tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post4506975590024684146..comments2024-03-22T15:55:34.030-04:00Comments on Evo and Proud: The new European phenotype: expansion into the Middle EastPeter Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04303172060029254340noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-13562591694784281882014-08-20T16:49:35.311-04:002014-08-20T16:49:35.311-04:00why did European hunter gatherers have blue eyes?
...<i>why did European hunter gatherers have blue eyes?</i><br /><br />In animals, blue/green/grey eyes are mostly found in night-hunting predators. <br /><br />It's hard to imagine humans specializing in nocturnal hunting... but then again, look at the eye-orbit size on Neanderthals.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-59171062965507578842014-02-20T22:02:05.621-05:002014-02-20T22:02:05.621-05:00Has anyone sampled the Veddoids of Yemen yet for e...Has anyone sampled the Veddoids of Yemen yet for either their atDNA or dental trait frequencies?Bones and Behaviourshttp://www.twitter.com/bonesbehavioursnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-76907449113691329612014-02-07T10:45:39.098-05:002014-02-07T10:45:39.098-05:00""On this understanding, then, natural k...""On this understanding, then, natural kinds should be contrasted not with social kinds, but with superficial or gerrymandered kinds. Gerrymandered kinds will be kinds, such as things that weigh more than 124 kg, whose boundaries we directly impose on the world. They are the products of classifications we make, as opposed to kinds that are demarcated by the world itself."<br /><br />The Syrian rebels are a side in a civil war, but there are certain groups within them . And imagine those groups might start fighting each other, perhaps even switch sides to an extent. Those are not "boundaries we directly impose on the world". Thats why they are not arbitary and can surprise us. A saxophone was invented patented, and then jazz musicians found ways to make noises come out of it that hadn't before. A <i>concept</i> must cohere to be meaningful yes. What the concept is about doesn't need to cohere in the same way. The definition of race is a taxon not totally distinct from others; seperation would mean a population being classified as consisting of good species at least.Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-76886679571512459582014-02-07T09:47:59.103-05:002014-02-07T09:47:59.103-05:00'Oliver', I said that Keith and Vallois th...'Oliver', I said that Keith and Vallois thought there was a single very variable population in ancient Mesopotamia, obviously there are few if any European individuals about to day who resemble Combe-Capelle so I was saying the first civilisation was populated by European who had not been exposed to the most intense sexual selection I mentioned Coon as disagreeing. Then we are of to the races with a digression about Coon being a typologist, typology being guilty of essentialism's metaphysical mistake.<br /><br />Re ""On this understanding, then, natural kinds should be contrasted not with social kinds, but with superficial or gerrymandered kinds. Gerrymandered kinds will be kinds, such as things that weigh more than 124 kg, whose boundaries we directly impose on the world. They are the products of classifications we make, as opposed to kinds that are demarcated by the world itself. Now this doesn’t mean that things that weigh more than 124 kg are not in the world itself. Instead, it means that the kind composed of those things is a mere classificatory convenience,<br />and the telltale sign is that its members don’t have much in common other than the features we use to identify them as members of their category." (Glasgow, 2009)"<br /><br />Aniston's 'The Rachel' hairstyle is real and a certain type of hair is 'The Rachel'.<br /><br /> "One might hold that something has essential properties without agreeing that it has an<br />identity-determining essence". (Bird, 2009"<br /><br />But it is that inner occult essence that shows things are REAL, and enables real things to surprise us with there emergent properties. The saxophone always had its essence but it was only when jazz musicians got ahold of it that certain aspects of it because evident.<br />Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-35092522546151512642014-02-01T16:07:57.494-05:002014-02-01T16:07:57.494-05:00Frost, read the Caspari quote I posted if you want...Frost, read the Caspari quote I posted if you want to see why Coon's race views were essentialist.<br /><br />The real fallacy here seems to be Sesardic trying to confuse the arbitrary objection to race with essentialism.<br /><br />"One might hold that something has essential properties without agreeing that it has an<br />identity-determining essence". (Bird, 2009)Olivernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-76239186023780385032014-02-01T15:28:45.564-05:002014-02-01T15:28:45.564-05:00"Arthur Keith himself said that the Natufians..."Arthur Keith himself said that the Natufians were Mediterranean"<br /><br />Read the first link which describes their noses as wide.