WTF is wrong with you!? Armenians have used that for a long, long time, way before you either knew who you are for 12 generations!, hahaaa I really hate SJWs with an axe to grind.

no, you're wrong. The term comes from the Arals - look at a map. Sorry, I love to curse and use the F word as much as possible...it's an imaginary weapon, I suppose.

Replies: @Twinkie

Sorry to be so strident...but I just found out that my family goes back to the Levant...to Armenia/Iran/Iraq...haplo stuff...incredible stuff logged by a professor family person. I know that sounds weird, but I want him to remain anonymous...bc we only care about our one weird family - did not realize with DNA results that we added 2000+ years to our known family tree (goes back 800 yrs).

Razib returns and immediately runs into Lagertha. It could've been donut ...

Replies: @Redneck farmer

aryans is a term only used by indo-iranians.
 

Replies: @Anonymous

The Nazis were Persian? Besides, it's a great way for those of us from the lower orders to say we're equal to aristocrats.

Replies: @J.Ross

Well, what would the cumulative genetic effect be if homozygous babies were routinely killed over dozens of generations? Say a heterozygous man has a homozygous kid with a heterozygous woman. He'd probably think he wasn't the father, and that's kind of a problem.

I don't really believe sexual selection for light skin and eyes is extremely strong, because white guys will have sex with dark women no problem so long as they have the right parts and shape. But there is an instinctive aversion to sharing one's resources with a mate's children with another male, and having a surprise black baby with a white woman is a strong visual indication of infidelity, even if it's a false positive.

It's kind of an uncomfortable thought, but killing unwanted children is not at all out of the ordinary, even today as the Irish vote for abortion makes clear. It needn't be only for paternity issues; women routinely abort babies that have conditions of one sort or another. They'd probably abort a lot more if testing could determine the child's IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, etc. Even in the current year, it wouldn't surprise me if some women would abort children for being too dark if they could.

Given the remarkably thorough elimination of the ancestral version of this gene, I have to leave open the possibility that it was due to conscious selection, i.e. culling. I'll leave it up to scientists to determine whether this is possible or likely, but reason points in that direction.

Replies: @BB753, @Thirdeye

GO away.

so it is very strange that if lightness is driving the selection that heterozygotes are so much less fit than homozygotes. lactase persistence allele is maxed out at ~90% because it is dominant it. this allele should have been similar, but it’s not.
 

Razib, when will you put your hot sauce write-ups behind a paywall?

I heard of you. But I do not know you. Never read a word written by you until what Karlin cited here and then the few comments you decided to bless us with here. And from what I see I think I do not really like you. Your cockiness is way too ethnic. Do you think it's genetic or cultural? You know, if it's the latter perhaps you could try to changed it but if it is the former perhaps you could try gene editing like getting yourself some nice WASPy gene for courteousness.
.

Razib it’s nice to see you here.

I even miss your super-harsh take-downs of commenters :-)

I try to check your http://gnxp.nofe.me/ blog regularly, but I don’t read you as regularly as when you were on Unz. It was a real loss for this site when you left.

It’s odd what a difference it makes to be one click or two away from the site. I think I understand why you left, but it’s a pity. There ought to be some secret way to have your blog posts appear on the site, for reader convenience but while providing you with deniability.

Maybe Ron could add a Bloglines-like plugin feature that would allow people to add an RSS feed of their choice to their view of the Unz home page...

Replies: @Anatoly Karlin

Hey Razib - good to see you're still checking out UNZ.

By the way, thanks for all the write ups on the Rohingya situation - those were very helpful in trying to assess the situation beyond just the info in the MSM.

Peace.

nevermind. it's your russian IP.

Thank you Razib, that's appreciated, I'll amend the post shortly.

In all fairness:
(1) I haven't been able to get any comments posted on your site since you moved (there were a couple before this one which didn't appear either, I remember one of them was on your post about Peter Turchin).
(2) I asked you whether I was banned on Twitter and had no reply.

So my suspicions that I was banned weren't entirely off the rails.

Seems like you had twitter account @gnxp back in 2009 to push your blog posts.
https://twitter.com/gnxp

No reason not to revive that account as a blog feed twitter account once you move to new site.

