Hugh Pope is the author of Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East, Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, and Turkey Unveiled. He was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for 25 years, most recently with The Wall Street Journal, and has a degree in Oriental Studies from Oxford. He currently works for the International Crisis Group, focusing on issues of Turkey and Cyprus. Despite similarities of physiognomy and Oxford educations Hugh Pope is not Hugh Grant.

Below are 10 questions.

1 – In Sons of the Conquerors I recall you being able to communicate with people from all over the Turkic world in Turkish. My impression from that is that from Xinjiang to Anatolia the differences between Turkic languages are relatively marginal. Am I misremembering something here? Can you give an analogy as to the distance between Turkic languages in terms of intelligibility? (e.g., Spanish:Italian::Turkish:Uzbek)

Turkic languages are in three main groups: roughly the more westerly group of Turkish, Azeri, Balkan Turkish and Turkmen; a central group including Uzbek and Uygur; and an eastern group that includes Kazakh and Kyrgyz. The westerly is the most developed, and you could say share the same inter-intelligibility of Spanish, French and Italian. A Kazakh and a Turk will however take longer to learn each other’s languages. However, since the structure is similar, and there is quite a good overlap of words (although they can be pronounced very differently), they learn them much quicker than learning a tongue in another language group. Because Japanese shares many grammatical similarities with the group, many Turks and Japanese can also learn their languages much quicker than others.

2 – One of the first nations in the Middle East in which you lived was Syria. As you observe in Dining with al-Qaeda Syria preserves a great deal of religious diversity, a variety draining out of many of the other nations in the region. In particular, I am curious as to your assessment of the attitudes of Alawis to the Muslim world as a whole. From my reading I am to understand that they have been “mainstreaming” their identity over the past few generations so that they are now a sect of Twelver Shia Muslims, whereas in the early 20th century their own self-perception was much grayer, with an identity more distinct from Islam as a whole like the Druze or Yezidis.

Interestingly, Alawis in Syria are different from the Alevis in Turkey, but both have hesitated to describe themselves completely outside mainstream Islam. Clearly they come from rural groups who share a common point of a different, Shia-style tradition, distinct from the main (Ottoman) Sunni power of the Middle Ages. In Turkey, many Alevi communities appear to have been converted by missionaries from Safavid/Shia Iran, and because there was so little communication between different parts of the empire, it gave rise to many different Alevi traditions. The picture in the two main post-Ottoman countries with Alevis/Alawis, Syria and Turkey, has diverged somewhat since then. The minority Alawism of the Assad family, in power since the 1970s, has had more impact on their efforts to keep Syria ’secular’ rather than promoting any Alawi orthodoxy. In Turkey, where Western style rights and freedoms have been spreading, various Alevi factions compete to be known as mainstream or even official. There are some Turkish Alevis, apparently a minority, who want to be considered as a distinct religion. One feature shared with Syria is a love of secularism — some Turkish Alevis even treat republican founder Kemal Ataturk as a kind of saint, probably because his secularism defended them from oppression by the Sunni majority. A difference with Syria is that even though the Alevis in Turkey can’t agree on a common dogma, Alevism is now very much established as an alternative to Sunni Islam.

3 – I’ve never been to the Middle East so what I know is mostly from books, papers, and various data sources. The World Values Survey in 2005-2008 had he following results for selected nations in regards to those who were convinced atheists:

Great Britain – 10.4%, 105 out of 1041
USA – 3.6%, 42 out of 1249
Turkey – 0.5% 7 out of 1346
Egypt – 0% 0 out of 3051
Iran – 0.1% 3 out of 2156
Jordan – 0.1% 1 out of 1106

I’ve provided percentages and counts. As someone more intimately familiar with Middle Eastern people, do these numbers tell us anything real? (I know in the USA the percentage who don’t believe in God is higher than those who say they’re atheists, because the label atheist has some stigma)

It’s true that religion, and respect for religion, is very deep-rooted in Middle Eastern societies. I think it is partly because they have had a very rough time in the past couple of centuries, making people distrustful of human efforts and outside powers. You should also take into account the very vivid and influential stigma attached by the Koran and Muslim societies to anyone leaving the faith or not believing in God.

4 – The term nation has a relatively broad meaning in English today, and informally denotes a particular land mass enclosed by political boundaries. But a narrower older meaning is that a nation consists of a particular people with an identity as a nation on a particular territory. The nation-state if you will. By the second definition it seems that Turks and Iranians (despite the ethnic and religious diversity in both these nation-states) have a sense of nationality. Most Americans at this point would probably agree with the assertion that Iraqis do not have such a viewpoint, while it seems that many of the Persian Gulf monarchies are more coalitions of clans brought together by personal rule. Of the Arab nations Egypt in particular seems to stand out to me as analogous to Turkey or Iran. What would say of this assertion?

