Clusters and Clines

This paper

Front Genet. 2016; 7: 22.
Published online 2016 Feb 17. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2016.00022
PMCID: PMC4756148
Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Biological Classification of Human Populations and Implications for Clinical Genetic Epidemiological Research
Koffi N. Maglo, Tesfaye B. Mersha, and Lisa J. Martin

From the abstract: "...contrasts the scientific status of the “cluster” and “cline” constructs in human population genomics, and shows how cluster may be instrumentally produced."

To be frank, I do not yet fully understand the paper.  But this is intriguing (you'll have to read the paper to get the context):

Furthermore, it has been shown that the rate of individuals having membership in multiple clusters increases with the inclusion of admixed populations in studies. This does not however negate the computational possibility of clustering admixed individuals. But under this scenario, many individuals will typically have mixed membership in different clusters (Pritchard et al., 2007; Bryc et al., 2010; Maglo, 2011; Jin et al., 2012). As mentioned above, the correlated allele model was specifically designed to resolve “subtle admixture problems.” Curiously, some researchers perform cluster analysis on admixed populations by bypassing this model (Tang et al., 2005), raising questions about their findings (Graves, 2011). Yet the user guide of Structure states that “Admixture is a common feature of real data, and you probably won't find it if you use the no-admixture model” (Pritchard et al., 2000; Elhaik, 2012).

In a word, computational success does not by itself alone entail the natural reality of clustered entities in evolutionary classification.

On Orlando

The commission of a crime requires the confluence of motive, means and opportunity.

A terrorist has a lot of opportunities in an open society.  There is no means to secure every venue from somebody who wants to spray a crowd with bullets or to blow them up.  Only some opportunities, such as those provided by commercial airline flights, can be diminished.

On the motive side - ISIS has shown itself capable of long-distance conversion of Americans into jihadis, whether or not these converts were previously from a Muslim culture.  Unless we shut down all social media there is no way to prevent to the local crazy from connecting up with the far-away crazies.  The Trump solution of a temporary (or permanent) ban on Muslims entering the US of A can't work, even if somehow it was made palatable to a majority of Americans.

Regarding the means - Americans are quite determined to keep the type of weapons and ammunition that are designed kill and maim people freely available.  The principle involved is called the Second Amendment.

It seems we are stymied on all fronts.  But we are not entirely devoid of hope.  Governments are actually quite pretty good at squashing ISIS-like organizations -- provided such organizations are not themselves state-sponsored (or aided by a wealthy diaspora - e.g., the Irish Republican Army or the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers).    If ISIS still exists, it is because eradicating it is not any government's top priority, and because it likely has state-level covert sponsors.  This is what we can change.

R1a-M780 map in India and AIT

If I had failed to notice before, I notice now that this following paper, if its conclusions stand, places the genetic record completely at odds with the linguistic Aryan Immigration/Migration Theory.

European Journal of Human Genetics (2015) 23, 124–131; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.50; published online 26 March 2014
The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a,
Peter Underhill et. al.

A brief explanation of why I say so.
Figure 1 from the above publication:

Caption:
Haplogroup (hg) R1a-M420 topology, shown within the context of hg R-M207. Common names of the SNPs discussed in this study are shown along the branches, with those genotyped presented in color and those for which phylogenetic placement was previously unknown in orange. Hg labels are assigned according to YCC nomenclature principles with an asterisk (*) denoting a paragroup.⁶³ Dashed lines indicate lineages not observed in our sample. The marker Z280 was not used as it maps to duplicated ampliconic tracts.

Notice the positions of M417 -- Z93 -- M780.  Also note:

Of the 1693 European R1a-M417/Page7 samples, more than 96% were assigned to R1a-Z282 (Figure 2), whereas 98.4% of the 490 Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to hg R1a-Z93 (Figure 3), consistent with the previously proposed trend.

Let us take the position that M417 (the common ancestor of Indians and Europeans with R1a) originated outside India and its descendants in India are a result of immigration.  This would be (so far) in accord with the Aryan immigration theory.

Here is Figure 3-d from the paper
Caption: Spatial frequency distributions of Z93 affiliated haplogroups. Maps were generated as described in Figure 2.

The M780 map above might make sense if M780 arose well after the Aryans supposedly arrived in India, perhaps just prior to the urbanizing period of the Gangetic plain, well into the Iron Age, i.e., ~500 BC.  But the paper places this at least two thousand years earlier!

The corresponding diversification {of R1a} in the Middle East and South Asia is more obscure. However, early urbanization within the Indus Valley also occurred at this time⁵⁷ and the geographic distribution of R1a-M780 (Figure 3d) may reflect this.

(The "mature Harappan phase" is 2600-1900 BC.  Wiki says Early Harappan has two phases - 3300 BC- 2800 BC, and 2800 BC - 2600 BC.)

The paper does say:

The four subhaplogroups of Z93 (branches 9-M582, 10-M560, 12-Z2125, and 17-M780, L657) constitute a multifurcation unresolved by 10 Mb of sequencing; it is likely that no further resolution of this part of the tree will be possible with current technology. Similarly, the shared European branch has just three SNPs.

If R1a-M780 was present at the early urbanization within the Indus Valley, then the "genetic Indo-Aryans" had arrived in India earlier than 2600 BC, well before the first spoke-wheeled chariots (Andronovo, ~2000 BC).  Traditional Aryan immigration theory has them arrive after 1900 BC (after the collapse of the Indus Valley cities) and before 1200 BC (start of the Iron Age in India); and typically around 1400 BC,  around or just after the Sanskritic words (supposedly pre-Sanskritic) that appear in the Mitanni written records.  

The Andronovo culture and AIT

Koenraad Elst goes over Elena Kuzmina's Origin of the Indo-Iranians and finds:

While this is undoubtedly an important book, and as far as I can judge, it is a classic of Andronovo archaeology, but it fails in its primary mission: to show that this culture was the staging-ground for an Aryan invasion of Iran and India. It only assumes that much, but doesn’t demonstrate it.

The Origin of the Patriarchy?

Stilted old English translation but this story from the Mahabharata (PG-13) makes one wonder why the supposedly patriarchal oppressive Brahmins who are supposed to have manipulated the epic for their evil, cunning purposes, preserved this story.

"Vaisampayana said, 'Thus addressed by his loving wife, king Pandu, well-acquainted with all rules of morality, replied in these words of virtuous import, 'O Kunti, what thou hast said is quite true. Vyushitaswa of old did even as thou hast said. Indeed he was equal unto the celestials themselves.

But I shall now tell thee about the practices of old indicated by illustrious Rishis, fully acquainted with every rule of morality. O thou of handsome face and sweet smiles, women formerly were not immured within houses and dependent on husbands and other relatives. They used to go about freely, enjoying themselves as best as they liked. O thou of excellent qualities, they did not then adhere to their husbands faithfully, and yet, O handsome one, they were not regarded sinful, for that was the sanctioned usage of the times. That very usage is followed to this day by birds and beasts without any (exhibition of) jealousy. That practice, sanctioned by precedent, is applauded by great Rishis. O thou of taper thighs, the practice is yet regarded with respect amongst the Northern Kurus. Indeed, that usage, so lenient to women, hath the sanction of antiquity. The present practice, however (of women's being confined to one husband for life) hath been established but lately. I shall tell thee in detail who established it and why.

