Category: Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity

The SNPs of Primitive Man

In The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas wrote:

In interpreting these observations, it must be strongly
emphasized that the races which we are accustomed to
call higher races are not by any means and in all re-
spects farthest removed from the animal. The European
and the Mongol have the largest brains; the European
has a small face and a high nose — all features farther
removed from the probable animal ancestor of man than
the corresponding features of other races. On the other
hand, the European shares lower characteristics with the
Australian, both retaining in the strongest degree the
hairiness of the animal ancestor, while the specifically
human development of the red lip is most marked in the
Negro. The proportions of the limbs of the Negro are
also more distinct from the corresponding proportions in
the higher apes than are those of the European.

When we interpret these data in the light of modern
biological concepts, we may say that the specifically hu-
man features appear with varying intensity in various
races, and that the divergence from the animal ancestor
has developed in varying directions.

Boas wanted us to believe that no group is necessarily more primitive than another.  Today, due in no small part to Boas’ life work, it is assumed that anyone disputing this ‘modern consensus’ must be an evil cretin.  Even for some white racialists, it is considered vulgar or gratuitously pejorative to say, for example, that negroes are primitive. 

It must be understood, though, that primitive is a relative term that can be based on objective measures.  When we say negroes are primitive (in the biological sense), we mean they are closer to our last common ancestor (LCA) than are other groups.  Such empirical claims must be based on their scientific merit, not the prevailing zeitgeist or group feelings.  I agree with Boas when he wrote the following in the preface to the 1938 edition of TMoPM:

Still worse is the subjection
of science to ignorant prejudice in countries controlled by
dictators. Such control has extended particularly to books
dealing with the subject matter of race and culture. Since
nothing is permitted to be printed that runs counter to the
ignorant whims and prejudices of the governing clique,
there can be no trustworthy science. When a publisher
whose pride used to be the number and value of his scien-
tific books announces in his calendar a book trying to
show that race mixture is not (sic) harmful, withdraws the
same book after a dictator comes into power, when great
encyclopedias are rewritten according to prescribed tenets,
when scientists either do not dare or are not allowed to
publish results contradicting the prescribed doctrines,
when others, in order to advance their own material in-
terests or blinded by uncontrolled emotion follow blindly
the prescribed road no confidence can be placed in their
statements. The suppression of intellectual freedom rings
the death knell of science.

The traditional way to rank groups in terms of proximity to the LCA is based on anatomical features.  As shown by Boas, though, such methods can result in people with different motivations cherry picking features for their argument.  A better measure, then, may be a genome-wide comparison that counts the alleles shared with the LCA (ancestral alleles).  Based on the HGDP SNP data, I created the following ‘hate plot’ showing the percent of ancestral alleles by human groups:

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 03:03 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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From Egalitarianism to Runaway Inequality.

In Race, Ethnicity and Nation, (2007) Peter Wade states that “The impact of genomics on race studies has generated a good deal of controversy, particularly in the U.S.A. The key question has been the old chestnut of whether ‘race’ has any biological reality. Gilroy holds out hope that ‘the meaning of racial difference is being reconstructed by the impact of the DNA revolution and of the technological developments that have energized it’, although he recognizes that ‘genomics may send out the signal to reify “race” as code and information’ and that it will take some work to produce a ‘post-racial’ version of what it means to be human. Foster and Sharp capture the ambivalent results of genomics in a world before that work has been done: ‘It was hoped by some that the sequencing of the human genome would undermine the view that racial and ethnic classifications have biological significance. This position was based on the prospect that by showing that there are numerous genetic similarities across all social classifications and no genetic features that are entirely unique to any particular racial or ethnic population, genomics would provide definitive evidence that race and ethnicity are social, not biological, classifications. Ironically, the sequencing of the human genome has instead renewed and strengthened interest in biological differences between racial and ethnic populations, as genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility, environmental response, and drug metabolism are identified, and frequencies of these variants in different populations reported.’”

