Issues of Race in the USA

[Nonc Hilaire]

This Dolezal thing is sad. Ms. Dolezal was by all accounts a highly effective administrator. I hope she finds a good therapist who can help her elucidate her experience, because she has a unique and tremendously positive potential for mediating race relations.

Who you spend time around does affect you. I lived in NO (80%+ black) for twenty plus years, and was even on the board of the local Council of Negro Women for a term. I am not Negro and not a woman, but I was dedicated to their programs for teenage mothers. I got along quite well with the board, which included several Jewish white women.

I felt out of place when I would travel and there were only white people in the restaurant, even though I am a fat, baldheaded white guy. I was just used to seeing a majority of black people everywhere. When you are immersed in a society, you adapt. Dolezal may have overadapted, but I see that as a good thing. She needs to be back in the game ASAP.

Ms. Dolezal has a self concept issue, but she can work through that. Psychologically, it's embarassing but not pathological. Why people want to attack her is beyond me. Her deep identification with people of color is human; not opportunistic. I hope she becomes a leader in the national NAACP and does not let the exploitation of her enemies bring her down permanently.

[Simple Minded]

This Dolezal thing is sad. Ms. Dolezal was by all accounts a highly effective administrator. I hope she finds a good therapist who can help her elucidate her experience, because she has a unique and tremendously positive potential for mediating race relations.

Who you spend time around does affect you. I lived in NO (80%+ black) for twenty plus years, and was even on the board of the local Council of Negro Women for a term. I am not Negro and not a woman, but I was dedicated to their programs for teenage mothers. I got along quite well with the board, which included several Jewish white women.

I felt out of place when I would travel and there were only white people in the restaurant, even though I am a fat, baldheaded white guy. I was just used to seeing a majority of black people everywhere. When you are immersed in a society, you adapt. Dolezal may have overadapted, but I see that as a good thing. She needs to be back in the game ASAP.

Ms. Dolezal has a self concept issue, but she can work through that. Psychologically, it's embarassing but not pathological. Why people want to attack her is beyond me. Her deep identification with people of color is human; not opportunistic. I hope she becomes a leader in the national NAACP and does not let the exploitation of her enemies bring her down permanently.

I suspect you may be correct, her lack of publicity seeking behavior after achieving notoriety, implies sincerity. You speak of the behavior of individuals humans when they actually look each other in the eye and get to know each other. Not surprisingly, that is when Joe becomes known as Joe, and not member # nnn of a demographic herd. Humans as pack animals have often acted less humanely.

Stripped of politics & political money/reward, culture is very local, and often extremely flexible, adapting, and accommodating.

I hope she does not fade from view, for the reasons you state above and also to find out how much of her behavior is due to self perception, how much is role playing to gain tactical/financial advantage, or empathetic reaction, to learn her definitions of all the common terms used in racial discussions, and to discover her perspectives on when the label or black or white has an advantage.

I would not consider her to be any more expert than any other single individual, but due to her background, her perspectives should be very interesting. It does not seem that she is harming anyone, just that her behavior/existence interferes with the agendas of her critics & detractors. She is viewed as a heretic, and heretics must be destroyed.

Where is NO?

[Nonc Hilaire]

New Orleans, Louisiana.

[Typhoon]

This Dolezal thing is sad. Ms. Dolezal was by all accounts a highly effective administrator. . . . Why people want to attack her is beyond me. , , ,

It appears that some people will make an issue out of anything as long as it is related to race.

[Doc]

This Dolezal thing is sad. Ms. Dolezal was by all accounts a highly effective administrator. . . . Why people want to attack her is beyond me. , , ,

It appears that some people will make an issue out of anything as long as it is related to race.

Race is nothing but a social construct meat to divide people for political gain.

As for people attacking Dolezal, with at least some black folks I have talked to, the issue is the fake hate mail. It is hard for people that have actually received it to "understand" why she would use fake hate mail as a means to get ahead.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Race is real, Doc. People instinctively like those who resemble themselves, and distrust those who are different. We can make people like us by merely mirroring body language

We are also instinctively programmed for pattern recognition. Even when no pattern exists, we will find one.

These are two biological factors which contribute to racism. We can't just intellectualize it away.

[Apollonius]

Some good books about human evolution, genetics, and migration:



Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (North Point Press, 2000)


Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes by Steve Olson (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002)


Journey of Man: A Genetic Journey by Spencer Wells (Princeton University Press, 2002)


The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa by Stephen Oppenheimer (Constable, 2003)


DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America by Bryan Skyes (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012)


Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings by Jean Manco (Thames & Hudson, 2013)


A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Nicholas Wade (Penguin Press, 2014)




One frustrating thing about most books that discuss early humans, especially if the emphasis is on genetic roots, is the inevitable lecture about racism. It's kind of funny to see scientists devoting entire chapters to explaining how we trace DNA strands, their origins and possible reasons for spreading through populations, and always having to apologize to their audience for writing about human differences, meanwhile pointing an accusatory finger at anyone who would use this information to justify any sort of racism. You just have to get used to this lecture. It's repeated over and over again to assure their readers that it is THEY who are most likely to harbour impure thoughts, not the authors.


For example, Cavalli-Sforza devotes most of his introductory chapter to allaying fears that he is promoting racism with sub-sections on: Is There a Scientific Basis for Racism? and Visible and Hidden Variables, which includes this statement:

The racial differences that impressed our ancestors and that continue to bother many people today include skin color, eye shape, hair type, body and facial form-- in short, the traits that often allow us to determine a person's origin in a single glance.

... followed by several pages where he explains how superficial and relatively unimportant these differences are.




But by the time he's gotten into the full swing of his book he's devoting whole chapters to clusters of genetic traits, including charts and maps showing degrees of differentiation between different populations, many of them fairly superficial.


