry on manipulating stats to hide politically incorrect truths until they can’t be hidden any more.

“Male stags engage in non-fatal mating competition. Its their way of making love not war.”

In itself, but even more so in the current context, that’s got to be one of the stupidest things i’ve ever read.

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terry
“I’d wager America would be a more peaceful nation. The rest of the developed world experiences less criminal violence despite soft-on-crime policies.”

Well you’re going to lose that wager in the most dramatic and bloody way. Each ethnic group has their own average violent crime rate. Each ethnic group follows a rough pattern where the worst 10% commit 50% of that ethnic’s group violent crime, the second 10% commit 25%, the third 10% commit 12% etc. Prison generally deals with the worst 10% of each ethnic group which is why it has such a very dramatic and disproportionate effect on the total.

Things *were* getting better. It started going backwards at least two decades ago which is when the stats started to be rigged. We’re getting closer and closer to the point where the PC illusion can’t be held together anymore. I give it 2-3 years before your blank slate blows up in your face.

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syon
“One figure cited by the article is 600,000 deaths out of a population of 1.4 million.”

Every parish church in Ireland has records of births, marriages and deaths going back well beyond this time. If there was a massacre the numbers of births, marriages and deaths in all those thousands of churchs would show a dramatic drop. If there was no massacre at all then the numbers would be almost identical. I wonder if any objective Irish historians have thought of checking?

“What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that, even as they were learning how to dispose of the body fluids more discreetly, they were systematically re butchering the natives on two continents? Or about the humanitarianism of the British that, as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they were shipping slaves across the Atlantic?”

It reveals that people make distinctions between “us” and “them.”

There are multiple parts to this
1) the moral rules that apply when it’s “us”
2) the moral rules, if any, that apply when it’s “them”
3) the changes over time in who is included as “us”
4) the changes over time in the moral rules that apply when it’s “us”
5) the changes over time in the moral rules, if any, that apply when it’s “them”

“Us” groups want to reduce violence within the group. “Us” groups also want enough “warriors” to defend the borders of their terriotory and i would suggest the smaller the size of the “us” group the higher the proportion of men who need to be warriors. If so then if over time there is an increase in the average size of “us” groups the balance between the two pressures will tilt towards reducing predisposition to violence. If you believe certain genetic traits predispose individuals to violence e.g lack of impulse control, then cultural and criminal sanctions to reduce in-group violence creates selection pressure against those traits.

This would reduce the total amount of violence within “us” groups across the planet. This doesn’t require any changes in the moral rules of the “us” group and certainly doesn’t require any change in the moral rules, if any, the “us” group apply to their “them.” All it requires is for the average size of “us” groups to increase and for sanctions against violent crimes within the “us” group to be applied over time.

“but remember that many small scale ‘wars’ had lower casualty rates per war, but these ‘wars’ (really raids) may have been more common because their impact was less. so i don’t think the gap is as big as you imply.”

I think this is the key point. If you read tribal scale history then you realise they were in a state of almost permanent small-scale war comprising of raids, ambushes and individual murder.

If you picture a terriotory the size of say Korea and imagine one option where it’s divided into thousands of small clans constantly raiding each other – and as a partial consequence of the need for most men to be warriors, lots of in-group violence also – and then compare it to a second option where the same terriotory is divided into two very internally peaceful nations who every twenty-five years or so have an extremely destructive war then i think it’s quite possible that the first case would have a greater total of violence and possibly a much greater total.

My quibble with Pinker is if his data was for example based on the number of stab wounds treated in urban western hospitals rather than the number of stabbing incidents the police record (or report they’ve recorded) then he’d see that under the surface things have been going into reverse.

toto
“Maybe the Western (i.e. European) actions are seen as “worse” not because of their intrinsic character, but because of their sheer extent?”

I think that’s a lot of it, which is largely a simple function of technology, especially ship-building, but the other aspect is a certain version of the history is used as a current political weapon within western countries which ironically enough leads to western anti-colonialists needing to colonize other people’s history.

I wonder about a computer analogy – separate genes for CPU, RAM and size of hard-drive – and high IQ is simply having the full set – which makes me wonder if idiots-savant break down into categories. If so some of those component genes may be a consequence of other physical parameters e.g. size of hard-drive might be equivalent to brain size i.e. skull size i.e. height? Larger brain sizes might not be useful without a CPU or RAM upgrade.

I imagine these things as a mixture of pressure caused by differential population density and geographical paths of least resistance so it makes intuitive sense to me.

Step 1) Hunter-gatherers somewhere, Africa or Southern India or wherever, and empty space as ice retreats. Hunter-gatherers expand to fill the vaccuum.

Step 2) Neolithic farmers expand out in all directions from a start point somewhere in the Near East. Personally i don’t see any need for them to massacre the hunter-gatherers. If the farmers had a higher population density on suitable farming terrain then i think they’d more or less simply push the H-Gs off through weight of numbers. No doubt there’d be lots of skirmishing type conflict but on the whole i can imagine a quite rapid farming expansion along the path of least resistance / highest farming potential with the H-Gs gradually pushed back into the terrain unsuitable for farming (at that time). If the average population density differential was 5:1 then even if the two groups ended up with 50% of the terrain each the farmers would still be 5/6 of the total numbers, if 3:1 and 70% then 7/8, so once the two groups started mixing the paleolithic H-Gs would get mostly absorbed into the neolithic farmers.

(I think it follows from this that the least accessible parts of Europe might have the highest concentration of paleo H-G DNA.)

Step 3) Those of the neolithic farmers who settled at the northern edge were changed somewhat by the environment – perhaps because of diet – in two broad groups, northern european and caucasus. When the climate warmed up some of both the northern european and Caucasus groups moved onto the steppe – initally just as foot herders – but as the steppe was initially empty of people they could move rapidly east and west anyway. The west-moving part of the Caucasus group mixed with the eastern half of the northern european group somewhere in the general vicinity of the Ukraine. Further west, unmixed elements of the northern european group expanded in various directions including into Scandinavia and Britain.

If so then coming into the historic period the three main population blocs would be
– neolithic farmers + absorbed paleo HGs (south and central)
– northern european (northwest)
– mixed caucasus and northern european (northeast) (western IE?)

(If true, it might follow that if the most inaccessible parts of Europe (coming from the south and east i.e neolithic direction) had the most paleo H-G DNA then the least accessible parts of europe (coming from the north and east i.e. IE direction) might have the least IE DNA i.e. an inverse relationship.)

“I’m not sure about associating the Caucasus component with Indo-Europeans when it seems weird in that it is a huge presence in say, Egyptians”

May not be relevant but…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk

“lasting from the 9th to the 19th century AD”

“The Abbasids bought slave-soldiers mainly from areas near the Caucasus (mainly Circassian and Georgian), and from areas north of the Black Sea (Kipchak and other Turks). Those captured had non-Muslim backgrounds.”

“i don’t think
1) the west asian/caucasian element is 1:1 correspondent with indo-european
2) nor do i think it is exclusive to indo-europeans”

yes, that was the point i was making

for the sake of argument
1) caucacus + x -> western IE (early)
2) caucasus + y -> eastern IE (early)
3) caucasus + turkic -> kipchak/cuman -> egyptian mamelukes (much later)

so the same component in varying compound form arriving in different places at different times.

