beaker

speaking of the bell-beaker people(s), this (or this shape anyway)…

…just looks like a d*mn fine milking vessel! if it’s big enough (i didn’t actually bother to check how big this particular beaker is — some of them were drinking vessels, but plenty of them were bucket-sized), you could just position that under your cow’s udder, get a good grip on it (the vessel, not the udder) just under the rim with your knees on either side (you may have to have milked a cow once or twice to appreciate this feature), and that nice big rim will even catch any off-piste spray during your milking session.

it also looks like a great thing to put on your head when you’ve had too much to drink. the bell-beaker culture version of a lampshade. (~_^)

(all credit/blame goes to the d.h. for these thoughts. not the lampshade one, although he’d prolly approve of that. (~_^) )

btw:

greg cochran. true scientist. "we were wrong." http://t.co/3xFX6t7A06 (^_^)

— 🎄☃hbd chick☃🎄 (@hbdchick) March 17, 2015

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greg and henry and the economists

“every society selects for something.”

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(^_^)

see also: Talking to Economists

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random notes: 09/06/13

something that sobl1 asked me yesterday on twitter about the kurds led me to this on wikipedia:

“Barth finds in his study of southern Kurdistan that in tribal villages 57% of all marriages were cousin marriages (48% bint ‘amm marriages) while in a nontribal village made up of recent immigrant families only 17% were cousin marriages (13% bint ‘amm).”

the barth reference is: Barth F. (1954) Father’s brother’s daughter marriage in Kurdistan. South Western Journal of Anthropology 10, 164-171.

i haven’t seen it (yet), because it’s not online — only some tantilizing previews here and here — and, no, i still haven’t gone to the library.

what piques my interest here is the difference in cousin marriage rates between the traditional kurdish tribal villages (57%) and nontribal villages “made up of recent immigrant families“ (17%).

while it seems like it should be obvious that immigration would reduce cousin marriage rates, this is the first actual example i’ve (almost) seen of that. in other cases of immigration that i’ve seen — europe in general in the late-1800s (see second half of this post), germans in gdańsk in the 1500-1700s (see here), and, for example, not to be forgotten, pakistanis and their chain-migration patterns in places like the u.k. today — the cousin marriage rates have actually gone UP in connection with immigration. here — finally, then — is an example of cousin marriage decreasing with immigration — by a LOT, apparently.

so it seems like the effect of emigration on cousin marriage rates is something that can vary depending on circumstances, although what those circumstances are, is not clear to me.

Further Research is Required.^TM (^_^)
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a little bit on iceland (and the faroe islands) from The Faroe Islands: Interpretations of History [pg. 14]:

“The Church’s power [in the faroe islands] was also moral, and the workings of ecclesiastical law may have contributed to the relative impoverishment of freeholders. We do not know what ecclesiastical law was in the Faroes before the Reformation; only that in 1584 the Løgting complied with Frederick II’s request that a compilation of late thirteenth-century Icelandic law called the Stóridómur continue to be valid in the Faroes. Among other things, the Stóridómur set the bounds within which kinsmen were forbidden to marry; since marriage between cousins was held to be incestuous, lands divided by inheritance could not easily be recombined. After the Reformation, the Stóridómur was supplemented by secular laws prescribing harsh punishments for bearing or fathering children out of wedlock (death, if the parents were cousins) and allowing couples to marry only if they had a certain amount of land. Similar restrictions on marriage were in effect earlier as well. It could hardly be otherwise in so ecologically precarious a land, where overpopulation was always a threat. Thus the Seyðabræv had ‘established certain requirements for a man if he was to be able to marry and set up his own house’: none could do so without being able to support at least three cows. In effect, the poor were forbidden to marry.”

so it sounds as though by at least the 1580s — and very likely the late 1200s — cousin marriage was banned in iceland in this stóridómur (and, then, from at least the 1580s onwards on the faroe islands). that cousin marriage was banned in iceland starting in the late 1200s — if that’s what happened (i’m still not sure yet) — would fit my prediction that cousin marriage was probably banned there when the norwegian crown took over iceland in 1262. my bet is that the ban was introduced to the island at that point in time from the continent.