I think your assertion is broadly correct, and I’d also note that the sense of Iraqi nationality may be in eclipse but that it is still there. Most Iraqi Kurds might dream of an independent Kurdistan, but I’m not sure they really want to merge their advanced society of three million people with, say, the 12-15 million poorer, less educated Kurds of Turkey. Turkey, Iran and Egypt all have long and well-established state traditions, which also tends to nurture a sense of nationhood. Arab states, many of which were previously part of the Ottoman Empire, have a much harder time making their statehood seem like nationhood. Saudi Arabia may come the closest to this – the Saudi family has been running things in that part of the world off and on for 300 years – but Saudi Arabia is a rather unusual place so hard to make generalisations about it!

5 – Let’s play at “alternate history.” What if the world’s largest concentration of oil reserves were not in the Arab Middle East and Iran. Would these Middle Eastern nations be more well off, like Turkey, or would they be ignored and destitute like much of Africa and Afghanistan?

With all the caveats of alternative history, I suspect that a country like Iraq, with a state tradition and a long history would have done better, and that it would have been very hard without oil to make something of the Persian Gulf states. I agree however with the underlying idea behind your question, that lack of oil has forced a country like Turkey to work harder and have a more tolerant and pluralist culture.

6 – I’m curious about your interactions with the Yezidi’s. Did you discuss the details of their religion at all with them? If so, were you simply stonewalled, or did they give you consistent or inconsistent descriptions of their beliefs?

I did discuss aspects of their religion with some Yezidis, and they seemed to have as coherent a world view as any other in terms of theology (try explaining the Trinity to an outsider). In terms of religious culture, however, they had almost nothing to talk about since they have been so marginalized and oppressed. Certainly they feel a lot freer in U.S.-backed Iraq than they did under Saddam Hussein, but the attacks on them by extremists show that things could go badly for them too.

7 – I have an Iranian American friend. He is an ethnic Persian, and I inquired of him as to the existence of an independent Azeri Iranian community, and he did not know if such a group existed. Of course he knew that many Iranians were Azeris, but the distinction seemed of minimal interest to him. More a matter of curiosity than any importance. I’m curious as to ethnic relations in Iran, which seem relatively amicable. One model I have proposed for why Azeris and other Turks are so well integrated into the Iranian state is that to a great extent modern Iran as a Shia nation is a product of the Turkic Safavids and their successors. What do you think of this thesis?

That’s possible, but I’m not sure the Safavids took their ‘Turkicness’ very seriously (the Ottomans, their big rivals, didn’t make a big deal of it either). Iranian Azeris are well-integrated because they share Shia faith, they fought side by side with the others in the Iran-Iraq war, and because there is no limit to how high they can rise in Iranian society (despite all the Iranian snobbery against Turks and the Turkish language, and the occasional ethnic frictions there are in Persian/Azeri border towns). Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei comes from an Azeri family, as does Hossein Mousavi. The merchants of the Tehran bazaar are mostly Azeris.

8 – In Dining with al-Qaeda I was struck by the fact that Iranians you questioned about their militant rhetoric dismissed those who took their slogans literally. There seems to have been a gap in how people perceived language from culture to culture (this is true even within the United States). Perhaps a specialist in semiotics would have been handy. Your task as a journalist was to transmit information to the Western public, and so serve as an intermediary. And yet sometimes you encountered difficulties because your editors were less than familiar with the different way language is used in other cultures. Are the diplomats and politicians who deal with Middle Eastern issues versed in these nuances? After the Iraq War debacle I am not so sure that complacent confidence in the “commanding heights” of American civil service and politics should be a default.

The American civil service was well-versed in the nuances of Iraq before the war, but the political power chose to disregard their wisdom almost completely. (Same goes for the UK). American civil servants could not be expected to rebel against an unwise policy – in fact, only a handful resigned – but applied their can-do optimism to what (to me) seems like a completely impossible proposition. In Dining with al-Qaeda I was trying to tell people that they should trust no one with complacent confidence, especially not the media, and that they should develop a sceptical approach to information.

9 – A personal question. Your “divided loyalties,” so to speak, are highlighted in Dining with al-Qaeda. You’re British by national origin, have lived in the Middle East for much of your life, and worked for American journalistic outfits. If someone asks you “where are you from?, what do you answer? Is it very important who is asking the question?

I find this a very difficult question to answer. I was born in South Africa and raised there until I was nine, by English parents; I went to school in Britain; my university studies were of the Arab and Iranian worlds; I lived nearly half of my life in Turkey; I first married a Swiss national and now a Dutch national; my children have been educated in French and German schools. Generally I say, “I’m from Istanbul”, but even that seems less part of my loyalties now, since my favorite place to live is my house in the mountains in the south of Turkey.

10 – There exists the category “Middle East,” which includes the Arab nations (or perhaps the Arab nations of the Mashriq + Egypt + Arabia), Turkey and Iran. And yet there is also quite a bit of prejudice between Arabs, Turks, and Persians (as a South Asian I have experienced members of each group taking pains to distinguish itself from the others). But walking through Istanbul, Tehran, and an Arab city such as Damascus or Cairo, are the cultural differences that stark? Can the casual observer tell simply from styles of architecture what is Turk and Persian and Arab? Is it simply narcissism of small differences?