I remember the Boethius having quite an effect when i read it. He steps out of the pages.

“Also relating “Caucasus” component with IEs is like crazy: not just IEs should have originated further North but also most Caucasian peoples are non-IE, being arguably the main refuge of pre-IE survivals”

I may have misunderstood but isn’t the idea that the caucasus component simply acts as a marker?

http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/btn_Archeology/Zhou/CambridgeZhouChouArcheologyNorthEn.htm

Looking at Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 and assuming some of the northern european genetics moved onto the steppe from one side of the Black Sea and some of the caucasus genetics did the same from the other side and the two mixed then you’d end up with a northern european group and a caucasus group in their original positions and a mixed northern europe + caucasus group on the steppe.

So (caucasus + something else connected to the Caucasus by the steppe) would be a steppe marker rather than neccessarily an IE marker (as shown later with the mamluks).

I may have misunderstood though.

Yes. It never occurred to me that some people couldn’t drink milk until very recently as everyone i grew up with drank gallons of the stuff.

“I also figured dwarvish singing for more Eurasian/Slavic/Turkic instead of this Celtic-esque New Age-y stuff in the trailer.”

It sounded monk-ish to me, which i would never have thought of myself, but actually works if you think of Dwarf cities as giant underground cathedrals.

“What sort of selection would this be called? I think it should be differentiated from natural and sexual selection. I think it should be called ‘group selection’ in that a population evolves in relation to its group structure and culture.”

“Cultural selection” fits better imo as it’s the culture acting on the individual to select for individual traits. “Group selection” would more suit the process of how culture is selected for by the environment e.g. late marrying or early marrying, subsistence monogamy or surplus polygamy etc. Once the environment has selected aspects of the culture then the culture goes to work on individuals.

Agree on all points however as a pre New Year’s resolution cheap opinion related to a previous mention of Mamluks…

If you consider Dioneke’s “Caucasus” component and lay out some of his ADMIXTURE strips for North Africa west to east and the Middle East north to south and you look at the scale of the Caucasus component and the clines down through to Egypt:

then it leads me to think the “Caucasus” component may be most concentrated *now* in the isolated mountainous regions of the Caucasus but might more likely have its origins in SE Asia Minor in the general vicinity of Gobekli as the first (or one of the first) farmers from where it radiated out in all directions depending on path of least resistance and where its original concentration was diluted by later backflows.

If so then the path of least resistance would take it west to the coast of Levant and down to Egypt – where apparently the Delta has covered over most traces of the earliest farming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predynastic_Egypt

and down the twin rivers to the Persian Gulf. Apparently the first farmers in Mesopotamia were

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halaf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassuna

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarra_culture#Ancient_Samarra

etc

developing into

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubaid_period

which developed into Sumer, which got taken over by… nomadic Akkadians.

Given that settled farming cultures tend to come under the control of any nomadic pastoralists who happen to be in range i’m wondering if the same people that brought farming into the Balkans and Greece brought farming into the middle-east down to Egypt as well but were later overrun by nomadic tribes coming out of Arabia.

(What this would mean if the Anatolian IE hypothesis was correct is the Indo-Iranic branch could have come through the fertile crescent and then got cut off from the root by expansion out of Arabia. It would also tidy up King Tut’s R1b.)

K-values

It seems to me there’s two ways of looking at this. You can view every geographically bounded population (nation) as a unique element or view them as a unique compound of a potentially quite limited number of major elements that exist like tectonic plates under the surface.

I may not understand it right but it seems to me that if the latter case is more correct then as you raise the K value at first you will identify the major components but as you raise it more you run the risk of slipping over into identifying the most unique blends or (uniquely unblended) i.e. are Basques a unique component or are they a uniquely unblended representative of one of the other major components?

Moors in Spain

If you have elite conquest then the winners will be living in the castles and palaces and will have servant girls from the conquered population and will have children with them. I don’t think there will ever be an exception to that rule. However it does seem in many places the genetic consequences of elite conquest are smaller than might be expected.

Some possible explanations:

1) Volk or military elite: If the conquerors bring their wives they’ll have full blooded legitimate children and half-blooded illegitimate ones. If they don’t bring wives their legitimate and illegitimate children will be half-blooded from the start and their children’s illegitimate children will be quarter. I think this must make a dramatic difference.

2) Pre-modern political elites were a military elite: The male line of the pre-modern political elite did a lot of getting killed. If you imagine a battle like Agincourt the modern equivalent might be like half the members of Congress losing a male family member in one battle. I think conquering elites in the past would have replenished by promoting junior ranks of their ethnic aristocracy to higher ranks and filling in the lower ranks from the conquered population or their more mixed illegitimate children. So after a few hundred years a Moorish Duke of Zaragossa might only be 1/8 Moorish.

I think the recorded Norman experience in England is likely to be representative of a standard pattern. This may depend on how psycho the conquering elite are.

3) Concentration and Massacre: Seiges often ended in massacre. If a conquering elite took over as the rulers of a town and surrounding countryside their genetic impact might be 3-4% outside the town and 20-30% inside. Then when the next conquering elite comes along and the town gets massacred most of the genetic impact goes too.

4) Big initial massacre: Not very pleasant but if a 5% male elite conquers a terriotory and massacres the previous 5% male elite then even if they have 3 or 4 times as many descendents per head as the base male population that’s still only 15-20% impact. However if you’re Genghis and you replace the original 5% elite and massacre 50% of the rest then your group is suddenly 10% of the surviving male population and your long-term genetic impact will be doubled. (This is more a possible explanation of exceptions to the limited impact rule.)

"As outcastes with a monopoly on certain occupations, the Burakumin were spared this demographic replacement. They may thus represent the Japanese population as it existed several centuries ago."

Interesting idea.

Amanda
“If the East Anglians really had genes that made them more intelligent, wouldn’t
you expect them to show a comparative regional advantage in England as well as
America?”

It did e.g.

“East Anglia was a relatively densely populated area of England in the
medieval period containing most of its largest towns.”

however

“Since then the region stagnated relative to other regions of England and is relatively more rural than the midlands, the north or the south east of England.”

1) As per the header they may have lost a critical slice of their population.

I don’t think that was the main reason personally.

2) East Anglia was significant in the agricultural revolution so they lost most of their population to London as labour demands were reduced by technology (unintended consequences of brains maybe).
3) Industrial revolution. No coal. (And no labour force).

~~~

However i think the main point is if IQ is part hereditary and part environment then two genetically identical populations could have (marginally) different average measured IQ if one had a particularly strong cultural tradition that stressed an environmental bonus e.g. early literacy.

Danny
“Scotland is supposed to have been much more literate and advanced than other countries since Calvinism encouraged Bible reading, and thus literacy. But it doesn’t seem that nowadays Scotland enjoys any advantages compared to the rest of Europe.”

They did. The Scottish contribution to the industrial revolution was disproportionate but most of it took place in England i.e. the brains went south.

