If Harvard picked the president we wouldn't have had FDR

The leftism that dominated Harvard from the 1960s onward did not originate with the people who founded Harvard.

If Harvard Picked The President:

If Harvard picked the president, half the men who have occupied the Oval Office in the past 128 years never would have made it to the White House.

According to records of Harvard straw polls over The Crimson’s 139-year history, the winner of the poll at Harvard—this year, Barack Obama by a wide margin—has won the real thing only 50 percent of the time. [. . .]

Over that time, the political views of the student body have shifted along with—and sometimes against—the tides of history. Harvard picked Republicans—the party of Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, but also of losing contenders like Charles Evan Hughes—in every contest from 1884 to World War II, save 1912. In that year, as the Republican Party split its vote between incumbent President William Howard Taft and Roosevelt, who decided four years after his term ended that he had not had enough of the presidency, Democrat Woodrow Wilson managed to take the most Crimson votes. The same phenomenon occurred on a national level.

Even the Harvard pedigree of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904 and a president of The Harvard Crimson, was insufficient to take the top of The Crimson’s poll. As the rest of the country voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt, the student body picked Herbert Hoover—the man hated nationwide for supposedly bringing on the scourge of the Great Depression—then Alfred M. Landon and Wendell Willkie, all by significant margins. Clearly, economic woes dogged the Harvard voter far less than the ordinary election-goer. [. . .]

In 1960, a Democrat won the poll by an absolute majority for the first time: Harvard alumnus and youth favorite John F. Kennedy ’40.

The post-WWII Harvard student body was very disproportionately Jewish: "At least 19 percent of Harvard freshmen enrolling in the class of 1946 were Jewish. Between 1950 and 1970 the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard and Columbia would be well in the 20 percent bracket, averaging 25 percent during the two decades." The shift left at Harvard also followed an increased emphasis on "meritocracy" that led to fewer students from the old Protestant upper class:

Harvard was not, the Rollo Book insisted, "a rich-man's college": "More than half of the students earn a significant part of their college expenses and about thirty per cent receive financial aid from the College in the form of scholarships, beneficiary aid, or loans." [. . .]

Despite the shift in rhetoric, change in Harvard's actual practices came only gradually. Nevertheless, Bender's accession to the chairmanship of the Committee on Admission and on Scholarships and Financial Aids did produce some identifiable shifts in the character of the student body. In his first year in office, Bender raised incoming freshman median scores on the SAT from 583 to 609 on the verbal section and 598 to 625 on the mathematical section. At the same time, the percentage of entering freshmen from private schools declined from 52 percent in 1952 to 47 percent in 1953. This was the first time in Harvard's peacetime history that public school graduates outnumbered private school graduates. [. . .]

By 1957, faculty power had been rising for over a decade, and faculty members everywhere sought to apply more meritocratic standards in selecting undergraduates. That fall, their efforts received a powerful boost from an unexpected source when, on Octorber 4, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. [. . .]

Harvard's scientists seized the opportunity to increase pressure on the Admission Office. [. . .]

As the Admission and Scholarship Committee convened in the spring of 1958 to conduct the annual business of selection, it faced heavy pressure -- from an increasingly assertive faculty, from applicants empowered by knowing their SAT scores, and from the growing national obsession with scientific brilliance -- to give greater weight to scholastic talent than ever before. The freshmen who enrolled that fall showed every sign of being the strongest class academically in Harvard's history. In one year, median combined SATs had risen by 50 points, from 1285 to 1335 -- the second-largest increase ever recorded at Harvard. [. . .] In a related trend, the number of students from public schools reached an all-time high of 54 percent [. . .] -- a development that could only be welcomed by faculty calling for more meritocracy. [. . .]

Bender had hit on a central dilemma: in a changing society, would Harvard be best served by continuing to favor the children of the upper class or should it attach itself to a potentially rising class of academically talented boys from the nation's public schools? "Are we interested in keeping Harard an institution which will be socially acceptable for young gentlemen to attend?" he asked. "Or are young gentlemen a vanishing rose and would we be better off without them?" How the Special Committee answered these questions would reveal a great deal about Harvard's strategy for maintaining its preeminence in a world in which the Protestant upper class was already losing its hegemony.

[Jerome Karabel. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale . . .]

The New Deal coalition:

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

The various groups who supported Roosevelt all believed that the national government should play a larger economic role.

More on student radicalism at Harvard (including catching Digby Baltzell in some misleading omissions)

We were previously shocked to discover that the general tenor of the 1970s pro-Khmer Rouge Harvard Crimson was Jewish.

You will be further surprised to learn that 1960s student radicalism didn't start at Harvard, and 1960s student radicalism at Harvard didn't start with "WASPs".