For example, after informing us that blond hair and blue eyes are fairly common in Berber populations, indicating movements of peoples from either Europe or West Asia, he opens his discussion of sub-Saharan populations with this statement:

Today, a few groups continue to live in the mountains of the Sahara, and are generally much darker than the Berbers, the Tuaregs, and the Beja ...

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages (North Point Press, 2000)

On one page he's talking about populations being more akin to clouds forming and dispersing on a summer day. On the next he diagrams, in detail, the places where and when various groups diverged from one another.

The most famous of these diagrams has been reprinted thousands of times in innumerable places, a graph where the x and y axis divides 42 of the world's populations based on genetic distances from one another.

A likewise famous chart shows a comparison of genetic and linguistic trees.

Some of these can be found here:



Genes and languages - Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Marges linguistiques, no. 11, May 2006
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf



Included in this summary article are parts of the book and the most interesting diagram, at least to me, chiefly because I've never seen one where someone ventured to risk putting some dates into it, is a chart showing "The tree of origin of human languages ... drawn by Merrit Ruhlen in 1994". Actually, as he explains in the book, Ruhlen's diagram did not include any dates. Cavalli-Sforza supplies a date of 70-50 kya for 'Asian' diverging from 'African', which split into 'Eurasian' and 'Southeast Asia/Pacific' 60-40 kya. Eurasian subsequently split into 'Eurasian/American' and 'Dene-Caucasian' 40-20 kya.

[Apollonius]

Steve Olson's book follows this by now familiar formula of stepping gingerly into the discussion about the subject he addresses, apologizing for and warning against misuse of his observations, and then getting into a detailed analysis of all these unimportant differences.


Olson is a science reporter, not a scientist. His book is pretty basic and relies a lot on the work of Cavalli-Sforza, whose groundbreaking studies got underway just as DNA analysis was coming into its own. It is, however, quite well written and has an excellent bibliography. Sometimes you can get a broader picture from someone who does a good review of the literature rather than from those actively engaged in the field. The experts can often be so taken up with their own theories that they don't give you a balanced view.


Being neither an archareologist, linguist, or geneticist himself, he finds himself wandering back to discussions of race on a regular basis, including some by now rather idealistic sounding pronouncements about the most recent wave of immigration to Europe. Still more contradictory information appears in an oddly discordant chapter near the end of the book on the state of ethnic relations in Hawaii, which has one of the most mixed populations anywhere, and yet is a place where all sorts of antagonisms and conflicts boil just beneath the surface.


A while back the famous travel writer Paul Theroux, who lives in Hawaii, wrote an article which touched on the exclusivity and unfriendliness of many native Hawaiians:



A man and his islands - Paul Theroux, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2012
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Pa ... awaii.html

... Some years ago, I spent six months attempting to write an in-depth piece for a magazine describing how Hawaiian culture is passed from one generation to the other. I wrote the story, after a fashion, but the real tale was how difficult it was to get anyone to talk to me. I went to a charter school on the Big Island, in which the Hawaiian language was used exclusively, though everyone at the place was bilingual. Aware of the protocol, I gained an introduction from the headmaster of the adjoining school. After witnessing the morning assembly where a chant was offered, and a prayer, and a stirring song, I approached a teacher and asked if she would share with me a translation of the Hawaiian words I had just heard. She said she’d have to ask a higher authority. Never mind the translation, I said; couldn’t she just write down the Hawaiian versions?

“We have to go through the proper channels,” she said.

That was fine with me, but in the end permission to know the words was refused. I appealed to a Hawaiian language specialist, Hawaiian himself, who had been instrumental in the establishment of such Hawaiian language immersion schools. He did not answer my calls or messages, and in the end, when I pressed him, he left me with a testy, not to say xenophobic, reply. ...

[Apollonius]

However, there are some nice easy to understand explanantions of some fundamentals concerning genetics in Olson's book.

Among them:

If everyone inherits his or her DNA from the same people -- if we all receive our mitochondrial DNA from mitochondrial Eve, and all men inherit their Y chromosomes from a single man, and everyone gets the rest of their DNA from 86,000 other people who lived sometime in the past -- then an obvious question is why everyone's DNA is not exactly the same. Why isn't everyone on earth as similar as identical twins?


... Whenever a cell divides, it has to copy its DNA so that each daughter cell has a complete set of chromosomes. This process is amazingly accurate. The molecular machinery that reproduces DNA can continue for millions of nucleotides without making a mistake.

But the process is not perfect -- if it were, after all, the earth might still be populated only by copies of that first primordial organism. Consider the 16,500 or so nucleotides in mitochondrial DNA. When a woman's mitochondria are copied and packaged into an egg cell, the sequence of mitochondrial nucleotides in the egg is almost always the same as in all the mother's other cells. But occasionally a mistake occurs. Maybe one nucleotide is switched. Maybe instead of an A, a particular location has a G, or a T, or a C. Perhaps a stray bit of genetic material is added at a particular spot, or some is deleted. Any such mistake in the copying of DNA is known as a mutation.

Mutations can occur in other ways. Parts of our DNA can move around and alter existing sequences. A stray bit of radiation or a nasty chemical can garble a section of DNA. The cell has repair mechanisms that attempt to fix such damage. But these mechanisms don't always leave the DNA the same as before. The result is a new mutation.


[...]


The loop of DNA carried in mitochondria is so small that mutations in it are rare. But the DNA sequences of our chromosomes are 400,000 times longer than those in our mitochondria. Because there is so much DNA in our cells, every act of human procreation produces unique mutations in chromosomal DNA. (The nucleotide sequences of a child's chromosomal DNA typically differ at about one hundred locations from the sequences of the mother and father.) Therefore, each newborn child is genetically unique; even identical twins have a few unique mutations that occur after the fertilized egg divides in two.


-- Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002

[Apollonius]

People like to trace their ancestry to famous figures. In Japan many families trace their lineages to the ninth-century emperor Seiwa. Many French believe they are descended from Charlemagne. Such claims are typically impossible to prove, and many genealogists dismiss them as fantasies.

However, these claims are almost certainly true. The exponential growth in the number of our ancestors going back in time connects us tightly to the past. If a historical figure who lived more than 1,600 years ago had children who themselves had children, that person is almost certainly among our ancestors. Everyone in the world today is most likely descended from Nefertiti (through the six daughters she had with Akhenaton), from Confucius (through the son and daughter he is said to have had), and from Julius Caesar (through his illegitimate children, not through Julia, who died in childbirth). One need go back only a couple of millennia to connect everyone alive today to a common pool of ancestors.


Being descended from someone doesn't necessarily mean that you have any DNA from that person. Essentially, the inheritance of DNA is weighted by numbers. If 800 years ago most of a person's ancestors were African a few European, then most of that person's DNA comes from the African ancestors alive at that time. The amount of DNA each of us gets from any one of our 1,024 ancestors ten generations back is minuscule -- and we might not get any DNA from that person, given the way the chromosomes rearrange themselves every generation. Still, the basic point is unchanged. The DNA now in our cells consists of bits and pieces of the DNA that was in thousands of people's cells a millennium or two ago. Our DNA is a patchwork quilt stitched together from the DNA of our ancestors.



The extravagance of our genetic ancestry needs to be kept in mind when thinking about the origins of our mitochondrial DNA. Sure, most Europeans received their mitochondrial DNA from a handful of women who lived in the past (one geneticist calls these mitochondrial ancestors the Seven Daughters of Eve). But today's Europeans received the DNA in their chromosomes, as opposed to their mitochondria, from thousands of other prehistoric Europeans, Africans, and Asians who lived at the same times as their mitochondrial ancestors. Similarly, the mitochondria of everyone on the planet today came from mitochondrial Eve, but the DNA in our chromosomes came from thousands of people who lived at the same time as mitochondrial Eve. The roots of our family trees extend to many of these early modern humans, not just one.


-- Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002)

[Apollonius]

Spencer Wells is a geneticist who studied under Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford. The subject of the book was actually first conceived and produced as a television program, hosted by the author. Wells states in the introduction that his aim here is to provide more detail than could be shown on the screen.

The title was chosen for a reason - and it wasn't sexism. The journey we trace is primarily one made by men, because it is the Y-chromosome, inherited from Adam down the male line, which gives us our keenest tool for deciphering the journey. The Y helps to place the stones, bones, and languages in context better than any other part of our genetic code, and ultimately gives us the genetic answers we are looking for. Of course, in order to leave descendants, these early human groups must have included women; while the journey we follow may leave out some female-specific details, the resolution we can achieve only by following the male lineage is worth the omission.

-- Spencer Wells, Journey of Man: A Genetic Journey (Princeton University Press, 2002)

Whoa!! This is bound to offend someone. Read the book and you'll learn the truth of this. It doesn't really mean what you might think on first reading. It's not a statement on the importance or contributions of genes from male and female. It's a statement about why it's easier to follow mutations and differentiation in the male line than the female line.

One of the quirky features of sexual reproduction is that the chromosomes that actually determine our sex - the so-called sex-chromosomes - are exceptions to the 50 : 50 sexual mixing rule. The double layout of our genomes, with two copies of each chromosome, fails us when we get to these chromosomes. This is because of the way in which sex is determined in most animals, through the presence of a mismatched sex chromosome. In the case of mammals, it is the male that is mismatched, with one X and one Y-chromosome. In females, the X-chromosome is present in two copies, like the other chromosomes, allowing normal recombination. In males, however, the Y only matches with the X in the short regions at either end, which serve to align the sex chromosomes properly during cell division. The rest of the Y-chromosome, known as the no-recombining portion of the Y, is pretty much completely unrelated to the X. Thus it has no paired chromosome with which it can recombine, and so it doesn't. It is passed unshuffled from one generation to the next, for ever - exactly like the mitochondrial genome.

The Y turns out to provide population geneticists with the most useful tool available for studying human diversity. Part of the reason for this is that, unlike mtDNA, a molecule roughly 16,000 nucleotide units long, the Y is huge - around 50 million nucleotides. It therefore has many, many sites at which mutations may have occurred in the past. As we saw in the last chapter, more polymorphic sites give us better resolution - if we only had Landsteiner's blood types to work with, everyone would be sorted into four categories: A, B, AB and O. To put it another way, the landscape of possible polymorphisms is simply much larger for the Y. And critically, because of its lack of recombination, we are able to infer the order in which the mutations occurred on the Y - just like mtDNA. Without this feature, we can't use Zuckerkandl and Pauling's methods to define lineages, and Ock the Knife can't help us with the ancestors.

After explaining the mechanisms that underly this differentiation and the techniques for detecting them and placing them in context, the author proceeds to describing the the findings.

Intersperced with this genetically decoded journey of humans across the planet are all sorts of fun factoids and interesting reminders. For example:

One of the apparent conundrums of biology is that the more temperate parts of the world actually contain the largest animals. In ecology there is an observation known as Bergmann's rule, which states that body size increases with latitude. While this isn't strictly true for every species, it is a good generalization. The woolly mammoths land mammals of the past few hundred thousand years, lived in the tundra regions of far northern Eurasia and America. In the sea, there is actually more biological material in the colder parts of the planet than there is in the warmer. In spite of the incredible diversity found on a coral reef, the total mass of organisms is significantly less than that found in more polar regions. The polar oceans, for instance, contain the world's densest concentrations of plankton. These tiny plants and animals support the largest animals on earth, the filter feeding baleen whales, which, over time, have become almost completely dependent on this unusual food source, the remnants of their terrestrial lives tens of millions of years ago being nearly invisible today.

