tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2277808616387670232024-03-13T08:37:05.595+00:00race/history/evolution notesn/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.comBlogger867125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-50819829433440032162016-06-07T14:12:00.000+01:002016-06-07T14:12:37.201+01:00Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration"Ethnic" names were (apparently causally) associated with lower earnings among sons of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrants vs. higher earnings among sons of Jewish immigrants, suggesting Jewish ethnic networks contributed to Jewish occupational advancement. Also points out shoddy assumptions behind Fryer/Levitt black names resume studies:
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<blockquote><b>For most major groups in the last era of immigration, carrying an ethnically distinct name
was associated with lower occupational
attainment. Native-born sons of Irish, Italian,
German, and Polish immigrant fathers who
were given very ethnic names ended up in
occupations that earned, on average, $50 to
$100 less per year than sons who were given
very “American” names</b>. This represented 2
to 5 percent of annual earnings. [. . .]
<p>Our work also produces several new findings. First, we find that for many groups there
appears to be a causal effect of having been
assigned an ethnic name—an effect due to
both the name and other cultural signals correlated with having been given this name.
This effect has eluded earlier observational
studies, such as Fryer and Levitt’s (2004)
research on black names, and the vast number
of studies using other measures of assimilation. Our adjustment for family characteristics is a powerful control for the possible
influences on name-giving, strengthening the
causal interpretation.
<p>Second, further analyses taking into
account last names allowed us to gain insight
into the mechanism behind the effects of cultural assimilation on achievement. Assimilation may operate by hiding foreign origins or
by displaying an American orientation, even
for people who have recognizably foreign
origins. Our finding that <b>American-sounding
first names were an advantage even for people with recognizably ethnic last names</b> suggests that the signal being sent was one of
mainstream orientation rather than origin.
Our study supports the idea that U.S. society
shared Roosevelt’s perspective: only immigrants who abandoned their foreign affiliations deserved “exact equality.”
<p><b>This distinction between signaling “origin” and “orientation” is useful for the study
of other forms of group differentiation and
discrimination. For example, one interpretation of the effect of distinctive black names is
that they reveal “blackness” that would otherwise remain hidden</b>. This might play out at
the job search stage in which only paper
applications are being considered. But another
interpretation is that the disadvantage of distinctive naming is not so much in revealing
origins (in this case, skin color) but in revealing orientation (in this case, a cultural orientation away from mainstream white society).
With this latter interpretation, the effect of
distinctive names would persist even in situations, like job interviews, when skin color is
known.
<p>Third, <b>our finding that for some groups—
notably the Russians, who were primarily of
Jewish origin—having an ethnic name has a
positive effect on occupational achievement
has important implications</b>. Scholars are currently challenging the applicability of the
lessons of the past century to recent waves of
immigrants, arguing that the potential for
downward mobility and the <b>advantages of
ethnic networks and enclaves could make it
advantageous for some groups to maintain
their culture of origin</b> (Portes and Zhou 1993;
Rumbaut 1997). Our findings suggest that
this kind of differentiated assimilation is not a
purely contemporary phenomenon. Instead, it
has a <b>strong historical precedent among at
least one group, Russian Jews</b>. This finding is
surprising, given the attention found in scholarship, biography, and literature on the importance for Jews of Americanizing first and last
names. In show business, for example, Jews
considered name changes a crucial ingredient
for success (Bial 2005; Buhle 2004; Lieberson 2010). Yet we find this was not true for
the general population. <b>Being named Moses
or Mordechai did not confer disadvantage—
quite the opposite</b>. 19
<p>On the other hand, <b>the literature on the
Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience attributes advantages to displaying a
strong ethnic identity</b>. Scholars have described
the important role of ethnic aid societies in
Jews’ economic success (Kahan 1978; Kasin-
itz 2008). In a climate of discrimination, the
use of <b>ethnic networks are advantageous for
occupational advancement</b>, particularly for a
minority group that tends toward entrepreneurship and self-employment (Rischin 1977).
Facing discrimination from non-Jews, the
potential benefits of an “American”-sounding
first name are small in comparison to strong
identification with one’s own landsleit.
<p>[. . .] interpretation of the results for Russian immigrants
requires a caveat. Although the vast majority
of these immigrants were Jewish, there were
also Christian immigrants. Part of the positive
gradient we observe for ethnic names may be
driven by the lower occupational earnings of
non-Jewish immigrants, who had less “ethnic”
first names, like John. However, Table 4 shows
that <b>the positive association between ENI score
and occupational income is stronger among
Russians with recognizably Jewish last names</b>,
providing support for the protective effect
suggested by the ethnic enclave thesis. The
1940 sample will allow researchers to further
explore this issue using a larger sample size.
Additional data sources, such as shipping reg-
isters from the turn of the last century, which
sometimes include an indicator for Jewish
ethnicity, may also prove helpful in future
work (Spitzer 2015).</blockquote>
From Patrick to John F.: Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration. Joshua R. Goldstein a and Guy Stecklov. American Sociological Review 1 –22. DOI: 10.1177/0003122415621910
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-16525506378327640502016-06-07T13:10:00.001+01:002016-06-07T13:10:40.138+01:00The Impact of the Civil War on Southern Wealth Holders<blockquote>
<p>The U.S. Civil War and emancipation wiped out a substantial fraction of southern wealth. The prevailing view of most economic historians, however, is that the southern planter elite was able to retain its relative status despite these shocks. Previous studies have been hampered, however, by limits on the ability to link individuals between census years, and have been forced to focus on persistence within one or a few counties. Recent advances in electronic access to the Federal Census manuscripts now make it possible to link individuals without these constraints. We exploit the ability to search the full manuscript census to construct a sample that links top wealth holders in 1870 to their 1860 census records. <b>Although there was an entrenched southern planter elite that retained their economic status, we find evidence that the turmoil of 1860s opened greater opportunities for mobility in the South than was the case in the North, resulting in much greater turnover among wealthy southerners than among comparably wealthy northerners</b>. [. . .]
<p>Comparing the two regions, it is apparent that there was considerably more turnover among the ranks of top southern wealth holders than among northern wealth holders. While more than half of the those in the top 5 percent of northern wealth holders had been in the same group in 1860 just one-third of top southern wealth holders in 1870 had enjoyed a similar status in 1860. Roughly the same proportion of the top 5 percent in each region was drawn from the next stratum of wealth holders in 1860 (90th to 95th percentile). On the other hand, our data suggest that the turmoil of the Civil War decade created much greater opportunities for those with moderate wealth in 1860 – between the 55th and 90th percentiles – to move up to the top of the wealth distribution. Nearly 40 percent of the wealthiest southerners in 1870 had been in this group in 1860, compared to less than one quarter of the richest northerners.</blockquote>
The Impact of the Civil War on Southern Wealth Holders. Brandon Dupont, Joshua Rosenbloom. NBER Working Paper No. 22184. Issued in April 2016. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22184n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-7715494966804486622016-05-28T05:53:00.001+01:002016-05-28T05:55:38.159+01:00PoBI paper BTFO <blockquote>We next analyzed UK Biobank population structure in conjunction with ancient DNA samples.
Modern European populations are known to have descended from three ancestral populations:
Steppe, Mesolithic Europeans and Neolithic farmers 21,22 . We projected ancient samples from
these three populations as well as ancient Saxon samples 24 onto the UK Biobank PCs (Figure 3,
Supplementary Figure 4, see Online Methods). These populations were primarily differentiated
along PC1 and PC3, indicating higher levels of Steppe ancestry in northern UK populations.
<p>Additionally, the <b>lack of any ancient sample correlation with PC2 suggests that Welsh
populations are not differentially admixed with any ancient population in our data set, and
likely underwent Welsh-specific genetic drift</b>. We confirmed these findings by projecting pan-
European POPRES 26 samples onto the UK Biobank PCs (see Online Methods, Supplementary
Figure 5) noting that of the continental European populations, Russians (who have the most
Steppe ancestry) lie on one side and Spanish and Italians (who have least) 22 lie on the other side
along PC1 and PC3, and that none of the continental European populations projected onto the
same regions as the Welsh on PC2 and PC5.
<p>In addition to the impact of ancient Eurasian populations, we know that the genetics of the UK
has been strongly impacted by Anglo-Saxon migrations since the Iron Age 24 , with the Angles
arriving in eastern England and the Saxons in southern England. The Anglo-Saxons interbred
with the native Celts, which explains much of the genetic landscape in the UK. We analyzed a
variety of samples from Celtic (Scotland and Wales) and Anglo-Saxon (southern and eastern
England) populations from modern Britain in conjunction with the PoBI samples 20 and 10
ancient Saxon samples from eastern England 24 in order to assess the relative amounts of Steppe
ancestry. [. . .] We consistently obtained significantly
positive f4 statistics, implying that <b>both the modern Celtic samples and the ancient Saxon
samples have more Steppe ancestry than the modern Anglo-Saxon samples from southern and
eastern England</b>. This indicates that southern and eastern England is not exclusively a genetic
mix of Celts and Saxons. There are a variety of possible explanations, but one is that the present
genetic structure of Britain, while subtle, is quite old, and that southern England in Roman
times already had less Steppe ancestry than Wales and Scotland.</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/27/055855">Population structure of UK Biobank and ancient Eurasians reveals adaptation at genes influencing blood pressure</a>. Kevin Galinsky, Po-Ru Loh, Swapan Mallick, Nick J Patterson, Alkes L Price
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/055855
<p>Note: I find it unlikely the pattern they observe is a holdover from Roman times. I suspect it will turn out the decrement of Steppe ancestry in England stems from a continual trickle of continental genes into England over the past 1000 years (from which the fringes of the British Isles were comparatively isolated).
<p>Also supports my impression that the Wellcome Trust paper still overestimated the degree of Iron Age British admixture in modern England (given that the authors had assumed a simple two-way admixture, while the authors of the above preprint provide evidence "<b>southern and eastern England is not exclusively a genetic mix of Celts and Saxons</b>").
<p><b>Related:</b>
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/03/people-of-british-isles-project-paper.html">People of the British Isles project paper</a>
<li> <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/07/iron-age-and-anglo-saxon-genomes-from.html">Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history </a>
</ul>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-4007897969225661622016-04-22T08:56:00.000+01:002016-04-22T09:17:52.126+01:00Gene-environment interaction for human fertility<a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/18/049163">Mega-analysis of 31,396 individuals from 6 countries uncovers strong gene-environment interaction for human fertility</a>
<blockquote>
Family and twin studies suggest that up to 50% of individual differences in human fertility within a population might be heritable. However, it remains unclear whether the genes associated with fertility outcomes such as number of children ever born (NEB) or age at first birth (AFB) are the same across geographical and historical environments. By not taking this into account, previous genetic studies implicitly assumed that the genetic effects are constant across time and space. We conduct a mega-analysis applying whole genome methods on 31,396 unrelated men and women from six Western countries. Across all individuals and environments, common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) explained only ~4% of the variance in NEB and AFB. We then extend these models to test whether genetic effects are shared across different environments or unique to them. <b>For individuals belonging to the same population and demographic cohort (born before or after the 20th century fertility decline), SNP-based heritability was almost five times higher at 22% for NEB and 19% for AFB. We also found no evidence suggesting that genetic effects on fertility are shared across time and space. Our findings imply that the environment strongly modifies genetic effects on the tempo and quantum of fertility, that currently ongoing natural selection is heterogeneous across environments, and that gene-environment interactions may partly account for missing heritability in fertility.</b> Future research needs to combine efforts from genetic research and from the social sciences to better understand human fertility.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<p>[. . .]
<p>For evolutionary biologists, our findings have at least two important implications. First,
the number of children ever born has been used as a proxy for fitness, given the diminishing
child mortality rate in contemporary societies [4,23,36]. Additive genetic variance therefore
indicates currently ongoing natural selection under environmental equilibrium within
populations: if all else equal, genes that lead to a higher number of offspring will have a higher
frequency in future generations. Due to natural selection, Fisher predicted additive genetic
variance in fertility to be (close to) zero in the absence of gene environment interaction, since
genes that reduce fitness are passed on to the next generation to a lesser extent thereby reducing
their frequencies [16]. Nevertheless, we find significant additive genetic influences on fitness
traits such as NEB and AFB – substantial yet lower than heritabilities observed for
morphological traits such as height [14,15,23,43]. Finding significant genetic influences on this
these proxies of fitness suggests that, along with sociocultural changes surrounding fertility,
genetic variants under selection have also changed [for review see 1,for review see
2,5,7,17,34,for comment see 44–46]. Gene-environment interaction can explain why we find
additive genetic variance in fitness related traits despite natural selection.
