Individual identity signaling in humans

Interesting-looking poster title:

Michael Sheehan Morphological and population genomic evidence of selection for individual identity signaling in human faces

There's no abstract, but one area where I suspect selection of this sort may turn out to be relevant (at least more relevant than Peter Frost-style sexual selection) is in explaining European hair and eye color variation.

"Traits signaling identity should be highly variable, often display polymodal distributions, not be condition dependent (i.e., be cheap to produce and/or maintain), not be associated with fitness differences, exhibit independent assortment of component characters, and often occur as fixed phenotypes with a high degree of genetic determination."

"Is human facial distinctiveness an adaptive signal of individual identity? From a sociobiological perspective, humans seem to have the ‘perfect storm’ of selection pressures that might favor recognizability. We are extremely social, interacting repeatedly with large numbers of individuals, each with varying roles in our lives. We are extremely cooperative, and we make complex decisions about whether and how much to cooperate based on kinship, friendship and social reputation [39,78]."

"Tracing the Indo-Europeans" conference videos

David Anthony, Wheeled vehicles, horses, and Indo-European origins (link)

Paper presented at the seminar "Tracing the Indo-Europeans: Origin and migration", organized by Roots of Europe - Language, Culture, and Migrations, University of Copenhagen, 12-14 December 2012

Kristian Kristiansen, Trade, travels and the transmission of cultural change in the Bronze Age (link)

See the playlist or Polako's blog for links to more talks.

Friendship and natural selection

NRNB Symposium on Network Biology 2012, Gladstone institutes, San Francisco: James Fowler presents Friendship and Natural Selection (link)

Friendship and Natural Selection

Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler

More than any other species, humans form social ties to individuals who are neither kin nor mates, and these ties tend to be with similar people. Here, we show that this similarity extends to genotypes. Across the whole genome, friends' genotypes at the SNP level tend to be positively correlated (homophilic); however, certain genotypes are negatively correlated (heterophilic). A focused gene set analysis suggests that some of the overall correlation can be explained by specific systems; for example, an olfactory gene set is homophilic and an immune system gene set is heterophilic. Finally, homophilic genotypes exhibit significantly higher measures of positive selection, suggesting that, on average, they may yield a synergistic fitness advantage that has been helping to drive recent human evolution.

Modeling European demographic history using neutral genomic regions

Neutral genomic regions refine models of recent rapid human population growth

In this study, we introduce targeted sequencing data for studying recent human history with minimal confounding by natural selection. We sequenced putatively neutral loci that are very far from genes and that meet a wide array of additional criteria. [. . .]

The best-fit model points to Europeans having experienced recent growth from an effective population size of about 4-7 thousand individuals as recently as 120--160 generations (3000--4000 years) ago. Growth over the last 3000-4000 years is estimated at an average rate of about 2--5% per generation, resulting in an overall increase in effective population size of two orders of magnitude.

Rare functional variants in French Canadians

Whole-Exome Sequencing Reveals a Rapid Change in the Frequency of Rare Functional Variants in a Founding Population of Humans

In this work, we analyze the whole-exome sequences of French-Canadian individuals, a founder population with a unique demographic history that includes an original population bottleneck less than 20 generations ago, followed by a demographic explosion, and the whole exomes of French individuals sampled from France. We show that in less than 20 generations of genetic isolation from the French population, the genetic pool of French-Canadians shows reduced levels of diversity, higher homozygosity, and an excess of rare variants with low variant sharing with Europeans. Furthermore, the French-Canadian population contains a larger proportion of putatively damaging functional variants, which could partially explain the increased incidence of genetic disease in the province. Our results highlight the impact of population demography on genetic fitness and the contribution of rare variants to the human genetic variation landscape, emphasizing the need for deep cataloguing of genetic variants by resequencing worldwide human populations in order to truly assess disease risk.

Charles Sumner, pre- and post-France

Charles Sumner, traveling in Maryland (February 24, 1834): "The whole country was barren and cheerless; houses were sprinkled very thinly on the road, and when they did appear they were little better than hovels [. . .] For the first time I saw slaves, and my worst preconception of their appearance and ignorance did not fall as low as their actual stupidity. They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, unendowed with any thing of intelligence above the brutes. I have now an idea of the blight upon that part of our country in which they live."

Charles Sumner, studying in Paris (January 13, 1838): "[The lecturer] had quite a large audience, among whom I noticed two or three blacks, or rather mulattoes,— two-thirds black, perhaps, — dressed quite a la mode, and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion, who were well received by their fellow students. They were standing in the midst of a knot of young men; and their color seemed to be no objection to them. I was glad to see this; though, with American impressions, it seemed very strange. It must be, then, that the distance between free blacks and the whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things."

David McCullough, in The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris:

It was for Sumner a stunning revelation. Until this point he is not known to have shown any particular interest in the lives of black people, neither free blacks nor slaves. On his trip to Washington a few years earlier, traveling by rail through Maryland, he had seen slaves for the first time. They were working in the fields, and as he made clear in his journal, he felt only disdain for them. [. . .] He was to think that way no longer.

It would be a while before Sumner's revelation--that attitudes about race in America were taught, not part of "the nature of things"--would take effect in his career, but when it did, the consequences would be profound. Indeed, of all that Americans were to "bring home" from their time in Paris in the form of newly acquired professional skills, new ideas, and new ways of seeing things, this insight was to be as important as any.

James Watson: reduce parental age

DNA pioneer James Watson's genetic prescription: Have kids early

"If you add together all the mental diseases ... your chance of having a child with something bad is about 5 percent," Watson explained [. . .] So here's Watson's prescription: "You could reduce the frequency of this 5 percent — maybe down to one and a half percent, or 1 percent — if everyone had their children or if the DNA came from them when they were 15," he said.

Related: Paternal age and fitness in pre-industrial Finland (SMBE 2013)

Black men have lower sperm counts than white men

Semen parameters in fertile US men: the Study for Future Families

The Study for Future Families (SFF) recruited men who were partners of pregnant women attending prenatal clinics in Los Angeles CA, Minneapolis MN, Columbia MO, New York City NY and Iowa City IA. Semen samples were collected on site from 763 men (73% White, 15% Hispanic/Latino, 7% Black and 5% Asian or other ethnic group) using strict quality control and well-defined protocols. [. . .] Black men had significantly lower semen volume, sperm concentration and total motile sperm counts than White and Hispanic/Latino men.

This is consistent with the other evidence I'm aware of. Lower sperm counts have been noted in Africa, and a study in Rochester, NY, that included a small number of American blacks similarly found:

All sperm parameters were significantly lower in the small subgroup (n = 7) of African-American men compared with other men in this population (p-values for sperm parameters, < 0.001 to 0.016).

Also consistent with these results: the only autopsy studies I'm aware of (at least one of which Rushton knew of before he became selectively forgetful) both suggest black men have smaller/lighter testes than white men.

Estimating the proportion of Irish ancestry in the US and Massachusetts

[See Estimating the proportion of Puritan genes in America's white population for links to census data.]

"A Survey of Irish Surnames 1992-97" (pdf) lists the following as the 10 most common surnames in Ireland in the 1990s:

1. Murphy 2. (O)Kelly 3. Walsh(e) 4. (O)Connor 5. (O)Sullivan 6. (O)Byrne 7. (O)Brien 8. Ryan 9. Smith/Smyth 10. (O)Neill

We'll exclude Smith/Smyth for obvious reasons. The remaining 9 most common names, all of Gaelic origin, cover 7.85% of the 1990s Irish population. (With the 1890 data, the number would be 7.67%; but that's leaving out some of the variants included in the 1990s survey.) Northern Ireland's inclusion in the survey might end up inflating our surname-based Irish Catholic population estimates by something like 10%, but I'm not worried about this level of error right now.

The number of US whites bearing one of the nine most common Irish surnames in 2000, from Census data: 1188571

The extrapolated equivalent total number of Irish individuals among the US white population in 2000: 15141032

Which comes out to 7.78% of the ancestry of the US non-Hispanic white population in 2000.

15 million (or maybe 13.5 million) descendants is certainly a more plausible biological outcome of 4.5 million Irish immigrants than the "40 million Irish Americans" we see from census self-identifications.

But it appears there's considerably less disconnect between levels of Irish ancestry and Irish self-identification in Massachusetts (vs. the US as a whole).

In the 1940 Census (the 2000 Census surname data is not available broken down by state), 87028 Massachusetts whites had one of the nine most common Irish names. Based on that, we can estimate the number of Irish in MA was 1108637 -- or 25.9% of the total 1940 MA white population of 4280019.

The 2005-2009 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates put the Irish proportion of the Massachusetts population, based on self-identification, at 23.7% (vs. 11.9% for English). Or, considering only the non-Hispanic white population, something like 29% identify as Irish.

This better agreement likely reflects relatively lower levels of intermarriage in MA, as might be expected from the state's greater Irish concentration.

The future of genealogy

An ASHG 2013 abstract from AncestryDNA:

Reconstruction of Ancestral Human Genomes from Genome-Wide DNA Matches.

Individuals who lived long ago may still have much or all of their genome present in modern populations. The genomes of these individuals exist in small segments broken down by recombination and inherited in part by his or her descendants. If such an individual had many children, leading to a large number of descendants today, much of the ancestral genome will be present in modern populations. For the pairs of descendants with the “target” ancestor as their most recent common ancestor (MRCA), any region of their genomes shared identical-by-descent (IBD) most likely represents the corresponding region of the ancestor’s genome. Given a set of pairs of individuals linked to the same MRCA, we develop a novel computational approach to reconstruct the haplotypes of the MRCA from the IBD segments and haplotypes of the descendants. With simulated data we assess the performance of our method, affected by factors such as quality of genealogical trees used to infer the MRCA, reliability of inferred IBD, coverage of IBD segments, number of descendants of the MRCA, and number of sampled descendants. To demonstrate the utility of our method, we examine over 125,000 individuals in the AncestryDNA database with phased genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data and detailed genealogical information. After first identifying regions of the genome shared IBD between all individuals, we selected one group of several hundred individuals with an 18th century couple as a known MRCA. Using our method to tile together these individuals’ IBD segments, we are able to reliably construct the ancestral couple’s four haplotypes in large genomic regions with high coverage of IBD segments. In regions of the genome with lower IBD coverage, we are unable to identify and construct all haplotypes with certainty. Our study demonstrates the possibility of reconstructing the genomes of human ancestors, with large family sizes and a large number of living descendants, who lived one to even 12 generations ago. The ability to reconstruct the genomes of human ancestors using genetic and genealogical data has exciting implications in the fields of population genetics, medical genetics, and genealogy research.

Blaine Bettinger has a longer post, The Science Fiction Future of Genetic Genealogy, inspired by the abstract.

While the potential for this sort of thing has been apparent for years, it's good to see concrete steps being taken in this direction. A related (perhaps slightly over-optimistic) 2010 post by Tamura Jones:

Evidence both purifying selection and positive selection act on MC1R in S. Europe

Mol Biol Evol (2013) doi: 10.1093/molbev/mst158 First published online: September 17, 2013

Simultaneous purifying selection on the ancestral MC1R allele and positive selection on the melanoma-risk allele V60L in South Europeans

Martínez-Cadenas et al.

In humans, the geographical apportionment of the coding diversity of the pigmentary locus MC1R is, unusually, higher in Eurasians than in Africans. This atypical observation has been interpreted as the result of purifying selection due to functional constraint on MC1R in high UVB radiation environments. By analyzing 3,142 human MC1R alleles from different regions of Spain in the context of additional haplotypic information from the 1000 Genomes (1000G) Project data, we show that purifying selection is also strong in Southern Europe, but not so in Northern Europe. Furthermore, we show that purifying and positive selection act simultaneously on MC1R. Thus, at least in Spain, regions at opposite ends of the incident UV-B radiation distribution show significantly different frequencies for the melanoma-risk allele V60L (a mutation also associated to red hair and fair skin and even blonde hair), with higher frequency of V60L at those regions of lower incident UV-B radiation. Besides, using the 1000G South-European data, we show that the V60L haplogroup is also characterized by an EHH pattern indicative of positive selection. We, thus, provide evidence for an adaptive value of human skin depigmentation in Europe and illustrate how an adaptive process can simultaneously help maintain a disease-risk allele. In addition, our data support the hypothesis proposed by Jablonski and Chaplin (2010), which posits that habitation of middle latitudes involved the evolution of partially depigmented phenotypes that are still capable of suitable tanning.

"Alienated" ethno-religious minorities preferring "inclusive" anti-majority narratives

Even more importantly, says Ryn, Catholics recognize in Straussians figures who share their own “alienation” about living in a predominantly Protestant country. [. . .] Straussians provide a narrative about the American founding that make ethnic Catholics feel secure about their Americanness.

Paul Gottfried on Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and their Catholic dupes:

Arthur Meier Schlesinger channeling Madison Grant (1921)

The swarming of foreigners into the great industries occurred at considerable cost to the native workingmen, for the latter struggled in vain for higher wages or better conditions as long as the employers could command the services of an inexhaustible supply of foreign laborers. Thus, the new immigration has made it easier for the few to amass enormous fortunes at the expense of the many and has helped to create in this country for the first time yawning inequalities of wealth.

Most sociologists believe that the addition of hordes of foreigners to the population of the United States has caused a decline in the birth-rate of the old American stock, for the native laborer has been forced to avoid large families in order to be in a position to meet the growing severity of the economic competition forced upon him by the immigrant. This condition, joined to the tendency of immigrant laborers to crowd the native Americans farther and farther from the industrial centers of the country, has caused the great communities and commonwealths of the Atlantic seaboard, about whose names cluster the heroic traditions of revolutionary times, to change completely their original characters. Puritan New England is today the home of a population of whom two-thirds were born in foreign lands or else had parents who were. Boston is as cosmopolitan a city as Chicago; and Faneuil Hall is an anachronism, a curiosity of bygone days left stranded on the shores of the Italian quarter. In fifteen of the largest cities of the United States the foreign immigrants and their children outnumber the native whites; and by the same token alien racial elements are in the majority in thirteen of the states of the Union. When President Wilson was at the Peace Conference, he reminded the Italian delegates that there were more of their countrymen in New York than in any Italian city; and it is not beside the point to add here that New York is also the greatest Irish city in the world and the largest Jewish city.

Whatever of history may be made in the future in these parts of the country will not be the result primarily of an "Anglo-Saxon" heritage but will be the product of the interaction of these more recent racial elements upon each other and their joint reaction to the American scene. Unless the unanticipated should intervene, the stewardship of American ideals and culture is destined to pass to a new composite American type now in the process of making. [. . .]

To the immigrant must also be assigned the responsibility for the accelerated growth of political and industrial radicalism in this country. While most of the newcomers quietly accepted their humble place in American society, a minority of the immigrants consisted of political refugees and other extremists, embittered by their experiences in European countries and suspicious of constituted authority under whatever guise.