<br /><br />"Mediterraneans" now have wide noses? <br /><br />Coon, Hooton, Czekanowski in contrast described "Mediterraneans" as leptorrhine.<br /><br />Now what?<br /><br />This is why typology is discredited science. The old typologists couldn't even agree what a "Mediterranean" even was.Olivernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-28048398983155462992014-02-01T15:20:11.028-05:002014-02-01T15:20:11.028-05:00"You have it backwards. In the postwar period..."You have it backwards. In the postwar period, antiracists redefined "race" as meaning a discrete, discontinuous, non-overlapping entity."<br /><br />Except that isn't a redefinition. For something to be "real" it must be all those things. Where's the straw man?<br /><br />"On this understanding, then, natural kinds should be contrasted not with social kinds, but with superficial or gerrymandered kinds. Gerrymandered kinds will be kinds, such as things that weigh more than 124 kg, whose boundaries we directly impose on the world. They are the products of classifications we make, as opposed to kinds that are demarcated by the world itself. Now this doesn’t mean that things that weigh more than 124 kg are not in the world itself. Instead, it means that the kind composed of those things is a mere classificatory convenience,<br />and the telltale sign is that its members don’t have much in common other than the features we use to identify them as members of their category." (Glasgow, 2009)<br /><br />A "real" kind is not biologically natural if the border drawn around it is arbitrary.<br /><br />If you're saying you believe races exist but they are arbitrary, then you are not a race "realist". You're "reality" certainly isn't natural but a social construct.Olivernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-24059967830320653432014-02-01T12:28:25.090-05:002014-02-01T12:28:25.090-05:00Arthur Keith himself said that the Natufians were ...Arthur Keith himself said that the Natufians were Mediterranean:<br />http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/7436/image1gx.jpg<br />http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/6320/image2sk.jpg<br />http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/5176/image3e.jpg<br />http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/8249/image4l.jpg<br />http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/1394/image5xgd.jpg<br />http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/3490/image6xr.jpg<br />http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/7896/image7ld.jpg<br />http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/2377/image8xb.jpg<br />http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/412/image9as.jpg<br />-The Antiquity of Man-by Arthur Keith<br /><br />Crimson Guardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11622608998338145821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-46821360610562453822014-02-01T11:37:45.417-05:002014-02-01T11:37:45.417-05:00Philosopher Justin EH Smith's NYT piece on rac...Philosopher <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0" rel="nofollow">Justin EH Smith's NYT piece</a> on race:"Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category". But any concept can be debunked as essentialist, for instance Smith's recent blog <a href="http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2014/01/against-gopnikism.html" rel="nofollow">Against Gopnikism</a> "The first rule of this genre is that one must assume at the outset that France --like America, in its own way-- is an absolutely exceptional place, with a timeless and unchanging and thoroughly authentic spirit. This authenticity is reflected par excellence in the French relation to food, which, as the subtitle of Adam Gopnik's now canonical book reminds us, stands synecdochically for family, and therefore implicitly also for nation." Essentialism again, they're all agin it. A claim to know what essential qualties make any entity (biological or social) authentically itself is indeed deeply suspect. But now you can't even speak as if it may be true that the French have a certain culture without being accused: "France, in other words, is a country that invites ignorant Americans, under cover of apolitical vacationing, of living 'the good life' and of cultivating their faculty of taste, to unwittingly indulge their fantasies of blood-and-soil ideology." Smith is flourishing as an academic, see <a href="http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/" rel="nofollow">here</a>.<br /><br />I believe it has been found a single neuron fires only when responding to any visual image of Jennifer Aniston. Now she must have some essential qualities that make her authentically herself, essential properties that make her an actual entity. For each kind of phenomenon there are unique and essential aspects making it distinguishable from all others. although one can't say exactly what they are because biological or other reality does not consist of facts. But I doubt Jennifer Aniston is socially constructed, and that she possesses no real essential properties.