Virtue Doesn't Pay (In The Very Long Run)

Virtue is an old fashioned term that used to be applied to morality but that way of thinking now seems mostly confined to issues of personal health. If you virtuously eat right, excerise, don't drink too much, floss, and so on, you will live a long and health life. Right?

Well, maybe not. It turns out that people "who live to 95 or older are no more virtuous than the rest of us in terms of their diet, exercise routine or smoking and drinking habits."

At age 70 the long lived had lifestyles not much different than others at that same time of life.

Overall, people with exceptional longevity did not have healthier habits than the comparison group in terms of BMI, smoking, physical activity, or diet. For example, 27 percent of the elderly women and an equal percentage of women in the general population attempted to eat a low-calorie diet. Among long-living men, 24 percent consumed alcohol daily, compared with 22 percent of the general population. And only 43 percent of male centenarians reported engaging in regular exercise of moderate intensity, compared with 57 percent of men in the comparison group.

Then again, it isn't as if the recommendation for diet and exercise come from nowhere. On average, these things have been demonstrated to help a lot in studies that have extremely large sample sizes and statistical significance, although the habits that have the highest work reward ratios (e.g. low dose asprin regimes and moderate alcohol consumption) are not all those one might naiively expect. Smoking, however, as expected, has a huge impact on life expectency, on average, as do little tips we would expect like not getting exposed to radioactivity above certain doses or to highly toxic chemicals like asbestos at work.

But, genes and luck, rather than diet and exercise, appear to be the key to making it from merely old to very old. And, there appears to be a pretty hard wall beyond which women just don't survive no matter what they do at about 114 to 115 years, and the absolute maximum lifespan of a man seems to be a bit shorter than it is for women.

There are a couple of competing theories as to why there is a maximum. One is that a small number of processes like telomere shorting and senile systemic amyloidosis eventually kill almost everybody that other mishaps didn't kill by that age.

If this is true, a small number of pills or magic bullet treatments might be able to significantly increase maximum human lifespan, although not necessarily average human lifespan. life expectency might increase only modestly (perhaps into the low 80s), but maximum life expectency might increase from 115 years to 130 years or more and a lot more people would live past 110.

An alternative narrative builds on the quip, "I'll bet they'll feel dumb when they get old and are dying of nothing." Maybe the causes of death that get most of us are front loaded, the very old are the people who escape those earlier onset body failures (mostly a few kinds of cancer and cardiovascular system collapses like heart attacks and strokes). Those people who don't die of those causes see more and more body systems that last just a little bit longer start to fail one after the other, until pretty sooner a person has multiple body systems that are all in trouble and one or the other of them catch up with them.

If this is true, comprehensive pre-failure life extension treatments of a large number of body systems would be necessary to meaningfully expand maximum life expectency, but a breakthrough on a small number of conditions might greatly expand average lifespan short of the maximum that is practically possible, which would be followed by multiple body system collapse later in life. Many more people might live to 90 instead of 70, but not many more people would live past 110 than do now.

READ MORE - Virtue Doesn't Pay (In The Very Long Run)

The Mass Migration Of The Late 19th Century

On average, 5 percent of the populations of Britain, Ireland, and Norway emigrated every decade between 1850 and 1910, which increased to 14 percent of the Irish population emigrating between 1890 and 1910. By the turn of the century, Italy, Portugal, and Spain recorded similar emigration levels... The Swedish population fell by 44 percent in the twenty-year period from 1871-1890.

Massive immigration dramatically impacted the economies of countries in the New World, which had relatively small populations. Between 1880 and 1910, Argentina received the equivalent of 20 percent of its population per decade; the United States between 5 and 10 percent per decade; and Canada between 5 and 15 percent per decade. Immigration in this age of mass migration accounted for around 50 percent of Argentina's population increase, and about a 30 percent increase for the United States and Australia.

From here quoting this book. A comment to the linked post references regarding immigration politics of the time: Goldin, C, “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921.” In The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, ed. C. Goldin and G.D. Libecap, 223-258. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

What was so awful in Europe that everyone wanted to get the heck out of there? Stories of misery and poverty driving people to leave Ireland after the potato famine and Southern Italy are familiar from immigrant narratives. But, I'm not familiar with any similar narrative for late 19th century Sweden. Yet, surely you wouldn't see a 44% exodus of Swedes from their homeland in twenty years if everything was fine and dandy in Sweden. Sure, the northern Midwest is full of Swedish Lutherans, but it had never occured to me that they would have emigrated in such large numbers relative to the population of Sweden. I'd always imagined that event as something more like a small subculture young people who set out to seek their fortune because the grass was reputed to be greener across the Atlantic, answering a call that most people ignored.

My own family history recounts the looming war of 1848 as a push factor in the migration of my patrilineal ancestor to the United States from Germany.

But, the story of my maternal Swede-Finn ancestors' migratration from Finland to the Upper Pennisula of Michigan a few decades later as teenagers isn't accompanied by a narrative that would suggest any push factor that dramatic. (Finland was a Grand Dutchy within Russia from 1809 to 1917, having been acquired in resolution of a war between tsarist Russia and Sweden, and was previously a part of the Swedish empire; Finnish emigration peaked around 1900, a bit later than than Swedish neighbors, perhaps because it industrialized a little later.)

According to Wikipedia:

Sweden—much like Japan at the same time—transformed from a stagnant rural society to a vibrant industrial society between the 1860s and 1910. The agricultural economy shifted gradually from communal village to a more efficient private farm-based agriculture. There was less need for manual labor on the farm so many went to the cities; and about 1 million Swedes emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1890. Many returned and brought word of the higher productivity of American industry, thus stimulating faster modernization.

The late 19th century saw the emergence of an opposition press, the abolition of guild monopolies on craftsmen, and the reform of taxation. Two years of military service was made compulsory for young men, though there was no warfare.

Health

The steady decline of death rates in Sweden began about 1810. For men and women of working age the death rate trend diverged, however, leading to increased excess male mortality during the first half of the century. There were very high rates of infant and child mortality before 1800, Among infants and children between the ages of one and four smallpox peaked as a cause of death in the 1770s-1780s and declined afterward. Mortality also peaked . . . due to other air-, food-, and waterborne diseases, but these declined as well during the early 19th century. The decline of several diseases during this time created a more favorable environment that increased children's resistance to disease and dramatically lowered child mortality.

Thus, rather than war or disease, the push factor appears to have been an increased supply of young people as mortality fell with modernity accompanied by a declining job market due to the mechanization of the economy. There are parallels to the enclosure movement in Britain as well as to the mass displacement of tenant-farmers in Japan referenced in Wikipedia. The coincidence of the imposition of compulsory military service and the mass migration is also notable.

This example also suggests give the very large percentages involved relative to the populations involved on both ends of the journey that there was a strong potential for population genetic selection in the New World for any trait that would predispose someone to make a migration and in the Old World for any trait that would predispose someone to not making a migration.

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Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Today is the last day of school for my children in the Denver Public Schools (a few schools affiliated with the district have alternative calendars).

Honestly, as inconvenient as it can be to cobble together everyone's new schedules for the summer, it is a joy for the sense of rhythm it adds to life. I spend the majority of of my daylight hours in climate controlled office buildings, and Denver's weather is quirky enough that the conditions when I do venture out don't always give me a clear take on the season.

Like most jobs, my work is amorphous. I have many cases going at any given time and they almost never all stop at once. While I'm often very aware of the date, one month can blur into the next, and one year slides into another. Everything that I do except tax planning has rolling deadlines, not annual ones. I'm not the exception. A colleague of mine I had lunch with this week could figure out what year he started his current employment only in reference to the year that someone in the firm had a child.

Children ground you and give you bearings. Their schools years make your place in the seasons relevant to your life. Their well defined march from year to year is full of landmarks - entering elementary school, hitting double digits in age, entering middle school, and soon enough for me, the teen years, and high school. Life with one or two preschoolers is so very different from having children in school. Life before one of the kids is old enough to babysit has immense logistical differences from life after that point. Their school vacations, their school performances and awards ceremonies, their sports seasons, their report cards and their fund raisers add predictable highlights to the year. Without them to ground us, life might seem to go by in a fugue.

The end of the school year is also one of the dates, along with my birthday, my anniversary, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my first admission to the practice of law that I step back and reflect on what I've accomplished in the past years.

The end of the school year, even more than my children's birthdays, is a day that I treat a bit like those signs that say "X days without accidents." I have gotten the kids this many years into their lives with parents who have stayed married, a stable home and school, and the kind of academic and social progress that they should have at this point. I'm someone who spends a lot of time reminding people of their mortality in connection with estate planning and probate work, and when I'm not doing that I'm often planning for worst case financial scenarios in asset protection planning. I also monitor the nature v. nurture debate on the context of the latest findings of psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists and geneticists. So, I help but to ponder at the end of each school year, "what if I got hit by a bus right now?", how much of doing everything we've done to raise our children so far would stick and what might fall apart? How irrevocable are the benefits we've conferred upon them this year? How set are they on the courses of their lives?

