I’ve been posting a fair amount about Southeast Asia. This an important part of the world. As outlined in Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, there are similarities to Europe in terms of the ‘naturalness’ of nation-states. Especially in mainland Southeast Asia. Burma is dominated by Burmans. Thailand is dominated by Thais. Laos, but the lowland Lao. Cambodia by the Khmers. And Vietnam by the Kinh. Liberman’s hypothesis is generally geographical. He contends that the ‘protected’ geographic character of mainland Southeast Asia has analogs to Western Europe, which also was relatively sheltered by the impact of the Eurasian steppe.
One of the primary similarities between Europe and mainland Southeast Asia is that there is a combination of deep indigenous ethnocultural traditions as well as important external influences. Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia leverage Indian religious and political theory to maintain coherence. In contrast, Vietnam replicates much of the character of China. The “standard model” has been Indian influence is a function of “cultural diffusion.” But looking more deeply at the genetic data, it seems that 5-20% of the ancestry might be Indian. This is a minority element. But it is not trivial, especially in light of the likely dilutive effects of the Tai migration, as well as the Chinese in Thailand.
In Coronavirus, a ‘Battle’ That Could Humble China’s Strongman. One thing I will say is that public health professionals are focused on the tail risk. The risks are real. But please note that the worst-case scenario may not be the most likely scenario.
A Glittering Crossroads: In Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, Roman paganism, Christianity, and Shiite and Sunni Islam all intersect. The Umayyad’s are Islam’s “first dynasty.” But they have a bad reputation among Muslims. The Shia hate them because their founder was an enemy of Ali, and eventually killed his grandsons. The Sunnis dislike them because they are perceived as impious Arab warlords, rather than Muslims. The latter view is colored by the commentaries of intellectuals who were patronized by the Abbassids, the successors of the Umayyads. But the piece above illustrates the reality that the Umayyads likely weren’t Muslims as we’d understand it for much of their history.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed endorses Mike Bloomberg for president. Weird.
The Saudi Connection: Inside the 9/11 Case That Divided the F.B.I. Money corrupts.
Medical data and machine learning improve power of stroke genome-wide association studies.
After Culinary and Literary Acclaim, She’s Moving to the Woods. ‘…every weekend from May to October, 10 people will each pay $750 to nearly $1,000 to relax in the woods and immerse themselves in what some chefs and writers have started calling “new gatherer” or “deep nature” cooking.’
Unrelated males in colonies of facultatively social bee.
Dynamic evolution of great ape Y chromosomes.
On the origin and evolution of RNA editing in metazoans.
Singer-songwriter David Olney dies on stage during performance at Florida festival.
Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75.
3000 years in the Levant, with Marc Haber. The Insight is cranking along.
One thing about why I like the Strange Parallels concept is because it also allows us to think about what was not parallel that was later decisive on a different trajectory.
A few elements I can think of (and there may be many more):
1) The glory of Rome and the transmitted glory of Athens in early phases was known to be as republic and democracy, and Italy remained with many republics through the medieval period (and this maybe comes from other city states further east). So this gave Europe an awareness of other form of successful government.
(I’d think this at least provided an influential intellectual bridge between calling together bodies of nobles to advise / support a monarch, and extending that into de facto republics?).
2) More speculatively, Romans may have transmitted more and better mechanical technology, like mills, and also early Greek ideas about science. So this may have then been causal on more/better mechanical technology much later (and decisive technologies like European version of printing press).
3) Rome into Western Europe was a lot about Rome’s military protection, not about trading for rare goods, so those were military supported and imperially backed expeditions and they built a lot of “bases”/urban centres and roads. The urban centres diminished went, but the roads stayed and built a long term network for trade. While mainland SE Asia had to wait for Khmer Empire and other powers to do that.
(In some ways, parallels between Southeast Asia and the Western Mediterranean specifically, where Phoenician / Anatolian traders may parallel S Asian ones may fit as a stronger parallel in some senses?)
On SE Asia, while searching around looking at the topic, found a nice open license version of a book by George Coedes – “The Indianized States of Southeast Asia” – https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/115019/2/b11055005.pdf. 1960s but does not seem too obviously vastly superseded (other than than recent metallurgy archaeology at Ban Chiang, Thailand and Nyaunggan, Burma, seems to push back widepsread bronze in SE Asia about 1/2 to a whole millennium further than he thought).
