The mystery of the Travellers

Monday's post, about the difficulty of defining the term race, prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to ask if I'd ever heard of the Irish Travellers.

I asked if they were Romani (colloquially referred to as Gypsies, although that term is now usually considered a slur) who live in Ireland.  She said no -- the story is more interesting than that.

And indeed it is.

The Travellers, or Mincéirí, are a generally nomadic group of people whose origins are shrouded in mystery, but who by some accounts have lived on the island as an identifiable group since at least the twelfth century C.E.  In the Irish language they're called An Lucht Siúil -- "the walking people."  They have a distinct style of dress, including emphasis on beadwork and embroidery, and their own sets of tunes and songs.  They even speak a separate language -- Shelta -- which contains words from Irish and English, as well as a number of what appear to be neologisms.  It's not been well-studied, because as a group with a history of persecution, the Travellers are (understandably) reluctant to share their knowledge with outsiders.  What's known of it, though, seems to be mutually unintelligible to both speakers of Irish and English, and to qualify as an actual separate language (i.e., not a dialect or a pidgin).

Despite the fact that they've experienced discrimination, and the difficulty of maintaining their lifestyle in the face of an increasingly homogenized, technological world, there are still over thirty thousand people in Ireland who self-identify as Travellers.

A Traveller caravan in July 1954 [Image credit: National Library of Ireland]

Their origins are a mystery.  There are Romani in Ireland, just as there are in most European countries; although they occupy a similar societal niche as the Travellers, they seem to be unrelated.  (Genetic studies of Romani have shown fairly conclusively that they are an Indo-Aryan people who made their way into Europe something like a thousand years ago from what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.)  An analysis of the genetics of the Travellers has found that they are essentially Irish in origin, although have been reproductively isolated from the rest of the population since at least the eleventh century C.E., and possibly before.  This study concluded that while related, the Travellers are as distinct from the rest of the Irish as the Icelanders are from the Norwegians.

How could this have happened?  One hypothesis -- and it's no more than that -- is that the ancestors of the Travellers belonged to an itinerant profession that was looked down upon and segregated not because of genetic unrelatedness, but because of social stigma (similar to the Dalits of India).  Like many people with a history of oppression, they are struggling to maintain their language, culture, and identity, and have finally achieved recognition by the Irish government as a distinct ethnic group worthy of protection.

Logo of the All-Travellers Forum (Mincéir Whiden is Shelta for "Travellers talking")

This group highlights once again the difficulty of defining what we mean by race or ethnicity.  Genetically, the Travellers are very similar to the Irish, and seem to share a common origin some time in the last millennium.  Their language, Shelta, probably started out being a pidgin of Old Gaelic and Middle English, but now (like the Kreyòl language of Haiti) has evolved and strengthened into an actual complex and complete language.  Culturally, they're distinct enough to warrant governmental recognition and at least some efforts toward protection and support.

This is hardly the only such case known.  Here in the United States, we've got the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana, all of which seem from genetic studies to be "tri-racial isolates" descended from a combination of sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and western European ancestors, but who -- like the Travellers -- have been separate long enough to develop their own distinct cultures.  My mother's people, the Cajuns, are another such case; they're predominantly of Nova Scotian French ancestry, but have a good admixture of Indigenous Canadian, French Creole, Spanish, and German ancestry, and by virtue of being isolated for a good two centuries, have developed a unique culture and language.  My having learned French as a child from my older relatives means I have a strong Cajun accent when I speak it.  When I've visited Québec, I've often found it difficult to understand and be understood -- another example, to pilfer a quip from Oscar Wilde, of two countries separated by the same language.

So there you have it.  Thank you to the reader who suggested the topic; I always love it when my research for this blog results in my learning something I hadn't known about.  I find human genetics, ethnicity, language, and migration patterns endlessly fascinating -- explaining my choice of a field for my master's degree, and the frequency with which the topic shows up here at Skeptophilia.  And I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the truth is more complex than our desire to pigeonhole reality would suggest.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a time or a life looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Race to the bottom

The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them.  Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.

It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.

Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there."  The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system.  The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.

Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps.  Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.

What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural.  The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate.  (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)

Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution.  Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book.  And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:

Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous...  The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount.  Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent.  Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly.  Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two.  On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world.  Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.

Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world.  The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.

Appearance confounds.  We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese.  (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)

Bigotry, of course, is based in fear.  People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in.  There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on.  But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.

And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.

Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates.  If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means.  My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.

So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.

I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock.  Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen.  If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."

Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor:  "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

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Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I only have a handful of records documenting where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and (s)he's either my ancestor, or (s)he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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A self-portrait drawn by others

As you might imagine, I get hate mail pretty frequently.

Most of it has to do with my targeting somebody's sacred cow, be it homeopathy, fundamentalist religion, ESP, homophobia, climate change denial, or actual sacred cows.  And it seems to fall into three general categories:

• Insults, some of which never get beyond the "you stupid poopyhead fuckface" level. These usually have the worst grammar and spelling.

• Arguments that are meant to be stinging rebuttals. They seldom are, at least not from the standpoint of adding anything of scientific merit to the conversation, although their authors inevitably think they've skewered me with the sharp rapier of their superior knowledge. (Sometimes I get honest, thoughtful comments or criticisms on what I've written; I have always, and will always, welcome those.)

• Diatribes that tell me what I actually believe, as if I'm somehow unaware of it.

It's the latter I want to address in this post, because they're the ones I find the most curious.  I've got a bit of a temper myself, so I can certainly understand the desire to strike back with an insult at someone who's angered you; and it's unsurprising that a person who is convinced of something will want to rebut anyone who says different.  But the idea that I'd tell someone I was arguing with what they believed, as if I knew it better than they did, is just plain weird.

Here are a handful of examples from my fan mail, to illustrate what I'm talking about:

• In response to a post I did on the vitriolic nonsense spouted by televangelist Kenneth Copeland: "Atheists make me want to puke. You have the nerve to attack a holy man like Brother Kenneth Copeland.  You want to tear down the foundation of this country, which is it's [sic] churches and pastors, and tell Christian Americans they have no right to be here."

• In response to my post on a group of alt-med wingnuts who are proposing drinking turpentine to cure damn near everything: "You like to make fun of people who believe nature knows best for curing us and promoting good health.  You pro-Monsanto, pro-chemical types think that the more processed something is, the better it is for you.  I bet you put weed killer on your cereal in the morning."

• In response to a post in which I described my frustration with how many of our elected officials are in the pockets of fossil fuel corporations: "Keep reading us your fairy tales about 'climate change' and 'rising sea levels.'  Your motives are clear, to destroy America's economy and hand over the reigns [sic] to the wacko vegetarian enviro nuts.  Now that at least the REPUBLICANS in government are actually looking out for AMERICAN interests, not to mention a good man running for president who will put our country first when he's re-elected, people like you are crapping your pants because you know your [sic] not going to be in control any more."

• And finally, in response to a post I did on the fact that the concept of race has little biological meaning: "You really don't get it do you?  From your picture you're as white as I am, and you're gonna stand there and tell me that you have no problem being overrun by people who have different customs and don't speak English?  Let's see how you feel when your kid's teacher requires them to learn Arabic."

So, let's see.  That makes me a white English-only wacko vegetarian enviro nut (with crap in my pants) who eats weed killer for breakfast while writing checks to Monsanto and plotting how to tear down churches and deport all Christians so I can destroy the United States.

Man, I've got a lot on my to-do list today.

I know it's a common tendency to want to attribute some set of horrible characteristics to the people we disagree with.  It engages all that tribal mentality stuff that's pretty deeply ingrained in our brains -- us = good, them = bad.  The problem is, reality is a hell of a lot more complex that that, and it's only seldom that you can find someone who is so bad that they have no admixture whatsoever of good, no justification for what they're doing, no explanation at all for how they got to be the way they are.  We're all mixed-up cauldrons of conflicting emotions.  It's hard to understand ourselves half the time; harder still to parse the motives of others.

So let me disabuse my detractors of a few notions.