Similarly, the tropical rainforest contains a huge number of species, but the size - and density - of any particular species is quite low. Furthermore, because all the nutrients are tied up in organisms, the soil actually contains very little in the way of minerals and organic matter. ... The tropical environment is poised precariously on the edge of fecundity and death, extremely susceptible to relatively trivial disturbances.

The temperate parts of the planet, on the other hand, are endowed with rather more resilience. While the species diversity is a small fraction of that seen in the rainforest, the organisms living there are better able to withstand drastic upheaval. This is primarily due to the vicissitudes of life in the temperate zone. Tropical climatic stability has nurtured the evolution of species over tens of millions of years in virtually unchanged conditions (save for variations in geographic range). On the other hand, vast tracts of the Eurasian landmass have been periodically covered in ice or reduced to deserts during the same period. This long-term cycle actually mirrors the annual variation in weather that produces the temperate zone's seasons: the dry heat of a Mongolian summer yields to icy winter storms in the space of a few months. Because of the enormous environmental variation seen there, animals living in the temperate zones have had to rely on two crucial adaptations to keep themselves alive: investment and migration.

-- Spencer Wells, Journey of Man: A Genetic Journey (Princeton University Press, 2002)

[Apollonius]

Stephen Oppenheimer is a paediatrician and geneticist. His book on the subject, which came out just a year after the one by Wells.


The great plus of Oppenheimer's book is the inclusion of a number of good maps. These are especially welcome for those portraying the eastern hemisphere in various stages of the Late Pleistocene. As we know, there have been a series of over twenty major glaciations during the Pleistocene, punctuated by interglacial periods when it sometimes reached temperatures even warmer than at present. However, these were brief, 15,000 to 20,000 years. During the last million years more than 80% of the time it was colder, generally much colder, than at present. You regularly see maps portraying the last Late Glacial Maximum, but other time periods don't get equal attention. However, it was cold and dry then too. For most of the last 100,000 years until about 11,000 years ago, more than half of the continent of Africa was a desert. The Sahara was even larger and drier than it is now.




The epilogue of Oppenheimer's is chiefly concerned with the question of whether humans are still evolving and the certainty that infectious diseases that affect humans are evolving faster than we are.

Prenatal diagnosis and genetic counselling services for lethal and serious genetically determined blood disorders have been around for some time and make an enormous difference to the lives of individuals. They have had a major influence in countries such as Cyprus, which suffers high rates of beta thalassaemia mutations as a result of previous malarial selection. Such ethically motivated interventions will continue to prevent individual misery.


However, what genetic intervention cannot do is increase our collective genetic diversity. Putting aside the ethical and technical problems, the fact is that genetic intervention can only reduce diversity. This applies equally to the abhorrent concept of culling the more subjective 'undesirable' genetic elements, as practiced by the Nazis on a variety of patients with mental and other disease as well as on Jews and gypsies, and to the Brave New World concept of designer humans. Even if a new breed of geneticists were able to design an especially 'good model' that found a large market among potential parents, the exercise would be self-defeating. A clone of such superhumans expanding in our midst would reduce our herd diversity, thus increasing our herd susceptibility to new infectious diseases.

-- Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa (Constable, 2003)

Stephen Oppenheimer has a website that provides snapshots of the story he explains in more detail in his book:


Journey of mankind: the peopling of the world - by Stephen Oppenheimer, Bradshaw Foundation, 2007
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

[Apollonius]

Bryan Sykes is a professor of human genetics at Oxford. His three books popular books on the subject are: The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001), Saxons, Vikings, and Celts (2006), and DNA USA, A Genetic Portrait of America (2012). All are fascinating looks at the incredible amount of information that can now be learned from looking at a person's DNA. Because this author is trying to reach a general audience, the information is described largely in a lay person's terms and includes quite a bit of anecdotal material to give it more of a storyline. But even though these books are aimed at general readers and have a distinctly popular or colloquial approach to the subject, the genetics are sound. For example, the DNA strands which allow geneticists to trace family histories are named after the letters of the alphabet: A, H, U, etc. In order to make it more personal sounding, Sykes gives the people who first show up with these strands names, like Aiyana, Helena, and Ursula. These are all determined from mitochondrial DNA, so they are traced through the female line. The Y chromosome traces paternal ancestry through segments of DNA in a distinctively separate but methodolgical similar way.

Bryan Sykes has even established a business called Oxford Ancestors which will test your DNA and trace your genetic history. By now there are quite a few businesses and organizations which do the same thing, like the Genographic Project set up by National Geographic. There are even companies that cater to specific ethnic groups, like one called African Ancestors.


Interestingly, in Sykes' book about DNA testing and genetic relationships in America you discover that almost all peoples living in the U.S. are interested in the information DNA analysis can provide, with one major exception. That is Native American groups. They are mostly opposed. There's a reason for this. It will reveal that many, perhaps most of them actually have very little Native American DNA.

