When did Whites Evolve?

Defining exactly who is white is contentious and difficult–so I shan’t. If you want to debate among yourselves whether or not the Irish or Hindus count, that’s your own business.

Here’s Haak et al’s full graph of human genomes from around the world, (see here and here for various discussions.) The genomes on the far left are ancient European skeletons; everything from the “pink” section onward is modern. The “African” genomes all have bright blue at their bottoms; Asian (and American Indian) genomes all have yellow. The European countries tend to have a triple-color profile, reflecting their recent (evolutionarily speaking) mix of European hunter-gatherers (dark blue), Middle Eastern farmers (orange), and a “teal” group that came in with the Indo-European speakers, but whose origins we have yet to uncover:

Unsurprisingly, the Basque have less of this “teal.” Middle Easterners, as you can see, are quite similar genetically, but tend to have “purple” instead of “dark blue”

Physically, of course, whites’ most distinctive feature is pale skin. They are also unique among human clades in their variety of hair and eye colors, ranging from dark to light, and tend to have wavy hair that is “oval” in cross-section. (Africans tend to have curly hair that is flat in cross section, and Asians tend to have straight hair that is cylindrical in cross section. See map for more hair details.)

There are other traits–the Wikipedia page on “Caucasian race” (not exactly synonymous with “whites”) notes:

According to George W. Gill and other modern forensic anthropologists, physical traits of Caucasoid crania are generally distinct from those of the Mongoloid and Negroid races. They assert that they can identify a Caucasoid skull with an accuracy of up to 95% by the following features: ^{[20][21][22][23][24]}

• An orthognathic profile, with minimal protrusion of the lower part of the face (little or no prognathism).
• Retreating zygomatic bones (cheekbones), making the face look more “pointed”.
• Narrow nasal aperture, with a tear-shaped nasal cavity (nasal fossa).

But I am not going to deal with any of these, unless I hear of something like the EDAR gene coding for a bunch of traits.

Old racial classifications made use of language groups as stand-ins for racial groups. This turns out to be not very reliable, as we’ve found that in many cases, a small group of conquerors has managed to impose its language without imposing its genetics, as you’ve discovered in real life if you’ve ever met an African or Indian who speaks English.

The first known modern humans in Europe (IE, not Neanderthals nor Homo Erectuses,) popularly known as Cro-Magnons and unpopularly known as European early modern humans, (because anthropologists hate being understood dislike sounding like commoners,) lived around 43,ooo-45,000 years ago in Italy. By 41,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons had reached the southern coast of England.

Humanity’s path out of Africa

(Incidentally, Mungo Man, found in south-east Australia, is also estimated to be about 40,000 years old, suggesting that either:

A. People took a much longer route from Africa to Europe than to Australia
B. Europe was difficult to enter when folks left Africa, possibly because of glaciers or Neanderthals
C. There were multiple Out-of-Africa events, or
D. Our knowledge is incomplete.

D is obviously true, and I favor C regardless of Mungo’s true age.)

source: Wikipedia

These Cro-Magnons appear to have been brown skinned, brown eyed, and black haired–they likely looked more like their close relatives in the Middle East (whatever they looked like,) than their distant descendants in modern Europe. (Despite all of the mixing and conquering of the centuries, I think modern Europeans are partially descended from Cro-Magnons, but I could be wrong.)

The Cro-Magnons carved the famous “Venus of Willendorf” (we don’t really know if the figurine was intended as a “goddess” or a fertility figure or just a portrait of a local lady or what, but it’s a nice name,) among many other similar figurines, some of them quite stylized.

Venus of Monruz

Venus of Willendorf

Venus of Brassempouy

Some people think the figurines look African, with cornrows or peppercorn hair and steatopygia. Others suggest the figurines are wearing hats or braids, and point out that not all of them are fat or have large butts.

 

 

So when did Europeans acquire their modern appearances? Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Wikipedia states:

Variations in the KITL gene have been positively associated with about 20% of melanin concentration differences between African and non-African populations. One of the alleles of the gene has an 80% occurrence rate in Eurasian populations.^[52][53] The ASIP gene has a 75–80% variation rate among Eurasian populations compared to 20–25% in African populations.^[54] Variations in the SLC24A5 gene account for 20–25% of the variation between dark and light skinned populations of Africa,^[55]and appear to have arisen as recently as within the last 10,000 years.^[56] The Ala111Thr or rs1426654 polymorphism in the coding region of the SLC24A5 gene reaches fixation in Europe, but is found across the globe, particularly among populations in Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.^[57][58][59]

The Guardian reports:

According to a team of researchers from Copenhagen University, a single mutation which arose as recently as 6-10,000 years ago was responsible for all the blue-eyed people alive on Earth today.

The team, whose research is published in the journal Human Genetics, identified a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the northwest coasts of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago.