<p>Second, previous research has uncovered an ongoing natural selection in contemporary
societies [3,4,23,47,48] and even attempted to forecast changes in for example height and blood
pressure across generations [4]. For valid evolutionary predictions about observable changes in
traits across generations due to currently ongoing natural selection, fertility needs to be
consistently heritable, the same genes need to be under selection across generations and the
direction of the selection needs be similar. Our results demonstrate moderate genetic influences
on fertility within populations indicating potentially ongoing human evolution. However, this
potential is delimited in at least two ways: First, genetic effects on fertility strongly differ
across countries and therefore may lead to heterogeneity across human populations rather than
to universal changes in humans. Second, the finding that genetic effects underlying proxies of
fitness vary so markedly across time periods suggests that substantial caution is needed when
inferring long-term evolutionary predictions.
<p>For social scientists, genetic influences had been originally thought of as biological
constraints on human reproductive behavior [42]. Yet some previous studies showed that
genetic predispositions may underlie decision making processes on fertility timing and
motivation [6,7,49,50]. It has been suspected that genetically based behavioural and
psychological traits have become more important than physiological ones in the recent past
[6,8,34,51]. This hypothesis remains to be tested, but our results confirm that genetic influences
on fertility have evolved with social changes in the reproductive environment and therefore
underscore the necessity to integrate social factors into genetic research on fertility.
</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-17563238804953891022016-02-15T00:32:00.000+00:002016-02-15T00:32:19.969+00:00Testosterone-related abstracts from AAPA 2016Facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is not associated with pubertal testosterone
<blockquote>Several researchers have proposed that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is a sexually dimorphic signal that develops under the influence of pubertal testosterone (T); however, this hypothesis is currently under supported. Here we examine the association between fWHR and T during the period of the life span when facial growth is canalized--adolescence. To do so, we examine the association between T, known T-derived traits (i.e. strength and voice pitch), and craniofacial measurements in a sample of adolescent Tsimane males. If fWHR variation derives from pubertal T’s influence on craniofacial growth, several predictions can be made: 1) fWHR should increase with age as T increases, 2) fWHR should reflect adolescent T (rather than adult T per se), 3) fWHR should exhibit a growth spurt in parallel with T, 4) fWHR and T should correlate after controlling for potential confounds, and 5) fWHR should show a strong relationship to other T-derived traits. These effects were not observed. <b>We also examined three additional facial masculinity ratios: facial width/lower face height, cheekbone prominence, and facial width/full face height. In contrast to fWHR, each of the three additional measures exhibit a strong age-related pattern of change and are associated with both T and T-dependent traits</b>. In summary, our results challenge the status of fWHR as a sexually-selected signal of pubertal T and T-linked traits.</blockquote>
The relationship between social status, body size, and salivary hormone levels among Garisakang forager-horticulturalist men of lowland Papua New Guinea
<blockquote>
Social hierarchy is a robust phenomenon that exists within all human societies. Over the past several decades, a growing body of evidence from industrialized Western populations has suggested that social status is closely related to individual measures of stress, health, and many other fitness-related traits. Data regarding such relationships, however, remain rare among small-scale subsistence societies, preventing a clear understanding of the importance of social position for fitness cross-culturally. Here we contribute to this area of research by exploring the relationship between adult male social status, BMI, and levels of salivary testosterone and diurnal cortisol among Garisakang small-scale forager-horticulturalists of lowland Papua New Guinea (N = 32). Three measures of individual social status – Respect, Dominance and Prosociality – were extracted from principal components analysis of photo-rank data for locally valued male traits (e.g., sociability, hunting ability, community influence). Preliminary results from multiple regression models controlling for age suggest complex relationships between social status, body size, and salivary hormone levels among the Garisakang. <b>Male Dominance is positively related to BMI (p < 0.05) but not with salivary hormone measures, while greater male Respect is associated with reduced salivary cortisol (p = 0.06) but not testosterone or BMI. Prosociality, conversely, is not significantly related to any evaluated measure</b>. We discuss the evolutionary implications of our findings, with a focus on future directions for investigating the biocultural interface of health in this population.</blockquote>
Men’s reproductive ecology and diminished hormonal regulation of skeletal muscle phenotype: An analysis of between- and within-individual variation among rural Polish men
<blockquote>Human life history is characterized by several distinctive features—sexual division of labor, prolonged care of altricial young, multiple dependents of different ages, and male provisioning. Testosterone has been suggested to mediate a trade-off between men’s reproduction and survival, through the regulation of sexually dimorphic musculature. This hypothesis predicts a relationship between testosterone and musculature in which mating effort, elevated testosterone, and dimorphic musculature covary positively. Testosterone is also posited to mediate a trade-off between mating and parenting effort, and accordingly, investing fathers show decreased testosterone production. Because men use their musculature not only in mating competition but also to support work demands, an important component of parenting effort, a relatively fixed relationship between testosterone and muscularity would seem maladaptive. We hypothesize that men’s parenting effort, specifically provisioning and subsistence activities, becomes a primary determinant of muscularity. Life history, anthropometric, and hormonal data were collected from 122 rural Polish men (at the Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site) during the summer harvest and for 103 of these participants in the winter. We found that fatherhood jointly predicted heavier workload and decreased testosterone, but positively predicted muscle mass and strength measures. Furthermore, within-individuals, men experienced intensified workload and suppressed testosterone during summer, along with a concomitant increase in muscularity and strength. These findings provide preliminary support for our model, termed the ‘Paternal Provisioning Hypothesis’. Between and within individuals, men’s provisioning and subsistence activities were robust predictors of muscular development and performance, whereas their testosterone levels had no appreciable effect on skeletal muscle phenotype.</blockquote>
Testosterone, musculature, and development in Kanyawara chimpanzees and Tsimane forager-horticulturalists
<blockquote>Considerable evidence suggests that the steroid hormone testosterone mediates major life-history trade-offs in primates, promoting mating effort at the expense of parenting effort or survival. In many species, chronic shifts in testosterone production over the life course correlate with investment in male-male competition. Chimpanzees and humans represent interesting test cases, because although closely related, they maintain divergent mating systems. Chimpanzee males do not invest in pair bonds or paternal care. Consequently, across the lifespan, their testosterone levels are expected to track changes in (1) behavioral investment in dominance striving, and (2) investment in sexually dimorphic musculature employed in male-male competition. <b>Humans, by contrast, are expected to show weaker associations between testosterone and musculature, because the latter is important not only for male competition, but for men’s work provisioning wives and children</b>. We assayed >7000 chimpanzee and >3350 Tsimane urine samples for testosterone, creatinine, and specific gravity, in the same laboratory using the same assay methods. Male chimpanzees showed peak acceleration in testosterone increase at age 6, peak velocity at age 10, and peak deceleration at age 14, reaching adult levels by 15-16, when they began to challenge other adult males. Adult levels of testosterone were achieved 3 years later than in captivity, likely reflecting energetic constraints in the wild. Indirect measures of muscle mass followed a similar pattern, and were highly correlated with testosterone. <b>As predicted, Tsimane men exhibited a weaker correlation, with testosterone accounting for half as much variance in the muscle mass measure as in the chimpanzee sample</b>.</blockquote>
Dads and cads? Male reproductive success, androgen profiles, and male-infant social bonds in wild mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei)
<blockquote>
Male reproductive strategies are often reduced to a ‘dad versus cad’ dichotomy. When paternity certainty is high and mating opportunities scarce, theory predicts high levels of paternal investment; if paternity certainty is low and/or access to mating opportunities plentiful, male parenting is expected to be scarce. However, conflict between mating and parenting behavior is not equally strong across ecologies and social structures. Wild mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei) have variable paternity certainty and a morphology suggestive of intense male contest competition. Despite this, relationships between males and infants are an important component of group structure, likely because males protect infants from infanticide and predation. Using data from gorilla groups monitored by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s Karisoke Research Center, we evaluated 1) the relationship between male-infant social bond strength and males’ reproductive success, and 2) the relationship between male-infant social bonds and males’ fecal androgen metabolite levels. Higher testosterone levels are generally correlated with increased aggression and mating activity, which are typically considered incompatible with parenting behavior. After controlling for male age and rank, males who had the strongest social bonds with infants were also the males with the highest reproductive success. <b>There was no relationship between strength of male-infant social bonds and fecal androgen metabolite levels. Results demonstrate that reductive descriptions of male reproductive strategies may obscure important connections between mating and parenting effort, and highlight the need for additional data on the relationship between androgen activity, mating, and parenting in multimale/multifemale social systems</b>.
</blockquote>
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-16266250548179601702016-02-04T20:36:00.001+00:002016-02-05T16:19:18.147+00:00No comment
<a href="http://www.livescience.com/53613-race-is-social-construct-not-scientific.html">Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue</a>:
<blockquote><p>In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]
<p>They've called on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to put together a panel of experts across the biological and social sciences to come up with ways for researchers to shift away from the racial concept in genetics research.
<p>"It's a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it's a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from," said Michael <b>Yudell</b>, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
<p>Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.
<p><b>"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo</b>, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who worked on the Neanderthal genome but was not involved with the new paper. [. . .]
<p>So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Pääbo said geography might be a better substitute in regions such as Europe to define "populations" from a genetic perspective. <b>However, he added that, in North America, where the majority of the population has come from different parts of the world during the past 300 years, distinctions like "African Americans" or "European Americans" might still work as a proxy to suggest where a person's major ancestry originated.</b></blockquote>
<b>Update:</b> A commenter points to this <a href="http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/genewatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=198">previous contribution</a> from Michael Yudell:
<blockquote>Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to categorize humans. The idea gained strength towards the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism towards Jewish religious beliefs, <b>began to evolve into anti-Semitism</b>. These blood kinship beliefs rationalized anti-Jewish hatred instead as the hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized, were considered a threat to Christendom by virtue of their ancestry because they could not prove purity of blood to the Inquisition.</blockquote>
But it's hard to imagine Yudell's ethnic neuroses could have anything to do with his totally non-tendentious (not to mention fresh, novel) advocacy for "<a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/564.full">Taking race out of human genetics</a>". Who could disagree with his "simple goal", as stated in the concluding paragraph of his current paper: "to improve the scientific study of human difference and commonality" and "strengthen research by thinking more carefully about human genetic diversity". Please suppress any cognitive dissonance engendered by the <i>second</i> to last paragraph:
<blockquote>Phasing out racial terminology in biological sciences would <b>send an important message</b> to scientists and the public alike: Historical racial categories that are treated as natural and infused with notions of superiority and inferiority have no place in biology. We acknowledge that <b>using race as a political or social category to study racism and its biological effects, although fraught with challenges, remains necessary</b>. Such research is important to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities in socioculturally defined groups.</blockquote>
Who would argue impartial, objective science is <i>not</i> synonymous with the promotion of minority grievance politics?n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-28612301339220066882016-02-04T20:11:00.000+00:002016-02-04T20:12:24.866+00:00Paleolithic European mtDNA
<b>Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe</b> (<a href="http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816%2900087-7">free full text</a>):
<blockquote>How modern humans dispersed into Eurasia and Australasia, including the number of separate expansions and their timings, is highly debated [ 1, 2 ]. Two categories of models are proposed for the dispersal of non-Africans: (1) single dispersal, i.e., a single major diffusion of modern humans across Eurasia and Australasia [ 3–5 ]; and (2) multiple dispersal, i.e., additional earlier population expansions that may have contributed to the genetic diversity of some present-day humans outside of Africa [ 6–9 ]. Many variants of these models focus largely on Asia and Australasia, neglecting human dispersal into Europe, thus explaining only a subset of the entire colonization process outside of Africa [ 3–5, 8, 9 ]. The genetic diversity of the first modern humans who spread into Europe during the Late Pleistocene and the impact of subsequent climatic events on their demography are largely unknown. <b>Here we analyze 55 complete human mitochondrial genomes (mtDNAs) of hunter-gatherers spanning ∼35,000 years of European prehistory. We unexpectedly find mtDNA lineage M in individuals prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).</b> This lineage is absent in contemporary Europeans, although it is found at high frequency in modern Asians, Australasians, and Native Americans. Dating the most recent common ancestor of each of the modern non-African mtDNA clades reveals their single, late, and rapid dispersal less than 55,000 years ago. <b>Demographic modeling not only indicates an LGM genetic bottleneck, but also provides surprising evidence of a major population turnover in Europe around 14,500 years ago during the Late Glacial, a period of climatic instability at the end of the Pleistocene</b>.</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-80029028225518759782016-01-21T00:11:00.001+00:002016-01-21T00:11:38.584+00:00Visscher's commentary on "Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem"Commentary on "Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem" (<a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/20/036574">abstract</a>; <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/20/036574.full.pdf">pdf</a>):
<blockquote>
In a recent publication entitled "Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem" Krishna Kumar et al. (2015 PNAS) claim that "GCTA applied to current SNP data cannot produce reliable or stable estimates of heritability". Here we show that those claims are false and that results presented by Krishna Kumar et al. are in fact entirely consistent with and can be predicted from the theory underlying GCTA.</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-63521131223816930782016-01-19T20:10:00.000+00:002016-01-19T20:10:18.791+00:00More ancient DNA from Britain supporting significant later Anglo-Saxon genomic impact<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhETRVF8OlYxtx5sJkctPDveiT98n8qMccZlRJD4aDuC4esMMPM3uSh-H2G3q2EAgmtyMl1-ymwDmdqsDW6L7-Jk1uKskvCE_wTyTXEQ-xkXLOFWVXajPrj32pM5Q1E-HW1YFAElNVcv0AE/s1600/ancient.british.dna.ncomms10326-f5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhETRVF8OlYxtx5sJkctPDveiT98n8qMccZlRJD4aDuC4esMMPM3uSh-H2G3q2EAgmtyMl1-ymwDmdqsDW6L7-Jk1uKskvCE_wTyTXEQ-xkXLOFWVXajPrj32pM5Q1E-HW1YFAElNVcv0AE/s400/ancient.british.dna.ncomms10326-f5.jpg" /></a></div>
<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160119/ncomms10326/full/ncomms10326.html">Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons</a>:
<blockquote>The purported migrations that have formed the peoples of Britain have been the focus of generations of scholarly controversy. However, this has not benefited from direct analyses of ancient genomes. Here we report nine ancient genomes (~1 ×) of individuals from northern Britain: seven from a Roman era York cemetery, bookended by earlier Iron-Age and later Anglo-Saxon burials. <b>Six of the Roman genomes show affinity with modern British Celtic populations, particularly Welsh, but significantly diverge from populations from Yorkshire and other eastern English samples. They also show similarity with the earlier Iron-Age genome, suggesting population continuity, but differ from the later Anglo-Saxon genome</b>. This pattern concords with profound impact of migrations in the Anglo-Saxon period. Strikingly, one Roman skeleton shows a clear signal of exogenous origin, with affinities pointing towards the Middle East, confirming the cosmopolitan character of the Empire, even at its northernmost fringes.</blockquote>
The full text is <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160119/ncomms10326/full/ncomms10326.html">freely accessible</a>. More:
<blockquote>Ancient sample ancestry within Britain
<p>To place our ancient genomes within a detailed British context, we next plotted these in a background PCA using 3,075 published genotypes from British3, Irish23 and southern Netherlands samples24. The modern samples were analysed using SNP genotypes at ~250,000 loci and projected into a single plot using smartpca (Fig. 3a). As in Burton et al.3 the first component of the variation was informative for the structure within Britain. Given the close ancestral relationships between these populations and their well-known history of migrational exchange, a substantial overlap between regional groups was both expected and observed. However, by considering median values, one can see a clear progression from Irish samples at one pole through Scottish, Welsh, English to the Dutch cohort at the other extreme. In this plot the York Romans cluster centrally close to the modern Welsh median value, along with the Iron-Age genome. The local Anglo-Saxon is placed differently, closest to modern East Anglians between the English and Dutch medians.
