DNAprint methodology


For those who care, a "new" paper from Shriver, Frudakis, and friends:

Hum Mutat. 2008 Feb 19 [Epub ahead of print]

A panel of ancestry informative markers for estimating individual biogeographical ancestry and admixture from four continents: utility and applications.

Autosomal ancestry informative markers (AIMs) are useful for inferring individual biogeographical ancestry (I-BGA) and admixture. Ancestry estimates obtained from Y and mtDNA are useful for reconstructing population expansions and migrations in our recent past but individual genomic admixture estimates are useful to test for association of admixture with phenotypes, as covariate in association studies to control for stratification and, in forensics, to estimate certain overt phenotypes from ancestry. We have developed a panel of 176 autosomal AIMs that can effectively distinguish I-BGA and admixture proportions from four continental ancestral populations: Europeans, West Africans, Indigenous Americans, and East Asians. We present allele frequencies for these AIMs in all four ancestral populations and use them to assess the global apportionment of I-BGA and admixture diversity among some extant populations. We observed patterns of apportionment similar to those described previously using sex and autosomal markers, such as European admixture for African Americans (14.3%) and Mexicans (43.2%), European (65.5%) and East Asian affiliation (27%) for South Asians, and low levels of African admixture (2.8-10.8%) mirroring the distribution of Y E3b haplogroups among various Eurasian populations. Using simulation studies and pedigree analysis we show that I-BGA estimates obtained using this panel and a four-population model has a high degree of precision (average root mean square error [RMSE]=0.026). Using ancestry-phenotype associations we demonstrate that a large and informative AIM panel such as this can help reduce false-positive and false-negative associations between phenotypes and admixture proportions, which may result when using a smaller panel of less informative AIMs. Hum Mutat 0, 1-11, 2008. (c) 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

PMID: 18286470 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]


Mainly, the paper seems to be pimping "ANCESTRYbyDNA™ 2.5" with information similar to that which has been provided on DNAprint's website for years. The supplementary pdf contains a list of the 176 "AIMs" and their allele frequencies for DNAprint's reference poulations, as well as the map above. (Notice the European American sample apparently has less admixture than the European reference sample and, especially, the southern European samples.)

N.B.: As far as I'm concerned, ABD is utterly useless for detecting or quantifying minor admixture in individuals.

See also: DNAprint patent application; John Chandler's analysis of said patent application; Frudakis' book Molecular Photofitting: Predicting Ancestry and Phenotype Using DNA.

Testosterone and Dominance in Men

This paper serves as a good introduction to the relevant literature, and offers a possible explanation for what black-white T differences may exist in the US (*):

8. HONOR SUBCULTURES

Nisbett (1993; Nisbett and Cohen 1996) has attributed the historically high violence in the American South, compared to the North, to its "culture of honor" whereby Southern men, when challenged by insults to themselves or their families, are required to defend themselves as virtuous warriors or else lose face. Apparently as a result, Southern men are unusually alert to possible insults, reacting dominantly -- sometimes violently -- to speech or actions that might not be perceived as injurious in other cultures.

Leaving aside the particular historic roots of the South, there may be a general hypersensitivity to insult in any subculture that is (or once was) organized around young men who are unconstrained by traditional community agents of social control, as often occurs in frontier communities, gangs, among vagabonds or bohemians, and after breakdowns in the social fabric following wars or natural disasters. When young men place special emphasis on protecting their reputations, and they are not restrained from doing so, dominance contests become ubiquitous, the hallmark of male-to-male interaction (Thrasher 1963, Sanchez-Jankowsky 1991).

The leading student of street behavior in America's inner cities, sociologist Elijah Anderson (1994), vividly portrays the importance of dominance contests and their constant presence for poor young black men:

[. . .]

We know from laboratory and athletic studies that T rises in men awaiting a contest, regardless of the eventual outcome of that contest. Generalizing to the street, hormone levels should be elevated in young men who are constantly vigilant against assaults on their reputations. Of course, T is also affected by the outcome of the contest, so persistent losers might be hormonally depressed, but most men -- those with mixed outcomes or better -- should have elevated T.