Overall probably not worth the trouble. Very marginal in terms of page views. But suspect people who follow that kind of account tend to be high value readers (maybe they just want the posts for high SNR). I read a lot of ben thompson on tech, and also follow his blog posts via his twitter feed
https://twitter.com/stratechery

So it's common enough.

But I think RSS far more important for power readers.

One downside is confusion on who to follow on twitter. You or gnxp. Maybe makes more sense to name the twitter account something like @gnxp_blogfeed to make it more explicit.

Anyway. Enjoy your writing. Keep it up.

Replies: @Razib Khan

Pseudonymously or using his actual name?

Replies: @Razib Khan

Dear Razib Khan,

Do Southeast Asians such as Burmese, Cambodians, Malays and Thais have minor ANI/West Eurasian ancestry and how much? I ask this because I notice SE Asians usually score quite substantial South Asian component in ADMIXTURE calculators. So I wonder if they have very minor ANI/West Eurasian that comes with the South Asian component or is their "South Asian" component just ASI/ASI-like?

I will appreciate your generous reply to my inquiry.

Thank you very much and best regards,
Qagan

If you use the Kindle store, you can only use a single amazon store. Basically, if you shop on amazon.fr for your Kindle books, you are not allowed to purchases books for that account from amazon.com. You can create a separate account, but you need to purchase a second kindle to link to the account...

It's basically due to the way authors and publishers set worldwide licensing. It's quite common to have books licensed for sale in the US thru one publisher, thru most of the commonwealth by another, and worldwide (the rest) thru a third. So, if you purchase from the US, you're purchasing from the first one, if you purchase in UK, the second one, or France, the 3rd.

Rather than setting up a complicated process which would end up very confusing for the customer (why can I purchase that book for my kindle, but not that one? I can purchase both on paper!!!), Amazon simply set up so that you shop only in your country.

Replies: @phanmo, @Douglas Knight

Many parts of the Reform Jewish service were expressly modelled on church worship. The early Reformers admired the pageantry / majesty / decorum of Christian religious services -- traditional Jewish services are chaotic and free-wheeling by comparison.

There were places (mostly Europe, in the 19th c., IIRC) where Reform Jews observed their principal day of worship on Sunday -- for the same reason.

I think the move back to traditionalism in Reform Judaism is partly due to lack of a "need to compromise" as Razib mentions -- the other side of this coin is a renewed desire to affirm a sort of cultural or religious identity, and a recognition that Reform Judaism as it was being practiced in the mid-20th century typically led directly to disaffiliation or assimilation.

Thanks! And will do.

Yeah. Christianity, with its universalist creed ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus") , is not exactly easily adaptable to extreme forms of racialism/nationalism.As you note, that's almost certainly why many hardcore WNs are moving towards Paganism.....which tends to give them a kind of LARPy aspect. I mean, it's pretty hard to take seriously a bunch of guys going off in the woods to pray to Thor or Zeus....

Replies: @Bill P

For example, I’ve long noted how atheists with Christian backgrounds tend to understand religion in strongly Christian terms (central texts, formal creeds, etc).

this is true for non-christians in christian majority societies.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan, @Triumph104

Hey Razib,

this is true for non-christians in christian majority societies
 

some muslim americans basically treat islam in a wya that makes more sense as a sect of protestant christianity (i noticed this in particular with the way that free will has become normative despite the ambivalence* on this by sunni islam traditionally)
 

re: atheist muslim. here are some arguments

1) some would argue that society defines you. if you are defined as a muslim perhaps you ‘own it’.

2) prejudice against muslims. show solidarity with believing muslims by identifying as muslim.

3) accept functional importance of religion and have fuzzy feelings toward muslims and islamic community.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan, @Razib Khan

the analogy to xtianity and islam breaks down there, as these emphasize belief and not ethnicity, and are pretty essential aspects of them (in contrast, judaism is like hinduism in having an explicit ethnic dimension).
 

