The years before 1914 and the First World War are often termed the “first age of globalization” (with our current era the second). But that’s a little short-sighted view, even though arguably correct in some sense.
Books such as The Fate of Rome and The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization make it quite clear that Classical Antiquity achieved some level of globalization in its corner of Eurasia. At the other end of Eurasia, the Grand Canal also illustrates the importance of trade and economic interdependence in complex pre-modern societies.
But what has been made can be unmade. One of the major arguments in Framing the Early Middle Ages is that the decline in the social complexity of the early medieval period in Europe was due in part to the collapse of the whole fiscal apparatus of the Roman bureaucratic state. Some of these weak post-Roman states were really chiefdoms bound together with personalized rule. A process which advanced the furthest in Britain and the Balkans.
And yet during the first grat maximum of human civilization in the years after 0 international trade extended even beyond the bounds of specific imperium, from one end of Eurasia to the other.
The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy and the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia and India focus mostly on the international aspect of the trade. Much of it is concerned with the role of conspicuous consumption among elites in the Roman Empire in driving this trade, and so the bullion drain to the east. Silk, incense, ivory, and medicines were all imported in large quantities from the east. The state benefited in some sense through taxation, but the drain on specie was a constant consideration. It is well known that Roman coinage, sometimes modified, became the standard in the southern half of India in the first centuries AD.
In a stepwise fashion, East Roman traders pushed across the Indian ocean until in 166 we know that they reached the imperial court in China. This connection seems to have been made by following the trade routes which were already established by Indians into Southeast Asia. Roman geographers were familiar with the general shape of Peninsular Malaysia, as well as Java.
Because our records from China and the Roman Empire are very good, is easy to ignore the reality that a whole network of cities existed along the shores of the Indian ocean. These cities grew up around trade and acted as intermediaries for the demand for particular luxury goods which also pumped specie out of Roman mines. But the decades after the Antonine plague seems to have been defined by multiple regressions across Eurasia, as societies dependent and expecting trade faltered when local nodes collapsed and interrupted the flow.
A few friends pointed out that I likely garbled my attribution of who were the guiding forces between the “classical” and “balance” in the post below (Muller & Dobzhansky as opposed to Fisher & Wright as I said). I’ll probably do some reading and update the post shortly…but it did make me reflect that in the hurry to keep up on the current literature it is easy to lose historical perspective and muddle what one had learned.
Defenders of the Truth in particular paints a broad and vivid picture of a period in the 1960s and later into the 1970s when evolutionary thinkers began to grapple with ideas such as inclusive fitness. E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology famously triggered a counter-reaction by some intellectuals (Wilson was also physically assaulted in the 1978 AAAS meeting). Characters such as Noam Chomsky make cameo appearances.
The death of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reminds us that the last of the students of the first generation of population geneticists are now passing on. With that, a great of history is going to be inaccessible. The same is not yet true of the acolytes of W. D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, or Robert Trivers.
In the 20th century version of the TV series Murphy Brown, there was an episode where three young American scholars were introduced. The big laugh was that they had very Chinese or Indian names. Though it’s probably politically incorrect today to depict it that way, the joke is that the best “American” scholars were not really American….
If you’re an Asian American who remembers the period before the 1990s, you know where I’m coming from. This was an America in black and white, and you were literally the Other if you were outside of those two boxes. People would be surprised that you spoke English without an accent, and inquire where you really came from. This still happens now and then, but back in the 1980s, it was pervasive. It was tradition. The children of the first post-1965 immigrants were not yet grown, so the majority of Asian American adults you saw and encountered were immigrants outside of a few areas, such as Hawaii and portions of the West Coast. In 1980 1.7% of the people residing in the United States were Asian American. Today nearly 7% are Asian American.
This is having an impact. The winners of spelling bees and science fair winners don’t “look like America” anymore.
And this is the major reason why the cultural elite is very upset about the scrutiny which admissions processes at top universities have been receiving. Consider this op-ed in The New York Times, A Damaging Bid to Censor Applications at Harvard. It concludes:
As a leader in higher education, Harvard is trying to change this through its modest consideration of race in admissions. Its goal is to create a diverse community of students who can engage with and learn from people who are different, and carry those experiences with them beyond the university.
Expressions of racial identity are part of the fullness of our humanity. It’s not possible to be blind to race. Pretending as though it is ensures we will forever be divided.
The op-ed is pretty measured and not particularly shoddy as far as it goes. This is the sort of message that the editors and reporters at The New York Times want to amplify. Call it the anti-Bari Weiss effect.
In the 1970s A. J. Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza argued for the validity of a model of Neolithic expansion of farmers into Europe predicated on a “demic diffusion” dynamic. This is in contrast to the idea that farming spread through the diffusion of ideas, not people. The formal theory is inspired by the Fisher wave model, but empirically just imagine two populations with very different carrying capacities due to their mode of production, farmers, and hunter-gatherers. In a Malthusian framework, the farmer carrying capacity in a given area of land might be ~10× greater than that of hunter-gatherers. Starting at the same initial population, the farmers will simply breed the hunter-gatherers out of existence.
As the farmers reaching their local carrying capacity, migration outward will occur in a continuous and diffusive process. For all practical purposes, the farmers will perceive the landscape occupied by hunter-gatherers as “empty.” This is due to the fact that hunter-gatherers often engage in extensive, not intensive, exploitation of resources. In contrast, even slash and burn agriculturalists leave a much bigger ecological footprint. They swarm over the land.
The beauty of the demic diffusion process is that that it’s analytically elegant and tractable. Families or villages engaged in primary production to “fill up” a landscape through simple cultural practices which manifest on the individual scale that allow for aggregate endogenous growth. And this model underlies much of the work by Peter Bellwood in First Farmers and Colin Renfrew’s theories about the spread of Indo-European langauges. You can call it the Walder Frey theory of history.
I didn’t really think deeply about this theory because I didn’t have much empirical knowledge until I read Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization. In this book, Keeley observes that the archaeological record suggests that there was violent conflict between the first farmers and hunter-gatherers in northwestern Europe, near the North Sea. He reports that there seems to have been a broad front of conflict, presumably a prehistoric “no man’s land.” Not only that, but Keeley claims that the spread of agriculture stopped for a period. The barrier between hunter-gatherer occupation and farmer territory was not permeable. Not diffusion.
As a stylized fact, the demic diffusion framework treats all farmers as interchangeable and all hunter-gatherers as interchangeable. On the face of it, we know that this is wrong. But the assumption is that to a first approximation this axiom will allow us to capture the main features of the dynamics in question. This may be a false assumption. The fact is we know that some hunting and gathering populations can engage in intensive resource extraction and remain sedentary.
For a while now I’ve been really haunted by a question about the verisimilitude of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world-building: what are the long-term social and biological consequences of the fact that the Eldar, the elves, are immortal?
Consider the fact that the elves are long-lived, and not particularly fecund. Even when they are, inter-general patterns are spotty. Fëanor had seven sons, but only one grandson! Today we have “helicopter parents”, always worried about the safety of their offspring. How would an elvish society ever flourish if parents are terrified about the risk of their few offspring dying prematurely?
The fact that elves even go to war is indicative of a very strange and alien psychology. If you had the opportunity for everlasting life, would you risk it in battle? Are elves courageous? Or do they just have high time-preference?
But for me, the bigger question is the psychology of Galadriel. At 7,000 years old she is one of the oldest creatures in Middle Earth, along with Gandalf, Sauron, Cirdan, and Glorfindel. Assuming 100 years that’s 70 human lifetimes. J. R. R. Tolkien is quite clear about her physical appearance. She is quite tall, with silver-gold hair. But her head is not particularly large. So the question presents itself: how does her long-term memory allocation work? We know she has a human cranial capacity.
If salient and emotionally resonant memories connected to excitement in the hippocampus are the ones banked, does that mean that Galadriel’s mind is brimming with incredibly vivid recollections? Shouldn’t she be depressed in the present, because the present is going to be so dull compared to her glittering memories of Aman, and the beauty and elegance of the First Age civilization of the Eldar?
Additionally, it seems clear that the Eldar don’t suffer from cognitive decline in the same way as humans. Does that mean perhaps that Galadriel’s intuitive abilities would be suprahuman? Both humans and elves are children of Eru Ilúvatar. There is no evidence from the legendarium that elves are orders of magnitude more gifted than humans in “system 2” thinking, that is, rational reflection. But in their grace and acuity in matters of perception are curious. Could be it be a function of acquired “system 1” faculties, as opposed to what they were born with?
Perhaps the fey grace of the Eldar is not a matter of their natural abilities, but a function of developmental psychology? If the 10,000-hour rule is a thing, how about the 100-generation rule?
Finally, the elvish recourse to writing strikes me as peculiar in light of their immortality. They seem to be primary producers and foragers who don’t engage in much trade, so accounting is not highly valued in all likelihood. And writing does not confer the gains of the advantage of immortality to an already immortal species.
Note: For those readers who suggest that this post may mean that I never have sex, I already have three children. That’s more than most elves!
If you have any background in evolutionary biology you are probably aware of the controversy around the neutral theory of molecular evolution. Fundamentally a theoretical framework, and instrumentally a null hypothesis, it came to the foreground in the 1970s just as empirical molecular data in evolutionary was becoming a thing.
At the same time that Motoo Kimura and colleagues were developing the formal mathematical framework for the neutral theory, empirical evolutionary geneticists were leveraging molecular biology to more directly assay natural allelic variation. In 1966 Richard Lewontin and John Hubby presented results which suggested far more variation than they had been expecting. Lewontin argued in the early 1970s that their data and the neutral model actually was a natural extension of the “classical” model of expected polymorphism as outlined by R. A. Fisher, as opposed to the “balance school” of Sewall Wright. In short, Lewontin proposed that the extent of polymorphism was too great to explain in the context of the dynamics of the balance school (e.g., segregation load and its impact on fitness), where numerous selective forces maintained variation. The classical school emphasized both strong selective sweeps on favored alleles and strong constraint against most new mutations.
And yet one might expect low levels of polymorphism from the classical school. The way in which the neutral framework was a more natural extension of this model is that even if most inter-specific variation, most substitutions across species, are due to selectively neutral variants, most variants could nevertheless be deleterious and so constrained. Alleles which increase in frequency may have done so through positive selection, or, just random drift. Not balancing forces like diversifying selection and overdominance.
The general argument around neutral theory generated much acrimony and spilled out from the borders of population genetics and molecular evolution to evolutionary biology writ large. Stephen Jay Gould, Simon Conway Morris, and Richard Dawkins, were all under the shadow of neutral theory in their meta-scientific spats about adaptation and contingency.
That was then, this is now. I’ve already stated that sometimes people overplay how much genomics has transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology. But in the arguments around neutral theory, I do think it has had a salubrious impact on the tone and quality of the discourse. Neutral theory and the great controversies flowered and flourished in an age where there was some empirical data to support everyone’s position. But there was never enough data to resolve the debates.
From where I stand, I think we’re moving beyond that phase in our intellectual history. To be frank, some of the older researchers who came up in the trenches when Kimura and his bête noire John Gillespie were engaged a scientific dispute which went beyond conventional collegiality seem to retain the scars of that era. But younger scientists are more sanguine, whatever their current position might be because they anticipate that the data will ultimately adjudicate, because there is so much of it.
Disentangling the effect on genomic diversity of natural selection from that of demography is notoriously difficult, but necessary to properly reconstruct the history of species. Here, we use high-quality human genomic data to show that purifying selection at linked sites (i.e. background selection, BGS) and GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) together affect as much as 95% of the variants of our genome. We find that the magnitude and relative importance of BGS and gBGC are largely determined by variation in recombination rate and base composition. Importantly, synonymous sites and non-transcribed regions are also affected, albeit to different degrees. Their use for demographic inference can lead to strong biases. However, by conditioning on genomic regions with recombination rates above 1.5 cM/Mb and mutation types (C↔G, A↔T), we identify a set of SNPs that is mostly unaffected by BGS or gBGC, and that avoids these biases in the reconstruction of human history.
This is not an entirely surprising result. Some researchers in human genetics have been arguing for the pervasiveness of background selection, selection against deleterious alleles which effects nearby regions, for nearly a decade. In contrast, there are others who argue selective sweeps driven by positive selection are important in determining variation. Unlike the 1970s and 1980s these researchers don’t evince much acrimony, in part because the data keeps coming, and ultimately they’ll probably converge on the same position. And, the results may differ by species or taxon.
Finally, some of you might wonder about the implications for demographic inference which preoccupies me so much on this weblog. In the big picture, it probably won’t change a lot, but it will be important for the details. So this is a step forward. That being said, the possibility of variable mutation rates and recombination rates across time and between lineages are also probably quite important.
As you may not know Google+ was finally given an explicit sunset schedule. Google tried twice to tackle Facebook but failed both times. But it turns out that Facebook may never have a successor. A centralized social-graph has weaknesses, and younger cohorts seem to be creating segmentation. Their parents are on Facebook, so they have a nominal Facebook account. But the real action is on other platforms.
Life on the Dirtiest Block in San Francisco. Having drinks with friends at the top of hotels and high rise condominium complexes makes you forget that far below the homeless have come out and taken over the night.
Why most narrative history is wrong. First, this seems to be more about ‘popular’ history today, and the mainstream of past history. One reason contemporary academic history is so boring for most people is that it resists grand narrative temptation.
With that being said, this is more of an indictment on modern journalism.
Max Boot is making the rounds promoting his new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. I haven’t read the book, but having listened to him on various podcasts, one thing that annoys me about this guy: his faction of maximalist neoconservatives and war-hawks in the post-9/11 era were cheering on the mass psychosis which led to this nation backing multiple military adventures. In particular, I’m talking about the invasion of Iraq, which cost $2 trillion dollars, 4,500 American soldiers’ lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.
Instead of starting in 2015, he should start in 2003.
We analyze whole-genome sequencing data from 141,431 Chinese women generated for non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). We use these data to characterize the population genetic structure and to investigate genetic associations with maternal and infectious traits. We show that the present day distribution of alleles is a function of both ancient migration and very recent population movements. We reveal novel phenotype-genotype associations, including several replicated associations with height and BMI, an association between maternal age and EMB, and between twin pregnancy and NRG1. Finally, we identify a unique pattern of circulating viral DNA in plasma with high prevalence of hepatitis B and other clinically relevant maternal infections. A GWAS for viral infections identifies an exceptionally strong association between integrated herpesvirus 6 and MOV10L1, which affects piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) processing and PIWI protein function. These findings demonstrate the great value and potential of accumulating NIPT data for worldwide medical and genetic analyses.
In The New York Timeswrite-up there is an interesting detail, “This study served as proof-of-concept, he added. His team is moving forward on evaluating prenatal testing data from more than 3.5 million Chinese people.” So what he’s saying is that this study with >100,000 individuals is a “pilot study.” Let that sink in.
A new paper on Chinese genomics using hundreds of thousands of low-coverage data from NIPT screenings is making some waves. I’ll probably talk about the paper at some point. But I want to highlight the frequency of rs17822931 in Han Chinese. It’s pretty incredible how high it is.
Because the derived variant SNP, which is correlated with dry flaky earwax when present in homozygote genotypes, is also associated with less body odor, it has been studied extensively by East Asian geneticists. Basically, individuals who are homozygote for the ancestral SNP, which is the norm in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, tend to have more body odor, and in societies and contexts where this is offensive these people are subject to more ostracism in East Asia as they are a minority (some of the studies in Japan were motivated by conscripts who elicited complaints from their colleagues).
The relatively low frequency in Guangxi is to be expected. This province was Sinicized only recently. As in, the last 500 years. And it still retains a huge ethnic minority population, and many of the Han in the province likely have that ancestry. But the question still arises: why do the Han have such a high frequency of rs17822931?
Black, Michael L., et al. “Genetic ancestries in northwest Cambodia.”
In the commentsbelow a reader has pointed out that there are Y and mtDNA results for Cham people.
This Austronesian group was once dominant in what was termed Annam by the French, the central regions of coastal Vietnam between the deltas flanking the northern and south (dominated by the Vietnamese and Khmer respectively). The Cham were a seafaring population and had extensive contacts with maritime Southeast Asian and the network of Austronesian peoples.
As such, the Cham were influenced by the currents of cultural change to their south, and as by the early modern era many had become Muslims. But a minority resident in Vietnam retained their Hindu religious identity, and this reflects a deep current of Indianization which took root among them in the centuries before 1000 AD. The boundary between ancient Champa and Đại Việt was also a civilizational boundary, between the elite culture of India and China.
The commenter states:
As far as I can see, this sample of Chams from Binh Thuan Province, Vietnam does not exhibit any clear South Asian influence in its mtDNA. This contrasts starkly with the significant (18.6% to 32.2%) South Asian influence that is apparent in the Y-DNA of the male subset of the same sample
This seems right. As you can see above I’ve found plenty of evident that R1a1a is found in Southeast Asia where it shouldn’t be. Notice that among northern groups in China R1a1a is pretty frequent too. Obviously from a different source, but the same general pattern. And in that case we have plenty of historical evidence of interaction with Indo-Europeans on the steppe.
I’m not very conversant in mtDNA. This paper argues that the Mon people of Thailand have some mtDNA affinities with India. I created this pivot table for readers to double-check (the “MO” populations are Mon).
The history of Southeast Asia, or perhaps more accurately the quasi-history of Southeast Asia since so many of the records are from China and elsewhere, indicates strong Indian influence in the period before 1000 AD. The standard model is that this is cultural diffusion. And by and large Southeast Asian peoples are are mostly indigenous. But, a non-trivial minority of their ancestry is recent, but pre-colonial, gene flow from the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, the imprint is easier to see in the Y chromosome than the mtDNA. The legends of marriages between Indian Brahmins and native princesses in places like Cambodia probably do reflect something real in the dynamics of the early Indianization.
The years before 1914 and the First World War are often termed the “first age of globalization” (with our current era the second). But that’s a little short-sighted view, even though arguably correct in some sense.
The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy and the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia and India focus mostly on the international aspect of the trade. Much of it is concerned with the role of conspicuous consumption among elites in the Roman Empire in driving this trade, and so the bullion drain to the east. Silk, incense, ivory, and medicines were all imported in large quantities from the east. The state benefited in some sense through taxation, but the drain on specie was a constant consideration. It is well known that Roman coinage, sometimes modified, became the standard in the southern half of India in the first centuries AD.
