This article on affirmative action in Brazil is interesting. Here is the conclusion:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that some middle-class white kids are taking advantage of the system by declaring themselves black,” said Salgueiro, the admissions director. “It’s disappointing because that means the program is not always benefiting poor or underprivileged kids. But at the same time, what can you do? We have no idea really who is black and who is not. This is Brazil.”

Bulbul, the black filmmaker, acknowledges that the quotas are an imperfect tool, and that the solution really is to expand education opportunities to accommodate people like Fracescutti and poorer Brazilians, both black and white.

Brazil seems the classic case study in how cultural norms influence how genes assort themselves in a mixed population. Since most of the population is part black by ancestrty they are looking for phenotype, so if they want to get practical and cut out cheaters they need a system of auditors like the old South Africa had to verify racial identity. Perhaps this system will impose a high enough cost on “whiteness” that “good features” will be redefined in Brazilian society.

Posted by razib at 06:21 PM

I’ll be there for a week starting tomorrow. Anything going on there???

Posted by razib at 02:53 PM

This article on “urban nomads,” wandering youth that have dropped out of society, is pretty interesting. My small town in Imbler seems to have a lot of these kids (and older types too) hanging around the main drag doing the Portland-San Francisco circuit (we’re about equidistant along the I-5 route). They’re kind of irritating because they basically squat right along major sidewalks taking up a lot of space on both sides and swarm so as to almost be a physical menace. Also, some of their dogs aren’t cute little things, but rather large strong-jawed creatures that glower at you as if they want to take a bite out of your shank. Additionally, they don’t always stay satisfied with one dog but seem to accumulate packs. Anyway, I’m libertarian enough not to want the police to round them up (after all, where will that sort of thing stop?), but they can be a pain-in-the-ass sometimes, though that’s probably their raison d’être.

There is an interview with John Maynard Smith in the current issue of New Scientist (14 June). Among other things, he says:

“Eugenics is a dirty word, but I don’t think it should be. I think we are going to have to think quite seriously about it. The words ‘eugenics’ and ‘fascism’ are regarded as almost synonymous and I think that’s just plain silly”.

He also reveals that he has ‘just finished’ writing a book on the evolution of animal signals. But he says he is currently ‘working on tuberculosis. There are a number of problems that arise from the evolution of antibiotic resistance’.

He also thinks the most exciting issues in evolutionary biology concern the theory of development. He believes there is now enough detailed information on developmental processes to begin work on a theory of the genetic regulation of development, by analogy with computer programming. ‘It’s tremendously exciting! If I were 40 years younger, this is what I would be doing.’

John Maynard Smith is 83.

DAVID BURBRIDGE

Sex Differences in the Distribution of Mental Ability. Good bookmark for those interested in psychometry.

Posted by razib at 03:43 PM

Nice to see this kind of thinking percolating into the mainstream:

The second effect of the literacy obligation was to drive a lot of Jews away from their religion. [stupid Jews become Christians or Muslims -Razib] Botticini and Eckstein admit that they have little direct evidence for this conclusion, but there’s a lot of indirect evidence. First, it makes sense: People do tend to run away from expensive obligations. Second, we can look at population trends: While the world population increased from 50 million in the sixth century to 285 million in the 18th, the population of Jews remained almost fixed at just a little over a million. Why were the Jews not expanding when everyone else was? We don’t know for sure, but a reasonable guess is that a lot of Jews were becoming Christians and Muslims.

So—which Jews stuck with Judaism? Presumably those with a particularly strong attachment to their religion and/or a particularly strong attachment to education for education’s sake. [the smart Jews remain -Razib] (The burden of acquiring an education is, after all, less of a burden for those who enjoy being educated.) The result: Over time, you’re left with a population of people who enjoy education, are required by their religion to be educated, and are particularly attached to their religion. Naturally, these people tend to become educated. And once they’re educated, they leave the farms.

Read the whole thing over at Slate. And before godless chimes in, the same kind of article could be applied to priestly elites the world over, Brahmins, families that form the ulema and Protestant clergy. Is it any coincidence that these groups tend to become the intelligensia once they become secularized?

Update from Jason M: The Slate article summarizes the work of Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. For a fuller treatment of the theory you can read their entire original paper (PDF) From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History.

Update from Razib: Also, check out the thread over @ Yglesias’ blog on this topic.

Further information from Razib: Readers might be interested in the National Jewish Survey data (PDF). Look at the traits for “Jews of other religions,” and note the contrast in educational level and income with “Jews by religion” and “Jewish with no religion.” This might not apply historically, but it is interesting in the American context.

Zack Ajmal has a great post on arranged marriage and all that jazz.

On an aside, I think arranged marriages tend to be a trait of dense agricultural societies, which means most of written history. Studies, from what I know, of hunter-gatherer peoples indicate a more chaotic and free-form attitude toward love & marriage, perhaps explaining the tumult that is the characteristic of human relationships [1].

On a related note I got this email this week:

First, I think that I have brought up the need for serious cost-benefits analysis of the effect of biological honesty on a multi-ethnic society.

