Like the poster above, I think issues of social power are not coming into this analysis enough. Why does everyone have to be educated these days? To please their employers. Why do women go to college? Because female-dominated jobs that don’t require a college degree are very low-paying (nannies, etc.). And yes, the debt burden that college graduates labor under is crushing, and not conducive to risk-taking of any kind.

Furthermore, general economic and labor-market trends are terrible and don’t seem to be improving for most people. Many college graduates are stuck in menial labor and can hardly pay their debts as it is. It doesn’t take a genius to see that all of these things will put severe downward pressure on the fertility of high-IQ, highly conscientious people (but not that of low-IQ/unconscientious people, who have much more of a “what, happens, happens” outlook).

The elites really have us by the balls. Not only have they successfully pushed multiculturalism and mass immigration on us, their financial polices and the inequality they have created are crushing the fertility of high-IQ people. Also, as a result of those policies, vastly more people are going to college and being exposed to Cathedral indoctrination with little to show for it. And there is no end in sight. I wonder if you could address this social power aspect of the problem in your “HBD and Society” series? It’s certainly one thing that a broad awareness of HBD might change.

Razib, I was wondering if you had any book recommendations on Islamic history in the last 500-800 years. I am particularly interested in learning about how the Islamic world fell into its current (frankly) backward state. Pretty much all I’ve found are very simplistic or highly politicized explanations. Could you tell me of anything good you’ve found?

I recently finished War in Human Civilization and am also reading Nations. I am highly impressed by Gat’s scholarship. Unfortunately, his internet presence is small. I’ve rounded up what links I can find.

Hear him speak about war in this video (his speech starts about 15 minutes in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSIo-kLBNY

A phone interview with him about War in Human Civilization: http://newbooksinhistory.com/2010/07/15/azar-gat-war-in-human-civilization/

Another phone interview concerning Nations: http://newbooksinpoliticalscience.com/2013/04/09/azar-gat-nations-the-long-history-and-deep-roots-of-political-ethnicity-and-nationalism-cambridge-up-2013/

An article Gat wrote about the Arab Spring: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-arabs-1848-10256

“The students I met were generally pleasant but superficial and a bit too calculating for people their age.”

Sociopaths? Wouldn’t be surprising, considering the set of people we’re talking about.

“one hears whispered rumors of easier breaks for women getting in—is there something wrong with that?”

Pinker addressed this in The Blank Slate–it makes it harder for the women who actually are qualified.

I took the survey. I thought the last survey I completed, in 2012, had some better questions, about sex and race differences in personality and intelligence, abortion in cases of genetic disease, etc. I would have been interested in comparing the 2014 results on these (far more controversial) questions to the 2012 ones, and seeing how they were affected by the switch to Unz.

Razib, I noticed on your goodreads that The Bell Curve is one of the few books you’ve given five stars. I’ve never seen you mention it on the blog, but given that it’s now 20 years old, could you tell us some of your thoughts about the book and how its arguments have held up over time?

I’ve been fond of Ian Morris ever since reading Why the West Rules–For Now; he has an easy writing style and gives a good intro to Chinese history for the uninitiated in that book. In addition, like Anatoly Karlin above, I was really fascinated by his attempt to link historical trends to levels of energy capture, shaky though it may be. While Morris can adhere to convention in areas outside his expertise (I skipped the “singularity” section at the end of Why the West Rules, for example), I have enjoyed all his books and am always interested in reading his latest ones.

Speaking of which, Ian Morris is coming out with a new book in a couple of months, called Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, in which he uses his ideas about energy capture to shed light on moral systems through history: http://www.amazon.com/Foragers-Farmers-Fossil-Fuels-University/dp/0691160392/ Sounds interesting!

Anatoly Karlin: As the above book shows, Morris is still interested in using an analytic approach (though lately he’s been focused on religion and morality), but there’s very little of it in War! What is it Good For?, probably because he looks beyond the West and East Asia in that book. He talks a lot more about Native Americans and India in it, and I don’t think he’s ever come out with quantification statistics for those societies. The book is similar in some ways to The Better Angels of Our Nature and War in Human Civilization (which Morris acknowledges at the beginning). If you have already read those books, you won’t find too much that is new, although Morris actually discusses ant and chimpanzee group conflict (something I found to be strangely lacking in Azar Gat’s book, which was so thorough about so much else).

Ian Morris also recently coauthored a paper about the origins of Axial Age religions: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2901372-4 (gated). Peter Turchin critiqued it here: http://socialevolutionforum.com/2014/12/14/does-affluence-lead-to-asceticism-part-i/ and here: http://socialevolutionforum.com/2014/12/16/does-affluence-lead-to-asceticism-part-ii/

All of these links come from Pseudoerasmus’ great link round-up: http://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/01/15/link-dump-15jan15/

@#1: what is this I don’t even

Was this a post you let through for humor’s sake, Razib?

Razib, are you interested in Stanislas Dehaene’s latest book, Consciousness in the Brain? I bought that one recently and am making my way through it; it’s pretty good so far.

I agree with #6 that your goodreads and “edifying books” list has been a godsend.

The most interesting book I’ve discovered in the past few days (thanks to James Thompson’s blog) is Earl Hunt’s Human Intelligence, a broad and refreshingly cautious look at IQ testing and correlates of IQ scores with life outcomes. I had already read Ian Deary’s Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction and wanted to learn more, but Arthur Jensen’s book The g Factor is a bit much for me. I am very glad to discover Hunt’s book as he is a clear and commonsensical writer. I’ve finished the first chapter on Amazon’s site and would gladly recommend it so far.

Update: the paper is now on Biorxiv!

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/10/013433

So have you become open to the idea that the ANIs were, or were mainly, Indo-Europeans? I remember a few years ago in one of your bloggingheads conversations that you said you didn’t believe ANI was likely to be a signature of the IEs. Fascinating if so. I highly suspect the Reich team will continue to publish on the Indo-European expansion phenomenon and a lot of this will be clarified in a few years–which would be amazing, since people have been discussing this for centuries. Truly, we live in interesting times.

Razib, Nathan:

I misspoke above. I clearly implied that I thought Razib thought the IEs were the sole contributors to ANI in India, but what I meant to ask is whether he now believed they brought a substantially greater portion of it than he had previously assumed. I know there has been a lot of migration into India from its northeast, both before and after the IEs came, which must have brought ANI into India. I never meant to say only the IEs brought it.

The reanalysis of US (and world) history in the last couple decades has been almost entirely for the better, as we have a stronger understanding of the processes that molded the US (and world) into what it is today. Perhaps due to the very large amount of immigration the US has received in the past 40 years, there is a tendency to view the colonial Americans and their English-speaking white descendants as “other” in a way that is unprecedented in US historiography, as far as I know.

As the US has become a mixed nation and people have started marrying interracially in large numbers, the ethnocentric character of the white English-speakers (let’s call them WASPs for lack of a better term) has become more and more glaring, as it contrasts very strongly with the sort of society the US now sees itself to be. Hence the analysis of them as singularly unwilling to adjust to the racially diverse tenor of the New World and unjustifiably clinging to the ways of life found in their home countries in Europe.

This new way of viewing WASPs is often contrasted with the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World, as that quote demonstrates. The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry, and since anti-racism in the modern US is closely aligned with acceptance of intermarriage, they appear less racist in a (highly) superficial modern analysis. Of course, anyone who has researched Spain’s and Portugal’s colonial history knows such a view is nonsense, but even relatively smart people have been fooled. I recall that in Charles C. Mann’s book 1493, he took ridiculous pains to argue that the Spanish casta system was “not racial in the modern sense.” Why, exactly, should that matter so much? Was he trying to make the Spaniards look better than early US settlers by demonstrating that they avoided the specific type of racism modern Americans hate so much?

Because of this sea change, virtually any discussion of the virtues of WASPs must subsume them into the general character of American society, to which all peoples have contributed. Singling them out in a good way is increasingly risky. Minority groups are much more allowed to be seen as having made accomplishments in their own right. The founding and original majority group in the US, however, is either invisible or demonized.

Note that I am trying to explain these changes as I have seen them over my own (short) lifetime, not to take sides one way or the other. I don’t like overt partisanship of any kind in academic writing. If a country can discuss its own flagship culture or ethnic group without bias, that is very much a virtue in my eyes. However, I don’t think American historians have managed to do this well. Avoiding or demonizing the majority group does not constitute viewing it in a mature way. To me it is no coincidence that the best recent book about English-speaking whites, Replenishing the Earth, was written by a non-American, New Zealander James Belich. It neither celebrates their deeds or denigrates them, but still treats them as a distinctive group with unique contributions to US and world history.

Razib: thanks for the reply! Ironic that the genes were more egalitarian than the society was.

To put what I said into more succinct terms, I think there is now a tendency to view the US colonial white population as “them” rather than “those who will someday be us.” This wasn’t the case even when I was in school.

This is to T. Greer or anyone who is interested in Chinese literature: what are the best English translations of the Four Classical Novels?

T. Greer, thanks for your reply. I’ll look into these translations!

One of the nice things about asking and getting answered in public is that other people aside from oneself can see the answer. 🙂

The authors sounded surprised by what they did NOT find: strong selection related to immunity from disease. Why do you think they didn’t discover anything on that front, Razib?

My god. This is absolutely pathetic on the Times’ part. Razib Khan links to his articles on Taki’s etc. on his own website. If that’s what scared them, they should have been smart enough to do the obvious and actually visit his webpage before hiring him, instead of delivering this cowardly slap in the face.

I have been reading Ian Morris’ latest book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. I got through the main part of his arguments, which Razib might find interesting, since Morris makes some of the same points that Razib has in that the relative freedom offered by fossil fuel-using societies has allowed people to revive some of the mores more common in foraging societies that were suppressed by farming. On the other hand, the book has some problems, mostly caused by vagueness as to what “values” refers to, or ought to refer to. Morris, taking up an avowedly functionalist point of view, doesn’t seem to allow that there might be conflict between what people feel to be right and what they actually must do in order to survive. The problems surrounding the word “values” comes up in some of the rebuttals by the other authors, which I am currently reading, although the rebuttals don’t offer too much value, in my opinion.

Anyway, it is a very interesting book and I have a lot more thoughts on it than can be summarized here. It’d be nice if some people here looked into it.

I too am a member of the Razib Khan Book Club!

As for books on IQ, I learned of a good one from James Thompson’s site: Human Intelligence by Earl Hunt. It’s a good overview of both the tests themselves, the latest psychometrics research, and what real-life traits the tests correlate with. It’s newer than Jensen’s book and more cautious in its conclusions, but still a very good introduction to the field.

“Second, do readers have any particular papers/books on domestication that they think are particularly good?”

I have looked for such things myself and the situation is not very good. I have seen the Zohary book for plants, and there are plenty of others floating around about “why would humans switch to an agricultural lifestyle?” but when it comes to the domestication of animals, there is a strange dearth of comprehensive books on the topic, in spite of its popularity among the lay public. There are plenty of academic papers to be found on individual animals, and a few books on them, but few take the totality of domesticates into consideration to point out common themes.

While shopping at a local bookstore, I stumbled upon an advance copy of an upcoming popular account, called Domesticated, which I promptly bought (I suspect selling advance copies is not even legal!). The author is a neuroscientist himself, and there is an extensive bibliography, which you might be interested in viewing when the book comes out. Quite a few species of mammals are covered, and he discusses some commonalities between them, as well as general ideas about evolution (mostly good, but a little too enthusiastic about epigenetics for me). Unfortunately, there was nothing in my advance copy about chickens or other non-mammals, which might change in the final version. Of course, it is a popular account, so a lot of it is going to be too basic for your needs.

Getting more technical, there is a book I managed to find called Animals as Domesticates: A Worldview through History, which had a lot of information on archaeological finds. Since a lot of animals probably passed through a commensal stage on their way to domestication, you might also be interested in its fellow book, Animals as Neighbors. I also found a book called Social Zooarchaeology, which details the effect of domesticated animals on human societies (beware that it has a fair amount of post-modern jargon; at least the parts I read did). Other than these I haven’t found very much at all, and I’d be happy for some suggestions myself!

(Just like with domestication books themselves, the whole field surrounding study of animal domestication is weirdly obscure: it doesn’t even know whether to call itself archaeozoology or zooarchaeology. One can see the obscurity in the lack of suggested books given by Amazon in the links below.)

Upcoming book Domesticated: http://www.amazon.com/Domesticated-Evolution-Man-Made-Richard-Francis/dp/0393064603
Animals as Domesticates: http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Domesticates-through-History-Animal/dp/1611860288/
Animals as Neighbors: http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Neighbors-Present-Commensal-Animal/dp/1611860954/
Social Zooarchaeology: http://www.amazon.com/Social-Zooarchaeology-Humans-Animals-Prehistory/dp/052114311X/

Does anyone know of any relatively recent papers or books on Kalash religion? Everything I’ve seen so far is at least 100 years old.

“the Kalash are lactose tolerant, but they lack the common Eurasian variant in totality. That implies that there is another variant in the LCT region unique to the Kalash.”

Reminds me of the second half of this post: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/phenotypes-vs-genetic-statistics/

Thanks for the links.

