What has brown done for you?

January 6, 2020 Razib Khan 52 Comments filed under Popular

I’v bemoaned the hard-Left shift of Indian Americans in political organization and consulting (Bong-commies at every turn!). But there are still neolib centrists around! Tech Veteran’s Fundraising Team Rakes In Cash for Pete Buttigieg Campaign:

Three years ago, Swati Mylavarapu had never worked for a political campaign and attended just a single campaign fundraiser.

Now, the 36-year-old Silicon Valley investor is a financial force behind one of the best fundraisers in the Democratic presidential primary, serving as national investment chairwoman for Pete Buttigieg, a fellow Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar whom she has known for half her life.

Indian Americans are 1% of America’s population. And in the older generation of 1.5 and 2nd generation far less (“Generation X”). But they sure are punching above their weight!

Please read Who We Are and How We Got Here

January 6, 2020 Razib Khan No Comments filed under Razib Khan

Many questions on this weblog would be answered if the individuals just read Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Not all questions would be answered. The book is dated in some ways, and there are certain lacunae. There are also things we still don’t know to any great satisfaction (e.g., Eastern Eurasia is under-understood). But to a first approximation, this book answers most big questions, at least from a scientific perspective.

Though American price on Kindle is $4.99, this may not be feasible for some readers. There are free preprints of almost all of the Reich lab’s publications on the lab’s website.

This post seems relevant since new readers may not be aware of the resources out there.

Genetic odds & ends

January 6, 2020 Razib Khan 49 Comments filed under Razib Khan

At my other weblog I report on evidence that a sample from Cambodia dated to 100 to 300 AD seems to have considerable Indian ancestry. This is not a result in isolation. Lots of evidence points to non-trivial Indian gene flow. The devil is now in the details of when/who.

Second, there is lots of talk about “person X looks like population Y, so perhaps they have ancestry from population Y.” This is almost certainly wrong in most cases.

Looking at Indian populations there tends to be far more variation in physical appearance within a population than the variation of total ancestry. In other words, some Tamil Brahmins look like South Indian Tribal people and other Tamil Brahmins look like West Asians. But in terms of total ancestral components, there’s no difference.

The theoretical explanation for what’s going on is that the genetic loci which control “physical appearance” are much smaller in number than the whole genome (on the order of dozens of loci). As such, the sample variance is rather large (the N denominator is small).

South Asian populations differ across each other, but there is usually a quite large within-population variation on genetic variants implicated in physical characteristics. This means that there are a large range and quite a bit of variation.

Though a lot of the discussion involves Muslims, I have heard from multiple non-Muslim people of Northwest Indian stock (e.g., Pandits) that they must have “Persian ancestry” because they look so Persian. The genetics refutes this rather strongly. Rather, modern Persians and many Northwest Indians share deep ancestry which diverged after the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago.