Americans on Amphetamines

 How the first amphetamine epidemic came about (emphasis added):

From 2008:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/
America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971
Am J Public Health. 2008 June; 98(6): 974–985.

The first amphetamine epidemic was iatrogenic, created by the pharmaceutical industry and (mostly) well-meaning prescribers. The current amphetamine resurgence began through a combination of recreational drug fashion cycles and increased illicit supply since the late 1980s. On the basis of treatment admissions data, methamphetamine abuse doubled in the United States from 1983 to 1988, doubled again between 1988 and 1992, and then quintupled from 1992 to 2002. According to usage surveys, during 2004, some 3 million Americans consumed amphetamine-type stimulants of all kinds nonmedically, twice the number of a decade earlier. As noted, 250000 to 350000 of them were addicted. Thus, in terms of absolute numbers, the current epidemic has now reached approximately the same extent and severity as that of the original epidemic at its peak in 1970, when there were roughly 3.8 million past-year nonmedical amphetamine users, about 320 000 of whom were addicted. (Of course, the national population then was about 200 million compared with 300 million today, meaning that in relative terms today’s epidemic is only two thirds as extensive.)

Another striking similarity between present and past epidemics relates to the role of pharmaceutical amphetamines. Although illicitly manufactured methamphetamine launched the current epidemic, in step with rising amphetamine abuse in recent years, the United States has seen a surge in the legal supply and use of amphetamine-type attention deficit medications, such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (amphetamine). American physicians, much more than those in other countries, apparently are again finding it difficult to resist prescribing stimulants that patients and parents consider necessary, or at least helpful, in their struggle with everyday duties. According to DEA production data, since 1995, medical consumption of these drugs has more than quintupled, and in 2005, for the first time exceeded amphetamine consumption for medical use at the epidemic’s original peak: 2.5 billion 10-mg amphetamine base units in 1969 vs 2.6 billion comparable units in 2005. Thus, just as the absolute prevalence of amphetamine abuse and dependency have now reached levels matching the original epidemic’s peak, so has the supply of medical amphetamines.

...

(Of course, the national population then was about 200 million compared with 300 million today, meaning that in relative terms today’s epidemic is only two thirds as extensive.)

and (emphasis added)

Besides iatrogenic dependence and diversion to nonmedical users, there is another way that widespread prescription of amphetamine-type stimulants can contribute to an amphetamine epidemic. When a drug is treated not only as a legal medicine but as a virtually harmless one, it is difficult to make a convincing case that the same drug is terribly harmful if used nonmedically. This is what happened in the 1960s and is presumably happening today. Thus, to end their rampant abuse, amphetamines had to be made strictly controlled substances and their prescription sharply curtailed. Today, amphetamines are widely accepted as safe even for small children, and this return of medical normalization inevitably undermines public health efforts to limit amphetamine abuse. We have not yet reached the point where up to 90% of the amphetamines sold on the street are products of US pharmaceutical firms, as the federal narcotics chief reluctantly admitted before Congress in 1970. But with half the nation’s nonmedical users evidently consuming pharmaceutical amphetamines only, the comments made by Senator Thomas Dodd in those hearings echo strongly today. America’s drug problems were no accidental development, Dodd observed; the pharmaceutical industry’s “multihundred million dollar advertising budgets, frequently the most costly ingredient in the price of a pill, have pill by pill, led, coaxed and seduced post–World War II generations into the ‘freaked out’ drug culture” plaguing the nation. Any effort to deal harshly with methamphetamine users today in the name of epidemic control, without touching medical stimulant production and prescription, is as impossible practically as in 1970—and given historical experience, even more hypocritical.

We have seen a similar opioid epidemic created in a similar way; and opioids are a gateway to heroin. 

Obviously, criminalization is not a solution, but medical normalization, removal of tight regulations, and making it socially acceptable (e.g., the way alcohol is) is not going to help either.  It is not clear to me why society cannot find getting intoxicated/getting high as socially unacceptable as body odor or even perspiration.

Not learning from history: legalization of drugs

History doesn't provide any comfort about the legalization of drugs. Per Alan Schwarz in ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma and the Making of an American Epidemic, in the 1960s:

Dexedrine had become perhaps the most widely abused drug in the United States—more than hippies' marijuana, more than Timothy Leary's LSD, more than the heroin that would soon kill Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. In the 1960s, doctors prescribed amphetamines so willingly—for weight loss, depression, all but hangnails—that an estimated four billion tablets were dispensed by American pharmacies per year, or enough for every man, woman and child in the United States to have twenty apiece.

The United States military handed out Dexedrine so freely that an estimated 7 percent of its Vietnam forces became abusers and addicts. About eight hundred thousand Americans were dependent on amphetamines, about three hundred thousand of them flat-out addicted—and many of them average housewives. These addicts weren't the young beatniks and hippies so reviled by the establishment; they were, in many cases, the establishment itself.

There was talk in about banning amphetamines in the United States altogether, its medical uses be damned. Instead the federal Controlled Substances Act placed unprecedented restrictions on the handling of addictive pharmaceuticals like Dexedrine and Ritalin. Prescribers were now required to maintain a special government license, fill out much more paperwork, and prescribe no more than a thirty-day supply at a time. Drug companies could not produce such medications in quantities higher than the government deemed clinically necessary.

It was the ultimate buzzkill. US production of amphetamine plummeted an astonishing 90 percent in only a few years. Stimulants could no longer be handed out as mere pick-me-ups for tired professionals, but only for narcolepsy or short-term weight loss. And for a children's malady just now hitting America's living rooms: minimal brain dysfunction.

Minimal brain dysfunction is simply the old name for Attention Deficity Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The author says it is a real malady, but where about only 5% of children are actually affected by ADHD, about 15% are diagnosed with ADHD, leading to a massive over-prescription of drugs. Why?  There are simply too many perverse incentives in the system.

I expect there is a similar story behind opioids and their widespread abuse today; and in a few years, I expect the states busy legalizing pot, whether for medical purposes only or more comprehensively, will have similar findings.

FYI: alcohol use is a leading cause of death in the USA and in the world; but in the USA the deaths due to alcohol are parceled up among many different buckets to disguise that fact.  While Daniel J. Levitin's very timely book A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age does not mention this example, it does mention the template of this lie. Levitin calls it "specious subdividing".

Suppose you work for a manufacturer of air purifies, and you're on a campaign to prove respiratory disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, overwhelming other causes like heart disease and cancer. 

 But respiratory disease is only the third leading cause of death, and doesn't make for an impressive ad campaign.  So subdivide heart disease into categories like rheumatic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, acute myocardial infarction, and so on, and likewise with the various cancers.

By failing to amalgamate, and creating these fine subdivisions, you've done it! Chronic lower respiratory disease becomes the number one killer.  You've just earned yourself a bonus.

 

Hurricane Matthew

The forecasts are highly uncertain, but since they look highly unusual (from tropicaltidbits.com) to my eye, here they are.  This hurricane could possibly go around in a complete circle and hit Florida twice.

PCA, Neighbor-joining

This is from the 2016 Reich paper:

 The pink dots at the top of the PCA diagram are "West Eurasia".  The green dots down the side are "South Asia".  The blue dots further below are East Asia/C.A.S., clustered along with the dots for Amerindians.

The PCA diagram would lead you to believe that the green and pink are more closely related than the green and blue.   But the first two principal eigenvectors account for only 7.8% and 4.0% of the variance.   The remaining 88% of the variance is in dimensions not shown in the diagram.  It is a very high dimensional space, and perhaps the normal intuitions of distance do not apply, and that is why we see the counter-intuitive result that the group of green dots is closer connected to each other by neighbor-joining rather than some green dots being put close to some pink dots, and other green dots being put close to some blue dots.  The spread of green dots along PC2 does not preclude them from being closer to each other than to any other pink dot (the Tajik being the exception). Likewise the wide spread of the blue dots along PC2 does not preclude them from joining in one group; and finally, the green and blue join together before the green joins with the pink. 

The PCA in the 2009 Reich paper does not present how much of the variance is captured in their first two principal eigenvectors, as far as I can tell.

ANI, ASI, etc.

CIP wrote in the comments to the previous post about the 2016 Reich paper:

This is in accord with the conventional view that Europeans and Asians probably separated after leaving Africa in the Middle East. East Asians then separated from South Asians in India and Amerindians and related groups separated from East Asians much later.

Guest wrote in the comments about the 2009 Reich paper:

One, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other. By introducing methods that can estimate ancestry without accurate ancestral populations, we show that ANI ancestry ranges from 39–71% in most Indian groups, and is higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. Groups with only ASI ancestry may no longer exist in mainland India. However, the indigenous Andaman Islanders are unique in being ASI-related groups without ANI ancestry.

Guest wrote this in another comment:

You are confusing the ANI and Indians who currently live in the North. All Indians studied in the Reich paper (except Andamese) are mixtures of ANI and ASI, and consequently more related to each other than to outside groups like West Eurasians. The two papers are quite consistent, and David Reich is an author on both papers.

My response:

New indications on the peopling of India

The NYT reports:

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

The three teams are led by Eske Willersley of the University of Copenhagen (A genomic history of aboriginal Australia), David Reich of Harvard University (The Simons Genetic Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations), and Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Biocentre (Genomic analyses inform on migration events during the peopling of Eurasia).

Unfortunately all the articles are behind a paywall, and a visit to the nearby university library is not in the plan for now.  The article with the most to do about anything Indian is the Reich article.

Some observations follow.

Towards a sustainable economy

It should be fairly obvious that fisheries and timber industries cannot grow indefinitely.  They have a natural limit which is the renewal rate of the underling resources.  

It may be somewhat less obvious, but manufacturing on the planet as a whole also similarly has a natural limit.  About the only thing you can do here is replace lower value manufactures with higher value ones.  But the planet's ecosystem can sustain only so much manufacturing.   One could have manufacturing in space, and thus keep growing.   But that won't generate a lot of employment for humans on earth.

The obsession with manufacturing jobs is misplaced. Services - what humans do for each other - however are sustainable, can employ any number of people.  If the human touch is of value, then these can only be assisted but not replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.   The question then is - how to make human services more valuable?

Purna Swadeshi?

Our chromosomes are mostly shuffled versions of both of our parents' chromosomes. The two exceptions of unshuffled genes are those from the mitochondria, which are inherited from the mother only, and for men, the Y chromosome, that is from the father only.   Therefore, these two enable some tracing of deep ancestry, of my mother's mother's mother's ... and father's father's father's father's.... sometimes back to when homo sapiens first left Africa.

Note that my mother's father could have been from Mars, and my father's mother could have been from Venus, it won't show up in this particular set of DNA markers.

Per 23andme.com, a genetic testing company:

Paternal haplogroups are families of Y chromosomes that all trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time. By looking at the geographic distribution of these related lineages, we learn how our ancient male ancestors migrated throughout the world.

My paternal haplogroup is H1a*.  Its estimated modern distribution is shown in the map below.

Origin: Haplogroup H arose in India between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, likely in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Today it reaches levels of up to 90% among some isolated tribal populations on the subcontinent. H is also found in regions that have historical ties to India, such as Bali and Cambodia, and the Roma, or Gypsies.

Highlight: Today, haplogroup H is most common in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

 

My maternal haplogroup is M37e.

Origin: Haplogroup M is one of two branches on the mitochondrial DNA tree that arose about 60,000 years ago, soon after humans first expanded out of Africa. Because of its deep roots it is widespread in southern and eastern Asia, and its branches extend into North America as well.

Highlight: Haplogroup M spread from Africa to southeastern Asia in a few millennia.

The estimated modern distribution of haplogroup M is shown in the map below.

This map from the National Geographic,  shows roughly the route humans took out of Africa, of the order of 100,000 years ago.

This map, from Wiki, places haplogroup M in perspective.

I surmise from all this that my ultimate maternal grandmother as far as it can be traced, was in India some 60,000 years ago.

Keeping in mind what I wrote about possible ancestors from Venus and Mars above, do I qualify as purna swadeshi? If recombination analysis of the rest of my genes show an Indian origin in the deep past, does that qualify me as an Adivasi? Or does alleged Sanskritization in my deep past disqualify me?

(Wiki): Adivasi (Hindi: आदिवासी, IPA: [aːd̪ɪˈʋaːsi]) is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups considered the aboriginal population of South Asia.

 

To fly-everywhere vacationers that worry about climate change

To the type of tourist who flies all over the world, and then laments climate change, you had better have a lot of carbon offsets. Know this, to keep the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from increasing, there is a per capita per year carbon allowance, it is somewhere between 1 and 2 tons per person per year.   Just one long distance plane flight for a person already exceeds that allowance. 

It is ironic that to save the world we will need to avoid long distance visits (or else, find carbon offsets).

Photography: DSLR versus smartphone

As someone upgrading from Canon's 5D2 DSLR to its latest and greatest 5D4, it behooves me to think about whether I'm spending my money wisely.

The truth is that smartphone cameras are indeed very good. Arstechnica has a good recent shootout.  Their conclusion:

Ultimately, the winner here is the smartphone, not the DSLR. The DSLR triumphs technically, and it will produce better images under almost any circumstance, but it’s just hella hard to stack it against the iPhone’s portability and "good enough"-ness.