While I'm not religious myself, I really have a live-and-let-live attitude toward religious folks, as long as they're not trying to impose their religion on others or using it as an excuse to deny others their rights as humans.  I have religious friends and non-religious friends and friends who don't care much about the topic one way or the other, and mostly we all get along pretty well.

I have to admit, though, that being a card-carrying atheist, I do have to indulge every so often in the dietary requirements as set forth in the official Atheist Code of Conduct.

Speaking of diet, I'm pretty far from a vegetarian, even when I'm not dining on babies.  In fact, I think that a medium-rare t-bone steak with a glass of good red wine is one of the most delicious things ever conceived by the human species.  But neither am I a chemical-lovin' pro-Monsanto corporate shill who drinks a nice steaming mug of RoundUp in the morning.  I'll stick with coffee, thanks.

Yes, I do accept climate change, because I am capable of reading and understanding a scientific paper and also do not think that because something is inconvenient to American economic expediency, it must not be true.  I'd rather that the US economy doesn't collapse, mainly because I live here, but I'd also like my grandchildren to be born on a planet that is habitable in the long term.

And finally: yes, I am white.  You got me there.  If I had any thought of denying it, it was put to rest when I did a 23 & Me test and found out that I'm... white.  My ancestry is nearly all from western Europe, unsurprising given that three of my grandparents were of French descent and one of Scottish descent.  But my being white doesn't mean that I always have to place the concerns of other white people first, or fear people who aren't white, or pass laws making sure that America stays white.  For one thing, it'd be a little hypocritical if I demanded that everyone in the US speak English, given that my mother and three of my grandparents spoke French as their first language; and trust me when I say that I would have loved my kids to learn Arabic in school.  The more other cultures you learn about in school, the better, largely because it's hard to hate people when you realize that they're human, just like you are.

So anyway.  Nice try telling me who I am, but you got a good many of the details wrong.  Inevitable, I suppose, when it's a self-portrait drawn by someone else.  Next time, maybe you should try engaging the people you disagree with in dialogue, rather than ridiculing, demeaning, dismissing, or condescending to them.  It's in general a nicer way to live, and who knows?  Maybe you'll learn something.

And if you want to know anything about me, just ask rather than making assumptions.  It's not like I'm shy about telling people what I think.  Kind of hiding in plain sight, here.

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The global melting pot

One of the shakiest concepts in biological anthropology is race.

Pretty much all biologists agree that race, as usually defined, has very little genetic basis.  Note that I'm not saying race doesn't exist; just that it's primarily a cultural, not a biological, phenomenon.  Given the fact that race has been used as the basis for systematic oppression for millennia, it would be somewhere beyond disingenuous to claim that it isn't real.

The problem is, determination of race has usually been based upon a handful of physical characteristics, most often skin, eye, and hair pigmentation and the presence or absence of an epicanthal fold across the inner corner of the eye.  These traits are not only superficial and not necessarily indicative of an underlying relationship, the pigment-related ones are highly subject to natural selection.  Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, this highly oversimplified and drastically inaccurate criterion was used to develop maps like this one:

The "three great races" according to the 1885 Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 

This subdivides all humanity into three groups -- "Caucasoid" (shown in various shades of blue), "Negroid" (shown in brown), and "Mongoloid" (shown in yellow and orange).  (The people of India and Sri Lanka, shown in green, are said to be "of uncertain affinities.")  If you're jumping up and down saying, "Wait, but... but..." -- well, you should be.  The lumping together of people like Indigenous Australians and all sub-Saharan Africans (based mainly on skin color) is only the most glaring error.  (Another is that any classification putting the Finns, Polynesians, Koreans, and Mayans into a single group has something seriously amiss.)

The worst part of all of this is that this sort of map was used to justify colonialism.  If you believed that there really was a qualitative difference (for that, read genetic) between the "three great races," it was only one step away from deciding which one was the best and shrugging your shoulders at the subjugation by that one of the other two. 