The excerpts below come from The Protestant Establishment Revisited (along with other sources, where noted, to correct Baltzell).

Note that Baltzell is pushing a ridiculous narrative of his own (namely, that "WASPs" doomed themselves by being too exclusionary), is eager to maximize the role of his subjects (elite "WASPs"), and leans heavily on a slanted source (a Jewish radical who in ranting about inter-leftist squabbles was evidently more interested in airing his hostility toward "WASPs" than in historical accuracy); yet he still acknowledges the primacy of Jews in 1960s student radicalism:

While the main reasons for the turmoil on the best campuses in America during the 1960s were the black revolution and the war in Vietnam, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the turmoil was also closely related to the decline of the WASP establishment and the rise of other groups, especially the affluent and newly suburbanized Jews, to elite status. Nevertheless, in viewing the generation gap within the old-stock upper class that resulted in its children's radical behavior, let us bear in mind that throughout the 1960s only a small minority of students were, as the saying went, "radicalized." Although in stable times students have always held more or less the same political opinions as their parents, those of the 1960s moved steadily away from the values of the Republican WASP establishment. For instance, in a 1960 presidential straw poll taken at Harvard, John F. Kennedy received 60 percent of the vote--more than Franklin Roosevelt or any other Democratic candidate had ever mustered on that campus since the Civil War. [. . .]

In the late 1960s, the student meritocracy at Harvard was very much like Princeton's--the ratio of students from private and public schools being a similar 40 and 60 percent. Harvard had, of course, been heterogeneous and meritocratic for a longer time, with its proportion of Jewish students higher than at Princeton and far higher than in President Lowell's day. In this connection, it is important to stress one factor in the generation gap within the upper class: the brighter young people were far more opposed to a general, blanket anti-Semitism than were their parents. [. . .] But for a clue to the values and attitudes of the brightest sons of the fourth-generation WASP establishment, let us look at the behavior of private school graduates at Harvard in the late 1960s.

The Berkeley campus revolution came in 1964, Columbia's in 1968, and Harvard's in the spring of 1969. The book on Harvard by S.M. Lipset and David Riesman includes a study of all the student revolts on that campus since the "Great Rebellion" of 1823, when John Quincy Adams's son John was expelled. "Harvard's year of the 'bust,' 1968-69," write these two authors, "was the most momentous year in the University's history in the century since Eliot took office." The history of that second Great Rebellion in 1969 has been thoroughly documented and need not be gone into here. But one thing is worth stressing: it was the sons of the WASP establishment who finally occupied the central administration building--an act that led to President Pusey's disastrous summoning of the local police.

This assertion ("it was the sons of the WASP establishment who finally occupied the central administration building") is, to say the least, questionable, as we'll see below.

Student radicalism at Harvard, as on most other campuses, was led by members of the SDS. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962, and its Harvard chapter was by 1966 the largest in the nation. One of its founders at Harvard (his father was an ADA Democrat and a member of the Kennedy administration) was a great-grandson of James Stillman, John D. Rockefeller's banker.

Baltzell is referring here to Nat Stillman (Whit Stillman's brother), who was at one point "a vice-president of Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society". A fact not reported by Baltzell: "According to Nat Stillman, an early Harvard SDS leader who joined and later left the group, well over half of the Harvard SDS executive committee in its early days was made up of people who identified with or were members of the old-line Communist party, U. S. A."

Also not reported by Baltzell: Harvard SDS was "organized in 1964 by Carl Offner '64 and Michael Ansara". These appear to be the actual founders of the Harvard SDS chapter, and the surnames do not strike me as "WASP". Michael Ansara was also the leader of the University Hall occupation, and Offner, as a graduate student, was still involved at that time as well.

Lastly, it's interesting to note that Stillman too turns out to have apparent Jewish ancestry. While Nat Stillman's father was a grandson of Rockefeller's banker, not mentioned by Baltzell (and something I was not previously aware of) is that his (Deputy to the Under Secretary of Commerce in the Kennedy administration, John Sterling Stillman's) maternal grandmother was Jewish (or probably half-Jewish), a daughter of one Marcus Derckheim Boruck (who was apparently a newspaper editor and politician in mid/late 19th-century San Francisco). While this inheritance may be of little significance genetically, to the extent Nat and his father were aware of this minority ancestry it would not surprise me if it exerted some influence on their identity / politics.

