1600 words

I’ve been in a few discussion with PumpkinPerson on phenotype and if the similar phenotype found in Australoids and Pacific Islanders meant they were Negroid. However, just because two *dissimilar groups* look *phenotypically similar*, that doesn’t mean that they are *genotypically similar*. Afrocentrists have also latched on to this ridiculous theory, saying that blacks are ‘all over the world, displaced by whites yada yada yada’. Today, I’ll show that just because those two groups look similar to Africans doesn’t mean that they are similar on the genotype.

PP wrote an article last week, The importance of leaving Africa, which I will be quoting from for the remainder of this article.

The root of this debate is not so much genuine scientific disagreement, but ethnic genetic interests. The black Afrocentrists believe it’s good for black people to be seen as part of this larger, global black community, thus dispelling the claim that blacks only left Africa in chains. For leaving Africa was one of the milestones that separates humans from our closest living relatives (chimpanzees), so the claim that blacks never left Africa is seen as racist indeed.

I agree here that Ethnic Genetic Interests is the main driver of the dispute.

But if the mere leaving of Africa did indeed screen for IQ, why do the Australoids score even lower on IQ tests than sub-Saharan Africans do, and have somewhat smaller brains

Because the environment is similar it would select for similar phenotypes, but just because the environment is extremely similar doesn’t mean that no genetic change occurred in the 70 ky that Australoids left Africa in.

By contrast, the non-black HBDers think it elevates their racial status to promote the idea that their ancestors did something that blacks couldn’t accomplish: leaving Africa.

Well, as I’ve covered here last year (time flys), those who left Africa had specific alleles, the DRD7 and DRD4 alleles, which are absent from SSA populations. This ‘wanderlust’, due to the DRD7 allele, is the *cause* of the migration OoA. It has nothing to do with being more intelligent than those who stayed, it has to do with the genetic mutation that arose from a common ancestor around the time of the OoA migration. The cause of the migration does come down to genetic differences in the founder population (s), but not intelligence differences.

Two notes on the DRD4 allele: populations with a history of migration have a higher chance of having the allele in comparison to sedentary populations. And: a correlation of .85 was found between km traveled and the rate of DRDR4 allele frequency distributions. These alleles are more prevalent in South America, which is not surprising since they had to travel the furthest.

PP then starts talking about why Australoids have lower IQs, saying:

With agriculture/civilization, the dark caucasoids traveled the World, spreading their high IQ mutation to every corner of the globe except those that are most isolated. So the mean genetic IQ of the entire World increased by 13 points, with the exception of places that were too hard to get to, such as Australia and Papua New Guineas, the Congo rain forest, the Southern tip of Africa, and the Americas. Since most of sub-Saharan Africa got the genes, they suddenly leaped from having lower IQs than the Austaloids, to being smarter (only the bushmen and pygmies, who like the Australoids, were too isolated to get the genes, remained behind the Australoids).

This is a great hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense. The ‘Dark Caucasoids’ as PP calls them, better known as Anatolian/Neolithic Farmers could have had a higher chance for more high IQ mutations due to the fact that they could farm and thus have a higher population giving more of a chance for higher IQs.

The downfall for the dark caucasoids was spreading these genes to whites and East Asians. Because of cold winters, East Asians and whites were smarter than pre-mutation dark caucasoids, and now with these mutations, they were smarter once again.

I’m confused here. What we call whites today did not exist that far back in the past. Europeans are an amalgamation of four different ancient populations, basically are an amalgamation of ‘Dark Caucasoids’. Is he also saying that the Neolithic Farmers were more intelligent than East Asians?

Eurasians didn’t become a distinct breeding group until the end of the last Glacial Maximum. This is why there is ‘genetic similarity’ to modern-day Europeans with some old, 10k year plus peoples in the Americas. Because the two groups didn’t split into distinct populations, they show a similar genotype. This is what proponents of the Solutrean Hypothesis need to get through their heads. (I recently got into a nice discussion over at The Alternative Hypothesis, scroll down for comments. I’m going to make a more comprehensive post on the SH in the near future as I have come across even better data on it.)

