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Old May 8th, 2014 #1
Alex Linder
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Default #1 "A Troublesome Inheritance" Thread: Charles Murray Reviews Nicholas Wade's New Book on Race, "The Troublesome Inheritance"

Book Review: 'A Troublesome Inheritance' by Nicholas Wade
A scientific revolution is under way—upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.

By CHARLES MURRAY
May 2, 2014 5:35 p.m. ET

America's modern struggle with race has proceeded on three fronts. The legal battle effectively ended a half-century ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second front, the battle against private prejudice, has not been won so decisively, but the experiences of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling in the past few weeks confirm a longstanding truth about American society: Expressions of racial prejudice by public figures are punished swiftly and severely.

The third front is different in kind. This campaign is waged not against actual violations of civil rights or expressions of prejudice or hatred, but against the idea that biological differences among human populations are a legitimate subject of scholarly study. The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a "social construct," a cultural artifact without biological merit.



Quote:
A Troublesome Inheritance
By Nicholas Wade
The Penguin Press, 278 pages, $27.95

A digital representation of part of the human genome, which was fully mapped in 2003. Getty Images

The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, NYT -0.20% has written a book that pulls back the curtain.

It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester's college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens's diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read—conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven't seen for a few decades.

The title gives fair warning: "A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History." At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong.

Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right, then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that's exactly what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are known to vary among humans—from among the millions of them—will cluster them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide the best statistical fit. If the subjects' ancestors came from all over the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of Europe's many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that humans have identified from time out of mind.

Stephen Jay Gould's assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so counterintuitive to begin with. Humans who left Africa moved into environments that introduced radically new selection pressures, such as lethally cold temperatures. Surely, one would think, important evolutionary adaptations followed. Modern genetic methods for tracking adaptations have established that they did. A 2009 appraisal of the available genome-wide scans estimated that 14% of the genome has been under the pressure of natural selection during the past 30,000 years, long after humans left Africa. The genes under selection include a wide variety of biological traits affecting everything from bone structure and diet to aspects of the brain and nervous system involving cognition and sensory perception.

The question, then, is whether the sets of genes under selection have varied across races, to which the answer is a clear yes. To date, studies of Caucasians, Asians and sub-Saharan Africans have found that of the hundreds of genetic regions under selection, about 75% to 80% are under selection in only one race. We also know that the genes in these regions affect more than cosmetic variations in appearance. Some of them involve brain function, which in turn could be implicated in a cascade of effects. "What these genes do within the brain is largely unknown," Mr. Wade writes. "But the findings establish the obvious truth that brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from natural selection. They are as much under evolutionary pressure as any other category of gene."

Let me emphasize, as Mr. Wade does, how little we yet know about the substance of racial and ethnic differences. Work in the decade since the genome was sequenced has taught us that genetically linked traits, even a comparatively simple one like height, are far more complex than previously imagined, involving dozens or hundreds of genes, plus other forms of variation within our DNA, plus interactions between the environment and gene expression. For emotional or cognitive traits, the story is so complicated that we are probably a decade or more away from substantial understanding.

As the story is untangled, it will also become obvious how inappropriate it is to talk in terms of the "inferiority" or "superiority" of groups. Consider, for example, the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. What are the ideal points on these continua? They will differ depending on whether you're looking for the paragon of, say, a parent or an entrepreneur. And the Big Five only begin to tap the dozens of ways in which human traits express themselves. Individual human beings are complicated bundles of talents, proclivities, strengths and flaws that interact to produce unexpected and even internally contradictory results. The statistical tendencies (and they will be only tendencies) that differentiate groups of humans will be just as impossible to add up as the qualities of an individual. Vive les différences.

The problem facing us down the road is the increasing rate at which the technical literature reports new links between specific genes and specific traits. Soon there will be dozens, then hundreds, of such links being reported each year. The findings will be tentative and often disputed—a case in point is the so-called warrior gene that encodes monoamine oxidase A and may encourage aggression. But so far it has been the norm, not the exception, that variations in these genes show large differences across races. We don't yet know what the genetically significant racial differences will turn out to be, but we have to expect that they will be many. It is unhelpful for social scientists and the media to continue to proclaim that "race is a social construct" in the face of this looming rendezvous with reality.

After laying out the technical aspects of race and genetics, Mr. Wade devotes the second half of his book to a larger set of topics: "The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races and others; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations."

To develop his case, Mr. Wade draws from a wide range of technical literature in political science, sociology, economics and anthropology. He contrasts the polities and social institutions of China, India, the Islamic world and Europe. He reviews circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th. He takes up the outsize Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences, most easily explained by the Jews' conspicuously high average IQ, and recounts the competing evolutionary explanations for that elevated cognitive ability. Then, with courage that verges on the foolhardy, he adds a chapter that incorporates genetics into an explanation of the West's rise during the past 600 years.

Mr. Wade explicitly warns the reader that these latter chapters, unlike his presentation of the genetics of race, must speculate from evidence that falls far short of scientific proof. His trust in his audience is touching: "There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it."

I fear Mr. Wade's trust is misplaced. Before they have even opened "A Troublesome Inheritance," some reviewers will be determined not just to refute it but to discredit it utterly—to make people embarrassed to be seen purchasing it or reading it. These chapters will be their primary target because Mr. Wade chose to expose his readers to a broad range of speculative analyses, some of which are brilliant and some of which are weak. If I had been out to trash the book, I would have focused on the weak ones, associated their flaws with the book as a whole and dismissed "A Troublesome Inheritance" as sloppy and inaccurate. The orthodoxy's clerisy will take that route, ransacking these chapters for material to accuse Mr. Wade of racism, pseudoscience, reliance on tainted sources, incompetence and evil intent. You can bet on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...21482247869874
 
Old May 8th, 2014 #2
Sam Emerson
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It's not doing Bell Curve business but it's dominating its categories on Amazon. These are updated every hour so they will change.

# Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
* #1 in Books > Textbooks > Science & Mathematics > Biology & Life Sciences
* #1 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Social History
* #1 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Genetics

http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462/

If you sort the customer reviews by time posted the first two are the most negative, probably posted by antis who never read the book standing by to smear it on release.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #3
Alex Linder
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The genome of history
DNA explains more than you think

27 CommentsNicholas Wade 17 May 2014

Ever since Darwin published his uncomforting theory, people have been trying to exempt themselves from one or another of its unwelcome consequences. Today’s equivalents of the 19th century’s outraged clerics include the many social scientists, economists and historians who insist that evolution is of no relevance to their disciplines.

In the United States the leading social science organisations proclaim that race is a social, not a biological construct. They reject the obvious notion that races differ because the populations on each continent have been evolving independently of one another for the last 50,000 years. Economists treat people as interchangeable entities of little or no intrinsic interest. Could the nature of the humble human units that produce and consume all of an economy’s goods and services have any bearing on a society’s productivity? Heavens, no! That wouldn’t compute at all. Historians, too, like other social scientists, assume that social groups differ only in their culture, not their genetics, and dismiss the idea that inherited social behaviour might make Chinese society, say, slightly different from that of a hunter-gatherer band.

All these academic tribes have been averting their eyes and minds from the discoveries flowing out of the human genome during the past decade. These show that human evolution has been extensive, recent and regional.

Fingerprints of natural selection

Scientists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favoured by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14 per cent of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure. Most of these signals of natural selection date from 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, just an eye-blink in evolution’s three-billion-year timescale. Recent evolution is very hard to detect, but with suitable groups, such as the large patient populations studied for medical reasons, one can see natural selection at work at the present day. Under the pressure of selection, the age of first reproduction among women born between 1799 and 1940 on L’Isle-aux-Coudres, an island in the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec, fell from 26 to 22 years. The researchers who gleaned this finding from the island’s parish records noted that the tendency to give birth at a younger age appeared to be heritable, confirming that a genetic change had taken place. ‘Our study supports the idea that humans are still evolving,’ they write. ‘It also demonstrates that microevolution is detectable over just a few generations in a long-lived species.’

Evolution doesn’t stop. Humans are no exception to the rule, and there’s no reason to suppose human evolution ground to a halt at some decent interval before the present, as historians and economists habitually assume.

The other fact to emerge from the genome is that natural selection has been regional. In the genomes of the three main races — Africans, East Asians and Caucasians (i.e. West Eurasians, meaning Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent) — different sets of genes bear the signatures of natural selection. This is an interesting finding, but hardly surprising: each race, evolving independently, has adapted to its own set of regional challenges.

Yet many social scientists profess to believe that there is no biological basis to race. ‘Race is a recent human invention,’ proclaims the American Association of Anthropologists. ‘Race is about culture, not biology.’ Scientists who have been indoctrinated in this view find it hard to accept any other. Researchers get attached to the view of their field they grew up with, and, as they grow older, they may gain the influence to thwart change. For 50 years after it was first proposed, leading geophysicists strenuously resisted the idea that the continents have drifted across the face of the globe. ‘Knowledge advances funeral by funeral,’ the economist Paul Samuelson once observed.

Academics, obsessed with intelligence, fear the discovery of some gene that will prove one group of people to be brighter than another. In fact intelligence is probably governed by hundreds of genes, each with so small effect that none has yet been detected. But even if it were proved that one major race was genetically more intelligent than another, what consequence would follow? In fact, not much. East Asians score around 105 on intelligence tests, an average above that of Europeans, whose score is 100. A higher IQ score doesn’t make East Asians morally superior to other races. East Asian societies have many virtues but are not necessarily more successful than European societies in meeting their members’ needs.

Indeed, it’s hard to see anything in the human genome that would support any notion of racism. The genome proclaims the unity of humankind. Not only do all humans carry the same set of genes, but races are not even demarcated by alleles, the alternative forms of a gene. In fact they are not demarcated at all, in the sense of having any definable boundary; races differ merely in relative allele frequencies. It’s because of characteristic differences in allele frequencies, however, that geneticists can track along the genome of someone of mixed race, such as an African American, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor. This exercise would be impossible if races lacked an evolutionary basis.

Natural selection and social behaviour

The genes that bear the fingerprints of natural selection affect nutritional metabolism, bone structure, skin colour and some are also active in the brain. Their role is unknown, but evidently brain genes are as much subject to natural selection as any other category of gene. A class of brain gene particularly likely to fall under evolutionary pressure is that of genes that affect social behaviour.

Edward O. Wilson was pilloried for suggesting in his 1975 book Sociobiology that many human social behaviours might have an evolutionary basis; his Marxist critics wanted to keep the mind a blank slate, mouldable by governments into Socialist Man. Research since then has established that Wilson was correct. From their earliest years, children wish to be part of a group, to obey its rules and to punish violators. People have an instinctive morality, a readiness to make any sacrifice in defence of their family or group. These and several other social behaviours seem to be inherent and therefore genetically based, even though the relevant genes have yet to be identified.

Any trait that has a genetic basis can be modified by evolution. There are reasons to think that social behaviour would be vigorously shaped by natural selection. One is that people survive not as individuals but as social groups; the nature of a society is highly relevant to its success and therefore likely to be a target of selection. Social species are rare and very difficult for evolution to contrive, but once the necessary altruistic instincts are in place, social species are highly successful. Both ants and humans have conquered the world, though fortunately at different scales.

In the case of ants, nature’s strategy been to keep the ant body much the same but to vary its social behaviour. Slight tweaks in social behaviour can quickly adapt an ant society to a different ecological niche. Thus leaf-cutter ants cultivate a mushroom-like fungus in underground caverns, army ants conduct devastating raids, other ants live in the thorns of acacia trees and so forth. Evolution has developed some 15,000 ant species just by varying their social behaviour.

With people, evolution seems to have followed the same strategy: keep the human body as is, but vary the social behaviour to let people exploit new niches. Humans are still a single species, but at least three evolutionary changes in social structure seem evident.

Historical changes in social structure

One is the transition from foraging to settled life. Modern humans first appear in the fossil record some 200,000 years ago, yet the first settlements date to merely 15,000 years ago, in the Near East. Putting a roof over one’s head and being able to own more than one could carry on one’s back seems such an obvious step. So why did it take 185,000 years for people to figure it out? Probably because it wasn’t a matter of perceiving the benefits of settled life, but of evolving the necessary social behaviours. Hunter-gathers are aggressive and egalitarian. Settlers live in larger groups and have to get on with people they are not related to. They must accept hierarchy and division of labour. The reason these behaviours appeared so recently is because they took so long to evolve.

Another social transformation that is evidently hard to make, and probably requires a makeover of social behaviour, is the transition from tribalism to modern states. Tribalism is the default human social organisation. It can be extremely effective — the world’s largest land empire, that of the Mongols, was a tribal state. It is also hard to abandon, so hard that an evolutionary shift in behaviour seems required. China was the first state to replace tribalism, developing in its place a bureaucracy beholden to an autocratic leader. Population build-up between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers and incessant warfare between tribes were the forces under which the tribal system collapsed. The unification of China in 221 BC marked the emergence of the first modern state. Europeans took another thousand years to escape tribalism, noted symbolically as the time when the King of the Franks became King of France. Other populations, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, are in the throes of achieving this transition.

More specific evidence that evolution has shaped human social behaviour in the recent past comes from a third major social transition, from agrarian to modern economies.

This transition is usually known as the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone in agrarian economies but the rich lived near the edge of starvation. Whenever any improvement in farming technology raised productivity, more children were born, the extra mouths ate up the surplus and semi-starvation soon reigned again. This harsh regime is known as a Malthusian economy after the Revd Thomas Malthus, who described it in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’. As it happened, the Malthusian regime was nearing an end at the very time Malthus was writing because of the vast increase in productivity that was the essence of the Industrial Revolution.

The cause of the Industrial Revolution is the central issue of economic history, yet economic historians have arrived at no consensus as to what that cause or causes may have been. Their preferred candidates are institutions of various kinds, or access to resources. For a quite different explanation, step back to Malthus for a moment. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the idea of natural selection. Darwin perceived that if people were struggling on the edge of existence, as Malthus described, then a person with the slightest advantage would have more children and bequeath this advantage to them. ‘Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work,’ Darwin wrote in his autobiography.

If the English population provided the example from which Darwin intuited the idea of natural selection, that population was surely being subjected to the same force. The question then is what traits were being selected for. The economic historian Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, has documented four behavioural changes in the English population between 1200 and 1800 AD. The level of violence declined, literacy increased, and so did work hours and the propensity to save. The effect of these changes, Clark notes in his 2009 book Farewell to Alms, was to transform the violent peasant population of 1200 into the disciplined workforce of 1800. Because the nature of the people had changed, productivity soared, and for the first time an increase in population failed to drag down the standard of living.

Clark not only documents the behavioural change in English society but also provides a plausible mechanism of hereditary transmission. From the study of wills he finds that the well-off had more surviving children than the poor. Since the size of the English population remained fairly constant, many children of the rich must have dropped in social status, diffusing the genes and values that had made their parents wealthy into the wider -population.

The same process presumably occurred in other agrarian populations, which is why the Industrial Revolution spread so easily to other European countries and later, after political obstacles had been removed, to the countries of East Asia.

With all three transitions, an evolutionary change is plausible but remains a hypothesis nonetheless: proof awaits discovery of the relevant genes.

Human differences

The continental populations or races have evolved largely independently ever since modern humans spread across the globe from their African homeland some 50,000 years ago. In many respects their evolution has been largely in parallel. Thus both Caucasians and East Asians have developed the pale skin necessary for living in high northern latitudes, but each has a different set of alleles for doing so. This is not so surprising: evolution can only work with the mutations available, and different mutations for contriving pale skin were present in the Caucasian and East Asian populations.

In social behaviour, too, the three main races have followed largely parallel tracks but on slightly different timescales, probably because of demographic factors. Caucasians first made the transition from foraging to settled life, East Asians were the first to abandon tribalism. In adapting to their local environments, these societies naturally gained different skills and attributes. For most of recorded history, Chinese civilisation has been more advanced than others. Since 1500, the societies of the West have shown greater dynamism and creativity. Clearly no society is intrinsically superior to any other, but inevitably each has its periods of greater relative success.

