I’m finally getting settled in to this website. Basically I’m my own sysadmin at this point, so I’ll be making changes and tweeks…but if you want to bookmark this URL, it is probably fine now. As always, my permanent RSS, feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed, is always a good bet too. Right now https seems to be breaking formatting. I will fix that. Also, the database crashes too often. I have a 1 minute cron running but that’s not sufficient.
For a few days it looks like comments did not work because of a plugin I activated. If you have a problem like this you can contact me on Twitter or email me at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com (you can find this on my own website too).
A long-time reader (as in, back to 2002) messaged me on Facebook a few days ago and asked if I’d stopped blogging, as they’d heard a rumor from another long-time reader. Instead of asking me, 15 seconds of checking on the interwebs, or razib.com, would have clarified things. Some day I may stop blogging. But I have been saying that since 2002.
Almost finished Reformations. Seems to be losing steam toward the end. This is reasonable, as no one would want to start getting into the Thirty Years War in any detail.
The New York Times has a piece up, ‘Age of Empires’: How 2 Dynasties of Art Forged China’s Identity. Reminds me of a book that is on my “essential reading” about China list, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. To me what is curious and notable about China is that Han dynasty mores and views are much more reflected in modern China than that of Augustan Era Rome is in modern Italy.
U.S. increasingly sees Iran’s hand in the arming of Bahraini militants. By the lights of our own values we are not the “good guys” here. Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni elite, around a Sunni royal family, which has placed the Shia majority in a position of subjugation. A relatively peaceful Shia protest movement was violently suppressed by an alliance of Gulf states during the Arab Spring, with the help of Pakistani mercenaries. The United States averted its eyes.
There are legitimate reasons to engage in realpolitik. But the press does not do us any favors when it implicitly misleads the American public on the broader context, as people abroad are quite often much more well versed in our duplicity and hypocrisy.
This is not to say that I don’t think the United States is on a balance a force for good, but over the last generation our portfolio has been decidedly mixed, but our political and journalistic elite has masked this from the public by and large unless there is a partisan angle to it. But really this is a problem of elite hubris, on both the Right and Left.
Human demographic history impacts genetic risk prediction across diverse populations is now out in AJHG. I might blog it again. It’s an important paper.
This week Alexander Kim tweeted from a conference with a lot of ancient DNA results. One datum is that pre-classical Egyptians did not have any Sub-Saharan African ancestry…at least based on the samples they had. I’m mildly skeptical of this finding. First, we know of the old presence of Nubian soldiers and slaves in Egypt. And second, it seems likely that there was some early mixing which was equally distributed throughout the population and recombined in the genetic background. We’ll see.
I assume that a bunch of ancient DNA papers will break before SMBE 2017. Speaking of which, I will be around then. Planning on meeting some friends and checking out the scene.
Finally, I have some free time in the next two weeks to read books. So I’d appreciate recommendations, though my reading stack is currently pretty high….
I’ll give you my reading list:
Conley & Fletcher: The Genome Factor
Dugatkin & Trut: How To Tame a Fox
Laland: Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony
Rubin: Rulers, Religion, and Riches
Smil: Energy and Civilization, A History (out next month)
Concerning Egypt and genetics, if I were those scientists, I’d be careful. They’d better get ready for a lot of hurt feelings from the peanut gallery. It’d be much more prudent to gather a large number (~100) of samples from various times and places before stating what the Egyptians looked like genetically. Saying they had no SSA DNA, especially if it turns out wrong later, will just overexcite the white nationalists and enrage the Afrocentrists. Another time bomb is India–I wouldn’t want to break any bad news about their ancient DNA, either.
I recently enjoyed: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, and suspect you might too.
“The Ownership of Enterprise” (1996) by Henry Hansmann can be hard to find, but is an incredibly insightful and eye opening analysis of the forces that drive organizations to be organized as for profit shareholder owned companies v. non-profits v. worker co-operatives v. mutual companies owned by consumers, etc. with convincing historical and empirical evidence that drives the theory instead of being cherry picked to fit the theory. It also examines how government policies like the creation of the FDIC can change those incentives, and explores some of the features of rural America that make it such favorable territory for co-operatives.
https://www.amazon.com/Ownership-Enterprise-Henry-Hansmann-ebook/dp/B002OSY7G4/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=
Compared to much of your usual fare it would be light reading, and since it is largely descriptive instead of theoretical, it doesn’t include the endless equations ill grounded in reality found in most economics texts. It is paradigm shifting. I guarantee that you will come away from it with at least three or four novel ideas that you will be able to apply to your analysis of history and current events on a semi-regular basis.
A couple of other interesting books for providing background context to your understanding of the nuts and bolts of how cultures in East Asia work are:
* “Law without lawyers: A comparative view of law in China and the United States” (The Portable Stanford) Paperback (1977) by Victor H Li which describes the political and legal organization of China in the formative period that led to the modern regime.
* “Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West”
(2000) by T.R. Reid is a detailed ethnographic description of daily life in Japan with a focus on its social culture. (Full disclosure, T.R. Reid is also one of my neighbors and ran for public office (he didn’t win) in a district that included mine.)
