I got an early copy of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. This book, by Joe Henrich, doesn’t come out until early September, but hopefully I can get Henrich on The Insight to talk about it around the release date. Long-time readers know I’ve appreciated Henrich’s work. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend his earlier book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
The core of the book is the argument in the paper The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation.
Even ten years ago a book arguing that Western prosperity might be due to the cultural and historical peculiarities of the Western Christian Church would be a bit “edgy”, insofar as economic differences between the “West and the rest” were often chalked up in mainstream elite circles as due to exploitation. In 2020 a book like this seems really out of place, especially with the current mood and its attitudes toward institutions associated with the West.
Stories and Data. Coleman Hughes is 24. He’s a really impressive thinker.
The Ancient DNA Insights into Aboriginal Australian Mortuary Practices Y and mtDNA. Hopefully more of this.
Ross Douthat: The Tom Cotton Op-Ed and the Cultural Revolution. Some of my academic friends dismiss the changes happening within their institution. I happen to know for a fact that many people are engaging in preference falsification and terrified that they’ll be targeted or denounced. Perhaps these people are paranoid, and the reigning grandees of justice are in fact tolerant and big-hearted souls, but they’re real people.
Korean Adoptee Wins Landmark Case in Search for Birth Parents.
Statue of Leopold II, Belgian King Who Brutalized Congo, Is Removed in Antwerp. If you read King Leopold’s Ghost you will get the sense that what he did in this time was horrifying to contemporaries.
The production of within-family inequality: Insights and implications of integrating genetic data. The implication here seems to be that “within family environment” isn’t uniform. Parents invest more in children who need more resources?
I’m sure you recall Fukuyama made the same argument in “The Origins of Political Order”, based heavily on a Jack Goody book from 1986.
Is the Heinrich worth reading as a work of history?
A bit of an aside, but it is an open thread…
On another forum I am on, there got to be a discussion about Tolkien and whether he was racist/sexist/homophobic. It was a bit of a troll thread – Tolkien himself was assuredly not a racist man by the standards of his day, though people can squint very hard and see the orcs, Easterlings, etc as allegories of evil non-whites – though Tolkien himself insisted his mythos was not meant to be allegorical. He was of course interested in creating a distinctly European mythology, but that’s not the same thing.
Regardless, this veered into a more interesting discussion about modern depictions of diversity in fantasy. It’s been increasingly common in fantasy (see The Witcher, or the new Wheel of Time and Middle Earth series which are in development) to basically recapitulate modern day demographics even where it doesn’t make sense with the in-universe worldbuilding. Some of this might be because one of the early things Game of Thrones was criticized for was not being “diverse” enough, even though characters like Greyworm who were racially undefined in the books were explicitly made people of color in the show. Regardless, the ideal now appears to be to just plunk down random people of color into a fantasy setting – not as members of a different nationality, just as random people who happen to be nonwhite in a mostly white setting. However, this is almost never remarked upon within story – the actual setting is color-blind. There might be racism against non-humans, but there’s never racism against the random black (or brown, or whatever) humans.
I would broadly call this an “aspirational” representation of diversity. This is completely fine for a non-dystopian future setting like Star Trek – most people expect the world to get better over time after all. But it’s very strange to me to see this in feudal settings, because applying a patina of “diversity” on top of a nasty hierarchical system makes it seem to be a better place than it really was. This was one of the things Game of Thrones got right (even if the theme was less obvious at times than in the books). I also think it’s part of the reason that people hated the last season so much – people were expecting a conventional fantasy ending (the “good guys” who are more diverse win) and instead they got a condemnation of the entire system of feudalism (even if poorly executed).
Regardless, there could assuredly be more diversity between stories in fantasy, but I’m not sure why there needs to be universal diversity within stories. Though I’m sure the readership here would concur regardless.
The production of within-family inequality: Insights and implications of integrating genetic data. The implication here seems to be that “within family environment” isn’t uniform. Parents invest more in children who need more resources?
According to the summary of the linked article: “We find strong evidence of compensatory processes, on average, where the association between genotype and phenotype of educational attainment is reduced by over 20% for the higher-ranked sibling compared to the lower-ranked sibling. These effects are most pronounced in high socioeconomic status areas.”
