Does Tad Williams still have game?

Like many people I was quite taken with Tad Williams Memory, Sorry, and Throne, when they came out in the years around 1990. George R. R. Martin has admitted that Williams’ trilogy helped awaken him to the possibilities of the fantasy genre.

I tried to read his Shadowmarch series, but I didn’t find it as original so gave up after one and a half books. So I was excited for Williams to go back to a world where he seemed to shine. The first reviews for The Witchwood Crown make it seem like it’s actually pretty good, and perhaps even might be better then the original series. Not sure frankly I’ll ever get to reading it, but who knows.

Addendum: In the fall Brandon Sanderson is coming out with Oathbringer, and R. Scott Bakker’s Unholy Consult will be out at the end of July. I preordered the latter because I thought Bakker’s third book in the tetralogy was actually better than the first two so I have hopes the fourth will be best of all.

Basal humans in our evolutionary closet

The ancient genome from South Africa was of not because it confirmed what many had long suspected: the deep structure of modern humans in Africa goes back quite a bit further than we had been assuming. A few years ago I co-wrote an op-ed for USA Today where I initially wrote that the Khoisan divergence from other humans was around ~200,000 years ago. For various reasons I let a “fact-checker” change that to ~150,000 years ago. But as I told my co-author Alex Berezow people had access to whole genomes just leaning toward an older date than in the current literature.

Now we know that the date of divergence may be closer to ~300,000 years. Both because of the ancient DNA, and the Moroccan fossils which make it obvious that morphology associated with our own lineage was already beyond incipient before 300,000 years ago.

The past was more complicated than we think. Ancient DNA has made us toss many of our preconceptions out. For example, several years ago researchers concluded that the Out of Africa populations exhibited a different structure than we had thought. Populations of the Near East and Europe had ancestry from a group that was basal to all other non-Africans. That is, if you have a family tree then Oceanians, East Asians, Amerindians, Siberians, and European hunter-gatherers would be on one branch. On the other branch would be “Basal Eurasians” (BEu), named due to their basal position on the tree in comparison to all other non-Africans. Ancient DNA has not uncovered any population which is mostly BEu. Early Holocene Near Eastern populations, the various first farmers, invariably seem to show mixture between BEu and a West Eurasian element similar to what gave rise to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe.

It seems possible we may never find “pure” BEu samples. We know that 10,000-15,000 years ago in Europe there was a massive expansion of a population of hunter-gatherers with stronger affinities to modern Middle Easterners than in the past. Perhaps this was part of a broader expansion of this group of hunter-gatherers across vast swaths of Western Eurasia, and in the process they absorbed the BEu populations until there were no pure populations left?

These questions were triggered by novel results which couldn’t be accommodated by current accepted models. This reminds me of a paper from over a year ago which presented some puzzling results which make much more sense now, Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals. The authors compared the Altai Neanderthal genome, the Denisovan genome, and those of modern humans (as well as a European Neanderthal). The stylized phylogenetic tree is one which the Neanderthal-Denisovan clade spits off from African proto-modern humans ~600,000 years ago. Then around ~400,000 years ago you see the divergence between Neanderthals and Denisovans. This gives us rough expectations as to the nature of the genetic variation in these populations, as they shared quite distinct periods of evolutionary history together and apart.

What the authors found is that a small minority of the Altai Neanderthal genome exhibited much stronger affinities to modern African populations than to the Denisovan. On the order of ~5%. Looking at the length of the haplotypes they estimated that the admixture occurred ~100,000 year ago. Curiously, at least at the time, this modern human population was basal to all modern humans. The authors estimate that the divergence from modern lineages occurred about ~200,000 year ago based on what was understood about modern human differentiation at the time.

At the time that was pushing it, though not unreasonably so. Now that number is probably comfortably defensible. One important point to note is that the modern human admixture was from a group equally related to all Africans. This implied that this group separated before the division of the Bantu and the Yoruba. So if you accept the most recent genomics then this group may date to closer to 260,000 years before the present. And in fact if the fossil record is correct they might have separated as early 350,000 years before the present. Additionally, the group which published the South African genome study posited another group, Basal Africans (BA), who diverged far earlier than the Khoisan from most African (and also non-African) groups.

Maximal Neanderthal range

The Neanderthals are a well studied group. We know what their range was. One can spit all sorts of speculative scenarios, from wide range proto-modern humans pushing deep in Eurasia during the Eemian interglacial 130,000 years ago. Or, it may have been through contact in the Near East and expansion of a somewhat admixed Neanderthal population north and east over time. Who knows? At least until there’s more ancient DNA….