A caveat: Stressors such as weight loss, surgery, or military training sometimes depress T (Kreuz et al. 1972; Strauss et al. 1985; Booth et al. 1993). If all stressors depressed T, then the stressful challenges of inner-city street life should lower the hormone, not elevate it. However, not all stressors are the same, and social challenges in particular evoke hormonal responses different from those due to surgery or weight loss. Indeed, we have already seen that T reliably rises in the face of competitive challenges, even while cortisol (the "stress hormone") goes up as well (Booth et al. 1989; Elias 1981; Salvador et al. 1987; Gladue et al. 1989). Thus, stress effects do not negate the hypothesis that street challenges elevate male T.

We may use this hypothesis to interpret reported racial differences in T. A comparison of black and white boys aged 6 to 18 years, mostly preteens, showed no significant race difference in T (Richards et al. 1992). By adulthood, black males do have significantly higher T levels than white males (Ross et al. 1986; Ellis and Nyborg 1992), possibly reflecting the higher defensive demands on black men during young adulthood.

The data set used by Ellis and Nyborg (1992) came from 4,462 army veterans, ranging in age from 30 to 47, and permits a finer grain analysis (Mazur 1995). Among veterans older than the median age of 37 years -- too old to be involved in inner-city honor cultures -- the T of blacks is no higher than that of whites. Furthermore, among younger veterans who have gone to college -- and thus are unlikely to be inner-city residents -- there is no significant race difference in T. Only among younger veterans with little education do we find T in blacks to be unusually high, significantly higher than in whites. These younger black men, poorly educated, most of them urban residents, are most likely to participate in the honor subculture, and that may be the reason for their elevated T.

The reciprocal linkage between hormones and behavior suggests that if T levels among young men in the inner city are heightened by their constant defensive posture against challenge, then these high hormone levels in turn encourage further dominance contests. Feedback between challenge and T may create a vicious circle, sometimes with lethal effects.

[. . .]

A basal model is usually used in describing the causal effects of T on behavior, meaning that each man's T measurements represent short-term fluctuations around his characteristic basal level, which is genetically based, and that by adolescence or shortly afterward, this basal level is more or less consistent from year to year. Consistent with this model, reliabilities from r = .50 to .65 are reported for T measurements taken (at the same time of day to control for circadian variation) over periods ranging from days to six years (Booth and Dabbs 1993), showing that men with relatively high T at one time tend to be relatively high at other times too. On the assumption that basal hormone levels are consistent, they necessarily predate any post-adolescent behavior and so cannot be a consequence of that behavior. Furthermore, since basal levels are stable, it follows that they can be adequately measured at any time, whether before or after the behavior, and therefore can be adequately assessed in a cross-sectional study. Going further, basal hormone level is regarded as a prima facie cause of any post-adolescent behavior that it predicts, especially if the effect persists after controlling for alternate explanations.

We contrast the static basal model with a dynamic reciprocal model in which T and status competition influence one another, going up or down together. The observed reliability of a man's T measurements from year to year may reflect his stable social position rather than his genetically determined basal level. Current data are insufficient to choose one model over the other, so we regard both as viable and heuristically useful.

[. . .]

The reliable association of high T with antisocial behaviors, including marital disruption and violent criminality, raises an interesting puzzle. These negative behaviors foster downward social mobility. Under the basal model, which assumes T level to be a persistent trait, we should expect an accumulation of high T men in the lower ranks of society. Indeed, as we have noted, correlations between T and various measures of socioeconomic status (occupation, income, education) are significantly negative. But they are slight in magnitude. Thus, leaving aside honor subcultures, we find little concentration of men with high T in the lower classes. Why not? One possibility is that the downward flow of high T men who are antisocial is nearly balanced by an upward flow of high T men who are prosocial. This hypothetical stream of prosocial high-T men remains invisible to us, so far, perhaps because past studies have used as subjects mostly working class men or convicts, who have limited opportunities for legitimate advancement.

