Stable isotopes and Nubian/Egyptian relationships

Wikipedia on Tombos site:

Tombos in an archaeological site in Northern Sudan. The village of Tombos was located at the third cataract of the Nile, not far from Kerma near the present Karmah. An important granite quarry was located here in the Pharaonic era. Its stone was used mostly to build statues and buildings between the river delta and the southern regions of the kingdom. A statue to the Pharaoh Taharqa, abandoned for over 2700 years, contains inscriptions. About 3000 years ago, there were pyramids dedicated to ten noble Egyptians. 

In 2000, several discoveries were made by the archaeologist, Professor Stuart Tyson Smith of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Smith and his team discovered the remains of a pyramid more than 3,500 years old, and the buried remains of an Egyptian colonial administrator named Siamun and his wife, Wernu. The two mummies were intact, and were buried with Ushabti figurines, a boomerang, and painted Mycenaean terracotta.[1] The burial chamber includes a series of rooms, some plundered by thieves, while others were undisturbed in whole or in part. Also, an epigraphic survey by the British Museum uncovered pharaonic rock-inscriptions.[2]

Might be interesting to look at DNA from remains from the Tombos site, both the ones mentioned in Wikipedia and the likely Egyptian immigrants mentioned in the following article.


Am J Phys Anthropol DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22235

Strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) variability in the Nile Valley: Identifying residential mobility during ancient Egyptian and Nubian sociopolitical changes in the New Kingdom and Napatan periods

Michele R. Buzon, Antonio Simonetti

As a successful technique for identifying residential mobility in other areas, this study investigates the feasibility of using 87Sr/86Sr analysis to track the movements of the ancient peoples of Egypt and Nubia in the Nile Valley, who interacted via trade, warfare, and political occupations over millennia. Dental enamel from faunal remains is used to examine variability in strontium sources in seven regional sites; human enamel samples are analyzed from eight Nile Valley sites in order to trace human movements. The faunal samples show a wide range of 87Sr/86Sr values demonstrating that some animals were raised in a variety of locales. The results of the human samples reveal overlap in 87Sr/86Sr values between Egyptian and Nubian sites; however, Egyptian 87Sr/86Sr values (mean/median [0.70777], sd [0.00027]) are statistically higher than the Nubian 87Sr/86Sr values (mean [0.70762], median [0.70757], sd [0.00036], suggesting that it is possible to identify if immigrant Egyptians were present at Nubian sites. Samples examined from the site of Tombos provide important information regarding the sociopolitical activities during the New Kingdom and Napatan periods. Based on a newly established local 87Sr/86Sr range, human values, and bioarchaeological evidence, this study confirms the preliminary idea that immigrants, likely from Egypt, were present during the Egyptian New Kingdom occupation of Nubia. In the subsequent Napatan period when Nubia ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty, 87Sr/86Sr values are statistically different from the New Kingdom component and indicate that only locals were present at Tombos during this developmental time. 

Link

The advantage of being first

From press release:

"We find that families who are at the forefront of a range expansion into new territories had greater reproductive success. In other words, that they had more children, and more children who also had children," Labuda explained. "As a result, these families made a higher genetic contribution to the contemporary population than those who remained behind in what we call the range core, as opposed to the wave front.

The research confirms in humans a phenomenon that has already been observed in other species with much shorter generation spans. "We knew that the migration of species into new areas promoted the spread of rare mutations through a phenomenon known as 'gene surfing', but now we find that selection at the wave front could make this surfing much more efficient," Excoffier said. This evolutionary mechanism in combination with founder effects and social or cultural transmission of reproductive behavior could explain why some genetic diseases are found at an elevated frequency in the Charlevoix and Saguenay Lac Saint-Jean regions where the study was carried out, as rare mutations can also surf during a range expansion.

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1212880

Deep Human Genealogies Reveal a Selective Advantage to Be on an Expanding Wave Front

Claudia Moreau et al.

Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than 1 million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.

