Cochran/Harpending on Proto-Indo-European expansion

Their book (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution) hasn't yet been released, but much of it is now readable on Google Books. Here is Cochran and Harpending's take on the spread of Indo-European:

Milk and the Kurgans

Improved variants of the Kurgan hypotheses fit many facts, but what they don't do is explain why the Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded at the expense of neighboring peoples [. . .]

We suggest that the advantage driving those Indo-European expansions was biological--a high frequency of the European lactose-tolerance mutation (the 13910-T allele). The usual story about lactose tolerance is that it's the result of a cultural innovation, the domestication of cattle. That innovation led to selection for a new mutation that extended lactase production into adulthood. But there's more to the story.

Initially, selection favored individual carriers of the lactose-tolerance mutation, but the mutation was rare and had little social effect. Cattle were used for plowing and pulling wagons, for their beef, and as a source of secondary products like leather and tallow. But when the lactase persistence allele became common, so that a majority of the adult population could drink milk, a new kind of pastoralism became possible, one in which people kept cattle primarily for their milk rather than for their flesh. This change is very significant, because dairying is much more efficient than raising cattle for slaughter: It produces about five times as many calories per acre. Dairying pastoralists produce more high-quality food on the same amount of land than nondairy pastoralists, so higher frequencies of lactose tolerance among Indo-Europeans would have caused the carrying capacity of land to increase--for them.

Standard ecological theory indicates that when two similar populations use the same resources, the one with the greater carrying capacity always wins. In more familiar terms, the Proto-Indo-Europeans in our scenario could raise and feed more warriors on the same amount of land--and that is a recipe for expansion. The same basic idea is behind theories of the expansion of farming through local population growth (called demic expansion): Farming produces more food per acre, therefore farmers will outnumber foragers, and so farmers will expand at the expense of foragers.

Proto-Indo-Europeans probably were most competitive in areas where grain agriculture was marginal. In the steppe, the problem was limited rainfall. Since raising cattle there had been competitive with grain farming even before dairying arose, milk-drinking Indo-Europeans would have had an absolute advantage and should have spread rapidly over the steppe. In much of northern Europe, shorter growing seasons must have interfered with production of cereal crops such as wheat, particularly when agriculture was new there, as those crops had had little time to adapt to the local climate. Eventually, other cereal crops, such as oats and rye that could do well in those climates, were developed--probably by accident, starting as weeds in wheat or barley fields. But that happened in the Bronze Age, long after the introduction of farming. Dairying may have been more productive than grain farming in northern Europe during the late Neolithic. Even if it was not, it may have been close enough to let other advantages of the pastoral way of life tip the scales. It seems clear that the Proto-Indo-European form of patoralism did have other advantages in intergroup competition.

As the Proto-Indo-Europeans became dairymen, they should have come to rely more and more on their cattle and less on grain farming. As that happened, they would have become mobile, which is a military advantage, especially against farmers. Farmers have homes and villages that they must defend, whereas pastoralists can fight at a time and place of their choosing.

[. . .]

Back in the early days of their expansion, the Indo-Europeans appear to have encountered farmers in the Balkans who had been farming since about 6000 BC, but who weren't under a powerful central government. Around 4200 BC, things went sour. Ancient village sites were abandoned, advanced work in metals and ceramics became rare, and the inhabitants shifted to easily defended sites such as caves, hilltops, and islands. We find an increasing number of Kurgan burials similar to those found earlier on the steppe. (Interestingly, the bodies in those Kurgan burials averaged almost four inches taller than the earlier peoples of the region--milk does a body good.)

We suspect that pre-state farmers had a lot of trouble with invading Indo-European pastoralists. It wasn't just that dairying was productive and conferred increased mobility. It made cattle very valuable, and cattle are far easier to steal than heaps of grain: They can walk. It looks as if the early Indo-Europeans spent a lot of time rustling each other's cattle, fighting over cattle, planning revenge for previous raids, and in general raising hell. They became a warrior society.

So far, so plausible. Now it starts to get a bit pat.

European languages and culture spread past those regions in which dairying was favored--for example, into southern Europe and Iran--but strong states probably limited their expansion into the Middle East.

As much as anything, those peripheral expansions were probably driven by what might be called historical momentum: Peoples with a long record of success in war and raiding kept expanding even in areas where they had no special ecological advantages. Something similar happened when the Indo-Aryans moved into India: Internal weakness, possibly even collapse, of the Indus civilization may have allowed that expansion to occur.

In Understanding Human History (pdf), Michael Hart attributes conquests of more southerly peoples by Indo-Europeans to higher intelligence among the latter, which, while it may not be a complete explanation, I find more compelling than "historical momentum". Continuing:

Today the LCT 13910-T variant has reached almost 100 percent frequency in some parts of northern Europe; it is common in northern India and can even be found at low levels among some pastoral peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Fulani and Hausa.

