The myth of the radically leftist Boston Unitarian

Mid-nineteenth-century upper class Boston Unitarians were not on the whole the proto-SJWs moldbug would have his readers believe, but relatively conservative as a group.

From an editorial at a UU website:

Yet, most Boston Unitarian ministers supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which set up federal commissioners to catch and return escaped slaves. And many of the Boston Brahmins at the core of Unitarian membership were, in fact, industrialists who profited enormously from slavery: New England textile mills used slave-grown cotton from Southern plantations. As abolition gained ground among Unitarians, many industrialists left the denomination. Many Southern Unitarians—who owned slaves—also withdrew.

A faith for the few?

Unitarian Universalists are torn between pride in our elite history and aspirations to be a religion for all. It’s a tension with deep roots. [. . .]

Does a liberal faith only appeal to a narrow segment of the population—a liberal, economically comfortable, well-educated elite—or is that simply a self-fulfilling prophecy? Many Unitarian Universalists believe the stereotype that we are only educated suburbanites, but it is clearly not true. My wife grew up as one of six children in a family that struggled to survive economically, yet she is a born UU—and so is her mother. Many Unitarian Universalists live in marginal economic circumstances or do not have college educations. Yet looking back at the Unitarian and Universalist past, we see that the stereotype has old and very real roots. Fortunately, our history also shows us that liberal religion can reach beyond the elite.

Casual students of Unitarian history might look back with pride on the period when Unitarians controlled all the educational, social, economic, and political power in Boston. They might take for granted that Unitarianism has always been liberal—not only theologically, but in literature, politics, and social action as well. On closer inspection, however, Unitarian dominance of mid-nineteenth-century Boston is harder to celebrate wholeheartedly.

Jane and William Pease, who analyzed the demographics of nineteenth-century Boston, report that of the three major sects—Episcopal, Congregational, and Unitarian—the Unitarians were most likely to enjoy political or economic power. (See “Whose Right Hand of Fellowship? Pew and Pulpit in Shaping Church Practice,” in American Unitarianism, 1805–1865, ed. by Conrad E. Wright, Northeastern Univ. Press, 1989.) In the first generation after the Revolutionary War, Unitarian churches included a large membership of farmers, but this changed rapidly with the economy. By the 1830s Unitarians made the decisions that shaped the city’s economy. Compared to other denominations, Unitarians had twenty-two times more lawyers, twenty times the number of bankers, twice as many merchants, and twenty-eight times the number of manufacturers. But they had almost no farmers, craftsmen, or industrial proletariats. In 1850 two-thirds of the wealthiest Bostonians were Unitarians. By 1870, the average Unitarian was thirteen times richer than the average member of any other denomination. By 1870 Boston Unitarians were almost entirely upper-middle and upper class.

What did they do with their power? Ronald Story writes that “middle-period” Unitarians (around 1850) dominated Boston’s intellectual and philanthropic organizations and shaped them not to “melioristic liberalism but to their own exclusive, conservative, and business-oriented values.”

The Unitarians were responsible for the establishment of a number of cultural institutions, but they often kept them private. The Boston Athenaeum, for instance, an independent library and museum, was controlled by proprietors who opposed its public use. They did not want to throw open its doors to the “many-headed” rabble. And, historian Anne Rose argues, the upper classes practiced defensive self-containment in these institutions, excluding those who stepped beyond permissible boundaries as well. After Lydia Maria Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the Athenaeum revoked her reading privileges. Bronson Alcott later lost his reading privileges, too. Rose says the culture became increasingly insular as the number of immigrants increased.

The expansion of Harvard College best exemplifies this growth of private institutions. The university’s expansion was built upon wealthy, enterprising, politically conservative but theologically liberal families. From 1805 to 1860, thirty-six members were elected to the Harvard Corporation. Thirty-three were Unitarian. Eighty percent of the faculty were Unitarian. By the mid-1850s the student body was three-quarters Unitarian. Elite progeny commonly chose to matriculate there, but a poor person could not afford it. It was the seminary and academy for the inner circle of Bostonians. Harvard students trained to achieve a class status that would keep them from mixing with the rabble. Harvard established its own church after Cambridge acquired its first lower class congregations, including Universalist. The church leaders strove for gentlemanly qualities and regularly denounced the vulgar, the tawdry, and the disorderly—characterized first by rural people and later immigrants.

"The Unitarian Controversy and Its Puritan Roots"

See if you're able to contort your mind such as to be able to perceive this reasonably standard history of early New England religion (proffered by ashv) as supportive of moldbuggism -- or if you see aspects of human nature that might conceivably generalize beyond New England Puritans (along with important divergences of interest and opinion among early New Englanders and free transit of ideas from Europe).

Meanwhile, the growing mercantile economy of New England also exerted a moderating influence on New England religious life. Merchants belonged not only to a Puritan congregation but to the international trading community as well. They felt that in markets abroad they labored at a disadvantage, in that a certain stigma of intolerance attached to anyone from New England. One businessman complained that public punishment for heretical belief was bad for business because it "makes us stinke every wheare." The interest of the merchants in promoting free movement of people and goods conflicted with the desire of the Puritan leaders to keep New England isolated and free from foreign influence.

Moreover many merchants chafed under regulations imposed upon them by Puritan authorities. [. . .]

A number of early New England businessmen, finding they could not operate under the Puritan regime, returned to England. Some of these were replaced in the middle of the seventeenth century by Anglican entrepeneurs from England whose latitudinarian views put them in immediate opposition to the local parish churches. By the end of the century Puritan authority had lost its power to do more than utter ineffective admonitions against uncontrolled capitalist behavior. [. . .]

Chauncy and the other 18th century Congregationalist liberals held that the use of reason was a better means of religious growth. While this attitude had evolved from the old Puritan confidence in the exercise of conscience, especially in church members’ corporate discussions of issues of right and wrong, it was bolstered by new ideas in science and philosophy, in particular the writings of Isaac Newton and John Locke. The Arminian Congregationalists-and many others-saw in Newton’s orderly universe evidence of the work of God. From Locke they learned that human beings are not born with a set of innate ideas, but that all ideas come from experience. Chauncy wrote, "I am not convinced that we have any ideas, but what take rise from sensation and reflection, or that we can have any, upon the present establishment of nature, any other way."

On this basis, Arminians could envision the potential for continuous development in the human mind, including the refinement of morality and other aspects of religious character. From the perspective of the Lockean model of the evolution of reason and also from the orderliness of Newtonian creation, the irrationality of revivalism and the sudden emotional swing of instant conversion had no place.

Remedial history for people who take moldbug seriously

At Nick Land's, self-described "actual Calvinist" ashv explains that he's fully on board with moldbuggism, as long as the scapegoating of Calvinists is restricted to New England Puritans:

Regarding the the Moldbuggian ultracalvinism thesis — it’s entirely correct, but its wider reception has ignored several details. It wasn’t the Calvinism per se that launched progressivism, it was Calvinism plus emphasis on emotional conversion experience plus Puritan character. English Puritanism was Calvinist, but so were Scottish Presbyterians and French Huguenots, neither of which contributed significantly to the development of progressivism (the former gave us Carlyle, of course). In America, the Half-way Covenant created Unitarians, the source of Abolition, Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, and so forth. (The Unitarian Universalist history on this is largely accurate: http://uudb.org/articles/unitariancontroversy.html )

America has had its share of rightist/reactionary Calvinists too, as seen in the Southern Presbyterians such as Dabney and Thornwell.

I point out, among other things:

• Unitarianism "began almost simultaneously in Poland-Lithuania and Transylvania in the mid-16th century. Among the adherents were a significant number of Italians."
• "In England, the first Unitarian Church was established in 1774 on Essex Street, London", a decade before the first congregation in New England accepted Unitarianism.
• Abolitionism did not originate with and was never the exclusive province of Unitarians or others of New England Puritan stock.
• The same for "Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, and so forth".

Relationships between wealth or social class and prosocial behavior

In recent years, some no doubt totally impartial academic psychologists discovered that the welfare class have hearts of gold and a deep focus on philanthropy, while it's the rich (or upper middle income) who are in fact more likely to lie, cheat, and steal. Surprisingly, it now turns out reality may not have been designed specifically to line up with leftist narratives.

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and implications are discussed.

