It's amazing that the TV series "Bones" is still broadcast in syndication.
"New Testament begats" I believe you mean Old.
The federal govt was still using 8x10.5 paper in the Carter administration, so the space problem was even worse. Plus, it was run by nuts, and that hasn't changed.
True, but they were no longer Hebrews at the time of writing. I'd say the Torah begats are more famous even among Christians. When and how did they switch to matrilineal?
It seems to have been codified in the early rabbinic period, around the same time as the composition of the New Testament (whose hottest debates seem to be over whether Christians are Hebrews or something else). Maybe with Jews being dispersed over the Mediterranean it’s to some extent an anti-shiksa law telling Jewish guys that their kids with non-Jewish women will not be fully Jewish.
Similarly the gospels seem keen to assert Jesus’s indisputably Jewish pedigree, descended from Abraham and David, but also to show that (in today’s language) he’s not Joseph’s biological child.
As a non-American I find the term “Hispanic” to be particularly useless.
There are humans all over the New World who speak Old World languages such as Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish due to post-1492 events.
I don’t mean this in a pedantic way. If “francophone” were a US Census category it would include Quebecers who are >90% European heritage and Haitians who are >90% African heritage. Aside from speaking (different varieties of )French, the cultural gap is pretty large too.
No category is perfect but I find these language-based classes of ancestry to be more confusing than informative.
It was obviously an attempt to forge a socio-political identity (against whites, as always) from a disparate group of people that don’t normally consider themselves to have much in common. We also have the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) category, which is even an even more ludicrous and unrelated grouping of people are quite proud of their distinction from those they would be lumped in with. Again, it’s just intended to emphasize non-whiteness, nothing more.
Yes, but the main purpose is to racialize groups that are not as inherently resentful of the white majority and its norms. The hope is that they will join politically with blacks rather than gravitate towards whites.
However I think the latter is more the general trend, as black identity is wrapped around a sort of permanent outsider status, and most Latinos and Asians don’t want that.
"Asian American Pacific Islander" made sense when most of both groups in the U.S. were in Hawaii and often were intermarried. Plus, it helped fit things on one sheet of paper easier.
In the 1990s, however, Pacific Islander groups pointed out that they didn't really have that much in common with little Asian nerds. The Clinton Administration said, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense," and broke out Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders separately.
But then during the Racial Reckoning you started to hear a lot about AAPI Heritage Month. That's based on a law passed by Congress before the division in the 2000 Census, so it refers to AAPI. If it hadn't already existed, Congress in 2020 likely would have passed separate Asian Heritage Month and Pacific Islander Heritage Month bills.
But AAPI Heritage Month is the main reason AAPI made a comeback after 20 years of declining use.
Interesting. There is definitely a hierarchy within the American Asian cohort though. A Filipino friend always said they were considered ‘dirt Asians’ by Chinese and Japanese. Not sure how any of those groups look at Indians.
"Hispanic" is kind of not _entirely_ useless for human taxonomic purposes, in the sense that it captures the great majority of people living in the USA who have both a large Native American ancestry component and a large European ancestry component, but that's not why the category was originally set up (and of course, most of the people who consider themselves to be Native Americans in the sense of being indigenous to the territories that became the USA _also_ now have a large European ancestry component; there just aren't that many of them compared to, e.g. Mexican mestizos).
It’s interesting how they keep using Hispanic or biracial individuals as examples to prove that reported race doesn’t align with genetic markers. Well obviously!
The race doesn’t exist crowd (except for the famous forensic guess of Black Jesus of course) will always have their data points. Maybe in 100 hundred years they will be right!
The Hispanic designation is a rainbow stew united mostly by the ability to speak Spanish. At my church, we have three Hispanic families. One is a divorced white Cuban man whose family were big landowners in Cuba until Castro gave them the boot and expropriated their land. He became a CPA. He speaks perfect English and Spanish. Another is a mestizo Salvadoran man who immigrated during the Civil Wars of the 80s. He drives a trash truck. He speaks perfect English and Spanish. He is recently divorced from his white wife. The last is a family with five children. Both the man and his wife are short, squat and are from El Salvador. Both speak poor English. Both probably are heavily Indian in heritage. He's a handyman for an apartment complex. All are very different Hispanics. But they share a category.