Many important features of today’s world lack explanation. Why are some countries rich and others persistently poor? Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark? Africa has absorbed billions of dollars in aid over the past half-century and yet, until a recent spurt of growth, its standard of living has stagnated for decades. South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, almost as poor at the start of the period, have enjoyed an economic resurgence. Why have these countries been able to modernise so rapidly while others have found it much harder?

The answers to such questions may lie in a hitherto unexamined possibility, that human social nature has been shaped by evolution and that human groups therefore differ slightly in their social behaviour and in the social institutions that depend on that behaviour. This would explain why it is so difficult to export American institutions into tribal societies like those of Iraq or Afghanistan, just as it would be impossible to import tribal systems into the United States or Europe. Persistently poor countries, particularly those that are still tribally organised, have not been through the Malthusian wringer experienced by agrarian populations and may therefore find the transition to a modern state that much harder.

People, unlike institutions, can easily migrate from one society to another. Recall evolution’s formula for social species: keep the organisms the same, just transform the social behaviour. Human nature is pretty much universal apart from slight differences in social behaviour, variations in which can lead to very different kinds of society. Significant human differences lie at this level, not that of individuals.

If the fear of racism can be overcome sufficiently for researchers to accept that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional, a number of critical issues in history and economics may be laid open for exploration. Race may be a troublesome inheritance, but it is better to explore and understand its bearing on human nature and history than to pretend for reasons of political convenience that it has no evolutionary basis.

Nicholas Wade has worked at Nature and Science magazines and is a former science editor of the New York Times. A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade is published by Penguin.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/...me-of-history/
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #4
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NYT review of "A Troublesome Inheritance" http://bit.ly/QOkxqo
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Old May 15th, 2014 #5
Alex Linder
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[nyt review]

Charging Into the Minefield of Genes and Racial Difference
Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’

MAY 15, 2014

Few areas of science have contributed more to human misery than the study of racial difference. In the 1920s, eugenicists from top American universities promoted the sterilization of the unfit and later praised Hitler’s racial codes while advocating laws that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores.

Contemporary researchers have found it useful to examine genetic variations that affect traits like diabetes in Native Americans or high blood pressure in African-Americans. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, scientists in the United States have largely avoided the classification of races as a “futile exercise,” in the words of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza; the very concept of race is a matter of scientific debate.

In “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” however, Nicholas Wade argues that scientists need to get over their hang-ups and jump into studies of racial difference. “The intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past,” he writes.


Nicholas Wade Credit The New York Times

Mr. Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, draws on the wealth of evolutionary data that has emerged from the decoding of human genomes. This research has enabled scientists to imagine our prehistory with more precision, and the picture is one of unexpectedly significant genetic change since many of our ancestors left Africa. Since this evolution affected traits such as skin color, body hair and the tolerance of alcohol, milk and high altitude, why not intelligence and social behavior as well? Mr. Wade asks.

The central problem here is that if significant genetic-controlled behavioral differences exist among races, with scant (at most) exception they haven’t been discovered yet. To build a case with the evidence at hand requires a great deal of speculation, with the inevitable protrusion of the nonscientific worldview.

Mr. Wade presents a few scattered genetic studies and attempts to weld them into a grand theory of global history for the past 50,000 years. Where Jared Diamond argued in “Guns, Germs and Steel” that environment and geography enabled Europe to develop a highly successful civilization, Mr. Wade says environmental pressures led to genetic differences that account for much of that advantage. “The rise of the West,” he writes, “is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.”

Conservative scholars like the political scientist Francis Fukuyama have long argued that social institutions and culture explain why Europe beat Asia to prosperity, and why parts of the Mideast and Africa continue to suffer destabilizing violence and misery.

Mr. Wade takes this already controversial argument a step further, contending that “slight evolutionary differences in social behavior” underlie social and cultural differences. A small but consistent divergence in a racial group’s tendency to trust outsiders — and therefore to accept central rather than tribal authority — could explain “much of the difference between tribal and modern societies,” he writes.

This is where Mr. Wade’s argument starts to go off the rails.

At times, his theorizing is merely puzzling, as when he notes that the gene variant that gives East Asians dry earwax also produces less body odor, which would have been attractive “among people spending many months in confined spaces to escape the cold.” No explanation of why ancient Europeans, presumably cooped up just as much, didn’t also develop this trait. Later, he speculates that thick hair and small breasts evolved in Asian women because they may have been “much admired by Asian men.” And why, you might ask, did Asian men alone prefer these traits?

Mr. Wade occasionally drops in broad, at times insulting assumptions about the behavior of particular groups without substantiating the existence of such behaviors, let alone their genetic basis. Writing about Africans’ economic condition, for example, Mr. Wade wonders whether “variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.”

For Mr. Wade, genetic differences help explain the failure of the United States occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “If institutions were purely cultural,” he writes, “it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another.” It’s hard to know how to begin to address such a puzzling statement.

Mr. Wade acknowledges that specific evidence for the influence of “social behavior” genes is quite limited. The one example he presents repeatedly is the MAOA 2R variant, the so-called warrior gene that has been linked to violent behavior in men abused as children and is more common in blacks than whites or Asians. Mr. Wade admits that such genes at most create a tendency to violence, and adds that there may be other, yet undiscovered violence-susceptibility genes that could skew the racial picture.

Mr. Wade’s distinctive focus is on how evolution, in his view, shaped different races’ “radius of trust,” or ability to assume loyalty to, say, a nation rather than a tribe, and to punish those who violate social rules. Modern civilizations select out violent individuals and their genes, which might be more valuable in tribal societies, he argues.

