I asked a question about African admixture among “Southern Whites” that seems to have upset you?! IMO there are no dumb questions. What’s dumb is people running scared and then making baseless ad hominem attacks…

I’m from Ireland and come from a large extended family of business owners/large farmers in past generations, to being almost exclusively professionals today, with – I’m guessing – a mean IQ well above 115. I’ve also tested with 23andMe and now have over 800 Relatives, about 500+ of these are clustered in 5 Southern states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana. Most of these people identify as Anglo and some as Scots-Irish, almost all are non-Catholic, many are Quaker.

The question is assuming they came to the US with a similar IQ average of around 115, then what would lower their IQ in a Southern US setting, over a few hundred years? Razib’s prior mention of hookworms is fascinating, as I had previously mentioned – a few years ago on this blog – that I suspected that worms or other internal parasites may have been responsible for the fact that all my cousins are appreciably taller than their parents – 3 to 6″ for males. That’s something I’d definitely like to see more research on.

However another result I see in my 23andMe data is that quite a few of these Southern relatives have African mtDNA, but are White phenotypically – that may point to another clue partly.

Oh, and NO, I’m not PC, as it has no utility to me.

Max Weber and a lot of political and economic geographers that walked in his footsteps would beg to differ with you on this point.

“New England’s dominance over American intellectual life during the antebellum period can be neatly demonstrated simply by looking at the major writers ”

Alternately, maybe this has something to do with the fact that the folks who devised the literary canon were Yankees, or studied at Harvard or Yale and chose to assimilate culturally.

I believe that Thomas Melvill’s highest rank during the Revolution was major; he was famous in Boston for being a kind if living representative of the Revolutionary generation (cf Holmes’ LAST LEAF).Peter Gansevoort, Melville’s maternal grandfather, was a colonel during the Revolution, and, to the best of my knowledge, did not make general until after 1800.

I believe he had an article, on a defunct website, that was also a takedown of the theory. In either case, Newton’s point was not all “Celts” acted “Southern” once they settled in the US. Highland Scots in Canada and in the North, like the Catholic Irish, had different historical and social trajectories than the Southerners.

My own impression is that Southern environmental and economic determinism played a role, combined with the effects of the dominance of frontier Evangelicalism. The Catholic Irish benefited, in the long run, from the counter-Reformation intellectual tradition. The dispersed nature of Southern settlement on the frontier also contributed to a decline of social life or the maintenance of pre-modern behaviors.
Southern towns weren’t real urban settlements, they were service villages surrounding county courthouses. The question is whether this was a Highland British tradition affecting Southern settlement patterns or whether it was a strictly North American cultural development.

Personally, I think it more useful, if at first somewhat confusing, to use the terms “highland” (not limited to Scottish highlands) and “lowland” when distinguishing British regional cultures instead of Anglo-Saxon vs. Celtic. Sir Cyril Fox, whose work was so foundational in this field of inquiry and who influenced subsequent scholars like Hackett-Fischer,
used “highland zone” to describe the upland British societies of England, Wales and Scotland: pastoral based, organized in extended families, dispersed settlement, in contrast to the lowland, more densely settled, richer agricultural regions. Fox believed these differences went back to neolithic times. Fox was an environmental determinist.

Much of what the Celtic theorists maintain is distinctively “Celtic”: blood feuds, transhumance, tanistry, characterized premodern Germanic societies as well and the distinction of highland vs. lowland one sees in Britain is replayed in non-Celtic areas like Scandinavia. Think Norway vs. Denmark.

Hacket-Fisher, to his credit, recognized that this Anglo-Celtic borderland region was internally diverse and not simply a Celtic cultural zone, there were important Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Scandinavian elements. He opted for the term “borderer” for this very reason.

@ryan and @pcconroy,

That was Mencken’s theory; read his Sahara of the Bozart.

you should be nicer. i just looked up your past comments and you often verge toward assholery, even when making valid points (this comment is not an invitation for you to respond, i’m telling you something).

Why sure it could.

Except that since most of those who tried to pass went north, African ancestry in antebellum anglo populations followed a cline from the north, not from the south.

On the other hand, there was a significant difference in ancestries among northern and southern Anglo groups – there was far more Celtic influence among southern whites. Is the bold Mr Conroy, smasher of PC attitudes, willing to follow where the historiography leads? I doubt it.

Personally, I doubt Celtic ancestry is correlated with idiocy, but one wouldn’t know it from avatars like PConroy.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (MA)
2. Hawthorne (MA)
3. Thoreau (MA)
4. Dickinson (MA)
5. Whitman*
6. Melville*

Indeed, the only major figure who stands outside of the N E tradition during this period is Poe, who, although born in Boston, was lacking in cultural and ancestral links to New England.

*Whitman: Although usually counted as a New Yorker, Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, a town that was settled by immigrants from Massachusetts and Connecticut (Whitman’s paternal line stems from this migration) and can be considered as part of greater New England. Furthermore, the very framework of his poetry was derived from Emerson.

*Melville:As with Whitman, Melville was of New England origins on his father’s side;his paternal grandfather was Boston icon Thomas Melvill, the hero of Holmes’ THE LAST LEAF.Similarly, his literary idol was another New Englander, Hawthorne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-environment_correlation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norms_of_reaction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-environment_interaction