And you don't have to speak Spanish, just have an ancestor who spoke Spanish. There's no definitive court ruling on how many great-grandparents have to be Hispanic for you to get Hispanic preferences. Some judges have said 1 out of 8 is ridiculous. Others have said 1 out of four grandparents is good enough. But it also helps to have a treasured copy of your grandmother's enchilada recipe.
They should make people cook one of their grandmother's Mexican meals in the courtroom and then take a vote of the bailiffs on whether or not it's spicy enough.
Didn't one of her submissions to Pow Wow Chow turn out to be from Wallis Simpson? We have family lore I find dubious now that I'm old and cynical, so she might actually have believed hers.
Yeah, somebody tracked down Senator Warren's recipe submission to "Pow Wow Chow" and found it was originally attributed to, IIRC, the chef at The Ritz, where it was a favorite of the Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.
The Daily Mail got the dirt, as usual. It was Le Pavillon in the Ritz Tower '57-'72, on Fifth Ave before that. Warren's cousin edited the cookbook, and her mother contributed, too.
I was laughing all through this article. My question. What is the ultimate purpose in all this? I don’t have a clue. It seems that if taken to its logical conclusion they will be able to identify my remains as me, a unique human individual. If so, then flies in the face of the current groupthink politics of groups of victims and victimizers. We are all different and unique for one reason or another.
Recently, I was identified as a Viking. A very competent medical professional noticed my dupuytren’s contracture and sorted me out immediately.
Theodore Dalrymple put it like this, and it seems both a reasonable thesis and as with many things he has written, worthy of repeating:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
As certainly a phrase such as "growing acceptance of the idea that social identities related to ancestry don’t align with genetic groupings" seems to be emblematic of the article as a whole and to my mind to be the rankest of lies
The difference in this case -- if it is a difference -- is that most college-educated Americans don't feel that they have a firm enough grasp of the underlying biology, the history, and the statistics to defend a reasoned view of the matter. They are mostly correct in that. (On the other hand, giving a greater weight to common sense and believing Their Lyin' Eyes would greatly improve the public's understanding.)
By the time you've found Sailer, can follow the reasoning of a blog post like this, and can think, "well of course" -- you've already given up hope of being invited to the Best Holiday Parties.
Yes, the "trust your lying eyes" test is worryingly something that an awful lot of people seem unable to apply. Thankfully Messrs Sailer and Dalrymple provide useful insight as to the Emperor's raiment
She is from Swedish ancestry and just recognized a fellow Viking. This is a common affliction in that part of the world. Last I looked 18% of men from Scandanavian countries had that affliction in greater or lesser degree. The Vikings, the few Scandinavians who did the raiding, brought it to the British Isles where along with rape, pillage and such, left some genes for the condition among my ancestors. My medical friend was joking with me, I'm not a real Viking but she's known me long enough to know that I am a real Scots Irish Texan. The history of that group also includes a lot of fighting, pillaging, drinking, singing and such. History can be fun if you remember that the past did not recognize the wokeness of the current day, they had their own battles to fight.
Those Vikings got around. I fell in love with that culture when I saw The Vikings in my youth. I always identified more with Kirk Douglas than Tony Curtis. I guess that explains a lot.
The final scene in "The Vikings" was absurd. Tony Curtis kickin' Kirk Douglas' ass. One of the silliest fight scenes, about as silly as Montgomery Clift knocking John Wayne on his ass in "Red River."
Not sure if they call it that but the hand doctors I’ve seen recognize it as prevalent in Scandinavia. Many people think that all Scandinavians were Vikings hence the name.
Sometimes forensic anthropologists can do a unique positive ID through dental records. But a lot of what they do is simply rule out a large chunk of humanity for the benefit of shortening the detectives' workloads.
The scientists and activists (but I repeat myself) who are quoted by activist journalists (but I repeat myself) throughout the two articles in Steve's post remind me of the adherents of other religious beliefs I've encountered, in person and in print.
