This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The question of Northern vs Southern Italy is back with this new graphic. I'm going to dox myself slightly and say I have some perspective on this because both of my parents are Sicilian from Sicily, although I grew up in America. Though I will add it just to interject my general bemusement and provide some Med charm. My background isn't needed to reach this conclusion (though I'm surprised to see so few people arguing it... so maybe!)
Anyway, I presume HBD enjoyers love this North vs South divide because it comes across like that satellite photo of North vs South Korea where the dependent variable is "Communism", except in the case of Italy it's "African ancestry". That's fun to think about, and it certainly has a lot of pop culture roots (that hard scene in True Romance where the Sicilian mob boss is infuriated by being accused of being descended from the Moors), but this link is weak and it mostly ignores the elephant in the room: colonialism.
Yeah yeah we're all sick of hearing about colonialism, but hear me out. I don't mean the kind of colonialism where the natives resist being dragged kicking and screaming into an empire with reading, roads, global trade and capital. I mean the kind of colonialism where your island is considered a useful military outpost and changes hands constantly in wars of dominance.
Quick incomplete list of who ran Sicily over the last thousand years: Byzantines, then Arabs (reasonably good rulers, all things considered), then the Normans rolled in around 1060, then the Hohenstaufens, then the French Angevins, who got kicked out in 1282 in the Sicilian Vespers. A real popular uprising, my people murdering 3000+ Frenchmen over Easter weekend. Much proud. But short-lived! Then the Sicilians, having won, immediately had to invite the Aragonese in to rule them, because a chunk of land in the middle of the Mediterranean does not get to just be independent. The (definitely not gay) hypermasculine types who love the Vesper story seem to not really read to the next chapter where you have to bend the knee to a different imperial lord. Curious!
Anyway then there's the Spanish Habsburgs, who figured out how to maximally extract Naples and Sicily to fund their wars in Flanders. Then the Bourbons. Then briefly Napoleon. Then the Bourbons again. Then finally Garibaldi shows up in 1860 and the place gets annexed into the new Italian state. Run from afar, by people who didn't speak the language and considered the south basically Africa. BTW you knew these regions spoke different languages, right?
Sure, history is sad everywhere. But my point is you can't build anything durable on top of that. Every time a new overlord shows up, the previous administrative class either gets purged or has to switch sides. Whatever institutional knowledge existed gets fragmented. The legal system is whatever the new guy says it is. Tax collection is whatever can be extracted before the next regime change. Land tenure is locked in whatever extractive configuration was useful to the latest set of foreigners, which in Sicily's case meant gigantic estates owned by absentee landlords who lived in Naples or Madrid and never set foot on the property. Nobody is investing in the long term because there is no long term. The mafia isn't a quirk of North African ancestry but rather a survival instinct when you have a long, long standing tradition and belief that the state is illegitimate.
Again, whatever, story of the world. But now we're trying to compare this outpost (these outposts, not just Sicily here) to the seat of the fucking Renaissance up north! Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan. City-states running their own banks, their own foreign policies, colonial empires of their own. Bit players in bootstrapping the enlightenment! Nobody could conquer the whole north cheaply because the Po Valley was fragmented and the cities played the Holy Roman Empire and France against each other for centuries.
The South had very little of this. It's not so much Guns, Germs and Steel as it is one is a series of defensible mini-Switzerlands and the other are islands easily starved.
The "one peoples, different outcomes, let's Notice" framing seems so off to me because it's clearly more more like smooshing two different countries together and asking why they're still so different. Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions doesn't really change in decades.
You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.
I find it really frustrating how often HBD gets dismissed, and then an alternative explanation is given that is perfectly compatible with HBD. Usually connected to the assumption that HBD is about either differences between people being either 100% genetics and/or that it's just about black vs white.
No, HBD is simply about the finding that genes/biology in humans matter for everything, even for those attributes where the implications are a bit unpleasant. Yes, some people are just more violent. Some people are just less conscientious. And yes, some people are just less intelligent. It's not even their fault so I have a lot of sympathy with them, in a way. But it's not claiming that environment has no influence at all; That's just silly.
Once you accept this, group differences follow directly. Let's take brain drain. If we accept that intelligence is, say 60% genetic, and that a place suffers from a large percentage of intelligent people leaving, what does this imply about the group that has left vs the group that stayed behind? It's nearly mathematically impossible for both groups to have the same genetic mean afterwards! It would require some convoluted simultaneous anti-selection. And this applies in one way or another to every large migration wave. There is always some reason why people leave, and that reason will have implications for group differences between the stayers vs the leavers. Also, this applies of course to the average, not to literally every single person in each group.
