i think that i’m maybe — maybe — starting to notice a paradoxical pattern in clannishness. maybe. time will tell.
and the paradox is: on the one hand, we have peoples who behave clannishly generally favoring their close and extended family members (when they actually live amongst them) over the broader society (the commonweal) — egs. nepotism, corruption, feuding, etc. but on the other hand, i think that those very same clannish people are often more willing than non-clannish peoples to sacrifice one of their own under certain circumstances — it seems especially when it will benefit themselves and/or other members of the extended family/clan. i could be wrong about this. data needs to be compiled.
some examples:
– honor killings: as were discussed in yesterday’s post. and we know from before that honor killings — which are pretty extreme as far as sacrificing a member of the family goes — are most common in the arab world/maghreb/mashriq/afghanistan+pakistan where father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage is preferred and has the highest rates — and fbd marriage pushes towards the highest inbreeding rates.
– the pashtuns: fbd marriage practitioners again. here’s a pashtun proverb via steve sailer:
“When the floodwaters reach your chin, put your son beneath your feet.”
presumably that’s not meant to be taken literally — presumably! but it does sound rather indicative of a willingness to sacrifice even one’s kids if necessary.
– the myddletonians: a middling clannish population from shropshire, england, in the seventeenth century (see here):
“Though placed toward the back of the church, tenant farmers, particularly those who boasted generations of ancestors in the parish, held much honor. They lost this honor, however, if they suffered rituals of public humiliation. So while often ignoring private vices, tenant farmers always made an effort to prevent overt mortifications. Worried middling parents sent their juvenile delinquents far from the surrounding countryside, not to rehabilitate them spiritually or even to save their skins, but to remove their likely and shameful jailings and hangings from the sight and recording of neighbors. A Myddle tavern-keeper, Thomas Jukes, exiled a larcenous son by placing him into apprenticeship with a roving juggler who happened to pass through the village. Michael Brame, of a long-standing Myddle family, came to Myddle following the death of his brother and brother’s wife in order to preserve the family’s leasehold and also to raise his brother’s son William. William robbed meat from several neighbors’ houses. The Braine clan took the only possible action: ‘at last he was sent away,’ noted Gough, ‘I know not whither.’”
disowned. in a serious way!
this all seems rather counter-intuitive — you’d think that clannish peoples would be less willing to sacrifice one of their family members since, most of the time, they seem overly concerned about favoring them. i mean, that’s why their societies are so dysfunctional (to different degrees). but i think it makes a sort-of upside-down-and-backwards sense if you think of these behaviors as altruistic in the strictest biological sense of the word. these behaviors are an example of “inclusive inclusive fitness,” i think. from yesterday’s post:
“you’re not sacrificing your *own* fitness to benefit another’s (whose genes you share), you’re sacrificing *someone else’s* — but you share a lot of genes with them, too, so in a way you *are* sacrificing the fitness of your own genes, just not those in your own person.”
another clannishness paradox that i’ve mentioned before is that individuals from clannish societies often feel very independent. here, for example, is taki on the greeks:
“The highly individualistic Greek is too self-seeking to submit easily to others’ dictates. His unruliness has helped him survive through the centuries of oppression, as well as to rise above adversity. But it has also made him unaware of the advantages of a communal spirit and true democratic attitudes. This has created a climate where cheating is a way of life, where the highest and lowest of citizens do not hesitate to use dishonesty, especially in politics.”
yeah. well, the misunderstanding there is that greeks are “individualistic.” they’re not. they’re clannish. and because they’re clannish, they don’t like outside interference — they’re not going to “submit easily to others’ dictates” and they’re certainly not going to have “a communal spirit and true democratic attitudes.” clannish people — like southern libertarians — don’t want outside interference (like from the gub’ment), so they seem individualistic, but what they are, in fact, is independent-minded — but in a clannish sort of way. the true individualists — the non-clannish peoples — tend to be communally oriented. and they are rare.
paradoxical, no? (^_^)
anyhoo — Further Research is RequiredTM.
(note: comments do not require an email. *ahem*)
hbd chick 
The simplest explanation is that survival is a dual game. Cooperative effort is necessary against man, beast, and emergency, so the tribe/clan must survive or there is no point in having progeny. OTOH, one must be competitive within the tribe, or resources gradually go to others. It is not so much a paradox as a balancing act. If a child’s behavior does indeed put the tribe at risk, the child must go, actively or passively. Clans try to enforce this, with only partial success, as the powerful members can keep even renegade children somewhat protected. But this leads to the more common reason for distancing from the child – survival within the clan. Renegade children imperil the acquisition of resources by the rest of the family. They become unable to find suitable mates for their children, favors are no longer granted.
I think of Tevye, and Hasidic Jews at the balancing point of how strictly the requirement to regard the child marrying outside the faith as dead will be enforced.
We are rare. ? ! What percent of the world’s population is (relatively) outbred? Is it a white thing?
I think of Tevye, and Hasidic Jews at the balancing point of how strictly the requirement to regard the child marrying outside the faith as dead will be enforced.
OT but an interesting fact: Nearly all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Shicksas.
This is not a paradox. In both cases the clannish individual is simply putting the needs of the group above the needs of individuals. He is willing to sacrifice much of himself for the sake of the clan. He is just willing to sacrifice other members for the sake of the clan as well.
It is not too hard. You got stop thinking like a Westerner. ^_~
@luke – “We are rare. ? ! What percent of the world’s population is (relatively) outbred? Is it a white thing?”
well, it’s the nw europeans, the semai, maybe the bushmen (i still haven’t read about them). i don’t know about any/many others yet.
The might also be related to IQ and levels of aggression. Stupid, aggressive populations murder their daughters. Smarter ones figure out that a less brash approach may be a better idea. Why murder when you can exile?
@had chick “i think that those very same clannish people are often more willing than non-clannish peoples to sacrifice one of their own under certain circumstances ” Seems to me that of course it’s the case. My sense of light communities is that they are very strict, claustorphobic, totally lacking it privacy. Your life is not your own. You have to do what the group wants you to do. Biologically it may be necessary to have a tightly controlled society, but nobody ever said it was any fun … unless of course you place a high value on love.
Who is outbred? I would say 1) The Inuit 2) All urban populations 3) No other population that has survived very long
I think, you can add suicide bombing to the list. There it’s even voluntary most of the time. The bomber (often an underachiever in his family) sacrifices himself to raise the social status of his family, and hence the marriage prospects of his siblings/cousins.
Just a thought.
@ hbd chick: “..maybe the bushmen..”
I haven’t seen the roh figures, but they look inbred if lack of diversity of HLA haplotypes is anything to go by (11th HLA Workshop). Sample size was rather small though..
re: i think that those very same clannish people are often more willing than non-clannish peoples to sacrifice one of their own under certain circumstances
True, I think. OTH, consider the Battle of Midway, when an entire squadron of airmen was sent on a mission for which it would have insufficient fuel to return to home base. Or consider the Battle of Britain, when air crews went up day after day with a high chance of never returning. Clannish societies can produce nothing like that. Unless you count suicide bombers. Speaking of which, how do you explain suicide bombers?
The might also be related to IQ and levels of aggression. Stupid, aggressive populations murder their daughters. Smarter ones figure out that a less brash approach may be a better idea. Why murder when you can exile?
I think this is your bias clouding your judgment. You’re Israeli, and honor killing is an Arab thing, so you’re classifying it as something stupid people must do.
Objectively speaking, there’s nothing inherently stupid about honor killing daughters. In every species males fight to maintain territory against male immigrants. Successfully maintaining territory means dominating the access to the breeding females on that territory. Honor killing daughters and other female relatives helps prevent foreign males from breeding on the territory. Honor killing arises because the male right to fight other males to the death is suppressed by a government or some external force.
The ancient Roman Republic allowed fathers to commit “honor killings”. Fathers were allowed to kill their wives and children for any or no reason whatsoever. The Romans of the Republican Period certainly weren’t “stupid”.
yeah. well, the misunderstanding there is that greeks are “individualistic.” they’re not. they’re clannish. and because they’re clannish, they don’t like outside interference — they’re not going to “submit easily to others’ dictates” and they’re certainly not going to have “a communal spirit and true democratic attitudes.” clannish people — like southern libertarians — don’t want outside interference (like from the gub’ment), so they seem individualistic, but what they are, in fact, is independent-minded — but in a clannish sort of way. the true individualists — the non-clannish peoples — tend to be communally oriented. and they are rare.
