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I’ve been reading The Making of Modern Japan. Tokugawa Ieyasu is a pretty big deal, and I’ve long been intrigued by him as an individual after reading about him and his contemporaries in the novel Taiko. Also, Japan seems a good way to investigate the possibilities of how one becomes modern without being fully Western.
Stanford is hosting BAPG XII in two weeks. Unless something intervenes I’ll be attending as usual. I also assume that the excessive population genomics tweeting will lose me some followers, as is the norm.
Had a good chat with Iain Mathieson today, as I swung through Berkeley (had Peking duck for lunch and Texas barbecue for dinner!). It’s a good time to be alive and be interested in human evolutionary genomics.
Lots of comments below on my post on Asian Americans and university admissions. I don’t really have a strong opinion as to how admissions should be handled. As usual my sentiment is to make a plea for honesty and candor. But I’m probably being naive and hopeless about it all.
Update: I’m in the third & fourth segments.
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Kieran Healy has a couple of posts about who doesn’t vaccinate.
He got the data for every school in California from the government. I was surprised that the data was so easily available. A few months ago you posted a paper that got data from Kaiser, but just for a few counties. So I assumed that this data was not so easy to get. Maybe the government data is well-known and that paper was a complementary source, but I missed that context.
Healy gives some disclaimers about the quality of the data. I guess the Kaiser data is more accurate about whether the children actually got vaccines, but I suspect that the school data is more accurate about whether the parents refused. The work of the paper is to find geographic clusters, but school clusters are much better. They are better both for the sociological question of where do ideas come from and for the epidemiological consequences.
I’m curious what Razib and the readers of this blog recommend as a way to keep track of websites and articles that one encounters while browsing. I’d like to settle on an app or extension or something else that allows me to easily tag links and saved webpages. Do you guys think that Pocket or oneNote are a good for this ? I started to used diigo a few years ago but I was never sure that diigo was going to stick around. Does anyone know if the Leo outliner would be useful for this ? I don’t have a problem with a solution that involves me doing light programming in, say, python or a similarly ubiquitous language. I’d like to settle on a solution that seems likely to stick around and that is potentially scriptable and modifiable by the user.
I”m thinking of starting to blog and I want to be able to go to my app and enter a few tags like “2014”,”indo-european%” and “genetics” to have access to links and saved web pages that I would have tagged and that would be related to, say, indo-european genetics articles published in 2014.
Razib, what do you think ISIS is thinking after the Delta Force raid yesterday.? These ISIS guys live on bravado. America commandos swoop in, kill one of the ISIS leaders and twelve fighters, leave with the wife and lots of laptops and phones, and none of the Americans has a scratch on ’em! How impotent must these ISIS guys feel, with the U.S. knowing where you are and can strike with impunity when they want?! This news yesterday was the best news I’ve heard in a long time and made me feel better about the world. I felt like going down to the recruiting center and joining the Army (kind of like on the movie American Sniper).
Thoughts?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/16/u-s-troops-fought-hand-to-hand-in-syria-raid.html
Too snarky?
Believing that honesty and candor can solve problems, and that there are actually solutions, seems to me something exclusive to people on the far right side of the Bell Curve but shunned as unsophisticated in the middle. Sort of like serving mixed greens and not arugula (or kale) at Brooklyn dinner parties.
“They are suggesting that variation itself might be a genetic trait,”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150512-fruit-flies-individuality/
I am also for transparency on these issues. Simply put, I think it helps to have more data available publicly, especially at the more granular level. It’s more difficult to be dishonest and/or opaque when clear(er) information is available.