Replies: @German_reader, @Razib Khan

[you are very good at packing in a huge # of factual inaccuracies into one comment; my question is are you trying, or this is an innate aptitude? -Razib]

The English were able to "solve" the elite overproduction problem by having some of their elite prey elsewhere in places like Ireland, and by exporting population to huge, newly discovered continental territories. Who knows if they would have maintained liberal democracy, or even had it in the first place, without this outlet. They might not have had the luxury, especially since they were competing with the Continental states.

Replies: @iffen

Bringing it back to food - Thanksgiving is around the bend after all - halal turkey!!!

Anyway, so you know what achar is - awesome! Any good brands from the Bengali side of the border you can suggest? Nothing with pickled fish though - I got my limits! I found a Bangladeshi store (fish mart of course!) not too far from me that I was going to checkout.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sundarbans-Fish-Bazar/145522465480625

Peace.

That ain't even a weak hadith! ;)

But hey, you know, you gotta face the *heat* - either in this world or the next! By the way, I just finished off my jar of achar last night, gotta get some more:
https://www.google.com/search?q=achar&espv=2&biw=1229&bih=608&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXu7vWz7_QAhWKqlQKHVweAkYQ_AUIBigB&dpr=1.56

I don't know if Bengalis are into achar, but since I have to refill, any suggestions?

'He who controls the spice controls the universe.' - Dune

Peace.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you subtely bring a thread back to food where it started!

Replies: @Razib Khan

At first I thought annoy was an odd description but I think it fits. Obviously they can't come up with any rational definition of who qualifies. What do they do with ME peoples who are Christian? Some say Jews are white, Chinese are okay with some, it is completely arbitrary. I am not going to belong to any club where the membership qualifications are not transparent.

Replies: @Razib Khan, @Anonymous

That was my impression. In fact, I thought he was a ski bum from Whitefish (am I wrong about that?). When he tried to get me to give him my blog I asked him "for what?" and he seemed to think people just traded their work as some sort of courtesy. That was the only and last contact I had with him, and I came away from it thinking he lives in an entirely different world from my own. You know, the world where you have to worry about how you're going to pay your bills and thereby stay under a roof and out of jail.

At his conference he opened with a dramatic poetry reading set to montage of European looking things playing in the background (marble statues, forests, alps). He also designed a goofy looking alt-right logo, that was supposed to have some artistic meaning. In contrast to a lot of other people on the alt-right (or whatever you want to call that general sort of intellectual space) he doesn’t seem interested in engaging with real world issues like “head start”, housing policy, affirmative action, crime etc. That’s what I meant by "ungrounded from the real world”.

But yes, certainly he knows how to get his name in the news. I’m curious how he is able to maintain this lifestyle, I’m sure being a professional white nationalist doesn’t pay very well. Or maybe it does, I wouldn’t know. It says on wikipedia that his dad is an opthalmologist, so is he just mooching off of him?

Replies: @Razib Khan

"and no, in general i am not like a lot of the others who post in this space. i think that’s obvious"

I agree. I love your blog. Consistently great information, no bullshit only truth and no spin. Wish everyone was like this.

he has a postmodern sensibility about these things
 

that being said, he’s not the huge player he makes it out to be.
 

He dresses in three-piece Brooks Brothers suits, gold-coin cuff links and $5,000 Swiss watches
 

Replies: @iffen, @Razib Khan, @CupOfCanada, @notanon

he’s not the *yuge* player he makes it out to be
 

you don’t go there. period.
 

Replies: @RaceRealist88

as for richard, he’s a problem for everyone he touched now because of his nuttiness.
 

“We need an ethno-state,” he said in a 2013 speech, “so that our people can ‘come home again,’ can live amongst family and feel safe and secure.”

He ended his address by invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have a dream.”

Last week, Spencer was reluctant to discuss how that dream would be achieved.

How, he was asked, in a nation with more than 100 million blacks, Asians and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be created without overwhelming violence?

Over chocolate croissants and an Americano coffee at a Corner Bakery Cafe, he avoided the question, discussing Nietzsche, communism’s origins, history’s unpredictability.

Then, at last, he offered an answer.

“Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible,” he said. “That’s a possibility with everything.”
 

Spencer, of course, would expel Muslims from his ethno-state. And most women, he said as he was being driven from the hotel to his next appointment, would return to their traditional role of bearing children.

