“Race” is not a social construction…but “ethnicity” is.

Clarification: Obviously if you are comparing the Japanese and Swedish ethnic groups you would not think they are social constructions, but, the key here is that the ethnic groups correlate to racial differences. My point is that though broad racial clusters seem to exist, ethnic differences are far less clear cut. While the predictive power of race as a level of classification is quite often rather high, that of ethnicity is far less clear cut when the racial component is extracted. There are haplotype discontinuities between neighboring groups (Lithuanians vs. Poles on the TAT-C), but they are far less substantial than the differences between races, and often individuals within each group have a difficult time telling one from another by inspection alone.

The implication is that many ethnic rivalries are, as many people would assume, constructs of culture and history rather than literal blood feuds. Since most wars have been between neighbors, they have been intraracial rather than interracial, and the putative “Race War” to come is a future imagining, not a reflection of past Darwinian history.

Addendum: Leo the Syrian was the emperor who defended Constantinople against the Arabs in the early 8th century, just to show you how cultural-religious divides were much more salient on the ground than racial differences because conflict is more likely between neighbors. The modern age of transcontinental migration has resulted in a terminology of racial conflict & tension that often gets confounded with the more ancient one of ethnic conflict, resulting in confusions. A classic example is the pattern of some Leftists of trying to depict the Palestinians as “people of color” and Israeli Jews as white, when only 50% of Israeli Jews are of European origin, and a substantial portion of the remainder are Yemeni or Ethiopian, ergo, no less “people of color” than Palestinian Arabs.

Posted by razib at 03:19 PM

No, I’m not talking about Oswald Spengler, the great declinist, cyclical history theorist, and, most famously, the author of The Decline of the West. He’s a pretty neat read, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I absolutely love his concept of Western Civilization as a “Faustian” culture. Other than that, he’s sort of a crank, and not much of what he says should be taken too seriously.

Who I’m talking about the author of a great many articles and Q&As over at the Asia Times website who writes under the pseudonym “Spengler.” He’s very interesting and I have read everything that he has written and posted on the Asia Times website. He isn’t exactly “Spenglerian” in his outlook, although he has obviously read him and been influenced by him.

Some have said that they believe he is Henry Kissinger (an absurd idea, especially if one compares Kissinger’s writings and ideas to those of “Spengler”). Nobody really knows who he is, though.

Care to take a guess?

Posted by Arcane at 06:10 PM

Recently I was flipping around channels and saw Bill Maher refer to Arabs keeping “half their population dressed like beekeepers.” I found that hilarious. Now, as Stanely Kurtz has noted Westerners should be really cautious about fiddling with Muslim modes of dress. I’m taking that off the table, rather, I want to focus on the importation of Muslim attire into the West.

Frankly, recently I’ve been moving toward a Kemalist position on this of late. It is basically driven by realism and a rejection of my basic liberal individualist inclinations on these sort of issues. My position is basically undergirded by my study of history and evolutionary psychology, it seems that complex societies tend to treat their women anywhere from moderate levels of patronizing freedom to isolated beekeepers. The exceptions prove the rule: ancient Sparta was a bizarre social experiment that Adolf Hitler took a shine too. Even societies where women had some amount of power, the republican Romans or the Mongols, it was mostly through their relationship to men and it was in a very restricted fashion. By analogy: Bangladesh, Pakistan and India are not feminist nations in any substantive fashion even though they have had female heads of state because those women derived their power through their familial relationships to men.

Not all societies are so blatantly sexist, but those that aren’t tend to be simpler, and closer to our EEA. The modern West is I think in many ways a peculiar, and unstable, throwback to the EEA (see here). It preserves values of cross-gender equality and cross-class egalitarianism that are not typical for large complex rule-based societies that restrict freedom of choice in the interests of social stability. Perhaps patriarchy is inevitable, but, I suspect with some elbow-grease we can maintain this sexual equalitarianism until the end of our species or its transformation into another form (I am skeptical that man-as-we-know it has much of a future beyond 100-200 years).