~~~

However heredity and environment are related: environmental factors largely derive from high IQ parents squeezing every drop of latent brains out of their offspring. You can only replicate that in a totalitarian system.

Before sending everyone’s kids to gulag-schools it might be best to test whether environmental factors are proportional. Say people do have a lazy IQ and a maximum IQ. The gap might be 85 and 86 at one end, 100 and 104 in the middle and 115 and 125 at the other end or perhaps the gap is small at both extremes and larger in the middle.

Either of those seem more likely to me than simply linear.

“That being said, is it in our social interest for police officers to be so average?”

As someone else mentioned most criminals are dumb as rocks but you need a few bright detectives at least. Unless New London is too small to need specialists this seems like a very strange policy. However if it’s the kind of place where nothing ever happens then maybe it makes more sense.

“More than half of the 350 Matis living along the Ituí River inside the Javari reserve perished in the months following contact, officials say.”

Makes you wonder how fast the original wave might have been coast to coast from the first infection – less than a year?

“New Guinea never had a major population crash post-European contact”

extreme xenophobia as disease firebreak?

“Makes me wonder of the ancient loathing of pigs in middle eastern cultures was not without reason, maybe an association was made between disease and pigs there as well.”

Interesting thought. I doubt it specifically because the first farmers must have wiped themselves out multiple times domesticating pigs, cows, sheep, chickens etc.

The process would likely have repeated at every step of the farming expansion as well – especially if the first farmers created a faster moving pastoralist bow-wave that expanded in front of them.

“the issue with europeans has to do with the inability of women to carry babies to term.”

Same with the Han in Tibet apparently.

It seems to me the critical factor since farming began is that most human mating decisions have been made by the family of the individuals concerned. If so wouldn’t the most likely models be those drawn from stock-breeding rather the natural world?

In stock-breeding you generally only need to keep a few males for breeding purposes and the rest are culled – why wouldn’t that be the case with family arranged marriages within a lineage – extra protection or labour might be a couple of possibilities?

I wonder if there’s a case where the normal sex ratios of a bred animal is the opposite way round e.g. a draught animal where the males can pull more so the breeders produce excess males and only a replacement number of females?

If so then things like tractors or office work might change the scales.

“the authors note that evolution of sex specific traits is not going to occur fast”

Maybe a dumb question but couldn’t a simple way of getting around the problem you mention be traits that only pass on the X, or the modulator only passes on the X, so females automatically get a double-dose and men only one?

@Paul Rain, ty

“the “traditional” and normative social systems common among civilized societies since the rise of agriculture and the emergence of mass society are cultural adaptations which serve to constrain impulses which are deeply hard-wired within our species.”

more recent for me but i think this is true, culture can act as a buffer against, suppressor of or accelerator of, natural selection

Example

There’s a lot of arguments over foragers and polyamory but it seems to me the most common form is nominally monogamous relationships with a lot of adultery on the side. The female side of this often seems to take the form of women trading sex for meat and in particular conducting affairs with good hunters when they think they may be pregnant as a primitive form of welfare. If multiple men think they may be the father then they may all bring food – as long as there’s not too many. If so then the traits controlling women’s sexual behaviour will have adapted to this environment.

With a shift to agriculture and inheritance the males will want strict monogamy (on the female side) to ensure paternity – so a conflict arises between behaviour suited to the two environments of foraging vs farming.

One path would be to leave it to natural selection, over time the more monogamous (or careful) women would have more children and the more promiscuous (or careless) would have less. Over time the frequencies for various sexual traits would shift. However in the transition that would be no use to families with forager-style daughters being thrown out by their farmer husbands.

So culture steps in to coerce female sexuality to suit the new environment. There is still selective pressure but it’s diluted. “In the wild” the selection is: does an individual’s traits suit the new environment, yes or no? In the cultural version however there are three options instead: does the monogamous culture suit the individual’s traits, does it not suit them but they conform to it anyway (through simple coercion or through the action of other traits like religiosity), or thirdly does the monogamous culture not suit and they don’t conform?

So culture can make the jump to a neccessary state faster than natural selection using coercion and then allow a weaker version of cultural selection to bring trait frequencies up to the coerced level.

If so then the frequency of hypergamous and monogamous traits in women from different regions might be more or less proportional to the length of time those regions had a contiguous history of agriculture.

I think there are other examples like male violence. Chagnon made a claim that Yanomani “killers” (unokai) had more children, a claim that is apparently very contentious e.g.

http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_5/b_fdi_20-21/27627.pdf

but which i personally believe because descriptions of the Yanomani are more or less identical to how it is among inner-city street gangs where almost all the non drug-related violence revolves around access to females and being “fierce” gets more women – some females are attracted to it, some are too scared to say no, male rivals can be scared or stabbed etc.

It is a high risk strategy but if anthropologists studied inner-city gangs i think they’d find the average number of children for the *successfully* fierce was higher.

Culturally enforced monogamy is a good way to reduce the male inclination to violence.

I wonder about a pastoralist bow-wave. The early farmers would be restricted to suitable terrain but around the sites suitable for the full package would be more marginal land that was viable for just the pastoralist element i.e farming in the valley, shepherds in the hills. The pastoralist ring would have a lower maximum population density than the farming core but as long as it was higher than foragers then once established the pastoralist ring could expand independently and possibly much faster.

I’m not sure how much this might effect things if at all but i’d imagine foragers being more likely to switch to herding than directly to farming.

Amy
“Use of force to protect the traps and later, farmlands would make more sense (if you must insist that “male inclination to violence” is more than just a response to stress..)”

Well in my case – speaking as someone naturally very aggressive – it’s a response to knowing that at an individual level i could use violence or the threat of violence to get what i want. I control it because i guess that control was bred into me by my ancestors not wanting to get hanged – while the guy not standing to my right isn’t standing there because his ancestors had the aggression without the self control – and the ancestors of the guy standing to my left didn’t have the aggression – but when the rule of law retreats from an area and a gang culture takes its place it gradually becomes just like Chagnon describes the Yanomani: reputation, being fierce, being an unokai, is one route to reproductive success – especially for the dumber ones.

Seriously, anthropologists should study it. I worked in those kind of environments for a long time and only recently read up on Yanomani. It’s just the same.

The terriotorial stuff is about controlling access to females too.

Missed a point

“Problem there Grey, is the high failure rate of hunts, when even specifically evolved predators f*** up most the time.”

If hunters only succeed one day out of three then all the more reason for a female to have three hunters on the go – one openly, two on the side.

“(if you must insist that “male inclination to violence” is more than just a response to stress..)”

Thinking about it more i take back “male inclination to violence.” I think there are aggressive traits and restraining traits and the balance between the two can vary over time but what i’m getting at is that in the right circumstances being successfully fierce is a good reproductive strategy – not through being attractive (although it attracts some), not through force (although there’s a lot of that too), but through chasing off, wounding or occasionally killing rival males. This represents a lot of the norm among the inner-city underclass where the successfully fierce have 5-6 kids each with 5-6 different women.