Today membership of a recognized tribe is a highly sought-after privilege. American Indian nations now make their own rules for tribal membership, and almost all contain a reference to "blood quantum". This refers to the proportion of an applicant's ancestry that is considered to be tribal. So, if one of your parents is a "full-blooded" member of the tribe and the other is not, your blood quantum is one-half. The minimum requirements vary among tribes, from one-half in the case of the White Mountain Apache of Arizona to one-sixteenth for the Mashantucket Pequot of Connecticut and one thirty-second for the Cherokee Nation. Just as the original Allotment Act encouraged fraudulent applicants after land, so has tribal membership attracted a deluge of new applicants eager to enjoy the financial and other benefits it confers. There are the reparation payments for illegally acquired land, educational grants, subsidized health care, income from the lease of mining rights, and, most prominent of all, revenues from gaming. The most famous example of the last, Foxwood Resort Casino, is owned and operated by the Mashantucket Pequot and has the largest turnover of any gambling resort in the world, dwarfing both Atlantic City and Las Vegas, a remarkable achievement for a tribe that numbered only fifteen members in 1900 and whose land holdings had shrunk to less than an acre.

-- Bryan Sykes, DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012)

It is not well remembered that Native Americans kept slaves. In pre-contact times these were other Indians. In colonial times, Indians bought and sold black slaves. When the 'Five Civilized Tribes' were moved to Oklahoma, they took their slaves with them. After the slaves were emancipated in 1863, these slaves were freed and these "freedmen" integrated into the Indian reservations they found themselves in.


However, more recently this harmony has broken down:


The money that put an end to decades of harmony was a combination of gaming receipts accrued since the passing of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, and American government reparations for historic land seizures. ...

... Once the money began to pour into the tribal coffers, applications for tribal membership mushroomed. For example, membership of the Chreokee Nation of Oklahoma, which also saw a similar increase in its financial fortunes, rose from fifty thousand in 1980 to more than a quarter of a million today. In 1983 the Cherokee introduced a requirement for tribal members to carry a "Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood" that was open to anyone who could establish a genealogical link to the Dawes Rolls. As we have already seen, the rolls were not directly concerned with any literal concept of a blood relationship, but the very title of the certificate infers a link based on biology. When the Seminole expelled all two thousand black members of the tribe in 2000, it was not long before the Freedman realized that directly establishing at least a degree of authentic Native American ancestry through a DNA test should help them challenge the expulsions where other legal means had failed.

-- Bryan Sykes, DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2012)

Tests were run and these 'freedmen' turn out to have an average of about 6% Native American genes (about the same as the average African American living in Baltimore or New York). Not a lot, but more than is officially required by many tribes. The Cherokee Nation allows those who are on descended from people listed on the Dawes Rolls, established in 1906, and based mostly one's own recognisance or have other means of establishing a relationship with the Cherokee that can show them to be at least 1/32 Cherokee.


Blacks and others expelled from Indian tribal lists have, however, no recourse. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right of the tribes to determine their own membership.

[Apollonius]

A more strictly scientific book on genetic and other relationships of the peoples of Europe is called Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings by Jean Manco (Thames & Hudson, 2013).

Thames & Hudson is usually reliable for their solid scholarship and generally excellent presentation. The one place where they seem to consistently fall down is with the maps, which are typically rather slap dash. That's not the case with this volume, which has 59 excellent and very useful maps showing DNA, linguistic, and archaeological data in very well done cartographical form. In another departure from their usual format, incidental, yet odd because it is so exceptional to the usual format, this book is printed on old-fashioned unbleached paper. Not sure if this means anything, but taking into account the other aspects of the style and presentation of the book, it seems that this book is uncharacteristically aimed more at academics than general readers.


There are some good charts as well. The table which delineates 'The first satisfactorily tested and dated appearance of each mtDNA haplogroup found in European ancient DNA down to c. 2600 BC.' is amazing. For example haplogroup U2, is found 30,000 years ago in foragers from Kostenki, Russia. The first distinct haplogroup found among farmers is from 5500 BC. in Seehausen, Germany.




The text itself reviews all the evidence: genetic, linguistic, archaeological, and historical documents, to come up with a truly outstanding account of how the various peoples of Europe originated along with their histories and relationships with each other. I'd go so far as to say that this is probably the best single introductory volume on the subject.



One section of the book that I was particularly pleased to see was some discussion of the contrasting views on the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages. The most widely held opinion is that of Marija Gimbutas and James P. Mallory, who view the Indo-Europeans as having originated on the Eurasian steppes north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine sometime around 4000 BC. In particular, this appears to provide the best match for the linguistic evidence. A contrary view is that of Colin Renfrew who speaks for a much earlier origin, perhaps as early as 8000 BC in Anatolia. He posits that the success of the Indo-Europeans is a natural result of them being descendants of the first people to practice agriculture, and their presence is a result of the spread of the earliest farmers into Europe.



Another thing that Ancestral Journeys is especially good for, is in providing some nuance in terms of population sizes, especially as these relate to climate change. Pollen and ice core samples and other techniques have revealed a lot of the fine detail of climate fluctuations over the last 30,000 years. Thus, although agriculture had spread to northern Europe by 4000 BC, it seems that after an initial boom there was the inevitable bust as soil exhaustion set in and the climate deteriorated. The author sees the early centuries of the fourth millennium BC as a time when pastoralists had the upper hand over settled agriculturalists, and this is when the Indo-Europeans spread across Europe, perhaps largely replacing the earlier farmers, and certainly replacing their languages.

One graph shows "peaks and troughs in the numbers of radiocarbon-dated human sites in various European countries from 10,000 to 3,000 years ago. Belgium and the Netherlands show remarkably high concentrations of hunter-gatherer activity as the climate warmed after the last Ice Age. As the forests returned, hunting bands were fewer. They were followed by a population surge on the arrival of farming, then another fall."


Britain and Ireland show a similar pattern, with a big increase in sites immediately after the introduction of farming, and then a dramatic fall to the point where in England and Wales there are fewer sites dated from 2000 BC. than from 8000 BC.