i haven’t found out much about this stóridómur — here is the icelandic wikipedia page google translated. sounds like it wasn’t compiled until the 1560s, but, perhaps, based upon earlier law tracts? dunno. it does mean something like “big judgement” or something like that.

and how about the faroe islands there?! those were some eugenical practices (if they enforced them, which it actually sounds like they did, if you read through the book above)! the faroese ought to be geniuses! (~_^)
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finally…

conclusion: we need more physicists studying/being interested in human biodiversity/sociobiology/anthropolgy!:

(probable) reason: they’re more logical/have higher iqs.

examples: greg cochran, steve hsu, william shockley, and — i didn’t know — napoleon chagnon (h/t g-nice!):

“Darkness in Anthropology: A Conversation with Napoleon Chagnon”

“Iannone: How did your interest in anthropology begin? What made you want to be an anthropologist?

“Chagnon: My original major as an undergraduate in a local two-year college — Michigan College of Mining and Technology — was physics. At that time I had never heard of anthropology. I transferred to the University of Michigan after my first year and discovered that ‘physics’ was in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and I would have to take courses in each of these fields. The only thing I could fit into my schedule for the social science requirement was a course in a field called anthropology.”

(^_^)

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mating patterns, family types, social structures, and selection pressures

i’ve mentioned this before (see here and here and here), specifically wrt family types like nuclear families vs. clans, but i thought i’d bring it up again:

more attention ought to be paid to things like mating patterns, family types, and the social structures within societies as creating different sorts of selection pressures for different types of individuals — personality types, iq, other behavioral patterns, etc.

some researchers have been looking at how, for instance, mating patterns can affect genes and genomes in populations: cochran and harpending have been investigating paternal age and mutation rates, some of greg’s low-hanging fruit (double entendre NOT intended), and hage and marck discovered how matrilineality and matrilocal residence affected the distribution of y-chromosome haplogroups in polynesia (other researchers have done similar research for other parts of the world) — and these types of research are really interesting and very exciting, but they’re not quite what i’m talking about.

here’s one example of the sort of thing i’m interested in asking (and answering!): what sort of persons succeed in reproducing the most in a society based on the nuclear family versus a society based around extended families or even clans? what sort(s) of personalities do they have? how high of an iq do they need? what other types of behavioral patterns do they exhibit?

gregory clark famously found that, over the course of the medieval period in england, it was the hard-working, thrifty, forward planning folks with middle-class values who reproduced the most. but he made next to no (actually i think it was none whatsoever) mention of the prevailing family type in medieval england: the nuclear family, which was well-established by at least the 1200s.

imagine what sort of people would do well — what sorts of traits would be selected for — in a society which was based on the individual and his nuclear family making it on their own — with a little help from immediate family and, most importantly, friends and neighbors. someone trustworthy? and trusting? someone who can plan ahead, because those who don’t can’t rely on falling back on an extended family/clan? someone with not the lowest iq in the world?

and what sorts of people do well in a clannish society? those who believe in putting family first ahead of friends and/or the wider community? those who trust their family members more than outsiders, because the outsiders have always had their own family members that they prioritized? individuals who don’t feel a strong urge to plan that far in advance, ’cause hey — uncle joe or cousin ahmed will be there to help out when times are tough? too many individuals who are not so bright because their brighter relatives support them and their offspring?

here, once again, is my favorite example of how at least some clannish societies work. (see if you can spot the potential dysgenic practices!) this is from modern-day egypt — upstream which is much more clannish/tribal than the delta region of the country — Development and Social Change in Rural Egypt (1986), pgs. 150-51:

“The importance that poor peasants attach to the brokerage services by a single wealthy patron can be seen in the continuing importance of the extended family unit in rural Egypt. In the village of El-Diblah [pseudonymous village representative of upper egypt], as well as other Egyptian communities, politics and much of life itself are organized on the basis of large, extended families numbering 500 members or more. These extended families are broad patrilineal structures, which may or may not be able to trace themselves back to a single historical founder. While these extended families do not represent monolithic social structures, most fellahin are animated by a real feeling of belonging to a particular extended family unit. When they need a loan or help with outside government officials, poor peasants will often turn to the leader or a prominent person within their extended family. In the village of El-Diblah three of the four leading extended families are headed by rich peasants. In the eyes of most fellahin, this is exactly as it should be. In the countryside wealth acquired by virtually any means provides a good indication of an individual’s ability to deal with (or against) the ouside world.

“‘Zaghlul,’ for example, is the rich peasant head of one of the leading extended families in El-Diblah. A short, wiry 55-year-old fellah, whose dress and mannerisms are almost indistinguishable from those of other peasants in the village, Zaghlul now owns about 25 feddans of land. Much of this land is planted in sugar cane, a crop that he uses to supply his own cane press that produces black molasses for local sale. As the owner of 25 feddans of land, and the proprietor of one of the few ‘manufacturing’ enterprises in the village, Zaghlul is able to dispense a wide number of agricultural and non-agricultrual work opportunities to favored members of his extended family. Many of the poorer members of his extended family live in a mud-brick settlement surrounding Zaghlul’s modern two-story, red-brick house. In the evenings a steady stream of these poor people come to Zaghlul’s house, seeking brokerage and intercessionary services (for example, help in securing agricultural inputs and medical services from the government)….”

mating patterns matter. family types matter. social structures matter. all in the sense that they (i think) set up selection pressures for different sorts of traits — or at least they can do. no doubt they cannot be looked at in isolation (one needs to consider all sorts of other life factors, too, like economic structures), but i think they’re probably pretty important — and need more attention. from this perspective, i mean.

previously: a sense of entitlement and clannish dysgenics and inbreeding and iq

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arab thoroughbreds

greg cochran says (or writes, i guess — unless he talks to his computer monitor like some of us people do…):

“If a new environment favored lower (or higher) aggressiveness in males, a Y-chromosome that induced lower (or higher) aggressiveness would take off. And since different Y chromosomes do indeed affect the level of aggressiveness in mice [which I just found out], possibly by affecting testosterone production – this mechanism is plausible….

“Fortunately for all concerned, the selective value of aggressiveness, etc. has been the same for all human populations forever and ever, before and after the development of agriculture. Otherwise you might see weirdly rapid expansions of particular Y-chromosome haplogroups – common, yet only a few thousand years old.”

i nominate as one such example of this selection that never happened the “YCAII=22-22 and DYS388≥15” cluster of haplogroup J-M267 which, depending on who you read, may or may not be related to the arabs’ expansion out of their peninsula in historic times. whatever the full story, haplogroup J-M267 certainly looks arab-expansiony:

hage and marck have shown how mating patterns can affect the distribution of sex chromosome haplogroups (mmmm-hmmm!). the prevalence of father’s brother’s daughter’s (fbd) marriage amongst the arabs could certainly have had an effect on the successful distribution of the J-M267 haplogroup, especially the YCAII-whatchamacallit cluster mentioned above if it was really connected to the arab expansion.

remember that fbd marriage concentrates y-chromosome types into these patrilineages, so fathers, sons, grandfathers, paternal uncles, paternal nephews, paternal male cousins, etc., all share the same y-chromosome (barring variations due to mutations, of course):

of particular interest is how men (“C” in diagram above) ensure that their male grandchildren by their daughters (“E” in diagram above) also have their y-chromosome, ’cause they marry their daughters off to their paternal nephews (i talked about that here). this doesn’t happen in most marriage systems. so, really, ALL the males in (ideal) arab, fbd patrilineages share the same y-chromosome.

this is one way that inbreeding could serve to accelerate the acquisition of “genes for altruism” in a population. if, say, those genes were aggression genes on the y-chromosome — genes that led to altruistic behaviors in the sense that the individuals having them were more likely to “kill thy unrelated neighbor” and make life better for themselves and their own — then inbreeding, especially father’s brother’s daughter’s marriage, could help those genes pile up more quickly.