<p>This first component also offers an opportunity to compare within the English sample. Figure 3b shows a boxplot of PC1 values for each subsample and structure is evident, with higher median values in Eastern regions such as East Anglia, East Midlands, intermediate values in the southern and western parts and lower values in the north and northwest. This pattern is more clearly seen in a geographical plot of interpolated values (Fig. 5a). When the York Romans are compared together with each modern cohort, they are most similar to the Welsh distribution of PC1 values and differ significantly from all other regional groups, apart from those from North and Northwest England (Mann–Whitney test; Fig. 3b, Supplementary Note 2 and Supplementary Table 13). An interesting difference is the marked one between the Driffield Terrace ancient and contemporary Yorkshire samples (P=0.003), implying regional discontinuity. It is also worth noting that the PC1 coordinate of the Anglo-Saxon individual is closer to the median PC1 value of East Anglians, possibly reflecting a more pronounced contribution of Germanic immigrants to eastern British populations. However, we note the inherent uncertainty in drawing inference from a single sample.</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-69400057892219258812015-12-28T21:41:00.001+00:002015-12-28T21:41:37.710+00:00Ancient Irish genomes confirm Bronze Age steppe incursion
Press release: <a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-12-ancient-irish-human-genomes-sequenced.html">First ancient Irish human genomes sequenced</a>.
<p>BBC: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35179269">Ancient DNA sheds light on Irish origins</a>.
<p>Guardian: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/28/origins-of-the-irish-down-to-mass-migration-ancient-dna-confirms">Origins of the Irish down to mass migration, ancient DNA confirms</a>.
<blockquote>
<p>These settlers were followed by people, initially from the Pontic steppe of southern Russia, who knew how to mine for copper and work with gold, and who carried the genetic variant for a blood disorder called haemochromatosis, a hereditary genetic condition so common in Ireland that it is sometimes called Celtic disease.
<p><b>These people also brought with them the inherited variation that permits the digestion of milk in maturity – much of the world becomes intolerant to the milk sugar lactose after infancy – and they may even have brought the language that became what is now Irish. Some of them, too, had blue eyes</b>.
<p>“There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” said Dan Bradley, professor of population genetics at Trinity College Dublin.
<p>“And this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues.”
<p>The Dublin team and colleagues from Queens University Belfast report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the two great changes in European prehistory – the emergence of agriculture and the advance of metallurgy – were not just culture shifts: they came with new blood. An earlier population of hunter gatherers was successively overwhelmed by new arrivals. And in Ireland, these new settlers began to define a nation.
<p>But the latest study throws more light on the birth of a nation. <b>All three dead men from Rathlin Island carried what is now the most common type of Irish Y chromosome</b>, inherited only from male forebears. [. . .]
<p>And Lara Cassidy, a researcher in genetics at Trinity College Dublin and another co-author, said <b>“Genetic affinity is strongest between Bronze Age genomes and modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh, suggesting establishment of central attributes of the insular Celtic genome 4,000 years ago.”</b></blockquote>
The PNAS paper: <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/22/1518445113.abstract">Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome</a>
<blockquote>The Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions were profound cultural shifts catalyzed in parts of Europe by migrations, first of early farmers from the Near East and then Bronze Age herders from the Pontic Steppe. However, a decades-long, unresolved controversy is whether population change or cultural adoption occurred at the Atlantic edge, within the British Isles. We address this issue by using the first whole genome data from prehistoric Irish individuals. A Neolithic woman (3343–3020 cal BC) from a megalithic burial (10.3× coverage) possessed a genome of predominantly Near Eastern origin. She had some hunter–gatherer ancestry but belonged to a population of large effective size, suggesting a substantial influx of early farmers to the island. <b>Three Bronze Age individuals from Rathlin Island (2026–1534 cal BC), including one high coverage (10.5×) genome, showed substantial Steppe genetic heritage indicating that the European population upheavals of the third millennium manifested all of the way from southern Siberia to the western ocean</b>. This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying <b>introduction of Indo-European</b>, perhaps early Celtic, language. Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for <b>lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes</b>, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago. </blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-4577454115914399742015-11-17T16:07:00.002+00:002015-11-17T16:07:50.530+00:00Ancient DNA: Late Upper Paleolithic Swiss and Caucasus hunter-gatherers sequenced<a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151116/ncomms9912/full/ncomms9912.html">Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians</a> (open access):
<blockquote> We extend the scope of European palaeogenomics by sequencing the genomes of Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,300 years old, 1.4-fold coverage) and Mesolithic (9,700 years old, 15.4-fold) males from western Georgia in the Caucasus and a Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,700 years old, 9.5-fold) male from Switzerland. While we detect Late Palaeolithic–Mesolithic genomic continuity in both regions, <b>we find that Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ~45 kya, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ~25 kya, around the Last Glacial Maximum</b>. CHG genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe ~3,000 BC, supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture. CHG left their imprint on modern populations from the Caucasus and also central and south Asia possibly marking the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages.</blockquote>
Press release: <a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-11-fourth-strand-european-ancestry-hunter-gatherers.html">'Fourth strand' of European ancestry originated with hunter-gatherers isolated by Ice Age</a>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-38963248205952575922015-11-02T02:56:00.002+00:002015-11-02T02:56:53.916+00:00Selection against Neanderthal introgression (two biorxiv preprints)<p><h3>The Strength of Selection Against Neanderthal Introgression</h3>
Ivan Juric, Simon Aeschbacher, Graham Coop
<br>doi: <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/30/030148">http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/030148</a>
<blockquote>
<p>Hybridization between humans and Neanderthals has resulted in a low level of Neanderthal ancestry scattered across the genomes of many modern-day humans. After hybridization, on average, selection appears to have removed Neanderthal alleles from the human population. Quantifying the strength and causes of this selection against Neanderthal ancestry is key to understanding our relationship to Neanderthals and, more broadly, how populations remain distinct after secondary contact. Here, we develop a novel method for estimating the genome-wide average strength of selection and the density of selected sites using estimates of Neanderthal allele frequency along the genomes of modern-day humans. We confirm that East Asians had somewhat higher initial levels of Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans even after accounting for selection. We find that there are systematically lower levels of initial introgression on the X chromosome, a finding consistent with a strong sex bias in the initial matings between the populations. <b>We find that the bulk of purifying selection against Neanderthal ancestry is best understood as acting on many weakly deleterious alleles. We propose that the majority of these alleles were effectively neutral-and segregating at high frequency-in Neanderthals, but became selected against after entering human populations of much larger effective size</b>. While individually of small effect, these alleles potentially imposed a heavy genetic load on the early-generation human-Neanderthal hybrids. This work suggests that <b>differences in effective population size may play a far more important role in shaping levels of introgression than previously thought</b>.</blockquote>
<p>
<h3>The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression</h3>
Kelley Harris, Rasmus Nielsen
<br>doi: <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/31/030387">http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/030387</a>
<blockquote>Approximately 2-4% of the human genome is in non-Africans comprised of DNA intro- gressed from Neanderthals. Recent studies have shown that there is a paucity of introgressed DNA around functional regions, presumably caused by selection after introgression. This observation has been suggested to be a possible consequence of the accumulation of a large amount of Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities, i.e. epistatic effects between human and Neanderthal specific mutations, since the divergence of humans and Neanderthals approx. 400-600 kya. However, using previously published estimates of inbreeding in Neanderthals, and of the distribution of fitness effects from human protein coding genes, we show that the average Neanderthal would have had at least 40% lower fitness than the average human due to higher levels of inbreeding and an increased mutational load, regardless of the dominance coefficients of new mutations. Using simulations, we show that under the assumption of additive dominance effects, early Neanderthal/human hybrids would have experienced strong negative selection, though not so strong that it would prevent Neanderthal DNA from entering the human population. In fact, <b>the increased mutational load in Neanderthals predicts the observed reduction in Neanderthal introgressed segments around protein coding genes, without any need to invoke epistasis</b>. The simulations also predict that there is a residual Neanderthal derived mutational load in non-African humans, leading to an average fitness reduction of at least 0.5%. Although there has been much previous debate about the effects of the out-of-Africa bottleneck on mutational loads in non-Africans, the significant deleterious effects of Neanderthal introgression have hitherto been left out of this discussion, but might be just as important for understanding fitness differences among human populations. We also show that if deleterious mutations are recessive, the Neanderthal admixture fraction would gradually increase over time due to selection for Neanderthal haplotypes that mask human deleterious mutations in the heterozygous state. This effect of dominance heterosis might partially explain why adaptive introgression appears to be widespread in nature.</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-53721013831816123742015-10-13T09:12:00.000+01:002015-10-13T09:13:20.808+01:00"Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe" preprint - updated with Anatolian Neolithic and other data
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZUmgd6JiOSx6Ic3uv0weCZRENf6fshcirI98L1WSCBIIBvM2Fe7S3IfLj_UUuixQ8LC8ZUFjJPIlHRxs-ojoAignd-Gy2zVPK8mbqeRzLYD1t7I7hbW79h4wh4_JkYItzahUH7TMTESIl/s1600/eight.thousand.years.natural.selection.europe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZUmgd6JiOSx6Ic3uv0weCZRENf6fshcirI98L1WSCBIIBvM2Fe7S3IfLj_UUuixQ8LC8ZUFjJPIlHRxs-ojoAignd-Gy2zVPK8mbqeRzLYD1t7I7hbW79h4wh4_JkYItzahUH7TMTESIl/s400/eight.thousand.years.natural.selection.europe.jpg" /></a></div>
<p><a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/10/016477">Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe</a>
<blockquote>
The arrival of farming in Europe around 8,500 years ago necessitated adaptation to new environments, pathogens, diets, and social organizations. While indirect evidence of adaptation can be detected in patterns of genetic variation in present-day people, ancient DNA makes it possible to witness selection directly by analyzing samples from populations before, during and after adaptation events. <b>Here we report the first genome-wide scan for selection using ancient DNA, capitalizing on the largest genome-wide dataset yet assembled: 230 West Eurasians dating to between 6500 and 1000 BCE, including 163 with newly reported data. The new samples include the first genome-wide data from the Anatolian Neolithic culture, who we show were members of the population that was the source of Europe's first farmers</b>, and whose genetic material we extracted by focusing on the DNA-rich petrous bone. We identify <b>genome-wide significant signatures of selection at loci associated with diet, pigmentation and immunity, and two independent episodes of selection on height</b>. [. . .]
