Category: Anthropology

Race in humans: A reply to the “Statement on Race” by the American Anthropological Association (AAA)

This is a discussion section for the race FAQ at the wiki, which presently doesn't discuss all the things that it should, but it will be periodically updated. Suggestions for improvement and criticism will be appreciated. If you offer criticism, stick to scientific issues, and you better have the requistive scientific background.

Population of Shangdong, China in 500 B.C. closer to European than Asian

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/17/9/1396

Genetic Structure of a 2,500-Year-Old Human Population in China and Its Spatiotemporal Changes

Li Wang*{dagger}, Hiroki Oota*, Naruya Saitou{ddagger}, Feng Jin§, Takayuki Matsushita|| and Shintaroh UedaGo,*

*Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;
{dagger}Department of Medical and Animal Genetics, Institute of Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;
{ddagger}Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan;
§Laboratory of Human Genetics, Institute of Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; and
||Doigahama Site Anthropological Museum, Houhoku, Japan

Abstract

To examine temporal changes in population genetic structure, we compared the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences of three populations that lived in the same location, Linzi, China, in different periods: 2,500 years ago (the Spring–Autumn era), 2,000 years ago (the Han era), and the present day. Two indices were used to compare the genetic differences: the frequency distributions of the radiating haplotype groups and the genetic distances among the populations. The results indicate that the genetic backgrounds of the three populations are distinct from each other. Inconsistent with the geographical distribution, the 2,500-year-old Linzi population showed greater genetic similarity to present-day European populations than to present-day east Asian populations. The 2,000-year-old Linzi population had features that were intermediate between the present-day European/2,500-year-old Linzi populations and the present-day east Asian populations. These relationships suggest the occurrence of drastic spatiotemporal changes in the genetic structure of Chinese people during the past 2,500 years.

Hmmmmmm.  You know me, I’m thinking about political implications, not mtDNA, right now.

:D

Book review of “Breeding between the Lines” by Alon Ziv

This is a book review of “Breeding between the lines: Why interracial people are healthier and more attractive,” by Alon Ziv, 184 pp., Barricade Books, 2006, ISBN: 1569803064. My preliminary impression that the book most likely doesn’t have decent data in it is confirmed.

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Oh for G-d’s sake: insane miscegenation propaganda

Interesting new book out this week

Breeding Between the Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive

by Alon Ziv

Book Description This book combines sex, race, health and genetics in a daring new theory. Written with accessible, direct prose, anecdotes, analogies, and examples from human and animal studies, it is sure to spark debate in a massive way.

Jay Phelan, Author of Mean Genes: Breeding Between the Lines is that rare book that is insightful and revolutionary, while remaining compulsively readable and downright fun.

Alon Ziv, Alon Ziv, why is that name pinging my Jewdar?

A member of the group least likely to miscegenate (with the world’s highest mean IQ as a direct result) persuades the rest of us to miscegenate in an insightful, revolutionary, readable and downright fun book.

Yay, more jewish psyops.

Addendum by J Richards

Svy, I simply have to add a few things to this entry, and I don’t think you would mind.

Here is the cover of the book by Alon Ziv.

Is the mixed race woman a match for white beauty?

Alon Ziv has to be insane if he believes that the broad-nosed and masculine mixed-race woman looks better.  Can people in their right mind believe that attractive white women can be improved upon if non-whites are absorbed into the white gene pool? 

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The evolution of blond hair and blue eyes among Nordics

Peter Frost has written a cool paper on the evolution of blond hair and the origin of the remarkable diversity of eye and hair color in Northern and Eastern Europeans.  His paper will be published in the upcoming March edition of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.  Frost is spot-on in nailing intense sexual selection as the primary reason for the high prevalence of blondness, which is of recent origin (less than 20,000 years old), and the unusual diversity of hair and eye color among Northern and Eastern Europeans.  Whereas Frost’s proposed reason for the intense sexual selection is open to debate, the conclusion that intense sexual selection is implicated is almost certain.  I am including his paper in this post, but will first mention some important implications.

