PConroy:
Ossetians do seem related with Scythians (and related stuff such as Sarmathians), probably their most direct descendants, at least culturally. But Ossetians live outside of the area of the Kura-Araxes culture and their origins seem steppary, not from the mountains. The Caucasus range hosts a number of unique linguistic families (NW Caucasian, NE caucasian, Kartvelian) that are not found elswhere but are arguably related to the pre-Indoeuropean substrate of the region (not the Caucasus only but Eastern Europe and highlands West Asia).
The (partial) kurgan burial practices of this culture would suggest it was Indoeuropean or IE-dominated but certainly there are older areas where this was practiced (specially the Samara valley cultures, normally considered the IE homeland). I would suggest tentatively that it could be a precursor of Hittites ir anything. The dates seem to fit pretty well, certainly, and IEs must have crossed the Caucasus in some way to become the historical Hitttes.
Your Caucasus link for Tocharian clothing anyhow is intriguing, as Tocharians, like Hittites, constitute clearly a separate branch of IE linguistically, distinct from the Western (European) and Eastern (Indo-Iranian) major branches. But Ossetians (and Scythians) belong to the Indo-Iranian branch quite clearly.
But please consider that the first (mostly westward) IE expansion pre-dates not wheel (that is at least as old as Sumer: Sumerians used heavy four-wheeled “war chariots” pulled by onagers) but the latter more effective two-wheeled chariots of the Bronze Age. IE expansion in Europe (east of the Rhin) is apparently a Chalcolithic pehnomenon. The Kura-Araxes culture is not older than the similar ones found in Ukraine (Seredny-Stog II), Eastern Germany and Poland (Baalberge and descendants) or the Eastern Balcans (several cultures), all of which were into kurgan burial and show rather clear links to their putative Samara valley cultural heartland. This Caucasus culture would be just one among several expanding branches, not the core.

Read about it at Science Daily. They talk of the two clades as separate “species” (1 million year genetic distance may justify that I guess) and they also say that their mtDNA is much more complex than that of both species of elephants and that hey had very low mtDNA diversity.
In any case, it’s certainly interesting that whole mtDNA reconstruction is possible when hairs are available.

Is that the same Richard Lynn of race and IQ? That guy is totally discredited, no matter he now spouses something I think it’s true. How can someone claim that any human group has overall an IQ of deeply retarded, when we know some (trained) chimps have non-verbal scores of 80 or so. It’s pathetic!
Besides, I’m pretty sure that most countries have not actualized “national IQ” stats anyhow. It’s not, you know, something administrations, or even univrsities, invest their money in finding out. They are just interested in GNP and stuff like that. So how do you or Lynn know which is the average IQ of say Botswana (preferably something that is of this century, of course)?
Said that, I do think IQ and skepticism/critical thought (atheism included) are related, of course. But I don’t think these transnational or trans-ethnic studies have the least validity. I want to check with microscope the “matherials and methods” section, sincerely.

The case is that term Lesbian is very old and widespread. You can’t defeat common usage with court action, really. I find that extremely silly, specially as they should be proud and not ashamed of Sappho.

We don’t need advanced technology to make poor decisions – look at the questionable tactics already used by agricultural corporations.
Possibly one can argue that agricultural (or rather chemo-pharmaceutical) corporations also have “advanced technology”, at least in comparison with previous periods. In fact they are a good exapmle on how technology is not to be trusted blindly.
We correct natural birth defects, treat natural infertility…
Reducing natural selection is just “bread for today and hunger for tomorrow”, probably. We are perpetuating the defects, nothing more. It can be “humanitarian” but not beneficial in the long run. And there are other much cheaper (less elitist) humanitarian priorities, I believe, notably education, freedom and equal rights for all.
Do you think that people who can barely pay for a mosquito net or anti-malaria drugs care about fertility treatments? That’s a silverspoon caprice as much as plastic surgery.
… and fertilize naturally barren land.
In fact we mostly erode naturally midling land. Most terrains (Mediterranean, Africa) are being eroded and damaged by aggresive agriculture techniques imported from the much deeper soils of the north. If mediterraneans did not incorporate the heavy plough in the Middle Ages, it was for a reason, not because they were stupid… but now they have taken up on deep soil techniques as well, destroying the land.
Again “bread for today, hunger for tomorrow”. No technology will restore the eroded desertified land – or it will be much more expensive than using low impact techniques.

Lesbians (the islanders) are insulting their most famous citizen ever: Sappho of Lesbos. True that she had to flee for her life in the past anyhow, so it doesn’t seem that Lesbians were ever much pro-Lesbian – ih, oh! 
 
Siracusans were more hospitable.  
 
In any case (some) Greeks seem to be really nitty-picky about using historical terms that have anything to do with them. Beware all you whose name is Alexander, Philp, Plato, Homer, Archimedes… well, one could well argue that Archimedes was Italian anyhow.

What’s your point, Razib? Are you suggesting they should be vaccinated or something? There’s no vaccine nor effective treatment against viral infections, you know.
And, what the heck… let them live their lives, and save the jungle at the same time. You cannot make farmers of them because it’s not possible to farm the jungle intensvely: just to fell it until it becomes semidesert, barely able to sustain some cattle.
What the Brazilian government has been doing in the last years is to expel the missionaries and keep contact at minimal levels, always through the specialized institutions (mostly made up of ill-paid native volunteers). It’s not like no contact but good, limited, contact: something that helps them keep their culture while becoming aware of the world surrounding them.
They also have many contradictions, of course, and the recent resignation of the populat Enviroment Minister Marina Silva is a clear sign that the priorities of Lula’s government are too much headed towards a likely myopic developism.

I’m very pessimistic in this aspect, we already invest a lot of resources in almost totally dumb machines and get little from them (example: we use, and feed and repair, the car but we only get greater distances to travel, traffic-jams and ecological problems, not more time of leisure, maybe even less). The trend so far has been to build up a technological society in which everything orbits around machines, now we even grow human food to make biofuels… And eventually a human-like or super-human intelligent machine will be built. I have no idea what kind of “emotions” and “desires” it will have but certainly it will have its own interests and those won’t be alient to its possibly cold logic mind. Humans then will be obsolete.
Consolation prize: the new machines will be somewhat human-like. But that’s all.
I really don’t see how such developement may help humans at all. And I don’t understand the geek slang (the very term “Singularity” aplid out of astrophysics is totally new to me) that seems to claim that such developement will be beneficial. It will be not – not for humans, certainly. They will have their own interests and will manage to impose them. We will never be able to survey and control them without help from machines. It’s the perfect self-kicking one’s butt.
A brief, almost illusory and certainly out of control Anthropocene followed by a Mechanocene, whose parameters I can’t really imagine. If that’s all the well we can do, then maybe we deserve to end in that really stupid way: destroyed by our own creations.

Guess it takes a Finn to understand (and explain) the machanics of the cold north. Very informative exchange. Thanks again.

Thanks again for your explanations. Pretty interesting, certainly.
What about permafrost? Another thing that puzzled me is that while permafrost (that obviously requies water ice, even if under the soil) is known to have reached as far south as Beijing in the LGM, Siberia as a whole remained mostly ice-free, at least on he surface. How can there be permafrost and not surface ice, specially in such a vast extension?
Though guess the answer is in the dry winds, not affecting the underground water ice, right?

Well, it’s mainstream now, I believe. But the main reason is that E (including E3a) is clearly an African clade, with a mostly tropical African spread, and even DE* has been found only in tropical Africa too, what really dispels the hypothesis of E being a back-migrant clade from Asia, today mostly abandoned.  
 
Nowadays E3b expansion is mostly associated with the Mesolithic (grain-gathering economy) expansion initiated in Nubia, that would have spread the Afroasiatic languages and very posibly triggered the very Mesolithic of West Asia. I know there are some (implictly racist or racism-fearing) diffuse resistences to this idea but most are mute or have no evidence to put ahead to defend any alternative model.  
 
For me it’s just one of the more clear concepts regarding haplogroup origins. Only the somewhat peculiar Greek/Albanian founder effect may raise some questions but their clades are not really different from those found elsewhere, so they must have a “recent” (Neolithic, Mesolithic at most) origin shared with the rest.

IQ is not everything you need for college/university. You also need self-discipline and surely some conformism. These are not IQ-related. In fact, if the exams only (or mostly) ask to reproduce memorized data there’s no much room for IQ, though it may be of some help by allowing faster and greater understanding.
Uni is not about IQ but about passing exams. Arguably a smart person has better chances but I would not say it’s the only factor at all. I’ve known too many people with great minds failing at uni and loads of people with mediocre minds doing well, or at least well enough out of self-discipline, memory and conformity (and the occasional cheat, I guess).

That’s a pretty reasonable explanation. Thanks, Jaakeli. 🙂
Not an easy one to figure out on my own really. True that I’ve never been in Siberia but typically I figure it almost like Antarctica, at least in the northern latitudes. Obviously a wrong stereotype.

Luis,
The world does have a bad habit of being complex, don’t it? 🙂
Sure. I’m still trying to understand why the Ice Age did not cover Siberia of ice, when it’s now the coldest region of Eurasia.
This may look somewhat offtopic but certainly it’s the same thing: understanding the why of climate. And really, I don’t understand this part at all.

You got it backwards.
The east coasts of America and Eurasia have warm water currents coming up from the south. The Gulf Stream in the case of North America, and the Japan Current of the case of Eurasia.
The Gulf Stream warms up the east coast of North America and Western Eurasia because the current is relatively close to each.
It’s more complicated it seems. Neither you nor I have it completely straight. The Gulf Stream warms up the US Southeast but it gets into the Ocean at the latitude of Virginia, becoming the North Atlantic Drift (aka Gulf Stream too) that fans out to warm up all Atlantic Europe. North of Virginia you have the Cabot Current that is a southward flow of cold water from near Greenland.
A similar pattern happens in the Pacific Ocean with the North Pacific Drift, that leaves the Asian coasts at the latitude of Tokyo (replaced by a cold current there) to cross the ocean and reach North America at Vancouver island roughly. The derived coastal flow warms up Alaska and cools somewhat the Western coast of the USA.
See this (large) map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Ocean_currents_1943_%28borderless%29.png

Another element is oceanic circulation: warm currents from the south in Europe and the North American western coast make winters a lot milder than would be otherwise. Certainly the Gulf Stream is extremely important to keep Europe warm, not just Lisbon but, specially, much farther north. Siberian winds do affect Europe (and Saharan ones too) but the Oceanic high and low pressures dominate and keep their effect limited and in general tend to push them back. When the Siberian high pressures manage to temporarily dominate though, this becomes like the Ice Age.
Instead both Eastern coasts are affected by cold streams from the arctic.
Quite pedagogical anyhow. I was not really aware that I live north of New York (similar latitude yes). 🙂

Though, on second thought, it’s maybe lack of gene-flow if you mean specifically gene-flow from Africa or other distant regions, i.e. from outside the population studied. IMO, there’s no reason to think of long-distance gene flow into West Eurasians (at least significatively) until maybe the Neolithic or Epipaleolithic, when elements like E3b (and later others surely) appear in scene. Maybe West Asia was more in direct contact (not too much anyhow) with India and some parts of Africa but they would have buffered or filtered this minor gene-flow towards Europeans in any case, so the result could be very similar.  
 
But in any case 160 or 200 milennia are way too much time.

100,000 years in the complete absence of gene flow? 
 
The original concept, as per p-ter’s post was: Europeans experienced a mild long-term bottleneck starting ~8000 generations (~160K years) ago, 
 
I don’t understand this as lack of gene-flow but as continuous drift towards a narrow genotype.  
 
But I may be wrong, you are the experts here after all.  
 
In any case, it’s not the first paper that seems to find an important bottleneck in Europeans (and East Asians too). I would like to see comparisons with presumably intermediated populations as West, South and SE Asians, and not just Africans, because that would give us a better idea of when the alleged bottleneck might have happened: if in the OOA epysode or later (LGM maybe) – or whatever other possibilities.  
 
It would also be interesting if now and then they changed the samples, just to be sure there is no bias in the ones always used (case of CEU, for instance, on which I have serious doubts of its representativity).

