Jamie Johnson on "WASP" ethnocentrism

I managed to read a few of Jamie Johnson's blog posts. Here are some highlights.

Being a Wasp myself, and having grown up around people like the gentleman I mention above, I have heard many of them complain about their diminishing influence from the previous generation to the present. In private, many of them go beyond declaring that the establishment is dead as a way of expressing disappointment over their losses. They say things they shouldn’t, things that reveal a rather troubling independent identity and a deep-rooted sense of superiority. The recent renaming of the New York Public Library for Blackstone Group C.E.O. Stephen Schwarzman is something that caused quite a hidden stir within certain Wasp circles, but I will address that issue more specifically in future dispatches.

["The Decline of the Wasp Establishment"]


“It is an act of the worst kind of buffoonery. Schwarzman is horrid.”

This statement was made to me by a member of New York’s Protestant establishment in reference to the renaming of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street after Stephen A. Schwarzman, C.E.O. of The Blackstone Group, a private equity company. In March news broke that Mr. Schwarzman had agreed to lead the library’s current fundraising campaign by pledging a $100 million gift—the largest the institution has ever received. In recognition, the library announced, his name would be would be carved onto the exterior of the lion-guarded building.

Within senior Wasp circles, Schwarzman and the distinction he has received for his gift have set off a great deal of concealed outrage. [. . .]

Old-guard Wasps appear to feel threatened by the newly rich and their growing influence around the city, and dismiss new money as “tasteless and gauche.” When discussing vastly rich people who are Jewish, it is not uncommon for them to use anti-Semitic slurs.

“Come on, though, it’s not Wasps giving Jews a bad name, it’s Jews giving Jews a bad name,” one said. Another told me, “The Astors knew to put their name on the inside. It’s good taste, that’s the difference between old and new.” [. . . ]

The comments reveal the extent to which elitism, and, even more disturbingly, anti-Semitism still exist in certain quarters of Wasp society. [. . .]

Eric Richman (35), a successful attorney and New York social fixture who counts the great-grandchildren of William Randolph Hearst and the children of Saul Steinberg among his many friends, was quick to tell me that ” I don’t think about it, being Jewish doesn’t come up when I’m around my Waspy friends.” But as our discussion continued, he remembered an awkward incident he had had with one of his closest friends (a Wasp). They were out drinking and once they had gotten a little drunk they started to talk about religion. He recalls a moment when the tenor of their conversation changed and his friend looked at him and said, “what’s interesting about you is that you have no idea how much we really hate you.” Eric told me that it was probably intended to be a joke, “yet there was something in it that seemed like a real residual sentiment. After a few drinks, it came out.”

["Wasps Stung over Renaming of the N.Y.P.L."]


There is an old line that Wasps use when joking around in private about the exclusivity of their clubs. One member will say to another, “What do you mean we don’t have any diversity here? There are plenty of Catholic members.” I’ve heard the line delivered a number of different ways, but most people who use it go on to attribute it to the president of their particular club. It’s something of an urban myth. Wasps at dozens of clubs all claim the line as their own, proudly asserting that it was originally employed by their president in reference to their club.

I’ve always felt that the line, and especially the strong desire to take credit for it, reveal the extreme degree to which Wasps like to distinguish themselves from others. Wasp culture is obsessed with exclusivity and defining distinctions in order to support a sense of superiority. [. . .]

Wasps have even developed their own code words to help differentiate themselves from non-Wasps while at the same time avoiding accusations of classism or bigotry. Some of the terms are appropriated from elite British culture, but the origins of others are difficult to determine.

Acronyms like N.O.C.D. and P.L.U. are used to mean Not Our Class, Dear and People Like Us. W.O.G. refers to Wealthy Oriental Gentleman or Wise Oriental Gentleman, depending on whom you ask for a definition. “Hawaiian,” “Canadian,” and “Eskimo” all have special meaning as well. I was told by one Palm Beach resident that Hawaiian refers to anyone who pronounces the phrase “how are you” as “how ahhh yaaa” (they are howahhhyaaa-n, or Hawaiian). Another Wasp told me that, at the establishment-incubating St. Paul’s School in the early 1960s, Hawaiian was used to refer to anyone who was considered “trash.” To say that someone is Canadian can mean that they are Jewish, and Eskimo that they are African American [Note: this is backwards].

Insider terms like these are dying out quickly in the Protestant establishment, but they continue to represent the unfortunate historical tendency of Wasps to deliberately exclude people on economic, religious, and racial grounds.

