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Pre-addendum: You can talk about anything in the open thread. End Note
Still reading the second volume of Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in a Global Context, and it’s hard going. The issue is that the author’s prose is turgid, and I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing as something of a scholarly book addict. Frankly the total length of the book is partly due to repetition. The upside of that is that you can skim over sections which are reiterated what has come before, but the downside is that you have to do this in the first place. With that in mind I decided to get Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, after a mention by Steve. I’ve heard about this book for a year or so, and just skimming through it I have to stay it’s an easier read in terms of prose style than Strange Parallels (granted, this was a low bar). But the very title itself highlights why I didn’t prioritize reading this book: a priori I’m very skeptical of scholars who attempt to infer the singular historically contingent origins of a particular contemporary social phenomenon. For example, inventing love, or inventing war, or inventing democracy.
As an example of what I mean, obviously the modern idea of republics has a great deal to do with the Roman republic. The term itself derives from the Roman example. But the general features which we would highlight as republican were not limited to Classical Mediterranean. Rather, it seems likely to me as societies develop there were attempts to maintain a less autocratic equilibrium in the transition toward complexity and scale, but they invariably failed (the example of the Roman shift from republic to empire is famous, but it is clear in the mythology and text that Mesopatamian civilization in the early Sumerian period was less autocratic and more oligarchic than it was later). A cross-cultural comparison is essential when asserting the sui generis character of any particular phenomenon. For example, if you are interesting the nature of millennarian religious sects, there’s no excuse for you not to know about the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, a Han dynasty movement indigenous to China (rule of thumb, if you are curious about comparing across cultures, just look at the two ends of Eurasia prior to the Mongols).
Finally, there’s the issue of evolutionary and cognitive psychology. I have written at length for over 10 years that many of the individualistic features of modern social existence are probably primal, insofar as the economic growth of the past few centuries in the West has allowed for the loosening or disintegration of mores which evolved organically as cultural adaptations to mass living during and after the Neolithic revolution. Obviously this model has drawbacks, in that there is not a perfect correspondence between the Paleolithic and modern lifestyles. But, I think where it is most evident is in domains of personal choice in regards to sexual partners, where the individual restraint and social constraint of many “traditional” societies have fallen away, to be replaced by individual utility maximization (at least in the short term!). This maximization I think can only make sense in light of the psychological priors which evolved in the context of small groups where pair bonds were an important feature of male-female relations.
In fact, the corporate “organization man” is the true cultural invention. Taking the thesis of Inventing the Individual at face value, it can perhaps be restated more precisely as Rediscovering the Individual. Western liberalism has inflected and interpreted the individual, but it was always there in chrysalis, trapped by the exigences of pre-modern agricultural society. In contrast, topology is a genuine novel cultural invention which has no ancient or prehistoric analog amongst humans.
On a different note, yesterday I listened to an interview with the author of Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, on the bloggingheads.tv (for what it’s worth, I always listen to the podcasts). The specific details were interesting, but the general arc is pretty straightforward, as it falls into the narrative of the “Nadir of American race relations”. The reason I’m mentioning this is that Robert Wright, author of many books, expressed surprise that race relations in New Orleans got worse during the late 19th and early 20th century. This ignorance surprised me, but even more annoying was his tendency to want to term the segregationist impulse among Progressives who enforced Jim Crow on New Orleans as “reactionary.”
It seems he couldn’t restrain his Whiggish worldview and acknowledge that in this time and period the modern terms don’t apply very well. Though the nature of increased social complexity and economic growth does lend itself to a Whiggish worldview over the past thousand years or so, history has gone through many epicycles.
If you read a book like The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln it is hard to deny that between the Founding and the Civil War race relations got much worse over time, and that the inferior status of black Americans became much more explicit in law and social custom. After the Civil War there was a thaw, and then a ratcheting up of racial conflict, tension, and segregation, up until the early 20th century. To term the racial ideology of the United States “reactionary” is entirely misleading, as well as false. Rather, it was a novel cultural concoction which emerged in the 19th century, shaped by the economics of the slave economy and justified by religion, science, and history.
And as it is clear from the interview with the author of the Empire of Sin those progressives who believe that the arc of history is unidirectional, and that they have special insight into its ultimate telos, have often been mistaken. Unfortunately, instead of learning from history most people simply retrofit it into a theory of their own making and preference.
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Razib,
Every few months or so in a year, there’s always a paper coming out purportedly showing how insidious anti-black racial discrimination is in the daily lives of citizens . For example, here’s a recent experiment done in Brisbane, Australia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/opinion/research-shows-white-privilege-is-real.html?_r=0
Do you think these studies, taken together, might indicate something true going on that matches the criticisms of social leftists?
Every few months or so in a year, there's always a paper coming out purportedly showing how insidious anti-black racial discrimination is in the daily lives of citizens . For example, here's a recent experiment done in Brisbane, Australia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/opinion/research-shows-white-privilege-is-real.html?_r=0
Do you think these studies, taken together, might indicate something true going on that matches the criticisms of social leftists?Replies: @Razib Khan
did you read the original working paper? i did.
first, 1) sample sizes are small
2) the results are pretty complicated. for example, east asians get no penalty. south asians are between aboriginals and whites/east asians. east asians bus drivers discriminate against other minorities. south asian bus drivers against aboriginals only. whites against everyone. but again, look at #1
i’m pretty sure that if the results didn’t fit some expectations (and again, people are ignoring the east asian finding, since it doesn’t “fit”) you’d note stuff like N = 29.
it seems likely given the sum of evidence that there is privilege to being white. but i’m not convinced that these studies have easy social policy implications. they’re too much like a lot of the implicit bias tests, which are used to support the concept of particular social policies, but turn out to be hard to make concrete in terms of what outcomes they might entail (see chabris’ *the invisible gorilla* on issues with the implicit bias research’s applicability; the results are real, the inferences from those results are often unwarranted or disputable).
also, one thing that immediately jumps out is that there might be different average behaviors of the groups impacting the behavior of bus drivers. it’s just assumed that race is the underlying causal variable, rather than it being a proxy for something else.
in a similar vein, this research came out years ago
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-eber-021308.html
the subjects were stanford students with ‘racial progressive’ views. if you took the implicit stuff seriously, then big implications. OTOH, i’m not sure that it matters in terms of everyday social policy (these kids who associate black features with apes implicitly almost certainly voted for obama and support policies which would make a SJW happy).
this usual pattern of behavior which is in status A in pre-neolithic times, than changes to status B after the neolthic, in traditional societies and back to status A in post-modern times leads to a kind of utopia: the ultimate aim of humanity would be to create social and physical environment such that people could live as much the paleolithic life as possible but with as much as necessary of the accomplishments of modern science as vaccination, hospitals, antibiotics etc. This would be probably happiness-maximizing as people would live in the environment they were made for (although as we know in the last 10.000 years not only culture but also genes changed). This is no new idea, thats what the paleo lifestyle is all about, I just wanted to emphasize it in this context
As someone who as studied cat genomes, why are dogs so much more phenotypically varied than cats? I know there are hairless sphinxes and munchkins, but you never see something as drastic as a great dane or chihuahua (as compared with a wolf). Nobody has bred guinea pig sized or cougar-sized house cats. Have humans simply been more creative with what they select in dogs (as they may have more varied utility) or (and forgive me if this sounds stupid) is there something about the genomes of dogs that make them more plastic?
yea, selection i think. don’t think dogs are innately more plastic. though it may be it is easier to get smaller than bigger, and cats are already relatively small.
Razib —
Having moved to unz.com, how comfortable are you with your neighbors?
The thing is, I used to read you when your were on Discover. I also used to read Steve Sailer and Peter Frost when they had their own sites. I felt I got a lot out of these blogs (and still feel that way). But now that Ron has collected you all on unz.com, you are associated with each other, and that strikes me as a problem. Steve, for example, is controversial in a way that you are not. This means I have to be careful about directing someone to an article of yours, because depending on who it is, there is a chance he will peruse the rest of the site, look at a few of Steve’s articles, and freak. He will see you as being discredited by your associations, and he will also wonder (quite rightly!) what I am doing reading a site like this. Both of us lose.
I think understand what Ron is trying to do with this site, and I hope he succeeds, but I’m not entirely convinced of the wisdom of it. It isn’t just you and Steve. Frankly it makes me uncomfortable to see Steve associated too closely with John Derbyshire. And I happen to like John Derbyshire! Then there are people like Jared Taylor, who in my opinion is starting to get dubious, and in other people’s opinion is the devil incarnate. And then there are people like Paul Craig Roberts, who strikes me as a total loon that I’d prefer none of you were associated with.