The truth is way more complicated, and way more interesting.  By far the highest amount of genetic diversity in the world is in sub-Saharan Africa; a 2009 study by Jeffrey Long found more genetic differences between individuals from two different ethnic groups in central Africa than between a typical White American and a typical person from Japan.  To quote a paper by Long, Keith Hunley, and Graciela Cabana that appeared in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2015: "Western-based racial classifications have no taxonomic significance."

The reason all this comes up -- besides, of course, the continuing relevance of this discussion to the aforementioned systematic oppression based on race that is still happening in many parts of the world, including the United States -- is a paper that appeared last week in Nature looking at the genetics of the Swahili people of east Africa, a large ethnic group extending from southern Somalia down to northern Mozambique.  While usually thought to be a quintessentially sub-Saharan African population, the Swahili were found to have only around half of their genetic ancestry from known African roots; the other half came from southwestern Asia, primarily Persia, India, and Arabia.

The authors write:

[We analyzed] ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern (AD 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after AD 1650.  More than half of the DNA of many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors.  The Asian ancestry includes components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from Persian men.  Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about AD 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam.  Before about AD 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast.  After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia.  Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.

Note that on the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon map, the Arabians and Persians are considered "Caucasoid," the Indians are "uncertain," while the Swahili are definitely "Negroid."

A bit awkward, that.

It's appalling that we still use an outmoded and scientifically-unsound concept to justify bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination, despite the mountains of evidence showing that there's no biological basis whatsoever to the way race is usually defined.  Easy, I suppose, to hang on to your biases like grim death rather than questioning them when new data comes along.  Not even all that new; the Long study I referenced above was from fourteen years ago.  And hell, the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was researching all this back in the 1960s.  Okay, it takes time for people's minds to catch up with scientific discovery, but how much damn time do you need?

The truth is that (1) ultimately, we all come from Africa, (2) since then, we've continued to move around all over the place, and therefore (3) the world is just a huge single melting pot.  Oh, and (4), the result is that we're all of (very) mixed ancestry.  I'm sorry if that makes some people feel squinky, but as I've pointed out before, the universe is under no obligation to align with your preconceived notions about how the world should work.

Time to accept the beauty and complexity of our shared humanity, and stop looking for further ways to divide us.

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Fish tales

Undoubtedly you are aware of the outrage from people on the anti-woke end of the spectrum about Disney's choice of Black actress Halle Bailey to play Ariel in their upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.

This is just the latest in a very long line of people getting their panties in a twist over what fictional characters "really" are, all of which conveniently ignores the meaning of the words "fictional" and "really."  Authors, screenwriters, and casters are free to reimagine a fictional character any way they want to -- take, for example, the revision of The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West into the tortured heroine in Gregory Maguire's novel (and later Broadway hit) Wicked.  This one didn't cause much of a stir amongst the I Hate Diversity crowd, though, undoubtedly because the character of the Witch stayed green the whole time.

But that's the exception.  In the past, we've had:

• A French professor claiming the Smurfs are communists
• An Islamic cleric issuing a fatwa against Mickey Mouse
• Right-wing media calling Dora the Explorer an illegal immigrant
• The Vatican declaring that the Simpsons are Roman Catholic

The current uproar, of course, is worse; not only is it blatantly racist, it's aimed at a real person, the actress who will play Ariel.  But these lunatics show every day that they care more about fictional characters than they do about actual people; note that the same folks screeching about Black mermaids seem to have zero problem with using public funds to transport actual living, breathing human beings to another state, where they were dropped on a street corner like so much refuse, in order to own the libs.

Oh, but you can't mess about with the skin color of mermaids.  In fact, the outrage over this was so intense that it has triggered some of them to invoke something they never otherwise give a second thought to:

Science.

Yes, if you thought this story couldn't get any more idiotic, think again.  Now we have members of the Mermaid Racial Purity Squad claiming that mermaids can't be Black, because they live underwater, and if you're underwater you can't produce melanin.

I wish I was making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

Mermaids live in ocean.  Underwater = limited sunlight.  Limited sunlight = less melanin.  Less melanin = lighter skin color.  Because they live underwater, which has no access to light beyond a certain depth, Ariel and every other mermaid in existence would be albino.