I don’t think that anyone thinks that the Greeks are individualistic. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone say that. Taki doesn’t always use English terms completely accurately.
I don’t really think there’s a paradox because I don’t think that either of the “clannish” and “non-clannish” are particularly “independent minded” or “true individualists”. I would say both are group oriented, domesticated in different ways to be communally oriented.
A truly individualist, independent minded human would be a very “wild” type man, solitary, territorial, etc. Like wild cats and bears or something. He would not be very social. Social contact would largely be limited to sexual relations. He would rely on tools and perhaps animal symbionts.
Similar to how libertarians perceive their out-group distrust as simple independence, it can be said that white nationalists and race realists consider their own clannishness to be nothing more than self-determination. Such folks, largely Southern, apply tribal sensibilities to all Northwest Europeans (as well as the entire species) without even fathoming the idea that some NW Euro groups might not share said traits.
This universalist interpretation of clannishness could lead to otherwise liberal White Americans marching in lockstep with Dixie as their numbers decline and ethnic conflict worsens. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. My sympathies lie with the ethno-patriots, after all.
IHTG: The might also be related to IQ and levels of aggression. Stupid, aggressive populations murder their daughters. Smarter ones figure out that a less brash approach may be a better idea. Why murder when you can exile?
Perhaps, but intense aggression can just be a result of extreme inbreeding. Han Chinese, while possessing a higher “IQ ceiling” than Arabs, are not as inbred. And does inbreeding not depress IQ across the board?
[…] most recent post is clannish paradox? which is very insightful. The part I wanted to focus in on, however, isn’t a new insight of […]
I don’t know anything else but that you can easily let go of one replicator for the sake of keeping your other replicators working in harmony if you want to maximize their numbers. Especially when the replicators have the ability to spawn multiple replicators, who also spawn replicators. We are the replicators of course.
I mean just from a simple math perspective, provided you want to maximize the number of your kin, one sacrifice for the group doesn’t really decrease their numbers, if people are making many kids already, and there is some limited resource keeping the numbers down.
I would have to think the limited resource is mostly money
But the reality is I don’t know. I would very much like to know what happens to all those kids in a typical family for a few generations, let’s say in the Middle East. I suppose many of the children of a large family eventually just cannot support a large family of their own? Someone dies at some point, someone doesn’t get married or just cannot afford it?
A greater willingness on occasion to sacrifice one’s own is due to the immense importance applied to family. If a Jordanian tribesman kills someone due to reckless driving, or an Italian mob boss’s nephew expressing his adolescence by spitting at a rival mob boss or a Jewish family in Boro Park has a child with an IQ of 75, the immediate and secondary family will suffer to the sins of the defective one and he needs to be dealt with by his own people. His own people will be as merciful as they can be but with the safety of the entire family or tribe at stake, at times one must be sacrificed. That sacrifice can take the form of anything from sending the flagrant one away to a public apology/shaming to personal liquidation but the least means required will be affected for the sake of the rest of the body politic in question.
http://www.exoticjewishhistory.com
IHTG on 09/04/2013 at 4:37 AM
Stupid, aggressive populations murder their daughters. Smarter ones figure out that a less brash approach may be a better idea. Why murder when you can exile?
honor killings include the men. but if your point is about inappropriate punishments and the sanctity of life… you would have to include jail population, capitol punishment (we’ve killed quite a few innocents), war, extremely hazardous working conditions (creating a bridge or the panama canal), and so forth, into the discussion.
in all these cases the society is choosing death for its members in one way or another.
from a psychological perspective maybe the paradox can be explained as follows. You love yourself and anything you feel is an extension of you, ie your clan and family. Helping others who are similar to you is a way of preserving yourself. But when there is a deviant in the family, a part of yourself that threatens your core sense of self, you ruthlessly get rid of it to preserve your identity. its like a love-hate thing, which is… another paradox.
but still… that doesn’t explain a parent (metaphorically) standing on their son in order to have their head above the water during a flood. thats just selfish detachment.
now that I think about it, maybe we are having trouble with this “paradox” because we are being too idealistic about things. we see that the clannish guy will be extra helpful to his family member. we then like to think that he wants what’s best for the family member he just helped. We say he has love for that family member. but that is our ideal. in reality he does not always do what’s best for that family member. the love-hate paradox I mentioned above is a paradox if you think that love is about wanting what’s trully best for the other person. but the reality is that most people don’t express love in that fashion. the person they “love”, they will turn against if something important is taken away in the process of “love”.
I still haven’t really explained why people do what they do, but I think I put some things into perspective.
A possible rationalization:
Honor killings etc. are a way of filtering out genes which do not promote in group altruism. It identifies people who do not follow the will of the clan, who for some reason are not altruistic enough, and gets rid of them. In group altruism is rewarded with greater rates of reproduction, and lack of in group altruism is punished with preventing reproduction. The actions are in this light actually consistent with each other.
One other thing. Honor killings for sex outside of marriage is consistent with enforcing father’s brother’s daughter as the social norm. In that it’s almost certainly the case that the extramarital sex which led to the honor killing was not between first or second cousins. It also acts to shield the clan from the DNA of outsiders infecting their offspring. As before, encourage inbreeding, discourage outbreeding. It’s complementary, not contradictory.
Objectively speaking, there’s nothing inherently stupid about honor killing daughters. In every species males fight to maintain territory against male immigrants. Successfully maintaining territory means dominating the access to the breeding females on that territory. Honor killing daughters and other female relatives helps prevent foreign males from breeding on the territory. Honor killing arises because the male right to fight other males to the death is suppressed by a government or some external force.
You’re making a whole bunch of assumptions here.
Exiling your daughter somewhere far, far away is smarter than killing her because you gain the advantage of possibly spreading your genes far and wide, but still punish her and prevent loss of honor inside your own community.
Also, why are you assuming honor killing is about “immigrants”? The boy next door who isn’t her cousin that you chose for her isn’t an immigrant.
@avi – “The simplest explanation is that survival is a dual game. Cooperative effort is necessary against man, beast, and emergency, so the tribe/clan must survive or there is no point in having progeny. OTOH, one must be competitive within the tribe, or resources gradually go to others. It is not so much a paradox as a balancing act.”
yes. but this is really a clannish thing — it’s not something you find much of in outbred societies — or you don’t find it to such extremes anyway.
and the more inbred, the more clannish, and the more extreme the ejection from the clan turns out to be: the seventeenth century myddletonians – sent away from the village; today’s arabs – killed.
@avi – “Hasidic Jews at the balancing point of how strictly the requirement to regard the child marrying outside the faith as dead will be enforced.”
yeah, that’s a good example. thanks! (lots of uncle-niece marriage amongst hasidic jews, of course. don’t know how long they’ve been doing that. -?- )
@ihtg – “Why murder when you can exile?”
but exile to where in, for instance, tribal arab (or afghani) society? society just isn’t structured that way, because it’s so … tribal.
edit: i guess selling into slavery would’ve been an option. never heard of that happening today. wonder if it ever happened in the past?
@linton – “My sense of light communities is that they are very strict, claustorphobic, totally lacking it privacy. Your life is not your own.”
quite so.
@linton – “Who is outbred? I would say 1) The Inuit 2) All urban populations….”
i’ll bet you $1.50 that that’s a NO for the inuit. too much feuding, apparently (an indicator of inbreeding and, therefore, clannishness). (~_^)
and not all urban populations, either — think of all the big cities in the arab world, egypt, middle east, pakistan, afghanistan … even india (esp. in the south). absolutely not. outbreeding is not tied to urbanization at all.
@hbdgay – “I think, you can add suicide bombing to the list. There it’s even voluntary most of the time. The bomber (often an underachiever in his family) sacrifices himself to raise the social status of his family, and hence the marriage prospects of his siblings/cousins.”
absolutely! especially if money/status goes to their family, like you say. clearly altruistic in the scientific sense of the word.
@chris – “I haven’t seen the roh figures, but they look inbred if lack of diversity of HLA haplotypes is anything to go by (11th HLA Workshop). Sample size was rather small though.”
thanks! i really have to learn something — anything! — about the bushmen. i just haven’t got a clue at the moment. (*^_^*)
@luke – “True, I think. OTH, consider the Battle of Midway, when an entire squadron of airmen was sent on a mission for which it would have insufficient fuel to return to home base. Or consider the Battle of Britain, when air crews went up day after day with a high chance of never returning. Clannish societies can produce nothing like that. Unless you count suicide bombers.”
no, they don’t seem to be able to produce anything like that, and that’s — i think — because they’re just not tied to the broader society — to the commonweal. they’re tied to their extended families/clans/tribes — so why would they sacrifice themselves for “the nation”? they don’t have a nation.