From an essay in which the half-Jewish child of immigrants helpfully explains "The Significance of Immigration in American History" (the inevitable conclusion, naturally, being that America is "a nation of immigrants" -- or something like that). More:

Social changes in New England in the past fifty years (1900)

If some supernatural observer could have taken a bird's-eye view of New England in 1850 and again in 1900, he would read the story of change in plain characters. Approaching New England, as would become a Superior Intelligence, by way of Boston, he would find the region for some fifteen miles around the gilded dome on Beacon Hill so "filled in " as to form a continuous city with a million people, nearly half of them — figuring back for three generations — being Irish, about one-sixth "Old Americans," and the rest Germans, British, Scandinavians, Italians, Frenchmen, Chinamen, and citizens generally. [. . .] In Fall River, with 85 per cent, of foreign population, he might inquire his way half a dozen times before meeting a person who spoke English.

Having left a New England of full-blooded Yankees, which supplied its own wants and sent little abroad, he finds a population half foreign, dependent on others for its corn and grain and beef and mutton, but supplying half the nation with boots and shoes, making three-fourth's of its cottons and using half its wool.

Social changes in New England in the past fifty years

By Edwin Webster Sanborn

Fifty years ago the new order of things had made little change in the outward appearance of New England. It was still a compact community, peopled for the most part by direct descendants of the old Puritan stock. It was a land of farmers, and the type of New England life was the country village. Commerce and fisheries were important sources of wealth; but merchants and seafaring men, as well as the minister, lawyer, doctor, and mechanic, generally owned a little land, and helped to make agriculture the prevailing occupation. Factories had been slowly taking the place of household' industry, yet manners and way of living belonged to the homespun age.

Genetic and neuroanatomical influences on political affiliation and ingroup favoritism

Work from our own group demonstrated that in-group favouritism also contains a substantial heritable component (Lewis & Bates, 2010). In this study, we examined the claim that race favouritism (i.e. preferences for members of one’s own racial group) is simply one manifestation of a more general ‘us vs. them’ coalitional mechanism. This claim is based on reasoning that limited exposure to other racial groups over evolutionary time necessarily must have limited any ability of natural selection to shape the human mind towards specific race preferences (Kurzban et al., 2001). Our study found support for a common, and strongly heritable, favouritism ‘system’ – reflecting in-group bias in the realm of religion, ethnicity and race. Interestingly, however, we also found evidence for specific sets of genetic factors for each of these forms of favouritism: in other words, even when one accounts for the common favouritism system, additional genetic factors appear to influence race favouritism. [. . .]

Neuroanatomical work provides partial support for functional imaging findings linking political conservatism to the ACC and amygdala. For instance, Kanai et al. (2011) recently reported that increased grey matter volume in the ACC and decreased volume of the right amygdala predicts political liberalism in young adults. This association between liberalism and the ACC supports the work noted above forging links between politics and conflict monitoring/response. And the finding that liberals have less grey matter in the amygdala – a region with links to disgust processing and fear conditioning – also converges with behavioural work showing that conservatives tend to be more disgust sensitive and responsive to threat (Oxley et al., 2008).

Lewis, G. J. and Bates, T. C. (2013). The long reach of the gene: Prejudice, politics, and religiosity. The Psychologist, 26. 194-199. (pdf)

The liberal progress narrative and moral foundations

As we elaborate in this article, we view the “five foundations” of morality as Level 2 psychological constructs that people use in the construction of Level 3 narratives, including their individual life stories, and the collective narratives that animate competing political ideologies. [. . .]

Consistent with the first graph in Figure 1, the liberal progress narrative makes extensive use of the Harm foundation (“suffering,” “misery,” “oppression”) and the Fairness foundation (“unjust,” “inequality”). There is no mention of ingroup or nation, and no mention of purity or sanctity. Authority and tradition are mentioned only as the sources of harm and injustice.

Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations (pdf)

In Defense of Israel: How Social Context Affects Jewish-Americans’ Moral Reasoning

The American Jewish community is liberal, yet some contend that American Jews become more conservative when thinking about the defense of Israel. Recent research suggests that conservatives base their moral judgments on the foundations of fairness, minimizing harm, in-group favoritism, respect for authority, and purity. By contrast, liberals largely base moral judgments on just two foundations: fairness and harm-minimization (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). This thesis expands this research by thinking about how a topic that is important to someone alters their moral reasoning. If Israel is important to someone who is Jewish and if thinking about Israel, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, makes American Jews more conservative, they should alter their moral judgments in ways consistent with conservatives. To test this hypothesis, two studies primed Jews and non-Jews to think about Israel or a different location, and measured the accessibility and relevance of moral foundation categories. Results suggest that priming for Israel does not influence the moral reasoning of Jewish-Americans. However, when asked to think about explicit moral violations committed by military guards, Jewish-Americans expressed less concern for the interrogated victim, less anger at the interrogating soldier, and more support for the soldier’s actions when the military guards were Israeli, compared to a different location. Irrespective of ingroup identification, when individuals were presented with a moral violation committed by soldiers from a nation that they glorify, individuals also showed a preference for conservative-consistent moral foundations. The results from this study also suggest that previous research may have conflated the effects of ingroup identification and those of group-specific glorification.

Pasek, Michael, "In Defense of Israel: How Social Context Affects Jewish-Americans’ Moral Reasoning" (2012). Honors Theses. Paper 40. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/40

Author's Preface to The Puritan Dilemma (1958)

The Puritans of New England are not in good repute today. Authors and critics who aspire to any degree of sophistication take care to repudiate them. Liberals and conservatives alike find it advantageous to label the measures they oppose as Puritan. Whatever is wrong with the American mind is attributed to its Puritan ancestry, and anything that escapes these assaults is smothered under a homespun mantle of quaintness by lovers of the antique. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts has thus become in retrospect a preposterous land of witches and witch hunters, of killjoys in tall-crowned hats, whose main occupation was to prevent each other from having any fun and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.

While we're at it . . .

The first anti-slavery novel wasn't written by a "Yankee". It was written by Tory Englishwoman.

"Yankees" and women's suffrage

Steve Sailer, citing Wikipedia:

So it was not surprising that WASPy America was favorable ground for feminism in the early 20th century, as shown by the Yankee domination of the women’s vote movement. In contrast, the newer immigrants of the era, such as Sicilians and Jews, came from more patriarchal cultures.

The Wikipedia edit actually claims:

The woman suffrage movement was led by old stock women, especially Yankees and Quakers of English or German ancestry, whose families had been in North America for generations.

And, if this were completely accurate, it would hardly have been surprising that colonial stock Americans (still the majority of the US population in the mid-to-late 19th century and the overwhelming majority among the more educated) were the leaders of a particular intellectual movement in America (while noting that the comparable movements in Europe were led by Italian women in Italy, German and Jewish women in Germany, etc.). But if we scroll up in the same Wikipedia entry:

Agitation for equal suffrage was carried on by only a few individuals. The first of these was Frances Wright, a Scottish woman who came to the country in 1826 and advocated women's suffrage in an extensive series of lectures. In 1836 Ernestine Rose, a Polish woman, came to the country and carried on a different campaign so effectively that she obtained a personal hearing before the New York Legislature, though her petition bore only five signatures.

Polish woman?

Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. [. . .]

She was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrków Trybunalski, Russia-Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.