Razib, what do you think of this?
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0100-stone-bracelet-is-oldest-ever-found-in-the-world/

I’m really interested but a bit skeptical, at this point. But does this mean they’ve found more confirmed Denisovan bones that could be reconstructed into a skeleton?

I realize that this is wading into very troubled waters, but does anyone know of good books discussing the forecasted effects of climate change? I am aware that the ratio of honest, carefully reasoned accounts to ideological bullshit is extremely depressing when it comes to this topic.

Razib, apropos of your population post, I was curious about something. You’ve made many posts on here describing how we can ascertain from modern-day genomes that human populations were far smaller in the past than the present (which is also what the archaeological record and common sense tell us).

What if there was a huge disaster not too long from now, and 10,000 years later, there were only 5 million or so humans on Earth, similar to our previous hunter-gatherer days. Would an alien taking genotypes from these 5 million people be able to figure out that the human population had been much larger 10,000 years ago? Would they be able to guess that the number was about 7 billion? If the alien couldn’t make such a guess, why not?

A speculative question, but I’ve wondered about it for a long time.

Interracial breeding: two legs good, four legs bad?

Don’t forget ants.

Incredible. I know many have begged you over the years to write a book, but this post really shows why you need to do that, at least at some point.

I have a few questions and comments:

1) ” The figure from Haak et al does not use admixture components that break out naturally, but their inferred demographic mixes taking into account the genetic character of the putative ancestral populations. The blue component refers to WHG, but WHG-like ancestry is also in both the green (Yamnaya) and orange (EEF) elements (this is why I’m saying it is likely that modern Europeans are mostly >50% WHG-like).”

Thank you for explaining this figure from Haak et al, because I have been wondering about it for awhile. Just to clarify, then, does the blue WHG ancestry shown in (say) the English in that diagram refer to WHGs that lived *in England itself* and became part of the modern English, whereas WHG picked up by EEF is shown in the orange EEF section?

2) “Allentoft et al. has broader Eurasian samples, including likely Indo-European populations in the trans-Ural and trans-Altai regions. In both of these areas the successor cultures had EEF-like ancestry. That is, like the Corded Ware population, and unlike the parent Yamnaya group. This strongly implies back-migration by this complex from Eastern Europe, as far east as western China, during the Bronze Age.”

This point isn’t quite clear to me either, and I don’t have access to the Allentoft paper. According to it, who back-migrated to/from where? Did Corded Ware people go to the Altai and Ural regions?

3) Regarding the IE expansion and David Anthony’s comments, do you think his elite dominance model is still salvageable for southern Europe? There is less Yamnaya admixture there, and there were non-IE groups in areas of southern Europe well into the Iron Age, implying that the completion of Indo-Europeanization was more due to the contingent historical phenomenon of Rome’s success. (Perhaps Romans had higher LCT rates than non-IEs, a la Tutsis/Hutus? Has anyone looked?) In general, the whole southerly aspect of the IE expansion (S. Europe, Iran, India, the Balkans, and Anatolia) is still virtually untouched by ancient DNA researchers, and will probably be the hardest part to unravel.

4) “Why would one think that selection upon variation in pigmentation began at the cusp of the Holocene?”

Well, the Inuit live further north than most Europeans, and yet are darker than them (though lighter than most Native Americans). Quite probably, diet affected Vitamin D intake; HGs may not have been so dependent on sunlight to get it. I do think it is telling that this gene was apparently selected for in early farmers from the Middle East, i.e., people living in an even sunnier and more southerly place than most of Europe, who also had relatively poor diets. Still, more research on divergent paths to depigmentation among Paleolithic European HGs would be very productive.

5) “Intriguingly Allentoft et al. indicates that though the Bronze Age steppe populations had low frequencies of the derived allele, it seems that they did have a higher frequency than contemporary populations.”

How do you think this compares to Haak et al’s completely negative finding of LCT among the Yamnaya? What might account for the discrepancy?

6) Regarding cultural evolution and its role in the success of groups, have you heard about the upcoming book “The Secret of Our Success” by Joseph Henrich (the author of Foundations of Human Sociality)? http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854/

Apparently he will be tackling these and other questions regarding the role of cultural evolution in human history. Here is a video of him talking in March 2015 about matter which he says will be addressed in his “upcoming book.” He discusses the role of monogamy and outbreeding in cultural group selection and in the creation of WEIRD people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV1LRsI0ybA

Video Link

This book sounds like it will be a culmination of a lot of the cultural evolution research that’s been undertaken in the last couple decades, as well as answering your call for more culturally-informed explanations for human evolutionary change. It’s definitely on my to-read list.