Wikipedia again:

The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe giving the continent a wide range of hair and eye shades. Based on recent genetic research carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age.^[25] …

Recent archaeological and genetic study published in 2014 found that, seven “Scandinavian hunter-gatherers” found in 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, they also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and also contribute to lighter skin and blond hair.^[29] …

Genetic research published in 2014, 2015 and 2016 found that Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans, who migrated to Europe in early bronze age were overwhelmingly dark-eyed (brown), dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European.^[49] While light pigmentation traits had already existed in pre-Indo-European Europeans (both farmers and hunter-gatherers) and long-standing philological attempts to correlate them with the arrival of Indo-Europeans from the steppes were misguided.^[50] …

According to genetic studies, Yamnaya Proto-Indo-European migration to Europe lead to Corded Ware culture, where Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans mixed with “Scandinavian hunter-gatherer” women who carried genetic alleles HERC2/OCA2, which causes combination of blue eyes and blond hair.^[51][52][53] Descendants of this “Corded Ware admixture”, split from Corded Ware culture in every direction forming new branches of Indo-European tree, notably Proto-Greeks, Proto-Italio-Celtic, Proto-Indo-Iranians and Proto-Anatolians.^[54] Proto-Indo-Iranians who split from Corded ware culture, formed Andronovo culture and are believed to have spread genetic alleles HERC2/OCA2 that causes blonde hair to parts of West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.^[52]

Genetic analysis in 2014 also found that Afanasevo culture which flourished in Altai Mountains were genetically identical to Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans and that they did not carry genetic alleles for blonde hair or light eyes.^[55][51][52] Afanasevo culture was later replaced by second wave of Indo-European invaders from Andronovo culture, who were product of Corded Ware admixture that took place in Europe, and carried genetic alleles that causes blond hair and light eyes.^[55][51][52]

Dienekes writes:

An interesting finding [in Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans] is that the Luxembourg hunter-gatherer probably had blue eyes (like a Mesolithic La Brana Iberian, a paper on which seems to be in the works) but darker skin than the LBK farmer who had brown eyes but lighter skin. Raghavan et al. did not find light pigmentation in Mal’ta (but that was a very old sample), so with the exception of light eyes that seem established for Western European hunter-gatherers (and may have been “darker” in European steppe populations, but “lighter” in Bronze Age South Siberians?), the origin of depigmentation of many recent Europeans remains a mystery.

Beleza et al, in The Timing of Pigmentation Lightening in Europeans, write:

… we estimate that the onset of the sweep shared by Europeans and East Asians at KITLG occurred approximately 30,000 years ago, after the out-of-Africa migration, whereas the selective sweeps for the European-specific alleles at TYRP1, SLC24A5, and SLC45A2 started much later, within the last 11,000–19,000 years, well after the first migrations of modern humans into Europe.

And finally from Wikipedia:

In a 2015 study based on 230 ancient DNA samples, researchers traced the origins of several genetic adaptations found in Europe.^[46] The original mesolithic hunter-gatherers were dark skinned and blue eyed.^[46] The HERC2 and OCA2 variations for blue eyes are derived from the original mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and the genes were not found in the Yamna people.^[46] The HERC2 variation for blue eyes first appears around 13,000 to 14,000 years ago in Italy and the Caucasus.^[38]

The migration of the neolithic farmers into Europe brought along several new adaptations.^[46] The variation for light skin color was introduced to Europe by the neolithic farmers.^[46] After the arrival of the neolithic farmers, a SLC22A4 mutation was selected for, a mutation which probably arose to deal with ergothioneine deficiency but increases the risk of ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, and irritable bowel disease.

The genetic variations for lactose persistence and greater height came with the Yamna people.^[46]

To sum:

Skin: 10,000 years, 11-19,000 years, possibly arriving after blue eyes

Blond hair: 11,000 years

Blue eyes: 6-10,000 years ago, 13,000 to 14,000 years ago

It looks like some of these traits emerged in different populations and later combined as they spread, but they all look like they arose at approximately the same time.

Obviously I have neglected red and brown hair, green and hazel eyes, but the genetics all seem to be related.

Donald Trump and the Death of White Identitarian Politics

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Isn’t this the beginning?”

Mainstream American conservatives (perhaps all conservatives) are essentially reactive. Not reactionary, mind. That word has a different meaning in this context. Just reactive.

Liberals come up with new ideas, and conservatives react by opposing them. Liberals are high-class, in-party; their ideas make it into university curricula and influence the nation’s movers and shakers. By the time conservatives (who do not usually run in liberal circles, nor read much from university presses,) notice a liberal idea, it has already become quite widespread. And nothing makes an idea seem old and passe quite like having it suddenly associated with the out-party, the politically low-class and uncool folks who vote Republican.

BTW, if you are the “homophobic uncle” or “racist grandma” at family functions, try to turn this into a secret power: make ideas sound bad just by talking about them. Global warming? Caused by immigrant-driven population growth! Rising wealth inequality? Clearly capitalists would rather hire illegal immigrants than pay blacks a living wage–build the wall! You support Hillary Clinton because she voted for the Iraq war! Etc.

Report back to me if it works. I’m curious.

But back on subject: the upshot of this is that by the time the Republicans notice something and start making a big deal out of it, it is already too late. The trends are already in place and moving inexorably against them.

Back in the ’80s, we witnessed the rise of the “Christian right;” throughout the 90s, “conservative” and “Republican” were synonymous with “Evangelical Christianity.” They ran on platforms that included banning abortion, reinstating prayer in school, replacing the theory of evolution with Biblical creationism in school textbooks, and general opposition to “Godless liberals.”

They have failed pretty spectacularly. While they have made some piecemeal hacks at abortion, it is still basically legal through out the country. Creationism and “Intelligent Design” have both been struck down as unconstitutional due to being blatantly religious. And you probably know the story on prayer in school even better than I do.

