father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage and honor killings

i took this table from the recent pew survey of muslims…

…and made a couple of maps (adapted from this map).

the first one is a map of the differences between what percentage of muslims in each country responded that honor killing is never justifiable when a man commits an offense versus a woman committing an offense. a plus number (+) means more enthusiasm for honor killing women — a negative (-), men. here it is (click on image for LARGER view):

what i think we can see is that, the closer you get to the arab expansion epicenter (the arab peninsula), the greater the enthusiasm for honor killing women. so in jordan it’s +47, lebanon and egypt +10, iraq +11. but when you get out to the edges of the caliphate, the differences are not so great, or they are in fact reversed: morocco -1, turkey and afghanistan and tajikistan 0. even pakistan is only +3. when you get way out to uzbekistan and kyrgyzstan, then the numbers are reversed: -14 and -3.

(it should be noted that for some reason the question was worded differently in uzbekistan, afghanistan, and iraq. everyone else was asked specifically about premarital sex/adultery and family honor, while the uzbekis, afghanis, and iraqis were only asked about family honor. see questions 53 and 54 here [pdf].)

i think that perhaps this is a reflection of what korotayev noticed, i.e. that father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage is found in those places of the world that were a part of the eighth century muslim caliphate, because those populations wanted to emulate the arabs, and the arabs practiced fbd marriage. the reason that the populations on the edges of the caliphate are less enthusiastic about honor killing women is that they were arabized less and/or later than (dare i say it) the “core arabs” and so probably have been practicing fbd marriage for a shorter amount of time. (in fact, korotayev and other russian anthropologists suggest that fbd marriage started in the levant and moved southwards into the arab peninsula, so some of the jordanians and lebanese may have started practicing fbd marriage before the arabs down in the peninsula.)

i think, too, that there is a connection between fbd marriage and honor killings, because fbd marriage leads to greater inbreeding, and greater amounts of inbreeding may very probably lead to greater frequencies of “genes for altruism” — and honor killings can be viewed as a sort-of upside-down-and-backwards form of altruism (at least they seem that way to us).

and/or the arabs simply introduced some crazy “genes for upside-down-and-backwards altruism” to these various populations, and less so on the fringes presumably because not so many arabs actually made it that far. edit: also interesting to note is that in fbd societies, all of the men in extended families/clans share the same y-chromosome. if there is a connection between violence and some gene(s) on the y-chromosome (i thought greg cochran said something about this, but i can’t find it now), maybe this is exacerbated by fbd marriage.

here is the other map — the percentage of muslims in each country responding that it is rarely, sometimes, or often justified to honor kill women:

again, the numbers taper off on the edges of the extent of the caliphate.

previously: father’s brother’s daughter’s marriage and inclusive inclusive fitness and who wants sharia?

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who wants sharia?

pew has just released the results of their latest survey of muslims around the world (in 39 different countries).

here’s a map showing the percentage of muslims in each country that would like sharia to be the law of their land (click on map for LARGER image – should take you to the pew site):

the iraqs, afghanis, and pakistanis all seem pretty eager for sharia — they’re all in the 75-100% range. the moroccans, too. and the palestinian territories.

this is a large report from pew, so have a look at the whole thing yourself.

here’s something else that i found particularly interesting:

of the countries that think that honor killing is more justified when women commit an offense than when men do — russia, albania, azerbaijan, bangladesh, pakistan, jordan, iraq, egypt, lebanon, tunisia, and the palestinian territories — a majority of them (7 out of 11) have a preference for father’s brother’s daughter’s (fbd) marriage — pakistan, jordan, iraq, egypt, lebanon, tunisia, and the palestinian territories.

i don’t know what, if any, form of cousin marriage is preferred in azerbaijan or bangladesh. paternal cousin marriage, which would include fbd marriage, is avoided in places like chechnya and (at least among some peoples in) dagestan (russia in this survey?) and albania. the difference in the responses in albania was not very great (+1 point), but the difference in russia(?) was statistically significant at +7 points. it’s difficult to know who these “russian” muslims are (maybe the info is in an appendix somewhere — i’ll have to look), so i don’t know if they’re the chechens and/or some dagestanis and/or some other group(s) — and, so, i don’t know what their mating patterns are.

i’m surprised that afghanistan breaks even. i would’ve predicted that they would be like the other fbd marriage groups.

it’s interesting that some of the central asian “stans” — kyrgyzstan and uzbekistan — swing in the opposite direction. a greater number of people feel that honor killings are more justified against men who break the rules than women. i don’t know much of anything about these populations, but i did read a bit just the other day, and it seems that they have a preference for maternal cousin marriage. (note that i don’t have a good idea what the rates might be.)

previously: inclusive inclusive fitness

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linkfest – 04/15/13

Born to run: genetic test can reveal those best able to run marathons – “[T]o run a marathon in a good time requires the right combination of genes and that nearly a fifth of the population lack this special mix. For runners with the right genes, it means their bodies can quickly adapt to carry large amounts of oxygen to their muscles, allowing them to run faster and for longer. Those who lack these genes, however, will never improve, no matter how much they train, and their performance may even get worse the harder they push themselves.”

Scientists Breed Exercise-Crazy Rats – “While a wide biological gap exists between humans and rats, the researchers do propose that some people could be genetically predisposed against exercising.”

Genetic discovery found to influence obesity in people of African ancestry

New Studies Shake Up Human Family Tree – “[I]n a spate of new studies, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, and a team of collaborators have put forward a controversial claim that another hominin — *Australopithecus sediba* — might be even closer to the origin of our lineage [than *australopithecus afarensis,* the most famous example being "lucy"]….” — see also: Special Collection – Australopithecus sediba @science.

Fish Fossil Shows Why Humans Have Two Arms, Legs

Castaways – “We may have yet another story of long-distance prehistoric contact. A new paper in PLOS genetics suggests that people from the Jomon culture in Japan may have reached northwestern South America.” – from greg cochran. also from south america: Southern Native American Y-DNA: no correlation with language – @for what they were…we are.

Fluctuation of Fertility with Number in a Real Insect Population and a Virtual Population – “Real fruit fly fertility increases with average consanguinity thus decreasing with population size in a pattern that is modelled successfully with a virtual population. This invites the deliberate manipulation of wild insect populations for the control of vectors of human disease.” – from our very own linton herbert! yay! (^_^)

Do drugs for bipolar disorder ‘normalize’ brain gene function? U-M study suggests so – “Brain tissue study shows gene expression in patients treated with antipsychotics is similar to expression in non-bipolar brains.”

Serenity – “If the realities of human nature render your hope on how to make a better world impossible, merely wishing it were not so is not going to help your cause. But instead, better results can be attained to by working *with* what we learn about human nature.” – from jayman. hear, hear!

HVGIQ: Dominican Republic – from jason malloy.

Napoleon Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” – The Life of an Anthropological Heretic – “Napoleon Chagnon’s ‘Noble Savages’ is a must read.” – from helian unbound.

Frequent texters more shallow, racist, study finds – w.e.i.r.d. students. (psychology students, no less! (~_^) ) also: Texting, social networking and other media use linked to poor academic performance.

Study: we assume people stare at us – “People often think that other people are staring at them even when they aren’t, vision scientists have found. In a new article in Current Biology, researchers at The Vision Centre reveal that, when in doubt, the human brain is more likely to tell its owner that they’re under the gaze of another person.”

Political organization in a hunter-gatherer tribe – @mangan’s.

First Encounters of the Close Kind: John Derbyshire’s Address To The 2013 American Renaissance Conference – from john derbyshire.

Jared Taylor Remembers Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen

Our Inconsistent Ethical Instincts – read also: The Pro-Death Movement from jim goad – “[T]here’s an almost universal human definition of good and evil: If it enhances my survival, it’s good. If it harms it, it’s evil.” – yup.

Individual Donation Amounts Drop When Givers Are in Groups, Says MU Researcher – “Numerous studies have provided evidence that people are less likely to help when in groups, a phenomenon known as the ‘bystander effect.’” – see also this old post from steve sailer: Chinese kindness.

The Fraud Of America’s “Rape Culture” – from anatoly. see also his earlier post Much Ado About Rape: Quantifying A Big Taboo – “[I]t is ironic that the public panic over rape and sexual assault has risen to fever pitch at precisely the moment in history when the real lifetime risk of becoming a victim of rape has never been lower.”

Monkey chatter smacks of human speech, researcher says

How Parents Around the World Describe Their Children, in Charts – “A fascinating new study reveals that Americans are more likely to call their children ‘intelligent,’ while European parents focus on happiness and balance.”

DNA Shows It: Birds Are Promiscuous – “Here’s the warm and fuzzy part of this column: most birds really do mate for life. But here’s the cold side: They mess around. And here’s the switch: Blame the ladies.”

How to blackmail your parents for food – “Fledglings extort food by putting themselves in danger.”

When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human – cr*p. i hate sad animal stories. *sniff*

Hawking: Humans Will Not Survive Another 1,000 Years ‘Without Escaping’ Earth – manifest destiny!

In Defence of Pseudonyms in Science: Defending the Right to Write

bonus: read this!>> Sam Parnia – the man who could bring you back from the dead – “This British doctor specialises in resurrection and insists outdated resuscitation techniques are squandering lives that could be saved.”

bonus bonus: James Lovelock: A man for all seasons – lovelock thinks there are too many people on the planet.

bonus bonus bonus: and this week’s “bras in the news” stories >> Bras Make Breasts “Saggier”, 15-year French [of course! - h.chick] Study Reveals and How your under-wired bra could kill you… if you’re a keen walker – “Metal in under-wired bras can cause compasses to be reversed because of the magnetic effect”. (sorry, no naked boobies at either of those pages.)

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structural endogamy

for those of us who prefer to think about things in pictures/drawings/pie charts/hieroglypics rather than numbers (*hbd chick frantically raises her hand in the back of the classroom*), anonymous commenter pointed out this wikipedia page on structural endogamy to me (thanks, anonymous commenter! (^_^) ).

here, at long last, are a bunch of people diagramming mating patterns. ACTUAL mating patterns from real world examples. in detail.

below, for instance, are what the mating patterns — and the resultant connections between the members of the group — in a turkish nomadic clan look like (i haven’t read about this specific example yet, but i’m going to assume that this diagram represents a case of regular preferred father’s brother’s daughter’s [fbd] marriage since that’s pretty common amongst turkish nomadic clans):

the nodes that you see there, i.e. the colored dots, are married couples, not individuals. as you can see, this is a very tightly related clan with nearly everyone being connected somehow to the two founding couples. there’s a tight “core” to this clan, but it does expand in later generations simply due to the increase in the number of its members.

here’s a more detailed diagram of what i think must be the same turkish clan:

yeah. complicated!

and here’s a different mating pattern altogether mapped out. this is from a mexican village in which anything closer than, and including, marriage to a second cousin was not allowed (sounds like the influence of christianity to me, but i could be wrong about that), however marriage within the village was preferred (the village was studied in the late 1970s and the authors describe it as having been in a transitional phase in between a traditional nahuatl way of life and a more modern mestizo stage):

as you can see, everyone’s still connected since most people married within the village, but the relationships are not as close as in the more closely inbreeding turkish clan. neat!

i’m sure i’ll be looking further into this structural endogamy or (marital) relinking as it’s also sometimes called. there’s even a whole book on the subject!

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ibd rates and kindreds in germanic populations

i’ve inserted phillpotts’ “end of the germanic kindreds” dates on top of ralph and coop’s “mean within-country ibd rates” map — just ’cause i could. here’s what it looks like:

the idea is that greater inbreeding ought to lead to greater “clannishness” — i.e. a greater prevalence of kindreds in the case of the germanics, and kindreds for longer the longer the inbreeding happened — while outbreeding ought to lead to less “clannishness.”

this map maybe kinda/sorta shows that (i think).

if you look at, for instance, the region from france through belgium and up through the netherlands towards dithmarschen (the black square on the map and “ground zero” for clannishness amongst the medieval germanic populations), the pattern does seem to hold: where there are lower ibd rates (i.e. suggesting lower inbreeding), as in northern france, the kindreds disappeared earlier (1300s) than where there are higher ibd rates, namely friesland (1400s). and the ibd rates increase the closer you get towards dithmarschen.

germany, too, has low ibd rates (relatively small green circle centered on berlin there — smaller than friesland’s circle), and, according to phillpotts, kindreds were pretty much gone in central/southern germany by the 1200s.

and norway has lower ibd rates than sweden, and the kindreds disappeared there sooner (1200s) than in sweden (1300s).

i would’ve predicted lower ibd rates for england, especially now given what phillpotts said about the kindreds in anglo-saxon england being gone by the 600-700s — although perhaps that had to do with their migration over water like she suggested and wasn’t related to whether or not they were inbreeding or outbreeding at the time. on the other hand, lorraine lancaster argued that kindreds were actually still around in england into the 1000s, so perhaps that explains the ibd rates a bit better — or vice versa, rather (but see below).
_____

btw, i looked a little further into the sources of the genetic data that ralph and coop used for their ibd study [pdf]. the data came from popres (The Population Reference Sample), and afaict (correct me if i’m wrong) the european data in the popres collection came from two sources: the london-based Lolipop Study and the swiss-based CoLaus study.

the lolipop study surveyed both indian asian and white european individuals living in london [pdf] — i’m sure ralph and coop used only the white european individuals for their study of europe, of course. only europeans having four grandparents born in the u.k. were included, so i guess that must make them all british (english, welsh, scottish, northern irish) — but they could also be irish. the inclusion of welsh, scottish, and/or irish individuals could’ve skewed the ibd results. ralph and coop seem to have isolated some number of scottish and irish individuals (see their map above), but it’s not clear to me if those individuals were from the lolipop study or the colaus one.

the colaus study looked at caucasians living in lausanne, switzerland, who were either swiss or from another european(?) country. both the subjects’ parents and grandparents had to have been born in whatever country they were described as coming from. the researchers tried to further narrow down their ethnicity during a clinical visit. i presume it was from this study that ralph and coop drew the rest of their samples, including the data from: germany, france, belgium, the netherlands, norway, and sweden — possibly england, too. it’s difficult to know because they don’t spell it all out specifically. these data could be skewed, too, for my purposes — for example, hypothetically speaking, due to the presence of a lot of non-french, but still european, individuals in the set of samples of france. again, difficult to know.

finally, here are the numbers of individuals from each country sampled by ralph and coop. some of them are kinda low — like n=2 for norway:

previously: ibd and historic mating patterns in europe and medieval germanic kindreds … and the ditmarsians

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democracy in libya…

…allahu akbar!

previously: libya – land o’ tribes and “hard-won democracy”

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linkfest – 08/21/11

Breaking down intelligence to environmental and genetic components – from dienekes.

Stress During Early Development Is Inherited by Offspring

“The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas” – “[A] study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness.”

Y haplogroup R1b and light hair in Italy – @race/history/evolution notes.

Don’t rely on a pretty face: Beautiful people with symmetrical faces more likely to be selfish

The Secret Language Code – “Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns”

Parasite load, race, and IQ – from the inductivist.

Blacks, dopamine, and IQ – also from the inductivist.

Boys Reaching Sexual Maturity Earlier Than Ever

Web Genetic Sudy Confirms Genetic Associations – @futurepundit.

bonus: First life: The search for the first replicator – via malcolm pollack.

bonus bonus: Would You Please Fucking Stop?

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