Does this mean that I espouse legalistic Kemalist positions on the expression of non-normative dress in public? No! Rather, what I think is sane is non-accommodationism on the issue of gender-mixing. There are news reports recently that Muslims in the West want local institutions to “respect” their need for gender segregation in physical education, swimming or would prefer non-male doctors. This is natural as an expression of many traditionalist cultures. Nevertheless, Westerners should not accommodate. I believe that most Muslims will eventually switch over to Western norms on this issue (frankly, most already have, if against their will). There is a precedent for this: the millions of traditionalist Jews who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century. The smaller community of established Reform German Jews were ashamed by the ways of the Eastern European Jews when they first came to American shores, but today, only 10% of Jews are Orthodox, and a smaller percentage are Hasidic. The American society simply did not accommodate Jewish needs when it came to perpetuating their shtetl life, and so you have 4 generations later acclimated Americans. Now, there are differences between Jews and Muslims, but in the United States immigrant Muslims tend to be rather educated, so the model is not wholly rhetoric.

Related: Zack Ajmal has a entry where the issue of Islamic separatism comes up. In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris uses the example of students getting the label of “overestimators” and “underestimators” in a totally arbitrary fashion but still favoring “their own kind” (who they did not know and had no incentive to favor) when disbursing rewards. This is highly illustrative of a tendency toward “groupishness.” The problem with “Islamic dress,” just like “Jewish dress,” is that it perpetuates groupishness. Now, Western society can withstand some amount of intrasocial groupishness, but a People Apart can cause long term problems, and even though some Muslims will reformulate the wearing of Islamic dress as an individual prerogative, the donning of certain attire automatically sends signals to everyone around you about who you are (or might be) and how you view them (or how they think you view them). As a point of law one might circumscribe the individual from the society in which they reside, but as a operational reality it is simply naive.

Additionally, one of the commentors makes a point about Catholic nuns “dressing differently,” and how no one objects to this. This betrays a lack of understanding of the history of anti-Catholicism, and in Roman Catholic nations anti-clericalism. The clerical class is obviously a sanctified People Apart, and so when the Reformation (and later the French Revolution) broke out they were objects of public fury and rage because of their perceived privileges and superiority.

Posted by razib at 03:56 PM

I’m about 1/3 of the way through Narrow Roads of Gene Land and I must report that I misled (inadvertently) when I suggested that suggested that William Hamilton believed that interpopulation marriage would perpetuate heterozygote advantage immunologically, something I’ve discussed before. Well, from what I gather, Hamilton didn’t buy heterozygote advantage. Partially this is because it is rather rare to detect it empirically (this I knew) in relation to how much polymorphism exists within populations (allelic diversity at a locus), and, because he worries that a overdominant line could mutate toward asexuality and so make sexual individuals less fit over the long run.

So what did Hamilton believe? Well, I’m only 1/3 through, but it seems he thought that variance in fitness as a function of time of any given homozygote genotype (this is a model that restricts the number of locii for simplicity’s sake) resulted in prevention of fixation (that is, one type becoming universal). Where do the heterozygotes come in? Well, in a random mating population you will have the production of heterozygote individuals when two differing homozygotes mate. In short, where before I was asserting that homozygotes are byproducts of the maximization of heterozygosity in a random mating population, Hamilton seems to be suggesting that heterozygotes are transitionary forms that are byproducts of fact that the fitness of various homozygote types oscillates as a function of time within a population (they are repositories of genetic diversity that sexual reproduction utilizes to stay ahead of parasitic infection).

I think this can be related to my post on the personality types of “Great Men.” I noted that the Mongols tended to decimate local elites, so that the nobility of the Tatar people was gutted and its male lineages exterminated, but they often treated the common people with magnanimity. Where 10 years previous a humble smith or other artisan would be part of the servile class, and perhaps have few children if any in comparison to the Tatar nobility, with the coming of the Mongols their fitness in comparison with the Tatar leadership would have increased greatly. I also recall reading once that the Spartans often killed Helot males who seemed to display evidence of future leadership capacities. The implication is that the fitness of dominant personalities is a function of time, the perpetuation of less dominant lineages might be the result of the constant churn and elite turnover which this personality type can persevere through. In a period of peace the elite of a given population reproduces as a higher rate, but during times of chaos and war it might be better to keep a low profile and be beneath notice.

