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Henry Harpending

71 quotes

“When Darius invaded, the Scythians kept retreating farther and farther into the sea of grass: They had no cities or fields and thus had nothing to lose by retreating. Darius eventually realized that his expedition had been fruitless and turned back before his army ran out of supplies.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They became a warrior society. That general tendency of pastoral society—a gift for causing trouble—was a key theme in Eurasian history for millennia. The threat receded as agricultural peoples built strong states, intensified again in the Middle Ages as states weakened and steppe techniques improved (reaching an apogee with Genghis Khan), and ended only with the invention of gunpowder.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The occupational pattern of the Jews living in the Islamic world was different from that of the Ashkenazim... there were many more Jews in the Islamic world than in Europe—more Jews, in fact, than there were white-collar jobs.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The selection process we are interested in may have been under way during the Middle Ages, but its results were not yet evident in 1800. Of course, there were no IQ tests then, but there were as yet no Ashkenazi discoveries in science or mathematics either.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a practical matter, if you can distinguish between the members of two populations by looking at them, genetic analysis will be able to do so as well. And sometimes it will be able to make such distinctions when you can’t tell by looking at them.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The supposed special kinds of intelligence don’t predict anything useful or, when they do, predict only to the extent that they are correlated with general intelligence.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“even 2 percent mixing per generation over the past 2,000 years would have caused the Ashkenazim to become almost completely (80 percent) European. A continuing process of admixture (as opposed to a lot of admixture in the early stages) interferes the most with ongoing natural selection, but even if we make that pessimistic assumption, it looks as if the admixture rate was under 1 percent per generation”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s time for researchers in the human sciences to shrug off the chains of dogmas like evolutionary stasis and “psychic unity.” There’s no time to lose—and there’s a world to win.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s time to address the old chestnut that biological differences among human populations are “superficial,” only skin-deep. It’s not true: We’re seeing genetically caused differences in all kinds of functions, and every such difference was important enough to cause a significant increase in fitness (number of offspring)—otherwise it wouldn’t have reached high frequency in just a few millennia. These were not just superficial changes affecting things like hair color, skin color, and the shape of the nose, although even those apparently superficial differences sometimes had important consequences. Some of these differences were far from being superficial or insignificant and profoundly affected the populations in which they appeared, sometimes in unexpected ways. They had a major influence on history; some continue to shape the course of events today.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Foragers had no tradition of self-denial and no inclination to deny themselves. They weren’t very good at self-denial back in the early Neolithic period, and they aren’t very good at it even today: Efforts to teach Bushmen to become herders frequently fail when they eat all their goats. People can learn new traditions, but genetic differences must make this kind of self-denial easier for some people than it is for others. It takes a certain type of personality—with traits including patience, self-control, and the ability to look to long-term benefits instead of short-term satisfaction—and natural selection must have gradually made such personalities more common among peoples that farmed for a long time.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And once there was property, laziness must have decreased. There were many ways in which hard work could produce enduring assets that could increase an individual’s fitness or that of his children and relatives. Farmers could save to buy more land or livestock. They could build long-lasting improvements like buildings or irrigation works. This was not really possible for hunter-gatherers—there was no way for them to accumulate wealth. If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape, hunter-gatherers didn’t work. They hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang. They were lazy, and they should have been: Being lazy made biological sense.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Generally, though, we think there was no direct selection favoring creativity itself, and that creative individuals are accidental by-products of selection for other traits, traits that really did pay off in everyday life, such as low time preference and the ability to make complex mental models. Our view is in sharp contrast to those who have argued that creativity conferred fitness benefits... creativity seldom confers large fitness advantages, because good new ideas can be rapidly copied by others. The copiers receive the fitness benefits without paying the associated costs. In fact, it’s been obvious for a long time that innovators seldom harvest much of the benefit generated by their innovations.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Other people getting in the way must have been one of the most powerful forces slowing gene flow. Many alleles that helped people adjust to agriculture probably came into existence in the Middle East, since agriculture began there. When we consider the ways in which those alleles could have reached western Europe, where agriculture developed later, it’s worth remembering that it only takes a few months to walk that entire distance. If that happened often, you’d expect genes to have spread far more rapidly than they actually did. The problem is that would-be long-distance travelers quickly encountered other groups that spoke a different language and had uncongenial customs. Some were enemies, and all were suspicious of strangers. Passing through other groups was very difficult, so long-distance land travel was almost impossible.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“rom 1500 to 1800, Muslim corsairs captured and enslaved many Europeans: by one estimate, more than a million. Mainly they took captives from the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and Spain, but occasionally they ranged farther afield, raiding Cornwall, Ireland, and even Iceland. Most male slaves were worked to death and made little contribution to the gene pool, but women could and often did end up in harems. You see a similar pattern with the slaves the Arabs took from sub-Saharan Africa: About 5 percent of the maternal ancestry of Arabs in the Middle East is African, judging from mtDNA, but you see very few African Y chromosomes there.