Open Thread , 6/8/2014
RSS
Search Text Case Sensitive Exact Words Include Comments
List of Bookmarks
Thinking that understanding the distribution of phenomena which characterize human cultural evolution might be extremely important toward understanding genomic patterns of variation. Also, excited about Peter’s Heather’s The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders and Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (America in the World). When I’ll get to read them, who knows?
Follow @razibkhan
• Tags: Miscellaneous, Open Thread
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I’m looking forward to Peter Heather’s “Restoration of Rome”. His “Empires and Barbarians” was very good, pairing the fall of Rome with the rise of Europe. Parenthetically I might note that he suggests that his concept of “predatory migration” might be applicable to the Bronze Age collapse of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.
Does anyone else think biohacking is a stupid term? I’ve seen it used in several online journals:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/superman/2013/03/cyborgs_grinders_and_body_hackers_diy_tools_for_adding_sensory_perceptions.html
http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-future-of-biohacking-in-the-age-of-patent-trolls
I can’t quite articulate my dislike of it; maybe it just seems too trendy for me.
don’t know about stupid. but yeah, annoying
recent comments can now be found at the bottom of right nav bar. also, rss of comments
https://www.unz.com/comments/feed/?post_type=gnxp
Artificial selection pressures created by culture seems to be how traits that benefit a group but not the individual concerned can be made to be adaptive to the individual – at least in theory.
(or at least conformity as a catch all if not the actual traits)
This might seem like an irrelevancy or bit of trivia, but I am prompted by the observation of the lack of wide sampling with geography of Australians, and it comes from an unlikely source.
Two people who are high in the administration of Australian national football recently produced data that proves that the Noongar (or more correctly, part Aboriginal people whose Aboriginal ancestry is Noongar, meaning the group occupying the south west corner of Australia) have been more highly represented at elite level in Australian football than all other Aboriginal groups combined. Aboriginal players are already over-represented in comparison to players of European ancestry in relative proportion to general population, so the Noonger come out looking like the elite of the elite.
Australian football was developed by someone who had been observing Aboriginal people in western Victoria playing a native version of football called Marngrook, a traditional game played with a ball made from a possum skin, but western Victoria is a long way from south-west WA, and the Noongar were never known to play such a game, although the modern variant is now played enthusiastically by Aboriginal people all over Australia.
The over-representation of the Noongar at elite level is such that it suggests something special about them – the people who compiled and released these data inferred that the difference must be cultural, something about the Noongar that make them the ‘Zulus’ of Australia, as they put it, but those guys are retired footballers, not geneticists.
Another notable difference about the Noongar, obviously cultural, is that they are the only group in Australia which never practised any form of male circumcision, despite heavy pressure from neighbouring groups at the boundaries to adopt the practice. I am not suggesting a connection between that and their ability to play football, but it illustrates that culture was certainly not homogeneous, and that maybe there is something special about Noongar genes as well. The relatively temperate, fertile south west of WA which was more densely populated is separated from other fertile parts of Australia by extensive stretches of hot desert which had low population density, so although there was some mixing at the boundaries, it would not surprise me to find regional clustering at a fine grained level within Australia – isolation by distance and partial geographic/climatic porous barriers.
“The relatively temperate, fertile south west of WA which was more densely populated”
Did they have more of a warrior culture than the average?
Grey – No, and I think Kevin Sheedy’s reference to Zulus is totally inappropriate; Aboriginal people were never organised like that. I think I understand what he is trying to say, but it’s not an appropriate metaphor. There were some stand-out individuals, but they acted as individuals.
But then, the Australian game is very unlike American football or rugby – it relies much less on tactical teamwork and strength, and much more on individual athleticism. I’ll probably cop hell from AFL supporters for saying so, but there is no real teamwork or tactics in Aussie Rules, it’s more like 36 blokes running and scrambling all over a huge playing area in a disorganised melee, competing individually one-on-one for the ball (remarkably like recorded descriptions of Marngrook) – in that sense, it is a very good ‘fit’ for Aboriginal players, as much as Polynesians are well suited for rugby.
@Sandgroper
“The relatively temperate, fertile south west of WA which was more densely populated is separated from other fertile parts of Australia by extensive stretches of hot desert which had low population density”
I wondered if the denser population might have led to more conflict. Another option is the thing about more mutations with larger effective populations so maybe their genetics are different?
The thing that distinguishes Aboriginal players in general and Noongar in particular are speed, balance, agility, ball handling and kicking, and high leaping ability. And scarily-good spacial awareness.