The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. A book by the great Richard Wrangham.
Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers.
Life (science) comes at you fast, part 1.
University of California loses breakthrough CRISPR patent in PTO ruling.
Oregon Pulls Russian Vodka From Liquor Store Shelves.
The mass defunding of higher education that’s yet to come. 2017 post.
I have been thinking about a new psyops approach to combating the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I call it win win warfare:
The bulk of Russian troops are low skill, very young, conscripts on short terms. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-the-russians-are-struggling/
What would happen if we offered any Russian soldier who surrenders peaceably, €10,000 in cash, a clean set of civilian clothes, and a ticket to the NATO country of his choice with a visa and a work permit. I will wager that we would get a surprising number of takers.
We might pay an additional bonus to any officer who delivers a whole unit.
We could also pay for any arms and ammo they surrender. We could easily justify paying a tank crew that surrenders an intact MBT peaceably, €1,000,000. The Russian MBTs are priced at €2,000,000+ new off the lot. Late model used vehicles are being sold at like new prices these days, so we could get our money back.
Think people just had too high of an expectation for the Russians. Myself included, we thought Russians would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a day or two. Evidently that was impossible. Even the US at the height of its power(and with the support of UK, Australia etc) took more than a month to conquer Iraq. And Iraq is just 2/3rds the size of Ukraine. Ukraine is fucked as the West will lose interest in a few weeks when something more interesting comes along.
Re; the anti-war “Russia vodka ban”, I guess writ small (and perhaps small in a way that doesn’t amount to much; either way) that seems to me what the idea of “Peace through globalisation” concretely means. That claim was that commerce between nations would make it too expensive for countries to wage aggressive war, and by doing so lose their markets to backlash, organic or centrally driven.
If we want “Peace through globalisation” to have teeth, we should be somewhat supportive of this species of action. If we said about every such measure “Oh, but this might make Putin angry, so keep on buying that Russian X, Y, Z”, or “Oh, we can’t hold peoples collectively responsible!” etc then we have to admit that “peace through globalisation” doesn’t really have much in the way of potential legs. Putin has to be the living evidence that you will be shackled up in Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Straitjacket”, or you will be much poorer, or we shouldn’t expect globalisation to reduce war; just giving pro-war, aggressive and invasive regime’s like Putin’s funds without any economically punitive element is hardly going to reduce war.
(Arguably this is already falsified by other scenarios and other countries! But the Russian example might clarify for anyone on the fence about this idea. It’s seriously discrediting to advocacy for globalisation as pro-peace if various claims fly that this tool cannot be used in this scenario.)
Matt- everyone is still burning Russian petroleum in our vehicles.
@JMcG, yes; that’s a big part of the question. Globalisation -> Peace relied on the idea that war could lead trade partners to stop importing, and so to become self-defeating for countries. But how much can countries pivot away from the big Russian good (fossil fuels, with military technology one of the few industries they’re viable in)?
I’ve seen the small-scale stuff analogized to “Freedom Fries”, but that seems really off and it’s clearly more like some anti-war French student circa 2005 refusing to eat “Le McDo” as a boycott of “L’impérialisme Americain”. (It’s a boycott of an aggressor nation aiming to stop war, not an ally that refuses to agree. It’s an act with history in the anti-war movement, not neocon.). And how much did that work? (Though big difference in scale).
I was right:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/42341-Adriatic-Sea-through-the-analysis-of-genome-wide-data-from-Southern-Italy
I would like recommendations of books on Russian History, especially the Soviet Union.
On the whole Russian sanctions again (at risk of talking to myself aloud), the degree to which there’s almost a “whole global online society” effort being engaged kind of reminds me of some comments I think I say (perhaps from Andrew Batson’s twitter), on how China’s Covid-19 response was different from the West, and even that of Hong Kong and successful politically liberal (mostly) East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.
Namely, by being a effort that could reach into the entire society via huge numbers of the important Communist party cadre who are everywhere in China, and who have a different mission from emergency and civic services (who are the only kinds of comparably frequent bureaucrats in Western countries). They could mount a much more united society effort with universal participation… and this (mass participation and links down into the whole of society) rather than autocracy was the main advantage they had. (Compare the Russian system, which is by repute “autocracy without participation”, and sharp insider-outsider divides and a dominance by a secret service establishment that seeks to misdirect and marginalize civic society, and which has seen one of the world’s worst outcomes for a nation of its wealth and resources).
And that chimed for me with some comments Tanner Greer had made about the wasting away of fabric of normal civic society in Western countries (and which some other commentators attribute to post-industrial work, which tends to be more individual bargaining based rather than collective bargaining, leading to the end of unions and civic organisations).
Yet from the sanctions, and their ground-up implementations (even if some the latter are extreme and seem unnecessary overkill), it seems like in some sense, Western countries do have quite an ability to mount a whole society effort against some goal, but that this quite is perhaps quite bifurcated between our onlines (heavily engaged) and the offlines (feel alienated). So is the ultimate equilibrium for this that everyone becomes heavily online (which seems kind of a problem), or some other merger between the online world and the offline in some sense (resolving “the contradiction” as the Marxists might put it), or will we just maintain this quite bifurcated pattern going forward?