In this context Razib is not talking about the modern model, but rather explaining what the British’s (outdated) Aryan Invasion model consisted of.

Thank you for your extensive reply and link to the Allentoft paper.

“the blue WHG is stuff that came in later and added to a well mixed EEF substrate.”

So, would this have happened during the time after the initial EEF push in which HG ancestry increased in frequency across Europe?

“some one inference is that post-yamnaya european group migrated back. or, EEF was on the steppe.”

Interesting. Given how demographically successful the first farmers were, I would not rule out EEF going eastward and northward onto the steppe. On the other hand, much has been made, in light of this finding, of the linguistic connections between Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian. And we should never forget that there were surely branches of Indo-European languages that were never committed to writing before going extinct. As always, more research is needed! We live in interesting times, and scientific preprints and posts like yours help laypeople like us feel some small slice of the awe and fascination that the scientists making all these discoveries must experience.

“i think anatolia will be good.”

Turkey has a pretty good antiquities program, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, anything in the Middle East, such as Iran, might be harder to access. What do you think it would take to convince skeptics of the steppe hypothesis? A clear change in material culture at the same time as Yamnaya genetic material appeared in people? Alternatively, what ancient DNA evidence would prove (or at least strongly hint) that the IE expansion was more complicated than the canonical steppe hypothesis predicts? In some ways things are much easier to explain when they just drive out the previous inhabitants!

Regarding Henrich’s upcoming book, I should point out that I learned about it due to you–I look at the work of a lot of the scientists and historians you link to on your goodreads page.

This is a great speech by Jonathan Haidt in which he not only describes his theory about liberals and conservatives in moral terms, but also how the liberal domination of science (and the subsequent conservative distrust of it) are quite new. I was shocked to learn this phenomenon seems to date only to the 1990’s. The science part of the discussion starts at 48 minutes into the video.

I was particularly pleased to see him single out the denial of IQ, heritability, and sex differences as problems among liberal social scientists.

Cities tend to be population sinks.

On the whole, though, I wonder how much this study controlled for the effects of internal migration.

The books mentioned here by Razib and the commenters are one of the main draws of the site for me. I own many of the works listed above and some of them, like War in Human Civilization, have absolutely blown me away. Finding GNXP has been a life-changing event for me for this reason. I try to give back in some small way by leaving my own suggestions in the comments. Thanks, Razib and everyone!

I am about halfway through “The Secret of our Success” and am greatly enjoying it. Culture is surely the most notable item in the last frontier of topics yet to be well explained by science. Seeing Joe Henrich take a crack at it makes me think that its days in that frontier are numbered.

Henrich starts with the proposition that nobody, even modern hunter-gatherers in Africa living in the very environment where our species evolved, could survive long without the cultural armor that has allowed their society to make effective use of its environment. (As he sardonically puts it, “If not for surviving as hunter-gatherers in Africa, what is our species good for?”) Simply putting even highly motivated people (e.g. lost European explorers) in an environment quite unfamiliar to them shows this clearly. From this well-articulated idea that cultural learning is the only thing now keeping our species going, Henrich develops ideas about how it has shaped our evolution for at least the past million years–from our eyes and throats to sweat glands, arm shape, and Achilles’ heels. Our leaning on culture has also pushed us to seek out “prestigious” individuals who are deep in knowledge–Henrich believes that prestige is a form of social status that is unique to our species, which exists alongside dominance, which we inherited from our ape ancestors. This means our vaunted intellect is actually more intended for being good at picking up and storing information learned from others–the human mind is no disembodied reasoner, explaining why humans so easily fall prey to various logical fallacies and make irrational decisions (Henrich leaves various comments implying he has a beef with economists on this front).

Another refreshing thing about the book is the lack of bad ideas or time wasted taking potshots in eternal academic debates. Henrich has no problem admitting high rates of warfare among hunter-gatherers, that both learning and genes work together to create phenotypes that can reproduce themselves, that modern small-scale societies are at best a highly imperfect guide to the Paleolithic, and so on. He has clearly constructed his theories such that they need not change much depending on which side of such debates turns out to be more true.

There are fewer surprises here if you have followed the cultural evolution literature for the last few years (especially Henrich’s own academic papers, to which he refers extensively), but this is the single best book for exploring the most important things that that literature has to say about our species and its evolution. Most of the previous books released concerning CE (such as “Cultural Evolution” by Mesoudi) have been about elucidating the techniques used by the researchers as opposed to building large theories about the importance of culture. Therefore, “The Secret of our Success” should be seen as a milestone of the field.