By the time of the rebellion, the Harvard SDS had broken into two opposing factions, as left-wing movements often do: the more conservative SDS caucus and the more radical PL group, linked to the Maoist Progressive Labor party. From our point of view, the most useful description of the contrasting roles of these two wings in the 1969 "bust" is found in the book Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protests by Steven Kelman, a student at Harvard between 1966 and 1970. Kelman came to Harvard as a convinced socialist and was the leader of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) on the campus. From his first day there, he strongly disapproved of, indeed despised, the "pallid preppies." "On the second day," he wrote in his diary," I saw a tall, bond, not-quite-fat kid around the dorm. . . . One time he was gazing down at the rest of the world from his pedestal on the ledge of the staircase one floor up, and once against, later in the afternoon, downstairs. His eyes eyed me in a superciliousness so classic that I felt like photographing it. The lips seemed delicately positioned so that he could voice his contempt without saying one audible word . . . Disgusting prep school kid!" This reversal of the kike-on-sight syndrome held by private school boys in the 1930s prevails throughout the Kelman book. Young Kelman somehow never seemed to apply the "preppie" epithet, however, to preppies of Jewish background, some of whom were his friends.

But . . . I though moldbug explained Jewish radicals were driven only by an unexceptionable desire to assimilate with elite "WASPs".

"Who's in Harvard SDS?" Kelman asks, and immediately discards the Freudian approach in the Yale psychologist Kenneth Kenisston's "sycophantic accoun in The Young Radicals."

As more of a follower of Marx [Kelman writes], I think it would be useful to apply a class analysis to the sole phenomenon to which SDS refuses to apply this method: themselves, of course. Family income: average for U.S., $8,000 a year; average for Harvard, $17,000 a year; average for SDS, $23,000 a year (Source: poll of family incomes taken in Soc. Sci. 125, an SDS-run course taken almost entirely by New Leftists.) Secondary school education: of the 150-odd Harvard students arrested after the occupation of University Hall, approximately 50 percent attended prep school, with the largest representation from the most exclusive ones like St. Paul's. Just over 40 percent of the Harvard student body as a whole comes from prep schools.

Kelman divides the affluent SDS membership into the "hereditary left," which dominated the SDS caucus, and the Maoist PL group, made up of preppies whom he calls "WASP" rebels." The SDS at Harvard, according to Kelman, "never could have gotten started without the initial services of the hereditary radicals." This group became radical in the same way a Boston Irishman's son becomes a Democrat--by instinct. Their fathers had come of age in the 1930s and were now members of the increasingly affluent American intelligentsia. According to Kelman:

Irving Howe estimates that during the thirties and forties a million Americans may have passed through membership in the Communist party. Many are still radicals, if only under the table--or, to put it more accurately, at the dinner table--today. Around these talkative dinner tables the hereditary radicals absorbed from early childhood certain notions about who the bad guys and who the good guys are. . . . The hereditary radicals came to Harvard with their political commitments already well established.

Although the hereditary radicals founded and kept SDS going at Harvard in the 1960s, they lost out tot he Maoist PL leaders in the April 1969 rebellion--the taking over of University Hall and the calling of the police by President Pusey. Thus, according to Kelman, "almost none of the leaders of the New Left caucus, up to and including SDS co-chairman Kazin, were arrested. . . . The hereditary radicals tried to conceal their fears in a hocus-pocus of SDS rhetoric, . . . but the real source of their hesitancy was easier to understand . . . they might get jail and expulsion. That was more than Mom and Dad had led them to bargain for."

The hereditary radicals "combined the confidence and optimism of members of a rising social group," says Kelman--and, one might add, the sophisticated caution born of the experience of their fathers. The WASP rebels, on the other hand, seemed to have many of the characteristics (perhaps in the extreme) of most of their declining class. Kelman reflects on his WASP rebel classmates as follows:

The sight of an aristocrat who has lost the will to live is aesthetically degrading. These declining members of the American aristocracy are not at all similar to the standard aristocratic stereotypes. They are neither self-confident men at the top, uncaring of those below, nor the humane, social-service oriented democratic aristocrats.

The left should normally expect [Kelman continues] good strong hostility and opposition from the upper class--the enemy is nothing if not powerful. If some aristocrats want to rebel, though, that's their right. But the pale, delicate face of the used-up aristocrat who goes into SDS reminds one of nothing so much as Spengler's Decline of the West. The American upper class has been an aristocracy produced by primitive dog-eat-dog competition, and it is only now that enough generations have passed for it to begin to produce soft, declining offspring who are not "up" to its standards. . . . It is in the guilty aristocrat that we see clearly politics not for politics' sake, but for self-expression, the possibility of recapturing a lost vitality that one feels to weak to create for oneself.

I'm not inclined to take Kelman as credible even on this point, but I have no trouble believing that those scions of elite "WASPs" who did become radicals were on the whole lacking in confidence and poor specimens of their class, typically resentful of their peers and easily manipulable by foreign cultural streams.

The "declining aristocrats," as Kelman calls them, were all members of PL, not a "single one of them in the New Left caucus." But it was the PL preppies who carried their convictions--shallow and temporary as they were, and born of their declining self-confidence and frustration--to the ultimate conclusion in taking over University Hall, and being brutalized and arrested in doing so. The occupation of University Hall by the "pallid preppies" was a vital, symbolic event in the history of class relations in this country. Nothing since The Protestant Establishment was written, I should imagine, better illustrates what was happening to the WASP upper class, especially in its fourth generation. Imagine the reactions of the Harvard clubmen in their fathers' and grandfathers' generation had they witnessed "virtually everyone around the exclusive clubs wearing red armbands," as preppie David Bruce, Kelman's roommate in his sophomore year, reported to him during the bust. Kelman's views of his despised preppie classmates may seem to say more about his own relations with his ideological peers than about them. But perhaps his views were not so far off base.

From what I can tell, Kelman appears to have been almost entirely off base. Here's another radical chiding Seymour Martin Lipset for relying on Kelman:

You devote a page and a half of your conclusion (p. 250-251) to a discussion of the militant "worker-student alliance" (WSA) faction of SDS, which was led by the Maoist group "Progressive Labor Party" (PLP). You repeatedly state as fact, quoting Kelman, that the most militant student leaders during the turbulent spring of 1969 were "the scions of well-to-do WASP elite" (p. 250), "scions of privileged WASP America" (p. 251), "the children of the true blue, of the WASP elite, linked by social origins to the classes which had manned the clubs" (p. 251). You devote a half-page of sociological theorizing to conjectures aimed at explaining this fascinating phenomenon.

However, anyone who sat through a few SDS meetings during that period (as I did) knows differently. There was no mystery about who the PLP-ers were. Leading the most important caucus in SDS, they were vocal participants in every debate, and were always proud to identify themselves as "party members". It is a fact taht, at the time of the takeover of University Hall, there were precisely five PLP-ers at Harvard. Of them, three(3) were ethnically Jewish. "WASP elite"??

In the same part of the conclusion you refer to "the students arrested in University Hall, almost all of whom were WSA" (p. 250). At that time, the entire WSA caucus consisted of no more than 40-50 people. (By the summer it had increased to almost a hundred.) Over 170 students were arrested at University Hall. So no more than one fourth "were WSA"! The majority of SDS members were unaffiliated with any caucus, and many of the participants in SDS-led demonstrations (including the building seizure) were not even SDS members. The group of students arrested was not nearly so monolithic as your faith in Kelman's reporting leads you to believe. In fact, the WSA caucus was out-voted on some key points. (For example, the majority of arrested students chose a popular "movement lawyer" by the name of Flynn who was intensely disliked by the WSA people for ideological reasons.)

[Serge Lang. The File (1977-1979): Case Study in Correction.]

Ansara was anti-PL/WSA, while Offner was a member of the WSA. Jared Israel and Norm Daniels are the strikingly WASP names Google turns up as founders / leaders of the Harvard PL faction. (Hilary Putnam, another person mentioned as having been a member of PL at Harvard, was half Jewish; and his father was a scion not of elite northeastern "WASPs", but of small-town Midwestern farmers who look to have been ultimately of Southern and Mid-Atlantic ancestry.) The Progressive Labor party itself was "Created in 1962 by Milton Rosen". Back to Baltzell:

Four days after the occupation, the executive editor of the Crimson "Bared his soul, in the proud Crimson tell-it-like-it-is tradition, with a piece entitled 'Non-Politics on the Battlefront.'" The following excerpts cannot be faulted as coming from an anti-prep-school point of view:

What was most euphoric was us and what we were to each other. We were brothers and sisters. We did reach out and hold onto each other . . . we were very human and very together.

None of the above is very political stuff. But there was a group of us in University Hall who were not very political people. It was a strange group, not well-defined at all, that included some girls, some people from the Loeb (Drama Center), a couple of guys from the Fly Club, at least one from the Lampoon, and one in a tuxedo who had just come from a party and was drunk. There were others. Some of us didn't even know what the six demands were.

The executive editor of the Crimson, a graduate of Saint Paul's, as was his father before him, had everything that meritocratic Harvard now looks for. He was a good athlete, very popular, and a top scholar. Not long after Kelman's book was written, this wealthy and gifted preppie took his own life. One wonders what will happen to the rest of the gilded-Harvard youth who led the rebellion that spring.

What will happen to freedom in the fourth generation from the robber barons, which dropped out and rebelled in its youth during the late 1960s? Their problem partly reflected a severe crisis of class authority in America, highlighted in a series of tragic events from the assassination of President Kennedy to the Watergate affair. It would be too facile to blame the current decline of authority in America, or the tragic fate of the editor of the Harvard Crimson in 1969, entirely on the suicidal, exclusionary values of the WASP establishment. Perhaps the very strengths of an establishment in one generation preclude its functioning successfully in another. At any rate, when I wrote The Protestant Establishment during the administration of President Kennedy, I still had faith in the ability of the WASP establishment assimilate talented men and women of other ethnic and religious origins into its ranks. I have no such faith today. I remain convinced, though, that modern republican, political institutions, in both England and America, have traditionally been based on hierarchical social systems where class authority and the threat of class ostracism have been major agents of social control. A free press is a vital virtue in any democracy; like all virtues, however, it becomes a vice when carried too far and the fear of media exposure becomes the major sanction of a normative system. An authoritative establishment, in the long run, is far more important to the protection of freedom and democracy.

But perhaps it is best to forget about the WASP establishment, and instead cultivate an open but hierarchical society where all men aspire to be like Washington or Jefferson, rather than one in which all men must overtly ape the values of Everyman, all the while covertly coveting the shallow comforts of affluence and power. Not long after the decline of the Federalist establishment (of which the "Rebellion of 1823" at Harvard was a sympton) and the rise of Jacksonian democracy, Tocqueville pointed out the affinities between materialism and egalitarianism, from which the following lines are taken:

There is in fact a manly and lawful passion for equality which incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to raise the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level.

The name of the implied "WASP" Crimson executive editor who killed himself, which Baltzell fails to provide: Nicholas Gagarin. The father who also attended St. Paul's was not a "WASP" but a Russian prince (Andre Sergeievich Gagarin, born 1914 in St. Petersburg). And his mother certainly seems to have been rich, but also appears to have been part Irish. In omitting these facts while expounding on the "the suicidal, exclusionary values" of "WASPs" Baltzell goes well beyond discretion into deception. Nor does Baltzell mention that Nick Gagarin was evidently homosexual:

"I lived in Winthrop House from 1966 to 1969," he recalls. "In those days only Tom Hopkins '69"--the guy I was homophobic toward--"was flamboyantly 'out.' He was a magnet for a dozen embryonic gay Winthrop men. Our homoerotic world was very like the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, with Tom as Anthony Blanche constantly egging us on. I was a cautious Charles Ryder; my Sebastian Flyte was Nick Gagarin '70--beautiful, aristocratic, charming, and responsive. It was a time of intense romantic friendships, resonant with youthful laughter and daring and rebellion. These friendships reached sexual consummation only rarely and hesitantly--for me, just four or five times. Late-night knocks on my door, awkward passionate embraces, long intense confessions..."

The transition from 1966 (when Newmeyer got to Winthrop House and the Ivy League was still pretty much a tweedy, traditional place) to 1969 (the year of the Strike, when he left) was extraordinary. Vietnam was the catalyst, but everything changed.

"The year 1969 marked the end of an era in sexual politics at Harvard," says Newmeyer. "Dress codes, parietal rules, same-sex Houses were on the way out. The civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, the exploration of marijuana, the Strike--for us wannabe gays it all culminated in Stonewall. That was all we needed: we leapt out of the closet, became gay activists, and hesitated no longer about our sexuality. Actually, we pretty much concluded that it was a damn lucky thing to be gay in that blissful dawn."

Not for me. Not quite yet. And not for Nick Gagarin, ever. He committed suicide in 1971.

While that particular confirmation was published well after The Protestant Establishment Revisited, Baltzell undoubtedly read the following histrionic obituary from another Gagarin "friend" in the St. Paul's alumni magazine before he decided to pass off this half-Russian, part-Irish, mentally-unstable homosexual as an exemplary "WASP" doomed to tragedy by exclusive "WASP" values.

'66 - Nicholas Gagarin died at his home in Litchfield, Connecticut. November 25, 1971. He leaves his parents. Andrew S. Gagarin, '33, and Jamie Porter Gagarin: a sister, Mrs. Raoul Pujol, and two brothers, Michael, '59. and Peter Gagarin, '63.

The absurdity of it outweighs the tragedy. The brilliant young man with everything in the world shoots himself to death, in the middle of a blizzard early on Thanksgiving morning. The family grieves, friends are rounded up for a funeral, his ashes are scattered over the fields and hills that he loved. And here I sit, the old school chum, the roommate of so many academic years, the "closest friend," stuck with the problem of making a dead man live, when I still can't believe that he's dead.

Nick Gagarin was the most talented, intelligent, and enigmatic person I've ever met. Those of you who knew him at St. Paul's did not know him at all. He changed a great deal over the past five years and became, as I hope most of us have, something far removed from the captain of this and the president of that, a spoiled and arrogant product of a classy school. His warmth and humor increased as his shyness vanished. His interest in other people was immense. He physicalized everything he felt, and was at his best hugging and holding the people he loved.

His career at Harvard was the expected success: he wrote and published a novel, he was big cheese on the Crimson, and he spent time at Esalen in California where he broadened and tested himself. By the time he graduated in 1970, Nick Gagarin had become someone quite special.