His attitude toward women and minorities made his admiration for Tila Tequila, the Nazi-loving Vietnamese American, surprising. Would he allow her in the ethno-state?

“There are always exceptions, I guess,” an amused Spencer would say later. “I’m a generous guy.”
 

Replies: @Razib Khan, @Lord Jeff Sessions, @Talha, @Razib Khan, @syonredux

"as i said on twitter, i am not alt-right. i’m moderately conservative with libertarianish tendencies. "
I thought that the Unz Review was an alt-right site, although as a foreigner, my understanding of the American political tendencies is really limited. Is that uncorrect or are your views not in agreement with those of the other bloggers of the site?

Replies: @Razib Khan, @German_reader

re: "The problem is that the author confuses the terminology, “Asian”, with reality."

Based on the relevant passage, the problem isn't simply semiotic. The guy imagines that there is no possible biological justification for exclusion. And so he infers that the researchers are imposing their cultural sense of "Asian-ness" (as opposed to specifying a subset of "Asians" for some pragmatic population genetic reason).

...
“But I’m Filipino. Your flyer said it wanted Asian American participants.”
“Yes, but we need a genetically similar sample.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
I knew the genetics argument was bogus. Anyone who’s taken introduction to Sociology knows that race is a social construction, not a genetic one. People, not biology, determine the meaning of racial categories. Besides, there is a consensus within the scientific community that with respects to genetics, “all human beings, regardless of race, are 99.9 percent the same.” Even though I had science on my side, the coordinator wouldn’t budge. By her definition, I wasn’t Asian American. I hung up the phone without bothering to say good-bye.
…But this wasn’t the main issue. What upset me most was that a researcher from a top university felt at liberty to exclude Filipinos from a study about Asians Americans. This researcher had no idea what she was talking about. Besides the plethora of scientific articles that have debunked the relationship between race and genetics. I also had the history books on my side. Any Asian Americans historian can tell you that Filipinos played a central role in the creation of Asian identity… Although I was angry, I wasn’t entirely surprised. For all intents and purposes, there are many out there who forget that Filipinos are, in fact, Asian American.
...

The real story here is that he doesn't question his strong constructionist interpretation, but assumes rather that the genetic researchers are the ones who are wrong.

Replies: @spandrell

Checked that out. Man, Unz.com archives are nice.

You are right that the cult around him is quite unseemly; and he didn't really have a system. But your own thinking seems to have evolved a bit. And his basic argument that language is a social game; that semantics *is* the particular social game played in a particular instance using a particular set of utterances, that there is no intrinsic to words, is still true and still ignored by mainstream rationalist social science.

After Xunzi and after your recent epiphanies about how political arguments really aren't about facts I do think you might appreciate what he was getting on to. You don't need to like his lifestyle but you'll give him he had a point that it's all bullshit.

Replies: @Razib Khan

iffen, you are being stupid or uncertain.

I want it to be the 2nd one because it is said that there is no cure for the first one.

One last comment and I will stop.

I know that professional journalism came into its own in the 20th century. I know that in the past everything was along the lines of FOX or MSNBC or much worse.
My point is that in spite of the biases of the media there was a core ideal of professional objective journalism, and that with few exceptions they put that aside this cycle and told themselves that they could pick it back up after this election. I don’t think that it works like this. Some things are lost forever.

Replies: @Twinkie

Fourth Estate

Why the Press Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Quit Trump

By Jack Shafer
| December 14, 2015

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on Campaign 2016’s horizon, journalists have been imploring other journalists not to cover him. This began, amazingly, five months before he announced he was running for president, when Conor Friedersdorf laid down the dictum in the Atlantic. Just last week, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown bookended Friedersdorf’s argument with a piece in POLITICO Magazine, calling upon TV news to stage a one-week Trump moratorium because TV coverage was only making him stronger.

 

There's plenty more.

SJWs seem to have purity, respect for authority, and loyalty to their ingroup down.

Jordan Peterson and his team at UofT Psych apparently have some work in the pipe on PC culture, which they discuss in an interview here.