The academic literature on this isn't terribly rigorous, mostly because people who have critical experiences tend to be undersampled.  Basket case parents usually don't adopt and thus, don't end up in adoption studies. Very few twins are separated at birth, because its cruel. Flakes on the brink of survival tend to not volunteer for longitudinal research studies.

There is a lot of literature on on the extent to which traits are hereditary and the point in time when academic achievement gaps start to manifest. This literature offers reassurance to the anxious parent. Statistically speaking, a much larger share of variance between people in a wide variety of traits than people who are not familiar with the literature would expect can be attributed either to hereditary effects, or to "non-shared environment" between siblings which mostly involves things other than the choices that parents can control in raising their children.

But, to be a pessimist and cast a necessary dollop of doubt upon these findings, a great many traits involve gene x environment interactions, and the vast majority of people whose experiences give rise to the estimates of heredity don't experience many major upheavals in their lives. Studies that select subjects based on shared experiences of major upheavals and traumas tend to see bigger environmental effects than studies of the general population that capture people who have experienced these things only sporadically.

For example, the research seems to indicate that the genetic component of IQ is basically a ceiling on a person's intellectual ability in the absence of negative environmental factors that drag someone down. For people in middle class or upper middle class environments that have few of these drags on learning, the genetic component of IQ is quite large. For people who grow up in poverty, the shared environment impact of poverty on family members which varies a lot depending upon the parenting present that can mitigate or aggravate these environmental drags on learning are far more important as a source of variation from one person to the next, than a person's peak genetic potential IQ which is very hard to achieve when one is in poverty.

Not all traits in a child's development are in formative periods at the same time either. The genetic and environmental influences of IQ have pretty much run their course by the time a child heads to middle school, if not sooner.  Most children have clearly left the path that includes anger management problems and disruptive behavior by then as well.  A tendency towards anxiety manifests extremely early, as does gender identity (i.e. viewing oneself as male or female, regardless of one's body or sexual orientation).  A child's capacity to delay gratification also appears to manifest quite early.

There is some psychological literature that indicates that middle school and high school are critical ages in terms of how a person will function later in life in intimate relationships. A nasty divorce or betrayal of trust by an adults through sexual relationships with a kid at that point in life can undermine a kid's willingness to make the commitments and have the trust needed to avoid stumbling blocks later in life in those relationships.  But, few people end up spending their lives with their middle school, or even high school, sweethearts.  Some people are more resilient than others in the face of trauma.  Some young people who are made into child soldiers or gang members will be forever stone cold, while others can be restored to some semblance of normalcy if intervention happens soon enough and their reentry to society is managed well.

There is anecdotal evidence that people tend to keep whatever hairstyle and fashion preferences they adopt in their early twenties for the rest of their adult lives.

For parents the goal posts keep moving. Just when you can be confident that you have finally cleared the hurdle of getting your kids on the right track in life in one thing no matter how much you screw up later, there is some new critical developmental hurdle to clear.

Of course, this isn't exclusively a parent's responsibility. Kids make good and bad choices in their own lives that start when parents no longer have effective absolute veto power over what they eat for lunches and snacks and continue well into adulthood. Academics and opera singers have critical developments they need to make in their career specialties that will influence the rest of their lives greatly, well into their thirties, long after most have left the nest. For political staffers and lawyers and management consultants and investment bankers and doctors, one's first few years on the job are typically when you develop your professional specialty, which can be very hard to predict based upon your generalized education before that point. Some people who move to a new country as adults will adapt fairly gracefully, even if they never entirely lose their accents, while others fail to thrive or "crack" psychologically at that point. A choice of a life partner can change who you become.

For better or for worse, my own tendency is not to second guess what I've already done very much - it is what it is, but to fret over how secure what has already been accomplished will be in the future and one what developmental issues are not yet set strongly for children of the same age and gender as mine. I'm sure that there are other ways of looking at it, and some are probably better than mine. But, these are the kind of yardsticks that come to mind almost involuntarily.

Similarly, it is hard for me to stay focused on what my children do well and could perhaps advance further doing, as opposed to focusing on the issues that they struggle with but need to master. Focusing on the negative can be discouraging to them, but every time I see an issue come up for one of my children that is a struggle, I hear a clock silently ticking away in my head. Is it too late to make real progress in dealing with this? And, of course, there is joy in simply seeing children cease to become abstract possibilities and become their own distinctive individuals on their own paths in life. Each time that they take one fork instead of another in life you can develop a better feel for the kinds of paths they will take in life as adults and who they are becoming. Is he outgoing or introspective? Will she be a tomboy or a girl who is all sugar and spice? How tall will they grow? What are their academic strong and weak points? How do they treat their friends?  What lessons are they learning from me by example?

Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. My dear wife has been obsessing about where our children will go to college since they were in pre-school, although this urge has been tamed a little over time. I'm less like a "tiger dad" and more like someone reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish and impatiently driven by pure curiosity to see what ends up in the epilogue, perhaps at the expense of the joy of the journey, without as much emphasis on having any particular ending.  We each only have one shot for each child and we can only do our best and strive to improve.

READ MORE - Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Parental Rights For The Other Man

Men who father a child during an affair with a married woman have the right to seek a role in the child's life, the Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled [4-3]. In an emotionally charged decision that critics say will undermine marriage, the court reversed centuries of common law and its own 2008 ruling that held such children are presumed to be the offspring of the woman and her husband.

From here referring to this ruling.

The only think I find surprising about the result on the merits, once paternity has been established notwithstanding the non-conclusive presumption that children are the offspring of the woman and her husband, is that it was so controversial, and an examination of the opinion reveals that the issue framed by the newspaper in the quote above wasn't the real issue before the court anyway.

The common law presumption of paternity in a marriage couple is centuries old, but that presumption has rarely been interpreted as being a conclusive one and has very rarely been applied in cases where it is obvious at birth (e.g. because a child is of mixed race or the husband was away at sea or at war for the entire period when the child could have been conceived) that the child is not the genetic offspring of the mother's husband. Usually, people don't look beyond the presumption and there is no duty or expectation that married couples will affirmatively establish whether or not husbands are cuckolds, even were there are good reasons to be suspicious. In the absence of scientific testing in cases of same race fathers, where the wife continued to have sex with the husband during the affair, however, which made up most of the cases when the common law presumption was developed, there was no reliable evidentiary way to overcome the presumption, and a version of this common law approach that captured the effect of this rule but not the reasoning behind it was codified into the archaic laws of Kentucky.

So, the real controversy in the Kentucky case (notwithstanding the spin given to it by the newspaper quoted above) for five of the seven judgges was really over whether the presumption of paternity in the case of a married couple was conclusive or merely evidentiary, given the archaic language of Kentucky's family law statutes that replaced the common law in this area of law. Kentucky's past precedents which were less than clear on the issue because a 2008 decision on a similar issue produced a consensus on the outcome but not on the legal justification for that outcome. The statute gives courts jurisdiction over paternity matters in cases of children "born out of wedlock." One past interpretation of that statute reached this result by reasoning that an affair interrupted "the marital relationship" even in the absence of a divorce or physical separation, by breaking the vow of monogamy. The Kentucky Supreme Court this week took a more direct approach, holding that defines the term "born out of wedlock" in relation to a child to refer to "a child whose mother, married or not, is not married to the child's biological father" without regard to the condition of the mother's marriage.

The new rule will make it unnecessary to procure in future legal proceedings of this kind the kind of evidence considered by the trial judge in this case to the effect that:

Appellant married R.S. on October 9, 1999. They have lived together ever since. They slept in the same bed, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse, and prior to 2008 had one child, whose paternity is not at issue. From August 2007 through the spring of 2008, Appellant was involved in an intimate and secret affair with Real Party In Interest, C .H .E., who was also married but was in the process of divorce. Appellant and C.H .E. had sexual intercourse on numerous occasions between October 2007 and March 2008. Throughout the affair, however, Appellant and her husband continued having sexual intercourse on a regular basis.

According to Appellant, the affair began because her marital relationship was troubled. She professed her love to C.H .E. and told him that she wanted to leave her marriage to be with him. He professed his love for her. She lied to her husband about her whereabouts when she was with C .H .E ., and she lied about the reason his phone number often appeared on her phone bill.

In early 2008, Appellant discovered she was pregnant. By March of 2008, she decided to end the illicit affair, but admits that she did not clearly communicate that to C .H.E . Instead, she continued to have frequent, nonsexual contact with him. She met some of his family members and kept him informed about her prenatal medical care: Appellant's husband remained unaware of the affair. He testified that had they not been having regular sexual intercourse, her pregnancy would have been a "huge problem" that he would have addressed immediately.

On September 8, 2008, Appellant gave birth in Kentucky to a baby girl, N.R.S. Two weeks later, she and C .H .E. arranged for a DNA test to determine if he was the father of N.R.S. The DNA test revealed a 99.9429% probability that C.H .E . was the baby's father. When C.H.E. expressed a desire to acknowledge his daughter and to be a part of her life, Appellant informed her husband of the affair.