["The 'Diversity' of Wasp Clubs"]

And returning to the topic of "WASP" decline:

When I asked her what reasons were behind the change, she told me that she couldn’t be sure. She said that social changes are hard to perceive as they are happening. She also told me that she believes the break-up of the Protestant establishment took many of its affluent members by surprise. “People weren’t so aware of it, and then, bang, there it was.”

Oatsie’s grandson, Nicholas Mele, 25, who was on hand when I spoke with his grandmother, told me that he wasn’t exactly sure either what caused the collapse of the Wasp establishment, but he felt certain that it had eroded. Nicholas grew up in what has traditionally been considered the center of the Wasp world. He attended Phillips Academy Andover boarding school and spent summers in Newport, Rhode Island. Now, though, he sees those places “only as time capsules.” Nicholas currently lives in New York and notices few remnants of the Wasp establishment. Other than a few friends he knew as a kid, he doesn’t encounter affluent Wasps in Manhattan. “Being pretty or having a great career matters today in New York,” he says, “but not being a Wasp.”

["Oatsie Charles Recalls the Wasp Heyday"]

"WASP" decline: two more data points

Upper-class twit Jamie Johnson (maker of the film Born Rich and a painful-to-read blog at Vanity Fair) says "WASPs" remain "prejudiced":

IS: Books and articles on the “decline of the WASP” have practically become a cottage industry, and that’s part of what you cover in your column. What are your thoughts on this?

JJ: I think we’ve been witnessing the end of WASP ascendancy for a while. It’s true that WASPs have less power with each passing decade since the ’50s. Part of it is their own fault, because their exclusive social practices have limited them. They haven’t brought in fresh talent and ideas, and been able to maintain their influence. Both the decline and what still remains equally fascinate me. And there are people I know who’ve had much more WASPy upbringings than I did.

IS: What are the degrees of WASPiness in one’s upbringing?

JJ: I mean that I had some outside influences. If you are raised in an affluent WASPy household, and you don’t interact with anyone who isn’t a part of that community, your upbringing is more WASPy. And there are some people who don’t want to interact with anyone who isn’t Protestant Old Money.

IS: How much of the old WASP prejudices still exist?

JJ: They still exist. They’re acknowledged less and less, and are certainly stated less and less, but it’s definitely a community that still holds prejudices. That’s how you’re raised. Exclusivity has been such a part of the WASP world for so long it’s impossible not to take impressions from it.

I consider the theory that "WASPs" declined in influence because they were too "exclusive" (essentially a rehashing of Baltzell's argument) so ridiculous it needs no refutation. Did the existence of exclusively Jewish institutions hinder the ascent of Jews?

IS: And what of the virtues still remain? Are young people still raised to hold things like ostentation and naked ambition in contempt, and to appreciate understatement, have a moral sense, and feel an obligation for civic duty?

JJ: I think those values still exist. There is definitely a preference for understatement, and people encourage subtlety and a less ostentatious way of living.

IS: Your film includes Ivanka Trump, and the Trump family isn’t exactly known for subtlety.

JJ: But I think WASPs are behind the times in that regard. There’s nothing wrong with subtlety, but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with self-promotion. Times have changed, that’s why you don’t see that many WASPs involved in the highest ranks of government, business and culture. They’re hanging on to values that are irrelevant in the modern world.

Now we're getting closer to the truth. Membership in the modern corporate and political elite selects for values that are antithetical to those traditionally professed by "WASPs".

On a related note, a VDARE reader points out "Blue-Eyed Bankers Left Wall Street Long Ago":

For years, blue eyes have been very out of fashion on Wall Street to the point of obvious and systemic discrimination.

During the era I lived in Manhattan, the overwhelming ethnic profile of banking and the New York Mayor's office Manhattan was "Mediterranean White." This extended to Washington D.C. appointments, some of whom came from those communities.

The reader also points to an article by Jim Cramer, "Wrong! That's Not Blue Blood Running Morgan Stanley.":

Last I looked, Lloyd Blankfein, Richard Fuld, Stan O'Neal, Jimmy Cayne and Sandy Weill weren't Skull-and-Bones guys. I mean, what is Hatch thinking? The only place where there was even a hint of blue blood the whole time I worked on Wall Street was at Morgan, and that got swept away years ago. The Bones types are in the White House, but they aren't on Wall Street.

This amazing observation from a well-intentioned Senator comes at a time when still one more non-blueBlood, Joe Perella, joins perennial non-blueblood Vikram Pandit in exiting the firm.

We are reviled for much on Wall Street, but one thing we are pretty good at is having a meritocracy of numbers. You deliver numbers no matter what race, color or creed you are moving up on Wall Street. You blow the numbers away, you are king. You mess up on the numbers, you are supposed to be gone.

And that's the true irony in this Morgan Stanley story. The guys departing Morgan Stanley now aren't Bones types at all. They left long ago. The guys departing now are the numbers guys. That's the real irony.

Too bad that Hatch doesn't spend some time on Wall Street. I think he would be shocked. It looks a lot more like Main Street than, say, Pennsylvania Avenue. And that's a good thing.

"Nordic diet" superior to Mediterranean

Telegraph.co.uk: "Olive oil, vegetables, citrus fruit and unrefined cereals from the Mediterranean may be replaced in slimmers' shopping baskets by Scandinavian rapeseed oil, elk and berries such as cowberries and cloudberries."

The Mediterranean diet – one of the leading eating plans for the past 20 years – is facing competition from the "Nordic diet", which, scientists are finding, could be significantly healthier. [. . .]

Trina Hahnemann, a Danish chef who recently published The Scandinavian Cookbook, added that in many parts of Scandinavia and Britain, traditional diets had been abandoned in favour of foods from Italy and Spain.

She said: "I think that people have lost their food culture and forgotten about how foods suited to northern climates can be healthy.

"In Britain you have a lot of kale, but almost no one realises that you can eat it raw like lettuce and it is very nutritious."

Misc. links

John Hawks on Nazi aurochs breeding experiment

Peter Frost mentions a racially-segregated Egyptian cemetery

Silver's "cool new blog"

FlowingData: Ethnic background of New York street vendors, 1925 vs. 2005

"WASP" decline: two papers

Kaufmann, Eric. "The Decline of the WASP?: Anglo-Protestant Ethnicity and the American Nation-State" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, Sep 01, 2005 . 2009-02-05 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p40195_index.html>

This paper argues that the United States possessed a dominant ethnic group or 'core ethnie' (Smith 1986; 1991) like most European and Asian nations. This ethnie was intimately linked to the nation's identity. This WASP (or Anglo-Protestant) ethnic group went into decline largely because it failed to continue processes of Anglo-conformity and immigration restriction which were integral to the maintenance of its hegemony. Reform originated largely within the WASP community among religious and secular liberals in the first half of the 20th c., which facilitated external challenges from subaltern groups.

Wright, Theodore. "The Identity and Changing Status of Former Elite Minorities: the Contrasting cases of North Indian Muslims and American WASPS" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, Sep 01, 2005 . 2009-02-05 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p40194_index.html>

My paper, unlike the others on this panel, approaches the subject of “core ethnic groups” comparatively. My research focus for forty-five years has been not on my own ascribed identity group, the so-called White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) of North America, but on the 12% of the post-independence population of India who are Muslims by religion, whom I have categorized as a “former elite minority”. (1) The comparison occurred to me at the time of the publication of Peter Schrag’s “Decline of the WASP” (2) and several other popular books with the same theme. It explained why I found attractive a group generally viewed unsympathetically by upwardly mobile academics as “oppressors” of minorities. Other examples of this type are the Manchus of China, the Tatars in Russia, former European colonists in Kenya and Algeria, the Afrikaners of South Africa since 1994, the Watutsi of Rwanda and the Arabs of Zanzibar; Fijians and Maoris in Oceania, in Latin America possibly one could count the Spanish-descended Creoles after the Mestizos seized power from them; in North America the French-Canadians; and in Europe the Anglo-Irish and the various German, Hungarian and Turkish communities which were left outside of their former homelands by defeat and boundary changes after the two world wars, most noteably including the Sudeten Germans until their expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1945.

In terms of Richard Schermerhorn’s (3) fourfold typology of ethnicities within a matrix of power and numbers: dominant majorities, dominant elites, subordinate mass subjects and subordinate minorities, these groups have slipped by loss of political dominance from Schermerhorn’s “dominant elite” to his “subordinate minority”. [. . .]

I'm not overly impressed with either paper, though Kaufmann's at least offers a reasonable framework for further discussion. The Wright paper sounds interesting enough in concept but descends into conflating the blending of NW European ethnies among old-stock Americans with interracial marriage, and bizarrely arguing "WASPs" will maintain dominance by mixing themselves out of existence.

More data on racial mixing

In reply to an email I received on this topic.

Consider age

To what extend are bright women opting to have black babies rather that
pursue education?

You're claiming these are "low quality" women.

That is NOT obvious.