8000 generations makes “only” 160,000 years if you take a quite low estimate for the generational gap (20 years). If you use the more common (and possibly better justified) 25 yrs/gen span, then you get 200,000 years, what is all the lifespan of humankind. Very unlikely in my opinion. 
 
Otherwise, I’d have no major problem if the estimates would fall around c. 100-110,000 BP, as that would also fit arguably the archaeological record of South Asia (I’m thinking in that other model that Razib posted on recently in the other GNXP). But 200,000 years really makes a figure hard to swallow. 
 
Now, I have already suggested that the CEU sample may not be the best one to work with re. European genetics. Utah has probably a peculiar demographic history and even Northern Europe itself (the almost single source of Utah whites, according to US census) may also have experienced its own distortions. Founder effects certainly should look like bottlenecks in any case, right?

@James:
It was central for the thousand years through to the end of the Crusades and was a keen point of controversy during the Reformation.
But then the name was not “Western civilization” that is a much more modern concept, surely not older than a few cenuries (19th century maybe?). Then it was “Christendom” and it included Emperor Charlemagne and King Ezana of Axum, but not Benjamin of Tudela nor Beowulf, nor then historical people as Caesar or Aristotle. The definition was primarily (and almost exclusively) religious. Now it’s not: things have changed and older (Greco-Roman) and newer (Renaissance, Illustration and derivates) have been adopted instead. There has been indeed a major cultural revolution and the very secular concept of the West lays on it.
One that I think incorrectly understimates the power that Christian belief and culture has had on the development of Western Civilzation
I would not go as far as denying that Christianity, for good or bad, is a historical component of “the West”. It is, like Buddhism is to “the East” (understood here as East Asia). But it is not something with local roots in either case (both are imported religions) nor define the modern society in most aspects. Of course both had their influence and even now still have a remnant of it. But neither the East is defined primarily by Buddhism, nor the West by Christianity. This unlike the Near East and India, whose dominant religions are local developements and I would dare to say more totalist (in the sense of permeating society much more intimately and deeply).
@Razib:
fact, i do not believe that its outline really appeared until late the 6th century when was clear that the eastern roman empire was not going to reconquer or hold the west.
But you still basically seem to equate “the West” with Western Christianity (Catholicism and splinter sects), when actually all European cultures are seen as equally (or almost equally) western in contrast with the rest.
Normally West means “Europe and the like” (specially colonies of European culture in America and Oceania, but also in Siberia). Certainly the western half of what we could call post-Roman cultural area showed to be more dynamic and innovative than the East, at least most of the time, but the community of values really overshadows any differences. These values are Liberal or post-Liberal (such as Socialism), they are burgueoise and illustrated, or attempts to trascend that burgueoise liberal paradigm (or to limit it, in the case of conservatives) but in the same overall socio-cultural frame.
It’s not west-east like Western and Eastern Empires or Churches, nor the (somewhat parallel) temporal circumstance of the Cold War blocs. It’s west-east as Roman (or Greco-Roman) vs. non-Roman, European vs. non-European (in a cultural sense), so the eastern parts of “Roman heir cultures” or European cultures are also the West.
Islam could be Western and in some aspects is but its totalism simply seems to deny any other roots than those that are specifically Islamic. They are generally not very interested in pre-islamic history, not even that of Arabia, for instance. It’s like a “wrong world” that should better never have existed for them. Christianity also had much of that totalism (and the psalms written on classical works are a good example of how the pre-Christian reality mattered little in that obscurantist cultural frame). But the West managed to get rid of that limiting shell, at least largely, and became secular, illustrated and liberal… that’s how it was born, not with the Great Schism nor with the intrusion of Islam… but with the reduction of the role of religion, Christianity primarily but any other religion as well.
But Turkish secularism is Western (or Western-like, and likehood is what counts here), as it is secular pan-Arabism like that of Hussein (Hitler was also western, so nothing to be surprised about) and other similar secularist trends. Certainly the divide generated in the Middle Ages is there for a while but the roots of countries like Syria or Tunisia are largely shared with Europe, if one can see beyond the sectarian divide of the Dark Ages. This sectarian divide is precisely what makes the possibly less historically Western of all areas, Eastern Asia, look as much more western-like than any of the other major Eurasian regions. Because it’s in that “opposite” corner where secularism and rationalism are also particularly strong – and not in the regions in between, largely trapped in religious totalism.

James said: the touchstone of the concept of what constitutes Western Civilisation or “Christendom” has always been the Nicene Creed.
Razib said: that’s really retarded
Certainly (even if would have expressed it with softer words porbably). I am of Western culture by all sides and would need to look in some encyclopedia what the heck is the “Nicene creed” and why is it “Western” if Nicea was in the Byzantine Empire.
For me the touchstone of Western civilization may be things like Diogenes and Plato spitting each other’s shadow, Descartes and Spinoza analyzing reality it totally opposite directions, the head of corrupt Louis XVI and later that of the incorruptible Robespierre, Leonardo (the Mona Lisa and the cannons of Ludovico Sforza), Marx, Jefferson, Darwin, Human Rights, Feminism, carracks sailing the oceans of the world, colonialism, the Edict of Tolerance, universities, Hollywood, the Internet…
But no idea about the Nicene creed. Would you ask me in any other context and I would think of emperor Constantine or something like that. Maybe relevant in the Middle Ages but not for modernity. I’m probably wrong though.
It is ironic that the near universal decline in religious belief in Europe is part and parcel with the understanding that fundametalist Islam is alien to the concept of what consititutes “The West.”
In fact fundamentalist Christianity is alien too. It may be a historical fact but it’s more like the dark side we prefer to completely erase. I would not think the Inquistion or the Salem trial or the burning of Servet are fundamentals of what we call the West now. Certainly they are part of our history but not a part we can be proud of, nor that we desire to repeat. Certainly not any touchstone nor pillar but rather the rubble that hides at the building foundations.
Christianity is a historical part but not pillar nor touchstone. A historical accident and of little use apprently.

I also browsed it casually only first and now I’ve re-read it with more care, even if it’s a little too dense and arithmetic for my level.
What most called my attention was the “Inference on Demography” section of the discussion and the related table S1.
According to that Africans have been expanding regularly since 6809 generations ago, what I translate into some 170,000 years (at 25 years per gen.) That is roughly coincident with estimates of the formation of H. sapiens as separate species but it also means that all that literature about many small groups separated by massive droughts and the like suddenly seem to make little sense: African humans, at least those represented in the sample (probably Khoisan are not, for instance) have been expanding steadily since the very beginning of the species (or shortly after). The lack of bottlenecks in Africans (or their American descendants) is not something new anyhow.
I’m not sure how to read the European results. The authors state that the best-fitting model is that of two expansions with an intermediate bottleneck but that the other two models (not the stationary one) are also reasonably fit to results.
So we have three models that more or less agree with the results:
1. Model “Expansion”: Europeans have expanded since some 6500 years ago (Neolithic).
2. Model “Bottleneck”: Europeans have been expanding since some 21,850 years ago (LGM). The bottleneck lasted for c.192,000 years before that.
3. Model “Bottleneck + 2 step recovery”: first expansion c. 130,000 years ago (an early OOA?), a second expansion c. 14,400 years ago (post-LGM) and a bottleneck lasting some 2100 years only (when? before the first or second expansion?).
Model 3 is the best model but while it does fit well with what we know of post-LGM expansion it also seems to suggest another earlier expansion c. 130,000 BP. That seems to suggest that the OOA event happened a lot earlier than usually acknowledged. That it has nothing to do with Toba nor the massive African droughts that preceded it but that people was in Eurasia since about that date. Certainly Indian late Middle Paleolithic does suggest pre and post Toba continuity and there is no good reason to think that H. sapiens only arrived in the traiditionally considered transition to UP, specially as blade tools are known since c. 100 BP.
In fact, I have been driven to this same conclusion recently by just counting haplogroup SNPs: unless there’s been not an acceleration but a deceleration of mutation rates (what makes little sense, IMO) there is no way that best studied Y-DNA branches, like R1b or O3 fit with their TMRCA estimated ages. A much older OOA than the usual c. 60-70,000 years ago seems a realistic consideration to me. In fact an OOA of c. 130,000 BP was precisely what I was “finding” with my amauterish logic (but logic after all). So I’m somehow glad to see that others with better qualifications and different methods seem to reach to the same conclusions, even if they shyly express them in generations (and not more impacting terms of years).

Luis, have you replicated those findings of “stereotype threat?” 
 
I didn’t think so. 
 
Obviously not, have you falsified them? ^^ 
 
At the linked article you can find many other similar articles in the same line. Other people have duplicated the study or done something that is about the same, not once but several times.  
 
Sorry if your macho pride got hurt.

I think both Aziz and you are overall correct in the asessment of the term “the West”. Neverthelss I don’t think this term was used in the Middle Ages at all. It’s specially a post-Christian term and rather than just in opposition to Islam or Orthodox countries is an opposition to all those “the East” as seen from Europe: Eastern Europe (sometimes only) the Near and/or Middle East, the far East…
I don’t know for sure but surely the term became more popular since the USA grew as a large power, as replacement for the moder classical “Europe”.
The west-east dicotomy inside Europe is anyhow something inside the same cultural-geographical entity, much like north/south China or east/west USA. It doesn’t seem to have such a strong meaning as the West as opposed to Asia specially and Eastern Europe is readily included in the “West” category as soon as you look outside Europe for the counter-reference.
From a historical viewpoint one could also argue that West Asia (and North Africa) is Western and even the core of the Western World. Islam is certainly a Western religion, very tightly related to Judaism and Christianity, both developed in West Asia.
So it’s a slippery concept.

Your late 18th century dates (not sure if Bengal as such counts: it doesn’t seem more important than Malacca, Hormuz, Zandj, Ceylon, Ternate or Mataram) are signs of a change of grade not so much a fundamental one. And this change of grade is so directly tied to the effects of the Industrial Revolution that cannot be treated separately.
The Ottomans were still a sizeable rival in the Crimea War of the 1850s (considered the first clearly industrial war) and even in WWI, the Japanese were challenging all Western powers in the early 20th century. It’s not like it can be described in black and white terms. Maybe for India and China the late 18th century was a historical landmark but that is partly a local focus in these two countries/regions. From the global perspective it is also a landmark but not so much for a not-so-clear radical shift of power relations between Europe and mainland Asia but for radical socio-economical and therefore political changes.
One issue clearly is the ability of power to deploy sufficient troops to fight large inland wars so far from home. This was not something Portugal could do of course and surely only in the age you mention was possible and only for large powers like Britain, France and the like. The Netherlands for instance could not do that either at any time.
It’s not an Iberian viewpoint: Spanish historiography, unlike English one, makes a marked difference between the Modern age (early Modern: since the Colombus and de Gama explorations) and the Contemporary age (late Modern: since the US and French revolutions). This difference is terminologically as sharp as the contrast between Middle and Modern ages and Antiquity and Middle Ages. But it’s clear for me that the Modern (early Modern) age preludes the Contemporary (late Modern) age very markedly and that one cannot be even imagined without the other, as you seem to want to do.

The Dorset culture (called Tuniit by the Inuit) preceded the Eskimos (Thule culture) in arctic America. They were gradually replaced after 1000 CE by the real Inuits. The seem to have been already in decline when the new immigrants arrived in any case.
I don’t think this particular case is any mystery in itself (Inuits are a recent arrival, we alredy knew it), though the aDNA found may help explaining the origins of the Dorset people anyhow.