I find this fascinating. When I was growing up in East Asia a few decades ago, its economies were rising rapidly, but there was still substantial poverty. In poorer families, it was common to invest what family economic resources were available heavily into the smartest child. Often all the members of these families would work to fund the education of the most academically gifted of the children, with the idea that these children, once successful, would help out the rest of the family (esp. their siblings who did not benefit from the investment). While my family wasn’t poor, I did see this dynamic among my poorer peers as well as less well-off relatives (and the ethos of investing heavily into “the smart set” – who would then presumably pull the rest up once established – was pervasive throughout the society).
When I came to the U.S., I found that things were different at least among the middle to upper class families I observed – they tended to practice what my wife calls “family socialism,” of providing “compensating” resources to children who were less gifted or perhaps even lazier. This would often lead to some intrafamily conflicts over what was considered “fair.”
I always found it odd that, in East Asia of my generation and earlier, siblings were extremely close and supported each other, displaying a very high degree of cohesion and a sense of shared purpose of advancing the family while, in the U.S., siblings would often develop jealousies and rivalries and engage in scorched earth legal warfare over inheritances and other parental resources.
the ideal now appears to be to just plunk down random people of color into a fantasy setting – not as members of a different nationality, just as random people who happen to be nonwhite in a mostly white setting. However, this is almost never remarked upon within story – the actual setting is color-blind. There might be racism against non-humans, but there’s never racism against the random black (or brown, or whatever) humans.
I recently watched “The Favorite” and was rather put off to find random black ladies (and they were dressed as ladies and danced with white gentlemen) in the queen’s court. WTF?
Some of this might be because one of the early things Game of Thrones was criticized for was not being “diverse” enough, even though characters like Greyworm who were racially undefined in the books were explicitly made people of color in the show.
I never read the GoT books, but aren’t the Dothraki described as having bronzed skin and “almond” eyes? I would think they were supposed to be some sort of Mongol or Central Asian nomad-types, but were instead portrayed as some sort of dark MENA types in the show. I guess no more BadAsians on TV. 😉
I recently watched “The Favorite” and was rather put off to find random black ladies (and they were dressed as ladies and danced with white gentlemen) in the queen’s court. WTF?
Yes, this is becoming increasingly common in historical dramas as well. Of course, this has been used by Hollywood for decades (witness Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). But the work of sites like the medievalpoc tumblr has seemingly convinced a lot of people that black people were fairly common in the middle ages in Europe, rather than being known of (and occasionally seen in cosmopolitan areas) but rare outside of Iberia until the start of the European slave trade. Therefore, if you cast a period drama with no POC, people will complain and site websites like that one.
As someone of the left, I am not entirely unsympathetic to the idea that there should be more representation in stories involving people of color. But if the stories don’t actually examine what it means to be black (or whatever) in a white setting, it’s just window dressing to make progressive white audiences feel better. Or, to put it more simply – tokenism.
the ideal now appears to be to just plunk down random people of color into a fantasy setting – not as members of a different nationality, just as random people who happen to be nonwhite in a mostly white setting. However, this is almost never remarked upon within story – the actual setting is color-blind. There might be racism against non-humans, but there’s never racism against the random black (or brown, or whatever) humans.
I don’t know if I’d call that the ideal or the norm. In Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle there’s some pretty extreme levels of racism directed at the Edema Ruh (a nomadic people). It’s just not particularly directed along the lines of skin tone (which varies depending on your national ancestry). I think that’s a smart way of handling the issue – addressing racism in a way that’s accessible. Though I suppose it leans heavily on the history of antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment in Europe.
It’s been increasingly common in fantasy (see The Witcher, or the new Wheel of Time and Middle Earth series which are in development) to basically recapitulate modern day demographics even where it doesn’t make sense with the in-universe worldbuilding. Some of this might be because one of the early things Game of Thrones was criticized for was not being “diverse” enough, even though characters like Greyworm who were racially undefined in the books were explicitly made people of color in the show.
I’d make a distinction between a series like the Lord of the Rings or a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) or R. Scott Baker’s Second Apocalypse, where the traits of different peoples is meant to tell you something about the world’s history, and a series like the Witcher, where humans in the setting have very little history.
Recall that in the Witcher, the dominant human cultures only arrived in the North around 500 years prior, and humans only arrived on the world itself 1,500 years before that. Those original humans were refugees from another (or other) world(s). Who is to say that those refugees all had to have the same skin tone?
And if the world doesn’t have old ethnic divisions, just casting the best actors for the job at hand is going to naturally mean replicating something close to modern demographics.
