& a happy New Year.

& a happy New Year.

Ross Douthat, Into The Mystic:

But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to church in 1962, but many fewer people went out looking for their own private encounters with the numinous. This isn’t a surprising correlation, since the traditional Christian churches tended to either discourage mystical freelancing or (in the case of Catholicism) encourage it only within the framework of monastic discipline. The churches constrained and channeled Americans’ religious impulses; their declining influence let a hundred mystic flowers bloom. Christianity became less culturally powerful, but religion itself – whether you were a tongues-speaking Pentecostal, a Gaia-communing pantheist, or some combination thereof – became much more freewheeling and intense.

Whether atheists, agnostics, and secular-minded Americans should prefer this dispensation depends on which raises their hackles more: Having laws and moral norms that are heavily influenced by Christianity, or having a culture that’s heavily influenced by mysticism and supernaturalism. If you favor legal abortion, no-fault divorce, and easy access to pornography, today’s America is a more pleasant place to live than the America of mid-century. (Especially if, like some atheists, you find pantheism to be the most congenial form of theism.) But if you don’t like having your seatmate on an airplane ask if you’ve been born again…if you don’t like being harangued at cocktail parties about the Mayan apocalypse or the healing power of crystals…if you don’t like seeing the shelves at your local bookstores filled up by authors who claim to have conversed with the Almighty…well, then you might legitimately feel nostalgia for an earlier, less mystical America.

I recently recorded a diavlog with Nicholas Wade on The Faith Instinct. In that book Nicholas outlines the change in religion from its “primitive” state to what we would term “higher religion.” Higher religion is built on the foundations of primitive religion, as institutional religion becomes less powerful in the lives people in the Western world people seem to be reverting back to their cognitive “default” settings. More often when you strip away adherence to theology you do not get atheism, you get animism.

Is this good for the small set of atheists and asupernaturalists? On an interpersonal level it might add a bit more confusion to one’s life, as you never know which direction someone trying to sell you on supernaturalism is going to come from. But on a societal level it probably reduces the ability of religious elites to manipulate sects as cohesive functional units toward their ends.

Just a weird random thought. In the early 20th century the Ainu of Japan were considered by many physical anthropologists a branch of the white race. This fit in nicely with the historical fantasy of the period which often featured “Lost Races,” with a lost white race the best of all. By contrast, the Negrito and Melanesian populations were considered outliers of the black race. Though the idea of Ainu as white seems to have diminished, in part because those sorts of ideas aren’t too popular today, and partly because hardly any Ainu remain who do not have substantial ancestry from the Japanese. On the other hand, there remain pan-Africanists and black nationalists who talk about the unity of black peoples, from India to Melanesia. To the left is a photo where I’ve placed an Ainu man from the 19th century next to contemporary Andaman Islanders. I think you could understand why physical anthropologists of the period classified populations as they did based on appearance.

But with all the more recent genetic studies it seems pretty clear that the Ainu and the Andaman Islanders are part of a broader swath of “easterners” who swept out of Africa (in fact, there are Y chromosomal haplogroups which the Ainu share with Andaman Islanders). Older classical markers suggested that the Ainu were an East Asian people, and the uniparental markers suggest the same thing (I don’t see any more recent SNP array studies which look at the Ainu). As for the Andaman Islanders, it seems very likely that they’re simply an island population of the ancient “eastern” substrate of South Asia, which has been admixed on the mainland with a “western” quasi-European element, which in many regions and castes is now dominant. The Ainu and the Andaman Islanders are probably just the remains of the physical diversity which was once much more common in eastern Eurasia than it is today. That diversity may have gone by the wayside because of the expansion of the Han and the Austronesians, but it may serve as a hint that there may be only a few basic human racial morphs which reoccur, whether by chance or adaptation.

Addendum: The non-Bantu populations of southern Africa look East Asian. Also, since the Reich et al. paper on Indian genetics came out I’ve been reading up, and now I can see how the Andaman Islanders do kind of “look Indian.” More specifically, there are some subtle facial features which South Asians have which must have come down from people distantly related to the Andaman Islanders. Look at the individual on the left in the photo above.

Most of the readers of this weblog probably have as much use for the Singularity as John Derbyshire, but for those of you who dig Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, you might check out Transhuman Goodness. The author, Roko Mijic, is so normal he could almost pass as a civilian!

I was skimming through a book on Scandinavian migration to Utah the other day, these Scandinavians being converts to Mormonism. The author noted that while most Scandinavian Americans settled in areas where farming was relatively easy, these converts went to Utah, which is a less than optimal territory when it comes to per unit productivity. Fair enough. But it got me thinking about why Mormons are so successful: perhaps it’s just a function of migration. There were lots of American sects which arose during the early 19th century. The Disciples of Christ and the Seventh Day Adventists derive from the same period of religious ferment during the Second Great Awakening. But the Mormons have been the most successful. Why?