The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800.
That’s a more purely economic viewpoint (almost a matter of accountancy only, I’d say) than the one I had, which was more based in mere political and militar power. From a purely economic view, parts of NW Europe, specially Flanders were already on the rise in the late Middle Ages though their time would not come until Portuguese expansion severely damaged the economy of the Italian city-states, specially Venice. From that viewpoint certainly Spain was never a manufacturing power, nor much less Portugal. With few localized exceptions (textiles in Catalonia and some weaponry specially in the Basque Country) their main manufacture was ships. Portugal was more of a trading power though, specialized in slaves and spice.
Anyhow, I am not sure why political-militar power has only to be seen from an economic perspective. Certainly the main issues for the modern USA are as much economical as political-militar. And that was the case also for earlier powers. The variables of economy have changed somewhat though but the issue of controlling key resources and keeping them cheap and available for national companies is the main theme driving imperialist competence along history, specially through modern history.
no, you’re wrong.
You mean you disagree with my opinion. Ok.
the fleet was mostly italian
The fleet was about 40% Spanish. The rest was mostly Venetians, who certainly had a big share in the victory with their six heavy galleases and all that. But it’s like saying that the USA did not win WWI (or even WWII) because the French and the English (and specially the Soviets in WWII) had many more troops in the battlefields. Spain (or the Habsburgian domain centered in Spain) was the leader of the alliance and the one who took the important decissions, for instance if to keep attacking the Turks after that or not. Venice was a most important ally but it was not the leader at all. Its time had passed.
but more importantly lepanto wasn’t that big of a deal from an ottoman perspective, they didn’t mention it in their records.
I have discussed this issue in depth before with people from all around the world, including many Turks, and certainly it was a very big blow in the naval facet: the Turkish navy was destroyed and, most importantly, their able seamen were too (either dead or captured). They rebuilt it eventually but only because Spain did not attempt to exploit this victory, busy as it was in so many other fronts. The Venetians wanted to carry on but they could not alone.
Wikipedia mentions that historian Paul K. Davis said:
“This Turkish defeat stopped Turkey’s expansion into the Mediterranean, thus maintaining western dominance, and confidence grew in the west that Turks, previously unstoppable, could be beaten.”
It was not like the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th century but it was a clear landmark that that their fromer unstoppable expansion westward had reached a limit.
historians don’t agree with you.
Then why they call the whole period since c.1500 “Modern history”.
the base of comparison are the asian powers, not the african or new world examples (the african ones are also not a good example because europeans were prevented from expanded beyond small ports by disease until the 19th century).
I understand well that some Asian powers were much more powerful and advanced than these but Spain did not head to Asia (except Philippines) and Portugal was always a small power of the sort the Netherlands or Denmark (or Venice in the Mediterranean) could be. Portugal was still able to estabilish a wide network of colonies not only in Africa but also along southern Asia, defeating everyone who faced them and causing the collapse of the traditional routes along the Middle East, seriously damaging the conomy of many Muslim powers as well as the Italian city-states (particularly Venice, who tried to stop them). The Netherlands would never do much more – in fact probably less, except in Indonesia. You cannot compare Portugal with England or France, it just makes no sense. And for historical reasons the only comparable power, Spain, went in the opposite direction and never intervened significatively in Asia (or Africa).
But the impact anc challenge of Portuguese expansion specially cannot be undermined: they broke the Muslim monopoly on several key merchandises (the spices as most important) and opened trade and colonization routes that other powers would follow later. They invented the plantation colony (Madeira was the first one), they developed high seas navigation and cartography. The Castilian contribution is maybe more focused in America but certainly they also were important pioneers (discovery and conquest of most of America, circunnavigation of the world). You just cannot ignore all this pioneering and the Spanish status as first global power for more than a century. In fact Spain (Habsburgian empire) was the first western superpower since Rome.
It’s not nationalist apology (I don’t feel attached to Spanish identity, rather the opposite) just sense of proportion.
you are totally eurocentric insofar as you mention european expansion, but you don’t know that the peak of mughal expanion was 1700, or that the chinese state-empire was at its historical peak in the late 18th century.
And the Safavid empire, and Oman, and the brief Moroccan imperial adventure in West Africa, and Ethiopia, and the Algerian corsairs…
I cannot help being somewhat eurocentric by birth and education but certainly none of these powers was much of a global challenge, to any European power: they were focused in their own regional areas and did not directly compete. Not even China, without doubt the most powerful of all. If China would have wanted to compete… then maybe all modern history would have been different. But it wasn’t the case. When a European power in this timeline fell it was for internal problems and, specially, for the competence of other rising European powers.
In fact it is a very interesting moment now because it is the first time in many centuries that non-western powers are challenging the hegemony of a wester superpower, and because there is no new western rising power (Brasil?, Russia?) in the game. The USA could well be the last of western great powers. It is a a new chapter but the chapter that may be ending was opened in the late 15th century.
you assert that by the 17th century europeans were dominant and had bases at the time, but not mentioning that those bases were purchased or begged from asian powers (generally there was a process of giving mercentile concessions by land powers who had always worked with middlemen, whether arabs, gujaratis or europeans).
Sometimes there were wars too: Portugal conquered Malaca, almost 180º away from home. And Portugal was a tiny country, it still is in spite of demographic growth. Certainly attacking the large continental empires woud have been suicidal, but, as you may be having a slightly Indo-centric viewpoint, India was conquered by the English, a large country (six times Portugal), only in the 19th century (and alrgely motivated because of rivalry with France, the same reason behind the capture of Dutch colonies, as the Dutch were allied of the french Republic and later Napoleon). Portugal had not the power to make such conquests but also did not have the need either. Portugal, like the Dutch after them, was never a major European power, even if it was a major African and Asiatic power. It was another scale of things than what drove French and specially British imperialism.
I do agree that the conquest of India and some other Asian countries, along with the rush for Africa are the apogee of European imperialism and imperial power but that doesn’t deny the rest.
you also don’t know the history well in terms of the russian expansion, so why start arguing with me? the manchus were focused on some other events like finishing their conquest of south china while the russians were expanding through siberia. when the former was complete they turned around and rollbacked the russians without much trouble and forced a treaty on them and pushed into central asia beyond the current borders of the people’s republic (the russian-chinese border is an artifact of unequal treaties in the 1860s).
It doesn’t matter. What I mean is that the transformation of power relations wasn’t radically done by the British East India Company or the eventual decreased power of the late Manchu dynasty. It was gradual but this gradual transformation had a quite suddent start in the 1490s and the decades following this date. It also had a not sudden apogee at the late 19th and early 20th century. You cannot pinpoint a date (except maybe the Napoleonic wars or the Congress of Berlin, very internal European affairs) for a the beginning of that imperialist apogee. You can with the Portuguese/Castilians explorations and colonization.
economists have things called statistics. these statistics make clear that gain in productivity and relative economic power by europe shifted toward increasing marginal returns in the 19th century
That sounds more like an end than a beginning. It’s a totaly different thing.
additionally, most economic historians don’t accept that there was a specific industrial revolution, rather, the increase in productivity was continuous and reaches back centuries, but simply accelerated.
You mean some economic historians. I have also read some economical history myself (in fact it used to be one of my favorite subjects). Certainly an exact date for the industrial revoltion is hard to find but since the end of the 18th century in Britain and soon after in increasing areas of the rest of Europe there was a much larger increase in productivity and gradual mechanization of the productive processes. Surely you can trace the roots of this economic improvement to the early Modern Age, the Italian Renaissance or even the High Middle Ages, but the last two centuries have witnessed changes without precedent and at unprecedented speed, not just in economy and technology but socio-politically too. Increase in western imperial power has accompanied them certainly but is not the main feature. The main feature is a new way of production that soon clashed with the old post-Medieval way of doing things.
I can even agree that some form of proto-Capitalism has existed before, at least through all Modern history and maybe “always”. But the Industrial revolution (or revolutions) is a major change (or chain of succesive changes, each one more radical and faster) on its own.
I really don’t understand your logic: you deny that the Iberian colonial expansions changed (or began changing) the global relations of power in favor of Europe and then you try to push back into an undefinite timeline the Industrial Revolution(s). Then what do you have left in the 18th century that makes up the “Great Divergence”? Nothing.
If the Russians and Brits had accumulated enough power to defeat the Indians and the Chinese in the 19th century, that was basically because of the Industrial Revolution, something these countries had not. Ok, Russia had not it either but it could buy the weapons and hire the experts in Germany or Britain (and China or the Mughal Empire could not).
________
Anyhow, this discussion only touches a minor issue in the main topic that is about the “post-American world”. If we are not to get focused on it, I’d suggest that you reply to this if you wish and we leave it. Considering our divergent viewpoints we could go on and on for long otherwise wihout arriving anywhere.
Intersting debate but somewhat off-topic probably.

Portugal in those dates was in decline. The expansion of Portugal (much of precursor of Dutch one, both based in relatively small trading colonies and unable to colonize effectively large areas) had a timeline of the late 15th century and specially early 16th century. At that time they defeated virtually anyone who stood in their way, including a Venetian-Egyptian coalition. They took what they wanted from Congo and its neighbours, Zandj and Hormus, they estabilished many bases in South and SE Asia at the expense of local powers and even obtained Macao from still powerful China.
Later, with the personal union with Spain (1580-1640), they became the target specially of the Dutch (but also the English). Overall both Iberian states were overextended and somewhat retrograde by then but Portugal was by nature (size) much weaker.
This Portuguese decline period also approaches the decline of Spain. But, with the Omani exception, certainly the greatest blows were inflicted by other nascent European powers.
european power in the old world was not particularly of note until late in the 18th century. e.g., the manchus expelled the russians from the amur river valley in the late 17th century and forced a treat upon the czar.
But the Russians had got to the Manchu borders (after defeting a number of Central Asian and Eastern European khanates).
Anyhow, Russia is not clearly a western power (western as in European or West Eurasian yes – but then also Ottomans probably; western as in Western European or Atlantic no). Its expansion and developement certainly differs greatly from that of other European powers, although it’s surely related too.
remember that ottomans were campaigning in austria until 1700 or so.
I agree that the decline of power of China and Ottomans was gradual and in that time they were still major regional powers (in fact the timeline of Ottomans strangely parallels that of Spain). But it’s also true that the Spanish were able to smash them at Lepanto and force an agreement on the division of spheres of influences in the Mediterranean (much to the anger of Venetians, who wanted to exploit that victory). Basically Spain was not anymore focused in the Med as much as in the oceans, where opportunities were much better.
But the dividing line between a time when Europe was just like anything else in the planet and the time when it was clearly dominant begins in the 1490s with Portuguese and Castilian naval expansion. The other Western European powers basically followed their path (and partly caused their demise). Arguing that this or that other Western power stole this or that from the Iberians (or later also The English from the French and the Ducth, and later the USA from all – albeit indirectly in most cases) is just “internal matters” in this Western context.
I don’t really see any justification for the odd concept of “Great Divergence”, except, as mentioned the Industrial Revolution, a process clearly led by England and focused in NW Europe. I suspect it’s an Anglocentric/Nordicist concept and, as said, never ever heard of it before.

I don’t really like this graph better because of the logarithmic scale. I strongly prefer the other one posted at Ecstathy with the straight trend transformed into a smooth curve. Anyhow I think it’s nitty-pickiness: the indicated trend is almost the same.

And stop referring to Jesus as if he actually existed.
He may have existed actually, even if the accounts are largely exaggerated. The most simple and reasonable explanation is that the guy actually was there, even if what we read of him now is mostly mythology. Actually I think Herakles also existed probably, even if only a little bit of his mythology is remotely close to reality and all the rest is just decoration, imports from other myths, popular superstitions and general Disney-ization of the real thing.
Personally I think Jesus was probably a zealot “terrorist” and that the transformation of the real man into the ideal god is very well metaphorized in the choice of Jesus Barrabas (son of the father, literally) and Jesus the Christ (both the same person: one the real thing and the other the edulcorated myth).
If media recording doesn’t prevent it, they may one day do the same with Osama.

As I remember, there’s a translation question about the meaning of a certain Hebrew word that was interpreted as a prophecy of Christ’s birth. To those who accept the “virgin” translation, it’s a literalist question. American literalists are probably much more literalist than Luther was; Luther was an associate of Erasmus, who produced a critical translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek which contradicted the Catholic Vulgate.
It seems you are right. I must have misplaced that with some other creed item. My bad.

