A quick follow-up on my previous post, Genetical observations on caste.
1) I am aware that the term “caste” was introduced by Europeans. Which is why I used the terms jati and varna. That being said, a word is a word. I you can replace the word with a symbol.
2) I am not very interested in the food-fights that crop up between Allah-idolaters and Vishu-idolaters about whether caste is constitutive to Hinduism or excluded from Islam. Since I’m American caste almost never impinges on my thoughts, and it doesn’t really impact most Indian Americans (granted, most are of “higher caste” as commonly understood).
3) The population-genetic structure in South Asia is very unique. Most populations across a reasonable geographical scale are “random-mating”, with genetic structure due to geography. This is what you see in China and Europe. In a place like the Middle East there is a lot of cousin-marriage, so clearly it is not random-mating. But the deviations from random-mating are not ethnically freighted. In places like North India, you have exogamous groups which are still very genetically distinct. And this is due to deep structure.
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