It's true that controlling for age will reduce the gap in educational attainment, but it makes no sense to control for age unless you can give me some reason to believe girls who become pregnant at young ages are as intelligent as those who don't (nevermind more intelligent!). Everything I've read and observed leads me to believe this is not the case. I believe younger mothers tend to be less intelligent and women who reproduce with blacks at any given age are less intelligent than those who reproduce with whites, and the numbers line up with this:

For Non-Hispanic White mothers (of white vs. mulatto children) aged 20-24:
Less than HS: 16.7% vs. 21.2%
B.A. or higher: 7.0% vs. 3.2%

For Non-Hispanic White mothers (of white vs. mulatto children) aged 25-29:
Less than HS: 5.7% vs. 11.8%
B.A. or higher: 37% vs. 16.2%

For Non-Hispanic White mothers (of white vs. mulatto children) aged 30-34:
Less than HS: 2.8% vs. 6.8%
B.A. or higher: 54.2% vs. 30.5%

We are seeing is the less bitchy, more compliant women get grabbed by
blacks -- basically the women that are susceptable to indoctrination.

Along with thousands of other variables, NLSY97 contains information on respondents' sexual partners, including race. What do we find when we compare white females who report black sexual partners to those who don't?

The former are fatter (mean BMI: 27.8 vs. 25.4), dumber (median ASVAB math/verbal percentile: 52.2 vs. 61.1), and bitchier. According to self-ratings, they are more quarrelsome:
3.72 vs. 3.84 (where 1 means quarrelsome and 5 means agreeable)

More difficult:
2.38 vs. 2.13 (where 1 means cooperative and 5 means difficult)

More stubborn:
3.22 vs. 2.84 (where 1 means flexible and 5 means stubborn)

Less dependable:
1.73 vs. 1.60 (where 1 means dependable and 5 means undependable)

They're also more likely to report they lie or cheat (lie or cheat only sometimes: 60.3% vs. 45.3%; lie or cheat often: 5.8% vs. 3.0%)

Those with mulatto children are even fatter (mean BMI: 29), dumber (median ASVAB math/verbal percentile: 45.9) and as bitchy or bitchier on the metrics mentioned above.


Looking at data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which followed a different cohort, results are similar. White females who have ever had a black sexual partner are fatter (mean BMI: 28.8 vs. 26.2) and less intelligent (median ADD HEALTH Picture Vocabulary Test score: 99 vs. 105).

As rated by interviewers, they are less attractive (3.29 vs. 3.63, where 1 = very unattractive and 5 = very attractive) and have less attractive personalities (3.53 vs. 3.77) and worse grooming (3.31 vs. 3.61). Unsurprisingly, they are more likely to test positive for sexually transmitted diseases (4.3% vs. 1.8% for chlamydia; 7.2% vs. 1.0% positive for trichomoniasis).

Incidentally, they also have darker hair on average, refuting the fiction promoted by Jewish pornographers and sexually-frustrated Meds that blondes are particularly apt to mix with blacks. The percent of white females in this sample who report any black sex partner, by hair color:
Black 8.2%
Brown 5.0%
Blond 3.9%
Red 3.9%

Some clues about the sensitivity of 23andMe's ancestry analysis

23andMe labs recently added a "Native American Ancestry Finder":

Do you have Native American Ancestry? This feature scans a person's Ancestry Painting for distinctive signatures that indicate a Native American ancestor up to five generations in the past. It also takes into account the maternal and, if available, paternal lines, looking for Native American ancestry at any depth along those two branches of the family tree.

The "five generations" number is the minimum number of generations, based on 23andMe's simulations, after which any trace of American Indian ancestry may fall below the threshold of detection.

How can we be sure this person has no genetically Native American ancestors in the past five generations, and what Is the likelihood prior to that?

To address this question we start with the observation that people who identify themselves as Native American exhibit fairly consistent Ancestry Painting proportions of about 75% Asian and 25% European, plus or minus 10%. The reason: Native Americans descend from a small number of people who crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia more than 14,000 years ago. In Ancestry Painting, Siberians and people from many other central and northern Asian locales tend to have a roughly three-to-one proportion of Asian to European DNA simply because they lie geographically and thus genetically intermediate between the Asian reference population, which consists of Japanese and Han Chinese individuals, and the European reference population, which consists of Americans of northern European descent.

Next we consider what would happen to that three-to-one Asian/European proportion over the generations if a Native American and a partner of all-European descent had a child who then reproduced with another all-European partner, and so on. In such a case, the amount of Asian DNA in each successive generation's Ancestry Painting would necessarily diminish, until at some point it disappeared altogether.

To get an empirical idea of how this process works, we created simulated Ancestry Paintings for 1,000 people with one Native American and one European parent, then 1,000 people with one Native American parent and three European grandparents, and so on down the line. Then we ran all these simulated individuals through Ancestry Painting, and looked at the range of Asian and European DNA percentages for each kind of relationship. (We also looked at the African percentages for these simulations, but those were nearly always zero, or a trace at most.)