There are real differences between Turks, Persians, Arabs, Kurds and Jews, who are all main Middle Eastern peoples. But each national category has many sub-categories, some of which seem closer to the other main categories than they are to each other! It’s the same with Islam – people keep claiming it’s ‘one’, but in fact, Turkish, Persian and Saudi Islam, despite their shared theological reference points, could be entirely different religious cultures. The important thing in the Middle East is to recognize these differences, but also to see where they overlap, along with equally important overlaps with Western culture and commerce.

Image Credit: Thomas Foley

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One of the issues with pre-modern trade is that international banking and communication as we understand it did not exist, and trust was a major problem across distance and time. This is why dispersed ethno-religious groups could be the vectors by which private trade occurred between civilizations, because there was a circle of trust which existed between these groups despite their particular residence. Jews are the most famous cases of this, but the pre-Islamic Silk Road saw a similar phenomenon with the Sogdians. In the modern world various ethno-religious groups from Gujarat whose traditional occupation is trade also maintain this link to the past of international commerce, which was embedded in kin and religious networks, not transnational corporate institutions.

A major way to establish fellow feeling and trust is religion. The Islamic scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta trekked from his native Morocco across the world of Islam, all the way to China. Notably throughout his travels he remained within the confines of a predominantly Muslim subculture. This made sense in regions where Islam was the religion of the majority, or of the minority which was in power (India), but even in China he found refuge among that region’s Islamic community (the presence of Muslims was important, because he could always offer up his services as an Islamic legal expert, though in some cases he was obviously drafted into the role). Ibn Battuta flourished in the 14th century, when Islam may have been ceding ground to Western Christendom (e.g., in Spain), but was waxing in the east, and in particular the Indian ocean basin. Already regions of maritime Southeast Asia such as Aceh were Muslim, and within the next three centuries all of what is today Indonesia would come under sway of rulers who were professing Muslims (with the minor exception of Bali).

How did this happen? This became the subject of discussion below. There aren’t any hard & fast answers here. Much of what I know is from a few books, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, and A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World. In none of these books is the Indian ocean trade network the center of the narrative, but all of them focus on its evolution. In particular, with the rise of the Portuguese in the 16th century we get a sense that in that period the Indian ocean was for all practical purposes a Muslim sea! Granted, the peoples who inhabited the shores were not necessarily Muslim, but from the European (and also earlier Chinese) perspective the trade seems to have been captured by peoples who professed Islam. In this lay the possible answer for why maritime Southeast Asia became Muslim, while mainland Southeast Asia did not. The main exception in the latter case are the Chams, a people who happen to be Malay, and so were intimately connected with maritime Southeast Asia.

To me the striking evidence of this happens to be a map of the distribution of schools of Islamic jurisprudence. The details are not relevant, but it is interesting to note that the Hanafi school is found in regions where Turkic or Persian culture was dominant. The Muslims of most of South Asia and China proper are generally assumed to have come from these two cultural stems, and so they are by and large Hanafi, despite the fact that they are neither Persian nor Turkic (the Sunnis of the Balkans are Hanafi as well, whether they’re Turkish or not). But look at the distribution of the Shafi’i school. The map does not show it, but the Muslims of Sri Lanka, Kerala, and the Maldives are Shafi’i as well. It seems then to me that the Indian ocean trade network which was dominated by Muslims between 1000 and 1500 A.D. resulted in the spread of the Shafi’i school of Islam, in particular from the Hadhramaut region of Arabia. If we didn’t know anything else about the history of the Indian ocean except for this map, I think we’d have a sense that the Shafi’i school was spread by people who had some involvement in trade and seaborne traffic.

Image credit: Wikimedia

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Update: Results so far….

Too harsh - 3.0%
About right – 15.0%
Not harsh enough, though he shouldn’t be ostracized – 26.0%
He should be ostracized from science - 56.0%

The editor of Cognition believes that Marc Hauser was guilty of fabrication in light of what he’s seen in the Harvard report on Hauser’s misconduct. Marc Hauser is on on leave, and will be supervised in his research in the future. But, he continues to teach extension courses. It doesn’t seem as if his work on human moral cognition is under a cloud. There are other researchers working in the same area who have been able to replicate his general findings. Rather, it seems that it was the work on cotton-top tamarins which is under scrutiny, in large part because Marc Hauser was the only one who was doing that sort of research on that organism.

In the end this is about a violation of trust. Alison Gopnik told Nicholas Wade that “It’s always a problem in science when we have to depend on one person.” Science is a famously a self-regulating culture. The system works because science is about something real, and scientists are constrained by the data. But, science is also a human enterprise so conscious and unconscious bias enters into the system. The question is whether the system works well enough that scientists trust their colleagues to report truthful results. If every scientist had to check in on every other scientist I suspect that the system would collapse because there aren’t enough labor hours to go around. Science is very competitive, and many people work many hours for only modest renumeration. Careers hang in the balance, and many are weeded out. People accept this because there is at least a perception of a minimal level of fairness. Finally, on a social scale the economic growth which our society depends on is driven in large part by scientific innovation. The culture of science is the engine upon whom billions depend.