Moreover, there is reason to think that this historical phenomenon has happened at least three times. Cattle herders of East Africa in the region of the Upper Nile and further south are lactase-tolerant[sic] milk drinkers dure to a younger mutation of their own. They, too, have expanded: They have become warlike, and there are fascinating parallels between their religions and social structure and those of the ancestral Indo-Europeans. Another separate pair of mutations causing lactose tolerance happened in the Arabian peninsula, driven in this case by the domestication of camels. This may have been an important cause of the explosive growth of Islam and the Arab conquests of the sevention century AD and later.

"Half of Brits have immigrant ancestors"

Headline from The Telegraph, reporting on the results of a survey by ancestry.co.uk last month. The Daily Mail has more details:

[British] who investigated at least four generations of their family tree revealed just over half had recent immigrant ancestors.

The majority came from our European neighbours, including a quarter from Ireland, one in ten from France and a similar number from Germany.

But distant countries which featured high on the list included Canada, where one in 20 of us can trace a family member - a reminder of our close links with the Commonwealth country.

Around one in 30 have American blood in their veins - the country which gave us Christmas turkey.

[. . .]

Yet most of us remain unaware of the rich mixture of nationalities in our families. In all, 84 per cent of us know nothing about our foreign background, says ancestry.co.uk which commissioned a poll of 2,500 individuals, including 500 who had investigated their family trees.

I don't know how representative of Britain ancestry.co.uk's sample is, but I'm aware of other surveys showing large proportions (19% to 77%) of Londoners report Irish ancestors.

Most of the reporting on this story conflates/equates immigration from neighboring European countries and immigration of non-Europeans, which is of course nonsense. This survey bears notice, however: the presence of a significant recent non-English element in England complicates efforts to make historical inferences from genetic surveys of the present-day general English population. The People of the British Isles project, sampling rural people "whose parents and grandparents were all born in the same locality", should allow clearer results than studies based on medical samples.

Update on Pacific BioSciences sequencing technology

New Scientist: Molecular fireworks could produce '30-minute genomes':

A more promising approach is to watch a molecule of double-stranded DNA being constructed from a single strand in real time. The trouble is that this occurs on such a small scale that it has been impossible to see. Now a team at Pacific BioSciences in Menlo Park, California, says it has worked out how this can be done (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1162986).

[. . .]

So far, the team has built a chip housing 3000 ZMWs, which the company hopes will hit the market in 2010. By 2013, it aims to squeeze a million ZMWs onto a single chip and observe DNA being assembled in each simultaneously. Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000.

"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant"

"WASP" is a pejorative for (unhyphenated) "American". The term may be applied to broad or narrow segments of the founding American ethny, in terms of class, region, and ancestral background, leading to many opportunities for confusion and misdirection. "WASP" functions primarily as an instrument for delegitimizing and dispossessing the progeny of the founders.

Exactly who it is that will take over the center is a problem of definition. Wasps are not so easily characterized as other ethnic groups. The term itself can be merely descriptive or mildly offensive, depending on the user and the hearer; at any rate, it has become part of the American idiom. In one sense, it is redundant: since all Anglo-Saxons are white, the word could be Asp. Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment; at the widest, they include Okies and Snopeses, "Holy Rollers" and hillbillies. Wasps range from Mc-George Bundy and Penelope Tree to William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Phyllis Diller. Generously defined, Wasps constitute about 55% of the U.S. population, and they have in common what Columnist Russell Baker calls a "case of majority inferiority."

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost." Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp's traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.

Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels—the big cities—were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos—schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies.

Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and "swarthy" persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation's intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O'Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students."

Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will—and money—can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd.

[ARE THE WASPS COMING BACK? HAVE THEY EVER BEEN AWAY? Time Friday, Jan. 17, 1969]

Updated Bayesian ancestry analysis software

Enhanced Bayesian modelling in BAPS software for learning genetic structures of populations.

BMC Bioinformatics. 2008 Dec 16;9(1):539

Authors: Corander J, Marttinen P, Siren J, Tang J

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: During the most recent decade many Bayesian statistical models and software for answering questions related to the genetic structure underlying population samples have appeared in the scientific literature. Most of these methods utilize molecular markers for the inferences, while some are also capable of handling DNA sequence data. In a number of earlier works, we have introduced an array of statistical methods for population genetic inference that are implemented in the software BAPS. However, the complexity of biological problems related to genetic structure analysis keeps increasing such that in many cases the current methods may provide either inappropriate or insufficient solutions. RESULTS: We discuss the necessity of enhancing the statistical approaches to face the challenges posed by the ever-increasing amounts of molecular data generated by scientists over a wide range of research areas and introduce an array of new statistical tools implemented in the most recent version of BAPS. With these methods it is possible, e.g., to fit genetic mixture models using user-specified numbers of clusters and to estimate levels of admixture under a genetic linkage model. Also, alleles representing a different ancestry compared to the average observed genomic positions can be tracked for the sampled individuals, and a priori specified hypotheses about genetic population structure can be directly compared using Bayes' theorem. In general, we have improved further the computational characteristics of the algorithms behind the methods implemented in BAPS facilitating the analyses of large and complex datasets. In particular, analysis of a single dataset can now be spread over multiple computers using a script interface to the software. CONCLUSIONS: The Bayesian modelling methods introduced in this article represent an array of enhanced tools for learning the genetic structure of populations. Their implementations in the BAPS software are designed to meet the increasing need for analyzing large-scale population genetics data. The software is freely downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems at http://web.abo.fi/fak/mnf//mate/jc/software/baps.html.