Desperately seeking the secret of FOXP2


Since the early 2000s FOXP2 has shown up again and again in the press and scientific literature. Dubbed the “language gene” it exhibits evidence of accelerated evolution in the human lineage after it split from other apes. Additionally, a homolog of the same gene shows evidence of evolutionary change distinctive to songbirds and whales. Obviously this locus is involved in vocalization. Mutated mice on FOXP2 can even sing.

It isn’t difficult to connect the dots here. From 2002:

Dr. Paabo says this date fits with the theory advanced by Dr. Klein to account for the sudden appearance of novel behaviors 50,000 years ago, including art, ornamentation and long distance trade. Human remains from this period are physically indistinguishable from those of 100,000 years ago, leading Dr. Klein to propose that some genetically based cognitive change must have prompted the new behaviors. The only change of sufficient magnitude, in his view, is acquisition of language.

Klein’s thesis, advanced in The Dawn of Human Culture, is that a singular genetic change resulted in some sort of developmental cascade that allowed for the emergence of syntactically rich recursive language. And from language comes culture, and from culture comes world domination.

It was a clean and powerful hegemony while it lasted, but genomic and archaeological findings of the last decade have put such a elegant and simple model under a harsh light. With genomic technology even FOXP2 turns out to be much more complex and rich than the earlier reports had suggested. Neanderthals exhibited all the same mutations as modern humans to make them distinctive from chimpanzees. In other words, the changes on FOXP2 by and large predate the emergence of modern humanity, and go back closer to the root of the hominin lineage (Neanderthals and modern humans diverged ~600,000 years ago).

But FOXP2 keeps coming back. Why? It is an important gene. But another issue is that researchers still perceive in it the key to the holy grail of finding out what makes us distinctively human.

A new preprint (which is somewhat peculiarly formatted), takes another look at FOXP2, Human-specific changes in two functional enhancers of FOXP2:

Two functional enhancers of FOXP2, a gene important for language development and evolution, exhibit several human-specific changes compared to extinct hominins that are located within the binding site for different transcription factors. Specifically, Neanderthals and Denisovans bear the ancestral allele in one position within the binding site for SMARCC1, involved in brain development and vitamin D metabolism. This change might have resulted in a different pattern of FOXP2 expression in our species compared to extinct hominins.

The big picture is now the authors are focusing on gene expression levels as what might allow for modern human traits to be distinctive. Basically the DNA does not magically turn into protein. Biological machinery has to transcribe the sequence, and to transcribe it it has to bind to a particular region, a transcription factor binding site.

Most of the analysis involves comparing genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the human reference. I would be curious if they looked across lots of whole genomes to check if there was polymorphism in modern human populations. If modern humans with Neanderthal and Denisovan mutations had perfectly fine speech, that would be interesting.

Also, they spend a lot of time talking about how other genes interact and express with FOXP2, and all the other functions that are implicated. This is important, because of course selection may have nothing to do with speech, though perhaps speech changes are a side effect? Remember to that the Altai Neanderthal had some modern human admixture, and that one of the introgressed regions turns out to be FOXP2.

This sort of comparative genomic style research is interesting and suggestive. But we need more population wide analysis.

But, the authors do allude other work using genetic engineering where cell lines did show radically difference gene expression based on the mutation above. I do believe that CRISPR/Cas9 technology is cheap enough and going to be widespread enough that someone’s going to play around with splicing in “human” variants into primate models. Meanwhile, bioethicists will furrowing their brows about sequencing humans….

Why you should learn some population genetics

From reader surveys I know a substantial portion of the people who will see this post are financially well off (of those who aren’t, a large number are students). Therefore, you can invest in some books.

Often people ask me questions related to population genetics in the comments (sometimes I get emails). That is all well and good. But it is always better to be able to fish than have to ask for fish. Additionally, learning some population and quantitative genetics allows you to develop some tacit schemas through which you can process information coming at you, and through with you can develop some general intuition.

If you have a modest level of mathematical fluency and and the disposable income, here are three indispensable books which are like the keys to the kingdom:

* Elements of Evolutionary Genetics
* Principles of Population Genetics
* Introduction to Quantitative Genetics.

If you don’t have the cash to spare, there are online notes which are pretty good:

* Graham Coop’s Population Genetics notes
* Joe Felsenstein’s Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics

There are others online resources, but they are not as comprehensive. John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide is good as very gentle introductions go, but if you are going to spend money, I think just plumping down for a more comprehensive textbook (which will have more genomics in it) is better over the long run.