First a side comment: I was left rather perplex at the concept of “Great Divergence”, totally new to me. Wikipedia’s article is very poor and unsourced, so I did not get the idea really. In my understanding of History, the West was already dominant in the 16th century, when Portuguese and Castilians (rather than Spanish) divided the non-western world in two with very important practical effects. A divergence that begins in the 18th century can only be the Industrial Revolution anyhow but the global dominance of the West is at least two centuries older.
Now, going to the matter: powers arise and fall, that’s known, normal and to be expected. Sometimes they fall dramatically but more commonly their decline is gradual. But even when gradual, they may experience sudden somehwat dramatic transitions, maybe because of a failed war or an economical crisis. France for instance lost global hegemony with Canada in the Seven Years’ War, Spain in several more localized ones (Netherlands, Portugal, the Caribbean Sea) and related economical crisis, England was faced with a fast growing Germany that forced them to look for US protection twice in a row. It was maybe less spectacular because they did not technically lose any war and the new power was a former colony of them… but anyhow.
I suspect that the USA with all its huge external debt and ubiquitous presence all around the planet resembles maybe more Spain than other cases. I was reading today to Michael Hudson (in Spanish, not sure if there is an English version or where) claiming that the falling dollar is caused because its stregth depends largely of foreign powers, powers that are not anymore interested in feeding (with a strong dollar) the US imperal militar intervention everywhere. He argued that the USA has now (and now is now in this delicate moment of incipient structural crisis, I undertstand) to make a choice between a costly empire and a the internal economy. This may go in line with the “Clintonian” (as opposed to “Bushian” interventionism) suggestions of this Fareed Zakaria.
Nevertheless I am not sure: the huge consume per capita of the USA (they call it GNP but it’s a tricky term) relies in certain form of neocolonialism. This kind of control of foreign resources may require imperialist intervention. Renouncing to that may just make the economy of the USA even more unstable. Of course, fueling conflicts without viable solutions doesn’t seem to help either.
Certainly China and the other alternative powers (India, Brazil, Russia, Germany…) act in that non-interventionist way mostly. But that’s largely because they have no choice and also because their needs are much lower than those of a huge developed hyper-consumerist economy like that of the USA. But certainly keeping up with the costs of the military machinery and network that constitute the “American Empire” without almost any foreign support (support for a srong dollar primarily) is not possible either.
If the vassals are reluctant to pay the bills and the competitors much more so, the USA faces a big problem. Specially in these times of structural crisis. Maybe the USA is still holding the 25% of global GNP (consume) but that will probably not be the case after this crisis is over. And it may well be largely irrelevant what the USA does in fact because it’s not something that they seem to be able to control anymore. Earlier with the socio-political challenge of the Soviet Union, the internal solidarity of the Empire was somewhat guaranteed but nowadays it is not anymore, specially as the allies see the new adventures as meaningless or rather troublesome and the USA and China (or any other big power) largely interchangeable.
Now China (for example) may hope to grow to levels that approach those of the USA in gross GNP but never in GNP per capita, as they are like four or five times the population of the USA. In fact countries as big as India or China are necesarily bound to practice some sort of internal colonialism unless they could actually dominate all the rest single-handedly, what is not likely at all.
My two cents.

I think Christianity, as all or most organized religions, is basically political: organization for power (not of the masses, of course). This has been so since the beginning (probably Jesus himself was heavily involved in Jewish politics) and if you dig in the Christian Coup in the Roman Empire (and religious persecution after it) it’s very evident. So I’m not the least surprised that business and government (and also media, “the fourth power”) score high in religious types.
Still I will never stop getting negatively surprised by the high rate of biblical literalism among USAmericans. This kind of fundamentalist belief is more proper of underdeveloped low education countries, really.

The literalism seems to be concentrated on specific docrines questioned by modernizers: (…) virgin birth (…).
Actually this item is actually doctrine not Biblical literalism. It was agreed by bishops at some old council (Nicea?) and questioned by Luther precisely because it’s not explicit in the Gospels.
That’s an issue with Catholics (and surely Orthodox): they may be low in the Biblical literalism scale but high in the doctrinarian one. They believe more in the Church’s doctrine than in the Bible itself. (Of course this only applies to true Catholics, not people who just vaguely identify with Catholicism but exerts independent judgement).

With all due respect, I find your conclusion to be incorrect. I have a 145 IQ and do take the Bible literally.
Stats are stats, you know: they don’t show the exception but the rule.
Anyhow I am very surprised you could take the Bible (all of it? Genesis and Revelation too?) literally being so technically smart, after all you surely are very aware that it’s just a compendium of old religious texts and that there is no evidence that they were dictated by any god (nor there is any evidence of the existence of such god either).
I can only guess you have a very technical type of IQ, engineering-oriented or something like that, because you are really missing the big picture here.
It only demostrates how relative IQ can be. 🙂

Just something I accidentally read yesterday (but has a date from 2000): 
 
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000913083409.htm 
 
women tested in single-sex groups scored a 70-percent accuracy rate on math exams; women tested in groups in which they were outnumbered by men scored a 58-percent accuracy rate 
 
Being outnumbered may cause females to suffer from ?stereotype threat,? a situational phenomenon that occurs when targets of a stereotype ? in this case the idea that women do not perform as well as men in math ? are reminded of that stereotype, 
 
In the same journal you can find similar aricles of more recent dates: “Women math performance affected by theories on sex differences”, “Are women being scared off math, science and engineering fields” (I know my own dad scared off my very smart sister from becoming an engineer in fact), “Gender stereotypes influence intent to pursue entrepenerial careers”, etc.

In Spain it’s certainly been argued now and then that women tend to feel and vote more conservatively than me. It seems that the data does reflect that for this particular case. It’s been even argued by historians that the implementation of universal suffrage in 1933 was what gave the conservatives the edge for victory (this was reversed in 1936 though).
Anyhow, I’m glad that the Spanish trend is not universal.

The only problem I see with “cultural” cousin marriages is that they are arranged marriages where the interested people normally have no say. It’s pimping your daughter or son and that’s illegal and unethical (from a western perspective at least).
In our culture, marriage (or any other kind of similar relationship) is presumed to be consensual and free between the two people involved.
We have not gone through all the 19th century conflicts on this very issue just to allow now again paternal pimping on grounds of ill-understood multiculturalism. Euro-Pakistani young people, specially women (as the weaker and most abused sector), are entitled to whole protection of the law, as any other citizen.
Multiculturalism only has room as long as it doesn’t conflict with human rights. No cultural pretext can justify breaches in this fundamental aspect.
Otherwise I have no problem with cousin marriage or even true incest. If it’s free, consensual and informed, then it’s ok. The key word is “freedom”.

Very interesting and ample meditation. I read it with unusual pleasure (vivid interest).
Certainly to me Obama doesnt look black, or at least not just black, but I know most US Americans know of no distinctions nor gradations in this aspect.
It reminds me of my childhood surprise at the use of the term “black” for people who in my eyes looked clearly brown. Most black African people look brown, not even close to real black, there is also a lot of tonal variation among them: near black (some Sudanese), dark brown (most common maybe), middle brown (often reddish) and even quite light pinky brown (just saw it among some Fang women). So my nitty-picky young self was not the least happy about that oversimplification. I also disliked “white”, beige being much more correct in most cases.
As for the visual perception, I just noticed in the illustration of the white-black strip that I do percieve black color in about 1/4 of it, while white only apears to occupy some 5% (10% being generous). So Lassi’s comment seems to make sense. And maybe that’s a reason why the mixed offspring is technically slanted to the white, while visually not so much.

One wonders if the loci would be the same for Spanish musical aptitude. 
 
Certainly, specially as Finns seem to have experienced important bottlenecks till rather recently.  
 
What about Africans?, they have fame of being very good at music (unsure if it’s genetic or cultural or a mix of both) and have a high genetic variability.

1- After much fumbling, I understood that these graphs indicate the value of various “measures of selection” at a given locus. CEU are Europeans, ASN are Asians, and YRI are Western Africans.  
 
CEU are Utah whites (mostly of self-reported British/Scandinavian ancestry as per US census). I don’t remember what the other two samples stand for but yes they attempt to represent Asians and Africans somewhat.  
 
… 
 
“With this first structure we can start to build models of binding sites and hopefully in the future design more effective pharmaceuticals for a wide range of medical conditions.? 
 
is nothing but hype at this point 
 
They have to justify their salaries. It seems that science is more valuable if it has a technological potential, even if improbable, medical or pharmacological are the more plausible pretexts in the case of genetics.  
 
Science for the sake of it may not be of the like of those who approve the budgets, you know.

Interesting gratis lesson. Thanks.  
 
Certainly we all (all with an interest in genetics) have found Fst around there and mostly just ignored it. 😀 
 
Now at least I have an idea of what it means. True that I could have looked it up but, well, I’m lazy enough not to. So this explanation is certainly welcome.

I’m not sure I understand well the rest of your comment (too cryptic) but in what regards to my quote it was (more in full): 
 
Conservatives always walk behind reality. But they move anyhow. 
 
What actually seems to be, I realize now, an unconscious plagiarism of the alleged phrase of Galileo after his forced retraction: but it moves anyhow. And that’s exactly what happens: conservatives, like Galileo’s Pope, can try to hide it, can build walls of concrete or propaganda… but cannot prevent Earth from moving in fact, neither the planet as such nor the human societies and economies that thrive on it, nor the ethereous realm of ideas they create and modify every day. Eventually, like the Catholic institutions of this so good historical example, they have to accept reality. Catholic teologists today do not anymore argue Geocentrism, they now try to insert the Big Bang in their traditional belief system. They walk behind (but they walk anyhow). 
 
But walking ahead, like Galileo, is not easier nor magically exempt of errors anyhow. Moving with the pack (being more or less at the center) is normally the easiest thing to do. And that’s what most tend to.

Luis — to clarify, assmen pay attention to how the buttocks protrude from the body, not necessarily to the breadth of the hips. To repeat a finding from the Hadza study, the males prefer somewhat narrow hips but protruding buttocks. So the connection between a focus on the derriere and on wide hips for birthing isn’t automatic. 
 
Ok, noted. You are hence suggesting that buttock size in women is also an erotic-appeal specific traic, like boobs, right?

Erratum: In 1932 and 1948 should oviously be 1838 and 1848. 😀

… the hypothesis that “ass men” are high in testosterone, and “boob men” are betas…  
 
They don’t have to be incompatible but, if these categories do exist, I’d rather think ass-men are looking for reproduction and boob-men for sex, even if unconsciously. Hips are more likely to correlate directly with child-birth, while boobs rather seem a sexual semaphore. 
 
Human females are the only great ape with such large breasts. Chimps and bonobos instead have large genitals, also as sexual bait. Gorillas and orangutans, that are not just more distant but also poligynic, lack of such sexual attributes – the main dimorphism being body size and secondary attributes of males (to attract as many females as possible to their harem, I guess).  
 
So we are more in line with Pan sp. Chimp males also have visible sexual attributes in their genitals with the largest testicles among all apes. Human males instead have the largest penises in the family (chimps are intermediate, gorillas and orangutans have it small). 
 
But I think that sexual selection is not just about that. Overall physical and psychological evaluation happens too, at least when the issue is somewhat serious. Chatting and dancing are just two sooo typical ways of getting to know each other – though surely women are more attentive to this kind of less obvious clues, at least on average. Personally I find the face (and eyes) extremely important in judging and feeling attracted to (or repelled by) people (not just in the sexual sense but also) – and I don’t think I’m so special. A nice body helps of course… but it’s not just about boobs and asses.

Ok, thanks.  
 
So we have about 1/5 – 1/4 of pygmentation apparently explained genetically with this study. Not bad but still a lot to discover.

Women (ceteris paribus) are born in slightly smaller numbers than men (100:105, roughly) but survive better. For some biological reason guys are weaker on average. By the age of 20 or so the normal ratio should be very close to 1:1. And in older cohorts women tend to be the larger fraction (being very marked differences at old ages specially).  
 
If the median age in India is, say, close to 20 (it’s a young thriving largely underdeveloped country with very high natality and high mortality) then the ratio in every single state should be 1:1 or very close.  
 
When men of all ages are significatively more than women it means that there is selective abortion or infanticide (or otherwise artifically caused much greater female mortality). The opposite is not true: it may mean just an elderly population, with birth rates under or close to the replacement rate and/or with large emigration of young adults, specially males (case of many Eastern European countries).  
 
If you don’t believe me, check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio

The opposite of a conservative isn’t a liberal, it’s a radical, or someone who thinks that the present arrangements stink and wants to replace them. 
 
Makes some sense but I’d rather use here the terms conformist and either reformist or revolutionary (depending on the scope of the changes promoted). Revolutionary and radical could be synonimous but only as long radical is used in its etymological sense (from radix=root, going to the root of the problems or wanting to change things at root/fundamental level) and not in the usual sense of extremist. One can be a an extremist conservative (a reactionary).  
 