Nick always talked about being "up" - he tried desperately to be high on life all the time, and was badly let down when he failed or others failed him. The dreams got bigger the more he questioned his ability to make them come true. The strange, remote, frightening, and rather wild side of him flourished.

And so with exquisite logic Nick took his own life. It's appalling and incredible and a waste and such a shame, blah blah blah, but that's the way he wanted it and one must respect that.

A horrible thing, I find, is how quickly the image fades. There's not much left except things he said that you remember and the letters he wrote that you kept.

I wish I could could end this without being corny and obvious but I can't, so you must each supply your own endings and learn from your own conclusions.

Andre Bishop, '66

Place your bets: Maoist-period Harvard Crimson staff was dominated by New England Puritans or Jews?

The moldbug-owned autistic nydwracu compiles "every article that the Harvard Crimson ran between 1973 and 1976 that mentions the Khmer Rouge", inspired by an assertion from Ross Douthat that:

@yeselson @jneeley78 @dylanmatt There was a period in the late '60s/early '70s when pretty much everyone at Harvard was a Maoist.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 26, 2013

I think Douthat may be engaging in slight hyperbole as concerns the Harvard student body as a whole. But the comment appears to fairly characterize the Harvard Crimson staff of the era.

Presumably nydwracu thinks he's piling up evidence in favor of moldbuggism.

But it takes effort not to notice that the more egregious pro-Khmer Rouge articles are signed by and/or published during the leadership of Daniel Swanson or Nicholas Lemann. Lemann is confirmed Jewish and Swanson is almost certainly Jewish.

Lemann helpfully recounts the ethnic tenor of the Swanson and Lemann-era Crimson in a 1998 article:

Minority Voices

In 1973, The Crimson was supporting demonstrations against Harvard's investment in African colonies and fighting internally over whether to capitalize the words "black" and "Chicano" in stories.

At the same time, the staff was, by its own estimation, woefully lacking in minority voices.

"We were disturbed by the under representation of blacks and Latinos on staff," says Daniel A. Swanson '74, Crimson president in 1973.

The homogeneity of the staff would continue to be addressed by Crimson presidents throughout the seventies and eighties and is still one of the challenges facing today's Crimson executives.

Nicholas B. Lemann '76, Crimson president two years after Swanson, says a reporter once came to him with a list of campus ethnic organizations, having listed The Crimson as a group for Jewish students.

"The tenor of The Crimson was suburban, upper-middle-class northeastern Jewish," Lemann says. "There was a little bit of everybody, but that was the dominant group."

Executives from the '70s say this stereo-type of a predominantly white and Jewish Crimson continued to be fairly accurate, despite minority recruitment efforts.

nydwracu is also the character who attempted to chasten to one of the Jewish radicals who purged moldbug from Strangeloop that moldbuggists are the true ideological heirs of Jewish radicals like Emma Goldman, while today's no platform communist Jews are engaged in "crypto-calvinist" "Comstockery".

Collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe

The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe

With the recently examined LBK mass grave site of Schöneck-Kilianstädten, Germany, we present new conclusive and indisputable evidence for another massacre, adding new data to the discussion of LBK violence patterns. At least 26 individuals were violently killed by blunt force and arrow injuries before being deposited in a commingled mass grave. Although the absence and possible abduction of younger females has been suggested for other sites previously, a new violence-related pattern was identified here: the intentional and systematic breaking of lower limbs. The abundance of the identified perimortem fractures clearly indicates torture and/or mutilation of the victims. The new evidence presented here for unequivocal lethal violence on a large scale is put into perspective for the Early Neolithic of Central Europe and, in conjunction with previous results, indicates that massacres of entire communities were not isolated occurrences but rather were frequent features of the last phases of the LBK.

Ancient mass grave reveals evidence of brutal massacre among Europe's prehistoric farmers

Archaeologists who painstakingly examined the bones of some 26 men, women and children buried in the Stone Age grave site at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt, say they found blunt force marks to the head, arrow wounds and deliberate efforts to smash at least half of the victims' shins — either to stop them from running away or as a grim message to survivors. [. . .]

"What is particularly interesting is the level of violence. Not just the suppression of a rival community — if that is what it was — but the egregious and systematic breaking of the lower legs," said Scarre. "It suggests the use of terror tactics as part of this inter-community violence." [. . .]

"The LBK population had expanded considerably, and this increases the potential for conflict," said Meyer. "Also, the LBK were farmers, they settled. So unlike hunter gatherers, who could move away to avoid conflict, these people couldn't just escape. Add to this the fact that there may have been a period of drought that constrained resources, causing conflicts to erupt."

Meyer said the theory of conflict between different groups within the LBK is supported by the existence of an apparent ancient border near the Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten site. Archaeologists have found that flint was traded on either side of the divide but not necessarily across it — suggesting the two groups did not see each other as kin, he said.

The attackers, however, spared some members of the group, with victims skewed toward young children, adult men and older women.

"It's likely that the young women, who are missing in the grave, were kidnapped by the attackers," said Meyer.

Related:

• "Ancestral men probably competed for mates mainly by excluding competitors by force or threat"
• Sewall Wright on race differences, group selection, and cultural selection among humans (1978)
• More from Hamilton on kin recognition and intergroup hostility

  With pleasure in cruelty as the motivation to punishment,62 and with cruelty to create terror, an individualistic argument sounds less plausible; but considering inclusive fitness, or group selection (which may be a really appropriate term for many human situations), there is no theoretical difficulty. For example, a priori, terror seems as good a weapon as false promises in bringing about the early submission or removal of a threatened tribe.

The Boston upper class circa 1950: "a Republican-Episcopalian group"

Moldbug infamously attempted to blame Jewish political radicalism on a desire to assimilate with "Boston Brahmins". I'm not making this up:

to succeed [Jews] assimilated the cultural tropes of America's highest status caste - the Boston Brahmins, basically.

In reality, of course, the Boston upper class was never politically radical as a group relative to other Americans -- much less in comparison to frequently socialist or communist Jewish immigrants. Not when it was predominantly Unitarian in the middle of the nineteenth century. And not in the mid-20th century, when the Boston upper class had shifted Episcopalian and remained relatively conservative:

Clearly Boston was in a state of change following World War II, undergoing alterations in outlook and values that perhaps would not be clarified for another generation. In spite of the changes, however, there was evidence that the stereotypical Boston lifestyle still existed. In maintaining this way of life in the face of strong challenges, the influence of the past on Boston and its social leaders cannot be overlooked. To appraise more scientifically the mid-century Boston Brahmin, a survey was conducted by the writer in April, 1949, when a questionnaire was mailed to a sample of women from the year's Boston Social Register. Many of the questions included sough to determine the truth of previously discussed generalities, and although it has become increasingly clear that many important points for research were not included in the questionnaire, nevertheless, a definite effort was made to test several of the previously noted characteristics of Boston Brahmins.

[. . .] The religious preference of our sample was clear; indeed, the previously quoted statement beginning "I come from Boston, I am Unitarian, I wear . . ." might more realistically be changed to "I am Episcopalian or Unitarian, with an emphasis on the former." For even though 77 percent of the women attended one or the other, more than twice as many were Episcopalian. The eloquence of Phillips Brooks and the English tradition seem to have eclipsed the more intellectual approach to religion exemplified by Emerson.

Certain data from this sample, if not startlingly new, clearly validated previously mentioned statements from the literature. Not only was this class Episcopalian, but it was Republican in politics. Eighty-one percent of the respondents were Republican--this in 1949, while located in Democratic Boston, and after living seventeen years under Democratic presidents.

The questionnaire's answers showed, as illustrated in literary sources, that Boston Brahmins emphasized education as a broad cultural goal, but they have been quite conservative in the amount of education given their daughters compared with that provided to sons. Of the sample, only 11 percent of the husbands did not attend college, and of the college-trained group, 71 percent attended Harvard. Of the women, only 13 percent completed college, while the largest group (39 percent), completed secondary private school only. The pattern of private schooling before college--with almost no trend toward either a more-democratic or more-aristocratic type of education--was suggested by the fact that no one in the sample attended only a secondary public school, and just 3 percent indicated they had been taught solely by private tutors.

Regarding the group's marital status, 76 percent were married, 15 percent widowed, 2 percent divorced, and 5 percent were single. Of those married, 51 percent had three or more children and only 7 percent were childless.

[. . .] The single home and its location have remained very important criteria to determine class status; however, upper-class idiosyncracies became manifest in the type of home owned and the conveniences it had. Homeowners comprised 77 percent of the sample, but not all houses were equipped with what are generally thought to be basic essentials, such as electric refrigerators or central heating. Only 2 percent had televisions. An odd item was that a few more families had fireplaces than central heating. The actual differential, while not significant in absolute figures, had some symbolic import--illustrating a way of life hardly typical of the "Great Middle Class."

The lifestyle of Boston's social leaders has alternately stimulated admiration or amusement in the minds of outsiders. The excessive frugality and the tendency not to change butchers, grocers, or candlestick makers generation after generation are well known. To a large extent, such generalities are overdrawn but not incorrect or entirely fanciful. The sample did tend to shop at R. H. Stearns and S. S. Pierce. Forty-three percent named Stearns as their favorite department store [. . .]

