In Honor of #MLK50; jm prefacing this post with my wife’s status. Her politics, as I like to joke, is right of right but she admonished me that as a Man of Colour I didn’t honor MLK, who was a trailblazer for people like me.
Is Political Philosophy the key difference between west and the rest even now?
One of the reasons by which west has perhaps emerged successful is through political philosophy, philosophy is a method of discourse that seeks to corner the opponent into providing coherent answers that are not rooted in identity based reasoning. Western world has gone through incredible transformation over last 5 centuries and one of the key component of that transformation has been the political philosophy that emerged in parallel and its place in guiding their worldview.
Which is why one might observe and study the arguments and discourse of people in other countries in public and in parliament . One must check for the proliferation of enlightenment values in these societies . If it is tribal in nature with no understanding or value given to plain reasoning not rooted in identity or no active pressure by various levels of society, from civic rights groups to media to academics to politics & business to this effect, then one might conclude that they deeply value tribal identity as a means to be preserved without it being called into question(free speech), these societies are going to continue to be trapped in the said discourse without any recognition precisely as the political /tribal interests of various participants across different sections of society are rooted in identity .Civic groups, media, academics in those societies for all their pretensions of being liberal or secular are infact engaging in this tribal discourse. Without enlightenment values, can these societies transform?. I would have to say no. This brings us to the fact that progress measured merely in terms of benefits or poverty or maternal mortality etc can still accompany illiberal politics. Any difference measured in these societies will be imagined only through identity and solutions will also be driven with regards to identity.
Philosophy must be therefore made a necessary part of education, specially made for law,media,politics and science . This is so, because with freedom one can gain further freedom and make social progress on all measures, but society without freedom , even if it advances in some or all other social scores cannot be certain to preserve or gain further freedom . I see lot of comparison being made between Islamist states or states with Islam given primacy and India or china/communist states and India. This is unfair comparison altogether, making progress while preserving freedom is harder than otherwise.
Was there an “Aryan Invasion?”
I’ve been fairly busy recently with work but I read a very good comment right now about semantics.
An Indo-European migration is a very different term to an “Aryan invasion”; the latter seems simply to be a Euro-colonialist divide & rule tactic.
I confess I don’t know much on the matter but I don’t see how the recent genetics somehow justifies anything more than a population movement.
Until there is more evidence of an “Aryan invasion”; I don’t see why such hurtful terms need to be bandied about (it only accentuates unnecessary divisions, which do have modern-Day political consequences).
We should be wary of external narratives foisted on a vulnerable Subcontinent; South Asians have a worrying propensity for ideology that has already cost so much in terms lives, prosperity & prestige..
Where readers come from….
A little surprised.
The quiz show contestant
I think I'm in love with an Australian game show contestant. pic.twitter.com/F9q1bzUECR
— Kevin O'Keeffe (@kevinpokeeffe) March 31, 2018
The above click is “going viral.” One of the things that crosses my mind: would a guy who looks like this ever get a shot in Bollywood, or more generally Indian, film industry as a leading man? Is skin color an issue for men as well as women? The only leading men I know off the top of my head are relatively fair to medium, as opposed to dark (I can think of three or four, hardly any, I don’t follow Indian media).
South Asian genetics, the penultimate chapter
A long post at my other blog, The Maturation Of The South Asian Genetic Landscape, a reflection on the important preprint The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. Shorter:
- The original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent who descent from the “out of Africa” migration separated very quickly, ~50,000 years ago, from other eastern populations (East Asians, Andaman Islanders, Papuans, etc.). These are the “Ancient Ancestral South Indians” (AASI).
- Agriculturalists from what is today Iran seem to have entered and mixed with the AASI in the Indus Valley earlier than 5,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 9,000 years ago. The only samples they have are from extra-Indian sites, in Central Asia and eastern Iran, as outlier individuals. They call these “Indus_Periphery” (I call then InPe).
- The “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI) were created from a mixing of InPe with AASI still extant in much of South Asia ~4,000 years ago.
- Between ~4,000 and ~3,200 years ago populations from the steppe arrive, carrying admixture from Iranian farmers, as well as people from the steppe (Andronovo-Sintashta?). They mix with the ASI population, though a few groups, such as the Kalash, mix directly with InPe, and create unmixed “Ancestral North Indian” (ANI).