Guilt by association is a bitch. It may in some sense be a logical fallacy, but in practice that’s how most people see the world. So I’m wondering what your thoughts are. Has this been a problem for you? Do you think it’s likely to be? (I have to admit I was kind of shocked to see your op-eds in the New York Times, because I would have thought they would rule you out simply because of where your blog is located. So maybe I’m completely wrong about this. Still interested in your thoughts though).
Heartening at least, that I am being judged on what I say and not something tangentially related to what I read.
sure, it concerns me if people confuse others on this website for me (this happened on discover too, though with the liberal slant). OTOH, i did get in the ny times. so it doesn’t seem like people are synthesizing everyone together. unz.com is still a work in progress, so we’ll see. it’s been working so far. also, you have to remember that now a lot of people know me as much/more via my twitter, rather than my blog (they see the blog posts, but only as a side effect of following my twitter feed).
re: the nadir of race relations
New A.P. U.S. History standards have been released, which hammer home the point that the U.S. is a product of British racists, and that the arc of history is a straight line to the present. Now a student is expected to know that
“Unlike Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, which accepted intermarriage and cross-racial sexual unions with native peoples, English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with either native peoples or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy.”
How many errors or sloppy thinking are contained in this sentence?
I don’t think the British are that unique in racial attitudes or acceptance of slavery. They do appear to be unique in female settlement, the reasons for which are not quite clear to me, but certainly was not because of fear of sex with Native Americans. Who is Pocahontas and her relations? What racial caste system flourished in New Orleans re creoles? Why did Americans invent miscegenation laws? Did the British play an important in ending the slave trade? You will not learn these things in school.
As the US has become a mixed nation and people have started marrying interracially in large numbers, the ethnocentric character of the white English-speakers (let's call them WASPs for lack of a better term) has become more and more glaring, as it contrasts very strongly with the sort of society the US now sees itself to be. Hence the analysis of them as singularly unwilling to adjust to the racially diverse tenor of the New World and unjustifiably clinging to the ways of life found in their home countries in Europe.
This new way of viewing WASPs is often contrasted with the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World, as that quote demonstrates. The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry, and since anti-racism in the modern US is closely aligned with acceptance of intermarriage, they appear less racist in a (highly) superficial modern analysis. Of course, anyone who has researched Spain's and Portugal's colonial history knows such a view is nonsense, but even relatively smart people have been fooled. I recall that in Charles C. Mann's book 1493, he took ridiculous pains to argue that the Spanish casta system was "not racial in the modern sense." Why, exactly, should that matter so much? Was he trying to make the Spaniards look better than early US settlers by demonstrating that they avoided the specific type of racism modern Americans hate so much?
Because of this sea change, virtually any discussion of the virtues of WASPs must subsume them into the general character of American society, to which all peoples have contributed. Singling them out in a good way is increasingly risky. Minority groups are much more allowed to be seen as having made accomplishments in their own right. The founding and original majority group in the US, however, is either invisible or demonized.
Note that I am trying to explain these changes as I have seen them over my own (short) lifetime, not to take sides one way or the other. I don't like overt partisanship of any kind in academic writing. If a country can discuss its own flagship culture or ethnic group without bias, that is very much a virtue in my eyes. However, I don't think American historians have managed to do this well. Avoiding or demonizing the majority group does not constitute viewing it in a mature way. To me it is no coincidence that the best recent book about English-speaking whites, Replenishing the Earth, was written by a non-American, New Zealander James Belich. It neither celebrates their deeds or denigrates them, but still treats them as a distinctive group with unique contributions to US and world history.Replies: @Razib Khan, @PD Shaw
I have wondered about this. I live in a Liberal social circle and have shared links from various articles here with people. No one has ever made the jump of accusing me of believing the most shocking thing they can find here, but they have been shocked at views I directly express which would be normal here.
Heartening at least, that I am being judged on what I say and not something tangentially related to what I read.
@ Riordan
in think most people do judge other people in part based on perceives race. The only question is: does this actually harm some specific minorities as social lefties say or does is not. I say it does not. E.g. when somebody is perceived as rather aggressive and strong and because of this a bus driver would rather not have that person in his bus, but at the same time this person very successful attracting women in clubbing because he is perceives as aggressive and strong, and at the same time the person gets to college because he plays some sport and he is aggressive and strong, than all in all the stereotyping has had positive effects for that person.