The nearly uniform distribution of T across social classes is less puzzling under the reciprocal model, which regards T as malleable rather than a stable personality trait. Again excepting honor subcultures, where challenges are exceptionally common, dominance contests probably occur nearly as frequently among elites as in the working class, as often in the boardroom as on the shop floor. Therefore, T responses to challenge, and to winning and losing, should be distributed fairly evenly across classes. Under this reciprocal model, we would expect little accumulation of T at the bottom levels of society.

The applicability of one model or the other would be elucidated by studying the relationship of T to behavior among upper class men who have favorable social opportunities and strong incentives for prosocial behavior.


(*) A more recent study shows higher T levels in Hispanics (not quite in keeping with Rushton's rule) with little black-white difference, as well as higher estrogen levels in blacks than whites [1]. And, as noted previously, Africans in Africa evidently have lower T than whites. Given these facts, I find Mazur's "honor subcultures" hypothesis entirely plausible.


[1] J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2007 Jul;92(7):2519-25. Epub 2007 Apr 24. Serum estrogen, but not testosterone, levels differ between black and white men in a nationally representative sample of Americans. Rohrmann S, Nelson WG, Rifai N, Brown TR, Dobs A, Kanarek N, Yager JD, Platz EA. http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/rapidpdf/jc.2007-0028v1.pdf

Salivary T levels markedly lower in African than "Western" males

Testosterone levels in saliva correlate well with serum testosterone levels [1, 2]. Studies show:

"among nomadic and settled Ariaal pastoralists of northern Kenya [. . .] salivary testosterone (T) levels (avg. am value = 176.8 +/- 74.8 pmol/l) were low compared to values from Western populations" [3]. A later study reports even lower levels among the Ariaal [4].

"in Harare, Zimbabwe [. . .] salivary T levels (AM = 196 +/- 96 pmol/l; pm = 172 +/- 98 pmol/l) were much lower [compared to 'Western populations']" [5].

Among men aged 15 to <30 years, mean salivary T for an American sample from Massachusetts is 335 pmol/l, compared to 286 pmol/l for the Congo sample [6].


[1] J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1981 Nov;53(5):1021-4. Salivary testosterone in men: further evidence of a direct correlation with free serum testosterone. Wang C, Plymate S, Nieschlag E, Paulse

[2] Clin Chim Acta. 1987 Mar 30;163(3):309-18. Direct assay for testosterone in saliva: relationship with a direct serum free testosterone assay. Johnson SG, Joplin GF, Burrin JM.

[3] Am J Hum Biol. 2003 Sep-Oct;15(5):697-708. Salivary testosterone and body composition among Ariaal males. Campbell B, O'Rourke MT, Lipson SF.

[4] Aging Clin Exp Res. 2006 Dec;18(6):470-6. Age-related patterns of body composition and salivary testosterone among Ariaal men of Northern Kenya. Campbell BC, Gray PB, Ellison PT.

[5] Am J Hum Biol. 2004 Nov-Dec;16(6):704-12. Testosterone, aging, and body composition in men from Harare, Zimbabwe. Lukas WD, Campbell BC, Ellison PT.

[6] Hum Reprod. 2002 Dec;17(12):3251-3. Population variation in age-related decline in male salivary testosterone. Ellison PT, Bribiescas RG, Bentley GR, Campbell BC, Lipson SF, Panter-Brick C, Hill K.

No significant difference in mean fundamental vocal frequencies of black and white men

Evidence exists for "a negative relationship between circulating levels of testosterone and fundamental frequency, with higher testosterone indicating lower fundamental frequency"[1]. Edward Miller argues:
Hudson & Holbrook (1982) found lower mean fundamental vocal frequencies in Negro males and females than others had found for whites. As is well known (and found by them), males display a lower frequency (deeper voice) than do females, and puberty deepens the male voice. This deepening is generally attributed to testosterone. The deeper Negro voice may reflect the influence of higher testosterone levels at puberty or prenatally.

More recent studies have failed to replicate the result cited by Miller. A study of "vocal productions of 44 Euro-American and 40 African-American elderly speakers" showed "Euro-American elderly speakers did not differ significantly from African-American elderly speakers on the measurements of all the selected acoustic parameters of voice [including fundamental frequency]"[2]. A study on age, height, and weight-matched samples of black and white adults detected no "significant mean differences between the African American and White speakers" in fundamental frequency[3]. A study on vocal samples of 50 black and 50 white men found "no significant differences in the mean fundamental frequency or formant structure of the voice samples"[4]. Though the difference is not statistically significant, the whites in this study registered a lower mean fundamental frequency than the blacks (107.55 Hz vs. 108.85 Hz).

The study cited by Miller compared data on blacks collected by the authors to data on whites collected by others, a potential source of error. The study's claim is not sustained by more recent, direct black-white comparisons, and can not be used to argue in favor of black-white differences in masculinization.

[1] Physiol Behav. 2007 Nov 29 [Epub ahead of print] The relationship between testosterone and vocal frequencies in human males. Evans S, Neave N, Wakelin D, Hamilton C.

[2] Percept Mot Skills. 2000 Dec;91(3 Pt 1):951-8. Effects of race and sex on acoustic features of voice analysis. Xue SA, Fucci D.

[3] J Voice. 1997 Dec;11(4):410-6. Aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics of the adult African American voice. Sapienza CM.

[4] J Speech Hear Res. 1994 Aug;37(4):738-45. Speaker race identification from acoustic cues in the vocal signal. Walton JH, Orlikoff RF.

Estimating Local Ancestry in Admixed Populations

Full text: http://ajhg.org/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297(08)00079-7

By the way:
Cell Press is proud to take over the publishing of The American Journal of Human Genetics from the University of Chicago Press. To facilitate the transition all content on the site will be freely available until April 2008. Members of The American Society of Human Genetics will be sent an email explaining how they can activate their online subscription in the middle of February.


The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 82, Issue 2, 290-303, 8 February 2008

Estimating Local Ancestry in Admixed Populations

Sriram Sankararaman1, Srinath Sridhar2, Gad Kimmel1 and Eran Halperin

Large-scale genotyping of SNPs has shown a great promise in identifying markers that could be linked to diseases. One of the major obstacles involved in performing these studies is that the underlying population substructure could produce spurious associations. Population substructure can be caused by the presence of two distinct subpopulations or a single pool of admixed individuals. In this work, we focus on the latter, which is significantly harder to detect in practice. New advances in this research direction are expected to play a key role in identifying loci that are different among different populations and are still associated with a disease. We evaluated current methods for inference of population substructure in such cases and show that they might be quite inaccurate even in relatively simple scenarios. We therefore introduce a new method, LAMP (Local Ancestry in adMixed Populations), which infers the ancestry of each individual at every single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). LAMP computes the ancestry structure for overlapping windows of contiguous SNPs and combines the results with a majority vote. Our empirical results show that LAMP is significantly more accurate and more efficient than existing methods for inferrring locus-specific ancestries, enabling it to handle large-scale datasets. We further show that LAMP can be used to estimate the individual admixture of each individual. Our experimental evaluation indicates that this extension yields a considerably more accurate estimate of individual admixture than state-of-the-art methods such as STRUCTURE or EIGENSTRAT, which are frequently used for the correction of population stratification in association studies.
[. . .]
The problem of inferring the population substructure is especially challenging when recently admixed populations are involved. In these populations (e.g., African Americans and Latinos), two or more ancestral populations have been mixing for a relatively small number of generations, resulting in a new population in which the ancestry of every individual can be explained by different proportions of the original populations. Because of recombination events, even within the DNA of a single individual, different regions of the genome could originate from different ancestral populations. This adds to the complexity of the problem of finding the ancestral information of an individual because in nonadmixed populations, the whole genome can be used as evidence for the population membership of an individual, whereas in the admixed case, the genome of each individual is fragmented into shorter regions of different ancestry. It is therefore challenging to find the ancestral information of these individuals and, in particular, to find the locus-specific ancestries.
[. . .]
Here, we propose a new method, LAMP (Local Ancestry in adMixed Populations), for de novo estimation of the locus-specific ancestry in recently admixed populations (see Figure 1). Our method is based on the observation that previous methods that use a Hidden Markov Model, or extensions of it, are set to infer a very large set of parameters, including the exact position of the recombination events, making the search over the parameter space infeasible. Instead, our method operates on sliding windows of contiguous SNPs. We first calculate an optimal window length. Next, we use a clustering algorithm that operates on these windows and estimates each individual's ancestry. We then use a majority vote for each SNP, over all windows that overlap with the SNP, in order to decide the most likely ancestral populations at the SNP. This simple approach has two advantages over previous ones. First, we show analytically that the estimates of the algorithm are asymptotically correct across the entire genome. Second, it optimizes fewer parameters than previous methods, and hence the optimization is much faster and more robust than previous methods.