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“brainwash – race”

episode six of “hjernevask” (“brainwash”) entitled “race.” feat. greg cochran, charles murray, and richard lynn.

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previously: brainwash and brainwash e01: the gender equality paradox

japan – reversal of fortune?

a couple of months ago, greg cochran wrote about how a population (any given population) might raise its average iq quickly — like over two or three generations. one possible method, he suggested, was to quit inbreeding. here’s what he said:

“I’ve been thinking, off and on, about sudden changes in the cognitive abilities of populations: groups low suddenly scoring much higher or lower on a time scale too short to be explained by selection: say, three generations or less…. I can think of two perfectly feasible strategies that *would* cause significant one-generation increases in intelligence, in certain populations. Iodine supplementation, in places where it’s short, has a big payoff…. The other practical, low-tech strategy would be stopping cousin marriage. The next generation would be in much better shape, since the children of first cousins take a substantial IQ hit – maybe six points or so.“

i think i may have stumbled across an example of a population rapidly dropping cousin marriage and, also very rapidly, gaining iq points.

japan.

yesterday, i was working on a completely different post about japan and cousin marriage, when i rediscovered this [pg. 30] (click on chart for LARGER version):

that’s the decline in the average national consanguinity rates in japan from 1947 to the early-1980s. but the consang rates were even higher in the 1910s-1920s at 22.4% [pg. 29] (and who knows how high the rates might’ve been even further back?), so the chart above should look something more like this (pardon my crayola — and note that i just eyeballed it — click on chart for LARGER version):

when i rediscovered this yesterday, i remembered what greg had written, and got to wondering if there were any historic data for japanese iqs and if there’d been any changes in those iqs over time. so i googled (as one does) … and found this:

The Rise of National Intelligence: Evidence from Britain, Japan and the U.S.A. [pdf] – lynn and hampson.

from that article [pgs. 27-31]:

“It has been possible to find five studies providing evidence on the secular trend of intelligence in Japan for the post World War II period….

“(1) Ushijima’s study (1961)….

“Here the Ushijima intelligence test was administered to 1365 children in 1953 and to a comparable sample of 1370 children in 1960 with the objective of determining any change in the mean over this relatively short period. The children were aged 9-15 years.

“(i) All age groups show a rise in scores for all abilities. The overall mean increase was 0.66 standard deviations, the equivalent of 9.9 IQ points, and representing an IQ gain of 14.1 IQ points per decade. This is of course a very considerable increase and much greater than anything found in either Britain or the U.S.A.

“(ii) The IQ increases are in general greater among the younger age groups than among the older….”

see my crayola chart above. kids who were fifteen in 1953 would’ve been born way back in 1938 when the consang rates were above 15% — maybe 17 or 18% (remember, i just eyeballed it, so this is a complete guess really) — while kids who were nine in 1953 would’ve been born in 1944 when consang rates were hovering right around 15%, in other words lower. same for the later cohort from 1960: fifteen year olds would’ve been born in 1945, nine years old in 1951. the younger the kids in the cohorts, the less chances their parents were related.

more from the article…

“(2) Kaneko’s study (1970)….

“Kaneko’s invetigation of a possible rise in the scores on this test was carried out in 1963….

“Hence the mean IQ in these schools has risen 10.38 IQ points over the 9-yr period … represents an IQ gain of 11.4 IQ points per decade. This figure is evidently broadly similar to the rise of 14.1 IQ points per decade for 1953-1960 found by Ushijima and confirms a very considerable rate of IQ gain in Japan in these early post World War II years.

“(3) Sano’s study (1974)….

“It will be seen that in all samples there were considerable increases in mean IQ from 1954 to 1972. The increases appear to be a little greater among the city children than among those from the prefrecture. When the results for 10- and 11-yr olds are combined, city children gained 18.04 IQ points and prefrecture children 15.07 IQ points….”

that the city children had greater gains than the rural kids is not surprising if inbreeding is the factor making the difference here. even up to the 1980s, consanguinity rates have been quite a bit lower in urban areas in japan as compared to rural areas (see table in this post for example). (more on this soon in that upcoming post on japan.)