Giving behavior of millionaires

Significance

Wealthy individuals play an important role in charitable giving. We present evidence that millionaires give more than any other group studied in the literature. This holds particularly in a clear giving situation. In our study, millionaires either participated in a dictator game or an ultimatum game and they either interacted with another millionaire or with a low-income individual. In the dictator game, the millionaire decides how to split an amount between herself and a recipient who has no power. In the ultimatum game, the receiver needs to approve the proposer’s proposal; otherwise, both players are paid zero. Millionaires give more to a low-income participant in the dictator game than in the more strategic ultimatum game.

Abstract

This paper studies conditions influencing the generosity of wealthy people. We conduct incentivized experiments with individuals who have at least €1 million in their bank account. The results show that millionaires are more generous toward low-income individuals in a giving situation when the other participant has no power, than in a strategic setting, where the other participant can punish unfair behavior. Moreover, the level of giving by millionaires is higher than in any other previous study. Our findings have important implications for charities and financial institutions that deal with wealthy individuals.

Sewall Wright on race differences, group selection, and cultural selection among humans (1978)

[From Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 4: Variability Within and Among Natural Populations, pp. 439-457]

Racial Differentiation in Mankind

The existence of conspicuous diversity among human populations in physical appearance has been common knowledge at least since the time of ancient Egypt. The subject is discussed at length in numerous books on physical anthropology and need not be considered here in detail.

There is no question that all mankind constitutes a single species in view of the absence of any physiological bar to hybridization between the most diverse races or of any recognizable loss of vigor in the first or later generations.

There is also no question, however, that populations that have long inhabited widely separated parts of the world should, in general, be considered to be of different subspecies by the usual criterion that most individuals of such populations can be allocated correctly by inspection. It does not require a trained anthropologist to classify an array of Englishmen, West Africans, and Chinese with 100% accuracy by features, skin color, and type of hair in spite of so much variability within each of these groups that every individual can easily be distinguished from every other.

[. . .] It has been indicated earlier that such an evolutionary process as that of man is much more understandable if it occurred by the shifting balance process. Simultaneous sampling drive at thousands of sufficiently neutral loci provides different material in innumerable localities without appreciable cost, material that can give the basis for effective interdeme selection.

Was the population structure of primitive man favorable to this process? There have been a number of studies of the few remaining peoples at the hunting and gathering level of culture that bear on this matter. Birdsell (1972), in an intensive study of Australian aborigines in western Australia, has described their population structure. The primary territorial unit is the band, consisting of a group of related families. Marriage is exogamous but largely restricted to the tribe, a group of bands in which the same dialect is spoken. He estimates the average total number in a tribe to be about 500, with a breeding population of about 185 and an effective number of about 100. This is small enough for the building up of considerable differences among large areas at each nearly neutral polymorphic locus merely by sampling drift. There is thus the basis for operation of the shifting balance process. [. . .]

The actual process of interdeme selection may take different forms. At one extreme, the local appearance of a superior genetic system is followed by expansion of its territory accompanied by complete elimination of its neighbors until it occupies the entire range of the species. At the other extreme there is merely excess diffusion from the superior center. Neighboring populations are graded up until they reach the point (the crossing of a saddle in the surface of selective values) at which mass selection carries them autonomously to the new selective peak, or perhaps beyond, if they contribute something that improves on the latter. The locations of the population with the highest selective peak may shift from place to place in the course of time, as a group of neighboring populations step each other up to heights well above the general level.

Bigelow (1969) has emphasized the importance of tribal warfare in the operation of this process. A tribe that is generally successful because of superior intelligence, capacity for cooperation, and high frequency of the heroic virtues as well as physical prowess, tends to increase its territory and also to grade up what is left of the defeated group by hybridization. The process is illustrated by the incessant tribal warfare of the tribes of American Indians observed by the European settlers in America, in which some tribes such as the Iroquois expanded at the expense of their neighbors.

The heroic virtues, including willingness to sacrifice one's own life for the good of the tribe, are traits that can hardly be developed (insofar as they have a genetic basis) by purely individual selection. They may to some extent arise as a by-product of familial selection in which close relatives with heredities strongly correlated with that of an individual who gives his own life to save them. As noted earlier, the effectiveness of familial selection in general is testified to by the improvement of milk production in cattle and of egg production fowls, mainly by selection of males on the basis of the performance of close female relatives. The importance of this sort of intergroup selection in evolution has been emphasized as noted in chapter 7 by Hamilton. The increase in frequency of traits deleterious on the average to their possessors but beneficial to the deme may also, however, be increased by interdeme selection (referred to as intergroup selection in early articles) if the benefit to the deme sufficiently outweighs the damage to the individual. A more rigorous demonstration of this mode of evolution of "altruistic" characters as been given by Eshel (1972).

Not all interdeme selection in man has consisted of intertribal warfare. According to Birdsell, about 15% of marriage among Australian aborigines were intertribal; not enough as shown by the wide variability of gene frequencies to homogenize the whole population but enough to permit effective interdeme selection if exchange was asymmetrical, predominantly from the more to the less successful. That differences were not swamped was presumably due to the exchange being largely between neighboring tribes which differed little, as indicated by the semiclinal nature of the pattern of gene frequencies. The average effective immigration from the population as a whole, the m of formulas, was thus very much less than 0.15. [. . .]

Evolution Since the Origin of Agriculture [. . .]

We can form a better idea of the course of event than in any earlier period but the interpretation is confused by the exponential progress of a second evolutionary process, barely existent at all in any other animal, and little if any more rapid in the earlier history man than his biological evolution.

This is the evolution of culture with its line of transmission largely from speaker to listener, supplemented in the last three thousand years by transmission from writer to reader. It began to become of major importance with the origin of language, but during the hunting and gathering phase of human life the slow advance of culture is indicated by that in the fashioning of stone tools and weapons. It was probably accompanied by relatively rapid diffusion of knowledge of such advances as were made. The success of tribes thus probably depended to a greater extent on capabilities, determined by their genes, than on the possession of techniques not known to their neighbors.

The mode of evolution of culture is analogous to that of the genetic system. Invention is the analog of mutation. Diffusion of culture is the analog of gene flow. Cultural variation is continually subject to selection on the basis of utility. There is random cultural drift, exemplified by the breaking up of languages into dialects. Finally, the most favorable conditions for cultural advance is local isolation, providing the basis for simultaneous trial and error among many variants and the diffusion of the more successful ones in analogy with the shifting balance process in biological evolution. We think here of the multiple competing cultures in ancient Southwest Asia, the evolution of culture among the city states of ancient Greece, and in much divided Europe from the Dark Ages to modern times. The great empires of the ancient Southwest Asia of Alexander and of Rome constituted an overbalancing final phase in the process, giving widespread diffusion but less progress by trial and error.

There has undoubtedly always been a considerable but incomplete correlation between the two kinds of evolution. The state of the culture has been to a considerable extent an index of the rank of populations genetically in the distinctive human line of evolutionary advance, and reciprocally the demands of culture have been the primary selective agent in this advance in its later stages. Aspects of culture are continually being borrowed, but whether such borrowings are effectively integrated into the existent culture to form new peaks (as most conspicuously in the recent period in Japan), or are adopted only superficially and to the detriment of the previous culture, is also an index of genetic capability.

The treatment of either the genetic capabilities or the cultures of peoples as if they could be ranked on single scales is, of course, a gross simplification. If the multiple genetic aspects of mental ability could be measured more independently of culture than is the case, it would no doubt be found that each local race has its own unique combination of favorable qualities. At present only IQ seems to have a repeatability that permits evaluation of the contributions of genetic and nongenetic variabilities to its variability, discussed in the previous chapter, and this only within a particular culture.

On the other hand there have probably always been wide differences among the peoples of the world in average intellectual ability and cultural level from the standpoint of progress toward the situation in civilized man. This was presumably related to the environmental conditions. Men could not endure the northern winters without fire, the use of which is documented by hearths found in France dating back over half a million years and somewhat later in Hungary and in China but only about one-tenth as far back in Africa (Campbell 1974).

The capacity to anticipate and plan for the future is a mental attribute which would be favored under northern conditions and selected for insofar as it has a genetic basis. This would presumably have come to be more advanced in the temperate zone than in the tropics. [. . .]

