@26
“There is no evidence for pastoralists moving East-West through North-Central Europe. The area had been settled with agriculturalists since LBK – and that never changed.”

Proportions.

I’m over-simplifying as in reality the people i’m dividing into farmer and pastoralist are both. If you have one population in the valleya who are 80% farmer and 20% pastoralist (because that is optimal) and another group in the mountains where those proportions aren’t viable because crops aren’t as productive then they could develop an alternative that was say 20% farmer, 80% pastoralist.

The important difference (imo) is – during the early stages of agriculture – the second group have a larger range.

Also in reality the “second group” may in fact be multiple groups each with their own proportions and therefore ranges e.g.
– a westward ho group hopping along the med islands along the line of ideal climate for the original package with a 80% / 20% split
– a danube group with a 60%/40% split
– a northern latitude group with a 20%/80% split

The main thing (imo) is the potential range of each package.

@19
“One thing I don’t understand here is how the Finns fit into this. Genetically speaking, they have among the highest clearly apparent Asian admixture in Europe, yet they also not only speak a non Indo-European language, they also seem to be the most “pure” representation of the Mesolithic Europe.”

(This is just my guess so treat accordingly.)

If the nordics (including Finns) weren’t IE themselves but HGs and the northernmost IE expansion (if it happened) was pastoralist and came through below the level of the Finns i.e. more at the poland lattiude

then the Finns would have been left out, which would explain the language part. I think the Finn’s higher North Asian admixture would simply be a result of the shorter distances at the top of the world.

If so then
Finns would be original foraga + some north asian
Non-Finn nordics in the next layer below would be original foraga + some IE + (less?) north asian

(i’d assume the north asian element would decline as you went west but in a sort of diagonal way i.e. at the top of the world the north asian element would be larger and decline slower than lower down).

(i’d assume the IE would be the same but opposite i.e. declining east to west but lower down)

(with maybe some odd effects at the western coastal end of europe if there were multiple IE routes and one IE element arrived from the south up the Atlantic coast route at one time and another element from the east at a later time.)

(American Finndians lol – sorry made me laugh)

I think the confusing element may be the whole Aryan = nordic idea. I’m thinking that may not be so. It may have been phenotypically true in some places depending on the proportions but at root i think any northern route IE migration (if it happened that way) will have been a hybrid of resident nordic and migratory IE so Hittite IE may have looked very different.

Just a guess though.

“these east-west flows don’t seem that rare….”

yes, along paths of least resistance (imo) – so rare at some points along the join and common at others.

@6
“And why does this suite of behaviors also lead to higher fertility, etc?”

The current dominant culture is extremely anti-natal imo so i think it’s more a case of a culturally reduced fertility rate being reduced slightly less among people who have a level of vaccination from the dominant culture.

“A possible test to that theory could be to see if european left-wingers (where there is not – or it was not until very recently – a racial subtext in discussions about equality/unequality) are less prone than american “liberals” to deny the value and/or the “geneticity” of IQ.”

Race isn’t required. They don’t believe in innate IQ differences between individuals and they attempt to prove it by creating 100% pass rates to the great detriment of everyone concerned.

I think this mostly fits the mental picture i have. Nordics as the survivors of the original hunter-gatherers. Anatolian first farmers spreading rapidly west from Gobekli or thereabouts but only slowly north (because their crops weren’t viable in the north yet) except along the Atlantic coast where fishing could substitute for the crops.

Indo-europeans (originally pastoralists from the transcaucasus imo) following the Anatolians directly west but also taking a more northerly pastoralist route not as limited by latitude. The northern route IE, mixing with the nordics, forming both the Balkan and the kurgan secondary indo-european heimats.

I see the Iberian backflow as the result of either the Anatolians or Indos introducing cattle (originally as a draft animal) beyond the viable farming line and with the climate of the Atlantic coast being particularly good for cattle that spawning a cattle-raising culture which spread south and east from the Atlantic coast (and maybe having further knock-on effects as the cattle-culture travelled east in a step-wise fashion).

The northeast Asian thing doesn’t surprise me if nordics are the surviving HGs (and therefore ironically possibly the least IE) as the globe is quite a small circle up there but i guess it would depend on when it happened.