<p>Our sample of 26 Anatolian Neolithic individuals represents the first genome-wide ancient
DNA data from the eastern Mediterranean. Our success at analyzing such a large number of samples is
likely due to the fact that at the Barcin site–the source of 21 of the working samples–we sampled from
the cochlea of the petrous bone 9 , which has been shown to increase the amount of DNA obtained by up
to two orders of magnitude relative to teeth (the next-most-promising tissue) 3 . Principal component
(PCA) and ADMIXTURE 10 analysis, shows that the <b>Anatolian Neolithic samples do not resemble any
present-day Near Eastern populations but are shifted towards Europe, clustering with Neolithic
European farmers (EEF) from Germany, Hungary, and Spain 7 (Fig. 1b, Extended Data Fig. 2). Further
evidence that the Anatolian Neolithic and EEF were related comes from the high frequency (47%;
n=15) of Y-chromosome haplogroup G2a typical of ancient EEF samples 7 (Supplementary Data Table
1), and the low F ST (0.005-0.016) between Neolithic Anatolians and EEF</b> (Supplementary Data Table
2). These results support the hypothesis 7 of a common ancestral population of EEF prior to their
dispersal along distinct inland/central European and coastal/Mediterranean routes. The EEF are slightly
more shifted to Europe in the PCA than are the Anatolian Neolithic (Fig. 1b) and have significantly
more admixture from Western hunter-gatherers (WHG), shown by f 4 -statistics (|Z|>6 standard errors
from 0) and negative f 3 -statistics (|Z|>4) 11 (Extended Data Table 3). We estimate that the <b>EEF have 7-
11% more WHG admixture than their Anatolian relatives</b> (Extended Data Fig. 2, Supplementary
Information section 2). </blockquote>
On the presence of the "East Asian" EDAR variant in Scandinavian hunter-gatherers:
<blockquote>We find a surprise in six Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHG) from the Motala site in
southern Sweden. In three out of six samples, we observe the haplotype carrying the derived allele of
rs3827760 in the EDAR gene (Extended Data Fig. 5), which affects tooth morphology and hair
thickness and has been the subject of a selective sweep in East Asia 24 , and today is at high frequency in
East Asians and Native Americans. The EDAR derived allele is largely absent in present-day Europe
except in Scandinavia, plausibly due to Siberian movements into the region millennia after the date of
the Motala samples. <b>The SHG have no evidence of East Asian ancestry 4,7 , suggesting that the EDAR
derived allele may not have originated not in East Asians as previously suggested</b> 24 . A second surprise
is that, unlike closely related western hunter-gatherers, the Motala samples have predominantly derived
pigmentation alleles at SLC45A2 and SLC24A5. </blockquote>
Polygenic selection on height in Europe:
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMpVF1I2u7OgVupsZk_xm-78Ycetl8zjdzulCue6sPOw5177W1E4uUrX6xOSzSc6nn8raR9chXmQAEkIFVWxWff6lAS4FKHytq9tDy7MVQykR9NCtZlKi5_nqZeX2YO673g9V9YfkJffx/s1600/polygenic.selection.on.height.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMpVF1I2u7OgVupsZk_xm-78Ycetl8zjdzulCue6sPOw5177W1E4uUrX6xOSzSc6nn8raR9chXmQAEkIFVWxWff6lAS4FKHytq9tDy7MVQykR9NCtZlKi5_nqZeX2YO673g9V9YfkJffx/s400/polygenic.selection.on.height.jpg" /></a></div>
<blockquote>We also tested for selection on complex traits. The best-documented example of this process in
humans is height, for which the differences between Northern and Southern Europe have driven by
selection 25 . To test for this signal in our data, we used a statistic that tests whether trait-affecting alleles
are both highly correlated and more differentiated, compared to randomly sampled alleles 26 . We
predicted genetic heights for each population and applied the test to all populations together, as well as
to pairs of populations (Fig. 4). Using 180 height-associated SNPs 27 (restricted to 169 where we
successfully targeted at least two chromosomes in each population), we detect a significant signal of
directional selection on height (p=0.002). Applying this to pairs of populations allows us to detect two
independent signals. <b>First, the Iberian Neolithic and Chalcolithic samples show selection for reduced
height relative to both the Anatolian Neolithic (p=0.042) and the Central European Early and Middle
Neolithic (p=0.003). Second, we detect a signal for increased height in the steppe populations</b> (p=0.030
relative to the Central European Early and Middle Neolithic). These results suggest that <b>the modern
South-North gradient in height across Europe is due to both increased steppe ancestry in northern
populations, and selection for decreased height in Early Neolithic migrants to southern Europe</b>. We do
not observe any other significant signals of polygenetic selection in five other complex traits we tested:
body mass index 28 (p=0.20), waist-to-hip ratio 29 (p=0.51), type 2 diabetes 30 (p=0.37), inflammatory
bowel disease 21 (p=0.17) and lipid levels 16 (p=0.50).
</blockquote>
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-1109909779797550192015-10-08T08:49:00.000+01:002015-10-08T08:49:04.058+01:00Political background and identification of US professors circa 1969Previously, we've seen that upper income <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2011/11/jewish-liberalism-allinsmith-study.html">Jews in Boston voted much further left than Protestant Bostonians</a> in the middle of the 20th century; that <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-boston-upper-class-circa-1950.html">"Boston Brahmins" were a relatively conservative group</a>; that <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2009/01/old-rich-more-conservative-than-new.html">Jewish billionaires are further left than non-Jewish billionaires</a>; etc.
<p>It should not come as much of a surprise to anyone passingly familiar with non-Moldbuggist American history that in a 1969 survey of professors, Jews reported themselves more leftist in parental background, personal identification, voting behavior, and their children's activism than Protestants.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMzwciFMSL0_1GLBH1FGruIFgtRubMU6Nf4uZZ1xUueYuO14-FZf70rqfQb5T6Ne6GNIDUqZRslfvrxcXlZVuQY9h8c9e1nQzjESuZ6_pJM-VW4qgMUCSmd9jzQbUHzaBmr5NN2bHt9318/s1600/politics.american.professors.growing.up.1969.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMzwciFMSL0_1GLBH1FGruIFgtRubMU6Nf4uZZ1xUueYuO14-FZf70rqfQb5T6Ne6GNIDUqZRslfvrxcXlZVuQY9h8c9e1nQzjESuZ6_pJM-VW4qgMUCSmd9jzQbUHzaBmr5NN2bHt9318/s400/politics.american.professors.growing.up.1969.png" /></a></div>
<p>In "<a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/10/religious-backgrounds-of-us-professors.html">Jewish academics in the United States</a>", Lipset reports:
<blockquote>
The extent to which the political background of Jewish academics
differs from that of others may be seen in the responses to the Carnegie
survey question: "What were your father's politics while you were grow-
ing up?" <b>Forty-six per cent of the Jews, as contrasted to 19 per cent
of the Catholics and but 14 per cent of the Protestant majority, reported
fathers who were "left" or "liberal" in their views. Conversely, less than
20 per cent of the Jewish professors had "conservative" fathers, while
63 per cent of the Protestant academics indicated such a background</b>
(Table 19).
<p>Family political-intellectual tradition affects the behavior of the chil-
dren of academics. Among those faculty with children of college age, <b>a
majority (56 per cent) of the Jews report that their children have "been
active in civil rights, anti-Vietnam, or other demonstrations," as con-
trasted with little more than one-fifth (22 per cent) of the Gentile pro-
fessors</b>. The reason, of course, is that the children of liberal academics
participate much, much more in demonstrations than children of con-
servative academics, and Jewish faculty are disproportionately liberal.
That the correlation is between parental politics and participation is made
clear by Table 20, which shows that 68 per cent of the left faculty having
children of the right age—regardless of religion—said their children
had been active in demonstrations, compared to just 4 per cent of the
strongly conservative professors.</blockquote>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU1gJF03-4NkkXd_iUdRQCcpABP2o6CGiLWXMW9uQSQXuryGxxWbsOhr4zPdGT3J_rDuGiCXrqRot9wbJ2j25sY662Ei0eTfuKh6tEZiS9t6YcgnV1VBh_Z3lriAKN0EUFJxw6QbRhGgiG/s1600/politics.american.professors.identify.as.1969.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU1gJF03-4NkkXd_iUdRQCcpABP2o6CGiLWXMW9uQSQXuryGxxWbsOhr4zPdGT3J_rDuGiCXrqRot9wbJ2j25sY662Ei0eTfuKh6tEZiS9t6YcgnV1VBh_Z3lriAKN0EUFJxw6QbRhGgiG/s400/politics.american.professors.identify.as.1969.png" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
The contribution of faculty of Jewish background to liberal and left
political groups has been stressed in a number of surveys preceding
our own. Almost all earlier studies found that close to 90 per cent of
Jewish academics regularly voted Democratic in presidential elections. 45
Jewish faculty also were found to contribute heavily to the backing of
leftist third parties. Thus, according to a 1948 study, fully <b>30 per cent
of the Jewish professors voted for <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-jew-in-american-politics-part-8.html">Henry Wallace</a></b>. 46 The same proclivity
can be seen in Britain, where a faculty opinion study reported that the
Jews were "the most left-wing of all." 47 Recent studies of American
college professors conclude that Jews have been much more heavily
opposed to the Vietnam war, and stronger supporters of student activism,
than their Gentile colleagues. 48
<p>The Carnegie Commission's national survey yielded the same strong
relationships. The <b>Jewish faculty were much more inclined to identify
their politics as "left" or "liberal" than Protestants and Catholics</b> (Table
21 ). 49 Jews contributed disproportionately to the small group who
backed left-wing third party presidential candidates in 1968; they were
much more likely to have been for the nomination of Eugene McCarthy
than of Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic convention, and gave
Richard Nixon an exceptionally low vote in the election. <b>In 1964 only
2 per cent of the Jewish faculty voted for Barry Goldwater, compared
to 24 per cent of those of Protestant parentage</b> (Tables 22, 23, and 24).
</blockquote>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg3adFh6goP2OO0sU4YtF6vfVJJlnZCCkX8cqPRvpTWlMe_i6cwrqfKFa6Vgxa2jXkpaNz1kIAHZ8WyNN404IsgkAfP6JndgYcMJiqfeOSjINKVtpohbxcNOStN7AgF5H9belGaG_-088q/s1600/politics.american.professors.vote.1968.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg3adFh6goP2OO0sU4YtF6vfVJJlnZCCkX8cqPRvpTWlMe_i6cwrqfKFa6Vgxa2jXkpaNz1kIAHZ8WyNN404IsgkAfP6JndgYcMJiqfeOSjINKVtpohbxcNOStN7AgF5H9belGaG_-088q/s400/politics.american.professors.vote.1968.png" /></a></div>
<blockquote>The Jews, as a group, took much more liberal positions on such issues
as the use of force at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, the
Vietnam war, student activism, the treatment of blacks in both the
university and the larger society, and the legalization of marijuana
(Tables 25, 26 and 27). <b>The gap between Jews and Christians on these
issues is very large, while among Christians, Protestants are usually
slightly more conservative than Catholics</b>. For example, 59 per cent of
the Jews gave general approval to "the emergence of radical student
activism in recent years," compared to 44 per cent of the Catholics and
40 per cent of the Protestants. The proportion of Jews favoring immediate
United States withdrawal from Vietnam is twice that of non-Jews. Three-
fifths of the Jews favored the legalization of marijuana (59 per cent),
compared to 33 per cent of the Catholics and 29 per cent of the Protestants.</blockquote>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrdpaqFofY_FrJmYPPmfKBJfym7q5vlzshk-Z_3mZuRqI43RDnTC7pI6pNDdelDFQ2EKoTEDMVfN_I5kgzl0N5tKc2HkyIteLZHONx1Jw42r4Z-zDegpbWLBbPNP2TpYHAiPOuxAkLFwe7/s1600/politics.american.professors.vote.1964.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrdpaqFofY_FrJmYPPmfKBJfym7q5vlzshk-Z_3mZuRqI43RDnTC7pI6pNDdelDFQ2EKoTEDMVfN_I5kgzl0N5tKc2HkyIteLZHONx1Jw42r4Z-zDegpbWLBbPNP2TpYHAiPOuxAkLFwe7/s400/politics.american.professors.vote.1964.png" /></a></div>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-30201066252147725032015-10-08T07:21:00.000+01:002015-10-08T07:22:03.461+01:00Religious backgrounds of US professors circa 1969<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8UTQPhBz2uuhbGmjHzpAr6uU-NQ3dHxxCkpcIGQiO5nmghlBoUr24Shc-NJhjegOXJ9zswmvfjBPZ3JqHixaT6PU7RYC9u77Sqhk0SyLUQLtcWRIR-CsbeaIFrxoOqLdhDdbcPM56Yd2/s1600/religious.background.of.american.professoriate.1969.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV8UTQPhBz2uuhbGmjHzpAr6uU-NQ3dHxxCkpcIGQiO5nmghlBoUr24Shc-NJhjegOXJ9zswmvfjBPZ3JqHixaT6PU7RYC9u77Sqhk0SyLUQLtcWRIR-CsbeaIFrxoOqLdhDdbcPM56Yd2/s400/religious.background.of.american.professoriate.1969.png" /></a></div>
<p>This data comes from "a large national sample (60,000) of faculty who filled out questionnaires for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1969", as reported in "JEWISH ACADEMICS IN THE UNITED STATES: THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS, CULTURE AND POLITICS" by Seymour Martin Lipset and a co-author (<a href="http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=20263">pdf</a>).