Of course, this is hardly the only dynamic; The recent Reich paper shows clear evidence for ongoing selection even just inside west eurasia and in particular shows that the idea of cultural evolution supplanting biological evolution is simply wrong; They work in tandem with each other. Which makes perfect sense: If a society requires substantial long-term planning for winter months, then you will have both cultural adaption to do so and biological selective pressure towards more conscientiousness, intelligence, etc. Likewise, living in literal centuries of civilization with a highly developed tax code such as China will plainly have different selective pressures than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Also, an aside: It's perfectly sensible to say that HBD is more important for differences inside developed states than for the differences between the developed vs the undeveloped world, since the latter has larger environmental differences. The black-white gap inside the US is probably substantially more genetic than the Europe-Africa gap. And this fits very well with the data, since the latter is significantly larger, even accounting for admixture.
Coming back to this post, assuming HBD is true, it makes sense that people with
will also have substantially biologically adapted to that environment. Or the other way around, if we assume the differences currently holding them back were pre-existing, than we would of course expect them to fare badly in international warfare and regularly get conquered and colonized. I agree with @SecureSignals that at least part of the difference here is likely pre-existing.
Now you may ask, if HBD is so compatible with everything, when does it really fail? That's simple: I lean towards cultural/environmental explanations where the split is historically recent, and/or where there is little evidence for plausible, sufficiently large genetic differences. NK vs SK is the gold-standard here. Korea has historically always been relatively developed and well-managed. Koreans are of course not perfectly homogenous, every group has subgroups, but it's relatively isolated and as homogenous as it gets. The split is an inheritance of WW2, which is quite recent. And it's at this point well-known that neither communism nor most other autocratic governments are very conducive to economic development, so the cultural explanation makes very plain sense.
More options
Context Copy link
This is just constructing a narrative to suit your assumptions. Yes, the Southern Italy was much more stable compared to the North It did not see as much of a direct conflict but it experienced more of a silent subjugation. But this does not explain anything. Northern Italy was fractured and constantly at war as battleground of Great Powers especially during Italian wars which was also the time of renaissance. So conflict supposedly helped?
Interestingly enough tight next to Italy we have Balkans which was also literal battleground between Ottomans and Habsburgs with armies moving around, endless rebellions and revolts and betrayals - and it did not make them center of science and prosperity. Plus there is also one other place which was also safe from any direct conflict except devastating civil wars and literal Game of Thrones power struggles, centralized and ruled by foreign rulers. It was endlessly exploited to finance their continental war adventures against Holy Roman Empire and France in futile and disastrous Hundred Years War and beyond. This place is called England. And they seemed to end up okay moving to modernity.
More options
Context Copy link
The HBD explanation for the differences between northern and southern Italy isn't African ancestry, it's the Hajnal line. The north fell within the region where the influence of the Catholic church and the manor system was sufficient to break traditional clan networks and create an individualistic population with higher social trust where it was possible to do business with strangers, while in the south the same type of tribal honor culture persisted that holds back much of the Middle East and Africa ("Me and my brothers against my cousins; me and my cousins against the world").
More options
Context Copy link
On the colonialism point, before even the Byzantines arguably that the Greeks and Romans, too.
Plus Carthage between those two. But if you're going back that far then it stops being a distinctive feature of Sicily because everywhere was conquered back and forth in those days.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why doesn't this effect hit Alsace-Lorraine/Rhineland then or the Benelux region? How many empires have run Flanders? That was a chokepoint that the great powers sought to control or invade and yet also a great centre of wealth and industry even before coal was ever discovered there. The Spanish were spending all the silver from the New World buying German cannons and German mercs to fight in Flanders.
If we were going post-colonial, we could easily create a narrative that Belgium's been very hard done by - centuries of imperial rule, getting tossed around and partitioned between the French, Spanish and Dutch, constant warfare, along with the bloodiest fighting of WW1 and getting wrecked in WW2.
In antiquity, Egypt, Greece, Southern Italy, North Africa and Turkey were all well-developed regions despite no shortage of armies passing through and conquering them. Now they're largely a backwater. I find it highly suspicious that all these areas were overrun by the forces of Islam to some extent. Meanwhile, all the areas overrun by Franks, Saxons and men from the North turned out advanced and highly developed.