When it comes to his leitmotif — the need for scientists to drop “politically correct” attitudes toward race — Mr. Wade displays surprisingly sanguine assumptions about the ability of science to generate facts free from the cultural mesh of its times. He argues that because the word “racism” did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1910, racism is a “modern concept, and that pre-eugenics studies of race were “reasonably scientific.” This would surely surprise any historian of European colonies in Africa or the Americas.

“Science is about what is, not what ought to be,” Mr. Wade writes. “Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.” Yet he acknowledges that views of scientific truth are highly contextual. The philosopher Herbert Spencer “was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century, and his ideas, however harsh they may seem today, were widely discussed,” Mr. Wade writes. Why does he suppose that Spencer was so popular? Was it science’s “shifting sands” that gave his ideas credibility, or their tendency to support what powerful people wanted to believe?

The philosopher Ludwik Fleck once wrote, “ ‘To see’ means to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs.” While there is much of interest in Mr. Wade’s book, readers will probably see what they are predisposed to see: a confirmation of prejudices, or a rather unconvincing attempt to promote the science of racial difference.

Quote:
A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE
Genes, Race and Human History
By Nicholas Wade
278 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
Arthur Allen is the author of “The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl,” to be published by W. W. Norton in July.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/bo...ref=books&_r=0


[sailer]

May 15, 2014

NYT review of "A Troublesome Inheritance"

The New York Times hands their veteran reporter Nicholas Wade's book to somebody I've never noticed, Arthur Allen. A quick search suggests this Arthur Allen is this writer for the Huffington Post.*

Quote:
Charging Into the Minefield of Genes and Racial Difference
Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’
MAY 15, 2014

By ARTHUR ALLEN

Few areas of science have contributed more to human misery than the study of racial difference. In the 1920s, eugenicists from top American universities promoted the sterilization of the unfit and later praised Hitler’s racial codes while advocating laws that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores.

Contemporary researchers have found it useful to examine genetic variations that affect traits like diabetes in Native Americans or high blood pressure in African-Americans. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, scientists in the United States have largely avoided the classification of races as a “futile exercise,” in the words of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza; the very concept of race is a matter of scientific debate.
Almost a decade and a half ago, both leftist anthropologist Jonathan Marks and I pointed out the obvious problem with this popular interpretation of Cavalli-Sforza's forgivable attempt to use the newly fashionable race-does-not-exist verbiage to not get Watsoned avant la lettre: Just look at the map on the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's 1994 magnum opus the The History and Geography of Human Genes:



I noted in VDARE in 2000:

This is Cavalli-Sforza's description of the map that is the capstone of his half century of labor in human genetics: "The color map of the world shows very distinctly the differences that we know exist among the continents: Africans (yellow), Caucasoids (green), Mongoloids … (purple), and Australian Aborigines (red). The map does not show well the strong Caucasoid component in northern Africa, but it does show the unity of the other Caucasoids from Europe, and in West, South, and much of Central Asia."

Basically, all his number-crunching has produced a map that looks about like what you'd get if you gave Strom Thurmond a paper napkin and a box of crayons and had him draw a racial map of the world.

From the left, the perceptive Marks wrote in his 2003 book What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes:

Quote:
But things quickly worsened, for Time ran a color figure from The History and Geography of Human Genes, in which each of the non-existent human races actually came color-coded: Africans yellow, Mongoloids blue, Caucasoids green, and Australians red.

Quite literally!

It was the old essentialist fallacy of Linnaeus, except now with different colors and computerized.


Cavalli-Sforza's map of the Old World from
the cover of a different edition.
But who can notice the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's book when on the inside he uses the word "populations" instead of "races?"

By the way, Marks is by nurture a leftwinger, but by nature he's a Noticer, and that hasn't made him very popular.

Back to Arthur Allen's review of Nicholas Wade:

Quote:
In “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” however, Nicholas Wade argues that scientists need to get over their hang-ups and jump into studies of racial difference. “The intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past,” he writes.

Mr. Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, draws on the wealth of evolutionary data that has emerged from the decoding of human genomes. This research has enabled scientists to imagine our prehistory with more precision, and the picture is one of unexpectedly significant genetic change since many of our ancestors left Africa. Since this evolution affected traits such as skin color, body hair and the tolerance of alcohol, milk and high altitude, why not intelligence and social behavior as well? Mr. Wade asks.

The central problem here is that if significant genetic-controlled behavioral differences exist among races, with scant (at most) exception they haven’t been discovered yet. To build a case with the evidence at hand requires a great deal of speculation, with the inevitable protrusion of the nonscientific worldview.

Mr. Wade presents a few scattered genetic studies and attempts to weld them into a grand theory of global history for the past 50,000 years. Where Jared Diamond argued in “Guns, Germs and Steel” that environment and geography enabled Europe to develop a highly successful civilization, Mr. Wade says environmental pressures led to genetic differences that account for much of that advantage.
Here's my anecdote about when I pointed out to Dr. Diamond at the 2002 Milken Global Conference that his documentation of the massive environmental differences between continents would tend to select for the evolution of genetic differences between continental races.

Quote:
“The rise of the West,” he writes, “is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.”

Conservative scholars like the political scientist Francis Fukuyama have long argued that social institutions and culture explain why Europe beat Asia to prosperity, and why parts of the Mideast and Africa continue to suffer destabilizing violence and misery.

