Look at this phylogenetic tree:

Do you notice that "turtles" are in a separate clade from the other reptiles and birds? When I noticed this years ago I thought it was pretty strange, but I had a sketchy understanding of the difference between morphological similarities and genetic affinity.

Now, going up the tree toward reptiles you get this:

Birds are in the same clade as crocodiles and their "extinct relatives" (guess who!), while lizards and snakes are up another branch. Let's keep moving up the first branch....

A few steps ahead, and you end up here:

We've left crocodiles behind. Keep going up and you'll reach the end of the line.

• Eoraptor


• Herrerasauridae


• Ceratosauria (Dilophosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and relatives)


• Tetanurae




• Torvosauridae


• Spinosauridae


• Allosauroidea


• Coelurosauria (tyrannosaurs, Oviraptor, Velociraptor, birds, and relatives)

Birds & T-rex, together at last. Many of you know about paraphyletic groups, and even if you didn't know that particular term, the general idea is pretty intuitive. I only point this out to suggest that studies which sketch out cladistic relationships might not always jive with our morphological preconceptions. Now that you have powerful computers crunching the 3-D data of skull & bones this isn't as much of a problem, but the issue still remains, morphology or data from neutral markers?¹

A few years ago I posted an email Henry Harpending sent me about being careful about weighting neutral vs. functional markers. That is, even if two groups mix their neutral markers, selection forces, whether it be environmental or sociological, can still serve to erect robust phenotypic distinctions between the two groups. After a few thousand years two groups which inhabit sharply different but adjacent biomes might have an extremely confounded ancestry, but their functionally constrained genome might still restict phenotypic expression to "optimally" adapted forms. One could also imagine a sociocultural tradition enforcing some phenotypic shibboleth that might also result in the perpetuation of a particular modal type.

Examples? Henry offers the Khoisan/Bantu division as one that is clearly discernable phenotypically (and on locii that are functionally crucial and shaped by selection forces), but less clear when looking at neutral mtDNA markers. Similarly, there is some evidence that three centuries of social forces in Brazil might have maintained two distinct phenotypic races despite the fact that both groups overlap considerably in terms of their neutral ancestrally informative markers.

This relates to my common theme of proximate vs. ultimate. The phenotype is an expression of the proximate adaptations to the environment, while the neutral markers in the genotype carry the signatures of demographic expansion and or bottlenecks the genes have been through due to the fitness of the individuals who carry them. These two issues are often confused and treated as identical in many contexts. From a common sense perspective our "folk biology," likely shaped by our EEA, reinterprets morphological input in terms of broad taxonomical categories that seem cross-culturally robust. Sometimes miscategorizations occur because of this tendency, for example, the idea that whales are fish, or less naively, that crocodiles and lizards have more of an affinity than crocodiles and birds. Our cognitive templates are insensitive to reality in any direct sense, rather, they are influenced and framed by the contexts in which our fitness was impacted by decisions we made based on the predispositions we were endowed with.

These issues crop up on the context of humans in various ways. I have criticized Kevin MacDonald for simply assuming that genetic ends are in and of themselves are somehow meaningful without any supporting norms or conjectures. White nationalists themselves have gotten into these disputes, as those who emphasize phenotypic identity (proximate) confront those who emphasize ancestry (the ultimate). I can't help but feel they are missing the point of it all.

Traditionally an assumption of rough aproximation between proximate human traits and ultimate ancestral relationship has held because of geographic distance. Today, these truths do not necessarily hold, especially in mobile modern societies. With the spread of cosmetic surgery and the looming genetic engineering revolution phenotype might be far more of an issue of individual volition and preference. Since humans can not intuit ancestry in any other way by mere inspection this will throw up another barrier between the cognitive tools at our disposal and the reality that encapsulates us.

I have to admit that these discussions about humans strike me as somewhat strange. Though I've known of the issues about turtles & other reptiles, their supposed morphological affinity, and their phylogenetic distance, since I was a child, never did I consider reformulating these issues in light of humans. In my head I suppose I had stuck a wall between macroevolution and microevolution, and in particular was not open to microevolution among human beings.

I have read quite a bit of the new historically oriented human population genetics. You get the impression from this material that human beings were shaped to final completion in Africa, from which they issued full formed. The author of The Real Eve makes this explicit. Then, he proceeds to write a chapter on the specialized adaptations of East Asians that led to their particular physique. Humans are animals like any other, shaped by microevolution. In less than 10,000 years the Neolithic revolution has reshaped the lactose metabolization propensities of some populations, reduced susceptibility to alcoholism and drunkeness in other groups and also led to increased population densities which fueled the emergence of a whole host of endemic rhinoviruses.²

An animal like any other, which means the simplistic gruel based on NRY & mtDNA must be tempered by the reality that humans are a functionally varied species. True, there is great overlap, but the dark and the fair and the tall and the short are part of a broad and varied range. The reality of genetic relationships are salient to us, but I predict that though genetic testing will become affordable and cheap, and basic information about your distance on a host of locii from a person you meet might be had (hopefully assuming some consent on the part of both individuals), phenotype will be more important, that plasticity of human morphology and the range of lifestyles will increase. For thousands of years humans have already clustered around the transcending cultural phenotype of universal religions, in the future we might see an increased importance in other niche tribes.

Look at this blog, many of the readers band together not by genetic relation, physical appearence or shared faith in a god or gods, rather, many GNXP readers have a fixation on ideas and their mental manipulation, a value on mental dexterity and its worth that is simply abnormal. Our phenotype, our morphologically significant feature, is all psychological, under the hood. Someday perhaps a phenotypic race, Homo sapeins eggheadus will rise forth....

Things are only going to get weirder.

Related: The George Schuyler novel Black No More is an expression of the craziness that can ensue when proximate features become extremely plastic.

1 - Obviously the tree was not all based on modern wet lab methods, though the relationship between living classes like birds & reptiles have been more thoroughly elucidated.

2 - I have read that the common colds generally need a particular population density threshold to become endemic. This suggests that many isolated populations, like the Andanman Islanders, might die from exposure to rhinovirus. The "demic diffusions" of the past brought on by agriculture might have been enabled by plagues which acted as selective sweeps on the edge of a demographic wave that swept over the world.