New A.P. U.S. History standards have been released, which hammer home the point that the U.S. is a product of British racists, and that the arc of history is a straight line to the present. Now a student is expected to know that
"Unlike Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, which accepted intermarriage and cross-racial sexual unions with native peoples, English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with either native peoples or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy."
How many errors or sloppy thinking are contained in this sentence?
I don't think the British are that unique in racial attitudes or acceptance of slavery. They do appear to be unique in female settlement, the reasons for which are not quite clear to me, but certainly was not because of fear of sex with Native Americans. Who is Pocahontas and her relations? What racial caste system flourished in New Orleans re creoles? Why did Americans invent miscegenation laws? Did the British play an important in ending the slave trade? You will not learn these things in school.Replies: @Yudi, @TGGP
The reanalysis of US (and world) history in the last couple decades has been almost entirely for the better, as we have a stronger understanding of the processes that molded the US (and world) into what it is today. Perhaps due to the very large amount of immigration the US has received in the past 40 years, there is a tendency to view the colonial Americans and their English-speaking white descendants as “other” in a way that is unprecedented in US historiography, as far as I know.
As the US has become a mixed nation and people have started marrying interracially in large numbers, the ethnocentric character of the white English-speakers (let’s call them WASPs for lack of a better term) has become more and more glaring, as it contrasts very strongly with the sort of society the US now sees itself to be. Hence the analysis of them as singularly unwilling to adjust to the racially diverse tenor of the New World and unjustifiably clinging to the ways of life found in their home countries in Europe.
This new way of viewing WASPs is often contrasted with the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World, as that quote demonstrates. The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry, and since anti-racism in the modern US is closely aligned with acceptance of intermarriage, they appear less racist in a (highly) superficial modern analysis. Of course, anyone who has researched Spain’s and Portugal’s colonial history knows such a view is nonsense, but even relatively smart people have been fooled. I recall that in Charles C. Mann’s book 1493, he took ridiculous pains to argue that the Spanish casta system was “not racial in the modern sense.” Why, exactly, should that matter so much? Was he trying to make the Spaniards look better than early US settlers by demonstrating that they avoided the specific type of racism modern Americans hate so much?
Because of this sea change, virtually any discussion of the virtues of WASPs must subsume them into the general character of American society, to which all peoples have contributed. Singling them out in a good way is increasingly risky. Minority groups are much more allowed to be seen as having made accomplishments in their own right. The founding and original majority group in the US, however, is either invisible or demonized.
Note that I am trying to explain these changes as I have seen them over my own (short) lifetime, not to take sides one way or the other. I don’t like overt partisanship of any kind in academic writing. If a country can discuss its own flagship culture or ethnic group without bias, that is very much a virtue in my eyes. However, I don’t think American historians have managed to do this well. Avoiding or demonizing the majority group does not constitute viewing it in a mature way. To me it is no coincidence that the best recent book about English-speaking whites, Replenishing the Earth, was written by a non-American, New Zealander James Belich. It neither celebrates their deeds or denigrates them, but still treats them as a distinctive group with unique contributions to US and world history.
semantic clarification: the norm was really cohabitation, and often de facto polygyny (explaining how a small number of european men could have such an outsized genetic impact). this i think highlights the fact that this wasn't a reciprocal and symmetric pairing in anyway, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF GENETICS :-)
So, when I point out that African-Americans had the right to vote before the Fifteenth Amendment, had their inter-racial marriages recognized before the Loving decision, and had all of the rights to own property, including slaves, I generally get looped into the category of apologists, when in fact I'm pointing the assumption of recent moral improvement is mistaken.
As the US has become a mixed nation and people have started marrying interracially in large numbers, the ethnocentric character of the white English-speakers (let's call them WASPs for lack of a better term) has become more and more glaring, as it contrasts very strongly with the sort of society the US now sees itself to be. Hence the analysis of them as singularly unwilling to adjust to the racially diverse tenor of the New World and unjustifiably clinging to the ways of life found in their home countries in Europe.
This new way of viewing WASPs is often contrasted with the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World, as that quote demonstrates. The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry, and since anti-racism in the modern US is closely aligned with acceptance of intermarriage, they appear less racist in a (highly) superficial modern analysis. Of course, anyone who has researched Spain's and Portugal's colonial history knows such a view is nonsense, but even relatively smart people have been fooled. I recall that in Charles C. Mann's book 1493, he took ridiculous pains to argue that the Spanish casta system was "not racial in the modern sense." Why, exactly, should that matter so much? Was he trying to make the Spaniards look better than early US settlers by demonstrating that they avoided the specific type of racism modern Americans hate so much?
