Now is the Winter of our Discontent – II

One of the problems with being over 80 is that you watch your friends get sick.  In the past month, one classmate developed ALS and another has cardiac amyloidosis complete with implantable defibrillator.  The 40 year old daughter of a friend who we watched since infancy has serious breast cancer and is undergoing surgery radiation and chemo.  While I don’t have survivor’s guilt (yet), it isn’t fun.

Add to that the recent loss of an excellent surgeon I practiced medicine with in Montana for 15 years.  Reading his obit was how I found out that he was a Fulbright scholar.  This is so typical of Montana and how great it was.  Don’t ever brag.  Show us how you are and what you can do, but never tell us.  There are so few people out there that you’ll bump up against each other again and again. They’ll figure out who you are without you telling them.  When I’d go back East, I noticed that city people (who a friend in Montana called decorated ants) would tell you what they were really like.  They had to as they’d likely never get another shot at you.

Which brings me to another greatness of Montana back in the 70s.  Back East your education pretty much pigeonholed you.  Right or wrong, you assumed intelligence correlated with the amount of education.  Not so in Montana. In the early 70s there were plenty of bright people who couldn’t go on to college growing up during the depression.  So you quickly learned to treat everyone the same.

Princeton?  Where is it?  Is is an Ag school?  You were free to create your own identity without being pigeonholed.   It was a fabulous feeling.

There were Ivy leaguers around (all Ivy Fullback, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale etc. etc.)  but we all kept it fairly low key.  One rancher acquaintance had gone through Harvard in 3 years.  His daughter went there as well, and was actually the centerfold of the Harvard alumni magazine, and this before she won a silver in the olympics.   The son of another rancher went to Harvard and was told that his father was a cow farmer.  When he did well academically, he was told that he was there to lower the curve.

The children of my friends continued the great Montana tradition of exporting its  brightest youth, going to Cornell, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Harvard (and doing quite well there) but never coming back.

The one group of people that I didn’t (initially) treat ‘the same’ were the Indians, united only by their different appearance from what I was used to (maybe I met one in the years of college, grad school, med school, internship, residence and even the Air Force).   Calling them native americans back then would have gotten you some strange looks.  I worked with some excellent Indian nurses in the local hospitals, and did some consulting for the Indian Health Service, getting to know the culture much better.  My kids went to school with some.

If you wanted to invent an institution to produce social pathologies (alcoholism, child abuse in particular) you couldn’t do better than putting people on a reservation, giving them enough money to get by and giving them nothing to do.

My father and his brother had  the classic liberal conservative debate (before I knew what they were).  Uncle Irv would always say — it’s the system doing (whatever behavior that he didn’t like) — you must change the system.  My father would  counter saying that people would corrupt any system.

I basically bought my father’s position (being reinforced by living for the past 16 years in Massachusetts).

Now I’m not so sure. After one son moved to Hong Kong, I realized that uncle Irv had a point.  Hong Kong is dynamic, vibrant and clean (at least it was 2 years ago the last time I was there) with hordes of hardworking active people.

No so where my son lives along with many exPats — Lamma island, a 20 minute ferry ride from the city.   Walk home from the ferry and you’ll see a bunch of fat asian guys sitting around drinking and smoking.  Who are they?  They are the descendants of the tribes that lived there initially.  Either they own the place or they are continually supported and don’t need to work.

I looked at them and said, my God it’s the rez.  My son said, yup it’s the rez.

The initial native Americans were quite inbred

From Science vol. 365 pp. 138, eaat 5447 pp.  1 —> 9 ’19  12 July ‘19

“Genetic studies of contemporary Indigenous people and ancient individuals from Asia and the Americas reveal an outline of the ancestry of the first humans to settle the Americas, providing age estimates for the timing of population contact, divergence, and migration. Studies of contemporary mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA lineages gave the first genetic insights into Indigenous American population history (6). These studies demonstrated that the ancestors of all contemporary Indigenous people had descended from only five maternal lineages (haplogroups A, B, C, D, and X) and two paternal lineages (haplogroups C and Q). These lineages also showed that the founding population came from Asia and experienced a severe genetic bottleneck, in which a small number of people with limited genetic diversity gave rise to all Indigenous people who occupied the continent before European arrival.”

Interesting that the authors of the papers discussed below didn’t know this (or weren’t telling) when I wrote them last December asking if there was limited genetic diversity in the ancestors of today’s native Americans (or Indians as they called themselves when we lived in Montana in the 70s and 80s).

 

Usually when I eMail the author(s) of a paper or a math book with a question or a comment I get a quick response.  My cynical wife says thing this is because mathematicians don’t have much to do.  Not so in this case. Hence the hopefully attention getting title of this post.

I refer to the following papers [ Cell vol. 175 pp. 1173 – 1174, 1185 – 1197 ’18 ]  Nature vol. 563 pp. 303 – 304 ’18,Science vol. 362 pp. 1128 eaav2621  1 –> 11 ’18 ] I’ve sent a bunch letters to the authors and have heard nothing back in a week.

So what is all this about?  It’s about population bottlenecks and founder effects in the ancestors of what are now called ‘native Americans’ — although while living in Montana from ’72 – ’87, if you called an Indian, a Native American, you would have received some strange looks.

I am not a population geneticist, so I wonder just how many people made it over the Bering land bridge during the last ice age, and just how genetically diverse they were.  Northern Siberia today is a rather forbidding place, and I doubt that hordes of genetically different people lived here.  I’m not sure how long the land bridge was open and how many people crossed it.