Link

Roman DNA Project

Kristina "Bone Girl" Killgrove is launching a Roman DNA Project

This is a pilot project to study the DNA from the skeletal remains of lower-class Romans dating to the Imperial period. Some DNA analysis has been done in ancient Italy, but it hasn't yet been explored as a method for understanding the geographic origins of immigrants to Rome. In particular, the combination of DNA with results I obtained from isotope analyses (Sr/O/C/N/Pb) in my dissertation research will be a powerful way of investigating the life histories of groups under-represented in history, particularly slaves, immigrants, women, and children.

She is asking for contributions to the Roman DNA Project. There is also a video associated with the Project:



This is a good idea, and I encourage readers to contribute, if, after reading the project materials, they want to pitch in.

Just one quick comment: testing lower-class Imperial Romans is, indeed, admirable, but I am pretty sure there are ancient remains from Latium that date to before the period when cremation burial became the norm, with inhumation never entirely dying out even among the patrician gentes.

In studying the origin of foreigners in Rome, it makes sense to first have a picture of what the Romans of old were like. They may not have been "under-represented" in history, but they are certainly under-represented when it comes to ancient DNA research.

DNA tests for asylum seekers

ScienceInsider has some reactions to plans from the UK Border Agency to use DNA tests to verify claims of asylum seekers that they do in fact come from the countries they claim (e.g., Somalia), rather than other ones which do not face the same geopolitical turmoil. This is a real problem for European countries, as many illegal immigrants without documents claim to be from war-zones.

I am completely in agreement with the use of DNA tests to substantiate asylum seekers' claims, with the caveat that the followed protocols should be transparent to the scientific community, so that they can be subjected to scrutiny. Right now, many DNA testing companies make bold assertions of being able to distinguish one ethnicity from another, but given that their methods are "closed box", their results are suspect.

However, it is completely inaccurate that DNA is unrelated to ethnicity. Both simple uniparental tests (Y chromosome and mtDNA), and of course autosomal panels, are useful in updating (via Bayes' rule) one's prior belief in a particular hypothesis.

A combination of linguistic assessment (whether someone knows the language of the country he claims to be form), tests of common knowledge (whether someone knows some simple facts about that country), and a DNA test (whether someone has DNA that is common in this country) is enough to determine whether someone is from some claimed origin.

Such determinations are never foolproof, but there really is no foolproof method of determining that a person with no papers is in fact what he says he is. However, they can, in fact, both statistically confirm or reject a great number of cases with very high probability of being right. This, in itself, is a great improvement.

Population density and cultural complexity (Powell et al. 2009)

From ScienceDaily:

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for climatic reasons at the time when modern human behaviour temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.

Science doi:10.1126/science.1170165

Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior

Adam Powell et al.

Abstract

The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.

Link

Isolation-with-migration model

From the paper:

Reconstructing human history requires an accurate picture of global human population structure [1]. However, methods currently used to describe structure among human groups typically rely on very simple demographic models that make unrealistic biological assumptions. Two commonly used models include the island model, which assumes that populations have no shared ancestry and are related only through gene flow (Figure 1A), and the phylogenetic branching or splitting model, which assumes that populations diverged at some time in the past and have remained completely isolated ever since (i.e., no gene flow) (Figure 1B). Despite increasingly sophisticated genetic datasets, most contemporary studies still assume these unrealistic models to infer aspects of human demographic history [2-8].

BMC Genetics doi: 10.1186/1471-2156-9-76

Intergenic DNA sequences from the human X chromosome reveal high rates of global gene flow

Murray P. Cox et al.

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Despite intensive efforts devoted to collecting human polymorphism data, little is known about the role of gene flow in the ancestry of human populations. This is partly because most analyses have applied one of two simple models of population structure, the island model or the splitting model, which make unrealistic biological assumptions.

Results

Here, we analyze 98-kb of DNA sequence from 20 independently evolving intergenic regions on the X chromosome in a sample of 90 humans from six globally diverse populations. We employ an isolation-with-migration (IM) model, which assumes that populations split and subsequently exchange migrants, to independently estimate effective population sizes and migration rates. While the maximum effective size of modern humans is estimated at ~10,000, individual populations vary substantially in size, with African populations tending to be larger (2,300-9,000) than non-African populations (300-3,300). We estimate mean rates of bidirectional gene flow at 4.8 x 10-4/generation. Bidirectional migration rates are ~5-fold higher among non-African populations (1.5 x 10-3) than among African populations (2.7 x 10-4). Interestingly, because effective sizes and migration rates are inversely related in African and non-African populations, population migration rates are similar within Africa and Eurasia (e.g., global mean Nm = 2.4).

Conclusion

We conclude that gene flow has played an important role in structuring global human populations and that migration rates should be incorporated as critical parameters in models of human demography.

Link

Article on Greek citizenship and naturalization

The Christian Science Monitor has an article titled Being born in Greece may not make you Greek.

Greece, like most European countries, does not give automatic citizenship to children born in the country. And becoming a naturalized citizen is a long, difficult process: Greece makes it harder than almost any other country in the European Union – only Austria is tougher. It’s also the only one of the original EU 15 that makes no special provisions for children born to immigrants in the country. Members of the Greek diaspora, in contrast, can get a passport easily.

While much can be done to improve the existing legal framework, I am fundamentally in agreement with the basic principle of jus sanguinis, citizenship by descent, rather than jus soli, citizenship by birthplace.

How should one become a Greek citizen? This is an elaboration and amendment of my earlier thoughts on this matter:

1. The offspring of a Greek citizen are Greek citizens.
2. Non-citizens may be naturalized by Law passed with increased Majority of 2/3 of the Parliament. (General provisions should be made for persons of Greek origin, although individual persons of non-Greek origin who rendered extraordinary service to the Nation should also be allowed to become citizens).
   
3. Spouses of Greek citizens become permanent residents, and may become Greek citizens after ten years of marriage and demonstrable knowledge of Greek language and culture. They cannot, however, confer their citizenship to offspring from non-Greek mates (as in #1)
   
4. Legal immigrants have renewable residence permits (for work, study, etc.) of specific time length.
   
5. Legal immigrants may obtain permanent residency (of unspecified time length) after 10 years of immigrant status and demonstrable knowledge of Greek language and culture.
6. Children found in Greece become Greek citizens; if they are claimed by their non-Greek parents before the age of 18, then the provisions of #7 apply to them.
   
7. Children educated in Greece are allowed in the country for the duration of their studies, and become permanent residents thereafter.
8. Illegal immigrants may not be legalized within the country; they may apply for legal immigrant status after departing from Greece.
   

I believe that such a system is flexible enough to facilitate honest legal immigrants in their everyday life. On the other hand, it also ensures that the Greek citizen body will always consist of ethnic Greeks and their descendants.

Immigration and intermarriage rate

This reminds me of my 2003 post on Group Bias in Mate Selection and Outmarriage. In that post I argued that -given a preference level of marrying members of one's own group- larger groups have lower outmarriage rates.

Immigration Correlates with Slowed Rate of Intermarriages in United States

The study suggests Hispanic and Asian immigrants are likely to marry among themselves. In addition, more native-born minorities are selecting marriage partners from the growing pool of immigrants.

The result is that the number of native-born Hispanic men in intermarriages with whites declined by nearly 4 percentage points between 1990 and 2000 – from 35.3 percent to 31.9 percent. The number of native-born Asian American men in intermarriages declined from 50.2 to 45.8 percent.

The expression "the number of" is probably unfortunate, since it is the percentage that is declining, but the percentage is out of a bigger minority population.

Ethnic nationalism reappraised

Jerry Z. Muller has an interesting article in Foreign Affairs, titled Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism, in which he argues that the reason why Europe has enjoyed such a long period of peace after World War II was the fact that post-war states were largely ethnically homogeneous. Thus, he argues, peace was not so much the result of European nations' "overcoming" their nationalism, but rather its fulfillment, i.e. the creation of nation states dominated by a single ethnic group.

It's a fairly interesting piece, touching among other things on the resurgence of nationalism after the Cold War in the few places in Europe (e.g. the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union) where national and ethnic borders did not coincide, the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, and the challenges that ethnic nationalism faces in an age of immigration.