PMID: 19087322 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

[link]

Sex, race, and selection for height

A few papers relating to a conversation I'm not particularly interested in. For the record, in the West:

Selection worked strongly in favor of very tall men, not just against short men. Since there were no hints of any evolutionary check on this selection, these findings suggest unconstrained directional selection for tallness in men. [Evidence of unconstrained directional selection for male tallness]

And:

Height was weakly but significantly related to reproductive success [among women]. The relationship was U-shaped, with deficits at the extremes of height. This pattern was largely due to poor health among extremely tall and extremely short women. However, the maximum reproductive success was found below the mean height for women. Thus, selection appears to be sexually disruptive in this population, favouring tall men and short women. Over evolutionary time, such a situation tends to maintain sexual dimorphism. Men do not use stature as a positive mate-choice criterion as women do. It is argued that there is good evolutionary reason for this, because men are orientated towards cues of fertility, and female height, being positively related to age of sexual maturity, is not such a cue. [Women's height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans]

Whereas, in Africa:

In Western societies, height is positively correlated with reproductive success (RS) for men but negatively correlated with RS for women. These relationships have been attributed to sexual selection: women prefer tall men, and men prefer short women. It is this success in the marriage market which leads to higher RS for tall men and short women. We have already shown that the relationship between height and RS for women is quite different in a non-Western context. In a subsistence farming community in rural Gambia, height is positively correlated with reproductive success for women, largely owing to the higher survival of the children of tall women. Here, the relationship between height and reproductive success is analyzed for men in the same community. For these Gambian men, there is no significant relationship between height and the number of children they produce, although tall men do contract more marriages than shorter men. We conclude that environmental context needs to be taken into account when analyzing human reproductive behavior. [Height and reproductive success: How a Gambian population compares with the west]

Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology: new URL

The SNPA website is now located at:

http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/

The domain also hosts a new forum, from the people who used to run The Nordish Portal.

Geographic population structure in Britain

This 2007 genome-wide SNP study provides some information on geographic population structure in Britain.

 Thirteen genomic regions showing strong geographical variation are listed in Table 1, and Supplementary Fig. 7 shows the way in which their allele frequencies vary geographically. The predominant pattern is variation along a NW/SE axis. The most likely cause for these marked geographical differences is natural selection, most plausibly in populations ancestral to those now in the UK. Variation due to selection has previously been implicated at LCT (lactase) and major histocompatibility complex(MHC)7–9, and within-UK differentiation at 4p14 has been found independently10, but others seem to be new findings. All but three of the regions contain known genes. Aside from evolutionary interest, genes showing evidence of natural selection are particularly interesting for the biology of traits such as infectious diseases; possible targets for selection include NADSYN1 (NAD synthetase 1) at 11q13, which could have a role in prevention of pellagra, as well as TLR1 (toll-like receptor 1) at 4p14, for which a role in the biology of tuberculosis and leprosy has been suggested10.

There may be important population structure that is not well captured by current geographical region of residence. Present implementations of strongly model-based approaches such as STRUCTURE11,12 are impracticable for data sets of this size, and we reverted to the classical method of principal components13,14, using a subset of 197,175 SNPs chosen to reduce inter-locus linkage disequilibrium. Nevertheless, four of the first six principal components clearly picked up effects attributable to local linkage disequilibrium rather than genome-wide structure. The remaining two components show the same predominant geographical trend from NW to SE but, perhaps unsurprisingly, London is set somewhat apart (Supplementary Fig. 8).

[The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature 447, 661-678 (7 June 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature05911]

  

 

A later study ("Investigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studies") finds 11 of these 13 SNPs are also "involved in East–West and North–South gradients covering all of Europe".

 

I'd prefer to see Scotland broken down by region -- I'd expect Lowlanders to be more similar to northern English. Ignoring London and Scotland, we see a continuum with East Anglia on one end and Wales on the other, consistent with the major trend detected here being varying proportions of continental Germanic and indigenous British ancestry.

Related: Genetic differentiation in the UK

Balls and brains

That's The Economist's headline:

The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa

THERE are few better ways of upsetting a certain sort of politically correct person than to suggest that intelligence (or, rather, the variation in intelligence between individuals) is under genetic control. That, however, is one implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London, and her colleagues. Another is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. And the third, a consequence of the second, is that intelligence is sexy. The most surprising thing of all, though, is that these results have emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm.

[. . .]

Ms Arden found 425 cases where samples had been collected and analysed from unvasectomised men who had managed to avoid spilling their seed during the collection process and had answered all the necessary questions for her to test her hypothesis, namely that their g values would correlate with all three measures of their sperm quality.

They did. Moreover, neither age nor any obvious confounding variable that might have been a consequence of intelligent decisions about health (obesity, smoking, drinking and drug use) had any effect on the result. Brainy men, it seems, do have better sperm.

By implication, therefore, they have fitter bodies over all, at least in the Darwinian sense of fitness, namely the ability to survive, to attract mates and to produce offspring. That is an important finding. Hitherto, biologists have tended to disaggregate the idea of fitness into a series of adaptations that are more or less independent of each other. This work adds to the idea of a general fitness factor, f, that is similar in concept to g—and of which g is one manifestation. To him that hath, in other words, shall be given. Unfortunately for the politically correct, Dr Miller’s hypothesis looks stronger by the day.

Dienekes links to the study. While the result has no direct bearing on Rushton's cross-racial claims (which stand or fall on their own merits), it seems to contradict the broader theoretical underpinning of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, proving that intelligence and reproductive potential need not be inversely related in humans (at least in men).

Related: Physical correlates of cognitive ability

What Americans (used to) look like

From an early article on Ales Hrdlicka's work [1]:

 

 

From The Old Americans by Ales Hrdlicka:

[1] "The 'Melting Pot' a Myth," Journal of Heredity, VIII (March 1917), 99-105 (link)

Related:

• Hrdlicka on "American type"
  
• Hrdlicka on Old New Englanders
  
• Coon on American racial types
  
• Brues on American physical types
  
• Harry Laughlin's definition of an American

Implicit Association Test = leftwing pseudoscience

Researchers Disagree on Accuracy of Well-Known Bias Test (NYT):

“One can decrease racial bias scores on the I.A.T. by simply exposing people to pictures of African-Americans enjoying a picnic,” says Hart Blanton, a psychologist at Texas A&M. “Yet respondents who take this test on the Web are given feedback suggesting that some enduring quality is being assessed.” He says that even the scoring system itself has been changed arbitrarily in recent years. “People receiving feedback about their ‘strong’ racial biases,” Dr. Blanton says, “are encouraged in sensitivity workshops to confront these tendencies as some ugly reality that has meaning in their daily lives. But unbeknownst to respondents who take this test, the labels given to them were chosen by a small group of people who simply looked at a distribution of test scores and decided what terms seemed about right. This is not how science is done.”

Having just taken the "Race IAT" again, I'm told: "Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between African American and European American."

(The title of this post is slightly hyperbolic. I'm not sold either way on the general usefulness of IATs, but clearly Greenwald and Banaji are bent on social engineering.)

Brues on American physical types

Based on data collected on a large sample of U.S. soldiers in the middle of the last century, Alice Brues sees six broad physical types in America:

[. . .] table 10 [. . .] lists certain very broad categories of physical type (derived quite empirically from the data of tables 6 and 7, without retrospect on any special system of racial classification.) Under each physical type are listed the regions and national extractions characterized by it.

The first type, a tall thin-faced dolichocephal, is typical of Old Americans and British and of the Old American stronghold in the southern states east of the Mississippi. The second type, which is distinguished from the first by greater width of the face and head, is typical of Scandinavian extraction and of the West North Central and to a lesser extend the Mountain and Pacific states.

The third type, diametrically opposite from the first, is short, relatively brachycephalic, and broad-faced. It characterizes Germanic, Russian and Slavic extractions and the Middle Atlantic and East North Central states; i.e., the industrial north exclusive of New England. The fourth type, not too clearly marked, differs from the third in that the head breadth and bizygomatic are not high; this type is small all over. It characterizes Gallic and Mediterranean strains and the New England area.

The fifth type is peculiar to the West South Central states, and is not parallelled by any of the European extractions. It is characterized by a strong inverse relation of head breadth and bizygomatic (which otherwise show a very general correlation) the face breadth being disproportionately high. A clue to this may be seen in the 4% frequency of Latin American extraction in this are, though this alone could hardly account for the approximate 2.5 mm excess of face breadth relative to head breadth. Since this area, which includes Texas and Oklahoma, is not only the principal point of Mexican immigration, but also the area in which maximum infiltration of Indian blood into the general population has undoubtedly taken place, it appears probable that the excessive face breadth is the result of a tangible mongoloid admixture.

The sixth type is really no type at all; it comprises the Irish, who happen to be very close to the general averages of the total American melange, as well as very randomly distributed regionally.