"It hath been heard by us that there was a great Rishi of the name of Uddalaka, who had a son named Swetaketu who also was an ascetic of merit. O thou of eyes like lotus-petals, the present virtuous practice hath been established by that Swetaketu from anger. Hear thou the reason. One day, in the presence of Swetaketu's father a Brahmana came and catching Swetaketu's mother by the hand, told her, 'Let us go.' Beholding his mother seized by the hand and taken away apparently by force, the son was greatly moved by wrath. Seeing his son indignant, Uddalaka addressed him and said, 'Be not angry. O son! This is the practice sanctioned by antiquity. The women of all orders in this world are free, O son; men in this matter, as regards their respective orders, act as kine.'

The Rishi's son, Swetaketu, however, disapproved of the usage and established in the world the present practice as regards men and women. It hath been heard by us, O thou of great virtue, that the existing practice dates from that period among human beings but not among beings of other classes. Accordingly, since the establishment of the present usage, it is sinful for women not to adhere to their husbands. Women transgressing the limits assigned by the Rishi became guilty of slaying the embryo. And, men, too, violating a chaste and loving wife who hath from her maidenhood observed the vow of purity, became guilty of the same sin. The woman also who, being commanded by her husband to raise offspring, refuses to do his bidding, becometh equally sinful.

"Thus, O timid one, was the existing usage established of old by Swetaketu, the son of Uddalaka, in defiance of antiquity.

Shvetaketu, son of Uddalaka, might be a historical figure (that is, if the ancient Hindus had history :) )

And Pandu was informing his wife Kunti that the practice of Niyoga was legitimate. In the Mahabharata, Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura are the children of Veda Vyasa (traditional author of the Mahabharata), by niyoga.

Life as a dhimmi - 17

During April-May, 18 Christian women kidnapped and converted to Islam in Pakistan.

The gloomy report for Pakistani Christians stated that charge sheets were not brought against the abductors in any one of the case after the abductors presented the Christian abductees’ certificates of conversion to Islam.
....
In none of the cases, the parents or family members of the Christian abductees were ever allowed to meet their daughters, they were just informed that their daughters have married Muslim men after converting to Islam.
....
The NGO stated in its report that there has been a sharp rise in cases of abduction of Christian girls, and their forced conversions and forced marriages with Muslim men after a Fatwa issued by Islamic clerics on electronic media. The report detailed the fatwa declared “Islam permits Muslim man to keep non-Muslim women as mistresses and perform sex with them without marriage while he is married to Muslim woman.”

In contrast to the Christian marriage Act under which the Christian marriage stands in effect even after conversion to Islam, there are claims that after conversion to Islam, the previous marriage becomes invalid and the kidnappers misuse this fatwa while the police fervently drops charges of kidnapping filed by the Christian families. On the other hand, Hindu girls are being kidnapped and forcefully given in marriage to Muslims in Sindh.

More on the Aryan Invasion Theory

The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) says that a set of invasions of people(s) from Central Asia around 3500-3200 years ago, first introduced the Indo-European (IE) language family to India.  Since the archaeological record does not show any discontinuity (e.g., as is evident in parts of Europe where an invasion did take place), sometimes AIT is moderated to AMT (Aryan Migration Theory), and instead of outright conquest and extermination, elite dominance is the mechanism by which the large native population utterly forgot its original language and place-names.

Please note, 4600-3900 years ago is the "mature period" of the Saraswati-Sindhu civilization; and per AIT/AMT this civilization is not of the IE family; and so  the postulated period of invasion/migration cannot be pushed back very much in time.  That is, if for example, an IE incursion occurred 4200 years ago, it would no longer be AIT/AMT.  The linguistic basis of the AIT/AMT theory also suffers if the incursion is pushed back in time.  For example, the Indo-Aryan words found in the written records of the Mitanni (a people of Northwestern Syria, eastern Anatolia) date to 1400 BC, and were, per AIT, part of the expansion of Indo-Aryan speakers into India.  (BTW, if you examine it closely, "Indo-Aryan" is simply a fancy and obscuring word for archaic Sanskrit.)

The counter-narrative to AIT/AMT is OIT (Out-of-India Theory).  OIT, I think covers a wide gamut of possibilities, but the basis of it is:

1. The Saraswati river that was an abundant river in the time of the Rg Veda, as mentioned there, is the same Saraswati river whose dried up course is described in the Mahabharata; the Mahabharata river  corresponds to the dried river-bed along whose banks the vast majority of Saraswati-Sindhu civilization sites have been found - very much more than along the Indus.  Hence the "Saraswati-Sindhu" rather than "Indus" civilization.

2. If the above is valid, then IE speakers were in India while the Saraswati still flowed, and that throws AIT/AMT out-of-whack.   And then the initial seeds of the IE language might have been spread by migrations out of India much before 4000 years ago.   Nothing precludes round-tripping, of course.

Anyway, there's also an increasing amount of genetic evidence and more to come (Indian populations have been vastly undersampled, most of the studies having people from Pakistan or Gujarat as representative of the whole of India).   And according to Prem Kumar, "There is Genetic Evidence against the Aryan Invasion Myth".

The Indian population is a mixture of two ancestral populations, termed ANI and ASI. Except for some isolated tribes in the Andaman islands, everyone else in India is a mixture of these two.  A diagram from one of the papers is shown below.  This shows a family tree, but not the time depth.  Other papers claim to establish that the Europe-ANI split is at least 12,500 years old.   The ASI-ANI split is theorized to have arisen 60-55,000 years ago.   The great volcanic eruption of Toba in Indonesia, some 75,000 years ago, has left deep deposits of ash in parts of India; it is theorized to have greatly depopulated India.  Incursions of new peoples, some 55000 years ago led to ASI.  With that background, you can read Prem Kumar's article.

Indian Left and Freedom of Expression

Mayuresh Didolkar writes:

To truly appreciate the scale of the attack on Freedom of Expression (FoE) that the Jadavpur incident represents, you have to see ‘Buddha in a Traffic Jam’. I think most of the social media discourse about the movie is misleading as it refers the movie as anti-naxal or anti-left, and hence the battle for its screening as a battle between red and saffron in a manner of speaking. Actually the movie is neither of these. It is a microscopic, almost anthropological, look at how the poorest people of India are hard done to by evil corporates on one side and the militants on the other. Vivek turns his creative eye on the right wing hooliganism like the Mangalore pub incident, where women were attacked for wearing skimpy clothes. He is also critical of the counter insurgency movements like Salwa Judum, showing how often the ground levels of both Naxal and Salwa Judum are in cahoots to target the poor people. That intellectuals supporting terrorism and NGO activists are in bed with the militants is no secret either. As the movie cuts back and forth between the metro where college professors talk revolution, and the harsh, arid landscapes of rural India, we realise there are no heroes, only victims. That, argues Vivek, is the true tragedy of this conflict.

What the movie refuses to do, is to portray the cold blooded Naxallites as messiahs of the poor, like in the 2012 film ‘chakravyuh’ where Om Puri’s Naxal leader is seen telling to Abhay Deol to distribute money earmarked for buying guns to the poor. That does not happen in real life. You cannot call a movie right leaning or anti left just because it refuses to fabricate lies. Vivek’s own credentials as a right winger (Or Sanghi if you will) are iffy at best. After all, less than 18 months ago, his wife and eminent actress, Pallavi Joshi, resigned from the FTII in protest. One of the reasons for the protest, as we all know, was NDA government appointing Gajendra Chouhan as the Chairman.

So here is a movie that reflects the counter insurgency movement and the right wing extremists in an extremely unflattering light, made by a moviemaker with no particular political leanings, and yet the activists at Jadavpur nearly killed the filmmaker when he landed in their den to screen his movie. When you reflect on this, the true extent of left fascism and intolerance will dawn upon you.