King Leopold:
Excellent analysis of his reign in a podcast:
“The Political Economy of Power” Aug 14 2006
https://www.econtalk.org/the-political-economy-of-power/
“Russ Roberts talks with Hoover Institution and NYU political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita about his theory of political power–how dictators and democratically elected leaders respond to the political forces that keep them in office. This lengthy and intense conversation covers a wide range of topics including the evil political genius of Lenin, the dark side of US foreign aid, the sinister machinations of King Leopold of Belgium, the natural resource curse, the British monarchy in the 11th century, term limits and the inevitable failure of the standard methods of fighting world poverty.”
Adam Hochschild: I enjoyed his book on the British Anti-slavery movement:
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004H1UE90/
If y E is SSA, y K1 is AASI and y K2b/P is ENA then some Bedouin group (y J) or isolated Caucasus group (y G) are the most West Eurasian on the y side. Who would have thought?
Re; Henrich, whether the medieval church was decisive or not (and I tend to think not, but that’s another question), it’s not that surprising I guess to see the world of real study of Western economic divergence continue to go its own way from the folk theory explanation among the “Better-than-average educated”. The folk theories of colonial economic and extraction exploitation don’t really work very well when put to the test, but they’re attractive to flatter ethnic majority BTAEs’ self-image as the smart, free-thinking, progressive set able to criticize and bravely confront their own nation’s historical injustices without any patriotic bias, and for others as providing a box ready solution to any sense of cultural cringe (in this frame “Western accomplishment” is simply derived from extra stolen wealth taken from someone else, not anything cultural). The psychological and social utility is too high.
I think that, if it is a work who are supposed to occur in a kind of universe/history alternative to the real world, there is not any problem in having random “people of color” as characters – in this universe, being “black” is simply being considered a thing similar to being blond or having green eyes in ours (a personal characteristic who don’t means a connection to an ethnic group).
Makes less sense if it is in a work who, in-universe, is supposed to occur in the real human history, even if mythologized (example – Angel Coulby/Guinevere and Adetomiwa Edun/Elyan in “Merlin”)
@ Jatt
“If y E is SSA, y K1 is AASI and y K2b/P is ENA then some Bedouin group (y J) or isolated Caucasus group (y G) are the most West Eurasian on the y side. Who would have thought?”
There’s also I, which is definitely West Eurasian. Also, by K1 do you mean LT? What makes you say it’s AASI? I know L in particular is big in Pakistan and India but IIRC the deepest splits and aDNA imply it has a West Asian origin, ditto for T.
RK: In your other blog (one of your other blogs?), you wrote:
This does not mean that those who are not in nuclear families should be ostracized or thought of as second-class citizens. Rather, the idea is that society and politics should have the dominant family structure, the nuclear family, at the heart of its understanding, and that that should shape policy (e.g., tax-credits for having children). My impression and understanding are that the modern Left does not believe this privileging should occur (explicit in the platforms of groups like BLM above). Therefore, I am against the modern Left.
Can you be a bit more specific about what you mean by nuclear family? Are you restricting that to one where the 2 parents have a heterosexual relationship or do you also mean to include homosexual relationships as well? I imagine, but am not certain, that you exclude families that share a husband/father but not living quarters: where each mother and her children have a separate home and consequently do not (necessarily) consider those in other households as part of their (nuclear) family. I am thinking here of family structures similar to Mandela’s natal family.
In the more recent “Hollow Crown” series, Queens Margaret was played by a black woman:) Same with the new Mary Queen of Scots on netflix. The director indignantly announced that they “weren’t going to do another all-white period piece” and cast a black man as one of the Queen’s main assistants or whatever. LOL. I know the first one is Shakespeare but still…
@Twinkie:
“When I came to the U.S., I found that things were different at least among the middle to upper class families I observed – they tended to practice what my wife calls “family socialism,” of providing “compensating” resources to children who were less gifted or perhaps even lazier. This would often lead to some intrafamily conflicts over what was considered “fair.””
I think that’s also because we are not as much under pressure “to deliver” and therefore prefer to act fair to all our children and because of the 60’s anti-authoritarian and “understanding” tone in education, we also try to not demotivate or affront our children. I mean what is a parent supposed to do: “You don’t need to try hard, you are too stupid anyway and we are saving our resources for your sibling which was always smarter than you since birth.”
