Ancients perceived color differently?

Anglo-Irish proto-hippie and Aldous Huxley associate, Gerald Heard speculates:

In Homeric Greek the same rudimentary colour vocabulary is evident, Homer having half a dozen words for red, but no clear terms for blue and green. The eyes of his generation seem to have picked out the slight tinge of red in the purple of the Mediterranean, and to have been blind to the blue — hence his strange but constant epithet for the sea, "wine-dark." The painting of the deities' hair blue and calling such locks hyacinthine also seems due to a confusion in their colour sense. As most blues appear white in an ordinary photograph taken without chromatically corrected negatives, it is possible that the Greeks thought they were making all their gods platinum blonds. Nor did this limitation disappear even at the high noon of Greek culture. Their pottery, in spite of the increasing mastery of form, remained black and red.

I don't entirely buy this (and I notice at least one error in the surrounding discussion), but it's an interesting thought. Longer excerpt within:

Science's review of The Passing of the Great Race

The reviewer is Frederick Adams Woods:

Guilt-wracked, self-hating Puritan?

The August 21, 1921, New York Tribune features a letter to the editor arguing against Prohibition in the following terms.

The towering Nordic race of physical and mental giants, comprising the Germans, Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons--the big-headed, broad-shouldered, big-eating, big-drinking and big-fighting sword-arm men of the north--were the architects of the modern world. They were the old Vikings who, before Columbus, ferried the Atlantic in an open boat. They were the conquerors of Imperial Rome. That race of men has civilized, enlightened and uplifted the entire world, banished the ages of darkness and savagery, and replaced them with this age of invention, discovery, enlightenment and human well-being. But that was a race of boozers, wine-bibbers and beer-drinkers.

During thousands of years the Norse giants, with the divine old brutality of the cave-man in them, had their nightly wassail and carousal around the oaken table, in the glare of the great fire and under the flare of the torches, where they drank to one another's health and well-being until they fell under the table; [. . .]

While the hard-drinking Nordics were molding the world into a thing of beauty in their great hands, what were the non-drinking races doing? What were the teetotaling Mohamedan Arabs and Turks and the Buddhist East Indians doing? What were the abstemious Chinese doing? What were four-fifths of the rest of the human race, who were abstemious in the use of alcohol doing, while these Nordic sots were conquering savage races, reclaiming wild domains and building empires? I, for one, am willing to risk for the sake of good fellowship and a good time, a little of the light alcoholic stimulants with which the great Nordic people soused themselves for thousands of years without apparent harm.

The author is Hudson Maxim, the brother of inventor Hiram Maxim, born in Maine of New England Puritan stock and a successful inventor in his own right.

The racial worldview of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's mocking of the ideas of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard in The Great Gatsby recently came up a couple times at Alternative Right. Fitzgerald, however, seems to have been more sympathetic to Tom Buchanan's point of view than he let on in public (continue reading):

Nordics aren't Meds

Gracile Northern Caucasoids are gracile Northern Caucasoids -- not exactly surprising in light of ancient and modern genetic data and archaeological evidence:

A.G. Kozintsev. THE “MEDITERRANEANS” OF SOUTHERN SIBERIA AND KAZAKHSTAN, INDO-EUROPEAN MIGRATIONS, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE SCYTHIANS: A MULTIVARIATE CRANIOMETRIC ANALYSIS. Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia Volume 36, Issue 4, December 2008, Pages 140-144. doi:10.1016/j.aeae.2009.03.013

The article presents some results of a multivariate analysis of 245 male Eurasian cranial series dating to various periods from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age. These results contradict the commonly held view that certain comparatively gracile (narrow-faced) Bronze Age populations of Southern Siberia and Kazakhstan were “Mediterranean” in the anthropological sense, i.e. Southern Caucasoid. Craniometry provides no support for the theory that those people migrated to Southern Siberia or Kazakhstan from Southwestern Central Asia, the Near East, or Trans-Caucasia. Populations described as “Mediterranean” (the Okunev people of Tuva, the Yelunino, the Samus, and some Afanasiev and Andronov groups) display craniometric resemblance with the Bronze Age people of Southern Russian and Ukrainian steppes, as well as with certain Late Neolithic and Bronze Age groups of Central and Western Europe. These affinities are apparently caused by migrations of Indo-Europeans (specifically Indo-Iranians) from their European homeland eastward, as far as Eastern Central Asia. The return from Eastern Central Asia to Europe of the descendents of one of these groups during the Early Iron Age was probably the principal cause for the emergence of the Scythians on the historical arena.