The Mayor of Londonistan

The just-elected Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is reported to have said:

"This isn't just about me - it's about my friends, my family and everyone who comes from a background similar to mine, anywhere in the world," he said.

Mr Khan added: "Donald Trump's ignorant view of Islam could make both of our countries less safe - it risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of extremists.

"Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam - London has proved him wrong."

The second sentence is quite infelicitous.  He seems to be saying -- "If you offend mainstream Muslims, then Muslim extremists will attack you".  "Or you alienate us, and we will dump Western liberal values."

If you look around, that is how it is being interpreted by some: The Daily Caller headline is "London’s New Mayor Warns Trump: Let In Muslims Or They Will Attack America".

This is not going to build any bridges.

Secularism, Indian-style!

Aravindan Neelakandan describes it.

Columbus sought South Asia?

If we go by the California school bureaucracy,  Christopher Columbus hoped to discover a sea route to South Asia.  Or did he?

E.g.:  "It seems clear that the Spanish monarchs also shared at least a part of Columbus’ enthusiasm for spreading the message of Christ. The first entry in Christopher’s journal of the maiden voyage stated, “Because of the report that I had given to Your Highnesses [Ferdinand and Isabella] about the lands of India and about a prince who is called ‘Grand Khan’... Your Highnesses . . . lovers and promoters of the Holy Christian faith . . . thought of sending me, Christobal Colon, to the said regions of India to see the said princes and the peoples and lands .. . to see how their conversion to our Holy Faith might be undertaken” (Dunn and Kelly 17,19...)" (via https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/christopher-columbus-latter-day-saint-perspective/years-spain-columbus-finds-sponsor.).

The Dunn and Kelly reference is to a translation of what remains of Columbus' diary from his first voyage- "The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493".  You can get a preview on books.google.com, and the book has the original text there as well as a translation into English.  What is "India" in the translation is "Yndia" in the original text.

So are students in California going to be taught that Columbus was looking for "South Asia" (a term that did not exist until relatively recently when some European university or the US Department of State or such invented it)?

If Americans are going to sacrifice the understanding of their own history in the name of some political correctness misbegotten among the leftists of the Indian immigrant community, aided by Harvard honchos,  they probably deserve the President that they are about to get.

And while they are at it, are they going to try to rename the Indian Ocean?

How the second-place behaved: Clinton 2008 v. Sanders 2016

Clintonistas like Prof. Krugman are complaining that Sanders is behaving badly by not conceding to Clinton right now.  But looking at the record, at least, as captured in the New York Times archives, Clinton in 2008 behaved pretty much the same way as Sanders is in 2016.   Of course, the situations are somewhat different then and now; it would be a miracle if history repeated itself exactly; but Clinton pretty much followed the Sanders game plan of 2016 until she was mathematically eliminated from the nomination in 2008; and Sanders is not yet mathematically eliminated.

All links but one are to the NYT archives.

Here goes:

Raising the electability-in-the-general election issue

May 2, 2008: Clinton more electable than Obama

Seven former Democratic National Committee chairs released a letter on Clinton's behalf:

In fact, if the election were held today, Hillary would beat Senator McCain, but Senator Obama would lose to the presumptive GOP nominee. According to the most recent polls available, Hillary would beat McCain by a margin of 279 to 259 Electoral Votes. But McCain would beat Obama by a margin of 291 to 247 Electoral Votes. 

In a hypothetical general election matchup with McCain, Clinton is winning handily (50%-41%) while Obama is statistically tied with McCain (46%-44%), according to the AP-Ipsos poll released Monday.

May 19, 2008: Clinton repeats the argument about electability.

 “The states that I’ve won total 300 electoral votes,” she told about 300 people in a high school gymnasium in Maysville, the birthplace of the actor George Clooney. “The question is who can win 270 electoral votes? My opponent has won states totaling 217 electoral votes.”

Winning the more relevant states 

 May 19, 2008: The states Clinton won are more relevant than the states Obama won.

As she has in the past, she discounted Mr. Obama’s victories in caucus states and states likely to vote Republican in November, ticking off Alaska, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas and Idaho. “Many of his votes and delegates come from caucus state which have a relatively low turnout,” she said.

Contesting the super delegates

June 1, 2008: The super delegates might switch sides and support the so-far-runner-up.

Remember that Florida and Michigan broke the Democratic Party rules and held their primaries out of sequence.  As a result, their delegates were initially disallowed; and eventually allowed but with half the votes.  Moreover, Obama and other candidates had withdrawn from the Michigan primary, Obama was awarded delegates proportional to the non-Hillary vote.

"Mrs. Clinton had hoped that the rules committee would uphold the elections in Florida and Michigan so as to confer legitimacy on their popular vote; if they were added to her national tally, she would lead Mr. Obama in the popular vote. Mrs. Clinton hoped that would stir the passions of the party’s superdelegates, who would then swing to her side and choose her as the party’s nominee."

Complaints about the Democratic primary rules

May 19, 2008: If Democrats followed Republican rules, Clinton would be the nominee.

"She also dismissed Democratic nominating rules requiring proportional allocation of delegates from primaries and caucuses, rather than the winner-take-all system used by the Republicans.

“If we had same rules as the Republicans, I would be the nominee right now,” she said. "

May 22, 2008: The primaries should be decided by the popular vote.

"Her swing across South Florida on Wednesday seemed essentially to be a campaign-within-a-campaign, one that is about process and is directed chiefly at the party’s rules committee.

“I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country.”

She also sought to whip up populist sentiment, telling voters in Boca Raton, where the 2000 election played out vividly, “You didn’t break a single rule, and you should not be punished for matters beyond your control.”

She argued with fervor that the nomination should be determined by popular vote. She has claimed to have the lead in the popular vote by including Florida and Michigan in her tally."

Threatening to go all the way to the Convention
(CBS News, not NYT archive link):
May 14, 2008: Taking it to Denver!

Less than an hour after news broke that John Edwards would endorse Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe walked out of Senator Clinton's Washington home and stood before the rash of press spread out on her cul de sac.  

.........
.........
"We have six million eligible Democrats left to vote," McAuliffe said. "They're going to determine who the nominee of the Democratic Party is. And it's not someone on television telling them what to do. People like it that Hillary Clinton is fighting for them."

"These folks are not quitting on Hillary Clinton, and she is not quitting on them. We are in this thing 'til the end. We are in it. We are taking it to Denver, and we're taking it to the White House. Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States of America."

May 22, 2008: Headline: Clinton Signals She May Carry Fight to Convention

Fighting on till the last possible moment 

June 1, 2008: Continuing the contest

"To jeers and boos that showcased deep party divisions, Democratic Party officials agreed Saturday to seat delegates from the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries at the party’s convention in August but give them only half a vote each, dealing a setback to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton."

"The deal prompted one of her chief advisers, Harold Ickes, a member of the rules committee himself, to declare that Mrs. Clinton’s fight may not be over, even though Mr. Obama’s advisers say he is only days away from gaining enough delegates to claim the nomination.

“Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” Mr. Ickes said before the final vote, raising the specter of a fight until that committee meets. " 

June 4, 2008: Not conceding

And while Mrs. Clinton reminisced about her campaign and talked of a need to unite the party, she did not concede, and indeed did not acknowledge that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had passed the threshold of delegates needed to secure the nomination.

 ---
Of course, eventually Clinton yielded to Obama gracefully.  I think Clinton supporters should not complain about Sanders unless and until he deviates from the pattern she followed in 2008.

PS:
June 8, 2008 

 {After the North Carolina Primary on May 6, 2008}  Deep in debt and no longer harboring even illusions of winning the nomination, Mrs. Clinton stopped attacks on Mr. Obama to avoid alienating him or the party.