So not so much a male “inclination” as a viable male choice in some environments – especially if an individual happens to have fierce genes – and as it’s a successful strategy those fierce genes will increase their frequency among the population increasing the number of males for whom it is a viable choice. If those males with the potential to be successfully fierce can impose this regime through forcing other males to compete on the same terms then it is in their interest to do so.

So what are the characteristics of the inner-city underclass environment that make it the right circumstances?

– enclosed population who mostly stay on their own turf
– terriotorial, the males of each terriotory attack any males from outside
– basic subsistence doesn’t take too much time or effort
– females can provision themselves with the basics
– males can provide limited amounts of harder to get luxury items
– no rule of law to turn being fierce into a bad strategy

The females are limited to the males on their turf and one viable male strategy is to simply scare off rivals.

In inner-city areas those conditions are met by a combination of welfare, drug-dealing and the surrender of the state monopoly of violence in those areas.

However wouldn’t those conditions also be met in any semi-abundant forager environment where there was no state authority to begin with?

“he’s occasionally on the right side of important arguments”

The political arguments masquerading as science break down to
– humans are innately x (where x suits one political agenda)
– humans are innately y (where y suits a different political agenda)
– humans aren’t innately anything (and therefore can be moulded to suit a political agenda)

The right side of the argument surely is that human populations can be defined in terms of trait frequencies and in a suitable physical or cultural environment any trait can increase in frequency over time and in unsuitable environments it can decrease. This means human characteristics are both fixed and mutable, innate and environmental – but at the genetic level of environment i.e. generational.

so
– population groups are innately x (when x has been selected for over generations)
– population groups are innately y (when y has been selected for over generations)
– the innate aspects of population groups are mutable but over generations

So if certain conditions are met for enough generations
– humans are innately x
and under different conditions
– humans are innately y
but they’re always innately something.

One of the things about fierceness polygyny (to coin a phrase) is it’s not in the interests of the majority of males (and as it’s selecting for a propensity for sudden flashes of extreme violence it’s not that great for the females either). So it would be in the interests of the other males to institute some form of “rule of law” if they can where you could even define “rule of law” as rules designed to stop fierceness being a good reproductive strategy. This might imply that fierceness polygyny has a strong tendency to morph into something else if/when people figure out how e.g. arranging marriages between lineages.

“and the general decline in sexual dimorphism beginning at least with early Homo”

Fierceness polygyny doesn’t rquire a great deal of sexual dimorphism because most of the violence isn’t fair. It’s not like gorillas duking it out where you have to be one of the 3-4 biggest gorillas to have a chance. Humans cheat. If the number 2 guy is a lot smaller than the number 1 guy then he’ll jump him when he’s not looking and stab him in the neck. Chagnon mentions a yanomani unokai who’d killed sixteen men, guessing from the the inner-city version i doubt he’s particularly big, more likely thin and wiry with very low empathic restraint – the other guy hesitates a fraction of a second more than the unokai. I’d say sexual dimorphism for propensity to violence in humans is much more mental than physical – a fierce little guy is much scarier than a peaceable big guy.

Interestingly enough i’d say (physical) sexual dimorphism in humans is more likely where violence is restrained. If females can mostly provision themselves limiting that form of male competition and males are also restricted from using violence and intimidation by a rule of law then the women might select for physical size, loudness, showing off – entertainment value basically.

MAOA was mentioned on here recently so some thoughts on this discussion about yanomani and unokai and possible connections to MAOA based on experience in urban underclass environments.

There’s some very specific behaviors related to the “unokai” type which doesn’t fit the phrase “warrior gene” as a cultural icon (but maybe does fit historical reality). So if researchers are looking for “warrior” traits in some heroic or bravery sense they won’t find it.

Also, although,

actual aggression ~ innate aggression minus restraint

if MAOA maps to the thing i think it does then it doesn’t map to greater natural aggression per se. It increases actual aggression by reducing restraint. An unokai may have varying levels of aggression as well but the main difference is in the lack of restraint.

Also i used to think the lack of restraint was just impulsiveness as that’s very common in the same areas but again an unokai type may have varying levels of impulsiveness as well but with unokai it’s a specific kind of impulsiveness (in my opinion).

1. The standard unokai kill.
Gang leader arguing with some guy over something. Other gang members form a little semi-circular huddle behind the leader. The unokai is at the back with his hoodie up, hand on his knife – they almost always carry a weapon because they assume everyone is like them – and he slowly shifts round the side of the group until he is behind the guy. He stabs him 3-4 times in the side. The rest of the gang if they have knives may stab him 1-2 times each after he goes down to make sure they get their name on the kill but not till after the unokai has made him defenceless.

2. Unokai are ambush or surprise killers. They’ll back away from a fair fight and their only consistent form of restraint is not having a weapon. If they get in an altercation and don’t have a weapon or some other major advantage over the other guy they’ll back off and get a weapon and come back.

3. Online gamers
Some online games with player vs player combat and killing exemplify this behavior. With most online shooters the players are all the same and have an equal chance. With others it’s possible for players to give themselves extreme advantages over other players which they exploit mercilessly. It’s all about not giving the other guy a chance. A lot of the people who play the latter kind are likely to have it.

4. Good MAOA experiment
I was reading about some MAOA experiments. If it’s what i think it is a good experiment would be:

Get a beef carcass and hang it from the ceiling add table and a nasty looking knife. Bring subjects in one by one and ask them to stab the carcass. Optional, hang a picture of a nice cow on the wall behind. The picture may not be neccessary but the aim is to calibrate it to the point where the most empathic of the female subjects has a hard time even picking up the knife. If it’s calibrated to that point then most of the other subjects won’t be able to stick it right in. Some particularly strong guys might by accident. The unokai will stick it in to the hilt even to the extent of taking a little run up or twisting to get some torque on the strike.

(There’ll be a separate group with the MAOA (if it is the cause of what i’m thinking of) who won’t do it (because they have other over-riding empathic restraining traits imo). Offer $100 to a children’s charity if they stick it right in and they’ll do what the unokai did i.e. the little run-up or twist to get extra force.)

5. Empathic restraint
The other critical difference you’d see with unokai in the above experiment (or similar) is they’ll smile or laugh afterwards. This is the big thing. They always do that. Hurting gives them a rush – even if it’s a dead cow. Most normal people hesitate before hurting someone which i think is partly empathic restraint. Not having that empathic restraint can look like a higher level of aggression or higher level of impulsiveness but it’s actually a lower than “normal” level of hesitation. Given the smiling and laughing thing i’d go further and say it’s almost an anti-empathy where they get a rush from it.

6. I think the frequency of this trait has been increasing for decades in underclass, gang-dominated environments because it has reproductive advantages. If you tested men in their 60s and 20s from a place like that i think the men in their 20s would have a higher frequency or if you had blood tests of men from those environments in their 20s from the 1960s and compared them to now.

7. If MAOA = the unokai thing = the specific thing you see in gang-dominated underclass populations then it’s responsible for tens of thousands of killings over the last 50 years. There’s a lot of aggression and a lot of impulsivity and subsequently a lot of general violence in underclass areas but the level of lethality of that violence is very disproportionately skewed to this very specific type of individual.