We found that it takes at least five generations after the appearance of a Native American for the percentage of Asian (orange) DNA to reach zero. So we're able to say with confidence that a person with an all-European Ancestry Painting (actually, 99.74% European or greater) did not have any genetically Native American ancestors in the past five generations.

Since the promised white paper on Ancestry Painting has yet to appear, this seems to be the best information available on the accuracy and precision of 23andMe's admixture analysis. Presumably, Asian and particularly African ancestors would be detectable even farther back.

Natality data / rates of cross-racial breeding

Lenny asked for statistics on interbreeding (as opposed to just intermarriage/dating). Based on my analysis of the 2005 Natality Detail File [1]:

Of 2280259 children born to Non-Hispanic White women, the racial breakdown of fathers is roughly:
89.23% Non-Hispanic White
5.46% Hispanic
3.18% Non-Hispanic Black
2.13% Non-Hispanic Other Races

Of approximately 2217946 children fathered by Non-Hispanic White men, the racial breakdown of mothers is around:
92.76% Non-Hispanic White
4.12% Hispanic
0.96% Non-Hispanic Black
2.17% Non-Hispanic Other Races

These numbers are not inconsistent with the facts in my previous post: lower-quality women, who are more likely to engage in miscegenation, also unfortunately account for a disproportionate share of births [2].

For white mothers with Bachelor's degrees or above, the father is white in 94+% of cases. For married white mothers, the father is white 93% of the time. The educational breakdown of white mothers of white children vs. white mothers of mulatto children:

Less than HS: 9.1% vs. 19%
HS grad. or GED: 23.5% vs. 35.5%
Some college: 21.1% vs. 24.6%
Associate degree: 9.6% vs. 7.2%
Bachelor's degree or above: 36.3% vs. 13.1%

Education levels of white women who breed with Hispanics are similar to those of white women who mate with blacks.

So, on a positive note, while interbreeding will contribute to a reduction in the number of whites in America, it may slow the dysgenic decline of the whites who remain.


[1] "The public-use Natality Detail Files include all births occurring within the United States. Births occurring to United States citizens outside the United States are not part of these files. Data are obtained from certificates filed for births occurring in each state."

2005 is the most recent year for which this data is available. Race of father is "unknown or unstated" for about 9.6% of births to white mothers (the fraction is larger for most other groups). In the overwhelming majority of cases, when the race of the father is unknown or unstated, the mother is unmarried. My estimates assume the racial breakdown of fathers in these cases follows that for unmarried mothers of a given race where race of father is reported. Since about 10% of white mothers where the race of the father is not reported are married, and because I have ignored the (small number of) mothers with race unknown or unstated, the numbers I post above probably slightly overstate rates of interbreeding for white women and understate numbers for white men.

[2] E.g.:

In a 1988 study, Retherford and Sewell examined the association between the measured intelligence and fertility of over 9,000 high school graduates in Wisconsin in 1957, and confirmed the inverse relationship between IQ and fertility for both sexes, but much more so for females.[9]

In a 1999 study Richard Lynn examined the relationship between the intelligence of adults aged 40 and above and their numbers of children and their siblings. Data were collected from the 1994 National Opinion Research Center survey among a representative sample of 2992 English-speaking individuals aged 18 years. Findings revealed that weak negative correlations of -0.05 and -0.09, respectively were found. Further analysis showed that the negative correlation was present only in females.

Also likely contributing to the lower interbreeding rate by white men: the U.S. Hispanic population contains significantly fewer females than males.

# Sex Ratio (Males per 100 Females) in 2000
* Latino Foreign-Born (113)/Native-Born (100)
* Mex. Foreign-Born (126)/Native-Born (102)
* U.S. Population (96)
* U.S. Non-Latino White (96)

Laughing at GNXPers

Beyond parody -- quarter-Mongoloid GNXP-poster/child-predator "agnostic" tells how he badly intimidated a member of the least athletically-talented race on the planet by showing off his dance skills:

Last night was the first time I nearly got into a fight since... probably elementary school. Some dude and I were walking past each other in a not-so-crowded night club, and he bumped me with his shoulder. Not a body-check, but enough for me to have to respond -- you never let another guy touch you without touching back. [. . .]

Now we've both turned around to face each other and size one another up. He was about 3 inches taller than me, probably 40 - 50 pounds heavier, mesomorphic shape, and probably 5 - 8 years younger. He was South Asian [. . .]

With the energy high I was on, and having warmed up long before and already gotten into high gear, I could have easily jumped and planted my knees in that guy's gut 10 times in under 5 seconds. Shit, I could have climbed the walls if I wanted to. To signal this to him, I simply showed off my dancing skills, moving my whole body, taking up a lot of space, and making explosive moves with my limbs. Luckily, "Thriller" had just come on, so it was simple to get into the groove here.

