[MGSA-L] Golden Dawn Abuse of History: Sparta

[Dan Tompkins]

Thanks very much for this. Fuller quote.

Are other Cavalli-Sforza results this dubious?  I'd bet someone's worked this up.

Dan

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 26, 2014, at 2:22 PM, Colin McLarty <colin.mclarty at CASE.EDU> wrote:
> 
> Thanks to Dan for digging into this, but the quote from Jon Marks got badly
> shortened, so it left out the actual criticism of Cavalli-Sforza's
> conclusion.  Marks knows genetics and statistics very well as do a good
> many anthropologists.  The fuller quote is
> 
>> In fact, I have always thought that the root of Cavalli-Sforza's failure
> to connect with the
>> broader anthropological community is simply that most anthropologists
> simply do not know
>> how seriously to take research that can contrast the DNA of 64 samples of
> "Chinese ..
>> . living in the San Francisco Bay Area", 94 samples from "two groups of
> African pygmies",
>> and 110 samples from "individuals of European origin from ongoing studies
> in our laboratories
>> or reported in the literature", and conclude sweepingly that "ancestral
> Europeans are
>> estimated to be an admixture of 65% ancestral Chinese and 35% ancestral
> Africans"
>> (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 88 839, 1991).
> However
>> sophisticated the statistics, they simply cannot transcend the
> limitations of
>> unsophisticated epistemologies.
> 
> The samples are explicitly spotty and poorly characterized.  It is a safe
> bet that all living humans are of African ancestry (though few of
> specifically pygmy ancestry). So why is that 35% not reported as 100%?
> And what are either "ancestral Europeans" or "individuals of European
> origin"?   Sophisticated crunching of numbers leads nowhere if the numbers
> are poorly obtained.
> 
> Colin
> 
> On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 1:31 PM, DANIEL P. Tompkins <pericles at temple.edu>
> wrote:
> 
>> Thanks, Jim,
>> 
>> I'm copying the Modern Greek Studies list as well
>> 
>> I went to JStor and did a quick search for what recent scholarship in bio,
>> anthro and other disciplines has had to say.  There is a lot of positive
>> comment, but also serious reservations, e.g. this from Jonathan Marks in
>> The
>> Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2006 (reviewing Lurkin's
>> book on Cavalli-Sforza).
>> 
>> It sounds as if one should be careful here.   I have not dug very deep.
>> 
>> I have always thought that the root of Cavalli-Sforza's failure to connect
>> with the broader anthropological community is simply that most
>> anthropologists simply do not know how seriously to take research that can
>> contrast the DNA of 64 samples of "Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area,"
>> 94 samples from two groups of African pygmies, and 110 samples from
>> "individuals of European origin from ongoing studies in our laboratories or
>> of the National Academy of Sciences USA."  However sophisticated the
>> statistics, they simply cannot transcend the limitations of unsophisticated
>> epistemologies.
>> 
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 12:54 PM, James H. Dee <jhdee1243 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Almost certainly to *The History & Geography of Human Genes* (Princeton
>>> 1994), a thousand-plus-page work -- done *before* the analysis of the
>>> genome was completed in the late 90s.  There must be better & more
>> detailed
>>> information available now -- is there a population biologist in the
>> house?
>>> There's a less-indigestible version, *The Great Human Diasporas* (1995).
>>> As a recently-released study of "African-American" & "Native-American"
>>> genetics shows, there can be significant gaps between "cultural identity"
>>> and "biological identity."
>>> J. H. Dee
>>> Austin, TX
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Elias j Theodoracopoulos <
>>> ejtheod at hunter.cuny.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> For those of us not up-to-date on anthropology or genetics, what is the
>>>> reference in "Cavalli-Sforza"? Thank you.
>>>> E. J. Theodoracopoulos
>>>> Hunter College, CUNY
>>>> 
>>>> ________________________________________
>>>> From: Classical Greek and Latin Discussion Group [
>> CLASSICS-L at LSV.UKY.EDU
>>> ]
>>>> on behalf of Aristide Caratzas [acaratzas at GMAIL.COM]
>>>> Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 3:50 PM
>>>> To: CLASSICS-L at LSV.UKY.EDU
>>>> Subject: Re: [CLASSICS-L] Golden Dawn Abuse of History: Sparta
>>>> 
>>>> Concepts such a "purity of Greek descent" are clearly outdated, given
>> the
>>>> fact that DNA now allows us to establish the biological relationships
>>>> between human groupings; it is interesting to note that Cavalli-Sforza
>>> and
>>>> his students have established a genetic "map" of Greece, which attests
>> to
>>>> the fact that 95% of the native population below a line formed by
>>>> Dyrrhachion, Monastiri (in today's Skopje statelet), Philippoupolis
>>> (today
>>>> Plovdiv, Bulgaria) and Pyrgos (Burgas, also in Bulgaria) all the way to
>>>> Crete and including the Ionian coast and Cyprus, has a continuity in a
>>>> *biologica*l presence (as distinct from *cultural *identity and the
>>>> elements on which it draws) of about 12,000 years.
>>