8. In populations subject to a rule of law the trait will both decrease in frequency and be suppressed. If you were trying to predict MAOA type behavior among a population like that then you’d need to imagine the least detectable form of ambush-killing or fierceness polygyny in that kind of environment. I’d suggest incapacity-rape where a man of this type goes to a social gathering place of some kind looking for women who are drunk / drugged and incapable.

It sounds like it could be the basis for an interesting episode of CSI or House. I can imagine some potential with ancient DNA too, maybe.

Makes me wonder about the Hindu thing. An actual taboo might hint at a moment in time with a group of people hungry enough to want to eat their cattle who could only survive if they didn’t.

“it makes no sense for Egyptians to be more ‘european’ than Berbers”

It depends what you’re measuring. If you had a population from where segments moved to both Egypt and Europe then you might be measuring what was originally pre-european. This might be partially disguised if the original region and the terriotory between it and Egypt had been partly overrun in the intervening millenia by other peoples.

For example, imagine orange paint from Anatolia to Greece and Anatolia through the Levant to Egypt being then half-covered over with purple paint from Arabia to Egypt and Arabia to the Levant.

I vaguely recall reading about the Vandals ending up in the Rif mountains (kabyles) also which ties into a broader point.

In very general terms civilization is a question of calories. Civilization is higher population density and it expands out into lower population density barbarian lands wherever civilized agriculture could increase the number of calories available on the same land and with a line of equilibrium at the margins. What that means is generally barbarian invasions involve moving from lower population densities to higher.

As an illustrative example take France and Germany as roughly the same size and saying they were divided into 16 regions each with 100,000 per French region but only 50,000 per German region because of the lower pop. density and only half of each region went wandering so 16 x 25,000 combined into four federated armies of 100,000 one targeting each of Britain, France, Italy and Spain.

Now that can work militarily because 25,000 soldiers >> 25,000 warriors >>>>>> 25,000 civilians and the romans lost their ability to maintain their soldiery but demographically that still leaves only 100,000 Germans to the 16 x 100,000 French. Maybe 20,000 each completely displacing French farmers in large chunks of the four most northern regions and 20,000 scattered around as the new elite.

The numbers are just illustrative but if the condition is lower pop. density peoples invading higher pop. density then even if it is a volkwanderung the demographic impact is likely to only involve islands of displacement. There are many examples in classical writing of these events – the first part of Gallic Wars describes one and the Belgae were supposedly the result of an earlier one – so i think they happened exactly as the classical writers said they did (minus a zero on the numbers).

I think the argument is driven by the seeming inconsistency between the relative largeness of the military impact of these events compared to the relative smallness of the demographic impact. I think this is simply the product of a situation where a civilized society with specialized soldiers and farmers and a barbarian one where every man is both a warrior and a farmer collide after the civilized society can no longer produce soldiers – very large military impact but a demographic impact characterized by only islands of displacement.

Similarly with Britain. More or less how Bede described it, lots of complete displacement in clumps along the south and east coasts but diffuse impact beyond that.

“With regards to Hungarians, I could be wrong but I recall reading that Hungary lost about 50% of it’s population during the Mongol invasions of the 1240s.”

This is the other thing, more applicable maybe to 5% elite type conquests but in extreme cases maybe to volkwanderung displacements also. 5% elites tend to concentrate in strategic spots that dominate the surrounding countryside. If a new 5% elite comes along they focus on the same spots so most of the massacring gets done there. You can easily imagine most of the demographic impact of one 5% elite being undone if a new one comes along. For a 5% elite to have a big demographic impact they need to be the last one and not wipe each other out in civil wars.

“it’s more that trans-Danubian barbarian culture and identity weren’t simply transplanted wholesale into the post-Roman kingdoms. They didn’t attempt to replicate their “tribal culture”: even in the better-documented kingdoms, there were substantial differences between pre- and post-migration cultures. Think about the differences between diaspora communities and the homeland, for a parallel.”

That’s precisely the point though. If you look at ex-pat or diaspora communities they often cling to things that are the same to make up for all the things that aren’t the same – like the last survivors of the Alans clinging to their name. They also like to live in a huddle for security which ties back to the volkwanderung question and islands of displacement for security.

“russia”

higher pop. density -> lower pop. density can swamp very easily while lower pop. density -> higher pop. density can’t (unless there’s a really big massacre).

so in a nutshell the searchs for genetic evidence for historical movements is likely to require finding the islands. imo.

“Genes are not ethnic identity. There were no “Germans” in this period; that’s a name ascribed to them by outsiders, and talking about “German” components of ancestry in this period is simply incorrect. Attempting to correlate genetic markers with populations that didn’t actually exist outside the mind of a Roman author (Tacitus, in this case) is not productive.”

Did ducks call themselves ducks?

Of course there were Germans. Any population behind any kind of marriage incline whether geographical, cultural, linguistic or religious will eventually develop separate physical characteristics even if very slight. To a Roman the people on one side of the Rhine looked a bit different and spoke a different language to the people on the Gallic side so he gave them a different name. Even if the two populations had been genetically identical as soon as one part crossed the Rhine and created a marriage incline they would have started to drift apart. That means there will be (or at least would have been) genetic markers that distinguished the two populations – even if very slight.

Although personally i think the signature is more likely to mirror the recent research on male and female personality differences i.e. a consistent pattern of small differences rather than a big single thing like a haplotype.

If these signatures can be found then it might be possible for history to be pushed back way into prehistory which is very productive if you like that sort of thing.

“The case for the T allele having selective advantage in situ for the Basque seems pretty weak, because it is no so nearly powerfully enriched in neighboring populations and a nearby older Neolithic site find it to be lacking.”

It’s the Atlantic coast and mountainous areas i.e. very rainy areas where crops are relatively poor but cows produced exceptional amounts of milk compared to what they produce elsewhere. So the relevant neighboring populations are only along the coast not inland (except heavy rainfall inland mountainous areas like the Alps).

European rainfall: http://imageshack.us/f/527/eurprcyfz7.jpg/

Lactase persistence:

The slipper seems to fit.

Also

Rainfall map of India:
Knowing nothing more than there’s a lot of LP in northern India and the assumption that there’s an optimal amount of rainfall for the grass to milk production system aka cow, i’m going to guess the highest frequency of LP in northern India will be found in the pale orangy shaded parts of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab with maybe an extension in the Kashmir and a few blobs along the west coast.

Predictive ability ftw.

I’d also predict those areas will have higher levels of things like wheat allergies than their neighboring less rainy, crop-dominated populations

The other interesting thing is camels i.e. Arabia, because apparently they can produce even more milk than cows – under the right conditions for camels.

I hadn’t thought about it before the post on the Vandals but if you stuck an Afrika Korps hat on his head it wouldn’t actually look that out of place.

“”Grey: the region you pointed to in India is actually the driest one, bordering the Thar Desert…However even in South Asia, the focus of the real phenotype persistence is in Sindh (which is bound by deserts and semi-deserts but centered along a historically and prehistorically important alluvial plain, much like Egypt or Mesopotamia, which may be more familiar to you).”