And another:

Correct me if I'm wrong.  But isn't it physically impossible for Ariel to be black?  She lives underwater, how would the sun get to her for her to produce melanin?!  Nobody thought this through..?

Okay, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but applying science to a movie in which there's a singing, dancing crab, a sea witch with octopus legs, and a character named Flounder who clearly isn't a flounder is kind of a losing proposition from the get-go.

Fig. 1.  Flounder from The Little Mermaid.

Fig. 2.  An actual flounder.

Plus, there are plenty of underwater animals that aren't white, which you'd think would occur to these people when they recall the last science book they read, which was One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss.

Oh, and another thing.  It's an ironic fact that the squawking knuckle-draggers who complain about "wokeness" every time some fictional character they like isn't played by a White American and are the same ones who pitch a fit at any kind of representation of diversity, be it in books, movies, music, or whatever, conveniently overlook the fact that (1) Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Little Mermaid, was bisexual, and (2) there's a credible argument that the original story itself was inspired by his grief at having his romantic advances rejected by his friend Edvard Collin.  (In fact, in the original story, the mermaid doesn't marry the prince -- he goes off and marries a human girl, just as Collin himself did, and the mermaid weeps herself to death.  Not a fan of happy endings, Andersen.)

Anyhow, anti-woke people, do go on and tell me more about "reality" and "what science says."  Hell, have at it, apply science anywhere you want.  Start with climate change and environmental policy if you like.  Or... does it only matter to you when the subject is people who aren't the right color, gender, ethnic origin, nationality, or sexual orientation?

****************************************

Virtue signaling

Well, I once again broke the Cardinal Rule of the Internet, namely: don't argue online with strangers.

This time, the source of the argument was the one and only television show I really obsess over, which is Doctor Who.  On Saturday, we watched the eagerly-awaited New Year's special, "Eve of the Daleks," and (IMHO) it was fantastic, easily one of the best in the last three seasons.

It was not only a nifty story with some really funny moments (especially from the character of Sarah, played with deft wit by the Irish comedienne Aisling Bea as the weary, snarky owner of the self-storage facility where the entire episode takes place), but it featured a revelation that got the fan base buzzing.  About 2/3 of the way through, we find out that the Doctor's companion Yaz (played by Mandip Gill) has fallen in love with the Doctor (currently in a female incarnation, played by Jodie Whittaker).  The scene is sweet and subtle, and Mandip Gill does a beautiful job expressing the painful difficulty many LGBTQ people have in admitting who they are (as Yaz says, even to herself).

While it was a wonderful scene, to many Who fans it was hardly a surprise; there have been clues throughout the last two seasons that Yaz was falling for the Doctor.  Having it confirmed, however, was nice, and for queer fans of Who (myself very much included) it was a welcome sign of acceptance and representation of LGBTQ identity.

But then the backlash started.

I'm sure you can imagine it, so I'll only give you a handful of examples:

• Of course Chibs [showrunner Chris Chibnall] had to take the opportunity to ram his woke agenda down our throats.  I don't know why we can't just have a good story for a change.
• Oh, god, here we go with the fucking virtue signaling.  The characters have to tell us what we should think, feel, and approve of.
• If Yaz and the Doctor kiss, I'm done.

My responses were pretty much what you'd expect, and their responses to my responses also pretty much what you'd expect.  Nothing much accomplished, but I've been stewing about it ever since, so I thought I'd write about it here.

What gets me is it's gotten to be that any time some bigot sees something in a movie, television show, or book that pushes the cultural envelope, it's labeled as "virtue signaling" or "wokeness," and forthwith dismissed as a manipulative attempt by the writer to force an agenda.  They seem to see no difference between LGBTQ people and minorities appearing in a work of fiction, and a deliberate attempt to push an opinion -- as if merely being visible is an affront to their sensibilities.

I've run into this repeatedly myself, as an author.  I have been asked more than once why the characters of Dr. Will Daigle (in Whistling in the Dark and Fear No Colors) and Judy Kahn (in Signal to Noise) were written as LGBTQ.  I used to answer this question by going into how I create characters, but I finally ran out of patience -- now my tendency is to snap back, "Because queer people exist," and then watch the person squirm (which, at least, most of them have enough self-awareness to do).  Not once have I ever been asked why (for example) I made the character of Seth Augustine (in The Snowe Agency Mysteries) 100% straight.