Nationalism and liberalism are independent properties.  
 
Yes and not. The rise of the nation-state is intimately linked to liberalism – that can hardly be denied. True that nation-states are not necesarily the same as nation-peoples but “nationalism” has both meanings. Ethnical nationalism (even if in an ill-structured manner) is probably much older than liberalism but political nationalism is essentially liberal and opposed by both classical conservatism (claiming adherence to monarchy and church instead) and socialism (claiming adherence to humankind or working class above ethnicity or polity).  
 
Sure that many ancient monarchies got recycled as nation-states, often somewhat forcedly (see the ethnic mess that are Western European states), and that they even had some more or less solid national character before. But this recycling (or creation from scratch in other cases) into ethnically defined states was almost always a liberal/burgueoise policy.  
 
Of course, once the genie is out of the bottle… it takes life of its own.  
 
See 19th century Germany, just to start. 
 
You mean late 19th century Germany… when the liberal “way of life” was already mainstream, even among conservatives. German unification under Prussia only happened in 1871, what is rather nearing the 20th century.  
 
In 1932 and 1948, maybe the more classically liberal revolutionary epysodes of all, German liberals demanded unification and were crushed by the conservatives, Prussia included, who wanted tradition and the status quo. Eventually Prussia realized it was letting a good opportunity slide and changed sides – but they were initially quite reluctant.  
 
You can anyhow always argue that Prussia was more liberal than Austria (not much maybe but more anyhow). And in the almost parallel epysode of Italian unification, certainly it was the liberals (both the “moderate” Cavourists and the “radical” Garibaldists) who did it, while the conservatives were supporting (including my Italian ancestors at, who worked for the Habsburgs) the traditional monarchic papist non-national status quo. 
 
Prussia then, anyhow, had the traditional support of “liberal” Britain. It only vanished later on, in the 20th century, when Britain realized that unified Germany was growing faster than themselves and threatened their hegemonical position. Then London switched sides and alligned with weaker France, their traditional rival, that had been isolated diplomatically by Bismark.  
 
Personally, at the ideal level, I still think of the Hobbesian “state of nature” as the principle driver of modern “conservative” leanings, and the “noble savage” fantasy a staple of liberal leanings. 
 
Makes sense: conservatives then think that people is intrinsecally evil (social-pessimism) and liberals (in the past) and socialists (in the present) would tend to think that people is intrinsecally good (social-optimism). A little too simple but makes some sense.  
 
And I again see in this the paranoid-schizoid dychotomy: irrational fear vs. irrational freedom, obsession with control and obsession with discontrol.  
 
Anyhow, as one of those “people”, I prefer to be percieved as intrinsecally good than evil. And I think I’m actually closer to that, though very imperfectly, of course.  
 
It also makes me think of that Spanish adagio: “the thief thinks all are like him”. So I suspect (deduce) your Hobbesian tories are actually quite evil and know it intuitively at least, extending that introspection to the rest, with or without reason. 😉

…Taken together, these four regions explain approximately 21.9% of the residual variation in hair color (black-blond) after adjusting for the top four principal components of genetic variation. (Conversely, after adjusting for these four regions, the top four principal components of genetic variation explain 2.6% of the residual variation in hair color.)… 
 
I don’t get it. The four PCs explain 21.9% but then only 2.6%. Uh?! 
 
In any case they seem to explain way too little – but 22% is a much larger little chunk than 2.6%, that seems nearly irrelevant.

Have you even thought how are those traits good for women and birthgiving/childcaring?  
 
I mean: one problem human females have is that birthgiving and bidepedalism are largely in conflict. For bidepedalism the ideal shape would be the male one, with narrow hips, for birthgiving is ideal to have rather wide hips.  
 
So female specific morphology in this aspect is largely conditioned by these two contradictory needs. Too narrow waist and birthgiving can be dangerous, too wide and mobility is limited.  
 
From the viewpoint of men, if you prefer an “action woman”, you surely do not want her with too broad buttocks, if what you want is primarily a mother, then the opposite may be true.  
 
The breasts instead seem secondary, right? There doesn’t seem to be any real need for large breasts other than erotic publicity. Most mammals, including our closest relatives, manage with much smaller ones without any problem. 
 
Anyhow, I am of the impression that men (and women) normally like better what they are used to. In PNG they like women with big noses, for instance. Of course you can argue that the opposite is true instead: that such traits have evolved because of sexual selection. But I’d rather think that drift has caused individual and ethnical preferences, at least to some extent.

Btw, I was just watching a documentary on African birth rate and women… and made me think a bit. I earlier mentioned that education is an important piece to control natality but after watching this I realized that female education and economical empowerment (they may go together somewhat) is maybe even more important.  
 
Most women in the film said that they had little choice: that men took the decissions and they did not like to use condoms. The result: almost half the population under 14, no money to school them all (so girls specially are excluded from education) or to pay for healthcare.  
 
It was quite apparent that if women had choice, some control on how many kids to have, there would not be such an overpopulation.

Agreed with Jaakeli. We tend to forget that all our “Western” concepts (or most of them) are essentially liberal. That includes the concept of nation-state.  
 
The American revolution was liberal and nationalist, the French revolution was maybe more varied but can widely be considered the same thing, the Latin American revolutions were nationalist and liberal, the revolutions of 1948 (excepting maybe the Paris commune) were liberal and nationalist, etc. Even the older burgueoise revolutionary processes in England, Switzerland or the Netherlands shared that dual nationalist-liberal thingy.  
 
Though the liberal concept of “nation” is more as in “republic” than as in “ethnicity” maybe.  
 
Capitalism (as autonomous economical force) is internationalist though.  
 
Burke, who people forget was a Whig… 
 
Good point. Unlike in the States (where liberal became synonimous of leftist), in Europe the line between conservatism and liberalism eventually became tenuous. All early 19th century Spain was ruled by two different corrupt “liberal” parties, both pretty much conservative in fact. Nowadays in many countries, specially where bipartidism tends to dominate, liberals and conservatives often are in the same political parties/blocs.  
 
That’s because, once the feudalist old regime was fundamentally overturned, the only thing left to conserve was the liberal burgueois system. So you could be liberal and conservative all at once and liberalism had almost nothing to claim beyond that point.  
 
Nowadays I guess you can even be social-democrat and conservative too (social-conservative?).

There is the nationalism of the big (imperialism by other term) and nationalism of the small (anti-imperialism). But the fine line between the two can be crossed too easily.  
 
You have also a point on multiculturalism being potentially an imperial building block, Jaakeli.  
 
But, in my experience at least, right-wing nationalism tends to exclussion (we Spaniards vs. all others; we Europeans vs. all others; we Christians vs. all others, etc.), while left-wing nationalism is a lot less exclusivist (rather inclusionist) and tends to internationalism. Nevertheless some presumpt leftists hide behind internationalism to justify the nationalism of the big, that’s often called Jacobinism.

Nice piece of info, Randy. Thanks.

However, it is a point in the anarchists favor that Somalia improved without government. 
 
That site doesn’t look Anarchist to me. It’s all the time talking about the goods of free market. Right-wing libertarian, I’d say.  
 
Anarchism is about libertarian communism. No state (but grassroots assembleary organization) and no (or very limited) private property. But this would be another discussion.  
 
The issue with libertarian capitalism and the Somali example is that property can only be upheld manu militari. If there is no state and property and market still exist, then private militias (neo-feudalism, mafia-rule) are the natural outcome.

Hmmm, one woman for every 100 males. That would be an unusual situation. 
 
Can you give me the names of these some villages you are referring to? 
 
No, sorry. I watched it in a documentary and can’t remember the name. The whole movie was about men in that village, where many were eternal bachelors. The one “starring” blamed his bachelorship for taking up on vices like alcohol and smoking. His elder brother was married but he was the only one of four.  
 
The distortion is aggrandized because the few women tended to marry out of the village.  
 
The data for all India surely do not reflect many local extremes like this.  
 
Can you actually convert numbers like 952 females to every 1000 (oooh, look, some evil males have been killing 48 baby females) males back to the more normal ratio that is expressed in these cases? 
 
“The ratio is significantly higher in certain states such as Punjab (126.1) and Haryana (122.0)”. From Wikipedia, source: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3092788 (needs subscription).  
 
This ratios surpasses the figures of P.R. China.  
 
Equally in China the situation varies from place to place. Again I cannot provide the original source but I have read (in BBC?) about towns where the young males are almost all that it is in their own generation.

Generally it turns out that marxists are sane, and everybody else mad 
 
Ever doubted it? 😉 
 
Seriously: it’s a dissection of the social reality. They don’t analyze any marxists, nor actual conservatives or whatever. What I wrote above is more like my own loose interpretation of their analysis than their actual ideas. Only the schizoid-paranoid dialectic and the association of Capital with the schizoid pole is genuinely theirs. 
 
They do emphasize though that Capital uses and corrupts every kind of value or institution (hence its schizoid decodifying nature), including apparently those re-created by the Paranoid pole.  
 
I only mentioned it because it was strangely coincident with your own observations above anyhow. Even from different viewpoints, you seem to have arrived to similar conclussions, what is interesting in itself.  
 
My vote floats, but in Europe – where I am – i describe myself as conservative, albeit socially liberal, but specifically in the Burkean sense, which is clearly not free market. 
 
Ok. If it’s not free-market oriented you’d surely would not be considered liberal, except maybe in Britain (unsure).  
 
In any case the black-and-white conservative-progressive dychotomy is necesarily an oversimplification.

@Razib: 
 
the liberal thing is semantic; in the united states liberals include within them social democrats 
 
I know, I just wanted to express the quite natural semantics of the conservative-progressive dichotomy. If you use liberal or socialist, the meaning is not so evident.  
 
i think the past vs. future orientation isn’t unfair. this might reflect the empirical/inductive bent of conservatives and the rationalist/deductive bent of liberals. the former trusts experiments that worked in the past, while the latter puts faith in projecting social models into the future… 
 
Yah. And the dialectic is operating all the time, with some wanting to experiment faster, others wanting to restore past idealized glories, and what we could call the center, keeping the balance. In fact, most of the time neither conservatives are too extreme (reactionary) nor progressives are either (revolutionary) precisely because the common sense (people is not as stupid as you think) tends to a pragmatic center. Sometimes the balance breaks up though and extremists from either side take over.  
 
libertarians are philosophically liberals ultimately 
 
Right wing libertarians, that have taken over the term in the USA lately (“libertarian” here usually refers to anarchists, anti-state commies), are classical liberals of an extremist kind: zero state all private property. Their problem is that with no state to defend property, the only non-communist solution is private armies. Their “utopy” was actually in practice in Somalia for many years, with quite dubious results, until the Islamists took over.  
 
@Eoin 
 
Luis is wrong, as usual 
 
LOL.  
 
Free Market sentiment can be opposed to real conservatism, as it may destroy ancient bonds etc.-  
 
If you read Deleuze and Guattari’s masterpiece, The Anti-Oedipus, you’ll find more or less the same thought. They describe it in psychiatric terms as an schizoid trend (decodification caused by Capitalism, or market economy if you wish) and a paranoid reaction (conservatism, fascisms in the extreme), quite powerless in the long run but somewhat estabilizing at times. Commies are out of this game, they just want to play with different rules. But in the long run… the unstoppable schizoid trend may favor them by bringing the system to an untenable situation, after having exhausted all the potential from the paranoid reactionary field.  
 
What Luis is talking about is pretty much reaction. Which is different. 
 
What you are talking about is about the center. In Europe you’d be liberal, because liberals are generally the center here (and they favor personal freedoms as you seem to do).  
 
Conservatism, like the progressive factions too, have to play near the center… while the system is stable. When it’s not, most conservatives allign with reaction (it happened with Hitler, it happened with Franco…). And even in the current rather stable situation you see those trends badly dissimulated. Some are more politically correct (centered) but others like Berlusconi clearly show what I’m talking about.  
 
The case is that the pragmatics of both fields know they cannot be too radical pushing the brakes (in the conservative case) or speeding up (in the progressive case). But sometimes this kind of pragamatism becomes sidelined by reality.