By the way, while it doesn’t deal with the “white women don’t like to have sex with Asian men” issue, the following source does provide much more detailed interracial marriage data concerning Asians in America. So I would say there is finer grained information about *mutual* desirability as partners among various groups of Asians on the one hand and non-Asians on the other: http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml
Among U.S.-raised Asian men marrying U.S.-raised white partners (to account for acculturation), here are the percentages by ethnicity, from high to low:
Koreans: 34.6%
Filipinos: 31.8%
Chinese: 26.5%
Indians: 25.6%
Japanese: 25.1%
Vietnamese: 21.9%
And here are the numbers for U.S.-raised Asian women marrying U.S.-raised white partners, from high to low:
Koreans: 57.7%
Filipinos: 42.7%
Vietnamese: 41.3%
Indians: 37.8%
Chinese: 37.7%
Japanese: 29.9%
Koreans stick out for their high rates of intermarriage with whites in the United States, even the men. It would be interesting to see even finer grained data, but I could think of two reasons off hand 1) the highest rate of Protestantism among Asians (I think it’s over 50% among U.S. Koreans) and 2) the highest average height among Asians.
1) relates to what Mr. Khan alluded earlier – declining church membership in America, but likely *higher salience.* In an increasingly secular society, highly devout Christians tend to seeks others of similar persuasion as marriage partners. I happen to live in an area with high church attendance rate (probably the highest among all large metros) and one that also has high percentages of Asians. It is very common here to see Asian male/white females couples with mixed children at the mega churches in the area (I am a Roman Catholic, but I used to visit the mega churches for political events).
2) I haven’t seen the data, but I bet height correlates much better with attractiveness of males to females than appearance (handsome/ugly).
As for the Asian “leadership,” issue, again, I’d like to see open access to data that universities no doubt have. It would be interesting, for example, to see how those applicants with military experience (especially with leadership positions) fare.
My suspicion is that they do not fare all that well (so I speculate that universities are merely using the “lack of leadership” allegation as a tool of opaque discrimination, both against Asians and “flyover country” whites). My wife and I are alums to four Ivy League/top-ten universities/graduate programs, and over the years we have interviewed dozens of applicants for our almae matres (probably over 100). While an undergrad at an Ivy, I also worked at the admissions office and did research for the development office (specifically, investigating financial data of alums). From what she and I have seen, the top universities are not selecting for leadership in any objective sense of that word. Status is more like it. But that’s just our speculation.
Koreans in America: total population 1.7 million; 71% Christians (61% Protestant, 10% Catholic).
Filipinos: 3.4-4.5 million (I assume full-partial ancestry); 86% Christians (21% Protestant, 65% Catholic).
Chinese: 3.8 million; 30% Christians (22% Protestant, 8% Catholic).
Indians: 3.1-3.14 million (full-partial); 18% Christians (11% Protestant, 5% Catholic, 3% other).
Japanese: 0.76-1.3 million (full-partial); 37% Christians (33% Protestant, 4% Catholic).
Vietnamese: 1.74 million; 36% Christians (6% Protestant; 30% Catholic).
Now, for the height of young male adults (national averages, obviously doesn't factor for immigration selections):
Koreans (South): 173.5 cm (5' 8 1/2"), ages 20-29, 2014
Filipinos: 163.4 cm (5' 4 1/2"), ages 20-49, 2003
Chinese (Mainland); 172.1 cm (5' 8"), age 19, 2010
Indians: 164.7 cm (5' 5"), ages 20-49, 2005-2006
Japanese: 172 cm (5' 7"), ages 20-49, 2005
Vietnamese: 162.1 cm (5' 5"), ages 20-29, 1992-1993
I am guessing here that Chinese and Indians numbers, in particular, have high deviations and may have relatively higher unreliability for methodological reasons.
Obviously Tokugawa Ieyasu was the last man standing and established a dynasty, so history remembers him as the great unifier. He is an excellent example of the oft-cited maxim that “If you sit by a river long enough, you see the bodies of your enemies floating by.” You don’t have to beat your rivals – you just have to outlive them.
But for my money, the real force behind the Japanese unification during the Sengoku Jidai was Oda Nobunaga. It was he who created the impetus for the unification (by crushing local and sectarian/Buddhist resistance) and came so close to it (when he was betrayed and assassinated), and it was his army, utilizing volley-firing arquebusiers, that won the very pivotal Battle of Nagashino and ushered in a new phase of warfare in Japan (incorrectly depicted by Akira Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha” in 1980): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga
Toyotomi Hideoyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu merely stood on the shoulders of this colossus in Japanese history.