Apparently, political correctness requires two types of people: PC authoritarians and PC egalitarians. The former tends to be correlated with high disgust sensitivity, low verbal cognitive ability, high agreeableness, diagnosed anxiety disorders in themselves or close family members. These are the SJWs proper. The latter are more ordinary left liberals. They also high in agreeableness, but have high verbal cognitive ability and high openness. They find it difficult not to go along with what the PC authoritarians want and often verbally rationalize PC authoritarian claims.

Basically, SJWs are a (presumably small) set of left liberals with a high disgust sensitivity who are also particularly adept at pushing the compassion buttons of ordinary left liberals. SJWs share high agreeableness with ordinary left liberals. However, in other respects, SJWs are not necessarily representative of left liberal personality traits.

I personally have always found the idea of widely distributed liberal purity rather fishy. The standard examples related to food and the environment never struck me as terribly compelling, as most liberals I know do not actually buy organic food or spend much time purifying their body of "toxins" and such.* In my experience, most left liberals are a bit messy and disorganized, a bit lax sexually (though not necessarily promiscuous), and aren't terribly bothered by ingestion of drugs for recreational purposes. Not a lot of purity there.

One will have to read the research if and when Peterson et al. publish, but the idea that left liberals in general are awash in purity seems to me unlikely.

*I know a few of these people, so they're real enough. But they're not the majority of the liberals I know by a long shot.

no they’re not.

Indonesian Islam is indubitably conservative in one perfectly normal sense of the word. One can be misleading by switching to a different sense, but that just requires people to clarify what sense they are using. Given that, saying that Indonesian Islam is not conservative is as misleading as anything.

people think it means certain things, and those things lead to false inferences.

Often it does mean those things. The problem is that the word also means other things. The false inferences come from carelessly switching between meanings, not from getting the meaning wrong in the first place.

Replies: @Miguel Madeira

SJWs seem to have purity, respect for authority, and loyalty to their ingroup down.

Amen to that.

As the linked comic indicates, among the respectable it is zealotry to want to keep out foreign people but a good thing to keep out foreign species. Purity of Ecosystem is a real feeling.

Biologists make a distinction between exotic and invasive species. An exotic species is any species that is not native to an ecosystem. (Though the idea of "native" is problematic: go back in time and species are always moving. Go back far enough and most present species aren't native to anywhere because they don't even exist. Much environmentalism is more Platonic than Darwinian.) An invasive species is an exotic that when introduced to an ecosystem, changes it in ways the biologist doesn't like.

Yet many environmentalists will use the word invasive for any foreign species, and they want to keep all invasives out--and, to the extent possible, to get rid of the invasives that are already here. They are the equivalent of white nationalists, but there is nothing alt- about them.

http://rhymeswithorange.com/comics/june-15-1997/

Let's throw another piece into the mix.

Brooks Adams claimed that political centralization was a result of offensive force being more powerful than defensive force. Well, defensive force just got a lot more powerful post-1945, even if the means are expensive and technologically advanced.

The reality is that sovereign is he who controls the direction of a nuclear weapon, and rather than moving into an integrated world, I suspect centrifugal forces will prove unstoppable in the absence of technological advances changing the offensive/defensive balance.

I suspect this new world will not be conducive to the same trends that gave rise to what we are seeing historically in the West, and will break toward ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism, as these are the centrifugal force in human societies.

Replies: @Sean

well over 90% of indonesians, like well over 90% indians, emerge out of the core civilization
 

Replies: @Razib Khan, @Miguel Madeira

Well said Humpty Dumpty! Only one person - and a real good egg he is and must be acknowledged to be - should have free definitional rights on your blog. If H D says that Tibeto-- Burmans were incorporated in India by the British Empire and are a related nationality and that Papuan Melanesians colonised by Javanese under Soekarno from 1962 are equally a related nationality let us have no more stupid quibbles but reflect facts on the ground. Fact on ground: H D has the big bazooka.

It is not clear that Islam is amenable to secularization. All the regimes like Turkey and Iran under Shah imposed secularism with the sword. Further, looking at Turkey and Iran today, they appear to be reverting away from secularism. Modernization without Westernization seems increasingly like the future.