Yes, that was a wild guess to see if someone knew because my googling failed 🙂 Sindh ty.

///

“Pastoralism is actually often an activity of marginal areas not too good for crops: some are lush but too humid, as you say of Atlantic Europe but others are mostly dry.”

Yes, it’s about differential calorie production rather than milk per se.

///

“You are putting the cart before the horses: you have embraced too vehemently the belief in the adaptive origin of lactose tolerance and that keeps you from looking at the facts for what they are: neither cow primacy nor lush fields are requirements for lactose tolerance in real life.”

I thought it was an established theory so originally i was more surprised than embracing – though since finding the map of euro rainfall i think the onus is on alternative theories. (I’m not saying it proves anything – just a very strong correlation.)

I’m not really saying cows and lush fields are requirements i’m saying differential calorie production / consumption is what created the selective pressure (if there was one) and the highest differential is more likely to be in areas where the maximum amount of milk calories can be produced. Cows and lush fields (or camels in some environments) fit one half of that equation.

However it’s the differential that matters. There’s no selective pressure in those areas now even though they are still the best for milk production because anyone can go into a shop and buy bread. So LP, if it was selected, also likely requires an environment where there was limited production of other sources of calories at the same time.

///

“There is probably some association with some populations in which pastoralism has been historically important (not necessarily bovine, not at all) but then other pastoralist populations do not display the phenotype, including some (Central Asians) exposed to very different genetic inputs, but at residual levels…So I think it’s worth considering that the evolutionary (adaptive) aspect of this phenotype’s distribution (and related alleles) may only be enhanced and not fundamentally determined everywhere by pastoralism or arguable dietetic advantages (never mind cows and lush fields).”

Sure if i had to guess i’d guess the basic allele could randomly pop up anywhere through not switching off infant lactase leading to residual levels of LP everywhere. (If so i’d imagine more east Asians have it than is assumed but maybe not the same alleles that have already been identified elsewhere). Only under very specific conditions where there was an extreme calorie differential for a period of time or over bursts of time i.e. starvation events does it expand from those residual levels.

Simple experiment, take 1000 people who have 10% LP, put them on an island with no food and airdrop 400 calories per person per day in bread and 400 calories per person per day in cheese and 400 in milk and check LP frequency after three generations. Differential starvation = selective pressure.

” It makes sense for less intelligent people to be conservative. Rapid change, overturning of social norms and the like are hard to deal with, even for the more intelligent.”

Agree.

You could even make a case for liberalism being a war waged by the clever on the stupid with the clever using the combination of constant change and their faster turning circle to gain increased competitive advantage.

“so I am a little hesitant to point to this new paper”

I only get 10% from stuff like this but it’s an interesting 10%.

“I wonder how much distinction is done between formal polygyny versus de facto forms such as powerful males in 19th century Europe typically having mistresses put up in homes financially taken care of.”

The critical thing is the percentage obviously. I don’t think anyone would say any society was ever 100% monogamous. If 5% of males had three females (in some form) and 85% had one then there’s only 10% left without and if you subtract the asexual, homosexual, misanthropic, retarded etc from that 10% then the angry spares are very few. On the other hand if 5% of males have six females, 10% have four and 10% have two and 10% have one that leaves 65% angry spares.

.
“but i think i tend to be too glib about assuming that norms are irrelevant”

I think functionally it comes to the same thing but the norms are important for creating peer pressure and (critically imo) reducing elite emulation. Rich mistresses were there but hidden.

.
“But it was the rise of more democratic movement and dispersion of power that made monogamy dominant.”

Greeks, Romans, Catholic Church. Monogamy has been dominant in Europe for a very long time.

.
“The basic flaw of the article is to assume lifelong monogamy as the prevailing form of relationship in the developed countries.”

It’s saying past monogamy is correlated with current prosperity. We’ll see if the prosperity lasts now the norms have been broken down.

.
“There was after all a time when Islamic nations (where the men had multiple wives) were the dominant force”

People from a polygamous, pastoral population conquered a pre-existing settled (mostly) monogamous civilzation and replaced the ruling elite. They didn’t trash it but they didn’t create it from scratch either. Same thing with the Mongols and China.

.
“Polygamy and violence potentially form a vicious circle: more violence means fewer men to go around, and institutional polygamy means more motivation for violence once the sex ratio re-equalises. To break such a cycle requires effective violence-suppressing institutions – ie, usually, a strong state.”

Or movement into an environment where females couldn’t provision themselves and males couldn’t provision more than one female. Polygamy requires either that females can provision themselves or that some males have access to a surplus which they can use to support more than one female. Monogamy isn’t just about reducing conflict there’s a simple calorie element underlying it.

So a population that moved from an environemnt where the females could feed themselves and their offspring to one that required male provisioning would have had to become monogamous with all the evolutionary changes that might have been neccessary before monogamy became viable e.g. longterm emotional rather than just short-term sexual bonding, tears reducing aggression, reduction in female hypergamy etc.

(Perhaps limiting original out of Africa to a specifc type of environment until some of those changes had occurred?)
.
Also, levels of monogamy / polygyny would have an effect on inbreeding / outbreeding which might have knock-on effects.

From the paper

“Given its historical rarity and apparent ill-fit with much of our evolved psychology, why has this marriage package spread so successfully? Historically, the emergence of monogamous marriage is particularly puzzling since the very men who most benefit from polygynous marriage—wealthy aristocrats—are often those most influential in setting norms and shaping laws. Yet,here we are.”

I’m not sure it’s so puzzling as there’s only a few logical options.

Firstly either a female can provision her offspring on her own or not. If she can’t provision herself then there’s a limiting subsistence case where it takes one male (or possibly more than one e.g. three brothers sharing two wives) to support one female and then there’s a surplus case where a male can support more than one female so
1) female provisioning polygyny
2) subsistence monogamy
3) surplus polygyny

Female provisioning polygyny (sans modern welfare systems) is mostly restricted to certain environments. I find it hard to imagine routes from that to surplus polygyny that don’t go through subsistence monogamy first.

The only situations where i can imagine it happening are something like Arab / Greek trading outposts with a pre-existing agricultural package setting up shop among people who are in stage (1) and in adopting the package the locals jump straight from (1) to (3).

In most cases the situation will be a population in the tropics where (1) applies try to move to a new terriotory. If (1) doesn’t apply in the new terriotory and the females require male assistance to feed the young then that population will go through a phase of subsistence monogamy which will apply dramatically different selection pressures for some period of time.

(There’s also the possibility of group provisioning here where both the provisioning and all the children are viewed as a group responsibility but either way the selection pressures are very different to (1))

At some point, either through foraging in a particularly abundant environment, or through the jump to agriculture and either pastoralism or eventual abundant agriculture a population can produce a concentrated surplus which can be collected by elite males and used to support surplus polygyny. The most obvious examples of this last would be the early agrarian civilizations based around the great river-valleys: Nile, Fertile Crescent, Indus and Yellow River.