I hope you’ll read and review it soon, Razib!

Maybe you should set up a page with the worst comments as a sort of Wall of Shame, to show people what not to say here. It’d be good for laughs, if nothing else.

Are there any commenters whose names you can remember for the good things they’ve said?

Henrich talks quite about about gene-culture coevolution in his new book. I am partway through Peter Turchin’s book but I find it more uneven than Henrich’s, which was top quality throughout.

I have spoken highly of The Secret of Our Success in the comments here before, but I did indeed mention that having familiarity with the author’s previous output (much of which is available for free on his website) makes the book’s content much less novel.

One thing I liked about TSOS in comparison with Turchin’s Ultrasociety book is that, judging from the remarks at the very end of his book, Henrich is much more cautious about the ability of humans to direct their own cultural evolution, whereas Turchin is very optimistic about applying his findings. Linked with this is Henrich’s relatively apolitical stance, whereas Turchin wears his views on his sleeve. I found this aspect of Henrich’s writing very refreshing and honest. Most research really isn’t going to translate into immediate results.

“Unfortunately some of the references to genomics are out of date, because he was writing the book in 2014.”

Could you go into more detail about which ones?

Surely that’s the worst book you could recommend to outsiders on the topic. Everyone knows how controversial and supposedly racist it is. Go with Ritchie; at least he’s a young white guy with a cute accent instead of an old crusty white guy.

Or wait until a non-white person publishes a nice book about intelligence, because I think that’s what it’s really going to take to get people to listen. It’s a shame more POC aren’t interested in intelligence research. Only Nixon could go to China.

Regarding #4, one of the great advantages of UBI is the possibility of cracking down on lending to people who can’t handle the money–right now, payday lenders, and credit card companies point out that such people cannot live without their services. Give them cash regularly, and that defense is much weaker. Both the lower classes and the financial system would become more stable if lending became more restricted again.

Very interesting to see that 90% of the respondents think that “Differences on intelligence test scores between populations will be confirmed by genomics to be due at least in part due to genetic factors.”

A REALLY good follow-up question would be, “Which people are you willing to discuss your views with?” with options for family/friends/coworkers/in public etc. How much are these beliefs circulating? How afraid are people of talking about them?

The first half is somewhat amusing; he merely makes snide cracks while most of the group appears to play along. It’s the last half, where he cleverly exposes the problems with their ideology and they become visibly flustered, that is brilliant. Great video.

“Indo-European is likely one example of a mixed hunter-gatherer/farmer culture that adopted the hunter-gatherers’ language.”

Crucially, they probably weren’t hunter-gatherers at the time they absorbed the farmers.

It was also common in Western family photos several decades ago. It used to take a long time for the picture to take, so having a straight face was probably a lot easier on everyone.

One wonders if SJWs’ extreme racial awareness combined with the growing cynicism of old age will have toxic consequences in the future…

I, like Steven Pinker, find it very instructive to note that IQ research has mostly avoided this replication crisis.

So, let’s try to regroup and look at the big picture. I’m going to list all the known and suspected migrations into the Americas. Correct me where I’m wrong.

1. The Andaman-like people, whose existence was only recently discovered due to the paucity of genetic and archaeological remains. Therefore, their time and route of entry into the Americas is very mysterious. They are almost gone but have left a small signature in modern-day Amazonians.

2. The group discussed in this latest paper, who were trapped in Beringia for a few thousand years. They then migrated into the Americas and quickly increased in number about 16,000 years ago. Those who survived the Columbian Exchange form the majority of modern South American native DNA.

3. Clovis? Although I have not finished the paper, my biggest question is where Clovis now fits into things–the former explanation, that it was the first group of people to settle the Americas, nicely explained the lack of cultural diversity over such a large area. And supposedly Clovis closely matches modern Native North Americans, insofar as they have been sampled. Is Clovis extremely closely related to group #2, and represents some kind of expansion of people already in the continent (like Pama-Nyungan languages in Australia), or were they a separate migration that came later?

4. Na-Dene people–came from Siberia several thousand years ago, and left a distinctive genetic signature in people who speak these languages today.

5. The Thule, predecessors of the Inuit.

6. The Inuit, who arrived about 700 years ago and seem to have wiped out the the Thule.

Whew! This is starting to look much more complicated than people once believed, and that the levels of Native genetic diversity would imply. This must be because all people in the Americas prior to 1492 (except maybe for the Andamanish folk) came from the same area of Siberia, and hence none of the source populations were very genetically distant. Getting to the bottom of this story will be fascinating.