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Monday, February 28, 2011 at 01:18 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Partitioning intra- and inter-racial genetic variation

We are all familiar with the mantra of the anti-racist when confronted with facts about race: there is more genetic variation within a race than between races.  Is this true?  It depends on how one measures genetic variation.  Using Fst or AMOVA, the split is typically 85/15 between intra-racial and inter-racial variation.  But these measures are based on allele frequency comparisons averaged over individual genes.  It’s hard to reconcile an 85/15 split with the following PCA plot, based on 250,000 SNPs:

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Monday, October 25, 2010 at 07:23 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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The eternal nation in its rural hearth

Science’s capacity to explain the “what” but not the “why” has excelled itself again in a new study of population genetics reported under the title Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe.  It is published in the European Journal of Human Genetics.  Coordinated across ten European institutions, the study is, in fact, focussed on three different area of bucolic Europe, as the abstract explains:

The genetic structure of human populations is important in population genetics, forensics and medicine. Using genome-wide scans and individuals with all four grandparents born in the same settlement, we here demonstrate remarkable geographical structure across 8–30?km in three different parts of rural Europe. After excluding close kin and inbreeding, village of origin could still be predicted correctly on the basis of genetic data for 89–100% of individuals.

All four grandparents being born in the same settlement is probably about as tight as one could reasonably expect to frame an investigation into rural population structure.  The result - that up to 100% of study subjects could be gene-mapped to within 8km of their familial villages - reveals not merely an increasingly refined technical capacity on the part of the researchers, but a remarkable portrait of European blood and soil.

I don’t think I would be presuming too much upon the study’s methodology to say that the portrait endures because, while a certain number of individuals move away and the rural population as a whole is declining, others move into these areas far less frequently.  It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing a wider picture of conflict between the modernity, dynamism and cosmopolitanism of urban life - a life which is heterogeneous and destabilising in character - and their opposites among the fields of green and gold.  It is worth remembering that, irrespective of whether one is born to town or country, in a healthy, monist society everyone’s forefathers will have worked the land in all weathers with forks, graips, shovels, hedge knives and hoes, brewed the beer, baked the bread and butchered the livestock, or milled flour, made pottery, worked iron, and taken up arms alongside his brothers when bidden.  Timelessness underpins everything.  And while science cannot tell us why the genes of the people who did all this, and which we all carry today, should be preserved and not lost to Neo-Marxism, globalism, Christian universalism and Jewish millenarianism, yet we are them, we serve them, and in the turn to our selfhood they are no longer a mystery or a mere portrait.

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, October 22, 2010 at 05:55 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Antisemitic LBK Undead Blitz Megalithic France

I’ve previously warned of the threat presented by the racist LBK (proto-KKK?) culture to Civilization As We Know It.  If only unbiased scientists like Stephen Jay Gould were alive today to broadcast to the 125 IQ coeds with big bazooms the true interpretation of these new “data”:

The widespread distribution of the N1a lineage in Early and Middle Neolithic northwestern Europe may indicate genetic continuity from Mesolithic populations.  This scenario would support a Mesolithic contribution to the earliest Neolithic of Atlantic Europe. This would imply that the N1a lineage was already common in indigenous north European populations and that the spread of the Neolithic was principally the result of cultural diffusion. Although so far the N1a lineage has not been encountered among late European hunter-gatherers in central and north Europe (Bramanti et al., 2009; Malmstro¨m et al., 2009), it is worth noting that less than half of the hunter-gatherers’ paleogenetic data come indeed from the pre-Neolithic period (predating LBK expansion). Finally, no paleogenetic data currently exist for the Mesolithic period in Western Europe. This prevents any conclusion being drawn about N1a occurrence during the Mesolithic period in those regions.

Posted by James Bowery on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:36 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Debunking a racialist myth about the genetic variation between dog breeds

In a previous entry, I made the following comment:

For dogs it’s:

Canus (genus) lupus (species) familiaris (subspecies).

There are 37 subspecies of Canis lupus.

Breeds don’t qualify as subspecies.  The genetic differentiation between dog breeds is tiny (don’t know exact percentage, but it’s much less than between human races).

This is not true. 

I’ve heard this bit about limited genetic differentiation in dogs repeated a number of times in racialist circles.  I remember Jared Taylor using it in a debate with Tim Wise. 

Steve Sailer wrote:

Dog genome research progress has been fairly slow, partly for economic reasons, but partly, I suspect, because dogs aren’t really that variable, strange as it may seem. Without breeding, dogs in the tropics seem to wind up medium size, short-haired, and yellowish, reddish, or brownish.

