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Give him a “G”
Posted by DNW on 2012/02/29
Those who have an interest in prehistory will want to note, if they have not already, that the Y chromosome of the Tyrolean Iceman is now being reported, and while having been hinted at recently, it involved something of a surprise initially.
It appears that the portion of the continental landmass that we know as Europe has had a relatively complex post-glacial population history. Trying to reconstruct what the “original” Europeans “looked like“, or exactly where they came from at the point wherein these particular populations may be said to have had anything resembling a distinctive cultural kit, is an ongoing project.
What seems to be the case however is that there are a multitude of distinct genetic lineages within the classification “European”, and that these distinctions run deep into history.
Otzi himself is an example of this complex history. And indeed his own story, a long time in unfolding since the discovery of his mummified corpse, has changed substantially since it was first reported that he was probably a wayfarer who had died of hypothermia as a result of being caught in an unpredictable change of weather.
He was according to recent reports killed in fact by an arrow which severed a subclavian artery, some days, it appears, after he had been in a fight which had left him with serious hand wounds, and the blood of four other individuals on his clothing and weapons.
Penn Museum lecture
9 Responses to “Give him a “G””
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Truth Before Dishonor 
Foxfier said
COOL!
I admit, my response to hearing that he looked like a “Sardinian” was a solid “whut?” Then I had to Bing! around for an image… Look like sandy-haired Basque Italians to me….
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AOTC said
interestingly, otzi never went through a mcdonalds drive through,scarfed down wings and french fries, yet was in dire need of bypass surgery at the age of 40-something. he ate off the land and walked everywhere he went. poor dna doomed guy.
poor dna doomed people NOW too… because you do realize, dont you, (im talking to you liberals ) that all the michelle O lettuce and apples in the world wont change your dna right? just like my husband could not 50 years ago, for any amount of exercise or carrot consumption, grow a new leaf on a bicuspid aortic valve, you leftist utopians understand that right? gheezzz…..
this brings me to the liberals and the food police, and finally obamacare. this is the vehicle that will be used as a test of purity. it wont be racial purity this time around. you are going to need to be healthy to fit into the free health care model. and leftist to boot…..
and you better hope you have perfect genes.
oh well. anyhooo
my grandfather was from extreme northern italy. he was dark skinned had pale blue eyes and black hair. my grandmother was from rome. (not that that has anything whatsoever to do with anything but hey, )
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DNW said
Foxfier said
2012/02/29 at 19:17
COOL!
I admit, my response to hearing that he looked like a “Sardinian” was a solid “whut?” Then I had to Bing! around for an image… Look like sandy-haired Basque Italians to me….”
LOL Sandy haired Basque Italians … a pretty interesting word picture.
As you know the Y chromosome is passed along father to son unchanged (unless a mutation occurs) scientists can trace specific lineages fairly well. But unfortunately, as you also know, any inference we might make as to the physical appearance of a temporal cross slice of that line based on a backward extrapolation from a present sample is dubious.
Hitler was an “E”. He didn’t look particularly African. Napoleon was as well, I believe.
Which is exactly what makes Otzi, even though he lacks an epidermis, and the mummies of Urumqi so outstandingly as you rightly say, “COOL”. You get to see these people as, within limits, they were.
What’s also interesting is that “G” seems to be some kind of Caucasian (speaking geographically) lineage. Otzi’s mother was a “K” – http://www.familytreedna.com/public/mtdna_k/ – (… well her mitochondrial DNA is typed K) and K is widespread but not comparatively numerous, being found in peculiar if modest concentrations (if you ignore the subclades) in places as diverse as the Middle East and Norway.
“Analysis of the mtDNA of Ötzi the Iceman, the frozen mummy from 3300 BC found on the Austrian-Italian border, has shown that Ötzi belongs to the K1 subclade. It cannot be categorized into any of the three modern branches of that subclade (K1a, K1b or K1c). The new subclade has provisionally been named K1ö for Ötzi.[11] Multiplex assay study was able to confirm that the Iceman’s mtDNA belongs to a new European mtDNA clade with a very limited distribution amongst modern data sets …”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_K_%28mtDNA%29
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DNW said
” my grandfather was from extreme northern italy. he was dark skinned had pale blue eyes and black hair. my grandmother was from rome. (not that that has anything whatsoever to do with anything but hey, )”
A cheek swab from a son would reveal his paternal line. Maybe he’s a relative of Otzi.
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DNW said
AOTC said
2012/02/29 at 20:56 e
poor dna doomed people NOW too… because you do realize, dont you, (im talking to you liberals ) that all the michelle O lettuce and apples in the world wont change your dna right? just like my husband could not 50 years ago, for any amount of exercise or carrot consumption, grow a new leaf on a bicuspid aortic valve, you leftist utopians understand that right? gheezzz…..
this brings me to the liberals and the food police, and finally obamacare. this is the vehicle that will be used as a test of purity. it wont be racial purity this time around. you are going to need to be healthy to fit into the free health care model. and leftist to boot…..
and you better hope you have perfect genes. ”
They are a curious lot, modern liberals. They can best be understood if one views their “liberalism” through the prism of their own evolutionary and atheistic anthropology. The illusion of “liberalism” (in the sense of freedom and individual self-determination, lack of political coercion, and voluntary association) then evaporates away and what one is left with is a view of another kind of Darwinism or genetic jockeying, in action.
They of course protest that they are the protectors of the weak in the face of a Conservative indifference to the phenomenon labeled social Darwinism; but what they seek to replaced it with, is merely another kind of Darwinian ploy or gambit; i.e., population selection and management through political means under their control. In other words they seek to burrow into a preexisting classically liberal human environment, and to use the internal processes of that system against itself in order to recreate it as an environment which they can manage for their own selective purposes.
When gene therapy aimed at correcting damage or dysfunction becomes routinely possible as we might reasonably hope it would, don’t expect it to stop there if the modern liberal mentality has any influence on what is thought to be right or proper.
They’ll be chomping at the bit to turn themselves into cyborgs, chimera, anything at all, in order to escape from the ruin of what they actually are. A ruin which cannot be traced merely to damaged genes or a lack of social affirmations.
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AOTC said
i wanted to share this. (weekly g-file from Jonah Goldberg of national review online) it was awesome this week! it fit right in with what dnw was saying and was far more articulate than anything i could say. it also fits in with this blog thread and political issues of the week.
could not have said anything better myself, so i didnt. lol
( i didn’t link to anything because this is an email news letter. its sent to anyone who wants to subscribe) there is a link down page if you want to subscribe though)
The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
March 2, 2012
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Reader (and, of course, Andrew who is too busy in heaven right now asking how
he can Saran Wrap Saul Alinsky’s toilet),
It seems like this “news”letter has become a death notice of late. I don’t want
to write about Andrew here mostly because I would desperately like this to be a
brilliant Breitbartian hoax (How great would it be if he’s in some spa so he could
slim down enough to fit inside President Obama’s birthday cake, pop out with some
videos of Obama shaking Mao’s Little Red Book, or a long-form birth certificate
and dancing to Rock the Casbah?). But also because I’m sick of writing about dead
people.
Yesterday I reread my Dad’s eulogy because it was his birthday, which happens to
come just two weeks or so after the one-year anniversary of my brother’s death,
which happened to come just a couple weeks after my sister-in-law’s death. A few
hours after I read my Dad’s eulogy, I find myself at Fox being told that Andrew
had died.
I am starting to discern a pattern here.
I wrote my column [http://tinyurl.com/6m6epru] today about Andrew. It tries to make
the point I struggled making on Fox yesterday. Andrew’s great strength was that
he rejected the authority of those who didn’t deserve it. He was like a mark who
realizes he’s been conned for years, an acolyte who wakes up and realizes he’s
a member of a cult.It was as if Andrew woke up one day and said, “Your magic —
i.e. your liberal guilt, your false charges of racism, your threats to deny me success
in your system — it just doesn’t work on me anymore.” He was free from the bad
juju and had no fear of it.
It’s a worldview I’m deeply sympathetic to, I hope for at least somewhat understandable
reasons. It certainly explains why he loved Liberal Fascism and helped to promote
it. He loved learning about how long liberals have been running some of these cons.
Anyway, enough about that for now.
On Political Religions
Speaking of Liberal Fascism, one of its core themes — and mine — is that modern
liberalism is a political religion.