So modern native Americans may be quite genetically homogeneous.  How to tell?  This is where the papers come in.  They sequenced genomes from a variety of locations in the western hemisphere, all dying over a thousand years ago (before the Europeans came and interbred with them).  It seems that they have around 100 such genomes.

I wrote to ask how similar these genomes are.  No response.  Is it because the answer might be politically incorrect?

I don’t think the question is idiotic.  Possibly we don’t have enough genomes to make a sensible statement, but if they’re all really close (however defined) we could say something.

Anybody out there have any thoughts (or even better)  knowledge about these matters?

Were the initial native Americans inbred?

Addendum 16 July ’19   Yes they were quite inbred

From Science vol. 365 pp. 138, eaat 5447 pp.  1 —> 9 ’19  12 July ‘19

This is a direct quote

“Genetic studies of contemporary Indigenous people and ancient individuals from Asia and the Americas reveal an outline of the ancestry of the first humans to settle the Americas, providing age estimates for the timing of population contact, divergence, and migration. Studies of contemporary mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA lineages gave the first genetic insights into Indigenous American population history (6). These studies demonstrated that the ancestors of all contemporary Indigenous people had descended from only five maternal lineages (haplogroups A, B, C, D, and X) and two paternal lineages (haplogroups C and Q). These lineages also showed that the founding population came from Asia and experienced a severe genetic bottleneck, in which a small number of people with limited genetic diversity gave rise to all Indigenous people who occupied the continent before European arrival.”

Interesting that the authors of the papers below didn’t know this.

 

 

Usually when I eMail the author(s) of a paper or a math book with a question or a comment I get a quick response.  My cynical wife says thing this is because mathematicians don’t have much to do.  Not so in this case. Hence the hopefully attention getting title of this post.

I refer to the following papers [ Cell vol. 175 pp. 1173 – 1174, 1185 – 1197 ’18 ]  Nature vol. 563 pp. 303 – 304 ’18,Science vol. 362 pp. 1128 eaav2621  1 –> 11 ’18 ] I’ve sent a bunch letters to the authors and have heard nothing back in a week.

So what is all this about?  It’s about population bottlenecks and founder effects in the ancestors of what are now called ‘native Americans’ — although while living in Montana from ’72 – ’87, if you called an Indian, a Native American, you would have received some strange looks.

I am not a population geneticist, so I wonder just how many people made it over the Bering land bridge during the last ice age, and just how genetically diverse they were.  Northern Siberia today is a rather forbidding place, and I doubt that hordes of genetically different people lived here.  I’m not sure how long the land bridge was open and how many people crossed it.

So modern native Americans may be quite genetically homogeneous.  How to tell?  This is where the papers come in.  They sequenced genomes from a variety of locations in the western hemisphere, all dying over a thousand years ago (before the Europeans came and interbred with them).  It seems that they have around 100 such genomes.

I wrote to ask how similar these genomes are.  No response.  Is it because the answer might be politically incorrect?

I don’t think the question is idiotic.  Possibly we don’t have enough genomes to make a sensible statement, but if they’re all really close (however defined) we could say something.

Anybody out there have any thoughts (or even better)  knowledge about these matters?

The Harvard Chemistry Department Reunion — Part IV — setting the record straight

While waiting for my copy of the new edition of Clayden to arrive, it’s time to apologize to Harvard for the first post in the series, which mostly blamed them for the total absence of blacks in the 150+ attendees at the reunion. For details see –https://luysii.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-harvard-chemistry-department-reunion-part-i/.

Well, silly me, I didn’t realize blacks were there all the time.  My problem was not counting them the way Harvard people do.  Consider Harvard Law Professor and senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, listing herself as a minority (native American variety) because she is 1/32nd Cherokee thanks to her great great great grandmother who was (perhaps).  The Law School celebrated her appointment in ’95 as one of the few women in the Law School, and then a year or so later celebrated her native American heritage. ““Of 71 current Law School professors and assistant professors, 11 are women, five are black, one is Native American and one is Hispanic,” The Harvard Crimson quotes then-Law School spokesman Mike Chmura as saying in a 1996 article.

Given those criteria for blackness, I’m sure blacks were well represented at the chemistry reunion.  Apologies to all.

Professor Warren doesn’t look native American, but then neither did one of my late father’s clients, a nice lady from Staten Island who was of the Sally Hemings family, and very proud of it.

I’m well aware of people attempting to glom on to an Indian heritage.  It happened all the time in Montana when I lived there.    The people wanting to get such recognition were after the (fairly minimal) benefits of tribal membership.  They weren’t something you’d want to be related to.  Neither did the Crows or the Cheyenne’s (the two tribes I knew best).  They drew the line at 1/32; just where Ms. Warren claims to be presently — I don’t remember if 1/32 meant acceptance or rejection.  Suffice it to say, it was harder to bluff your way in to those tribes than it was to get into Burke’s peerage.

I doubt that Warren used this to get into any of the places she’s taught.  But the places she’s taught have certainly used it, which shows you how even the best ideas (making sure minorities with brains aren’t arbitrarily excluded) can be ruined.  This sort of thing can’t help the cause, and frankly it stinks.  For just how minority free the Ivy league was 50+  years ago see the link above.

One more example.  One of my son’s Cornell friends (Asian) used her minority status to get a job in D. C. after graduation.  She certainly wasn’t disadvantaged, having been exposed to some of the country’s (and the world’s) finest intellectual capital for 4 years.

P. S. Having lived in Montana from ’72 to ’87 and taken care of perhaps 1,000 Indians,  you would have received some rather strange looks from a Crow or a Cheyenne if you called them a ‘native American’.  They called themselves Indians back then.  Perhaps they still do. I don’t know. I haven’t been back.