......
......
......

By last week, though, anger had given way to resignation. Even before the final primaries on Tuesday, aides said Mrs. Clinton knew she could not continue. But she told them she would not concede that evening in the college gymnasium where she was to give her speech celebrating victory in South Dakota {June 3, 2008. Per Wiki, Obama had won enough delegates for the nomination on that day.} She and her supporters, she told aides, had earned the right to their own day, and she planned to take two weeks to think through her options.

The next day, though, Democratic supporters in Congress pressed her on a conference call to give up quickly. She gave in, hung up and asked top advisers to prepare a plan to withdraw. They met with her at campaign headquarters, where every member of her inner circle recommended she pull out and endorse Mr. Obama without preconditions or negotiations — every member except Mr. Penn, who said she should hold out for concessions.

But Mrs. Clinton was, at last, ready to call it quits and switch focus to the general election, two aides recalled. “Let’s get on with it,” she said.

mathpages.com

Stumbled across this yesterday - http://mathpages.com/ - looks like a lot of interesting reading - mostly mathematics, and some physics.  I came across this via a trail that began at a classic - The Art of Unix Programming.

Indian Millenial Nationalism

Kush Arora has an essay from which I extract these lines: (emphasis added)

It has been argued by historians of the Marxist fold that Indian nationalism rests on, and is born out of the freedom struggle. I have deep reservations against this idea; however, it is very obvious that with the fading memory of colonialism, spoken if at all, in the dense post-colonial theory, no one on the younger side of 30 (60% of India) really cares if we were brought together through collectively opposing the Brits or through sitting round in a circle peeling potatoes in someone’s wedding. What is of relevance is that at the end of it all there has been cultivated a sense of the collective “Indian”.

The Indian Marxists in the US are busy trying to extirpate "India" from California's textbooks -- "“most references to India before 1947 should be changed to South Asia.”".  So inspiring to know that Columbus set out to find a sea route to the fabled South Asia,  and that the inhabitants of America that he and later voyagers found should have been called S. Asians.   It is unclear why America suffers these idiots;  but in India, they are fighting a rear-guard action (I hope) that will end with their permanent extinction from the world of ideas.

Secularism: A Primer for Pagans

Divya Jhingran, in her own way, says that secularism is a concept that is meaningful only within a Christian framework.

The innumerable rites of the pagans were so closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, in public and in private life, that it seemed impossible to escape them, without, at the same time, renouncing all human commerce and entertainment. The Christians with pious horror found themselves avoiding the circus and the theatre.

The Invariant British Parliament

The House of Lords, today.

The White Man’s burden weighs so heavily in the House of Lords.

 The House of Commons, 1813.  (the burden hadn't yet been invented by Kipling).

Pretty much the same stuff, just now some Sepoys have been added to the mix that weren't there in 1813.

Cicero-Kickero Row

 I had first read about the "Cicero-Kickero" controversy in "Goodbye, Mr Chips!".  Lately, I found this in Volume VII of The Maine Journal of Education, 1873.

Chillocothe, Ohio, is divided on the momentous question whether Cicero shall be pronounced 'Kickero' or 'Sisero'.  A professor of the Kickero party has been dismissed from his position in the public schools, and the Kickeronians rally to his rescue and threaten to depose the school board.  The strife wages hotly, and the whole town shares the excitement.  Who talks about 'dead' classics?

There is a book with a free Kindle version on amazon.com, "The Roman Pronunciation of Latin : Why we use it and how to use it", by Frances Ellen Lord, Professor of Latin in Wellesley College, 1894, which goes into this and many other things.

Unlike Latin, there is very little controversy about pronunciation in Sanskrit.  The language was engineered to be a means of loss-free communication across the ages.

Amazing growth in Indian internet users

Statistics from internetlivestats.com

Notice the "Users 1 Year Change (%)" figure for India: 30.5%.

Caveat: I have no clue as to how the statistics were gathered. 

Turning meat-eaters into vegans

Rowan Jacobsen, author of "Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis" has an article about plant-based replacements for meat, from which I quote this encouraging paragraph:

“Livestock is an outdated technology,” says Patrick Brown.

Considering the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem, and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. It will be a textbook case of disruptive technology: overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast. Our grandchildren will look back on our practice of using caged animals to assemble proteins with the same incredulousness that we apply to our ancestors’ habit of slaughtering whales to light their homes.

How India Made Britain More Literate

Aravindan Neelakandan: How India Made Britain More Literate: The ‘Beautiful Tree’ Beyond Dharampal

Dharampal’s book ‘The Beautiful Tree’ contains a 1823 report by Ballari district collector. The collector mentions a curious fact:

The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less advanced and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable, and well deserved the imitation it has received in England.

Rev. Bell was in India to work in the asylum for the progeny of British soldiers through native Indian women, whom of course the soldiers abandoned. The imported teachers for these children were not exactly enthusiastic. One day as he was riding along Madras beach he noticed a native school session. He saw “little children writing with their fingers on sand, which after the fashion of such schools, had been strewn before them for that purpose” and he also saw “peer teaching - children learning from one another.”

Bell had his Eureka moment. He experimented successfully with this method and in 1797 published the description of his “Madras method” in England. Tooley discovered that the new National Society for the Education for the Poor in 1811 adapted this Madras method and by 1821, 300,000 children were being educated by Bell’s principles .

Meanwhile Jospeh Lancaster has launched his famous Lancastrian schools for furthering education in England. Bell and Lancaster entered into a bitter controversy as to the intellectual property of the particular system of education. But Tooley points out that “it wasn’t invented by either Bell or Lancaster. It was based precisely on what the Rev.Dr.Andrew Bell had observed in India”.

Rogoff: "....global population in long-term decline..."????

Kenneth Rogoff here:

Some say that governments did not do enough to stoke demand. Although that is true, it is not the whole story. The biggest problem burdening the world today is most countries’ abject failure to implement structural reforms. With productivity growth at least temporarily stuck in low gear, and global population in long-term decline, the supply side, not lack of demand, is the real constraint in advanced economies.

Perhaps he means the "global population of the advanced economies" (whatever that means)?
Even restricted to what the UN calls "more developed regions", a population decline begins in 25 years from now, if it ever does.  It is hard to imagine that quarterly-results-obsessed US industry is thinking that far ahead.  But I'm not an economist, let alone a very sharp and respected one.

From a United Nations website:

Human evolution: an extraordinary claim from Masol

As reported in Outlook India:

"Cut marks on bone fossils found on an Indian foothill could well change the narrative on human evolution".

PS: looking for publications on the subject, here is one (but the abstract mentions no dates):

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631068315002237

The lithic industries on the fossiliferous outcrops of the Late Pliocene Masol Formation, Siwalik Frontal Range, northwestern India (Punjab)

PPS:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631068315002304
Intentional cut marks on bovid from the Quranwala zone, 2.6 Ma, Siwalik Frontal Range, northwestern India

Abstract:

The Indo-French research program ‘Siwaliks’ has been surveying the Late Pliocene Formation of the Chandigarh anticline (NW India) since 2008. These sub-Himalayan floodplain deposits are known for their Tertiary-Quaternary transitional fauna, especially those from the Quranwala zone in the Masol Formation, whose basal member is approximately 130 meters below the Gauss/Matuyama paleomagnetic reversal (2.588 Ma). About 1500 fossils have been collected in the inlier of Masol, most often on recently eroded outcrops, and sometimes in association with stone tools (choppers, flakes). Many bones were covered by a variety of marks (animal, bioerosion and tectonics) and among these traces a few were intentional cut marks. Different methods have been applied in Paris (France) to describe their topography on a micron scale, using the 3D Digital Video Microscope Hirox, and completed with binocular microscopy at the Center for Research and Restoration of Museums of France (C2RMF), and X-ray microtomography with the AST-RX platform, at the National Museum of Natural History, Paris. Experiments with quartzite cobbles collected near the fossils were carried out in India and in France. The mineralization of the traces is identical to the bone tissue, and comparison with our experimental cut marks confirms that the profiles are typical of the sharp edge of a flake or cobble in quartzite; their size and spatial organization testify to energetic and intentional gestures from an agile wrist acting with precision, and to a good knowledge of the bovid anatomy.