My hunch is that genetic diversity in dogs will prove to be narrow but deep, focusing on a small number of genes that vary sharply, whereas genetic diversity among humans will prove broader but shallower than among dogs, involving more genes than among dog breeds, but not as sharply defined. [ed- this last part might be true- there may be fewer SNPs in dogs, but I’m not sure about this.  It is certainly true that indivisual SNPs have much larger phenotypic effects in dogs, which is one reason why a comparison between dog breeds and human races could be considered inappropriate]

The myth seems to originate from the book Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Frank Miele and Vincent Sarich (which I also read several years ago).  Miele writes:

I (Miele) then raised the question of dog breeds. I’ve liked dogs since I was a kid and am now on my third (the first two bullterriers and now a Great Dane).  I’ve also been to a number of dog shows and even took my first bull terrier to an AKC championship.  In addition, I’ve read widely both in the popular literature on dogs as well as in scientific journals that cover canine behavior genetics.  I pointed out to Vince that there were huge differences between dog breeds, both in morphology and in behavior.  How different were they genetically?  Had the same methodology been applied to sorting out dog breeds as was described for humans in Chapter 5?  With such large morhphological and behavioral differences, shouldn’t there be large DNA differences betwen the breeds? (It is now well known that the morphological and behavioral characteristics that distinguish breeds from one another are genetically bases.)  Vince’s surprising answer was that (at that time) not only were there no known DNA differences between the breeds, but these methods couldn’t even distinguish between domestic dogs and wolves.  Although it was possbile to identify individuals with the same microsatellite approach that has been in use for the past two decades, only this year (2003) have researchers been able to distinguish between a few dog breeds by DNA differences.

Miele also repeated parts of this in an online essay published on Vdare in 2008:

Despite minimal genetic differences,  human physical racial differences are clearly observable.

Likewise for dogs. But only recently has genetic analysis been able to distinguish between breeds—or even between dogs and wolves.

Vince’s surprising answer, though, was very misleading.  Or Miele misinterpreted what he was told.

In reality, dog breeds are much more genetically diverse than human races, and they can be classified very accurately.

In a 2004 paper in Science, Parker et al. showed that very accurate classification is possible (410 of 414 dogs were correctly assigned to their breed).  They also showed by Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA, a technique often used for estimating genetic variability using microsattelites and repeats, although it can also be used for SNPs) that 27% of genetic variance is between breeds.  Using SNP data, they calculated an Fst distance between the breeds of 0.33.  A recent paper on a genome-wide SNP analysis on 919 dogs from 85 breeds, showed by AMOVA that 65.1% of genetic variance was within breeds, 31.1% between breeds, and 3.8% between breed groups (they defined 10 different groups:  Spaniels, Retrievers, etc.).  They also that as few as 20 diagnostic SNPs can be used to accurately classify dogs into their breeds.

How does the genetic variation in dogs compare to that of humans?  AMOVA analysis of humans shows that approximately 85% of variance is between individuals, 5% is between populations in the same racial group, and 10% is interracial (btw, this number is also close to the updated Fst measurement of Xing et al.).  The average Fst distance between human races is approximately 0.15.

So, we can see that dog breeds are actually much more variable than human races.  The myth of limited genetic diversity prevalent in racialist circles (to which I also fell victim) needs to be dispelled.

Posted by Dasein on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:29 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Invasive subcon keeps it ‘empirical’

Razib writes the following, in response to a recent paper highlighting the exquisite structure detectable at the village level in Europe:

The utility of this sort of data collection and analysis in the modern world is an empirical question. On the one hand many Europeans are relatively less inclined to move in comparison to Americans. And yet the breaking down of borders with the European Union and the likely need for a more productive economic sector on that continent because of changing demographics point to greater mobility, migration and mixing, which would make these sorts of studies of only near-term use. Of more interest to me are going to be fine-grained analyses of social groups. For example the Indian caste system. Last fall in the Reich et al. paper the authors seemed to be indicating the likelihood of a lot of between population variance groups these groups. It doesn’t matter if a particular Bania sub-caste from Gujarat is scattered across the world, from Kenya to England to the United States. They may all still marry amongst a set of individuals who hale [sic] from the same original few villages.

Good times.