“Then I see headlines in trashy British tabloids of the form: The three men who have fathered 78 children with 46 different women… and they’re not paying child support to any of them.”

The transition from a policy of full employment to one of mass unemployment and a welfare underclass – effectively a complete change of habitat – completely changed the type of men who had the most kids from the steady family man type to chancers and gangsters. If you work in that kind of environment for 30 years or so you can see it happening in front of your eyes.

“and they’re not paying child support to any of them”

That’s why they can have so many. They spend all their money on display to entice new girl friends: cars, clothes, spending money etc – and don’t feel guilty about it.

So the habitat changes and different types of men start having the most kids – very display-focused “r” types on the one hand or the successfully violent (through a mixture of intimidation of the women and chasing off any male rivals) on the other – and those types of genes become more prevalent. Obviously the change in 30 years can’t be that high but if you have a population that had been part of an industrial working class for a long time (and pre-welfare) then the level of those kind of “r” type behaviors was initially very low so even a small jump is pretty noticeable i.e. a change from 1% to 2% is more noticeable than from 9% to 10% because the jump is bigger.

“who have fathered 78 children with 46 different women”

The women who have had multiple kids from the same chancer tend to be dumber than the ones who only had one so that adds to the almost comically dysgenic nature of it all as well.

.
“but empirically it can’t explain the arc of western civilization since 1800, when secular french started their demographic transition”

“Demographic transition may have occurred earlier in France perhaps because it has been historically one of the most populous countries in Europe”

I wonder if the demographic transition may be something to do with this

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/02/why-cousin-lookin-fertile/

“show a significant positive association between kinship and fertility, with the greatest reproductive success observed for couples related at the level of third and fourth cousins”

If you have a little valley with a population that has inter-married locally for a long time then they’d have an average level of relatedness which could be expressed in nth cousin terms. So in theory if such a population was on average at the 2nd cousin level and the population increased they might shift into the 3rd / 4th cousin fertile zone and experience higher fertility simply through the effect of having a larger population pool. By the same token if people from separate closely related little villages moved to a city neighborhood then the average relatedness of the composite population might shift into the 5th+ cousin range and experience a drop in fertility.

So i’m wondering if this might be a factor?

@28 “One thing people have not mentioned is that there is really no good reason to send people to the moon now.”

Until you try and build a colony on the moon you won’t know what all the problems and pitfalls will be. The experience gained is the benefit and the moon is closest.

@32 “So I’d imagine the original prohibition on foreskins was an attempt to cure masturbation”

Didn’t the phoenicians sacrifice their first-born at one point and then stop? I always assumed circumcision would date from that time (with an echo in the bible story).

I think the anti-masturbation argument is the likely explanation for why and when it took off in the USA.

“That suggests to me that much of the evolution of “European pigmentation” may have taken outside of geographical Europe proper.”

I was wondering about that. The assumption based on current distribution leads to people looking for answers related to northern latitudes (vitamins etc) but if the people further south were lighter once when populations were more isolated and got darker again later through migration / slavery / use of mercenaries from Africa etc when populations became more connected again then the list of potential explanations becomes a lot wider.

@38 I exaggerated but i think the main point stands. If a terriotory is fought over then the ultimate cultural winner doesn’t have to have any connection to the original population.

@39 Fair point.

@37 “You’re presupposing that Hattic preceded Hittite in Anatolia, you aren’t mentioning why. If you want to argue that, you need to provide us with the relevant information if you have it.”

I tend to look at things as a process of elimination which is the wrong way round, however…

If farming started in Eastern Anatolia and then spread in the directions that were viable for farming at the time then either

1) The original farmer population expanded into adjacent suitable regions

or

2) The idea of farming was transferred to adjacent populations in suitable regions

*If* it was the first case then you’d expect peoples like the Sumerians to the south or other early farming groups to the west of Eastern Anatolia to show some cultural and/or genetic connection to the first farmers and from my understanding they don’t show any sign of being IE or PIE. So unless i’ve missed something i think that implies either it’s case (2) or the first farmers weren’t PIE.

Case (1) seems more plausible to me on path of least resistance grounds so that would leave the first farmers not being PIE.