Manjul Bhargava on fringe science

Fields medalist Manjul Bhargava has a higher tolerance for fringe science than I do -- and perhaps I need to learn from him.

Perhaps Ramanujan’s struggle to find an audience for his work and the hardship he underwent to be taken seriously by the mathematics establishment of his time informs Dr. Bhargava’s relatively tolerant take on the inclusion of sessions on ancient Indian science in the proceedings of the Indian Science Congress. Last year, an ex-pilot made the apocryphal claim that an ancient Indian sage had laid down detailed plans of ancient airplanes; this year, too, a bureaucrat successfully submitted in the environmental sciences sub-conference a ‘research paper’ on how Lord Shiva was a “great environmentalist” — though he didn’t go on to present it.

To Dr. Bhargava, this is “fringe” science, though he adds that it’s in the very nature of science congresses the world over to occasionally entertain speculative claims and “fringe” science. The key, according to him, is that fringe science be treated as such and not be given greater space than actual scientific discussions or talks. “I was upset at the last Congress [in Mumbai] that the fantastic achievements of the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) were barely covered in the media and all space was taken up by those discussions. Real scientists there were wondering, ‘Hey, what about us?’” he says. Moreover, he adds, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), there were always claims that someone had solved the Riemann hypothesis [a bedevilling maths problem, nearly a century old, whose solving guarantees a million dollars in prize money from the Clay Mathematics Institute]. On the other hand, the solution to another tricky problem — of rapidly testing whether a given number was prime — was proffered by an Indian computer scientist, Manindra Agrawal and his two graduate students. “They are computer scientists and not professional mathematicians. Imagine if their work wasn’t accepted at an ICM… solutions can from anywhere,” he reasons, “Science marches ahead when as many ideas are allowed to be communicated.”

Christian secularism

Former candidate for the Republican nomination for the US presidency, Ben Carson, is a believing  Christian.   Carson stirred up a bit of a controversy when an old speech of his surfaced, where he said the Old Testament figure Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids in order to store grain.  The Bible merely says that Joseph stored surplus grain against a future famine deduced from the Pharaoh's dream, but not how he stored it.

This controversy merits careful unpacking.

Carson most certainly believes in the resurrection, the water-into-wine miracle, the parting of the Red Sea, and such;  he shares these beliefs with a huge number of voters, and his statement of belief about these things would cause not the least bit of controversy, quite unlike his statement about the pyramids.    The average western liberal or Indian secularist would say that all the former miraculous things that violate the laws of physics are all about Carson's religious belief,  which per the tenets of secularism, are outside the realm of politics; but when he talks about the purpose of the pyramids, he is talking about something that we have archaeological and other evidence, and is therefore within the realm of political criticism.

That is, to be secular, one has to be familiar with the contents of the Bible.  Since the Bible is silent about the pyramids, a candidate's belief about the purpose of the pyramids is within the political arena; but the laws-of-physics busting stuff that the Bible does speak about is beyond political criticism.  In fact, without paying at least lip service to belief in what the Bible says, it is not possible to be a viable Republican candidate for the presidency.  One cannot say that the candidate is a credulous idiot for believing in miracle stories.

Suppose we accept that as a necessary compromise for secularism to work.  The very same culture from which this secularism arose encountered India and constructed religions called Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.    One would expect that secularism then requires extending the same respect to beliefs from these religions as it does for Christianity or Judaism.   One would be bitterly disappointed, however.   Also, unlike with the Bible, one does not have to be familiar with the contents of the Hindu "scriptures" to know the boundary between religious belief and politically attackable ideas.   Anything Hindu is fair game for political criticism.   Which also shows that those who claim "Hinduism is a religion" in practice do not treat it like one.

Further, notice, Carson says that his belief about the pyramids is a religious belief, based on the Bible; but the political class and media reject that.  The limits of religious belief are what are in the Bible, and that is about it.  Islam is struggling to get a foothold in this shielded area, aided by leftists and regressive liberals; and cries of Islamophobia.   Hinduism will forever be outside this area separated from political criticism.

I'm not saying that it is not as it should be - Hinduism is a living tradition - in religious terms it has new "prophets" and "scriptures" constantly being created.  Wendy Doniger (see "Purana Perennius") for one is upset that the Hindu "canon" is not closed, and her pungent remarks about the Skanda Purana stem from that.   I'm just pointing out that "secularism" and the separation of religious belief and politics has a very Christian basis.   The Hindu basis for what is legitimate in politics and what should be left out will be rather different.

PS: June 6, 2016 - Justin E.H. Smith in the New York Times makes the same mistake:

The leader of India, Mr. Modi, for example has brought about, through support of the ideology of Hindutva, a political climate in which Indian nationalist academics can claim that airplanes are described in the millenniums-old Vedas without being ridiculed or marginalized.

I note again that it is next to impossible for a candidate to win the Republican nomination in America without proclaiming his/her belief that a man rose from the dead, turned water into wine, and so on;  and there are plenty of professors in American universities who teach so; if anyone tried to ridicule or marginalize such beliefs, they would face a huge political backlash.   But that is normal and unremarkable.   It is only Hindu belief that is abnormal and that must be held to ridicule and marginalization.
 

Evolutionary web

Per this NYTimes story, the human evolutionary tree looks something like this crude drawing - not to scale.  The dotted lines indicate some extent of inter-breeding.  I have added "South Asians" to the narrative as well.  Given that supposedly India has a human genetic diversity rivaled only by that of Africa, and that India remains under-studied, I expect a lot more surprises in the future.

The dotted lines are small perturbations (a few percent of the genome) in each case.  I expect the "tree" of language families and languages to actually have much denser cross-connects in an undiscoverable reality, because the evidence on languages is much less rich than the evidence from genes; even constructing the basic tree for languages is a struggle.

Supreme Follies

Everyone probably has their own list of the worst decisions ever of the US Supreme Court.  My top three can be stated thusly:

1. Slaves are property.
2. Corporations are people.
3. Money is speech.

 A terrible war was fought to overcome the effects of the first ruling.  The last two are insidiously changing the political and economic landscape, to the extent that American democracy may eventually become unsustainable.   They accomplish their effects by making the government increasingly unresponsive to the people.

The story behind Doniger's Scrap Purana

The main excuse for posting this is the story at the end.

Wendy Doniger in "Purana Perennis":

In this world of ever-shifting puranic sands, the Skanda Purana is surely the shiftiest, or perhaps the sandiest, of all. The longest and most sprawling of all the puranas, though it was usually grouped with the Maha -rather than the Upapuranas it was regarded even by the native Indian tradition as a scrap-bag; its name forms a pun to this effect in Tamil, where it is the “scrap” Purana (Kantal-Puranam).(Pg 59)

RS Senthilkumaran on the Rajiv Malhotra egroup:

Kantha-Puranam in Tamil narrates the birth and story of Kantha.  Kantha is another name for Muruga/Karthikeya, the son of Shiva and it's common meaning is "The Beautiful One". If I twist my brain like Wendy then I can infer that she's mixing "Kantha" with "Kanthal" a Tamil word meaning "Torn". Even then it is not same as "Scrap". A torn piece of cloth can be used as scrap cloth in kitchen, but that does not mean Torn = Scrap. And stretching it even further to say Kantha Puranam = Scrap bag is ridiculous.