International attitudes towards immigration

Gene Expression points me to an article (pdf) on attitudes in several countries towards immigration; there are quite a few interesting survey questions, which you can read in the freely available paper.

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2008 VOL 56, 33–56

Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States

Jack Citrin John Sides

Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration.We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born.An implication of these findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of newcomers.

Age-related immigration to imperial Rome

Am J Phys Anthropol. 2007 Jan 4; [Epub ahead of print]

Isotopic evidence for age-related immigration to imperial Rome

Browse TL et al.

Oxygen stable isotope ratios (delta(18)O) have been determined in carbonate in paired first and third molar teeth from individuals (N = 61) who lived in the town of Portus Romae ("Portus") and who were buried in the necropolis of Isola Sacra (First to Third centuries AD) near Rome, Italy. We compare these analyses with data for deciduous teeth of modern Roman children. Approximately one-third of the archaeological sample has first molar (M1) values outside the modern range, implying a large rate of population turnover at that time, consistent with historical data. Delta (18)O(ap) values suggest that a group within the sample migrated to the area before the third molar (M3) crown had completely formed (i.e., between 10 and 17.5 years of age). This is the first quantitative assessment of population mobility in Classical antiquity. This study demonstrates that migration was not limited to predominantly single adult males, as suggested by historical sources, but rather a complex phenomenon involving families. We hypothesize that migrants most likely came from higher elevations to the East and North of Rome. One individual with a higher delta(18)O value may have come (as a child) from an area isotopically similar to North Africa.

Link

Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity

By John Lloyd in London
Published: October 8 2006 22:08 | Last updated: October 8 2006 22:08

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that”.

The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human history”, but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where “diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnic”.

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”

British Home Office research has pointed in the same direction and Prof Putnam, now working with social scientists at Manchester University, said other European countries would be likely to have similar trends.

His 2000 book, Bowling Alone, on the increasing atomisation of contemporary society, made him an academic celebrity. Though some scholars questioned how well its findings applied outside the US, policymakers were impressed and he was invited to speak at Camp David, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.

Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the “importing” and “exporting” societies, and that trends “have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed”.

In an oblique criticism of Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, who revealed last week he prefers Muslim women not to wear a full veil, Prof Putnam said: “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us.”

From the Financial Times

Y chromosomes reveal limited Viking settlement in Ireland

More on this later...

European Journal of Human Genetics (advance online publication)

The scale and nature of Viking settlement in Ireland from Y-chromosome admixture analysis

Brian McEvoy et al.

Abstract

The Vikings (or Norse) played a prominent role in Irish history but, despite this, their genetic legacy in Ireland, which may provide insights into the nature and scale of their immigration, is largely unexplored. Irish surnames, some of which are thought to have Norse roots, are paternally inherited in a similar manner to Y-chromosomes. The correspondence of Scandinavian patrilineal ancestry in a cohort of Irish men bearing surnames of putative Norse origin was examined using both slow mutating unique event polymorphisms and relatively rapidly changing short tandem repeat Y-chromosome markers. Irish and Scandinavian admixture proportions were explored for both systems using six different admixture estimators, allowing a parallel investigation of the impact of method and marker type in Y-chromosome admixture analysis. Admixture proportion estimates in the putative Norse surname group were highly consistent and detected little trace of Scandinavian ancestry. In addition, there is scant evidence of Scandinavian Y-chromosome introgression in a general Irish population sample. Although conclusions are largely dependent on the accurate identification of Norse surnames, the findings are consistent with a relatively small number of Norse settlers (and descendents) migrating to Ireland during the Viking period (ca. AD 800–1200) suggesting that Norse colonial settlements might have been largely composed of indigenous Irish. This observation adds to previous genetic studies that point to a flexible Viking settlement approach across North Atlantic Europe.

Link

Origin of the Yakuts

Hum Genet. 2006 Jul 15; [Epub ahead of print]

Investigating the effects of prehistoric migrations in Siberia: genetic variation and the origins of Yakuts.