However where the expansion of early farming out of eastern Anatolia was blocked in some way either by physical geography (mountains, marshes, deserts) or climate (too hot, too wet, too cold, too dry) and that blockage lasted for a long time then i think part of the farmer population would develop a purely pastoralist model along the edges of the blockage and that model might spread to the indigenous hunter-gatherers through their hiring as stockmen (if the blockage lasted long enough).

So the most plausible model to me is original farmers expanding where suitable from Eastern Anatolia – mostly to the west and south – sparking in their wake the creation of pastoralist societies all around the edges of the farming terriotory e.g. the Semitic tribes in the south and maybe the PIE tribes in the vicinity of the transcaucasus. If so, once pastoralized, that position would be very convenient for expanding around the black sea coast, to the steppe or to the Tarim basin – or over-running the non PIE farmers in Anatolia (while the Semitic pastoralist tribes did the same thing in the south).

I think that works as a model – at least to my current level of knowledge.

(I’m not saying it’s true just that it’s a plausible fit.)

@24 “The problem is, both of these scenarios involve language replacement in areas which are conducive to horse-based pastoralism”

I think another possible example comes from the Arab conquests. If a relatively small elite-based expansion has an associated religion and their language is associated with that religion then that may increase the chances of the language taking over although that could only apply if the indo-european expansion had an associated religion.

@30
“If PIE arose in Anatolia then why didn’t IE come to dominate the region , even as it came to dominate areas as far apart as the Western fringe of Europe and most of South Asia?”

Although i personally think PIE is more likely to be in the mountainous regions north and east of Anatolia than Anatolia proper, in the period between the Hittites and the Turks, Anatolia was a crossroads and fought over almost incessantly so it could just be a question of who got to be the ultimate (or most recent) winner.

If the Hattities etc were non-IE then i don’t think Anatolia itself makes much sense as the IE urheimat but a region adjacent to Anatolia* which was also relatively unsuitable for the agriculture developed in Anatolia – thereby preventing expansion from the Anatolian farmers into that region – seems very likely especially if those mountain(?) IE then picked up pastoralism from the Anatolian farmers which led to them expanding in various directions – initially with their flocks – and maybe at some later time in a different place after their draft oxen had been bred into milk and meat producing cattle, with their herds?

(*or an internal sub-region of Anatolia but a position north/east of Anatolia would give convenient access for Tocharian and steppe expansions.)

@1 “Are we now saying that there is evidence of something like an “Aryan Invasion” that took place long ago? Or should I say Indo-European migration that displaced a whole lotta people (or mixed with them).”

If early farming spread fairly rapidly east to west but much more slowly into the colder north then in theory there would have been a moment in time where there was (in simple terms) one broad latitudinal band of farmers and another of hunter-gatherers. If – although crops didn’t yet grow well in those latitudes – domesticated animals were introduced into the forager zone at one or more locations (for whatever reason) which triggered a pastoralist, particularly cattle-raising culture then i think you’d expect a population boom in the forager zone which could have expanded very rapidly east-west (because of the combination of being pastoralist and the low population density of the forager population at the time) but also back down south into the farmer zone.

One thing i wonder though is if this happened when farming was still relatively new then what was the population density in the farming zone – outside places like the fertile crescent, Nile, Ganges etc? If it was still relatively empty then i wonder if in some places – especially if the land best suited to farming was different to the land best suited to cattle-raising – it may have been more of a barging-in than a blood and guts invasion.

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@2 “given that some religions seem to have a need for “purity” and avoiding things which are “unclean”, is it possible that religious instincts conferred a survival advantage as people settled and urbanized and humanity’s environment became more germ-ridden?”

Religion based dietary and hygiene rules would be a neat and convenient way for the brighter element among a population to get the less bright to adopt adaptive behavior to a higher degree than they otherwise would. This aspect of religion would effectively be getting lower IQ people to act like higher IQ people through their religiosity and should have led to lower IQ people with high religiosity having a fitness advantage over those with low religiosity. (This last point would only apply if the religious rules in question were adaptive on balance and would be proportional to how adaptive the religious rules in question were.)