Even with my basic knowledge on Skanda-Purana, I can tell that there are HUGE differences between Skanda-Purana(Sanskrit) and Kantha-Puranam(Tamil).

Skanda purana is massive and there are so many Khandas and Samhitas that comprise the Sanskrit body of the purana. Its subject matter is diverse.

Kantha puranam is a Tamil work that was inspired by a specific Khanda of a specific Samhita from the Sanskrit version. It is much smaller in size and has a more focused subject matter. All the more reason why it makes no sense why Tamils would call it a scrap bag.

Also, there are many other Tamil literary works like "Kanthar Alangaram", "Kanthar Anubhoothi", "Kantha Sasti kavacham", "Kantha Guru Kavacham" etc. Why would Tamils call all these works as scrap??

In fact the purana about Kantha-puranam, tells us about the rigorous intellectual debates that went behind, before it was accepted as a purana. 

Here's the version:

Katchiappa Shivacharyar was born in Kanchipuram, Tamilnadu in the Kaumaram sect that worships Kantha(Murugan). Once he had a vision in which the Lord asked him to bring his sacred purana to the Tamil people, from the Sanskrit version. HE gave clear instructions on the source material: Shiva-Rahasya Khanda of Shankara Samhita of Skanda Purana. HE also gave the author, the first few Tamil words with which to start the purana (Thigada-sakkara...).

Every day the author would prepare 100 verses and keep it at the feet of Muruga's murthi at Kumarakottam temple at night. The next morning he would find it corrected for grammar and poetic usage of language.

Once he completed his work, Shivacharyar went to the learned assembly of scholars and submitted it for peer-review. To his disappointment, the very first words (incidentally given by Muruga) of the book were rejected by the scholars stating that it contradicted the rules-of-union of words as per Tamil grammar. He went back home dejected to re-work on his product.

The next day, an old scholar (Muruga Himself or someone blessed by Him) appeared in the assembly in defense of the choice of words of Shivacharyar. He provided citations from another Tamil work called Veera-Choliyam (Sandhi chapter, 15th verse) where such grammatical unions were used and were approved by the learned scholars. The assembly was satisfied at that point and the work became published for mass consumption as a purana.

Calling such a purana, a scrap-bag?

One can only say that the quality of American scholarship on India is outstanding.  But may the Beautiful One inspire us as he did Shivacharyar.

Particle Physics to-do list from 2005

Chris Quigg:  (the stuff in italics has answers today)

A Pollockism

Pollock concludes in his essay "Deep Orientalism":

“From its colonial origins in Justice Sir William to its consummation in SS Obersturmführer [a senior rank in the Nazi party] Wüst, Sanskrit and Indian studies have contributed directly to consolidating and sustaining programs of domination. In this (noteworthy orthogenesis) these studies have recapitulated the character of their subject, that indigenous discourse of power for which Sanskrit has been one major vehicle and which has shown a notable longevity and resilience.”

In brief, the Germans learned Sanskrit, and that caused them to be infected with Nazi doctrines, per Pollock. 

Other scholars have remarked that Pollock is remarkably thin on evidence.

To quote Rajiv Malhotra, Reinhold Grünendahl "says Pollock's narrative "is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitisim based largely on trumped-up "evidence"...... He takes up the question of Pollock's attempt to associate Indology with Paul Lagarde (1827-91), a noted German scholar who focused his analysis on Greek, Arabic and Hebrew texts using tools of comparative philology.  Grünendahl says there is no evidence that Lagarde was influenced by Indology or had any association with it.  Lagarde's The Current Tasks of German Politics is supposed to have deeply influenced Hitler.   In it, he called for (a) unification of the German peoples, and (b) relocation of Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine.  During his lifetime, he was seen and celebrated for his knowledge of classical Greek and Hebrew — not anything remotely connected with Sanskrit.  Interestingly, the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia has a detailed entry on Lagarde, with no mention of his association, in any way, to Sanskrit, Indology or India.

The Pollock Postulates

Sheldon Pollock is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University.  (Disclosure: Arvind R. and I were classmates a long time ago; and it has been equally long since I last met him, which is just as well, since I think this university chair is a bad idea.)

Summary of Sheldon Pollock by Surya Kachivuk.

Sheldon Pollock writes, “All Indian learning ... perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.” ... “We ourselves do not "create" knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials [Vedas/Sastras]” and concludes that since “all knowledge is pre-existent”, “progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.” Therefore, “there can be no conception of progress of the forward movement from worse to better, on the basis of innovations in practice”.

“If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a "regress'" a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern [Vedas/Sastras].”

Question: Do Hindus (“traditional Indians”) believe that all knowledge is sourced from Vedas and Sastras?

Sheldon Pollock says so emphatically. In fact, he is convinced sufficiently to write an entire article towards this conclusion titled “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History”. This paper was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Oriental Society in a special issue in honor of Pollock’s teacher, the famous Harvard Indologist, Daniel Ingalls. In that paper,  Pollock draws the damning conclusion that Hindus believe that all knowledge is sourced from Vedas/Sastras and hence failed to make progress in sciences (vyavaharika or this-worldly knowledge) because they saw themselves limited to merely extracting knowledge of the Vedas: theory (rules or “grammars”) of the Vedas always preceded the practice of science. 

The West, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to it and held experimentation and practice as the means to developing knowledge of science.

Summarizing his conclusive views on Indian intellectual history, Pollock writes,“The understanding of the relationship of sastra (‘theory’) to prayoga (‘practical activity’) in Sanskritic culture is shown to be diametrically opposed to that usually found in the West. Theory is held always and necessarily to precede and govern practice; there is no dialectical interaction between them. Two important implications of this fundamental postulate are that all knowledge is pre-existent, and that progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.

Pollock arrives at his thesis as follows:

1. Epistemology of Hindus points all knowledge to be divine in origin as with all of material Universe (Satkaryavada cosmogony); there is no knowledge creation, only uncovering concealed preexisting knowledge. Pollock writes, “First the "creation” of knowledge is presented as an exclusively divine activity and occupies a structural cosmological position suggestive of the creation of the material universe as a whole.

Knowledge, moreover - and again, this is knowledge of every variety from the transcendent sort "whose purposes are uncognizable (adrstartha) to that of social relations, music, medicine (and evidently even historical knowledge) - is by and large viewed as permanently fixed in its dimensions.”

2. Vedas and Sastras are of a divine origin. Moreover, all divine knowledge has been transmitted through and only through Vedas and Sastras. Therefore, all human exploration of knowledge is limited to uncovering concealed knowledge in Vedas and Sastras. Pollock writes, “Knowledge, along with the practices that depend on it,does not change or grow, but is frozen for all time in a given set of texts that are continually made available to human beings in whole or in part during the ever repeated cycles of cosmic creation.”

3. Sastras provided rules (or grammars) to govern many aspects of non-ritualistic human behavior. Grammars of Sastra had a stranglehold on practically all aspects of secular human behavior in traditional India. Pollock writes, “These grammars were, by a process to be discussed, invested with massive authority, ensuring what in many cases seems to have been a nearly unchallengeable claim to normative control of cultural practice.”