Re-colonization of deserted territory appears far more common than was once thought. The re-colonization of northern Europe after the glaciers retreated has long been understood. Radiocarbon databases now reveal local episodes of re-colonization in later periods. There are unexpected gaps in places between hunter-gatherer occupation and the first farmers. Equally unexpected is the evidence of population collapse in places after farming arrived. The traditional assumption has been that once agriculture was established in a region, it would simply continue in an unbroken sequence to modern times. We need to take into account the vagaries of climate. As any farmer will tell you, farming depends for its success on the weather. Regions could also be depopulated by other calamities, such as disease or warfare, leaving vacant lands for the next wave of immigrants.

-- Jean Manco, Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings (Thames & Hudson, 2013)

[Apollonius]

A related BBC article about European migrations:


Frequently one finds articles on the internet that purport to describe new discoveries which are, in fact, reconfirmation of existing ideas, and this is one of them. The Yamnaya culture from approximately 3300 BC is described in detail in the book I just described above. The author considers these people to be the ancestors of Indo-Europeans.


Genomes document ancient mass migrations to Europe - BBC News, 2 March 2015
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31695214

DNA analysis has revealed evidence for a massive migration into the heartland of Europe 4,500 years ago.

[Apollonius]

A new overview of the subject of human evolution, genetics, and migration comes from someone who was deputy editor of Nature magazine, a long-time reporter for Science, and New York Times science editor for a number of years. Nicholas Wade's most recently published book, which might be considered part of a trilogy, starts off with Before the Dawn (2006), continues with The Faith Instinct (2010) , and now we have A Troublesome Inheritance (2014).


Nicholas Wade believes that humans are still evolving, and he thinks we are evolving rather quickly.


I've mentioned before that all authors writing to a general audience about genetics and human evolution start with a little lecture about race. Nicholas Wade's is one of the most nicely put together encapsulations. He starts with Linnaeus and quickly moves on to Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau's book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55), reviewing the most influential racist literature through the next one hundred years, which perhaps peaked, in America at any rate, with Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race in the early twentieth century, and with various papers written by so-called 'Progressives' who believed that sterilization was the necessary and proper tool to be used if a nation was to prevent social and genetic decline. The eugenics movement got its start with several prominent English authors, and was endorsed by many other intellectuals, like Bernard Shaw, but the prescription offered the British was never acted on in that country. However, a limited eugenicist program was started in the U.S, where by 1934 nearly 35,000 people had been sterilized. The eugenics program had a profound influence in Germany where the Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny was decreed on July 14, 1933. By 1937, the last year in which data was published, some 200,000 Germans had been sterilized. After the start of the war in 1939, hospital beds were at a premium and a full scale euthanasia program was instigated to help solve this problem. Those who were "feebleminded" and those with schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington's disease, epilepsy, deafness, hereditary deformities, hereditary blindness, and alcoholism, were actually the first victims of the Nazi death camps. Apart from alcoholism, these categories were exactly the same ones that had been used by the American eugenicists in the previous decade.


All of this history will be well familiar to those who follow the history of ideas on race.


One place where Nicholas Wade breaks new ground is on another section of the book which he devotes to the history of the movement to deny that races exist. This effectively begins with Ashley Montagu. Montagu was a Jewish man who was brought up in the East End of London where he experienced considerable anti-Semitism, and he wrote in the years immediately following the World War II.


Montagu's ideas followed close on the heels of Franz Boaz, who was convinced that culture determined everything about humans, and Montagu and others in the Boaz tradition developed the notion of the "blank slate", where every single trait that could be called human was acquired and passed on through culture, with all hereditary factors being basically irrelevant.

In the postwar years, with the horror of the Holocaust weighing on people's minds, Montagu found ready acceptance of his views. These were prominent in the influential UNESCO statement on race, first issued in 1950, which he helped draft. He believed that imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism were driven by notions of race and could be undermined by showing that races did not exist. However much one may sympathize with Montagu's motives, it is perhaps simplistic to believe that an evil can be eliminated by banning the words that conceptualize it. But suppression the word was Montagu's goal, and to remarkable extent he succeeded.

"The very word race is itself racist", he wrote in his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Many scholars who understood human races very well began to drop the use of the term rather than risk being ostracized as racists. In a survey taken in 1987, only 50% of physical anthropologists (researchers who deal with human bones) agreed that races exist, and among social anthropologists (who deal with people) just 29% did so.

But even before the advent of DNA analysis it was easy for anthropologists to distinguish the members of these non-existent races from skeletal remains alone:

... By taking just a few measurements, physical anthropologists can tell police departments the race of skull's former owner with better than 80% accuracy. This ability has occasioned some anguish among those persuaded by Montagu that human races shouldn't be acknowledged. How could they identify a skull's race so accurately if race doesn't exist? "That forensic anthropologists place our field's stamp of approval on the traditional and unscientific concept of race each time we make such a judgement is a problem for which I see no easy solution", wrote one physical anthropologist. His suggestion was to obfuscate, by retaining the concept but substituting a euphemism for the word race, such as ancestry. This advice has been followed by a wide range of researchers who, while retaining the necessary concept of race, refer to it in print with bland periphrases like "population structure" or "population stratification". As for the actual DNA elements now used by biologists to assign people to their race, or races if of mixed parentage, these are known discreetly as AIMs, or ancestry infomative markers.

-- Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin Press, 2014)

[Apollonius]

There has been tremendous controversy about Wade's book. There was a short letter to the New York Times signed by 139 population geneticists who issued a fatwa against it because they claimed it misrepresented some of the views that are current orthodoxy in the field. Wade explicitly offers the last half of his book, which is primarily focused on economic considerations as they might be influenced by genetics, as speculations. The authors of the letter don't like people who speculate.