Is the smartphone better? No. The DSLR and its lenses, even in my unskilled hands, produce higher-quality images, period. They’re higher resolution, and they contain more detail. It’s impossible for the iPhone’s little 8.5mm-ish sensor to grab as many photons as the DSLR’s big 35mm full-frame sensor. The DSLR wins every time, and the iPhone’s output, while good, isn’t as good.

But that’s the thing: the smartphone may not produce the same massive, high-detail 22MP images as the full-frame DSLR, but the smartphone does manage to be good enough.

Remember also that it matters on what medium you are going to display your photographs.  The difference in quality between DSLR and smartphone cameras is less perceptible in typical web-sized photograph or on a tiny screen,  but will be visible on a large screen or in a large print.

From my perspective, it is not an "either-or" situation, the smartphone camera and DSLR are two different tools and my purposes are best met by having both.  There are pictures a DSLR will never take because it wasn't possible to carry it to the scene; and there are pictures a smartphone is simply incapable of taking.

Cixin Liu: The Dark Forest and The Three Body Problem

The first two books of Cixin Liu's trilogy, translated from the Chinese: The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest are excellent science fiction, and I look forward to the final book Death's End that is due for release in a couple of weeks.

Reviews likely contain spoilers, so avoid them if you plan on reading the books. After reading the pair of books, I've read a few of the reviews that show up in the first page of Google search, and generally agree with them, so I won't burden the world with yet another review.  What to expect from the books, though?  The general portrayal of characters is weak, like in Asimov's early fiction, but the science fiction imagination on display is absolutely top-notch.  The author has to bend a little some well-known physics to make his plot work, but unless you are an insufferable purist, it shouldn't matter.   The Dark Forest sufficiently closes out the story that I don't feel compelled to read the third book to get closure, but rather to see what further worlds of imagination the author creates.

How to interpret the weather forecast

Someone wrote: "When a weather forecaster tells me the probability of rain tomorrow is 50%, I translate it as “I don’t know.”"

I translate the weather forecaster as saying "Out of a 100 days where the forecast is 50% probability of rain, it rains on 50 of them".

Is this the same as "I don't know"?

Some possibly relevant information:  where I live it rains on the average on 117 days of the year.   In Arizona, it rains on the average on 36 days of the year.  Honolulu, Hawaii has rain on 154 days of the year.

With the above examples, I think the forecast of "the probability of rain tomorrow is 50%" is the closest to "I don't know" in Honolulu, and the furthest away from "I don't know" in Arizona.   I haven't done any Bayesian calculations or anything, just working from intuition.

What do you think?

Vedic Deities are indwelling.

The idea that Indra, Agni, etc.,  the thirty-three crore (1 crore = 10 million) devatas are indwelling powers I first heard from Dadaji Pandurang Shastri Athavale.  Dr. Nicolas Kazanas now writes on the same theme:

However, there is a vast difference between the Vedic conception of deities and other traditions including Buddhist, Christian etc, and even Hindu. This difference is hardly ever mentioned and when it is mentioned, as by Edgerton, it is hardly given much value. Vedic deities are forces within man. Yes, of course they are deities outside, all around, natural forces on earth, in the atmosphere and the sky, (the earth itself with its fecundity, waters, rain, air, sun, moon etc); there are also gods of morality like Varuṇa, Mitra and Bṛhaspati. But, as the Atharvavedic hymn 11.8.32 says, Man is the brahman and all devatā (deities, gods) reside in him as cattle in a pen!

....

But the internalisation of the deities had already appeared in the RV. Agni, the Firegod, is said to be set within man’s heart hṛ́daya āhitá and, so, is the constant light of all inspiration, in the early hymn 6.9.6 of the Bharadvāja clan. This luminous power is perceived through mind mánasā nicay – (3.26.1) and itself as mental force manas is the fastest of all entities that fly (6.9.5). Indra too is internalised identifying himself with sages Manu, Kakṣivan and Uśanās (4.26.1) and his state may be attained by men, though not by deeds or sacrificial rites (8.70.3). Then, human functions like foresight and vigour are deified in 1.53.5 as devī prámati and devī táviṣī respectively.

.....

However, I do acknowledge that probably most people in the Vedic age regarded deities as external, imperceptible superhuman Powers that should be worshipped, placated and invoked for favours. Thus, from the very earliest hymns (Maṇḍalas 3, 6, 7) some people or clans, and certainly some rishis, knew that “deities” were not mere Powers of natural phenomena but also forces-functions within man. 