4. Even when (vyavaharika) knowledge of this world – such as medical, surgical, ayurvedic, astronomical/astrological, art - was developed in traditional India, Indians viewed such knowledge to be necessarily originating from but concealed in preexisting Vedas/sastras. Pollock writes “All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.”

5. Believing that Vedas are eternal and perfect, and that all knowledge, ideological and of practice, is in the Vedas has limited Hindu minds to Vedas for seeking knowledge and eliminated any change of civilizational progress. Pollock writes, “The eternality of the Vedas, Sastras par excellence, is one presupposition or justification for this assessment of Sastras”. Pollock adds, “From the conception of an a priori sastra it logically follows - and Indian intellectual history demonstrates that this conclusion was clearly drawn - that there can be no conception of progress of the forward movement from worse to better, on the basis of innovations in practice. ... it is clear that in traditional India there were at all events ideological hindrances in its way.

If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a "regress'" a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern.”

Pollock’s conclusion is nothing short of a sweeping judgment on the entire Indian civilization and knowledge development. He summarizes this moribund predicament when he writes,

“Logically excluded from epistemological meaningfulness are likewise experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation. According to his own self-representation, there can be for the thinker no originality of thought, no brand-new insights, notions, perceptions, but only the attempt better and more clearly to grasp and explain the antecedent, always already formulated truth. All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.”

If Sheldon Pollock’s pronouncements are true, Indian civilization amounts to becoming a victim of its own creation by jailing creative minds of generations of intellectuals within the restrictive confines of cultural rules enunciated in Sastras over multiple millennia. This is not only a damning narrative of India’s past, but also a damning foreboding for those who follow tradition in India.

To summarize Pollock, give up your traditions and progress the way of the West or be damned.

 This is a far more sophisticated attack on India than that of Max Muller, who wrote:

The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.

This attack also comes at a time when the Indian anglophone elite has completely lost its way.  There are no Mahatma Gandhis, Rabindranath Tagores, Sri Aurobindos, Ramakrishna Paramahamsas and Swami Vivekanandas any more.   And people like the Murthys of Infosys or the people of the Sringeri Sharada Peetham seem stupidly intent on giving away interpretational authority to the Pollocks of this world.

And this attack comes when to dispute the premises, facts and reasoning behind the attack is to almost automatically to qualify one for the "Hindu fundamentalist" label.

The situation is dire.

One from Manasataramgini

Worth a read:  A note on lost Śaiva centers

Rajiv Malhotra - the Battle for Sanskrit

I just received my copy of Rajiv Malhotra's "The Battle for Sanskrit", and am just upto page 12.  Rajivji writes about his conversation with the person merely designated as "the financial donor", supposedly a fifth generation follower of the Sringeri Peetham. 

My observation, peripheral to the theme of the book is that this person, a major money man in the financial industry, it seems, exhibits such woolly thinking, e.g., that since the truth is unassailable, it doesn't matter if people propagate lies, that one can only wonder how this person made his money.  A lawyer, a physician, a software engineer, an architect, a scientist can never be successful with a mind with such poor quality of thought.   If people such as this donor can amass a fortune in the financial industry, it simply reinforces the impression that it cannot be honest work and these must be dens of crooks.  If not law-breaking,  it must be low animal cunning.   Moreover, the enormous power that their money gives them makes these people dangerous to everyone around them.  Even more so in modern capitalist society that valorizes the "money maker".

What passes for political discourse

Many of Professor Krugman's readers of his column and blog at the New York Times are upset with him.  It boils down to this (taken from a reader's comment):

The arguments keep changing with the new ones contradicting the old ones, but the aim stays fixed: to tar Sanders

• He is not popular
• Wait, he is popular but he is not serious
• He is serious but is not electable!
• Ok, he polls stronger against Trump and wins with Cruz (unlike Hillary!) but 4 "wonks" I hang out with think Hillary is more electable.
• He has no concrete plans
• He has concrete plans but cannot carry them out
• Policy proposals of his economist are crazy, say 4 guys working for Hillary citing no numbers
• OK, the economist in question actually supports Hillary not Sanders and better macroeconomists than me say his numbers add up, but Sanders' supporters are mean
• He is mean to point out that Hillary gorges on Wall St money
• I think Sanders also takes contributions! No? Never mind, his supporters are so mean
• Obamacare is great but single payer would be better
• Now that Hillary says single payer will never happen and Sanders proposes it, single payer is crazy
• Some health care VSP who worked for Hillary assumed crazy numbers and proved Sanders wrong
• OK, his analysis was debunked by health policy professors, but Sanders' supporters are just too mean to listen to us wonks.

As I recall it, for months, Krugman's readers were asking for commentary on Bernie Sanders, but none were forthcoming.  Until Sanders starting posing a serious threat to Hillary Clinton.  Then there was a whole series of posts, deriding Sanders' supporters as "Bernie bros", and essentially terming them deluded for supporting Sanders.  Krugman then cited other economists, who it turns out, didn't really do their homework.  Krugman, famously a wonk, did not explain whether the premises behind Sanders' programs are flawed, or whether the reasoning leading to the results was flawed; he simply targeted the rosy projections as absurd.  As they may be.  But the sequence above that Krugman is seen to have gone through does not aid his credibility.

The US was on a particular trajectory of economic growth till 2008; and then the financial crisis hit, and since then the US is on a lower trajectory.  This is the famous "output gap".   The economists who are positive about Sanders' plans essentially believe that it is possible to get back to the previous trajectory,  to close the output gap,  and that is where their rosy numbers come from.  Only now is there some substantial argument that, sorry, that is impossible.  And sorry to say, that did not come from Krugman, who gave us only the big sneer.  Great economist though he is, I think he has jumped the shark. 

PS: see this.

Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti - commentary by Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst's "Pluralism in Ilā’s city" which is a commentary on Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti is, I suggest, well worth your time.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physical Insight

Physicist Lee Smolin has an interesting pre-print in the History and Philosophy of Physics section of arxiv.org : "Lessons from Einstein's 1915 discovery of general relativity".  ( If one has read books at the level of Penrose's popular works, this paper should be quite comprehensible.)

Smolin argues, that contrary to the myth created by Einstein himself, it was not beautiful mathematics that led Einstein to his theory of general relativity.  Historians of physics have gone through Einstein's notebooks, and what they shared with Smolin led him to this:

I had a very happy day about fifteen years ago when I visited Jurgen Renn in Berlin and he showed me images of the notebooks in which Einstein had created general relativity. What impressed me was that Einstein was using the same techniques all physicists use to grasp the essential features of a phenomena they want to model. These are the development of approximate expressions, together with theplayful creation of simple examples and models. These are the tools every physicist is taught, which they employ throughout their career, first, to do their homework and, later, to make progress in their research.

The mathematics Einstein used may appear beautiful to some who study it, but what is going on in Einstein’s notebooks was not beautiful. It was hardheaded and pragmatic.  When you dine at a fancy restaurant you may be impressed by the aesthetic presentation of a dish as it is brought to the table. But this is only the last step, just as the freshness of the ingredients as they come from the farm is only the first step. In between, hidden in the kitchen, it is all just hard, practical work. Mistakes are made, but these, ideally, never leave the kitchen. In Einstein’s kitchen—his notebooks it was no different.

It was Einstein's physical insight and intuition that gave him his greatest successes, and when he had no new insights and relied on the beauty of mathematics, as in his futile quest for a unified theory, he got absolutely nowhere. 

Smolin draws the lesson:

The lesson is that the task of formulating a physical principle must come first—only when we have one in hand do we have a basis to look for new mathematics to express the new principle.

The physical principles "that Einstein invented such as the principle of equivalence and the principle of the relativity of inertial frames"..."are directly about nature."

They constrain, and can be falsified by, individual experiments. They require no mathematics to express them: their contents can be entirely captured in a verbal description of an experiment. Historians talk of “thought experiments”, but in fact the principles invented by the young Einstein referred to genuinely doable experiments.

All very good, but then Smolin goes on to propose that background independence ("...the laws of nature should be statable in a form that does not rely on the specification of a fixed geometry of spacetime") might be one such physical principle. Here, I'm lost. This seems to me to be a statement the real content of which can only be expressed in mathematics. I'm hard-pressed to think of genuinely doable experiments that test this principle.

Smolin weighs in on the holography principle: "This says that a model world with gravity can be described as if it were a world without gravity, with one fewer dimension, where that surface theory has one degree of freedom per Planck area", and says that this principle does not have the physical content of the principles of relativity and equivalence, and cannot be tested in single experiment.

So color me puzzled. But it suits my particular inclination that physics proceeds with physical insight, not with mathematics. Of course, if we're stuck with no unexplained anomalous observations or experimental results, and we have no good physical principle, then we can only pay attention to the mathematics, and hope that it leads to something. The history of the last forty years of particle physics is that this is a slender straw to cling to.

Climate disorders

New York City just had its warmest Christmas Day (66°F) on record, and likely will have its coldest Valentine's Day on record tomorrow.   (The current record is 2°F in 1916.)

The Legal Meaning of "Hindu"

India is a country with "religious" personal (civil) laws.  Its Constitution, adopted in 1947, when the so-called "Hindu Right" was a tiny political minority,  has a directive principle, which states that the State will strive to have a Uniform Civil Code, but apart from the so-called "Hindu Right",  nobody wants to get there.

So, e.g., to govern marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc., there is a Muslim Personal Law, a Christian Personal Law, a Parsi Personal Law and a Hindu Personal Law. The question always arises, to who does the Hindu Personal Law apply?

The Constitution does not really go into this. However, specific legislation does, so e.g., to borrow from Koenraad Elst:

The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 goes in greater detail to define this "legal Hindu", by stipulating in Section 2 that the Act applies:

(a) to any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms and developments, including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj,

(b) to any person who is a Buddhist, Jain or Sikh by religion, and

(c) to any other person domiciled in the territories to which this Act extends who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew by religion

This is a legal definition.  How it should be related to cultural realities is yet to be determined.

Why is it possible to legally determine who a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew is?  Because each of these has a definite creed, a definite Holy Book, definite Prophets and so on.

In fact, in "secular" India, the government can interfere with Hindu institutions, such as Hindu temples or schools; but are constitutionally barred from interfering with non-Hindu institutions. So back iwhen the communist government of West Bengal was giving the Ramakrishna Mission a hard time, the Ramakrishna Mission moved the courts that it is not a Hindu institution.

The Supreme Court in its ruling, way back in 1995 stated:

When we think of the Hindu religion, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to define Hindu religion or even adequately describe it. Unlike other religions in the world, the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one God; it does not subscribe to any one dogma; it does not believe in any one philosophic concept; it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances; in fact, it does not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion of creed. It may broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more.  Confronted by this difficulty, Dr. Radhakrishnan realized that ` to many Hinduism seems to be a name without any content. Is it a museum of beliefs, a medley or rites, or a mere map, a geographical expression [The Hindu View of Life by Dr. Radhakrishnan, p.11]]

(Dr. Radhakrishnan was the first Vice President and the second President of independent India.)

and therefore, with this reasoning

In the result we dismiss these appeals, however by setting aside the holding of the learned single Judge in the Writ Petition that Ramakrishna religion being a religion distinct and separate from Hindu Religion was a minority in West Bengal based on religion, entitled to protection under Article 30 (1) of the constitution of India as upheld by the Division Bench of the High Court in its judgment deciding the appeals before it and also by setting aside the holding of the Division Bench of the High Court that Ramakrishna Mission as a religious denomination was entitled to establish and maintain institutions of general education under Article 26 (a) of the Constitution of India as those established and maintained for a charitable purpose. 

PS: one might, based on behavior observed from a distant ship, think that sharks and dolphins are the same, e.g. when they swim at the surface with their dorsal fin sticking above the surface.  Having analogous behavior does not make them the same, one has to look deeper into the structure.  Casting the Indic traditions as religion is akin to someone who only knows sharks, insisting that dolphins are sharks, and throws into doubt whether the someone understands even sharks.

We have no religion

Professor Roddam Narasimha (a Caltecher, by the way) points out that the Kannada word that is used for "religion" in the "what is your religion?" question is "mat" (Devanagari: मत ) which is the same word for the vote. "Mat" means "opinion" or "view".  Anyone who tells you religion is just an opinion or a view, analogous to a vote is simply wrong.  "Religion", even after a millenium of exposure to Islam,  and centuries of exposure to Christianity, simply is not a native Indian concept.

With that,  perhaps this description Kalavai Venkat gives of himself, "a Silicon Valley-based writer, an atheist, a practicing orthodox Hindu" might become a little closer to comprehensible to those from the Western cultures grounded in religion.

How Free Speech Actually Works

Begin at 12:08, for how free speech actually works.  Rajiv Malhotra takes on American academic Sheldon Pollock and the response is to try to stop the publication of his book through "informal" methods.  However, when someone moves the court (e.g., with respect to Doniger's book) that is gross intolerance.

Artificial Intelligence is not yet ready to take over the world

Per Yoshio Bengio, the fears that Artificial Intelligence is on the threshold of taking over the world are misplaced.

I'd also add that a real AI, if asked to take over the world, will probably politely decline.

R1a1: Z93 and Z280

An intriguing paper by G. Lucotte:

In the present study we have extended the field of detection of haplotype XI/haplogroup R1a subject to other countries previously uncovered in our preceding articles [9,10]: these countries are mainly Northern Europe, Georgia and Armenia, Near/Middle East, North-Africa, Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. We found high haplotype XI frequencies values in Afghanistan (18.4%), in Iran (26.5%), in Pakistan (28% and 30.4%) and in India; in this last sub-continent, the maximal value of 61.3% was found in Punjab.

We have refound in our samples the clear distinction initially established by Pamjav et al. [21] between Indian Z93 populations and European Z280 populations: all our South Asian populations are Z93, while almost all our European populations are Z280. Datations show that the Z93 Pakistan Indian group is the most ancient (about 15.5 K years); in Europe, the Eastern populations are the most ancient (about 12.5 K years) and the Northern ones the most recent (about 6.9 Kyears).

Like a whole lot of other genetics papers, I am told it puts paid to the idea that there was a significant Y-chromosome influx into India 4.5 Kyears ago (which supposedly introduced Indo-European languages to India).

Some stronger conclusions are derived here.

When you see papers like this one, I have been told (I haven't read that one myself) that: "this paper takes only the Z280 and M458 marker found only in Europe and leaves out the much older Z93 branch".

PS: the reason for associating R1a genetics with Indo-European linguistics is, IMO, motivated by the prevailing theories of linguistic history and prehistory.   This map, from the Lucotte paper, which would seem to show some correlation between presence of R1a with the extent of the Indo-European language family, is an example.

PS:  I venture that the linguists see an Indo-European language tree because of the extremely low resolution of the linguistic data that they have, e.g., from a previous post of mine, even the human evolutionary tree is not a tree; and this is visible because of the very high resolution that DNA affords.  For languages, if we really had century-by-century evidence of the form languages took, we would deduce a dense network of cross-connections, so much so that the tree would vanish.