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Aztecs probably would have utterly destroyed the invaders, were it not for the smallpox epidemic under way at the same time. The leader of the Aztec defense died in the epidemic, and Cortés and his men conquered the Aztec Empire. It is hard to see how Cortés could have won without those microscopic allies, since he was trying to conquer an empire of millions with a few hundred men. Moreover, major Indian polities such as the Mayan city-states were still intact after the defeat of the Aztecs, and the Spaniards might well have lost control except for the series of epidemics that followed. Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incan Empire was also aided by a smallpox epidemic. It killed the emperor and his heir, causing a convenient succession struggle. Considering that Pizarro was invading another empire of millions with only 168 soldiers, it’s obvious that he needed all the help he could get. Amerindian vulnerability to infectious disease shaped history again and again. The first Spanish attempts at colonization in the West Indies were actually jeopardized by it, since the Taino and Arawak peoples diminished so rapidly (they were almost gone by 1530) that the Spanish were left without a labor force. Inhabitants of those Caribbean islands had been even more isolated and shielded from disease than the Amerindians of the mainland, and so were even more vulnerable. The Pilgrims’ first settlement was on land that already had been cleared by an Indian tribe that had been ravaged by some plague (possibly smallpox) just three years earlier. Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims survival skills, seems to have been one of the few survivors of that tribe. The later Puritan settlement of New England was also furthered by devastating epidemics among the Amerindians, while Jamestown’s safety was only secured when epidemic disease had weakened the local tribes.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another interesting hint is a 2,500-year-old frieze in Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, which shows peoples from many lands bringing tribute. One panel shows a Pygmy with an okapi, a deep-forest relative of the giraffe that was only rediscovered by Europeans in 1901. Sub-Saharan Africa may actually have been easier to reach and explore in classical times than it is today. The Sahara had not yet become as bone-dry as it is now: Horses could cross the desert until Roman times, and there are old, shallow wells in places where the water table is now thousands of feet below the surface.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literacy, the wheel, sailing ships, and guns gave the Europeans a huge military advantage, but nothing came of it for hundreds of years, except in the far south, where a temperate climate allowed Dutch colonization. In the 1800s, quinine became widely available, and that allowed Europeans to venture into interior Africa with moderate success, since falciparum malaria had been the deadliest of many African diseases. Later scientific advances controlled or eliminated a number of other local diseases, including yellow fever and sleeping sickness. This made possible the “scramble for Africa”... But Africa did not become another America: Africans were not displaced by Europeans. In order for limited numbers of colonists to become the predominant population, the locals must die off, and Africans didn’t. Powerful tropical diseases, combined with the local biological defenses (evolved at vast cost), kept Africa African. As in the case of the Columbian expansion, recent human evolution played a key role in determining the victors.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When persecution became a serious problem and the security required for long-distance travel no longer existed, the Ashkenazim increasingly specialized in one occupation, finance, left open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury. The majority of the Ashkenazim seem to have been moneylenders by 1100, and this pattern continued for several centuries. Such occupations (trade and finance) had high IQ demands, and we know of no other population that had such a large fraction of cognitively demanding jobs for an extended period... from roughly 800 to 1650 or 1700, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Admixture has not kept the Ashkenazim from becoming genetically distinct. Even if a population starts out as a mixture of two peoples, as in this case, becoming endogamous (ending intermarriage) and staying so for a long time ensures that the population will become homogeneous. If the population’s ancestry is 60 percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European, for example, a few dozen generations of endogamy will result in a population in which each individual’s ancestry is quite close to 60 percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European. In other words, you eventually get a population that has a flavor all its own—even more so if it experiences special selective pressures. This means that if you look at the most informative parts of the genome, you can tell whether a certain individual is Ashkenazi (as opposed to, say, a non-Jewish Italian, Greek, or German) just about every time, particularly if all his or her recent ancestors are Jewish.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Members of the general public sometimes believe that individual genetic profiles do not necessarily reflect nationality. Somebody who is Swedish, for example, might be genetically closer to someone from Japan than to another Swede, according to this view of things. If this was true, it would apply to a group like the Ashkenazi Jews as well, even though they are not quite a “nationality.” However, that belief is false. In fact, a case where a person of one nationality is closer genetically to someone of a distant nationality than to his or her own compatriots never happens. If you’re Swedish, every Swede (not counting recent immigrants) is genetically closer to you than any person in Japan. It’s possible to be closer to someone in Japan if you consider only one gene: Both of you might have the same blood type while your next-door neighbor might not, for example. Nevertheless, it is somewhat more likely that your neighbor will have the same blood type as you, since the frequency of blood types varies according to nationality. If you look over the whole genome—about 20,000 genes—with a match with your neighbor being somewhat more likely for every single gene, the chance of the overall match with someone Japanese being closer than the match with your neighbor becomes vanishingly small.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This rapid evolution of our species following the spread of agriculture is indeed a 10,000 year explosion. The explosion is ongoing: Human evolution didn’t stop when anatomically modern humans appeared, or when they expanded out of Africa. It never stopped—and why would it? Evolutionary stasis requires a static environment, whereas behavioral modernity is all about innovation and change. Stability is exactly what we have not had. This should be obvious, but instead the human sciences have labored under the strange idea that evolution stopped 40,000 years ago. All this means, has to mean, that biological change has been a key factor driving history.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source