Linguistic evidence indicates the establishment of an important center of diffusion in east-central Europe some 5,000 years ago from which wave after wave peoples moved in all directions. The Hittites carried an Indo-European language of the western (centum) type into Asia Minor and established an empire some 4,000 years ago. A thousand years later the Iranians, who had moved east into what is now southern Russia and Turkestan, brought an Indo-European language of the eastern (satem) type into the original cultural center and later established the Persian Empire. They also carried another Aryan dialect to India. Other tribes moving south from the east-central European center reached Greece in several waves which, after mixing with the indigenous people, produced classical Greek civilization.

Other waves moved to the southwest into Italy, giving rise to Latin and other Italic languages; to the west, giving rise to Celtic languages in what is now southern Germany, France, and the British Isles; and to the northwest into what is not northern Germany and Scandinavia, to give rise, in much altered form, to the Germanic languages. Subsequent migrations greatly expanded the areas occupied by derivatives of Latin and Germanic branches at the expense in Europe of the Celtic. All the tribal migrations were undoubtedly accompanied by much intermixture with indigenous peoples, but the diffusion of language also undoubtedly implies considerable gene flow.

[. . .] The history of Europe, especially western Europe, was thus prevailingly one of inflow of genes up to the relatively recent period in which it itself became a center of massive outflow.

Related posts:

• Sewall Wright on Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship (1922)
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans
• More from Hamilton on kin recognition and intergroup hostility
• R. A. Fisher on group selection in humans
• James Neel and early human population structure
• Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
• More ancient DNA evidence of Indo-European mass migrations
• C. S. Coon on the endocrine system and racial differences in temperament

Sewall Wright on Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship (1922)

JayMan continues to misunderstand basic population genetics, and continues to respond to people who point this out to him by sticking his fingers in his ears and reiterating his misunderstandings:

@johan stavers:

coefficient of relationship is flawed, if a man fathers a child with his sister his child is more than 50% related, this extends to niece/nephew mating and therefore logically also to mating within ethnicity or even nation

No, coefficient of relationship is perfectly fine.

I attempt yet again to get across to JayMan that the table of coefficients of relationship he looked up on wikipedia in no way proves that "unrelated" members of a given race share no kinship relative to members of other races (if JayMan were correct, of course, observable racial differences would not exist; JayMan inadvertently assesses his own level of knowledge in an unrelated twitter comment: "according to people who don't know science, there's no such thing as race."). Sewall Wright explicitly noted in the 1922 paper in which he defined coefficients of relationship that values like ".50 for brothers" hold "in a random stock" and that individuals belonging to an "inbred subline" will share relatedness relative to the general population.

JayMan, the fact that the table of "coefficients of relationship" on wikipedia is not valid for the purpose you're attempting to use it is not some subtle issue that's open to debate, but a point that follows directly from the definitions of the relevant terms.

Thus, if we can calculate the percentage of homozygosis which would follow on the average from a given system of mating, we can at once form the most. natural coefficient of inbreeding. The writer3 has recently pointed out a method of calculating this percentage of honmozygosis which is applicable to the irregular systems of mating found in actual pedigrees as well as to regular systems. This method, it may be said. gives results widely different from Pearl's coefficient, in many cases even as regards the relative degree of inbreeding of two animals.

Taking the typical case in which there are an equal number of dominant. and recessive genes (A and a) in the population, the random-bred stock will be composed of 25 per cent. AA, 50 per cent. Aa and 25 per cent. aa. Close inbreeding will tend to convert the proportions to 50 per cent. AA, 50 per cent. aa, a change from 50 per cent. homozygosis to 100 per cent. homozygosis. For a natural coefficient of inbreeding, we want a scale which runs from 0 to 1, while the percentage of homozygosis is running from, 50 per cent. to 100 per cent. The formula. 2h-1, where h is the proportion of complete homozygosis, gives the required value. This can also be written 1-2p where p is the proportion of heterozygosis. In the above-mentioned paper it was shown that the coefficient of correlation between uniting egg and sperm is expressed by this same formula, f 1-2p. We can thus obtain the coefficient of inbreeding fb for a given individual B, by the use of the methods there out- lined.

The symbol r_bc, for the coefficient of the correlation between B and C, may be used as a coefficient of relationship. It has the value 0 in the case of two random individuals, .50 for brothers in a random stock and approaches 1.00 for individuals belonging to a closely inbred subline of the general population. [. . .]

If an individual is inbred, his sire and dam are connected in the pedigree by lines of descent from a common ancestor or ancestors. The coefficient of inbreeding is obtained by a summation of coefficients for every line by which the parents are connected, each line tracing back from the sire to a common ancestor and thence forward to the dam, and passing through no individual more than once. The same ancestor may of course be involved in more than one line.

Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship
Sewall Wright
The American Naturalist
Vol. 56, No. 645 (Jul. - Aug., 1922), pp. 330-338
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2456273

Go ask Greg Cochran about this if comprehension continues to elude you.

From Wright's 1943 paper on "Isolation by distance" (pdf):

Study of statistical differences among local populations is an important line of attack on the evolutionary problem. While such differences can only rarely represent first steps toward speciation in the sense of the splitting of the species, they are important for the evolution of the species as a whole. They provide a possible basis for intergroup selection of genetic systems, a process that provides a more effective mechanism for adaptive advance of the species as a whole than does the mass selection which is all that can occur under panmixia. [. . .]

THE INBREEDING COEFFICIENT

Departures from panmixia may be expressed in terms of the average inbreeding coefficient of individuals, relative to the total population under consideration. This coefficient has been defined as the correlation between uniting gametes with respect to the gene complex as an additive system. It has been shown that its value can be found for any pedigree by finding all paths by which one may trace back from the egg to a common ancestor (A) and thence forward to the sperm along a wholly different path. [. . .]

The inbreeding, measured by F, may be of either of two extreme sorts: sporadic mating of close relatives with no tendency to break the population into subgroups, and division into partially isolated subgroups, within each of which there is random mating. The latter is the case in which we are primarily interested here.

Sewall Wright, incidentally, was of New England Puritan stock.

"Ancestral men probably competed for mates mainly by excluding competitors by force or threat"

An abstract of a paper by David Puts on Human Sexual Selection:

Highlights
• Sexual selection has been stronger in humans than is often assumed.
• Ancestral men competed primarily through force and threat of force.
• Ancestral women competed mainly through mate attraction.
• Understanding sexual selection clarifies some human psychological sex differences.

Abstract

Sexual selection favors traits that aid in competition over mates. Widespread monogamous mating, biparental care, moderate body size sexual dimorphism, and low canine tooth dimorphism suggest modest sexual selection operating over human evolution, but other evidence indicates that sexual selection has actually been comparatively strong. Ancestral men probably competed for mates mainly by excluding competitors by force or threat, and women likely competed primarily by attracting mates. These and other forms of sexual selection shaped human anatomy and psychology, including some psychological sex differences.

Related posts:

• Mechanisms of sexual selection in humans (also from David Puts)
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans

Rightists fatter than leftists?

Commenter Mugabe holds up a "map showing that obesity rates for whites is highest in the red states" as evidence American conservatives are more likely to be obese that US leftists.

Similar notions have circulated among the clickbait consumers of the left for years (based on the same sort of inadequate state-level data). In 2010, Razib, looking at individual-level GSS data found:

I don’t see a notable different obetween liberals and conservatives. The only exception might be that liberals are more well represented among those who are below average in weight than those who are considerably above average, but the samples are small enough than I don’t trust that to be anything more than measurement error.

A survey from neuropolitics.org similarly found:

The above graph shows some interesting trends. First, the Very Liberal males reported the highest percent in the relatively trim 0-5 pounds range, (46%), and the highest rate, among males, in the obese 41+ range (16.8%). The regular Liberal males were second in the 0-5 range, at (38.3%). The Conservative and Very Conservative males had the lowest rates in the 0-5 range, at (29.6 and 34.9%).

Conversely, the Very Conservative females reported the highest rate in 0-5 range (38.2%). The regular Conservative females were next at (31.2%). The Very Liberal and Liberal females had the lowest rates in the 0-5 range, at (26 and 31%). They also had the highest rates in the obese 41+ range (17.7 and 19.4%). [. . .]

According to our survey respondents, the Liberal males are thinner than the Conservative males, and the Conservative females are thinner than the Liberal females. However, this is self-reported, not controlled for age, and not clinically confirmed. So for now, the hypothesis that political-gender cohorts have different average Body Mass Indexes is still very speculative.

