Stephen Jay Gould became famous in part for his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. By examining the strange creatures in the Burgess Shale formation Gould makes the case that evolution is a highly contingent process, and that if you reran the experiment of life what we’d see might be very different from what we have now.
But the scientist whose study of the formation that inspired Gould’s interpretation, Simon Conway Morris, had very different views. Though it can sometimes be churlish, his rebuttal can be found in The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals. Simony Conway Morris does not believe that contingency is nearly as powerful a force as Gould would have you believe. And his viewpoints are influential. Richard Dawkins leaned on him to make the case for convergence in evolution in The Ancestor’s Tale.
Today, placental mammals like flying squirrels and marsupials like sugar gliders travel through the air from tree to tree. But Volaticotherium belonged to a different lineage and independently evolved the ability to glide.
They were not the only mammals to do so, it turns out. Dr. Luo and his colleagues have now discovered at least two other species of gliding mammals from China, which they described in the journal Nature.
…
Dr. Meng said that the growing number of fossil gliders showed that many different kinds of mammals followed the same evolutionary path. “They did their own experiments,” he said.
This ultimately comes down to physics. There are only so many ways you can make an organize that flies or glides. Mammals come to the table with a general body plan, and that can be modified only so many different ways.
This is not a foolproof point of datum in favor of convergence as opposed to contingency. Frankly these are often vague verbal arguments which are hard to refute or confirm. And even molecular evolutionary analyses come to different conclusions. It may be that we are asking the wrong question. But, it does suggest that evolution may work in a much narrower range of parameters as time progresses because of the winnowing power of selection.
If you have been following Game of Thrones you have been noticing that there is a brewing romance between Jon Snow, King in the North, and Daenerys Targaryen, the aspiring claimant to her father’s Iron Throne.
Of course there is a twist to all of this: unbenknownst to either, Jon Snow’s biological father is Daenerys’ dead brother, Rhaegar. This means that Daenery’s is Jon Snow’s aunt.
Long-time followers of the world of Game of Thrones are aware that incest between near relations is neither unknown nor shocking. But there is a non-trivial detail which it is important to note. Jon and Daenerys are far more closely related than typical aunts and nephews.
The reason is simple, Daenerys and her brother were the products of two generations of sibling incest. Incest results in inbreeding, and inbreeding as you know results in loss of genetic diversity. By Daenerys’s generation the coefficient of relationship between herself and her brothers was much higher than normal.
To be concrete, the coefficient of relationship of full-siblings is 0.50. That of half-siblings 0.25. Identical twins? Obviously 1.0. Another way to think about this is how much of the genome do any two pairs of individuals share in terms of long tracts of inheritance from recent ancestors. On the whole siblings share about half of their genomes in such a fashion. After two generations of inbreeding Daenerys and Rhaegar have a coefficient of relationship of 0.727 (using Wright’s method). They’re not identical twins, obviously, but their genetic relationship is far closer than full-siblings!
Don’t let the mother of dragons ride you Jon!
Dividing this in half gives 0.36 as the coefficient of relationship between Jon and Daenerys, as opposed to 0.50 for full-siblings and 0.25 for a conventional aunt-nephew. Jon and Daenerys have almost the same genetic relationship as 3/4 siblings; two individuals who share a common parent, like half-siblings, but whose unshared parents are first order relatives (full-siblings or parent-child).
Not Jaime & Cersei creepy, but still creepy.
Addendum: Though Daenerys is quite inbred, Jon is not at all. One generation of outbreeding can eliminate all inbreeding.
I know that George R. R Martin has stated that the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire is going to be bittersweet. R. Scott Bakker’s conclusion to the Aspect Emperor tetralogy ends with a bittersour ending. Fair warning.
Also, the writing of the last third of The Unholy Consult was good in terms of packing a lot of action and plotting, but it was hard to keep track of all the obscure names.
The new episode of Game of Thrones is very good. Nice for things to actually happen.
I’ve been offline most of the weekend. Several people asked me about the Google Memo. Here’s the weird thing: huge subcultures within the organization aren’t even American. Several friends for example have been token Americans on Chinese teams. Their values and priorities are obviously very different even if they don’t inform the ‘public face’ of the company. It’s all rather strange (yes, whoever wrote that memo will surely be fired).
How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. I think Matt Stoller’s anti-monopolist views should appeal to many people on the Right as well as the Left. Google and Facebook are arguably much more powerful than any state government when it comes to shaping our culture.
I can only comment on what I know in more detail. At some point Wilson tries to tag Neo-Darwinians with Dawkins’ atheism. But Dawkins is an extreme case. Arguably the god-father of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, R. A. Fisher, was an Anglican and a Tory. No offense to Dawkins, but his substantive scientific contribution is dwarfed by Fisher. And yet Wilson is pushing Dawkins to the front as an exemplar of Neo-Darwinism.
Wilson also says that Neo-Darwinians couldn’t therefore revere Gregor Mendel because he was a monk. It’s all rather strange because it’s called “Mendelian Genetics.” Not mention that biographies I’ve read suggested that Mendel himself was not excessively pious. Rather, his monastic vocation freed him from financial worries, allowing him sufficient leisure to engage in studies. But perhaps I’m wrong in this, after all Wilson has studied Darwin for five years!
Finally, there is the utilization of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge to attack Darwinian gradualism. I’m not a big fan of all this macroevolutionary talk, but the late Gould and Eldridge would not be happy to be drafted in this way. Charles Darwin was wrong on a lot of things. That’s because he had a lot of ideas.
The central deep insight from Darwin’s theory was the power of natural selection to shape variation and drive adaptation. One can argue about the importance of this dynamic in evolutionary process, but the fact that it is still being studied shows how fruitful Darwin’s theory was in generating a living program of science.
In Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire he makes the assertion that Mao Zedong was the heir of the moralist Confucian tradition, while Deng Xiaoping’s stances looked more toward pragmatic Legalism. I don’t want to rehash why Terrill presented this strange framework as a central thesis in his book. Rather, there was an instance that I found memorable where he observed that Deng was much more particular about pointing out territorial losses that China had suffered with foreign dignitaries than Mao. Deng was more conventionally nationalistic.
I always felt that this required some chutzpah on Deng’s part. The map above shows clearly why I found it curious: the maximal extend of the Chinese Empire in the 19th century was to due to the imperial ambitions of the Manchu people, under whose yoke the Han experienced centuries of being a subordinate group. Of course it is true that just as Greece conquered Rome, so the Manchus assimilated into Chinese society to such an extent that today they have basically been absorbed by the Han in all but name. And famously, rulers such as the Kangxi Emperor and the Qianlong Emperor, became for their Han subjects, that is the vast majority of them, paragons of the Confucian potentate.
But the Manchus always remained Manchus, self-conscious that they were a ruling people. They struggled against their assimilation, and in their conquests outside of their civilized Chinese heartland the emperors became Manchurian warlords (the Kangxi Emperor in particular paints a broadly as a steppe warlord when he deigned to take on that persona). They were a people from from beyond the Great Wall, who had good relations with the Khalkha Mongols, and cultivated the Buddhist statelets of greater Tibet. In China, but not always of it. In other words, the empire which the republic of China inherited by and large was the achievement of a non-Chinese people.
Modern borders are what they are. Accidents of history. I don’t begrudge the Han Chinese for having inheriting the Manchu Empire. To some extent it’s their luck. But it’s a little strange that Deng Xiaoping would assume that the borders of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1689, were somehow sacrosanct. The Manchus were at this period waxing into the fullness of their powers, and blocked Russia from bringing the Amur basin into its hegemony (and also banned Han from migrating into these new territories!).
China’s most cosmopolitan native dynasty, the Tang*, did have dominion over much of what is today called Xinjiang. Their forces famously clashed with that of the Abbasids at Talas in modern day Kyrgyzstan. But this dominion lasted only a century. The earlier Han dynasty hegemonies over the eastern Silk Road cities were also short-lived.
As you can see on this map the Tang had to contend with a powerful Tibetan Empire, as well as Uighurs and Goturks to their north. On the northeast, in modern Manchuria, were the Khitan people, who would later reappear in Chinese history.
The reality is that for most of Chinese history half of what is today China was not part of China. If the Manchus had not conquered China, and the Ming had been replaced by an indigenous dynasty, it seems entirely likely that the outlines of the modern nation-state of China would be coterminous with with the outlines of the Ming dynasty polity.
To me a plausible “alternative history” then would result in Xinjiang and Mongolia being absorbed into the orbit of the Russia Empire, and perhaps both today being post-Soviet states. In fact, northern Xinjiang would be a distinct post-Soviet state, because prior to genocidal campaigns by the Manchus in the 18th century this area was dominated by a western branch of the Mongol people, the Oirats. It seems likely that Tibet would have fallen more explicitly under the British orbit, and become independent along with India and other South and Southeast Asian nations after World War II.
This historical context is relevant to the situation of why minority groups such as Uyghurs and Tibetans chafe under Chinese rule, especially when told that they have always been part of China. It also is important because it gives a sense of cultural and historical affinities which might go unnoticed.
Broadly speaking Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan and Vietnam (in different ways), have been part of the broader “Sinic civilization.” There are differences of detail, particularly in Japan and Vietnam, in how Chinese culture was interpreted, but its influence is undeniable. This is less clear in places like Tibet and Mongolia. I believe people sometimes confuse Chinese cultural influence with China’s geopolitical heft and the fact that to Westerners these people look East Asian, so how could they not be influenced by China despite their proximity?
The Economist recently published a fascinating article in its 1843 magazine, Animal spirits, about the revival of Mongolian shamanism. But this section is simply false: “While Buddhism is an import from China, shamanism is an expression of Mongolian national identity.” Mongols are mostly Tibetan Buddhists, and they received their Buddhism from Tibetan lamas and monks. Not Chinese. It is technically important to remember that though Tibet is part of China, but it was not part of China when it was propagating Buddhism to Mongolia!
For a detailed exploration of the Mongol religious conversion to Tibetan Buddhism, and their flirtation with Islam**, see Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. What I will say is that it does not seem to be a surprise that Mongols seem to have a history of flirting with non-Chinese religions. Many of Genghis Khan’s subjects during his rise to power were at least nominally Syriac Christians. Though Genghis Khan was an adherent of shamanism, he patronized religious professionals of many sects, and had a particularly close relationship with a Daoist monk.
Ambiguities as to the genealogy of cultural relationships also crops up in this piece in The New York Times, China and India File Rival Claims Over Tibetan Medicine. Obviously Asia’s two most powerful nations fighting over the heritage of Tibetan medicine is unseemly and gauche, though perhaps a little less worrisome than the saber rattling which is occurring on the northeast border right now.
Geographically Tibet is obviously within the borders of the modern Chinese nation-state (though Ladakh in India is arguably a fragment of Tibet which landed on the Indian side of the border). But recall that for most of its history Tibet has not been under Chinese rule. Perhaps even more importantly, Tibet has not been under much Chinese influence. On the contrary, Tibetan lamas have been cultural impresarios, exporting their religious vision to the court of Kublai Khan, then that of the Manchus, and the finally converting the Khans of the various Mongol tribes.
And in terms of its precursors, Tibetan Buddhism is the child of the last flowering of North Indian Buddhism, not Chinese Buddhism, which had evolved into an independent tradition by the time the Tibetan Empire was deciding on an institutional religion to adhere to (Chinese Buddhism was reputedly brought to the kingdom first, by a Chinese princess).*** And the Tibetan alphabet is also derived from an Indian script. Curiously, just as Indian high-level cultural influence is very salient in Southeast Asia, so it is in Buddhist Inner Asia. But while Southeast Asian Indian influences were usually maritime South Indian, those of Tibetan are from a bygone North India where Islam was marginal and Buddhism was still a presence.