<p>Jewish overrepresentation was even greater among faculty of elite colleges and universities, and Protestants were reduced to a bare-majority of under-30 professors at elite schools by this time.
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGnNISOTw2V-S9N6uWn-AtZt-jqA5-hXD_heCiU4VtdVaJVaTNq8nPd84eMJLoelkRY2RlJuTImOhzC76_u5DulThlxeaAMg9BrUOwn1_kZTOVRuoUXg-ObnWPjo_QEoDwCrbro5krD1cE/s1600/religious.background.of.american.professoriate.elite.colleges.1969.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGnNISOTw2V-S9N6uWn-AtZt-jqA5-hXD_heCiU4VtdVaJVaTNq8nPd84eMJLoelkRY2RlJuTImOhzC76_u5DulThlxeaAMg9BrUOwn1_kZTOVRuoUXg-ObnWPjo_QEoDwCrbro5krD1cE/s400/religious.background.of.american.professoriate.elite.colleges.1969.png" /></a></div>
<p>Lipset: <blockquote>
<b>The considerable presence of Jews in social science departments (and
schools of social work), in comparison to most of the humanities and
natural sciences, may be related to the disposition of secularized Western
Jews for reform-oriented politics</b>, to be discussed later. A variety of
studies of undergraduate career choices indicate that the <b>more left-
disposed students are more inclined than others to an academic career,
particularly in the politically relevant social sciences</b>. 14 As the newest
group of disciplines, the social sciences have been less discriminatory,
more committed to universalistic principles than the humanities. The
latter, as the oldest and least "practical" fields, have tended to be
identified with high status, and hence were more restrictive in their
admission policies.
<p>The underrepresentation of Jews in the humanities and history may
reflect the continuation of a distinction frequently made in Wilhelminian
and even Weimar Germany. Some who supported the appointment of
Jews to professorships in the sciences and social sciences argued that
they could not be professors of German literature or history. These
subjects were at the heart of the Volkswesen, the national essence, while
the Jews (obviously) were wesenfremd, alien to the national essence.
Suspicions about the Volkswesen suitability of Jews in English and
history have not completely vanished in the U.S. <b>In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, in 1962, Carl Bridenbaugh
lamented that "many of the younger practitioners of our craft . . . are
products of lower middle-class or foreign origins and . . . find themselves
in a real sense outsiders to our past and feel themselves shut out. This
is certainly not their fault, but it is true."</b> By "products of . . . foreign
origins," we would hazard the guess, Professor Bridenbaugh was not
thinking primarily of Albanians. 15
</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-26670733464075876052015-10-08T01:30:00.000+01:002015-10-08T02:45:17.612+01:00Moldbug's sources: Forrest McDonald, "Celtic Southernism", and the Lew Rockwell school of late 20th C. PC anti-Yankeeism<p>As he himself eventually confirmed, moldbug's ideology was formed by mashing up a variety of vaguely rightist and libertarian ideas and filtering them through the lens of what he perceived to be "<a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2009/08/moldbug-bring-back-monarchy-so-i-can.html">good for the Jews</a>".
<p>Similarly, moldbug's school of pseudo-history arose from moldbug latching on to a convenient thread and running with it to outlandish extremes, the overriding goal not being to promote understanding but to absolve Jews (and moldbug's Communist grandparents, in particular) of any agency in their radical political activity.
<p>Moldbug picked up the initial inspiration for moldbuggist history from the anti-Yankeeism of lewrockwell.com contributors like Clyde Wilson, Jimmy Cantrell, and Thomas "Abraham Lincoln was the real racist" DiLorenzo, some of which was outlandish enough to begin with. They, in turn, were influenced by Forrest McDonald. <a name='more'></a>
<p>(The core of Rothbard-Rockwell circle was a miniature <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-deal-coalition.html">New Deal coalition</a> of Jews, Catholics, and Southerners, generally less irritating in their politics, but carrying over in many cases the same ingroup biases and sense of minority aggrievement as their socialist parents or grandparents. The appeal of "Yankees" as villains is as obvious for these types as for moldbug. And while I find grievance against Yankees less offensive coming from Southerners, focusing on "Yankees" to the exclusion of Jewish or Catholic immigrants, or Southern elites, is never going to be all that helpful in understanding the state of the US today.)
<p>Forrest McDonald, along with Grady McWhiney and McDonald's "wife and longtime intellectual partner" Ellen Shapiro McDonald, is responsible for the "Celtic Southern hypothesis", according to which "the distinctiveness of Southern culture derives largely from the majority of the Southern population being descendants of Celtic herdsmen while the majority of the Northern population was the descendants of farmers."
<p>Moldbug's favorite encyclopedia I think gives a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grady_McWhiney">fair assessment</a> of the scholarly reception:
<blockquote>
<p>McWhiney and Forrest McDonald were the authors of the "Celtic Thesis," which holds that most Southerners were of Celtic ancestry (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon), and that all groups he declared to be "Celtic" (Scots-Irish, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish) were descended from warlike herdsmen, in contrast to the peaceful farmers who predominated in England. They attempted to trace numerous ways in which the Celtic culture shaped social, economic and military behavior. For example, they demonstrated that livestock raising (especially of cattle and hogs) developed a more individualistic, militant society than tilling the soil.
<p>Attack and Die stressed the ferocity of the Celtic warrior tradition. In "Continuity in Celtic Warfare." (1981) McWhiney argues that an analysis of Celtic warfare from 225 BC to 1865 demonstrates cultural continuity. The Celts repeatedly took high risks that resulted in lost battles and lost wars. Celts were not self-disciplined, patient, or tenacious. They fought boldly but recklessly in the battles of Telamon (225 BC), Culloden (1746) and Gettysburg (1863). <b>According to their thesis, the South lost the Civil War because Southerners fought like their Celtic ancestors</b>, who were intensely loyal to their leaders but lacked efficiency, perseverance, and foresight.
<p>In 1993 he argued the fundamental differences between North and South developed during the 18th century, when Celtic migrants first settled in the Old South. Some of the fundamental attributes that caused the Old South to adopt anti-English values and practices were Celtic social organization, language, and means of livelihood. It was supposedly the Celtic values and traditions that set the agrarian South apart from the industrialized civilization developing in the North.
<p>However, McWhiney's theories do not address large-scale Irish immigration to New York, Boston, and other northern cities. They also ignore the degree to which the Southern planter class resembled the English gentry in lineage, religion, and social structure. Furthermore his work <b>avoids mentioning or acknowledging the fact that the largest group of pre-Revolution immigrants to the Southern colonies were English indentured servants who vastly outnumbered the "Celtic" settlers both in numbers and in cultural influence</b>.,[1][2][3] [. . .]
<p>Criticisms
<p> Berthoff, Rowland; "Celtic Mist over the South." Journal of Southern History 1986 52(4): 523-546. ISSN: 0022-4642 with commentary by Forrest McDonald, and Grady McWhiney, pp. 547–548; Fulltext: in Jstor. Berthoff <b>rejects the Celtic Thesis because it exaggerates the numbers and roles of Celtic folk in the South, fails to define "Celtic," and misunderstands animal husbandry traditions in the British Isles</b>. reply by Berthoff, pp. 548–550.
<p> Walley, Cherilyn A. "Grady McWhiney's 'Antebellum Piney Woods Culture': the Non-Celtic Origins of Greene County, Mississippi." Journal of Mississippi History 1998 60(3): 223-239. Issn: 0022-2771 Argues that <b>census data from Greene County refutes McWhiney's claim that Mississippi's Piney Woods region was predominantly Celtic during the antebellum decades. Surname analysis indicates that most settlers were English</b>, and all settlers were at least one generation removed from their home country. There were <b>no significant differences between the English and Celtic farmers in terms of cattle raising or family size</b>. Also, contrary to McWhiney's arguments, Celtic children attended school at a higher rate than did English children. McWhiney used questionable sources and took evidence out of context to support his claims
</blockquote>
<p>The motivation behind the "Celtic thesis" was obviously to minimize the significance of the shared British and particularly English genes and culture of Southerners and New Englanders, and exaggerate the level and time-depth of differences between them. This motivation also found an outlet in a piece Forrest McDonald originally published in 1985 ("<a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/07/why-yankees-wont-and-cant-leave-the-south-alone.html">Why Yankees Won’t (and Can’t) Leave the South Alone</a>"), which circulated online recently:
<blockquote>
Southerners rarely while away their leisure hours by contemplating Yankees, for there is no point in thinking of unpleasant things if one is not obliged to do so. Yet the practice does have value; to some extent, at least, we are defined by those attributes which set us apart from others, and sometimes we can be made aware of such attributes only by observing people who do not share them. Another virtue of thinking about Yankees, in the long run perhaps a more important one, is that it serves to remind us that they have repeatedly tried to make us over in their own image. Indeed, though it may seem that they have been off our backs since the demise of the civil rights movement, their latest campaign to reform us is actually well under way. [. . .]
<p>The psyche of the Yankee—by which I do not mean all Northerners, but only of seventeenth-century New England Puritans and their descendants, both genetic and ideological—has roots that run deep, and ultimately to the Yankee’s ever-changing concept of the nature of God; thus it is that, in regard to the shaping of the New England character, various errors, heresies, nay even blasphemies, figure prominently. To get a handle on the Yankee, it is helpful to begin with his original Calvinism, and especially with the doctrine of predestination: The belief that most men are doomed and a few are elected for salvation, not by faith or works or any other act of human volition, but only in accordance with a preordained and unknowable divine plan. It might seem that the premise precludes speculation by the puny human intellect, that is logical disputation and inspires unlimited arrogance. [. . .]
<p>That is the first thing to understand about the Yankee: He is a doctrinal puritan, characterized by what William G. McLaughlin has called pietistic perfectionism. Unlike the Southerner, he is constitutionally incapable of letting things be, of adopting a live-and-let-live attitude. [. . .] In other words, he must reform society <b>or secede from it</b>; and though he has long since been thoroughly secularized, the compulsion remains as strong in the twentieth century as it was in the seventeenth.
<p>A second and related characteristic of the Yankee is that, as others have pointed out, he is a gnostic. Adherents of this heresy in ancient times regarded themselves as privy to “knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved to an elite;” the original puritan counterpart was the Elect. The essence of gnosticism as a mindset is the absolute, unquestioning certainty that one is possessed of the Truth. <b>Now it may be objected that there is nothing peculiar to the Yankee about this, for many and possibly most Southerners are unquestioning in their religious faith. But there are profound differences</b>. [. . .]
<p>Lest this seem a trifle exaggerated, even to confirmed Yankee-haters, I submit the following words from John Adams, written on the eve of independence. Republican government, Adams wrote, is superior to all others, if its principles are pure. But it “is only to be supported by pure Religion or austere Morals. Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real liberty.” This public passion, he added, “must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they stand in Competition with the Rights of Society.”
<p><b>Before the end of the century that same John Adams was writing with the same dogmatic certainty that limited monarchy was the best guarantor of “real liberty,”</b> and his fellow Yankees were simultaneously embracing Unitarianism and materialism with equal self-assurance. And so on, generation after generation, even unto our own benighted epoch, in which Ivy League professors and presidents solemnly assure us that there are no inborn differences between men and women and that people who object to homosexuality and abortion-on-demand are religious fanatics. They are always wrong—or at least they cannot, by definition, have been right more than once—and yet they are always utterly certain and utterly impervious to argument.
<p>Another difference between Southern and Yankee “certain knowledge” is more subtle and more important. The religious Southerner’s conviction is normally a source of inner peace and contentment to him; and though a spirit of Christian charity may inspire him to share the joys of his faith, and even to spread the Gospel around the globe, he is devoid of the urge to force his faith upon others. [. . .]
<p>That predisposition was reinforced by a related aspect of what the late Perry Miller called the New England Mind. One of the forms that ancient gnosticism took was Manichaeism—the belief in two gods, a god of light and pure goodness and a god of darkness and pure evil—and a form of Manichaeism became firmly rooted in the Yankee character. <b>In purely theological terms, of course, a variety of Manichaeism is also central to the religious beliefs of many Southerners</b>: The human soul is a battleground in which God and the Devil perpetually contend for supremacy. But as with gnosticism, there are fundamental differences. To Southerners, the struggle against evil is spiritual and internal. To Yankees, evil has been secularized at least since the early eighteenth century, and it has always been externalized.
