Category: Razib Khan

Sometimes you fall into things. Indian population genetics is not a major interest of mine that looms large, but I know a fair amount about the topic, and people seem to be looking to me to say something about recent developments. I have admitted that I am close to completing a major article in an Indian publication on the topic. It will in broad sketches resemble Tony Joseph’s piece in The Hindu, but there will be some differences. Because I am a geneticist with some knowledge of this topic I will avoid the minor errors which occur within the piece because the author is not a specialist (nor are the editors). Second, I’m going to take a less strident tone. Joseph’s piece read like a brief for the prosecution. But science is not a lawyerly endeavor. Being wrong is something scientists accept, embrace, and reject only in breach of their values, not as a matter of course.

As noted by readers this is an emotional topic. A friend informed me that Sanjeev Sanyal positively passed around the Swarajy piece which attacked my character by relying on social justice warrior and Leftist critiques. I tweeted at Sanjeev taking some objection to this behavior, as we had been friendly (I had dinner with him in New York City a few years back). Today I see that he unfollowed me on Twitter. Such is life (an Indian friend who is Facebook friends with Sanjeev apparently objected to his posting that article due to its attack on me, and he deleted that comment).

But I have to stand by what is true. So I’m going to respond to another piece,

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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.

4)

In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process.

But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a lot of skepticism of the early claims as more genomic datasets have come online. Cell has a new paper which pretty much smashes the door down and breaks the skepticism out into the open, No Evidence for Recent Selection at FOXP2 among Diverse Human Populations:

FOXP2, initially identified for its role in human speech, contains two nonsynonymous substitutions derived in the human lineage. Evidence for a recent selective sweep in Homo sapiens, however, is at odds with the presence of these substitutions in archaic hominins. Here, we comprehensively reanalyze FOXP2 in hundreds of globally distributed genomes to test for recent selection. We do not find evidence of recent positive or balancing selection at FOXP2. Instead, the original signal appears to have been due to sample composition. Our tests do identify an intronic region that is enriched for highly conserved sites that are polymorphic among humans, compatible with a loss of function in humans. This region is lowly expressed in relevant tissue types that were tested via RNA-seq in human prefrontal cortex and RT-PCR in immortalized human brain cells. Our results represent a substantial revision to the adaptive history of FOXP2, a gene regarded as vital to human evolution.

How Bangladesh Made Abortion Safer
The government’s effort to help Rohingya victims of wartime rape has lessons for the world. The article has some historical backdrop:

The systematic sexual violence against the Rohingya reminded many in Bangladesh of their own painful history: During Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, the Pakistani military and local collaborators killed about 300,000 civilians and raped and tortured as many as 400,000 women and girls.

That’s a lot of sexual violence! To me, it’s weird sometimes to think back how friendly my parents were to their (West) Pakistani friends in the USA in the early 1980s, only ten years after the war. I’ve heard other people are more bitter and angry, but to be honest I’ve never seen it.

I listened to the above on a podcast. To be frank it was a bit ho-hum. To non-brown listeners some of the stuff was surprising, but I had heard most of it elsewhere before, and Varsha Venkatasubramanian is not particularly heterodox, so her “UC Berkeley” affiliation immediately indicated a lot of her answers to the questions posed.

But I want to talk about one aspect of the discussion, and that is Venkatasubramanian’s understanding of the role that British colonialism played in the emergence of Pakistan and India.