Civilization is not Ferguson’s best
Last winter I took note of a major conflict between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson over a review by the former of the latter’s most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest. Ferguson accused Mishra of attempting to assassinate his char…
Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry
A correspondent emailed me to tell me that Linda Chavez, whose father was a New Mexican Hispano, was found to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Henry Louise Gates Jr’s Finding your Roots series. This brings me to point to a recent paper, The impa…
White supremacy and white privilege; same coin
A few weeks ago I met Chris Mooney for some drinks & snacks, and we talked about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. It was an interesting conversation. We have a long history, so it wasn̵…
It doesn’t always get “better”
The History News Network has a post up, Now It’s Obama Who’s Our First Gay President!, which hammers home points which I’ve been making implicitly and explicitly about historical processes, especially in the United States:
Today, I kn…
Unz Historical Research Competition
For your consideration:
As a means of publicizing the vast quantity of high-quality content material uniquely available on its recently released website, UNZ.org is announcing a historical research competition.
A First Prize of $10,000 and several …
Post-Neolithic revenge of the foragers
If I have something to share, why not share it? Over the past few weeks I’ve been ruminating on some of the possible intersections between historical population genetics and anthropology, especially in light of the discussion that I’ve had …
The collapse of logic & human culture
Slavery’s last stronghold: Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her master’s goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to die. The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept […]
Are genes the key to the Yankee Empire?
That’s the question a commenter poses, albeit with skepticism. First, the background here. New England was a peculiar society for various demographic reasons. In the early 17th century there was a mass migration of Puritan Protestants from England to the colonies which later became New England because of their religious dissent from the manner in […]
The poverty of multiculturalist discourse
As I’ve noted in this space before many of my “web friends” and readers are confused why I call myself “conservative.” This is actually an issue in “real life” as well, though I’m not going to get into that because I’m a believer in semi-separation of the worlds. I’ll be giving a full account of […]
History obviates surprises
There’s a piece in The New Republic, Mormonism’s Surprisingly Deep Affinity For Progressive Politics. It’s interesting, but I think that the niche for these sorts of pieces relies on the reality that there’s a deep lack of interest in American history on the part of the moderately educated public. Many of the “trends” or “surprises” […]
E. O. Wilson in The Atlantic
The Atlantic has a huge profile of E. O. Wilson up. The main course is his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. It seems to be an elaboration of some of the ideas in the infamous Martin Nowak paper which resulted in a huge counter-response from biologists. But this part was kind of fun: […]
The history of the world!
My post from last week, Relative angels and absolute demons, got a lot of circulation. Interestingly I received several emails from self-described lurkers who asked me for recommendations on world history, with a particular thought to rectify deficiencies in non-European history. These were people who were not looking for exceedingly abstruse monographs. Below are some […]
The words of the father
Over at A Replicated Typo they are talking about a short paper in Science, Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In it Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew observe that “A correlation is emerging that suggests language change in an already-populated region may require a minimum proportion of immigrant males, as reflected in Y-chromosome DNA types.” But […]
Rational optimist or scientific racist?
I’m quite looking forward to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s coming out in three weeks, so expect to hear a lot more about it. That violence has declined is known outside of Pinker’s own work, and I try and spread this “good news” as much as I […]
Horses, not people (sort of)
I have criticized the “pots not people” paradigm on this weblog before. In short, the idea is that material cultural changes reflected in the archaeological record are an indicator of memetic, not genetic, evolution. So a shift from pottery…
10 Questions for Charles C. Mann
Over at Discover Blogs. Mostly about 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.
The fall of empires as an exponential distribution
I was alerted to Samuel’s Arbesman’s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research on his weblog. Interestingly I’m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round u…
War in Pre-Columbian Sumeria
For most of my life I have had an implicit directional view of Holocene human culture. And that direction was toward more social complexity and cultural proteanism. Ancient Egypt traversed ~2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the fall of the New Ki…
Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…
The biocultural frog and tortoise
As many of you know when you have two adjacent demes, breeding populations, they often rapidly equilibrate in gene frequencies if they were originally distinct. There are plenty of good concrete examples of this. The Hui of China are Muslims who speak…