Mr. Wade takes this already controversial argument a step further, contending that “slight evolutionary differences in social behavior” underlie social and cultural differences. A small but consistent divergence in a racial group’s tendency to trust outsiders — and therefore to accept central rather than tribal authority — could explain “much of the difference between tribal and modern societies,” he writes.

This is where Mr. Wade’s argument starts to go off the rails.

At times, his theorizing is merely puzzling, as when he notes that the gene variant that gives East Asians dry earwax also produces less body odor, which would have been attractive “among people spending many months in confined spaces to escape the cold.” No explanation of why ancient Europeans, presumably cooped up just as much, didn’t also develop this trait. Later, he speculates that thick hair and small breasts evolved in Asian women because they may have been “much admired by Asian men.” And why, you might ask, did Asian men alone prefer these traits?
Maybe Mr. Allen should ask Charles Darwin, whose 1871 classic The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex offers at vast length a sexual selection theory for racial differences.

Quote:
Mr. Wade occasionally drops in broad, at times insulting assumptions about the behavior of particular groups without substantiating the existence of such behaviors, let alone their genetic basis. Writing about Africans’ economic condition, for example, Mr. Wade wonders whether “variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.”

For Mr. Wade, genetic differences help explain the failure of the United States occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “If institutions were purely cultural,” he writes, “it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another.” It’s hard to know how to begin to address such a puzzling statement.
But pointing-'n'-sputtering is the standard response.

Quote:
Mr. Wade acknowledges that specific evidence for the influence of “social behavior” genes is quite limited. The one example he presents repeatedly is the MAOA 2R variant, the so-called warrior gene that has been linked to violent behavior in men abused as children and is more common in blacks than whites or Asians. Mr. Wade admits that such genes at most create a tendency to violence, and adds that there may be other, yet undiscovered violence-susceptibility genes that could skew the racial picture.

Mr. Wade’s distinctive focus is on how evolution, in his view, shaped different races’ “radius of trust,” or ability to assume loyalty to, say, a nation rather than a tribe, and to punish those who violate social rules. Modern civilizations select out violent individuals and their genes, which might be more valuable in tribal societies, he argues.

When it comes to his leitmotif — the need for scientists to drop “politically correct” attitudes toward race — Mr. Wade displays surprisingly sanguine assumptions about the ability of science to generate facts free from the cultural mesh of its times. He argues that because the word “racism” did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1910, racism is a “modern concept, and that pre-eugenics studies of race were “reasonably scientific.” This would surely surprise any historian of European colonies in Africa or the Americas.

“Science is about what is, not what ought to be,” Mr. Wade writes. “Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.” Yet he acknowledges that views of scientific truth are highly contextual. The philosopher Herbert Spencer “was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century, and his ideas, however harsh they may seem today, were widely discussed,” Mr. Wade writes. Why does he suppose that Spencer was so popular? Was it science’s “shifting sands” that gave his ideas credibility, or their tendency to support what powerful people wanted to believe?
What is it that powerful people want to believe (or, at least, want the rest of us to believe) today?

Quote:
The philosopher Ludwik Fleck once wrote, “ ‘To see’ means to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs.” While there is much of interest in Mr. Wade’s book, readers will probably see what they are predisposed to see: a confirmation of prejudices, or a rather unconvincing attempt to promote the science of racial difference.

Arthur Allen is the author of “The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl,” to be published by W. W. Norton in July.
--------------------
* This Arthur Allen is almost certainly not the other Arthur Allen, I am relieved to say, whom a Google search turns up as a suspect in the Zodiac Killer mystery.

By Steve Sailer on 5/15/2014

6 comments:

ricpic said...
Race is naturally fascinating because it is so obviously a factor if not the factor in the organization of the world. And yet we are living in an age in which the topic is taboo. This anomaly - that something inherently fascinating must not be noticed or discussed - cannot hold.
5/15/14, 5:20 PM
Soylent Yellow said...
Probably by the time this comment gets through others will have made the point better, but, this is what Charles Murray predicted, and, Wade's book does have these soft spots. I wish Wade had spent time with "Why the West Rules--for Now" (I see no references to it in his book which is really too bad). It would have thinned his genetic argument down to the point where he might have left it out. As it is it looks too much like the kind of private HBD-tard ethno-preening you see so much of, here and elsewhere.

One good thing about the attack, is that being attacked is better than being ignored.

BTW, the best review of Wade I've read is Dr James Thompson's.
5/15/14, 5:30 PM
TGGP said...
What was so bad about Herbert Spencer?
5/15/14, 5:30 PM
HBD said...
At least the reviewer waited until the second sentence to bring up Hitler.
5/15/14, 5:36 PM
Anonymous said...
advocating laws that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores


Oh, the humanity! Thousands of Jews! Excluded!
5/15/14, 5:58 PM
Laguna Beach Fogey said...
that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores

O, the horror!!

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 15th, 2014 at 09:10 PM.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #6
Alex Linder
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[nyt review]

Charging Into the Minefield of Genes and Racial Difference
Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’

MAY 15, 2014

Few areas of science have contributed more to human misery than the study of racial difference. Few things have caused more misery than jews pretending race doesn't exist so they can use inferior black to torture and murder superior whites. In the 1920s, eugenicists from top American universities promoted the sterilization of the unfit and later praised Hitler’s racial codes while advocating laws that would exclude thousands of Jews from our shores. Well, that ought to scare your readers. Probably makes the rest of us jump and down. America is so much better because we have more jews and retards. But notice the first paragraph is pure well-poisoning.