He was very pissed off and stared at me for the better part of the song, and was talking to his buddy as well. Again, if sheer strength were all that mattered, he would've quickly moved in and started a fight. But by displaying my own physical prowess, albeit of a different type than his, as well as signaling emotional coolness (with a confident smile) and high status (by taking up lots of space without being encroached on), I shut him down.

Expect the above-cited post to disappear eventually (as agnostic's hilarious self-portraits and fashion advice previously have).

On the subject of the least athletically-talented race on the planet, "Junior Unz Fellow" Newamul "razib" Khan gives a fair impression of Paul Reubens during a mediocre interview of Greg Cochran.

Are the alleged remains of Johann Sebastian Bach authentic?

This group claims probably not:

Med J Aust. 2009 Feb 16;190(4):213-6

Authors: Zegers RH, Maas M, Koopman AT, Maat GJ

A skeleton alleged to be that of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was exhumed from a graveyard in Leipzig, Germany, in 1894, but its authenticity is not established. In 1895, anatomist Wilhelm His concluded from his examination of the skeleton and reconstruction of the face that it most likely belonged to Bach. In 1949, surgeon Wolfgang Rosenthal noticed exostoses on the skeleton and on x-rays of 11 living organists and proposed a condition, Organistenkrankheit, which he interpreted as evidence that the skeleton was Bach's. However, our critical assessment of the remains analysis raises doubts: the localisation of the grave was dubious, and the methods used by His to reconstruct the face are controversial. Also, our study of the pelvic x-rays of 12 living professional organists failed to find evidence for the existence of Organistenkrankheit. We believe it is unlikely that the skeleton is that of Bach; techniques such as DNA analysis might help resolve the question but, to date, church authorities have not approved their use on the skeleton.

PMID: 19220191 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Related: Swarthoid Bach reconsctruction; More on Bach

CEU HapMap sample

The CEU HapMap sample consists of "Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe". The paper Geographical Affinities of the HapMap Samples contains this bit of retardation:

The lack of detailed similarity between the genome-wide autosomal genotypes of the CHB and CEU samples and the HGDP-CEPH panel could reflect the combination of high discriminatory power from such a large number of SNPs and the small number of comparison populations. In a more detailed comparison of the CEU with 2,457 individuals from 23 European populations, individual's SNP genotypes were clustered using principal component analysis [26]. Individuals from each European population generally clustered together and although the populations formed overlapping clusters, the broad North, South, East and West geographical areas of Europe were readily separated. In this analysis, the CEU were most similar to samples from the Netherlands and the UK, in agreement with the Y-chromosomal data, but in contrast were quite distinct from Spanish and Portuguese samples, which were not significantly different at the Y-chromosomal level (c.f. Figure 3B). We compared the number of samples that showed different or not different Y-chromosomal distances from the CEU in Central, Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western Europe with, in each case, the rest of Europe, using a Fisher exact test and found a striking enrichment of similar samples in Western Europe (p<0.000001) but in no other region. Some differences between a single locus and the combination of a large number of loci is unsurprising, but may also reflect the limited number of Y-STRs available for the detailed European comparison and the similarities in Y-chromosomal haplotypes throughout much of Western Europe, where haplogroup R1b predominates, being common in both Britain and Iberia [27], [28], for example. Together, these results show that the CEU, in contrast to the HapMap recommended descriptor ‘Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe’ (http://www.hapmap.org/citinghapmap.html) are not appropriately described as having Northern European ancestry; Western or North-western Europe ancestry would be more accurate.

Apparently, this is what happens when Chinese lead authors try to write about Europe. Hint: Northwestern Europe is the intersection of Northern Europe and Western Europe. Every analysis I've ever seen supports the NW European affinities of the CEU sample (also see "Geographical structure and differential natural selection amongst North European populations"), including analyses in this paper. Low-resolution Y-STR matches throughout western Europe are expected and are absolutely irrelevant.

Miscegenation

re: hysterical commenter "Euro" at Occidental Dissent

White female/black male I presume.Race realist need to take a cold hard look at womankind.

Studies consistently show white women are less willing than white men to date non-whites. A recent example: Gendered Racial Exclusion among White Internet Daters

Several studies support the notion that interracial mate preferences are gendered. For example, white women are more likely than white men to state a white racial preference (Sakai and Johnson, 1997) and report more disapproval from family and friends than white males when they date nonwhites (Miller et al., 2004). White males are also more likely to date nonwhites than their female counterparts (Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan, 1995). In speed dating experiments, women have also been shown to place more emphasis on selecting a same-race partner than men (Fisman et al., 2006). These findings may reflect the fact that white men are not as constrained as women in their dating choices, because, in a historically patriarchal society, men’s status is not as associated with their partner (Root, 2001; Spickard, 1989). These findings may also be due to gender differences in dating goals: women may more often be looking for a marriage partner, while men may more often be seeking a casual encounter. Regardless of the cause, based on these studies, we expect to find that white men are more open to interracial dating than their white female counterparts. [. . .]