Do not forget that the same phenomenon of selective female abortion happens in other places where there is no one-child policy. One of the best known is India. In some villages of India there are almost no women and, yes, they end up being married to the wealthier males, while lots of men end up sentenced to a life of bachelorship. Young women in age for marriage in these rural traditionalist societies anyhow normally have no control on whom they are married, so it’s not just that women can afford to be chosier but that they become a more priced “merchandise” – either for marriage or prostitution.  
 
The overall alteration of society is clear in any case.

I think conservatism tends to look to the past rather than the present, even if sometimes it’s an idealized past. For instance feminism is mainstream today yet conservatives are genrally anti-feminist, evolution paradigm is mainstream, yet many conservatives prefer it would not be, acceptance of homosexuality, preservatives or even some drugs are common today, yet conservatives are often against all that. So basically conservatives try to reinject the past into the present and therefore are normally bound to be a drag but also somewhat powerless, as societies and their cultural evolution don’t stop just because of some ideology.  
 
In Europe at least, the opposite of conservative is not liberal but progressive (in the sense of “social progress”, not mere “industrial” or “techological progress”), more often associated with the social-democrat, socialist and ecologist (and, of course, somewhat anti-patriarchal or feminist) options that in the USA would be tagged as “liberal”.

No, they can only be talked at. Debate is impossible.
Just terminology. If you (assuming you are the one defending the rational viewpoint) are showing the facts that support it and the flaws of the irrational approach, you are making people think and giving them tools to think better. Maybe you’ll never persuade your opponent (if he/she is so stubborn as to reject the facts) but that is a less important matter.
But, anyhow, I like to think that even themost stubborn and irrational of such dialectical opponents is at least minimally intelligent and self-honest, so sowing doubt on such irrational beliefs may have surprising long-term effects.

Hehe. I’m glad to see I have some readers. 🙂 
 
I’m certainly in the high-sugar intake group (and also high rotten teeth), though I always thought it was an educational error of my family, who allowed me all sort of candy when young. It’s horribly nice to find out that it’s just destiny and I can’t do nothing about it. Long life to genetical self-complancency! 😉

Very high levels of smoking among men in China may attenuate this effect. 
 
Smoking kills too slowly (50s, 60s). The main effects are percieved only when one is rather old already. It may atenuate the burden caused by excess of old survivors but not mating competence in youth and adulthood.  
 
… 
 
Anyhow there is certainly a huge problem (not just in China but all around the world) of excessive population growth. I suspect legal measures like tha one-child policy can only have a limited impact, while improvement of health has a negative impact (much greater rates of survival both for old and young). In developed countries, factors like education, cost of life, individualistic hedonism and availability of anticonceptive methods have stabilized the growth to reasonable levels but in the huge slums where most of the semi-illiterate population lives around the world this is not happening yet: people may have barely to eat but they do have many children and these children survive most often into adulthood. There are few opportunities for them and therefore they migrate.  
 
Dealing with the problem country by country really provides no solutions. Retrieving basic health care is not an ethical nor politically viable solution. In my opinion the only solution is massive education and availbilty of anticonceptive methods. Of course religious fundamentalists all around the world, who rely on ill-educated people with huge reproductive rates, will oppose this. Shortening the educational distance between the Thrid and First World, while reducing the availability of uneducated cheap workers, is probably something many corporations and governments would not like to happen, at least too fast. But there are no other realistic solutions.  
 
A demographic balance can only be achieved via education. Educated people often have other goals (even if they are just stupidly hedonistic ones) than just having children chaotically. If this is accompanied by availability of anticonception methods, then we may have solved this problem. With enough political will it should only take one generation.

People do who not follow the principles of rationality on the matter of debates cannot be debated with.
Of course they can be debated, specially if that debate is public.
Even privately the fruitless discussion of today may sow the seeds for the change of thought tomorrow: one may happen to be stubborn about something today and change his/her mind some years later. It happens often. The mind may need time to chew on the “new” logic, to open itself to alternative ideas.
But publically this debate is even much more important because one of the main objective values of irrational ideas is their consensuality. If public debate erodes the consensuality of irrational ideas (even with the best of reasonings and pedagogy you are likely to have uneven effect on the different individual minds: some may be convinced, others set in doubt, others yet apparently unmoved), they lose that social value and are therefore more likely to be dropped eventually.
Today nearly nobody seems to believe that the Earth is flat or that it is at the center of the Universe… but that’s not just because of the rational weight of the arguments against them but also because it is emotionally wrong: it’s going against the mainstream and that has an emotional cost. Adding rationality with social acceptation makes a greater effect than just with rationality, which will be ignored or distrusted by many if it’s not mainstream.
Of course, there may be other “irrational reasons” apart of socially induced ones. But the social value, consensuality or gregarism or however you want to describe that so human tendency, is a major factor in any case.

…the diversity of fruit accessible because of local abundance is something that American supply chains can never recreate.
There are really many things that industrialization and modernity cannot but provide sucedaneous for, indeed.
i once listened to a (serious) proponent of intelligent design argue that the banana is the perfect fruit, since it was created to fit neatly in the human hand.
LOL. And what about the non-human monkey hand?
Guess these people think the same of, much more impressive, hummingbird-orchid mutual adaptation, right?

I tend to agree with this comment of Razib. Geneticists by the very nature of their profession tend to look for genetic causes of everything but it’s quite self-evident that not is genetics, much less hardcore gentics (one gene > one phenotypical effect). That there are many other factors beginning by slippery epigenetics and ending by the very fact that we humans are very much genetically hardcoded not to be just genetically harcoded (i.e. we are very flexible and adaptative).

Whatever, Jaakkeli. You are contradicting the very graph you used some posts above to demonstrate another point. In that graph it’s evident that, in midsummer as in midwinter, the daily dose of solar radiation is much higher (almost double for midsummer) at 50ºN than at 70ºN. The same happens when you compare 30ºN with 50ºN. The length of the day is not really relevant because it does not even compensate for the much lower angle of inccidence.
Please!

Jaakeli: it’s very simple: in midsummer at noon, the Sun hits the tropic of Cancer from “right above” (90º), it must hit Malaga at some 70º and Denmark at not more than 50º (didn’t do the exact tangent calculations but should be quite simple anyhow if you are maths oriented). It’s (angularly) high but never higher than more to the south.
Even yourself have posted earlier a graph that shows that the total ammount of radiation/daily sunlight increases for any time of the year as you move southwards. 50º get more radiation than 70º, etc. Therefore any Mediterranean spot at 35º degrees gets more radiation at any time of the year than any Nordic spot at 50º. This simple logic is only broken at the tropic of Cancer (circa 22ºN).

An article at BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7385315.stm) mentions that Bangla Desh actually has left mangroves grow and recover after being badly damaged by another typhoon 20 years ago. Meanwhile Myanmar has been destroying them at very high rates for (ecologically disastrous) shrimp farms.
Said, that the attitude of Myanmar’s Junta is criminal by all standards. I really can’t think of any other government of any type that leaves their population exposed to a typhoon like that (compare with Cuba for instance, where huricanes rarely cause a single death because of well organized evaquations).
It still reminds me of the disaster of Katrina in Lousiana somewhat, where the citizens were for weeks almost left on their own.

You’re thinking of the momentary intensity. That is greater at the equator – but the day lasts much longer in the north, so the *total daily dose* is higher at 60N in midsummer.
I can’t agree with this reasoning. Short nights don’t mean greater solar radiation overall and any map of that kind will tell you that. Southern Spain may have longer nights than Denmark in summertime (only) but still gets a lot more solar radiation in that same period – and that’s why Danes go to get tanned (and sometimes burned) to the Costa del Sol, not just because prices are cheaper (that they aren’t anymore).
The above is your own speculation but it’s in disagreement with the data.
Also, if you also count snowcover effects & reflected radiation, the intensity in the far north will be greater at some times than it is at the equator (although only in some areas at midsummer).
You may have a point here. Winter sun plus snow ammounts to greater radiation and need for protection (as any ski aficionado knows) and this element is maybe being overlooked. It should anyhow affect more those areas with less cloud cover (Siberia, inner Russia) than the Atlantic areas with winter cloudy skies. It might be an element accounting for the greater natural tan observed among some Siberian populations maybe.
…
Finno-Ugric populations probably contributed lots to modern Russians and Balts.
It seems that mostly to Northern Russians and Latvians. Though it’s surely true that Finno-Ugrics and Indo-Europeans expanded side by side in NE Europe (with different ecological niches though) and that may have ammounted overall to a lot of “invisible” admixture and/or cultural loans.

Luis – I take your point, but East Asians are traditionally large consumers of mushrooms, and notably dried mushrooms (sun-drying is important). E.g. in north-eastern Chinese diets, mushrooms feature just about daily.
Ok. I didn’t realize that you meant specificlaly China (the world’s largest exporter), sorry.
I am anyhow under the impression that the culture of mushroom hunting, while extended, is much stronger and deeply rooted in the eastern part of Europe than in the West. It may be related to vit. D provisioning in high latitudes as well as to influences of Siberian shamanism.

What you say, Philip Guy, makes a lot of sense to me. It’s long beeen noticed that people mature earlier (puberty for instance) in southern than in northern Europe and it may be largely genetic, even if it surely is also an adaptation to reduced vit.D input.
Wonder if greater vit. D input (like in the US and Australia) may alter their biology one way or another.
Anyhow, I would not use the word “stockier”, because many southern Europeans are slender, even if shorter in average, and many northern Europeans are very robust, even if taller. My only criticism anyhow. 🙂

Even in Denmark the difference between deep winter and summer sunlight dose is massive.
Maybe. But it’s still pretty different than north of the Polar Circle. Basically you were claiming that there is no diffeence between Denmark and Lappland and that is not the case.
Also most Europeans, including many pale and blond, live south of Denmark (except maybe in Russia). Scandinavia and Scotland have historically been very marginal areas (and the more nortwards you go, the more preipherical from a historical and prehistorical viewpoint – until some centuries ago, as heavy plough first and industralization later changed that somewhat). I strongly think the basic pygmentation variant evolved not so far north but in continental Europe probably, though it was even more extremely selected as the far north latitudes were colonized in the Epipaleolithic and later on.
Actually, what you’d expect compared to coastal Western Europeans would be a greater ability to both tan and lose that tan. In Finland, the daily radiation dose in the summer is larger than it is on the equator (!)
That doesn’t make sense. The ability to tan is surely useful in any case but the direct sunlight radiation at 60ºN cannot be higher than at the tropics, not even in midsummer! The highest UV radiation will always be at the tropical belt because it’s the only area of Earth where the Sun ever hits vertically. And the tropic of Cancer is like 22ºN, crossing the Sahara, just south of the transition between zones 1 and 2 in Razib’s map.
Razib’s map is very illustrative actually because it strongly suggest that, while migrating to South Asia (in zone 1) required little or o adaptation in this respect, moving further north into East, Central or West Asia (zone 2)already began to demand some lightening of the skin. That surely happened in the Upper Paleolithic.
Zone 3 was almost not touched in the Paleolithic but there are at least a couple of exceptions: the Altai (at the border) some spots of the Eastern European region (border too) and, specially, the Rhin area (clearly inside zone 3). The Rhin area was definitively inhabited for most of the UP (except possibly the LGM) and I would think that this is the region where with the highest likehood the phenotype evolved first to the lightest versions we can see today.

Think ‘edible fungus’.
Commercial producer does not mean raditional consumer. Russians are maybe among the most traditionaly attached to mushroom consumption and they don’t even appear on that map. Instead I doubt mushrooms have deep roots in US cuisine.