Everyone should experience being proselytized, e.g. in my case by Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. It turns out -- surprise -- that every imaginable avenue of exploration leads to the implacable conclusion that the tenets of the One True Faith have been proven to be entirely correct.
It was the same thing with the Anti-Death-Penalty faith community. Some time back (1990s?), that movement was at its high point as the focus of the ACLU, the media, organized social-justice religion, and progressives. Article after Op-Ed after teach-in after policy piece after sermon: dozens of points of departure and scores of arguments. All roads leading to the same set of conclusions: the Death Penalty is Wrong / Doesn't influence perpetrators / Ineffective / Immoral / Expensive / Cruel / Unconstitutional / Ruins victims lives / Corrodes social norms / Deeply unfashionable / Unworkable. QED!
Many of the Current Year's anti-racist scientists evidently fear for their prestigious, interesting, and sometimes well-paid careers. So perhaps they deserve to be cut more slack than the ideologues of yesteryear.
But it's still tiresome to see such silliness given pride of place in eminent journals.
One night as I parked my car in a residential neighborhood 1/2 mile from Candlestick Park, about to walk to the Giants game, I was approached by two Jehovah's Witnsses, both black, in business suits. I needed to quickly deflect, so I told them about this JW I caddied with for a few years as a teenager at the San Francisco Club. Every weekend, he would tell me that the world would end on the following Wednesday. Their response: "you left your lights on."
Maybe we can start using the term “ancestry” instead of “race” if the latter is too icky. Sort of like how American blacks are always calling themselves something new in an attempt to outrun the stigma against being black. The problem with renaming blacks though is that the underlying behaviors and interactions that generate stigma remain. With race to ancestry, however, we might be able to benefit more permanently from a reset, leave behind the Hitler-y past. The old bad stuff was about “race”; the new good stuff is about “ancestry.”
Because they prefer disciplinary suicide to abandoning socio-cultural doctrines that have held sway for nearly a century. Paying attention to exciting new research that tends to challenge those doctrines and which could breathe incredible new life into ethnographic work? No thanks, they'll go down with their familiar old ship and take as many students with them as they can.
The assumption was similar conditions lead to similar practices and beliefs, plus the psychic unity of mankind means the same ideas just keep re-occurring to human populations. Not bad or stupid explanations.
HOWEVER, given the very surprising 2015 finding of Melanesian ancestry in some Amazonian populations, other possibilities proliferate. This could be a renaissance moment for ethnographic research. If only.
The first sentence of the first Abstract isn't bad. Professor Jose Leonardo Santos writes,
"This vital topics forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology."
But then he continues. "The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives." And so on.
There is a part of the Academy whose work products are genuinely useful to society. Inventing and refining new types of LEDs. Understanding the etiology of heart disease. Etc. At some point that grades into useless, and from there into actively harmful. What fraction is above the Useless/Harmful line? 50%? 20%?
I've been meaning to read up on Henry VIII's confiscation of the Church's properties (1536-1540). Prof. Santos: "Society will cease to function if you dare touch our holy monasteries, priories, convents, friaries, farmland, wealth, and other assets! You *need* us to pray for your souls! We cannot possibly do so if you interfere with our grants, legislative appropriations, endowments, and 403(b) matching contributions! Not to mention promotions, tenure, and high social status!"
It's a good analogy in more ways than one. Certainly there were lots of abuses by monasteries, hoarding of wealth and so on. but if you tour the wreckage -- some of which stands to this day -- it's hard not to feel bereft about what was destroyed, too.
I don't think it's really wrong that part of the role of universities is to lecture society about its bad choices. Monasteries were not wrong that people get up to a lot of sins and that it is socially beneficial to remind everyone about that beam in their own eye etc. It's not that the project is wrong-headed, it's the corruption of the project.
So right now would be a good time for universities to say for example: "gender affirming care" is medically quite harmful, and socially it doesn't liberate anybody. It reinforces sex role stereotypes, is corrosive to gays and lesbians, and oppressive to women. That would not involve generating any new discoveries but it would be the university doing some useful societal critique.
of course that's not the role the university is playing... I guess we'll see if it all ends in dissolution. I really hope not, I hope for reform.
