doppelgangers

canadien photographer françois brunelle has a neat project/exhibit/book going called I’m Not a Look-Alike! in which he photographs pairs of people who look alike but who are not relatives — at least not as far as they are aware.

i love these two men from munich:

it would be sooo cool to check these people’s genomes out to see if they are crypto cousins or not. i betcha many of them are! especially the individuals from the same areas.

many of brunelle’s subjects seem to be from montreal/quebec, and since the number of founding french canadians was so small (ca. 6000), it’s not surprising that there should be a lot of doppelgangers in that population, since they really ARE all (relatively speaking) closely related! here are a pair of doppelgangers from montreal:

(jayman posted a couple of links here on the blog once to two french-american politicians, one in canada and one in new england, who look very much alike, but i can’t find his comment now. dr*t! jayman…?)

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linkfest – 01/06/13

All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable – from jayman. (<< read this!)

John Derbyshire’s Vade Mecum For Diversity Conversations (<< read this, too!)

Male Superiority in Spatial Navigation: Adaptation or Side Effect?

Why Girls Do Better in School – “Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys, even when they perform worse on standardized tests?” – basically ’cause they behave better in the classroom (but you knew that already, didn’t you?).

White murder rates by state – from the awesome epigone.

‘Universal’ personality traits don’t necessarily apply to isolated indigenous people – “Researchers who spent two years looking at 1,062 members of the Tsimane culture found that they didn’t necessarily exhibit the five broad dimensions of personality – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – also known as the ‘Big Five.’”

Dopamine-receptor gene variant linked to human longevity – “[S]tudy finds genetic tie to personality traits influencing healthy aging.”

War Before Civilization – from greg cochran.

bonus: The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist

bonus bonus: Cloud of atoms goes beyond absolute zero – whoa!

bonus bonus bonus: The Offenses Clause & Universal Jurisdiction Over Terrorists – bad stuff. =/

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Banter about Dildoes – review of Shopping in Ancient Rome.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: How to Really Read in 2013 – from foseti – i like this!

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civicness in france by region

here are the results of the world values survey‘s civicness questions for france (2006) by region.

these data cover whites in france only. i’m pretty sure that doesn’t include north africans (berbers/arabs from algeria, for instance) because literally just a couple of the white respondents said they were muslims. so these data should really represent mostly ethnic french folks, with maybe some other europeans thrown in here and there. unlike in the post for spain, the samples sizes for all the (NUTS) regions of france were 50+. the pale yellow highlights indicate the region that had the highest score for a particular question (click on charts for LARGER views):

here’s a map of the average civicness scores for each region. note that, while the color scheme here is the same one i used on the map of spain, the scale is different. for instance, the least civic region in france (paris) is more civic than the most civic region in spain (catalonia):

the first thing to notice is that the civicness scores for ethnic french folks are lower than those of the anglo world across the board — often a lot lower. the french scores are lower than those of great britain (which i haven’t broken down by region/ethnicity yet — you’re next, g.b.!) — and, except for membership in a sport/recreation organization, lower than those for white americans. for example, in 2006, 17.10% of white americans said they were active members of a political party, while only 2.60% of whites in france said so.

wrt the flatlanders vs. mountain people theory, it looks to me as though the mountain dwellers of france, all of whom have a recent history of close mating — the auvergnats, those in alpine regions, and populations in the east, like in parts of lorraine — prove to be true to form in being less civic than the more lowland regions further to the west:

the most civic region of france — “paris east” (captain picardy, champagne-ardenne, and burgundy) — apart from being something of a lowland region, also appears to have been a part of early medieval austrasia. the population of this area is, therefore, likely, due to the “invention” of manorialism in this region, to have had one of the longest histories of outbreeding/nuclear family structures in nw europe. (however, as charles donahue has shown, during the medieval period, the people of this region practiced arranged marriages much more often than in england during the same time period, so marriage wasn’t quite as “free” historically in this region as amongst the english.)

the least civic region of france is paris — but, of course, paris is a thoroughly multi-cultural city, and so its residents probably suffer from putnam’s lack of trust [opens pdf] that arises naturally in diverse societies.

the next least civic region of france is nord-pas-de-calais which is also multi-cultural in its own way being comprised historically of both french and flemish speakers. (there are also, apparently, a lot of other europeans, and more recent immigrants from africa/latin america, living in the region.) again, diversity does not normally make for civic societies.

it might also be that the french flemings, like their distant neighbors/cousins(?) the frisians, had a longer history of inbreeding than other populations in northern france. i’m not sure about that since i don’t have any mating info on the french flemings — and i don’t know, either, what sort of territory they traditionally occupied (was it swampy like the frisians? and did they, therefore, miss out on manorialism like the frisians?).

oh — and remember how french canadians don’t seem to be very civic or trusting/charitable compared to anglo-canadians? well, isn’t it interesting that the same holds true for french people in france vs. anglos? and remember where in france most of the ancestors of french canadians hailed from? — the area outlined in red on this map? that is smack in the middle of a slightly upland, not-so-very civic region in france today: “paris west” at 8.93%.

previously: civic societies and civicness in the u.s. by race and the flatlanders vs. the mountain people and meanwhile, in france… and the auvergnat pashtuns and medieval manoralism and the hajnal line and “l’explication de l’idéologie” and more on medieval england and france and what’s up with french candians? and canadiens and canadiens again

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linkfest – 09/16/12

Growing your own merchant class – “To explain the high incidence of Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews, some authors have invoked heterozygote advantage…. A similar situation may have developed in eastern Quebec, where the relative scarcity of British and American merchants made it easier for French Canadians to enter occupations that required literacy, numeracy, and future time orientation.” — cool! from peter frost.

A slower mutation rate has implications… and here they are – “Researchers have long used an autosomal mutation rate for humans that was based on a calibration of the split between humans and chimps…. More recently, a variety of studies using a variety of techniques (latest one from ASHG 2012) all came up with a rate that is about half that value.” — important stuff from dienekes.

Learning faster with neurodegenerative disease – “People who bear the genetic mutation for Huntington’s disease learn faster than healthy people. The more pronounced the mutation was, the more quickly they learned.”

Eating disorders and the extreme female brain – @the breviary.

Were you Assimilable? – superb post from m.g. over @those who can see!

How early social deprivation impairs long-term cognitive function – “Social isolation during early life prevents the cells that make up the brain’s white matter from maturing and producing the right amount of myelin….”

Soapy taste of coriander linked to genetic variants – “Dislike of herb traced to genes encoding odour and taste receptors.”

Looking at you: Face genes identified – “5 genes have been found to determine human facial shapes.” — see also Police could create image of suspect’s face from DNA.

The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis – kanazawa’s back. (~_^) via steve sailer.

bonus: GM corn loses its edge against pests – “Corn rootworms in the US may have developed resistance to a protective chemical made by a genetically modified corn.”

bonus bonus: Giant viruses coexisted with the cellular ancestors and represent a distinct supergroup along with superkingdoms Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya

bonus bonus bonus: After Egyptian Dictatorship Comes Epidemic Harassment Of Women – “Progress is not inevitable….” — no. no it’s not. from parapundit.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital — from matt taibbi. via anatoly.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: In China We (Don’t) Trust

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canadiens again

i decided to look at the “civicness” numbers for canadians by province in the world values survey (2006 wave for canada). these are the questions i looked at:

“Now I am going to read out a list of voluntary organizations; for each one, could you tell me whether you are a member, an active member, an inactive member or not a member of that type of organization?