What I saw from the East Asian world is that people are much more direct and concrete about such issues. They don’t talk as much around things. Like if someone “is ugly”, they call him so, if someone “is stupid”, they call him so. That was much more common here in Europe in the past, but we now have developed a “more sensitive and egalitarian” approach, don’t want to insult or humiliate anyone.
Its part of the “guilt & blame” cult, with everyone being better at anything having to feel guilty and caring for everybody else and everybody worse having a ton of excuses. Political correctness and Cultural Marxism play with this on a large scale, they feed from it, yet it even has a Christian base – remember that the poor & stupid are closer to the kingdom of heaven.
But really, inside a family, I can fully understand why people try to balance things out. I mean if one of your kids got in trouble financially, the most logical thing to me is to help it out, if I can. If another kid is doing well, financially, I see no reason to give him/her the same.
That was actually a debate I had with my wife, because she says the kid which is doing well might be offended by the fact that “the worse kid” is getting something, but the better not.
So you get into trouble in such a case regardless of how you decide, but clearly I too would always try to help everyone of my kids and if one is in trouble, it just needs more help.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t invest in the most talented at all, but I feel more concerned about the one doing worse. That’s because we have the individualist approach on the matter and every one should be able to support him/herself – even if just in case. Also, I would consider it quite risky to predecide who does best, because sometimes things don’t turn out like you thought they would. What if your “golden kid” does worse, does not deliver the way you think and you did actually just destroy potential of the other ones?
I think to put everything in just one kid, either by having just an only child or preferring one drastically before every other in your family, is quite a high risk and rather desperate strategy to pull off. It can be worth it, if your resources are very, very limited, but its highly risky nevertheless, especially if the whole family suffers because of it. But it tells you something about East Asian philosophy, to bundle the power of the family for a high risk enterprise, like a business on another continent led by a cousin. Many other people wouldn’t do that, Chinese in particular do it on a regular basis.
Just guessing that K as a whole is ENA related if K2b is and K2a also is (Oase, Ust-Ishim) and that the split between K and IJ accounts for the East-West split. I could be wrong. people also said K1 being AASI could explain the AASI type stuff in Iran_N.
To add something more to the parent:children debate, I would say that adoptions are a bad fit too, because they create an illusion by using oftentimes “better parents” which are able to compensate more than the biological parents would be able to. Yet their ability to compensate might be largely genetically determined as well, as intelligence, social status and even educational qualities are in part to a large part inherited.
This means the conclusion that some adoptees doing better in high quality households shouldn’t lead us to conclude its non genetic, because parenting qualities might be and are to some degree as inheritable. Therefore only a longer term, intergenerational study could say whether an intervention in the form of an adoption had a long term, means beyond the adoptee, effect. Like did the adoption not just better the outcome for the adoptee as an individual, but also the outcome for his children and grandchildren, for his lineage as whole.
This is not self-evident, because I know first hand social climbers from adoptions which themselves largely fail as parents and seem to not be able to keep up the boost they got from their higher level parents.
Its not just the talent of the kids which is heritable, but also, to some degree, the parenting style and abilities. They form a natural unity, which can’t be broken down artificially. Like many aggressive kids have aggressive parents, many calm kids have calm parents. The individual genetics and the family genetics can either increase or decrease a tendency. If the parents and kids have the same tendency towards violence, they will of course double the effect. But to conclude from that the genetic effect is lower, if the kid being raised by non-violent parents, is wrong. Kids AND parents can be influenced by the same genetic factors and if the kids can’t produce a different parenting style as adults, its a genetic factor in itself.
The genetics of parenting are so far much too understudied in my opinion. Most studies look just at the kids for genetics, but that’s wrong.
In the more recent “Hollow Crown” series, Queens Margaret was played by a black woman:) Same with the new Mary Queen of Scots on netflix. The director indignantly announced that they “weren’t going to do another all-white period piece” and cast a black man as one of the Queen’s main assistants or whatever. LOL. I know the first one is Shakespeare but still…
I think doing race-blind casting makes a lot of sense in theatre, because it’s very clear in a theatrical production that you’re just watching a performer play a role – you can’t really suspend disbelief enough to think you’re watching what “really happens.” Tecontextualizations like Hamilton are also perfectly fine, because everyone understands you’re trying to get across the “flavor of history” for a modern audience, not actually be faithful to the era.