(This is a little disappointing coming out of a party that could count among its recent accomplishments normalizing relations with China, nuclear reduction treaties with the Soviets, and overseeing the peaceful collapse of the entire USSR.)

Conservatives of the ’80s and ’90s could tell that the country was becoming increasingly secular, and reacted accordingly by trying to force it back to religiosity. Unfortunately for them, increasingly religious => fewer and fewer people who are even interested in their religious agenda. Despite the fact that abortion is still legal and school prayer is still illegal, even conservatives have moved on to other priorities.

During Bush II, Republicans launched a big push to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The measure failed; gay marriage is now not only legal, but constitutionally protected.

No one bothered with passing an anti-gay marriage amendment back in the ’50s, when Republicans could have actually gotten the numbers necessary to do it. Since the vast majority of people thought homosexuality was immoral, there was no push to legalize gay marriage, and so no one would have bothered with passing amendments against it. Once enough people were in favor of gay marriage to put it on the national agenda, the trends were clear: soon the majority of people would favor gay marriage, and an amendment did not pass.

It was the last, desperate thrashing of a cornered beast.

Today, people have noticed–finally–that America’s demographics are changing.

Of course, the time to do something about this was before the demographics changed. In 1900, the US was about 88% white, 12% black, and <1% Hispanic. Today, whites are 64%, blacks are still 12%, and Hispanics are 16% of the population. (Asians and others comprise an additional 8%.)

According to the census bureau, in 2012, American infants were 50% white and 50% non-white–about 25% of American children are now Hispanic.

The time to care about changing US demographics was 1965, when LBJ and Ted Kennedy’s Immigration and Naturalization Act quadrupled the number of (legal) immigrants per year from 250,000 to 1 million. 1975 and 1985 would also have been good years to start caring.

In 1950, there were 500,000 Hispanics in the US. Today, there are 5o.5 million. Even if you built a wall between the US and Mexico yesterday and deported 11 million illegal immigrants, that would still leave 39 million newcomers and their children whom you cannot get rid of.

By 2050, the US will be less than half white, and American children will be only 40% white.

Interestingly, the last time a Democrat won a majority of white votes was 1964–LBJ. Republicans have been the “white” party–though they may not have realized it–since 1968.

But this does not mean that whites vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans. Even blacks occasionally vote for Republicans–about 5% of them voted for Bush II. As whites near 50%, even 10% voting for the Democrats will consign Republicans to the losers, while an identifiably “white” party will have difficulty attracting non-white voters.

No matter how much effort the Republicans put into attracting white voters (and likely they will put a great deal of effort into it over the next few elections,) the numbers are moving against them.

You can’t maintain a majority with a shrinking % of the population. (Though, of course, we are talking about a process that will take decades.)

But we live in a two-party system, and the system will re-assert itself with a new set of balanced coalitions that can win, perhaps a system that pits Hispanics and Asians against whites and blacks, or some other random thing. (I am not guessing.) But that won’t happen until the Republicans are weak enough that Democrats can safely split.

 

Adoption as Genetic Strategy? Americans, Indians, and the Mongols

If a man adopt a child and to his name as son, and rear him, this grown son can not be demanded back again. …

If a man, who had adopted a son and reared him, founded a household, and had children, wish to put this adopted son out, then this son shall not simply go his way. His adoptive father shall give him of his wealth one-third of a child’s portion, and then he may go. He shall not give him of the field, garden, and house.

The Code of Hammurabi, lines 185-191

This post was inspired by a friend’s question: Can adoption of non-kin be a viable genetic (or memetic) strategy?

The full version of the question was more like, “Liberals are more positive toward interracial marriage, leading to more genetic variation in liberal communities. Could adoption be a similarly viable strategy for Conservatives, by increasing the ethnic diversity of the people who believe in their memetic values?”

Adoption could also work by just increasing sheer numbers of conservatives, even if it does nothing to genetic diversity.

My first thought was, “That sounds a lot like what the Amercan Indians were trying to do when they kidnapped and adopted white children, and I think Genghis Khan did something similar with the children of subjugated peoples.”

These customs stand in contrast to groups that have historically attempted to wipe out their enemy’s children, like the entire rest of the Mongol conquests, so I thought this question worth exploring.

But there’s a lot here that first needs unpacking. For starters, despite what people claim to believe, conservatives actually have very slightly higher interracial marriage rates than whites and are more likely to live in multi-ethnic households.

Let’s get some graphs.

The data is clear: atheists are the most hated minority in the country, followed by gun owners. (I jest; people are actually pretty polite to atheists, and you’re rude to a gun owner at your own risk.)

America’s most prominent ethnic division is actually between “liberals” and “conservatives,” a feature reflected in attitudes toward “gun owners” and “atheists.” Most Ameicans don’t think of this as an ethnic difference (even though it is,) just because they aren’t all that conscious of the different ethnic settlement patterns that influenced the modern political distribution.

Jayman’s map of the American Nations

Or to put it another way, there isn’t anything magical in the dirt in Massachusetts or South Carolina that has been turning the people there liberal or conservative for the past 300 years or so. The difference is mostly ethnicity–some ethnicities are just more liberal or conservative–but a lot of people (even people who loudly claim that there’s more intraracial than interracial variation,) regard all whites as one great big undifferentiated ethic mass that just happens to hold different opinions in different regions.