We tested LAMP extensively on various datasets of admixed populations generated from the HapMap resource. Our simulations show that LAMP is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods such as SABER and STRUCTURE. In addition, LAMP is highly efficient, with a running time that is about 200 times faster than SABER and about 104 times faster than STRUCTURE. The efficiency of LAMP allows us to estimate ancestries across the genome in several hours on a single computer.

An additional advantage of LAMP is that unlike previous methods, such as SABER, it does not require the ancestral genotypes to infer the locus-specific ancestries (though it can take advantage of these, if available). This might be crucial when the ancestral genotypes cannot be typed or are unknown. For instance, if one studies the population genetics of populations in remote geographic locations where historical admixing has not been recorded, a method such as LAMP could be used to reveal such recent admixing. Furthermore, even in cases where the history of admixing is known, it is not always possible to genotype all the ancestral populations because some of the subpopulations have become extinct and some have entirely mixed with other populations. On the other hand, as genotypes of major population groups become available, it would be beneficial to use LAMP-ANC (ANC: ancestral), which can take advantage of the pure genotypes.

Surprisingly, we find that in many cases where LAMP does not receive the genotypes of the ancestral populations as input, it performs considerably better than SABER. In particular, on a simulated dataset of African Americans, when measuring the percentage of individuals that are predicted with an accuracy of at least 90%, LAMP achieves high accuracies on 90% of the individuals, whereas SABER and STRUCTURE achieve less than 10%.

Finally, we used LAMP to estimate the individual admixture and showed empirically that this results in much more accurate estimates than methods such as STRUCTURE12 or EIGENSTRAT.2 This reduction in errors might be used to considerably reduce the rate of spurious association results in disease association studies.
[. . .]
We have presented a new method, LAMP, for de novo estimation of locus-specific ancestry in recently admixed populations. Unlike previous methods for locus-specific ancestry (e.g., SABER), LAMP does not use any information about the ancestral populations (i.e., it estimates the ancestries de novo). We show that LAMP is analytically justified and that it achieves significant improvements over existing methods both in terms of accuracy of prediction and speed. In particular, LAMP can easily be applied to whole-genome datasets, and the resulting locus-specific ancestries can be estimated within a few hours.

