Open Thread, 10/21/2018

You may have noticed I haven’t been posting much. Busy with other things, like ASHG, work, family, etc. I don’t normally post “won’t be posting often” notices, as no one really cares much about blogs…but when I go into lower production mode people sometimes worry. No reason to worry.

Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is an excellent book. So is The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. Finally, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. One of the most interesting things about Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is how Blanning recounts the importance of personally playing and repeatedly listening to music in the life of the German monarch. He was apparently a very competent flutist.

There was talk about ASHG about the Amy Harmon article, Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed). It seems most of the geneticists I know personally were contacted by Harmon at some point over the last two years. A lot of work went into this. Many of our quotes were obviously not used. That’s called journalism.

There was a period when many frog-Nazis were on Twitter brandishing a particular STRUCTURE bar plot (since frog-Nazism has been severely purged by Twitter I see this far less often). I understand that many journalists and people of the “chattering-thinking” classes are strongly influenced by what they see on Twitter in terms of their perception of what’s going on in the world.

Additionally, to be honest for many white people racism is somewhat an abstraction. They need to make recourse to instrumental variables. The SNL election night sketch which shows white liberals talking about how it’s never been so bad, and black comedians nodding along, illustrates a real trend, and that is that many white liberals feel like there has been a massive upsurge of racism over the past few years.* But as a nonwhite person who has lived in this country since the early 1980s, it is clear that America is far less racist than it was back then, and our society has been defined by a gradual decrease in racial prejudice. White support for laws banning interracial marriage went from about 25% in the 1980s to 10% in 2002, when the question stopped being asked because it was such a marginal viewpoint.

A story about the social and political of implications evolutionary population genetics is a reasonable one. And, it might make a somewhat interesting academic paper as well. But the prominence of this piece to me cuts to a deep disagreement about the nature of racial conflict and difference within human societies. Immanuel Kant’s abstract and intellectual reflections on race may be alarmingly white supremacist to many moderns, but the profitable character of exploitation of sugar and the utility of slavery in the West Indies, and the rise of the West in a much more robust manner as signified by the McCartney Mission in the 1790s, was far more important in shaping the emergence of a very vigorous white supremacist ideology in the late 19th century which culminated in Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

I enjoy discourses on the intersection of race and genetics as much as the next person. I write them myself. But the most concrete thing I can do for the “racial question” is what I’m doing already: participating in the amalgamation of very distinct pedigrees and producing Americans related to a much larger fraction of the world’s population. White Americans who believe in the cause of racial social justice and anti-racism can do something very easily if they so choose: select a non-white partner and produce mixed children. If you are already partnered up, encourage your children to do so. This will make a bigger difference than retweeting how great diversity is, while not living it in your own life. For white progressives, do understand that your nonwhite allies notice the overwhelming pallor of the types of people who become and remain your intimates. You spend an afternoon on a racially diverse panel. Why not spend life in a racially diverse manner? Because I am a political outsider to these issues nonwhites probably feel more comfortable telling me how they perceive you don’t have much skin in the game. An ounce of action is worth a pound of talk (also, you can proactively give money to nonwhite people from your own disposable income).

The above is not a troll at all. I’m not the sort of person who thinks that the type of person another human being becomes friends with, or partners with, is my business. Do as you wish. But if you accept the premises of most forms of anti-racist talk, then Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 essay which enjoins action still applies.

The Uralic podcast is up. Brown Pundits now have a podcast.

This Elizabeth Warren fact-check by the Daily Caller Foundation’s Emily Larsen is pretty good. Having to listen to political pundits talk about ancestry testing all week has been painful. More need for education….

ASHG photo that I find most amusing.

As most of you probably know, the human genome still has gaps. I felt this year more people talked about those gaps, and how to fill them in. Also, lots of African genetics (this was by plan).

May write some more tutorials soon. Depends on the time.

The Slow Burn podcast ended with talking about Juanita Broderick. The Broderick allegations really have shot into prominence over the last few years. But if the Republicans knew about them in detail, that does make their determination to impeach Bill Clinton far more comprehensible.

I don’t have much to say about the Khashoggi thing you haven’t heard elsewhere.

A new analysis of CEU mutation rates is there is an age effect, most mutations are paternal, and, there might be variation in increases in mutations with older individuals by family.

* Most of my white friends tend to point to particular media anecdotes. As a nonwhite person I have not perceived any difference, and I travel in various parts of the country. Your experience may vary.