Month: June 2018
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Coffee, Milk & Booze
This week Spencer and Razib dive into three of the most important beverages in human history: coffee, milk and alcohol.
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Open Thread
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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Why the world before 1450 matters
It is no surprise that I am not excited by the proposal to focus AP History in the United States on the period after 1450. Overall I agree with many of the comments made in T. Greer’s tweet thread. Though I have a concurrent opinion with many history teachers who oppose the change, my opposition…
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Why the Y chromosome is coming back
Last week Spencer and I talked about chromosomes and their sociological import on The Insight. It was a pretty popular episode, but then again, my post on the genetics of Genghis Khan is literally my most popular piece of writing of all time which wasn’t distributed in a non-blog channel (hundreds of thousands of people have…
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Burmese are a bit Bengali
About ten years ago I read the book The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma. Though I have read books where Burma figures prominently (e.g., Strange Parallels), this is the only history of Burma I have read. The author is Burmese, and provide something much more than a travelogue, as might have been the…
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Heredity and Our Fascination with It
A new book traces the history and science of a concept that resonates deeply.
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The days of the All-Fathers
Citation: Zerjal et al.“A man’s greatest joy is crushing his enemies.”— Genghis KhanThere are many apocryphal quotes attributed to Genghis Khan. And there’s a reason for that — in a single generation he led an obscure group of Mongolian tribes to conqu…
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Y-chromosomes and the Ascent of Man
This week Spencer and Razib discuss the Y-chromosome as tool for studying human history, from early migrations out of Africa to Genghis Khan and Bronze Age bottlenecks.
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Open Thread
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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The lost 50,000 years of non-African humanity
The figure above is from Efficiently inferring the demographic history of many populations with allele count data. This preprint came out a few months ago, but I was prompted to revisit it after reading Spectrum of Neandertal introgression across modern-day humans indicates multiple episodes of human-Neandertal interbreeding. The latter paper indicates that there were multiple…
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No steppe ancestry in the the Rakhigarhi samples = non sequitur
Harappan site of Rakhigarhi: DNA study finds no Central Asian trace, junks Aryan invasion theory: The much-awaited DNA study of the skeletal remains found at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana, shows no Central Asian trace, indicating the Aryan invasion theory was flawed and Vedic evolution was through indigenous people. … “The Rakhigarhi human DNA…
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The invention of Hinduism 1,000 years ago by a Muslim
On of the most annoying tropes in modern intellectual discourse, in particular of the postcolonial variety, is its Eurocentrism. That is, the focus on the Western colonial experience is so strong and unwavering that operationally the rest of history becomes prehistory, a formless period which we are ignorant of, when humans were different in fundamental…
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Bangladeshi freethinker shot dead
Freethinking writer and politician shot dead in Bangladesh: Shahzahan Bachchu was known locally and within the secular Bangladeshi movement as an outspoken, sometimes fiery activist for secularism. He printed poetry and books related to humanism and freethought via his publishing house Bishaka Prakashani (Star Publishers). He was also a political activist, serving as former general…
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Genetic variation in South Asia
I don’t have too much time right now. So a quick data post. The map above shows India’s scale in relation to Europe. Below is an NJ tree that shows pairwise Fst values (genetic distance): Please notice the small genetic difference between Britain/Spain/Poland. Compare to Gujrati vs. Sindhi, let alone Gujrati vs. Telegu. Now, PCA:…
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Open Thread, 06/11/2018
A few years ago a reader sent me a copy of Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Though I haven’t read that book, I did read a substantial proportion of Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide on a plane trip recently. I’m not a big believer in whole-hog Thomism, but I’ve read some…
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Gene Expression 2018-06-09 00:09:44
One of the major conclusions of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation is that Protestantism only captured societies with finality when the most powerful temporal leader pushed for the change from above or maintained the pressure. The “magisterial” Reformation succeeded in those nations where the king or the most powerful aristocrats defended Protestantism and made it their…
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Gene Expression 2018-06-09 00:09:44
One of the major conclusions of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation is that Protestantism only captured societies with finality when the most powerful temporal leader pushed for the change from above or maintained the pressure. The “magisterial” Reformation succeeded in those nations where the king or the most powerful aristocrats defended Protestantism and made it their…
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On the rectification of names and religion
A major influence on my thinking about human social phenomenon is Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Atran, along with other scholars such as Dan Sperber and younger researchers such as Harvey Whitehouse, work within a “naturalistic” paradigm, as opposed to the more interpretative framework currently ascendant within American anthropology.…
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Are pants really more comfortable than skirts?
Recently I stumbled upon this paper from a few years back, The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia. Basically, it seems that trousers emerge with mounted cavalry. The dominance of mounted cavalry in the…
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W. D. Hamilton, Darwin’s 20th century heir
Today on Twitter there was a discussion about why there wasn’t a biography of John Manyard Smith. One reason might be that John Maynard Smith was a pretty nice and congenial fellow. There wasn’t much excitement from what I know. In contrast, if you read R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, you get the…