Foreboding

India was the "America" of the first thousand years of the common era.  India was prosperous for its time; more than 30% of world output was in India.  Indian goods were valued highly even in far-away Europe.  People fleeing religious persecution, Zoroastrians, Jews, "heretic" sects of Islam, all found a friendly refuge in India with the freedom to follow their religious traditions.   People from Southeast Asia, China, Japan came to India to study; and carried Indian influence back with them, so that the Buddha, the Vedic Indra,  Saraswati, and Ganesha all still have living traces in these lands.

But around 1000 AD, the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni inaugurated a dreadful period of Indian history, where more was destroyed than created.  Mahmud himself reveled in the demolition of Mathura, which by his own estimate, would have taken two hundred years of labor to build.  And worse was to follow.

When one asks why a vibrant civilization fell prey to savage destructive warriors, it was because the people of that era could not bury their parochial differences and rivalries even in the face of that which would annihilate them.  So instead, they were picked off one by one and India became "a wounded civilization".  

Observing the American political scene today, it seems pretty much the same.  The political divisions are not anymore debatable policy differences on how to deal with ISIS, climate change, unsafe financial institutions,  economic growth,  mass incarceration, the crisis of drug addiction and such.  Policy debates, however heated, tend to produce solutions.   Instead today politics seems more like petty grudge matches.  NJ Governor Chris Christie's BridgeGate, where his officials created artificial traffic jams to punish a mayor who didn't endorse him, is an archetype.   In such circumstances, this Republic won't endure.

When will SUSY be wrong?

High energy particle physics theorists are disappointed and even dismayed that the Large Hadron Collider has shown up nothing beyond the Standard Model Higgs.  Their favorite "Beyond Standard Model" physics, based on an idea called supersymmetry (SUSY) has not shown even a tiny hint of existing.  Over on "Not Even Wrong", Peter Woit asked "“Is there any forseeable experimental data that would cause you to decide that SUSY was an idea that should be abandoned?”

Urs Schreiber gave a logical answer as to why physicists might think SUSY is relevant to physics - not just in a technical sense where it can make some computations tractable - but as a part of reality.  You can follow the link (or see below the fold).

So, I thought that Woit's question was answered.  Nothing but a mathematical theorem with a proof will serve to end the SUSY quest.  Namely, something like:

"Nature chose to have an ordinary group act on the supermanifold" because:

1. Using a supergroup on the supermanifold implies a necessary feature in the low energy theory that our observed low energy world lacks;  or

2. Our low energy world has an observed feature that the use of a supergroup on the supermanifold cannot reproduce; or else,

3. Using a supergroup on a supermanifold produces a high-energy theory that fails for some reason (without even considering the low energy world).

Since the question is: “Is there any foreseeable experimental data that would cause you to decide that SUSY was an idea that should be abandoned?”", (3.) above need not concern us here.  The Higgs as detected by the LHC, with nothing super- accompanying it, does not quite fall into either 1. or 2. without additional assumptions.

Therefore the SUSY search will continue.

Woit didn't like that answer and deleted it.

On a side note, Charles Darwin, around the time of spelling out his theory of evolution, also wrote: "It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life-- one might as well think of the origin of matter."  This is because he knew that the problem of the origin of life was well beyond the reach of the science of his time.  Particle physics theorists, however, have believed for about forty years that a complete description of fundamental physics is within their grasp.  Nature has proven to be rather elusive.

Hint of Rakhigarhi DNA news to come

The Times of India reports:

Scientists are anxiously awaiting complete re sults of the DNA tests of samples taken from Rakhigarhi. "We took DNA samples from skeletons recovered from the archeological dig as well as residents of Rakhigarhi village of today. The initial results have thrown up scientific evidence proving that even as the civilization faded away , some people adapted to the changes and continued to live here," the official added, requesting anonymity as the full results of the research project are not out yet.

Tying shoe laces

In each case, the link leads to a video that shows something that I did not know about tying shoe laces.

1. How to tie your shoes.

2. Running shoes.

Rakhigarhi DNA news

Via the Indian Express:

“We have found what has not been found at any other Harappan excavation site before — a DNA extraction from the skeletal remains,” says Shinde, describing it as one of the biggest breakthroughs in Harappan research, “The important aspect that we are working, on which has never been done before, is the facial reconstruction of the Harappan people. The South Koreans have developed a software in which if we feed the DNA data along with the morphological features, like measurements of bones, it can help us reconstruct the face. For the first time, we will be able to see what Harappans looked like, the colour of their skin, their eyes and so on.”