“The average of the two gains is 16.56 IQ points, representing a gain of approx. 9.15 IQ points per decade for the entire sample.

“Sano also considered the question of whether the IQ gains in Japan have been increasing at a constant rate. For this he used Kaneko’s 1964 data which were available for two of the schools. He calculated that the increase in mean IQ was 10.47 points for 1954-1963 and 3.42 for 1963-1972…. ([I]t will also be noted that the gain of 10.47 IQ points for 1954-1963 is closely similar to Kaneko’s figure of 10.38 for the same period.)

“It is apparent therefore that there was a considerable deceleration in the rate of increase in intelligence over the period 1954-1972….”

again, see my crayola chart. the decline in cousin marriage rates is much sharper in the decades preceding 1954 than during those preceding 1963. in other words, there was a deceleration in the reduction of cousin marriages over time, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at a deceleration in the increases in iq over time.

“(4) Wechsler studies….

“Thus after making these adjustments we have Japanese mean IQs of 101.9 for 1951 and 107.4 for 1975. Hence over this 24-yr period (1951-1975) the Japanese mean IQ increased by 5.5 IQ points relative to the American IQ…. This represents a Japanese IQ gain of 5.75 IQ points per decade. This rate of increase for the period of 1951-1975 is somewhat less than Sano’s result of a 9.15 IQ point per decade increase over approximately the same period (1954-1972)….

“A second Japanese study using the WISC and WISC-R is also available (Anon, 1981)…. This gives a rise of 20.03 IQ points over the 24-yr period, making 8.34 IQ points per decade….”

lynn and hampson conclude:

“The conclusion of the Japanese studies is as follows. Two studies of the early post World War II period show substantial IQ gains of 9.9 and 11.4 IQ points per decade. Three studies of a longer period from approx. 1950-1975 show lower IQ gains of 9.1, 8.3 and 5.7 IQ points per decade, giving an average gain of 7.7 IQ points per decade. Since the early part of this period was characterized by a greater rate of gain, it appears that since around 1960 the IQ gains in Japan have decelerated to approx. 5 IQ points per decade….

“It is not particularly surprising that the Japanese gains should have been the greatest of the three countries. Japan was a relatively underdeveloped country in the 1930s with a per capita income about one eighth of that of the U.S.A.”

but the country was probably relatively underdeveloped because the japanese had a lower average iq at the time, and it’s since increased phenomenally … due to the sharp and rapid decline in inbreeding in japan? and so has their economic success obviously.
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i’d be curious to know two things:

– why did the japanese quit marrying their cousins? was there some official policy out there discouraging it — as part of their general modernization, “be more like the westerners” move? did the people just naturally adopt it as part of that westernization package? was it connected to christianity in japan? (japanese catholics historically had lower first cousin marriage rates than other religious groups — i’ll get to this in my upcoming post on japanese cousin marriage — the one that i was working on yesterday!). was it related to industrialization and urbanization? all of the above? none of the above?

– has something similar happened in china and/or korea (or elsewhere for that matter — i mean in modern times)? the cousin marriage rates for china are reportedly very low — today — but i’m pretty sure they were much higher in the past — even the recent past (see mating patterns in asia series below ↓ in the left-hand column), but i don’t have as good data for china as what i’ve presented here for japan. but inquiring minds want to know!

see also: Reversal of Fortune

previously: historic mating patterns in japan

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human biodiversity in time

hbders are used to thinking about differences between human populations in the world today, but we shouldn’t forget that human biodiversity works in time as well as space the final frontier.

here’s one of my favorite quotes from greg cochran:

“[That human evolution has continued] means that people were different in the past, enough that we’ll have to take it into account when trying to understand history. Ultimately it may cause us to radically reevaluate some of our historical ideas — the past may never be the same again.”

people in the past were not just like us. and — omg! — people in the future are not gonna be like us either!

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