By the way, while it doesn't deal with the "white women don't like to have sex with Asian men" issue, the following source does provide much more detailed interracial marriage data concerning Asians in America. So I would say there is finer grained information about *mutual* desirability as partners among various groups of Asians on the one hand and non-Asians on the other: http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml
Among U.S.-raised Asian men marrying U.S.-raised white partners (to account for acculturation), here are the percentages by ethnicity, from high to low:
Koreans: 34.6%
Filipinos: 31.8%
Chinese: 26.5%
Indians: 25.6%
Japanese: 25.1%
Vietnamese: 21.9%
And here are the numbers for U.S.-raised Asian women marrying U.S.-raised white partners, from high to low:
Koreans: 57.7%
Filipinos: 42.7%
Vietnamese: 41.3%
Indians: 37.8%
Chinese: 37.7%
Japanese: 29.9%
Koreans stick out for their high rates of intermarriage with whites in the United States, even the men. It would be interesting to see even finer grained data, but I could think of two reasons off hand 1) the highest rate of Protestantism among Asians (I think it's over 50% among U.S. Koreans) and 2) the highest average height among Asians.
1) relates to what Mr. Khan alluded earlier - declining church membership in America, but likely *higher salience.* In an increasingly secular society, highly devout Christians tend to seeks others of similar persuasion as marriage partners. I happen to live in an area with high church attendance rate (probably the highest among all large metros) and one that also has high percentages of Asians. It is very common here to see Asian male/white females couples with mixed children at the mega churches in the area (I am a Roman Catholic, but I used to visit the mega churches for political events).
2) I haven't seen the data, but I bet height correlates much better with attractiveness of males to females than appearance (handsome/ugly).
As for the Asian "leadership," issue, again, I'd like to see open access to data that universities no doubt have. It would be interesting, for example, to see how those applicants with military experience (especially with leadership positions) fare.
My suspicion is that they do not fare all that well (so I speculate that universities are merely using the "lack of leadership" allegation as a tool of opaque discrimination, both against Asians and "flyover country" whites). My wife and I are alums to four Ivy League/top-ten universities/graduate programs, and over the years we have interviewed dozens of applicants for our almae matres (probably over 100). While an undergrad at an Ivy, I also worked at the admissions office and did research for the development office (specifically, investigating financial data of alums). From what she and I have seen, the top universities are not selecting for leadership in any objective sense of that word. Status is more like it. But that's just our speculation.Replies: @Alex M, @Twinkie
Those numbers for Asian men are still pretty bad when you consider their small population size and their stellar levels of education. And not only that but given the significant poaching of Asian women by white men, Asian men, more than any other male group are actually forced to look for partners outside of their race and still they’re coming up way short. It doesn’t seem like many people understand how significant an issue this will be in the near future as the Asian population explodes.
Thoughts?Replies: @Twinkie
Apparently there was some hand-to-hand combat, so there probably was a scratch or two at minimum.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/16/u-s-troops-fought-hand-to-hand-in-syria-raid.html
Too snarky?
But for my money, the real force behind the Japanese unification during the Sengoku Jidai was Oda Nobunaga. It was he who created the impetus for the unification (by crushing local and sectarian/Buddhist resistance) and came so close to it (when he was betrayed and assassinated), and it was his army, utilizing volley-firing arquebusiers, that won the very pivotal Battle of Nagashino and ushered in a new phase of warfare in Japan (incorrectly depicted by Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha" in 1980): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga
Toyotomi Hideoyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu merely stood on the shoulders of this colossus in Japanese history.Replies: @Razib Khan
agree re: oda.
Regards the debate on ratios of different ethnic groups in elite universities: We need data to resolve assorted theories and assertions. I’d really like to see:
– data gathered on how well each ethnic group graduated from the Ivy’s does in their careers. Do Harvard, Yale, etc gather this data and do the analysis by US-raised and foreigners of each ethnic group?