[Crossposted from West Hunter; thought it might be useful here]

Thanks for the corrections.

Thanks for making us aware of this terrible news, Razib.

I have read Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies and thought it was quite good as a basic overview, but it is not much more than that–someone who has read as much as you probably knows most of the facts in the book. It’s strange to me that there are not more general overviews on agricultural societies like this book, when there are so many books about hunter-gatherers. This fact makes books like Crone’s valuable.

“Obviously I have not been able to sit down and write a long treatment of Iosif Lazaridis’ magisterial The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers.”

Is this something we can look forward to?

“I suggested that sounds a lot like the sort of working class whites might also offer up for why mass immigration is a problem (he was taken aback by the analogy).”

Good God. And therein lies the reason for the dysfunction of the country and the elites’ complete inability to deal with it. “Diversity and creative destruction for thee, but not for me.”

In happier news, CARTA has put up a bunch of videos about ancient DNA. Razib readers will already know about lots of these findings, but learning about how the scientists got to them is instructive.

https://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/ancient-dna-and-human-evolution

This is one of the reasons I’m thankful for the rise of China. But I wonder how much of Western civilization will be ruined before people come to their senses.

Incidentally, as a working-class white person, I want to thank you for your willingness to speak the truth to power when it comes to discussing issues with upper-class whites/SWPLs, like in the open thread above. They would never listen to a person like me.

I’ll leave with:

‘If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. ‘If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

“It’s a little saddening to me that ultimately what came out of all that is a piece which tries to paint 23andMe as prejudiced against minorities.”

But in the age of SJW clickbait, can you say you’re surprised? 23andme’s biggest problem is that their new website is awful.

“First, they don’t have that many Asian customers. Second, their Asian customers might actually get a bit irritated!”

Could you explain this more? Do you think Asians set greater store by their ancestry results? The author of this article definitely seems miffed by hers.

Incidentally, would you be willing to look over individual/family results (if paid), or do you know someone who would? I have some questions about my family’s results.

A good, though troubling, post. I do wonder, however, if everyone on the wrong side of the orthodoxy divide in any society at any time hasn’t thought the same. “Surely people must realize how stupid the reigning wisdom is! Surely they must come around soon! Else, all is lost,” must be common feelings. I don’t say this to mock you, because I often have the same longing.

Your most unsettling point is the acquiescence of the young–young people seem to care little about liberty, and much about not being offensive. But things must have felt similar during the 1960’s, when the Old Left was challenged by the New Left, with the young going along with the latter. I have often felt that, if in 20 years SJW is not mocked with the same vigor that hippies were in the 1980’s, then we will know we have a serious problem on our hands.

Another way of looking at the situation is that, in this country’s long history as a relatively open society, there have been ebbs and flows in general social tolerance, as in many other things. Probably the most intense period in which power was more important than truth was the lead-up to the Civil War. I recall reading a letter by William T. Sherman before the War, when he was living in the South, in which he said that he dare not mention to anyone there that he came from a Northern state. And he was someone who cared little for politics and had little antipathy toward slavery. Obviously, in retrospect one side of this conflict was much more in the wrong than the other, but we often forget how pro-disunion some abolitionists were. And there have been other ugly periods, such as the Red Scares.

So far, social permissiveness has come roaring back after these crackdowns, but that isn’t inevitable. Maybe openness was a symptom more than a cause of America’s rise to power, and as it declines, so will freedom of conscience.

“my goal is try to get embedded in that class.”

I find this a confusing goal if you are heterodox in your thinking. The global, Western-led upper class is often the most aggressive in pushing PC orthodoxy onto the “ignorant rubes.” What makes you think they’d spare you if you went out of line, even if you were influential enough to be one of them?

For example, I’ve come to believe that the argument “even if we’re not all the same, fairness and decency dictate that we treat all people as well as possible,” which has appeared in Joe Henrich’s book and elsewhere, is a tell. It’s both good in and of itself and indicates that the speaker is at least cautiously accepting of some HBD ideas.

Already, people are starting to debate the theories in the new paper about steppe migrations into Europe. One side seems to accept the authors’ suggestion that it was mostly men who migrated, and mixed with local women through the generations. Others speculate that plenty of steppe women came too, and families of steppe people replaced farmers, at least in northern Europe. But in addition to their steppe wives, steppe men had a large number of female farmer concubines/mistresses/slaves.