Addendum: The variation in fitness of homozygotes as a function of time might explain why in many species there is so little evidence of a reproductive barrier between variant forms: limiting the range of one’s potentional mates is diminishing the recombinant power of sex. Imagine a “ideal” form A, with a variance within the population of the capacity to be fecund witn non-A forms. If at some point in the future A’s fitness drops in relation to non-A forms, A individuals who became reproductively isolated would be at a sharp disadvantage.

Posted by razib at 02:59 PM

It can be hard for girls to find jeans sometimes. Is this because female bodies are particularly difficult because of their morphology? I would submit not. I would submit that it is because women’s jeans have to form fit, while male jeans do not. Why? I think it is because women need to “show off” their bodies to men more than the reverse. So I predict that:

Gay men will wear tight clothes.
Gay women will wear baggy clothes.

Posted by razib at 04:13 PM

Rereading Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, I stumbled upon this fact: Bob Trivers, author of Natural Selection and Social Theory, has had bouts of schizophrenia. As has been noted, William Hamilton, pioneer of ‘inclusive fitness,’ and so a key figure in theories about the evolution of animal societies, was likely autistic. Ironic that two individuals who had profound difficulties in interacting with their fellow man had such an enormous impact on how we model relations between animals, including humans. Also, George Price, who prodded JM Smith toward the crucial ESS, eventually killed himself after giving away all his money to the homeless.

Posted by razib at 06:13 PM

Parents exist for the care of their children, rather than children existing for the “self-fulfillment” of their parents, a concept that has difficulty penetrating the narcissistic, self-absorbed “therapeutic” ethos of the boomer generation.

– me, hereTim Guest, “Bringing Up Me”, The New York Times, 2004 September 26.

When I was 4, my mother became a disciple of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She took a Sanskrit name, dyed her clothes orange and began to do loud meditations in our living room. Soon she left me with my father — they already lived apart — and flew off to the guru’s ashram in India. She replied to my shaky letters with variations on the same answer: ”I’ll be home soon.” When she claimed me back from my dad, she dyed my clothes orange too. For the next seven years, I bounced around the world behind her, living in Bhagwan’s communes in India, England, Germany and Imbler. Bhagwan invented radically new ”dynamic” meditations and therapies; he took nitrous oxide and spoke from a dentist’s chair; he encouraged his disciples to surrender totally to him and to live their lives to the extreme. For my mother, on a rocket-ship rebellion from her strict Catholic girlhood, Bhagwan offered everything she had long hoped for: the path to enlightenment but with free love, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll thrown in.

For the children — at least, for me — Bhagwan’s communes were a different proposition. As each adult struggled to prove himself or herself the most egoless, we competed to show who had the best break-dance moves. As they abandoned the consumerist dream, we fought over Legos and ”E.T.” toys. Intent on building spiritual togetherness as a model for the world, my mother and her friends ignored some of the more practical needs of the children under their feet — forgetting, for example, to take us to the dentist or to clip our fingernails.
….
When I was born, my mother swore she would never let her child suffer the way she had: she felt that her Catholic childhood had crushed her. She gave me what she had longed for.

Posted by jeet at 12:31 AM

“A history of sex”, The Economist, 2004 September 23.

By examining the DNA of living people, [Dr Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson] and his colleagues have found….a lot of variability in the mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA which follows the female line), and much less in the Y-chromosome DNA (which follows the male line). The most plausible explanation for this is that a few men in each generation contribute the bulk of the Y-chromosomes to the next.
….
This news will not surprise biologists. Although a moment’s thought shows the old canard that males are actually, on average, more promiscuous than females cannot be true (since every reproductive act involves one of each) biologists have known for a long time that in most species males want to be more promiscuous than females.God, why are you so cruel?One result which did surprise the researchers was that men’s genes tend to travel farther than women’s. Some 70% of the world’s modern cultures practice patrilocality—in which a woman moves from her native village to her husband’s village when she marries. Until now, it has widely been assumed that this practice would result in women’s genes migrating farther afield than men’s. So, not only are fewer men than women procreating, but they are travelling farther to sow their oats. Clearly, the tall, dark stranger from another place has been an attractive proposition to women for quite some time.Dark? Check. Tall? Dammit!