Despite being a far weaker military power than the United States China is already flexing its muscle and bullying its neighbors. There are a million Chinese in Africa. Even though China may not catch up with the United States in median affluence any time soon, the trajectory of aggregate economic production is such it will likely become the the largest economy within the next half generation. The Chinese know this, and are already acting as if they are #1. They’re preparing for their “time in the sun.”
Unfortunately this will exacerbate some of the unfortunate intellectual tendencies among the Chinese due to arrogance combined with a lack of total confidence in their new position. The Chinese view of their past has strange distortions, generally having to do with the fact that they don’t want to admit that their possession of vast swaths of Inner Asia was more a matter of historical happenstance than a necessary consequence of the geographical logic of the Chinese civilization-state.
But the truth is what it is. Unfortunately I suspect implicitly the media will begin telegraphing the Chinese viewpoint without much challenge because it seems plausible enough to those that they don’t know. It will be up to us to keep the unknowing propagandists in check.
* I am aware of their Xianbei heritage, but they were highly Sinicized and by the time of great Xuanzong Emperor they were mostly Han in origin.
** Mongols outside of the homeland invariably eventually became Muslims over time.
*** I am aware that Chinese Buddhism itself has an Indian source, though mediated through the cities of the Silk Road.
My major confusion is that this is normal science. The breakthrough was the discovery of the power of CRISPR-Cas9. Once the discovery was made there was a literally stampede to use the technique because its power and ease was so manifest. What’s happening now is that the technique is getting more powerful and effective. I think it would surprise people if it didn’t get better.
A major problem for economists in modeling productivity growth is that innovation is unpredictable. But in this case the big innovation has occurred. The next few decades are likely going to see progressive and continuous improvement in the technology. Where that will lead us? Unpredictable….
The Greeks are important because Western civilization began with Greece. And therefore modern civilization. I don’t think the Greeks were “Western” truly; my own preference is to state that the West as we understand it is really just Latin Christendom, which emerged in the late first millennium A.D. in any coherent fashion. Yet without Classical Greece and its accomplishments the West wouldn’t make any sense.
But here I have to stipulate Classical, because Greeks existed before the Classical period. That is, a people who spoke a language that was recognizably Greek and worshipped gods recognizable to the Greeks of the Classical period. But these Greeks were not proto-Western in any way. These were the Mycenaeans, a Bronze Age civilization which flourished in the Aegean in the centuries before the cataclysms outlined in 1177 B.C.
The issue with the Mycenaean civilization is that its final expiration in the 11th century ushered in a centuries long Dark Age. During this period the population of Greece seems to have declined, and society reverted to a more simple structure. By the time the Greeks emerged from this Dark Age much had changed. For example, they no longer used Linear B writing. Presumably this technique was passed down along lineages of scribes, whose services were no longer needed, because the grand warlords of the Bronze Age were no longer there to patronize them and make use of their skills. In its stead the Greeks modified the alphabet of the Phoenicians.
To be succinct the Greeks had to learn civilization all over again. The barbarian interlude had broken continuous cultural memory between the Mycenaeans and the Greeks of the developing polises of the Classical period. The fortifications of the Mycenaeans were assumed by their Classical descendants to be the work of a lost race which had the aid of monstrous cyclops.
Of course not all memories were forgotten. Epic poems such as The Iliad retained the memory of the past through the centuries. The list of kings who sailed to Troy actually reflected the distribution of power in Bronze Age Greece, while boar’s tusk helmets mentioned by Homer were typical of the period. To be sure, much of the detail in Homer seems more reflective of a simpler society of petty warlords, so the nuggets of memory are encased in later lore accrued over the centuries.
When antiquarians and archaeologists began to take a look at the Bronze Age Aegean the assumption by many was that the Mycenaeans were not Greek, but extensions of the earlier Minoan civilization. The whole intellectual history here is outlined in Michael Wood’s 1980s documentary In Search of the Trojan War. But suffice it to say that many were shocked when Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, and found that it was clearly Greek!
The surprise here was partly due to the fact that though Mycenaean cultural remains indicated a different civilization from that of the Minoans, its motifs are clearly inherited from the earlier group. Mycenaeans seemed in many ways to be Minoans in chariots. And the presumption has long been that the Minoans themselves were not an Indo-European population. In fact, the island of Crete had developed early on and become part of the orbit of civilized states from the northern Levant down to Egypt, including Cyprus. Therefore some scholars hypothesized an Egyptian connection.
In any case, the Mycenaeans were Greek. And Homer then most certainly must have transmitted traditions which went back to the Bronze Age.
At this point we can now speak to demographics with some data, as Nature has come out with a paper using ancient DNA from Mycenaeans, Minoans, as well as Bronze Age Anatolians, Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans:
The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean1, 2, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran4, 5. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia6, 7, 8, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe1,6, 9 or Armenia4, 9. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.
About 85% of the ancestry of the Minoan samples could be modeled as being derived from Anatolian farmers, the ancestors of the “Early European Farmers” (EEF) that introduced agriculture to most of the continent, and whose heritage is most clear in modern populations among Sardinians. For the three Mycenaean samples the value is closer to 80% (though perhaps high 70s is more accurate).
Now the question though is what’s the balance? For the Minoans the residual is a component which seems to derive from “Eastern Farmer” populations. Additionally the authors note that the Y chromosomes in four out of five individuals in their Mycenaean-Minoan-Anatolians are haplogroup J associated with these eastern groups, rather than the ubiquitous G2 of the earlier farmer populations. The authors suggest that in the 4th millennium B.C. there was a demographic event where this ancestral component swept west, and served as the common Mycenaean-Minoan (and Anatolian) substrate.
But the Mycenaean samples (one of which was elite, two of which were not) also have a third component: affinities with steppe populations. One model which presents itself is that there was a pulse out of the Balkans, and this was part of the dynamic described in Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. But another model, which they could not reject, is that the steppe affinity came from the east, perhaps from a proto-Armenian population. Additionally, they did not find much steppe ancestry in the Anatolian samples at all.
My own preference is for a migration through the Balkans. It seems relatively straightforward. As for why the Anatolian samples did not have the steppe ancestry, the authors provide the reasonable supposition that Indo-European in Anatolia branched off first, and the demographic signal was diluted over successor generations. Perhaps. But another aspect of Anatolia is that it seems the Hittites, the Nesa, where never a numerous population in comparison to the Hatti amongst whom they lived. Perhaps a good model for their rise and takeover may be that of the post-Roman West and the Franks in Gaul.
Then the question becomes how does a less numerous people impose their language on a more numerous one? This happens. See the Hungarians for an example. In fact the paper which covered the other end of the Mediterranean, The population genomics of archaeological transition in west Iberia: Investigation of ancient substructure using imputation and haplotype-based methods, suggests that language shift can occur in unpredictable ways. On the one hand Basques seem to have mostly Indo-European Y chromosomes, but their whole genome ancestry indicates less exogenous input than their neighbors. Speaking of which, we know by the Classical period large regions of western Spain were dominated by Celtic speaking peoples, but the genetic imprint of the Indo-Europeans is still very modest in the Iberian peninsula.
I think what we’re seeing here is the difference between Indo-European agro-pastoralists arriving to a landscape of relatively simple societies with more primal institutions, and those who migrated into regions where local population densities are higher and social complexity is also greater. This higher social complexity means that external elites can takeover a system, as opposed to an almost animal competition for resources as seems to have occurred in Northern Europe.
Finally, at the end of the supplements there is an analysis of the physical features of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. There’s not much that’s surprising. The Minoans and Mycenaeans were a dark haired and dark eyed folk. Why should this surprise us at all? We actually have self representations of them! That’s what they look like. If anything they were darker than modern Greeks (small sample size means power to draw conclusions is not high). Why?
Two reasons that come to mind: natural selection, and the fact that modern Greeks seem to be shifted to continental Europeans to their north, likely due to migration. My number one contender here are the Scalveni Slavic tribes which pushed into much of Greece in the second half of the 6th century A.D. (though a minority of Greek samples I’ve seen don’t exhibit much skew toward Slavs at all).
In the future with more samples and more genomes we’ll know more. But I think this work emphasizes that when it comes to Europe most of the demographic patterns we see around us date to the Bronze Age or earlier.
About 20 percent of the world’s population is Chinese (and since over 90% of Chinese citizens are ethnically Han, so by Chinese here I mean Han to a first approximation). In comparison to other non-European groups a fair amount of genetics research has been done with Chinese populations. But in comparison to their overall numbers, not too much has really been done. That will change.
A new preprint, A comprehensive map of genetic variation in the world’s largest ethnic group – Han Chinese, aims to enrich our knowledge set somewhat. The authors used low coverage next generation sequencing to get increase their sample sizes greatly (cheaper). By low coverage, I mean instead of hitting each genetic position on average 30 times or more, as is in the norm in medical genomics, they sampled a position closer to twice.
But while any given genome was usually not given much close attention, their overall sample size of individuals was 11,670 Han Chinese women. Impressive This means that if they called a position as a variant, they could assess their confidence that it was a variant by looking at how many times it was called as a variant across their data set (as coverage declines one’s confidence that a call of a variant is a true call declines because there is a relatively high base rate of error set against the proportion of true expected polymorphisms; in contrast if you sample 30 times the error rate gets overwhelmed by repeated sampling). Overall they counted 25,057,223 variants, which sounds about right. They also found 548,401 novel variants with at least a count of 10 in the data set (a ~0.04% allele frequency, so a very low cut-off).
The most important thing about this preprint is not that the sample size is large enough that they could detect low frequency variants and add to the catalog. No, for me, it is that they sampled so many of the provinces. As you can see in the figure up top just like Europe China’s Han population recapitulate the map of China. That is, populations arrange themselves spatially when projected onto a principle components analysis plot in the same manner that they do geographically. This is a new finding in some ways because previous sampling strategies had not been robust enough to detect the east-west cline (though to be honest if you looked at the Chinese samples in the 1000 Genomes there was suggestion of this).
All that being said, please note that the PCA is not to scale, insofar as most of the variation is north-south (4 to 5 times more than east-west). Rather like Europe in this regard. Part of this difference is due to the fact that gene flow from non-Han populations, particularly in the South, inflate the genetic variation on the first dimension. Another aspect of interest is that genetic variation between Han populations is rather low to begin with.
One way to visualize this is a matrix like the one to the left. You see pairwise population Fst statistics. The largest is between Guangdong in the south, home to Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), and the northern provinces. The Fst value between Guangdong and Shanxi in the center-north is 0.0029. You may know that the Fst value between Han Chinese and Northern Europeans is ~0.10. A 34 factor difference, more than one order of magnitude. As a point of comparison you can find Fst tables which show values between English and Croations and English and Spaniards are about the same as between Guangdong and Shanxi.
What is just as interesting is the very low genetic differentiation on the North China plain. Why is this? There are two reasons I can think of. The easy explanation is that across politically unified flat landscapes gene flow occurs so easily that genetic differences disappear over time.
But, this presupposes there were genetic differences in the first place. The reason I say this is that though there was a early period of migration from the north to the south (from the Han dynasty onward), and absorption of non-Chinese peoples, there were also periods when much of China north of the Yangtze river valley was under barbarian domination or politically unstable. Elite northern families fled to the south, and eventually when political stability reemerged migrated back to the north (similarly, persistent north-south migration occurred, as the Hakka people of South China are clearly of northern provenance).
The low genetic differentiation across northern China may then be thought of as the outcome of structural fixtures of the landscape (no mountains to obstruct gene flow), as well as possibly due to historical instances of copious back-migration from various regions of southern China (or perhaps more accurately Central China, as I’m presuming much of the settlement would come from the lower Yangtze river valley). Both of these dynamics may have led to little intra-regional structure. In contrast you notice that genetic distance between Fujian and Guangdong, two regions adjacent to each other in the South, is still higher than between any of the northern regions.