If religion is a source of authority (in the sense of deciding who lives and dies), and the secular nation-state takes over and claims a monopoly on that authority, then religion falls a notch. If religion is a group strategy for keeping fertility over replacement rates, then modernism in the sense of birth control, rejection of traditional gender roles, and acceptance of homosexuality pretty much ends that function. Nor are people, even high IQ people, very big on exogamy taboos these days which a religion might foster.

A lot of post-Christian secularism is based on the fact that "liberal" religion no longer serves a useful social purpose. But Islam has never disavowed killing authority, nor is it particularly inclined to embrace modernism. Further, with often weak or failed Nation-States in Muslim lands, there is in many places no functional state to even attempt to impose a monopoly on force. (Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.)

Replies: @Talha, @Razib Khan

I enjoyed it, Naipaul is a very fine writer. It was a travelog, not a work of sociology.

Replies: @jimmyriddle

he went into major depression after 2004, and that might have pushed *a feast for crows* back a few months.
 

that relationship was not a great secret. ppl in DC had to have known since it dates from that era. i know his ex- personally. she’s a normal/nice person.
 

For that matter, I think Jared Taylor had a Japanese companion once, but then again he grew up in Japan.

And of course John Derbyshire is married to a daughter of a Chinese communist party member... though in his defense he seems to be for love over white nationalism as was displayed in their mutually testy online exchanges between him and Taylor.

None of this is of any consequence, except I don't like hyprocrisy. Or making up ideologies to which the said makers don't subscribe in private.

Replies: @Talha

they came as conquerors to collect rents, not as settlers. that’s the important distinction.
 

I used the term "settlers" ("Kleruchoi" in Greek) to distinquish them from those Greek warriors who were pure (short term) mercenaries - those who were not assigned land/produce but were given money and gifts (and were frequently dismissed after a campaign).

Like the later Germanic conquerors in Rome, the Kleruchoi initially collected rent, but eventually assumed ownership of land in toto and took over/assimilated into the local elite.

By the way, one correction. When I wrote "hoplite" above, I meant phalangite. I regret the error.

richard is from the lower upper class.
 

Replies: @iffen, @Razib Khan, @Talha, @benjaminl

"roma have lower IQs than s. asians. "

Is there an explanation for this? I vaguely recall there's a theory Roma are descended from Indian untouchables, how do their IQs compare?
(sorry if that's a stupid question).

"continues to write articles about this association and how it might be causal"


Sorry if my question is stupid, but isn´t J. Philippe Rushton dead? Or you´re talking about another Rushton? Because Wikipedia tells me he passed in 2012.

The sense I get from reading the so-called Alt-Right writers and leaders in general is that most are propagandists and story-tellers - even those who fancy themselves truth-tellers, scientists, historians or intellectuals. In other words, they cater their products to the particular desires of their clientele.

Mind you, I do have some regard for their courage in attempting to attract attention to their less-than-mainstream views (which are usually a mishmash of the good, the bad, and the ugly). Indeed I share some of their goals - the restoration of some elements of the traditional America - though obviously white nationalism is a bridge much too far for me.

On the other hand, for some of them, the whole Alt-Right thing seems to a racket, a way to earn a living. To be sure, there are those who are perfectly capable of earning a good living otherwise (e.g. Jared Taylor via writing about computers/Japanese translation/consulting). But several of the young leaders of the movement (e.g. Richard Spencer, Kevin Deanna, and Matthew Heimbach) seem just like other red book-toting political agitators and activists, regardless of ideological stripe - people who are incapable of earning a good living doing "normal" things and for whom activism is a profession that fulfills material and psychic needs* rather than a passion/sacrifice in search of the true and the good.

*There is a lot of "will to power" feel to their antics, and white nationalism appears to be mostly a cover for their power-longing. They are often hypocritical in that they give themselves the power to decide who is in and who is out (and give themselves the freedom of action they would deny others). So we end up with a situation, for example, in which a Korean-Jew (Marcus Epstein) gets to be an honorary white so long as he has Jared Taylor's blessing and Richard Spencer - he of "fashy" haircut - turns out to have a thing for Asian women. I hate to go all reductio ad hitlerum here, but there is more than a whiff of the Nazis denouncing the decadence of the Weimar culture in public all the while attending risque private cabarets at night.