That’s why I’ve been so intrigued and frustrated by the discussion around Rick Santorum
and his various comments, including: His ham-fisted remarks about wanting to vomit
after reading JFK’s church-state speech, his defense of religious freedom, his insistence
that Obama’s environmental theology is “not a theology based on Bible. A different
theology,” his claim that David Axelrod is the reincarnated snake God Thulsa Doom.
These have all sparked controversy, save for the last one, which I simply wish Santorum
said.
I basically agree with the substance behind everything Santorum has said in this
regard, even if I think his phrasing, timing, tactics, tone, tenor, and emphasis
leave something to be desired. How’s that for an “I agree with you in principle
but . . . ” statement?
The idea that liberalism is a political religion is not an obscure contention of
crackpots — even if I do hold it. As [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1109436185985&s=67744&e=001tQ8H3hiX_unFVwgwPfw5LDAzKwfpGL6a2m0B31g3MNdXp6LNUsjOAZ8qlEtRrN3dTad64ZaQdeq7rUboo0fUhLROfgE99ixZ0flFcTZrIqTRrfMkIzAFvg==]I’ve
[http://tinyurl.com/8x8xpwp] argued [http://tinyurl.com/7cs5a9r] — some would say
incessantly [http://tinyurl.com/84j46qv] — the Progressives saw their political
movement as a fundamentally religious one.
The 1960s have been seen by many liberal and leftist intellectuals as a religious
awakening. As I wrote in LF:
The religious character of modern liberalism was never far from the surface. Indeed,
the 1960s should be seen as another in a series of “great awakenings” in American
history — a widespread yearning for new meaning that gave rise to a tumultuous
social and political movement. The only difference was that this awakening largely
left God behind. Paul Goodman, whose 1960 Growing Up Absurd helped launch the politics
of hope in the first part of the decade, came to recognize in the second half how
insufficient his original diagnosis had been: “I . . . imagined that the world-wide
student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which
I was sympathetic, but I now saw [in 1969] that we had to do with a religious crisis
of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, when not only all institutions
but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon.”
And a bit later:
In 1965 Harvey Cox, an obscure Baptist minister and former Oberlin College chaplain,
wrote The Secular City, which turned him into an overnight prophet. Selling more
than one million copies, The Secular City argued for a kind of desacralization
of Christianity in favor of a new transcendence found in the “technopolis,” which
was “the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization.”
Modern religion and spirituality required “the breaking of all supernatural myths
and sacred symbols.” Instead, we must spiritualize the material culture to perfect
man and society through technology and social planning. In The Secular City “politics
replaces metaphysics as the language of theology.” Authentic worship was done not
by kneeling in a church but by “standing in a picket line.” The Secular City was
an important intellectual hinge to the transition of the 1960s (though we should
note that Cox recanted much of its argument twenty years later).
“Man is homo religiosus, by ‘nature’ religious: as much as he needs food to eat
or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living,” wrote the late Will Herberg.
As the Chestertonian line goes, if man stops believing in God, he won’t believe
in nothing he’ll believe in anything. You can make a religion out of anything. That
doesn’t mean it won’t be a stupid religion. People have worshipped all sorts of
crazy stuff, including tree stumps. But just because it’s stupid to worship tree
stumps, doesn’t mean you won’t piss off tree-stump worshippers if you desecrate
their stumps. And it doesn’t mean the Holy Faith of Tree Stumpers won’t see competing
faiths as a threat to their own.
I could go on. Really. (“Please, no more about Immanentizing the Eschaton, please.”
— The Couch.) I honestly think that today’s liberals have little to no conception
of how liberalism has become a religion unto to itself. Indeed, modern politics
could be seen as “a chapter in the history of religion [http://tinyurl.com/7rgy7w8].”
This is a huge, fundamental, first-order point about the state of contemporary life
that we don’t have nearly the vocabulary to discuss adequately. And that’s why Rick
Santorum’s discussion of this stuff is so frustrating: because he’s right, and yet
neither he nor the rest of us have the vocabulary to discuss it easily.
If you clear the public square of what we traditionally call religion — Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, Buddhism etc. — we will not have a public square free
of religion. We have a public square full of religion fighting under the false flag
of “secular values” — with no opposing sources of moral authority to resist it.The
utopianism, millenarianism and radical egalitarianism at the emotional core of liberalism
are fundamentally religious in nature. That doesn’t mean liberalism is evil or totalitarian.
But it is less than totally self-aware. The nice thing about traditional religion
is you know where it comes from. The unwritten faith of liberalism masquerades in
the costumes of modernity, progress, social justice and the like without recognizing
that liberalism requires leaps of faith, too.
Liberalism’s lack of self-knowledge about its nature makes it very powerful and
very dangerous. Liberals can simply claim — without seeming like they’re lying,
because they actually believe it — that they are cold, rational presenters of
fact and decency. Comte’s “religion of humanity” has forgotten that it is a religion
at all. But forgetting something doesn’t make it any less real. Wile E. Coyote forgets
there’s no land underneath him. His ignorance doesn’t keep him aloft.
This is how the New Class of experts and helping professions become secular priests
of a wholly political religion. We confuse credentials for ordinations, regression
analyses for consecrations. And without a conception of a higher authority, without
a more enduring and transcendent dogma to inform our consciences, we are left following
the captains of rudderless ships leading us to ruin.
Ethicists for the Slaughter of Innocents
For instance, ethicists at Oxford have now declared [http://tinyurl.com/7wohzxw]
babies — babies! — are “morally irrelevant” creatures that can be killed without
consequence by their parents. This would be horrifying and repugnant enough, save
for the fact that among the core missions of the progressive state is to supplant
the role and authority of parents [http://tinyurl.com/6or5sdr].
Follow the logic of secular priests as far as it will go, and you have the recipe
for a modern Sparta that makes talk of death panels seem cautious and optimistic.
Sign Up: Join the Goldberg File mailing list. Click here [http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=001RgvbKVLa7a5BY3s-bMhqwQ%3D%3D].
[This comment released despite its far-too-large copy/paste of someone else’s work. In the future, please keep quotes of other people to 5 paragraphs or less and add your own commentary. Thanks — admin]
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AOTC said
im sorry. i got overly exuberant about the newsletter. i forgot the rules. the bottom of the newsletter had a link to share with friends but it was to forward to email contacts. i would encourage people to sign up for the goldburg newsletter though.
i have a great deal of respect and admiration for conservative posters,bloggers and writers. it is a craft, that for the life of me, i will likely never develop any respectable level of skill for though.
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Foxfier said
I’ve been trying to figure out how to share it, too, AOTC– I’ve got a folder full of the email G-Files! Just no spot to cut down as a waste of space…..
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DNW said
AOTC,
Interesting material …
Goldberg’s thesis that modern liberal-fascism is a kind of religion is of course incontestable; at least by anyone who still entertains the significance of such concepts as truth, or historical accuracy.
Anyone ignorant enough or obtuse enough or duplicitous enough to deny that secular humanist scientism is in principle a totalitarian religion, merely needs to be pointed to the original Humanist Manifesto, its declarations, and its implications, for a convenient starting point.
And Goldberg makes another important point. We, more or less all, (meaning those of us born long after 1930’s era progressives were active) always knew it.
We knew it from having read those 1960’s Aquarian age era social revolution manifestos, plans, schemes, and predictions in school; even if they too were written and published somewhat before we ever got to them.
However, sometime during the 1980’s and 90’s I would guess, and after the fall of Soviet communism, the active memory of that generation of anti-metaphysical metaphysics, with its schemes for a totalizing human management program inaugurated in the name of a new era for a new man, sort of faded away under the pressure of other preoccupations. The recollection of a dead serious and always immanent intent, was replaced by somewhat more vague images of comic opera Yippies, and obsolete Stalinists, and floundering fools like Jimminy Carter.
Thus we found ourselves, after once again and inevitably being confronted by a politically programmatic undermining of the regime of classical liberty, thinking hard about the matter. How did we get to this point again?
We then begin tracking back, and “inferring” the existence of programmatic causes which it is completely redundant to infer.
Why redundant? Because “inference” is unneeded when the agendas were never really hidden in the first place. They were laying right out there in the open, only slightly submerged under a pile of more recent paperwork.
It is the self-appointed task of historically minded persons like Jonah Goldberg, to periodically remind us of the fact that except for our inattention and distraction, the totalitarian message and impulse of the political progressive – like the 1971 paperback copy of “The Population Bomb” that has been laying on the far corner of my desk, ostensibly slated for future comment – has been starring us in the face all along.
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