But in general, maybe if you want avoid an all-white period piece, it would be better to set it in Byzantium, Baghdad, Cairo, Zanzibar, etc. That’s what I don’t get about the modern “aspirational integration” – it’s still telling the stories of white people even if it’s casting some non-white people.
@Robert Ford:
So what. She is a good actress. Denzel Washington has appeared in major Shakespearean roles. In 1993 he played the Duke, Don Pedro, in Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Much Ado About Nothing. In 2005, he appeared in Broadway production of Julius Ceasar as Brutus. We took our children to see it for our 25th Anniversary. Washington will play Macbeth in a film version now in production by Joel Coen. Coen cast his wife Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth.
I think the issue is there is widespread outrage if the vice versa ever happens.
I think the talk of “nuclear family” is usually much confuse: the opposite of “nuclear family” is “extended family”, but my impression is that most self-proclaimed defenders of “nuclear family” don’t have any problem with grandparents, uncles, siblings, etc. living together; their main problem seems to be with things like divorce or single motherhood, who, IMO, are more extreme versions of the principle of “nuclear family” than its opposite.
Well, Shakespeare, and classically art theatre in general, is just different. It’s a formal, consciously artificial model of narrative. It’s not an attempt to create a believable recreation of reality, or an internally consistent secondary world, or to iconically represent the “true” form of characters. Features that call to light the constructed nature of the reality with the drama, or its lack of a coherent history, or that characters and roles are only changeable masks donned by the actors, are just very secondary to the quality of the performances. (In certain ways, calling attention to dream-like incoherence of the reality in the play adds to the experience.)
This is not to say that it’s wrong to call out when dramas that do purport to represent a consistent reality or a true history totally undermine that by bad, political casting choices, and worse, actively misrepresents those. But lots of the more theatrical end of drama isn’t really going for that in the first place.
I once saw a version of Othello where both Iago and Othello were black. It was … interesting. It was certainly not the best version I have seen but I remember it more than any other one.
@Mick
You might be right about LT. I’m not sure.
Also is the SE Asian origin of K2b back in play given Tianyuan is not a very good fit for the eastern ancestry in ANE.
On Twinkie and family socialism:
In a nuclear family regime, every kid has to shift for him/her self, and the most talented kid isn’t supposed to look after the others, it’s not considered fair. The only exception might be if there was a family business big enough to employ everyone, and if so, “resources” aren’t scarce, so every kid can get his cup filled, so to speak.
Effects at the society wide, as to why the west put a man on the moon and China didn’t, might be hard to tease out.
@Walter because these movies spend tens of millions of dollars making the most realistic costumes and sets, down to the most minute details, including ALL of the other characters except for one character who is always played by a black person of a certain skin tone. It’s never a Congolese actor or a japanese, South Asian person playing a lead role and replacing a white person. It’s always a secondary role that has been changed to a light-skinned black lead in a movie about European culture. they know exactly what they need to do to satisfy their token diversty plan rather than just funding a fantastic movie that’s actually about black culture like 12 years a slave or Beasts of No Nation. “Why does it matter?” wouldn’t be asked if Queen margaret was played by a midget, people would just think it’s insane. Only certain actors can fill token diversity roles.
for the record, i know tons of blacks have done shakespeare but every time i see this happen in other shows/films it’s the *only* salient thing that’s historically inaccurate. not to mention that BAFTA has diversity requirements now…
do i think a “John Henry” movie should star Jason Statham instead of Ludacris? No.
and yes, i’m aware of numerous recent whitewashing instances in film, most of which are garbage movies and they need famous white people in them so they make money.
on the fantasy nonwhite casting. i have something to say cuz i looked into this once. it turns out some of the ‘white’ characters are not white even tho the cover art makes them white. so, for example, rand al thor is probably someone we’d say is white, but a lot of the ppl from his corner of wot world may not look so white. jordan was asked about this in relation to cover art and he said the artist did a fine job, but that they didn’t really look like how he described them.
this become more interesting to me cuz brandon sanderson said the ppl in the stormlight archive, the main eastern nation, actually look more east asian than anything, which is not what i thought. i assumed they were the ‘white analog.’ infact, the most european looking ppl i had cast in my mind as east asian. part of it has to do with the illustrations. i know sanderson signed off on them, so must be due to marketing.
basically, if you make the races accurately nonwhite in depiction probably less attractive to american buyers.
i think a lot of the race-bending is a bit much. but it is also clear a lot of written fantasy isn’t as much like LotR as i’d have thought.