– SATs compared against IQ tests for each ethnic group. Does SAT over-predict IQ for some ethnic groups and under-predict for others? Is ACT more correlated with IQ than SAT? Is ACT harder to game?
Everyone can offer opinions. But good data would be so so much better.
I wished I lived in a society where my curiosities were not taboo.
He got the data for every school in California from the government. I was surprised that the data was so easily available. A few months ago you posted a paper that got data from Kaiser, but just for a few counties. So I assumed that this data was not so easy to get. Maybe the government data is well-known and that paper was a complementary source, but I missed that context.
Healy gives some disclaimers about the quality of the data. I guess the Kaiser data is more accurate about whether the children actually got vaccines, but I suspect that the school data is more accurate about whether the parents refused. The work of the paper is to find geographic clusters, but school clusters are much better. They are better both for the sociological question of where do ideas come from and for the epidemiological consequences.Replies: @Douglas Knight
Actually, a serious problem with using school data is that it excludes the homeschooled. Although it does catch a couple of large charter quasi-schools that exist to provide services to the homeschooled.
Where exactly does Razib appear in the video? Always interesting to hear someone speak after you’ve followed their writing for a while. I clicked though it but couldn’t find him.
@ Ron Unz
Restricting ourselves to the political, how much of the recent selection has been driven by the power of television? It seems to be that the competence of political leadership starts to decline in the 1950’s and accelerates in the 1960’s. How much of this is determined by the “television appeal” of the candidates? I look at Carter and Obama who initially were very appealing on TV but are missing the crucial capability of being able to select competent lieutenants. Look at McCain, who came close to being President, but who demonstrated his incompetence with the selection of Palin as his running mate. Before television a person who could get to the presidential level had to have been able to personally evaluate the abilities and loyalties of the people around him. Two different abilities; television appeal vs. ability to choose and inspire able lieutenants.
“white women don’t like to have sex with Asian men”
It is more to do with physical feature than characters of Asian males. This can be easily tested with online experiment of fake Asian or white male ID. Just playing some head game as Sakawa boys, you will be surprised.
Interesting enough, Chinese red army under Li De (German guy) suffered hugely due to their blind belief that white guys were better leaders. Since the lesson of LiDe, Chinese communists never let foreigner have top position any more. Mao himself had even contempt for them at end. That explained Mao lacks of fear of Westerners. He was only few in Chinese communist leadership wanted to enter Korean War even quite a lots in the party apposing it due to fear of USA. Brown nose gets no respect at end.
In USA, assortative mating explained a lot of things. Even in China, a nerdy high achiever still has problem dating working class Chinese women who only found working class guys attractive due to their characters. If you are top 1% intellectually, forget about dating regular women since you have nothing in common with.
Like I said before, personal taste for physical attraction is like food taste. You really can not change people's taste that much. Beauty is in the eyes of beholder.
https://youtu.be/rnk5w4aa6y4?list=PL_W7mUd33vjd3RBz0jEM811zhQEB9sEvU
In my eyes, this woman is still the most beautiful woman in my taste.
For me, as long as this kind of women who like to have sex with me matters more than white women. Growing up in Manchuria, western looks actually were discriminated against back my time. Russians had hard time to find dates. Even Russian wanted to marry Han in order to assimilate. I was among a few who have incredible open-minded attitude toward Western look earlier than most people. My very first girlfriend was ethnic Russian due to my tolerant attitude toward non-Han people. Yes, I do not give a shit how other people think.
It is more to do with physical feature than characters of Asian males. This can be easily tested with online experiment of fake Asian or white male ID. Just playing some head game as Sakawa boys, you will be surprised.
Interesting enough, Chinese red army under Li De (German guy) suffered hugely due to their blind belief that white guys were better leaders. Since the lesson of LiDe, Chinese communists never let foreigner have top position any more. Mao himself had even contempt for them at end. That explained Mao lacks of fear of Westerners. He was only few in Chinese communist leadership wanted to enter Korean War even quite a lots in the party apposing it due to fear of USA. Brown nose gets no respect at end.