- Church or religious organization
- Sport or recreation organization
- Art, music or educational organization
- Labour union
- Political party
- Environmental organization
- Professional association
- Charitable/humanitarian organization”

for each province, i broke down the numbers for active members only by size of town where the interview was conducted (see x-axis on chart below). what i was trying to get around was françois’ montreal problem — i.e. that the civicness numbers for quebec might be so low because of the presence of multi-culti montreal. (i’ve already shown, though, that ontarians don’t seem to have much of a problem with the presence of multi-culti toronto in their province.)

so, now that i’ve got some numbers for small town quebec (and other provinces) we can ask: are the québécois who don’t live in montreal more civic than their counterparts who do live in montreal, and are they more or less civic than other canadians?

before i try to answer that, let me say that there are lots — LOTS — of problems with this data set, so take this whole post with a big block of freshly mined salt. for one thing, the sample sizes for some of the provinces were so small, i just had to skip them entirely (egs. prince edward island – n=7; newfoundland – n=37). also, some of the data that i did use aren’t so hot either — example: sample size for quebec towns sized 50,000-100,000 – n=10. but, hey — what’s an hbd chick to do?

also, i couldn’t filter out the responses of non-white canadians, so the numbers for quebec do not represent just ethnic québécois. same story for the other provinces. however, 87% of the respondents from canada on the 2006 wvs were white, so we are looking at a strong majority of white canadians here.

so when you look at the chart below — squint!

without further ado, here are the average “civicness” scores by town size for quebec, ontario and alberta (click on graph for LARGER, not-so-fuzzy view):

as you can see, the civicness in small town quebec looks to be ’round about the same as in ontario or alberta — maybe/probably. living in a small-ish town in any of these places would probably feel pretty similar, civicness-wise. the scores do diverge, though, the larger the town/city size, until the difference is ca. twelve points when we get to the largest cities. perhaps that’s due to the multi-cultural nature of the largest cities, but then why are ontario’s numbers so high when they’ve got one of the most vibrant cities on the planet?

no. my guess — and this is just a guess — is that civicness in small-town quebec works quite well because french canadians have a good dose of “genes for familial altruism” (whatever they might be), either thanks to their french ancestors and/or because of the bottleneck and subsequent inbreeding that the population experienced once in the new world, and in small-town quebec they’re still living quite near extended family members, so they’re all quite civic. however, for the very same reason, civicness fails (compared to anglo-canadians) in urban quebec when they’re presented with lots of non-relatives. in contrast, anglo-canadian civicness scores get even better when they get out there in the Big World amongst other individualists like themselves.

the extended family was extremely important for a large part of quebec’s history, which rings familial altruism bells for me. i think that the good folks of quebec are some of my inbreeders — and that’s why they’re not very trusting (of outsiders) and not very civic when they get around different sorts of folks (like in big cities).

oh, and — death to america!

previously: canadiens and what’s up with french canadians? and civic societies

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canadiens

i referenced an article last week which claimed that, out of all the provinces in canada, quebec has the most corruption. i wondered out loud what the story was with french canadians, but françois objected saying that the problem is not (only?) the french canadians in quebec, but rather multicultural montreal inflating the corruption numbers for quebec on the whole. he pointed out that montreal has its share of italian mafioso types, for instance. certainly, as we all know, italians are no strangers to corruption and nepotism, and so it might, indeed, be a problem for montreal — and quebec — that seven percent of montreal’s inhabitants have an italian background. not to mention, like i already said, the general multicultiness of montreal. that doesn’t ever seem to lead to less corruption (unless you have an unbelievably wise leader).

still, i wondered if françois was right and that, if you took montreal out of the mix, that quebec wouldn’t look any more corrupt than, say, saskatchewan. so i looked around for corruption data for canada broken down by province and came up with…

…nada. (mind you, i didn’t really look all that hard, so it might be out there somewhere on the innerwebs.)

what i did find, however, are some neat data on the civic behaviors of canadians by province: things like amount of time spent volunteering, donations, and trust in others, etc.

before i present some of that data, i want to make it clear that complaining that canadians aren’t civic enough would be like complaining that germans don’t like beer enough — totally nonsensical! by any sort of metric that you look at — transparency international’s corruption perceptions index (canada was number 10 in 2011) or the world values survey civicness numbers — canadians are a very civic bunch. living anywhere in canada — quebec included — would obviously NOT feel like living anywhere in eastern europe or the arab world.

having said that:

so the québécois trust others quite a lot less than other canadians do. a lot less. now, maybe that’s all down to the presence of montreal in quebec, but then why are the people in ontario so gosh-durned trusting? i mean, ontario’s got toronto and last time i checked that is very multiculti city. (the greater toronto metropolitan region, btw, comprises nearly half of ontario’s population — 5.5M out of 12.8M — and the montreal metro area is about the same for quebec — 3.8M out of 7.9M.)

couldn’t find this trust data broken down intra-regionally.

but here are some data for donations that i did find broken down by cities within regions — this chart is sorted by “mean charitable donation” (note that the figures for percent english or french for each city come from either wikipedia or here which is where most of the wikipedia figures seem to have come from) [click on chart for LARGER view]:

as you can see, the six quebec cities in the survey all rank right at the bottom of the list wrt how much money they donated in 2010. british columbians, otoh, are right up there at the top. i found a positive 0.57 correlation between the percentage of english-canadians living in a city and mean donation size, and conversely a negative 0.58 (-0.58) correlation between the percentage of french-canadians living in a city and mean donation size. in other words, if you want to benefit from large charitable donations in canada, make sure you live where there are lots of people of english ancestry — british columbia seems to be your best bet.

françois might make the montreal objection again, but what about places in quebec with high numbers of french-canadians but negligible numbers of other ethnic groups (like italians) — sherbrooke and saguenay, for instance — why are the people in those places so comparatively ungenerous?

the funniest contrast is between gatineau in quebec and ottawa in ontario which are right across the ontario river from each other. in 2001, 37.6% of the gatineau population responded that they had french ancestry, but only 6.4% said they had english ancestry. the next biggest group after french was the irish at 7.6%. italians were only 1.4% of the population. otoh, gatineau’s neighbor, ottawa, had 24.3% of english decent. and more italians than gatineau (4.9%). but ottawans were much more generous than people from gatineau in 2010.

here are the data sorted another way — by the percentages of taxfilers in each city who claimed deductions for their donations:

i found no correlation for either percent of english or french living in a city and the percentage of the population having given a donation (and claimed it on their taxes) in 2010. still, you can see on the chart that five of the six quebec cities are still in the lower half of the chart, four of them below the national average. but, most of the british columbian cities were also below the national average wrt the percentage of people in those cities actually giving donations. they may be big donors, but fewer of them actually donate than compared to people in, say, ontario.

so, the people in canadian cities with relatively high percentages of french-canadians give smaller charitable donations compared to the national average for canada, and they seem to give less frequently, too — although the connection between that latter behavior and french or english ethnicity doesn’t seem to be so strong. and the people in the province with the most french canadians — quebec — trust others much less than the rest of canadians. and, as seen in the previous post, quebec experiences the most corruption.

there’s something up with french canadians, i think. my guess is that, like other inbred populations, they’re more family-oriented than anglos. they might not be giving so generously to strangers because they’re busy giving generously to close and extended family members. i dunno. this is hardly the last word on the social/civic behaviors of french canadians. further research is required! (~_^)

previously: what’s up with french canadians?

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what’s up with french canadians?

melykin says: “In Canada, Quebec seems to be much more corrupt than the rest of Canada. (This difference pre-dates mass immigration from non-European sources).”

sure enough, that seems to be true: Quebec: The most corrupt province.

i wondered where in france the québécois came from — one of the more inbred regions maybe? doesn’t look like it.

from (the first page of) The French Canadians in the Province of Quebec (’cause i don’t have access to the full article) [links added by me]:

“The ancestors of the French Canadians came from the northwest of France, chiefly from Normandy, Perche, Beauce, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, Aunis, Angoumois, Saintonge, and part of Gascony. Nineteen twentieths of this population were derived from the above-mentioned provinces, and not from Brittany, as has often been stated.”

i drew a map. or, rather, i outlined these areas in orange on a map someone else drew (~_^):

if wikipedia is to be believed, most — or a lot — of the french immigrants to canada came from the area i outlined in red. (the ancestors of the acadians, many of whom wound up as cajuns in louisiana, came mostly from the area i outlined in green, which was also the homeland of the huguenots funnily enough.)