De novo estimation of the locus-specific ancestries is sometimes infeasible, especially when the ancestral populations are very close to each other (e.g., CHB and JPT). We therefore extended LAMP to a method called LAMP-ANC, which uses additional genotypes from the ancestral populations as priors. This approach has been shown to be useful before by methods such as SABER.
[. . .]
Although LAMP relies on a knowledge of the parameters g and α, we have shown the robustness of the ancestry estimates to inaccuracies in these parameters. These parameters control the window size. As the window size is decreased, each window might contain fewer informative SNPs. On the other hand, errors in classifying individuals who have breakpoints within a window are reduced. This tradeoff is illustrated in Figure 7, where we see that the ancestry estimates are robust when g is overestimated. In practice, we would therefore recommend the use of an upper bound on g when g cannot be estimated accurately. Furthermore, g might actually be a more complex parameter—for example, if some portions of the admixed population have admixed for g1 generations and other portions have been admixed for only g2 generations, where g2 is smaller than g1. In this case, g is set to be g1, and more accurate results are expected than if the whole population has admixed for exactly g1 generation.
[. . .]
A simple extension to LAMP can be used to infer the individual admixture. As we show here, the resulting estimates of the individual admixture are considerably better than the estimates achieved by STRUCTURE or EIGENSTRAT. A number of recent studies have produced panels of AIMs in admixed populations;33, 34, 35, 36 AIMs are SNPs that have differing frequencies in the ancestral populations. It is possible that the AIMs might be used to improve the accuracy of individual admixture prediction done by STRUCTURE or other methods, including LAMP. However, the AIMs have disadvantages because there is a risk of over fitting, and the studied population might be somewhat different than the population for which the AIMs were found. As we show here, in an era where the genotyping technology is getting cheaper, it is useful to use the entire set of genotyped SNPs in the analysis of population stratification.

Ernst Mayr on getting American citizenship

When the war was ended I immediately said again to the naturalisation people "Now I want to have my citizenship," and they delayed it, and - there was several things happened during that time also. For instance, there were two people who were my sponsors. One of the was Professor Schraeder [of the Department of Zoology, Columbia University], whom you know of course, and - because he lived in the same town of Tenafly, and he asked the agents one, one day, he said "Well why don't you let Mayr, lift all these things, restrictions on him, he's as good an American as any of us?" And this agent said "Well, if he was a baker or butcher or some tradesman like that, that's what we would do. But we don't trust these intellectuals." And then, I say something which is the honest truth and it may be held against me when I say it now; my colleague Robert Cushman Murphy went down to the naturalisation office in New York and he complained. This was already 1946 or 1947, several years after the end of the war and said "What is holding it up?" And that office at that time was entirely staffed to the last man by Jewish agents, and one of them said to Murphy "As long as we are here, no God damn German is going to be naturalised." Now, this is an important thing to know because many people in America know that such things happen all over the world, but of course they couldn't happen possibly in America. Well, this has happened in America. I finally had to sue the naturalisation service for citizenship and I came to court case and I had to submit, my wife and I had to submit fifty statements from various American citizens among whom were, I think, seventeen Jewish friends of ours, saying that we were perfectly good material for citizenship and there was no reason to hold it up any longer. And finally we got - we got it in 1950, too late to go to the Upsala Congress and the office, the naturalisation office with these particular agents, urged me to go to Upsala on a German passport, and I said that's all they want in order to stamp again and say "See, he's used the German passport to travel. See, how much of a American citizen he is." And so I couldn't go to the Congress because it might have again jeopardised my becoming an American citizen. I'm glad I had an opportunity now to say all this, I have never said this in public before, but all these facts can be checked in official documents, and we - neither my wife nor I ? My younger brother for instance, when the Nazis came to power was immediately dismissed and put in the army, there wasn't anybody in my family who was a Nazi. I had been fighting with Nazis when I was a student, so there was no justification for this treatment.

[Source: http://www.peoplesarchive.com/browse/movies/3254/en/]


Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany – February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

Dumbest argument against McCulloch ever

Award goes to TGGP:

Judging by his last name I am likely more related to Richard McCulloch, but despite that and the Anglophile mild bigotry I share with John Derbyshire (even against my own Catholic Irish ancestors, though it is fading with my old Whigness), I’ll have to side with Torrianni and Rienzi. McCulloch’s main problem with Southern Europeans (Torrianni uses the term IIB, or Italian-Iberian-Balkan) is that they will breed with Northern Europeans and bring about the extinction of the more distinctive types. As someone who agrees with Assman [= rajiv's girlish, semi-Mongoloid side-kick "agnostic", who writes, evidently in total seriousness: "Ground zero for hotness, in my book, is Iran."] that the world-center of hotness is nearer to the Mediterranean than Sweden (though I’m open to women of all races and willing to prove it on camera given a suitably pun-filled title), I find his restrictions unacceptable.