So the first point is i don’t believe monogamy is entirely an ill-fit with our evolved psychology. I think most human populations must have gone through a phase of varying length where the selection pressures were very different to those that created the foundational psychology. It seems plausible to me that some changes to the base human psychology may have been neccessary before a successfull move out of the tropical zone was possible. This doesn’t mean the foundational psychology was erased just that other layers had to be laid on top of both male and female psychology to make child provisioning work.

Secondly if you look at a world map outside the tropics and mentally cover up the areas of the great river valleys (and all the places their armies could reach) and those regions only suitable to nomadic pastoralism (and all the places their armies could reach) that doesn’t leave a lot of places available for monogamy.

However if a region without one of the great riverine valleys e.g. Europe, spent longer in subsistence monogamy and it couldn’t be easily reached by either agrarian or nomad armies then that region may have spent longer developing monogamously inclined traits – again not exclusively monogamously-inclined but the balance of power between that and the foundational polygamous psychology – to the point where monogamous traits became dominant and locked in culturally and then further reinforced through religion so even when Europe got to the point where surplus polygyny *would* have taken off it was (mostly) culturally blocked.

When Europe became globally powerful (which may or not have much to do with monogamy although i think it did for the reasons mentioned in the paper and others) monogamy could be adopted elsewhere simply through elite emulation in the same way Ancient Gauls adopted Togas and it wouldn’t neccessarily be that hard a jump because most of the world would still have their underlying layers of monogamy-inclined psychology from their subsistence monogamy phase.

“Is there a strong preference among the playas in those groups *for* having children by multiple women, or merely an indifference to fathering children?)”

Yes, it’s a kind of a competition and how many separate women have had one of their kids is how they score it. 2+ from the same woman doesn’t count. It’s also why they go after them very young as “if you love me you’ll have my baby” works better when the girls are very naive.

“Is this an indication of a sudden rupture in the very types of norms being praised here?”

The polarity of the social norms has more or less been reversed.

congrats

I don't have enough knowledge to comment but…

High levels of archaic admixture makes me imagine a collection of sub-species existing concurrently (in their own environmental niche?) with none adaptable enough to displace the others from their niche – so less a progression of hominids from lower to higher functioning than a collection of more or less equally adapted branches.

(If the archaics were adapted to a particular niche then the archaic admixture might be the useful bits like high altitude adaptations?)

Then one of the branchs became more adaptable – either through some special spark or perhaps simply because their geographical location had a migration route to an empty and different environment which forced them to adapt to fill – and that newfound adaptability allowed them to backflow and displace the what then become archaic others.

The obvious prime candidate for a geographical migration explanation would be Ethiopia in east Africa close to Arabia.

So it's the out of Africa event itself that creates a more adaptable hominid.

“Why is it so popular?”

Desire for a famous ancestor maybe – kings wanting descent from Gods, plebs wanting descent from kings.

“Biological science has prestige and privilege”

That’s the key point imo. If biologists start using the term the average person will – rightly (rightly) or wrongly (wrongly) – give them more credence than the people who’ve been saying race is a social construct for decades and those people will look very silly (and dishonest).

On the other hand race as a word was a neater fit to its intended meaning in the past when it was commonly used to describe a lineage or a tribe / nation as well. The word used needs to be seen as as variable in scale as “population.”

On the other, other hand after sixty years of inquisition some squealing seems justified.

Completely tangential but some of this made me wonder about Dionysian rituals.

http://www.indigenouspeople.net/Kalashvalley.htm

Last ditch defense.

“You can look at this another way: Male sexual behavior follows a Pareto distribution, where a few alpha males get most of the sexual opportunities, and with the most fertile women; while the lower status men have to fight for the scraps, leavings, rejects and leftovers.”

And where did this ever happen? Only in the world of the kind of “alphas” who have no knowledge or understanding of violence could anyone believe this nonsense. It can never just be a few or they’d be killed. They need a gang to protect them and the gang needs to be kept happy and outside the modern welfare environment the gang need to be fed and watered so that needs a class of people who provide that and enough of them need to be kept happy too.

“Chengis wouldn’t have been the only one with a harem. Many important men would have.”

I find it hard to believe any amount of harems amidst a normal population distribution could create the 1 in 200 effect (much higher near the epicentre i assume?) It seems much more likely to me the scale of mongol massacres was as recorded in the histories allowing the proportion of genghis Y chromosome to multiply as the population grew back to fill the void.

“The underlying issue about race seems to be whether heritable differences between socially defined races are only “skin-deep” or more profound.”

It’s a political (and in practical terms anti-scientific) argument masquerading as a scientific one.

.
“On the subject of revealed preferences in inter[social construct] relationships, I really do believe the issue is mainly cultural, not racial.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

“When proximity during this critical period does not occur — for example, where a brother and sister are brought up separately, never meeting one another — they may find one another highly sexually attractive when they meet as adults, according to the hypothesis of genetic sexual attraction (q.v.).”

You get races because the default preference is racial i.e. genetic, i.e. maximizing genes passed on. It’s *one* very simple and very logical factor.

Last comment.

“don’t pass off shit like this as established science”

Obviously it couldn’t be established science could it?

"There is evidence that the upper classes in many countries are lighter-skinned than average."

"Chinless" is an insult in the UK directed at the upper class. This also fits the idea of the upper class selecting a disproportionate number of the most feminine women over time and partially feminizing their offspring.

"the extension of trust outside the family is probably best done in stages, each one extending trust to a larger circle of people. This process takes a long time. The colonels tried to rush it, but they achieved only partial success….or must it be done in small steps?"

I think that's the nub of it (and i imagine the process can be reversed so Greeks may have had a wider circle of trust in the past than today).

I think you can try and jump-start the process by imposing cultural elements from populations that have a wider trust-circle, but eventually you need the people themselves to adjust – and that of course depends on knowing what made higher-trust populations the way they are.

“Ultimately exact knowledge of paternity is probably going to be a force for “good” rather than mischief.”

Absolutely. The damage done at ground level by the (far greater) number of men who suspect “their” children may not be theirs compared to the number where it’s true is huge. A lot of the nastiest anti-child violence has that root. On balance a very good thing indeed.

Behind every very wealthy 100 IQ executive there’s a much less wealthy 130 IQ techie whose ambition mainly revolves around items in World of Warcraft.

Obviously not really true but an element of truth maybe – especially with the importance of IT in generating competive advantage over the last 30 years.

There’s another side to the environment angle which is that a violent person can display differently in different environments

For the sake of example say the critical traits are
– violent or non-violent
– impulsive or controlled
– good or bad

where
good is defined: won’t use or threaten violence unless provoked
bad is defined: will use or threaten violence to get what they want on a cost-benefit basis

with eight possible combinations then ignoring the combinations that include “non-violent” or “good” and assuming the combinations containing “impulsive” behave the same in all environments you’re left with one type

violent / controlled / bad

Someone like this in a very non-violent environment i.e. an environment with very few people like him in it, doesn’t have to be violent to generate a usable amount of fear. He can get what he wants using intimidation and hints of violence and therefore fly below the radar of any serious law enforcement.

The same man in a violent environment e.g. prison, might need to kill someone to generate a similarly usable amount of fear.