In USA, assortative mating explained a lot of things. Even in China, a nerdy high achiever still has problem dating working class Chinese women who only found working class guys attractive due to their characters. If you are top 1% intellectually, forget about dating regular women since you have nothing in common with.Replies: @AG
“white women don’t like to have sex with Asian men”
Like I said before, personal taste for physical attraction is like food taste. You really can not change people’s taste that much. Beauty is in the eyes of beholder.
In my eyes, this woman is still the most beautiful woman in my taste.
For me, as long as this kind of women who like to have sex with me matters more than white women. Growing up in Manchuria, western looks actually were discriminated against back my time. Russians had hard time to find dates. Even Russian wanted to marry Han in order to assimilate. I was among a few who have incredible open-minded attitude toward Western look earlier than most people. My very first girlfriend was ethnic Russian due to my tolerant attitude toward non-Han people. Yes, I do not give a shit how other people think.
I know you like photos of admixtures. This one is spectacular. She is the new Israeli Minister of Justice. Her mother was Ashkenazi and he father was Mizrahi.
I’d be curious to know people’s thoughts on this prepint: “Genome-wide Scan of Archaic Hominin Introgressions in Eurasians Reveals Complex Admixture History” http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1404/1404.7766.pdf
It’s way over my head but seemed interesting. The suggested that there were two other archaic hominins (beyond Denisovans and Neanderthals) that contributed to our modern DNA – one of which diverged from modern humans ~3.5 million years ago?!?
By the way, while it doesn't deal with the "white women don't like to have sex with Asian men" issue, the following source does provide much more detailed interracial marriage data concerning Asians in America. So I would say there is finer grained information about *mutual* desirability as partners among various groups of Asians on the one hand and non-Asians on the other: http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml
Among U.S.-raised Asian men marrying U.S.-raised white partners (to account for acculturation), here are the percentages by ethnicity, from high to low:
Koreans: 34.6%
Filipinos: 31.8%
Chinese: 26.5%
Indians: 25.6%
Japanese: 25.1%
Vietnamese: 21.9%
And here are the numbers for U.S.-raised Asian women marrying U.S.-raised white partners, from high to low:
Koreans: 57.7%
Filipinos: 42.7%
Vietnamese: 41.3%
Indians: 37.8%
Chinese: 37.7%
Japanese: 29.9%
Koreans stick out for their high rates of intermarriage with whites in the United States, even the men. It would be interesting to see even finer grained data, but I could think of two reasons off hand 1) the highest rate of Protestantism among Asians (I think it's over 50% among U.S. Koreans) and 2) the highest average height among Asians.
1) relates to what Mr. Khan alluded earlier - declining church membership in America, but likely *higher salience.* In an increasingly secular society, highly devout Christians tend to seeks others of similar persuasion as marriage partners. I happen to live in an area with high church attendance rate (probably the highest among all large metros) and one that also has high percentages of Asians. It is very common here to see Asian male/white females couples with mixed children at the mega churches in the area (I am a Roman Catholic, but I used to visit the mega churches for political events).
2) I haven't seen the data, but I bet height correlates much better with attractiveness of males to females than appearance (handsome/ugly).
As for the Asian "leadership," issue, again, I'd like to see open access to data that universities no doubt have. It would be interesting, for example, to see how those applicants with military experience (especially with leadership positions) fare.
My suspicion is that they do not fare all that well (so I speculate that universities are merely using the "lack of leadership" allegation as a tool of opaque discrimination, both against Asians and "flyover country" whites). My wife and I are alums to four Ivy League/top-ten universities/graduate programs, and over the years we have interviewed dozens of applicants for our almae matres (probably over 100). While an undergrad at an Ivy, I also worked at the admissions office and did research for the development office (specifically, investigating financial data of alums). From what she and I have seen, the top universities are not selecting for leadership in any objective sense of that word. Status is more like it. But that's just our speculation.Replies: @Alex M, @Twinkie
Here is some context for the above intermarriage rates (please note that the rates above are about those raised in the U.S., meaning either born here or raised here since age 13 or below, while the numbers below are for the populations at large in the U.S. for Christianity and homeland averages for height). I speculated that Christianity (cultural) and height (biological) may be important factors in the Asian male-white female intermarriage rates.