The majority of Americans (even the majority of very conservative Americans, however many of those there are,) claim to care more about one’s beliefs (and actions) than about superficial things like skin tone or the geographic origin of one’s ancestors.

This is anti-tribalism.

Tribalism (the human norm,) states that it is morally correct to overlook differences of opinion within your own group, (family, clan, tribe, nation, ethnic group, ethnie, thede, race, clade, take your pick,) and always side with your group against outsiders.

So Americans are perfectly okay with saying that they would not want to marry someone who holds belief they disagree with, but look askance at saying they have an ethnic preference. (Which explains why, even when people say things that are quite negative about outgroup members, they tend to quite vociferously object that they are not “racist” because their objection is not to the outgroup’s appearances, but to their behaviors.)

But what people say and what they do are different matters. According to Volokh:

…among families with step-children or adopted children, 11 percent of conservatives were living in mixed race households compared to 10 percent of liberals living in mixed-race households.

Similarly, 9.4 percent of Republicans living in step- or adopted families were in mixed-race households, compared to only 8.8 percent of Democrats in such families. (Again, this small advantage for Republicans is not large enough to be statistically significant).

And looking at all children instead of non-related children,

• 11.9% of conservatives live in mixed-race families compared to 11.4% of liberals.
• 9.5% of Republicans live in mixed-race families compared to 11.2% of Democrats.

Unfortunately, I am having difficulty finding statistics on the exact % of conservatives/Republicans who are in mixed-race marriages vs. the % of liberals in mixed-race marriages–we may posit that there is a difference between an interracial couple with three interracial children and a white person who, on their third marriage, marries someone who already has a half-white child, but just eyeballing the data, I don’t think there’s going to be a huge statistical difference.

(The difference between “conservatives” and “Republicans” in the data is due to may conservative blacks and Hispanics not voting Republican.)

The folks who are most strongly anti-miscegenation tend to be old people (over the age of 65,) and the folks who are most likely to be in mixed-race households, conservative or liberal, are the minorities themselves–many blacks and Hispanics are married to each other.

If you look only at whites, according to Volokh,

2.0% of non-Hispanic white conservatives live in mixed-race families compared to 2.4% of non-Hispanic white liberals. …

2.8% of non-Hispanic white Republicans live in mixed-race families compared to 0.7% of non-Hispanic white Democrats.

Assuming these numbers are correct…

61% of whites say they’re okay with intermarriage, but only about 2% of them have mixed or other-race children, including step and adopted kids. Given the number of minorities in the country + random chance, about half of the whites who say they’re okay with intermarriage ought to have a mixed-race family–30% of whites, not 2%.

Of course, these folks would object that it’s not that they don’t like minorities, they just happen not to be around any they’ve fallen in love with. It’s not about superficial skin tones; it’s just something else that happens to be incredibly well correlated with superficial skin tones, like paying exorbitant rents in order to live in neighborhoods without any minorities in them. But those Republicans, dude, they’re like super racist.

What about the numbers on adoption?

The Wikipedia page on Adoption starts out nicely, then descends into gibbering mush. It has, tragically, very little information on non-Western adoption customs, and not as much as I’d hoped for on historical adoptions in the West. For that, we’ll have to search elsewhere.

But we’re still going to make use of it for the stats:

Australia	270 (2007–2008)[52]	254,000 (2004)[53]	0.2 per 100 live births	Includes known relative adoptions
England & Wales	4,764 (2006)[54]	669,601(2006)[55]	0.7 per 100 live births	Includes all adoption orders in England and Wales
Iceland	between 20–35 year[56]	4,560 (2007)[57]	0.8 per 100 live births
Ireland	263 (2003)[58]	61,517 (2003)[59]	0.4 per 100 live births	92 non-family adoptions; 171 family adoptions (e.g. stepparent). 459 international adoptions were also recorded.
Italy	3,158 (2006)[60]	560,010 (2006)[61]	0.6 per 100 live births
New Zealand	154 (2012/13) [62]	59,863 (2012/13) [63]	0.26 per 100 live births	Breakdown: 50 non-relative, 50 relative, 17 step-parent, 12 surrogacy, 1 foster parent, 18 international relative, 6 international non-relative
Norway	657 (2006)[64]	58,545(2006)[65]	1.1 per 100 live births	Adoptions breakdown: 438 inter-country; 174 stepchildren; 35 foster; 10 other.
Sweden	1044(2002)[66]	91,466(2002)[67]	1.1 per 100 live births	10–20 of these were national adoptions of infants. The rest were international adoptions.
United States	approx 127,000 (2001)[68]	4,021,725 (2002)[69]	~3 per 100 live births	The number of adoptions is reported to be constant since 1987.

America has about 3 times the adoption rate as the rest of the West, and 15x Australia’s rate!

What’s up with that?

The most commonly given reason for wanting to adopt is infertility, and one of the big drivers of infertility is being overweight, (the other big one is being too old,) so perhaps Americans are just more prone to infertility.

We probably have a larger population of children in orphanages/foster care than the rest of the West, which might have inspired people over time to be more receptive to adoption.

Or perhaps we have a relatively unique view on the idea that family doesn’t have to be blood-related.

International adoptions, though they get a lot of press, are less than 15% of overall adoptions in the US; in Sweden, by contrast, they are over 99.999% of adoptions. (This may be due to few Swedish children being up for adoption.)

Also, according to Wikipedia, only 1.4% of ever-married American women adopt. (What about unmarried women?) So it sounds like the average adopting family adopts 2 or 3 kids.

 

Overall:

Unfortunately for our original inquiry, a 2% intermarriage rate is not going to do much, short term, to white genetics.

By contrast, intermarriage may be an effective strategy for forging genetic/memetic alliances among minorities.

An adoption rate of 3%, even if it were confined entirely to conservatives, isn’t doing much to overall numbers. As a memetic strategy, it is also constrained by the fact that political orientation, in adults, is determined largely by a combination of genetic personality factors and random chance.

The Shakers did an experiment along these lines: none (or extremely few) of the Shakers had children, because they didn’t believe in having sex. However, many Shakers adopted children, raising them in Shaker communities. No one forced these children to become Shakers, but it was certainly hoped that they would.

Most of them didn’t, and the Shakers have died out. (Technically, as of 2012, there were three elderly shakers left in Maine.) You just can’t replace yourself though adoption.

 

So tomorrow, let’s look at some cases where adoption might have played a larger genetic role: the Mongols, the Indians, and if I can find anything interesting on it, ancient Europeans.

Are “Whites” Real?

From Haak et al.

I may have given the impression the other day that a “race” exists if and only if it shows up as a singel color (or almost a single color) on Haak’s graph. Certainly mon-=color groups satisfy the requirements for genetic distinctiveness, but mon-chronicity is not a requirement.

Homogeneity is more important than mono-chronicity.

For starters, the number of colors in certain parts of Haak’s graph pobably hhas more to do with the number of ancient skeletons that have been analyzed htan net common ancetry–as you can see from the left side of the graph, scientists have analyzed the genomes of numerous ancient European skeletons (all of which show continuity with modern European people,) but they’ve analyzed rather few ancient sub-Saharan skeletons. This isnt’ ebcause they dislike ancient sub-Saharan skeletons or anything, but because the DNA content breaks down very quickly in the Sub-Saharan environment. Many of the groups here identified as mono-chromatic or nearly mono-chromatic may begin showing up as multi-chromatic as our powers of analysis continue to develop and we learn more about ancient human migrations.

But back to homogeneity. Let’s take a look at the Japanese. (One of the Yellow/Red groups on the right side of the graph.) The Japanese genome, like most east-Asian peoples’, composed of two distinct colors. And in this case, we even have names for these two groups, the Jomon and Yayoi people (not to be confused with the Yanomami or Yamnaya.) (Maybe we should institute a system where all cultures are given a set of coordinates based on physical location and era. EG, the Jomon would be J-35N,139E-12,000BC. Okay, maybe that’s not an improvement for ordinary conversaton, though when I’m trying to look up a group like the Evens, it would be.)

But this does not mean that the “Japanese” possess a great deal of ethnic diversity. The Japanese people are fairly homogenous–notice that the border between red and yellow is very smooth. Almost every Japanese person has the exact same % of Jomon and Yayoi ancestry as every other Japanese person.

This is because the merger of the Jomon and Yayoi cultures happened a long time ago, and the modern Japanese are descended from a single, homogenous population. The Japanese are a single people.

By contrast, take a look at the Evens, a Siberian group, (E-62°N,153°E-Today.) There is no homogeneity in the Evens’ genomes; they are a very mixed group in which different individuals have vastly different genetic heritages. The Evens may exist as a cultural, ethic, or linguistic group, but genetically they are a bunch of different things. The Turks, likewise, have a very choppy profile, though in this case the anomaly is easy to figure out: some “Turks” are Greek. The Ojibwa, Nama, and Yukagir are all jagged–these are groups with a great deal of recent mixing, in which many individuals are not closely related to other group members or share much DNA with them at all.

Zooming back out, let’s take a general look at the European cultures. From Greece through Spain, southern France through Ukraine, we see a smooth, three-color pattern. The blue is perhaps most concentrated in Lithuania, the orange in the Basque, and the teal in Greeks. There is a bit of purple in the south and red in the north east. But overall, the pattern is found, with consistency and evenness, throughout Europe, and not found outside of Europe.

Yes, the borders of Europe are fuzzy–Turkey, the Caucasus, and a variety of steppe-peoples are obviously related to some of the same guys as Europeans. But these do not show the same pattern as the Europeans, and beyond these border zones, the resemblance disappears entirely.

 

So, yes, we may speak of the Orange/Blue/Teal people, and call the “Whites” or “Europeans” if we so desire. They are a real genetic grouping, just like the “Japanese” and the “East Asians” and the Onge.

 

SJWs come out in favor of rape, violence against women

honestly, why the fuck do I even check FB anymore?

FromDarkMatter’s FB page: “DarkMatter is a non-binary trans south asian artist collaboration composed of alok vaid-menon and janani balasubramanian.”

They’re also, apparently, in favor of raping white women.

 

Oh, btw, while there is someone named EvolutionistX on Twitter, they’re not me.

Thoughts on Frost’s The Adaptive Value of “Aw Shucks”

Peter Frost recently posted on female shyness among men–more specifically, on the observation that adolescent white females appear to become very shy among groups of males and suffer depression, but adolescent black females don’t.

Frost theorizes that women are instinctually deferential to men, especially when they are economically dependent on them, and that whites show more of this deference than blacks because traditional white marriage patterns–monogamy–have brought women into more contact with men while making them more economically dependent on them than traditional African marriage patterns–polygyny–and therefore white women have evolved to have more shyness.