<p>[Yankees] bred like flies and they spread westward, infesting an area from Salem, Massachusetts, to Salem, Oregon, and a dozen Salems and New Salems in between. Yankees formed the backbone of the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, and it is unnecessary to rehearse here what that meant. There is, however, one important point to be made—one which, though obvious, few historians have been wiling to make. The Yankees perceived slavery as an evil and stamped it out without giving any serious thought to the consequences. It hardly occurred to them that the former slaves needed preparation if they were to bear the awesome burdens and responsibilities of freedom. Consequently, <b>the blacks were the principal victims of the Civil War</b>, though the white South, too, lay devastated. [. . .]
<p>It is here that the last main theology-derived Yankee characteristic becomes relevant: the Yankees are millennialists. Once again, so are many Southerners, and once again the differences between the two varieties are vast.
</blockquote>
New England and the South may have both been overwhelmingly Protestant and had significant Calvinist influences. But while Southerners may sometimes think they're right, they don't think they're right the way Yankees think they're right. Southerners may sometimes be missionaries, but they're not Yankee missionaries. Southern secessionism is justified. Yankee secessionism is not. Southern "Manichaeism" is good. Yankee "Manichaeism" is bad. Southern millennialism is fine. Yankee millennialism is vastly different. And Yankees, for Forrest McDonald's purposes, are an undifferentiated mass.
<p>Ingroup biases are normal, but they can't be counted on in general to form a sound foundation for an objective or useful school of history. To the extent this sort of crude historical exposition enhances
group cohesiveness or mobilization, it could still serve a purpose. National myths don't necessarily need to be true to be useful. But, in this case, Forrest McDonald is <b>encouraging mobilization against what even in 1985 was essentially a non-existent target</b>. Yankees as substantially unmixed, ethnically self-conscious descendants of New England Puritans do not exist in significant numbers today. Nor does it seem useful for Southerners to imagine their present-day political opponents, including in Forrest McDonald's case other Southerners (and presumably Jews, ethnic Catholics, and so on), as "intellectual descendants" of Yankees.
<p>Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney were involved in founding the League of the South. A member of that group later <a href="http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-south&month=0107&week=a&msg=E6jBkSxTwRSuxKg4zwXzzw&user=&pw=">recalled</a>:
<blockquote>"By the way, Forest <b>McDonald's Jewish wife went into semi-hysterics at the
founding meeting of the League of the South when I raised the issue of what
would happen to the Confederate Flag and other such icons when the South
becomes majority Black and demanded that I be thrown out of the meeting</b>.
Apparently Ms. McDonald believes that she has an immuity bubble allowing
her to insist that no White person offend her by advocating the survival of
the White race in her presence. Well, at least the McDonalds are a known
quantity."</blockquote>
<p>McWhiney, who evidently had a Mexican wife, also later <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/us/30mcwhiney.html?_r=0">distanced himself</a>: 'In 1994, Dr. McWhiney helped found the league and was a director for a few years, but resigned, <b>complaining that it had been taken over by "the dirty fingernail crowd,"</b> Dr. Frazier said.' I believe the League of the South is no longer bound by the vision of McDonald and McWhiney; but an article J. Michael Hill wrote while under the influence of McDonald/McWhiney thinking provides an amusing example of the confusion that arises from it:
<blockquote>Honor, Violence, and Civilization
<p>Dr. J. Michael Hill
<p>Southerners should wear the “culture of honor” mantle proudly. As further evidence that academics frequently miss the obvious one need look no further than the 1996 study by <b>two mid-western psychologists</b> on the proclivity of white Southern males to resort to violence when their honor is challenged. The latest clap-trap from the pointy-head class is enough to underwhelm Southerners who have long known that good ole’ boys like to get into a scuffle now and again over questions of propriety and good manners.
<p>Psychologists <b>Richard Nisbett</b> (University of Michigan) and <b>Dov Cohen</b> (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) conducted a series of, it would seem, rather risky experiments with their collegiate charges and concluded from them that insulting a non-Hispanic white man from the South can be downright dangerous. [. . .]
<p>What indeed should we Southrons make of this study? There are, after all, some not-so-obvious implications at work here. Twenty years ago, my academic mentors at The University of Alabama, historians Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, began looking seriously into the Celtic (Scottish, Irish, and Welsh) influence on Southern culture. As Southerners themselves, McDonald and McWhiney knew that most crackers claimed to be at least partly Celtic, and that the Celts were products of a martial society in which men of action were held in high regard. In one sense, these historians did not tell Southerners of Celtic descent anything they did not already know: that they were a people prone to commit violent acts over questions of honor and repute. What they did was provide a proper historical understanding of why this cultural trait is so prevalent in Dixie. Professors McDonald and McWhiney advanced their “Celtic thesis” with understandable regional pride. It gave Southern crackers and rednecks (the only group that can still be insulted with impunity in polite company) a wider historical identity and made them proud to be descended from a fierce and independent people. In doing so, it suggested to them that their “culture of honor” was nothing to be ashamed of.
<p><b>I seriously doubt that Nisbett and Cohen intended their study to contribute to the self-esteem of Southern Celts. But perhaps there is more here than Yankee cracker-bashing</b>. Noting that a white Alabama boy is more likely to shoot someone over an affaire d’ honneur than is someone from Massachusetts (I’m reminded here of candidate Michael Dukakis’ craven response to a hypothetical question about what he might do to avenge his wife’s rape), they seem to suggest that it is somehow unwise to permit Southerners to exercise their rights under the 2nd Amendment. Now, its all right with me if the gentlefolk from New England and elsewhere above Mason and Dixon’s line wish to perceive us as gun-totin’ cowboys. Perhaps this will stem the influx of snowbirds (distinguishable by sandals over black socks), yuppies, and Yankee socialist professors. </blockquote>
Because they were employed at Northern schools (as Forrest McDonald himself was for many years), Hill assumed Richard Nisbett (a Texan) and Dov Cohen (quite possibly a Jew) were "Yankees" engaged in "cracker-bashing". Again, this does not strike me as a very useful way to think if one wants to actually understand the world.
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-44193584224184130492015-10-06T01:47:00.000+01:002015-10-06T01:47:32.785+01:00Linguistics, Archaeology & Genetics conference abstractsThis conference, <a href="http://www.shh.mpg.de/105110/lag_conference">aimed at</a> "integrating new evidence for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages", will take place next week. Some abstracts (<a href="http://www.shh.mpg.de/106023/Draft_Abstractbook_Oct_5th.pdf">pdf</a>):
<blockquote>
<p><h3>Close genetic relationship of Neolithic Anatolians to early European farmers</h3>
<p>Iosif Lazaridis 1,2 , Songül Alpaslan 3 , Daniel Fernandes 4 , Mario Nowak 4 , Kendra
Sirak 4 , Nadin Rohland 1,2 , Swapan Mallick 1,2,5 , Kristin Stewardson 1,5 , Fokke Gerritsen 6 , Nick Patterson 2 , Ron Pinhasi 4, *, David Reich 1,2,5, *
<p>We study 1.2 million genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms on a sample of
26 Neolithic individuals (~6,300 years BCE) from northwestern Anatolia. Our analysis reveals a homogeneous population that was genetically similar to early farmers
from Europe (F ST =0.004±0.0003 and frequency of 60% of Y-chromosome haplogroup G2a). <b>We model Early Neolithic farmers from central Europe and Iberia as a
genetic mixture of ~90% Anatolians and ~10% European hunter-gatherers</b>, suggesting little influence by Mesolithic Europeans prior to the dispersal of European farmers into the interior of the continent. Neolithic Anatolians differ from all present-day
populations of western Asia, suggesting genetic changes have occurred in parts of
this region since the Neolithic period. <b>We suggest that the language spoken by the
homogeneous Anatolian-European Neolithic farmers is unlikely to have been the
same as that spoken by the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists whose ancestry was derived from eastern Europe and a different population from the Caucasus/Near East</b>
[Haak et al. 2015], and discuss implications for alternative models of Indo-European
dispersals.
<p><h3>The Genetic History and Structure of Britain</h3>
<p>Nick Patterson, Broad Institute, Boston and David Reich, Harvard Medical School
and Broad Institute, Boston
<p>The recently published paper on the genetic structure of Britain (Leslie et al. Nature
2015) has shown subtle genetic variation correlating with geography.
Here we reexamine the evidence in the light of our understanding of the genetics
of Ancient Europe and comment on some implications for how Indo-Europeans
spread into Europe.
<p><h3>In search for initial Indo-European gene pool from genome-wide data on IE popula-
tions as compared with their non-IE neighbors</h3>
<p>Oleg Balanovsky, Vavilow Institue of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sci-
ences, Moscow
<p><h3>From Yamnaya to Bell Beakers: Mechanisms of Transmission in an Interconnected
Europe, 3500–2000 BC</h3>
<p>Volker Heyd, Universtiy Bristol, Bistol and University of Helsinki, Helsinki
<p><b>Yamnaya Peoples in the East and Bell Beakers Users in the West are rightly seen as
the apogees in a long-term process of individualisation, gender differentiation, warrior display and internationalisation/unification that fundamentally change the face
of the European Continent from the mid fourth and throughout the third millennium BC<b></b></b>. We can only approach the reasons why prehistoric peoples and cultures from
regions across Europe, which were no more than marginally in touch before, join in
the same emblematic pottery, new drinking habits, similar burial customs, anthropomorphic stelae, ostentatious display of weapons and other paraphernalia, and
thus common values. However rather than seeing this development as an internal
European progress <b>I want to point to the importance of the Pontic-Caspian steppes,
and a 2000 years lasting interaction scenario of infiltrating Suvorovo-Novodanilovka, Nizhnemikhailovka-Kvityana and Yamnaya peoples and populations
with their more sedentary contemporaries in southeast Europe, the Carpathian basin and northeast of the Carpathian bow. A crucial part of this interaction –besides
migrations and the exchange of genes and goods as recently highlighted in several
publications not only in Nature and Science– is the forwarding of innovations in the
sphere of subsistence economy</b>. We see this archaeologically in a further importance
of animal husbandry, with larger herds, specialised breeding and new forms of herding management in particular for cattle. This obviously sets in motion a substantial
shift in general mobility patterns and of communication networks.
<p>It is easily conceivable that this interaction must also have had a profound impact on the whole settlement organisation and people’s way-of-life, in consequence
probably fundamentally affecting the basics of societies and thus challenging the
whole system of ideas, imaginations, morale, symbols and terms – a new world-view
and ultimately the base for a new language.
<p><h3>Pre-Indo-European speech carrying a Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean</h3>
<p>Guus Kroonen, Institute for Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University,
Copenhagen
<p>When different Indo-European speaking groups settled Europe, they did not arrive
in terra nullius. Both from the perspective of the Anatolian hypothesis 1,2,3 and the
Steppe hypothesis, 4,5,6 the carriers of Indo-European speech likely encountered existing populations that spoke dissimilar, unrelated languages. Relatively little is known
about the Pre-Indo-European linguistic landscape of Europe, as the Indo-Europeanization of the continent caused a largely unrecorded, massive linguistic
extinction event. However, when the different Indo-European groups entered Europe, they incorporated lexical material from Europe’s original languages into their
own vocabularies. 7 By integrating these “natural samples” of Pre-Indo-European
speech, the original European linguistic and cultural landscape can partly be reconstructed and matched against the Anatolia and the Steppe hypotheses. <b>My results
reveal that Pre-Indo-European speech contains a clear Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean, 8 and thus patterns with the prehistoric migration of Europe’s
first farming populations. 9,10,11 These results also imply that Indo-European speech
came to Europe following a later migration wave, and therefore favor the Steppe
Hypothesis</b> as a likely scenario for the spread of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. 12</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-66719815744215641792015-10-05T06:08:00.000+01:002015-10-05T06:08:22.518+01:00More carriers of deeply diverged Y lineage (haplogroup A00) found in CameroonThis <a href="http://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/02/possible-archaic-african-y-lineage.html">possibly archaic African Y lineage </a> was discovered a few years ago by hobbyists, and a project run and funded by hobbyists to collect and test additional A00 samples has <a href="https://experiment.com/u/1EEpqw">started to report results</a>:
<blockquote>
There are some striking patterns in the results already. 85% of the A00 so far are from the Bangwa (Nweh) people, and 15% from the Nkongho-Mbo. This is despite the fact that nearly 57% of the samples collected were from Mbo, and only 37% were from Bangwa. Once all the results have been fully tabulated, we can provide more complete statistics. It will take a while to transcribe all the rich data from those handwritten sheets into electronic spreadsheets. [. . .]
<p>What's next? Matthew would like to head back to the field quite soon, in the second half of October, when the school where he teaches has a break. Our current plan is for him to visit the region of the Bamileke people. Matthew, an ethno-historian, has said "The similarity in names, language, dancing style and all other aspects of life suggest that the Bangwa are 90 percent Bamileke." By testing a good number of Bamileke, we'll be able to see whether the heritage they share includes A00, or not. It is possible that the A00 among the Bangwa comes from the indigenous people who originally inhabited the hills, before they arrived several centuries ago, or it could also have been present among the Bamileke earlier. Our results should give strong evidence to answer that question.