Straight, apparently, is the default, and anything else is due to the author trying to make a point about how virtuous and woke (s)he is.

This is reminiscent of the furor that surrounded the choice of actress Jodie Turner-Smith (who is Black) to play the lead role in Channel 5's miniseries Anne Boleyn.  It wasn't historically accurate, people said; the real Boleyn was (of course) a White Englishwoman.  Conservative commentator Candace Owens, who never can resist an opportunity to throw gasoline on a fire, said that she had no problem with a Black Anne Boleyn "so long as the radical left promises to keep their mouth shut if in the future Henry Caville [sic] is selected to play Barack Obama and Rachel McAdams can play Michelle."

Which isn't just tone-deaf, it's a false equivalence ignoring the fact that for decades -- in fact, since the beginnings of cinematic history -- filmmakers have been doing exactly that.  Take, for example, the evil Chinese mastermind Fu Manchu, who has been played in movies and television by a long list of actors -- Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, Warner Oland, Harry Agar Lyons, Henry Brandon, and John Carradine, to name a few.  Notice anything about this list?

Not one of them is Chinese.  In fact, Fu Manchu has never been played by a Chinese actor.

John Wayne played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.  Yul Brynner played King Mongkut of Thailand in The King and I.  Laurence Olivier played Othello in the 1965 movie adaptation of the play.  It's not a thing of the distant past, however.  In 2007 Angelina Jolie played (real-life) Afro-Cuban journalist Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart.  Johnny Depp played Tonto in the 2013 movie The Lone Ranger -- although the character of Tonto isn't exactly a realistic portrayal of Native Americans anyhow, so maybe that one shouldn't count.  Worse, in 2016 White actor Joseph Fiennes played Michael Jackson in the movie Elizabeth, Michael, and Marlon.  Going back to Doctor Who, there's the 1977 episode "The Talons of Weng Chiang," which is not a bad story at its core but is rendered unwatchably cringe-y by White actor John Bennett's attempt to portray the Chinese bad guy Li H'sen Chang, and a script that bought into every one of the ugly "sinister Asian devils" stereotypes in existence.

What about the recent turning of the tables?  Could it be that some of the inclusion and representation, and some of the casting choices, were made as a deliberate attempt to prove a point?  I guess, but then you'd have to demonstrate to me how you knew what the intentions of the writers are.  If you don't know the writers made those decisions based upon a desire to appear "woke," then it's hard to see how you'd distinguish that from simply representing the diversity of people out there.  Or, in the case of Turner-Smith's portrayal of Anne Boleyn, that she was the best actress for the role.

But back to Yaz, the Thirteenth Doctor, and "Eve of the Daleks."  I've yet to hear anyone come up with a cogent reason why Yaz shouldn't be a lesbian.  And as far as Chris Chibnall's alleged attempt to force a "woke agenda" on us, allow me to point out that Doctor Who has been at the forefront of representation pretty much since the beginning of the modern era in 2005, with people of color playing major roles (to name only two of many examples, Freema Agyeman as companion Dr. Martha Jones, and Pearl Mackie as companion Bill Potts -- who was also queer).  The character of Captain Jack Harkness (played by John Barrowman) gave new meaning to "pansexual" by flirting with anyone and everyone, ultimately falling hard -- and tragically -- for a Welshman named Ianto Jones.  My favorite example, though, is the relationship -- not only queer but inter-species -- between the inimitable Silurian Vastra (Neve McIntosh) and her badass partner Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart).

So if you don't like representation, stop watching the fucking show.  Because it's here to stay -- as it should be.

And I, for one, will cheer loudly if Yaz kisses the Doctor.  High time that happened.

*********************************

One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Peering into the Neanderthal brain

Despite having taught genetics for 32 years, it still is astonishing to me that all of the genetic diversity of the 7.7-odd-billion humans on Earth is accounted for by differences amounting to only a tenth of a percent of the genome.

Put a different way, if you were to find the person who is the most genetically different from you, the two of you would still have a 99.9% overlap in your DNA.  A lot of that additional tenth of a percent is made up of genes for obvious appearance-related features -- eye color and shape, hair color and texture, skin color, body build, and so on.  But even these characteristics, which are usually considered to determine race, don't really tell you all that much.  A San man and his Tswana neighbor in Botswana were both called "black" by the white European colonists, but those same white Europeans were genetically closer to people in Japan than the San and Tswana were to each other.  There is, in fact, more human genetic diversity on the continent of Africa than there is in the entire rest of the world put together -- unsurprising, perhaps, given that our species originated there.

Race, then, is a social construct, not really a biological one.  There are some distinct genetic signatures in different ethnic groups, which is what allows the "percent composition" you get if you have your DNA analyzed by Ancestry or 23 & Me, and within their limitations, they don't have bad accuracy.  My own DNA test lined up almost perfectly with what I know of my family tree; something like two-thirds from western and northwestern France, a good chunk of the rest from Scotland and England, and an interesting (and spot-on) 6% of my DNA from my Ashkenazi Jewish great-great-grandfather.

Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the average difference between the human genome and that of our closest non-human relatives -- chimps and bonobos -- is still only 1.2%.  So all of the lineages that split off from our line of descent after the chimps and bonobos did, on the order of five million years ago, would be closer than that to us genetically.  This has been confirmed by analysis of DNA in those now-extinct groups of hominins -- Neanderthals, Denisovans, and so on.

Here, we're talking about way bigger physical differences than there are between any two races of modern humans you might pick.  Bone structure, brain size and structure, body proportions -- some pretty major stuff.  Still, the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us are all the same species, by the rather mushy definition of a species as being a group of organisms capable of reproduction that results in fertile offspring; modern humans have a good chunk of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, also at least in part detectable by genetic testing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stefan Scheer, Neandertaler reconst, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why all this comes up is a study in Science this week by a huge team led by Alysson Muotri of the University of California - San Diego in which geneticists tinkered with human stem cells, altering their DNA to reflect one of 61 genes that have been identified as differences between ourselves and our Neanderthal and Denisovan kin.  They then allowed those cells to proliferate and form organoids -- mini-brains that can form connections (synapses) just as a developing brain in an embryo would.

Well, my first thought was, "Haven't these people ever watched a science fiction movie?"  Because scientists always try shit like this in movies, and it always ends up with a giant brain-blob that goes rogue, escapes the lab, and proceeds to eat Tokyo.  But Dr. Muotri assures us that that's not possible in this case.  He explains that organoids are incapable of living all that long because they don't have all the support structures that real brains have -- a circulatory system for example -- so they'd never be capable of surviving outside the petri dish.

To which I say: of course, Dr. Muotri.  That's what you would say.  Just realize that in those same science fiction movies, it's always the scientist who says, "Wait, stand back!  Let me try to communicate with it!" and ends up being the first one to get devoured.

So don't say I didn't warn you.

In any case, what is kind of amazing is that these organoid brains with a single gene altered to what our Neanderthal cousins had developed in a way that was completely unlike our own.  As the press release in Science Daily explained it:

The Neanderthal-ized brain organoids looked very different than modern human brain organoids, even to the naked eye.  They had a distinctly different shape.  Peering deeper, the team found that modern and Neanderthal-ized brain organoids also differ in the way their cells proliferate and how their synapses -- the connections between neurons -- form.  Even the proteins involved in synapses differed.  And electrical impulses displayed higher activity at earlier stages, but didn't synchronize in networks in Neanderthal-ized brain organoids.

All of that, from a single gene.

"This study focused on only one gene that differed between modern humans and our extinct relatives. Next we want to take a look at the other sixty genes, and what happens when each, or a combination of two or more, are altered," Muotri said.  "We're looking forward to this new combination of stem cell biology, neuroscience and paleogenomics.  The ability to apply the comparative approach of modern humans to other extinct hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, using brain organoids carrying ancestral genetic variants is an entirely new field of study."