Because of this sea change, virtually any discussion of the virtues of WASPs must subsume them into the general character of American society, to which all peoples have contributed. Singling them out in a good way is increasingly risky. Minority groups are much more allowed to be seen as having made accomplishments in their own right. The founding and original majority group in the US, however, is either invisible or demonized.
Note that I am trying to explain these changes as I have seen them over my own (short) lifetime, not to take sides one way or the other. I don't like overt partisanship of any kind in academic writing. If a country can discuss its own flagship culture or ethnic group without bias, that is very much a virtue in my eyes. However, I don't think American historians have managed to do this well. Avoiding or demonizing the majority group does not constitute viewing it in a mature way. To me it is no coincidence that the best recent book about English-speaking whites, Replenishing the Earth, was written by a non-American, New Zealander James Belich. It neither celebrates their deeds or denigrates them, but still treats them as a distinctive group with unique contributions to US and world history.Replies: @Razib Khan, @PD Shaw
The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry
semantic clarification: the norm was really cohabitation, and often de facto polygyny (explaining how a small number of european men could have such an outsized genetic impact). this i think highlights the fact that this wasn’t a reciprocal and symmetric pairing in anyway, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF GENETICS 🙂
Razib: thanks for the reply! Ironic that the genes were more egalitarian than the society was.
To put what I said into more succinct terms, I think there is now a tendency to view the US colonial white population as “them” rather than “those who will someday be us.” This wasn’t the case even when I was in school.
not at all. google horizontal vs. vertical transmission.
“Guilt by association is a bitch. It may in some sense be a logical fallacy,”
Logical fallacy.
For awhile I’ve considered buying the 23andme genetic DNA kit, and I figured I’d find a higher percentage of informed information here than most places. I am curious, as the health information they’re now allowed to provide is limited, have you found it to be a practical service? If so would it be practical for everyone, or only those who want to do a high degree of sleuthing? Any information would be useful. Thanks.
No I did not, but that was besides the point, since I wasn’t looking to debate you on it, but rather curious about your opinion.
1 out of 10 ppl probably get something significant. but the raw data is probably worth it, since you can always check later for GWAS in other platforms.
also, going to note
1) going to randomly stop posting ppl who use handle ‘anonymous’
2) if you leave a gratuitously insulting comment you’re going to be banned. seems kind of weird to have to state that, but there are a lot of morons who fancy themselves super smart who seem to do this every week on my blog 😉
Any suggestions for good books on Zheng He and his travels?
Or the Bodhidharma?
Thanks,
subotai
Razib,
Any chance you’ll be back on bloggingheads? It’s not perfect, but I still listen to it regularly.
http://youtu.be/o6kdi1UXxhY
Origins of ISIS
nothing that new for many here probably but it keeps me thinking about how if you view destabilization as our goal then our past 25 years in the Middle East kinda makes sense. is our underlying plan just to prevent any one territory from becoming too powerful?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/mess-iraq-design.html
i haven’t heard too many people offer this probably because it sounds like a conspiracy theory. i do think rebuilding efforts are genuine but i also think they knew that if those efforts don’t work then it’s no biggie as they’ve already accomplished their goal of obliterating an empire(s). thoughts?
