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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I want to whine about weakly upvoted comment https://www.themotte.org/post/109/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/15573?context=8#context

In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct

The Mongol culture didn't spread because the premise (genetic success) is BS. Mongol conquests were due to better generals, discipline and ability to recruit non-Mongols into their war machine. They routinely beat numerically superior armies.

p.s:

So it's a very bad example of thesis 'genetic success doesn't imply cultural success', rather it's evidence in another direction.

Another thing I have with this that it looks poster is Western supermacist and imagines Mongols aka dumb zerg being strong only with their number.

The quoted comment says the Mongols' genes were successful in the appears to say that their genes prevailed, not that their genes caused their success.

Yes, I understand that correctly. However this their genes prevailed is totally made up. Which is what i'm concerned about (and maybe due to reasons why author made it up totally false premise).

I’m pretty sure this is about allele frequency.

Wouldn't mongol genetic success be determined by their original number, reproductive success, and direct descendants alive today?

Perhaps even normalised to total globe population at the relevant time, or even to comparable tech and econ development levels, etc?

Culture and supremacist thinking being irrelvant in determining IF they were genetically successful?

Maybe I am misunderstanding though.

If your descendants married out of your ethnicity for 32 generations and so there is about 1/(2^32) of "your" genes in them, have you really been all that genetically successful?

You would likely have substantially more than 1/2^32 of your genes coming from any specific 32nd-order ancestor - after all, 2^32 is over four billion, which would be eight times greater than world population in the 13th century, and many of those people would not have reproduced or have descendants alive today, no thanks to the Mongols.

Sure, drop a few orders of magnitude... or even a few dozen, I'd be making the same argument. 2^8 is 256. I would struggle hard to name 256 distinct traits of my body.

The Y Chromosome doesn't get diluted, and neither do mitochondrial DNA. The Mongols would be found in the former, not the latter, like every other conquering army in history.

If it doesn't get diluted and doesn't mutate, then how did it come to be different from another ethnicity's Y chromosome? If it does mutate, then it looks like there's the same implication as if it diluted.

I might as well skip to the logical conclusion of my view on genetic legacy: it's a scam. Its purpose is to preserve individual beneficial alleles, not anything as coherent as an ethnicity, let alone anything from one person.

Think of it like blockchain: we can trace the lineage of a specific modern Y chromosome to historical forms with fewer novel mutations. Thus, haplogroups can be represented as a branching tree.

There are many millions of living male descendants of Genghis, vastly more than for any other male of his era. Seeing the geographic distribution, they must have substantial percentages of his autosomal DNA too. Statistically, there should be plenty enough data to reconstruct his genome from theirs with >99.9% coverage. This is entirely explained by the fact that he was very sexually prolific and that his family, clan and society have been dominant for a long time.

I don’t think there was a claim that Y chromosomes don’t have mutations. They just don’t undergo reassortment.

Depends.

If they didn't breed out of ethnicity how many of them and how many of your genes would there be?

Also if each generation has say 4 children, then there are ( 4/2)^32 copies of your genes out there.....?

I would understand the sentiment if they interbred closely enough to produce near-clones (aside from the sex, of course).

Why do they need to be clones? Genetic fitness applies to individual genes, which don't especially care about each other except in-so-far as there are synergies in ability, so can be measured by just adding up the number of descendants weighted by their relatedness to you. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material (above the average human baseline) is equivalent to 1,000 clones of yourself or 2,000 direct children (who have 1/2).

Correct, but why would I care about genetic fitness in terms of individual genes?

I don't know. Why would you care about genetic fitness at all?

Some people care about their descendants because they actually know them and form emotional connections with them as "family" which are stronger than those formed with friends or neighbors. Such connections can also be formed by adopted children who have no genetic relation at all. From this perspective, there's no reason to care about distant descendants of any type, closely or distantly related, because you will be dead and form no connection at all.

Some people care about their descendants out of an instinctive or cultural care about bloodlines and legacy. They care about making an impact on the world even after they're gone, and part of that impact is in the actual people who will be living there. This would imply a slight preference for descendants staying in the same ethnic and culture because they can carry on the cultural traditions as well as the genetic, but again there are some summation effects. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material and 1/1,000 of your cultural traditions might be equivalent to 1,000 genetic/cultural clones. I suppose it depends on whether you care about cultural traditions individually (be kind to people instead of stealing from them) or as an entire package (you must obey every single one of these religious traditions in order to get into heaven, which is pass/fail such that obeying half is pointless).

Some people don't care at all.