The goal of getting these books isn’t to make you a population geneticist, but, if you are interested in evolutionary questions it gives you a powerful toolkit. Really nothing in evolutionary process makes sense except in the light of population genetics.

Genome sequencing for the people is near

When I first began writing on the internet genomics was an exciting field of science. Somewhat abstruse, but newly relevant and well known due to the completion of the draft of the human genome. Today it’s totally different. Genomics is ubiquitous. Instead of a novel field of science, it is transitioning into a personal technology.

But life comes at you fast. For all practical purposes the $1,000 genome is here.

And yet we haven’t seen a wholesale change in medicine. What happened? Obviously a major part of it is polygenicity of disease. Not to mention that a lot of illness will always have a random aspect. People who get back a “clean” genome and live a “healthy” life will still get cancer.

Another issue is a chicken & egg problem. When a large proportion of the population is sequenced and phenotyped we’ll probably discover actionable patterns. But until that moment the yield is going to not be too impressive.

Consider this piece in MIT Tech, DNA Testing Reveals the Chance of Bad News in Your Genes:

Out of 50 healthy adults [selected from a random 100] who had their genomes sequenced, 11—or 22 percent—discovered they had genetic variants in one of nearly 5,000 genes associated with rare inherited diseases. One surprise is that most of them had no symptoms at all. Two volunteers had genetic variants known to cause heart rhythm abnormalities, but their cardiology tests were normal.

There’s another possible consequence of people having their genome sequenced. For participants enrolled in the study, health-care costs rose an average of $350 per person compared with a control group in the six months after they received their test results. The authors don’t know whether those costs were directly related to the sequencing, but Vassy says it’s reasonable to think people might schedule follow-up appointments or get more testing on the basis of their results.

Researchers worry about this problem of increased costs. It’s not a trivial problem, and one that medicine doesn’t have a response to, as patients often find a way to follow up on likely false positives. But it seems that this is a phase we’ll have to go through. I see no chance that a substantial proportion of the American population in the 2020s will not be sequenced.

Over the long term civilization matters

In Peter Turchin’s work modeling human historical dynamics he introduces the idea of a “meta-ethnic” identity. Quite often this is synonymous with a world religion. These identities emerged in the last few years as human polities scaled so large as to expand beyond tribal-national boundaries.

These sorts of dynamics are clear when we think about the Crusades, the defense against the Ottomans in the 17th century, or the Iberian “division” of the world between Castile and Portugal. Common ties of civilization and identity allow for ingroup cohesion, as well as heightening hostilities against outgroups.

Of course there many exceptions. When reading The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean I recall being struck by how southern Italian city-states like Amalfi opportunistically allied with Muslim pirates against other Christian powers. Similarly, during the Battle of Vienna Protestant Hungarians marched with the Ottomans against the broader Christian alliance which came to the aid of the Habsburgs.

These are two instances which show short term self-interest or necessity driving choices of group coalitions. Amalfi, like later Italian city-states, found it in their interest to do business with Muslims, even if it was to the detriment of their co-religionists. This did not mean they were no longer Christians. But in many instances they put that identity aside for their own gains. In the case of the Protestant Hungarians there’s was an alliance of necessity.

As recounted in Divided by the Faith the decades leading up to the Battle of Vienna the Hungarians experienced a concerted campaign of conversion and persecution of the part of the Habsburg monarchy in concert withe Roman Catholic Church. The Habsburg’s Austrian lands were brought back fully into Catholicism, as was most of Imperial Hungary. It is no coincidence that Hungarian Reformed Protestantism was strong in the east, which had been under Ottoman influence. The arrival of an expansive Austrian monarchy was an existential threat for them.

The flip side are cases where groups with the same civilizational identity engage in wars over resources or boundaries. The conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea would certainly fit into this mold, and to some extent the Great War in the Congo which has flared for two decades now.

This sort of dynamic has been used to argue that Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is not a useful framework. But on the contrary what Turchin and colleagues have shown is that over the long run civilizational fissures tend to result in the most vicious and dehumanizing wars.

Open Thread, 6/25/2017

I’m beyond the “keto flu.” That was tough.

A few months ago I asked a Hindu nationalist friend of mine the best persons who promote the “Out of India Theory.” One name he forwarded to me was Koenraad Elst. Though Elst and I disagree on facts in relation to the issue at hand, a reader has pointed out that he’s taken a very strident and clear stand against the ad hominem attacks against me from those who would consider him a fellow traveler. This honorable stance frankly has shocked me to my core, as I’m just not used to it after engaging with SJWs and various ideologues for so long. The ad hominem is so easy that it takes some fiber and integrity to resist it.