@luke – “Speaking of which, how do you explain suicide bombers?”
what hbdgay said above. plus this.
@martin – “I would say both are group oriented, domesticated in different ways to be communally oriented.”
no. clannish people are oriented towards their extended families/clans/tribes, whereas people who are more individualistic (i.e. NOT attached by the hip to their extended families/clans/tribes) are oriented more towards the commonweal. that’s what i’m getting at.
@rome’s creature – “Similar to how libertarians perceive their out-group distrust as simple independence, it can be said that white nationalists and race realists consider their own clannishness to be nothing more than self-determination. Such folks, largely Southern, apply tribal sensibilities to all Northwest Europeans (as well as the entire species) without even fathoming the idea that some NW Euro groups might not share said traits.”
yes and yes! complete misunderstanding.
@not_my_subject – “I don’t know anything else but that you can easily let go of one replicator for the sake of keeping your other replicators working in harmony if you want to maximize their numbers…. I mean just from a simple math perspective, provided you want to maximize the number of your kin, one sacrifice for the group doesn’t really decrease their numbers….”
yes, i think this is right, but i think this is more right for inbred populations than outbred ones. in inbred populations, all the extended family members are more alike one another genetically than in outbred populations, so it’s … easier to sacrifice one member. it should be easier to commit an “inclusive inclusive fitness” altruistic, sacrificial act — or, rather, it shouldn’t matter so much to lose that one member.
@mark – “A greater willingness on occasion to sacrifice one’s own is due to the immense importance applied to family.”
yes, but why is the (extended) family so important in some societies and not in others? that is the question.
@prince n. – “now that I think about it, maybe we are having trouble with this “paradox” because we are being too idealistic about things. we see that the clannish guy will be extra helpful to his family member. we then like to think that he wants what’s best for the family member he just helped. We say he has love for that family member. but that is our ideal.“
yes. that’s very good. (^_^) i’ve been thinking along those same lines myself. it’s not obvious that the way westerners feel about their family members/loved ones is the same as all peoples everywhere do. we might just be w.e.i.r.d. might not be that different, then again … who knows?
@ryan – “Honor killings etc. are a way of filtering out genes which do not promote in group altruism. It identifies people who do not follow the will of the clan, who for some reason are not altruistic enough, and gets rid of them.”
that’s very good! yes. i hadn’t thought of that. thanks! (^_^)
@ryan – “Honor killings for sex outside of marriage is consistent with enforcing father’s brother’s daughter as the social norm. In that it’s almost certainly the case that the extramarital sex which led to the honor killing was not between first or second cousins. It also acts to shield the clan from the DNA of outsiders infecting their offspring.”
that would certainly make sense. wonder if there’s any data out there on it? if the pre-marital sex was between cousins, you’d think some sort of quickie marriage would just be arranged.
@t. greer – “You got stop thinking like a Westerner. ^_~”
oi! who’re you calling a “westerner”?! i am one, yes, but one of the more clannish ones. (~_^)
@t. greer – “This is not a paradox. In both cases the clannish individual is simply putting the needs of the group above the needs of individuals. He is willing to sacrifice much of himself for the sake of the clan. He is just willing to sacrifice other members for the sake of the clan as well.”
yes, precisely! (^_^)
“clearly altruistic in the scientific sense of the word”
I think that’s true to a certain extent of women supporting the hijab, they have a sense of being part of a strong population. They don’t mind covering in public because public is not important to family survival. Where women object to covering may be where it is accompanied by domestic abuse. But say in Turkey with these new individualized patterned headscarves maybe for many it is a workable social system.
“no, they don’t seem to be able to produce anything like that”
I heard Robert Hardy talking about cross-bows on Radio 4. When he was asked why the English and Welsh were so good at it, but the Scots weren’t he said, to paraphrase, ‘that would take a whole other programme, there were lots of reasons….they were too clannish, they couldn’t cooperate, cross-bows are difficult weapons, it requires tremendous physical effort and coordination for them to produce volleys of arrows that are effective in battle.’
“Objectively speaking, there’s nothing inherently stupid about honor killing daughters.”
Is there not a difference between ‘biology has no moral imperative’ and ‘human objectivity specifically in relation to human relationships’? Is objectivity in relation to humans not subject to morality first? In which case, a person’s objective opinion on social relations may depend on the person’s moral code?
Are the Canadians being objective or subjective?
“I think Canadians and Canada is a very open and generous country and we don’t want to extend—and we don’t extend—any tolerance to harmful cultural practices: spousal abuse, killing in the name of so-called ‘honour’, female genital mutilation,” she said.” Kellie Leitch, the federal Status of Women Minister
no. clannish people are oriented towards their extended families/clans/tribes, whereas people who are more individualistic (i.e. NOT attached by the hip to their extended families/clans/tribes) are oriented more towards the commonweal. that’s what i’m getting at.
Could the commonweal be considered a kind of group?
You’re making a whole bunch of assumptions here.
Exiling your daughter somewhere far, far away is smarter than killing her because you gain the advantage of possibly spreading your genes far and wide, but still punish her and prevent loss of honor inside your own community.
You’re assuming that male and female genetic interests are equivalent in this context. Daughters share your genes but they don’t share your male genes like your sons and brothers do. Males and groups of related males compete against other males to control a territory and dominate access to breeding females. This is why men care less about foreign females coming onto their turf than they do about foreign males intruding onto their turf. This is also reflected in male and female genetic geography. Y-chromosomes track geography much more. For example, a few related Y-chromosome haplogroups will dominate an area while the mtdna is much more geographically dispersed.
Exiling a daughter far away doesn’t necessarily advance paternal genetic interests, and may in fact be detrimental to them by providing a rival paternal group with more breeding females. Furthermore, as a much less severe punishment, there could be less deterrence against the females upsetting the dominance of the paternal group in the future.
Of course there are instances where sending a daughter to a different paternal group occurs. An aristocratic lord may arrange to have his daughter betrothed to some lord in another region or country for diplomatic or alliance purposes. Generally the idea is that such an arrangement will serve the interests of the lord’s paternal group. It would have to for it to be a viable long term strategy. If your daughters’ exogamy benefits other paternal groups relative to your own, then over the long term female exogamy is not a good strategy and your paternal group will die out. Your paternal group wouldn’t exist in the future to even have daughters in the first place. Your exogamous daughter and her offspring would have to serve your paternal group’s interests for it to be a good strategy. That’s generally going to be rare since the daughter and her offspring’s new environment will be dominated by a different paternal group which of course will be trying to maintain its genetic dominance.
Judaism is actually quite interesting in this regard since as a long time diaspora group living among different paternal groups, it will have many opportunities to employ such a strategy more effectively than usual, and because certain cultural practices, such as asserting identity through maternal descent, may render such a strategy more effective.
@martin – “Could the commonweal be considered a kind of group?”
sure! the commonweal is just a BIG group.
however, in places where you find it — or concern for it — the individuals that are members of it are not that closely related to one another — comparatively speaking. in england, you have people in kent identifying with people in lincolnshire — and even, to some degree, with people in aberdeen. they all feel as though they are a part of a nation. in afghanistan, you’re lucky if people from one village to another get along — unless they’re related, they probably don’t. no commonweal there. the group size is smaller — and they’re all very closely related within those groups (extended families, clans, etc.)
@martin – “Daughters share your genes but they don’t share your male genes like your sons and brothers do.”
daughters don’t share your male genes, that’s true — but fathers and daughters are more alike than fathers and sons because they share more genes (daughters inherit a virtually unchanged x-chromosome from their fathers, which is larger than the y-chromosome).
i don’t know what to make of that, if anything, but it’s curious.
Also, why are you assuming honor killing is about “immigrants”? The boy next door who isn’t her cousin that you chose for her isn’t an immigrant.
By “immigrant’ I mean “foreign” male encroaching on a paternal group’s turf and seeking its females. “Foreign” is going to be context dependent. In an area with a bunch of small clans and very narrowly defined paternal groups, the boy next door could very well be a “foreign” male.
daughters don’t share your male genes, that’s true — but fathers and daughters are more alike than fathers and sons because they share more genes (daughters inherit a virtually unchanged x-chromosome from their fathers, which is larger than the y-chromosome).
In both cases the mother contributes more DNA than the father, and the mother’s contribution is relatively higher in sons than in daughters. So fathers share quantitatively more genes with daughters than sons and thus are more related in a sense. On the other hand, fathers share the Y-chromosome with sons, which is unique to the paternal line. So fathers and sons are uniquely related in a qualitative sense.
@martin – “In both cases the mother contributes more DNA than the father….”
no. just in the case of sons. both mothers and fathers contribute an x-chromosome to a daughter, so the amount of genetic material contributed to a daughter from each parent should be the same.
@martin – “So fathers and sons are uniquely related in a qualitative sense.”
i understand that the y-chromosome is obviously special, but fathers and daughters are also “uniquely related in a qualitative sense” since a father contributes a (virtually) unrecombined x-chromosome to his daughter, while a mother contributes recombined x-chromosomes to both sons and daughters.
no?
@martin – what’s different, obviously, from the y-chromosome is that this one-generational x-chromosome “lineage” doesn’t continue on down through grandchildren and great-grandchildren, etc.
no. just in the case of sons. both mothers and fathers contribute an x-chromosome to a daughter, so the amount of genetic material contributed to a daughter from each parent should be the same.
Even in daughters the mother’s contribution is slightly higher due to the mtDNA.
i understand that the y-chromosome is obviously special, but fathers and daughters are also “uniquely related in a qualitative sense” since a father contributes a (virtually) unrecombined x-chromosome to his daughter, while a mother contributes recombined x-chromosomes to both sons and daughters.
I suppose, but it would appear to be short lived, since when the daughter goes on to have kids, she passes one recombined x-chromosome to her child. It seems like a relatively less robust and less persistent transmission of paternal identity. The Y-chromosome is always unrecombined.
@martin – “Even in daughters the mother’s contribution is slightly higher due to the mtDNA.”
that’s true. i was thinking only of nucleic genetic material.
@martin – “The Y-chromosome is always unrecombined.”
mostly unrecombined. there is a little corner of the y that does get recombined with the dad’s x. tiny piece.
@martin – “I suppose, but it would appear to be short lived, since when the daughter goes on to have kids….”
yes. but, still, daughters are very much like their fathers genetically speaking — in one way, even more so than sons are like their fathers (because the y-chromosome is smaller) — but in another, proportional way, equally as alike, since the father contributes a (virtually) unrecombined sex chromosome to each type of child.
funny!
“a few related Y-chromosome haplogroups will dominate an area while the mtdna is much more geographically dispersed.”
True, but it isn’t a uniform relationship across the globe. For example, in East Asia there are four mt lines, from two different macro groups, in different proportions over a vast area. In Europe there is a single dominant mt line with a couple of lesser ones from the same macro group. In each area there is a single dominant Y. Then there are the countries on the crossroads of Africa and Asia, which have multiple paternal lines.
[…] The clannishness paradox. […]
“I think Canadians and Canada is a very open and generous country and we don’t want to extend—and we don’t extend—any tolerance to harmful cultural practices: spousal abuse, killing in the name of so-called ‘honour’, female genital mutilation,” she said.” Kellie Leitch, the federal Status of Women Minister
how can she talk about “we” when her only concern is towards women and girls. She says we (Canada) doesn’t do female genital mutilation implicitly admitting and accepting the practice of male genital mutilation.
Hey hbd chick. I think I have something for you on this matter.
“i think that those very same clannish people are often more willing than non-clannish peoples to sacrifice one of their own under certain circumstances — it seems especially when it will benefit themselves and/or other members of the extended family/clan. i could be wrong about this. data needs to be compiled.”
George Price stated that in the same way an organism might sacrifice itself to spread it’s genes, that same organism will sacrifice itself to eliminate those of the same species if it enabled closely related organisms to better spread their genes.
Here is a paper be coauthored, The Logic of Animal Conflict:
“Conflicts between animals of the same species usually are of “limited war” type, not causing serious injury. This is often explained as due to group or species selection for behaviour benefiting the species rather than individuals. Game theory and computer simulation analyses show, however, that a “limited war” strategy benefits individual animals as well as the species.”
ftp://oceane.obsvlfr.fr/pub/irisson/papersMaynard%20Smith1973The%20logic%20of%20animal%20conflict00.pdf
I believe these 2 things solve your clannish paradox. I just wrote a post on genetic similarity theory yesterday, check it out and tell me what you think.
https://notpolitcallycorrect.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/genetic-similarity-theory/
Love your blog by the way.