The brighter element didn’t need those rules to be based on religion but they accepted the restrictions of the religion for the benefit of the group (at least in this aspect). This traditional form has reversed in the west since the 60s as the elites have wanted the freedom to do things which have negative consequences inversely proportional to IQ regardless of the effect this has had on the left side of the bell curve.

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@17 “I was slightly surprised that 72% in the Telegraph poll disagree that we should even _consider_ genetically screening for preferred behavioural traits. I suspect many of them would if given the choice.”

Well if you changed the wording to “do you trust the current ruling class in any way shape or form” which is the implicit question then i’m surprised it was only 72%. Maybe most of the other 28% hadn’t translated the question?

I think eugenics based on criminal behavior is best done on the basis of criminal behavior i.e. prison i.e. locking the criminally inclined up during their prime reproductive years so they have less kids.

What i think genetics will show is there were good reasons for a lot of traditional views – even if the people who espoused those views didn’t know what those logical reasons were – because those views had *evolved* over time through trial and error. So in some areas i think it will be less a case of genetics pointing to new solutions to old problems but genetics showing why the old solutions for old problems worked.

@17 “I understand your hunch at haplogroup I but there is no straightforward systematicity in it.”

Yes, unless it (or one clade of it) was associated with a cultural adaptation which for some reason effected height and the spread of that clade of I also spread the cultural adaptation. (Just a guess.)

@14
distribution of haplotype I to compare with Maju’s maps

#

addendum to previous post, google gives

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/aug/28/science.research

“The mean height of UK citizens is 1,755.1mm (5ft 9in). Among European men only the Dutch are taller, averaging 1,795mm and with a clear height advantage over the US men’s average of 1,760.4.

The average British woman is 1,620mm tall (just under 5ft 4in), compared with 1,604mm for her French counterpart, 1,610mm for the Italians and 1,619mm for the Germans. Swedish women average 1,640mm, Dutch 1,650mm and Americans 1,626.7mm”

I won’t argue the data though as i wouldn’t know where to find a definitive source and more importantly i think the regional differences (SE to NW cline?) bundled into a UK average would hide more than it reveals as well.

@13 “It’s clearly not any cline in Western Europe, Grey…Only towards the East (Central parts of Europe) has the cline some reality…It needs a lot of qualification indeed.”

Yes, i wasn’t clear in what i was getting at which is the difference between pure myth and misperception myth. It looks to me like if you divided the maps into 2-3 strips and *averaged* all the results you’d see a simple cline but that wouldn’t make it true, as you say. It would mask more variation than it would reveal. However if a very simple averaging did result in a cline then on average well-travelled individuals would experience that same average cline in terms of the relative number of northern and southern euros who were shorter or taller than them – especially if you add some time-depth into the perception – so you could see how such a perception could arise with a large enough sample of travellers.

I thought your post made a good example of how myth can have a kernel of truth in it (the central wedge part) and the kernel (and the anomalies) are the interesting bits.

@13 Yes, globalization works both ways – greater interconnectedness means no-one can escape the bust: China’s momentum slows down as their western export markets slow down and eventually that slow down will knock on to the suppliers of raw materials.

@5 It looks like a north-south cline to me if you divide the maps into 2-3 horizonatal layers and average the layers however doing so would seem to disguise more than it reveals as the biggest element of the height distribution (just going by those maps) looks more like a triangular wedge (very roughly) with the base of the wedge around Scandinavia / North Germany coming down to a point somewhere in the vicinity of Northern Italy / Croatia. The greater size of the wedge in the north than the south distorting the horizontal average and maybe also (?) the popular perception of a straightforward north-south cline

Every 60-80 years the banking system creates a gigantic credit bubble and when it eventually bursts everyone – except the banks – pays a very heavy price.

The size and breadth of these credit bubbles and the subsequent deflation when they burst depends on how globalized the banking system is so the credit bubble that built up since the late 90s and which burst in 2008 is both the biggest and *widest* in history. If things follows the same pattern that has afflicted Europe for centuries we should expect a deflationary spiral followed by mass unemployment, political turmoil, revolution and war.

Everything that has been done since 2008 has been the equivalent of emergency brakes but to save the banks – not the economy – hence why it won’t stop the usual outcomes as it’s not designed to do that. It’s just designed to delay the crash so the banksters can survive with their wealth intact.