SUMMARY

The study includes 3075 white enlisted men measured by the Chemical Warfare Service, representing all sections of the United States. Stature and eight head and face measurements have been correlated with states of birth and national extraction. Cephalic index, head length and breadth, and nose breadth, afford the clearest differentiation both for nationality of origin and for place of birth within the United States. Regional differences are less marked than those associated with national extraction, but are statistically considerable. Residence in the United Sates appears to have effected and increase in stature, at least in the shorter European stocks, with a corresponding slight decrease in cephalic index : certainty on this point is prevented by ignorance of selective factors in immigration. Differences in national extraction between different areas of the United States are found to be considerable, reflecting the historical sequence of migrations. The physical differences of the various regions appear to be primarily determined by the distribution of the various European stocks which settled them. Traces of aboriginal population are indicated in only one area.

TABLE 10
American "types" with regions and nationalities in which they predominate

1. Stature and head length high
   Head breadth and bizygomatic low
   South Atlantic
   East South Central
   Old American
   British
   
2. Stature high, head length average or high
   Head breadth and bizygomatic not low
   West North Central
   Mountain
   Pacific
   Scandinavian
   
3. Stature and head length low
   Head breadth and bizygomatic high
   Middle Atlantic
   East North Central
   Germanic
   Russian
   Slavic
   
4. Stature and head length low
   Head breadth and bizygomatic not high
   New England
   Gallic
   Mediterranean
   
5. Head breadth low, bizygomatic high
   West South Central
   
6. No marked deviation from U.S. average
   Irish

[Alice M. Brues. Regional differences in the physical characteristics of an american population. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 4:463-482, 1946.]

Based on Table 6, the "Germanic" group is intermediate between the British and Slavic in head length, head breadth, and bizygomatic. It's not obvious to me why Brues chose to include "Germanic" and Slavic in the same category. Considering "national extraction groups" individually:

the Slavic is most strongly differentiated from the total population [. . .] The significant differences are: plus in head breadth, bizygomatic, bigonial and nose breadth, and minus in head length.

After Slavic, the next most distinctive group is "Mediterranean, significantly less than average in stature and head length, and more than average in face length, nose length and nose breadth." Contra Boas:

The lowest cephalic index mean in the present series is 77.3 for Pure British. [. . .] The American "British" [. . .] appear to be fractionally more dolichocephalic than the British themselves. The highest cephalic index mean in the present series is 82.7 for Pure Slavic. [. . .] The general conclusion is nevertheless the same as in the case of the British group: the American "Slavics" are comparable to their European ancestors, with a suspicious tendency towards greater dolichocephaly, probably not more than one unit. [. . .] the difference appears to be that which might be expected from increase in height. It certainly appears that the European cephalic index differences, in the intermediate groups as well as in these two extremes, have been well preserved in their transplanted members, The long established position of the cephalic index as a critical and reasonably stable indicator of ancestry is well borne out by the present analysis. The probable decrease of the cephalic index in the presence of factors favoring greater physical size is small in relation to the hereditary differences.

Another nail in the coffin of the Iberian Irish myth

Within the last few months, the genetic genealogy community has placed a new SNP (L21 / rs11799226) on the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree downstream of the most frequent western European haplogroup (R1b). Preliminary results suggest the overwhelming majority of Irish R1b carry the mutation, while L21 is absent in the Iberian samples and subclades tested so far. R1b from England and continental northwestern Europe seem to be split between L21-derived and L21-ancestral. It's still early and I'd like to see more data, but I think L21 (and thus the direct male ancestor of the majority of the Irish) most likely originated in northwestern Europe. The supposed link between the Irish and Iberians was built on the high frequency of R1b Y-DNA in both regions. The autosomal and mtDNA data never supported any sort of special or close relationship between "Celts" and Basques; it's now clear that Y-DNA doesn't, either.

More ancient DNA from Germany (Corded Ware burials)

Via Dienekes:

Additionally, the Y chromosome haplogroup R1a of the boys corresponds with the man’s (ind. 3). It is noteworthy that in grave 99 the orientation of the adult individuals follows the established pattern of the CWC, whereas both children clearly deviate from it. It appears that the burial orientation pattern was overruled for each boy to face a parent to express a biological relationship.

[Haak et al. Ancient DNA, Strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age.
PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.0807592105.]

The R1a result is interesting, but I'd like to see Y-DNA results from many more samples before drawing any firm conclusions. Based on his analysis of physical remains, Roland Menk concluded:

The Corded Ware complex s.l. is biologically heterogeneous. The local groups of the core area (Central Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland) form a very homogeneous block, issued from the local "Old Europe" substratum and persisting until Aunjetitz at least. This block shows no biological affinities to the Ukrainian Kurgan populations. There is no evidence for physical presence of Kurgan tribes in this area. Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe could be explained by indirect Kurganization, i.e. by invasion of previously Kurganized neighbor groups.