Haidt on moral foundations 2/2

"As you can see, the lines for Care and Fairness (the two top lines) are moderately high across the board. Everyone—left, right, and center—says that concerns about compassion, cruelty, fairness, and injustice are relevant to their judgments about right and wrong. Yet still, the lines slope downward. Liberals say that these issues are a bit more relevant to morality than do conservatives.

But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality.4 As we move to the right, however, the lines slope upward. By the time we reach people who are “very conservative,” all five lines have converged. We can say, as shorthand, that conservatives have a five-foundation morality. [. . .]

Figure 8.2 shows our data on the MFQ as it stood in 2011, with more than 130,000 subjects. We’ve made many improvements since Jesse’s first simple survey, but we always find the same basic pattern that he found in 2006. The lines for Care and Fairness slant downward; the lines for Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity slant upward. Liberals value Care and Fairness far more than the other three foundations; conservatives endorse all five foundations more or less equally.8 [. . .] We’ve found this basic difference no matter how we ask the questions."

Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses:

• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.

• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.

• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.

• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.

• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.

Haidt on moral foundations 1/2

Excerpts from the introduction of The Righteous Mind:

Estimating the proportion of Puritan genes in America's white population

Ellsworth Huntington estimated about 5500 people bearing the surname Huntington were alive in America circa 1930.

Census Bureau estimates put the number of whites bearing the surname Huntington in 2000 at 6325.

So the absolute frequency of New England genes might have increased something like 6325/5500 = 1.15 times in a 65 year period in which the American "non-Hispanic white" population overall increased 188 128 296 / 110 286 740 = 1.7 times. While there is uncertainty in these numbers, there's little doubt the relative representation of New England genes amongst American "whites" has fallen over the past century.

As for what the actual proportion of Puritan genes might be, we can make a crude estimate as follows.

There were 992 421 whites in New England in 1790, perhaps 7/8 of whom were of Puritan stock.

There were 687 Huntingtons in the US in 1790, about 85% of them in New England.

6325 / 687 = 9.2

9.2 * 992 421 = 9 130 273

Adding say 20% to account for people of New England stock outside of New England in 1790 brings us to 10 956 328.

10 956 328 / 188 128 296 = 5.8% (of overall US white ancestry)

As of 1930, just over 1/4 of Huntingtons in Ellsworth Huntington's tabulations were located on the "East Coast", so the fraction in New England proper will have been well under 1/4 even at that date. But if, to find an upper limit, we assume 1/4 of New England genes remain in New England today, we're left with the equivalent of 10 956 328 / 4 = 2 739 082 individuals. That's against a total New England "non-Hispanic white" population of 11 686 617 in 2000.

2 739 082 / 11 686 617 = 23.4% (upper limit for New England) [the correct estimate is about half this number; see update below]

And, again, that's an overestimate of the proportion of New England genes in New England's white population today. [see update for more accurate estimate], but it's pretty clear "Yankees" are not the dominant force in voting in slates of Irish Catholic Democrats.

Update: Corrected math error and checked a couple more names.

Coolidge - 2663.892 / 225 = 11

Conant - 4671.9 / 551 = 8.48

Huntington + Coolidge + Conant - 13661 / 1463 = 9.34

More names can be added, but these seem similar enough.

Update 2: It appears something like 613 / 4,571 = 13.4% of Huntingtons were living in New England at the time of the 1940 Census.

So with better numbers the estimate for the average degree of New England ancestry of today's white New England residents becomes 12.6%.

Religion, ethnicity, and political alignment

Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate: Social Identity vs. Ideology. Political Research Quarterly June 2006 vol. 59 no. 2 175-187.

Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States. Political Behavior. June 1999, Volume 21, Issue 2, pp 123-151

[. . .] We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states.

[. . .] The estimates indicate that elements of the New Deal Democratic coalition remain intact across the largest states in recent presidential elections. For example, controlling for other factors, the voting poor in each state remain more inclined to support the Democratic standard bearer. [. . .]

The marginal Jewish effect approaches, and occasionally surpasses, that for race across the states. Relative to mainline Protestants, Jews remain much more Democratic in their presidential voting (see also Manza and Brooks, 1997b). This marginal effect is powerful across the states in both 1988 and 1992, showing that Jewish identification manifests itself in terms of distinctive political behavior both in states with sizable Jewish populations (e.g., New York) and in states with much smaller Jewish populations (e.g., Illinois).

The effect of Catholic identification on Democratic voting was uniformly positive in 1988, but much less potent than the influence of being Jewish. A noteworthy Catholic effect was evident in states as dissimilar as Massachusetts and Texas. Relative to the support for Dukakis in 1988, the Catholic support for Clinton in 1992 was much spottier." Only results for the voters of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania revealed a powerful, positive Catholic influence across both 1988 and 1992. With the possible exception of these three states, it appears that Democratic presidential candidates can no longer depend on a reservoir of support among large-state Catholics (see also Petrocik, 1987; Green and Guth, 1991; Kellstedt and Green, 1993). Some accounts suggested that the strong appeal of Reagan shook many Catholics loose from their Democratic moorings. But the results from 1992 suggest that this shift is more than a Reagan phenomenon.

Group Components of the Presidential Vote, 1952–1984. The Journal of Politics. Volume 51, Issue 02, May 1989, pp 337-346.

Except for bivariate analyses, previous research on the group basis of partisan strength in the United States has focused on party identification as the dependent variable. This essay examines the group basis of the presidential vote, 1952–1984, using a multivariate logit approach. Our multivariate analysis shows the persistence of group-based divisions between Republican and Democratic voters. Among other patterns, class-based divisions have noticeably increased.

[. . .] Over the full 32-year span of this study, the major group effects are race, religion, and class. This of course is not surprise. However, it may be a surprise to see the effect of being Jewish (vs. Protestant) is almost as great as the effect of being black (vs. nonblack), and that membership in the "no religion" category generally makes one more Democratic than does being Catholic. It may also be a surprise to see the more important "class" measure to be union membership rather than poverty.

[. . .] The bottom row of table 1 traces the voting behavior of non-group members, 1952-184. These nonmembers are northern white male Protestants who are not college educated but not poor, over thirty and living outside the largest SMSAs. These "vanilla" voters show a steady Republicanism that sometimes reaches margins of more than four to one.

Religion, Ethnicity, and Party Affiliation in the U.S.: Evidence from Pooled Electoral Surveys, 1968–72. Social Forces (1977) 56 (2): 637-653.

By analyzing a white Christian subsample of pooled national survey data collected in 1968, 1970, and 1972 (subsample's n = 4,142), we try to determine whether ethnicity has a direct effect on party identification net of parental party identification. In so doing, we raise a number of subsidiary issues: (1) how best to measure ethnicity, (2) the need to distinguish between ethnically identified and ethnically assimilated respondents, and (3) possible regional variation in the impact of ethnicity. We find that religion alone (Protestant versus Catholic) is an adequate measure of ethnicity for this analysis, there being little intrareligious variation in party identification by national origin. Second, religion's effect is largely limited to the ethnically identified. Third, its effect holds up when controlling for parental party identification and SES. Fourth, regional variation in the impact of religion is understood as largely flowing from regional variations in the distribution of Catholics. [. . .]

We had suggested that ethnicity's impact should be greatest in the Northeast and negligible in the South. Indeed, the explained variance estimates (R²s) of the ethnic (or religious) effect reported in Table 2 seem to bear out those hypotheses. [. . .] On the other hand, inspection of the unstandardized coefficients for those equations---a more appropriate way of comparing impact across populations with different distributions of dependent and independent variables---reveals only negligible differences between the Northeast and the other nonsouthern regions. In the Midwest and West the difference is virtually identical (Catholics are about one half a standard deviation unit more Democratic than Protestants) while in the North it is only slightly larger (about seven-tenths of a standard deviation unit). In the South, as expected, there is virtually no difference in the political identification scores of Catholics and Protestants.

New Deal coalition

"The New Deal coalition [. . .] united the many enemies of the old Puritan ethic: Catholic immigrants, Jewish intellectuals, southern gentlemen, black sharecroppers, Appalachian mountain folk, Texas stockmen and California hedonists."

Excerpt from Albion's Seed:

Political donations, 1980-2012: Puritan vs. other names

What happens when we search opensecrets.org for distinctive surnames? Note: there won't be much precision in these numbers. This is simply a demonstration of the sort of thing that's possible.

I'm only looking at donations that feature "repub" or "democ" in the name of the recipient. This saves time but excludes most or all donations to specific candidates. To do this properly, I suggest: (1) look at all donations (which will require sorting donations to specific candidates into republican/democrat or conservative/liberal); (2) aggregate donations to the level of individual donors, so we're comparing the number of individuals on each side, rather than the number of donations; (3) increase the number of "Puritan" and other names looked at; (4) also break down comparisons by region (or even by state, if statistics allow).

Where genealogical information is available, donors with Puritan surnames can also be divided into bins based on their actual degree of New England ancestry to see if any trends hold.

The Puritan name list includes the names used by Weyl (which came from Huntington) and some other names mentioned by Huntington here. "Lyman" has been adopted by Jews (e.g., Democratic donor "Princeton Nathan Lyman" writes about having lunch with anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo: "That day we talked a little about our roots, as we were both products of Lithuanian Jewish parents. Slovo had been born in Lithuania and came to South Africa as a child. He would credit his Jewish roots for some of his social conscience, but he was never religious."), so I prefer to exclude it. For the same reason, I excluded "Cole" from the English list and "Ross" from the Scottish list. The remaining name lists are based on Weyl ("The Geography of American Achievement"), except for the list of the ten most common Irish surnames, which I added.

	repub		democ		repub/democ
	records	dollars	records	dollars	records	dollars
PURITAN (excluding lyman)	703	595098	241	206523	2.92	2.88
ENGLISH CLERICAL	3864	3673871	1196	1287126	3.23	2.85
SCOTTISH	4057	3665089	1471	1291021	2.76	2.84
ENGLISH	3933	2983327	1106	1056399	3.56	2.82
IRISH	4903	5291109	1660	2036620	2.95	2.6
PURITAN (including lyman)	755	619566	318	242962	2.37	2.55
IRISH (top 10)	6535	6888658	2103	3249880	3.11	2.12
GERMAN	3832	3094483	1044	1510555	3.67	2.05
“NEW” CHINESE	18308	17037579	6982	9232097	2.62	1.85
KOREAN	1124	998377	276	583543	4.07	1.71
ITALIAN	415	267295	111	172194	3.74	1.55
WELSH	1485	1172239	527	779238	2.82	1.5
FRENCH	725	990795	274	724305	2.65	1.37
INDIAN	755	649459	380	599444	1.99	1.08
“OLD” CHINESE	1969	1533353	702	1598841	2.8	0.96
JEWISH	4476	7374127	6904	15332169	0.65	0.48
AFRO-AMERICAN	49	89210	61	224389	0.8	0.4

Puritan names

Huntington looked at a larger sample of early New England names in Mainsprings of Civilization (1945). He comes up with a selection of "129 colonial names belonging primarily to northern New England, 588 to southern New England". He doesn't appear to have published the full list, but it should be straightforward to recreate it from Table 111 in A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth (1909).

Religious affiliations of Puritan descendants, as of 1935

Source: Ellsworth Huntington and Martha Ragsdale. 1935. After three centuries; a typical New England family. Baltimore, Md: Williams & Wilkins Co.

This book belongs to the new science which deals with the growth and qualities of a population. It is a combination of sociology, economics, eugenics, geography, and history. It chooses a group of people and sees what changes have taken place in their numbers and quality from generation to generation during the three centuries since the United States was settled. Starting with typical New England Puritans the history of a sample family is traced from 1633 to the present. The modern representatives are also analyzed in comparison with people of other descent. Although the investigation on which the book is based began as a study of the Huntington family, it soon expanded into a more general analysis of the millions of people who claim descent from the Puritan stock of early New England. The typical quality of the people who are here analyzed is one of the main features of the book. Although these people all bear one name they are descended from two or three thousand old New England families and are typical of the entire Puritan stock. A second feature of the book is that a genuinely random sample of the people descended from a specific type of colonial ancestors has been examined. Equal effort has been devoted to obtaining information about all kinds of persons, no matter whether they are of world-wide eminence or criminals and paupers. A third feature is that this books attempts to study population by a new method, namely, the use of family names and the analysis of a fairly complete sample of all the people bearing the name. [iii-iv]

Another interesting phase of religion is the great extent to which the old New England stock has changed its denominational affiliations (Table 21). The original Puritans all belonged to the Congregational Church, although a few soon became Quakers. In our day the leading denominations are the Episcopalians and Methodists, each with 19 per cent of those for whom information is available. Then come the Baptists, Presbyterians, and finally the Congregationalists, each with about 12 per cent. The rest are divided among many denominations, among whom Roman Catholics on the one hand, and atheists, agnostics, and people of no denomination on the other hand, each number about two per cent of the total. [p. 145]

Ipsos-Reuters 2012 presidential polling data

New England Protestants favored Romney (43-35). Catholics and Jews favored Obama (43-37 and 59-29).

Looking only at Maine, we see the same trend. Protestants (n=678) were 44-38 for Romney and Catholics (n=475) 48-35 for Obama. The 18 Maine Jews surveyed were 83-11 for Obama.

Maybe Catholics and Jews just happen to have a heightened susceptibility to "mutated Puritanism" -- or maybe people like foseti should start to strongly consider the possibility they have been pwned by Moldbug.

Ethnic origins of leadership of large foundations

The Ford Foundation is currently the second largest U.S. foundation by asset size (after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). The Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation come in at number 15 and number 20, respectively, but I expect both still rank more highly than that in name recognition and influence.

Here's how the ethnic origins of their boards of trustees break down.

Ford Foundation: I count 3 blacks, 1 East Asian, 1 South Asian, 1 Middle Easterner, 1 mestizo, 1 Jew, 1 Hungarian, 3 Southern whites, and an Englishman. I count zero Yankees/Puritans.

Rockefeller Foundation: 5 blacks, 1 Asian, 1 Mexican, 2 Jews, 1 Irish Catholic, 1 German, and 1 98-year-old with significant New England ancestry.

Carnegie Corporation: 2 blacks, 6 Jews, 2 Armenians, 2 Iberians, 2 Italians, 2 Irish, 1 Irish/Italian, 1 Southerner, and one person of mixed colonial ancestry including a minor New England component.

Full lists of names below:

Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool derives from "recent severe bottleneck" of 300-400 individuals ca. 800 years ago

Some AJ-related ASHG 2013 abstracts.

(1) "In accordance with historical records, recent studies showed that AJ are genetically homogeneous with mixed European and Middle-Eastern ancestry and that the AJ population had undergone a severe bottleneck around 800ya followed by an extremely rapid expansion. [. . .] Analysis of identical-by-descent segments, which are abundant in AJ and highly informative on recent history, confirmed a recent severe bottleneck of merely ≈300-400 individuals. [. . .] the fraction of European ancestry in AJ to be ≈55±2%."