The finding that leftist males are disproportionately likely to be very skinny or very fat is in line with my own impressions. Unattractive and sex atypical people (effeminate males, masculine females) are drawn more strongly to leftism. Sex typical, conventionally attractive people are more likely to be conservative. Larger (non-obese) and more masculine males are more comfortable with undisguised assertion of self- and group interest (probably because weighted across evolutionary time they're the ones, at the top of status hierarchies, who could get away with it).

Moral parochialism and contextual contingency

Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement.

Of interest (and contra those who would predict Westerners would be the outliers):

The seven societies sampled vary in the degree to which moral judgements are parochial and contingent on the pronouncements of authorities. At one extreme, Ukrainian villagers evince strong reductions in judgements of moral wrongness as a function of temporal distance, spatial distance and authority consent. At the other extreme, Yasawan villagers display much smaller changes in judgement, and do so only in response to temporal and spatial distance. Interestingly, although Western liberal democracies often rhetorically espouse universalist moral positions, urban Californians occupied the middle of the spectrum in this regard. In the future, it will be important to explore which social, psychological or historical factors influence the degree of moral parochialism exhibited in a given society.

Harvard Civil War deaths

Moldbuggist Nick Land, inciting people he dislikes (Southerners) against other people he dislikes (Yankees/Puritans), using as evidence of Yankee perfidy the expressed worldview of an unlikeable ethnocentric Jew (who Nick Land likes); and, for bonus incitement, ascribing Talmudic ethics to Yankees:

Outsideness ?@Outsideness
If any of the eth-nat hardcore on my TL are in the mood to blow a bloodvessel tonight, I recommend this:
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2015/06/22/the-confederate-battle-flag-is-what-makes-america-stupid/ …

Preston S. Brooks ?@Rebel_Bill 2h2 hours ago
@Outsideness Actually it didn't kill nearly enough of those yankee bastards.

Preston S. Brooks ?@Rebel_Bill 2h2 hours ago
@skyagusta @Outsideness Many New Englanders paid for criminals to replace them in the draft.

Outsideness ?@Outsideness 2h2 hours ago
@Rebel_Bill @skyagusta Understandable, since they had important Unitarian-moral research to do.

Outsideness ?@Outsideness
@skyagusta @Rebel_Bill But, as you know, a broken Harvard fingernail hurts God more than an annihilated battalion of midwesterners.

The evidence I'm aware of tends to point in a direction opposite that implied by Nick Land to his followers:

The 20th was called “the Harvard regiment” because so many of its officers were educated at the College. Some had left Harvard as undergraduates, quitting school in April when the first rebel shells rained down on Fort Sumter. By 1865, the regiment’s nickname was “the Bloody 20th.” Of the nearly 3,000 Union regiments that saw action, the Harvard regiment had the fifth-highest number of casualties.

Harvard faculty, undergraduates, and graduates served in other regiments as well, and in every branch of the service. There were 246 dead among the 1,662 with Harvard ties who fought on both sides. In the Union ranks, 176 died. On the Confederate side, where 304 men with Harvard connections enlisted, 70 died, a mortality rate two and a half times higher than the Union side.

Note that the ratio of Confederate to Union deaths for those with Harvard connections is in line with or below the overall 3:1 ratio of Confederate to Union deaths reported here. From the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of 1918:

In 1860 the number of living Harvard graduates was between 4,100 and 4,200. To this number should be added the temporary students or non-degree-holders who were still alive; their number is uncertain, but can be approximated. About a quarter of the living graduates and temporary students, or 1,237, entered the Army and Navy; and of these 131 died in service. The percentage of deaths to men in service was roughly 10.6.

An earlier estimate, from 1865, puts the number of living Harvard graduates around 1860 even lower:

over 500 of Harvard's sons (of a total of 2,400 living Harvard graduates, including the aged, sick, absent and all,) had voluntarily entered the service of the country, enthusiastic admiration was expressed on all sides. When it was added that nearly 100 of the 500 had already fallen in the service -- not to count the wounded and the sick

Note also that many of the Midwesterners who died were of New England Puritan stock.

"Mormons are largely Puritans" (JayMan's latest embarrassing averral)

On twitter, someone responds to a story about Glenn Beck's banning coverage of Donald Trump from his show with "Mormons r becoming some the worst #cuckservatives-missions to Haiti & China & letting their daughters marry Samoans". JayMan seizes the opportunity to inform us: "Mormons are largely Puritans (augmented with Scandinavians)."

This is of course simply false. While Puritan ancestry is found at higher levels among Mormons than in the US population in general, it's not true that Mormons today are of predominantly Puritan descent. (Nor is any other major population in America today of predominantly Puritan descent.)

In addition to Scandinavians, converts from missionary efforts in Britain form a major component in the ancestry of those with early Mormon roots. Moreover, most of the British converts came from areas outside of East Anglia and should tend to be "clannish" relative to New England Puritans in the JayMan understanding of things.

Hail, looking at Mitt Romney's ancestry, found:

• Most of his ancestral stock consists of early converts to Mormonism from Britain (most from Northwest-England and Scotland) who were impelled to the USA from the 1830s to the 1850s, settling directly in Mormon communities.
• Colonial-Yankees account for 27% of Romney’s ancestral stock.
• 12.5% (one-eighth) of his ancestral stock comes from Northern-Germany.

The current president of the Mormon church, Thomas S. Monson, has no colonial American ancestry whatsoever. He's half Scottish, 1/4 northern English, and 1/4 Swedish.

What makes this all even more amusing is that Glenn Beck was not even born a Mormon. He's a convert, and per wikipedia:

He is descended from German immigrants who came to the United States in the 19th century.[24] Beck was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Mount Vernon.

Glenn and his older sister moved with their mother to Sumner, Washington, attending a Jesuit school[25] in Puyallup.

Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history

A preprint on some ancient DNA work in England is up. Researchers sequenced samples from seven early and middle Anglo-Saxon period and three late Iron Age (presumably Celtic) skeletons.

We  generated  a  principal  component  plot  of  the  ten  ancient  samples  together with  relevant  European  populations  selected  from  published  data 10,11  (Extended data  Figure  3).  The  ancient  samples  fall  within  the  range  of  modern  English  and Scottish  samples,  with  the  Iron  Age  samples  from  Hinxton  and  Linton  falling closer  to  modern  English  and  French  samples,  while  most  Anglo-­Saxon  era samples  are  closer  to  modern  Scottish  and  Norwegian  samples.  Overall,  though, population  genetic  differences  between  these  samples  at  common  alleles  are very  slight.

While  principal  component  analysis  can  reveal  relatively  old  population structure,  such  as  generated  from  long-­‐term  isolation-­‐by-­‐distance  models 12 , whole  genome  sequences  let  us  study  rare  variants  to  gain  insight  into  more recent  population  structure. [. . .]

There are  striking  differences  in  the  sharing  patterns  of  the  samples,  illustrated  by  the ratio  of  the  number  of  rare  alleles  shared  with  Dutch  individuals  to  the  number shared  with  Spanish  individuals  (Figure  2a).   The  middle  Anglo-­‐Saxon  samples from  Hinxton  (HS1,  HS2,  HS3)  share  relatively  more  rare  variants  with  modern Dutch  than  the  Iron  Age  samples  from  Hinxton  (HI1,  HI2)  and  Linton  (L).  The early  Anglo-­‐Saxon  samples  from  Oakington  are  more  diverse,  with  O1  and  O2 being  closer  to  the  middle  Anglo-­‐Saxon  samples,  O4  exhibiting  the  same  pattern as  the  Iron  Age  samples,  and  O3  showing  an  intermediate  level  of  allele  sharing, suggesting  mixed  ancestry.  The  differences  between  the  samples  are  highest  in low  frequency  alleles  and  decrease  with  increasing  allele  frequency.  This  is consistent  with  mutations  of  lower  frequency  on  average  being  younger, reflecting  more  recent  distinct  ancestry,  compared  with  higher  frequency mutations  reflecting  older  shared  ancestry.  

Comparing the relative number of rare alleles shared with the Dutch and Spanish samples, the researchers estimate 30% Anglo-Saxon admixture in the present-day East English and 20% in the Scottish and Welsh.