Pakendorf B, Novgorodov IN, Osakovskij VL, Danilova AP, Protod'jakonov AP, Stoneking M.

The Yakuts (also known as Sakha), Turkic-speaking cattle- and horse-breeders, inhabit a vast territory in Central and northeastern Siberia. On the basis of the archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic evidence, they are assumed to have migrated north from their original area of settlement in the vicinity of Lake Baykal in South Siberia under the pressure of the Mongol expansion during the thirteenth to fifteenth century AD: . During their initial migration and subsequent expansion, the ancestors of the Yakuts settled in the territory originally occupied by Tungusic- and Uralic-speaking reindeer-herders and hunters. In this paper we use mtDNA and Y-chromosomal analyses to elucidate whether the Yakut immigration and expansion was accompanied by admixture with the indigenous populations of their new area of settlement or whether the Yakuts displaced the original inhabitants without intermarriage. The mtDNA results show a very close affinity of the Yakuts with Central Asian and South Siberian groups, which confirms their southern origin. There is no conclusive evidence for admixture with indigenous populations, though a small amount cannot be excluded on the basis of the mtDNA data alone. The Y-chromosomal results confirm previous findings of a very strong bottleneck in the Yakuts, the age of which is in good accordance with the hypothesis that the Yakuts migrated north under Mongol pressure. Furthermore, the genetic results show that the Yakuts are a very homogenous population, notwithstanding their current spread over a very large territory. This confirms the historical accounts that they spread over their current area of settlement fairly recently.

Link

Y chromosomes of Sweden

Haplogroup frequencies:


European Journal of Human Genetics (advance online publication)

Y-chromosome diversity in Sweden – A long-time perspective

Andreas O Karlsson et al.

Abstract

Sixteen Y-chromosomal binary markers and nine Y-chromosome short tandem repeats were analyzed in a total of 383 unrelated males from seven different Swedish regions, one Finnish region and a Swedish Saami population in order to address questions about the origin and genetic structure of the present day population in Sweden. Haplogroup I1a* was found to be the most common haplogroup in Sweden and accounted, together with haplogroups R1b3, R1a1 and N3, for over 80% of the male lineages. Within Sweden, a minor stratification was found in which the northern region Västerbotten differed significantly (P<0.05) from the other Swedish regions. A flow of N3 chromosomes into Västerbotten mainly from Saami and Finnish populations could be one explanation for this stratification. However, the demographic history of Västerbotten involving a significant male absence during the 17th Century may also have had a large impact. Immigration of young men from elsewhere to Värmland at the same time, can be responsible for a similar deviation with I1a* haplotypes. Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1b3 were found to have the highest STR variation among all haplogroups and could thus be considered to be one of the earliest major male lineages present in Sweden. Regional haplotype variation, within R1b3, also showed a difference between two regions in the south of Sweden. This can also be traced from historical time and is visible in archaeological material. Overall this Y chromosome study provides interesting information about the genetic patterns and demographic events in the Swedish population.

Link

The ugly side of genetic ancestry testing

From a New York Times article title Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests :

Given the tests' speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities — and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.

Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights.

One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money.

"This is not just somebody's desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish," said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. "It's about access to money and power."

...

Ashley Klett's younger sister marked the "Asian" box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European.

Whether it mattered they do not know, but she did get into the college of her choice.

"And they gave her a scholarship," Ashley said.

...

Mr. Haedrich, a nursing home director who was raised a Christian, found through a DNA ancestry test that he bears a genetic signature commonly found among Jews. He says his European ancestors may have hidden their faith for fear of persecution.

Rabbis, too, have disavowed the claim: "DNA, schmeeNA," Mr. Haedrich, 44, said the rabbi at a local synagogue in Los Angeles told him when he called to discuss it.

Undeterred, Mr. Haedrich has hired a lawyer to sue the Israeli government. As in America, he argues, DNA is widely accepted as evidence in forensics and paternity cases, so why not immigration?

Read the whole thing.

