Kabloona Friday

Continuing a series of excerpts from Kabloona, an ethnography of the Eskimos published in 1941.

The homosexual Eskimo:

An apparition at the Post pulled me up one day with a shock of amazement. I am as well aware as the next man that sexual aberration knows no geography and no chronology, that inversion is a phenomenon observable in ancient as in modern times, in primitive as in civilized societies. Yet it was not in my thoughts that I should one day see a homosexual Eskimo; and if I put this man in my notebooks, and write about him now, it is not because of his aberration but because he was, in his repellant way, a singularly comic and glittering figure, at once loathsome and fascinating.

There was never such a master of pantomime as this infinitely strange, perpetually agitated, and yet extraordinarily self-possessed rogue who dropped in one afternoon from Back’s River and was off again the next day. He seemed to take it for granted that neither Gibson nor I would understand his speech, for immediately on coming in he began to display his talent as a mime, and he did it with obvious relish. He had no need of worse: face and hands sufficed him to paint for us his four days on the trail. He had run out of tea on the second day, and he wrote in sign language a poem of the brewing and drinking of his last cup. he had started with only a little coal-oil; and in a moment he was coxing the last drop of oil out of an invisible tin, aping marvelously–how he did it I do not know–the very tin itself, showing us with his hands what emptiness was. … Forgetting himself momentarily, he would speak rapid words, but his pantomime went faster than his words, and he would fasten his eyes on your face with the shrewdness and the childish self-satisfaction of an old actor, as if saying, “Don’t you admire the way I am doing this?”

Another thing: he looked exactly like portraits of Louis XIII’ and not only did I sketch him, but fearing that my drawing might be the fruit of my imagination, I photographed him, and it was Louis XIII to the life who stared at me from the negative. A narrow strip of beard that looked half natural and half makeup, ran down his chin, and he was either all curtsies and scrapings, bowing forward with rounded back to leer at you while his hands sent dismayingly over your person and he murmured over the beauty of your clothes, or he would straighten up abruptly, stick out his chest, and posture stiffly as if posing for his portrait.

Unfortunately, though several drawings and photographs made it into the book, this Louis XIII’s portrait did not. However, it is pretty easy to find portraits of the original Louis XIII:

Louis XIII by Franz Pourbour the Younger, 1620

You know, I can see the possible resemblance.

The WIkipedia notes some rumors on the subject of “Was Louis XIII gay?” and there’s some even weirder stuff on the talk page. I don’t know if this is some real connection, or if people just like to speculate that famous people might have been gay.

At any rate, it is a blow against the claim that homosexuality is unknown among hunter-gathers.

… To heighten the impression of inversion this man dragged along with him, behind him, a child whose features were no less astonishing than his own–a little Aiglon* with romantic locks brushed across his forehead and immense, incredibly ringed eyes that were a little melancholy and rather protuberant.

*According to Google, “Aiglon” is a private boarding school in Switzerland, so I take this as a French term for a school aged child?

What was this? Was it a girl, a boy? A boy, yes, said our Louis XIII, turning round to stroke the passive forehead’ and a very good trapper. He got two foxes the other day. The word “trapper” went very ill with the look of the boy, and I was sure the man was lying about his minion. As the evening wore on, and the child began to droop with sleep, he refused to allow the boy to go off to the igloo alone, explaining with inconceivable gestures that they always slept together (gesture of rocking the child to sleep in his arms) and saying that the boy was never able to go to sleep without him.

…The whole thing was beyond words disconcerting, and I aid to myself that next day, when thi man and the child had moved of over the sea, had vanished into the infinity of the North, I should be perfectly right to believe that the whole thing had been a dream.

It is interesting how our definition of “homosexual” has changed over time to no longer include “synonymous with pedophile.” I don’t know if this is because of a shift in the behavior of gay people, a shift in how people think of gay people, or a mere shift in the technical carving up of categories. The association with actors, however, remains.

The meeting of two worlds:

Trading at a Hudson’s Bay Post is a struggle in which two mentalities, the White and the Eskimo, meet and lock. In the end each is persuaded that he has won the match–the white man because in this barter he has got his “price,” and the Eskimo because he is convinced of having got something for nothing.

Your Eskimos turn up with sacks of foxes and signify that they want to trade. The trading is done at the Store, which stands some forty yards off from the Post proper. You lead them out, and as they troop over the snow there is a good deal of strangled laughter. What a great farce this is! Once again they are going to do the white man in the eye, and once again the white man is not going to know what has happened to him. All those wonderful things that fill the Store are to be theirs for a few foxes. What can the white man want with foxes? in the igloo, a fox-skin will do as a clout, but even to wipe things with, the ptarmigan makes a better rag It isn’t possible that the white man should have so many things that need wiping!

One by one, like Arab into a mosque, they file into the Store, wives and children at their heels. And though they have been inside before, each time that they see these treasures they stand stock still, silent, stunned. … To people for whom a rusted file is a treasure–Amundsent speaks of Eskimos traveling six hundred miles to get a few nails–this is the holy of hollies. They raise their heads and see fifty tea kettles hanging from the ceiling almost within reach. … The notion that thanks to a few tufts of frozen fur they are going to possess these gleaming treasures is too much for them. It sends them off into brief gusts of nervous laughter. And what an amazing being this white man is! Not only does he have all these pots and kettles that you see, but every year a new lot arrives. He must have, buried in his distant country, immense caches of pots and kettles. …

…when he leaves the Store, dragging behind him a wooden box filled with treasures, he senses vaguely that many of these shining objects are of no use to him. Oftener, however, it is simply that he no longer wants those things which, a moment ago, he was unable to resist. And then a second stage of trading begins–that between the natives themselves. And since in their eyes nothing possesses intrinsic value, but the value of an object is great or small accordingly as they desire or disdain it, a handsome dog-collar may be swapped for a clay pipe, or a half sack of flour for a red pencil. A needle thus becomes worth a whole fox, a worn strip of leather has the value of a lamp. And what is most curious is that no Eskimo will ever say to you that he has been had in a trade. It is not that his vanity forbids such a confession but that this can never occur to him. He wanted what he got in the trade; soon after, perhaps, he ceased to want it; but between the two his primitive intellect will not allow him to establish any relationship. Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to Eskimos. In the South Sea islands I have known natives to do sixty miles through the bush and across rives in order to trade for matches they furiously desired because the matches had red heads.

In the interests of fairness, I should note that de Poncins comes around to the necessity of the Eskimos’ ways and mentalities after a fair amount of exhausted traveling about on the ice himself. Much of what he says in the first half of the book is meant to show his own misconceptions. But continuing on with the subjects of trade and culture:

Everything about the Eskimo astonishes the white man, and everything about the white man is a subject of bewilderment to the Eskimo. Our least gesture seems to him pure madness, and our mot casual and insignificant act may have incalculable results for him. Let but a Post Manager say to an Eskimo, “here is a package of needles for your wife,” and he will have started … a train of questions and ruminations that may lead anywhere. The free gift is unknown among the Eskimos: better yet, it is incomprehensible to them. Had the white man said, “Lend me your wife in exchange,” the Eskimo would have understood. An exchange is normal’ a gift passes his understanding. It sends his thoughts going. It i amoral. He will not thank the white man. He will go back to his igloo and ruminate. “Since the white man has given me these needles,” he will in effect say to himself, “it must be that he does not want them, and if he does not want his treasures, why should not I have them?” From that day forth, this Eskimo will be a different man. He will begin by despising the white man, and soon he will plan cunningly to exploit him. Since the white man has proved himself a fool, why not? So the Eskimo becomes a liar and a cheat. A single generous impulse on the part of the white man has stared the moral disintegration of a native.

De Poncins does not tell us how he came to believe in the possibility of this final series of events, whether due to conversation or personal experience or what-have-you. Nevertheless, let us take it as a general warning against the dangers of misunderstood gifts.

On happiness:

Many people imagine that the sun is necessary to human happiness and that the South Sea islanders must be the gayest, most leisurely and most contented folk on earth. No notion could be more falsely romantic, for happiness has nothing to do with climate: these Eskimos afforded me decisive poof that happiness is a disposition of the spirit.

(De Poncins himself, however, develops some serious cabin fever in the middle of winter.)

Here was a people living in the mot rigorous climate in the world, in the most depressing surroundings imaginable, haunted by famine in a grey and sombre landscape sullen with the absence of life; shivering in their tents in the autumn, fighting with recurrent blizzard in the winter, toiling and moiling fifteen hour a day merely n order to get food and stay alive. Huddling and motionless in their igloos through this interminable night, they ought to have been melancholy men, men despondent and suicidal; instead, they were a cheerful people, always laughing, never weary of laughter.

A man is happy, in sum, when he is leading the life that suits him, and neither warmth nor comfort has anything to do with it. I watched these Eskimos at the Post. This house, you would say, ought to mean for them the zenith of well-being and relaxation… But look at them! They are dull, sullen, miserable. Physically, they seem shrunken, their personalities diminished and extinguished. Instead of laughing, they brood; and you see them come in, take their seats on the bench and remain like sleepwalkers, expressionless and spiritless… But open wide the door, fling them into the blizzard, and they come to. they wake up suddenly; they whistle,; their women scurry about, their children crack the triumphant whip, their dogs bark like mad: an impression of joy, of life, fills the environs of the Post.

I suspect that people are basically happy when living in accordance with their natures, active, and possessed of a sense of agency over their lives.

The Big Bang Theory is not “My People” (pt. 2)

Warning: I am not entirely satisfied with this post.

Errrg.

I had to spend today with dumbs.

At one point, someone claimed ISIS consists of militant atheists.

By the end I was about ready to chew my arm off to escape.

You know, if The Big Bang Theory were at all realistic, one of the rules in Sheldon’s roommate agreement would be that Penny isn’t allowed in his apartment. He wouldn’t be able to stand her.

“Tribe” can be a difficult concept to articulate, especially if you don’t live in an explicitly tribal society. To be an outlier (in any way) is a recipe for isolation–there’s simply no one else around like yourself. You make do, if you can. But when you finally find someone–or a whole group of someones–like yourself, it’s a wonderful moment.

These days, spending most of my time in the company of others like myself leads to a certain complacency,  but it takes only a few hours in the presence of outsiders to remind me of just how awful it is to be in a place where no one thinks like you do.

I’m not one for “who is a true X?” fights. I’m not going to debate who is and isn’t a poser. But I reserve the right to have personal opinions about whether or not we get along and how people affect group dynamics.

I think it is emotionally healthy–perhaps even necessary–to have a group of people you fit in with and whose company you enjoy.

To have such a group requires at least some awareness of the existence of your group and a willingness to define some people as inside of it and some as outside of it. This does not require hating outsiders–if anything, most people seem capable of identifying with some group or another (a local sports team, their state, people who use ham radios, etc.,) without particularly hating everyone outside of it. (For that matter, most people are quite innocently self-concerned–too busy with their own lives to really take much notice of things outside of it–and so do not really notice or know much about people outside of their own groups.)

But nerds have a habit, in my experience, of being explicitly anti-tribal. I think this is a side effect of growing up on the outside of everyone else’s tribes. When everyone else has a group of friends and you don’t, it’s pretty easy to decide that being exclusionary is wrong and immoral.

Realistically speaking, of course, there aren’t a lot of people trying to sneak into nerd spaces for inappropriate reasons–how many people are physics posers? (I am pretty sure I have been snuck to an exclusive physics lecture by someone trying to date me. Does that count as inappropriate?) But even so, group membership is not worthless. When my husband and I met and he asked me out, I was willing to give him a chance because I was vaguely familiar with him as a member of my social group. People in my group, at least, were somewhat known quantities–if he were a bad person, I likely would have heard about it or could find out quickly from a mutual acquaintance.

(A note for the unwary: sometimes your mutual acquaintances value different things in a partner than you do; sometimes people are outright liars. Tread cautiously when dealing with the opinions of others.)

Even now, I find that, “Do you look like people I have previously gotten along with?” is a pretty good metric for picking people to talk to.

Serious question, folks: Have you ever observed a correlation between “I find this person attractive” and “I enjoy talking to this person”? Not in an “I find it unpleasant to talk to ugly people because they hurt my eyes,” nor in an “I am going to be extra sympathetic to things you say because I want to have sex with you,” kind of way. More in a “Wow, how did I get so lucky that I am actually attracted to the small subset of people I can stand talking to?” My own taste in men hasn’t changed since 4th grade, which was really well before I had any idea what sorts of personality traits or political opinions or lifestyles I’d be interested in as a grown-up, and yet it has consistently served me well.

Anyway, back to politics. A few decades ago, it seems like there was more of a place for nerds in mainstream politics. Republicans liked funding projects that employ nerds, like atomic bombs, and Democrats claimed to believe in things like evolution. Even then, of course, there was a third political position that attracted a fair number of nerds: Libertarianism aka Objectivism. Heck, even the name sounds appropriate for people who are inclined toward a scientific view of the world.

Since then, both mainstream sides have turned against us. Republicans have been anti-science since at least Bush II–who ran on an explicitly anti-smart people campaign–and have been trying to prevent people from learning about the basic theories underlying modern science since approximately forever. This drove a lot of us into the “liberal” or “Libertarian” camps back in the ’90s and ’00s. Since then, though, liberalism underwent a shift, from extolling Libertarian-like meta-politics of respecting peoples’ individual rights on matters like free speech, entertainment, or religion, to the collectivist advocacy of particular group interests–groups that are, to be explicit, not nerds.

Demographically speaking, most nerds are English, German, Jewish, and East Asian men. (Most of them are also heterosexual, cisgendered, etc. etc.) Of course nerds come from all sorts of backgrounds–black, Russian, maybe even borderlands Scot. We are just talking overall numbers. But the SJW orthodoxy has been hammering, pretty explicitly, against the main nerd demographics.

To give an example: most of the nerdy and/or high IQ people I know were, circa 2000, sympathetic to feminist arguments. For that matter, when it comes to violence against women, nerds are probably among the groups least likely to commit any. Per capita, blacks, Hispanics, and lower-class whites commit much more violence. And yet, as a practical matter, people like Scott Alexander–who’s asexual, non-violent, and simply asked for advice on how to find love–or Scott Aaronsen, who confessed to feeling so terrified of the possibility of accidentally harassing someone that he became suicidal–are more likely to get attacked by feminists than folks who actually actually raped over a thousand children.

As a female nerd, I confess I find this a double insult: first you attack my people for something they aren’t guilty of, and then you refuse to defend women against the people actually raping them.

So nerds have split. Some of the old Libertarians have decided that, essentially, we can’t use a meta-ethic of treating everyone equally if some people are starting from unequal positions–that everyone has to be brought to equal positions first, and then treated equally. Others–especially those now styling themselves “Rationalists,” have stuck with the original Libertarian values but attempted to improve their ability to to deal with complex, real-world situations. And a third group–Neoreactionaries–has turned explicitly away from equality.

The Big Bang Theory is not “My People”: aspies, tribalism, and the development of nerd politics

As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t watch much TV, other than the odd documentary and some children’s programs. So while I’ve heard of The Big Bang Theory, I’ve only actually seen a couple of episodes. An acquaintance recently expressed surprise at this fact, asserting that TBBT depicts “[my] people.”

Curiosity got the better of me, so I attempted to watch some episodes on YouTube. Unfortunately, I could only find highlight reels; curse the zealous and effective enforcement of copyright laws. Regardless, I have watched a couple hours of highlights and read the relevant Wikipedia pages.

And these are not “my people.”

To be fair, I laughed. I’m not going to go on a rant claiming that a popular, successful show that lots of people enjoy is actually bad for reasons particular to my own taste in TV. Neither is this going to be an in-depth deconstruction of the good or bad points of a show I’ve barely seen. I’m content to say that it’s funny and I see what other people like in it.

I just don’t see myself in it.

“My people” is a bit of a fuzzy concept. Certainly plenty of “my people” like video games or comic books or have OCD or autism. But this is not what defines us; this is not what separates us from the rest of you.

If anything, video games, Star Trek, comic books, etc., are the things that connect us to normal people. Video games are immensely popular–Farmville2 had, as of 2013, 40 million regular players, which is about the same as the total number of copies of Super Mario Bros. (1985) sold. Then there’s The Sims, which sold over 125 million copies between 2000 and 2010 and has probably kept on selling.

“The success of The Sims resulted in Guinness World Records awarding the series five world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008. These records include “World’s Biggest-Selling Simulation Series” and “Best Selling PC Game of All Time” for the original The Sims game, which sold 16 million units…” (Wikipedia)

There’s nothing wrong with videogames. I like them; lots of people like them. The same goes for the rest of the list. Are nerds more into Star Wars or Star Trek than the average Joe? I think so, but the vast quantities of Star Wars merchandise available at Target certainly isn’t being driven by my tiny demographic; I own more things (books) on P. A. M. Dirac’s contributions to quantum physics than Star Wars and Star Trek-related things combined.

Maybe TBBT is what “my people” look like from the outside, but it’s not what we look like from the inside.

Let’s start with the clothes:

This show is set in southern California. It is hot there all the time. They have no winter. WHY ARE THEY WEARING JACKETS AND SWEATERS?

While nerds do occasionally dress nicely–especially for SCA events–most of the time, we wear clothes to cover our fleshy meat sacks. We do not (generally) have colorful, curated wardrobes.  Most of us don’t really think about clothing. I have seen nerds walking in the snow wearing less clothing than these guys are wearing for the simple reason that they were thinking about something else and had not thought to put on clothes.

If Sheldon were really an autistic (or OCD,) quantum physicist with an IQ around 178 or whatever, he’d look more like the guy on the left:

From left to right: Dirac, youngest Nobel prize winner in physics; Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan; and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Caltech, Calif., May 28, 1935.

(Say what you will, Dirac clearly did not notice that he put on a vest that’s too small for himself this morning.)

Or maybe this guy:

Blatantly cramming Niels Bohr into post

Of course, the modern style of Caltech Physicists is a little less formal–they appear to have ditched the jackets–but still a far cry from curated colors.

But clothes are a triviality. They are not my real objection; they’re just the easiest to express objection.

According to the Wikipedia’s summary of TBBT, the show revolves around the characters’ pop-culture obsessions and failures at dating:

One of the recurring plot lines is the relationship between Leonard and Penny. Leonard becomes attracted to Penny in the pilot episode and his need to do favors for her is a frequent point of humor in the first season. Their first long term relationship begins when Leonard returns from a three-month expedition to the North Pole in the season 3 premiere. However, when Leonard tells Penny that he loves her, she realizes she cannot say it back. Both Leonard and Penny go on to date other people; most notably with Leonard dating Raj’s sister Priya for much of season 4. This relationship is jeopardized when Leonard comes to falsely believe that Raj has slept with Penny, and ultimately ends when Priya sleeps with a former boyfriend in “The Good Guy Fluctuation“.

Penny, who admits to missing Leonard in “The Roommate Transmogrification”, accepts his request to renew their relationship in “The Beta Test Initiation”. After Penny suggests having sex in “The Launch Acceleration”, Leonard breaks the mood by proposing to her. Penny says “no” but does not break up with him. She stops a proposal a second time in “The Tangible Affection Proof”. In the sixth season episode, “The 43 Peculiarity”, Penny finally tells Leonard that she loves him. Although they both feel jealousy when the other receives significant attention from the opposite sex, Penny is secure enough in their relationship to send him off on an exciting four-month expedition without worrying in “The Bon Voyage Reaction”. After Leonard returns, their relationship blossoms over the seventh season. In the penultimate episode “The Gorilla Dissolution”, Penny admits that they should marry and when Leonard realizes that she is serious, he proposes with a ring that he had been saving for years.

Jeez. Who goes through that much crap for a relationship? Here’s what a normal relationship looks like:

Day 1: meet; ask other person out. Yes => date. No => meet someone else and ask them out.

Within a month or two: if you’re in love, keep dating. If not, break up.

Within a few years: get married or break up.

I feel like I am harping on something trivially mundane and totally obvious, except that a lot of people watch TBBT, and I honestly think that plotlines like this (which serve to draw back viewers for subsequent episodes with their constant “will they or won’t they finally get together?” rather than depict reality,) actually give some people (mostly beta males) the wrong impression about how to go about their relationships. Anime is also guilty of this. DO NOT SPEND YEARS OF YOUR LIFE WAITING FOR THE GIRL YOU LIKE TO FINALLY NOTICE YOU. If you don’t ask her out, she will not date you. If she says no, she’s probably not interested and you should go ask someone else out. Doing the “nice guy” beta-male best friend thing for years in the hope that someday she will notice you does not work and tends to work out badly for everyone involved.

Here’s what my life revolves around: personal relationships (kids, husband, friends, relatives, job, etc.,) and my ideas.

I have a lot of ideas, hence this blog and a few other projects I’ve got going.

The ideas permeate everything. Picking the kids up from school? Thinking about the evolution of social structures. Conversing with mom-friend on the playground while watching the kids? Calculating estimated total fertility rate for the neighborhood. Trying to fall asleep? Narrating the French Revolution in my head.

Sometimes the ideas are so intense, it’s agony to do anything else. I can’t sleep, can’t converse, can’t be still until I write them down.

It’s ideas, all the way down.

I wouldn’t care a whit about the colorful t-shirts and weird relationships if the show just focused on Sheldon’s ideas! Admittedly, each episode would be Sheldon wrangling his friends into the apartment and then 2o minutes of enthusiastic physics lecture, which might not go over so well with the intended audience. But real life tends not to be all that TV-worthy.

I am now going to break an unstated rule of this blog and talk about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

No, I don’t watch MLP. I have kids; my kids watch MLP. (But I admit that MLP is one of the kids’ shows that doesn’t make me want to light the TV on fire and defenestrate it.)

Anyway, if I were a pony, I’d be Maud Pie:

She likes rocks. (I like rocks.)

Unlike Sheldon, Maud was not written for the audience to connect with. Maud is the pony the other ponies cannot connect with; the one they cannot be friends with. (This is aside from her sister, Pinkie Pie, who loves her unconditionally because she’s family.) The point of Maud’s episode is that there are some people in this world who, though they are not bad or evil people, are simply interested in things you aren’t, and you don’t have any connection to them.

Maud is interested in rocks, rocks, and nothing but rocks. She writes poetry about rocks. She has a pet rock. Her special magic abilities have to do with rocks. Her cutie mark is probably a rock. She doesn’t really have interests outside of rocks.

The audience, like the main cast, is supposed to find Maud boring. You are supposed to connect with their total lack of anything in common with someone like Maud.

Of course, since I like rocks, I spent the episode going, “Why don’t they just learn to love rocks like Maud does? Why don’t they try connecting with her by finding out what she finds so fascinating about rocks?”

But the idea that one might try to connect with someone by being willing to discuss their passion did not occur to the show’s creators. This is why physics and ideas can never be the focus of TBBT–the viewers have no real interest in what makes Sheldon passionate about physics.

While researching this post, I happened into a conversation on whether or not Maud has Asperger’s. All but one of the folks in the thread who actually have Asperger’s agreed that Maud comes across as Aspie. All but one of the folks saying that Maud was not Aspie were neurotypicals.

Their arguments tended to go like this: “Maud is not Aspie. There is nothing wrong with her, and Aspies have something wrong with them because Asperger’s is a disorder. She is just very passionate about rocks.”

Yes, well, fuck you.

Let’s get something straight. We can call Maud “Aspie” without saying that there is anything “wrong” with her.

I don’t think the show’s creators intended to create an Aspie pony. I think they wanted to create a pony none of the other ponies could connect with because she was boring, uninterested in the other ponies, and only talked about one boring thing.

Which is basically the colloquial definition of “Aspie.”

Here I need to pause and clarify the difference between a formal diagnosis of Autism or Asperger’s with the colloquial usage of “Aspie.”

Autism and Asperger’s were never all that well defined to begin with, with a tremendous overlap between there. Asperger’s is thought of as the less severe of the two diagnoses, but there are “low functioning aspies” who are much worse off than many “high functioning autistics.” My suspicion is that the distinction drawn between the two (language delay and IQ,) wasn’t really the correct distinction, and the whole business should have been determined via degree of impairment in the first place.

Which I suppose is what they are trying to do, now that they’ve formally removed Asperger’s from the DSM.

A formal diagnosis of autism means that there probably is, in fact, something “wrong” with you. As Slate Star Codex notes, formally diagnosed, institutionalized autistics do a lot of things that are definitely problematic, like try to chew off their hands.

I do not have a formal diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s, or anything of the like.

According to the Wikipedia, “Asperger syndrome is characterized by impairment in social interaction accompanied by restricted and repetitive interests and behavior; it differs from the other ASDs by having no general delay in language or cognitive development.” Autism, “is distinguished not by a single symptom, but by a characteristic triad of symptoms: impairments in social interaction; impairments in communication; and restricted interests and repetitive behavior.”

Unlike the stereotype of autistics as “idiot savants,” most of them are intellectually impaired across the board, cannot work, and will be dependent on others for their entire lives. Many of them cannot talk, put on their own clothes, use the toilet unassisted, or communicate their needs to others.

A recent study of people with actual, diagnosed Autism found a bunch of de novo mutations. These kids can’t talk because there is actually something genetically wrong with them:

By comparing affected to unaffected siblings, we show that 13% of de novo missense mutations and 43% of de novo likely gene-disrupting (LGD) mutations contribute to 12% and 9% of diagnoses, respectively. Including copy number variants, coding de novo mutations contribute to about 30% of all simplex and 45% of female diagnoses.

The colloquial definition of “Aspie” is someone who’s interested in stuff you’re not interested in and who has trouble interacting with normal people. This definition has nothing to do with functionality; it’s really just a matter of whether or not you “fit in” with dumbs. So, a teenage girl who talks endlessly about boys and makeup is considered “normal” by most people, but a teenage girl who talks passionately about quantum physics is “aspie” because other teenage girls don’t want to hear about quantum physics. A man who is obsessed with motorcycles is “normal” because only an idiot risks getting punched in the face, but a man who is passionate about trains is “aspie.”

“Aspie” is the new “faggot,” now that you’re not supposed to make fun of gay people. (Is it mere coincidence that the actor picked to play Sheldon is, in fact, flamingly gay?)

There’s a major problem here that anyone who is exceptionally intelligent is probably going to have ideas floating around in their head that normal people can’t understand and is going to learn far more about any subject they’re interested in than the average person. If I am trying to express the idea that different environments favor mitochondrial or viral memes, and you’re trying to express the idea that a popular actor is very attractive, we are not going to socialize terribly well together.

But I have no difficulty socializing with other people like myself.

A recent study of “autism-spectrum-quotient” traits found that men do, indeed, rate higher than women on autism surveys, and people in STEM professions score higher than folks in non-STEM professions, true to stereotypes:

We examine correlations between the AQ and age, sex, occupation, and UK geographic region in 450,394 individuals. We predicted that age and geography would not be correlated with AQ, whilst sex and occupation would have a correlation. Mean AQ for the total sample score was m = 19.83 (SD = 8.71), slightly higher than a previous systematic review of 6,900 individuals in a non-clinical sample (mean of means = 16.94) This likely reflects that this big-data sample includes individuals with autism who in the systematic review score much higher (mean of means = 35.19). As predicted, sex and occupation differences were observed: on average, males (m = 21.55, SD = 8.82) scored higher than females (m = 18.95; SD = 8.52), and individuals working in a STEM career (m = 21.92, SD = 8.92) scored higher than individuals non-STEM careers (m = 18.92, SD = 8.48). Also as predicted, age and geographic region were not meaningfully correlated with AQ.

Hold on a second and look at that last sentence again: age was not meaningfully correlated with AQ. The number of autism diagnoses has been skyrocketing over the past couple of days, accompanied by a great deal of debate on why. Here we have evidence–from nearly half a million people–that the overall “AQ” of the British population has not increased (or decreased) significantly over the years. Either the increase in “autism” diagnoses is entirely an artifact of some other process–like kids who would previously have been diagnosed as just “retarded” getting diagnosed as “autisitic”–or the distribution of “Aspie” traits in the general population has nothing to do with autistics.

At any rate, I see no reason to assume that people in STEM fields are retarded; their aspieness strikes me as far more of the colloquial, “normal people just aren’t into this,” variety. Whereby “normal” I mean “people who talk about their emotions all the damn time.”

Stupid emotions.

Now, I have no idea whether or not Sheldon is really autistic. At this point, I’m not even comfortable with the colloquial use of “Aspie.” And I’m not saying that nerds never act like the guys on TBBT. I’m just saying that this isn’t really “my people,” at least as I see them.

A show about people like me would have one programmer guy who starts out libertarian in season one and then starts reading Moldbug in season two. The main character would be a prominent rationalist blogger/physicist, whose ex-girlfriend is in a bi-poly open relationship with an SJW Asian bio-major, who gets in frequent fights with the programmer. Their room would be full of computers, disassembled computers, computer parts, and robots. (TBBT has one Jewish and one Indian character, which I would obviously retain.)

It’s getting late, so I’m going to continue this tomorrow.

Why is India so dark?

source: Wikipedia

Take a closer look at the 20th parallel:

South of the 20th, India and Africa match pretty well, though south east Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Latin America are noticeably lighter. North of the 20th parallel, even most of Africa is lighter than most of India.

My theory is that one of the first groups out of Africa (if not the first) was a dark-skinned group (all of the groups that left Africa were dark-skinned, of course,) that took a coastal route though (modern) Yemen and Oman, along the southern coast of Pakistan, and then spread into the abundant, hospitable lands around the Indus, Ganges, Narmada, and other rivers.

Some of them continued on, into Tibet, Indochina, and Indonesia. These guys were competent boat-builders, who made it to the Andaman Islands, Australia, Melanesia, and possibly up to Japan (the Ainu) and the New World (where we are now finding what looks like Melanesian DNA deep in the rainforests of Brazil.) This all happened somewhere between 100,000 years ago (out of Africa, maybe) and 40,000 years ago (people reached Australia.)

More-or-less meanwhile, other groups headed northward, then circled back around. By the time they came back, they’d lightened. Several groups back-migrated into Africa, (most recently the Arab conquests, but we also have evidence of migrations 3 thousand and 23 thousand years ago;) they probably conquered Iran and Indochina from the north. From Taiwan spread another group, the Polynesians, who might have partially displaced the Melanesians and settled many islands they hadn’t been able to reach. The Ainu got pushed out and even Australia got a small invasion, though in its case, by folks from India, so its skin color didn’t change.

But India is a tough place to conquer from the north. There are some awfully big mountains in thew way. India has certainly been conquered during the long expanse of history–I suspect this accounts for the violet blob that pierces central India, perhaps due to the Indo-European expansion–but they’ve probably been conquered less, overall, than places like China.

There are a lot of small, interesting groups that I suspect are ultimately descended from what was once a large group of people that stretched around the south eastern curve of Asia (and its islands), but are now quite isolated–

Negrito couple from the Great Andaman Island

Andamanese people hunting turtles

Young Aeta girl, Philippines, 1901

Semang man from Malaysia (old picture, I know)

Semang people, Malaysia

Young Negrito Girl from the Philippines

Not so obscure Australians

Folks from Papua New Guinea

Two Melanesian girls from Vanatu

Ainu?

 

 

Tentative map of Neanderthal (and Denisovan) DNA in humans

I couldn’t find one, so I made one:

This is really tentative! And I am not a geneticist, so at this point, I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping I didn’t read any graphs backwards.

Notes:

This map shows Neanderthal DNA admixture in modern human groups (solid color) and Denisovan DNA (polka dots.) The Denisovan estimates are less exact than the Neanderthal estimates. (Also, the guys with Denisovan DNA also have Neanderthal DNA; I just don’t know how much.)

The biggest problem I ran up against was a total lack of numbers. Seriously, everyone likes quoting that “1-4% of non-African DNA is Neanderthal” stat, but no one likes breaking it down by individual country or group.

Some of the sources contradict each other–first we have papers claiming that Europeans have more Neanderthal DNA than Asians, then papers claiming that Asians have more. I went with the Asians have more estimates, since they were more recent. Also, we now think that many African groups also have some Neanderthal DNA, due to more recent back-migration of Eurasians into Africa.

Most of this map is still completely blank, even though I’m sure the data is out there somewhere. I would really appreciate if any of my readers can point me toward a good old list of Neanderthal (or Denisovan) DNA %s by country or group.

Alternatively, if you’ve had your DNA analyzed and know your Neanderthal and/or Denisovan %s, feel free to share in the comments.

When I have more data, I’ll update the map.

Sources read:

Dienekes: Neandertal admixture in modern humans

John Hawks: Neandertal ancestry iced, Neandertal introgression 1,000 genomes style

The Atlantic: The Other Neanderthal

1000 Genomes: about

Wang et al, Apparent Variation in Neanderthal Admixture among African Populations is Consistent with Gene Flow from Non-African Populations

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please, please let me know if you find some better lists of the %s of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in different populations.

Kabloona Friday

(Part of a series on de Poncins’s Kabloona, an ethnography of the Eskimo/Inuit.)

How’s winter treating you?

Up near the North Pole, I hear it gets really cold. Like, really cold:

That journey homeward in darkness was an unrelieved agony. I was cold; I was freezing; not only in the flesh, but my soul was frozen. As I sat on the swaying and creaking sled the cold became an obsession, almost an hallucination, and soon I was in a delirium of cold. … My brain had shrunk to the dimensions of a dried raisin. Stubbornly, painfully, almost maliciously, it clung to a single thought, made room for no other image: “I am cold!” I was not cold as people Outside are cold. I was not shivering. I was in the cold, dipped into a trough where the temperature was thirty degrees below zero…

During this same journey across the frozen polar sea, the Eskimo, dressed in the same clothes and just as many layers, experienced no such hypothermic delusions. Undoubtedly this is at least in part due to evolutionary adaptations that help them withstand the cold, but a few pages earlier, de Poncins had vividly (and unknowingly) described another reason the Eskimos were much warmer than he:

I do not know what the hour was, but I who had dozed off woke up. Under my eye were the three Eskimos, three silhouettes lit up from behind by the uncertain glow of a candle that threw on the walls of the igloo a mural of fantastically magnified shadows. All three men were down on the floor in the same posture… They were eating, and whether it was that the smell of the seal had been irresistible, or that the idea of the hunt had stimulated their appetites, they had embarked upon a feast. Each had a huge chunk of meat in his hands and mouth, and by the soundless flitting of their arms made immeasurably long in the shadows on the wall, I could see that even before one piece had been wholly gobbled their hands were fumbling in the basin for the next quarter. The smell in the igloo was of seal and of savages hot and gulping. …

I have seen astonishing things, in remote places and not merely in circuses. In the New Hebrides, for example, I have unpacked my own meat in a circle of cannibals and have seen in their eyes a gleam that was perhaps more intense than comforting. Here, in this igloo, all that I had seen before was now surpassed. There were three men, and there must have been fifty pounds of meat. The three men attacked that meat with the rumbling and growling of animals warning their kind away from their private prey. They ground their teeth and their jaws cracked as they ate, and they belched… The walls of the igloo were horrid with the ruddy dripping of bloody spittle and still they ate on, and still they put out simian arms and turned over with indescribable hands morsels in the beginning disdained and now become dainties greedily swallowed. And till, like beats, they picked up chunks and flung them almost instantly down again in order to put their teeth into other and perhaps more succulent bits. They had long since stopped cutting the meat with their circular knives: their teeth sufficed, and the very bones of the seal cracked and splintered in their faces. What those teeth could do, I already knew. When the cover of a gasoline drum could not be pried off with the fingers, an Eskimo would take it between his teeth and it would come easily away. When a strap made of seal skin freezes hard–and I know nothing tougher than seal skin–an Eskimo will put it in his mouth and chew it soft again. And those teeth were hardly to be called teeth. Worn down to the gums, they were sunken and unbreakable stumps of bone. If I were to fight with an Eskimo, my greatest fear would be lest he crack my skull with his teeth.

But on this evening their hands were even more fantastic than their teeth. … Their capacity of itself was fascinating to observe, and it was clear that like animals they were capable of absorbing amazing quantities of food, quite ready to take their chances with hunger a few days later.

The traditional Eskimo diet contains little to no vegetable matter, because very few plants grow up near the North Pole, especially in winter. It consists primarily of fish, seal, polar bear, foxes, and other meats, but by calorie, it is mostly fat. (This is because you can’t actually survive on a majority-protein diet.)

To run through the dietary science quickly, de Poncins has throughout the book been generally eating white-man’s food, which includes things like bread and beans. This is not to say that he disdained fish and seals–he does not make much mention of whether he ate those, but he does talk about bread, potatoes, beans, etc. So de Poncins is eating what you’d call a “normal” diet that makes use of glucose to transform food into energy. The Eskimo, by contrast, are eating the “Atkins” diet, making use of the ketogenic cycle.

No plants = no carbs; no carbs = no glucose.

But the brain cannot run without glucose, so luckily your body can make it out of protein.

Interestingly, you will die without proteins and fats in your diet, but you can survive without carbs.

Anyway, one of the side effects of a high-protein, ketogenic diet is (at least occasionally,) increased body heat:

Karst H, Steiniger J, Noack R, Steglich HD: Diet-induced thermogenesis in man: thermic effects of single proteins, carbohydrates and fats depending on their energy amount. Ann Nutr Metab 1984, 28(4):245-252.

Abstract: The diet-induced thermogenesis of 12 healthy males of normal body weight was measured by means of indirect calorimetry over 6 h after test meals of 1, 2 or 4 MJ protein (white egg, gelatin, casein), carbohydrate (starch, hydrolyzed starch) or fat (sunflower oil, butter). The effect of 1 MJ protein was at least three times as large as that of an isocaloric carbohydrate supply. [bold mine]

(isocaloric = having similar caloric values)

In other words, the Inuits’ low-carb diet probably increased their internal body temperature, keeping them warmer than our author.

I have attempted a low-carb diet, (solely for health reasons–I have never wanted to lose weight,) and one of the things I remember about it is that I would suddenly feel completely, ravenously hungry. There were times that, had I not been able to get food, I would not have begun devouring anything even remotely chewable. Of course, that may have just been a personal digestive quirk.

I feel compelled to note that this post is not advocating any particular diet; you are most likely not an Eskimo and there is no particular reason to believe, a priori, that you are better adapted to their diet than to the diet of your ancestors (whatever that happens to be.)

Unfortunately, this also holds true for the Eskimo, who probably are adapted to their ancestral diet and not adapted to the white man’s foods, which explains why diabetes and obesity are becoming epidemic among them:

Age-standardized rates of T2D show 17.2% prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes among First Nations individuals living on reserves, compared to 5.0% in the non-Aboriginal population; … First Nations women in particular suffer from diabetes, especially between ages 20–49. They have a 4 times higher incidence of diabetes than non-first nation women^[3] as well as experiencing higher rates of gestational diabetes than non-Aboriginal females, 8-18% compared to 2-4%.^[1]

“First nations” is Canadian for “Indian”.

In Greenland (majority Inuit):

The age-standardized prevalences of diabetes and IGT were 10.8 and 9.4% among men and 8.8 and 14.1% among women, respectively.

I am reminded here of the chapter in Dr. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (copyright 1939) on the Eskimo (which is, alas, too long to quote in full):

During the rise and fall of historic and prehistoric cultures that have often left their monuments and arts following each other in succession in the same location, one culture, the Eskimo, living on until today, bring us a robust sample of the Stone Age people. … The Eskimo face has remained true to ancestral type to give us a living demonstration of what Nature can do in the building of a race competent to withstand for thousands of years the rigors of an Arctic climate. Like the Indian, the Eskimo thrived as long as he was not blighted by the touch of modern civilization, but with it, like all primitives, he withers and dies.

In his primitive state he has provided an example of physical excellence and dental perfection such as has seldom been excelled by any race in the past or present. … It is a sad commentary that with the coming of the white man the Eskimos and Indians are rapidly reduced both in numbers and physical excellence by the white man’s diseases. …

Bethel is the largest settlement on the Kuskokwim, and contains in addition to the white residents many visiting Eskimos from the nearby Tundra country surrounding it.

From this population, Dr. Price noted:

88 Eskimos and mixed-race people, with 2,490 teeth.

27 lived on the traditional Eskimo diet. Of their 796 teeth, one had a cavity.

21 lived on a mixed Eskimo/white diet. Of their 600 teeth, 38–6.3%–had cavities.

40 lived on imported white foods. Of their 1,094 teeth, 252–or 21.1%–had cavities.

In another location, 28 people eating a traditional Eskimo diet had one cavity.

13 people on traditional Eskimo diet: 0 cavities.

72 people on Eskimo diet: 2 cavities.

81 people eating white foods: 394 cavities.

20 people eating white foods: 175 cavities.

(Yes, Dr. Price is a dentist.)

It is a common belief around the world that childbearing makes women lose teeth (my own grandmother lost two teeth while pregnant;) Dr. Price notes the case of an Eskimo woman who had borne 20 children without losing a single tooth or developing any cavities.

One does not get a conception of the magnificent dental development of the more primitive Eskimos simply by learning that they have freedom from dental carries [cavities]. The size and strength of the mandible, the breadth of the face and the strength of the muscles of mastication all reach a degree of excellence that is seldom seen in other races. …

Much has been reported in the literature of the excessive wear of the Eskimo’s teeth, which in the case of the women has been ascribed to the chewing of the leather in the process of tanning. [de Poncins also makes note of the frequent chewing of hides–evX.] It is of interest that while many of the teeth studied gave evidence of excessive wear involving the crowns down to a depth that in many individuals would have exposed the pulps, there was in no case an open pulp chamber. They were always filled with secondary dentin.

Does the Bronze Age Herald a Major Transformation in Human Dispersal Patterns?

Humans–Homo Sapiens or Anatomically Modern Humans–have been around for about 200,000 years. We have only recently–for the past few thousand years or so–begun making a serious effort at recording human history and figuring out what happened before our own times.

Most of what we know about major migrations and changes among human populations come from three major sources: written records, archaeology, and genetics.

Written records are (usually) the easiest to work with. We know when the Spaniards discovered Cuba because we have written records of the event, for example. Unfortunately, written records go back only a few thousand years–covering a teeny portion of human history–and can be highly unreliable. After all, we thought the entire world was only 6 thousand years old for a while because a book that seemed to say so.

Archaeology lets us peer much further back than written records, but with much less detail. We don’t know a lot, for example, about the folks who made Aurignacian tools–what they called themselves, what sort of rituals they had, what they hoped or dreamed of. Without those details, it’s hard to care much about one culture or another. After a while, pots blend into pots, stone tools into stone tools.

Can you tell which one is Aurignacian, and which is Gravettian?

(Oh, I threw in a Mousterian tool, as well. Those were made by Neanderthals, not H. sapiens.)

I can’t, either.

It is difficult to tell whether a change in artifacts between one layer and the next reflects a change in people or a change in technology. The proliferation of steel artifacts in the archaeological record in Mexico circa 1500 reflects an influx of new people, but the proliferation of television sets in the future-archaeological record of my area merely reflects a technological development. Finding a lot of mass graves in an area is, of course, a tip-off that invasion and replacement happened, but invasions aren’t always accompanied by easily identified mass-internments.

This is where genetics comes in. If we can find some skeletons and sequence their DNA, and then find some later or earlier skeletons in the same area and sequence their DNA, then we can get a pretty good idea of whether or not the later people are descended from the earlier people. This probably doesn’t always work (if the people in question are under some kind of selective pressure–which we all are–then their descendants might look genetically different from their ancestors simply due to evolution rather than replacement,) but it is a pretty darn good tool.

As I discussed back in “Oops, Looks Like it was People, not Pots,” archaeologists have fiercely debated over the decades whether the replacement of Narva Pots with Corded Ware Pots circa 3750 ago represented a population replacement or just a change in pot-making preferences:

    

Corded Ware on the left, Narva on the right.

Luckily for us, genetics has now figured out that the Corded Ware people are actually the Yamnaya, aka the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and that they expanded out of the Eurasian Steppe about 4,000 years ago, replacing much of the native population as they went.

So it’s starting to look like there were quite a few conquering events of this sort.

From, A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

from A Handful of Bronze Age Men Could have fathered two-thirds of Europeans

In general, if you see a lot of mtDNA and only a little Y-DNA, that means there were a lot of women around and only a few men. And that generally means those men just killed all of the other men and raped their wives and children.

Which appears to have happened on a massive scale throughout much of the world around 10,000-4,000 years ago.

Just off the top of my head, recent large-scale migrations and at least partial replacements include the arrival of Indians in Australia around 4,230 years ago; replacement of the Thule people by the Inuit (aka Dorset aka Eskimo) around 1,000 ago; successive waves of steppe peoples like the Turks and Mongols invading their neighbors; the Great Bantu Migration that began about 3,500 years ago; the spread of Polynesians through areas formerly controlled by Melanesians starting around 3,000 BC; displacement of the Ainu by the Japanese over the past couple thousand years; etc.

Replacement of the Thule by the Dorset, from The genetic prehistory of the New World Arctic

Paths of the great Bantu Migration

Map is in French. Negative numbers are years BC; positive numbers are years CE.

And of course, we know of many more recent migrations, like the one kicked off by Columbus.

So it looks like people have moved around a lot over the past 10,000 years.

Terms like “bronze age” are a little problematic because people adopted different technologies at different times. So the “bronze age” began around 5,300 years ago in the Middle East, 4,000 years ago in Ireland, and skipped the Inuit entirely (they basically went straight from stone and bone tools to guns.)

Agriculture emerged in the Middle East circa 11,500 years ago; followed by the wheel, 8,500 years ago; carts, 6,500 years ago; and domesticated horses about 6,000 years ago. These technologies made the world ripe for warfare–riders on horseback or in chariots were great at conquering, and agricultural settlements, with their large population centers and piles of food, were great for conquering.

Our conventional views of prehistory are tainted, I suspect, by a mis-perception of time. This is probably basically a quirk of perception–since we remember yesterday better than the day before yesterday, and that day better than last week, and last week better than last year, we tend to think of more recent time periods as longer than they really are, and older time periods as relatively shorter. Children are most prone to this; ask a child to make a numberline showing events like “Last week, my last birthday, the year I was born, and the year mommy was born,” and you’ll tend to get a very distorted number line. Grown ups are much better at this task (we can count the time-distance between these events,) but we’re not perfect.

We show this same tendency when thinking about human history. Our written documents barely go back past 3,000 years, and as far as most people are concerned, this is the beginning of “history”. Nevermind that humans have been around for 200,000 years–that’s 197,000 years of human history that we tend to condense down to: humans evolved, left Africa, and invented agriculture–then came us. We tend to mentally assign approximately equal chunks of time to each phase, which leads to things like people thinking that the Basques–who speak a language isolate–are an ancient, archaic people who hail directly from the first humans, or Neanderthals, or somesuch. Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years, and the Indo-European language expansion probably cut the Basques off from their fellow-language speakers about 3,000 years ago. Of course, the Basques could have been cut off since the Neanderthal age, but that’s a jump of 37,000 years (or more) on very little evidence. Likewise, we tend to assume that people just spread out from their original African homeland, got to where they were going, sat down, and never moved again. With the exception of Columbus and his European co-ethnics, everyone is sort of assumed to have gotten where they are now about 100,000-40,000 years ago. (Or the equivalent time period for people who think humanity is much younger or older than it is.)

But the emerging picture is one of conquering–lots of conquering, at least in the time periods we’ve been able to get details on. But go back more than 10,000 years or so, and the records start petering out. We’ve got no writing, far fewer artifacts, and even the DNA breaks down. The technology we’ve developed for extracting and sequencing ancient DNA is amazing, but I suspect we’ll have a devil of a time trying to find any well-preserved 40,000 year old DNA in the rainforest.

So what did the human story look like between 200,000 and 10,000 years ago? Have humans been conquering and re-conquering each other from the beginning? Is it ethnic group after ethnic group, all the way down? Or did lower population density in the pre-agricultural era make it easier to spread out and avoid one’s neighbors than to bother fighting with them? Certainly armies would have spread much less slowly before the domestication of the horse and invention of the chariot. (Not to mention that they require quite a bit of food, which is a tough sort of thing to get in large, easily-transportable form if you’re a hunter-gatherer.)

Certainly prehistoric peoples slaughtered (or slaughter) each other with great frequency–we can tell that:

It doesn’t take a lot of technology to go put a spear into your neighbor’s chest. Even bands of chimps go smash other bands of chimps to bits with rocks.

We also have genetic evidence emerging from further back, ie, An Older Layer of Eurasian Admixture in Africa. As Dienekes summarises:

The authors propose that a genetic component found in Horn of Africa populations back-migrated to Africa from Eurasia ~23 thousand years ago. … For a time, there was a taboo against imagining back-migration into Africa; in a sense this was reasonable on parsimony grounds: Africans have most autosomal genetic diversity and the basal clades of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes; a model with Out-of-Africa is simpler than one with both Out-of and Into-Africa. However, we now know that pretty much all Africans have Eurasian ancestry, ranging from at least traces in theYoruba and Pygmies (to account for the Neandertal admixture) to intermediate values in East Africans, to quite  a lot in North Africans.

Eurasian admixture in Africa seems to be general, variable, and to have occurred at different time scales. It’s still the best hypothesis that modern humans originated in Africa initially and migrated into Eurasia. However, it is no longer clear that Africa was always the pump and never the destination of human migrations.

Whether this was “conquering” or just wandering remains to be discovered.

As for me, my money’s on horses and agriculture making warfare and dispersal faster and more efficient, not fundamentally changing our human proclivities toward our neighbors.

Essential Rebellion of the Self

I define myself by what I create, not what I consume.

Consanguinity and Socialism

So I’ve been thinking about the connection between consanguinity and socialism.

In one account I read recently, a young man, attempting to better his lot in life, took out a loan, produced 30 loaves of bread, and began selling them along the side of the road. He managed to sell ten loaves before his father came along, spotted the bread, and took the remaining 20 loaves to feed his hungry children–the young man’s siblings and half siblings, of which there were well over a dozen.

Obviously the young man could not pay back his loan, and the business failed.

In Kabloona, de Poncins describes the extreme communality of the Eskimo lifestyle (including, it seems, some form of communal wife-sharing.) One man builds up a cache of fish and seals, and another family comes upon it and eats it all–it cannot be helped, says the author. No one was mad or even irritated. Life in the arctic is so precarious, the food supply so unsteady, that everyone would likely die if they could not depend on their neighbors’ catches in such a way.

He describes another case of a mentally retarded couple who were kept alive primarily through the generosity of their kin-folk.

Toward the end of Frederick and Josephine’s adventure through the Congo, they describe conversations with, IIRC, a white person living in the Congo. He noted that although he had lived there for many years, he had not become friends with the natives–that such was impossible, in fact, because friendship carries with it obligations, and those obligations would quickly bankrupt him.

In The Harmless People, anthropologist Elizabeth Thomas describes the distribution networks that determine exactly how a killed animal is distributed among everyone in the tribe. Obviously it makes sense to distribute a giraffe–no one can eat an entire giraffe, and the Bushmen (aka San) don’t have refrigerators. But even when people are hungry and there isn’t enough to go around, the rules still apply: you must share.

In another account (the name of which, forgive me, has slipped my mind over the intervening decade and a half since I read it,) the author discussed the difficulties of getting the Bushmen started on agriculture/animal husbandry. The crux of the matter was that people would give the Bushmen goats to raise, and then a while later some other Bushmen would come visiting, and the goats would get slaughtered to feed their guests. Pretty soon, the goats were gone and the Bushmen had nothing left to eat, until the outsiders donated some more goats and the round of visiting and goat-eating began again.

Apparently they solved this problem by giving the Bushmen cows. Because a cow has far more meat on it than a visiting family can eat in a week–even a large family–the social obligation to slaughter one’s livestock for visiting relatives didn’t apply to cows.

In The Continuum Concept, Liedloff describes life in an isolated Amazonian village. She relates a story about a young man who, after being raised in the hustle and bustle of the city, came back to his ancestral village (he’d been adopted.) He proceeded to sit on his butt for several years, supported by the rest of the village. He was not entirely idle–he managed to get marry and have children during those years. Eventually he got bored and began raising a garden of his own (it was a horticultural society.)

It took me a long time to figure out why people engage in ritual gift-giving, but one enlightening study on the subject found that Chinese folks with gift-giving networks that extended outside their own villages were less likely to starve during the famines–these folks, it appeared, had been able to call upon their networks when the local crops failed. People whose networks were limited to their own villages had no one to call upon when the village’s crops failed.

I recall someone–I think it was HBD Chick–claiming that Russia traditionally had a somewhat communal style of land inheritance/distribution among its serfs, but I can’t find it, now.

This “socialistic” gift-giving/distribution of wealth and catches is the essence of tribalism, and stands in contrast to capitalism. Westerners tend to either gush glowingly about the wonderful primitives who, in their Edenic state, know nothing of greed but share everything with their neighbors, or confusedly attempt to mush capitalism onto this tribal system and then wonder why it doesn’t work. The socialists tend to advocate that we should become more like the tribesfolk, while capitalists look for ways to get people to act more individually.

Of course, noble savages are a myth and people do not share because they’re morally pure; one glance at the homicide rates for tribal peoples dispels that notion. These systems exist (or existed) because they helped the people in them survive–or at least their DNA. You and your brother share quite a bit of DNA, so sharing your food with him can result in more copies of your DNA wandering around (via your brother’s children,) even if it doesn’t befit you, personally.

No man is an island; we all depend on each other for food and other resources. Where resources are few and times are tough, others become especially critical. Then the “rules” in these societies are often just as strict as ours–the young man with his loaves can no more resist his father’s claim than I can resist paying my taxes. And for the Inuit, the rules are even harsher: if you don’t share now, there will be no one left to share with you when you need them–and you will die.

Do such systems only work where people are closely related? Sharing wealth with my brother may be annoying, but that doesn’t mtter so long as my DNA gets passed on. My brother can be a total lout who takes advantage of me right and left and it doesn’t matter so long as my DNA gets passed on. But it is much more difficult to get people to cooperate with non-family–helping strangers does not lead directly to more of my DNA in the world, and if the helping harms me while helping them, then they may well increase the number of copies of their DNA at my expense.

This does not necessarily mean that cooperation with strangers is a bad idea–or that defecting on strangers is a good idea. Obviously if you’re caught out in a blizzard, it’s in your interest to cooperate with anyone around. And many, many groups have merged over the centuries of human history (and not just through warfare.) Groups can indeed merge, to their mutual benefit.

The question is whether some groups are genetically biased toward–or will reproduce better–under socialism or capitalism, and if consanguinity has any effect on this.

You see, not all brothers are created equal. If you and your brother are identical twins, then you share virtually 100% of your DNA, and giving your brother a cow is as good as giving you a cow; your brother having a kid is genetically as good as you having a kid.

Under normal conditions (as you tend to think of them, my reader), you and your brother share about 50% of your DNA–in this case, your brother has to have two kids to make up for the cost of you losing one.

If you and your brother are actually half-brothers, that % goes down to 25. Now your brother needs to have 4 kids to make up for the loss of one of yours.

But if you’re full siblings and your parents were first cousins–a pretty normal state of affairs throughout most of the world and most of history–then the DNA you share with your brother goes up. And if your grandparents and great grandparents were also cousins, well, you and your brother will start looking pretty similar to each other.

Let’s suppose that a gene for generosity pops up randomly among humans. These generous folks love cooperating. If they are closely related to their family, chances are their relatives also have this gene, and that they will all cooperate together. The less closely they are related to the folks they’re cooperating with, the less chance of those folks sharing the cooperating genes and thus, simultaneously, more chance of defection and fewer genetic gains from cooperating.

So it seems likely that the strongest norms for cooperating will exist within groups that are closely related. (Note that even Sweden-style socialism is quite weak compared to Inuit-style socialism.)

But most folks are, at best, neutral toward their out-group, and often highly antagonistic. (The few groups that are not antagonistic seem to mostly be folks who don’t have much experience with out-groups, due to geographic isolation.) But cooperation across groups may be possible if strong civic institutions / social norms exist to prevent defection.

Absolute Monarchy, Revolution, and the Bourgeoisie

So I was thinking about the Russian Revolution (as is my wont,) and wondering why everyone was so vehemently against the bourgeoisie and not, at least in their rhetoric, the nobility. (I’ve long wondered the exact same thing about the French Revolution.)

If there is one thing that all commentators seem to agree on, including the man himself, it’s that Nicholas II (aka Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, final Tsar of all Russia,) was not fit to rule. He was not an evil man (though he did send millions of his subjects to their deaths,) and he was not an idiot, but neither was he extraordinary in any of the ways necessary to rule an empire.

But this isn’t reason to go executing a guy. After all, Russia managed to survive the tsardom of Peter the Great’s retarded half-brother (principally by making Peter co-tsar,) so there’s no particular reason why the nobility couldn’t have just stepped in and run things for Nicholas. Poor little Alexei probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer, and then one of Nicholas’s brothers or nephews would have been in the running for tsar–seems like a pretty decent position to hold out for.

But in an absolute monarchy, how much power does the nobility have? Could they intervene and change the direction of the war (or stop/prevent it altogether?)

Louis XIV (1638 – 1715) consolidated an absolute monarchy in France (with the height of his power around 1680.) In 1789, about 110 years later, the French Revolution broke out; in 1793, Louis XVII was executed.

Peter and Catherine the Greats (1672 – 1725; 1729 – 1796) consolidated monarchical power in Russia. The Russian Revolution broke out in 1905 and then more successfully in 1917; Nicholas was executed in 1918. Assuming Catherine was fairly powerful until her death, (and I suspect she likely would have been deposed had she not,) that gives us about 110 or 120 years between absolute monarch and revolution.

Is there a connection?

Obviously one possibility is just that folks who manage to make themselves absolute monarchs are rare indeed, and their descendents tend to regress toward normal personalities until they just aren’t politically savvy enough to hold onto power, at which point a vacuum occurs and a revolution fills it.

Revolutionaries, by and large, aren’t penniless peasants or factory workers (at least, not at the beginning.) They’re fairly idle intellectuals who have the time and resources to write lots of books and articles about revolution. Lenin was hanging out in Switzerland, writing, when the Russian Revolution broke out, not slogging through the trenches or working in a factory.

As I understand it, the consolidation of absolute monarchy requires taking power from the nobles. The nobles get their support from their personal peasants (their serfs.) The Royalty get their support against the nobles, therefore, from free men–middle class folks not bound to any particular noble. These middle-class folks tend to live in the city–they are the bourgeoisie.

Think of a ladder–or a cellular automata–with four rungs: royals, nobles, bourgeoisie, and peasants.

If the royalty and bourgeoisie are aligned, and the nobles and peasants are aligned, then this might explain why, when Russia and France decided to execute their monarchs, they simultaneously attacked the bourgeoisie–but said little, at least explicitly and propagandically, against the nobility.

By using the peasants to attack the bourgeoisie, the nobles attacked the king’s base of support, leaving him unable to defend himself and hang onto power. A strong monarch might be able to prevent such maneuvering, but a weak monarch can’t. Nicholas II doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d imprison infant relatives for their whole lives or have his son tortured to death. He didn’t even bother taking another wife after the tsarina failed to produce a suitable heir.

I see the exact same dynamic happening today. For the peasants, we have America’s minority communities–mostly blacks and Hispanics–who are disproportionately poor. Working and middle-class whites are the bourgeoisie. College students and striving rich are the nobles, and the royalty are the rich.

Occupy Wall Street was an attempt by student-types to call direct attention to the wealth of the royalty, but never got widespread support. By contrast, student protests attacking bourgeois whites on behalf of black peasants have been getting tons of support; their ideas are now considered mainstream, while OWS’s are still fringe.

There’s a great irony in Ivy League kids lecturing anyone about their “privilege,” much like the irony in Lenin sitting on his butt in Switzerland while complaining about the bourgeoisie.

But in this case, is the students’ real target actually the rich?