[Roland Menk. A Synopsis of the Physical Anthropology of the Corded Ware Complex on the Background of the Expansion the Kurgan Cultures. Journal of Indo-European Studies, V. 8 361.]

On the other hand, Coon believed:

On the basis of the physical evidence as well, it is likely that the Corded people came from somewhere north or east of the Black Sea. The fully Neolithic crania from southern Russia which we have just studied include such a type, also seen in the midst of Sergi's Kurgan aggregation. Until better evidence is produced from elsewhere, we are entitled to consider southern Russia the most likely way station from which the Corded people moved westward.

I don't think the place of origin of R1a or the timing of its expansion(s) has been pinned down tightly enough as of yet to allow an R1a lineage in a single family to contribute much to the debate on the biological origins of the Corded people.

Copernicus facial reconstruction

 

The identity of the skull was supposedly confirmed through DNA testing.

WARSAW, Poland – Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books. The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.

[. . .]

The reconstruction shows a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus, and the skull bears a cut mark above the left eye that corresponds with a scar shown in the painting.

[. . .]

Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen analyzed DNA from a vertebrae, a tooth and femur bone and matched and compared it to that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned, which is kept at a library of Sweden's Uppsala University where Allen works.

If anyone has more details on the DNA analysis, please post them.

Related: Caroline Wilkinson's swarthy Bach reconstruction; more on Bach's skull.

New England political thought a century ago

The conclusion of a 1909 speech by Henry Cabot Lodge ("The Restriction of Immigration").

I have cited a witness of the highest authority and entire disinterestedness to support what I have said as to the fixed and determinate character of the English-speaking race. Now that I come to show what that race is by recounting its qualities and characteristics, I will not trust myself to speak, for I might be accused of prejudice, but I will quote again M. Le Bon, who is not of our race nor of our speech.

He says:—

Inability to foresee the remote consequences of actions and the tendency to be guided only by the instinct of the moment, condemn an individual as well as a race to remain always in a very inferior condition. It is only in proportion as they have been able to master their instincts—that is to say, as they have acquired strength of will and consequently empire over themselves—that nations have been able to understand the importance of discipline, the necessity of sacrificing themselves to an ideal and lifting themselves up to civilization. If it were necessary to determine by a single test the social level of races in history, I would take willingly as a standard the aptitude displayed by each in controlling their impulses. The Romans in antiquity, the Anglo-Americans in modern times, represent the people who have possessed this quality in the highest degree. It has powerfully contributed to assure their greatness.

Again he says, speaking now more in detail:—

Let us summarize, then, in a few words the characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has peopled the United States. There is not perhaps in the world one which is more homogeneous and whose mental constitution is more easy to define in its great outline. The dominant qualities of this mental constitution are, from the standpoint of character, a will power which scarcely any people except perhaps the Romans have possessed, an unconquerable energy, a very great initiative, an absolute empire over self, a sentiment of independence pushed even to excessive unsociability, a puissant activity, very keen religious sentiments, a very fixed morality, a very clear idea of duty.

Again he says:—

But, above all, it is in a new country like America that we must follow the astonishing progress due to the mental constitution of the English race. Transported to a wilderness inhabited only by savages and having only itself to count upon, we know what that race has done. Scarcely a century has been necessary to those people to place themselves in the first rank of the great powers of the world, and to-day there is hardly one who could struggle against them.

Such achievements as M. Le Bon credits us with are due to the qualities of the American people, whom he, as a man of science looking below the surface, rightly describes as homogeneous. Those qualities are moral far more than intellectual, and it is on the moral qualities of the English-speaking race that our history, our victories, and all our future rest. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes whit a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail. The lower race will absorb the higher, not the higher the lower, when the two strains approach equality in numbers. In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race; and when you begin to pour in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that a people can run. The lowering of a great race means not only its own decline, but that of civilization. M. Le Bon sees no danger to us in immigration, and his reason for this view is one of the most interesting things he says. He declares that the people of the United States will never be injured by immigration, because the moment they see the peril the great race instinct will assert its itself and shut the immigration out. The reports of the Treasury for the last fifteen years show that the peril is at hand. I trust that the prediction of science is true, and that the unerring instinct of the race will shut the danger out, as it closed the door upon the coming of the Chinese.

That the peril is not imaginary or the offspring of race prejudice, I will prove by another disinterested witness, also a Frenchman. M. Paul Bourget, the distinguished novelist, visited this country a few years ago, and wrote a book containing his impressions of what he saw. He was not content, as many travelers are, to say that our cabs were high-priced, the streets of New York noisy, the cars hot, and then feel that he had disposed of the United States and the people thereof for time and for eternity. M. Bourget saw here a great country and a great people; in other words, a great fact in modern times. Our ways were not his ways, nor our thoughts his thoughts, and he probably like his own country and his own ways much better; but he none the less studied us carefully and sympathetically. What most interested him was to see whether the socialistic movements, which now occupy the alarmed attention of Europe, were equally threatening here. His conclusion, which I will state in a few words, is of profound interest. He expected to find signs of a coming war of classes, and he went home believing that if any danger threatened the United States it was not from a war of classes, but a war of races.

Mr. President, more precious even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race. While those stand unimpaired all is safe. When those decline all is imperiled. They are exposed to but a single danger, and that is by changing the quality of our race and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours, and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past. The danger has begun. It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time and while it can be done easily and efficiently. There lies the peril at the portals of our land; there is pressing the tide of unrestricted immigration. The time has certainly come, if not to stop, at least to check, to, sift, and to restrict those immigrants. In careless strength, with generous hand, we have kept our gates wide open to all the world. If we do not close them, we should at least place sentinels beside them to challenge those who would pass through. The gates which admit men to the United States and to citizenship in the great republic should no longer be left unguarded.

Restrictionist efforts, spearheaded by New Englanders like Lodge and New Yorkers like Madison Grant, culminated in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which was rabidly opposed by and later overturned with aid from organized Jewry. Kevin MacDonald sees ethnic conflict. Moldbug claims to see an aracial minority aping New England Puritans in an attempt to win status points. I know which of these theories I find more convincing.

Moldbuggery Redux

More tiresome calumny against New England Puritans from self-described scion of communist Jews "Mencius Moldbug". Moldbug's libels typically take the form of absurdly-reasoned ten-thousand-word posts supported by links to whatever obscure, barely-relevant, centuries-old text he happens to be browsing on Google Books that day. My impression has been Moldbug prefers to dazzle his audience with pseudo-erudition and sheer volume of words, leaving it to his dumber commenters to try to state his world-view in direct and concise terms. Because when put simply moldbuggery makes claims about history which are blatantly counterfactual and easy to refute.

But MM has now surfaced in a desisite comment thread giving every bit as much indication as Jeff Williams of having failed high school-level American history. (Since, in light of MM's claimed educational credentials and implied obsessive reading habit, I find it unlikely simple ignorance is behind his lies, the question becomes what exactly is MM trying to accomplish? Some combination of deception and self-deception is clearly at play. Considering its author's ethnic background, it does seem slightly convenient that moldbuggery's central tenet holds "Dissenting British Protestantism caused All Leftism Ever" -- the corrollary being "The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing". Moldbug goes so far as to claim Jewish immigrants only transformed into communists through assimilating toward the culture of the descendants of New England Puritans.)

razib,

before the 1950s jews and catholics were allied as white ethnics against the protestant ascendancy. the new deal coalition was to some extent the culmination of this, though even as far back as the 19th century the two groups had to coordinate to defend themselves against protestant nativist groups. in the 1950s post-protestant intellectuals abandoned their nativism, and turned their guns on traditionalist religion, and secularized their anti-catholic rhetoric.

This wording is a little misleading: it implies that the liberal, anti-nativist strain of the Puritan tradition is a post-WWII invention. Which, as I'm sure you know, is anything but the case.

Liberal mainline Protestantism shows an extremely clear continuity from the Second Great Awakening, through the abolitionists and Transcendentalists, to the Social Gospel, the settlement movement, the Progressive Era proper, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc, etc, etc. It has not always been politically dominant, but it has generally been socially dominant.

While I have little interest in tracing the intellectual development of Eleanor Roosevelt, in the interest of defending the descendants of New England Puritans, I'll point out that:
(1) Eleanor Roosevelt's ancestry was Dutch, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish. She had little or no New England Puritan blood.
(2) One of her grandparents was born in Georgia (or in Connecticuit to Georgian parents). Three were born in New York.
(3) She was an Episcopalian.
(4) She was an insecure child who (correctly) considered herself ugly.
(5) She was sent to a finishing school in England run by a French feminist, but I can't imagine that had any impact on her later politics.
(6) She campaigned in favor of Catholic Al Smith in 1928.

Moreover, this obscures a bit of geographical culture history: the "nativist," American-nationalist branch of mainline Protestantism (eg, Madison Grant) to which you refer, responsible for the Harding-Coolidge restoration and now pretty much extinct, has its roots in one branch of the Unionist coalition, namely the Midwestern (or as they said then, just "Western"). There were considerable tensions between the Westerners and the New Englanders - for example, the latter hated the South because it oppressed blacks, the former because it was full of blacks. The last remnants of Midwestern nativist politics are seen with the isolationists, Taft, etc.

This is just plain wrong, as others in the thread point out and as I've pointed out before. Rather than waste any more time than necessary reasserting reality, here are some links:

United States Presidential Election Results
Immigration Restriction League

And, while as someone with roots in the Midwest it might be nice to be able to claim Madison Grant, the idea that his thinking owes much in particular to that region is just bizarre. Grant was a New York progressive. Yankees such as Charles Davenport (born in CT), William Ripley and General Francis Walker (the latter two born in Massachusetts), on the other hand, undoubtedly did influence Grant.