Replies: @Razib Khan, @German_reader, @Sean

How was he messing up basic stuff about genetic relationships between population groups? Been a while since I've read Race, Evolution and Behavior.

Thanks for the response.

Replies: @Razib Khan

That makes sense. I see that they give much wider predictions of relationship now than in the past.

However, I still have people on 23andme (white Americans with all of their ancestry from places like The Netherlands and Northern Ireland) with fewer than 5 relative matches sharing more than 0.4% total on only 1 matching segment. This is what they now classify as 3rd-6th cousins.

I find it quite remarkable that people of European descent could have so few 'close' relatives from a database of 2 million people, most of which have the same background.

roman for sure, yes.
 

also, please note that greek colonies in the classical period were founded by men. they did not have women. the mixed progeny were greek.
 

Do we have any genetic data from Greek burials in Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt?That would certainly help give us some sense of how common intermarriage was.

to give a concrete example, many of the byzantine emperors were not hellenes by ancestry if you go back a few generations (often armenians, sometimes syrian or isaurian), but they were thoroughly hellenized in terms of language and religion.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan

standard thinking yes, but it’s obvious and attested that hellenic identity was something that aspirant classes and individuals assimilated to (also, there are cases of intermarriage, e.g., antiochus soter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiochus_I_Soter).
 

Replies: @Razib Khan

Yes, the Sudanese copts surely aren't representative of the average driftedness of Egyptian copts. Just the old genetic structure should be the same since they clearly haven't intermarried with Sudanese.

Regarding the Egyptian coptic population in general, I don't know whether it has been constantly panmictic since islamization took place or if there are some subpopulations that have gotten isolated from the rest.

hellenization was a thing.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan

That makes sense, but I wouldn't discount a contribution in general.

I don't know what the odds are, but (according to the few dozen genes that 23andme checks) my daughter inherited 100% of her known pigmentation genes from just 2 grandparents. And that appears to be accurate based on her looks. She somehow got several homozygous recessive alleles.

On the other hand, she is lactose intolerant, unlike any of her grandparents, parents, or siblings. Again, double recessive.

Replies: @CaoMengDe

What I meant was that with human beings the number of genes that influence height (size) seems to be very large, and the influence of each quite small. You recently remarked on that here:

A lot of the pigmentation genes, such as KITLG, TYR, and SLC24A5, actually increase or decrease melanin production and alter tissue specific expression just as they do in humans, across vertebrates. Second, the fact that I just named genes off the top of my head highlights the fact that are a few conserved loci that explain most of the variance, crop up in study after study. This is in contrast to height, where the variance is distributed across thousands of genes, and the only one I can name off the top of my head is HGMA2. And it explains a princely ~0.3% of the variance of the trait.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan

Probably an obvious answer to this, but can Embark measure the % of wolf ancestry in a purported hybrid? I've found myself living in wide open country and am interested in getting one, but I also know it's easy to get ripped off in the hybrid market.

Replies: @Razib Khan

~20 loci explain 90% of the variance in dog size.
 

Replies: @Razib Khan

Thanks -- I'm sold! Of course, someone like me is as target market as it gets.

Unfortunately our dog died earlier this year. He was purebred Westie and came with a 5 generation pedigree. However, he lacked the characteristic thick double coat, which always made me wonder...

~20 loci explain 90% of the variance in dog size
 

You're right. I must have been thinning of this blog entry of yours where G Cochran commented "H-bd seems to attract two personalities — hyperrationalists and Stormfront type criminals/animals. Both of them are sort of low on the social empathy scale. But they’re obviously very different :) "

http://www.gnxp.com/new/2008/07/14/steve-sailer-on-grand-new-party/

Replies: @Razib Khan

Yeah. Historically , I think the border was much porous than previously. It only tightening due to terrorism threats. There are villages in Quebec/New England that straddle the border, including an entire library.

Probably if such restrictions became onerous enough to impede trade, the Canadian gov't would bend over backwards to try and meet those demands. I suspect that the Liberal Party is far more continentalist than public perception and their own rhetoric would suggest.

Replies: @Joe Q.