We collected data from internet dating profiles posted on Yahoo Personals, the most popular national online dating website (Madden and Lenhart, 2006), between September 2004 and May 2005. We randomly selected profiles from people who self-identified as black, white, Latino, or Asian living within 50 miles of four major U.S. cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta. [. . .]

Since daters may select among ten different racial/ethnic groups as preferred dates, our sample includes numerous possible responses to the question of which racial/ethnic groups are preferred (Appendix Table 2 shows the top combinations of racial preferences). To simplify the analysis, we mainly focus on the extent to which each racial group is excluded as a possible date among those with a stated preference. Fig. 1 shows the racial preferences for dates among white women and men.

As previously mentioned, women are more likely than men to state a racial preference. Consistent with prior research, they are also more likely to prefer to date whites only; among those with an expressed preference, approximately 64% of white women prefer whites only compared to only about 29% of white men. Accordingly, white women are more likely then white men to exclude certain racial groups from dating consideration. Over 90% of white women who state a racial preference prefer not to date East Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians, and blacks. White men with stated racial preferences, in contrast, only prefer not to date one group at levels above 90%: black women. As predicted by assimilation theory, East Indians and Middle Easterners (more recent immigrant groups) are excluded more than Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians, by both white men and women. However, racial hierarchy theories would predict that blacks are the least preferred group, and this is only the case for white men.

Furthermore:

Education is not a significant predictor of Asian exclusion, but college-educated females and males are more likely to exclude blacks than those with only high school degrees. This finding is consistent with racial–economic exchange theories predicting that less educated white women would be more open to minorities of lower racial status.

One of the most striking findings is that white women who describe themselves as slim, slender, athletic, fit or average are nearly seven times as likely to exclude black men as dates as women who describe themselves as thick, voluptuous, a few extra pounds, or large. This finding is consistent with racial–beauty exchange theories in that white women who do not meet conventional standards of beauty (in terms of having a thinner body type) are more open to dating black men, who may be considered a lower status group.

Black-white couples may be particularly offensive to the eyes, but in terms of sheer numbers of cross-racial pairings, mestizos represent the single greatest (and fastest growing) threat to white racial integrity in the U.S.

Articles and abstracts of interest

Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Scans for Human Adult Stature Identifies Novel Loci and Associations with Measures of Skeletal Frame Size

Genome-Wide Association Analyses Identify SPOCK as a Key Novel Gene Underlying Age at Menarche

Lactase persistence-related genetic variant: population substructure and health outcomes

Eye color and the prediction of complex phenotypes from genotypes

From genotypes to genometypes: putting the genome back in genome-wide association studies

Population genomics analysis of ALMS1 in humans reveals a surprisingly complex evolutionary history

Our data suggest that the interaction of human demographic history and positive selection on standing variation in Eurasian populations approximately 15 kya ago parsimoniously explains the spectrum of extant ALMS1 variation. These results provide new insights into the evolutionary history of ALMS1 in humans and suggest that selective events identified in genome-wide scans may be more complex than currently appreciated.

A genome-wide comparison of population structure at STRPs and nearby SNPs in humans

Collectively, these results confirm that individual STRPs can provide more information about population structure than individual SNPs, but suggest that the difference in structure at STRPs and SNPs depends on local genealogical history. Our study motivates theoretical comparisons of population structure at loci with different mutational properties.

Skin Blood Perfusion and Oxygenation Colour Affect Perceived Human Health

Genome-Wide Association Study of Tanning Phenotype in a Population of European Ancestry.

Human olfaction: from genomic variation to phenotypic diversity

FOXP2 as a molecular window into speech and language

Multiple Imputation to Correct for Measurement Error in Admixture Estimates in Genetic Structured Association Testing

Frequencies of spinocerebellar ataxia subtypes in Thailand: window to the population history?

Our results also supported some degree of admixture with the Indians in the Thai population and justify further study in the area

Hybridization rapidly reduces fitness of a native trout in the wild

A Novel Parallel Approach to the Likelihood-based Estimation of Admixture in Population Genetics

Inferring population admixture from genetic data and quantifying it is a difficult but crucial task in evolutionary and conservation biology. Unfortunately state-of-the-art probabilistic approaches are computationally demanding. Effectively exploiting the computational power of modern multiprocessor systems can thus have a positive impact to Monte-Carlo-based simulation of admixture modeling. A novel parallel approach is briefly described and promising results on its MPI-based C++ implementation are reported. AVAILABILITY: The software package ParLEA is freely available at http://dm.unife.it/parlea.