I could not download the Henrich Science article linked above because it is paywalled.
If any of you have a link to a free version, please post it.
I am a bit skeptical of statements from the abstract like this:
“Focusing on Europe, where we compare regions within countries, we show that longer exposure to the Western Church is associated with less intensive kinship, greater individualism, less conformity, and more fairness and trust toward strangers.”
Riddle for me why it was the Protestant areas that split with the Church a couple of centuries before the industrial revolution that began the revolution and even today are more prosperous than strictly catholic areas.
In England, for example, cousin marriage was common by the 19th Century. Jane Austin features cousins falling in love in Mansfield Park and does not comment on the family relationship. Similarly, in Can You Forgive Her by Anthony Trollope, Alice Vavasor declines to marry her cousin George because he is a lout, not because he is her cousin. That is simply not an issue.
My belief is that religious rules follow society, they do not make it. If Europeans had really wanted cousin marriage, they would have pushed the church into sanctioning it. (BTW, there is no Biblical injunction against cousin marriage). Not only that but I think family patterns were probably more due to environmental factors, life expectancies, costs of setting up households.
I think monogamy is a very important variable because I think polygamy is poison. But, the norm does not, I think come from religion. Polygamy is still widespread in MENA from whence Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all came. But, in Europe many Indo-European peoples were basically monogamous. Most notably the Romans, whose practices became embedded in Christianity. Tacitus says that the Germanic tribes were mostly monogamous.
I think this is a case where the institution preceded the religion
Twinkie wrote:
“I always found it odd that, in East Asia of my generation and earlier, siblings were extremely close and supported each other, displaying a very high degree of cohesion and a sense of shared purpose of advancing the family while, in the U.S., siblings would often develop jealousies and rivalries and engage in scorched earth legal warfare over inheritances and other parental resources.”
I can’t speak for general trends, but are you sure you’re not seeing through nostalgia-tinted glasses? I know quite a few East Asian siblings who don’t have as rosy relationships, partially because their parents heavily favored one sibling. Some of the siblings have made up, but others aren’t nearly as close. In a few cases the non-favored sibling became much less enamored of their parents too. Maybe there won’t be any legal battles, and the kids generally went along with it, but the unfavored children aren’t too happy about certain things.
On a tangential note, is there some sort of measurement for sibling closeness/relationship status? I’d be curious about that. However, with family sizes shrinking in many places it could be hard to compare different generations.
Even LotR has a small amount of whitewashing. The dominant hobbit ethnic group – Harfoots – are described as “more brown skinned” than the four hobbits in the Fellowship.
@Robert – if you don’t think mainstream movies should reflect mainstream society I’d suggest you stop watching them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2378-6 – “A dynastic elite in monumental Neolithic society”
Suggests a particular network of family linked to large scale monumental sites across northern Ireland.
Challenges what we know about formation of large scale political organization? Love to see a Turchin take on it. Would his models predict large scale organisation / networks of this kind then and there…?
Relevant to Henrich’s work “Notably, levels of consanguinity are consistently low and decrease through time across our wider dataset of imputed ancient genomes (Extended Data Fig. 4)” (includes some PC steppe samples, not particularly more of less inbred on average than MN->LNBA Europeans… Lack of some outliers *but* relatively small steppe sample set).
Razib,
As I understand you have interests in both pre-modern South Asia and East Asia. There’s now a new translation of a Song dynasty (1220’s) geographical monograph on various places in India and SE Asia that were known to mercantile fleets based in Southern China:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/39bce63e4e0642d3abce6c24db470760
Anyways, maybe of interest to you.
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-sledge-dogs-year-old-ancient-dog.html – “This means that modern sledge dogs and Zhokhov had the same common origin in Siberia more than 9,500 years ago. Until now, we have thought that sledge dogs were only 2-3,000 years old,” says the other first author, Associate Professor Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Globe Institute.”
Modern day sledge dogs descended from dogs of the “Neosiberians”? (“Neosiberians” the wave of more East Asian like people thought to have superceded Kolyma type populations in Siberia, per Sikora – “Between 11 and 4 kya, AP were in turn largely replaced by another group of peoples with ancestry from East Asia, the “Neosiberians” from which many contemporary Siberians derive.”). The timing is about right?
Paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1495 – “Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition”
The Zhokhov dog is about as old as the Kolyma “Paleosiberian” and from an island in the Arctic much further north, it could well be a Paleosiberian dog. It’s most similar to to pre-Columbian American dogs and modern sled dogs used in Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut speaking range, doesn’t show a specific relation to other Siberian dogs.
@Gade this is true; my thinking here was that Kolyma is a *late* Paleosiberian, while Zhokhov is an “on schedule” arrival with Neosiberian, but these are not certain things, of course.
Do we have any uniparental markers from far north regions like the Kola pensinsula,the new Siberian islands/Zhokov and such? Were the people of these regions always mixed like they are now (with eastern ydnas and some mtdna U? What were the kolmya people like?>
Please forgive me for this but once long ago I tried to wonder how religion (by which I mean some type of a philosophical-popular-composite theistic Hinduism) would interact with a scenario of a newly conceived fetus screened genetically for potential immoral predispositions for the future life (such as psychopathy, (homosexuality), (at least predatory) paraphilias, violent murder, etc.) and terminated if found to have such predispositions. As usual for me I constructed very many wishful, fantastical, muddy thoughts in that comment but I got one thing right: abortion is a grave evil from the perspective of Hinduism even if instances of it seem almost completely justifiable (and many times, necessary) from a secular perspective. The reason is that for the case of the technology in question, i.e. the screening of a fetus for potential predispositions of any kind, a fetus is necessary and the existence of a fetus means a soul has already selected the fetus’s parents as the people to provide it body and probably some other characteristics (the nature of which I don’t know) and not just that, it has begun a new life in the cycle of births and rebirths already. The fetus’s life-form physicality simply makes its potential termination an act of murder. (Details may differ as to when a soul enters a womb and such things but I have considered that Hindus believe a soul enters a womb right at the time of conception. I actually forgot what I might have read during my childhood and other times regarding this question.)
Now the thing is that even if the above technology was somehow capable of identifying the immoral predispositions of the fetus before the entrance of the soul into it (which possibility itself might be logically untenable from the Hindu perspective because without the soul how would we consider the fetus a life and the concept of moral predispositions is applicable only to life, no? But I am not sure if I am thinking through that any correctly) and helped terminate it before the entry of the soul, then also the result is not of course any better in spiritual terms (of course this is apparent to any person superficially knowledgeable about any religion of the world but I actually did not think all of this that day when I made that comment lol). Because the soul is eternal, and before its liberation is always deluded, it always seeks to take rebirths and making its path difficult to be able to take new bodies and lives might be a form of Himsa (I am not sure about this but this is the hinge of my argument lol) to it and consequently a generator of karma. The point is that liberation of anything nowhere close to occurs. The soul is eternal, it has at a given time some delusions due to its past karma and if not allowed to be born in this body it will choose some other body to be born with the same predispositions. The only thing that happens by obstructing its birth is the generation of karma. (This is again easily apparent to anybody even basically familiar with religion but a clueless me totally did not think of this that day.)
In fact, it must be the case that since liberation from the cycle of births and rebirths, of any kind, be it Advaitic, Vishishtadvaitic or Dvaitic, happenly only after birth (and in some of the above schools, only after a death following a perfectly correct life), there is no other way for a soul to decisively begin the final path to liberation than to consciously let go of all attachments and surrender to God (or attain correct knowledge, or whatever, depending on the school) while within a life. So anyone who believes suffering can be reduced by terminating fetuses with immoral predispositions might be gravely deluded according to Hindu view, because though a certain physical, mental, emotional kind of suffering may be apparently reduced, spiritual suffering of course will not unless liberation happens. They might say that such delusions are increasingly common because of the nature of the Kaliyuga and that makes sense; with liberation and avenues for liberation becoming more and more difficult for souls with time, God will be required to ultimately unite every soul back with Himself with the help of violence (physical violence, spiritual love, I assume) at the end of the Kaliyuga. Needless to say, all this is painfully obvious to everybody easily haha. It’s actually quite funny that I did not think of all of this at the time.
Theology is not my strong suit but … if a soul is created at conception, it cannot sin before birth and an abortion would send it straight to heaven, there to live forever in unimaginable bliss in the presence of God. So “the greatest good for the greatest number” would involve constantly creating souls, initiating pregnancies and terminating them before the soul’s body can sin.