My first thought about what has happened with Hauser is that he is “too big to fail.” He’s at Harvard, and, he has powerful friends. It reminds me of what a friend of mine told me about what occurred at a major tech corporation he had worked at. Apparently there had been an incompetent hire who lasted for years because no one wanted to take responsibility and fire him, because the very fact that managers actually hired him was a negative reflection on their discernment if someone eventually passed judgement on this individual. So there wasn’t an incentive to bite the bullet, and the incompetent employee was moved from department to department for years.

But I’m curious what readers think. Below is a survey asking what you think of the magnitude of Marc Hauser’s punishment in relation to his infractions. I’ll update the results at the top of this post every day for a week.

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I don’t know about you, but I have a weird mental problem whereby my visual model of the past is strongly shaped by the constraints on the various representational modes which preserve images from a particular era. For example, the paintings of the 18th century shape how I imagine the 18th century, while the black and white photos of the early 20th century tend to drain color out of that period from my mind’s eye. So it’s always of interest to me when extremely old color photographs are discovered. A reminder to my subconscious that the past looked just like the present in many ways. But this set from The Boston Globe are so good that it’s mind blowing. All the images are from between 1909 and 1912, and within the boundaries of the Russian Empire.

Here’s a sample:

Image Credit: Prokudin-Gorskii Collection

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On the heels of my post on cousin marriage, I thought readers might find this article on genetic screening in the United Arab Emirates of interest. One way to tackle the problem of genetic diseases which emerge out of consanguineous unions apparently isn’t to discourage the unions themselves, but dodge the outcomes. So pre-implantation screening of eggs as well as selective abortion of fetuses both seem to be options being evaluated. Aside from the costs, especially in the former case (though abortions are not without risk, and the initial stages of pregnancy are an investment of time as well), I still think there are long term problems with this. But first, Alan Bittles (who produced the map in the previous post) points to a major shortfall of a simple do-not-marry-cousins heuristic in this case:

People from the same tribe can also be highly genetically similar, he said.

“You can’t just compare the health of those children born of cousins but the comparison must be made within the tribes as well as between them, as some disorders are unique to particular tribes,” he said. “To stop consanguinity affecting health, you’d not only need to stop first cousin marriage but people in the same clan too, which is highly improbable and going against centuries of tradition.”

Another medical specialist opines:

Dr Anand Saggar, a clinical geneticist based in London, sees patients from the Gulf — who have been sponsored by their governments — at his clinic in Harley Street.

Western prejudice and health economics have led to the negative attitude towards cousin marriages, which are legal and accepted in many parts of the world, he said, pointing to Amish communities in the US.

“We’ll never get rid of any old genetic diseases because our genetic code keeps on mutating. You just have to accept that genetic disease is part of our evolution. It is a foolish and erroneous assumption that to stop marrying cousins would eradicate genetic disease.”

The National is paper based out of the United Arab Emirates, a former British colony. Therefore, I won’t put it past them to quote mine or distort (rule: beware of British newspapers!)…but this is just kind of a dumb assertion. The problem with inbreeding isn’t that one has deleterious alleles, it’s that there are correlations of deleterious alleles at the same locus. So the Jewish community has sharply reduced the manifestation of Tay-Sachs disease through genetic screening. The Amish community is is also impacted by recessive genetic diseases. As I noted earlier, inbred communities should have lower aggregate genetic load, and yet the the fact that deleterious alleles are concentrated on specific loci mean that they have reduced physiological fitness.

I’m skeptical of Alan Bittles assumption that there’s something set in stone about current Arab practices. Apparently miniskirts and exposed hair were de rigueur among the Arab female smart set in the 1960s, but now veiling is all the rage. Times change. But, the logical conclusion of generations of genetic screening of particular Arab lineages is that the clans of the Persian Gulf will eventually transform themselves into clones with very low mutational load. Even if the power of screening shields these lineages from the ill effects of inbreeding (by literally yanking out all the deleterious alleles from the gene pool by discarding eggs with problematic genotypes every generation), biological uniformity is going to have problematic long term consequences when it comes to battling co-evolving pathogens. Monocultures aren’t built to last.

In any case, interesting idea for a science fiction short story. The formula would be to take a pre-modern custom (e.g., cousin marriage) and mix it with future technology, and iterate forward.

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There is a border across which fertility drops by a factor of two in North America (defined as from Canada to Panama). Specifically, one nation has a TFR of ~4, and the other ~2. Can you guess the two nations? You can find the answer in the charts below.

First, linear:

Now, log-transformed:

That’s right, TFR, Guatemala (4.15) → Mexico (2.21) → United States (2.05) → Canada (1.53)

(source, 2005-2010 estimates)

Here’s GDP PPP per capita:

United States ($46,400) → Canada ($38,000) → Mexico ($13,600) → Guatemala ($4,800)

This is why the Mexican-Guatemalan border experiences a great deal of traffic.