Darwinian and demographic forces affecting human protein coding genes

Coalescent simulations of Yakut mtDNA variation suggest small founding population

The biologistical construction of race: 'admixture' technology and the new genetic medicine

"Anti-Semites" getting worse at identifying Jews?

So claim these unbiased researchers:

Anti-Semitism and Identification of Jewish Group Membership from Photographs
Susan A Andrzejewski, Judith A Hall, Elizabeth R Salib. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. New York: Mar 2009. Vol. 33, Iss. 1; pg. 47, 12 pgs
Abstract (Summary)

Early literature found that holding more anti-Semitic attitudes positively predicted ability to discern whether a photograph was of a Jewish or non-Jewish person. This contradicts the well established finding that interpersonal sensitivity is generally associated with healthy psychological characteristics. In five new, previously unpublished studies we found that this relation was negative, such that more prejudiced individuals were now less accurate than less prejudiced individuals at a similar task, consistent with the general finding. A meta-analysis of all the studies showed that time was a significant moderator of the relation. Possible reasons for the temporal change are discussed. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Why?

We can speculate about other mechanisms that might have produced the positive relations in the earlier studies. In an earlier era, far from being associated with social deviance or maladjustment, the possession of anti-Semitic attitudes was respectable. At prestigious universities, anti-Semitism was openly espoused by many members of the student body, students’ families, faculty, and administration (Karabel 2005). Indeed, prejudice against minorities was previously seen as being rooted in normal processes (Dovidio 2001), as the expression of the ‘‘natural’’ superiority of some groups over others.

Today, however, outgroup prejudice is not considered socially acceptable and, indeed, is seen in many segments of society (perhaps especially in college students) as representing a kind of social deviance or pathology. Therefore, because being prejudiced is now seen as abnormal rather than normal, the characteristics of the high prejudiced person and the low prejudiced person may have changed over time. The person who espouses high levels of outgroup prejudice today is likely to possess a range of problematic psychological characteristics that are inconsistent with the development of interpersonal sensitivity, whereas we can speculate that the high prejudiced person of the past used to possess more welladjusted psychological characteristics. Today, highly prejudiced individuals readily endorse cultural stereotypes (Kawakami et al. 1998), and they feel angry about being constrained by other people’s standards for them (Devine et al. 1991). More prejudiced individuals are consistently classified as being less psychologically healthy than those who are less prejudiced (Hightower 1997; Pettigrew 1981). Thus, prejudice in an earlier era might not have been as psychologically unhealthy as it is today.5

A second line of speculation stems from the functional value of having skill in identifying Jewish faces. As noted earlier, the motive to ‘‘spot the enemy’’ proposed by Allport and Kramer (1946) might have made more sense at an earlier time than it does today. In an era when the normal social order was assumed to have wealthy White Christians (indeed, Protestants) at the top, the motive to bar Jews from attaining power and privilege (or dating one’s sister, etc.) would have been well served by a finely honed ability to identify them. Today, however, it is all but impossible for the prejudiced person to exclude Jews from advancement or to avoid their presence in neighborhoods, educational institutions, and workplaces. Therefore the potential value of being able to ‘‘spot the enemy’’ has been greatly reduced. Further undermining the adaptive value of being able to ‘‘spot the enemy’’ is the fact that the enemy is no longer very difficult to spot. In the earlier era of more overt discrimination, many Jews tried to conceal their minority group membership. In such a climate, the prejudiced person would need to develop an acute ability to use expressive or physiognomic cues to pick out members of the stigmatized group. Today, in contrast, it is highly unlikely that Jewish individuals try to hide their group membership, meaning that the prejudiced person has much less need to develop sensitivity to subtle cues indicating Jewish group membership.

Another possibility not mentioned: the inclusion of non-white subjects renders comparisons with earlier studies meaningless. Participants in the new studies are only around 67-74% "Caucasian". I imagine the small negative correlation could simply be an artifact of non-white subjects being both more willing to give "anti-Semitic" answers and worse at distinguishing between Jews and Northern Europeans. Regardless:

Accuracy on the Jewish identification task was significantly above chance in all five studies (chance = 50%, or 25 items correct; Table 1). Accuracy was slightly but non-significantly lower in Studies 3–5 where there was a mixture of ethnicities among the non-Jewish faces as opposed to only Anglo non-Jewish faces. [Note: Studies 3-5 also included a higher proportion of non-white participants.]