Ireland had absentee landlords, plenty of them. I have no doubt that absentee landlords are harmful to development. But Ireland popped right back up after centuries of fairly tough colonial rule. Same with Poland for that matter.
Could be a certain Y-chromosome got spread really fast with polygamous Islam (do slave concubines even count against the 4 wife limit?), and the aggressive warlike genetics persisted even after the area was retaken by Christians. In that sense, the predominant genetics of the area got polluted. At least the reconquering Christian leaders would probably think the people were "polluted", and treat the population as expendable labor. So the poor economics of the area is in a way a self-fulfilling prophecy, whether their genetics were polluted or not, the apperance of pollution was enough to doom the area.
Of course not, what are you talking about!?
There's no genetic evidence of this happening. Northern and Southern Italians differ genetically quite significantly, but that difference goes back much longer - bronze age and copper age. Southerners are most similar to Greeks, while northerners are most similar to French.
Also, that span of genetic difference isn't really that uncommon. North and South Germans have similar genetic differences, for example.
More options
Context Copy link
The spanish golden age happens after islamic conquest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just going strictly by this description, that sounds a lot more like northern Italy (massively entrenched systems of medieval and early modern fortresses protecting mercantile interests from encroachment by numerous outside hostile powers, frequently fought over by Napoleonic armies, then the scene of ridiculously bloody WWI battles [e.g. the literal dozen battles of the Isonzo]) than southern (backwater latifundia)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think at this point S Italy has been brain drained too much to recover like W Virginia and it’s primarily not a HBD situation for why it didn’t develop. Colonialism probably stunted the region until it was W Virginia’d.
Most Americans are Southern or Central and did highly assimilate. There is some residual higher criminality. And the Mafia was not a low IQ business. Bigger than US Steel had a great degree of complexity. It was basically an international trading firm in illegal goods, gambling (requires math), and extortion (this kind of low IQ). Mafia did require a great deal of complexity.
My gut says the explanation for why S. Italy failed is primarily colonialism while at the same time Italians were allowed to mass migrate.
W Virginia scores poorly on demographically adjusted school performance. My gut says this does not mean West Virginia has bad public schools. I would probably prefer to send my children to a WV public school than a Chicago public school. But like 90% of the top 50% of WV population has emigrated elsewhere. This is think is also true comparing Florida Hispanic performance to California Hispanic performance. Florida is filled with upper class white people who came legally. Cali is filled with Aztec Hispanics who came illegally.
Aren't Italian Americans generally quite successful outside of organized crime?
Also quite successful inside of organized crime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, the Mafia is like Wal-Mart. A few pretty bright guys on top, a whole bunch of morons doing most of the work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Having spent time in southern Italy I don't buy the historic narratives. Singapore was a swamp long after the historic issues impacted Southern Italy. China was wrecked in the 1900s but they are really putting in effort into building their country.
The issues in Southern Italy are related to an inability to organize. Buses crawl through cities in Sicily because there are parked cars everywhere. Building will be in disrepair and nobody bothers to paint them. They are not too poor to buy paint. The ticket machine at the train stations are constantly broken. There is garbage on the street despite high unemployment. Why are they not cleaning if they have nothing to do? There are basic issues with petty crime, people not being able to queue properly, loud behaviour and other anti social issues that make life hard there.
What struck me most about southern Italy is the lack of any large scale organization. Even when walking through large cities like Naples there are few businesses or organizations that seem to have a turnover of more than one million Euros. There are plenty of small restaurants, cafés, tiny hotels etc. Southern Italians seem perfectly capable of managing their own small scale operation. But they seem to fail specularly at scale. There seem to be few instances of larger groups of people coming together to achieve anything. Southern Italians are the inverse of Chinese and Japanese people.
There is simply no way a semiconductor manufacturer or any high tech firm can function when people can't cooperate. Southern Italy is a bit like India. There is plenty of talent and individually the people can be amazing. However, as a collective there is widespread dysfunction.
As for HBD narrative I found southern Italians to be much more European and lighter in complexion than expected.
Wasn't Singapore already a full-blown British colony (the better kind) with a large ethnically Chinese population with deep mercantile tradition to draw on?
Singapore/Malayan Chinese were incredibly rich by Chinese standards prior to WW2. Part of the reason the Japanese were so vicious during occupation was since money from SEA Chinese funded a lot of the mainland resistance.