What do you think? And would it be easy to prove either theory?

The Cavalier culture is not *currently* capturing the national imagination, because it has been in decline for decades, as Woodard pointed out in his book. It was once a very important component of the national culture–Southerners used to be proud to point out that national heroes like Washington and Jefferson were slaveholding planters, whereas today those facts are unpleasant and swept under the rug.

However, there is a third Southern subculture that Fischer does not discuss in Albion’s Seed, namely the Deep South (probably because a) the Carolina planters came from elsewhere in the New World, not a region of Britain; and b) because he presumably wanted to keep the book under a thousand pages). Woodard does talk about them, however, and they do still loom large in the national imagination, viz. Dylan Roof.

The current Mormon alliance is mainly with the Scots-Irish and the Deep South, as Tidewater is disappearing.

“A little known fact about Scots Irish is that they also tended to oppose slavery, on account of so many of their brethren having been shipped off in chains to colonial plantations, which may as well have been death camps.”

I am always very skeptical of claims like this. The reading I’ve done demonstrates that all non-black groups in the South disliked slavery for a generation or two, but then became tolerant of it at the very least. More often they became enthusiastic supporters and practitioners of the institution. This includes the Native Americans living in that area.

Statements like this seek to put a satisfying modern interpretation on what our ancestors actually believed and did. Read James Oakes’ The Ruling Race if you want more information: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393317056/

Woodard did publish a new book this year: https://www.amazon.com/American-Character-History-Struggle-Individual/dp/0525427899/

It contains more discussion of the different American Nations, but I haven’t read it, so I’m not sure what else it’s about.

I’ve asked this question before and tried to find books on the topic, but haven’t found much of answer so far. I’d like to hear of some good reads about the decline of the Islamic world that are relatively ideology-free.

“I am struck by the colonialism described by Colin Woodard in American Nations when it comes to Reconstruction. In his telling Yankees swarmed to the South believing that they could recreate New England in the post-war societies. Eerily familiar in light of what happened after the Iraq War.”

Lots of conflicting information out there on Reconstruction–I think feelings run high even now. The scholarly consensus I’m familiar with is that it’s tragic Reconstruction failed, and its failure was due to not going far enough (e.g., no large-scale land distribution to freedmen).

While we’re on the Anglo-America topic, I was wondering if there are any other books that are as high quality, aside from the usual ones mentioned around here–Albion’s Seed, American Nations, Cousins’ Wars. I recently bought Bound Away by DHF, which is about westward migration from Virginia. More book recommendations would be great, as I am working on my family history.

That’s a bit more specific than I was aiming for, but thanks.

“it does not look as if Trump lost with minorities and gained with whites nearly as much as the press would have you believe.”

My guesses about this seemingly counterintuitive result, which the Narrative was so incapable of countenancing:

1) Most minorities long ago picked up on the basic idea that the Republicans are the white party, and avoid voting for them on the national level, particularly the presidency. Thus, Trump actually had little to lose by running an openly populist campaign, since low minority numbers are already baked into Republican results. On the margins, some minorities might have thought Trump was an interesting, charismatic, or compelling character and voted out of curiosity, just as some whites did.

2) Black turnout was much, much lower without a black person on the Democratic ticket. I saw someone on twitter attribute lower turnout in Mississippi to “voter suppression”, and was amused.

Here in Seattle, the fallout of this felt something like simultaneous barbarian raids upon all the major cities of America. As a new person to the city, with kinsfolk among the barbarians, I have noticed that it is increasingly hard for each side to see the other as human, and am more and more persuaded by Peter Turchin’s dire predictions.

(I am not for Trump, but like most people on this site, I loathe the politically correct establishment and want to see them weakened.)

Excited to see GNXP making a comeback, since I discovered you after you started moving away from it.

Been thinking about creating a “Razib’s greatest hits” sort of page, with links to all your best posts over the years… it would be a lot of work though. Perhaps other commenters could help compile it?

“Since this sample showed no sex difference in standard deviations (to the author’s and my surprise) that is as far as I will go with the calculations.”

Does this mean that the commonly-found result that men are overrrepresented on the far left side of the bell curve is now in doubt? Doesn’t really align with what we see in actual life outcomes. Could men be more susceptible to rare mutations (such as on the X chromosome) that give some of them serious disadvantages?

“Disclaimer: My attention was drawn to this paper by Charles Murray. On that basis, you may wish to discount everything I have said, and consign me to the utter depths of perdition.”

All IQ researchers were already consigned there decades ago.

Thank you for discussing this paper!