Perhaps it was the Mormon theology, the awesomeness of Joseph Smith. Or perhaps Mormons really are the One True Faith and god is on their side. But then I remembered that the original Mormons were New Englanders, and that most of New England’s population in 1800 derived from the period between 1630-1640. The 20-30,000 who left England to establish a Puritan utopia in the New World. In the colonial period, and up to the Civil War, New Englanders were the most fertile group of Americans. Those Puritans who emigrated to New England in the 17th century, and remained (many went back to England during the period of Cromwell), have been extremely successful genetically in relation to their relatives in the home country. The reason is the simple Malthusian nature of biological increase; America had more room for growth (though England’s population did grow very fast in the two centuries after the Puritans left, it did not match America).

The Utah Mormons are not the only descendants of Joseph Smith’s religious idea. The Community of Christ, once the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, and long under the stewardship of the Smith family, remained in the Midwest while Brigham Young led the migration west. Today the Community of Christ is in many ways a small mainline Protestant denomination, having lost or never developing the uniqueness of the Utah Mormons in terms of their theology. Numerically and socially it is relatively marginal, to the point where many Americans would be surprised as its existence (splinter Mormon sects which practice polygamy get a lot more press for obvious reasons).

The Community of Christ might illustrate the dynamic of attraction and absorption which occurs to splinter sects within a mature society. Over time minorities standardize their norms with that of the majority as they become respectable. This means they lose their distinctive cohesion. By contrast, the Utah Mormons were a people apart for several generations because of the nature of geographical distance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only with the rise of modern communication have they been assimilating, deemphasizing (at least in public) some of the more exotic aspects of their theology which might shock mainstream Christians. But because of the long incubation period in Utah the Church of Latter Day Saints remains fundamentally separate from what most Christians refer to as the “Great Tradition” of orthodox Christianity. By analogy to biology what occurred was an instance of allopatric religious speciation. In this model the great success of Mormons rests on their human geography during their formative period.

Some world historians point out that it has been nearly 1,500 since the last great distinctive world religion arose which challenged the status quo. Sikhism and Mormonism are instances of religious speciation, but they are small potatoes compared to Islam. Additionally, both of these traditions have shown some evidence of drifting back into their parent tradition (though Sikhs resist this, Hindus often claim Sikhs as simply a Hindu sect, while some Mormons have been slowly emphasizing their shared commonalities with other Christians). Perhaps modern communication technology and mobility will prevent future religious fissions on planet Earth? Perhaps subsequent to Islam the technological and communication gaps which new religions utilized to overturn older orders simply closed? In fact, if you read the travels of Ibn Battuta you might conclude that Islam itself served as a critical catalyst in closing up all the remaining gaps and discontinuities across the Old World oikoumene!

I already posted on the new paper on African American Genetics. I noticed that Frank Sweet says:

It is interesting that the 18 percent mean of Euro DNA markers in A-As has been holding steady for about 8 years now, having replaced the prior estimate of 25 percent.

Where did the prior estimate come from? I recall seeing it as well too. Were the older markers biased towards ones which might have been shaped by recent selection? The new paper doesn’t have anything definitive in regards to this (they they mention the variance in African vs. European across different regions of the genome), though certainly some genes which affect malaria seem to have been shifted away from what you’d expect.

Cosmos and Culture.

I referenced a paper in PNAS yesterday, and I thought it might be good to actually point to it today. There’s nothing that new in the paper. It confirms the finding that ~20% of the ancestry of African Americans is European, and, that African ancestry seems to be much more dominant when it comes to components of the genome presumably disproportionately contributed by females (2/3 of X chromosomes). In any case, the paper, Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture in West Africans and African Americans:

Quantifying patterns of population structure in Africans and African Americans illuminates the history of human populations and is critical for undertaking medical genomic studies on a global scale. To obtain a fine-scale genome-wide perspective of ancestry, we analyze Affymetrix GeneChip 500K genotype data from African Americans (n = 365) and individuals with ancestry from West Africa (n = 203 from 12 populations) and Europe (n = 400 from 42 countries). We find that population structure within the West African sample reflects primarily language and secondarily geographical distance, echoing the Bantu expansion. Among African Americans, analysis of genomic admixture by a principal component-based approach indicates that the median proportion of European ancestry is 18.5% (25th-75th percentiles: 11.6-27.7%), with very large variation among individuals. In the African-American sample as a whole, few autosomal regions showed exceptionally high or low mean African ancestry, but the X chromosome showed elevated levels of African ancestry, consistent with a sex-biased pattern of gene flow with an excess of European male and African female ancestry. We also find that genomic profiles of individual African Americans afford personalized ancestry reconstructions differentiating ancient vs. recent European and African ancestry. Finally, patterns of genetic similarity among inferred African segments of African-American genomes and genomes of contemporary African populations included in this study suggest African ancestry is most similar to non-Bantu Niger-Kordofanian-speaking populations, consistent with historical documents of the African Diaspora and trans-Atlantic slave trade.

One of the value-adds from this paper is that the authors explored how African Americans related to disparate African populations. The historical records indicate that American slaves arrived disproportionately from the regions to the west of the Bight of Bonny. In other words, black Americans derive predominantly from the non-Bantu populations of West Africa, from Senegal down to Nigeria. This is in contrast to Brazil, where the black population was reputedly of more diverse origin, including many Bantu speakers from Angola as well as West Africans.
I reedited part of figure 1 to show which African groups are in the study and how they relate to each other genetically:

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