Forgive me for suspecting TGGP, along with his fellow GNXPers, is in little danger of reproducing. Don't worry TGGP--I don't think McCulloch's plan includes confiscation of your jack-off material.

Though I’m a big proponent of secession and panarchy/intentional communities (which seasteading should help if it works out) racial separatists often seem to ignore how marginal their viewpoint is and don’t consider the fact that there will be a lot of white people like me who want to live in mixed areas. I want them to leave, and I’d like the option to leave, but I don’t want to be forced to leave with them.


Better argument than "I loves me some airbrushed nekkid photos of Maria Cuccinota so McCulloch is wrong"; but, in point of fact:

(1) McCulloch is well-aware of the present state of public opinion (can TGGP point to any racialist or racial separatist who is not?):
In classical drama a tragedy is the downfall or destruction of a great person, or a great people, often caused by a fatal flaw in themselves, as they can only really be destroyed by themselves, by self-destruction. So it is with the Northern European or Nordish peoples. A dominant ideology and value system that is profoundly anti-Nordish in the most extreme sense -- being against the very existence of the Nordish race -- has turned the Nordish peoples against their race and its interests, co-opting their support for their own destruction.


McCulloch believes "Nordish peoples' support for -- or lack of active opposition to -- multiracialism is largely based on ignorance". He seeks to raise awareness about the consequences of multiracialism and provide an alternative:

We must give the Nordish peoples something to be for and work for -- a credible, meaningful and preferable alternative to multiracialism that will save their race. The Nordish peoples must know they have choices, and be fully informed about the consequences of those choices. We must offer them the choice of racial preservation through the restoration of the racial environment they require for their continued existence. Exposing the racially terminal consequences of multiracialism explains the problem, describes the disease, but does not provide a solution or a cure. The alternative provides the solution, the cure, that will save the Nordish race. With an alternative there is hope. Without an alternative there is only despair. Hope inspires and encourages action. Despair demoralizes and discourages action. As important as it is for the Nordish peoples to know what they should be against, it is even more important for them to know what they should be for, to have something to be for, to have a goal, to have a dream.


On the essential issues--multiracialism threatens the continued existence of Northern Europeans; long-term racial survival requires geographic separation / territorial integrity--McCulloch is unassailable. The details of his proposed partition of the US matter little, for now.

(2) Continuing residential segregation along racial lines (including by those who disavow racialism) suggests most whites don't want to live in mixed areas. Whites already vote with their feet to live among their own. Nor are "Nordish" Americans scrambling to move to Bensonhurst or Staten Island. In my experience, most do not share your predilection for "Med" women; and, of those who do, I suspect most would still choose a prosperous, well-governed, homogeneously Northern European nation over Brazil.

Ancestries of various US political figures

Here. On Dubya:
The ethnic/national ancestry of George Walker Bush (as far as is currently known) can be shown as:

       39.099 121 093 75  %     English
25.585 937 5 % Unknown (presumably English)
12.109 375 % German
4.687 5 % Unknown (presumably German)
3.906 25 % Unknown
3.747 558 593 75 % Welsh
3.173 828 125 % Irish
2.075 195 312 5 % French
1.660 156 25 % Scottish
1.562 5 % Italian
0.781 25 % Unknown (presumably Scottish)
0.732 421 875 % Dutch
0.390 625 % Moravian
0.390 625 % Unknown (presumably Swedish)
0.048 828 125 % Belgian
0.048 828 125 % Swedish
===================================================
100.0 %

In honor of Black History Month

Black invention myths (in case of exceeded bandwidth: cache, archive.org):

Perhaps you've heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted but could hardly imagine life without.

Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history. Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there's no real evidence it was ever used.

Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too long, they begin to eclipse the truth. Thus I decided to put some records straight. Although this page does not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there, it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim for granted.

Spencer Wells and Will Self

Mildly interesting exchange, with the expected PC commonplaces on Wells' part.
WS: Do you think that we are in a race against time here? Do you think there are major questions to be answered?

SW: I do. The diversity of humanity is being subsumed into this global monoculture, if you will. Within the next few generations the genes will still be there, but they will be all mixed up and they will have no context. Socially, I think it's possibly a very good thing. But it just means that we're going to have erased who we are genetically, these patterns of variation that are relatively recent in the grand scheme of things.

Good for whom?

WS: In your book, you couldn't avoid a note of wistfulness. That's something that I've encountered in other people that write and think deeply about prehistory, a wistfulness about the hunter-gatherer period, about the late Paleolithic.

SW: Oh, absolutely, yes. Noble savages. That's actually the subject of my next book.

WS: Is it?

SW: Yeah, it's all about the changes that have happened since the development of agriculture and how, even from the very beginning, they seemed to be bad for us. Anyone who has spent time with hunter-gatherers—have you ever spent time with the San Bushmen, or any of these other groups?

[. . .]

WS: This hand axe is a beautiful piece of work to me in terms of its adaptation. There are some theorists of the Paleolithic who view these other hominid species as being more technically expert than we perhaps might imagine. I wonder about their demise in that sense—and I suppose it wouldn't be called genocide, but perhaps specicide, in this context.

SW: Call it genocide if you want. But I don't think it was something that we set out to do, in the case of the Neanderthals. It's just that they were perhaps better adapted to forested countryside, which is what Europe was until the worst part of the last Ice Age when the grasslands really came in and the tundra moved south. We were better adapted to living in open country and we had larger group sizes and better hunting techniques that had probably been developed on the steppes of central Asia, among other places. We just out‑competed them.

WS: There was a strong inclination towards speciation among humans, but we now have to reassert our connection with nature and the environment at the end of millennia and millennia of doing exactly the opposite. Those Neanderthals have nothing to do with us.

SW: Well it's a generalized xenophobia, to recognize things that are like us, and are, therefore, to be trusted. It's scary to think that might have been something that we've been adapting to do, for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly, it's not a good thing. How do you get past that in this modern world?

WS: But it is a paradox, isn't it, if we're going to be attracted to the other to the extent that it's no longer the other? With the level of miscegenation that we have at the moment, the other isn't going to look like the other anymore.

SW: Eventually, we will all look much more like Tiger Woods, perhaps.

WS: Yeah, then these key markers of who we once were will be eradicated.

SW: Then we'll develop new ones.

WS: It seems to me that humanness has been a question of refinement.

SW: That's the way evolution works. You don't typically have a revolution, you have slow changes, and evolution tinkers with what you have available.

In reality, within the "next few generations" anyway, there is no chance of any significant fraction of the projected two billion sub-saharan Africans or billions of Asians looking "much more like Tiger Woods". Only the West is threatened in this experiment. And even in the West, Wells' outcome is hardly inevitable.

One wonders how Wells reconciles his belief that miscegenation is "possibly a very good thing" socially with his acknowledgment that new group identifiers will always arise. Why not accept human nature now and structure society accordingly?

WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the imminent extinction of the chimpanzee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philosophically queasy moments. But I don't think people have reckoned on it at all.

SW: Any extinction, but particularly chimpanzees.

WS: Particularly the chimp, surely.

SW: It's the finality of it and the notion that, "These are our cousins, and we're the ones who caused their demise."

WS: Isn't it also like kicking out the ladder beneath us? The connection is then gone between us and the rest of the natural world in a really profound way.

SW: Yes, but we've done that before—we did it with Neanderthals.

WS: Yes, we've done it before.

SW: We seem to have no qualms about doing things like that. We're very good destroyers, as well as creators.

WS: I think, I can't remember the figure, but there are something like only 150,000 chimpanzees left in the wild?

SW: And fewer orangutans.

WS: And fewer mountain gorillas. But if they were allowed to get on with it now, they would be fine.

SW: If we set aside the territory, yeah. It's really that simple. It's just like hunter-gatherer human populations. All they need is to be left alone with enough territory and they will be fine.

Yes, Spencer, it really is that simple.

Understanding Human History

Book by Michael Hart: PDF (free, full text). Blog.