Resistance against a common political actor has played a defining role in the emergence of most nationalisms around the world. The wars against the ‘French’ turned England into a nation, even before any semblance of French nationalism emerging.
What if everything that’s not a disease is polygenic?
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.
A Bangladeshi perspective on ethnicity
Genetical clarifications on caste
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)
Kargil
Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict
Peter R. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
[Reviewed by Teresita Schaffer; Survival 52, 5 (2010): 219-20]
This volume is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand Pakistan’s military decision-making or the half-war in Kargil in 1999, just a year after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. Peter Lavoy, long a scholar of South Asian military affairs, assembled a first-rate team from Pakistan, India and the United States to examine the causes, conduct and impact of the Kargil conflict, based in part on an astonishing number of interviews with high-level participants from both sides.
The resulting book does not change the basic ‘storyline’ of Kargil that has been generally accepted for a decade: that Pakistan’s tactical victory in crossing the Line of Control with India ended in tactical defeat, and that the nuclear shadow under which the fighting took place had effectively frozen the territorial status quo. But it does offer numerous surprising and important insights below that macro level. Lavoy’s introduction directs a spotlight on, among other things, the implications of Kargil for nuclear deterrence theory, noting that one of its key postulates – that a nuclear environment fosters arms control – is contradicted by Kargil; and two others – that nuclear powers do not fight and that they do not initiate or escalate crises – are at least partly refuted.
In my view, two other conclusions in this book have special importance. The first has to do with the dynamics of Pakistan’s decision-making. Several authors note that, in Pakistan’s view, the Kargil operation was intended to create a ‘fait accompli’ that would change the status quo in Kashmir, and also to avenge decades of what Pakistanis consider India’s taking advantage of them (most importantly the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh War, but also India’s occupation of the Siachen Glacier in 1984). Together with a long history of military pre-eminence in Pakistan’s decision-making and the Pakistan Army’s institutional distaste for self-criticism after its military reverses, this genesis of Kargil led the Pakistani military leadership to assume, in ways that seem quite remarkable to outside observers, that India would not mount much of a defence.
This streak of self-delusion in a military organisation that is in other respects highly professional has important consequences for the region, not to speak of Pakistan’s relations with the United States.
A second arresting analysis is the discussion of the role of surprise in military operations. James Wirtz and Surinder Rana review the literature and conclude that surprise is most valued by military leaders who face a stronger adversary and who believe that surprise can neutralise the power imbalance. They also conclude, after looking at the results of a number of surprise operations, that the result is often tactical victory but strategic failure. This is of course how Kargil turned out. It also raises questions about how both analysts and especially military leaders do and do not absorb lessons from history.
As happens in nearly every edited volume, there is a certain amount of repetition, and one chapter, by Bruce Riedel, basically condenses and reviews material he has already published elsewhere. But these are minor flaws in a book that combines many important insights and a welcome readability.
HINDU-MUSLIM CONFLICT IN INDIA: A “PRE-COLONIAL” VIEW
Ajay Verghese of US Riverside is one of the up and coming political scientists who specialize on South Asia. His earlier book “The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India” (Stanford University Press, 2016) argued that the geographic pattern of mob-violence in India has its root in the Colonial era but in a surprising way. He argued that religious or communal violence (Hindu-Muslim usually) is associated with the former princely states (the Maharaja, Nawab states), while tribal and caste violence is associated with areas under direct British colonial rule.
I have always thought colonial studies infantalizing. Yhe british drew a few lines
Can Hinduism Survive?
One of our authors wrote a post with the title “Should Hinduism Survive“? I think it should, but leave that aside for the moment and consider a different question: CAN Hinduism survive? And if so, in what form (or forms) will it survive?
I do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to answer these questions with any confidence. What I intend to do instead is to set out some random thoughts and observations, and hope that our commentators can help us approach an answer (or more likely, a range of possible answers)
One response to this question (and for various reasons this response is common among my liberal, secular and leftist Hindu friends) is to say: Of course it will survive. It is non-Hindus who should be afraid of extinction. Hinduism is the religion of over a billion people. It has survived for thousands of years. Groups that claim to be “Hindutvadi” are in power at the Federal and state level in India. Indians who are not Hindu are said to live in a state of fear and trepidation, with the specter of “Hindu-Fascism” hanging over their heads. Conversely, if you ask Hindu Nationalists you may be surprised to get a very different response. While there is a fair amount of jingoism and occasionally there is outright triumphalism, the dominant response is surprisingly pessimistic. I have not done a scientific poll, but I have asked this question of many friends and acquaintances who consider themselves “pro-Hindu” in some sense or the other, and a decisive majority tend to answer that better organized, better prepared and better funded “Abrahamic” religions are taking over India. Hindu survival is hanging by a thread and we probably won’t make it into the next century. Some of this is just the usual way Right wingers in all countries complain that the traditional mores of the people are under threat, the barbarians are multiplying and our leaders are weak. The sky will fall tomorrow unless XYZ is made the supreme leader and drastic (usually extra-constitutional) steps are taken to reverse our present course. But at least in my experience, the Indian version is more deeply pessimistic and a lot of smart people really do feel their culture and religion will not make it past this crisis. Are they right?
The basis for philosophy in science are religion https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/the-basis-for-philosophy-in-science-especially-biology-and-religion/
Macranthropy and the saMbandha-s between microcosm and macrocosm
Don’t want to comment on the specific issue but one point i would like to make: Hindu liberals would never make the argument about *Hinduphobia* lest they be labeled parochial bigots: Muslim liberals have no such compunctions. Observe around and see if you can really disagree.
— Rohit Pradhan (@Retributions) June 13, 2018
gm
Indian Officers in the British Indian Army
How Bengalis rejected “genetic improvement”
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.