… as in northernmost Europe, there is a significant period of time with no sun at all in the winter!
C’mon! That’s called Lappland!
When we talk of Epipaleolithic and Neolithic Northern Europeans, we mean much more to the south normally, where the Sun may be low in Winter but it does rise for many hours anyhow: short days maybe but days anyhow.
Even today that extreme area you mention is barely populated (except for the Russian naval base of Murmansk, a very recent endeavour). For most of its history Lappland has been inhabited by just a handful of tribal reindeer herders (the Saami) with a very specialized way of life and that are not significatively ancestral for other populations.
In contrast, Denmark (at the latitude of Edinburgh, but also of the Hudson Bay and Kamtchatka) has been populated with some density since the Epipaleolithic.
Even somewhat below that, the deep winter sun is completely meaningless, so in countries like Iceland and Finland there is effectively no sunlight for a significant time.
Iceland is a “recent” colony and not ancestral to other peoples too, so we can exclude it. Finland might be the only meaningful example you have mentioned so far but mostly Finns lived in the south of the country, where the situation is not as extreme. It’s unclear if Finns are ancestral to other populations of Northern Europe but it would be in small ammounts in any case. I don’t have very clear if Finns are less pygmented (“whiter”) than other North European populations of lower latitudes but my impression is that they are roughly like the rest of that group.

“the Indo-Aryan religion held that all cattle were their property, gifted to them by the sky-God”: commie bastards! 
 
That’s more like private accumulation actually. It’s what companies do with the enviroment right now, what the enclosures did in early Modern Britain, etc. Some (the elite) decide to appropiate what is common or shared. It’s exactly the opposite of communism. 
 
Anyhow, it seems a very unlikely hypothesis to me. Pirates, raiders and conquerors really do not need any moral justification other than which is on the bloody edge of their swords. Later they may want to invent or adapt myths to justify their supremacy and keep social peace through religious brainwashing and propaganda, but their real motivation is fundamentally greed and ambition, very material reasons.

so u really see no difference between believers of naturalistic evolution and believers of intelligent design? 
 
I see a difference, of course, but it’s not really fundamental: as long as scientific facts are not challenged from a religious (non-scientific) point of view you can believe whatever you want. What’s the big problem in, say, the Pope believing (possibly) that “God” is behind the Big Bang (or evolution)? As long as they don’t insist in nonsenses as geocentrism or that the Universe is just 4 thousand years-old, as long as they accept that science has merit and that their beliefs are the ones that must adapt (if anything) to reality (and not vice versa), we are in scientific agreement (even if we can disagree in philosophical matters).  
 
This arrangement (their adaptation to real facts) is good for both: science can keep going on without inquisitorial interference and “the faithful” can keep believing whatever they want (beyond human knowledge) without banging heads against harcore (and sometimes very painful) real facts.  
 
I see all that adaptation of religion to science as a “victory of Truth”, not as a defeat. Religion as such seems quite difficult to uproot but as long as it does not interfere with science (and freedom and human rights in general), it’s relatively harmless.  
 
The problem (in the USA specially) with ID (aka teleology) is that some (too many maybe) fanatics want to add it to the science curriculum, what is not logical at all, and could head to further fundamentalization of society and devaluation of science if accepted.

More seriously, fascination with Ireland (and with all things Celtic in general) has been a dominant feature of continental Europe for a couple centuries now. 
 
That’s true: it’s a romantic trend that has some venerable age by now.

i think that question is poorly worded. there’s no way to tell if the respondents believed in naturalistic evolution or a guided one like intelligent design. by that measure, 40% of americans would agree. 
 
It doesn’t matter. You can accept the scientific facts of naturalistic evolution and philosophically believe whatever you wish about it (that has a goal directed by some hidden god, that dolphins are smarter than humans, that we should never have got down from the ancestral trees…). That’s a personal interpretation. What matters is that science is not challenged with that.  
 
Btw, they should also make Sumerian mythology compulsory: most Biblical unfathomable legends are just distorted versions of earlier Sumerian ones. I think that creation precisely is more of a version of a Lower Egyptian legend but there are many others (Eve as rib, the flood, the confusion of tongues) that are all of Sumerian origin.  
 
Of course the most fanatics could always argue that Sumer did not exist, because it’s older than “creation”… but well. We all know that Abraham allegedly was from Ur, an ancient Sumerian city itself. Some could think about all that if they knew the facts – in this case the origins of the most obscure Hebraic legends.

The fish story sounds very fishy.
Ok. I take your explanation as much more plausible and scientific. I have indeed noticed that Mongols for instance are often quite pale and have rosy cheeks. But you also find very septentrional Siberians (I’m thinking in Nenets right now) who are rather light brown (“moreno”). So maybe there’s something in the fish after all (it is in fact the main dietary source of vit.D in any case).

I do realize. And I also realize that many people don’t realize that. So, yes, good post, Razib.
Northern Europe is unique in having relatively warm weather and being at that ultra-high latitude, allowing for a population density nowhere else in the planet isfound so far North. That’s because of the Gulf Stream. That alone seems a good reason for paleness of Northern Europeans.
Add to that the usual cloudiness because of sea influence (in comparison, most of Siberia is probably a lot sunnier, even if much cooler too).
For adequate Vitamin D synthesis you need sufficient UV exposure at least a couple times a week, so really what should matter is what the available UV is in the depths of winter and whether you can get enough outdoor time to soak it up (and then whether your skin is pale enough to soak up enough).
Are you sure about that?
Anyhow, I assume that pre-Modern people were a lot of their time outdoors, even in the depths of winter. There was no TV nor Internet, heating needed to have the wood fetched and almost anything needed someone to move out and aroudn. Same in Hebei as in Sweden.
Also, vit. D synthesis is not just the B&W extremes. People with brown or beige skin can actually synthetize it a lot better than people with black skin, while they are also better protected against UV damage than people with very pale skin (who often can’t even tan or have a hard time with that). It’s a gradual adaptation and probably most people have the best balance for the enviroment and diet of their ancestors. It may sound kind of “Mediterranean supremacist” (something I am not) but the fact is that people with intermediate skin tones and who can tan and untan easily are the ones who can adapt better to varied enviroments for this crucial health aspect. The extremes are of course “best adapted” for their ancestral enviroments… but they are less versatile too.

“For the purposes of this section an ?animal? is an animal other than man.” 
 
Hmmm… that spells doom for women, I’d say. Sure that some can argue that “man” is generical for human, but sure that others can argue the opposite at convenience, as often happens with theologians and religious jurists, be them Christian, Judaist, Muslim or whatever.

Does “Asian” mean East Asians, South Asians or a composite of the two groups? Or something else maybe?
Asia is a lot larger and more diverse than Europe (or even all the West Eurasian area) and South and East Asians (not to mention West Asians) are very different from each other, genetically, phenotypically and culturally.
Also I am somewhat wary of global genetic studies based on US samples, because these often represent specific fractions of the original populations. Even white Americans hardly represent all Europe but have a strong bias towards the NW quarter of the continent. African Americans are a local subset “filtered” by centuries of slavery (with all the selective mortality associated to it) and localized breeding. Asian Americans also often represent specific subsets of their original populations, with maybe marked founding effects. Etc.
A most incredible sample in this regard is the CEU one, a Utah white sample that has surely a marked bias to local founder effects (I’m not wrong in this, right?). In this study it also looks strongly different from the other Euro sample, being oddly closer to both non-Euro ones at the same time (in the detail). This is in itself interesting because it does suggest that the overall “continental” (or “racial” if you wish) differences surely hide a much wider diversity.
Still it’s not the first study that proposes that East Asians (specifically) are genetically inbuilt as calmer (and more submissive/conformist/gregarious). But, even if this is true in the general picture, it’s probably overlooking many individual and groupal differences.

Certainly Altai is, like Uyghuristan, an eastern pocket of partly western ancestry (assuming R1a is “western”, as it’s also very high in South Asia – but yes: I tend to accept the Kurgan model as very valid).
But haplogroup N needs not to be Finno-Ugric at all. That’s only in Europe (and maybe Western Siberia). N has a wide distribution mostly through Northern Eurasia and it is markedly strong also among Mongols (specially “old Mongols”, like Buryats), among other Siberian peoples. N is also found in lesser ammount, but occasionally with high diversity, in East Asia and it’s directly related to typical East Asian haplogroup O. So your conclussions in this aspect are surely wrong. Most probably Fino-Ugric ethnicity was formed at the Urals, maybe in direct correlation (but diferent male ancestry lines) with the formation of Indo-European one (it’s been posited once and again that Uralic and IE languages are related or at least were for long in intimate sprachbund, what is coincident with what we know of their adjacent archaeological urheimats).

@ Barry: 
 
Some clearly tendentious inaccuracies in your statements: 
 
In Germany, a militantly secular country… 
 
Since when? The Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) has been ruled through most of its post-war history (that it’s all its history actually) by a party called Christian Democratic Union (and their Bavarian allies the Christian Social Union, often accused of being too close to the extreme right). Germany, like most European states, is not “militantly secular”, only France and Turkey approach that since the fall of the socialist bloc. What may be is reluctant to give free ride to presumpt destructive brainwashing cults like Scientology, what is a very different thing.  
 
Greens across Europe have also taken militant anti-scientific stands against nuclear energy and against any kind of assaults against Mother Nature such as genetic modification of plants, animal testing, cloning of all kinds, and even genetic medicine. 
 
This is a very wide blanket statement. And it’s quite dubious that questioing the safety of nuclear energy is “anti-scientific” in any case. Nuclear energy is certainly very problematic, ignoring that fact is not being scientific, but having blind faith in technological progress, what is religion rather than science. 
 
Much of the elite is in the grip of a new pantheistic Earth religion… 
 
That’s absolutely nonsensical propaganda of the (Christian) religious far right, fearful not only of their evident loss of power but also, more secularly, of the danger to their petty economical interests that somewhat increased ecological awareness may pose. All very hysterical and would be laughable if it would not remind of the infamous “Protocols”.  
 
But nuclear plants continue to be shut down in Europe as we speak. 
 
I wish you were right. Totally obsolete nuclear plants, that have radioactive escapes now and then are not just being kept active for much longer than scheduled and paid largely by the taxpayer but the current trend, on light of increasd fuel prices, is that they will be allowed to operate indefinitely. The next Chernobyl is just a matter of time with such policies, of course. I just can hope it’s not too close to my home.  
 
Where still talking about a moralistic movement that has succeeded in limiting science and technology to a shocking and harmful degree. 
 
Are you telling me that Germany or the Netherlands, the kind of countries where green parties can be somewhat influential, always as minor force, have reduced science and technology investment in the last decades? That is laughable to say the least. Are you telling me that southern European countries, where green influence is non-existent (ol’ good commies occupy that political sector mostly instead) are more advanced? That the UK, that is all the time cutting down its science investment and has a very low investment in scientific European projects like ESA, is doing that because of the non-existent “british green party”? Absolutely ignorant nonsense. 
 
Anyhow, science is not just about playing Dr. Frankestein or, worse, Dr. Mengele. Surely there is that possibility but it has obvious social and ethical problems that our societies are adressing in general with quite an open mind (what is not the same as a blank cheque). Wether it is worth to “play God” with our embryos to briefly expand the life (hypothetically) of some ailing people that naturally will have to face death anyhow, is a major ethical problem with no easy answers. But still the most vocal sectors against such research are, of course, the remnant religious right, more mobilized by such issues than by the distant and quite trivial “creationism debate”.

Intelligent design is instead an appeal to decadence: Holocaust denial is mere “historical review”, 9/11 conspiracy theorising is only “asking for the truth”. 
 
That’s mixing apples and oranges. Historical review of the exact figures of the Holocaust is (when it’s serious, not typical denialism) a very reasonable proposition. After all, in the aftermath of WWII and around the foundaton of Israel, there was a lot of emotions and presumably propaganda around this issue. The usual 6 million figure is the highest estimate and the real figure is surely around 4.5 million. It doesn’t ethically matter after all but it’s important for History (as scientific discipline) to get the facts straight. Banning discussion on this is more like making creationism official. Much of the same about 9/11 conspirationist theories: research should be done to clarify it trhoughtly. Only a “believer” can reject to discuss calmly and scientifically what is being questioned with more or less reason. I understand that both issues are emotionally challenging but that’s no reason not to debate them, just a reason to relax and stop overreacting.  
 
The problem with creationism is that it doesn’t provide any valuable scientific evidence. First of all they are unable to prove the existence of God, second they are unable to prove the veracity and divine inspiration of the Bible (or whatever other holy book), and finally their criticisms to the estabilished paradigm (always changing anyhow) is just nitty-picky ignorant pseudo-science. The debate can be going on all you want, what makes absolutely no sense is to insert mythology or theology into the science curriculum, or to suggest that creationism (or ID for the case) is a finished elegant mainstream scientific theory when it is not anything of that.  
 