“- Do you think forms of discrimination (e.g. governmental, employer and general societal discrimination) are inevitable consequences of belief in differences?”

Do you think that if differences exist then imposing a level playing field despite the facts inevitably discriminates against individuals from the lower scoring end of the higher scoring group?

If you assume that once farming started it could spread relatively easily east-west but much slower into northern latitudes then that would create a moment in time and place where cattle-raising in northern latitudes could both produce much more food than hunter-gathering and much more food than farming (at that time in those specific latitudes). Not only could that then create a large population of relatively mobile pastoralist potential invaders but if that moment arrived while farming was still relatively undeveloped the population density from farming might not have outstripped the population density from cattle-raising as much as it does today so the invaders may have been larger as a final proportion of the total population than say the Arabs or Mongols were.

As farming improved it gradually replaced the cattle-raising model everywhere it wasn’t especially suited and that moment disappeared.

(The cattle would have been initially introduced by farmers possibly moving for other reasons into terriotory that wasn’t – at the time – suited for their standard agricultural package e.g. miners?)

@2 “As a feminist, I’m vastly more interested in patriarchy and non-level playing fields, both of which can be acted upon, than sex differences, which are whatever they are”

Sex differences “which are whatever they are” determines what is a level playing field.

@3 “Is cow’s milk necessary for reaching optimum adult height, or are the only things that matter calcium, calories and sleep?”

@4 “Andrew, there is no reason for that to be true. There are many other sources of the necessary nutrients.”

This gave me a thought relating back to the height post.

Imagine a time and place in the past where a population is living in an environment where
1) Foraging is okay
2) Crop growing isn’t very productive because of latitude or climate
3) Cattle-raising is productive

Then you could imagine a hybrid foraging / cattle-raising culture for example

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

“With the exception of some inland settlements such as Alvastra pile-dwelling, the settlements are located near those of the previous Ertebølle culture on the coast. It was characterised by single-family daubed houses ca 12 m x 6 m. It was dominated by animal husbandry of sheep, cattle, pigs and goats, but there was also hunting and fishing. Primitive wheat and barley was grown on small patches that were fast depleted, due to which the population frequently moved small distances.”

Say part of the diet involved drinking milk – maybe in the form of bowls of milk with added cereals and foraged seeds, nuts and berries like a kind of neolithic granola / muesli.

Now usually if a population is producing a surplus amount of calories you’d expect the population to grow to match it but what would happen in this scenario if only 10% were lactose tolerant? The food, including the milk component, would be shared out on the basis of what was needed to live so it would be based on the lactose intolerant group only getting part of the benefit from the milk they drank i.e. say for example each lactose intolerant adult got 1700 calories from fish, meat, cereals, berries etc and 300 calories from milk for a total of 2000 calories then that same quantity of milk would be worth 500 calories to a lactose tolerant person which would mean the lactose tolerant people would be getting 2200 calories from the same share of food.

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/the-indo-european-advantage/

“Consider that 1 Liter of cow’s milk has

* 250 Cal from lactose
* 300 Cal from fat
* 170 Cal from protein

or 720 Calories per liter. But what if one is lactose intolerant? Then no matter whether or not flatulence occurs that person does not get the 250 Calories of lactose from the liter of milk, but only gets 470.”

(So roughly 60% and 40%.)

So, all else being equal wouldn’t that make the lactose tolerant percentage of the population taller?

(If so this might have added some sexual selection into the spread of LP?)

So, maybe not the case that milk is neccessary to reach the “default” human height – despite what my extended family has always told their kids – but maybe historically heavy milk producing and consuming has correlated with greater height as a side-effect of lactose tolerance?

@1 “I’ve got the impression the jury is still out on both innate sex difference”

Then the jury is deliberately ignoring the male and female versions of olympic events.

@5 “I don’t recall any Olympics posts. Any insights?”

A lot of the medal winner’s podiums seemed to be filled with three people with almost the exact same body shape (although the exact shape varies from event to event).

Another thought on the “why” of a mutually opposite sexually selected height preference:

Take two men, one 5′ 4″ and the other 5′ 10″ both with the ideal height-width ratio for a man and two women, one 5′ 4″ and the other 5′ 10″ both with the ideal height-width ratio for a woman.