The lab in Seoul has sent the reports of the tests, but Shinde says they can’t be made public yet. He, along with his team, have tied up with top universities for cross-verification of the data. “Their experts will come down to Hyderabad in July and confirm the data and reports that we have received. Once that is done, we will apply for the data to be published in a world-reputed journal and only after that will we reveal it to the media and rest of the world,” he says.

Science?

The nerdy/geeky types have two obsessions - intelligence, and their self-perceived lack of social skills.  It is therefore a common theme with them that they have self-diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorders; that autism is also somehow correlated with high intelligence; and that many great minds of the past had some or other Autism Spectrum Disorder. This somehow is very comforting to them.

Then there are the conservative anti-government types, who want to find a genetic basis (and so supposedly immutable) for difference in intelligence - and intelligence to them is a one-dimensional IQ score; they pay lip service only to the idea that intelligence is multi-dimensional, such as Howard Gardner's musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic dimensions. All achievement in life is highly correlated to this IQ according to these theorists. The idea is that immutable genetic differences make all government programs to help the less intelligent poor quite pointless.

Some of these themes come together in this recent paper:
Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence

The abstract begins (emphasis added):

A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating.

For the highlighted part, e.g.,
Compared to What? Early Brain Overgrowth in Autism and the Perils of Population Norms

Elsewhere in the paper we see this:

However, a suite of recent studies, described in more detail below, has demonstrated that alleles “for” autism, that is, common alleles that each contributes slightly to its risk, overlap substantially and significantly with alleles “for” high intelligence (Bulik-Sullivan et al., 2015; Clarke et al., 2015; Hill et al., 2015; Hagenaars et al., 2016). To a notable, and well-replicated, degree, then, many “autism” alleles are “high intelligence” alleles. How can these paradoxical observations be reconciled?

When I chase the citations, I go, oh really? If I find the enthusiasm, then you might see more about it here.

"Archaeological and genetic insights into the origins of domesticated rice"

Warning: the publications in my last series of posts was obtained by "cites" or "cited by", so there is a selection bias.  Not being an expert, I cannot provide the nuance and balance that might be necessary to interpret these publications.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/17/6190.full.pdf
Archaeological and genetic insights into the origins of domesticated rice
Briana L. Gross and Zhijun Zhao

(emphasis added)
Excerpt:

India. The prehistory of indica and japonica in India presents one of the more interesting stories of domestication, long distance spread, and subsequent interactions of cultivars within a single genus of plants. Both O. rufipogon and another close wild relative, Oryza nivara, are native to India and well distributed there today, and probably were present since the Pleistocene (46). The country has a number of long archaeological sequences with good plant records including those in the Ganges River valley in the north where rice, likely wild O. rufipogon and O. nivara, is documented by 9000 BP (46,47). It is now recognized that the Indian subcontinent was probably an independent center of agricultural origins with important regions in the Ganges plain and to the south on the Deccan Plateau. Native plants that were cultivated or domesticated before crops were introduced from elsewhere include mung bean and small-seeded grasses, among others (47). The question of an origin of indica rice in India has been under active discussion, and recent research has done much to clarify and resolve the issue. It now appears that an independent origin of cultivation of ancestral indica or proto-indica rice took place in the Ganges plains, but that the plant was completely domesticated only when domesticated japonica arrived from China and hybridized with it about 4,000y ago (47). Indica consumption began early, by 8400 BP, and the plant was cultivated and appears to have been a staple food by 5000 BP (47).

"The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers?"

The (Barker 2006) reference found in the excerpt that I previously posted,  of "Cultural and Demic Diffusion of First Farmers, Herders, and their Innovations Across Eurasia" 

Our own simulations for the Indian subcontinent showed that the connection from the Indus region to the Levante was only established after the transition to agropastoralism (Lemmen and Khan 2012), consistent with the wheat/rice barrier identified by (Barker 2006).

is:
The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers? 1st Edition, by Graeme Barker

Large sections of the book are readable on amazon.com. I'm breaking my discipline by posting something without reading the whole book, but these, from the conclusion of chapter 5, Central and South Asia: the Wheat/Rice Frontier, I thought, would be a good motivation to get and read the book.

and:

"Cultural and Demic Diffusion of First Farmers, Herders, and their Innovations Across Eurasia"

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.00201v2.pdf  (PDF)
Cultural and Demic Diffusion of First Farmers, Herders, and their Innovations Across Eurasia
Carsten Lemmen

From the paper:

Our own simulations for the Indian subcontinent showed that the connection from the Indus region to the Levante was only established after the transition to agropastoralism (Lemmen and Khan 2012), consistent with the wheat/rice barrier identified by(Barker 2006).