Similarly, because (imo) non-violent environments are ones where the rule of law has been strictly applied over time hence reducing the number of violent individuals in the population then they would by definition be environments where violent behaviour has serious sanctions so for a violent / controlled / bad individual in that environment it pays to stealth.

In a violent environment however the opposite is true. In a violent environment i.e. one where there are a lot of violent individuals, it pays to advertize how dangerous you are.

So for instance the same individual in a non-violent environment might be a very careful serial rapist and in a violent environment a fairly brazen gang rapist. Being “bad” in a good environment is bad. Being “bad” in a bad environment is good.

TL;DR
The son of a violent individual adopted by people into a very non-violent environment might also be violent but the level of violence needed to intimidate the other teenagers in that environment might be (and generally is) below the level that registers as crime.

James
“If basque would have come from Caucasus-Armenia along with R1b, how do you explain that Basques show consistently on all runs 0% of Caucasus or West-Asian ??”

carpetanuiq
“However I do think it is likely that basque language came from this area much later (around VI century B.C) and through some kind of elite migration. This last factor explains the lack of this Caucasus / WA element in their genetics.”

1) If the first farmers were from eastern Anatolia and the Hattians, Minoans, Etruscans, Sumerians etc were farmers but non-IE speaking and the Hattians, Minoans, Etruscans etc were later over-run by IE speakers then it seems most likely that the first farmers were non-IE. So it seems to me if the argument is that IE speakers came from the same geographical region (or nearby) then there must have been at least two waves: the non-IE one and the IE one.

In which case the atlantic_med component could be the non-IE Anatolian first wave (or a hybrid of that with northern euro assuming northern euro was originally all-euro) and the west_asian component the later IE speaking wave (or one of them) so the Basques have the former but not the latter.

2) Apart from the two southern waves (if there were two) if the Transcaucasus IE speakers also hopped to the Balkans and the steppe by sea (bypassing the mountainous Caucasus) then they could have been the source regions for later IE-speaking waves (in each case in differently mixed form) one moving up the Danube and the other eventually becoming the standard Kurgan model.

“So, if all the _known_ out-of-steppe migrations affected only a tiny part of the agricultural zone, it is extremely unlikely that the prehistoric ones converted most of it.”

Religion. The biggest (only?) known pastoralist language replacement is the Arabic one. If a language is tied to a religion and the religion is replaced then i think language replacement is quite likely, otherwise much less so as a conquering pastoralist elite are always likely to be relatively small in numbers because pastoralism generally involves lower population densities.

“Since pastoralists can use land that farmers can’t (drier, more rugged, etc), it seems quite reasonable that pastoralism could develop on the “edges” — where hunters and farmers meet. Perhaps the hunters at first hired themselves out to guard and herd the farmer’s critters, and later acquired animals of their own and herded them deep into regions where the farmers couldn’t follow.”

Yes, i think so. Google “aboriginal stockman” for a lot of images like this:

In places like Australia the European colonization was fast and complete so people like those in the pictures didn’t have time to learn the trade on European sheep stations and then strike out on their own to the extent of creating a new pastoralist identity built on the hunter-gatherer one but what if something similar had happened in the past where the agricultural advance was halted by latitude for centuries or millenia at a time as seems to have been the case during the neolithic expansion in Europe and maybe elsewhere?

“Iranian religious distinctiveness is not primal”

I think there’s an indirect aspect to it though. If a people have a particularly strong sense of historical identity and an opportunity arises to reinforce that identity through some other means they are more likely to take it. I think this is a factor in the rise of Protestantism in Europe where the religious differences were more of an excuse than a reason e.g. Hussites in Bohemia. To a large extent i think the early Protestant churchs in Europe – to the followers if not the leaders – were first and foremost *national* churchs.

“the circumstantial fact is that too many Ashkenazim are light-featured for the shift to be mostly Anatolian, Aegean, or Italian.”

Unless the Levantines / Anatolians were originally lighter (not saying they were just the logic of it).

#

“not all that many who look Slavic”

I always thought Paul Newman looked Slavic but that may just have been me.

#

“Couldn’t the European genes be the result of Jewish slave owners mating with their female gentile slaves?”

There’s a lot of possibilities but if the root movement was related to banking and money lending then if a group of Jewish money-lenders moved to a new region from the Levant to open up a new franchise then one easy way to compete with the local money-lending families would have been to marry into those familes first and then go back to endogamy once the process was complete. Repeat with each new region / country.

@6
That’s a good example of how clannishness could prevent innovation and how the partial breakdown of clannishness could, maybe not create, but allow innovation to happen more easily.

If industrialization and urbanization can break down inbreeding then the creation of an urbanized middle class from the brightest among inbred villagers could – if the same schools they and their children went to were used to test for IQ results over time – show increasing IQ over time – at least in those schools. If so then the effects of this process would vary depending on whether it started in 1850, 1900, 1950 etc in that nation.

Another thought is regional or national caricatures of relative average stupidity – especially of people from the most rural areas – may have been true at the time those caricatures were created and became untrue later.

“do you know much about the history of how the safavids imposed shia islam on iran?”

No it’s pure speculation based on looking at old and new maps of various seemingly unrelated things and noticing recurring patterns and wondering if they are in fact related through some indirect mechanism. Obviously on the face of it if something is imposed that would tend to suggest the opposite but even then – what if that same dynasty had tried to impose it on non-Persians? But like i say it’s mostly map patterns so it may be nothing.

“this seems plausible on the face of it, but say more…the model of the ‘magesterial’ protestantism where the church and nationality are coterminous applies well only in scandinavia from what i can gather, though it comes close in england for a period when church of england was relatively ‘broad.’”

I wouldn’t go as far as the magesterial model. I’d only say that individuals who’d developed a national sense of us and them might be inclined to adopt a different religion to “them” if the opportunity arose. If so you’d have people who adopted a particular Protestant creed for religious reasons and others for proto-nationalist reasons. I also think you need to take the effects of the counter-reformation into account as this process didn’t occur under laboratory conditions.

The growth of Protestantism along the north european plain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain

from Eastern England to Western Poland and Bohemia didn’t develop without conflict. Protestantism in Poland, France, Bohemia etc was mostly counter-reformed while Germany was split in half and had the 30 years war, so i think only Holland, England and Scandinavia *could* fit the model in which case the fit isn’t that bad – although stull loose.

“the border region between ireland and scotland is the irish sea, same as in 1700”

The border shifted with the various easterly or westerly invasions over the Irish Sea over the centuries so sometimes it was in Ireland, sometimes in Scotland and occasionally it was the Irish Sea.

#

“Substitute “Scots-Irish” for “Pashtun”, “Hmong” or “Berber” and you will see what I mean.”

And Arab and Mongol and Indo-European(?) for Highlanders on horseback.

“The character of Worf fascinates me”

Now you mention it the Klingons are the Star Trek version of this type of culture.

“Craic believe it or not is actually a loan word in Irish language, been derived from middle-english Crack, which has same meaning. Thence you hear the term used in North of England, Scotland as well”

As in Wallace from Wallace and Gromit and “a cracking piece of cheese.”