(2) "For the AJ, we estimated mean ancestral proportions of 0.380, 0.305, 0.113, 0.041 and 0.148 for Middle Eastern, Italian, French, Russian and Caucasus ancestry, respectively."

(3) "Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population structure, we find that Ashkenazi Jewish samples share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations, and among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East"

Full abstracts below:

Here is an actual "Yankee" politician

Fred Upton appears to come close to having solid New England ancestry on both sides. There will be exceedingly few if any other serving House members about whom that can be said.

For example: of 8 current Massachusetts congressmen, 6 are Irish Catholics and one is a half-Irish Italian. The other is a woman with a French surname who was born in California and married a Greek. All are Democrats. Vermont: Irish Democrat. New Hampshire: one Irish Catholic and one woman with a Scottish-surnamed father and German-surnamed mother. Maine: a French Canadian and a Minnesota-born woman with Jewish husband. All of these are Democrats.

Upton is a Republican from Michigan.

Upton was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, the son of Elizabeth B. (née Vial) and Stephen Edward Upton. [. . .] Upton's grandfather, Frederick Upton, was co-founder of appliance manufacturer and marketer Whirlpool Corporation, which is headquartered in Benton Harbor. His wife’s name is Amey, and he has two children, Meg and Stephen.[41] Upton's niece is supermodel Kate Upton

See below for his sure-to-be radically-leftist platform:

Inverse relationship between percentage of population reporting English or American ancestry and Obama 2012 election share, for Maine counties

X-axis: percent of people reporting English or American ancestry in the 2000 Census (according to Wikipedia)

Y-axis: fraction of votes cast for Obama in 2012 (www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/2012/2012prescounty.xls‎)

This took me about 5 minutes. It could be repeated with more finely-grained data (town/city-level instead of county-level), using more recent ancestry information, and controlling for the presence of non-whites. But I don't anticipate the trend reversing.

Ethnic origins of presidents of Harvard University

[2007–] Drew Gilpin Faust - Grew up in Virginia. Southern father; New Jersey mother (with some New England ancestry, but also, e.g., German ancestry). Jewish husband.

[2001-2006] Lawrence H. Summers - Jewish. Summers says "WASPs" who wear ties and demand he enforce the honor code are assholes. "Rarely have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind."

[1991-2001] Derek Curtis Bok - Born in Pennsylvania. Father's father was a Dutch immigrant; mother's father was born in England. Does have some New England ancestry through other lines, but not exactly a prototypical "Yankee". Married Gunnar Myrdal's daughter.

[1971-1991] Neil L. Rudenstine - "His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, while his mother was Catholic and the daughter of immigrants from Campobasso in Italy."

[1953-1971] Nathan Marsh Pusey - "Pusey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to John and Rosa Pusey." Southern ancestry. "Dr. Pusey, a native of the Midwest, was the first non-New Englander to head the nation's oldest and richest university. [. . .] His father died when he was a year old; his mother, who supported the family as a $65-a-week school principal, taught him the value of study and a need for better salaries for educators. He won a scholarship to Harvard" (New York Times Biographical Service, Volume 32). "Pusey vigorously opposed McCarthyism in the 1950s and supported the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. His clashes with Joseph McCarthy were especially significant because Pusey's position at Lawrence College placed him in the senator's hometown (Appleton, Wisconsin) and amid the political power base of the then-conservative Fox Valley." (Wikipedia)

[1933-1953] James Bryant Conant - New England ancestry, but:

Conant never tired of pointing out that despite this lineage, he was not a "proper Bostonian," one of the aristocratic Back Bay and Beacon Hill Brahmins that were so pungently evoked by Cleveland Amory and John P. Marquand, but the offspring of hardworking, middle-income parents, James Scott Conant and Jennett Orr Bryant, who came from small villages in Plymouth country to raise their son and two daughters in the working-class Boston suburb of Dorchester. [James G. Hershberg. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.]

Also:

When Conant came into office, Lowell gave him his view of the matter, unchanged from a decade before: "The time has not come for any theoretical solution of the Jewish question. I tried, as you know, to find an open, fair and practical solution, but was howled down by the preference of most people to profess one principle and act upon another. Any educational institution that admits an unlimted number of Jews will soon have no one else."

Conant's pro-quota position in the early 1920s, his preference for more students from small towns and cities and the South and West, and his cool response to the plight of Jewish academic refugees from Hitler suggest that he shared the mild anti-Semitism common to his social group and time. But his commitment to meritocracy made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty. [. . .]

By 1944 over 30 percent of the students in the remaining civilian student houses were Jewish. In calculating the proper size of the wartime class of 1946, the "quota for a certain type" was dropped. The result: about 19 percent of the class was Jewish, the highest percentage since the early 1920s. [. . .]

Still, old demons lurked in the background. After the war ended, the house masters resumed their prewar screening and sharing practices. Not until May 1950 did they agree to take every house applicant and relegate the * designation to history's dustbin. [Morton Keller, Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard modern: the rise of America's university.]

[1909-1933] Abbott Lawrence Lowell - "Lowell was born on December 13, 1856 in Boston, Massachusetts, the second son of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. His siblings included the poet Amy Lowell, the astronomer Percival Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence.[4] [. . .]

Following Lowell's earlier reform of Harvard's admissions process to increase the admission of public school students, the Jewish proportion of the student body rose from 6% in 1908 to 22% in 1922, at a time when Jews constituted about 3% of the U.S. population. Lowell, continuing to focus on the cohesiveness of the student body, described a campus where antisemitism was growing and Jewish students were ever more likely to be isolated from the majority. He feared—and recent developments at Columbia University supported him—that the social elite would cease sending its sons to Harvard as Jewish enrollment increased. He cited what he saw as the parallel experience of hotels and clubs that lost their old membership when the proportion of Jewish members increased. He proposed limiting Jewish admissions to 15% of the entering class. [. . .]

The faculty committee eventually rejected Lowell's proposed quota. Instead, Harvard's new guiding principle in admissions would be the top seventh rule. Harvard would reach out to youths in smaller cities and towns, even to rural communities, with the guideline that the student place in the top seventh of his class. It would seek "to pick out the best pupils from good schools, here, there, and everywhere." Though some suspected this was nothing but a covert way to decrease Jewish enrollment, the policy had the opposite effect. The numbers of non-Jewish students attracted from the South and West could not match the larger numbers of Jews admitted from the Middle Atlantic and New England states. By 1925, Jews made up 27% of the entering class.[49]

Lowell then found another way to accomplish his goal, this time less publicly. He first won approval from the Harvard Board of Overseers for a new policy that would, in addition to traditional academic criteria, use letters from teachers and interviews to assess an applicant's "aptitude and character," thus introducing discretion in the place of the strict top seventh rule. He even persuaded one doubtful Overseer that this would not support discrimination against Jews as a group, but merely "careful discernment of differences among individuals." When Lowell gained final approval of these modifications in 1926 and appointed a compliant Admissions Committee, he had won his way.[50] When Lowell left his position in 1933, Jews made up 10% of the undergraduate population.[51]"

[1869-1909] Charles William Eliot - "Charles Eliot was a scion of the wealthy Eliot family of Boston, and was the grandson of banker Samuel Eliot. His mother Mary Lyman Eliot had ancestral roots in early Massachusetts Bay Colony as a descendant of Edmund Rice.[1]

[. . .] But instead, he used his grandfather's legacy and a small borrowed sum to spend the next two years studying the educational systems of the Old World in Europe. [. . .] Eliot's approach to investigating European education was unusual. He did not confine his attention to educational institutions, but explored the role of education in every aspect of national life. [. . .] Eliot understood the interdependence of education and enterprise. In a letter to his cousin Arthur T. Lyman, he discussed the value to the German chemical industry of discoveries made in university laboratories. [. . .] During nearly two years in Europe he had found himself as much fascinated by what he could learn concerning the methods by which science could be made to help industry as by what he discovered about the organization of institutions of learning. He was thinking much about what his own young country needed, and his hopes for the United States took account of industry and commerce as well as the field of academic endeavor."