Posted by jeet at 05:03 PM

In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World the author tells of the decision to kill all the adult males of the Tatar tribe and adopt their children and women into the Mongol nation after the former had been defeated by the latter in war. When reading this sort of thing, I could not help but think that this was the sort of decision that resulted in the fact that today 0.5% of men are direct male-line descendents of a Mongol who lived about ~1000 years ago. Additionally, the author emphasizes the fact that the Mongols had little sympathy for local elites, the implication being that “The Golden Family” (that is, Genghis Khan and his descendents) engaged in elite takeover across a vast swath of Asia.

Obviously this particular Y lineage was socially selected for. Both the Manchus and the Timurids, who were the ancestors of the Moghuls, consciously intermarried with the descendents of Genghis Khan to bolster their pretensions toward imperium (though this would have involved the marriage of non-Genghiside males with Genghiside females, so this would not be part of the spread of the haplotype in question). But after reading Game Theory and Animal Behavior, and in particular the chapter by David Sloan Wilson on machiavellianism, I wonder if more directly functional genes related to personality could have spread via selective sweeps through societies. Wilson considers whether “High Mach” and “Low Mach” individuals could exist in an ESS within a population. He tries to relate this to group selection, which I am skeptical of, but the range in personalities within human populations (a non-trivial minority are “introverted”) seems to beg the question whether the fitness of any given type varies a great deal as a function of time, so that the frequencies of the various alleles on any particular locus can never move toward fixation through selection or drift (that is, polymorphism is maintained).

So, cutting to the chase, what kind of personality makes one a World Conqueror? Here is a common definition for a High Mach: charming, confident and glib, but also arrogant, calculating and cynical, prone to manipulate and exploit. Does this describe what we know of Genghis Khan? I am not so sure, the book I refer to above takes a positive view of the Mongols, nevertheless, one common feature of Genghis Khan’s personality that I have seen noted was the value he placed on personal fidelity and honoring contracts. That is, Genghis Khan seems to have emphasized Tit-for-Tat values, when cities surrendered or his ambassadors were respected, he treated everyone involved fairly or with respect, but when faith was broken and cities rebelled or delegations sent under truce were injured or killed he would unleash the wrath of god upon his opponents (he would accept turncoats to his cause, but would sometimes reject them if they betrayed their oathbound leaders in a particularly disloyal fashion).

Variation of personality types through all populations of modern humans makes one wonder if the various traits might have fitnesses that differ depending on environment. Perhaps intergroup differences in the frequency of say High Machs and Low Machs might exist because of long term ecological & social differences. It is the long term part that is difficult, because most human populations have had to deal with dynamic and changing conditions, as evidenced by the mix of individual personalities within any group (though perhaps Wilson’s group selection theories or introversion and extreme extroversion being perpetuated by balancing selection for the modal type could explain the mix).

But, to those who emphasize the Great Man theory of history, I must ask, why is it that the Huns, Turks, Arabs, Mongols and Manchus produced the Great Men, while other “barbarian” groups like the Yakuts, Hmong, Toda and Berbers did not? Clearly, the circumstances of geography and social environment are important variables that determine the likelihood that a Great Man will express world changing capacities and be the focal point for social & political changes of historical import. But, seeing as how the steppe peoples of Central Asia tended to produce Great Men regularly between 400 CE and 1700 CE, one might look to these people to see if their psychological profiles tend to be characterized by a different distribution than the more settled peoples of the Eurasian periphery.

Posted by razib at 12:10 AM

Joanna Moorhead, “‘For decades we’ve been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we’ve been duped'”, The Guardian, 2004 September 22.

(hat tip: Stambord)

[“T]he glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US[,” says Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who specialises in women’s employment and women’s issues.]The corollary is, of course, that believers in the heritability of intelligence who want to see educated women have more children should champion generous Scandinavian-style child subsidies to tempt women away from the boardroom.

As should conservatives who want to see women at home rather than in the office.

And feminists of a revolutionary bent should take note of how successfully laissez-faire economic policies erode traditional gender roles.

Posted by jeet at 12:33 AM