Great podcast with Mark Koyama on his book Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.
The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca is free on Kindle. It’s an open-access textbook. Though I’m not sure how many people are reading, I do think the distribution of intellectual production needs to be more widespread. This is easy in many of the sciences and social sciences, where papers are the primary way you contribute to the literature. More difficult in history where books matter more.
CCR5-Δ32 is from Central Eurasia (like a lot of things). It’s almost as if being on the margin and isolated isn’t beneficial to adaptation and innovation always.
Saudi Aramco Announces Plans to Go Public. It is interesting to me that Saudi Arabia has never allowed ARAMCO to be run incompetently. The ruling elite is not delusional, they know how their bread is buttered.
A geostatistical approach to modelling human Holocene migrations in Europe using ancient DNA. Looks like a lot of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s illustrations with synthetic maps are making a comeback (different method obviously).
Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up.
Think Indians Are Mostly Non-Vegetarian, Or Only ‘Upper Castes’ Are Otherwise? This Menu Smriti Will Change Your Views. Basically weekly meat consumption is a minority preference in India, and common mostly in West Bengal and Kerala.
Why France is eyeing nuclear power again.
Characterisation of a second gain of function EDAR variant, encoding EDAR380R, in East Asia. The second variant though is not under selection.
Dropshipping journalism. The story of what’s happened at Newsweek. I think it speaks to the current moment in journalism.
“It’s almost as if being on the margin and isolated isn’t beneficial to adaptation and innovation always.”
I think it would be more correct to say its almost always bad to be on the margin and isolated.
Populations which are so become prone to one sided adaptive strategies and miss updates from the large, highly competitive meta-populations.
Homo sapiens first meta-population was in North East Africa and the next was formed in Eurasia.
Chances a fringe group develops superiority in isolation is like zero.
This is true in the cultural fields too. When China and Japan decided to isolate themselves from most of the world, Europe was significantly ahead in some respects, but the distance was not huge by any means and in some respects the high East Asian nations were ahead even.
After the isolation they were completely behind in most respects, even though their starting point was not that bad at all.
Think about a scenario of complete isolation of the Soviet block from the West, how far behind they would have been in 100 years in comparison to the West technology wise.
Biological evlution is usually slower, but the principles are the same.
The main rule and exception are diseases. The adaptation to diseases depends also on where the plague appears first. Can be a small or a large population alike.
The larger has better chances when being hit the first time, but would still suffer a lot more if the smaller did the adaptation already.
Since there is only one comment, allow me to take a bit of a tangent and see if I can spice things up. Apologies for the “Reductio ad Ashkenazim” in advance.
I listened to the Mark Koyama podcast — it was excellent! I followed up by going to his web page to see his other publications (GMU has a very interesting economics faculty).
http://mason.gmu.edu/~mkoyama2/About.html
It turns out the Mark has published a number papers about the persecution of Jews in Europe. For example:
“Jewish Communities and City Growth in Preindustrial Europe” with Noel D. Johnson, Journal of Development Economics, July 2017 Volume 127, pp 339-354
“Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks 1100-1800” with Warren Anderson and Noel D. Johnson Economic Journal, June 2017, Volume 127, Issue 602, pp 924-958
“Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, the Rule of Law, and the persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire” with Theresa Finley Journal of Law & Economics, May 2018, Volume 61, Issue 2, pp 253-277
The last was of great interest to me, so I skimmed it. Typical econ paper (not a huge fan of how they build models), but I was impressed with their dataset of Black Plague era pogroms. I had no idea that such detailed accounts existed.
Bringing it back to genetics: the estimates for the Ashkenazi bottleneck average back to around the time of the Black Plague. The Carmi paper* puts the bottle neck at 600-800 years ago.
So, was the AJ bottleneck the result of the pogroms? Can this be proven or disprove in any meaningful way?
*Carmi, Shai, et al. “Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins.” Nature communications 5 (2014): 4835.
I think its important to realise that the Rhenish Jews were no large population from the start, but a founding one. They were in close contacts to other communities though, closer than afterwards.
So the critical time was when the hard core of the sect decided to move East. Because we don’t know the true effect of the pogroms.
How many were killed, how many fled and dispersed in different directions and how many stayed, probably converted to Christianity and their descendents became German.
As far as I see it, it would be hard to prove any such conversion and mixture before the big bottleneck without finding and testing first generationers. Records on the issue are scarce, but at times conversion was an option.
I think its realistic to imagine the Ashkenazi moving East like the pilgrim fathers in the way that they were determined to keep their religious customs. So this rather small group settled down in the East and might have had a hard time in the first generations, so additional losses.
Because such migrations almost always demanded a toll from the settlers, even under the best circumstances.
So I would see at least the following reductions:
– When the Rhenish colonies were founded
– Dead, converts and refugees to other places during the pogroms and plagues
– Forming of the strict core which decided to move together to the East
– Additional losses on the way and in the first generations of the settlement.
Afterwards there was a fast expansion also because of high birth rates in this strict communities. Compare with strict orthodox Sephardics today.
Similar effects are observable for other religious sects under persecution or which simply tried to found a colony in which they could live like they wanted.
Its not by chance that the Eastern Jews were more extreme in some of their customs even in comparison to other Jewish communities.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-reveals-humans-migrated-europe-levant.html – ‘Study reveals that humans migrated from Europe to the Levant 40,000 years ago’. Dental traits indicate an influx of a H Sap+Neanderthal population into the Levant at 40kya which then becomes extinct? I’m skeptical though.
Blogger alfin also discusses inbreeding in Islamic societies:
https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/1500-year-experiment-in-effects-of-inbreeding/
I wanted to comment on your inbreeding post. Comments are closed, but it showed me a comment form, presumably because of some kind of overly aggressive caching. Probably not a big deal, but I thought I’d mention it.
You gave the example of Darwin, who blamed his children’s ill health on his cousin marriage, but he observed a fitness cost of a lot more than 0.1. So he was probably wrong in attributing this to inbreeding. If he was right, then the fitness cost in that environment was much higher, making your question of the popularity of inbreeding even more pressing.