From the paper:

"A simulation of the Neolithic transition in the Indus valley"

I didn't know arxiv.org carried papers on this subject:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1091

Emphasis added.
A simulation of the Neolithic transition in the Indus valley
Carsten Lemmen, Aurangzeb Khan

(Submitted on 5 Oct 2011 (v1), last revised 7 May 2012 (this version, v3))

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was one of the first great civilizations in prehistory. This bronze age civilization flourished from the end of the fourth millennium BC. It disintegrated during the second millennium BC; despite much research effort, this decline is not well understood. Less research has been devoted to the emergence of the IVC, which shows continuous cultural precursors since at least the seventh millennium BC. To understand the decline, we believe it is necessary to investigate the rise of the IVC, i.e., the establishment of agriculture and livestock, dense populations and technological developments 7000--3000 BC. Although much archaeological information is available, our capability to investigate the system is hindered by poorly resolved chronology, and by a lack of field work in the intermediate areas between the Indus valley and Mesopotamia. We thus employ a complementary numerical simulation to develop a consistent picture of technology, agropastoralism and population developments in the IVC domain. Results from this Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator show that there is (1) fair agreement between the simulated timing of the agricultural transition and radiocarbon dates from early agricultural sites, but the transition is simulated first in India then Pakistan; (2) an independent agropastoralism developing on the Indian subcontinent; and (3) a positive relationship between archeological artifact richness and simulated population density which remains to be quantified.

The authors point to a possible center of rice domestication ("Lahuredawa in the middle Ganges plains") as a possible source of agropastoralism.

Less favored by the model are the valleys along the Indo-Iranian plateau, where broad subsistence possibilities are seen as one precondition for the rise of the IVC and where agropastoralism arose before 6500 BC [Jarrige, 1995]. The model might underestimate the potential for agropastoralism in this area because of its coarse spatial scale.

FYI: Definition of agropastoral. : of or relating to a practice of agriculture that includes both the growing of crops and the raising of livestock.

The mythical link between poverty and terrorism

Back in 2014:

New research from Queen Mary University of London has found youth, wealth, and being in full-time education to be risk factors associated with violent radicalisation. Contrary to popular views – religious practice, health and social inequalities, discrimination, and political engagement showed no links.

The recent terror attack in Dhaka was committed by young, educated, highly privileged Bangladeshi youth.

Meanwhile, The Straits Times reports:

Two terror groups spread tentacles in Bangladesh
Officials say new breed of militants is efficient, highly educated, more organised.

Tacit approval of jihad in Bangladesh

From a June 8, 2016 article in the New York Times, Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who’s Killing the Bloggers:

In a lengthy interview, the chief of the police counterterrorism unit, Monirul Islam, who assumed his post in February, laid out the findings of his investigation in minute detail.
....
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But secularism is far from universally accepted in Bangladesh, and has always had to contend with a conservative Islamic culture.

To a surprising extent, the militants have succeeded in their aim of discrediting secularism, the chief investigator said.

“In general, people think they have done the right thing, that it’s not unjustifiable to kill” the bloggers, gay people and other secularists, he added.

Curry

The BBC reports:

In other words, had you been washed ashore four millennia ago on the banks of the now lost river of Saraswati and hitched a bullock cart ride to Farmana in the Ghaggar valley near modern-day Delhi, here's what you might have eaten - a curry.

For in 2010, when advanced science met archaeology at an excavation site in Farmana - southeast of the largest Harappan city of Rakhigarhi - they made history, and it was edible.

Archaeologists Arunima Kashyap and Steve Webber of Vancouver's Washington State University used the method of starch analysis to trace the world's first-known or "oldest" proto-curry of aubergine, ginger and turmeric from the pot shard of a bulbous handi (pot). 

Hoisted from the comments

In a comment on a previous post, I wrote:

I would say that the modern population genetic data and the archaeological data are consistent with a Yamnaya incursion into Europe. The ancient DNA data is also consistent. There is no literary record, and neither genes nor archaeology inform us about language, but presumably the Yamnaya incursion is a candidate to which to tie IE expansion into Europe. The problem is that the earlier farmers are also a candidate for I.E. introduction into Europe. Neither genes nor archaeology can help us decide between the two. Most historical linguists like the shorter time depth and favor the Yamnaya theory. But their tools, e.g., "glottochronology" are riddled with flaws.