So that "less than a percent" label on the differences between ourselves and our nearest non-modern-human kin is a little misleading, because apparently some of that less-than-a-percent are really critical.

In any case, that's our view of the cutting edge of science for today.  One can't help but be impressed with studies like this, which accomplish feats of genetic messing-about that would have been themselves in the realm of science fiction twenty years ago.  I wonder what the next twenty years will bring?  Hopefully not brain blobs eating Tokyo.  I mean, I'm all for scientific advancement, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

********************************

 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mermaid evolution

In further evidence that we're all part of a computer simulation being run by aliens, but the aliens have gotten tired of even trying to make things plausible and now are just fucking with us, we have: racists arguing that Ariel from The Little Mermaid should be white because real mermaids have light skin.

I know I say "I wish I was making this up" a lot, but merciful heavens above, I really wish I was making this one up.  Sadly, this is the truth.  When it was announced that African American actress Halle Bailey was going to be playing Ariel in the upcoming live-action version, racists throughout the United States took a break from sharpening the tips of their pointy white hats to have a complete meltdown.

In fact, I had a brief encounter with one of them on Twitter a couple of days ago.  She had posted this:

I'm sick of political correctness.  Making Ariel black is ridiculous.  The real Ariel was white and had red hair.

I responded:

Perhaps we should review the definition of real.

She responded with admirable articulateness:

Fuck you asshole.

I followed up with a gif that I have had increasing use for lately:

She responded:

FUCK YOU.

So I guess she told me.

Of course, she's not the only one who feels this way, which I found out when I ran into an article in Indy100 describing how the racists were using science to explain why Ariel should be white.

In case you don't believe me, how about this example of brilliant, peer-reviewed research on real mermaids:

My opinion on why mermaids are white is that they live so deep underwater that sunlight hardly reaches them, thus the lack of melanin.  It doesn't matter what ocean they're from cos they could've been migrating seasonally like fishes.  But maybe im thinking too much.

No, trust me, "thinking too much" is the last thing you'd ever be accused of.

Then there was this sterling piece of logic:

For those saying mermaids don't exist and Ariel being black is not impossible, you know what does exist?  Science. 

Mermaids are part fish.

Fishes live in the sea.

There is no sunlight under the sea.

Therefore, mermaids wouldn't evolve pigmented skin to protect against it!!!

Mermaid evolution.  And no sunlight under the sea.  So everything that lives in the sea is white.

Because science.

Then there was this:

Ariel can't even be black because of science behind it because of her and her ancestors living in water and so they are never exposed to strong sun rays.  the stupidity behind this... 

Which got this response, put better than I possibly could have:

bitch there is literally a singing crab in the movie & u worried about scientific accuracy.  stfu.

For sheer disconnect with reality, however, you can't beat this one:

My children were raised with Ariel.  She's an icon in the eyes of many children & adults of today.  To change her race is absurd.  That would be like someone making a movie about Opra [sic] Winfrey, and hiring a white girl to play Opra.  Opra is an icon.  We wouldn't want to change her.

Besides being an icon, Oprah Winfrey is, unlike Ariel the Mermaid, a real person.  For fuck's sake.

The news isn't all bad, though.  The most touching response to all the howling racists came from Twitter user Morgan Jarrett, @msmorganjarrett:

As a white-skinned redhead, I have very strong feelings about #TheLittleMermaid.  Ariel changed my ginger world.  The mean "jokes" ended.  I became envied for my hair.

And you know what?  I want little black girls to experience that same feeling with new Ariel.

 Beautiful.  Now there's how people should be responding.

So to all the racists who have your knickers in a twist: fine, don't go see the movie.  I don't think Disney's going to miss you.  Go back to your little white caves with your little white friends, confident that the entire universe should be arranged so as to comfort your prejudices.  File under "political correctness" any movement in the United States toward acknowledging the people in the world -- which, by the bye, make up well over 50% of the Earth's population -- who have darker skin than you do.

But know this.  Your numbers are dwindling.  Most of us are just fine with people who don't look like us, talk like us, or dress like us.

And that includes mermaids.

*********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]