The hubris of the humanities

Worth reproducing in its entirety:

The hubris of the humanities

The New York Times
December 6, 2005
The Hubris of the Humanities
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The best argument against "intelligent design" has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for "mediocre design."

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.

"The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had," C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, "The Two Cultures."

The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it's Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There's something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles - to appreciate the dangers of hubris - than studying the
science of explosives.

But don't pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible - or,
in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics.

Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218
lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines.

A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now, you can't turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus - in the science section.

So Pogo was right.

This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of
climate change.

In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S.

It's true that antagonism to science seems peculiarly American. The European right, for example, frets about taxes and immigration, but not about evolution.

But there's an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that's the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That's the hubris of the humanities.

Bottleneck in European population

Human Genetics (online first)

Genetic variability in a genomic region with long-range linkage disequilibrium reveals traces of a bottleneck in the history of the European population

Claudia Schmegner et al.

Abstract The inference of the demographic history of populations from genetic variability data is not only of academic interest. It also provides background information for the identification of genes which may have played a role in human evolution or in the aetiology of human disease. To obtain a clear picture of this background, it is necessary to compare data obtained from a number of genomic loci. Due to its very low recombination rate, the NF1 gene region can be regarded as a further suitable locus. A combined resequencing and SNP typing project in a European population disclosed the presence of only two well separated subgroups of NF1 sequences. Statistical analysis revealed a bimodal distribution of the pairwise differences, a positive value of Tajima’s D and a TMRCA of 700,000 years for the whole sample, and pairwise differences indicative for a growing population and TMRCAs of 130,000 to 150,000 years for the subgroups. Together, the data lead to a model that the recent European population went through a bottleneck during the last 150,000 years of its history. Regarding the given timeframe, this bottleneck could either reflect a speciation event which led to the anatomically modern human (AMH), or a severe reduction of the population size during the emigration of AMHs out of Africa or the immigration into Europe.

Link

Admixture in Rio Grade do Sol, Brazil

Am J Hum Biol. 2005 Jun 24;17(4):496-506 [Epub ahead of print]

Heterogeneity of the genome ancestry of individuals classified as White in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Marrero AR et al.

One hundred nineteen individuals classified as White, living in different localities of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, were studied in relation to the HVS-I region of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The male fraction of the sample (N = 74) was also tested for seven Y-chromosome polymorphisms. In a specific population (Veranopolis), a city characterized by a large influence of the Italian immigration of the 19th century, the results from the maternal and paternal sides indicated almost complete European ancestry. However, another sample identified as White, from different localities of Rio Grande do Sul, presented significant fractions of Native American (36%) and African (16%) mtDNA haplogroups. These results indicate that Brazilian populations are remarkably heterogeneous; while some present an overwhelming majority of transplanted European genomes, with a complete correspondence between physical appearance and ancestry, others reflect a history of extensive admixture with dissociation between physical appearance and ancestry.

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Male and female migration rates

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 May 13; [Epub ahead of print]

Molecular analysis reveals tighter social regulation of immigration in patrilocal populations than in matrilocal populations.

Hamilton G, Stoneking M, Excoffier L.

Human social organization can deeply affect levels of genetic diversity. This fact implies that genetic information can be used to study social structures, which is the basis of ethnogenetics. Recently, methods have been developed to extract this information from genetic data gathered from subdivided populations that have gone through recent spatial expansions, which is typical of most human populations. Here, we perform a Bayesian analysis of mitochondrial and Y chromosome diversity in three matrilocal and three patrilocal groups from northern Thailand to infer the number of males and females arriving in these populations each generation and to estimate the age of their range expansion. We find that the number of male immigrants is 8 times smaller in patrilocal populations than in matrilocal populations, whereas women move 2.5 times more in patrilocal populations than in matrilocal populations. In addition to providing genetic quantification of sex-specific dispersal rates in human populations, we show that although men and women are exchanged at a similar rate between matrilocal populations, there are far fewer men than women moving into patrilocal populations. This finding is compatible with the hypothesis that men are strictly controlling male immigration and promoting female immigration in patrilocal populations and that immigration is much less regulated in matrilocal populations.

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