Comments on: Race: maybe it's agriculture

By: ohwilleke

ohwilleke — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:09:24 +0000

Sequentially, one would imagine that there was first Model 1, which took pretty great distances and long time periods to be noticeable, and then Model 2 took over and has dominated since except in environments where selective pressures are intense and atypical for the source population (e.g. Tibet).

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:59:19 +0000

In general, I think the species model can be misleading because it encourages people to think of racial groups as archetypes. I don’t think the archetypal system is even hugely true for non-human animals. The species concept is an approximation applied to the confusion of nature.

When we have more direct information about genealogy, we don’t worry about fitting creatures into categories based on looks as much. For example, consider racehorses. They are seldom categorized by coat color because we know their entire genealogy for over two centuries. To be a thoroughbred, you have to be descended thoroughly from 3 Arabian stallions and 20 English mares. You don’t have to be a particular color. You don’t even have to be terribly fast. (I know, I’ve bet on some.) We say that Seabiscuit is the grandson of Man o’ War and nephew of his own rival War Admiral, because we have their papers.

Thoroughbreds are an extreme example of an inbred extended family, but human racial groups tend to be more moderately inbred extended families. We are all familiar with extended families, and are not baffled by the conundrums put forward about race when thinking about extended families. For example, how can people belong to more than one extended family? Well, how can they not?

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:50:37 +0000

The isolation-by-distance model works pretty well if you count oceans, which often get overlooked.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:44:37 +0000

Or maybe India is the center of the world and Europe, East Asia, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa are outlying lobes?

By: jb

jb — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:48:15 +0000

It seems to me that, in the limit, Models 1 & 2 are the same. If the demographic expansion of widely separated groups is sufficiently great, then it really doesn’t matter if those groups were genuinely isolated, or if they were originally part of a continuous population that showed clinal variation, because any intermediate populations which did not take part in the expansion end up being totally overwhelmed, and might as well never have existed.

I do think it’s quite interesting that Coon & co., just by eyeballing it, managed to come up with races that match up reasonably well with modern genetic cluster analysis!

By: doc

doc — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 02:39:57 +0000

Civilization is the worst thing to befall man.

Damn agriculture, damn it all to hell!

By: Ezequiel Martin Camara

Ezequiel Martin Camara — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 02:18:25 +0000

My view would be that reality is more complicated that any of these models. A constant difusion mixes everything and builds the clinal landscape. All the while, power-law-scattered events cause regions of the landscape to expand and overtake neighbours. That creates the perception of borders and homogeneity. The fact that the distribution of people is not even, and that people tend to mix with like, adds to the perception. But it is all a transient situation that will continue to evolve. The Neolitic expansion is probably the largest event, but I am sure that there were many before and after, at many different scales.