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The map above shows the distribution of consanguineous marriages. As you can see there’s a fair amount of cross-cultural variation. In the United States there’s a stereotype of cousin marriage being the practice of backward hillbillies or royalty. For typical middle class folk it’s relatively taboo, with different legal regimes by state. The history of cousin marriage in the West has been one of ups & downs. Marriage between close relatives was not unknown in antiquity. The pagan emperor Claudius married his niece Agrippina the Younger, while the Christian emperor Heraclius married his niece Martina. Marriage between cousins were presumably more common. With the rise in the West of the Roman Catholic Church marriages between cousins were officially more constrained. Adam Bellow argues in In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History that there’s a material explanation for this: the Roman church used its power over the sacrament of marriage to control the aristocracy. Though the church required dispensations for marriages between cousins of even distant degrees of separation, they were routinely given, as was obviously the case among Roman Catholic royal families like the Hapsburgs. But once given the dispensation could be revoked, rendering the marriage null and void. A highly convenient power politically.

But for much of European history the marriages of common folk were not of much concern to the church. Using ecclesiastical records L. L. Cavalli-Sforza documents very high levels of cousin marriage in Italy in the 19th century in Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy. The rates dropped rapidly with economic development, especially better transportation networks in mountainous regions. I think this explains the patterns in the United States, extremely isolated communities are more inbred, while most Americans have traditionally been very mobile and not relied excessively on family networks. In northern Europe cousin marriage was not unknown in the 19th century, Charles Darwin famously married his cousin. With the Reformation official church sanctions against cousin marriage on the aristocracy and gentry were relaxed, and a few clusters of closely networked intermarried clans arose, such as the Darwin-Wedgewood family (the Catholic Church had also been a bulwark against forced marriages of aristocratic women, who always had life in a religious order as a possibility. The Reformation in Germany seems to have initially resulted in a sharp increase in the power of the patriarch over the marital fates of his daughters because of the removal of the religious safety valve as leverage). I think that the case of Charles Darwin and his social set speak to the attraction of cousin marriage: familiarity breeds affinity. In Victorian England a small group of closely related and affiliated elite gentry families, the Darwins, Keynes, Wedgewoods, Galtons, etc., created a subculture which spawned subsets such as the Bloomsbury Group.

With a more fluid and harshly meritocratic global elite the attraction of cousin marriage seems to have diminished in the Western world. Consider the tycoon Rupert Murdoch. He is an American citizen born in Australia married to a Cantonese woman with grandchildren who are 1/4 Ghanaian, 1/4 Dutch, 1/4 ethnic Scotch (Australian) & 1/4 ethnic Estonian (Australian) . As for the common people, geographical and social isolation is sharply mitigated by modern transportation networks, as well as larger scale non-kin institutions such as the Christian church. The same dynamics do not necessarily apply outside of the developed world. A friend whose father is Arab once explained that cousin marriage was so pervasive in that culture in part because you marry who you meet, and it is difficult in Arab societies for men to meet women who were not their cousins. In less individualistic societies where zero sum power dynamics are still operative it may also be beneficial for a wife to be related to the family into which she is marrying. Anthropologists in South Asia attribute the more equitable power dynamics between the genders in Hindu South India as opposed to more patriarchal Hindu North India to the fact that in the South cousin (and uncle-niece) marriage is practiced, while in the north exogamy is the norm. In the latter case a young woman leaves her family and becomes a “stranger” in her husband’s home. In the former case one of the new in-laws is a blood aunt or uncle.

But that’s the cultural anthropology. What may be fit for a cultural kin-unit may not be biological fit for individual lineages. What are the risks of cousin marriage? Most obviously there are recessive diseases. Those illnesses which are expressed when you carry two malfunctional copies of a gene. Cystic fibrosis, tay sachs, various forms of deafness. Why is it that cousins have a higher risk of this occurring? Because two cousins are much more likely than two random individuals to share the same distinct gene from a common ancestor, because their common ancestors are so much more recent. More precisely the coefficient of kinship between two first cousins is 1/8. That means that at any given locus there’s a 1 out of 8 chance that the two individuals will have alleles which are identical by descent, which means that the genetic variant comes down from the same person in the family line.

If the allele is “good,” that is, totally normal/wild type, not associated with any pathology, then we’re in the clear. That’s why most first cousin marriages don’t produce children who are monsters. What a first cousin marriage does is change the odds. How you present these odds matters a great deal in how scary they sound. If I told you than the chance of first cousins having children with a birth defect is 4-7%, vs. 3-4% for a non-consanguineous couple, it might not sound that bad. But if I told you that the odds of having a birth defect is ~50% greater, then it sounds worse. Additionally, the costs of congenital illness are born by the offspring, and society through health insurance premiums. If you compared a society which had a tradition of universal first cousin marriages vs. one which didn’t, you’d see 50% more birth defects in the former society in the aggregate, all things equal.

But that’s the not the only issue there. There are two opposing forces which diminish the problems of common cousin marriage and make it worst. The first is the purging of genetic load which occurs when you expose deleterious recessive alleles. Remember that low frequency recessively expressed alleles aren’t exposed to natural selection because they’re mostly found in heterozygotes. This means they get to float around in the gene pool for very long periods of time. In plant breeding you can just “self” the plants, which will expose the alleles rather quickly, since selfing is an extreme form of inbreeding, purging heterozygosity. The deleterious alleles then are removed from the gene pool through the death of individuals who carry them in homozygote state. The theory is that some human populations which practice cousin marriage at higher frequencies may have a lower frequency of deleterious recessive alleles. Alan Templeton reports this for South Indian Hindus in Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory, and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza does the same for the Japanese in the aforementioned monograph. In the proximate sense this purging of the genetic load occurs through human misery. The early death of individuals, or their sterility, or sharply reduced fertility because of illness. In the ultimate sense it’s somewhat speculative, and many geneticists are skeptical that complex mammals are easy to analogize with plants which do occasionally self in the wild.