We  also  examined  using  the  same  method  30  modern  samples  from  the  UK10K project   16 ,  10  each  with  birthplaces  in  East  England,  Wales  and  Scotland.  Overall, these  samples  are  closer  to  the  Iron  Age  samples  than  to  the  Anglo-­‐Saxon  era samples  (Figure  2a).  There  is  a  small  but  significant  difference  between  the  three modern  British  sample  groups,  with  East  English  samples  sharing  slightly  more alleles  with  the  Dutch,  and  Scottish  samples  looking  more  like  the  Iron  Age samples.  To  quantify  the  ancestry  fractions,  we  fit  the  modern  British  samples with  a  mixture  model  of  ancient  components,  by  placing  all  the  samples  on  a linear  axis  of  relative  Dutch  allele  sharing  that  integrates  data  from  allele  counts one  to  five  (Figure  2b).  By  this  measure  the  East  England  samples  are  consistent with  30%  Anglo-­‐Saxon  ancestry  on  average,  with  a  spread  from  20%  to  40%, and  the  Welsh  and  Scottish  samples  are  consistent  with  20%  Anglo-­‐Saxon ancestry  on  average,  again  with  a  large  spread  (Supplementary  Table  2).  An alternative  and  potentially  more  direct  approach  to  estimate  these  fractions  is  to measure  rare  allele  sharing  directly  between  the  modern  British  and  the  ancient samples.  While  being  much  noisier  than  the  analysis  using  Dutch  and  Spanish outgroups,  this  yields  consistent  results  (Extended  Data  Figure  4  and Supplementary  Table  2).  In  summary,  this  analysis  suggests  that  only  20-­‐30%  of the  ancestry  of  modern  Britons  was  contributed  by  Anglo-­‐Saxon  immigrants, with  the  higher  number  in  East  England  closer  to  the  immigrant  source.  The difference  between  the  three  modern  groups  is  surprisingly  small  compared  to the  large  differences  seen  in  the  ancient  samples,  although  we  note  that  the UK10K  sample  locations  may  not  fully  reflect  historical  geographical  population structure  because  of  recent  population  mixing.

I have not thought about it deeply, but the rare variant comparison method used by the authors seems like it should produce reasonable results, at least for the relatively straightforward admixture estimates (with the understanding that Anglo-Saxons and Iron Age Britons are not the only two possible source populations for the modern British). I will say I was surprised to see Britain sharing a branch with Finland in this plot (even though it's a short one) to the exclusion of Denmark and Netherlands:

I've seen a few people interpret this study's estimates as a vindication of the ridiculous admixture estimates featured in the People of the British Isles project paper. For me, the ancient DNA results confirm my initial impression: the methods the POBI authors used to generate their estimates of ancient admixture were useless for divining what they thought they could divine.

That this 30% estimate informed by ancient DNA falls within the range of estimates suggested by the POBI authors is primarily a testament to the extremely broad range of possible admixture estimates they offered up (spanning 10% to 50%, depending on what one subjectively deemed "likely"). The POBI authors themselves were pushing for ~10% Anglo-Saxon admixture in the 19th-century Central and South English population (and if I recall correctly ~0% in the Welsh). POBI volunteers were primarily middle-aged or older people who could document four grandparents all born in particular locations. The UK10K modern British samples appearing in the ancient DNA paper are not screened in a similar manner, but are simply classified based on the sample donor's birth place. This means at least a couple generations (and probably disproportionately important generations, at that, as concerns mobility) of additional homogenization will have taken place.

So I have little doubt POBI samples from East Anglia (proxies for 19th-century East Anglians) would produce higher estimates of Anglo-Saxon admixture than "East England" UK10K samples (though apparently at present only microarray data, and not the whole genome sequencing data that would be necessary for the rare variant comparisons, is available for POBI samples). Levels up to 40% or higher Anglo-Saxon admixture in 19th-century East Anglians would not surprise me. And whatever the 19th-century number turns out to be, Anglo-Saxon admixture in England likely would have been progressively higher going back in time toward before the Norman conquest.

Gene flow into England over the past millennium (from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and France) will have tended to make the English look less Anglo-Saxon and more "Iron Age". The Scandinavian component in the Normans and particularly their followers was probably outweighed by the French; and subsequently France probably remained one of the main sources of continental immigrants into England at least down to the Huguenots. It's said around 50,000 Huguenots came to England (against a 17th-century English population of around 5 million). 1% does not sound like an especially large wave (and it's certainly not by the standards of modern mass immigration), but these immigrants were concentrated in south and east England:

Huguenot settlement was concentrated in London and the south, East Anglia and the Fens

Even a relative trickle of continental immigrants over the past 1000 years might have had a noticeable cumulative effect on the English gene pool, and Scottish, Welsh, and Irish gene flow into England over the past millennium is likely even more significant. 24% of British claim Irish ancestry recent enough to be aware of, including 77% of those in London. Around 10% of the UK population is estimated to have an Irish grandparent.

Filtering recent Irish immigration into Scotland might also lead to higher estimates of Anglo-Saxon admixture there, as well (though recent English immigration too would need to be excluded). Recent English immigration into Wales may mean the 20% Anglo-Saxon admixture estimate is significantly inflated (though going off the 20% estimate for modern Welsh I would guess 19th-century Welsh speakers had at least ~10% Anglo-Saxon-like admixture).

According to the authors:

The  genetic  analyses  described  above  add  significantly  to  our  picture  of  Anglo-­Saxon  migration  into  Britain.   In  the  cemetery  at  Oakington  we  see  evidence  even in  the  early  Anglo-­Saxon  period  for  a  genetically  mixed  but  culturally  Anglo-­Saxon  community ^21,22 ,  in  contrast  to  claims  for  strong  segregation  between newcomers  and  indigenous  peoples ⁷ .  The  genomes  of  two  sequenced  individuals are  consistent  with  them  being  of  recent  immigrant  origin,  from  different continental  source  populations,  one  was  genetically  similar  to  native  Iron  Age samples,  and  the  fourth  was  an  admixed  individual,  indicating  intermarriage.   Despite  this,  their  graves  were  conspicuously  similar,  with  all  four  individuals buried  in  flexed  position,  and  with  similar  grave  furnishing.  Interestingly  the wealthiest  grave,  with  a  large  cruciform  brooch,  belonged  to  the  individual  of native  British  ancestry  (O4),  and  the  individual  without  grave  goods  was  one  of the  two  genetically  “foreign”  ones  (O2),  an  observation  consistent  with  isotope analysis  at  West  Heslerton  which  suggests  that  new  immigrants  were  frequently poorer   ^23,24 .  Given  this  mixing  apparent  around  500CE,  and  that  the  modern population  is  no  more  than  30%  of  Anglo-­Saxon  ancestry,  it  is  perhaps  surprising that  the  middle  Anglo-­Saxon  individuals  from  the  more  dispersed  field  cemetery in  Hinxton  all  look  genetically  consistent  with  unmixed  immigrant  ancestry.  One possibility  is  that  this  reflects  continued  immigration  until  at  least  the  Middle Saxon  period.  

In fact, there's nothing really inconsistent with the "Anglo-Saxon apartheid" paper in the mixed earlier samples and unmixed later samples. The Anglo-Saxon period samples tested here are all female. It's easy to imagine intermarriage rates may have been higher among the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlers, when their fraction of the total British population would have been smallest -- especially if females were to any degree underrepresented among the incoming Anglo-Saxons.

From the "Anglo-Saxon apartheid" paper (Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England):

We have only considered the effects of differences in ethnic reproductive advantage and inter-ethnic marriage rate on patterns of genetic variation. If there were no sex bias in the intermarriage rate, then we would expect these effects to be equal for the different genetic systems (mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome, X-chromosome, autosomes). However, part of the motivation for this study was to seek an explanation for the discrepancy between archaeological estimates of the size of the Anglo-Saxon migration (Härke 1998, 2002; Hills 2003) and estimates based on Y-chromosome data (Weale et al. 2002; Capelli et al. 2003). There are three further factors that could exacerbate replacement of indigenous Y-chromosomes. The first is that when intermarriage does occur the offspring may be more likely to assume the identity of the father, thus reducing the effective intermarriage rate, as it would affect patterns of Y-chromosome diversity. The second is that forced extra-marital matings are more likely to occur between Anglo-Saxon men and native British women than the reverse since, as the law codes of Ine indicate, the degree of punishment was determined by the social status of the victim. The third is based on the theory that relatively ‘good condition’ males tend to out-reproduce females of a similar condition, whereas relatively ‘poor condition’ females tend to out-reproduce their male counterparts (Trivers & Willard 1973). From this, a strategy of sex-biased parental investment, whereby relatively wealthy parents favour wealth transfer to their sons, should emerge (Hartung 1976). Such a phenomenon is supported by genealogical data (Boone 1986) and should lead to an asymmetric increase in the population frequency of Y-chromosomes carried by wealthy men, when compared to the other genetic systems.