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Christmas is Racist

People get emotional about the public display of the Nativity Scene.  Maybe the real reason it is so emotionally charged is not that it is sectarian but racist.

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Of Penguins, Paleolithic Gender Ratio and White Fertility

Observing the reproduction of emperor penguins in March of the Penguins got me thinking.  Did paleolithic white males suffer a similarly high mortality rate during winter?  If so mating-age gender ratio may be the most under-rated controller of white fertility.

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Ecological correlations between IQ, skin color, temperature and GDP per capita

Here is some cool research that is about to be published in the journal Intelligence, though this research is unlikely to get a lot of press in the MSM.  The researchers (Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa) computed the correlations between the predominant skin color in 129 nations, GDP per capita, high and low mean temperatures in the summer and winter, and skin color.  The correlation between predominant skin color and population IQ was − 0.92!  The meat of the data is presented in the Table below. 

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The evolution of civilization

A little while back, I put up a post about Melanesians (and the people of New Guinea in particular) that speculated on why Melanesians seem pretty bright despite their having been in the Stone Age within living memory.  A reader has offered the following interesting observations on the factors which may have affected their evolution and the evolution of civilization in general:

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Were the original Indo-Europeans from Europe, Asia or India?

I don’t know how well-founded the assertions below are but I offer them for discussion.  The text is translated from German by Germans who could obviously do with help from a native English-speaker

To define the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Aryans it is necessary to mind the results of modern archaeology, linguistic and anthropology. After a long discussion we know today, that the homeland of the Indo-Aryan tribes is not in India, Anatolia (?) or central Asia. The Indo-Aryans are of European origin!

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Eurasians more attractive than ugly Caucasians, not average Caucasians: a reply to Gillian Rhodes

Recently, John Jay Ray posted part of a media report on a study alleging greater attractiveness ratings of Eurasian faces compared to Caucasian and Asian faces.  Surprisingly, John did not comment on the methodology used in the study, but its ridiculous absurdity needs to be exposed. 

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Racial variation in some parts of the skull involved in chewing

At some point, our ancestors made the switch to eating cooked food.  This allowed people to get by with a less robust chewing apparatus, and the chewing apparatus did indeed become less robust.  Therefore, an examination of racial variation in the chewing apparatus will surely reveal some interesting aspects of racial history. 

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The health consequences of race mixing

The health consequences of race mixing among living organisms could be neutral, beneficial or harmful.  This issue has been difficult to address in humans, but data from random, population-based studies have started coming in, and here we consider the first such dataset. 

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The facial proportions of beautiful people

We consider Saira Mohan again; this time with funky lines drawn on her face.  The lines are part of a unisex beauty mask/archetype that allegedly depicts the facial proportions of the most beautiful face, irrespective of race.


Figure 1: Saira Mohan with a superimposed beauty mask that is the brainchild of Stephen Marquardt of Marquardt Beauty Analysis.

The beauty mask appears to fit Saira Mohan reasonably well.  If the mask proportions apply to beautiful faces irrespective of sex or race, then the mask likely has some interesting biological significance.  Let us examine this issue. 

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Does race mixing increase physical attractiveness?

Does race mixing increase the likelihood of physical attractiveness?  Armand Marie Leroi, a developmental biologist at Imperial College, London, seems to think so, and as proof he offers the example of the “world’s most beautiful woman”: Saira Mohan, whose mother is French/Irish and father is Hindoo.

Figure 1: Saira Mohan on the cover of Newsweek, Nov. 10, 2003 (article here). 

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Does race exist? The stance of “Scientific American”…

The billboard shown below, the work of artist Nancy Burson, was displayed at the corner of Church and Canal streets in New York City in 2000.

Figure 1: An example of Nancy Burson’s artwork arguing that there is no gene for race.

Burson is right, there is no gene for race; however, there are genes for race, a cluster of alleles to be precise, the correlation structure of which defines race. 

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