One consequence of Elst’s clear stand is that I think I do need to revisit some of his work.

Read some of The Enigma of Reason yesterday. I would recommend it. I’ve read some of Dan Sperber’s previous stuff, like Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, and it’s familiar. Also, Sperber was a major influence on Scott Atran, so even though this book is new many of its ideas and orientation are prefigured in In Gods We Trust.

SMBE 2017 in about a week at the JW Marriott in Austin. I’m not going to be there the whole time, but when I’m there I’ll be tweeting.

Waking Up With Sam Harris #83 – The Politics of Emergency (with Fareed Zakaria). I agree with Fareed Zakaria more on Islam.

A left-wing journalist is attacking Richard Dawkins on the basis of his family having had African servants when they lived in Kenya. This person is some sort of Max Blumenthal clone from what I can see. A fringe element of far Left basically has a modus operandi: pick someone to destroy, and extract elements of their life to flog them as evil (call them racist, sexist, something -ist).

This is great on Twitter, but not optimal for movement building. I understand that there is a reasonable, moderate, liberal, Left. But this radical Left wants many of us out there on the street, our families dispossessed. When the lines are drawn, this is why some of us will keep voting Republican despite all our issues with the party: we don’t want to be personally destroyed.

Related to the chilling impact of this behavior, Liberals and Immigration, Kevin Drum says:

I have no idea what, if anything, we can do about this. But I will say this. I lurk on a number of message boards populated by liberals, and what they say privately is very often more nuanced than what they say publicly.¹ On immigration, there are probably lots of liberals willing to concede that there needs to be a limit to the flow of undocumented workers. There are cultural, economic, and nationalistic reasons for this. But there’s little benefit to saying so in public. It just invites massive, social media swarms insisting that you’re a closet racist.

White Cheese is white Supremacy

This is in response to Peter Beinart’s piece How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration. I think Michael Brendan Dougherty has a pretty good response to this in National Review. Before he wrote this piece he observed on Twitter that Beinart wasn’t confronting something that had changed on the Left. I responded: “white supremacy.”

White supremacy has gone from being the KKK or Neo-Nazis, to basically all of American society. The term is used liberally and without much care. Just like the term racist or sexist. It’s both a cudgel in tactical debates, and, for many it’s a sincere belief. A Sister Souljah moment could never happen today for a white male Democratic politician because he would be accused of being a white supremacist for attacking a black woman (Obama himself was attacked for pandering to ‘respectability politics’).

On immigration, note that in the mid-2000s Republicans could have probably been able to muster the courage to ignore the base if the Democrats had agreed to a bill to flood this country with high skilled immigration (a proposal by some Republicans). But for political and policy reasons the Democrats wanted something comprehensive, which includes lower skilled workers who are both the Democrats’ future vote bank, and people who are important (often relatives) to Democratic voters.

Above Drum asks about conservatives and which views they keep quiet about in relation to policy. I think there is more variation on responses to climate change, foreign policy, and tax policy than you might think. The fear comes not from the social media mobs, but from the wealth people and interest groups funding fellowships.

About ten years ago Reiham Salam and Ross Douthat wrote Grand New Party in part to stake out a fiscally more moderate and socially conservat(ish) framework. There are obviously a lot of voters in that position, but the donor class was never a big fan. Trump seems to have taken that plank in a more populist direction and run with it, but there doesn’t seem to be the policy and personnel infrastructure to execute on this, so you see a more donor class friendly presidency (at least so far).

The Evolution meeting is happening right now in Portland. Check out the hashtag, #evol2017.

California just added four more ‘discriminatory’ states to its travel ban. This is going to impact academics in the UC system who may want to visit UT or UNC or Duke. As a friend pointed out the state of California is really punishing the blue areas of red states, since these are the places which interact the most with California. I think this is just BDS thinking spreading. It may trigger counter proposals, but as I said the people most impacted in red states are Democrats. Perhaps there won’t be any reaction? Like economic sanctions on authoritarian states this is going to hurt people you don’t want to hurt, without impacting the people you are targeting. But it makes you feel good.

Happy Eid.

In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been posting on Brown Pundits a fair amount.

The assumption of pulse admixtures is easy, but it’s often wrong. I really hope this gets more wide circulation because it might be leading us astray in many ways. Though this varies by taxa. Plants probably have less pulse admixture going on that social organisms.