Second, and more practically, your discussion of the poor marital prospects of dark-skinned subcontinental women drew my attention. From what I have read, arranged marriages are actually rather successful on average. I know two or three semi-ascetic men who simply find the American dating scene too painful, time-consuming, and banal for them to put in the effort. I suspect that many of them could recieve substantial psychological and economic benefits from marrying any submissive, hard-working, high IQ, english speaker. In the process, they would improve the economy and gene-pool of the US and provide a major life-opportunity for someone who might otherwise have poor marriage prospects. Do you think that this would be a realistic, low-effort endeavor? Do you think that I should encourage my friends to consider this possibility. How would you recommend I sell a suggestion like this? In return for any assistance, if this works out I’ll be on the lookout for smart pretty blonds who like your appearance and writing (post a photo of yourself) :-).

I suggest a brown matrimonial site (Warning! Brown chicks are short). Oh, and as I told my correspondent the last service will not be necessary.

P.S. – Did anyone else find the relationship between the dirty Irish coach and the brown chick in Bend it Like Beckham creepy? They especially didn’t depict brown guys very well (the one cool brown guy is gay!).

[1] If our evolutionary heritage involved a long period of patrilocal & patriarchal systems where women were kept sequestered from the general male population I wonder if jealousy would be as much of a factor in the male psyche since he would have to worry less about other men cuckolding him. In fact in societies where women are cloistered the men doing the cuckolding are even likely to be near blood relatives, reducing the genetic cost of such acts to the legitimate husband.

I have at last got my hands on C. Capelli et al.: A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles, Current Biology, vol. 13, 979-984, 27 May 2003.

Capelli et al. took DNA samples from men in 25 small towns around the British Isles, excluding men whose paternal grandfathers were born more than 20 miles away. For comparison they also took samples from Norway, Denmark, North Germany (Schleswig-Holstein), Friesland (Netherlands), and the Basque region of Spain. Using comparison of Y chromosome haplotypes, the Danish, North German and Frisian samples are all closely similar to each other, but the Norwegian sample is significantly different from these, and the Basque sample is widely different.

In a Principal Components analysis the Irish and Welsh samples (with one exception) cluster together with the Basque sample, supporting earlier findings. As the Basques speak a pre-Indo-European language, this suggests that the Irish and Welsh (so-called ‘Celts’) have a largely pre-Celtic genetic ancestry, possibly going back to the Palaeolithic. In Britain, the Orkneys, Shetlands, Western Isles, Isle of Man, and Cumbria (Penrith) show a clear Norwegian input, as expected. Elsewhere in mainland Britain there is no obvious Norwegian input, but varying degrees of German/Danish ancestry. Scottish mainland sites are intermediate between English sites and the ‘indigenous’ (Welsh/Irish) ones. However, all the English and Scottish sites show some ‘indigenous’ ancestry. The German/Danish component is strongest in eastern England and weakest in England south of the Thames.

Most of this is unsurprising, but there are two more controversial conclusions.
One is the claim that ‘the results seem to suggest that in England the Danes had a greater demographic impact than the Anglo-Saxons’. This is based on the finding that the German/Danish element is strongest in areas like Yorkshire that are known to have been settled by Danes. The conclusion seems to me a non-sequitur. The areas settled by Danes were the areas most exposed to invasion from Denmark and North Germany, and they got a double dose of German/Danish genes: first from the Angles, then the Danes. It would be very surprising if they did not have the strongest German/Danish element.

The other controversial conclusion is that the German/Danish element in southern England (south of the Thames) is limited, and that the male ancestry of this area ‘appears to be predominantly indigenous’. This may be true, but I would want to see it replicated with different samples and methods before taking it as firmly established. It should perhaps be noted that the samples with the smallest German/Danish element all come from areas (Wessex, Sussex, and Kent) reputedly settled by Saxons and Jutes, while the samples with larger German/Danish elements come from areas settled by Angles (East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria). Conceivably there was already a genetic difference between these three ethnic groups before migration, though this does not seem particularly likely, as they all came from much the same area of Northern Europe.

As Capelli et al. recognise, their results seem to conflict with those of Weale et al., ‘Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2002, vol. 19, pp.1008-21, which found a sharp distinction between central English and Welsh populations, but no significant difference between the English population and a Frisian sample. This discrepancy needs to be reconciled.

As I am a historian and not a geneticist it may help if I outline the historical evidence on the ethnic origins of the English. There is no dispute that British Celtic) elements were predominant in Cornwall and Cumbria, where Celtic languages survived long after the Anglo-Saxon invasions. There is also good evidence of British elements surviving in Kent and Wessex (see esp. Myres, ‘The English Settlements’, pp.147-73). But beyond that, there has been controversy since Victorian times. At one extreme, which I call the ‘Wipeout’ theory, it is believed that Celts were virtually exterminated or expelled by the invading Anglo-Saxons. At the other extreme, which I call the ‘Upper Crust’ theory, the Anglo-Saxons took over as a ruling elite but left the peasants largely untouched (rather like the later Norman Conquest). And of course there are intermediate positions.

The main lines of evidence are as follows:

Written sources: the main sources – Gildas, Bede, and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle – make it clear that invaders from the Continent took political control of what is now England, and that in many places there was violent conflict between the invaders and native forces. But there are no reliable written sources on the numbers and proportions of different groups.

Language: the Old English or Anglo-Saxon language, in its various forms, is purely Germanic in its grammar and vocabulary, with no discernible Celtic element. If the Celts learned English, they learned it very thoroughly. The later Danish settlements strongly influenced the form of Old English spoken in eastern England, but did not replace it.

Place-names: the names of major towns and rivers often show some derivation from Celtic or Romano-British names, but the names of rural settlements are overwhelmingly Germanic (Anglo-Saxon or Danish), except in western England, where there is a ‘cline’ of increasing Celtic influence. However, there have been controversial claims that some Anglo-Saxon names have disguised Celtic origins.

Continental evidence: before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England there were people known as Angles in northern Germany, and after it there weren’t. Around the same time, the Armorican peninsula was settled by Celtic Britons, to the extent that the area became known as Britain (Bretagne or Brittany). This certainly looks like a mass displacement of populations.

Religion: late Roman Christianity and Celtic religions disappeared from England and were replaced by Anglo-Saxon paganism until Christian missionaries from Ireland and Rome arrived.

Archaeology: there are few recognisable remains of any kind from the 5th century. After that, archaeological remains are mainly Germanic in style. It was formerly assumed by archaeologists that a change in style of this kind involved a migration of people, but the recent tendency has been to assume that styles change by ‘cultural diffusion’ or elite influence. Sometimes archaeologists seem to forget that ‘no conclusive proof that A’ is not the same
as ‘conclusive proof that not-A’.

Social structure and customs: the evidence from Anglo-Saxon poetry, laws, etc., is of a Germanic/Scandinavian society and customs. However, some sources do refer to ‘wealh’ (Welsh) inhabitants, who are presumed to be surviving Britons. The laws of Ine, king of Wessex in the late 7th century, make it clear that ‘wealh’ people could be either free or slaves (theow), and that they could belong to ‘wealh’ kinship groups, which implies survival of more than isolated individuals. Also, some charters and other documents refer to substantial numbers of slaves. (It complicates matters that the word ‘wealh’ itself, which originally meant ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’, may sometimes be used to mean ‘slave’, implying status rather than necessarily ethnic origin.)

The positive evidence, so far as it goes, seems to me consistent with something closer to the ‘Wipeout’ theory than the ‘Upper Crust’ theory, though with survival of ‘wealh’ populations in varying proportions. The advocates of the ‘Upper Crust’ theory rely heavily on an ‘argument from impossibility’: it is impossible, they say, that a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxon invaders can have wipe
d out a much larger Romano-British population. However, I think this is a misunderstanding of the invasion scenario. Roman-British society rapidly broke down when the Romans left. Even without invasion there would have been a population crash. The Romano-British were virtually defenceless apart from mercenaries who were themselves mainly Germans (Saxons), and quick to invite their relatives over to share the spoils. To destroy a defenceless population, it is not necessary to kill them individually. Just take a few captives in the first village you come to, skin some of them alive in the market-place, and let the rest of them go to spread the news. A wave of panicking refugees will spread out in all directions, and starvation and disease will do the rest. For analogy, suppose you heard that Martians with invincible weapons and sadistic habits had landed twenty miles away. You would run like buggery!

However, the feasibility of a scenario does not mean it is true. Further genetic evidence may finally resolve the controversy. If it is in fact proved that the ‘Celtic’ element was predominant in southern England, this would have interesting implications for cultural history and evolution, for it would show that a complete change of language and culture can be imposed by a dominant minority, in an illiterate pre-industrial society, and in a short period of time.

DAVID BURBRIDGE

A few years back a study indicating that people are attracted to faces like their own came out. One thing that I neglected to mention when I blogged this last was the following:

What Perrett found was students who were born when their parents were older than 30 overwhelmingly preferred older faces. Students whose parents were younger when they were born selected younger faces as more attractive.

Those with older parents, Perrett said, “were less impressed by youth.”

Perrett’s colleague Anthony Little, also of St. Andrews University, has since followed up with another study looking at hair and eye color. His results show that people generally prefer faces with the same eye and hair color as their parent of the opposite sex (as in a woman’s father or a man’s mother).

The implication of the last finding for interracial relationships and children of mixed heritage is intriguing. Since most Asian-white relationships in the United States are female-male respectively, it would be interesting to see the pattern of spousal choice of men and women of biracial origin. The above results indicate that Eurasian women in the United States should prefer white men while Eurasian men should prefer Asian women as partners. It would probably be best to look at Hawaii to see if there is a pattern since the racial mix there is balanced enough that there is a wide choice of spouses.

Posted by razib at 12:50 AM

Our Islamic Fine-Tuning Project is an introduction to a book titled Progressive Muslims. I wish them good-luck, but I suspect that they’re the Spinozas of their age, ahead of their time….