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I would disagree.
Nomadic short-lived invasions had relatively little impact on the settled populations in terms of inter-marriage (or breeding).
In the past it took very long periods of time for inter-marriages to occur between populations even living in extreme proximity to each other (of course, if you think race doesn’t exist, try imagining what it meant in 200AD for people in a small village to have people with a different language, religion, and culture live next door. NO WAY were they inter-mingling)
Now we know this mainly because of the toponyms of villages throughout Europe, and subsequent observations of how people in regions with inter-mingled ethnicities lived alongside each other into modern times (into the 20th century).
You could have a village with a Bulgarian name next to one with a Greek or Aromanian or Albanian name…with the populations neatly divided ethnically in their respective village. This even into the 20th century.
They did not inter-marry, either genetically or culturally.
These sort of mixing happened only after centuries of co-existence in permanent settlements.
Nomadic populations never had such an impact on settled populations. They led to de-population of certain areas because they engaged in slavery and plundering, but they did not replenish the population with permanent settles of their own. Their conquests were short lived. This was the case with the Huns, the Bulgars and any other barbaric nomadic population you can think of.
Second, the “Huns” weren’t “Chinese”. Evidence from their language indicates they were some sort of proto-Slavic/ Scythian/Iranian/Turkic mix…which were the dominant ethnic types in the region you described (not the Chinese and pre-Mongolian).
We know the Slavs are a mixture of these groups (Scythian-Iranian types), as are Hungarians and Bulgars.
So….no. No Han Chinese mixing in England :) Sorry.
As for the Romans, yes of course they were a mixture of ethnicities. But all these ethnicities were…white. Could there have been a couple of guys from North Africa (who were actually of Berber descent…most of the Roman settlements in North Africa were actually settled by…Romans) who went to England and married there and had kids? Yes of course. But in population terms, that’s insignificant.
Now, if you think “race” is a modern social construct and doesn’t actually exist, or didn’t exist in the past, or doesn’t exist in other cultures…then you really need to read up on how people even in the relatively recent past lived in ethnically diverse regions of Europe.
Forget race. These people sub-divided themselves by language, religion and culture. And they segregated themselves into different villages on those bases. They did not inter-mingle.
Marriages across these villages were rare and coordinated efforts. I.e., someone in the village would have had to have run out of marriage material that wasn’t related to him/her by blood…and in the cluster of related villages of the same ethnicity/religion/clan…for them to go to a village of unrelated ethnicity.
I.e., it was an option of last resort.
It happened, but it was an extremely slow process. And it could only happen if both populations were settled in the same area, for prolonged periods of time.
Which is why, in reality, you get virtually no mixing across continents or races. You first have to overcome the barrier of language, religion, culture…and then geography…and then time…to arrive at the point of inter-marriage.
But the point being that people, across the world, were and are extremely…aware…of even minor differences between populations. And it takes an enormous amount of historical circumstances to overcome such…awareness. Never-mind something as obvious as race.
What we in America call being a “bigot” or a “racist”, for the vast majority of the people in the world, for the vast majority of human history…was/is called being “normal”.
I read recently that 18% of the four year olds in federally funded pre-school programs are black, yet they make up 48% of the students expelled from those programs. Disparate impact analysis would suggest we have an epidemic of closet Bull Conners going into the pre-school teaching profession. The alternative is that possibly traits such as the MAO-A gene mentioned above, compounded by the intense social pathologies of life in the underclass, has some impact on impulse control, emotional stability and the complex of behaviors needed to live in our civilization rather than a hunter-gatherer one.
Why should it be taboo to address these issues, and why can’t social policy be modified after it bumps it’s fuzzy head on reality? We should start by requiring Norplant or some similar effective birth control for anyone who is so disorganized they become a public ward. Conversely we should organize tax and subsidy policies to promote fertility by those who have the foresight to grasp the costs and obligations of childbearing. I do not think these ideas are eugenics in the common pejorative sense of the term, and I think they would have a lot of public support.
If you have ever witnessed (as I have) otherwise responsible middle-class people altering their behavior in pernicious ways in order to qualify for more government goodies, I wonder whether you’d be so quick to say that.
Offer a subsidy even for “good” behavior, and you shift people’s motivations from caring for themselves and their family as best they can with the resources they have to getting as much out of the public fisc as possible at their fellow taxpayers’ expense.
Responsible people – especially the aggrieved middle class – aren’t above wanting to “get their own back”, even if doing so undermines the very habits that make them responsible.
MFRattler – good point, I’m almost always against subsidies and the like, but right now it seems like we only subsidize the dysfunctional and penalize the productive. Maybe just changing the first half of the equation would be sufficient.
Just noticed this complementary item on the Ricochet twitter feed:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
While I don’t necessarily agree with the overall point of your comments, I do agree with this point.
But as Rattlesnake said, this goes against the current policies which try to incentivize births through financial incentives.
It also goes fundamentally in the opposite direction to the recommendations of the “social conservatives” and the “value-conservatives” and the conservative policy wonks that we have seen here in Ricochet in large numbers.
Their arguments are that we should incentive births because more children leads to greater economic prosperity…yada yada yada. Rachel Lu can make the points better than I can ;)
But…the people who are incentive by financial rewards on child bearing are precisely the poor. The middle and upper income people aren’t incentiveized by such. They’re not having kids because they don’t have the time, not because they can’t afford them.
Hence…the best incentive programs to dis-incentivize “poor” people from having kids, which will then flood the government welfare system…is to stop providing financial incentives for having kids.
Have the parents bear the full costs. That will send the message that those who should be having kids are those who will be able to afford them, and not impose them on the rest of society.
Doesn’t this make the term “African American” a bit silly given that Africa is so genetically diverse. Is it perhaps why real Africans mostly identify with their region or country rather than the continent of Africa.
This shows itself in the Leftist habit of insisting that unless one can point to a purely biological mandate for a particular cultural trait, that trait can be abolished at will and replaced with something more congenial to their ideology. Unless someone can prove that there is a biological basis for, say, property rights, we should be able to sweep them aside and choose to live in a Socialist paradise instead.
The flaw in this logic is that culture is an evolutionary process which discovers truths about what works in the real world, in a manner analogous to biological evolution. Even if there is no genetic basis for property rights, or gender roles, or social hierarchy, or the cannibalism taboo, there is an evolutionary basis for them that confounds efforts to discard them.
The interplay between cultural evolution and genetic evolution is a complicated and interesting topic. When I took my students to the zoo, the topic of elephant social behavior came up. Elephant herds consist of female adults and juveniles. The adult males live on their own, or sometimes in “bachelor herds,” and only come to the main herd to mate. My students recognized this “Oh, they’re baby daddies!” I said, “Basically, yes.”
I wonder if a cultural practice like “baby daddying,” if it goes on long enough, could lead to genetic evolution that reinforces the cultural trait. It would be not unlike the way cultures that practice dairy farming tend to acquire lactose tolerance. It’s a fascinating and troubling idea.
That’s true. Genetically speaking, the “African race” is really multiple races. Africa is the trunk of the human family tree, and Europeans, Asians, etc. are thin branches growing off of that trunk.
I don’t think it’s b.s., because Fred is actually describing a different “one drop” rule from the one under which a few individuals who appeared white could be held in slavery, or otherwise discriminated against. The Left’s new “one drop” rule is what allowed Harvard to congratulate itself for its “diversity” because of the presence of Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren on the faculty. It’s what makes Barack Obama, 50% white and raised almost entirely by his white mother and grandparents, prefer to be called “black”. But it’s still a “one drop” rule.
This is certainly odious, but in a different way from the old rule. Although the old rule was ignorant, it wasn’t incompatible with a confident culture that was capable of thriving in the world. When the dominant culture decides to regard its own patrimony, whether racial, political, philosophical, or economic, as something to be ridiculed or denigrated, the result isn’t likely to be sustainable for very long.
I am not sure what this lends to the discussion but several years ago I read about deer that lived between the no man land between east and west Germany.There was a high voltage fence between the two. If a deer came in contact with it ,the deer died. They learned to avoid it.After unification the fence was taken down.Several generations later the descendents of the deer were still avoiding the area were the fence once was. They did this even though they had no actual remembrance of the fence. The fear was some how passed from generation to generation . Is this different than human behavior ?
I don’t think race is a social contruct, but racial divisions are fuzzy. I think “race” is just ‘family” on a larger scale. You can often tell people share the same parents or grandparents based on observable similarties (i.e. relateness). Likewise, you can often tell that people share ancestors based on observable similarities (race). E.g. two people of East Asian ancestry probably share more ancestors than they do with someone of European ancestry. Family boundaries and racial boundaries are fuzzy and shifting, due to intermarriage/interbreeding between families, which families naturally do. Family and racial boundaries can be made more sharp if interbreeding is suppressed, but by nature these boundaries are made to be crossed.
This is important enough to bear repeating.
Culture is not limited to humans. Some animal behaviors are instinctive, but other behaviors are learned, either from parents or other members of the species. Animal culture consists of things like a squirrel watching another squirrel eating a tomato, then doing likewise.
And you actually got one from me, if you read closely. Requires clicking on the link, though. And thinking, “And just what does this entail, what must it entail, if this is in fact true, which it sure seems to be?” (Hint: major saltation. Hint again: Not really compatible with … well, let me leave you with the fun parts.)
And one last minor and amusing observation: I threw a nuclear bomb into what had up to that point been a mere flamethrower-level discussion. I am quite sad that no one really noticed. See my subsequent post about “needing attention,” because if anything should have started World War III, it should have been that, and that, frankly, was fully my intention.
Ah, well. Kids these days: They just don’t know how to read carefully.
Here is the bottleneck. 1 Peter 3:20:
Madame Berlinski, I found your comment to be quite amusing, and I also was disappointed that such an opening went without response.
You were quite correct to provide a warning before citing Noam Chomsky. Fortunately you were referring to his work as a linguist and not those other fields in which he has made a name for himself (as an intellectual to the usual crowd, and as a bona-fide kook to the rest of us).
And the work you cited was sort of an interesting distraction. Right there at the top of page 14 I found a statement that seems to me to sum up an awful lot of the problem with Big Evolution:
I think he shows a serious lack of imagination.
Exactly. The trick in such thing is always to remember that our categories are meant to serve our understanding of reality; reality itself may not always play ball, and is usually more complicated.
Indeed he does, in that sentence, but that’s not really a fair criticism of him overall (lack of imagination) and nor is it the point. Fact that he can’t quite bring himself to say, “If A, then B, A, therefore B,” hardly means we’re forbidden from pointing it out, does it?
This is true and important when making certain (but not all) decisions about individuals. However, when making public policy decisions about groups it makes sense to take group characteristics into account. This is why the concept of disparate impact is so pernicious. It leads to perverse outcomes such as race-norming the results of perfectly fair tests when those results don’t reflect a false group equality.
Group characteristics also are important to those aspects of decision-making about individuals in which actuarial calculations come into play. Race, sex, and age are just a few of the data to be taken into account when setting insurance premiums or pension contributions, if we want to avoid some persons subsidizing others who have differing actuarially computed expected payouts.
Finally, there are times when decisions must be made based on probabilities, because that is the only information available. For better or worse, race is one of the characteristics that affects probabilities; everyone knows this and, what is more, they act as if they know it.
When I clicked the link Google Books told me the pages were not available for preview. Maybe this happened to other people too.
Odd, that. What might cause it to be easily visible to me but not you? What’s the solution? (I could find another reference, of course–we are spoiled for choice where “Chomsky’s verbal output” is concerned, as well as his “output on all things verbal,” for that matter, but I’m curious about why I can see it but you can’t.)
You can use the reason I always fall back on in situations like this: his computer doesn’t like him very much.
The same thing happened to me. Just take the quote from the article and/or the search item from the google book page and reopen google books afresh, not via the link and then search search google books for the quote (you can cut and paste it) and the pages will come up.
Told me that too many people had previewed it lately and to try again later.
The more relevant question is whether history itself may be shaped by genetics. If different local geographic conditions led to evolution of subtlely different forms of social organization, we should not ignore the implications of genetics on, e.g., the emergence of different forms of government. Being too trusting of strangers can be more deadly in more sparsely populated regions, whereas a lack of trust can be a disadvantage in more dense human settlements. If a propensity to trust strangers has a genetic basis, then that cannot be ignored when wondering why e.g. Bedouin, Han Chinese, and Scandinavians developed different types of governmental systems — and why those differences may persist even after the advent of modern telecommunications. We study social organization in ants, bees, and bonobos with an understanding that genetics plays a role. Why not also for human mammals?
This is a great story, but in fact “lactose tolerance” appears to have little to do with lifetime consumption of dairy. Populations that are most reknowned for their dairy consumption may have low incidence of this gene, and some populations with the highest incidence do not consume dairy.
I don’t know why this gene has spread so quickly, but it’s not required for healthy consumption of dairy—that much is perfectly clear.