In Turkey, No Teaching Of Evolution, But Banning Gays Is Fine. It’s hard to gauge Erdogan sometimes, because he made some liberal(ish) noises as late as the Arab Spring in 2011. No longer.

Translating Genesis. Alter’s translation and commentary is my favorite so far, but it’s been many years since I read Genesis. Any good recommendations? (please don’t say NIV)

New job.

Enrichment of low-frequency functional variants revealed by whole-genome sequencing of multiple isolated European populations.

Draft genome of the Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). Huge on Sami Twitter.

Savarkar’s book Hindutva needs a new cover.

A former executive is accusing Infosys of racism that favours Indians #whiteSupremacy.

Genetic loci associated with coronary artery disease harbor evidence of selection and antagonistic pleiotropy. Not a huge surprise.

Did I mention SciReader is back?

Estimates of Introgression as a Function of Pairwise Distances.

Leaderless Uber Scrambles to Prevent Employee Exodus. I think if Netflix ever stumbles they’ll have enormous issues immediately, since their hiring and firing policy puts zero emphasis on loyalty.

US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub. If you don’t know about Sci-Hub, read the article.

Robots That Make 400 Burgers an Hour May Soon Take over Fast Food Restaurants. Burger meat is usually the low quality stuff. I suspect a combination of lab grown meat and/or vegan meat-substitute is going to come to dominate the market in a generation. Combined with automated burger making a whole sector will be transformed (in contrast, steaks require a lot more work to imitate, so people will probably eat real meat steaks for a while).

Natural selection shaped the rise and fall of passenger pigeon genomic diversity.

Revenge of the scaly Tyrannosaurus.

We need more housing for the upper upper middle class

$1.5 million dollar house in Palo Alto

When people talk about real estate affordability and gentrification often the focus is on housing for the poor. Myself, I don’t think this is the issue. People with means wouldn’t move into poor neighborhoods if there was housing they could afford elsewhere.

Most of the “multi-million dollar” houses in Palo Alto are not mansions. Many are not really worth that much because of the house; it’s just the land. These are modest homes which really are appropriate for middle class buyers. In fact they were often built with middle class buyers in mind.

But in places like Palo Alto they are now for two types of people: long-term residents (who also likely don’t pay much property tax), and those with very high incomes and/or wealth due to selling companies.

From an article published last year:

The average price of the Palo Alto homes that went on the market today is just over $3 million. With a 20 percent down payment and the state’s average 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 3.77 percent, the average monthly payment on those homes would be a little over $14,000, two-thirds of the monthly income for a quarter-million dollar household.

It’s hard to imagine that two married Google engineers in their twenties could afford a house in Palo Alto. It’s beyond their means. But these homes are not luxurious in and of themselves. They’re all that the upper upper middle class have access to nearby.

In Silicon Valley they love to reimagine stuff. But only some people like the demi-god Elon Musk are focusing on concrete things, like cars and rockets. They need to re-imagine housing. There’s no reason the people coding the future should live in post-war ranch homes.

Indian genetic history: before the storm

Over at Brown Pundits I’ve mentioned the continuing simmer of controversy over a recent piece, How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate. This has prompted responses in the Indian media from a Hindu nationalist perspective. One of these notes that the author of the piece above cites me, and then goes on to observe I was fired from The New York Times a few years ago due to accusations of racism (also, there is the implication that I’m just a blogger and we should trust researchers with credibility like Gyaneshwer Chaubey; well, perhaps he should know that Gyaneshwer Chaubey considers me “unbiased” according to an email exchange which I had with him last week [we all have biases, so I think he’s wrong in a literal sense]).

I was a little surprised that a right-wing magazine would lend legitimacy to the slanders of social justice warriors, but this is the world we live in. Those who believe that everything written about me in the media, I invite you to submit your name and background to me. I have contacts in the media and can get things written if I so choose. Watch me write something which is mostly fact, but can easily be misinterpreted by those who Google you, and watch how much you value the objective “truth-telling” power of the press all of a sudden.

There’s a reason so many of us detest vast swaths of the media, though to be fair we the public give people who don’t make much money a great deal of power to engage in propaganda. Should we be surprised they sensationalize and misrepresent with no guilt or shame? I have seen most of those who snipe at me in the comments disappear once I tell them that I know what their real identity is. Most humans are cowards. I have put some evidence into the public record to suggest that I’m not.