Our letter to the New York Times criticizing Nicholas Wade's book on race - Why Evolution Is True, 9 August 2014
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.co ... k-on-race/



Echoes of the past: Hereditarianism and A Troublesome Inheritance - Marcus Feldman, PLOS Genetics, 10 December 2014
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263368/



About the first half of Wade's book, which reviews what we know about genetics and the history of attitudes towards ideas of human heritability and race, the authors have little to say. The heart of their complaint is obviously the chapter on IQ, where there is strong disagreement between experts. When the critics saw the author quoting the results of surveys which measure IQs in Africa, and which conclude that the average is 67, they saw red. Wade immediately adds that malnutrition, disease, and tribal culture all contribute heavily to this dismal performance, but Nicholas Wade believes that genetics does play a role.. I do wonder if population geneticists are more qualified to talk to the subject of IQ than many others who study intelligence. In fact, the very authors whom the critics quote, Richard Lewontin, for example, are becoming rather dated, and are bitter enemies of any findings which contradict their theories from forty years ago (see the WSJ article linked to below for further insights into this feud).


The second review devotes some space to Wade's commentary about the studies of Gregory Clark, which appears in the second half of the book where the author speculates about how rapid evolution might have influenced economic performance in England. Without further studies, it comes down to a judgement call. It's just speculation, after all. But the very idea that genetics might play with human behaviour in some way is absolutely abhorrent to these population geneticists.


The comments to the first review are revealing. The last entries are all written by defenders of Wade's book and point out that in many cases these comments prove that the critics could not have actually read Wade's book, certainly not carefully. Further, they accuse Wade of ad hominem, but engage in little else themselves. The exchange is an eye-opener is just how petty and utterly dogmatic scientists can be.


It is certainly my view that the geneticists on this site are totally freaked out about the latest findings in their own field, many of which Nicholas Wade does not actually touch on, findings which have been steadily eroding the ground which their political beliefs are perched on. I have to wonder how scientific it could ever be to absolutely insist that genetics plays no role whatsoever in any facet of human culture. This is the reductio ad absurdum to which these critics descend.



Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal is more receptive to speculation and thinks that PC needs a kick in the pants:


Book review: 'A Troublesome Inheritance' by Nicholas Wade - Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2014
http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000 ... 2247869874

... Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that these latter chapters, unlike his presentation of the genetics of race, must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: "There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it."
I fear Mr. Wade's trust is misplaced. Before they have even opened "A Troublesome Inheritance," some reviewers will be determined not just to refute it but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it or reading it. These chapters will be their primary target because Mr. Wade chose to expose his readers to a broad range of speculative analyses, some of which are brilliant and some of which are weak. If I had been out to trash the book, I would have focused on the weak ones, associated their flaws with the book as a whole and dismissed "A Troublesome Inheritance" as sloppy and inaccurate. The orthodoxy's clerisy will take that route, ransacking these chapters for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.

All of which will make the academic reception of "A Troublesome Inheritance" a matter of historic interest. Discoveries have overturned scientific orthodoxies before—the Ptolemaic solar system, Aristotelian physics and the steady-state universe, among many others—and the new received wisdom has usually triumphed quickly among scientists for the simplest of reasons: They hate to look stupid to their peers. When the data become undeniable, continuing to deny them makes the deniers look stupid. The high priests of the orthodoxy such as Richard Lewontin are unlikely to recant, but I imagine that the publication of "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be welcomed by geneticists with their careers ahead of them—it gives them cover to write more openly about the emerging new knowledge. It will be unequivocally welcome to medical researchers, who often find it difficult to get grants if they openly say they will explore the genetic sources of racial health differences.

The reaction of social scientists is less predictable. The genetic findings that Mr. Wade reports should, in a reasonable world, affect the way social scientists approach the most important topics about human societies. Social scientists can still treat culture and institutions as important independent causal forces, but they also need to start considering the ways in which variations among population groups are causal forces shaping those cultures and institutions.

How long will it take them? In 1998, the biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a book, "Consilience," predicting that the 21st century would see the integration of the social and biological sciences. He is surely right about the long run, but the signs for early progress are not good. "The Bell Curve," which the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I published 20 years ago, should have made it easy for social scientists to acknowledge the role of cognitive ability in shaping class structure. It hasn't. David Geary's "Male/Female," published 16 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the different psychological and cognitive profiles of males and females. It hasn't. Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate," published 12 years ago, should have made it easy for them to acknowledge the role of human nature in explaining behavior. It hasn't. Social scientists who associate themselves with any of those viewpoints must still expect professional isolation and stigma.

"A Troublesome Inheritance" poses a different order of threat to the orthodoxy. The evidence in "The Bell Curve," "Male/Female" and "A Blank Slate" was confined to the phenotype—the observed characteristics of human beings—and was therefore vulnerable to attack or at least obfuscation. The discoveries Mr. Wade reports, that genetic variation clusters along racial and ethnic lines and that extensive evolution has continued ever since the exodus from Africa, are based on the genotype, and no one has any scientific reason to doubt their validity.

And yet, as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation's universities. I expect that their resistance to "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.

So one way or another, "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists' willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with "A Troublesome Inheritance" will be seen a century from now as proof of this era's intellectual corruption.

[Apollonius]

A lot of the second half of the book concerns history, not genetics per se.



I had never seen anyone put numbers to this part of China's history:

In 2000 BC, a large number of political entities -- traditionally put at 10,000 -- existed in the Yellow River valley. By the time of the Shang dynasty in 1500 BC, these had dwindled to some 3,000 tribal chiefdoms. The Eastern Zhou denasty began in 771 BC with 1,800 chiefdoms and ended with 14 entities that were much closer to states. During the ensuing Warring States perid, which lasted from around 475 BC to 221 BC, the remaining 7 states were reduced to 1.