<p>The next field trips should be even more exciting. One of our goals is to collect the most diverse samples of A00 possible, to uncover its internal structure. By sequencing the Y-DNA of A00 lines that have diverged and settled in different parts of Cameroon, we should be able to get a good idea of when those different lineages had a common ancestor, and understand better how the peoples among whom it's found are related.
<p>One trip will take Matthew westward into the lowland regions close to Nigeria, where the Banyangi and Ejagham peoples live, toward the Cross River, home of the endangered Cross River Gorilla. These villages are also on the roads that led to the old Nigerian port of Calabar, where captives from Cameroon's highlands, including some Bangwa, were sold into slavery in the past. He has never before sampled in the western regions, and only 16 Banyangi have been tested in his past research, but there are versions of Bangwa history which say that these peoples make up a significant element of their founders. Members of the A0 haplogroup have been found in Nigeria, but we have no idea yet whether A00 are also found in that direction. The famed Iwo Eleru cave is in southern Nigeria, where a skull with archaic features has been found that dates to only 13,000 years ago, suggesting long survival of diverse humans in that region.
<p>In his other trip, he'll seek to sample members of several of the different Pygmy communities of Cameroon, who live to the South and East. Among the Pygmy peoples, Matthew collected 53 samples in 2006, and two of them belonged to A00! These communities are far from the highlands where the Bangwa and Mbo live, so we can expect that their A00 will be quite distinct. This should be extremely interesting!
</blockquote>
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-30045344944465167232015-10-05T05:17:00.000+01:002015-10-05T05:17:22.756+01:001000 Genomes phase 3 papers<p>Both papers are freely accessible:
<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7571/full/nature15393.html">A global reference for human genetic variation</a>
<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7571/full/nature15394.html">An integrated map of structural variation in 2,504 human genomes</a>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-92212348391419113052015-09-29T07:00:00.000+01:002015-09-29T07:00:30.328+01:00"Male Homosexual Preference" and social stratificationI don't necessarily buy positive selection for genes predisposing to male homosexuality in stratified societies via pleiotropic effects in females. But I could easily believe that evolutionary mismatch leads to higher levels of homosexuality in denser (though population density is apparently not a significant predictor in their analysis) and/or more stratified societies, and that sexually antagonistic selection plays some role in slowing down selection against homosexuality.
<p><a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134817">Male Homosexual Preference: Where, When, Why?</a> (PLoS ONE):
<blockquote>
<p>Male homosexual preference (MHP) has long been of interest to scholars studying the evolution of human sexuality. Indeed, MHP is partially heritable, induces a reproductive cost and is common. MHP has thus been considered a Darwinian paradox. Several questions arise when MHP is considered in an evolutionary context. At what point did MHP appear in the human evolutionary history? Is MHP present in all human groups? How has MHP evolved, given that MHP is a reproductively costly trait? These questions were addressed here, using data from the anthropological and archaeological literature. <b>Our detailed analysis of the available data challenges the common view of MHP being a “virtually universal” trait present in humans since prehistory</b>. The conditions under which it is possible to affirm that MHP was present in past societies are discussed. Furthermore, using anthropological reports, the presence or absence of MHP was documented for 107 societies, allowing us to conclude that evidence of the absence of MHP is available for some societies. A recent evolutionary hypothesis has argued that social stratification together with hypergyny (the hypergyny hypothesis) are necessary conditions for the evolution of MHP. Here, the link between the level of stratification and the probability of observing MHP was tested using an unprecedented large dataset. Furthermore, the test was performed for the first time by controlling for the phylogenetic non-independence between societies. <b>A positive relationship was observed between the level of social stratification and the probability of observing MHP, supporting the hypergyny hypothesis</b>. [. . .]
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Alternatively, the increase in fertility in a close relative could be the result of an antagonistic factor. A sexually antagonistic gene that favors MHP in males and that increases fecundity in females has been proposed [31]. Several studies support this hypothesis [4, 22, 31–34] and other have provided results that are consistent with predictions from this hypothesis [22, 34–38]. However why such an effect would not operate also in wild animals is unclear. Sexually antagonistic genes are either fixed (when the advantage is higher than the cost) or selected against (when the cost is higher than the advantage). When the frequency of a sexually antagonistic gene increases, selection to decrease the cost could eventually operate (for example through the selection of a modifier gene), thus decreasing the fixation time of the antagonistic gene. In any case, such sexually antagonistic genes are only transiently observed in natural population, perhaps explaining the absence–so far–of reports of homosexual preference in wild animals. A recent change in social conditions could change the relative fitness advantage and cost of such gene, thus enhancing its selection.
<p>It has been recently proposed that selection for such sexually antagonistic genes could be promoted in social contexts specific to some human societies, where there is social stratification and hypergyny (i.e., a bride marries a groom of higher social status) [39]. Indeed in a stratified society, populations are organized into different groups (or classes) in which people share similar socioeconomic conditions. These groups can be ranked hierarchically depending on their access to resources (with more resources for the top class). This social inequality also affects the expected reproductive success of each group (with higher reproductive success associated with the top class) [40–45]. This hypergyny hypothesis posits that females carrying the sexual antagonistic variant (associated with MHP in males) will signal increased levels of fertility (through higher femininity or attractiveness), thereby increasing their probability of reproducing in a wealthier social environment. Such a sexually antagonistic gene will then provide a direct advantage (by increasing fertility) and an indirect advantage (by increasing the probability of marrying into higher social classes). Such a process may promote MHP in stratified societies, and indeed, a comparative analysis suggests that social stratification level is a predictor of the presence of MHP in a society [39]. Several potential confounding variables were considered in this analysis, with the conclusion that none of them significantly influenced the probability of report of homosexual preferences. These variables included population density (a good proxy of the number of indigenous people met by the anthropologist), geographical location and presence of moralizing gods. However, this comparative study considered only 48 societies, and phylogenetic dependence among them (Galton's problem) [46] was not clearly addressed. [. . .]
<p>Contrary to the widely held view that MHP is present in all contemporary societies e.g., [20, 22], the <b>anthropological data gathered here show that MHP is likely absent from some societies, especially those that display low levels of stratification</b>. Anthropologists that have explicitly searched for signs of MHP have acknowledged its absence: among the Alorese “The fact is that homosexuality as such is not known either among women or men” [85]; “Homosexuality and onanism are unknown among the Bororo, as well as among the majority of the Indian tribes visited by me” [62]; “Homosexuality is said to be unknown in Ulithi, but it is admitted as a possibility” [86]; among the Ifaluk people “The people know of no cases of homosexuality or of sexual perversions, nor did I observe any” [87]; and among the Yanomamö, “Most of the unmarried young men in Bisaasi-tedi were having homosexual relationships with each other […] The men involved in these affairs, however, were hardly more than teenagers; I have no cases of adult men satisfying their sexual needs by homosexuality” [11]. The most recent account of the absence of MHP concerns the Aka people, a hunter-gatherer group from Central African Republic for which an anthropologist noted that “The Aka, in particular, had a difficult time understanding the concept and mechanics of same sex relationships. No word existed and it was necessary to repeatedly describe the sexual act. [. . .]
<p>Hypergyny hypothesis
<p>A predictor of the presence of MHP in a given society is the level of social stratification. This result remains well supported even when non-independence among societies modelled as linguistic or geographical proximities is accounted for and when two independent measures of stratification level (using the EA or eHRAF) were considered. In all cases, the probability of observing MHP increases with the level of social stratification. It is thus expected that several social variables directly related to stratification would also be associated with MHP. There have been previous attempts to identify social variables related to homosexuality [88]. However, Barber did not distinguished male and female homosexuality, and did not differentiate between homosexual preference (MHP) and behavior, thus his results are not directly comparable to ours. Despite these caveats, Barber found several traits often associated with traditional stratified societies (large community size, agricultural food, low levels of female control over sex), that predict his measure of the homosexual frequency. Unfortunately, he did not studied directly the stratification level.
<p>In stratified societies, MHP is most likely not selected for directly as it represents a fitness cost, but we hypothesize that it is associated with a pleiotropic and antagonist factor. It has been proposed that the fitness advantage of such a pleiotropic factor is an increase in female fertility [31], which would affect the probability of females marrying men from higher social classes in stratified societies [39]. This effect of stratification level on the probability of observing MHP is thus consistent with the hypergyny hypothesis [39]. The present data do not allow the trait under selection in stratified societies to be identified. One possibility that cannot be excluded is that other types of pleiotropic factors have been selected for, as long as fitness advantages are conferred in a socially stratified context. In any case, social stratification remains the only pivotal identified social variable (i.e., defined above the individual level) associated with MHP in a cross-cultural analysis.
<p>MHP was observed in all highly stratified societies (with at least 5 levels of stratification) of the present sample. As social stratification has occurred independently in various parts of the globe, two scenarios can be proposed about the emergence of MHP. First it is possible that MHP arose independently in those stratified societies. In this case, the life-history traits associated with MHP may not be expected to be the same in different independent societies, depending on the exact nature of the pleiotropic factor that is the target of selection. Some data support this hypothesis, for example, the older brother effect, associated with MHP in Western societies [89]), is not exactly replicated in other stratified societies: in Samoa, MHP is associated with an “older sister” effect [38, 90]. This suggests that the pleiotropic and antagonistic factor expressing MHP is recurrent, although the pleiotropic factor may vary. Alternatively, the factors that favor MHP could have preexisted to the expansion of humans across the globe. In this case, the selection due to the effect of social stratification could have promoted the same preexisting factors that favor MHP. Thus, the life-history traits associated with MHP in the various highly stratified societies should be similar by descent. As an example of supportive data, the frequency of gender atypical behaviors during childhood is reported to be higher in MHP than in heterosexual men (on the basis of recall) in Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines and the United States of America [91]. This remains an open question, and more data are required. [. . .]
<p>Social stratification remains the only known social variable significantly influencing the presence of MHP in a given society. This is consistent with the idea that a pleiotropic and antagonist factor is the target of selection in stratified societies and that MHP imposes a fitness cost on male fertility. Whether the selected trait is female fertility (under the hypergyny hypothesis) or another life-history trait has yet to be evaluated, although the selected trait may differ among various independent stratified societies. Data from pristine prehistoric societies (i.e., isolated from the influence of stratified societies) are currently non-existent. Unless other social variables (independent from social stratification) influencing MHP are identified, societies with low levels of stratification are predicted to display, at best, a low level of MHP individuals. Social stratification as a promoting factor of MHP is also consistent with currently available data showing that MHP seems to be absent in wild animals. This is because the type of social stratification displayed in humans has no equivalent in other animals. Human social stratification is defined across generations, and a given individual generally belongs to the same social class during his entire lifetime, and usually reproduces within the same class. The dominance rank in social non-human animals is generally transient (e.g. the tenure of the alpha chimpanzee lasts only few years, [96]) or, if transmitted to the next generation, restricted to one sex (e.g. female ranks among the spotted hyaena and some Cercopithecines species [97, 98]) [. . .]
<p>Here we show that the commonly held view of the virtually universal presence of MHP since prehistoric time in human populations is not confirmed upon review of the cited data. Indeed, the existence of MHP in past times can never be proved or disproved using only archaeological remains: written texts are required to establish that homosexual preference was eventually present, and this information is probably definitively inaccessible for prehistoric (e.g., before written texts) societies. Today, MHP appears to be absent in some societies but present in others; this variability can be partly explained by the level of social stratification. This is consistent with a factor being selected for in a stratified society, despite a pleiotropic cost on functional male fertility (MHP). One possible candidate is a factor increasing female fertility, specifically by increasing the probability that a female marries males from higher social classes when hypergyny is enforced. As stratified societies are relatively recent (generally post-Neolithic), the substantial prevalence of MHP is most likely a recent phenomenon in humans and much remains to be understood.</blockquote>
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-53962328746948784262015-09-19T03:28:00.000+01:002015-09-19T03:49:48.840+01:00Minor sub-Saharan and substantial Levantine admixture in Southern Europe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDyqCEGXfB7qgmpO6UWwcTd-FKlptDsqwqDdEHtIgOZ7eygrFLs7epY_rLMMjjuKxiIlyNuD9bTfqKW-2Uol_2AU1y_JeOPUUFA3oyekEMGixshfwWxzBlxq71fiwsjoYJgys0VtcNBrP/s1600/admixture.west.eurasia.gr4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDyqCEGXfB7qgmpO6UWwcTd-FKlptDsqwqDdEHtIgOZ7eygrFLs7epY_rLMMjjuKxiIlyNuD9bTfqKW-2Uol_2AU1y_JeOPUUFA3oyekEMGixshfwWxzBlxq71fiwsjoYJgys0VtcNBrP/s400/admixture.west.eurasia.gr4.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>According to "<a href="http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2815%2900949-5">The Role of Recent Admixture in Forming the Contemporary West Eurasian Genomic Landscape</a>", something like a third of Southern Italian and Tuscan genetic ancestry appears to derive from the Levant in Roman times:
<blockquote><p> Moorjani et al [S?], who use a method based on allele frequency comparisons, and not haplotypes
(ROLLOFF), found evidence for sub-Saharan African admixture in Sardinia 71±28 generations
ago, at a proportion of 3%. These are the same Sardinians included in our analysis. <b>In the largest
Sardinian (sardi13) cluster in our analysis we infer West African admixture 66 (53-82) generations
ago at a proportion of 2%</b>.
<p>S5.2 Continuous low level African admixture in the Mediterranean and Anatolia
<p><b>We infer West African admixture across broad date ranges, but at low admixture proportions (admixture
α < 0.07; Figs. 2 and S3) in several Mediterranean groups, consistent with a long term movement be-
tween sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe</b> [S?,S?]. Specific <b>West African admixture dating to the
Arabic conquest of the Mediterranean [S?] is seen in Spanish (spani27: 1042 (740-1201CE)), Southern
Italian and Sicilian (sicil30: 1105 (882-1250CE)), and Basque (basqu24: 886 (283-1162CE)) clusters.
Earlier African admixture at low admixture proportion is inferred in the Cypriots</b> (cypri12: 427(107-
734CE)), and a Sardinian cluster (sardi13: 36 (458BCE-430CE); α = 0.02). This latter event is con-
sistent with the occurrence of A3b2-M13 (0.6%) and E1a-M44 (0.4%) African Y chromosome lineages
in Sardinia [S?]. and the dating is more compatible with documented exchanges between the island and
Mauretania Cesariensis in Roman times (2 nd century BCE to 2 nd century CE) than later displacements
of northern-African males to Sardinia at the time of the Vandals rule (5 th century CE) [S?]. [. . .]
<p>S5.3 A key role for the Levant in the genetic history of the Mediterranean
<p><b>Early admixture involving source groups most similar to contemporary populations from in and around
the Levant</b> (which we define as the World Region containing individuals from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon,
Jordan, Saudi, Yemen and Egypt) <b>is seen at high proportions in several clusters from Italy dating to
the first half of the first millennium CE, from Southern Italy (itali8: 295CE (72BCE-604CE); α = 0.34),
Tuscany (tsi23: 400CE(30BCE-686); α = 0.29), and Sardinia</b>, as well as in a large cluster from Armenia
at an early date (armen27: 363BCE(1085BCE-383CE)). [. . .] these events
loosely <b>coincide with the formation of the pan-Mediterranean Roman Empire [S?], which may also have
allowed increased gene flow from east to west Mediterranean</b>. [. . .] We infer more recent Levant admixture in the
French (frenc24: 728(424-1011CE)) and in a complex multiway event in a Spanish cluster (spani9: 668
(286-876CE)). The dates and sources of admixture in these cases are consistent with movements of
Middle Eastern and North African individuals during the <b>Islamic Conquest of Spain</b> [S?], and suggest <b>a
legacy of this key moment in southern European history in the genomes of French as well as Spanish
populations</b>.</blockquote>n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-88505925248556648682015-09-16T14:14:00.001+01:002015-09-16T15:24:55.687+01:00Autosomal DNA from Atapuerca pre- or proto-Neanderthals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7-fNArXOUER8XDG9YfztQAv3NOPoTd7a8k3lYlr6dpGyxYZGCXZoGukNLYL9QL2vmsTChcIjPwFO31sc_SpmpyPudNMN2_dF8YQ_DrDM__ruDsuaeomd50qWT6J-8U4SGymo1nvpNRiTY/s1600/Sima+de+los+Huesos.article-2662701-1EED41E300000578-789_634x426.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7-fNArXOUER8XDG9YfztQAv3NOPoTd7a8k3lYlr6dpGyxYZGCXZoGukNLYL9QL2vmsTChcIjPwFO31sc_SpmpyPudNMN2_dF8YQ_DrDM__ruDsuaeomd50qWT6J-8U4SGymo1nvpNRiTY/s400/Sima+de+los+Huesos.article-2662701-1EED41E300000578-789_634x426.jpg" /></a></div>
<p><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/09/dna-neandertal-relative-may-shake-human-family-tree">DNA from Neandertal relative may shake up human family tree</a>
<blockquote>The Sima people, who lived before Neandertals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neandertals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neandertals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so. [. . .]
<p>After 2 years of intense effort, paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has finally sequenced enough nuclear DNA from fossils of a tooth and a leg bone from the pit to solve the mystery. [. . .] They scanned this DNA for unique markers found only in Neandertals or Denisovans or modern humans, and found that <b>the two Sima fossils shared far more alleles—different nucleotides at the same address in the genome—with Neandertals than Denisovans or modern humans. “Indeed, the Sima de los Huesos specimens are early Neandertals or related to early Neandertals,” suggesting that the split of Denisovans and Neandertals should be moved back in time</b>, Meyer reported at the meeting. [. . .]
<p>“It resolves one controversy—that they’re in the Neandertal clade,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “But it’s not all good news: From my point of view, it pushes back the origin of H. sapiens from the Neandertals and Denisovans.” The possibility that humans were a distinct group so early shakes up the human family tree, promising to lead to new debate about when and where the branches belong.</blockquote>
Darren Curnoe <a href="https://theconversation.com/did-rising-star-shine-too-bright-47501">points out</a>:
<blockquote>What are the broader implications of the research for understanding the evolution of living humans?
<p>First, the finding pushes the age of the shared human-Neanderthal ancestor well beyond 400,000 years ago, suggesting our species, H. sapiens, might also be at least this old.
<p>Also, <b>with the Atapuerca group living in Europe, it’s even possible that our species evolved in this or an adjacent region of Eurasia, and later migrated back into Africa</b>.
<p>And being close to the common ancestor, the Atapuerca fossils give us real insights into what it must have looked like and the ancestral body form of our own species.
<p><b>The fossils from Europe, Asia and Africa from around this time are physically very diverse, with some researchers thinking they represent multiple species, only one of which could be the ancestor of living humans</b>.
<p>Question is, which one?
<p><b>This new research suggests the European branch is closest among them all and deserves much more attention in this regard</b>.
<p>In contrast, we don’t know, and will doubtless ever know, whether Homo naledi had anything to do with the evolution of living humans, least of all whether its brain, mind or behaviour were anything like our own.</blockquote>
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-72528489609081480202015-09-16T13:21:00.001+01:002015-09-16T13:26:25.159+01:00ASHG 2015: growth rate estimates from whole Y chromosome sequences
<b>Estimation of growth rates for populations and haplogroups using full Y chromosome sequences</b>.
<p>
F. L. Mendez; G. D. Poznik; C. D. Bustamante; 1000 Genomes Project Consortium
<p>Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
<p>
Evolutionary processes affecting a population influence gene genealogies across the genome. Coalescent theory provides the mathematical framework to connect realized genealogies to the underlying evolutionary processes. However, in most cases, information about the genealogies is obtained only indirectly through the observation of genetic variation. Therefore, in general, very limited information about any individual locus is available. As the longest non-recombining portion of the human genome, the Y chromosome accumulates mutations relatively quickly. When large amounts of sequence are used, the Y chromosome provides an unparalleled ability to resolve the structure and coalescence times of its genealogy. Because patterns of variation in the Y chromosome are only influenced by processes affecting men, they can be used to study both demographic and social phenomena. The 1000 Genomes Project includes whole Y-chromosome data from more than 1000 men and has an extensive representation of most lineages that have experienced recent massive expansions in size. Though the dynamics of population growth have likely changed over time, we are more interested in the growth rates at the times of these rapid expansions than on an average effect. To study this, we have developed a new method that takes advantage of the temporal resolution provided by Y-chromosome data and of historical data, while accounting for the uncertainties associated with the coalescent and mutational processes. We estimate the growth rates for several branches of the Y-chromosome tree, including those in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. We estimate that <b>several lineages within the European R1b, sub-Saharan African E1b, and South Asian R1a haplogroups experienced growth rates of at least 20-60% per generation at the onset of their massive expansions, some 3-5 thousand years ago</b>. These high growth rates are comparable to those experienced by human populations during the 20th century. However, we find that <b>most observed genealogies are unlikely to be the result of whole population expansion or of natural selection</b>.n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-82805358194367796942015-09-16T13:17:00.001+01:002015-09-16T13:17:12.311+01:00ASHG 2015: Population differentiation analysis of 54,734 European Americans
Population differentiation analysis of 54,734 European Americans reveals independent evolution of ADH1Bgene in Europe and East Asia.
<p>
K. J. Galinsky1,2 ; G. Bhatia2,3 ; P. Loh2,3 ; S. Georgiev4 ; S. Mukherjee5 ; N. J. Patterson2 ; A. L. Price1,2,3
<p>
Population differentiation is a widely used approach to detect the action of natural selection. Existing methods search for unusual differentiation in allele frequencies across discrete populations, e.g. using FST. Loci that are unusually differentiated with respect to the genome-wide FST or with respect to a null distribution of FST are reported as signals of selection. These approaches are particularly powerful for closely related populations with large sample sizes.However, population genetic data often is not naturally partitioned into discrete populations. We developed a test for selection that uses SNP loadings from principal components analysis (PCA). For a given PC reflecting geographic ancestry, under the null hypothesis of no selection, the square of the SNP loadings, rescaled by a scaling factor derived from the eigenvalue of the PC, follows a chi-square (1 d.o.f.) distribution. This statistic is able to infer selection with genome-wide significance, a key consideration in genome scans for selection. We confirmed via simulations that this statistic has correct null calibration under a wide range of demographies and is well-powered to detect selection at large sample sizes.We applied the method to a cohort of 54,734 European Americans genotyped on genome-wide arrays. PCs were inferred using our FastPCA software (running time: 57 minutes).<b> The top 4 PCs corresponded to clines of Irish, Eastern European, Northern European, Southeast European and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, validated via PCA projection of samples of known ancestry. </b> We detected genome-wide significant signals of selection at 4 known selected loci (LCT, HLA, OCA2 and IRF4) and 3 novel loci: ADH1B, IGFBP3 and IGH. 2 of the 3 novel loci could not be detected using discrete-population tests (or other existing tests). <b>The ADH1B gene is associated with alcoholism (via the same coding SNP rs1229984 producing a signal in our selection scan) and has been shown to be under recent selection in East Asians (via a haplotype-based test for recent selection); we show here that it is a rare example of independent evolution on two continents</b>. The IGFBP3 gene and IGH locus have been implicated in breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, respectively. Our results show that application of our PC-based selection statistic to large data sets can infer novel, genome-wide significant signals of selection at loci linked to disease traits.n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-227780861638767023.post-37084327306214440302015-09-16T13:13:00.000+01:002015-09-16T13:13:01.070+01:00ASHG 2015: The lingering load of archaic admixture in modern human populations
The lingering load of archaic admixture in modern human populations.
<p>
K. Harris1,2 ; R. Nielsen2,3
<p>
1) Stanford University, Stanford, CA; 2) University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; 3) Center for Bioinformatics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
<p>
Founder effects and bottlenecks can damage fitness by letting deleterious alleles drift to high frequencies. This almost certainly imposed a burden on Neanderthals and Denisovans, archaic hominid populations whose genetic diversity was less than a quarter of the level seen in humans today. A more controversial question is whether the out-of-Africa bottleneck created differences in genetic load between modern human populations. Some previous studies concluded that this bottleneck saddled non-Africans with potentially damaging genetic variants that could affect disease incidence across the globe today (e.g. Lohmueller, et al. 2009; Fu, et al. 2014), while other studies have concluded that there is little difference in genetic load between Africans and non-Africans (e.g. Simons, et al. 2014; Do, et al. 2015). Although previous studies have devoted considerable attention to simulating the accumulation of deleterious mutations during the out-of-Africa bottleneck, none to our knowledge have incorporated the fitness effects of introgression from Neanderthals into non-Africans. We present simulations showing that archaic introgression may have had a greater fitness effect than the out-of-Africa bottleneck itself, saddling non-Africans with weakly deleterious alleles that accumulated as nearly neutral variants in Neanderthals. Assuming that the exome experiences deleterious mutations with additive fitness effects drawn from a previously inferred gamma distribution, <b>we predict that the fitness of the average Neanderthal was about 50% lower than the fitness of the average human, implying the existence of strong selection against early Neanderthal-human hybrids</b>. This is a direct consequence of mutation accumulation during a period of low Neanderthal population size that is thought to have lasted ten times longer than the out-of-Africa bottleneck (Pruefer, et al. 2014). Although our model predicts some transmission of deleterious Neanderthal variation to present-day non-Africans, it also predicts that many Neanderthal alleles have been purged away, depleting conserved genomic regions of Neanderthal ancestry as observed empirically by Sankararaman, et al. (2014). <b>Our results imply that the deficit of Neanderthal DNA from functional genomic regions can be explained without the action of epistatic reproductive incompatibilities between human and Neanderthal alleles</b>.
n/ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02378473351485233448noreply@blogger.com0