On the supposed craniometric affinity between Harappa and the Tarim Basin:

Gumu Gou (Qäwrighul), Xinjiang

Han (1986), who measured this series according to a large trait set used by Russian anthropologists, believed that it conformed to a “Proto-European” pattern (a Russian term denoting robust Cro-Magnon-like Caucasoids) and that it was close to Afanasiev and Andronov groups. Solodovnikov and Tur (2003), while agreeing with him in general, noted that this series was more gracile and accordingly more “Mediterranean.” If “Mediterranean” means “Southern Caucasoid,” then the results of distance analysis contradict this view, since the group exhibits no Southern Caucasoid affinities. Generally, the Gumu Gou people show no distinct similarity to any other group. Least distant from them are the Andronov people from eastern, central, and northern Kazakhstan (according to data corrected by Solodovnikov (2006)), whereas those of the Samus and Yelunino are somewhat further. B.E. Hemphill found the Gumu Gou people to be close to the Harappans (Hemphill, Mallory, 2004). However, this result may be incidental, since Hemphill used a limited trait set and a very small comparative database. Also, the measurements of the Gumu Gou series used by him do not match those in the original publication (Han, 1986).

The conclusion:

The results of the multivariate statistical analysis disagree with the traditional view that the prehistoric Caucasoids who were not robust (“Proto-European”) were necessarily “Mediterranean” – a view until recently shared by myself (Kozintsev, 2000). This dichotomy takes no account of the Northern Caucasoids, who are simply ignored. Actually, by no means all gracile Caucasoids were of southern descent. Having begun in the southern parts of the Caucasoid realm, the gracilization process (probably not only spontaneous, but also caused by geneflow from the Mediterranean area) eventually spread northward and by the Neolithic had already extended over large areas of Western Europe, which were undoubtedly affected by depigmentation. The role of the narrow-faced, fair-haired people of Central and Western European descent in Indo-European (specifically Indo-Iranian) migrations to the east was no less central than that of the robust “Proto-Europeans” and was definitely more prominent than that of the Southern Caucasoids such as the Mediterraneans. Further research will hopefully help shed light on that role and will thereby contribute to elucidating the multidisciplinary issue of the Indo-European homeland.

Ancient DNA evidence agrees:

Our autosomal, Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA analyses reveal that whereas few specimens seem to be related matrilineally or patrilineally, nearly all subjects belong to haplogroup R1a1-M17 which is thought to mark the eastward migration of the early Indo-Europeans. Our results also confirm that at the Bronze and Iron Ages, south Siberia was a region of overwhelmingly predominant European settlement, suggesting an eastward migration of Kurgan people across the Russo-Kazakh steppe. Finally, our data indicate that at the Bronze and Iron Age timeframe, south Siberians were blue (or green)-eyed, fair-skinned and light-haired people and that they might have played a role in the early development of the Tarim Basin civilization.

[Keyser C. et al. Ancient DNA provides new insights into the history of south Siberian Kurgan people. Human Genetics doi:10.1007/s00439-009-0683-0]

Blue-eyed Siberians

Bouakaze et al. Pigment phenotype and biogeographical ancestry from ancient skeletal remains: inferences from multiplexed autosomal SNP analysis. International Journal of Legal Medicine doi:10.1007/s00414-009-0348-5

The genotype for rs12913832 was obtained for 23 out of the 25 samples, and most had the G/G genotype (n=15), which indicates that at least 60% of ancient specimens were probably blue- or green-eyed individuals. The remaining samples had the A/G (n=5) or A/A (n=3) genotypes, which are predictive of brown eye color phenotype.

See Dienekes for more, or read the pdf.

Physical correlates of cognitive ability

General intelligence has been found to correlate with hair and eye color, among other physical characteristics:

Among these physical correlates of IQ are certain blood group and particularly the positive correlation of g with the number of homozygous genetic loci (i.e., the same alleles at each locus on both chromosomes) for various blood types, which indicates greater-than-usual genetic similarity of the individual's parents. This would ensure less immunological risk of antigenic incompatibility between mother and fetus, a prenatal factor that can have subtle deleterious effects on brain development in utero. The best-known antigenic incompatibility between mother and fetus with potentially harmful effects on fetal development is that for the Rh factor, which occurs in second-born (and later-born) children when the mother is Rh-negative and the fetus is Rh-positive (having received the RH+ allele from the father). Dizygotic (DZ) twins who are discordant for the RH factor (and certain other blood antigens as well) show greater IQ differences than DZ twins who are concordant. Another blood variable of interest is the amount of uric acid in the blood (serum urate level). Many studies have shown it to have only a slight positive correlation with IQ. But it is considerably more correlated with measures of ambition and achievement. Uric acid, which has a chemical structure similar to caffeine, seems to act as a brain stimulant, and its stimulating effect over the course of the individual's life span results in more notable achievements than are seen in persons of comparable IQ, social and cultural background, and general life-style, but who have a lower serum urate level. High school students with elevated serum urate levels, for example, obtain higher grades than their IQ-matched peers with an average or below-average serum urate level, and, amusingly, one study found a positive correlation between university professors' serum urate levels and their publication rates. The undesirable aspect of high serum urate levels is that it predisposes to gout. In fact, that is how the association was originally discovered. The English scientist Havelock Ellis, in studying the lives and accomplishments of the most famous Britishers, discovered that they had a much higher incidence of gout than occurs in the general populations.

Asthma and other allergies have a much-higher-than-average frequency in children wiht higher IQs (over 130), particularly those who are mathematically gifted, and this is an intrinsic relationship. [. . .]

Then there are also a number of odd and less-well-established physical correlates of IQ that have each shown up in only one or two studies, such as vital capacity (i.e., the amount of air that can be expelled from the lungs), handgrip strength, symmetrical facial features, light hair color, light eye color, above-average basic metabolic rate (all these are positively correlated with IQ), and being unable to taste the synthetic chemical phenylthiocarbamide (nontasters are higher both in g and in spatial ability than tasters; the two types do not differ in tests of clerical speed and accuracy). The correlations are small and it is not yet known whether any of them are within-family correlations. Therefore, no causal connection with g has been established.

Finally, there is substantial evidence of a positive relation between g and general health or physical well-being. In a very large national sample of high school students (about 10,000 of each sex) there was a correlation of +.381 between a forty-three-item health questionnaire and the composite score on a large number of diverse mental tests, which is virtually a measure of g. By comparison, the correlation between the health index and the students' socioeconomic status (SES) was only +.222. Partialing out g leaves a very small correlation between SES and healthy status.

[Arthur Jensen, The g factor, pp. 162-163]

I don't know if the relationship between IQ and light hair/eyes holds within ethnically homogeneous samples. Taking Europe as a whole, I would find the reported correlation unsurprising. Internationally, lighter skin correlates with greater intelligence:

We correlated mean IQ of 129 countries with per capita income, skin color, and winter and summer temperatures, conceptualizing skin color as a multigenerational reflection of climate. The highest correlations were − 0.92 (rho = − 0.91) for skin color, − 0.76 (rho = − 0.76) for mean high winter temperature, − 0.66 (rho = − 0.68) for mean low winter temperature, and 0.63 (rho = 0.74) for real gross domestic product per capita. The correlations with population of country controlled for are almost identical. Our findings provide strong support for the observation of Lynn and of Rushton that persons in colder climates tend to have higher IQs. These findings could also be viewed as congruent with, although not providing unequivocal evidence for, the contention that higher intelligence evolves in colder climates.

[Templer and Arikawa. Temperature, skin color, per capita income, and IQ: An international perspective. Intelligence. Volume 34, Issue 2, March-April 2006, Pages 121-139.]

Higher cognitive ability was found to be associated with sharper, more linear facial features in an ethnically British and Irish sample.

Facial shape covaried with cognitive performance in a sexually dimorphic manner. Among men, the regression model for time to complete Trail Making Test A was associated with one PC of facial shape, which explains 14% of the variance in completion time ( F = 6.21, d.f. = 1, P < 0.05); on visualization of this statistical model (Fig. 6), increasing spatial attention, visuomotor tracking and processing speed was associated primarily with a relative increase in anterior–posterior length and relative decrease in facial width. Time to complete Trail Making Test B, which places additional demands on attention and ‘set shifting’ relative to Test A, was associated with one PC of facial shape, which explains 22% of the variance in completion time ( F = 10.13, d.f. = 1, P < 0.005); on visualization of this statistical model (Fig. 6), increasing spatial attention, visuomotor tracking, processing speed and ‘set shifting’ was associated primarily with anterior displacement of chin, posterior displacement of mouth, narrowing of cheeks and anterior displacement of forehead. Conversely, verbal fluency was unrelated to any component of facial shape in men.