That’s the positive genetically. What’s the negative? Pedigree collapse. I’ve been talking about marriages between first cousins throughout this post, but that’s really a small issue next to this. Even first cousin marriages produce individuals with a fair amount of inbreeding. I ran a test for runs of homozygosity in my 23andMe genetic profile and I got 3 hits, while a friend whose parents are first cousins got ~70 (the parameters for the test aren’t important, just giving a relative sense). For inbred clans it gets much worse because people are related in many different ways, and genetically are far closer than first cousins. That is what happened to the Spanish Hapsburgs. As you can see from the pedigree of Charles II his parents were closer than typical first cousins. The Samaritans of Israel are a religious sect which seems to be going through pedigree collapse. Some of them are proactively marrying outsiders to prevent their extinction through high infant mortality rates. Others, “traditionalists,” oppose exogamy because intermarriage within the group is the custom, and diseases are God’s will.

The Samaritans are an extreme case. But we may be seeing a thousand Samaritan flowers blooming across the Middle East. From what I know cousin marriage in the Middle East is not limited to Muslims, Christians and Jews practice it as well. But among many Muslims it has some cachet because of particular hadiths which point to this practice as preferred. Setting religion aside, there are also social reasons why this practice is common. As I noted above sex segregation means that you may not know women outside of your family well, and in some societies where veiling is practiced it may be that you do not see many women you are not related to (even if veiling occurs at puberty, you may have seen your cousin at a younger age). Marriages are bonds which may tie a family into one operational social unit, and so produce a powerful inbred clan. This illustrates the cross-purposes of a cultural unit of selection vs. the individual unit of selection. In a society where clan vs. clan competitions are critical sorting mechanisms consanguineous marriages may serve as beneficial cross-linkages. Balanced against this of course are marriages across clans. On an individual level a first cousin marriage reduces the reproductive fitness, but higher potential reproductive fitness of two individuals who have no social support because of ostracism may be a moot point.

From my cursory reading of the literature consanguineous marriage is not declining in much of the Muslim, especially Arab, world. Why? I can think of two superficial reasons obvious to someone like me, who is no anthropologist or sociologist with area knowledge. First, high fertility rates and lower infant mortality means that the sample space of possible matches increases. One way you can remove the option of cousin marriage is by shrinking the pool of potential cousins you may marry. In a Malthusian world the average family has only two children who manage to survive to adulthood and reproduce. The variance around this expectation means that many families will disappear within two or three generations simply due to stochastic forces. This is why Augustus attempted to use moral suasion and coercion to have the Roman Senatorial class reproduce at a higher rate. The aristocracy was going extinct as clans which were defined by a legitimate male line succession would routinely have a generation without a male heir (this explains the popularity of adoption in Roman society, with adoptees often being younger sons of related lineages). Later in imperial history Marcus Aurelius and his maternal cousin, Faustina the Younger, had thirteen children, but only four survived to adulthood. The modern world is very different, and great clans can rise in just a few generations if one has the will. A second reason I believe that cousin marriage is popular in the Arab world is economics. Specifically, commodity/resource driven economic growth doesn’t require great median human capital investment, so there isn’t an incentive to shift toward a less familial social structure. In plain English going to university, moving regularly for your career, etc., are going to weaken the bonds of affinity you may have with your family. This is not necessary for many Gulf Arabs, who have a guaranteed a minimum income because of resource revenue. Not only has this allowed them to preserve a relatively archaic set of social norms, but I believe it’s also allowed for the baroque elaboration of their customary traditions. I don’t find the second explanation persuasive for most Muslim nations though, as they aren’t as reliant on resource driven revenue, and have had to make more accommodations with the exigencies of the modern world. I believe that in all likelihood large families are probably responsible for the resurgence or persistence of the practice in societies where it has been the preferred pairing.

This post was inspired by a recent Channel 4 special, When Cousins Marry: Reporter Feature. If you live in Britain you can probably watch it online (I can not). But it highlights that the issue is going to be salient in the United Kingdom for a generation or so at a minimum. As I said, in the United States inbreeding is a way to make fun of poor, uneducated, and isolated whites. The photo to the right is from a blog entry mocking anti-Obama activists who were protesting his address to the children of the nation as “racist, inbred hicks.” The American perception of inbred people is not particularly positive, and the accusations of being inbred are used to mock and humiliate. But when it comes to the issue in Britain it is different, because consanguineous marriage is a feature of the Muslim community, and there are issues of race, religion and class which are operative. It isn’t just custom and tradition which are driving people to marry their cousins in Britain (perhaps more accurately, parents are demanding their children marry their cousins). Marrying one’s cousin is a rather convenient way in which to allow more of your relatives to immigrate. In a subculture where arranged marriage is the norm the marrying a cousin abroad seems eminently rational for the clan’s prospects. But there are other forces at work in the community which perpetuate and encourage it as well, and those forces can not be frankly addressed because of the tensions which are normal in many multicultural societies. From the summary of the program:

‘An attack on Pakistani culture’

However I also spoke to some people in cousin marriages who felt there were great benefits and questioned if it was yet another aspect of their culture that was coming under attack.