No, an empirical question is one which can be answered by direct observation.  The direct observation here is the exquisite genetic structure of Europeans. By this leap of illogic he can quickly arrive at the conclusion that such studies are ‘only of near-term use.’  Razib wants to keep things ‘empirical’ so people don’t ask important questions, like “Is this worth preserving?”.  This way, Razib can celebrate the ‘good times’ that are the detection of village-level structure of subcons in White countries that are being transformed by 3rd world immigration.  But people will wake up to this arrogant, invasive subcon.  The conservationist instinct is one of the strengths of Europeans.  Making the case for returning invasive species to their lands of origin will be one part of doing what me must to remain who we are.

Posted by Dasein on Monday, July 26, 2010 at 05:33 PM in Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests,  Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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A theory on trust and phenotypic diversity in Europe

Thus swyved was this financieris wyf

Browsing through the news in England last week, I came across an article detailing the latest relationship woes of Boris Johnson.  First some excerpts, then a theory:

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 01:41 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity,  Social Sciences
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Craig Venter debunked by his own DNA, once again

Craig Venter, recently made in/famous by his work on creating synthetic bacterial life, has long been infamous in racialist circles for his wild statements about human biodiversity, including one about all humans being “essentially identical twins.”  Following the initial release of the draft sequence for the human genome, few scientists did as much as Venter to downplay human genetic diversity. 

For the first few years after the release of the human genome sequence, the consensus figure was that any 2 people have 99.9% of their DNA sequence in common.  You still hear this number cited today by people who are not aware that Craig Venter himself, or rather, his DNA, showed in 2007 that this was an underestimate.  The 0.1% was based predominantly on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms, i.e. single base pair differences), but neglected structural variation like CNVs (copy number variants).  The authors showed 4.1 million structural variants (22% of which were structural) that covered 12.3 megabases (74% of which involved structural variation).  The end result was a new estimate of 99.5% similarity between 2 human genomes.

Now, a recent paper, again using Venter’s DNA, shows that 99.5% was also an underestimate.  The authors report almost 41 megabases of new structural variation in the Venter genome.  When ones accounts for differences to the reference human sequence due to SNPs (0.1%), inversions (~ 0.3%), and indels/CNVs (~ 1.2%), the percent similarity between human genomes is now estimated to be ~ 98.4%, in the range of previous estimates of human/chimpanzee similarity.

Posted by Dasein on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 03:43 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Non-parametric Analysis of Population Structure

I recently had a chance to look over this paper which n/a had pointed out a while back on his blog.  Unlike popular Bayesian clustering approaches such as structure and BAPS, the authors’ new method (Maximization of Genetic Distance, MGD) does not make assumptions about intra-population or inter-locus allele distributions, namely that they are in Hardy-Weinberg and linkage equilibrium.  In this sense, the method is analogous to statistical methods like Wilcoxon rank-sum (Mann-Whitney) and Kruskal-Wallis, which are non-parametric versions of the t-test and one-way ANOVA, respectively (these methods are non-parametric in that they do not assume a specific underlying distribution for the data, in these cases Normal). 

MGD uses a simulated annealing algorithm to find the partition that maximizes the average genetic distance between populations.  In this respect, it is very similar to traditional clustering methods like k-means.  One interesting feature of the method is that it permits use of different distance measures.  The authors use Nei’s D, which, while superior to Fst/Gst in that it is less sensitive to the level of heterozygosity, has the disadvantage of approaching infinity under certain conditions.  Jost’s D, a more recently developed measure, may prove superior here.  In simulation studies, the method performs better than structure or BAPS when the number of clusters is large or population structure is more complex.  However, only structure gives the correct clustering solution when Fst is as low as 0.01.

Perhaps the most interesting result from the paper is the following, which compares the clustering solutions of structure and MGD over different numbers of desired clusters (2-7).  The data set used is the HGDP microsatellite markers from Rosenberg’s 2002 paper.

(Af: Africa; E: Europe; ME: Middle East; CSA: Central-South Asia; EA: East Asia; O: Oceania; Am: America; Kal: Kalash)

MGD appears to be more robust, in the statistical sense, than structure, as would be expected from a non-parametric method.  The Kalash are no longer a structural outlier.  At K = 7, we get clusters corresponding to the main geographic regions of the HGDP populations.  Perhaps most interesting is the result for MGD at K = 6.  Here, we see the Middle Eastern populations emerging as a new cluster, while Oceanians and East Asians remain together in one cluster.  According to Cavalli-Sforza’s Fst distance matrix (Table 2.3.2 in HGHG, or Table 3.2 in Salter’s book), the distance between Europeans and non-European Caucasoids is 0.0155, while the distance between East Asians and New Guineans/Australians is 0.0734 (and 0.0724 for Pacific Islanders).  The results with MGD suggest some higher-level genetic difference between Europeans and Middle Easterners that is not being captured by Fst, which is an imperfect measure of genetic distance.  As a caveat, it’s worth noting, though, that the Fst distance between non-European Caucasoids and Europeans is approaching the limits of the MGD method. 

Based on the results of this paper, in particular the nonexistence of the Kalash as a separate cluster using MGD, it is questionable as to whether structure always provides the ‘most correct’ answer.

Posted by Dasein on Monday, June 7, 2010 at 08:00 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Seeing the Structure for the SNPs

Single locus based measures of genetic variance are the source of much of the misunderstanding about the existence of race and ethnicity.  They have also been used by politically motivated scientists to discredit the concept of race.  When arguing online with race-deniers, race realists often refer to A.W.F. Edward’s article on “Lewontin’s Fallacy” as a means to counter the claim that race cannot exist because most of the genetic variability (single locus based) is within human groups.  There was also a recent demonstration by Harpending (see Appendix) that the diversity loss of having all races spare one vanish from the earth would be the same as that from having all members of a race spare 2 couples vanish.  Graphic rebuttals are often PCA (or MDS) plots or structure clusters from studies that use hundreds or thousands of SNPs or microsattelites.  Recently, I came across the following, in a figure from a 2008 Nature paper, which nicely shows how deceptive statements about racial commonalities can be when based on single locus measures:

At the single locus level, 81.2% of SNPs can be found in all 5 major races.  However, when allelic correlation structure is considered, only 12.4% of haplotype clusters are common to all. 

This figure makes a good addition to the rebuttal toolbox for online discussions with race-deniers.

Posted by Dasein on Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 08:02 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age

The book Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (2008) has numerous academic contributors—most or all on the Left. Their collective angst stems from the wide popularization of several key developments from genetic research. First, racial differences are very important when it comes to how people are treated medically. Genetic differences affect response to medicines and other treatments. It is difficult to argue that we are all the same when there are medical treatments directed to persons of one race or another. Forensic science, prominent in television and movies, shows that race can be determined from a bit of DNA.

In a recent series of papers, population geneticists argue that the genome holds the key to medically and forensically significant biological differences among human racial and ethnic populations. Increasingly, genetic variation among human populations—races, ethnicities, nationalities—is an object of keen biomedical interest.

Second, there is a great deal of interest in genealogy. What really bothers race deniers is that Blacks have a high level of interest in “geographic ancestry”: the use of genes to determine not only their race, but also their tribal origins (even though there is no real difference between a race, a tribe, etc.). “Geographic ancestry”, “population group”, or “continent of ancestry”, are code words used by liberals to avoid the reality of race. They wish to protect Blacks from the stigma of racial differences; at the same time blacks are embracing genes to determine their racial background.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 09:54 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Selected behavioural traits by race

It would be interesting to build up as detailed a picture as possible of selected behavioural traits by race, and even within-race.  We have, I think, a pretty good idea of the sociobiology of Europeans.  We talk a lot about issues of individualism and altruism, intelligence, civilisational capacity, faith, sexual mores, and so on.  The tendency is, though, to see other racial and ethnic groups through the prism of their competition with us - some more than others, of course.  When we contemplate their evolutionarily-selected behavioural traits, which would likely not be adaptive for us, we may be tempted to express the strong emotional signals that necessarily accompany maladaptiveness.

I would like to avoid that kind of “noise” and, if possible, collate through the comments thread as many ideas as we can muster about the traits of Ashkenazics and other Jews, Eurasians, East Asians, South Asians, Mexicans, Arabs, North Africans, Sub-Saharans, and so on.

For example, one can see that Han Chinese place a very high value on conformism which appears to include a strong desire for approval from authority, and on honour which in the negative form of face-saving may be linked to the same desire.  Japanese, which might in large measure mean Yamato, are perhaps weaker than Han on conformism but stronger still on honour.  Even so, Japanese parents will allow school teachers to beat any sign of rebellious individualism out of children who are scarcely more than infants (damn, you see what I mean about moral interpolation).

These are both populations which exhibit the adaptiveness in a northern hemisphere, cold-climate environment of high-K strategies for intelligence.  But how different the outcome is from the European experience, and how fascinating that difference.

How fully can we explicate that difference on its own terms?  And what of other group differences?

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 06:07 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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The Specter of Genetic Communism

Racial cohesion is a result of different factors, important ones being similar physical appearance and behavioural patterns (whose aggregate phenotype is a ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’).  The difference in physical appearance between races is obvious and results in implicit negative attitudes towards racial others.  Aggregate behavioural differences can also be stark and are a major cause of the displacement of native Whites via ‘White Flight’.

One of the main weapons in the elite arsenal to weaken criticism of race-replacement has been the PC mythology on race:  that it doesn’t exist, that differences are only skin deep, that differences are the legacy of White racism, and corrective social programs can equalize achievement.  Although researchers have long ago taken the hammer to many of these idols, their worship in the popular press and political class continues.  The torrent of data coming from projects like HapMap, however, now portends a coming twilight.  Heretical musings bubble up in establishment organs like Slate and the NYT (though orthodoxy still prevails overwhelmingly).  Social programs, like No Child Left Behind, continue to fail.  The general avoidance or dismissal of heritable differences between human groups by the left (who do the elite’s ideological programming) is becoming less viable as a strategy for suppressing dissident views on race.

The crumbling of the dominant racial mythology and increasing racial tension undermine the legitimacy of Western elites who impose, or fail to prevent, race-replacement.  As Whites become increasingly displaced and dispossessed, their discontent weakens the foundations of the current political structure.

What is to be done?

Continued...

Posted by Dasein on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 02:35 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity,  Science & Technology
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Pretty picture of Europe

Right here.

From Nature:-

Genes mirror geography within Europe

Understanding the genetic structure of human populations is of fundamental interest to medical, forensic and anthropological sciences. Advances in high-throughput genotyping technology have markedly improved our understanding of global patterns of human genetic variation and suggest the potential to use large samples to uncover variation among closely spaced populations1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here we characterize genetic variation in a sample of 3,000 European individuals genotyped at over half a million variable DNA sites in the human genome. Despite low average levels of genetic differentiation among Europeans, we find a close correspondence between genetic and geographic distances; indeed, a geographical map of Europe arises naturally as an efficient two-dimensional summary of genetic variation in Europeans. The results emphasize that when mapping the genetic basis of a disease phenotype, spurious associations can arise if genetic structure is not properly accounted for. In addition, the results are relevant to the prospects of genetic ancestry testing6; an individual’s DNA can be used to infer their geographic origin with surprising accuracy—often to within a few hundred kilometres.

From Dienekes’ post:-

The realization that not only major continental races, but also ethnic groups are biological entitites goes against the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy. According to this orthodoxy, European nations are artificial cultural constructions whose members share a “myth” of common origins; they are “constructed” products of the last few centuries; ethnic identification is a subjective notion of self-identity, rather than an objective notion of ancestry and homeland.

It now appears that while European nations are not races, they are, nonetheless, biological populations, occupying specific positions along the Caucasoid genetic continuum, and distinguishable from most other European nations, if not always their immediate neighbors.

And, below the fold, the bulk of JWH’s post, with substantial quotes from the original paper:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 06:08 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Sperm and egg donor registries.

An article in the Chicago Tribune discusses the need for setting up a registry of egg and sperm donors. The argument for such a need seems a bit odd. The danger it seems is that a donor may have a condition that manifests itself later in life, like colon cancer, and they should be able to inform those children who carry the donors genes of the condition.

I don’t see how that is any different from parents who have family histories of ailments going ahead with having children. It is fairly accepted I assume that few of us are without at least some serious deleterious mutations of this sort or that. A registry however would be a good way to track quality donors by lineage, keeping track of the quality of the offspring, and using certain family lines as regular donors.

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 06:01 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Are Jews White?

Are Jews White?

by

Robert E. Reis

The Southern Poverty Law Center has declared war on Professor Kevin MacDonald, but the SPLC has not declared war on Jared Taylor and American Renaissance.

The SPLC has good things to say about American Renaissance and about Jared Taylor.

The SPLC mentions that American Renaissance consistently deletes readers’ posts critical of the Jews. The SPLC describes American Renaissance as “100% clean” white nationalism.

Jared Taylor and American Renaissance cater to modern non-Orthodox Jews by claiming that Jews are white.

E. Michael Jones believes that the American Renaissance is “the white man’s version of the NAACP, which is to say, one more organization which manipulates the race issue in the interests of the revolutionary Jews. The main purpose of the American Renaissance is to convince deracinated Protestants that Jews are white, and, therefore, no threat to their interests.”

If non-Jewish white people see Jews as white people in the context of the relationship between whites and blacks in America or in the context of non-white immigration to white countries, then Jews disappear from the radar screens. Ordinary white people will not suspect Jews and Jewish groups of having hidden motives when they make policy recommendations.

Are Jews white? Or are they a genetic clustering that is “acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them the enemies of the whole human race” (I Thess 1:15).

Continued...

Posted by Robert Reis on Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 06:44 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Eugenics in a most unlikely place.

It is common practice, now that eugenics in moving quickly within the science of reproductive genetics, to dismiss eugenics as pseudoscience. In fact, eugenics never ceased to play its part in demographics as it went from negative eugenics to Planned Parenthood, to preimplantation diagnosis, to sperm banks and attempts at cloning. Along with this goes the unfolding testing of individual’s genetic code revealing their personal genealogy or racial makeup.

In Darwin Day in America: how our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science by John G. West, 2007, a very typical approach is used to delegitimize eugenics:

“For decades, eugenics was embraced as legitimate by America’s leading scientists and scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Critics of eugenics, meanwhile, were stigmatized as antiscience and religious zealots. Yet the critics turned out to be right.”

In most books that mention eugenics, this is the standard rebuttal—a factual sounding statement without substance. Eugenics is a very broad area of scientific inquiry and breeding practice—as simple as picking a healthy mate to assure healthy children to selecting a defective fetus to be aborted.

Then I came across a book that reveals just how progressive Israeli eugenics is in comparison to Germany, with most modern countries in-between. A Life (Un)Worthy of Living: Reproductive Genetics in Israel and Germany, by Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, 2007, shows that the Israeli attitudes are closer to the progressive era attitudes that prevailed 100 years ago. As a modern, progressive state that embraces science and eugenics, it is quite absurd to claim that there is anything but solid science driving the genetic revolution, and one cannot separate eugenics from this scientific advancement. In Israel, the purpose is to have only healthy children, have as many children as possible, while giving preference to the life of the mother over the fetus where the interest of each is in conflict.

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 04:36 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Witherspoon et al. Important Race Study

The following is an essay that was originally submitted to the journal American Renaissance for publication. They declined to run it; the reason given that it was too similar to other race-genetic essays published there in the past. Nevertheless, I believe the findings discussed here to be of extreme importance. Thus, I am reproducing the proposed essay here, with minor revisions to remove it from its previous “Amren” context.

JWH

Racial Genetic Similarity and Difference: A New Study

One scientific topic that I have previously discussed is the biological validity of the race concept. This, unfortunately, has become necessary, because some people, perhaps with political motivations, assert, contrary to the evidence, that “race does not exist” and that race is a “social construct” with “no biological foundation.” These views have been effectively refuted in various forums, and more objective researchers support the race concept as well, if for no other reason the important medical implications of racial differences.

One popular and misinterpreted finding that has been eagerly grasped at by those who preach that “race is not real” is derived from the work of Richard Lewontin, which demonstrated that more genetic variation exits within rather than between groups. I have previously explained how Lewontin’s finding in no way discredits the race concept. However, there are “anti-racist” activists who still claim, based on their misinterpretations of population genetics, that individual Europeans (“whites”) can be more genetically similar to sub-Saharan Africans (“blacks”) than to other Europeans. Until now, there has been no formal proof that this assertion is incorrect. I am now pleased to say that a recent scientific paper has delved into this very topic and that the findings of this paper clearly demonstrate that the race deniers are wrong. First, let me give a brief introduction for the sake of clarity.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 09:31 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Kinship and Fertility

by JW Holliday

Guessedworker has expressed interest in the paper An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples, Helgason et al., Science 319:813-816, 2008, from the deCODE Genetics research group.  Therefore, a few comments are appropriate.

This paper demonstrates that, in an analysis of Icelandic couples born between 1800 and 1965, there is a “significant positive association” between kinship and fertility; maximal reproductive success was observed for couples with kinship relatedness at the level of third or fourth cousins.

The authors conclude that these differences in reproductive success (i.e. fitness*) have a “biological basis” - that is, a genetic basis.

I’d first like to reproduce several comments from the paper (blockquote) with some of my own (plain text) comments included.  I will then briefly cite some reviews of this paper, and then, finally, will reintroduce the concept of outbreeding depression which was previously discussed at “Majority Rights” with respect to the pro-miscegenation propaganda of Alon Ziv.

First deCODE:

Although Icelanders have experienced a socioeconomic transformation from 1800 to the present (14, 15), accompanied by a reduction in family size and decreasing kinship between couples (Table 1), essentially the same relationship between kinship and fertility was observed at the beginning and end of this 200-year period (fig. S2). By estimating kinship between spouses at a genealogical depth of up to 10 generations, it was possible to examine the association with fertility and reproductive success at a very fine scale. Thus, for example, there is a statistically significant difference in the number of children produced by couples related at the level of sixth versus seventh cousins (P = 1.4 x 10–7). Relationships at this genealogical distance are rarely known to the couples or their families and acquaintances in their social environment and are unlikely to influence factors such as age at the commencement of reproduction or the practice of consanguineous unions to preserve family property (4, 16).

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, February 11, 2008 at 03:42 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Obama for president?

About a year ago I read Barack Obama’s book Dreams from my Father. To keep it short his Kenyan father while at a university in Hawaii met his to be Irish mother. The first part of the book is about that relationship or lack of one, and how his father left to go back to Kenya and his mother traveled in search of helping the world’s needy, though he spent very little time talking about his mother. He was raised almost entirely by his White grandparents, except for a short spell in Indonesia where he lived with his mother and her new Indonesian husband.

When he became a teenager he discovered his blackness, and with the help of other black friends he became the angry black man, rebellious, blaming whitey for his problems, and offended that he was not part of the Black culture. I have little doubt that if he becomes President, we will see initiatives to return to making equal outcomes for Blacks one of his primary agendas. His bringing the country together will fail miserably, in my opinion. The major damage he can do is to appoint judges who are in favor of entitlements for minorities, though the party regulars may be able to keep the more radical or unqualified from be appointed.

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 08:20 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Misology in America Part 1

Misology in America
By Robert E. Reis

Misology is the hatred of objective knowledge gained by the scrupulous use of the scientific method when it contradicts the political goals, ideology or religious faith of the misologists.

Misologists dominate the discussion of public policies in several areas in the modern world.

In the United States misologists predominate in the media, the universities, the schools, and among the elected politicians and the clergy.

Can I prove that misologists rule the United States?

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Posted by Robert Reis on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 11:32 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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IQ Matters

IQ Matters
By
Robert E. Reis

The following is a summary of we know about the distribution of intelligence as measured by IQ tests among the genetic clusterings of humankind.

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Posted by Robert Reis on Thursday, October 11, 2007 at 06:48 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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No Diabetes Pride Parade

By
Robert E. Reis

The preferential homosexuality seen in human males is not common among the males of tens of thousands of other species living on our planet.

As animals we are engaged in a continuous struggle against competing species for survival, space, and evolutionary success. Victory is measured by passing one’s genes into the future.

A preference for sterile sexual activities does not make evolutionary sense.

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Posted by Robert Reis on Tuesday, October 2, 2007 at 01:40 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Staying Alive

Staying Alive
By
Robert E. Reis

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” -  Mohandas Gandhi

In 1972 the medical establishment had decided that infectious diseases were being eradicated in the developed world. It decided the future of medicine was finding solutions for the problems causes by non-infectious diseases.

The consensus was wrong on two counts. It did not foresee AIDS, Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola, Marburg, antibiotic-resistant TB, “flesh-eating staph, hepatitis C, and Rift Valley fever. Stomach ulcers and some forms of cancer and some forms of heart disease, definitely; all cancers and all heart diseases and diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia are possibly caused by infections.

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Posted by Robert Reis on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 06:34 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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