It's notable that 10,000 political entities in China in 2000 BC is the same number of political entities that historians who study the question give for Africa before the Berlin Conference of 1885 AD.



Here is an interesting sample of Wade's speculative half of the book:

Work hours steadily increased throughout the period, and interests rates fell. When inflation and risk are subtracted, an interest rate reflects the compensation that a person will demand to postpone immediate gratification by postponing consumption of a good from now until a future date. Economists call this attitude time preference, and psychologists call it delayed gratification. Children, who are generally not so good at delaying gratification, are said to have a high time preference. In his celebrated marshmallow test, the psychologist Walter Mischel tested young children as to their preference for receiving one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes. This simple decision turned out to have far-reaching consequences: those able to hold out for the larger reward had higher SAT scores and social competence in later life. Children have a very high time preference which falls as they grow older and develop more self-control. American six-year-olds, for instance, have a time preference of about 3% per day, or 150% per month; this is the extra reward they must be offered to delay instant gratification. Time preferences are also high among hunter-gatherers.

Interest rates, which reflect a society's time preferences, have been very high -- about 10% -- from the earliest historical times and for all societies before 1400 AD for which there is data. Interest rates then entered a period of steady decline, reaching about 3% by 1850. Because inflation and other pressures on interest rates were largely absent, Clark argues, the falling interest rates indicate that people were becoming less impulsive, more patient and more willing to save. ...


... Clark has uncovered the simple genetic mechanism through which the Malthusian economy wrought these changes on the English population: the rich had more surviving children than the poor. From a study of wills made between 1585 and 1638, he finds that will makers with £9 or less to leave their heirs had, on average, just under two children. The number of heirs rose steadily with assets, such that men with more than £1,000 in their gift, who formed the wealthiest asset class, left just over four children.

The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760. In this context, the fact that the rich were having more children than the poor led to the interesting phenomenon of unremitting social descent. Most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.

Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class -- nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience -- were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.

-- Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin Press, 2014)

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


The North is just as racist as the South

In fact, many of the racial injustices we associate with the South are actually worse in the North.

Housing segregation between black and white residents, for instance, is most pervasive above the Mason-Dixon line.

Of America’s 25 most racially segregated metropolitan areas, just five are in the South; Northern cities — Detroit, Milwaukee and New York — top the list. Segregation in Northern metro areas has declined a bit since 1990, but an analysis of 2010 census data found that Detroit’s level of segregation, for instance, is nearly twice as high as Charleston’s.

The division between black and white neighborhoods in the North is a result of a poisonous mix of racist public policies and real estate practices that reigned unchecked for decades. Until the mid-20th century, federal homeownership programs made it difficult for black Americans to get mortgages and fueled the massive growth of whites-only suburbs. Real estate agents openly discriminated against black aspiring homeowners, refusing to show them houses in predominately white communities.

..

.. “Another group with a vital role to play in the struggle for racial justice and equality is the white northern liberals. The racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem.”

That holds true for most of America’s troubles today.

Enough finger-wagging at Dixie.

Change begins at home.

.

Well folks, here you have it


.

[Doc]

.


Well folks, here you have it
.

Yes AZ, we know you hate America and will say anything true or not to try to destroy it. What is you favorite chant again "Down Down USA"

http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... ated-isis/

Iran Dictator Calls for Muslim World to Unite and Destroy Israel, Says USA Created ISIS

Which is interesting considering that Iran has managed to grab so much power because of ISIS with Obama and Valerie Jarett's help.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


Well folks, here you have it
.

Yes AZ, we know you hate America and will say anything true or not to try to destroy it. What is you favorite chant again "Down Down USA"

http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... ated-isis/

Iran Dictator Calls for Muslim World to Unite and Destroy Israel, Says USA Created ISIS

Which is interesting considering that Iran has managed to grab so much power because of ISIS with Obama and Valerie Jarett's help.

.

Doc, Azari LOOOOOOVES America

Why you attacking Azari ?

This not from RT or PressTv or MoscowTimes .. this from Washington Post

Look, as long as denial last, thing ain't changin

Why not enrol for 2 semesters :

Tehran University, Faculty of "Tolerance & Humanity"


.

[Doc]

.


Well folks, here you have it
.

Yes AZ, we know you hate America and will say anything true or not to try to destroy it. What is you favorite chant again "Down Down USA"

http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... ated-isis/

Iran Dictator Calls for Muslim World to Unite and Destroy Israel, Says USA Created ISIS

Which is interesting considering that Iran has managed to grab so much power because of ISIS with Obama and Valerie Jarett's help.

.

Doc, Azari LOOOOOOVES America

.

No you don't. You have already told or propagandized enough lies to show your above statement is not true as well.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


Well folks, here you have it
.

Yes AZ, we know you hate America and will say anything true or not to try to destroy it. What is you favorite chant again "Down Down USA"

http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... ated-isis/

Iran Dictator Calls for Muslim World to Unite and Destroy Israel, Says USA Created ISIS

Which is interesting considering that Iran has managed to grab so much power because of ISIS with Obama and Valerie Jarett's help.

.

Doc, Azari LOOOOOOVES America

.

No you don't. You have already told or propagandized enough lies to show your above statement is not true as well.

.

Lies ! ! ! !


What lies ? ? ?


Look, on this fora, we post articles from reputable media and debate their analysis

I posted that WP article sayin North as racist as South

That subject of debate here

Is North as racist as South ? ?

I, and that WP article, sayin YES

What you sayin, Doc ? ? ?

.

[Mr. Perfect]

We've noted that the Democrat cities are nearly purely segregated, completely voluntarily, for a long time.

It is what it is.

[Mr. Perfect]

Race is real, Doc. People instinctively like those who resemble themselves, and distrust those who are different.

A bit of projection there.