Again, this is not surprising due to both geography and history. The dialect map of China shows that southeast China is more fragmented than the north (or southwest). These differences are long-standing and date to the initial founding of Han communities in the south via migrants from the north. Unlike North China South China is a topographically diverse landscape, with beautiful escarpments and deep gorges. Fujian literally hugs the ocean, and has long had a relationship to overseas communities for this reason. Geographic barriers mean there are genetic barriers. Combined with admixture with local populations this means it is not surprising that there were greater genetic differences between southern regions than in the north.
Additionally, China south of the Yangtze has been relatively shielded from foreign conquest and invasion compared to the North China plain. Obviously events like the Taiping rebellion and famine more generally had impacts on South China, but North China has had more periods of domination in a destabilizing manner by non-Chinese invaders over the past 2,000 years.
Perhaps more intriguing than the modern genetic relationships within China are the relations with non-Chinese populations. It is not surprising that the South Chinese populations show evidence of admixture with Dai and Tawainese aboriginals (the basal group of the Austronesian migration). The genetics and cultural practices in parts of South China have long suggested relationships to indigenous groups, as well as Sinicization. Honestly I suspect many were surprised how similar North and South Chinese were, indicating either continuous gene flow or descent from a large demographic expansion.
More curious is that some North Chinese seem to show evidence of admixture with West Eurasians. In particular, they show affinities with European populations. Again, this is not surprising. Some earlier analyses have shown evidence of European-like admixture in northern China, and among ethnic groups like Mongolians. More precisely there are strong signals of European-like admixture in the northwestern provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Shanxi.
The details here are important though. The authors note that Hellenthal et al. detected admixture in the from Northern Europeans into North China using haplotype based methods to around 1200 AD. This preprint finds a similar admixture date. But they caution that these admixture dates may only signal the latest of the events.
As for what that event could be, there was clearly turmoil on the Silk Road in the years around 1000 AD. After 750 AD for all practical purposes the Chinese lost control of their portion of the Silk Road, what is now Xinjiang. Turkic groups like Uyghurs and Iranian ones such as Sogdians were prominent in China due to a power vacuum (the Uyghurs were used by the Tang emperors like the Germans were used by the later Roman Emperors, as federates). Later on one saw the emergence of Tanguts, various groups from Manchuria, and finally the Mongols. Since both haplotype based methods and these preprint suggest something around 1000 AD, the most likely candidate was the absorption of Central Asians with some European-like ancestry into the Chinese substrate. The Uyghur conquest of the major cities of in the centuries before the rise of the Mongols famously resulted in the assimilation of a European-like population which had earlier spoken Indo-European languages.
But admixture was not a feature of just recent Chinese history. The figure to the right is somewhat difficult to read, but it shows on the y-axis variance in the f3 statistic. In short, how well does the Chinese data set here form a clade with the outgroup, and how much does that statistic vary between groups. The x-axis is for the D statistic, which measures the relationship of four populations, with two clades. On the bottom left you see the Siberian genome from 45,000 years ago. On the y-axis you can see all provinces show very little variation, and that’s because the Siberian genome is old enough that it is basal to all the Chinese and Europeans. The D statistic indicates no gene flow between the Siberian populations and modern groups. Not so with other populations. You see the Pleistocene European populations are shifted to the right, and that’s because they all contribute to later Europeans. The Chinese-European clade is not a good fit. This is true across the Chinese populations (so the variance of the f3 statistic is very low),.
Also in the text they note that there is high shared drift with the three “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) samples from Siberia. This is discussed extensively in the supplements to Lazaridis et al. 2016. Another replicated finding is that the Chinese share drift with ancient European hunter-gatherers. The drift declines later on, likely because the Chinese do not share as much drift with the early farmers. This is due in part to the “Basal Eurasian” (BEu) element. But in Fu et al. 2016 they observe that drift between East Eurasians and European hunter-gatherers increases after 15,000 years BP, when there was a genetic turnover, and the Villabruna cluster (in their terminology) came to dominate the landscape.
The most probable, though not certain, explanation for this pattern is that ANE populations contributed ancestry to both antipodes of Eurasia. To European hunter-gatherers, and, to the ancestors of the Chinese in Pleistocene East Asia (remember that there was a fusion between a proto-East Asian population and ANE to give rise to the ancestors of Amerindians 15-20,000 years ago). Another explanation could be East Asian gene flow rather early on into Europe, some time after the Last Glacial Maximum ~20,000 years ago. We don’t have the sample density outside of Europe to really say with certainty.
Finally, I have to mention that at SMBE Melinda Yang of Qiaomei Fu’s lab gave a talk about the Tianyuan genome. Their group has found that the Tianyuan individual, who dates to 40,000 years ago, is the likely ancestor of modern East Asians. That is, Tianyuan shares more drift with modern East Asians than Europeans. No huge surprise. What was surprising though is that Tianyuan also shared appreciable drift with GoyetQ116, a 35,000 year old sample from Belgium, whose descendants seem to have played a role in the emergence of the Magdalenian culture. But not later European hunter-gatherer populations. The Tianyuan sample also seemed to share some drift with Australasian samples (a possible resolution for why some Amerindians share drift with Oceanians presents itself here obviously). Overall, the group’s conclusion was that this might be evidence of ancient population structure rather early on in the “Out of Africa” populations, which eventually carried over as the groups dispersed (rather than each geographic region being direct descendants from a single panmictic “Out of Africa” group). The implications here are beyond the purview of Chinese genetics so I’ll address it in a later post.
I have to mention there is a fair amount within this paper on selection as well as medical genetics. I didn’t tackle that in this post since there’s so much phylogenomics one could talk about.
Read a bit of The Unholy Consult. People who say George R R Martin’s work is too dark? They need to really read a bit of R. Scott Bakker, and Martin will seem to like someone who sees the world through rose-colored glasses.
I’m thinking of reading The Witchwood Crown later because I might need a pick-me-up after The Unholy Consult. I’ve also had The Wise Man’s Fear in my Kindle stack for over five years now, but I plan on reading it when Patrick Rothfuss finishes the series with book 3.
Speaking of fantasy, there is a lot of commentary on Game of Thrones. Always. Some of it is quite dumb. For instance, Game of Thrones and race: who are the non-white characters and where are they from in the books and show? To make a sound argument you actually need to know something about the books. The writer does not. For example, “The Targaryen monarchs, who ruled Westeros for hundreds of years but, thanks to their thing for incest, never really bred all that much with the locals.” This is false. Daenerys is only 1/8th Valyrian (at most). Half her recent ancestry is from a First Men house, the Blackwoods (though it surely has much Andal blood too). About 3/8th of her recent ancestry is Dornish, so a mix of Andal, First Men, and Rhoynish.
Second, George R. R. Martin published the first book in the series in 1996. It was on his mind for years before that. Obviously if he was writing these books today he’d tune them so they were more in sync with the cultural politics of the contemporary Left (since that is where his own personal sympathies lie). But it isn’t as if he can go back and rewrite the major characters and add some diversity which some of his fans might now want. The 1990s were a different time. I recall back on some message boards that Renly’s sexual orientation was an issue for some readers. Martin was arguably ahead of the times on that score.
There are fantasy works where the central characters are nonwhite. Both Judith Tarr’s Avaryan series and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series have been around for a while. And both these worlds have the added benefit of not being standard Tolkienesque medieval settings.
Divorce and Occupation. No surprise that there’s a correlation between income and divorce rate (negative). But some professions are outliers. Bartender and nurse anesthetists are above the trend line (more divorce than their income predicts). Clerics and actuaries are well below it.
I’ve been very loosely associated with libertarians because of my political sympathies for a long time. Years ago I actually visited The Center for Study of Public Choice where James Buchanan had his office because my friend Garett Jones had his office there. There’s no conspiracy here, or secret cabals under the radar. Libertarians are by and large a nerdy group of radicals fixated on stuff like the nonaggression principle. Just like you see on the internet. Kooky. Yes. But a cabal? Have you met libertarians? They don’t have the aptitude for that sort of coordination (Radicals for Capitalism is really the book to understand libertarianism, in particular because Buchanan and public choice theory have a minor role at best to play in libertarianism).
But that doesn’t matter. Democracy in Chains will validate the suspicions and beliefs of many people. And it’s a footnoted academic work. Unless it’s obvious fraud it’s going to be a success in influencingpeople.
Remember that Arming America won the Bancroft Prize for outstanding work of American history in 2000. Arming America was likely a work of fraud in large part. But its thesis, that America’s gun culture did not date to the colonial era, was congenial to the political ideology of many historians. Therefore even though it did not pass the smell test they gave the book rave reviews. I’d be surprised if Democracy in Chains is a work of fraud. The author just doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but she is telling a story her audience wants to hear, with some academic credibility to boot (and so far historians have supposedly supported her).
I must say, I don’t recommend All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy. The title suggests a broader work than it is. Far too much space is given to the English Reformation. Just thought I’d mention that.
Andrew Sullivan notices in this week’s column that Islam seems to now be untouchable on the Left. This is going to too far, but liberals who express anti-Islamic sentiments are getting rather rare, and though privately many on the Left have serious issues with Islam (I know, because they tell me privately) they’re careful not to say it out loud lest they be attacked as racist. My own view is that there are 1.6 billion Muslims, so it makes sense for the Left to align with them. Isn’t world domination worth a hijab?
Don’t blame the Empire. Alex Tabarrok takes some deserved shots at Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. The anti-colonialism tick often gets out of control among Indians, to the point where all evils are heaped upon the British. This is a major aspect of post-colonialism, which “erases” all identity-forming events before the arrival of Europeans.
Can 23andMe Tell Us If Jews Are A Race — And Is That A Good Thing? The author interviews scientists who know the science, but he still manages to garble and confuse everything. First, Ashkenazi Jews descend from a endogamous community which flourished in Central Europe probably no earlier than ~1000 AD. That is why a Ashkenazi Jewish cluster emerges naturally out of the population genetic data; there’s a real coherent demographic history being reflected. Whether that’s a “race” or not I’ll leave to the reader.
Second, the story states that “Sephardic Jews are not considered a distinct population by either company, or by researchers — their genetic make-up is not sufficiently different from surrounding North African, Iberian and Greek populations.” This very misleading. To a great extent Sephardic Jews are rather distinct from the surrounding populations. There is some evidence of shared ancestry in Moroccan Jews with Moroccan Berbers (I know because I’ve looked at a lot of this data), but it’s a small proportion. Similar things can be said about most Sephardic communities. But, they are not nearly as coherent a genetic cluster as Ashkenazi Jews. There has been some gene flow and assimilation with many local Jewish populations (e.g., the Syrian Sephardic Jews absorbed a local Levantine Jewish community, which had its own liturgy until the 19th century).
Because I watch Screen Junkies‘ “Honest Trailers” I get recommendations like the above from Looper, The Real Reason Why Valerian Flopped At The Box Office. Of course no one knows the ‘real reason’ Valerian flopped, aside from “it didn’t seem like a good movie.” The reality is that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets based on a French comic book and cast a 31 year old actor who looks like a haunted 15 year old. That’s all there is to say definitively. All the various failure points are overdetermined. But the video above gives you a lot of “reasons” if you want them in a list format in a British accent. All in the service of infotainment.
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason offers up an explanation for you have things like “top 10 reasons” for pop culture artifacts of an ephemeral nature (for a preview, The Function of Reason at Edge).
I’ve mentioned this book a few times. I finished while in the Persian Gulf (I’ll blog that at some point soon), and have been ruminating on its implications, and whether to mention it further. The issue I’m having is that I am very familiar with Sperber’s work, and those who he has influenced, and research domains complementary to his. Even if I didn’t know all the details of the argument in The Enigma of Reason, in the broad sketches I knew where they were going, and frankly I could anticipate it. I suppose somewhat ironically I managed to infer and reason ahead of the narrative since I had so many axioms from earlier publications.
The Enigma of Reason comes out of a particular tradition in cognitive anthropology. What Dan Sperber terms the “naturalistic paradigm” in anthropology. This is in contrast to the more interpretative framework that you are probably familiar with in the United States. No one would deny that the naturalistic paradigm has scientific aspirations. That is, it draws from natural science (in particular cognitive anthropology as well as the field of cultural evolution), and conceives of itself as the study of natural phenomenon.
Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion comes out of this tradition, and some of the experimental literature in The Enigma of Reason seem very familiar from the earlier book (as well as Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained). This is due to the fact that Atran goes to great lengths to show the ultimate nature of religion does not have to do with rational inferences as we understand them. That is, theological is a superstructure overlain atop a complex phenomenon which is not about philosophical reflection at all.
Of course the flip side can be true as well. When I was a teenager and younger adult I explored the literature on the existence of God a bit, from old classics like Thomas Aquinas’ arguments in Summa Theologica, to more recent and contrasting proofs of Norman Malcolm and Richard Swinburne (Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was actually a good sourcebook for high level arguments to theism).
When I read In Gods We Trust I realized that my earlier explorations were primarily intellectual justifications, and had little relationship why most people around me believed in God. And yet how did I become an atheist? For me this is a flashbulb memory. I was eight years old, in the public library. I was thumbing through the science books in the children’s section (particular, books on biology and medicine). The third row from the front of the stacks. And all of a sudden I had the insight that there wasn’t a necessary reason for the existence of God.
It all happened over the course of a minute or so. Mind you, I was never really religious in any deep sense. Something I’ve confirmed when talking to religious friends about their beliefs and how it impacts them. Though I nominally adhered to my parents’ religion when I was a small child, I was fascinated much more by science, and that really engaged most of my thoughts and guided my actions (contrastingly, going to the mosque was one of the most horribly boring things I recall doing as a small child).
My point here is that many of our beliefs are arrived at in an intuitive manner, and we find reasons to justify those beliefs. One of the core insights you’ll get from The Enigma of Reason is that rationalization isn’t that big of a misfire or abuse of our capacities. It’s probably just a natural outcome for what and how we use reason in our natural ecology.
Mercier and Sperber contrast their “interactionist” model of what reason is for with an “intellectualist: model. The intellecutalist model is rather straightforward. It is one where individual reasoning capacities exist so that one may make correct inferences about the world around us, often using methods that mimic those in abstract elucidated systems such as formal logic or Bayesian reasoning. When reasoning doesn’t work right, it’s because people aren’t using it for it’s right reasons. It can be entirely solitary because the tools don’t rely on social input or opinion.
The interactionist model holds that reasoning exists because it is a method of persuasion within social contexts. It is important here to note that the authors do not believe that reasoning is simply a tool for winning debates. That is, increasing your status in a social game. Rather, their overall thesis seems to be in alignment with the idea that cognition of reasoning properly understood is a social process. In this vein they offer evidence of how juries may be superior to judges, and the general examples you find in the “wisdom of the crowds” literature. Overall the authors make a strong case for the importance of diversity of good-faith viewpoints, because they believe that the truth on the whole tends to win out in dialogic formats (that is, if there is a truth; they are rather unclear and muddy about normative disagreements and how those can be resolved).
The major issues tend to crop up when reasoning is used outside of its proper context. One of the literature examples, which you are surely familiar with, in The Enigma of Reason is a psychological experiment where there are two conditions, and the researchers vary the conditions and note wide differences in behavior. In particular, the experiment where psychologists put subjects into a room where someone out of view is screaming for help. When they are alone, they quite often go to see what is wrong immediately. In contrast, when there is a confederate of the psychologists in the room who ignores the screaming, people also tend to ignore the screaming.
The researchers know the cause of the change in behavior. It’s the introduction of the confederate and that person’s behavior. But the subjects when interviewed give a wide range of plausible and possible answers. In other words, they are rationalizing their behavior when called to justify it in some way. This is entirely unexpected, we all know that people are very good at coming up with answers to explain their behavior (often in the best light possible). But that doesn’t mean they truly understanding their internal reasons, which seem to be more about intuition.
But much of The Enigma of Reason also recounts how bad people are at coming up with coherent and well thought out rationalizations. That is, their “reasons” tend to be ad hoc and weak. We’re not very good at formal logic or even simple syllogistic reasoning. The explanation for this seems to be two-fold.
First, reason is itself an intuitive process.
For the past few weeks we’ve had an intern at the office. I’ve given them a project using Python…a language they barely know. One of the things that is immediately obvious when going through pitfalls is that a lot of the debugging process relies on intuition one accrues over time, through trial and error. When someone is learning a programming language they don’t have this intuition, so bugs can be extremely difficult to overcome since they don’t have a good sense of the likely distribution of probabilities of the errors they’d introduce into the system (or, to be concrete, a novice programmer might not even recognize that there’s an unclosed loop, when that is one of the most obvious errors to anyone).
Second, reason is an iterative process which operates optimally in a social context. While The Enigma of Reason reviews all the data which suggests that humans are poor at formal logic and lazy in relation to production of reasons, the authors also assert that we are skeptical of alternative models. This rings true. I recall an evangelical Protestant friend who once told me how ridiculous the idea of Hindu divine incarnations were. He was less than pleased with I simply switched his logic to a Christian context. But Mercier and Sperber suggest that these two features of loose positive production of reasons and tighter negative skepticism of those reasons come together in a social context to converge upon important truths which might increase our reproductive fitness.