We can see from this PCA graph (from Zainel Abidin et al) that Australoids don’t even cluster in the vicinity of Africans. They are on the complete other side of the graph, showing how great of a genetic distance there is between these two populations. You can see the other Oceanic peoples (the orange dots, who Afrocentrists and others say are Negroid, Abos, Papuans, Melanesians, etc) are also clustered away from Africans. PCA graphs show that the three populations are not genetically similar and that phenotype, sometimes, isn’t enough to show who belongs to what racial grouping. PCA analysis refutes peoples ‘feelz’ on what they believe with their eyes. Even with this data, their ‘feelz’ still overrides the truth and they still believe lies.

While on this subject of similar phenotype not meaning one population is racially the same as another, people use this same fallacious reasoning for ‘white-looking’ peoples in the ME.

Quoting Razib Khan:

The final issue is that a lot of the phenotypes that we racially code are recent. This probably explains why groups like the Kalash and Nuristanis can look more like Europeans than South Asians, but they’re genetically more like South Asians. What does any of this have to do with non-scientific things? I don’t really know. My interest in population structure is intellectual, not personal. But a certain type of person should probably stop talking about how white people have been in Europe for 40,000 years. First, the ancestors of modern Europeans 40,000 years ago were almost all residing outside of Europe. An assertion that holds until 15,000 years ago. And most would still be resident outside of Europe 8,000 years ago as depending on how you count/calculate. *** And, perhaps more importantly, the typical phenotype of Northern Europeans probably really coalesced only around ~5,000 years ago. ***

How can there be such phenotypic similarity in two populations separated by thousands of miles?

Easy. The Kalash and other ME ‘white-looking’ populations have ancient Siberian ancestry. As shown in my linked article, modern-day Europeans have a great deal of Siberian ancestry, mostly from the true Aryans, the Yamnaya peoples.

And in the comments Razib was asked:

“Could I bother you to list the top three theories/positions that you see falling into this unsupportable category?”

To which he responded:

“that phylogeny and phenotype track closely. just because you can’t tell the physical difference between two pops (e.g., solomon islanders and sub-saharan africans) they must be phylogenetically close. this is not the case.”

Pretty much seals the deal.

Just because populations look similar on the outside doesn’t mean they are genetically similar. As shown from Razib’s post, the phenotypes that we code are relatively recent, which is why there are some populations separated by thousands of miles yet look extremely similar.

Bonus:

This was said in the comments:

I can’t really tell about the genetics since I don’t have the scientific background, but my impression is a lot of those white identity guys have an extremely mythologised view of the past. This seems to be true even of the smarter ones; e.g. I recently read a bit of Richard Spencer’s twitter account (out of interest in the alt right phenomenon) and he throws out such totally retarded comments as “Europe has always been unified, even before Christianity” (totally ignoring what is known about the ancient Greeks’ intimate links to the Near East, the Greeks’ and Romans’ unflattering view of the northern barbarians, the emergence of Latin Christendom in the middle ages and the fairly late rise of the concept of Europe etc.) or “Europe is a nation”. There seems to be little awareness of the complexities of historical change because everything is reduced to some supposedly unchanging racial essence reaching back into the mists of prehistoric times. Now I’m pretty far right and “racist” myself, but a lot of this really seems pretty stupid…like myth-making for identity politics.

To which Razib responded:

i knew the pre-WN richard spencer (we lost touch after his ideological changes ~2010). he’s smart. i have a hard time believing he doesn’t know the latest research, which was evening starting to be evident back then. so i think it’s myth-making. p.s. a friend of mine sent me a link to a richard spencer interview with kevin macdonald last year i think, pointing to a specific segment of the podcast talking about ancient genetics. kevin was telling richard how europeans 40,000 years ago were white, and those are the ancestors of europeans. that’s wrong.

Europeans 40kya were not white those in the area at that time are *not* the ancestors of today’s Europeans.

Both Afrocentrists and Nordicists need to keep up with the new information that’s constantly coming out. Because what they say in regards to genetics and/or anything else is mostly wrong.