The banning of Russians individuals from sports, restaurants, orchestras etc seems very silly. Espcially considering that many of these people are anti-Putin. But more importantly I think this also shows a Western civilization in decline. Civilizations confident about themselves don’t engage in such ridiculous tit-for-tats. For example, when Spain expelled their Muslims, the Ottomans didn’t respond by expelling any Christians. They were confident about themselves and knew they were the dominant power. Contrast that with the late 19th/early 20th century, when the expulsion of Muslims from Balkans resulted in Ottomans expelling/massacring their Christians(Greek/Armenians/Assyrians etc). It was a dying empire and could only respond in such way. Any thoughts?
Above all, it’s just petty. Why would you target the Paralympics? Are disabled athletes a core pillar of the Putin regime? Bourgeois Westerners just don’t know or care to act in any way but blind, righteous indignation.
@Harry, you think China today wouldn’t do that then? But I don’t get the example though; wasn’t that time a waxing of Spanish power in Iberia?
Oh right, I get what you were talking about. But isn’t that just that in 19th century, that was an action against the Ottoman Empire, while in the Reconquista, the Ottomans weren’t linked to al-Andalus at all? There wasn’t that much fellow feeling?
@ Walter Sobchak – For what it’s worth, today Tyler Cowen called Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians: A History, Second Edition “(by far) the best book on Russia I know.”
@Roger Sweeny: Thanks
Given Russia so newsworthy right now, so human pop genetics wise, from late last year, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.02.21265801v1.full –
Expanding the Russian allele frequency reference via cross-laboratory data integration: insights from 6,096 exome samples –
In contrast to all previous genomic studies (Zhernakova et al. 2020; Barbitoff et al. 2019; Ramensky et al. 2021), our analysis includes a diverse set of admixed samples that can allow us to investigate the fine structure of the present-day Russian population. Indeed, principal component analysis of the individual genotypes identified several distinct clusters of samples. (Samples from a diverse set of Moscow and St Petersburg medical case samples).
Given this observation, we went on to group the individuals into three clusters using the unsupervised k-means algorithm. The three clusters significantly differed in size and shape. The first cluster that was dubbed “heel” was the densest and contained 4,429 (84.1%) samples. The second cluster (“ankle”) was more sparse and smaller in size, containing 623 (11.8%) samples. Finally, the third cluster (“toes”) was the smallest and the most heterogeneous, spreading over the first principal component axis (Figure 2b), and comprising 216 (4.1%) individuals (labels were chosen by the authors because the plot looks like a foot 🙂 ).
(W)e conclude that the first cluster represents the individuals of European ancestry, i.e. native residents of the Central and Northwest Russia; the second cluster represents Southern Russia and Northern Caucasus populations, while the third cluster corresponds to patients originating from the Siberian regions and/or Asian republics of the former USSR. These assumptions were further validated by the available patient information from both sequencing centers (data not shown).
These three clusters kind of bleed into each other to some degree. When I plot the values of the “common variant allele frequencies in gnomAD ancestral groups” that they provide (as a similarity index, using Principal Coordinates Analysis), the main Russian cluster looks closest to the Finnish population, and shifted towards East Asia about the same degree (compared to Non-Finnish European, mainly Northwest Europeans), but more cosmopolitan and not as bottlenecked – https://imgur.com/a/HkhYNDR
What is your take on the latest paper on sub-Saharan African foragers by Lipson et. al.? I think it’s pretty incredible that they’ve been able to extract DNA from 16,000 year old sub-Saharan African samples (the oldest being in Malawi). It also goes to show that much of Haplogroup E’s modern-day distribution in sub-Saharan Africa is the result of the Bantu expansion.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28827-2 – “Ancient genomes from the Himalayas illuminate the genetic history of Tibetans and their Tibeto-Burman speaking neighbors”
“Here, we obtain new genome-wide data for 33 ancient individuals from high elevation sites on the southern fringe of the Tibetan Plateau in Nepal, who we show are most closely related to present-day Tibetans.”
Multiple lines of evidence of early goose domestication in a 7,000-y-old rice cultivation village in the lower Yangtze River, China.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2117064119
I infer that the goose-breeders were Austronesians. They had domesticated dogs that were ancestral to Polynesian dogs (which are now extinct).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01391-6 – “Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had similar auditory and speech capacities”
“The study of audition in fossil hominins is of great interest given its relationship with intraspecific vocal communication. While the auditory capacities have been studied in early hominins and in the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins, less is known about the hearing abilities of the Neanderthals. Here, we provide a detailed approach to their auditory capacities. Relying on computerized tomography scans and a comprehensive model from the field of auditory bioengineering, we have established sound power transmission through the outer and middle ear and calculated the occupied bandwidth in Neanderthals. The occupied bandwidth is directly related to the efficiency of the vocal communication system of a species. Our results show that the occupied bandwidth of Neanderthals was greater than the Sima de los Huesos hominins and similar to extant humans, implying that Neanderthals evolved the auditory capacities to support a vocal communication system as efficient as modern human speech.”
More evidence against the idea that the emergence/expansion of H. Sap was due to a leap in the capacity for language (and so social organisation, cultural transmission, etc).