The relationship with the Catholics is also more interesting than you describe. The Catholics were always Democrats. In 1932, someone had a bright idea: if the progressive wing of the Republican Party (which was the Northern Protestant party, containing both nativists and progressives) took over the Democrat name and the Democrat machine, they could wax fat on the votes of their enemies, the "hyphenated-American" inner-city white ethnics and the Solid South, for the next thirty years, before the suckers woke up. Done. Smooth move, gents.

[MM expands on the above claim in a later comment:]

Can you name names?

You mean, FDR? Or his advisers, like Louis Howe?

Of course, progressive takeover of the Democrats was nothing really new - see Wilson. But the level of cynicism was new. Wilsonians, for instance, aimed to smash the Democratic urban machines. Whereas the New Deal incorporated them, and raised vote-buying to an almost theological plane. (When you see Thomas Frank complaining that Kansans don't vote according to their "economic interests," basically what he's expressing is anger that they sold him their votes and didn't stay bought.)

Just bizarre. MM must be referring to some alternate universe, because these ravings bear little resemblance to actual history. As another commenter pointed out: "FDR was elected Democratic NY State Senator in 1910. Howe was an associate of FDR from around that time. The Democratic party in 1910 was not exactly an attractive vehicle for winning Presidential Elections, having held power for a grand total of 8 years in the previous 50. If either had previously been extreme progressive republicans, I don't know, but if they were - planning the New Deal coalition that arose out of the Great Depression 20 years before it happened - that would be some neat trick!" Moreover, Louis McHenry Howe hailed from Indianapolis, where he "began his journalism career at seventeen when he joined the staff of his father's Democratic-leaning weekly, The Sun". That sounds like one hell of a deep Yankee conspiracy.

Woodrow Wilson, of course, was of Scotch-Irish and Scottish ancestry. He was born in Virginia to Confederate loyalists. Thank god we have people like Jimmy Cantrell and Mencius Moldbug who can see past mundane facts and place the blame for Wilson where it's due: New England Puritans.

As for the Jews, being no suckers, they realized that they should assimilate into the most socially prestigious branch of the American tradition - the progressives. Again: done.

Brilliantly reasoned. This also helps explain why Jews in Russia assimilated so readily to local aristocratic norms.

"European Caucasian" unity

As manifested on the internet:

You say Europe is white? You are in dreamland and in denial. Spain white? the Greece white?, Italy white? They are by no means considered white. I am half Greek, half Dutch and my skin is olive color by the Greek side of my family. Italians and Spanish are along the same lines of that olive skin, dark eyes and hair from the majority of the populations. Europe is ready for an Obama of their own and the sooner the better to stop racism as soon as possible.

Posted by: sandra | November 12, 2008 2:26 AM

More:

razib, yes,you are right it was not a good argument and I am probably a little bitter from certains types of discrimination. You are also right about being considered not white in the netherlands because of being half Greek, although that was while I was growing up, now things are starting to change, slowly. If you look at the Dutch and other Europeans today, you see a lot of mixes of different nationalities. I don't think that anyone is pure anything nowadays. I think that we should all be happy to be of the human race and not focuss so much on the color of ones hair, skin or eyes. What do you think?

Posted by: sandra | November 12, 2008 3:41 AM

Is this the sort of "change" we need more of?

ASHG "Ancestry Testing Statement"

The statement and press release (via GENEALOGY-DNA-L). I agree almost entirely with Blaine Bettinger's comments. The funniest part of the statement for me:

Knowledge about genetic ancestry – if undesirable and unexpected – can elicit a range of psychological responses including shock, disbelief, denial, anxiety, anger, fear and other well-known reactions to unwanted news. [. . .] The use of AIMs and admixture mapping techniques, in general, has brought about anxiety with regard to its apparent reification of race.

The earlier sentence ostensibly concerns the tender feelings of vulnerable consumers of genetic ancestry tests, but the sentence which begins the next paragraph reveals what seems to have been the primary concern that drove most of the committee members in drafting this trash.

The committee's first two recommendations are unobjectionable:

1. Because the science of ancestry determination has limitations, greater efforts are needed on the part of both industry and academia to make the limitations of ancestry estimation clearer to consumers, the scientific community, and the public at large. In turn, the public has the responsibility to avail themselves of information regarding ancestry testing and strive to better understand the implications and limitations of these assessments.

2. Additional research is required to further understand the extent to which the accuracy of genetic ancestry estimation is influenced by the individuals represented in existing databases, geographical patterns of human diversity, marker selection and statistical methods.

However, the committee negates any value their statement may have had with their subsequent advocacy of "counseling" "guidelines" for ancestry testing, full-employment for cultural Marxists, and government controls on ancestry testing.

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).]