Ethnic origins of presidents of Yale University

[2013-] Peter Salovey - Jewish.

[1993–2013] Richard C. Levin - Jewish. 'With the forces of globalization becoming ever more visible in the early 1990s, Levin called in his inaugural address for Yale to become "a world university." Updating the time-honored view of Yale as a training ground for the next generation's elite, he expanded its traditional vision from a national to a global one, urging Yale to "aspire to educate leaders for the whole world."' (Jerome Karabel. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale ...)

[1992–1993] Howard R. Lamar - "He was born in 1923 in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.,[3] and was drawn into history in part by his rich family history which includes two United States Supreme Court justices and the second president of the Republic of Texas."

[1986–1992] Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. - Born in New York to Texas-born parents; half-German father.

[1977–1986] A. Bartlett Giamatti - "Giamatti was born in Boston and grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Claybaugh Walton (Smith College '35) and Valentine John Giamatti. His father was professor and chairman of the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College.[1] Giamatti's paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants Angelo Giammattei (Italian pronunciation: [dʒamaˈttɛi]) and Maria Lavorgna (Italian pronunciation: [laˈvɔrɲɲa]): his grandfather Angelo emigrated to the United States from Telese, near Naples, Italy, around 1900."

[1977–1977] Hanna Holborn Gray - Born in Germany. Daughter of "Hajo Holborn, whose wife, however, was Jewish" (http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/publications/occasional/2006-02/paper.pdf)

[1963–1977] Kingman Brewster, Jr. - New England ancestry (also see here).

[1951–1963] Alfred Whitney Griswold - Born in New Jersey. New England ancestry. "Furthermore, even if the candidate from Bronx Science was not Jewish himself, he came from a school that was predominantly Jewish [. . .] at a time when anti-Semitism in Yale's admissions was covert but active. Brewster's predecessor Whitney Griswold did not condone this kind of discrimination, but neither was he interested in rooting it out. [. . .] In the early 1960s, Yale was found to accept a lower percentage of Jews than any other Ivy League college." (Geoffrey Kabaservice. The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal ...)

[1937–1951] Charles Seymour - New England ancestry.

A big part of the problem was the exceptionally ingrown character of the Yale faculty: as late as 1950, half its members had Yale degrees. As Kabaservice points out, "Standards for appointment and promotions tended to emphasize citizenship rather than scholarship, clubbability rather than real merit," and "inheritance, wealth, background and social standing" remained "significant criteria." In such an atmosphere, "dark blossoms of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism flourished" in many departments.

Yale's admissions policy only compounded the problem. Under the admininstration of CHarles Seymour (B.A. '08, Ph.D. '11), Yale's president from 1937 to 1950, the selection of students was consistently and powerfully tilted toward the usual handful of preferred categories: athletes, alumni sons, and boarding school graduates, many of whom had less than sterling academic qualifications. [Jerome Karabel. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale ...]

[1921–1937] James Rowland Angell - New England ancestry.

[1899–1921] Arthur Twining Hadley - New England ancestry.

[1886–1899] The Reverend Timothy Dwight V - New England ancestry.

Ethnic origins of presidents of Princeton University

[2013-] Christopher L. Eisgruber - Jewish.

[2001-2013] Shirley M. Tilghman - Canadian with Jewish husband.

[1988-2001] Harold T. Shapiro - Canadian Jew.

[1972-1988] William G. Bowen - "William Gordon Bowen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 6, 1933. He was the first and only surviving child of Albert Andrew Bowen and Bernice Catherine Bowen. The Bowens, both originally from Indiana (Indianapolis and South Bend), had moved to Cincinnati because of Albert's job as a salesman for National Cash register." (Princeton Alumni Weekly - Volume 72 - Page 58)

"Bill Bowen is one of the great figures in American higher education," said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. "His legendary leadership of this University simultaneously elevated Princeton's stature and strengthened its core values. After stepping down from the presidency, he resumed his scholarly study of higher education, producing research of unsurpassed quality. [. . .]

Other books, including "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions" (1998) and "Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education" (2005), expand on Bowen's commitment to the importance of seeking diversity in building faculty and student bodies. [Former Princeton President Bowen awarded National Humanities Medal]

[1957-1972] Robert F. Goheen - "Robert Francis Goheen was born on August 15, 1919 to Anne (Ewing) and Dr Robert H. H. Goheen in Vengurla, India, where both his parents were serving as Presbyterian medical missionaries. [. . .] Goheen taught classics at Princeton as an assistant professor from 1950 until 1957, when he was appointed the university’s 16th president. At 37, he was the youngest man to assume that position since the 18th century. Faced with the social and political challenges of the 1960s, Goheen encouraged student involvement in decision-making processes and initiated active recruitment of minorities, as well as overseeing the admission of women in 1969." Son of Robert H. H. and Anne (Ewing) Goheen. Pennsylvania ancestry.

[1933-1957] Harold W. Dodds - "Dodds was born on June 28, 1889 in Utica, Pennsylvania, the son of a professor of Bible Studies at Grove City College."

[1912-1932] John Grier Hibben - "Hibben was born in Peoria, Illinois [. . .] He was the only son of the Rev. Samuel and Elizabeth (Grier) Hibben. The Hibbens were of Scottish and Scots-Irish descent. [. . .] Elizabeth Grier was a native of Peoria, from a large family with partial German ancestry. She later was one of the pioneers in the movement for woman's suffrage."

[1902-1910] Woodrow Wilson - Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry.

[1888-1902] Reverend Francis L. Patton - "He was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, and attended Warwick Academy. He studied at Knox College, Toronto and at the University of Toronto; graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865"

[1868-1888] Reverend James McCosh - "McCosh was born of a Covenanting family in Ayrshire, and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, obtaining his M.A. at the latter"

Ethnic origins of presidents of the University of California system

Somewhere on the internet, a chinegro Jamaican is babbling excitedly about Yankees "preaching diversity" and "SWPLs" being "literal" Puritans. When challenged, "JayMan" is unable to list a single actual name of a "Yankee" preaching diversity. Others engage in similar behavior. These are people whose love for abstraction outruns their knowledge, or who are motivated by ethnic animus. They don't like to name names, and when they do, they tend to be very selective or hilariously incompetent at driving forward this line of thought.

It's should be simple enough to just pick an actual category of people (less meaningless/amorphous than "SWPL") and look at their names.

Inspired by a recent Education Realist article, and since college administrators are commonly among the more vocal and destructive proponents of "diversity" today, we'll start by looking at UC system presidents.

The incoming UC president looks like some kind of beast but is said to be half Italian and half "German and Austrian". For those hard of seeing, she's not a Yankee. Nor were most of her predecessors during the period in which members of the group that founded the University of California saw themselves largely dispossessed of it.

Among 4 UC presidents since 1992, I count 2 Jews, one presumably British-descended Canadian with a Jewish wife, and one child of English/French(-German?) immigrants.

Among the 4 office holders for 1958 to 1992, I see one person with probable New England ancestry, two other Americans without obvious New England connections, and one Jew.

Among the 11 UC presidents from its founding in 1870 to 1958, I count 8 with at least half New England ancestry.

New Englanders disproportionately contributed to building the UC system. Others are leading the way in destroying it.

[2013- ] Janet Napolitano - "Janet Napolitano was born on November 29, 1957, in New York City, the daughter of Jane Marie (née Winer) and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.[6] Her father was of Italian descent and her mother had German and Austrian ancestry.[6][7]"

[2008-2013] Mark G. Yudof - "In 1993, he and his wife, Judy, were the co-recipients of the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award."

[2003-2008] Robert Carr Dynes - Canadian (who happened to be married to a Jewess at the time he was appointed UC president).

[1995-2003] Richard Chatham Atkinson - Born in Illinois; father from England, mother from Alsace-Lorraine (source).

[1992-1995] Jack W. Peltason - Born in St. Louis, Missouri; "s. of Walter Peltason and Emma Hartmann" (presumably Jewish). Author of such books as "Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation".

[1983-1992] David Pierpont Gardner - "Gardner was born in Berkeley, California to Reed S. Gardner and Margaret Pierpont Gardner. [. . .] Gardner was an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)". Presumably has some New England ancestry (the only person on the list up to this point we can say that about). Incidentally:

The Hispanic Coalition on Higher Education, representing 83 statewide educational and civil rights organizations, gave Gardner's affirmative-action record an "F" grade and released a "letter of no confidence" by a UC staff group. The letter sent to Gardner by the University of California Chicano-Latino Consortium complained that the UC administration has demonstrated only a "mechanical interest" in reversing a "serious underrepresentation" of Latinos and other minorities among students, faculty and management.

And:

As president of the University of California nine-campus system, from 1983-1992, President Gardner met with intense controversies over issues ranging from affirmative action and animal rights to AIDS research and weapons labs.

[1975-1983] David S. Saxon - "David was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on February 8, 1920, the older of two sons. His parents moved to Philadelphia when he was a young boy. His upbringing in a large and lively Eastern European Jewish household instilled in him a deep commitment to both family and education. [. . .] A few years after his arrival, David found himself embroiled in what became known as the loyalty oath controversy. The University of California Board of Regents, responding to postwar pressures to remove alleged Communists from university faculties, instituted a requirement that all faculty members must sign a loyalty oath as a condition of employment. David was one of thirty-one faculty who refused to sign, along with such distinguished older figures as psychologist Edward Tolman and the medieval historian Ernst H. Kantorowicz. " Summary or excerpt of a 1976 article:

David Saxon, president of the University of California, says that the school's program to encourage minority enrollment is the only way to correct social inequities caused by past racial discrimination. The University has a responsibility to attract more minority students.

[1967-1975] Charles J. Hitch - "Hitch was born in Boonville, Missouri to Arthur M. Hitch and Bertha Johnston." Father's parents from Delaware; mother's parents from Missouri (source).

[1958-1967] Clark Kerr - "Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, and earned his A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1932, an M.A. from Stanford University in 1933, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1939."

[1930-1958] Robert Gordon Sproul - "Robert Gordon Sproul was born in San Francisco on May 22, 1891. His father, Robert Sproul, an auditor of the Southern Pacific Company, was a native of Scotland and a graduate of the University of Glasgow. His mother, Sarah Elizabeth (Moore) Sproul, was a New Englander." Wikipedia:

By the time he left office in 1958, the University of California, Berkeley was a distinguished university recognized worldwide for the excellence of its programs. And the University of California had a total of eight campuses from Davis to Los Angeles. There is a Sproul Hall on every UC campus, except for the recently opened and not fully built-out UC Merced, as well as the UCSF campus.

[1923-1930] William Wallace Campbell - "He was born on a farm in Hancock county, Ohio, the son of Robert Wilson and Harriet Welsh Campbell."

[1919-1923] David Prescott Barrows - "David Prescott Barrows was born in Chicago on June 27, 1873. The family moved to California in 1874, and Barrows was reared on a ranch in Ventura County." According to this bio, Barrows was "of New England ancestry".

[1899-1919] Benjamin Ide Wheeler - "Benjamin Ide Wheeler was born at Randolph, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1854, the son of the Rev. Benjamin and Mary Eliza (Ide) Wheeler. His father was successively a church pastor in Plaistow, New Hampshire; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Randolph, Massachusetts; Haverhill, Massachusetts; Saco, Maine; Franklin, New Hampshire. His mother, Mary Eliza Ide, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, daughter of Ebenezer Ide of the Ide family which had its origin in South Attleborough, then Rehoboth. Their only son, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, had his education first in the public schools of Haverhill and Saco, Maine. [. . .] Under Wheeler the University of California underwent one of its periods of greatest growth." (Note: This is what an actual Yankee looks like. Also, note the date.)

[1893-1899] Martin Kellogg - "Martin Kellogg (March 15, 1828 – August 26, 1903) was born in Vernon, Connecticut to Allyn Kellogg and Eliza Kellogg née White. He graduated from Yale as valedictorian of the Class of 1850. He was ordained as a missionary in the Congregational Church and served as a pastor in Shasta, California in 1855, then in Grass Valley, California from 1857 to 1860, and then in Oakland, California starting in 1861." (Another actual Yankee.)

[1880-1890] Horace Davis - "Davis was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended the Worcester public schools and Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard University in 1849, and then studied law in the Dane Law School of Harvard University [. . .] Davis sailed for San Francisco, California around Cape Horn in 1852, and upon arriving, engaged for a brief time as a gold miner, a lumber supercargo surveyor for a coastal steamer, and a purser for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. In addition he helped found the Mercantile Library Association of California (its oldest public library). [. . .] he was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives of the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses (March 4, 1877 - March 3, 1881), where on June 8, 1878 he spoke in support of a bill to restrict Chinese immigration." (Yankee.)

[1885-1888] Edward S. Holden - "He was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1846 to Jeremiah and Sarah Holden. From 1862-66, he attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he obtained a B.S. degree. He later trained at West Point in the class of 1870." (New England stock on at least his father's side.)

[1881-1885] W.T. Reid - "W.T. Reid (1842–1922) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois and served as the Fourth President of the University of California from 1881 to 1885."

[1876-1881] John LeConte - "LeConte was born in Liberty County, Georgia to Louis Le Conte, patriarch of the noted LeConte family. He attended Franklin College at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society and graduated in 1838."

[1872-1875] Daniel Coit Gilman - "Born in Norwich, Connecticut,[2] the son of Eliza (née Coit) and mill owner William Charles Gilman, a descendant of Edward Gilman, one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, Daniel Coit Gilman graduated from Yale College in 1852 with a degree in geography.[3] At Yale he was a classmate of Andrew Dickson White, who would later serve as first president of Cornell University. The two were members of the Skull and Bones secret society, and traveled to Europe together after graduation and remained lifelong friends. Gilman would later co-found the Russell Trust Association, the foundation behind Skull and Bones." (Yankee.)

[1870-1872] Henry Durant - "Henry Durant (Acton, Massachusetts, June 18, 1802 – Oakland, California, January 22, 1875) was the founding president of the University of California.[1]" (Yankee.)