To put what I said into more succinct terms, I think there is now a tendency to view the US colonial white population as "them" rather than "those who will someday be us." This wasn't the case even when I was in school.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Razib Khan
not when i was in school in the 90s. very sad. my children will learn different 🙂
Any chance you'll be back on bloggingheads? It's not perfect, but I still listen to it regularly.Replies: @Razib Khan
no plans. i’m open to it if the fit is right in terms of who i’m paired up with. though last time i was on there as a pretty concerted campaign by liberal commenters to not have me back on because of the nature of some of my opinions (which were not at issue in the diavlog). because you know liberals are so open minded and tolerant 😉
Origins of ISIS
nothing that new for many here probably but it keeps me thinking about how if you view destabilization as our goal then our past 25 years in the Middle East kinda makes sense. is our underlying plan just to prevent any one territory from becoming too powerful?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/mess-iraq-design.html
i haven't heard too many people offer this probably because it sounds like a conspiracy theory. i do think rebuilding efforts are genuine but i also think they knew that if those efforts don't work then it's no biggie as they've already accomplished their goal of obliterating an empire(s). thoughts?Replies: @Anonymous
I think the last sentence should read Arabic and/or Muslim territory (country) becoming too powerful. There is a long history of US/Israel support of Sunnites (terrorists) battling Shiites (terrorists), including Israel’s role in forming and supporting Hamas to counter Hizbollah. Israel and the U.S. Neo-cons/Neo-libs seek to create a Middle East made up of nothing but dysfunctional states. A country at war with itself can’t project threats outside its borders. It’s sinister and diabolical, but it is the fundamental goal of Neo-con/lib foreign policy. There are countless articles detailing Israeli/US support for Al Qaeda and ISIS to weaken the Shiite alliance. Here is one of the most recent.
Razib Khan & Greg Cochran discuss science/politics weekly. That would be awesome.
,
I am curious if you could recommend any books for me touching on the the persistence of megafauna and their interaction with state level societies in south and south east asia.
The history of europe seems to indicate large state level societies generally extirpate the lions, bears, wolves, elephants etc in their local environs why the much longer persistence of these animals in the heavily populated regions of south and south east asia?
How does the interaction with those animals effect human societies?
i know population densities were far lower in SE asia on average in comparison to europe (reading *strange parallels* makes me aware of that!). re: S asia i don't know, but it could simply be that the terrain was less hospitable. e.g., eastern bengal wasn't really heavily populated until the past 1,000 years
the only book i know about this topic that i've read is *The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China*
New A.P. U.S. History standards have been released, which hammer home the point that the U.S. is a product of British racists, and that the arc of history is a straight line to the present. Now a student is expected to know that
"Unlike Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, which accepted intermarriage and cross-racial sexual unions with native peoples, English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with either native peoples or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy."
How many errors or sloppy thinking are contained in this sentence?
I don't think the British are that unique in racial attitudes or acceptance of slavery. They do appear to be unique in female settlement, the reasons for which are not quite clear to me, but certainly was not because of fear of sex with Native Americans. Who is Pocahontas and her relations? What racial caste system flourished in New Orleans re creoles? Why did Americans invent miscegenation laws? Did the British play an important in ending the slave trade? You will not learn these things in school.Replies: @Yudi, @TGGP
I think the English had more female settlement in part because the area was hospitable to them. In more tropical environments Europeans have something of an immunological disadvantage. In the New World natives were at something of a disadvantage (as per Guns, Germs, and Steel), but at least in latin america there was a counteracting tropical disadvantage for europeans and a large enough reservoir of natives from indigenous civilizations. Plymouth, in contrast, was already devastated by disease (transmitted from european fishermen) when the pilgrims arrived. John Randolph of the Virginia colony married a native (and I believe that colony was more male-heavy), but the colony didn’t last like Plymouth.
Two British groups settled with gender ratios of around 60/40 m/f, and also tended to come with families: (i) Puritans of the Great Migration, and (ii) the Northern English, Scots and Irish. I think the reasons for migrating this way had to do with social / religious reasons that are rooted in British experience, not the receiving climate.
The English that settled in the Chesapeake Bay tended to be younger and male (over 80/20 m/f), but it is here where there is more evidence of inter-marriage. In particular, blacks and whites bound to service together married. These marriages were recognized, but were increasingly regulated and eventually miscegenation was invented to serve the purpose of race-based slavery. Climate may have an impact, but it seems that it mainly drove more unemployed London labor to the opportunities in Virginia. Not as many farmers or frontiersmen in that group, so less likely contact with Natives.Replies: @Razib Khan
To put what I said into more succinct terms, I think there is now a tendency to view the US colonial white population as "them" rather than "those who will someday be us." This wasn't the case even when I was in school.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Razib Khan
Ironic that the genes were more egalitarian than the society was.
not at all. google horizontal vs. vertical transmission.
that’s happening. u just aren’t privy 🙂
yes, english intermarried when women weren ‘t avail (see the early trappers or even fort astoria). also, the french quebecois are almost all european in ancestry (small % of native) because of endogenous growth even from a small number of women and men. in this case ideology/culture explains little, rather than sexual circumstance.
I am curious if you could recommend any books for me touching on the the persistence of megafauna and their interaction with state level societies in south and south east asia.