- Subsequent mixing between ASI and ANI populations in various fractions accounts for most of the variation in South Asia.
- Some groups are enriched for “steppe” as opposed to the Iranian agriculturalist that first came with InPe. In particular, Brahmins. The hypothesis then is differential ancestry of Indo-Aryan heritage persists to this day.
- The Munda of northeast India have a somewhat different origin, mixing Southeast Asian ancestry with ASI and further AASI. The fact that unmixed AASI were present in South Asia indicates that the Munda arrived before the full mixture was complete. Though Austro-Asiatic expansion into northern Vietnam dates to ~4,000 BC, so I think it can’t be that early.
Things I now think are unlikely:
- Indo-Aryan interpenetration with non-Indo-Aryans in the IVC before 4,000 years ago (I was somewhat agnostic on this). The date for migration now seem very close to the “Classical Model” of arrival around 1500 BC.
- The AASI is very diverged from the Onge, who form a clade with mainland Southeast Asian Negritos. I now think it is likely that the AASI were primal, and not migrants from Southeast Asia.
It would be nice if the results were published from the Rakhigarhi site, which dates to 4,600 years ago. But it seems less and less necessary. Perhaps at some point we’ll get enough samples from Pakistan to generate a reasonable model….
Neoliberalism
Thomas Friedman is one of the world’s greatest champions of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism works great when most people have high levels of physical health, mental health (called Chitta Shuddhi in Sanskrit) and intelligence (called Buddhi in Sanskrit). In my opinion human beings can acquire these things through their own effort. [Many neuroscientists disagree with me that “environment” can appreciably increase measured IQ.]
Listening to Thomas Friedman makes clear how much new technologies such as AI benefit those with physical, mental health and intelligence. In my view countries with less post modernist syndrome (which colonizes the mind with inferiority complex, a lack of self confidence, and a lack of freedom of thought, intuition and feeling) especially benefit from globalized neoliberalism and technological innovation. Implicitly this benefits Asians. Very soon China will have more billionaires than America; India too will follow in less than a generation. How will post modernists react?
Administrative note on this weblog
I don’t know most of the people who contribute to this weblog anymore. So I don’t know how to contact you. Can you please update your profile with an image icon so that it’s easy to see who is who?
Thanks.
The Indian chapter of Who We Are and How We Got Here
Since Who We Are and How We Got Here is out I thought I would spoil the “India chapter” (though you should buy the book!).
– The “Ancestral North Indians” are best modeled as a 50/50 ratio of Yamna-type people from the steppes & “Iranian farmers.” The implication is that the Indo-Aryans mixed with agriculturalists in the BMC on the way into South Asia.
– The “Ancestral South Indians” have about ~25% “Iranian farmer”, along with the indigenous component more like the Andaman Islanders.
David Reich clearly believes in a model of the ethnogenesis of South Asian populations detailed in A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals. Also, I think I can now say in public when I had lunch with him he indicated that he thinks this is the most likely model. Also, the West Eurasian admixture into South Asian populations is “male-mediated.” R1a1a-z93 for the win!
He also believes there were several admixtures. He notes that his group’s 2013 paper, Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India, reported two admixture events in North India, but one in South India. And the North Indian populations had the most recent event. This makes more sense if you consider that much of the admixture probably happened in the Northwest, as a mixed population spread across the subcontinent.
Reich contends that long tracts of ANI ancestry in some North Indians indicate that later people arrived from the first ANI wave. Also, several populations have an atypical Yamna-Iranian ratio in their ANI ancestry, being enriched for Yamna, and not so enriched for Iranian. These are all Brahmin groups.
Finally, he unmasks some of the backstories of difficulties collaborating with researchers in India, who have to be sensitive to cultural and political pressures. 2009’s Reconstructing Indian Population History was hailed in India as refuting the “Aryan invasion theory,” but the evidence was on the contrary, and I said so at the time.
In Who We Are and How We Got Here David Reich makes an explicit analogy between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Both protrusions from Eurasia are characterized by a synthesis of indigenous hunter-gatherers, intrusive pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe, and migrating West Asian farmers.
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