<br /><br /> Prof Smith cites followers of <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/human-genetic-variation-fst-and.html" rel="nofollow">Lewontin on race</a>. But while he can brand any concept he doen't like as essentialism of natural kinds ansd proto nazi, Smith and co are unable to see through <a href="http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/apples-oranges-and-genes.html" rel="nofollow">'subtle sleight-of-mind'</a>. So whose views are more socially constucted?<br /><br />Almost any kind of mainstream intellectual, (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/moral-tribes-joshua-greene-review" rel="nofollow">Joshua Greene</a> is representative) says that humans are inherently tribalistic, and this is a bad thing('a cognitive glitch')we should morally overide. When everyone is saying something that's when you know the perception is overheating and becoming its opposite. Prepare for a world where the West is run to value everyone on Earth's happpiness equally.Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-37506763509378161592014-02-01T10:11:29.862-05:002014-02-01T10:11:29.862-05:00Oliver,
You have it backwards. In the postwar per...Oliver,<br /><br />You have it backwards. In the postwar period, antiracists redefined "race" as meaning a discrete, discontinuous, non-overlapping entity. Since this was clearly not the case, they had no trouble making it look ridiculous. Antiracists created a straw man, knocked it over, and pronounced it dead.<br /><br />At no time did most anthropologists, including Coon, subscribe to this definition. If Coon was indeed a typological racist, why did he discuss the concept of cline in his textbook? Clines are incompatible with the definition of race that you impute to him. Again, I'm not a fan of Coon. He was wrong, but he was not absurdly wrong.<br /><br />This is the difference between an academic and a propagandist. An academic tries to refute a contrary view on its own terms. A propagandist seeks to create an absurd caricature.Peter Fros_noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-15746587063935456952014-02-01T05:34:00.964-05:002014-02-01T05:34:00.964-05:00Frost, Dobzhansky REDEFINED race as a population. ...Frost, Dobzhansky REDEFINED race as a population. There are multiple race concepts. This is because as science kept debunking race, it was redefined over and over from typology to populationism etc. Sesardic's paper is a mess, he doesn't even clarify what race concept he is defending. Sesardic also doesn't even make a case for race. All he says is that race is arbitary. This isn't even race "realism". Biological reality isn't based on social constructs.<br />Olivernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-77304240764763991742014-01-31T18:18:43.710-05:002014-01-31T18:18:43.710-05:00@Sean
"The latest findings are Neanderthals ...@Sean<br /><br />"The latest findings are Neanderthals contibuted alleles for keratin structural protein in hair and skin in modern humans in Europe, not pigmentation."<br /><br />freckles<br /><br />Why did they use South Asians to test the skin lightening effects of SLC24A5? Because it's almost at fixation in Europeans so it would have been too hard to test.<br /><br />However what would be the effect of a skin lightening allele on people who were already white but with lots of brown freckles for UV protection - it would just cover up the freckles.<br /><br />There might even be studies on this somewhere i.e. the effect of various skin lightening alleles on covering up freckles as i assume there are various skin problems associated with this phenotype.<br /><br />What's happened is they're assuming a brown base coat - which i think makes sense further back in time but at only 7000 BP (i thought it was BC at first doh) I think an equally reasonable assumption should have been white with lots of brown freckles.<br /><br />.<br /><br />"Nothing to do with vitamin D can explain blue eyes."<br /><br />It can if it's part of a general de-pigmentation that happened before agriculture and if their test for blue eyes can't differentiate between **light** eyes i.e. blue, green and grey.<br /><br />(IIRC Ancient writers mention red hair and green eyes or red hair and grey eyes.)<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-39292126559508576972014-01-31T14:34:09.857-05:002014-01-31T14:34:09.857-05:00Wolves don't have blue eyes. Dogs do because h...Wolves don't have blue eyes. Dogs do because humans just like em.<br /><br />Neanderthal genes selected were keratin for straight hair and BNC2 for lighter skin. Straight hair, ie long hair; what is the use of that which is connected with light skin?Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-52508190383210055372014-01-30T11:22:36.711-05:002014-01-30T11:22:36.711-05:00Northern dogs like huskies have blue eyes. Were th...Northern dogs like huskies have blue eyes. Were they bred to have blue eyes? Has anyone looked into blue eyes in dogs?<br /><br />Toy dogs bred for cuteness seem to have big brown eyes. The big brown eyes in dogs project a childlike, doe-eyed, innocent expression. The big brown eyes in Pomeranians, for example, make it look like a baby or a doll. Blue eyes in Pomeranians would appear striking and piercing, but not so much childlike and innocent.<br /><br />This may be related to the pupils. The pupils are less noticeable in dark eyes. Pupils dilate when they see someone or something of interest. Babies' pupils dilate when they're looking at and interacting with their parents. A Pomeranian with big brown eyes looking at its owner looks like a baby with its pupils dilated significantly. With blue eyes, the pupils are noticeable and thus the pupil dilation is less exaggerated.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-48851050169055963292014-01-30T10:53:05.482-05:002014-01-30T10:53:05.482-05:00Oliver,
While I don't support Coon's mult...Oliver,<br /><br />While I don't support Coon's multiregional model, it is intellectually dishonest to portray him as a "race essentialist." This was simply a straw man to discredit the race concept. As Neven Sesardic points out:<br /><br />"... those who attempt to deconstruct the concept of race by gratuitously burdening it with essentialist connotations ("discrete", "non-overlapping", "discontinuous", "defined by racial markers", "racial genes", etc.) are unaware that their criticism has already been addressed by Dobzhansky more than 40 years ago:<br /><br />"Professor Fried has correctly pointed out that there is no careful and objective definition of race that would permit delimitation of races as exact, nonoverlapping, discrete entities. Indeed, such criteria do not exist because if they did,<br />we would not have races, we would have distinct species." (Dobzhansky in Mead 1968, 165)<br /><br />In fact, Dobzhansky’s argument should be taken one step further: the essentialist requirement is so unrealistically demanding that, if this criterion were applied, even the species concept would fail to pass muster."<br /><br />Race: a social destruction of a biological concept, Biol Philos (2010) 25:143-162<br /><br />Please stop your sputtering about the Angel quote. The "Out of Africa" model did not exist when he studied the Natufians. He assumed they were the product of an earlier expansion out of Africa, but he had no idea as to the timing.Peter Fros_noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-39736194966127270342014-01-30T10:45:22.074-05:002014-01-30T10:45:22.074-05:00Blue eyes = Rayleigh scattering as indicated in on...Blue eyes = Rayleigh scattering as indicated in one recent Peter's post. The scattered blue light from the sky is polarized. <br />It has been suggested that the scattered polarized blue light from blue eyes reduced the glare from the snow, perhaps also protecting against reflected UV light that could cause blindness.<br />Brown eyed Inuits Amerindians use slit goggles made of antlers to prevent snow blindness, showing that they are aware of it, perhaps blue eyes helped with that.<br />So snow would have been the inducer of blue eyes, and after that it was sexual selection? <br /><br /><br /> Ben10noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-63814161356169915252014-01-30T05:19:36.536-05:002014-01-30T05:19:36.536-05:00The latest findings are Neanderthals contibuted a...The latest findings are Neanderthals contibuted alleles for keratin structural protein in hair and skin in modern humans in Europe, not pigmentation. <br /><br />"<a href="http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/when-europeans-turned-white.html" rel="nofollow">AROUND</a> 30,000 years ago, not long after entering Europe, the ancestors of today’s Europeans and East Asians lightened in skin color through a new allele at the KITLG gene. But the real whitening came much later, between 19,000 and 11,000 years ago among ancestral Europeans only, through new alleles at TYRP1, SLC24A5, and SLC45A2."<br /><br />That suggests there were people doing just fine without white skin in northern Europe for 10,000 years. Now the we know there were modern humans doing just fine there without light skin, because 7-8000 years ago a couple of hunter gatherers didn't have the genes variants for white skin pigmentaion. So whatever the advantage was of those new alleles, they were not required for hunter gatherers to synthesise vitamin D at European latitude, as argued by <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color.html" rel="nofollow">Nina Jablonski</a> and the most commonly accepted hypothesis of white skin. It couldn't.<br /><br />If it was an agricultural diet that made white skin advantageous, and blue eyes were a side effect of that, why did European hunter gatherers have blue eyes?<br /><br />Nothing to do with vitamin D can explain blue eyes.Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-78831178448723893282014-01-29T13:46:40.199-05:002014-01-29T13:46:40.199-05:00They were white with freckles imo.