In women, times to complete Trail Making Tests A and B were not associated with any PC of facial shape. Conversely, the regression model for verbal fluency score was associated with two PCs of facial shape in women, which explain 16% of the variance in verbal fluency score ( F = 5.86, d.f. = 2, P < 0.005); on visualization of this statistical model (Fig. 6), increasing verbal fluency was associated primarily with anterior–inferior displacement of the nose, anterior–superior displacement of the chin, inferior displacement of the upper lip, inward displacement of the cheeks, posterior–superior displacement of the forehead and relative widening of the lateral face.

[Hennessy et al. Facial surface analysis by 3D laser scanning and geometric morphometrics in relation to sexual dimorphism in cerebral–craniofacial morphogenesis and cognitive function. Journal of Anatomy, Volume 207, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 283-295(13).]

"Nordicism", racial preservationism, and ethnonationalism

In a comment at majorityrights.com, Guessedworker identifies what he claims are the "four possible positions for an ethnically- or racially-aware member of our people(s) in respect to European preservation", described in terms of two binary variables: does the individual belong to "[a single] one of the European ethnies" or not; and is the individual "concerned to preserve his ethny while desiring the preservation of Europe’s ethnies as a whole" or does he see "no intrinsic value in ethny at all, and desires only the preservation at a combinative level". GW claims the latter "is the position of the Nordicist and the pan-European." While I believe GW's entire schema here is off base (with, for example, the rather glaring omission of an "advance my ethny at the expense of other European ethnies" position, despite the fact that almost the entirety of Europe's history [and likely prehistory] has been characterized by intertribal and interethnic competition), I'm concerned here primarily with GW's claim that "Nordicists" deprecate "ethnies". I find the claim so bizarre and wrongheaded it's hard to know where to start in refuting it, but defining terms is as good a place as any.

"Nordicism", particularly as the term is thrown around by Rienzi- and diabloblanco-types, encompasses various distinct schools of thought with divergent purposes, emphases, and interpretations. Here, I'll simply define "Nordicist" as someone who recognizes the existence within Europe of racially distinct type(s) associated today primarily with Northern Europe and her offshoots and who favors the continued existence of these type(s).

I'll let Frank Salter--from whom GW borrowed the term--define "ethny":

ethny

A population sharing common descent. 'Ethny' is a preferable term to 'ethnic group' because members of such a category rarely form a group. Ethnies are usually concentric clusters of encompassing populations, such as tribe, regional population, and geographic race. The term 'ethny' used in this book usually means 'a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of common culture, a link with a homeland and a sense of solidarity among at least some of its members'.² However, it sometimes has a more general meaning, and thus corresponds most closely to the biological concept of the population.

[From On Genetic Interests, Appendix 2; my emphasis.]

What should be immediately clear is that not only is "Nordicism" compatible with the preservation of "ethnies", to the extent the Nordicist correctly discerns relative kinship, Nordicism is synonymous with a desire to preserve a particular ethny or ethnies.

I presume when GW writes "ethny" he has in mind traditionally-defined ethnicities or nationalities. Frank Salter, as we see above, sometimes uses "ethny" in a similar manner. And indeed we should expect present-day national and linguistic borders to play some role in structuring genetic variation in Europe; but it's an empirical question (yet to be investigated adequately) how large that role is. Sir Arthur Keith argued nations are "races in the making" and I agree--but that process of race formation is, I think, far from complete in most European polities. Some "Nordicists" have critiqued elements of nationalism (e.g. "fratricidal" wars), but none of the major Nordicist thinkers I'm aware of ever called for abolition of national borders, customs, languages, or so forth--nor are they desirous only of "preservation at a combinative level." In fact, the ethnonationalist is more like the "pan-Europeanist" in that respect. The "Nordicist" almost by definition recognizes and values the existence of racial variation within national borders. The single-minded nationalist, on the other hand, would seek to minimize regional and class differences to promote national unity (at the likely expense of regional genetic interests). The "Pan-Europeanist" merely expands that mindset to cover an entire continent.

GW's belief that America is not a "real" country is again on display. I'll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I'll note that the genetic distance between SW and NE Germans (F_ST = 0.00054) is five times that between Americans reporting "western European" ancestry and those reporting "central European" ancestry (F_ST = 0.0001). No doubt the "ancient" nation of Italy (est. 1861) is even more homogenous.