Two couples suffering from fertility problems went to the same center, and chose the same egg donor and same sperm donor for IVF.

There are few things more terrifying than a young trainee nurse blinking myopically at you through her beer-bottle glasses as she advances on you awkwardly brandishing a razor and saying “I need to shave you…down there. I have never done this before.”

All of that made me curious about what genetics could teach us about the permanent human impact of the invasions. E.G. do the places where the Germanic tribes settled in France, Spain, and Italy show a genetic impact of those settlements?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/07/identity-by-descent-the-volkerwanderung/

also, read heather’s follow up book on the barbarian invasions. adrian goldsworthy’s book on the fall of rome might be a nice complement.

I’d been reading Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies” and often thought to myself that he could have benefited from reading “Empires and Barbarians”. How foolish of him to write his book decades before the latter came out.

My driver today was going on about hinduism and how the Buddha is also considered a god (as is Rama, one for obeying his father and the other for disobeying) by Hindus. So perhaps they don’t regard it as “displaced”, although historically speaking I understand there were large Buddhist kingdoms in what is now India and the faith is now relatively marginal.

I highly recommend both books. War-Perkins is shorter and more focused on the consequences of the Fall for material life in Western Europe. The Heather book is a terrific work of synthesis that combines cultural and political history with a strategic view of the roles of both the Western and Eastern Empires and of the Barbarians.

All of that made me curious about what genetics could teach us about the permanent human impact of the invasions. E.G. do the places where the Germanic tribes settled in France, Spain, and Italy show a genetic impact of those settlements?

I would appreciate any references to your posts or other things a non-scientist might find accessible and informative on this subject.

While surfing your blog to see what I could learn, I read: “Historical Dynamics & contingent conditions of religion”. It really impressed me.

I had read Stark, and thought that his theory did more to explain the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire than any thing else had read. Robin Lane Fox had written a couple of books on the subject that, IIRC, focused on ideology/theology not on the creation of concrete social networks. Gibbon, incidentally, had stressed the “social services” provided by Christians in that time. Stark’s social picture of Imperial Society fits very well with Heather’s (who emphasizes the assimilation of local elites to Roman culture) even though Heather does not cite Stark (Disciplinary silos, I suspect).

When reading and thinking about the Roman Empire in the religious context, I think it is important to keep in mind that paganism was not an entity, but a label for hundreds of cults practiced in hundreds of places throughout the empire. What Julian proved is that it is very hard to displace something with nothing.

Also, regarding Hinduism and Buddhism in the Subcontinent, has anybody ventured a plausible explanation of why Buddhism was displaced from the place where it was born?

Oh, and it’s also impossible to read past the first page, because when you click on the “older post” link it brings up a second page that has the Discovery Blogs header, but no posts.

Razib: you recommended a book about the Comanches by a Finn. Have you read T.E. Fehrenbach’s “The Comanches: History of a People”? If so, is reading the Finn’s book worthwhile? Fehrenbach’s was a great book, very enlightening about Texas.

What about a Northeastern candidate with a Midwestern running mate – would that change the electoral calculus too?