(Assuming there are ideal ratios and the value of the ratio is lower for a woman e.g. 0.7 versus 0.9 for a man.)

Would the vantage point of the viewer effect their perception of the ratio? Taking the three cases

1) The 5′ 4″ man and woman standing facing each other or the 5′ 10″ man and woman standing facing each other i.e. looking eye to eye
2) The 5′ 4″ man and 5′ 10″ woman standing facing each other
3) The 5′ 10″ man and 5′ 4″ woman standing facing each other

Does looking *up* have an optical stretching effect on the ratio (good for a man) and looking *down* have an optical compressing effect (good for a woman)?

@4 “if altruism springs from natural desires not to harm ones own young?”

I tend to that view myself except i’d express it as traits which chemically prevent people from (at least fatally) harming their young even when they’re in a fit of rage. A trait like that ought to be selected for you’d have thought – especially in species whose young take a long time to mature.

@3

“If people are working at or above their level of competence, doesn’t that mean that they are at most barely competent at their task?”

Maybe i should have said fully competent i.e. they are fully capable of performing the task to a satisfactory level on their own as opposed to people who can perform a task but not neccessarily always to a satisfactory level. In the first case interference wastes time. In the second case interference can improve average performance.

“Then I demonstrate that this effect can result in the evolution of a particular, genetically controlled psychology causing individuals to interfere in a bully–victim conflict on the side of the victim.”

Interesting. If you’ve seen a lot of violent incidents you’ll have seen this “type” although after reading this maybe it’s less of a type and more the case of particular individuals having a particulaly large dose of a common type of psychology – or even the random overlap between a large number of people with that broad psychology and inividual levels of bravery. It seems to particularly come out as a reaction to male vs female violence although i guess that may just be a function of physical size distorting the bully-victim ratio.

Actually – thinking while writing – on a smaller scale you see this behavior all the time it’s just that only in the particularly violent examples will you only see the particularly heroic.

.
“A necessary condition is a high efficiency of coalitions in conflicts against the bullies.”

Interesting again as the above starts to breaks down in environments where potential interveners aren’t sure they’re going to be backed up by onlookers. The less certain of backup a potential intervener is then the more “heroic” they’d need to be to act.

.
“Standard explanations and models for cooperation and altruism—reciprocity, kin and group selection, and punishment—are not directly applicable to the emergence of egalitarian behavior in hierarchically organized groups that characterized the social life of our ancestors.”

It may not be relevant but in my experience the more the individuals in a group attempting to perform a group task are functionally equal or close to equal the more egalitarian the forms become simply because it is more efficient. You see this in the military where the more specialist and selective a unit is the more egalitarian it is (in day to day functional forms if not on the surface).

(In a specialist unit with people working at or above their level of competence the added value from the officers and NCOs directly overseeing the work itself is low and potentially negative. It’s more efficient if they just check it afterwards. On the other hand where you have a lot of people engaging in a task below their level of competence then the officers and NCOs can have a direct influence on the average level of competence by directly controlling the task.)

You also see it on a larger scale between national armies where some are much more rigidly heirarchical than others at a functional level, by which i mean the rank in the heirarchy where individual initiative is allowed is set at a higher level.

@39
“Or the removal of one. Or are you suggesting women have less pubic hair?”

I was thinking about shaving legs etc.

@38
“I don’t think it’s a very good question, to be honest. The only evidence you cite that tall people enjoy significant reproductive success is from modern, 21st century societies”

Doesn’t that make it interesting? If you can figure out the reason why it matters now and didn’t in the past that might tell you something. For example if it turned out there was a natural two-way sexual selection on height but in opposite directions then cultural marriage forms where the sexual selection was solely on the females might tend to produce shorter populations while those populations where the women had more of an equal choice would be taller (through the height preferences balancing out).

The same distinction historically – the total amount of individual choice and how it is balanced between men and women – might effect a lot of physical and personality traits.

“If there’s something that make a woman resemble a child, that’s it.”

It’s also an exaggerated gender signal.

Surely it’s testable?

Are identical waist-hip ratios / bust sizes *perceived* as having more “width” depending on the height of the woman?

Similarly i read with men the preferred waist-hip ratio is 0.9. Does being taller create the *perception* of more stretch?

“Are you suggesting that height and “width” (bust and hips) are not correlated”

No i’m generally very data-challenged. I’m saying *if* height and “width” (lolz) were partially not correlated that might explain an unconscious male preference.

.
“Or the suggestion that shorter=younger, as in not fully grown.”

Yes and i agree. I think it’s possibly the exact opposite.

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“This analysis of OkCupid users is interesting”

If there was a (mostly) unconscious male preference based on perceived “width” i’d guess it would mostly only display visually i.e. they might not notice they had a preference with just a face photo. The drop off at 5′ 10″ goes against that a bit but not totally.

This may need a few reads to take in.

“short women don’t resemble children”

I’d say it’s almost the opposite. With the same bust and hip size short women look *less* like children i.e. the curvy bits are bursting out all over. Maybe that’s just my impression but geometrically speaking wouldn’t things like waist-hip ratio and the *percieved* size of breasts be influenced by height?

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“There are problems with this model, starting with the fact that one you need to tease apart inter-population variation…They’re looking at a huge data set of individuals from Wisconsin”

Wouldn’t it make a difference how much choice-based sexual-selection was taking place? In a culture where marriage was through personal choice there would be stronger selection on individual characteristics whereas in cultures where marriages were arranged by the family for other considerations – which i think is most of history in most places since agriculture – individual characteristics may have been secondary.

Then again if there’s a male-female balancing act on height selection then greater selection may cancel out anyway.

However another thought on that would be differential sexual selection i.e. in a culture where relatedness and status decided marriage along the male line then there might still be sexual selection of the females i.e. a fixed male choice based on status and family getting to choose one of four available female first cousins and the shortest (and therefore possibly curviest) getting picked thereby selecting on balance for shortness whereas in a more choice based culture the male-female preference sexual selection averages out?

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“Also, within families there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between height and intelligence, which you would expect to see if quantitative traits are reflections of variation in mutational load.”

What if total mutational load effected both but independently i.e. there’s mutational load related to height and mutational load related to IQ and although they go together they act separately so a family with 10 units of mutational load might randomly have kids with 1-10 points of height load and 1-10 units of IQ load while familes with 4 points of mutational load randomly had kids with 1-4 units of height load and 1-4 units of IQ load. If so then there might be a *higher* correlation between height and IQ among taller families than shorter ones?

Just a guess.

“At least in studies of modern society, it’s been shown that intelligent men father more children than the average.”

Assumptions based on modern society is the point though. I’d always assumed without thinking about it that evolution would be selecting for more brains and other factors had held it back – but maybe for most of the past it wasn’t.

“but outside of an environment where famine happens every few generations, it’s hard to see how caloric needs would select against the large brained”

Well it’s not hard to see it as you just pointed it out. However if it is only 20 calories a day then that would be a very weak pressure i guess even if constant and over millenia.

“Now that the subject has gotten back to the perennial race and IQ”

If the brain is such a high cost organ then doesn’t it make sense for evolution to select for the minimum level of average IQ needed to survive in a particular environment and as a social animal that would include the effect of the brighter members of the group being able to carry the dimmer ones to a certain extent e.g. through creating adaptive behaviors via culture and/or religion for the dimmer ones to blindly follow

.
“The correlation of GSCE English/Maths to iq, and to g particularly, looks to be high.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/19/a-level-results-2010

“A-level results 2010: A-level pass rate rises to 97.6%”

A-levels are the stage after GCSEs and taken around age 18.

So…98% pass rate.

Not only has the current version of the British education system eliminated average IQ differences between ethnic groups it has eliminated the differences between individuals as well. They increased everyone’s IQ to the same level!

So, logically speaking, either they’re miracle workers or the current British education system has been dumbed down to the point where everyone can pass.

@35

ty

@Shashi (if you’re reading)

On a previous post you said

“In Hindu society there is a concept of a “Gotr” which is basically a clan of people who have descended from a common male ancestor (sometimes mythical). I think the above statement fits pretty well with how the orthodox population sees matrimonial alliances on a greater scale. In North India, you hear about honor killings of sons/daughters often over the fact that they were of the same ‘gotr’. Something similar is popular as well in South India (at least in Telegu and Tamil anecdotally) where marrying cousins from the matrilineal side is a ‘good’ thing. Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that, and I don’t know if anyone cares to know.”

I didn’t want to say in a non-open thread but i’d be very interested in this.

I remember liking Creation a lot and now i think of it, and if i remember right, some of the themes have a latitudinal aspect which i didn’t notice at the time. I’ll have to read it again.

““If these differences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ points between impoverished Balkan Europeans and wealthy Western ones reflected deeply hereditary rather than transitory environmental influences…”

Differences between impoverished *low population density mountain dwelling* Balkan Europeans and wealthy *high population density fertile plain dwelling* western ones.

“is it still to correct to say modern Brits derive a large majority (perhaps 80-90? 60-70%?) of their genetic descent from the pre-Roman era Celtic/indigenous peoples living on the isle?”

What people tend to forget when discussing this is the Celt, Saxon, Viking and Norman invaders all came from the at least 40-50% R1b region themselves. So if those invasions were 50% R1b and 50% a mixture of I and R1a then the R1b component as a marker of a distinct population would be lost (unless you could separate out specific clades i guess).

A mirror analogy to what i mean might be an island to the east of Japan originally settled by Ainu subjected to multiple invasions made up of genetically 50% Japanese and 50% Ainu but culturally 100% Japanese.

Which ties back to the main point.

“Do you think such a reproductive technology would be utilized anywhere in the near future?”

A personal bet i have with myself on this is that the Japanese will one day start to give their kids funky hair colors.

“William Henry Harrison was the product of 2nd cousin marriage.”

I think the question will turn out to be more one of either
a) consciously repeated close-kin marriages among the same group of families for alliance or inheritance reasons
or
b) unconsciously repeated close-kin marriages among the same group of families simply due to a *very* low total breeding population.

I doubt one-offs among an otherwise outbred population are likely to matter much unless particularly unlucky.

If so the Icelandic situation where you have a small population breeding exogamously where that small population is just large enough to avoid the second case may turn out to work very well.

I think the existence of moiety type systems tends to point to closer marriage being the norm beforehand else why were they invented?

@51
“Culture of honor type distinctions between herding and farming cultures are at least as old as the oldest known writing, Sumerian epics, where they are prominent features of the stories.”

Quite.

The recurring conflict between farmers and herders seems to me to be one of the main drivers of world history.

“Proponents of the theory argue that it is a natural response to the demands of a low technology pastoralist society, because credible threats of force are necessary to protect flocks in a largely lawless land. This theory then argues that the culture then persists from one generation to the next culturally even when the functional justification for this cultural pattern is long gone.”

If pastoralism relatively encourages raiding because it’s easier to rustle a cow than a field then you have a physical environment leading to a man-made environment that selects for traits suited for a more violent raiding culture. (And the opposite in the fertile farming valley down below.) Wouldn’t a relatively but noticeably more honor based culture then persist as long as the original raiding population retained a higher proportion of pro-violence traits even after the original selection pressure was lifted?

“Some of the fear of inbreeding is more like a leftover from old traditional superstitions and old wives tales, without much connection to actual genetics.”

I wonder. I think it might depend on how quickly things like IQ inbreeding depression could lift. Say you had a bunch of inbred villages in a valley and a new settlement is created in virgin forest and settled by individuals from each of the local inbred villages who then inter-marry. Would the grand-children of the settlers already have changed enough to see their relatives in the inbred villages as some kind of mutant?

(I mean mutant in comic book terms as inbred people are always portrayed that way in western or at least Anglo western culture. I wonder how old that portrayal is?)

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

@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.

“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.

“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.

“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?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

"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.

"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.

Last comment.

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

Obviously it couldn’t be established science could it?

“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.

“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.

Last ditch defense.

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

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

“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.

“Why is it so popular?”

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

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.

congrats

“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.

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.

“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.

“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%.

” 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.

“”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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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 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.

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.

“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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

@Paul Rain, ty

“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?

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.

“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.

“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?

“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.

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.

"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.

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.)