This sentiment has been echoed several times during the making of this Dispatches programme. It’s a subject that has provoked a defensive and sometimes hostile reaction every time we’ve touched upon it. We spoke to dozens of families who refused to talk about it on camera and we were told frequently that even to discuss the issue was an attack on Pakistani culture or worse still, Islam.

Since Britain has the NHS this is a going to be a major public health issue. On the one hand, there is individual freedom of choice. This is a core Western value. On the other hand, there is the fact that health care costs are a long term structural issue for the fiscal health of any society. Ethnic Pakistanis are only a few percent of Britain’s population, so it is manageable right now, but their proportion will slowly rise because of higher fertility and continued immigration. If cousin marriage continues to remain popular in the community the later generations are going to have even greater health problems because of higher inbreeding coefficients (due to repeated cousin marriages across the generations within the family).

But why should we limited these sorts of social utilitarian considerations to cousin marriage? How about the increased debilities associated with the children of older mothers? Mothers who make recourse to assisted reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization? Lines have to be drawn. Costs and benefits have to be evaluated. With the passage of health care reform in the United States in 2010 the issue is now explicitly socialized in all developed nations. I began the post with a social-cultural narrative, and I end it with a reiteration of the importance of a social-cultural context.

Image Credits: Wikimedia, Consang.net, youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily

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Jonah Lehrer has a post up on why it might be that top-level athletes seem to come from smaller urban areas rather than larger ones. The possible reason is interesting. But I was reminded of the “10,000 hour rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. You know, how Tiger Woods’ dad “turned him” into a world class athlete from scratch? Even setting aside the elementary question of necessary and sufficient conditions, what about all those kids who invest thousands of hours and don’t “make it” big? I once knew a girl from a large Mormon family, and noticed offhand that she was far shorter than any of her siblings. I inquired as to this fact, wondering if perhaps she was adopted. Her explanation for her small stature (~2 standard deviations below the female norm) was that she was involved in competitive gymnastics up to early adolescence, and that stunted her growth.

I left it at that, but even at the time it made me wonder about the intense focus some young people have, only to realize that there are limits to the virtuosity they can achieve in their chosen domain. And this obviously applies to non-athletic areas. How many teenage “mathletes” fantasize about becoming the next Feynman? Eventually many reach graduate school and realize that perhaps they don’t have all the traits to become the next Feynman, and wonder if perhaps they wouldn’t have been better off getting a degree in engineering and going straight into the workforce after undergrad, or, perhaps entering the army of memorizing pre-med machines and eventually sliding into a smooth path which a professional guild enables.

A typical modern consumer lives as a king in the material domain. There is a level of egalitarianism in quality of life which was not the case for all of human history. And yet true virtuosity in mind and body have not become more democratic. Just as almost all humans are forgotten in a few generations, so all humans alive today will be forgotten in a few generations (for practical purposes, even if digital copies of aspects of their lives are easy to access, who would care?). Only a few luminaries will attain memetic immortality, just as always. Perhaps we moderns who have long and relatively healthy lives should think a little more about how best to invest the surfeit of non-subsistence hours we’ve been given, because the party’s over at some point.

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The New York Times has a piece up, Defusing India’s Population Time Bomb, which reiterates what I was trying to get at yesterday, India’s demographic problems are localized to particular regions, not the nation as a whole. First, let’s review the world’s population growth & fertility rates:

Now let’s focus on a few nations:

China’s coercive policy is often held up as a great success of the power of government to change from on high. But did you see the world population growth correction in the early 1960s? That was China. If you don’t know what was going on in China then, read books (hint: if you don’t know much about the history of China, you don’t know much about the history of the world). My point is that China’s solution was in part a reaction to a pro-natalist drive encouraged by one of the most powerful crazy men in the history of the world. On pure pragmatic grounds one may say that China had to do something, but their actions in the early 1980s did not occur in a vacuum, and were a consequence of a sequence of earlier events particular to that nation.

Contrast China with South Korea, a culturally similar nation, which went through decades of authoritarian rule, but never imposed coercive family planning policies of the sort common in the People’s Republic. Like Japan and Taiwan South Korea’s fertility and population growth rates declined naturally through economic development. With abundant human capital (high literacy) to start out with these nations replicated, and in some ways exceeded, the trajectory of the European demographic transition concomitant with an increase in economic productivity and urbanization. In fact, their fertility rates are lower than that of China, probably because they’re economically more advanced. If it wasn’t for China’s three decade long dance with crazy Communism the coercive policies in relation to reproduction may never have been necessary.

Economic development isn’t the only way to staunch population growth. Iran has taken a different, and less optimal, but still not grossly coercive, path. Because of the lack of economic opportunity in Iran’s society there was an understanding at both the commanding heights and the grassroots that large families were simply not sustainable, at least not using the quality of life which people had become used to in the 1970s as a reference point.

As I noted yesterday, the problem within India is that there is a wide region-to-region variation. The southern cone of India is already verging toward sub-replacement fertility. A major difference I see between China and India though is that the economically and socially most backward area is the cultural heart of the latter. There may be vague analogies to Italy, where Rome is a government town in the center, while northern Italy is the economic motive force, and southern Italy serves as a vote-bank which reliably backs the party which makes the biggest cash transfer promise. A big difference between Italy and India: the backward region is numerically dominant in India, while it is not in Italy.

Here are two bubble plots which show the divide in India. The size of the bubbles are proportion to the population size of the state. The two ones to the top left are Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

[View with PicLens]

tfr-vs-gdp-per-capita

tfr-vs-literacy

The fact is that South Asia is low on the human capital scale:

The only long term solution is to leverage the fact that other parts of the world are higher up on the human capital ladder, and still producing innovation and generating new ways to increase productivity. Matt Yglesias has a post up about Japan, from which I got this chart:

Because Japan’s population is shrinking its economy will decline over time. Additionally, because of the unfavorable demographics, with more older people than young workers, it will go through some decline in quality of life. But the average Japanese still consumes at a very high level, it’s not dystopia. Ultimately the Japanese are relying on innovation to buoy their economy. And that’s the real long term solution: without innovation we’re f**ked. Period. Demographic adjustments are really epiphenomena on the margins. That’s why the media can report on both sides of the ledger as if they are both positive and negative. It’s about quality of human capital and the innovation they’re producing, not the quantity of humans.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

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The heritability of religiosity is modest in the American environment. In some environments, such as Saudi Arabia, a normal range in variation in religiosity obviously can not express itself. But under more relaxed conditions it seems that around half of the variation in religiosity in the population can be traced to variation in genes; in other words, the trait value runs in families. Obama’s father was born a Muslim, but was an avowed atheist. I couldn’t find survey data from Kenya, but I did find some from Tanzania. According to the World Values Survey 8 out of 1171 respondents did not believe in God in Tanzania. The equivalent figure for the United States was 51 out of 1200. And his mother, from what we can tell, was also an atheist. The United States and Kenya are not, and were not, Saudi Arabia, but neither were they Sweden or Japan. Though one had license to be an atheist, it was certainly culturally atypical, and all the pressures would have gone in the other direction. From this I conclude that Barack H. Obama lacked a natural disposition toward supernatural belief.

Which is where environment steps in. From what I know of his biography (far less than most I assume) he did not receive any push toward religion until he began to consider his future in black urban politics. For historic reasons that African American church is the core institution within that ethnic community, maintaining a line of continuity even to the antebellum period. The relationship of black Americans to their churches is perhaps analogous to Greeks to Greek Orthodoxy. A Greek may not be very religious, but to be Greek is to be Greek Orthodox. Contrast this with a Korean ethnic identity, which can entail a host of religious or irreligious orientations. The analogy between blacks and Greeks breaks down insofar as black religion is sectarian and highly fractured, resembling the competitive marketplace common among white evangelicals. This even includes black Islam, which despite a recent move toward orthodoxy, originally resembled black Christianity far more than conventional Islam. One can perceive the black attraction to a particular style of religion in the fact that they are underrepresented in American Buddhism, except in Soka Gakkai, an “evangelical” Japanese Buddhist sect (a black Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson is a member).

Barack H. Obama started out with the biological “raw material” of being black in America. But from what we can tell he had to learn and socialize to be a black American during adulthood. An almost necessary constituent of being black in America is a relationship with a prophetic, evangelical and revivalist religious culture. Even if one is irreligious personally, this is the religious culture which one grows up in, and is familiar with. Obama, being raised in a white secular household did not experience this firsthand, so he could not afford to remain detached from religion as an adult. I can not speak to the sincerity or opportunism of Obama in accepting conversion into the Christian community, but one can not deny that the event lay at the nexus of disparate personal tensions, between his familial heritage and upbringing, which was extremely secular compared to the norm, and what was necessary to become a part of black America, a identity which is imbued with a religious tinge.

Finally, one must address the reality that most secular people do not view all higher superstitions as standing on equal ground. I had a Dutch friend who was an atheist who once explained to me how much more superstitious Roman Catholicism was than Calvinism. He was naturally from a Calvinist cultural background. Similarly, atheists from a Roman Catholic background on occasion will give the church its philosophical due in relation to the rank emotionality and blind faith which they perceive to be the bread & butter of evangelical Protestantism. The Protestants may respond that at least they read the Bible which Catholics also claim to believe in! At even a further remove, Edward Said was from an Arab Protestant background, but was an avowed atheist as an adult. Despite that he would assert that Islam was his civilization! This is I think analogous to atheist Jews who retain a strong identification with the religious culture of Judaism. So I suppose we can wonder where Obama’s heart is. I suspect that despite his lack of belief in the truth claims of black Christianity, he identifies with it on a moderate level as an expression of black nationalism with which he is not without sympathy toward, but balanced against this is a cosmopolitan respect for religion as a generality, from his sister’s philosophical Buddhism to Islam.

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