The framework above is fundamentally predicated on methodological individualism, focusing in natural selection at that level. The encephalization of humans over the past two million years was driven by increased social complexity, and this social complexity was enabled by the powerful ability to reason and relate by individual humans. In some ways The Enigma of Reason co-opts some of the same arguments presented by Robin Dunbar over ten years ago in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, except putting the emphasis on persuasion and reasoning.
At this point we need to address the elephant in the room: some humans seem extremely good at reasoning in a classical sense. I’m talking about individuals such as Blaise Pascal, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and John von Neumann. Early on in The Enigma of Reason the authors point out the power of reason by alluding to Eratosthenes’s calculation of the circumference of the earth, which was only off by one percent. Myself, I would have mentioned Archimedes, who I suspect was a genius on the same level as the ones mentioned above.
Mercier and Sperber state near the end of the book that math in particular is special and a powerful way to reason. We all know this. In math the axioms are clear, and agreed upon. And one can inspect the chain of propositions in a very transparent manner. Mathematics has guard-rails for any human who attempts to engage in reasoning. By reducing the ability of humans to enter into unforced errors math is the ideal avenue for solitary individual reasoning. But it is exceptional.
Second, though it is not discussed in The Enigma of Reason there does seem to be variation in general and domain specific intelligence within the human population. People who flourish in mathematics usually have high general intelligences, but they also often exhibit a tendency to be able to engage in high levels of visual-spatial conceptualization.
One the whole the more intelligent you are the better you are able to reason. But that does not mean that those with high intelligence are immune from the traps of motivated reasoning or faulty logic. Mercier and Sperber give many examples. There are two. Linus Pauling was indisputably brilliant, but by the end of his life he was consistently pushing Vitamin C quackery (in part through a very selective interpretation of the scientific literature).* They also point out that much of Isaac Newton’s prodigious intellectual output turns out to have been focused on alchemy and esoteric exegesis which is totally impenetrable. Newton undoubtedly had a first class mind, but if the domain it was applied to was garbage, then the output was also garbage.
A final issue, which is implicit in the emergence of genius is that it exists in can only manifest in a particular social context. Complex societies with some economic surplus and specialization are necessary for cognitive or creative genius to truly shine. In a hunter-gatherer egalitarian society having general skills to subsist on the Malthusian margin is more critical than being an exceptional mind.**
Overall, the take-homes are:
Reasoning exists to persuade in a group context through dialogue, not individual ratiocination.
Reasoning can give rise to storytelling when prompted, even if the reasons have no relationship to the underlying causality.
Motivated reasoning emerges because we are not skeptical of the reasons we proffer, but highly skeptical of reasons which refute our own.
The “wisdom of the crowds” is not just a curious phenomenon, but one of the primary reasons that humans have become more socially complex and our brains have larger.
Ultimately, if you want to argue someone out of their beliefs…well, good luck with that. But you should read The Enigma of Reason to understand the best strategies (many of them are common sense, and I’ve come to them independently simply through 15 years of having to engage with people of diverse viewpoints).
* R. A. Fisher, who was one of the pioneers of both evolutionary genetics and statistics, famously did not believe there was a connection between smoking and cancer. He himself smoked a pipe regularly.
** From what we know about Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton, their personalities were such that they’d probably be killed or expelled from a hunter-gatherer band.
As many of you know, Apple is doing away with the iPod Shuffle. One curious thing is that I’ve noticed several people buying these devices in the last week through my Amazon referrals. At $50 the price point isn’t high, but it does seem a bit much for an obsolete technology.
Which made me reflect on how quickly technologies become obsolete now. As the few people who read this blog and know me in real life are aware, between 2007 and 2014 I went everywhere with a Shuffle. I always had a backup Shuffle. This is not because I’m an audiophile. I’m not. I listened to podcasts.
Arguably the emergence of smartphones made the Shuffle redundant, but I found that the Shuffle was more portable than a smartphone. Ultimately what made me dump the Shuffle is that I went full d-bag and started doing the bluetooth thing. All of a sudden it didn’t matter where the phone was. I still have a Shuffle, but it’s in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps I have a backup too. I don’t recall.
I probably stuck with the Shuffle longer than most. As an old(er) person I’m reflecting now how fast “ubiquitous” technologies are getting obsolete. Faster and faster.
As a child of the 1980s VCRs were part and parcel of our technological furniture. By the early 2000s VCRs were in decline, with DVD rentals surpassing VHS in 2003. Cassettes were eclipsed by CDs in the early 1990s after a two decade reign, but CDs really didn’t master the space for more than ten years (at least in the USA). DVDs had a similarly short “moment.”
How much more can change though? Some of the transition occurred because smartphones, in particular the iPhone, swallowed up whole sectors (audio and photography). Other changes are due to the utilization of high speed internet for video. We got rid of our television in 2004, and for a while there I felt “out of the loop” on a lot of water cooler conversation. But now television has come to me, as binge watching on Netflix has become common.
Stephen Jay Gould became famous in part for his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. By examining the strange creatures in the Burgess Shale formation Gould makes the case that evolution is a highly contingent process, and that if you reran the experiment of life what we’d see might be very different from what we have now.
The most important thing about this preprint is not that the sample size is large enough that they could detect low frequency variants and add to the catalog. No, for me, it is that they sampled so many of the provinces. As you can see in the figure up top just like Europe China’s Han population recapitulate the map of China. That is, populations arrange themselves spatially when projected onto a principle components analysis plot in the same manner that they do geographically. This is a new finding in some ways because previous sampling strategies had not been robust enough to detect the east-west cline (though to be honest if you looked at the Chinese samples in the 1000 Genomes there was suggestion of this).
Arguably the emergence of smartphones made the Shuffle redundant, but I found that the Shuffle was more portable than a smartphone. Ultimately what made me dump the Shuffle is that I went full d-bag and started doing the bluetooth thing. All of a sudden it didn’t matter where the phone was. I still have a Shuffle, but it’s in a drawer somewhere. Perhaps I have a backup too. I don’t recall.