Razib, do you know of any papers on the Romani in Europe (Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France and/or Spain), and maybe comparing them to the Kalbelia people in Rajasthan, plus maybe Ghawazi people in Egypt and Turkish Roma?
Just some data on Romani would be a start. I have never seen any.
How easy is it for an amateur to use publicly available data to research ancestry like I see on your blog? Like if I have Python programming experience and good knowledge of math and statistics, how could I start doing these investigations, even at the level of things that come out in peer reviewed research papers? Any links giving tutorials would be nice.
Joe, if you know how to program Python *and* have a sufficient grasp of the relevant mathematics (by far the most important), I’m sure you could do some research of your own. The Python scientific stack likely has, in not all, then 95% of what you’d need. You’d have to come up to speed on the particular models and algorithms used in this sort of analysis. I know some of the amateurs like the Eurogenes blogger have talked about the analytical tools they use in their blogposts, might be a good place to start looking.
David at Eurogenes has a tutorial posted for using his thing. I never tried it, though.
Hi John, do you mean this one? https://bga101.blogspot.com/2018/02/modeling-genetic-ancestry-with-davidski.html
Any other links would be appreciated.
GFC: Yes, I know Python actually and I’m sure I can do the math. I couldn’t find anything besides the link I posted above. Is there another you’re thinking of? Is that the kind of thing that would show up in an actual paper? Thanks.
From the WSJ piece on the Umayyad Mosque it just appears that the early Mislim rulers of Damascus were a minority dependent on their Christian subjects’ administrative and military service, and that’s why they didn’t demolish the cathedral until decades later? The pagan and Christian-themed stones used for the Mosque construction didn’t seem to reflect anything ideologically eclectic. Just a plain practical considerations about reusing the best materials?
The Yemeni paper surprised me in one aspect. Usually the only major difference between the Yemeni Muslims and the Yemeni Jews is said to be the African admixture in the former. Same as between the Egyptian Muslims vs. the Copts. But in their modern-populations PCA the authors see a perfect African-Yemeni cline, but the Yemeni Jews are ways off this cline. What is going on there? Some sort of an earlier population flow which made the Jewish Yemenis distinct from their neighbors even BEFORE Islam?
Joe, yep, that’s the one. It’s the only one I know about.
I was amused by that article about what is essentially an expensive bed-and-breakfast joint using local ingredients in the meal. It’s good, but it’s always kind of funny when they manage to make a full article out of something like that.
@Dx
One of the fateful decisions the Arab conquerors did in places like Egypt and Syria is that they kept the tax and administrative systems run by Christians intact (at least in the short term), and used them to underwrite their rule. In the long run that probably helped consolidate them as a cultural-religious group apart from their subjects, and then later got those subjects to convert (since you had to go full into Islamicized Arab identity to convert).
Whereas if they’d spread out and become local overlords over rural estates, they probably would have been absorbed over the next couple generations – like the Vandals in North Africa were by the time their realm was smashed by Justinian’s reconquest.
john, this is the latest https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1008417
From the WSJ piece on the Umayyad Mosque it just appears that the early Mislim rulers of Damascus were a minority dependent on their Christian subjects’ administrative and military service, and that’s why they didn’t demolish the cathedral until decades later? The pagan and Christian-themed stones used for the Mosque construction didn’t seem to reflect anything ideologically eclectic. Just a plain practical considerations about reusing the best materials?
more than that. it’s a long time ago and not much left, but the umayyads patronized greco-roman artists who continued their artistic traditions into the 7th century. the reality that arabs worshipped in the same churches as native xtians for decades suggest less early sectarian differences too.
The Yemeni paper surprised me in one aspect. Usually the only major difference between the Yemeni Muslims and the Yemeni Jews is said to be the African admixture in the former. Same as between the Egyptian Muslims vs. the Copts. But in their modern-populations PCA the authors see a perfect African-Yemeni cline, but the Yemeni Jews are ways off this cline. What is going on there? Some sort of an earlier population flow which made the Jewish Yemenis distinct from their neighbors even BEFORE Islam?
i’ll look into this. i assumed it was drift/small effec pop size.
How easy is it for an amateur to use publicly available data to research ancestry like I see on your blog? Like if I have Python programming experience and good knowledge of math and statistics, how could I start doing these investigations, even at the level of things that come out in peer reviewed research papers? Any links giving tutorials would be nice.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/13/tutorial-to-run-supervised-admixture-analyses/
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/11/tutorial-to-run-pca-admixture-treemix-and-pairwise-fst-in-one-command/
The following article came up in my Pocket: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/jumping-worms-are-taking-over-north-american-forests/605257/
My first thought was, “Gene-drive the little m-fers!” Then of course the question instantly ramifies into a World-Historical circular firing-squad.
So question/request occurs: have I missed the Insitome podcast on gene-drive issues? Or will you be giving that one the ten-foot-pole berth until outside events demand/allow specific comment? As in every case, thanks for sharing your expertise to the extent that you do.
re: gene-drive. i’m of the school of thought that it’s not gonna be as crazy effective as ppl think. basically evolution will get around it a lot of the time. no plan right now to do crispr but perhaps we should get someone on.
the worm stuff is something i keep track of too. not sure we can turn the clock back (i do composting with red wrigglers).
Thanks Razib, that’s great.
Regarding early Islam, it does seem like the reign of Abd al-Malik (together with al-Hajjaj) marked a genuine inflection point in helping to shape Islam into a distinctive, coherent, socio-religious identity. That said, within the first one or two generations immediately after the Muslim conquest, we have written accounts from Christian chroniclers (Syriac, Greek, and Coptic) of people “converting” to Islam after the conquests and the installation of “Muslim” Arab rule (these are accounts directly from the 7th century itself too, not later recollections from several centuries after the fact). So what did it mean exactly to convert to Islam in the 7th century, if Islam as we understand it now didn’t actually exist?
Mick
Curious about those Syriac/Greek/Coptic sources? Could you tell me where to find them.
What I think the chroniclers mean by “converting” is that the early Arabs had a belief system that was a mix of Jewish and heretical Christian traditions. It was in flux, so the beliefs might have varied considerebly from person to person. They probably also held to a lower Christology than the Orthodox and Miaphysite population of Egypt and Syria. So if the locals adopted this belief system, they had “converted”. I think a major difference between this belief system and modern Islam would have been the lack of religious importance for Muhammad. Muhammad’s importance seems to increase from the late 7th century, during the reign of Abdel Malek. It might have been a deliberate choice to set a figure that the Byzantines didnt revere as well(like Jesus).
Charles Murray’s new book is out (Amazon customers got it today). One of the footnotes cites an article of yours from 2016: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2016/10/03/how-to-look-at-population-structure/
I didn’t get a direct link to it from a couple web searches though of course searching on this site found it immediately. I wonder if putting it in the sidebar or mentioning it in a new post will help the inevitable large number of searchers (assuming large numbers of people read footnotes).
“Genetics Will Revolutionize Social Science: Knowledge of which DNA strand does what will make it easier to judge which policies are effective.” By Charles Murray* on Jan. 27, 2020
https://www.wsj.com/articles/genetics-will-revolutionize-social-science-11580169106
… geneticists have identified at least a few hundred variants in the DNA code that are statistically associated with important traits such as intelligence, depression and risk tolerance. Over the next decade, they are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. …
The methods of scoring are improving almost monthly, but the essence is simple. Each variant has a version (more precisely, one of the alleles in a single nucleotide polymorphism) associated with a small boost to the trait in question. If you add up those small boosts, you have a score for that trait, in the same sense that you have an IQ score if you add up all the correct answers to the questions on an IQ test. In the case of DNA variants, it is called a “polygenic score.”…
Measures of IQ in early childhood are not only unreliable but already contaminated by environmental effects before birth and during infancy. Polygenic scores for IQ are free of that contamination. They can then be compared with actual IQ scores.
Suppose that, a few years from now, it has been solidly established that adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds have IQ scores that average 10 points lower than their genetic potential would have led us to expect. Confident new knowledge of that kind will energize the search for effective childhood interventions in ways we can scarcely imagine.
Suppose instead it is found that the adolescent IQ scores of children from disadvantaged backgrounds are about the same as we’d expect from their polygenic scores. That will provide an incentive to foster human flourishing for people with lesser abilities—an issue that has been criminally ignored in our era’s insistence that all the children can be above average….
I have presented an optimistic view of the coming genomic revolution. Some prominent scholars adamantly disagree. They argue that science is about understanding causal pathways. Complex social behaviors such as marriage and divorce are known to be partly heritable but they do not have a specific genetic etiology. In the words of one of the leading pessimists, psychologist Eric Turkheimer, causal explanations are not going to be found in individual bits of DNA “any more than explanations of plate tectonics can be found in the chemical composition of individual rocks.”…
*Mr. Murray is author of the new book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class,” from which this article is adapted.