The Boston Brahmin woman is reputedly a busy one; thus, how she spends her time should be informative. Only 12 percent of the sample worked outside the home, with teaching, business, editing, and secretarial work being listed. Thirty-five percent stated they were employed before marriage, and the premarital occupation was similar to that followed afterward. [. . .] The more than 70 percent of the "unemployed" busied themselves with all types of activities, the most popular being care of families, cultural pursuites, and church and charitable work. [. . .]

The purpose of this chapter was to draw a composite picture of the Boston upper class and, in particular, its upper-class women. Generalities made speculatively about the Boston upper-class woman were supported by evidence from literary, manuscript, and questionnaire sources. First of all, a strong awareness of an upper class existed in this community which was felt to a large extent by the members themselves as well as by others. Many names of families and individuals were easily identified as being members of this group. One reason for the perpetuation of this class is that conscientious effort has been made by its members to remain ingrown and to foster habits, customs, and values identified with them and their ancestors. The family played the key role in maintaining the proper lineages and instituting the right values. All other significant values appeared secondary to it: individual happiness, the importance of husband's occupation, and many other factors served only to strengthen the importance of family as an institution. Although divorce occurred, it was definitely not sanctioned. So family-oriented was this group that the trend toward smaller families, characteristic of the rest of the country, was reversed here. This was a Republican-Episcopalian group where the men attended Groton and Harvard and the women the Winsor School. The importance of ancestors and their role in the history of community and country continued to vie with the values of money and education as legitimate claims for upper-class position. Even though the women did not work, they wished to be active--in the home and in the family charities, large or small. In many areas, their horizons seemed limited and their concern for larger issues undeveloped. On particular issues, they were conservative, though in the matters of morals, the question of a single--albeit strict--standard was the major preference. Certain institutions patronized by this group either were unique as to type, for instance, "The Morning of Diversion," the sewing circle, or women's clubs with specific forms and roles; or, if generally familiar, were so influenced by the local culture as to seem unusual and at times unique, such as the dancing school or the debut. In all, the picture of the Boston Brahmin, while not drawn by social scientists, was nevertheless delineated and reminiscent of W. H. Warner's portrayal of the upper-upper class in nearby Newburyport ("Yankee City"). [. . .]

Twice as many non-Brahmins as Brahmins lacked a special interest in the history of their families, but when it was expressed, that interest was according to the prevailing community pattern of genealogy: English background and Revolutionary War experiences, for example.

[Source: The Other Brahmins, Boston's Black Upper Class (c). By Adelaide M. Cromwell.]

Also see Jewish Liberalism: the Allinsmith Study:

The 1944 presidential vote also revealed this marked difference between Jewish and Gentile political behavior. The upper-class and upper-middle-class Christian denominations voted heavily against Roosevelt and in favor of Republican standard-bearer Thomas Dewey. Only 31.4% of the Congregationalists, 39.9% of the Presbyterians and 44.6% of the Episcopalians backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The more working-class denominations, however, voted heavily for him, particularly the Catholics who were 72.8% in his favor. In terms of their combined educational, occupational and status rank in the Allinsmith survey-that of second place-the Jews might well have been expected to vote Republican. Actually, they were 92.1% for Roosevelt. This overwhelming support was greater than that of any of the Christian denominations. [. . .]

However, in the 1952 elections, despite the fact that the Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had led the Western coalition to victory over the Nazis, 75% of the Jewish voters supported Adlai E. Stevenson, a man who had played no role of any importance in World War II. There was no difference in the attitude of the candidates toward Jewry or the state of Israel. The issue was clearly one of moderation vs. liberalism. In a situation where American voters as a whole gave decisive support to Eisenhower, three-fourths of the Jews backed his Democratic opponent. Moreover, interviews in depth of Boston voters showed that only 30% of the Gentiles with high socioeconomic status, as against 60% of those with low socioeconomic status, backed Stevenson. Among Boston Jews, 72% of those with high status voted for Stevenson.

The myth of the radically leftist Boston Unitarian

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

From an editorial at a UU website:

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

A faith for the few?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Unitarian Controversy and Its Puritan Roots"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remedial history for people who take moldbug seriously

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

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

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

I point out, among other things:

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

Relationships between wealth or social class and prosocial behavior

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

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

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

Giving behavior of millionaires

Significance

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

Abstract

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

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

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

Racial Differentiation in Mankind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution Since the Origin of Agriculture [. . .]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

Sewall Wright on Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship (1922)

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

@johan stavers:

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

No, coefficient of relationship is perfectly fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE INBREEDING COEFFICIENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract

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

Related posts:

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

Rightists fatter than leftists?

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

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

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

A survey from neuropolitics.org similarly found:

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

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

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

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

Moral parochialism and contextual contingency

Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies

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

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

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

Harvard Civil War deaths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the authors:

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

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

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

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

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