The history of europe seems to indicate large state level societies generally extirpate the lions, bears, wolves, elephants etc in their local environs why the much longer persistence of these animals in the heavily populated regions of south and south east asia?
How does the interaction with those animals effect human societies?Replies: @Razib Khan
The history of europe seems to indicate large state level societies generally extirpate the lions, bears, wolves, elephants etc in their local environs why the much longer persistence of these animals in the heavily populated regions of south and south east asia?
i know population densities were far lower in SE asia on average in comparison to europe (reading *strange parallels* makes me aware of that!). re: S asia i don’t know, but it could simply be that the terrain was less hospitable. e.g., eastern bengal wasn’t really heavily populated until the past 1,000 years
the only book i know about this topic that i’ve read is *The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China*
OK thanks. Are there any articles you know of that talk about this destabilization strategy explicitly? I don’t recall seeing it mentioned ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_RealmReplies: @Robert Ford
That argument (breaking up mid-East states hostile to Israel as the real goal) was actually not uncommon among some opponents of the 2003 Iraq war, if I recall correctly, usually with reference to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_Realm
Yeah, I don’t think I read the comments on that one, but that’s ridiculous. Although, you know, haters gonna hate hate hate. I’d really like to see Steve Sailer on bloggingheads some time … that seems like an obvious idea to me … but I feel like in order for that to actually happen, Bob Wright would have to bump his head and switch to his alternate personality like in a sitcom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_RealmReplies: @Robert Ford
Ah, ok thanks a lot. I’d just downloaded that pdf but it wouldn’t work on my phone. I’m behind on this – trying to get a sense of how legit of a theory it is. I want to believe!
Razib, what do you think of this article (link in name)
I was disappointed that blogging heads pooped out in it’s science discussions. So many interesting scientists and historians with so much insight to share about their area of expertise, it is too damned bad that there isn’t a venue using the conversational style of blogging heads for them to reach a wider audience. Just you interviewing authors of excellent non fiction books would be great. I know you are too busy for such an endeavor at the moment but it just strikes me as simply sad at how little promotion there is of top notch science and history writing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/photo-of-weasel-attacking-a-woodpecker-2015-3
if you haven’t seen this yet you should take 10 seconds to see a weasel flying on the back of a woodpecker. i guess it’s real
As the US has become a mixed nation and people have started marrying interracially in large numbers, the ethnocentric character of the white English-speakers (let's call them WASPs for lack of a better term) has become more and more glaring, as it contrasts very strongly with the sort of society the US now sees itself to be. Hence the analysis of them as singularly unwilling to adjust to the racially diverse tenor of the New World and unjustifiably clinging to the ways of life found in their home countries in Europe.
This new way of viewing WASPs is often contrasted with the Spanish-speaking parts of the New World, as that quote demonstrates. The Spanish-speakers were more willing to intermarry, and since anti-racism in the modern US is closely aligned with acceptance of intermarriage, they appear less racist in a (highly) superficial modern analysis. Of course, anyone who has researched Spain's and Portugal's colonial history knows such a view is nonsense, but even relatively smart people have been fooled. I recall that in Charles C. Mann's book 1493, he took ridiculous pains to argue that the Spanish casta system was "not racial in the modern sense." Why, exactly, should that matter so much? Was he trying to make the Spaniards look better than early US settlers by demonstrating that they avoided the specific type of racism modern Americans hate so much?
Because of this sea change, virtually any discussion of the virtues of WASPs must subsume them into the general character of American society, to which all peoples have contributed. Singling them out in a good way is increasingly risky. Minority groups are much more allowed to be seen as having made accomplishments in their own right. The founding and original majority group in the US, however, is either invisible or demonized.
Note that I am trying to explain these changes as I have seen them over my own (short) lifetime, not to take sides one way or the other. I don't like overt partisanship of any kind in academic writing. If a country can discuss its own flagship culture or ethnic group without bias, that is very much a virtue in my eyes. However, I don't think American historians have managed to do this well. Avoiding or demonizing the majority group does not constitute viewing it in a mature way. To me it is no coincidence that the best recent book about English-speaking whites, Replenishing the Earth, was written by a non-American, New Zealander James Belich. It neither celebrates their deeds or denigrates them, but still treats them as a distinctive group with unique contributions to US and world history.Replies: @Razib Khan, @PD Shaw
The problem with looking to the past to find meaning in the present, is that you will only find what you are looking for. In the antebellum period, a revisionist history emerged that explained that America was founded as a white man’s republic, and received its most important venting in Justice Taney’s Dred Scot decision. He ignored facts which interfered with his objective, such as the right free blacks originally had to vote when the United States was founded (in all but two or three of the original thirteen states). These rights and others were eroded over time. As Lincoln said, ” In some trifling particulars, the condition of that race has been ameliorated; but, as a whole, in this country, the change between then and now is decidedly the other way; and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years.”