"This [screenshot from a 'Faculty Recruitment Toolkit'] is from the rubric used by UC Irvine and UC Berkeley to grade job applicants' DEI statements. If you said you "treat everyone the same," you got the lowest score and were automatically disqualified.
"For one job search in the life sciences in 2019, 76% of applicants were cut in the first round based solely on their DEI statements.
"Thousands of professors who were totally fine with all of that are now outraged that Trump is threatening free expression at universities."
The probability of accurately guessing an individual’s race based on one single gene alone isn’t that great (mostly around 70%, but can be higher or lower depending on the gene). However, the combined data of multiple genes paints a much more accurate picture. Once a sufficient quantity of grouped genes are used, the probability of inaccurately detecting an individual’s race drops to <1%.
Race and ethnicity are overwhelmingly correlated with genetic ancestry in the United States. Recent, large-scale studies of ~11,000 cancer patients and ~202,000 military veterans found that individuals’ self-identified race and ethnicity showed 95.6% (cancer) and 99.5% (veterans) correspondence to genetic ancestry clusters.
Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [Self-Identifying Race/Ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [Genetically Inferred Ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group.
"The letter triggered an explosion of debate. “It took a lot of courage for them to put that letter out,” says Kyra Stull, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno."
This self congratulatory reflex among the bien pensants awarding themselves and their ilk points for 'courage' is one of the more revolting facets of the modern world. It is, of course, the precise opposite of the truth, but more than that, it embodies the refusal of these people to acknowledge that they have occupied the commanding heights of the culture for at least two generations. To hear them tell it Eisenhower and the Kefauver Commission are still in charge. Feh.
One hears a lot about nominative determinism. Here is someone whose work deals with bones, whose name is just a very minor slip of the tongue away from including the word "skull".
Far be it from me to presume, on Steve Sailer's substack of all places, but that link describes him as an Ainu-American; I always thought that Hakan was meant to be a Yakut (Sakha in their own language).
Maybe this is old news here, but a little searching around suggests that the guy whose photo came to be used for the Hakan character is actually a real-life Yakut shaman called Vasily Atlasov. My knowledge of Russian is negligible (and my knowledge of Yakut is currently zero), but doesn't this look like the same guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfIowyMJB_s
It's amazing that the TV series "Bones" is still broadcast in syndication.
"New Testament begats" I believe you mean Old.
The federal govt was still using 8x10.5 paper in the Carter administration, so the space problem was even worse. Plus, it was run by nuts, and that hasn't changed.
The gospels according to Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s descent (via Joseph) in the patrilineal line from King David and Abraham.
True, but they were no longer Hebrews at the time of writing. I'd say the Torah begats are more famous even among Christians. When and how did they switch to matrilineal?
It seems to have been codified in the early rabbinic period, around the same time as the composition of the New Testament (whose hottest debates seem to be over whether Christians are Hebrews or something else). Maybe with Jews being dispersed over the Mediterranean it’s to some extent an anti-shiksa law telling Jewish guys that their kids with non-Jewish women will not be fully Jewish.
Similarly the gospels seem keen to assert Jesus’s indisputably Jewish pedigree, descended from Abraham and David, but also to show that (in today’s language) he’s not Joseph’s biological child.
That part never made sense to me. House of David, but not Joseph's. Probably one reason we Protestants deemphasize Mary, too.
I imagine it was easier to keep the daughters on the reservation than the sons, centuries before Shylock.
E.g., Simon Peter had a wife, but we only know that because Jesus healed her mother. Respectable women would have kept home.
As a non-American I find the term “Hispanic” to be particularly useless.
There are humans all over the New World who speak Old World languages such as Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish due to post-1492 events.
I don’t mean this in a pedantic way. If “francophone” were a US Census category it would include Quebecers who are >90% European heritage and Haitians who are >90% African heritage. Aside from speaking (different varieties of )French, the cultural gap is pretty large too.
No category is perfect but I find these language-based classes of ancestry to be more confusing than informative.
