Slashdot Mirror
Biologists Create Genetic Map of Europe
Death Metal Maniac brings us a story from the New York Times about a team of scientists who were able to relate genetic differences to geographical origins. Countries such as Germany, Austria, and France occupy the central area of the genetic map, with Italy, Finland, and the UK being relative outliers. Quoting:
"All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. ... Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago."
Update: 08/16 15:11 GMT: Reader iminplaya points out the source article, which contains the technical details behind the study.
I recommend two books here:
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel Huntington
The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza et al
Once humans evolved from apes, they went through several stages to create modern humans.
After that, modern humans underwent more aggressive development. This differentiated population groups.
Much like different programming languages are optimized for different tasks, but you can create just about anything in just about any language, human populations are different based on the optimizations that came about through their branch divergence.
This creates ethnicities, nationalities, and clines as mapped by Cavalli-Sforza.
Huntington points out that most of our modern wars have been caused by the nation-state, or an "imperial" grouping by politics that crosses these optimization lines, and suggests that as the superpower age winds down, people will identify with their optimization more than abstract and often illusory political concepts.
This is especially useful in understanding the difference between Georgia, Ossetia and Russia. For those who live in nation-states of an imperial nature, like the United States, Canada, Russia or UK, it's hard to grasp this, but not every country views itself as composed of generic people.
They view themselves as an organic nation, a notion which we may quaintly call "tribalism" yet seems to unite people with values more solidly than financial or political motivations.
The future will be determined by the struggle for these organic nations to define themselves.
All IMHO.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
The history of Hungarian migration is pretty clear, actually. The Hungarians were living with their closest Uralic brethren, the Khanty and Mansi tribes, in the south Russian steppes around the beginning of the Common Era. The expansion of the Turkic peoples brought a tribe, evidentally speaking a Chuvash-type language, into contact with some Hungarians, who then learnt horsemanship and began to move west. A number of Hungarians remained behind, and when the Friar Julianus visited the area eight hundred years ago, he was able to communicate with them.
The Hungarian migration to the Carpathian Basin happened fairly recently compared to the spread of Uralic languages to northwestern Russia, Finland and Scandinavia, which must have been complete a thousand years before the beginning of the Common Era.
I'm now kind of curious about how such a map of North America would look in comparison, because to me there are some pretty big areas here where there is no overlap (Great Britain, southern Italy, Poland, Sweden...). They've been on the same continent for how many centuries, and they're still so distinct?
I never thought the race-war bozos would make it onto /. It's the usual propoganda: Name check someone prominent (who didn't say anything in support of your argument), add some bogus theory with no support (but imply that it comes from the famous names), through in a little kernel of plausibility (hey, there's racism right? Maybe we are all genetically pre-disposed to hate each other), and stir.
See? Hmmm ... seems plausible. But think: Maybe I'm different based on the country I was born in, the way my parents fed me, raised me (the fact that I had loving parents), their wealth and social connections, the forces and choices that formed my personality. My education, the books I read, what I chose to study, my teachers and role models, how hard I worked at it, how well I networked, the career and jobs I chose, the person I married, the city I live in ... Where does this genetic optimization come in?
I recommend the same books as burnitdown, only you should read them and not just name-check them. I read Huntington's Clash of Civilizations when it was first published in Foreign Affairs. It says nothing at all about genetics or "optimization", only super-national cultural groups called 'civilizations', which are genetically diverse (see list here ). You can read more here.
I haven't read Cavalli-Sforza, but The Economist seems to think that his work challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all. Hmmm ... that seems opposite the ideas that burnitdown cited.
So Burnitdown is just talking out of his backside, start to finish. There is no outside support for it at all. I can't even imagine how it applies to Georgia, Russia, and North & South Ossetia. Does anyone know closely their populations correlate genetically? And why, on that basis, would South Ossetians want Russian more than Georgian citizenship? What the heck is 'Russian' genetically, anyway -- the country stretches from Europe to the Pacific; are they really genetically homogeneous?
Whenever I read something like this, I always try to remember: Think of the people who promolgate this theory of inevitable race-war hatred: From Milosovic to Bin Laden (who rails against Jewish people) to the Rwandan Hutu extremists to the KKK to, yes, Adolf Hitler. What have they accomplished? Then think of those who say that humans can integrate and live together regardless of supposed 'race', from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr., to Mahatma Gandhi and almost any current leader of prominence. Who has been more successful? Whose side would you rather be on?
Did you know that by the 3rd generation, most immigrants to the US marry across 'cultural' lines? Did you know that the rate of interracial marriage has increased ~700% in the US since 1970 [1]?