Razib: Since Murray is in book promotion mode, you might be able to get to be a guest on The Insight.
Quillette posted a podcast of Murray talking about his book with Toby Young.
https://quillette.com/2020/01/28/podcast-75-charles-murray-talks-about-his-new-book-human-diversity/
Young is a journalist, not a scientist. I think you and Spencer could contribute a more interesting angle on the book.
How Murray remains this naive after all that has happened with him, mystifies me. The Wokesters would resist any of the genetically-based social policy interventions he proposes to their dying breath. I mean agree with everything he proposes there, but I’m a capital thoughtcriminal. There would have to be some kind of major anti-Woke revolution for any of this to be even considered.
GFC: I think it is called the Scientific Revolution.
@ Mazyar
One example from Ishoyahb III, a Patriarch of the Church of the East in the mid 7th century:
” As for the Arabs, to whom God has at this time given rule (shultana) over the world, you know well how they act towards us. Not only do they not oppose Christianity, but they praise our faith, honour the priests and saints of our Lord, and give aid to the churches and monasteries. Why then do your Mazonaye [Omanis] reject their faith on a pretext of theirs? And this when the Mazonaye themselves admit that the Arabs have not compelled them to abandon their faith, but only asked them to give up half of their possessions in order to keep their faith. Yet they forsook their faith, which is forever, and retained the half of their wealth, which is for a short time.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishoyahb_III
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-ancient-skulls-story-settlers.html – “Early North Americans may have been more diverse than previously suspected”
This is kind of interesting because it points to a bit of diversity in cranial shape in skulls from Mexico from 7000 – 11000 BCE. (“The oldest skull showed strong similarities to North American arctic populations, while the second-oldest skull was consistent with modern European populations. The third skull showed affinities with Asian and Native American groups and the fourth had affinities with arctic populations in addition to having some modern South American features.”)
However, we probably know this doesn’t point to a very divergent or variable founding population of the Americas, as the ancient dna of about this vintage seems pretty decisive on this (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867418313801 by Reich lab).
We also know that Native Americans with distinct skull shape have previously come back as being essentially of the same genetic clade with respect to the rest of humanity (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733658/ – see Pericues and Fuegians)
On the other hand, we also know that some variants like Northeast Eurasian EDAR, were not quite at fixture in the founding population of the Americas, and that Native Americans may have been derived from a relatively recent admixture event between Ancient North Siberians (Yana Upper Paleolithic) and East Eurasians, not too long prior to the founding of the Americas.
So I wonder if perhaps there was still quite a bit of phenotypic diversity in some features in the founding population of the Americas, which responded in slightly different ways to selection when moving into a variable set of environments in the Americas, with lots of splitting and subsequent isolation of subpopulations, and an explosion of differentiation. (For an example, we know that facial morphology in Andean populations seems to have responded in quite a clear way). Then this may have been homogenised a bit by some of the relatively recent expansions Reich lab talks about (in the paper I’ve linked above). But certainly before this, perhaps Native Americans punched above their weight in terms of diverse phenotypes and adaptations relative to autosomal diversity.
New paper: More detection of back-migration from West Eurasia to Africa, via more sharing of Africans for Neanderthal introgressed sequences specific to West Eurasians through continuous migration – https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674(20)30059-3
That agrees with the Petr’s paper from 2019 that argued for this case and that this created a false image of decline of Neanderthal ancestry in Eurasian samples – https://www.pnas.org/content/116/5/1639
Also finds that West Eurasian and East Asian sharing of Neanderthal fairly smooth once this is accounted for (“Surprisingly, we observed only a modest enrichment (8%) of Neanderthal ancestry in East Asian compared to European individuals.”). That agrees with the low distinction of signal of Neanderthal ancestry using the “direct statistic” (see Lazaridis 2018 preprint – Table S5.2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2018/09/20/423079.DC1/423079-1.pdf
It’s not very much in Africans – “African individuals have approximately 33% as much detected sequence compared to non-African individuals” – at around 1.8-2.2% Neanderthal, Africans then get 0.6-0.7% Neanderthal. Again, it couldn’t be very much given high extent of symmetry with Denisovans in f4 stats, as said before. But may be 1/3% Eurasian related ancestry…? Seems like that would raise our guess that North African/Saharan populations with Eurasian ancestry actually contributed to Sub-Saharan populations today (and not just sister populations of these, without Eurasian ancestry).