This explanation is decent, but feels incomplete.

Did anyone bother to ask the girls why they felt shy around the boys? Probably someone has, but that information wasn’t included in the post. But I can share my own experiences.

For starters, I’ve never felt–and this may just be me–particularly shyer around males than around females, nor do I recall ever talking less in highschool due to class composition. Rather, the amount I talked had entirely to do with how much I liked the subject matter vs. how tired I was. However, in non-school settings, I am less likely to talk when conversations are dominated by men, simply because men tend to talk about things I find boring, like cars, sports, or finance. (I suspect I have an unusually high tolerance for finance/economic discussions for a female, but there are limits to what even I can stand, and the other two topics drive me to tears of boredom. Sports, as far as I am concerned, are the Kardashians of men.) I am sure the same is true in reverse–when groups of women get together, they talk about stuff that men find horribly dull.

Even in classroom conversations that are ostensibly led by the teacher, male students may make responses that just aren’t interesting to the female students, leading to the females getting bored or having little to say in response.

So, do black adolescent girls and boys have more conversation topics in common than whites?

Second, related to Frost’s observations, men tend to be more aggressive while talking than women. They are louder, they interrupt more, they put less effort into assuaging people’s feelings, etc. I am sure women do things men find annoying, like ramble on forever without getting to the point or talking about their feelings in these weirdly associative ways. Regardless, I suspect that women/adolescents (at least white ones) often find the male style overwhelming, and their response is to retreat.

When feminists say they need “safe spaces” away from men to discuss their feminism things, they aren’t entirely inaccurate. It’s just that society used to have these “safe spaces” for women back before the feminists themselves destroyed them! Even now, it is easy to join a Mommy Meetup group or find an all-female Bible study club. But, oh wait, these are regressive! What we need are all-female lawyers, or doctors, or mathematicians…

*Ahem* back on subject, if testosterone => aggression, it would be interesting to see if the difference in black vs white females is simply a result of different testosterone levels (though of course that is just kicking the ball back a bit, because we then must ask what causes different testosterone levels.)

I suspect that Frost is on the right track looking at polygyny vs. monogamy, but I think his mechanism (increased time around/dependence on men => increase shyness) is incomplete. He’s missed something from his own work: polygynous males have higher testosterone than monogamous ones (even within their own society.) (See: The Contradictions of Polygyny and Polygyny Makes Men Bigger, Tougher, and Meaner.) Even if women in polygynous societies were expected to behave exactly like women from monogamous societies, I’d expect some “spillover” effect from the higher testosterone in their men–that is, everyone in society ought to have higher testosterone levels than they would otherwise.

Additionally, let us consider that polygyny is not practiced the same everywhere. In the Middle East, sexual access to women is tightly controlled–to the point where women may be killed for extra-marital sexual activity. In this case, the women are effectively monogamous, while the men are not. By contrast, in the societies Frost describes from Sub-Saharan Africa, it sounds like both men and women have a great many sexual partners during adolescence and early adulthood (which explains the high STD rates.)

If polygamy increases male aggression and testosterone levels because them men have to invest more energy into finding mates, then it stands to reason that women who have lots of mates are also investing lots of energy into finding them, and so would also have increased levels of aggression and testosterone.

Speaking again from personal experience, I observed that my own desire to talk to men basically cratered after I got married (and then had kids.) Suddenly something about it seemed vaguely tawdry. Of course, this leaves me in a bit of a pickle, because there aren’t that many moms who want to discuss HBD or related topics. (Thankfully I have the internet, because talking to words on a screen is a very different dynamic.) Of course, if I were back on the dating market again (god forbid!) I’d have to talk to lots of men again.

So I think the equation here shouldn’t be +time with men => +shyness, -time with men => -shyness, but +pursuit of partners => +aggression, -pursuit of partners => -aggression.

None of this gets into the “depression” issue. What’s up with that?

Personally, while I felt plenty of annoying things during highschool, the only ones triggered by boys were of the wanting to fall in love variety and the feeling sad if someone didn’t like me variety. I did feel some distress over wanting the adults to treat me like an adult, but that has nothing to do with boys. But this may just be me being odd.

We know that whites, women, and the subset of white women suffer from depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness at higher rates than blacks, men, and pretty much everyone else. I speculate that anxiety, shyness, disgust, and possibly even depression are part of a suite of traits that help women women avoid male aggression, perform otherwise dull tasks like writing English papers or washing dishes, keep out of trouble, and stay interested in their husbands and only their husbands.

In a society where monogamy is enforced, people (or their parents) may even preferrentially chose partners who seem unlikely to stray–that is, women (or men) who display little interest in actively pursuing the opposite sex. So just as women in polygamous societies may be under selective pressure to become more aggressive, women in monogamous societies may be under selective pressure to have less interest in talking to men.

Eventually, you get Japan.

Amusingly, the studies Frost quotes view white female shyness as a bad thing to be corrected, and black female non-shyness as a good thing that mysteriously exists despite adverse conditions. But what are the effects of white female shyness? Do white women go to prison, become pregnant out of wedlock, or get killed by their partners at higher rates than black women? Do they get worse grades, graduate from school at lower rates, or end up in worse professions?

Or maybe shy girls are perfectly fine the way they are and don’t need fixing.