Perhaps more strange for me is that the above piece was passed around favorably by Sanjeev Sanyal, who I was on friendly terms with (we had dinner & drinks in Brooklyn a few years back). I asked him about the slander in the piece and he unfollowed me on Twitter (a friend of Hindu nationalist bent asked Sanjeev on Facebook about the articles’ attack on me, but the comment was deleted). It shows how strongly people feel about these issues.

I’m in a weird position because I’m brown and have a deep interest in Indian history. But that interest in Indian history isn’t because I’m brown, I’m pretty interested in all the major zones of the Old World Oikoumene. Aside from some jocular R1a1a chauvinism I don’t have much investment personally (I just told said Hindu nationalist friend who turns out to be R2 to clean my latrine; joking of course, though I’m sure he resents that I’m descended on the direct paternal line from the All-Father & Lord of the Steppes and he is not!).

In the aughts I accepted the model outlined in 2006’s The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations. But to be frank it always struck me as a little confusing because the tentative autosomal data we had suggested that many South Asians were closer to West Eurasians than deep divergences dating to the Last Glacial Maximum would suggest. Since I’ve written something like 5 million words in 15 years, I actually can check if I’m remembering correctly. So here’s a post from 2008 where I express reservations of the idea of long term deep heritage of Indians separate from other West Eurasians. The reason I was so impressed by 2009’s Reconstructing Indian Population History is that it resolved the paradox of South Asian genetic relatedness.

To recap, Reich et al. proposed that modern Indians (South Asians) could be modeled as a two way mixture between two distinct populations with separate evolutionary genetic histories, Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians (ANI and ASI). How distinct? ANI were basically another West Eurasian population, while ASI was likely nested in the clade with Eastern Non-Africans. Additionally, there was a NW-to-SE and caste admixture cline. In other words, the higher you were on the caste ladder the more ANI you had, and the closer your ancestors were from the north and west, and more ANI you had. The difference between Y and mtDNA, male and female, could be explained by sex-biased migration.

But there were still aspects of the paper which I had reservations about. After all, it was a model.

  • Models are imperfect fits onto reality. The idea of mass migration seemed ridiculous to me at the time, because even by the time of the Classical Greeks it was noted that India was reputedly the most populous land in the world (to their knowledge). But ancient DNA has convinced me of the reality of mass migrations.
  • I wasn’t sure about the nature of the closest modern populations to the ANI. The researchers themselves (in particular, Nick Patterson) told me that the relatedness of ANI to Europeans was very close (on the order of intra-European differences). But modern Indians do not look to be descended from a population that is half Northern European physically. Again, ancient DNA has shown that there was lots of population turnover, and it turns out that Europeans and ANI were likely both compounds and mixed daughter populations of common ancestors (also, typical European physical appearance seems to have emerged in situ over the past 5,000 years).
  • The two way admixture modeled seemed too simple. I had run some data and it struck me that North Indian populations like Jats had something different than South Indian groups like Pulayars. In 2013 Priya Moorjani’s paper pretty much confirmed that it was more than a two way admixture along the ANI-ASI cline.

This March BMC Evolution Biology published Silva et al’s A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals. It has made a huge splash in India, arguably triggering the write up in The Hindu. But for me it was a bit ho-hum. If you read my 2008 post it is pretty clear that I suspected the most general of the findings in this paper at least 10 years back. It is nice to get confirmation of what you suspect, but I’m more interested to be surprised by something novel.

Nevertheless A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals has come in for lots of repeated attack in the right-wing Indian press. This is unfair, because it is a rather good paper. I suspect that it wasn’t published in a higher ranked journal because most scientists don’t consider the history of India to be that important, and they didn’t really apply new methods, as opposed to bringing a bunch of data and methods together (in contrast, the 2009 Reich et al. paper was one of the first publications which showed how to utilize “ghost populations” in explicit phylogenetic models with relevance to human demographic history).

As it happens I will be writing up my thoughts in detail in an article for a major Indian publication (similar circulation numbers as The Hindu). This has been in talks for over six months, but I’ve been busy. But a month or so ago I thought it was time that I put something into print for the Indian audience, because I felt there was some misrepresentation going on (i.e., the Aryan invasion theory has not been been refuted by genetics, but this is what many Indians assert).

For any years people have told me there are certain topics that shouldn’t be talked about. I have offended people greatly. There are many things people do not want to know. I have come to the conclusion this is not an entirely indefensible viewpoint (though if you accept this viewpoint, I think acceptance of authoritarianism is inevitable, so I hope people will toe the line when the new order arrives; knowing their personalities I think they will conform fine). But my nature is such that I continue to have nothing but contempt for the duplicitous and craven manner in which people go about these sorts of private conversations. I assume that as someone with the name “Razib Khan” I will be attacked vociferously by Hindu nationalists, who will no doubt make recourse to the Left-wing hit pieces against me to undermine my credibility. The fact that these groups are fellow travelers should tell us something, though I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

I will write my piece that reflects the science as I believe it is, without much consideration of the attacks. That is rather easy for me to do in part because I live in the United States, where denigrating the deeply held views and self-esteem of Hindu nationalists is not sensitive or politically protected (unlike say, Muslims). And Hindu nationalists are less likely to kill me by orders of magnitude than Muslim radicals, and they have far less purchase in this nation then the latter (though you may be interested to know that very conservative Muslims follow me on Twitter; they’re actually more open-minded than many SJWs to be entirely honest).

Let me go over some general points that I see coming up over and over on the relationship between Indian (pre)history and genetics in the critiques .

One of the major critiques has to do with the nature of R1a-Z93 and its subclades. Basically this Y chromosomal haplogroup, the greatest that has ever been known, exhibits a strong signature of very rapid expansion over the past 4,000 years or so. It is divided from Z282. While Z93 is found in South Asia, Central Asia, and Siberia, Z282 is European, with its dominant subclade the one associated with Eastern Europeans. Both of these clades of R1a have gone through massive expansion. In the Altai region R1a is 40% of the heritage of peoples who are now predominantly East Eurasian today. But they are Z93. Additionally, ancient DNA from the Pontic Steppe dated ~4,000 years ago from Srubna remains is Z93, as are Scythian remains from the Iron Age.

Much of the argument comes down to dating, and citing papers that give deep coalescence numbers between difference branches of R1a1a. Hindu nationalists and their fellow travelers point to recent papers which give dates >10,000 years ago, and so place the origin of Z93 plausibly in the Pleistocene. The problem is that Y chromosomal coalescence dating is something of a mug’s game. Often they use microsatellite data whose mutational rates are highly uncertain. In contrast, using SNP data, which has a slower mutation rate but requires a lot more data, you get TRMCA (common ancestry) between Z93 and Z282 around ~5,800 years ago. But coalescence estimates often have wide confidence intervals of thousands of years. And even with these intervals, the assumptions you make (e.g., mutation rate) strongly influence your midpoint estimate.

The Y chromosomal data is powerful, but its interpretation is still buttressed upon other assumptions. The really big picture framework is the nature of ancient genome-wide variation across Eurasia. Lazaridis et al. 2016 condition us to a prior where much of Eurasia was subject to massive population-wide genetic changes since the Holocene. Therefore, I am much less surprised if there was massive genetic change in India relatively recently. The methods in Priya Moorjani’s paper and in other publications make it obvious that mixture was extensive in South Asia between very distinct groups until about ~2,000 years ago. In fact, Moorjani et al. using patterns of variation across the genome to come at a number of two to four thousand years ago as the period of massive admixture.

Though we don’t have relevant ancient DNA from India proper to answer any questions yet, we do have ancient DNA from across much of Europe, Central Asia, and the Near East. What they show is that Indian populations share ancestry from both Neolithic Iranians and peoples of the Pontic steppe, who flourished ~5 to ~10,000 years ago. To some extent the latter population is a daughter population of the former…which makes things complicated. Conversely, no West Eurasian population seems to harbor ancient signals of ASI ancestry.

One scientist who holds to the position that most South Asian ancestry dates to the Pleistocene argued to me that we don’t know if ancient Indian samples from the northwest won’t share even more ancestry than the Iranian Neolithic and Pontic steppe samples. In other words, ANI was part of some genetic continuum that extended to the west and north. This is possible, but I do not find it plausible.

The reasons are threefold. First, it doesn’t seem that continuous isolation-by-distance works across huge and rugged regions of Central Eurasia. Rather, there are demographic revolutions, and then relative stasis as the new social-cultural environment crystallizes. This inference I’m making from ancient DNA and extrapolating. This may be wrong, but I would bet I’m not off base here.

Second, it strikes me as implausible that there was literally apartheid between ASI and ANI populations for the whole Holocene right up until ~4,000 years before the present. That is, if Northwest India was involved in reciprocal gene flow with the rest of Eurasia over thousands of years I expect there should have been some distinctive South Asian ASI-like ancestry in the ancient DNA we have. We do not see it.