the orange areas had fairly low levels of consanguineous marriages in the twentieth century. and, i think, probably in the 1800s as well going by segalen’s reports on central france for that time period. what about cousin marriage rates for earlier periods in these orange areas? dunno. they probably weren’t much lower than the twentieth century figures, but were they much higher? my guess is probably not extraordinarily so, but i don’t know for sure.

which doesn’t really fit “the theory.” these very corrupt french canadians ought to have an inbred background according to me, right? well, maybe i’m wrong (“failure is always an option!” (~_^) ) — or maybe the french canadians will prove to be the exception that proves the rule. or maybe the past inbreeding rates were higher.

or maybe the corruption levels have to do with their subsequent inbreeding…?

only a few thousand (5,800?) french folks settled in canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from that stock we got the 10M+ french canadians of today. Six thousand (6,000) french settlers would mean, roughly, 3,000 couples (if the numbers of men and women were equal, which they may not have been). (i’ve also seen a figure of ca. 8,000 french settlers, so that would mean 4,000 couples. edit: or 2,600 québécois!) that’s a rather narrow gene pool for founding a population. it’s a sort of inbreeding in itself.

and there was definitely plenty of cousin marriage amongst the french canadians down through the years. one study of the mating patterns in the 1800s in an area of quebec that had less inbreeding than other parts of the region found that the inbreeding coefficient of offspring there was 0.0111. that’s the equivalent of everyone in the region being second cousins-once-removed to third cousins. (and that was based on genealogical records from canada, so it doesn’t even take into account that the base population was already pretty closely related having started off so small.)

so, inbreeding in french canada happened. for a couple of hundred years — on top of starting off as a small-sized population. enough inbreeding to lead to the population having a rather corrupt nature? dunno.

of course, quebec isn’t only populated by french canadians. there are also irish and italians and people of english and scottish descent. but mostly it’s french canadians.

previously: french canadians still evolving and meanwhile, in france…

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who’s outbreeding the most?

ron (a little facetiously i think) asks: “Is there any evidence that the Germans in America have become heavy inbreeders?”

i highly doubt it (and no one around here suggested that, btw). but it did get me to wondering which ethnic european-americans (i.e. whites) are outbreeding the most. so i checked the — you guessed it! — gss.

here are the percentages of respondents answering that their spouses were from the same ethnic background as themselves (of course, who knows how many of these people actually have mixed backgrounds):

danish = 9%
french = 9%

swedes = 12%
scottish = 13%
czechoslovakians = 18%

norwegians = 23%
polish = 27%
irish = 29%

netherlands = 31%
russians = 33%
italians = 34%
french canadians = 35%
germans = 36%
english/welsh = 39%

mexicans = 54%

i know — are these mexicans whites? i dunno. whatever. in any case, “white” mexicans marry other mexicans at a rate of 54%. that’s the highest rate for any of these groups.

the english/welsh group and the german-americans place next in the race for marrying their own kind — 39% and 36% respectively. their percentages are prolly so “high” in part because there are a lot of english-/welsh- and german-americans from which to choose.

only 9% of danish-americans are married to other danish-americans. the largest majority of them, 20%, have married german-americans. twenty percent (20%) of swedish-americans have married german-americans, too.

scottish-americans win the prize for marrying the most english/welsh at a rate of 41%. that’s more than the english/welsh marry themselves! (~_^) the czechoslovakians like the english/welsh, too — 21% of them have married anglo-/welsh-americans.

french-americans (not french canadians) like to marry irish-americans — 22% of them are married to irish-americans.

something like half of the russians, btw, are ashkenazi jews, presumably marrying other ashkenazi jews, although i didn’t actually check for that.

what’s pretty obvious from these numbers is that, apart from the mexicans, most white american ethnic groups are marrying out quite a LOT nowadays. dunno how long this has been going on (i tried to sort the data by cohort but that crashed my computer — twice. so i gave up.)

that is all.
_____

gss nesstar search: RACE + ETHNIC + SPETHNIC
n > 50 in all cases.

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