No book suggestions at the moment, but I wanted to note that Freddie DeBoer, who I have mentioned in the comments numerous times, has redeveloped his website. He’s decided to give up on his attempts to publicly scold the left to developing better tactics and is focusing on his professional background in educational research. One of his first posts, on selection bias being the primary contributor to differences in educational performance. His most recent covers the degree to which a recent study found IQ versus conscientiousness changes school performance – with the conclusion that the dull but driven do tend to perform better in school than the smart but lazy. The only truly surprising thing to me is the same study found that high conscientiousness is linked to lower levels of reasoning. I had never read about a negative coorelation between this trait and intelligence before. He also had a recent post debunking idea that peer effects matter much in education. None of this stuff will be that revolutionary to people who have followed your blog for years, but I’m guessing that much of it is not well known to the center left/left social science audience he is attempting to reach. Hopefully he will continue to post on the subject for the foreseeable future.
As an aside, although we’ve heard very little about it, I’m very interested in the Baikal Hunter Gatherers. From the little bit I’ve read online, it seems they are more East Asian than any modern East Asians, which could mean that some West Eurasian like ancestry was incorporated into East Eurasians near the foundation of the modern population. Or, perhaps it’s just a result of drift.
(edit – I just hit submit and nothing happened. I’m trying again. If this is a duplicate, feel free to delete.
Razib, was the subject of today’s Google Doodle, the late structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan, related to you?
https://www.google.com/doodles/fazlur-rahman-khans-88th-birthday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazlur_Rahman_Khan
I just finished Ian Baker’s “Heart of the World”. Would recommend. It’s about Baker’s attempt to map the Tsangpo Grand Canyon, the deepest gorge in the world. I bought it for the adventure aspect, but it also offered a good history and current cultural snapshot of the tribes who inhabit the border regions of Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh (and into Assam). They can be real party animals, it turns out.
Also, if I may seek your expert opinion:
On a scale of Impossible to Extremely Likely, how feasible is it that two full sisters, whose mother is 99% N. European (according to Ancestry), would have wildly different amounts of Amerind ancestry? One sister has 0%, comporting to the mother’s result, but the other has a confidence range between 16-21%. Their father is no longer around to take the test; he was white but purportedly had some “Cherokee blood” way back when. Theoretically, sure, he could have passed down Amerind ancestry only to one daughter—but, I dunno, a pure binary result seems fishy to me. Does mom have some explaining to do?
Razib: I am still waiting for your recommendation on Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves.
Re: the Google doodle, just say “yes” without clarifying that you mean related in the sense that we’re all related.
Isn’t asking if a given Khan is related to a particular famous Khan like asking the same of someone named Smith or Jones?
So DeBoer has taken up writing about selection bias and IQ? His run-in with the woke left must have had a quite the effect. The people who trained him at Purdue’s writing studies program must be looking on in horror.
These are not new thoughts by him. He has posted similar things in a less comprehensive fashion for years. From what I can gather from his past writings, he approaches things with the prior that HBD is categorically wrong – at least when it comes to differences between populations, if not individuals within those populations. But he is secure enough in this belief he doesn’t feel the need to engage in sophistry, and believes that an open and honest investigation of the facts in a scientific fashion is the best way to get to the bottom of things. I know when Razib abortive career as a NYTimes columnist was destroyed, he made comments that he didn’t understand why people felt the need to do it, that if they disagreed with some of his beliefs they should just engage with those statements with logic, not attempt to destroy his whole reputation. Call it naivete, but he’s not interested in playing games for political points within the “left tribe” in any sense.
Re: a given Khan is related to a particular famous Khan.
Had I first read Razib’s post “Why are so many of us “star-men””, which includes the statement: “The fact that I have the last name Khan is simply a legacy of the custom whereby South Asian Muslim lineages of a particular status accrued the surname to denote their position within Islamicate civilization.”, I would have posted the Google Doodle link there with the caveat that Razib is probably not related.
Baikal Hunter-Gatherers were supposedly a very homogenous population, which could cause extreme effects on PCA if there was enough of them included – this is the famous Kalash effect. They didn’t show any ADMIXTUREGRAPH fits which are common in ancient DNA papers these days and would have been more informative about ancient East Asian events.
By the way Razib, since you asked about genetics blogs on twitter here’s two that you might or might not have read: http://kurdishdna.blogspot.com/
http://terheninenmaa.blogspot.com/
Relatively narrow in focus (the Near East and NE Europe respectively) but they do their own analysis like the well known Eurogenes and now less active Dienekes, instead of just rehashing.
I enjoyed The Punisher’s Brain, by Morris Hoffman: Contra Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we evolved in groups, and our groups were more successful in the long run if people co-operated, but in the short run people often can do better by cheating. So,
“This deeply embedded tension between cooperation and cheating, between community and individuality, between selfishness and selflessness is what I call The Social Problem. It has been the central challenge of our species since our emergence.”
The solution was that we evolved brains that blamed and wanted to punish. An imperfect solution like so much of evolution. We blamed on the basis of harm and intent. But since a group with members constantly holding grudges would not work very well, our brains also evolved to forgive, especially when repentance is shown. (Our brains also evolved a distinction between “us” and “them”–and we thought differently of us and them. Holding a grudge against outsiders could actually be helpful in strengthening our group.)
Over evolutionary time, he says our brains developed three kinds of punishment. 1st party punishment: “We punish ourselves with conscience and guilt.” 2nd party punishment: “We punish our tormentors with retaliation and revenge.” 3rd party punishment: “As a group, we punish the wrongdoers we are able to detect with retribution.” Since we can imagine the future, the possibility of these punishments largely keeps us from “doing wrong.”
There’s a lot of evidence, not just “just-so stories.”
Somewhat complementary, Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. And Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease.