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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.
Finland is an interesting convergence of east and west. Their language is most closely related to Japanese and Hungarian; their population seems to be halfway between Swedes, Baltics and an Asian precursor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turan
The language record does not mirror the genetic record, necessarily, but it provides a useful clue.
I'm not sure how this is related to their ability to create quality death metal bands like Amorphis, Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich, Belial and Sentenced. However, all of Scandinavia is a death metal powerhouse, so it may be "cultural."
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Good job Hitler never had this kind of info. I can't see that as having ended well.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Surprising how far "out there" the Finnish genetic makeup is, considering the long period of integration with Sweden. It's also interesting that this kind of research may give us the final pieces to jigsaw of migration that took place from the Urals to Central and Northern Europe. This great migration of the tribes is what lead to Finno-Ugrian people ending up around the Baltic and in Hungary, but it's still unclear where the tribes "split up", one lot heading north and the other west. The closeness of the Hungarian genetic makeup to other Central Europeans must reflect the massive amount of migration and conquest that occurred across that region (by various Slavic and Turkic peoples in particular), along with a fair bit of Germanic immigration through trading.
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?
The map should have included Russia and other Eastern European areas. Also, one thing that makes me skeptical of the maps accuracy is there doesn't appear to be an overlap between EL and IT2.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Shall we?
What?
If this was the USA, it would be like making a map of the pacific states and some midwest states, and calling it a map of the USA. Where's the rest?
The country at the geographical centre of Europe (Ukraine) isn't even on there. Neither is Russia. Not to mention the dozens of smaller states. No wonder Finland is way out there... they're very similar to Russians who aren't on the map, like they weren't even part of Europe. This article is either very bad journalism or serious EU snobbery.
The article is quite light on details, but instead of the Alps, couldn't the reason for the Italian blob being outside the rest of Europe have more to do with it having absorbed a significant Arab/Berber population from North Africa?
The Iberian peninsula is also cut off by mountains but it sits in nicely with the rest of Europe. Of course Spain also had its Berbers and Arabs but kicked them - and the Jews - out rather successfully in 1492.
My wife is Finnish, and this pretty much confirms my suspicion that she and all other Finns are in fact from outer space.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I think this one will be under debate for some time. Japanese inherits from multiple sources; whether it once had an Altaic root or contributing source is still under debate among some linguists, as far as I know.
A better explanation:
Apologies if I did not make that clear.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Belgium does apparently have no people or are such a rare breed that it would falsify the map.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"...Most people switch off the lactose digesting gene after weaning, but the cattle herders evidently gained a great survival advantage by keeping the gene switched on through adulthood."
Behold the power of cheese!
Huntington is certainly an excellent scientist, but his socio-political theories about why wars are fought are better left to experts in that field
This argument is ridiculously reductive. First, what's the definition of 'war' in this context? I tried to imagine the different ways you can define 'war' and how they'd fit into this theory and none of them work.
This is good though:
I don't agree that we're in a 'superpower age' that is 'winding down'...neither are accurate, HOWEVER, the idea that people (at least the younger Americans [felt right, geographically. It just fit. The climate affected everything about me in a positive way. When I moved back to Indiana, the humidity, allergens, etc. just wrecked me. I could feel my immune system changing, I swear. My friends would talk about similar feelings.
How this renewed understanding of geography and sub-species human differences will effect populations long term is a toss up. I feel that to say this genetic-based aspect of neo-tribalism (which itself has several components) will be THE guiding force in macro level human behavior is jumping the gun.
Thank you Dave Raggett
They don't even have a whole map of europe...
Oh... and Yugoslavia, actually there is no Yugoslavia for last 17 Years, it fell apart in 1991...
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
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]?
Inbreeding is a big part of it. Finland used to be a big forest with swamps and lakes everywhere (and still mostly is), which made moving around very difficult. So we (I'm from Finland also) were isolated not only from the rest of the world. But also our internal parts were isolated from other parts of the country.
As a proof of this, there are several genetic deceases that are more common in Finland than anywhere else. E.g. AGU decease, which is found from around 200 families in Finland and only in about 20 families outside Finland (population of Finland is about 1/1000 of the population of the Earth). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartylglucosaminuria
But one should remember that it is estimated that the human race itself used to consist of a very few individuals, before it started spreading. So we all are distantly very close relatives.
While their research is certainly interesting it does suffer from them using PCA for creating the map. PCA is a linear transform that finds the axes of an ellipsoid that encompasses the data. This is an enormous simplification that seldom works well on real-world data. For an illustration of what PCA does and the problems with the simplification, see this. For the math, see this.
Now, the problem is that with such a simplification the resulting map is nearly meaningless. It only shows how things would have been distributed had the genetic data and the geographic data been neatly ordered in a form that could be described with a second degree n-dimensional body (i.e. an ellipsoid). There are much better non-linear methods, such as kernel PCA that most likely would have produced a much more accurate picture. PCA does have its uses and can indeed be used for mapping geo-genetic information, but the data needs to be statistically separated to a very large degree. This is an impossibility for Europe that has a limited genetic diversity and where the overlap between different groups is large.
I'd love to see their data analyzed with a bit more powerful algorithms.
These linked-to articles are intellectually dishonest on two levels:
Note that I am not claiming that the studies discussed on the pages I linked to are paragons of integrity and transparency. I wish merely to show that TFAs are giving people a fractional distillate of available information. If you went to school at the Jesuits', you might refer to this sort of clever maneuvering as “interpreting vetted facts” — but I call it “lying with the help of a gratuitous reduction of the data”. If you had any doubts that there is an agenda behind the way data from genetic studies is presented to the public, consider this your wake up call.
Yup, plenty of similarities there. Why don't you list them for us?
Actually it's more like the beginning of WWII only do a search and replace w/ the following changes. Germany==Russia, Czechoslovakia==Georgia and Britain/France==United States. Namely, there is little a distant power can do to stop the larger power in central/eastern Europe from gobbling up its smaller neighbors. As for the WWI analogies it is possible that Georgia(Austria-Hungary) believed it had a blank check to attack South Ossetia(Serbia) from the United States(Imperial Germany). HTH
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.