The motivation for this study was to reconcile the discrepancy between, on the one hand, archaeological and historical ideas about the scale of the Anglo-Saxon immigration (Hills 2003), and on the other, estimates of the genetic contribution of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the modern English gene pool (Weale et al. 2002; Capelli et al. 2003). We have shown that this discrepancy can be resolved by the assumption of an apartheid-like social structure within a range of plausible values for interethnic marriage and socially driven reproductive advantage following immigration (Woolf 2004). Perhaps most strikingly, our model indicates that, by using plausible parameter values, the genetic contribution of an immigrant population can rise from less than 10% to more than 50% in as little as five generations, and certainly less than fifteen generations. Similar processes are likely to have shaped patterns of genetic variation in other ‘conquest societies’ of the period, and perhaps more recently (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000).

Reply to RCB on the evolution and adaptiveness of ethnocentric altruism

Continued from this discussion.

"you are unable to explain to a competent person why you believe what you believe."

I'm trying to be patient here, but I don't know how much better I can explain this. You either get it, or you don't. If you don't, you're not as competent as you believe; you either don't really understand the basic concepts we're talking about or have mental blocks when it comes to applying them to humans, and this is something you need to deal with yourself.

No matter how many times I explain this, you don't want to get it. Your starting point is that Salter can't be right; so when I explain to you how your reasoning is flawed, regardless of how many times we go through this or how many times I address a particular objection, your response is just to throw out additional confused reasoning, often forgetting things you previously agreed I was correct on and switching back to objections that have already been addressed.

The benefit of the ethnocentric altruism alleles comes from between-group selection, not within-group selection. Even in the first generation, an allele for ethnocentric altruism can potentially boost its odds of representation in future generations by, for example, reducing the chance of extinction of the group it's found in (whether by contributing to avoiding defeat and extermination by rival groups in an ancestral environment, or resisting replacement-level immigration in the modern world).

It makes no difference whether there is enough between-group relative to within-group competition at modern scales to maintain or grow this sort of variation in the long run (and certainly Hamilton speculated that self-sacrificing altruism would be found at higher levels in tribal people than in the long-civilized). In a particular instance of intergroup competition of the sort we're discussing, ethnocentric altruism alleles attuned to Hamilton's rule would by definition be adaptive.

This will always be true, regardless of scale, and regardless of how often the group is actually faced with the threat of intergroup competition. In the face of such a threat, the alleles (ones that enhance group competitiveness in a generalized fashion and are sensitive to cost, benefit, and relatedness) will be adaptive.

Your argument is somewhat analogous to claiming sickle-cell alleles can't be adaptive (or even exist in the first place!) in a malarial environment because their frequency would not increase in the long run in the absence of malaria. Even if malaria is nearly wiped out and the frequency of sickle-cell alleles begins to decline, this does not prove that if a mosquito with malaria does land on you you'd be better off not having a sickle-cell allele.

"Yes, the behaviors are polygenic. But all genes have to start at low frequency, and you have not explained how they get to high frequency"

Again: positive selection will come from intergroup competition. If your argument is that all relevant variants would be snuffed out immediately, leaving no variation on which group-level selection could act, this is of course absurd. Yet again: we're talking about very large numbers of weakly-selected variants, and a large surface on which new mutations can arise.

Crow and Aoki modeled group selection for polygenic behavioral traits. Again, it boils down to Hamilton's rule.

Group selection for a polygenic behavioral trait: a differential proliferation model [pdf]

Group selection for a polygenic behavioral trait: estimating the degree of population subdivision [pdf]

Our general approach is to use molecular markers, which are selected very weakly at most, as neutral indicators of population structure. G_ST gives us an appropriate description of the relevant aspect of the structure. By using Eq. 3 we can state the maximum value of cost/benefit of a quantitative trait if that trait is to increase in average value or frequency in the population. G_ST describes the present structure of the population; it does not tell us how it got that way. If this value has been roughly stable in the past, we could expect that traits with c/b up to this value would have increased in the population, assuming of course that such traits exist and have heritability greater than zero.

Empirically, ethnocentrism exists, and no doubt has since before we were humans. Empirically, ethnocentrism has heritability greater than zero.

• Nature, nurture, and ethnocentrism in the Minnesota Twin Study [pdf]

• Common Heritable Effects Underpin Concerns Over Norm Maintenance and In-Group Favoritism: Evidence From Genetic Analyses of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Traditionalism [pdf]

• Genetic evidence for multiple biological mechanisms underlying in-group favoritism [pdf]

Your issue is with reality, not with Salter or me.

"Of course, ethnic altruist genes could be maladaptive relics of the past, when groups were small. But Salter says they are adaptive now."

Again, see above.

And Salter never claims we are well-adapted to ethnic competition in the modern world. If he'd believed that to be the case, he would have had little reason to write the book. From the introduction:

On Genetic Interests is an attempt to answer the empirical question: How would an individual behave in order to be adaptive in the modern world? I adopt the neo-Darwinian meaning of adaptive, which is to maximize the survival chances of one’s genes. I begin by describing humans as an evolved species and thus as creatures for whom genetic continuity consists of personal reproduction or reproduction of kin. [. . .]

Humans can no longer rely on their instincts

There is nothing immutable or necessarily perfect about adaptations or the understanding, appetites and preferences they organize. Natural selection is constrained by evolutionary history and environment. It shapes bodies and behaviours in small increments by modifying existing species. Much in nature is badly designed, if one examines it from an engineer’s viewpoint. [. . .]

Like adaptations that advance them, proximate interests can be imperfect in promoting genetic interests. The main problem is the slowness of natural selection compared to the rapidity of technological and social change since the Neolithic. The inertia of adaptations can cause them to continue to promote proximate interests that no longer serve fitness. For most of humans’ evolutionary history, adaptations tracked slow-moving environmental change, including technological advances. In the species’ distant hominid and pre-hominid past, proximate interests that reduced an actor’s fitness were valued less and less as the genes that coded for such valuation failed to reproduce. For this reason, at most moments in time proximate interests have correlated with ultimate interests because the environment has changed so slowly that physiology and behaviour could keep track with it. Proximate and ultimate interests have been in equilibrium except where rapid changes in environment occurred. The equilibrium applying to humans has been upset in recent generations, so that we can no longer rely on subjectively designated proximate interests to serve our ultimate interest. We must rely more on science to perceive the causal links between the things we value and formulate synthetic goals based on that rational appraisal.

Proximate interests, often reflected in consciously held values, have become increasingly fallible guides to ultimate interests because modern humans live in a rapidly changing world. Humans evolved in small bands consisting of a few families, sometimes grouped into tribes numbering in the hundreds. For most of their evolutionary history humans made a living by hunting and gathering in largely natural environments. They lacked formal organization and hierarchy. Adults coordinated activities by negotiating simple demographic role specializations — by age and sex — on an egalitarian basis with familiar band members. Most information was common. Humans now live in societies numbering in the millions where the great majority of interactants are strangers or acquaintances. They make their living through a great diversity of occupations resulting in radical asymmetries in information. They live and work in largely man-made urban environments. They are formally organized into states administered by extended hierarchies of rank and resources actuated by authoritative commands, impersonal contracts enforced by the state authority, and powerful forms of indoctrination performed by universal education, centralized media and entertainment.

However, to the extent we are able to correctly reason about what would be adaptive in the context of intergroup competition, and act in accordance with this, we have the equivalent of our generalized ethnocentric altruism alleles.

Related:

• JayMan continues to talk about things he doesn't understand
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans
• On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, And Humanity In An Age Of Mass Migration (pdf) by Frank Salter

NW-SE cline of brain volume in Europe

The authors of Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic Ancestry mention:

In our group’s previous study, we found that area measures of cortical surface and total brain volumes of individuals of European descent in the United States correlate significantly with their ancestral geographic locations in Europe [ 9 ].

This 2011 study ("A Geographic Cline of Skull and Brain Morphology among Individuals of European Ancestry") is freely accessible:

Background: Human skull and brain morphology are strongly influenced by genetic factors, and skull size and shape vary worldwide. However, the relationship between specific brain morphology and genetically-determined ancestry is largely unknown. Methods: We used two independent data sets to characterize variation in skull and brain morphology among individuals of European ancestry. The first data set is a historical sample of 1,170 male skulls with 37 shape measurements drawn from 27 European populations. The second data set includes 626 North American individuals of European ancestry participating in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) with magnetic resonance imaging, height and weight, neurological diagnosis, and genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. Results: We found that both skull and brain morphological variation exhibit a population-genetic fingerprint among individuals of European ancestry. This fingerprint shows a Northwest to Southeast gradient, is independent of body size, and involves frontotemporal cortical regions. Conclusion: Our findings are consistent with prior evidence for gene flow in Europe due to historical population movements and indicate that genetic background should be considered in studies seeking to identify genes involved in human cortical development and neuropsychiatric disease. [. . .]

Apparently the two main groups being compared in the neuroimaging sample are Americans of Northwestern European ancestry and Ashkenazi Jews ("ADNI subjects are spread out primarily along a NW-SE axis and form two distinct clusters corresponding to NW European and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry"):

To determine if brain morphometry exhibits similar geospatial population trends to the skull morphometry data, we estimated the ancestry of each individual in the ADNI sample using available genome-wide genotype data and confined attention to 626 individuals with a high probability of having European ancestry. In order to assign the European region of origin most likely to reflect the genetic background of each individual, genotypes from ADNI subjects were merged with publically available genotypes from 34 reference populations geographically distributed across Europe, and PCA was pursued. [. . .]

A plot of the first two principal components separates ADNI subjects into two main clusters: one overlaps NW populations and one lies SE of Europe ( fig. 3 a) and overlaps individuals with self-reported Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (online suppl. fig. S5). [. . .]

We found that ADNI individuals with a NW ancestry are on average 4 cm taller than ADNI individuals with a SE or Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (p = 7.3 ! 10–6 ), consistent with previously observed differences in height across Europe [30] . [. . .]

Intracranial and brain volumes and cortical surface area progressively increase with the amount of inferred NW European ancestry (fig. ​(fig.3b),3b), and these measures are approximately 5% larger in the 10% of individuals with the most NW European ancestry compared to the 10% with the most SE European ancestry. This percentage increase matches the percentage increase in cranial length and breadth observed along the same NW-SE geographic axis in the skull data set (fig. ​(fig.2b)2b) and cannot be attributed to a correlation with body size since we controlled for height and weight. This correlation involves specific – not global – brain morphology because hippocampal, basal ganglia, ventricular, and cerebellar volumes and average cortical thickness are not associated with NW-SE ancestry.

Next, we performed both a region of interest analysis and vertex-based tests across the cortex to test whether the surface area of specific cortical regions showed more significant association with the degree of NW-SE ancestry. We found that cortical surface area predominantly in the frontal and temporal lobes from both hemispheres is significantly associated (online suppl. table S4) and is 4–9% larger among 10% of individuals with the most NW European ancestry compared to 10% with the most SE European ancestry. We found a similar frontotemporal pattern of association with the degree of NW-SE ancestry with a vertex-based analysis (fig. ​(fig.4;4; online suppl. fig. S6).

[. . .] the existence of genetic and craniometric clines in modern European populations suggests at least two theories: (1) pre-historic population movements made such a dominant contribution to the structure of genetic variation in Europe that more recent gene flow has not masked it, and (2) local environmental factors and selection generated clinal variation or acted to restore clinal variation after gene flow occurred. One intriguing possibility for such an environmental factor is the cultural conditions associated with possessing agricultural technologies, e.g. sedentarism, altered diet including milk consumption [40] , and new disease exposures [41] . As these technologies spread progressively from SE to NW Europe over several 1,000 years [33] , natural selection may have acted either directly or indirectly to alter brain morphology, thus creating the clinal variation found in this study.

Plots of cranial measures from this study (left) and map of head size from Coon's 1939 book The Races of Europe (right):

The trend observed here is also consistent with that reported by Maurice Fishberg over a century ago in The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment:

One of the methods of determining the volume of the brain case, and approximately the weight of the brain, is the determination of the cranial capacity. Very few direct measurements of this kind have been taken, because only few Jewish skulls have found their way into anthropological museums, where they could be studied carefully. But from the few studies of this character that have been made, it appears that the Jews are somewhat at a disadvantage. Lombroso's studies of the Jews in Turin, Italy, which were made in an indirect fashion, showed that the Jews have a smaller cranial capacity than the Catholics of that city.2 Weinberg collected measurements of seventeen Jewish skulls in various museums of Europe, which were made properly, and are not approximations. The average cranial capacity was 1421 c.cm., which is about thirty to forty c.cm. below the average cranial capacity of the population of Europe. Of course the small number of skulls thus measured is not sufficient to draw positive conclusions.

As to the weight of the brain, there are also very few observations on record. The author knows only of twentythree Jewish brains reported by Giltchenko,3 four by Weisbach,4 and three by Weinberg.5 The average weight of these brains, as calculated by Weinberg, was 1320.4 gm. Since the average weight of the brain of the European is 1350 gms., the brain of Jews is rather lighter by 30 gms. , or nearly one ounce. Considering that the Jews are shorter of stature than the average Europeans, it would be expected that their brain should also be smaller. But, as Weinberg points out, the average for Germans was found to be 8.22 gm. of brain tissue for each centimetre of stature, while for the Jews it is only 8.05 gms. This shows the Jewish brain lighter not only absolutely, but also relatively.

Evolutionary significance of Denisovan admixture in Oceanians

Investigating the Evolutionary Importance of Denisovan Introgressions in Papua New Guineans and Australians

Previous research reported that Papua New Guineans (PNG) and Australians contain introgressions from Denisovans. Here we present a genome-wide analysis of Denisovan introgressions in PNG and Australians. We firstly developed a two-phase method to detect Denisovan introgressions from whole-genome sequencing data. This method has relatively high detection power (79.74%) and low false positive rate (2.44%) based on simulations. Using this method, we identified 1.34 Gb of Denisovan introgressions from sixteen PNG and four Australian genomes, in which we identified 38,877 Denisovan introgressive alleles (DIAs). We found that 78 Denisovan introgressions were under positive selection. Genes located in the 78 introgressions are related to evolutionarily important functions, such as spermatogenesis, fertilization, cold acclimation, circadian rhythm, development of brain, neural tube, face, and olfactory pit, immunity, etc. We also found that 121 DIAs are missense. Genes harboring the 121 missense DIAs are also related to evolutionarily important functions, such as female pregnancy, development of face, lung, heart, skin, nervous system, and male gonad, visual and smell perception, response to heat, pain, hypoxia, and UV, lipid transport, metabolism, blood coagulation, wound healing, aging, etc. Taken together, this study suggests that Denisovan introgressions in PNG and Australians are evolutionarily important, and may help PNG and Australians in local adaptation. In this study, we also proposed a method that could efficiently identify archaic hominin introgressions in modern non-African genomes.

Racial differences in brain shape

A press release:

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the School of Medicine have found that the three-dimensional shape of the cerebral cortex -- the wrinkled outer layer of the brain controlling many functions of thinking and sensation -- strongly correlates with ancestral background.

Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic Ancestry

Knowing how the human brain is shaped by migration and admixture is a critical step in studying human evolution [ 1, 2 ], as well as in preventing the bias of hidden population structure in brain research [ 3, 4 ]. [. . .] The geometry of the cortical surface contains richer information about ancestry than the areal variability of the cortical surface, independent of total brain volumes. Besides explaining more ancestry variance than other brain imaging measurements, the 3D geometry of the cortical surface further characterizes distinct regional patterns in the folding and gyrification of the human brain associated with each ancestral lineage.

Chris Stringer on the possibility of a Eurasian origin for Homo heidelbergensis

Who is Homo heidelbergensis?

H. heidelbergensis is a critical human species in the Middle Pleistocene (∼130–780 thousand years ago (ka)). We know from several beautifully preserved crania that this species had a large brain, within the lower range of modern human variation, and a less robust face than early fossil humans. We know from their long bones that they were tall, strong people. From their associated archaeology we know they were capable of producing beautiful tools such as the large handaxes found in huge numbers at Boxgrove in Sussex. But there are many unanswered questions: who exactly belongs to the species Homo heidelbergensis, where did they live, how do they fit into the human family tree, and are they a separate species at all? [. . .]

Are they our ancestors? African H. heidelbergensis material, such as Broken Hill, shares numerous features with European fossils such as Petralona, leading many to group them together. As long as Mauer is also included, this taxon can be named H. heidelbergensis. Proponents of this wide concept of H. heidelbergensis assert that the mosaic of primitive and derived features shared by this group of fossils is unique, with few traits linking them exclusively to either modern humans or Neanderthals ( Figure 1B). H. heidelbergensis is thus hypothesised to be the last common ancestor of both Neanderthals in Eurasia and H. sapiens in Africa. This scenario is probably the most popular and well supported at present. [. . .]

The geographic origin of H. heidelbergensis is still unknown, but the early fossils from Asia suggest that continent is as likely a place of origin as Europe or Africa at the moment. An Asian origin for a species directly ancestral to our own would certainly shake up the current rather Afro-centric view of our evolution.

Related:

• The Denisova hominin need not be an out of Africa story
• Alan Templeton's model of human origins

Inbreeding and inclusive fitness

Inbreeding avoidance, tolerance, or preference in animals?

The widespread presumption that inbreeding depression will inevitably cause net selection for inbreeding avoidance ignores the inclusive fitness benefit of inbreeding that exists because parents are more closely related to inbred offspring than to outbred offspring. This increased relatedness arises because inbred offspring, by definition, inherit alleles from one parent that are identical by descent to those carried by, and potentially inherited from, the other parent. Inbreeding thereby increases the expected proportion of alleles that any one parent shares with its offspring, including alleles favouring inbreeding [10,24,25]. This inclusive fitness benefit underpins extensive theory predicting the evolution of self-fertilisation in plants [10,25–27]. That this same benefit could also cause the evolution of biparental inbreeding was suggested three decades ago (Box 1) [28,29], but remained widely ignored by animal ecologists. The assumption that inbreeding depression inevitably causes selection for inbreeding avoidance continued to pervade hypotheses explaining dispersal, mate choice, and polyandry [3,5,6,11,30–32]. Recent theory has re-emphasised that biparental inbreeding could be adaptive, even given inbreeding depression, with the inclusive fitness benefit phrased as ‘helping relatives to breed’ and hence kin selection [12,13,33].

What Happens after Inbreeding Avoidance? Inbreeding by Rejected Relatives and the Inclusive Fitness Benefit of Inbreeding Avoidance

The fitness costs associated with inbreeding, primarily inbreeding depression in resulting offspring, have caused a widespread assumption among animal ecologists that inbreeding avoidance must be adaptive [10, 21, 22]. Meanwhile, empirical studies have reported a lack of inbreeding avoidance [34, 42–47], or even an apparent preference for inbreeding [48–52], causing a mismatch between expectations and data [27]. This mismatch is partially resolved by basic conceptual models of biparental inbreeding that imply that the inclusive fitness benefit of inbreeding might cause inbreeding tolerance or preference to be adaptive even given inbreeding depression in offspring fitness, and that predict sexual conflict over inbreeding [24–28]. [. . .]

Our models imply that the inclusive fitness costs and benefits of inbreeding versus avoiding inbreeding will vary among individuals depending on their interactions with multiple different relatives of both sexes, and on the degree to which focal individuals are themselves inbred. Understanding these costs and benefits and their combined consequences for the evolution of inbreeding strategies therefore requires consideration of not only the relatedness of an individual to its potential mate(s), but also the relatedness between the individual and the subsequent mates of rejected relatives. Knowledge of the distribution of relatedness within a population is therefore likely to be critical for understanding the evolution of inbreeding strategies. This distribution will in turn depend on the distribution of relatedness in previous generations and on previously realised inbreeding strategies and inbreeding loads, thereby generating complex feedbacks between inbreeding strategy, load, and relatedness. [. . .]

Sexual conflict and interactions among multiple non-self relatives are particular to biparental reproduction rather than self-fertilisation, but both types of inbreeding increase the expression of inbreeding load causing inbreeding depression in offspring [1, 2, 7, 12]. Inbreeding depression may decrease inbreeding load by exposing deleterious homozygous recessive alleles to selection [9, 71]. Resulting purging of deleterious recessive alleles may in turn affect the inclusive fitness benefit of inbreeding versus avoiding inbreeding causing inbreeding strategy and inbreeding load to coevolve [12, 72, 73]. The consequences of this coevolution have been modelled extensively with respect to outcrossing versus selfing [12, 18, 72, 74–76], but have not yet been modelled for the evolution of biparental inbreeding strategies [10]. Future theoretical developments will therefore need to explicitly consider coevolution between biparental inbreeding strategy and inbreeding load.

Predictive models of biparental inbreeding evolution cannot be simple, but their complexity need not preclude generality [77]. Tractable approaches for developing inbreeding theory might include game-theoretic models, or individual-based models that explicitly track ancestry and inbreeding load, and thereby incorporate feedbacks among relatedness, load, and inbreeding strategy.

Related:

• David Agus: inbred retard?
• JayMan continues to talk about things he doesn't understand
• James Neel and early human population structure

David Agus: inbred retard?

Discussing a recent study (Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations) that found an effect for runs of homozygosity on height and IQ within populations, Greg Cochran notes:

Some retards (British papers) have been spinning this as saying that there are big benefits to mixed-race marriage. Untrue: to avoid lots of ROH (runs of homozygosity), just marry someone who isn’t from the same isolated population as you. We’re talking outside the valley or across the river : intercontinental travel is not necessary. Now there might be a degree of hybrid vigor in some distant crosses (currently unclear) – but likely not enough to compensate for someone coming from a group that has low trait values. Marry a Pygmy and your kids are going to be short. Marry someone from a population whose average IQ is below 90 (much of the world) and your kids will on average be less smart.

CBS medical contributor David Agus (who, wikipedia informs us, "graduated cum laude in molecular biology from Princeton University and received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1991") promotes this misinterpretation of the study in a segment on CBS This Morning:

Do kids from mixed genetic backgrounds have an advantage?

Additionally, although one would hope someone who majored in molecular biology at Princeton and co-founded a personal genomics company would know that any benefits from outcrossing will fully accrue in the first generation, Agus gleefully urges the viewer to imagine how much "taller and smarter" children will be if "people of different backgrounds" continue interbreeding generation after generation.

It's a pretty interesting study that tells us a lot because this is really the first couple generations where people of different backgrounds are having children and if this happens in one, one generation children are 1.2 cm shorter, think of if this continues to happen, so, taller and smarter.

Curiously, Agus, the grandson of a rabbi, married a pre-Connie Chung daughter of Maury Povich. That is, Agus chose to mate with a member of the same rather inbred narrow ethnic group as himself. But I'm sure now that he's aware of this study (confused though he may be about it) and excited about the eugenic prospects of racial mixing, he's urged his own children to marry Africans, with that same gleeful look in his eyes.

It’s Sunday night, and Agus is at Jerusalem’s Mamilla Hotel. He just arrived for the Global Forum, a gathering of 70 of the world’s thinkers hosted by Israel’s National Library, to discuss how the People of the Book can use their ancient lore for contemporary needs.

It was Shimon Peres, the honorary chairman of the event, who convinced Agus to attend. Agus and Peres are friends – though he’s not the nonagenarian’s doctor – and the two meet every six months or so. This time, Agus will be discussing Maimonides at the National Library, from the perspective of what he, Agus, believes.

But first he had to go back and read some of the good doctor’s words. It’s been a long time since Agus studied Maimonides at Philadelphia’s Akiba Hebrew Academy. What he found resonated. [. . .]

Now Agus combines teaching, research and patient work, along with spending a lot of time at places like the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival and TEDMED – TED for the health field. He’s also at the CBS studio at 4 a.m., several mornings per week.

“You get a passion to change things, and I decided I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable on camera,” said Agus, who calls himself an introvert by nature. “I need to be a role model and it’s awkward, but you have to do it, over and over again. I get to talk to four million people every morning on CBS. I can just talk, I can call a spade a spade. I look at my patients losing their lives on a daily basis, so I’ve got nothing to lose.”

[Steve Jobs’ ex-doctor is in, and he’s quoting Maimonides. http://www.timesofisrael.com/steve-jobs-ex-doctor-is-in-and-hes-quoting-maimonides/]