Koreans in America: total population 1.7 million; 71% Christians (61% Protestant, 10% Catholic).
Filipinos: 3.4-4.5 million (I assume full-partial ancestry); 86% Christians (21% Protestant, 65% Catholic).
Chinese: 3.8 million; 30% Christians (22% Protestant, 8% Catholic).
Indians: 3.1-3.14 million (full-partial); 18% Christians (11% Protestant, 5% Catholic, 3% other).
Japanese: 0.76-1.3 million (full-partial); 37% Christians (33% Protestant, 4% Catholic).
Vietnamese: 1.74 million; 36% Christians (6% Protestant; 30% Catholic).
Now, for the height of young male adults (national averages, obviously doesn’t factor for immigration selections):
Koreans (South): 173.5 cm (5′ 8 1/2″), ages 20-29, 2014
Filipinos: 163.4 cm (5′ 4 1/2″), ages 20-49, 2003
Chinese (Mainland); 172.1 cm (5′ 8″), age 19, 2010
Indians: 164.7 cm (5′ 5″), ages 20-49, 2005-2006
Japanese: 172 cm (5′ 7″), ages 20-49, 2005
Vietnamese: 162.1 cm (5′ 5″), ages 20-29, 1992-1993
I am guessing here that Chinese and Indians numbers, in particular, have high deviations and may have relatively higher unreliability for methodological reasons.
Razib, have you also tried ghost peppers!? Ghost peppers have a sweet taste just like habanero; I wouldn’t eat it otherwise.
Re: height for age 18-34 and Asian subgroups, Health Survey for England 2004 gives the White British average for men at 177.2 cm, Pakistanis at 173cm (around 1.5 inches shorter) and Indians 171.4cm (about 2 inches shorter), British Chinese at 173.6 (again around 1.5 inches shorter).
The full age adjusted sample gives the Pakistanis as shorter than the general population by 1.15 inches, Chinese by 1.65 and Indians by 1.88. So for a young British male population of 5 foot 10 inches,Pakistanis 5 foot 8.85, Chinese 5 foot 8.35, Indians 5 foot 8.12. I’d presume the young Pakistanis and Indians in the age unadjusted sample might be a little more affected by recent immigration from a country with low nutritional standards, which is probably higher for them (South Asian migration is high and South Asia hasn’t made the nutritional progress China has generally, let alone Hong Kong or Singapore).
http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB01170/hea-surv-ethn-min-eng-2004-rep-v1.pdf – p179 and p180. There aren’t enough any Southeast Asians with which say much about what their height is like in the British environment. I don’t know if the US has a similar survey.
In terms of languages, British Chinese per Wikipedia have a ratio of 94% Cantonese, 4% Mandarin, 3% Hakka, so they’re mostly Southern Chinese from ex-British colonies (and the height figure basically agrees with the Hong Kong height measurements and is similar to Singapore).
You could impute from this Koreans as likely to 1 / 0.5 inches shorter than those of British descent under similar nutrition, since anecdotally they’re a little taller than Southern Chinese.
Height could affect intermarriage; however, the Korean female numbers show higher outmarriage, so it could just be that the male numbers show higher numbers as a passive effect, as the males seek more outgroup marriages in response (and to some degree they both also may share a cultural trend?).
Or another factor for Korean Americans though, is that in addition to the Christianity factor, there *are* about 100,000 Korean international adoptees who probably count as USA raised (even if not born), which would be around a 1/5 or so of the US raised total. And you’d basically expect those guys and girls, who are raised in usually a totally White American context, to disproportionately choose White American spouses compared to the kids of a couples of migrant Koreans. And maybe the men in this group might make more of an effort to find a coethnic spouse. That couldn’t be a total explanation, but could be substantial.