So, when I point out that African-Americans had the right to vote before the Fifteenth Amendment, had their inter-racial marriages recognized before the Loving decision, and had all of the rights to own property, including slaves, I generally get looped into the category of apologists, when in fact I’m pointing the assumption of recent moral improvement is mistaken.
The disease angle appears to be greatly unappreciated. If 95% of the Native American population died just before the settlers arrived, and if the Atlantic-North American world was not as densely populated as Central and South American, this would go far in explaining a lot of the population differences btw/ different parts of the Americas.
Two British groups settled with gender ratios of around 60/40 m/f, and also tended to come with families: (i) Puritans of the Great Migration, and (ii) the Northern English, Scots and Irish. I think the reasons for migrating this way had to do with social / religious reasons that are rooted in British experience, not the receiving climate.
The English that settled in the Chesapeake Bay tended to be younger and male (over 80/20 m/f), but it is here where there is more evidence of inter-marriage. In particular, blacks and whites bound to service together married. These marriages were recognized, but were increasingly regulated and eventually miscegenation was invented to serve the purpose of race-based slavery. Climate may have an impact, but it seems that it mainly drove more unemployed London labor to the opportunities in Virginia. Not as many farmers or frontiersmen in that group, so less likely contact with Natives.
and note that the puritan and scots-irish folk migrations came in relatively discrete pulses, and demographic growth then occurred through natural increase (very high rates!).
This might be a stupid question, but I’ll throw it out there.
I was reviewing older papers on Latin American admixture to cite in another place. I was reminded that generally speaking on K4 of admixture studies there is a small percentage (5%-10%) of European DNA which comes out as Native American. We now know that this admixture is in fact Ancient North Eurasian, which came into the Western European gene pool with Indo-European migrants (mostly).
But when looking at an admixed New World population, how are we certain that we’re actually picking up the “European” portions of ANE, versus the “Native American” ones? Could we be systematically over-estimating the Native American ancestry – at least on the order of 2%-3%?
Two British groups settled with gender ratios of around 60/40 m/f, and also tended to come with families: (i) Puritans of the Great Migration, and (ii) the Northern English, Scots and Irish. I think the reasons for migrating this way had to do with social / religious reasons that are rooted in British experience, not the receiving climate.
The English that settled in the Chesapeake Bay tended to be younger and male (over 80/20 m/f), but it is here where there is more evidence of inter-marriage. In particular, blacks and whites bound to service together married. These marriages were recognized, but were increasingly regulated and eventually miscegenation was invented to serve the purpose of race-based slavery. Climate may have an impact, but it seems that it mainly drove more unemployed London labor to the opportunities in Virginia. Not as many farmers or frontiersmen in that group, so less likely contact with Natives.Replies: @Razib Khan
I think the reasons for migrating this way had to do with social / religious reasons that are rooted in British experience, not the receiving climate.
and note that the puritan and scots-irish folk migrations came in relatively discrete pulses, and demographic growth then occurred through natural increase (very high rates!).
I was reviewing older papers on Latin American admixture to cite in another place. I was reminded that generally speaking on K4 of admixture studies there is a small percentage (5%-10%) of European DNA which comes out as Native American. We now know that this admixture is in fact Ancient North Eurasian, which came into the Western European gene pool with Indo-European migrants (mostly).
But when looking at an admixed New World population, how are we certain that we're actually picking up the "European" portions of ANE, versus the "Native American" ones? Could we be systematically over-estimating the Native American ancestry - at least on the order of 2%-3%?Replies: @Razib Khan
#42, first, this common ancestry is 20 K diverged. second, if you use reference populations which are pure that could obviate some of these issues. though both euros and amerindians are compounds, they’re both stabilized compounds.
I did it early enough to get the medical information, but have tried subsequently running my data file through different software available free online, and it is really very simple to do.