More importantly, this thread began as a discussion of the Mongol's evolutionary success. On the level of evolution and selection effects, genes/cultures which in practice increase their probability of spreading will be more likely to exist. The Mongols did in fact end up with an extremely high number of very distant descendants. The genes that the Mongols had did in fact replicate themselves diffused throughout those descendants rather than staying clumped together. And to this day there are many more genes which are copies of Mongol genes than there are of most other groups of people who lived at that time period. From an evolutionary perspective those genes were in fact successful: they are more likely to exist today than other genes at that time period. In so far as those genes cause certain traits and behaviors, those traits and behaviors were selected for and exist more in the current population as a result. They did not successfully spread the "Mongol archetype" as a cohesive culture and distinct people, but they did spread their genetic heritage and make it more prevalent. You don't need to "care" about genetic fitness on an individual level such that you personally seek to maximize it to care about it from a scholarly perspective as an explanatory and predictive force of nature. Genes which "win" from this perspective don't need to be desirable or good, but from an evolutionary perspective they still tend to win and increase their prevalence and it's important to understand that and adapt to their presence and natural advantage in competition.

If applied to the first common ancestor of terrestrial life then it never had genetic success because its descendants (all life on earth) billions of years later are not clones of it.

I think your reasoning is wrong. Genetic success can only be sensibly measured against reasonable outcomes. To define success as essentially clones, which embeds implictly the truth that the adaptations previously selected for are still present, also implies that the environment has not changed lest some new adaptations be selected for or another set of non clone family organisms come to prominence and outcompete them.

Given that it is extremely improbable that the environment the prospective clone tribe lives in will not change, thanks to entropy, thermodynamics as applied to that system, etc then for them to have succeded by your standards they must also at some point be expected to be maladapted and fail to successfully clone themselves as they have up to this point.

Your very definition of genetic success embeds an inevitable failure. It is a contradiction in likely outcomes.

Your very definition of genetic success embeds an inevitable failure.

Correct. For an organism, at least.

Seconding @2rafa, but for other reasons – what are you even disagreeing with?

It's commonly accepted that Mongols qua Mongols have been culturally infertile and left no posterity, certainly none commensurate with their success – sans, tellingly, the ancestral cult of Genghis and the story of pilfered riches. No catchy songs, no great monuments, no political treatises. Their military doctrine also didn't become some dominant paradigm. Peoples who suffered under their yoke have more to say of Mongols than Mongols themselves have! Modern scholars try to learn of Mongol institutions through Crimean Khanate!

I doubt they were all that genetically successful, though. Genghis was. The footprint of the whole tribe is not exceptional in proportion to their numbers prior the expansion.

Peoples who suffered under their yoke have more to say of Mongols than Mongols themselves have!

This is mainly because "mongol genetic success" is blatantly false thing. This is what i'm disagreeing with.

It’s not surprising their direct high-cultural legacy isn’t commensurate with their success, since the economic system that partially underlay their success tends to produce small, illiterate populations. But their political-military system did in fact become dominant in Central Asia, with Timur’s and Babur’s empires (and so-called Turco-Mongol states in general) being self-consciously in that tradition. I don’t think the Timurid empire was culturally infertile, let alone the Mughals.

Eh, it was an innovation, but I think the whole thing was another wave of Steppe expansion in a long series, just in a more historically aware period, making them a popular reference point. Maybe I'm unfair to Mongols.

Are you not counting the Tatars as true Mongols? Surely a Russian like yourself would know about the legacy they left culturally and even genetically to the Russian people. Modern Russia is as much a creation of the Golden Horde as it is the Rus.

I guess there’s the Yuan dynasty. I don’t know nearly enough about their legacy on Chinese culture.

It’s difficult to assess without defining the question more precisely because many of the people administering the Yuan were, well, not Mongol, and many of the changes under the Yuan were not done under Mongol direction. There are lasting imprints of Yuan rule in Chinese history:

  • Beijing as a lasting capital city likely owes itself to the Yuan

  • Modern Mandarin has much to owe the Yuan adoption and standardization of a simplified Middle Chinese language

  • Various innovations in dress, like buttons

  • Various food imports

  • Being a pivotal part of the Song-Yuan-Ming economic transition (not necessarily a good thing)

  • Popularisation of plays and operas, and I think novels

  • Increased identification of modern Han identity in opposition to non-Han, though this had started earlier and does have ancient roots

  • Etc.

Notably, though, many of these aren‘t really Mongol impositions on native Chinese that were then carried forth, and some were Chinese reactions to Mongol rule.

I was just thinking today that at least if Genghis Khan could somehow see into the present day (well, the last few decades), he would undoubtedly be pleased that he is still rememebered as one of the greatest conquerors ever, so much so that even almost 800 years after his passing bards still sing about his manly prowess.

after his passing bards still sing about his manly prowess.

I expected to see some mongol heavy metal here. Instead, HUH! HAH!

Thank you for your contribution to the preservation of this piece of our German cultural legacy.

There is a locally very-well-known Finnish cover of this song, too.

Oh. How much HBD debate spoils us xD

His premise was that Mongols were successful in darwinian sense (more copies of their genes) not that their genes conferred some advantage.

At the top level? Can't you say something more substantial about it?

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