Third, one of the populations with strong affinities to some Indian populations are those of the Pontic steppe. But we know that this group itself is a compound of admixture that arose 5,000-6,000 years ago. Because of the complexity of the likely population model of ANI this is not definitive, but it seems strange to imagine that ANI could have predated one of the populations with which it was in genetic continuum as part of a quasi-panmictic deme.

Finally, many of the critiques involve evaluation of the scientific literature in this field. Unfortunately this is hard to do from the outside. Citing papers from the aughts, for example, is not wrong, but evolutionary human population genomics is such a fast moving field that even papers published a few years ago are often out of date.

Many are citing a 2012 paper by a respected group which argues for the dominant model of the aughts (marginal population movement into South Asia). One of their arguments, that Central Asian migrant should have East Asian ancestry, is a red herring since it is well known that this dates to the last ~2,000 years or so (we know more now with ancient DNA). But the second point that is more persuasive in the paper is that when they look at local ancestry of ANI vs. ASI in modern Indians, the ANI haplotypes are more diverse than West Eurasians, indicating that they are  not descendants but rather antecedents (usually the direction of ancestry is from more diverse to less due to subsampling).

There are two points that I have make here. First, local ancestry analysis is difficult, so I would not be surprised if they integrated ASI regions into ANI and so elevated the diversity in that way (though they think they’ve taken care of it in the paper). Second, if the ANI are a compound of several West Eurasian groups then we expect them to be more diverse than their parents. In other words, the paper is refuting a model which is almost certainly incorrect, but the alternative hypothesis is not necessarily the true hypothesis (which is a more complex demographic model than many were testing in 2012).

But there are many things we do not know still. Many free variables which we haven’t nailed down. Here are some major points:

  • Y chromosomal lineages have a correlation with ethno-linguistic groups, but the correlation is imperfect. R1b and R1a seems correlated with Indo-European groups, but both these are found in high proportions in groups which are putatively mostly “pre-Indo-European” in origin (e.g., Basques, Sardinians, and South Indian tribals and non-Brahmin Dravidian speaking groups). Also, haplogroups like I1 in Europe expand with Indo-Europeans locally, suggesting there was lots of heterogeneity in Indo-Europeans as they expanded. In other words, Indo-European expansion in relation to powerful paternal lineages did not always correlate with ethno-linguistic change.
  • There are probably at minimum two Holocene intrusions from the northwest into South Asia, but this is a floor. The models that are constructed always lack power to detect more complexity. E.g., it is not impossible that there were several migrations of Indo-Europeans into South Asia which we can not distinguish genetically over a period of a few thousand years.
  • If one looks over all of South Asia it may be that ASI ancestry in totality is >50% of the total genome ancestry. I don’t have a good guess of the numbers. If this is correct, perhaps most South Asian ancestors 10,000 years ago were living in South Asia (though the fertility rate are such in Pakistan that ANI ancestry is increasing right now in relative rates).
  • But, this presupposes that ASI were present in South Asia in totality 10,000 years ago, rather than being migrants themselves. If ancient DNA confirms that ANI were long present in Northwest India, I hold then it is entirely likely that ASI was intrusive to South Asia! The BMC Evolutionary Biology Paper does a lot of interpretation of deep structure in haplogroup M in South Asia. I’m moderately skeptical of this. Europe may not be a good model for South Asia, but there we see lots of Pleistocene turnover.

So where does this leave us? Ancient DNA will answer a lot of questions. Pretty much all scientists I’ve talked to agree on this. My predictions, some of which I’ve made before:

  1. The first period of admixture is old, and dates to the founding of Mehrgarh as an agricultural settlement. The dominant ANI component dates to this period and mixture event, all across South Asia. The presence in South India is due to expansion of these farming populations.
  2. A second admixture event occurred with the arrival of steppe people. Those who argue for the Aryan invasion model posit 1500 BCE as the date. But these people probably were expanding in some form before this date.
  3. We still don’t know who the antecedents for the Indo-Aryans were. Probably they were a compound of different steppe groups, and also other populations which were mixed in (by analogy, in Europe it is obvious now that there was some mixture with the local European farmers and hunter-gatherers as Europeans expanded their frontier westward; the same probably applies for Indo-Aryans are the BMAC).

Nearly 20% of McDonald’s will have electronic kiosks by the end of 2017


McDonald’s hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks:

Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald’s calls “Experience of the Future,” includes digital ordering kiosks that will be offered in 2,500 restaurants by the end of the year and table delivery.

There are 14,500 locations. Right now 500 stores have kiosks.