 

Open thread / Links / Aaargh

So I wrote this great (by my standards, anyway,) post, and then there was a glitch and it disappeared. Totes frustrating.

So while I re-write it, here’s an Open Thread / Links post. Feel free to chit-chat, ask questions, whatever. Just keep things civil or whatever.

Some things I’ve been reading:

1. The incredible story of one couple’s trip across the Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. (I actually read this a while ago, but have been meaning to recommend it.) Story is notable in several ways:

A. The raw descriptions of what life is actually like in the heart of the DRC, where even Coca Cola can’t go because there are no roads.

B. The perspectives on what has happened since the end of colonialism (basically, the collapse or outright destruction of colonial infrastructure like roads and buildings):

“We also pass a ruin of what once must have been a grand building. The walls are marked with logos from a Belgian University. This must have once been some scientific study centre of sorts.”

 

C. It was the first thing I’d read in about a decade that gave an actually positive impression of religion.

 

2. Real History of the World, which is kind of like my blog, but devoted to the conspiracy theory that all human life began in Africa and then spread out from there to the rest of the world. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “Isn’t that, like, the accepted scientific consensus on the origins of humanity?” Why yes, yes it is. But Real History of the World thinks that “they” (“albinos”) are trying to keep you from knowing that.

Their site is part actually accurate, part inaccurate (jfc, “Black Celts” are not black-skinned people, they are Welsh people with dark hair like Catherine Zeta-Jones:

This is what the old books mean by “Black Celts”)

and part insight into the irrational paranoia of people who hate you.

This website is a good demonstration, btw, why I don’t believe conspiracy theories.

 

3. More perspectives on people who hate you (or at least me): Black Girl Dangerous’s This Is What Rihanna’s BBHMM Video Says About Black Women, White Women and Feminism

Still from Rhianna’s music video about torturing a white woman for money

“Yes, there are images of a woman being kidnapped, held hostage, and even hung upside down from the ceiling while topless. These are the kinds of images we see a lot in violent revenge films. They can be upsetting and harmful. I didn’t like seeing them here. But they’re also not the entire story.

Let me tell you what I see when I watch this video: I see a black woman putting her own well-being above the well-being of a white woman. …

if a white woman has to suffer some so that she, a black woman, can survive, so be it. After all, white women have been surviving on our suffering for hundreds of years.” –Black Girl Dangerous (Her bold, not mine.)

Feminists declaring themselves “allies” with people who beat, rape, and murder women is, of course, as much a betrayal of feminism’s goals as Anarchist communities getting taken over by Marxists.

 

4. Rushton’s Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (second abridged edition.)

Rushton lays out an impressive array of data in support of his theory that different branches of the human family tree (whites, blacks, and Asians,) mature at different rates (eg, different gestation lengths) and have different r/k reproduction strategies.

On a similar note, “Multiplication is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children is actually an anti-racist book. I only read the first few pages before I had to leave the bookstore, but the author had some interesting, Rushton-supporting information about cross-cultural infant development rates, including early crawling in African infants.

 

5. Next, I am totally going to finish Moby Dick.

Black Friends and White Tears

This is a story as related to me by a white acquaintance. For the sake of narrative simplicity, I’m going to give the characters completely made-up names.

Anne had worked for several years in an office, (I don’t recall specifically what profession, but something white-collar,) where she had happily befriended several co-workers. One of these co-workers happened to be a black woman, Betty.

One day, Anne happened to overhear Betty and another black co-worker, in the breakroom, discussing interracial friendship.

“White people never have black friends,” said Betty. “Every time I hear a white person claim they have a black friend, I know they’re a racist.” The other co-worker agreed.

Anne went home and cried.

Had her friend never thought they were friends? How could anyone take her friendship as proof of racism?

White people want to have black friends; it lets them prove to themselves (and others) just how non-racist they are. It makes them feel better about themselves and assuages some portion of guilt. To have a black friend makes a white person feel like a good white person.

(As emotions go, guilt seems does not seem to function very logically.)

Black people, by contrast, have no particular desire to prove how non-racist they are.

I suspect that many black people find it really annoying when whites try too hard to befriend them.

Whites like Goth and Metal because Whites are Depressives

On a global scale, poverty is probably a bigger predictor of suicide. But within the US there are some clear looking racial differences in depression:

Yes, I know that suicide and depression aren’t the same word. But I figure “depression” is kinda tricky to accurately document, (Is he really depressed, or just kinda bummed?), whereas suicide seems pretty reliable. And since whites and Asians probably have the best access to mental health care, the numbers probably aren’t being skewed by lack of Prozac among the poor.

I remember an article I read a year or two ago, but can’t find now, which found a correlation between depression and intelligence. More or less, the implication as I interpreted it, is that “depression” is functionally a slowing down of the brain, and during intellectual tasks, people who could slow down and concentrate performed better–thus, concentrating and depression look rather similar.

There are other, additional possibilities: people from further north get depressed because it’s dark and cold all winter/as an adaptation to the winters, and so the Finns listen to a ton of Death Metal:

 

Death Metal Bands Per Capita throughout the World

I don’t have a map for Goth music; does anyone listen to Goth anymore? Hot Topic seems to be doing fine at the mall.

Or maybe depression is an evolutionary adaptation to make people more peaceful and cooperative by internalizing their aggression instead of killing other people. Here the difference between whites and blacks seems like a point of evidence, since whites seem to kill themselves at higher rates than they kill others, while blacks kill others at higher rates than they kill themselves. Perhaps aggression/depression can be toggled on and off in some way, genetically or, in the case of folks with bi-polar, in a single individual.

Asians, I suspect, are also depressives, but have lower aggression than whites,  so they don’t kill themselves very often. Also, I don’t know what kinds of music they like.

 

White Women’s Tears

Did you know that white women cry a lot? And that it annoys the crap out of black women? I didn’t, either, but “White women’s tears” is a thing SJWs and anti-racists actually talk about. Apparently black women hate it when white women cry.

Some quotes from around the internet:

Serena Williams Drinks, Bathes In, And Makes Lemonade With White Tears:

NOTE: That subtitle is from the article, NOT from me. The person who wrote the article is claiming that Serena Williams makes tear-ade, not me.

Some people even write scholarly articles on the subject, eg, “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress People of Color” (PDF)

Betcha didn’t know that crying is a form of oppression.

The general sentiment is not just that white women cry a lot, but also that they do it specifically to avoid getting blamed for racism–like “crocodile tears,” implying that the emotions behind them are not real:

From the Urban Dictionary

 

Personally, I’d never given tears a second thought (other than not particularly liking them,) until I stumbled upon these sorts of comments. If I cry, it’s because of emotions, not because I’m trying to avoid blame.

But I suspect these black ladies are actually on to something. White women probably do cry more than black women. No, not to get out of being called racist; they cry because they’re biologically inclined to deal with conflict by crying.

Peter Frost speculates that whites, particularly white women, have been selected for neotenous traits, like pale skin and hair. (Frost has a ton of posts on the subject, so I’m not going to link to them all; you can just go read his blog if you want the details on his argument. I’m summarizing as relevant here; please forgive me if I’ve accidentally mixed in some arguments from West Hunter; it’s hard to keep my thoughts tagged with original authors for too long.)

This implies that white women are more neotenous than black women.

In many traditional African societies, women basically raise their children on their own/with the help of their kin networks, leading probably to a genetic preference for polygyny rather than monogamy and a personality type that we might characterize as strong, independent women. As I have previously noted, these societies happen to be very likely ancestral to much of the US’s African population.

By contrast, the cold, harsh winters of the northern European climate forced people into monogamous relationships in which the men did a lot of the back-breaking agricultural labor. Actually, Frost argues that it started before the advent of agriculture, but with mate selection on the ice age steppes:

“It seems that this evolution took place between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago—long after modern humans had arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago. This is when Europeans acquired their most visible features: white skin, multi-hued eyes and hair, and a more childlike face shape. In my opinion, such features were an adaptation not to weak sunlight but to a competitive mate market where men were scarce because they were less polygynous and more at risk of early death. This situation prevailed on the European steppe-tundra of the last ice age, whose high bio-productivity made possible a relatively large human population at the cost of a chronic oversupply of mateable women. The result was an unusually intense degree of sexual selection.”

The problem with living in close proximity to men is that men are violent and aggressive. Luckily, men appear to already have a neural subroutine for decreasing aggression: look/act like a baby. Being around babies or small children appears to make men less aggressive/reduces the quantity of the sorts of hormones that lead to aggression, which leads in turn to men being less likely to murder their own children.

The development of neotenous features in women thus both increased the chances of men bonding with them and wanting to care for them (the neural subroutine for bonding with and caring for children hopefully does not require discussion,) and  decreased their chances of being victims of male aggression as proximity increased.

Crying is chiefly a characteristic of babies and small children. Grownups cry far less; men have historically prided themselves (for better or worse) on not crying.

Tears are, for white women, an effective means of decreasing white male aggression. I’m not saying they’re a conscious strategy (though of course sometimes they are.) I’m saying that for thousands of years, white women who cried more were less likely to die childless than women who cried less. So most of the time, when they start to cry, it’s unintentional–they can’t help it. That’s just how they’re wired.

(Note: You don’t have to buy Frost’s line of reasoning to believe that white women cry more than black women; Greg Cochran attributes neotenous white features to selective pressure on white men to behave themselves in large social groups–the idea that “civilization” “domesticated” people; Rushton links longer infancy and childhood and late retention of neotenous features to brain development. There are many potential explanations, but one thing that does seem to be widely agreed upon is that whites are more neotenous than blacks.)

White women cry even when race isn’t being discussed (though this may not be obvious if your only interaction with white women is via SJW/anti-racist communities, where racism and women dominate almost all discussions.) White women love “tear jerker” movies, romance novels and women’s fiction, and all designed to make them cry. They weep over the Pope’s latest pronouncements. They cry about their hair and their weight and their makeup and just about anything, really. They probably even cry if you criticize their lab results. (Of course, if it’s a white dude who’s done nothing to contribute to the advancement of humanity but win a Nobel Prize in Physiology / Medicine for his discoveries of protein molecules that control cell division who says that white women cry [let’s not kid ourselves about the skin tones of most women in science,] then you’re an evil sexist woman-oppressor, rather than a brave social justice warrior helping create our new and better future by calling out racist white women for derailing the conversation.)

Black women, by contrast, haven’t been subject to the same neotenizing pressures. They simply aren’t wired to cry at the drop of a hat. To them, white women are acting like whiny babies:

and thus the contempt for “white women’s tears.”