On the other hand the jump between where Singapore was on the eve of independence and where it has since gone is huge and it was far from a given
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Could you appreciate the brain drain argument? Going by my own family, something like 17 out of 20 of my parents' generation left Sicily for America to start a new life away from the rest of the europoors.
This should tell you a lot about the psychology of those who chose to remain (though I love some of them). If you have enough ambition to paint your 700 square foot "house" with no windows that was a carriage repair shop in the 1940s, you might also have enough ambition to say fuck this lets leave for America.
The issue is that other European nations had similar levels of migration without long term disastrous effects on the economy and IQ.
It seems more likely to me that there might have been some initial difference and that most of the brain drain was internal in Italy due to very long running differences is economic development between the north and the south. Perhaps similar things happen in other places but it's less of a regional divide and more that the talented people went to the local city so if you measure the entire region it looks unchanged, while in Italy it doesn't.
More options
Context Copy link
It seems like late-19th/early-20th century migration to America might have been roughly a quarter of the population of Sicily, which (assuming they were non-random, which seems obvious) could certainly be expected to have an effect. On the other hand, Sicily was poor before and poor after, so who knows?
The counterfactual is, of course, Ireland, which saw much higher and longer migration and now has the same wages as the historic colonial overlord.
Ireland is independent, sicily isn't. Independence can motivate some patriotic notions that slow brain drain.
It wasn't independent during the period of greatest emigration though.
But it was independent during the era of petty kingdoms, before the vikings. Sicilians were the playthings of Carthage, Rome, and Pyrrhus of Epirus. At least the Irish tribes were independent back then.
Culturally, the Irish at least had a memory of freedom from subjugation, even if they weren't actually united back then.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't Ireland benefiting from being vastly smaller and benefiting from being a low tax location for foreign corporations?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some significant clarifications:
So the story there is more dominantly "Early European Farmers - Indo-European" spectrum from South to North and not really "African/Arab - European". Sicily is somewhat the exception given it does have non-negligible North African ancestry and that shows up in the Genetic analysis as well. You propose somewhat of a false dilemma:
Not because of African ancestry but Indo-European ancestry. Yes, the Indo European colonizers conquered the Italian peninsula in different waves and different times, first it was the Romans, then the Barbarians and so on. But the HBD interpretation would be that the percolation of various empires and city states in the areas with greater Indo-European admixture is not a coincidence, i.e. the establishment of the Roman Empire with the arrival of the Latin tribes to Italy. That would be the Noticer explanation for why Northern Italy had this high degree of civilizational development that lacked in Southern Italy, not because of African ancestry.
So the Noticing is not a black mark against North African ancestry as much as it stresses that the Indo Europeans really were a colonize and impose civilization everywhere type of people.
Maybe it's a bad picture, but I could find dozens of guys like him in any MMA club in Dagestan.
The Neolithic Farmers spread into the both Caucasus and Europe, the G2a Early European Farmer haplogroup is concentrated in both Sardinia and the Caucasus region.
More options
Context Copy link
Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.
There's a separate ancestral group, Caucasian Hunter-gatherers, but they seem to be close to EEF according to this chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Admixture_graph_of_deep_Eurasian_lineages.png
WSH (Yamnaya culture) are considered a 50/50 mix of CHG and EHG, so ㄟ( ▔, ▔ )ㄏ
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Mamma mia, get a load of this guy with the No True HBDer argument. Fuggadaboutit.
Isn't the South originally Indo-European descended? Greeks, Romans, Normans, the Aragonese?
All of Europe was originally (for purposes of this discussion) inhabited by Early European Farmers who migrated into Europe like 10,000 years ago. And then starting about 5,000 years ago, during the transition between the Neolithic age and early Bronze Age, Indo European tribes invaded Europe.
All Europeans have significant admixture from both groups, but that's the main story in the North/South divide in Italian admixture, not African admixture (really with the exception of Sicily itself).
Isn't the main non-Indo-European zone in Italy in historic times Etruria, today one of the wealthier regions?
To my recollection, the Romans and Etruscans had similar levels of IE vs EEF genes, but the Romans had an Indo-European language and the Etruscans did not. This may reflect a broader difference between the cultures, but of course their influence on one another was so enormous as to kind of muddle any early differences.
Quick edit: Ah, looks like SS's citation covers that.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not aware of Etruria being a non-Indo-European zone, are you referring to the Etruscans? The Etruscans were assimilated by the Romans, but it turns out they were also actually an IE tribe although they didn't speak an IE language. The Sabines and the Samnites were also IE tribes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But the indo-Europeans were not a civilized people, they were steppe barbarians, and indo-European-ness doesn’t elsewhere correlate with wealth within Europe- Finland and the Basque Country are both wealthier regions.
The Steppe nomads, Yamnaya culture, were barbarians but then they migrated to Europe and evolved into the Corded Ware culture which became ancestral to Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic cultures. The Haplogroups R1b and R1a are linked to the Indo-European steppe migrations and those haplogroups dominate European Royalty: R1b dominates Western European, British, and French royalty while R1a dominates Eastern European and Slavic royal lines.
Of course Haplogroup R1a is also prominently found in India at high frequencies (40-70%) among Indian Brahmin communities particularly in North India, and that haplogroup was brought to India by IE migrations into India. So that tells the same story as Europe.
The Finns have high levels of IE admixture, much higher than southern Italy.
Just browsing that map of Europe I linked does provide a strong correlation with wealth and development. Looking at that map also suggests there's no coincidence the Industrial Revolution was started in the North Sea area.
Edit: This is not to say I disagree that they were barbarians. But as Nietzsche said "The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste." The Latin barbarians (dominated by R1b haplogroup) did rampage through Italy and killed a lot of people, and then they built Rome and became the Nobles.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well I don't need to conclude anything, but I can certainly lean toward the explanation that seems to correlate to poverty basically 100% of the time across contexts, rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.
The goal isn't to find a single, simple master explanation for everything. The goal is to find the minimum number of explanations with the maximum amount of explanatory power.
Pure HBD clearly doesn't serve as a complete explanation. For example, African Americans are about 20% White admixture and have IQs of 85. If we think that 100% of the difference between African Americans and Whites is explained by genetics, we can predict the average IQs of Subsaharan Africans with the equation: (0.80x) + (0.2 * 100) = 85, and predict that their IQ should be around 81. And yet most of the numbers I see HBD people cite for Subsaharan African IQ are far lower than that. I've sometimes seen claims in the high 60's. A genetic difference between African Americans and Whites, implies a strong environmentally-mediated difference for Subsaharan Africans and African Americans.
But if we're already going to allow that environment effects can cause a one or more standard deviation in IQ from what we expect based on environmental factors (as we observe with the Subsaharan African vs Black disparity), I think we then have to double back and question our originally granted assumption that the IQ differences between African Americans and Whites is 100% genetic. It has got to be a mix, and if it is a mix, I don't think we can yet say where African Americans will top out.
On the other hand, I think the nutrition + parasites + tropical diseases explanations seem to have a lot of explanatory power. They're not another thing to memorize, they make predictions that I tend to think are born out in the data, even if they can't explain all of the difference with best estimates for effect size.
No race scientist worth their calipers claims that environmental factors have absolutely no effect. IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think you're trying very hard. North/South Korea, East/West Germany, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Same genes, different institutions, very different outcomes.
The Haiti/DR case is especially clean: same island, similar populations, 6-7x GDP gap, and Haiti spent 122 years paying France for having freed itself. Hold genes constant, vary institutions, get massive divergence. The "100%" claim doesn't survive contact with five minutes of thought.
I'm not memorizing hundreds of rationales, I just actually looked for counterexamples that ruined a seductive hobby horse.
Haiti being a basket case is relatively recent, because they were ruled by an insane witch who turned the country into a failed state because he didn't trust his own government, and the Dominican Republic's dictatorship was a normal standard average egomaniac strongman.
More options
Context Copy link
Not the same genes. Haiti is ~90% sub-Saharan African, the DR closer to 40%.
I expect there's some genetic variance east to west across Germany as well, though Communism was obviously the larger influence.
Never ask Puerto Ricans what they think of Dominicans, Dominicans what they think of Haitians—much less why.
As @SecureSignals distinguishes but @dr_analog appears to have elided—there’s a major genetic difference between North African ancestry and Sub-Saharan African ancestry.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll give that to you, though if we're going to contend a drop of African blood can turn South Italy into a wasteland imagine what 40% should be doing to the DR.
Sicily is very poor for Europe and the DR is doing quite well for Latin America, but Sicily is still much richer than the DR.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link