Skin lightenin...They were white with freckles imo.<br /><br />Skin lightening happened twice - three times if you include Neanderthals.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-35560388538032708692014-01-28T14:13:09.101-05:002014-01-28T14:13:09.101-05:00Maybe this 7000 years old was an isolated individu...Maybe this 7000 years old was an isolated individual. I remember they found the remains of tools of 9500 years old hunters gatherers, near Paris, but I can't recall any genetic analysis results from skeletons. <br />http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080707-paris-humans.html<br />b10noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-44218821334821015832014-01-28T12:58:50.892-05:002014-01-28T12:58:50.892-05:00So they evolved blue eyes under what selection pre...So they evolved blue eyes under what selection pressure?Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-73046209733154403082014-01-28T12:16:31.455-05:002014-01-28T12:16:31.455-05:00White skin seems increasingly likely to be a very ...White skin seems increasingly likely to be a very recent development. Not 7000 years old, for instance. <br /><br />Consider the recent discovery from Spain that the remains found in a cave were those of a blue-eyed, dark-skinned man. Pale skin becomes biologically adaptive in low-sun climes only when there's not enough vitamin D in the diet. Hunter-gatherers are better off with dark skin.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-27093034447766450162014-01-27T09:37:10.821-05:002014-01-27T09:37:10.821-05:00fair skin at 7000 years: obviously still not wides...fair skin at 7000 years: obviously still not widespread if already there at all.<br /><br />http://news.yahoo.com/7-000-old-human-bones-suggest-date-light-190422120.htmlBen10noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-49652538633644984892014-01-27T06:40:38.160-05:002014-01-27T06:40:38.160-05:00If it had been found that major human descent grou...If it had been found that major human descent groupings had no common descent from a single species (in the paleontological sense) whereby it would have been necessary for Dobzhansky or any other authority to classify human races as separate species, then Coon would have been correct. Even I know essentialism of natural kinds (which can only mean Aristotle's) would not allow for change such as the convengent evolution Coon posited, and nor could biblical polygenic creation.<br /><br />Some people have not thought through the implications of that hunter gatherer from 7000 years ago with dark skin and blue eyes.Seannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-13303789738836656472014-01-27T02:31:48.180-05:002014-01-27T02:31:48.180-05:00"Selective quoting"
Indeed. Also look h..."Selective quoting"<br /><br />Indeed. Also look how Angel was completely cut off and distorted.<br /><br />HBD bloggers these-days are as bad as creationists with quotes.<br />Olivernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734925856292601239.post-88316490603292853812014-01-26T21:49:11.419-05:002014-01-26T21:49:11.419-05:00The hypotheses you put forward in each new post ar...The hypotheses you put forward in each new post are becoming shakier and shakier. Selective quoting and looking at only a small amount of evidence while looking at the whole renders many of your hypotheses obsolete?<br /><br />Good for a laugh, though.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com