Contemporary researchers have found it useful to examine genetic variations that affect traits like diabetes in Native Americans or high blood pressure in African-Americans. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, scientists in the United States have largely avoided the classification of races as a “futile exercise,” in the words of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza; the very concept of race is a matter of scientific debate. No, it isn't. Notice the brazen lying: immediately after acknowledging racial differences matter to medicine, the jewspaper turns around and lies that the existence of race is disputed. How little respect the NYT has for its reader-suckers.

In “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” however, Nicholas Wade argues that scientists need to get over their hang-ups and jump into studies of racial difference. “The intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past,” he writes.


Nicholas Wade Credit The New York Times

Mr. Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, draws on the wealth of evolutionary data that has emerged from the decoding of human genomes. This research has enabled scientists to imagine (as opposed to reconstruct, implying facts are fiction) our prehistory with more precision, and the picture is one of unexpectedly significant genetic change since many of our ancestors left Africa. unexpected by who? no one who looks at blacks and whites with open eyes Since this evolution affected traits such as skin color, body hair and the tolerance of alcohol, milk and high altitude, why not intelligence and social behavior as well? Mr. Wade asks. gee...it would only jive with every recorded bit of human history and observation

The central problem here is that if significant genetic-controlled behavioral differences exist among races, with scant (at most) exception they haven’t been discovered yet. To build a case with the evidence at hand requires a great deal of speculation, with the inevitable protrusion of the nonscientific worldview.

Mr. Wade presents a few scattered genetic studies and attempts to weld them into a grand theory of global history for the past 50,000 years. Where Jared Diamond argued in “Guns, Germs and Steel” that environment and geography enabled Europe to develop a highly successful civilization, Mr. Wade says environmental pressures led to genetic differences that account for much of that advantage. “The rise of the West,” he writes, “is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.”

Conservative scholars like the political scientist Francis Fukuyama have long argued that social institutions and culture explain why Europe beat Asia to prosperity, and why parts of the Mideast and Africa continue to suffer destabilizing violence and misery.

Mr. Wade takes this already controversial argument a step further, contending that “slight evolutionary differences in social behavior” underlie social and cultural differences. A small but consistent divergence in a racial group’s tendency to trust outsiders — and therefore to accept central rather than tribal authority — could explain “much of the difference between tribal and modern societies,” he writes.

This is where Mr. Wade’s argument starts to go off the rails.

At times, his theorizing is merely puzzling, as when he notes that the gene variant that gives East Asians dry earwax also produces less body odor, which would have been attractive “among people spending many months in confined spaces to escape the cold.” No explanation of why ancient Europeans, presumably cooped up just as much, didn’t also develop this trait. Later, he speculates that thick hair and small breasts evolved in Asian women because they may have been “much admired by Asian men.” And why, you might ask, did Asian men alone prefer these traits?

Mr. Wade occasionally drops in broad, at times insulting assumptions about the behavior of particular groups without substantiating the existence of such behaviors, let alone their genetic basis. Writing about Africans’ economic condition, for example, Mr. Wade wonders whether “variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make.”

For Mr. Wade, genetic differences help explain the failure of the United States occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “If institutions were purely cultural,” he writes, “it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another.” It’s hard to know how to begin to address such a puzzling statement.

Mr. Wade acknowledges that specific evidence for the influence of “social behavior” genes is quite limited. The one example he presents repeatedly is the MAOA 2R variant, the so-called warrior gene that has been linked to violent behavior in men abused as children and is more common in blacks than whites or Asians. Mr. Wade admits that such genes at most create a tendency to violence, and adds that there may be other, yet undiscovered violence-susceptibility genes that could skew the racial picture.

Mr. Wade’s distinctive focus is on how evolution, in his view, shaped different races’ “radius of trust,” or ability to assume loyalty to, say, a nation rather than a tribe, and to punish those who violate social rules. Modern civilizations select out violent individuals and their genes, which might be more valuable in tribal societies, he argues.

When it comes to his leitmotif — the need for scientists to drop “politically correct” attitudes toward race — Mr. Wade displays surprisingly sanguine assumptions about the ability of science to generate facts free from the cultural mesh of its times. He argues that because the word “racism” did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1910, racism is a “modern concept, and that pre-eugenics studies of race were “reasonably scientific.” This would surely surprise any historian of European colonies in Africa or the Americas.

“Science is about what is, not what ought to be,” Mr. Wade writes. “Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.” Yet he acknowledges that views of scientific truth are highly contextual. The philosopher Herbert Spencer “was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century, and his ideas, however harsh they may seem today, were widely discussed,” Mr. Wade writes. Why does he suppose that Spencer was so popular? Was it science’s “shifting sands” that gave his ideas credibility, or their tendency to support what powerful people wanted to believe?

The philosopher Ludwik Fleck once wrote, “ ‘To see’ means to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs.” While there is much of interest in Mr. Wade’s book, readers will probably see what they are predisposed to see: a confirmation of prejudices, or a rather unconvincing attempt to promote the science of racial difference.

Quote:
A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE
Genes, Race and Human History
By Nicholas Wade
278 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
Arthur Allen is the author of “The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl,” to be published by W. W. Norton in July.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/bo...ref=books&_r=0

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 15th, 2014 at 09:13 PM.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #7
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very long derbyshire review

https://www.vdare.com/articles/nicho...ws-the-reviews
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #8
Alex Linder
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HBD chick has an awesome and updated compilation of every reaction to this book...very impressive.

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/0...e-inheritance/
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #9
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The best part of the book is that it shows ample evidence for evolution occurring in the past 7000 years. Most people say human evolution stopped post agriculture. Wrong!
 