It was obviously an attempt to forge a socio-political identity (against whites, as always) from a disparate group of people that don’t normally consider themselves to have much in common. We also have the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) category, which is even an even more ludicrous and unrelated grouping of people are quite proud of their distinction from those they would be lumped in with. Again, it’s just intended to emphasize non-whiteness, nothing more.
These categories also tend to emphasise non-blackness too though.
Yes, but the main purpose is to racialize groups that are not as inherently resentful of the white majority and its norms. The hope is that they will join politically with blacks rather than gravitate towards whites.
However I think the latter is more the general trend, as black identity is wrapped around a sort of permanent outsider status, and most Latinos and Asians don’t want that.
I’m always a bit sceptical of these theories about Machiavellian abilities of statisticians to achieve political objectives fifty years hence.
Anyway a more useful classification than “Hispanic” would be “Part-indigenous American”.
This would require people of indigenous ancestry north and south of the US-Mexico border to accept that:
- they are related
- they are substantially admixed with Europeans since 1492
It would also allow for a more correct classification of what Steve calls Conquistador-Americans.
"Asian American Pacific Islander" made sense when most of both groups in the U.S. were in Hawaii and often were intermarried. Plus, it helped fit things on one sheet of paper easier.
In the 1990s, however, Pacific Islander groups pointed out that they didn't really have that much in common with little Asian nerds. The Clinton Administration said, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense," and broke out Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders separately.
But then during the Racial Reckoning you started to hear a lot about AAPI Heritage Month. That's based on a law passed by Congress before the division in the 2000 Census, so it refers to AAPI. If it hadn't already existed, Congress in 2020 likely would have passed separate Asian Heritage Month and Pacific Islander Heritage Month bills.
But AAPI Heritage Month is the main reason AAPI made a comeback after 20 years of declining use.
Interesting. There is definitely a hierarchy within the American Asian cohort though. A Filipino friend always said they were considered ‘dirt Asians’ by Chinese and Japanese. Not sure how any of those groups look at Indians.
The Asian-American comedienne Ali Wong calls them Jungle Asians vs. Fancy Asians.
"Hispanic" is kind of not _entirely_ useless for human taxonomic purposes, in the sense that it captures the great majority of people living in the USA who have both a large Native American ancestry component and a large European ancestry component, but that's not why the category was originally set up (and of course, most of the people who consider themselves to be Native Americans in the sense of being indigenous to the territories that became the USA _also_ now have a large European ancestry component; there just aren't that many of them compared to, e.g. Mexican mestizos).
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/latest-rationalization-race-doesnt/comment/112965910?r=2pxzv&utm_medium=ios
It’s interesting how they keep using Hispanic or biracial individuals as examples to prove that reported race doesn’t align with genetic markers. Well obviously!
The race doesn’t exist crowd (except for the famous forensic guess of Black Jesus of course) will always have their data points. Maybe in 100 hundred years they will be right!
I was going to push the like button but I'm not sure that's the correct response for something that is either bitterly amusing or amusingly bitter
The Hispanic designation is a rainbow stew united mostly by the ability to speak Spanish. At my church, we have three Hispanic families. One is a divorced white Cuban man whose family were big landowners in Cuba until Castro gave them the boot and expropriated their land. He became a CPA. He speaks perfect English and Spanish. Another is a mestizo Salvadoran man who immigrated during the Civil Wars of the 80s. He drives a trash truck. He speaks perfect English and Spanish. He is recently divorced from his white wife. The last is a family with five children. Both the man and his wife are short, squat and are from El Salvador. Both speak poor English. Both probably are heavily Indian in heritage. He's a handyman for an apartment complex. All are very different Hispanics. But they share a category.
And you don't have to speak Spanish, just have an ancestor who spoke Spanish. There's no definitive court ruling on how many great-grandparents have to be Hispanic for you to get Hispanic preferences. Some judges have said 1 out of 8 is ridiculous. Others have said 1 out of four grandparents is good enough. But it also helps to have a treasured copy of your grandmother's enchilada recipe.
They should make people cook one of their grandmother's Mexican meals in the courtroom and then take a vote of the bailiffs on whether or not it's spicy enough.
You might want to ask Senator Warren her opinion on what percentage gets you into the ethnic category you desire.
Didn't one of her submissions to Pow Wow Chow turn out to be from Wallis Simpson? We have family lore I find dubious now that I'm old and cynical, so she might actually have believed hers.
Yeah, somebody tracked down Senator Warren's recipe submission to "Pow Wow Chow" and found it was originally attributed to, IIRC, the chef at The Ritz, where it was a favorite of the Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.
The Daily Mail got the dirt, as usual. It was Le Pavillon in the Ritz Tower '57-'72, on Fifth Ave before that. Warren's cousin edited the cookbook, and her mother contributed, too.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146628/Elizabeth-Warrens-Pow-Wow-Chow-Cherokee-recipes-word-word-COPIES-famous-FRENCH-chefs-techniques.html
I was laughing all through this article. My question. What is the ultimate purpose in all this? I don’t have a clue. It seems that if taken to its logical conclusion they will be able to identify my remains as me, a unique human individual. If so, then flies in the face of the current groupthink politics of groups of victims and victimizers. We are all different and unique for one reason or another.
Recently, I was identified as a Viking. A very competent medical professional noticed my dupuytren’s contracture and sorted me out immediately.
“What is the ultimate purpose in all this?”
That many people prefer signalling to their peers than accepting objective reality.
I'm not sure their purposes are that innocent and harmless. I suspect end goals are to benefit one (probably their own) group over another.
Theodore Dalrymple put it like this, and it seems both a reasonable thesis and as with many things he has written, worthy of repeating:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
As certainly a phrase such as "growing acceptance of the idea that social identities related to ancestry don’t align with genetic groupings" seems to be emblematic of the article as a whole and to my mind to be the rankest of lies
The difference in this case -- if it is a difference -- is that most college-educated Americans don't feel that they have a firm enough grasp of the underlying biology, the history, and the statistics to defend a reasoned view of the matter. They are mostly correct in that. (On the other hand, giving a greater weight to common sense and believing Their Lyin' Eyes would greatly improve the public's understanding.)
By the time you've found Sailer, can follow the reasoning of a blog post like this, and can think, "well of course" -- you've already given up hope of being invited to the Best Holiday Parties.
Yes, the "trust your lying eyes" test is worryingly something that an awful lot of people seem unable to apply. Thankfully Messrs Sailer and Dalrymple provide useful insight as to the Emperor's raiment
All that sword-swinging messed up your finger? Did he detect the pillaging, too?
She is from Swedish ancestry and just recognized a fellow Viking. This is a common affliction in that part of the world. Last I looked 18% of men from Scandanavian countries had that affliction in greater or lesser degree. The Vikings, the few Scandinavians who did the raiding, brought it to the British Isles where along with rape, pillage and such, left some genes for the condition among my ancestors. My medical friend was joking with me, I'm not a real Viking but she's known me long enough to know that I am a real Scots Irish Texan. The history of that group also includes a lot of fighting, pillaging, drinking, singing and such. History can be fun if you remember that the past did not recognize the wokeness of the current day, they had their own battles to fight.
The Norman Vikings came and stayed in England. No doubt their genes boinked their way to Scotland, too, legitimately or not.
Those Vikings got around. I fell in love with that culture when I saw The Vikings in my youth. I always identified more with Kirk Douglas than Tony Curtis. I guess that explains a lot.
The final scene in "The Vikings" was absurd. Tony Curtis kickin' Kirk Douglas' ass. One of the silliest fight scenes, about as silly as Montgomery Clift knocking John Wayne on his ass in "Red River."
Love ya man
Exactly, the pussification of Hollywood was true even then
I believe the people of the Shetlands and the Orkneys have mostly Norwegian DNA.
All the rowing. I didn't know this was called "The Viking Disease" but I'm pretty sure my very Scandinavian friend had it (though he is in denial).
Not sure if they call it that but the hand doctors I’ve seen recognize it as prevalent in Scandinavia. Many people think that all Scandinavians were Vikings hence the name.
Wikipedia calls it that.
Then that’s it, thank you.
From the Wikipedia pic I immediately recognized the odd hand position of a retired colleague of Danish descent. So interesting.
Sometimes forensic anthropologists can do a unique positive ID through dental records. But a lot of what they do is simply rule out a large chunk of humanity for the benefit of shortening the detectives' workloads.
It’s a job.
The scientists and activists (but I repeat myself) who are quoted by activist journalists (but I repeat myself) throughout the two articles in Steve's post remind me of the adherents of other religious beliefs I've encountered, in person and in print.
Everyone should experience being proselytized, e.g. in my case by Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. It turns out -- surprise -- that every imaginable avenue of exploration leads to the implacable conclusion that the tenets of the One True Faith have been proven to be entirely correct.
It was the same thing with the Anti-Death-Penalty faith community. Some time back (1990s?), that movement was at its high point as the focus of the ACLU, the media, organized social-justice religion, and progressives. Article after Op-Ed after teach-in after policy piece after sermon: dozens of points of departure and scores of arguments. All roads leading to the same set of conclusions: the Death Penalty is Wrong / Doesn't influence perpetrators / Ineffective / Immoral / Expensive / Cruel / Unconstitutional / Ruins victims lives / Corrodes social norms / Deeply unfashionable / Unworkable. QED!
Many of the Current Year's anti-racist scientists evidently fear for their prestigious, interesting, and sometimes well-paid careers. So perhaps they deserve to be cut more slack than the ideologues of yesteryear.
But it's still tiresome to see such silliness given pride of place in eminent journals.
In the words of Joe Rogan--one hunnerd percent!
One night as I parked my car in a residential neighborhood 1/2 mile from Candlestick Park, about to walk to the Giants game, I was approached by two Jehovah's Witnsses, both black, in business suits. I needed to quickly deflect, so I told them about this JW I caddied with for a few years as a teenager at the San Francisco Club. Every weekend, he would tell me that the world would end on the following Wednesday. Their response: "you left your lights on."
so, the apostrophe makes this pretty funny:
"the skull has forgotten it’s Stephen Jay Gould"
Alas poor Stephen! I knew him, Horatio...
Maybe we can start using the term “ancestry” instead of “race” if the latter is too icky. Sort of like how American blacks are always calling themselves something new in an attempt to outrun the stigma against being black. The problem with renaming blacks though is that the underlying behaviors and interactions that generate stigma remain. With race to ancestry, however, we might be able to benefit more permanently from a reset, leave behind the Hitler-y past. The old bad stuff was about “race”; the new good stuff is about “ancestry.”
Anthropologists on the "all the new science is bad science" side of things declare anthropology to be a "dying discipline":
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1548-1433.21st-century-anthropology
Because they prefer disciplinary suicide to abandoning socio-cultural doctrines that have held sway for nearly a century. Paying attention to exciting new research that tends to challenge those doctrines and which could breathe incredible new life into ethnographic work? No thanks, they'll go down with their familiar old ship and take as many students with them as they can.
It is beyond pathetic.
I'll give a specific example. Socio-cultural anthropologists had long noticed interesting parallels between the cultures of Amazonia and Melanesia.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp4h5
The assumption was similar conditions lead to similar practices and beliefs, plus the psychic unity of mankind means the same ideas just keep re-occurring to human populations. Not bad or stupid explanations.
HOWEVER, given the very surprising 2015 finding of Melanesian ancestry in some Amazonian populations, other possibilities proliferate. This could be a renaissance moment for ethnographic research. If only.
https://www.science.org/content/article/earliest-south-american-migrants-had-australian-melanesian-ancestry
Thanks for the Dying Discipline link.
The first sentence of the first Abstract isn't bad. Professor Jose Leonardo Santos writes,
"This vital topics forum focuses on the host of challenges that now threaten the future of anthropology."
But then he continues. "The political polarization of the current era, along with the economic rationale that matches it, leads to policy and legislation restricting content and speech in universities, cuts and closure of anthropology programs, and the loss of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives." And so on.
There is a part of the Academy whose work products are genuinely useful to society. Inventing and refining new types of LEDs. Understanding the etiology of heart disease. Etc. At some point that grades into useless, and from there into actively harmful. What fraction is above the Useless/Harmful line? 50%? 20%?
I've been meaning to read up on Henry VIII's confiscation of the Church's properties (1536-1540). Prof. Santos: "Society will cease to function if you dare touch our holy monasteries, priories, convents, friaries, farmland, wealth, and other assets! You *need* us to pray for your souls! We cannot possibly do so if you interfere with our grants, legislative appropriations, endowments, and 403(b) matching contributions! Not to mention promotions, tenure, and high social status!"
It's a good analogy in more ways than one. Certainly there were lots of abuses by monasteries, hoarding of wealth and so on. but if you tour the wreckage -- some of which stands to this day -- it's hard not to feel bereft about what was destroyed, too.
I don't think it's really wrong that part of the role of universities is to lecture society about its bad choices. Monasteries were not wrong that people get up to a lot of sins and that it is socially beneficial to remind everyone about that beam in their own eye etc. It's not that the project is wrong-headed, it's the corruption of the project.
So right now would be a good time for universities to say for example: "gender affirming care" is medically quite harmful, and socially it doesn't liberate anybody. It reinforces sex role stereotypes, is corrosive to gays and lesbians, and oppressive to women. That would not involve generating any new discoveries but it would be the university doing some useful societal critique.
of course that's not the role the university is playing... I guess we'll see if it all ends in dissolution. I really hope not, I hope for reform.
Nathan Cofnas tweeted (4/28/25, 12:15pm EDT):
"This [screenshot from a 'Faculty Recruitment Toolkit'] is from the rubric used by UC Irvine and UC Berkeley to grade job applicants' DEI statements. If you said you "treat everyone the same," you got the lowest score and were automatically disqualified.
"For one job search in the life sciences in 2019, 76% of applicants were cut in the first round based solely on their DEI statements.
"Thousands of professors who were totally fine with all of that are now outraged that Trump is threatening free expression at universities."
it's really hypocritical, absolutely.
Everytime I see this capitalization scheme I hate them even more, "Black, white, Asian, Hispanic"
The probability of accurately guessing an individual’s race based on one single gene alone isn’t that great (mostly around 70%, but can be higher or lower depending on the gene). However, the combined data of multiple genes paints a much more accurate picture. Once a sufficient quantity of grouped genes are used, the probability of inaccurately detecting an individual’s race drops to <1%.
Race and ethnicity are overwhelmingly correlated with genetic ancestry in the United States. Recent, large-scale studies of ~11,000 cancer patients and ~202,000 military veterans found that individuals’ self-identified race and ethnicity showed 95.6% (cancer) and 99.5% (veterans) correspondence to genetic ancestry clusters.
Yuan et al. (2018) Cancer Cell. 34: 549–560 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610818303799
Fang et al. (2019) Am J Hum Genet. 105:763-772
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(19)30338-6
Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [Self-Identifying Race/Ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [Genetically Inferred Ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group.
"The letter triggered an explosion of debate. “It took a lot of courage for them to put that letter out,” says Kyra Stull, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno."
This self congratulatory reflex among the bien pensants awarding themselves and their ilk points for 'courage' is one of the more revolting facets of the modern world. It is, of course, the precise opposite of the truth, but more than that, it embodies the refusal of these people to acknowledge that they have occupied the commanding heights of the culture for at least two generations. To hear them tell it Eisenhower and the Kefauver Commission are still in charge. Feh.
"...Kyra Stull, a forensic anthropologist..."
One hears a lot about nominative determinism. Here is someone whose work deals with bones, whose name is just a very minor slip of the tongue away from including the word "skull".
DiGangi is "Black and biracial" which sounds like tri-racial, except some races get lumped and some get split.
"going all Hakan Rotmwrt"
Far be it from me to presume, on Steve Sailer's substack of all places, but that link describes him as an Ainu-American; I always thought that Hakan was meant to be a Yakut (Sakha in their own language).
Maybe this is old news here, but a little searching around suggests that the guy whose photo came to be used for the Hakan character is actually a real-life Yakut shaman called Vasily Atlasov. My knowledge of Russian is negligible (and my knowledge of Yakut is currently zero), but doesn't this look like the same guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfIowyMJB_s