[lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 18:23:25 -0700
Wow. Genetic “facts” are falsifiable in the laboratory. “Historical facts”
whether “established” or not – are not, making genetic “facts” factier than
historical ones, if what you mean by “fact” has anything to do with provable
“truth.” In “fact” historians don’t usually say things like “historical facts”
because history is based upon records written by humans, testimony in other
words, and testimony is not considered reliable enough to refer to it as a bald
fact. If more than one person says the same thing then it is deemed a bit more
reliable than if one person says it, but still . . . groups of people have
testified to seeing flying saucers and not everyone considers their testimony
to be an “established fact.”
What Cochran and Harpending have done in their book is a work of consilience,
applying the latest conclusions from geology, archeology, and genetics to
history – or rather, applying those disciplines to each other. “History” that
hasn’t agreed with archeology and geology has been modified until it does. And
now the same thing must occur in regard to genetics.
Cochran and Harpending are not breaking much new ground. Cavilli Sforza
(father and son) wrote The Great Human Diasporas, the History of Diversity and
Evolution” back in 1993. Bryan Sykes has done something very like that in his
Saxons, Vikings, and Celts. Cochran and Harpending have gone beyond Sykes in
some respects but not hugely so.
And while you haven’t offered any “established historical” facts or even
references in regard to what went on during Cortes conquering of the Aztecs,
try reconciling the testimony of the people who were there or quoted people who
were there. Bernal Diaz was there. He was one of Cortes’ conquistadors and
awarded for his heroic acts by being made governor of Guatemala. What he wrote
supports what Cochran and Harpending wrote about Cortes as I understand it.
When Cortes first faced huge numbers in his first battle, numbers as much as
300 to 1 in certain points according to one witness, Cortes had 400 soldiers on
the ground.
Your comments are rather too brief for a clear understanding – at least by me.
I thought perhaps I hadn’t quoted or interpreted Cochran and Harpending
adequately; so I did a bit more; which I didn’t mind doing. Their book
deserves rereading, in my opinion, so to re-read parts of it now is no
hardship.
Being raised in Southern California I was exposed to a lot of Spanish History
as I grew. I had more interest in it in college than later on, primarily
because historians writing in English weren’t all that interested in Spanish
history . . . apparently Spanish historians weren’t all that interested in it
either from what I read. But now we have many more of the early texts available
in English as well as a few more historians taking up various aspects.
O’Callaghan’s Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain published in 2003
interests me.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 3:58 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
Well, but I was talking what we might consider established historical facts.
Before we start applying genetic explanations, perhaps we should get the facts
right ?
O.K.
On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 8:53 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
You might not like Cochran and Harpending’s book. They base their arguments
around recent studies in genetics; so their emphasis is not upon “tradition”
other than to point out cases where genetic analyses do not support it. They
probably don’t cover material in a form you would like. In places where you
would like a one to one counter of traditional views, they probably just
summarize their points making them susceptible to quibbles.
“In the case of the Jews they write, “Admixture has not kept the Ashkenazim
from becoming genetically distinct. Even if a population starts out as a
mixture of two peoples, as in this case, becoming endogamous (ending
intermarriage) and staying so for a long time ensures that the population will
become homogeneous. If the population’s ancestry is 60 percent Middle Eastern
and 40 percent European, for example, a few dozen generations of endogamy will
result in a population in which each individual’s ancestry is quite close to 60
percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European. In other words, you eventually
get a population that has a flavor all its own—even more so if it experiences
special selective pressures.
“This means that if you look at the most informative parts of the genome, you
can tell whether a certain individual is Ashkenazi (as opposed to, say, a
non-Jewish Italian, Greek, or German) just about every time, particularly if
all his or her recent ancestors are Jewish. In the plot, the circles represent
Ashkenazi Jewish individuals, but the shaded circles represent individuals
whose grandparents were all Ashkenazi Jews as well. That distinction matters,
because Jews haven’t been nearly as endogamous over the past century as they
were during the Middle Ages.
“Could these same methods distinguish the Ashkenazi from other Jewish groups,
such as Moroccan Jews or Yemeni Jews? The answer is almost certainly yes.
Although that particular measurement has not yet been made, it should be easy
to make that distinction because the genetic distance between Ashkenazi Jews
and Yemeni Jews is considerably larger than that between Ashkenazi Jews and
Western Europeans.
“Further down Cochran and Harpending write, “It is noteworthy that
non-Ashkenazi Jews do not have high average IQ scores. Nor are they
overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields like medicine, law, and
academics. In Israel, Ashkenazi Jews, on average, score 14 points higher than
Oriental Jews, almost a full standard deviation, which is 15 or 16 points on
most IQ tests.37 That difference means that the average non-Ashkenazi Jew in
Israel would have an IQ score that would be at the 20th percentile among the
Ashkenazim. Academic accomplishment in the two groups seems to vary in the same
way, even among those born and raised in Israel: Third-generation Ashkenazi
Jews in Israel are 2.5 to 3 times more likely to have graduated from college
than third-generation Mizrahi Jews, for example (the ancestors of the Mizrahim
moved to Israel from Asia and North Africa).”
As to the idea that the Ashkenazis genetic difference being resistance to a
disease, the happy side-effect being increased intelligence, Cochran and
Harpending write, “. . . we think that most of the characteristic Ashkenazi
mutations are not defenses against infectious disease. One reason is that these
mutations do not exist in neighboring populations—often literally people living
across the street—that must have been exposed to very similar diseases.
Instead, we think that the Ashkenazi mutations have something to do with
Ashkenazi intelligence, and that they arose because of the unique
natural-selection pressures the members of this group faced in their role as
financiers in the European Middle Ages.”
[Cochran, Gregory; Henry Harpending (2009-01-27). The 10,000 Year Explosion:
How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (p. 205-217). Basic Books. Kindle
Edition.]
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 9:50 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
Well again, the 'traditional view' holds that the Jews in the Ottoman Empire,
far from being permitted to do only manual work, played a key role in its
foreign trade. A few links below.
https://jewishhistory.research.wesleyan.edu/i-jewish-population/5-ottoman-empire/
http://books.google.me/books?
http://sephardichorizons.org/Volume1/Issue3/SecondGoldenAge.html
id=ScsUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=jewish+merchants+in+ottoman+empire&source=bl&ots=yE9HYC1Kxc&sig=1iqZBsT5qF2hdN5TzM2IoVQkmgA&hl=en&sa=
On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Yes, but I didn’t quite know how to reply to this since you were presenting the
traditional point of view while Cochran and Harpending are drawing conclusions
based on recent studies based upon the human genome and arguing new points of
view. Perhaps I put it poorly, but at some point Cortez put about 500 troops
on the ground. Not everyone available came ashore. I didn’t mean to imply
that 500 was all he had throughout his entire military career. Cochran and
Harpending clearly don’t imply that. But had it not been that disease
destroyed about 90% of the Amerindians during the period that Cortez was
working, he (in the opinion of Cochran and Harpending) would not have
succeeded. They mention one critical battle where the Amerindians opposing
Cortez were largely sick, but there were probably others.
The traditional view is to credit Cortez cleverness and not to think disease
played a critical role. I believe Cochran and Harpending have argued that the
traditional view does not adequately explain these events. Viruses and
bacteria deserve more credit than they’ve received.
I can see that my brief examples haven’t done justice to Cochran and
Harpending’s arguments but I don’t feel up to going into much more detail than
I already have – especially since their book seems one argument after another.
In another case, I had written that it was easier for colonist to settle North
America because disease had wiped out most of the Amerindians. North American
was empty. I thought I wrote enough to mean “empty” as compared to “India” for
example.
In another case I wrote that the Ashkenazi Jews working as money lenders
developed skills that gave rise to Einstein, but I intended “money lenders” as
a synecdoche. Medieval states didn’t need that many money-lenders. Ashkenazis
did other things as well. Cochran and Harpending refer to the Ashkenazis as
being the “white collar workers of the medieval world.”
Jews were treated better in Muslim dominated areas during the period the
Ashkenazis were coming into their own, but those Jews were only permitted to do
menial work. And today in Israel the difference in potential, between
Ashkenazi Jews and Jews from Muslim countries is marked. The latter apparently
are not competent to take on the more complicated work. They do menial work in
Israel just as they did in Muslim lands. I’m sure there are exceptions.
Lawrence
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