Old May 16th, 2014 #10
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Mr. Wade acknowledges that specific evidence for the influence of “social behavior” genes is quite limited. The one example he presents repeatedly (implying that he harps on one difference due to the "weakness" of the evidence)is the MAOA 2R variant, the so-called warrior gene that has been linked to violent behavior in men abused as children and is more common in blacks than whites or Asians. Mr. Wade admits (loaded language) that such genes at most create a tendency to violence (as if that hasn't proved to be more than enough to Nig White-created civilization), and adds that there may be other, yet undiscovered violence-susceptibility genes that could skew the racial picture. (all science, statistics & common-sense observation proves that niggers are vastly more violent & destructive than Whites or any other race; no subsequent genetic "discoveries" are going to alter that FACT)
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Old May 17th, 2014 #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hunter Morrow View Post
The best part of the book is that it shows ample evidence for evolution occurring in the past 7000 years. Most people say human evolution stopped post agriculture. Wrong!
The feminists say that's when men started oppressing wimmins too and gender roles began.
 
Old May 17th, 2014 #12
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I think the theory that Whites began drinking milk 5000 years ago is very viable. Non-whites on average have high lactose intolerance above 30%, almost always. Docs tell them to keep drinking milk anyways so they can catch up with us. But I'd like to know what chemicals in milk started to push our brains further ahead.
 
Old May 17th, 2014 #13
varg
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Holocaust Minimalism View Post
Docs tell them to keep drinking milk anyways so they can catch up with us. But I'd like to know what chemicals in milk started to push our brains further ahead.
Where'd you come up with that.. uh.. theory?
 
Old May 17th, 2014 #14
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I found it somewhere else on the interwebs like 2 years ago. Think it was Discover Magazine.


Found something.


Quote:
Consider lactase persistence, which confers the ability to digest milk as an adult. In the 20th century “lactose intolerance” was assumed to be a pathology, but it turns out that most human populations can not digest milk sugar as adults due to the lack of production of the lactase enzyme. This is the ancestral type. Rather, different mutations which result in the persistence of lactase production into adulthood seem to have arisen independently in several regions of western Eurasia and Africa. This suggests that the mutational target zone here is large, that is, given particular selection pressures (cattle culture) mutants will arise in the background and increase in frequency which produce the phenotype of lactase persistence.

The region of the world where lactase persistence is at highest frequency and greatest extent is northern Europe. It turns out that the region around LCT, the locus functionally implicated in variance of the trait of lactase persistence, has an enormous region of linkage disequilibrium around it. In other words, recombination hasn’t chopped up correlations of genetic variants along DNA strands. As you know this implies several possible evolutionary events, and may be a telltale signature of natural selection in the recent past. In much of western Eurasia it seems that one SNP, -13910*T, is responsible for the shift from ancestral to derived state in regards to lactase persistence. In other words, one gene copy which had a mutant from C to T rose rapidly in frequency from northwest Europe to northwest India (there are different alleles among Arabs and various populations in the Sahel).

There has already been suggestive data that ancient European populations lacked the -13910*T variant. A new study seems to confirm this


Results
Here we investigate the frequency of an allele (-13910*T) associated with lactase persistence in a Neolithic Scandinavian population. From the 14 individuals originally examined, 10 yielded reliable results. We find that the T allele frequency was very low (5%) in this Middle Neolithic hunter-gatherer population, and that the frequency is dramatically different from the extant Swedish population (74%).

Conclusions
We conclude that this difference in frequency could not have arisen by genetic drift and is either due to selection or, more likely, replacement of hunter-gatherer populations by sedentary agriculturalists.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...se-intolerant/


Quote:
My ancestry forms a smear across northern and central Europe, a region of the world where many people have a peculiar gift: they can drink milk as adults. Almost all people can digest milk sugar (lactose) as babies, but in many parts of the world they lose this ability after they stop nursing. The change is due to an enzyme called lactase, which breaks down lactose into digestible fragments. Most people stop making lactase as they grow up. If they drink milk, the lactose builds up in their guts, where it can be devoured by microbes that produce gas and other discomforts. (It’s not so unpleasant for such people to eat cheese or yogurt that’s low in lactose or which contains bacteria that make their own lactase.) You may know this condition as lactose intolerance. Geneticists, perhaps preferring to look on the bright side, like to talk about lactase persistence.
https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/l...ant-ancestors/


Quote:
The trait of lactase persistence (lactose tolerance) is probably one of the better schoolbook examples of natural selection in human populations. The reasons for this are probably two-fold. There is a very strong signature of selection within a specific gene known to associate with the trait in question in many populations. And, there is a very compelling historical narrative which explains rather neatly how this particular functional change could have undergone such strong selection within the past ~5,000 years across these populations. But the elucidation of the origin and spread of this genetic adaptation is also interesting because it looks as if it was not a singular event. Populations as disparate as Arabians, Danes, and Masai seem to carry different alleles around the locus of interest which confer the ability to digest milk. This illustrates the fact when selection pressures have a viable target, there is a rapid response on the genomic level. At some point during the maturation of a mammal the regulatory pathway which produces lactase enzyme shuts down. Yet within numerous human populations this gradual shutdown process has been short-circuited.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...ian-highlands/
 
Old May 17th, 2014 #15
varg
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I wasn't asking about lactose intolerance, I already know that.. that's why I didn't include that part in my quote of your post.

What I was asking was where did you come up with the relationship between drinking milk and having higher intelligence?
 
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