The archaeological record for India does not show a Yamnaya incursion or Andronovo incursion or any other significant incursion in the 1900 BC - 1200 BC timeframe. Language-wise - the Rg Veda is the oldest attested I.E. example but is known via oral tradition; and the Mitanni records with a few Vedic deities and I.E. words as its closest competitor; but the Indian archaeological record does not provide any evidence of language. (Re: Hittite, see below) India does not yet have any ancient DNA. Genetics of the modern population so far rules out any significant incursion into India 4000-2500 years ago - but India remains a grossly undersampled population.

The Saraswati River mentioned in the Rg Veda is named with other rivers; in the hymn, these other rivers are in the correct geographic sequence of rivers of the Indus and Gangetic systems. If we thus place the Saraswati, it was a mighty river then, it now corresponds to the seasonal Ghagghar-Hakra; the channel along of which the majority of Harappan civilization sites are found; it corresponds to the Saraswati, already dried up by the time of the Mahabharata. If we accept this identification it places the Rg Veda to before 2000 BC. Since Hittite is attested to 1600-1300 BC in written records (only), the Rg Veda would be the oldest attested I.E.

We need not accept this identification of the Saraswati, linguists such as Harvard's Sanskritist M. Witzel have theorized that some other river in Afghanistan was the original Saraswati, and for some reason the Rg Vedic people transferred the name to the already-dried up river bed that they found when they entered India.

The Rg Veda was composed in India, of that there can be little doubt. But the Saraswati timeline throws the historical linguists' 1900 BC - 1200 BC time line into confusion, so they hypothesize that the hymns are sometimes a memory of some other place where the "original" Saraswati was. They also dismiss the Rg Vedic mention of the sea and of hundred-oared boats, which are not there in the deep inland Afghan location that they want to place the "original" Saraswati, by saying that the composers were incorrigible boasters and exaggerators. Then, by their estimates, these memories were transformed into Rg Vedic hymns around 1400 BC. Then Hittite becomes the oldest attested IE language.

Some things to keep an eye on

This is from 2011, talking about the "next generation sequencing".  I'm told newer technology is on the way, but still not in wide use, so this is still relevant.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3593722/

Genotype and SNP calling from next-generation sequencing data

Meaningful analysis of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, which are produced extensively by genetics and genomics studies, relies crucially on the accurate calling of SNPs and genotypes. Recently developed statistical methods both improve and quantify the considerable uncertainty associated with genotype calling, and will especially benefit the growing number of studies using low- to medium-coverage data. We review these methods and provide a guide for their use in NGS studies.

This next one is intriguing too. Frankly, I would not have guessed that laboratory conditions, reagent lots and personnel differences might lead to large problems.
http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v11/n10/full/nrg2825.html
Tackling the widespread and critical impact of batch effects in high-throughput data

High-throughput technologies are widely used, for example to assay genetic variants, gene and protein expression, and epigenetic modifications. One often overlooked complication with such studies is batch effects, which occur because measurements are affected by laboratory conditions, reagent lots and personnel differences. This becomes a major problem when batch effects are correlated with an outcome of interest and lead to incorrect conclusions. Using both published studies and our own analyses, we argue that batch effects (as well as other technical and biological artefacts) are widespread and critical to address. We review experimental and computational approaches for doing so.

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The next one is a personal observation, possibly of little merit. All these studies that try to figure out the ancestry of populations essentially compile some data, apply some statistical models and computation and then try to come to some conclusions. One way of looking at it is that they trying to create classifiers, trees or directed graphs with some level of statistical reliability. But another way of looking at it is that they are doing one-half of machine learning. They have created a training set and applied it. The second part, which is to use the model to make predictions is missing. That is, having done their first thousand samples, they should now let their trained model work on the next thousand samples, and see how well it performs. IMO, this would be as good a demonstration of the statistical significance of their model as any other.

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PS:
http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/06/15/059139.full.pdf

"Population Structure Analysis of Globally Diverse Bull Genomes" has this fascinating plot.

Among these genomes, there are m = 3,967,995 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with no missing values and minor allele frequencies ¿ 0.05 (Supplementary Fig. 2). To explore structural complexity, whole genome sequences of n = 432 selected samples were hierarchically clustered using Manhattan distances (Figure 3, colored by 13 different breeds). It is evident that official breed codes (or countries of origin) do not necessarily represent the genetic diversity among bulls represented by SNPs.

The most effective way of learning about a complex topic

I'm sure there are many ways of learning about a complex topic.  The one that works least well for me is to simply be a sponge.  The most effective way I've found is to take a position - have some explicit or implicit hypothesis or major assumption - and then proceed therefrom.   It helps in many ways, too numerous to enumerate.

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.
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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.
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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.  

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"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.

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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.

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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.