I’d sincerely suggest to introduce Philosophy in the curriculum of US secondary education (as it’s generally in those of Europe) and place ID and some other relevant theology in it… along with all other philosophical stuff, western or not. That would surely enrich the cultural background of US students and silence fanatics a little bit, while leaving the curriculum fundamentally secular.

The other graph is also interesting: only Eastern European countries (mostly Orthodox) approach US levels of credulity but even these are significatively more rationalist. Only Turkey (the only polled Muslim, and largely underdeveloped, country) is more credulous than the USA.  
 
As (Western) European, I am always flippant of the very existence of the “creationist debate” in the 21st century USA. It looks like something of very old times: a 19th century debate, with aftertaste to witch-hunt. Would they be discussing the law of gravity I would be equally flippant, really.  
 
Anyhow, it does seem that the main factor on both sides of the Atlantic is religious beliefs. If it’s less important in Europe, it’s surely because even religious people has since long accepted evolution and make of teleology (ID) just a “private” explanation for it. Another related reason is the lack of emphasis in literalism, even among Protestants. If the Bible, specially the Book of Genesis, can be metaphorical, there’s no real problem between faith and evolution (and other scientific facts, like heliocentrism). This brand of illustrated (and somewhat relativistic) Christians, dominant in Europe among those that still fit into organized religion (a decreasing minority, in any case), still enjoy scientific discoveries like genetic “Adam” and “Eve” but it’s mostly a private self-satisfying meditation, not an educational or political issue. 
 
Possibly the problem in the USA is that, unlike in Europe, you never really had to resort to guillotine and the likes, because you never really suffered feudalism and theocracy like in the old world. Also the USA is maybe founded on religious minorities, often dogmatic. In Europe you don’t find a bible in each hotel room (crazy idea) nor read anything like “In God We Trust” on banknotes (probably even religious Europeans could consider that blasphemous: “to Caesar what is of Caesar…”). Even if official churches are still subsidied in some states that’s something rather controversial and overall society is very laicist. You don’t see politicians talking normally of their religious beliefs (it could alienate potential voters and it’s not a major political issue anyhow) and being atheist or agnostic is something absolutely normal.

Uh… great. I feel like I’m basically getting an accidental inside view into some weird internal dispute within the right over which group of outsiders to look down on 😐
Almost exactly my thoughts: conservative vs. conservative = meaningless ranting.
Sadly that seems the road that overall socio-political discussion is heading towards in the West, and that’s reminds me of the Greco-Roman decadence between Neoplatonic sofistic arguments, once they had already ostracized all critical thought. Then it came the Inquisition, not yet with that name, the “known world” became pious to the point of fanaticism, the political institutions and society went back many centuries, ancient philosophical works were overwritten with prayers, and the outcome is celebrated by historians with a very appropiate name: “the Dark Ages”.
I may sound somehwat like Derbyshire here but, unlike him and Kipling, I know that if “northwest Europe” (sic – what about France and Switzerland, what about Renaissance Italy?) eventually became the hub of rationalism and science, it was precisely because they were quite liberal. Otherwise they would have burned Kepler and, specially, Darwin at the stake.

Hmmm… vitamin D is not just to “boost the immune system”: it is essential for bone formation and its lack causes rickets and other health problems not directly related with the immune system. Also recenly Razib posted on some new research that strongly suggests that it’s most important in correct brain development. According to Wikipedia the main sources of vit. D in food are fatty fish and mushrooms, and to a lesser extent eggs. Ground meat and vegetables have negligible inputs of vitamin D, so unless hunter-gatherers in shadowy climates fished or gathered mushrooms frequently, or ate a lot of eggs, they were bound to have serious lack of this essential vitamin. So, almost necessarily, they should have started to evolve towards lighter skin (the only alternative source) early on as they moved away from the tropics.
In fact it’s a “classical” rationale that East Asians are not as light pygmented as West Eurasians because they traditionally eat more fish, what may be correct or not, but sounds very persuasive in any case.
Also I don’t think that farmers excercised much less than huntergatherers. They were more sedentary, of course, but they had to care their fields and animals almost every day too – and that’s a lot of excercise. What they may have experienced is a decrease of meat and fish in their diets.

Jim: we really don’t know for sure. In my not so humble opinion, the formation of the caucasoid type is part of the colonization of West Eurasia, though until the late UP (Magdalenian) we don’t really find skulls that are more or less the same as now. Earlier types (Co-Magnon, etc.) are surely related but more archaic (and somehwat distinct) in appearence (suff like very marked cheeks, much stronger jaws, overall more archaic look).
As for pygmentation, I would think that blond hair may be older than other traits (and evolutionarily trivial), and could have been present since soon after the OOA event, as it’s not just found in West Eurasia but also in Australia and Melanesia. But the focus here is pale skin, that is not any absolute trait, but gradual and enviromentally modifiable (tanning). Some degree of pale skin could well have evolved in the UP, though, as noticed by the graph above, it was not such a dire evolutionary need as later in the Neolithic, specially among groups that practiced fishing (the main dietary source of vit. D). Apparently, recent genetic research suggests that the main change in this happened rather recently, in or near the Neolithic period, allowing possibly for the palest types among “whites”, who were best adapted to live in the darker conditions of Northern Europe and to need less dietary input of vit. D, even in such enviroment.
Anyhow (and this goes for all), I am of the impression that the evolution of whiter types was probably gradual: first UP humans in Europe (at least non-Mediterranean Europe) would already benefit from such adaptation, then some more northern areas like Central but also Eastern Europe also give a plus to lighter skin, then, in the Epipaleolithic, when Northern Europe (properly speaking) begins to be colonized, the benefit is even greater, and finally Neolithic, with the alteration of diet, would give the final (and maybe decissive) impulse to this process, consolidating the dominance of “Nordic” (pygmentation-wise) types in Northern Europe specially, and of lighter (less brownish) types in the rest of West Eurasia and North Africa (and Central Asia before the Turkic migrations too).
I’d like to discuss the known (or speculated) timing of the different pygmentation mutations, as I really think that the process was not sudden but gradual (step by step maybe). I suspect that you could surely speak of “white” West Eurasians already in the late UP, even if the “Nordic” (whitest) types were still undeveloped or rare.

@daveinboca:  
 
What do you mean? The only minimally well known pre-IE languages of that area (Etruscan, Hattic) are not Semitic nor other Afroasiatic. The fememine Sun is something you also find in Basque mythology (but Basque lacks gender except in the colloquial 2nd person singular, so this is not found in actual language). You seem to be bulding a castle on thin air.  
 
It’s like that people that claim that the substrate of Celtic would be “Semitic” just because some specific gramatic item. Semitic is not known of in its historical area (lowland West Asia) until c. 4000 BCE and it’s not known at all north of Syria-Iraq, except for a handful of trading colonies. The fact that Semitic languages (Arab, Hebrew) are relatively well known and therefore easy to compare with, does not mean that every minimal coincidence means “Semitic substrate”. It could be anything else: extinct language families (without going too far, Sumerian is an isolate, for instance), other Afroasiatic languages (alive, like Amazigh, or dead), other live unrelated families that just nobody has bothered comparing with (say, NW Caucasian or Nilo-Saharan or Burushaski – whatever).  
 
The structural features could also perfectly pre-date the expansion of Afroasiatic languages into the Fertile Crescent (or even West Asia as a whole) and be as much substrate element in Semitic languages, as in Greek or Celtic.  
 
Building castles on thin air: just that.

there’s no signature of pre-turco-mongol ancestry in the kazakhs?
There is but it’s a lot lower than in neighbours like Uzbekistan. Of all former USSR Central Asia, Kazakhs seem the least “westerner” (and more “easterner”) of all (maybe together with little Kirgizisan), and the difference is very marked.
I’ve seen some other stuff that goes in the same line but the handiest example may be the Mc Donalds’ world maps (2005), where Kazaks are like 50% “easterner” (mostly C, but also O and Q), while Uzbeks are only like 15% that. Such contrast can’t but be caused by the difference of density in the semidesertic Kazakhstan and the more hospitable Uzbekistan, settled since at least Neolithic times.
The difference is even more marked if you look at haplogroup R (thought to be associated with the previous rulers of the area: the Indoeuropeans): Kazakhs are like 5% R, while Uzbeks are like 25% (in both cases R1a makes up the larger share). Instead, if you look at clades like J or H, the difference is irrelevant (what might mean they are a recent Silk Road arrival or that they were shared by groups not displaced by the Turks).

I had thought the pygmies broke off rather earlier than 70000; same time as the Bushmen. 
 
At least by Y-DNA, Pygmies clearly “belong” to the YxA branch that has many (at least 6) mutations separating it from A. Instead B nd CR (or CT, as some cal it now) are separated by only 2/3 mutations, what suggests that Pygmies and other B-Africans are much closer to the Afrasian CR bunch than to Khoisan (most directly associated with A).  
 
Maybe it was earlier than 70K but not much earlier anyhow, specially if mtDNA studies are convergent into this kind of genealogy. Not as old as Khoisans in any case.

… one of Lincoln’s theses is that the success of Indo-European expansion around the world results from a certain sort of “imperialist DNA” built into its religious belief that all the earth’s cattle belong to the Proto-IE tribes. The Hindu reverence for cattle could be an atavistic reminder of the original “those cows are my cows” mindset. 
 
The Hindu reverence for cattle has its best comparison in ancient Egypt, in fact. Egyptians of old did not even buy knives or pottery to the Greeks out of fear these could be polluted by cow meat. They even forced Lybian nomads (who did not have such custom) under the Pharaoh rule not to eat them.  
 
Instead the only comparison of “all cows belong to us” I can think of are the Masai, who are a little bit too distant in space and culture to make much sense.  
 
I’d say that the religious respect for cattle, specially milk-giving cows, is rooted in Neolithic practices that pre-date the Indoeuropeans by milennia. Cattle just was of much better use alive than dead: it provided milk and manure, and it ploughed the fields. Instead all cattle-herder peoples I can think of do kill and eat some animals even if sparsely.  
 
Also, maybe the most specific husbandry of Indoeuropeans was surely the horse, and in ancient Hindu religious literature you do find such element – sometimes as the holiest of sacrifices. I would not expect that IEs that were making all kind of animal sacrifices elsewhere, and were doing that with horses in India (and elsewhere too), would spare cows.

…the answer has to do with very low population densities verging upon nil in Central Asia.
Certainly, specially north of the “oasis area” of Uzbekistan and neighbours. This does not just apply to IE expansion eastward but also to Turco-Mongol expansion westward later on. Kazakhs apparently are surprisingly low in Western genetics and that can only be explained because of those extremely low population densities in the steppe and semideserts that constitute that country, that allowed Turco-Mongols to replace almost totally whatever peoples were there before.

Anyway reminds me of the rapidly disappearing blue eyes: 
 
“About half of Americans born at the turn of the 20th century had blue eyes, according to a 2002 Loyola University study in Chicago. By mid-century that number had dropped to a third. Today only about one 1 of every 6 Americans has blue eyes, said Mark Grant, the epidemiologist who conducted the study.” 
 
That should be more easily explained, probably: socio-biological reasons such as immigration, admixture and even simple adaptation to a sunnier climate than the original North European one (assuming there’s an evolutionary reason for blue eyes or that they are directly linked to other traits such as very pale skin) can account for it somewhat easily.  
 
I just don’t believe in “Martian” explanations. Sorry.

Luis: 
 
“”A lot of Smiths change their names. I used to be a Smith. Seemed like no name at all.” 
 
That’s a very logical explanation and the only reasonable one so far.” 
 
C’mon—30% of ALL the Smiths in America changed their last names during a single six year period???!!! 
 
I think my own Martian anthropologist suggestion is a little more plausible… 
 
Ok, it sounds extreme, really but I understand that it’s easy to change one’s name under US law. Just some paperwork.  
 
Also Luke Lea claims to be a former Smith, so he should know something about the matter directly. I can understand well why someone with a too common name may want something more personal – and eventually make it official too, specially if that is legally easy and socially acceptable.

A lot of Smiths change their names. I used to be a Smith. Seemed like no name at all. 
 
That’s a very logical explanation and the only reasonable one so far.