On October 14, 2008, C.H.E. filed a paternity action in the Kenton Family Court pursuant to KRS Chapter 406.

After this decision of the Kentucky Supreme Court, everything in the recitation of facts set forth above that is not in bold would have been excluded from testimony on the grounds that it was not legally relevant. Like "no fault" divorce, this innovation will save the husband, mother, genetic father, lawyers and judge hours of uncomfortable testimony about the sex lives and feelings of married couples and adulterers, will bring increased certainty to the law, will fit more squarely with modern views of what is just and fair, and will generally dispense will court hearings on that issue of paternity entirely - the real trial will take place in some genetic testing laboratory based entirely on scientific principles that are far more reliable than court testimony in this situation, rather than the ordinary court evidentiary process.

The notion that someone who is an established parent of a child is entitled to participate in the parenting of that child, absent of finding of unfitness, is a bedrock principle of family law in every U.S. state and probably has constitutional dimensions at this point. Also, given that it is common place in modern society for people who are not married to each other and may each be currently married to other people to co-parent a child, it is not as if this situation poses any special difficulties for family courts or societal institutions that deal with parents and children to handle.

What did the dissenting judges say?

The Chief Justice's dissent was lawyerly, and addressed the conclusiveness of the presumption, stating in the pertinent part:

The General Assembly could have adopted substantially the same
definition by incorporating into KRS 406 .011 the language proposed by the drafters of the Uniform Act on Paternity (1960) : "[a] child born out of wedlock includes a child born to a married woman by a man other than her husband." But it chose not to; instead, it explicitly "includes" in KRS 406.011 "a child born to a married woman" as a child born out of wedlock only "where evidence shows that the marital relationship between the husband and wife ceased ten (10) months prior to the birth of the child ." See J.N.R., 264 S .W.3d at 590-91. And while use of the term includes might otherwise signal an illustrative rather than exhaustive term, I believe that the legislature's refusal to adopt the broad definition proposed by the Uniform Act on Paternity draft evinces a clear legislative intent contrary to the majority's interpretation. Given that KRS 406.180 states that KRS Chapter 406 only applies to births "out of wedlock" and that the legislature chose not to adopt the definition of born out of wedlock that the majority adopts today, I do not agree with the majority that the trial court had subject matter jurisdiction simply because a paternity action was purportedly filed under KRS 406.021.

Perhaps changing mores and the advent of DNA testing call for a
different approach than the one the legislature chose in decades past . If so, the legislature should undertake that broad policy debate. But I do not believe it is proper for this Court to amend the statutes by construing them in a manner contrary to the legislature's clear intent.

The Chief Justice does not engage, perhaps because it was not adequately briefed, or perhaps because the dissent was a lost cause anyway, the constitutional argument that his proposed reading of the statute denies the father of the child a constitutional right to be recognized as a parent and to be involved in the parenting of his child absent abuse or neglect.

The other two dissenting justices on the Kentucky Supreme Court wrote a short opinion that was weak on the law, weak on the facts and classic cases of pounding on the table with characteristic Appalacian bluster and evangelical moral outrage. They also raise another issue. In their view, the problem is not necessarily that the presumption that a man married to the mother is conclusive, but that a challenge to that presumption can be raised by someone other than the man married to the mother. Thus, they want to allow a cuckolded man to have the right to challenge paternity, but also the right not to have the paternity of children of his wife, whatever their genetic ancestry may actually be, contested by "the other man." They state in their short opinion:

We vigorously dissent under the same banner for which we wrote in J.N.R. v. O'Reilly, 264 S .W.3d 587 (Ky. 2008). In essence, we hold strongly that only partners to marriage have the standing to question the legitimacy of children born during their marriage. Interlopers cannot use their own adulterous behavior as a license to invade and disrupt the matrimonial circle. The majority here deals with only one child. We speak for the thousands of children yet unborn . For centuries, the institution of marriage has "been the rock in the shadow of which children are born, shaded, protected, and nurtured." Id. at 599 (Cunningham, J., concurring in result only). Our extended comments in the J.N.R. case will be left to speak for our refusal to stand quietly by as the legal institution of marriage is surrendered to the funeral pyre of modern convenience and unanchored values. We refuse to bow down to the "Gods of the Market-Place ." RUDYARD KIPLING, THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS (1919) . Who is right and who is wrong in our debate will be left to the long view of history.

It will be interesting to see how this decision plays out in the next election for Kentucky Supreme Court seats in this religiously conservative state: "The Court has seven justices, each of whom is elected for an eight-year term from one of seven geographic districts in non-partisan elections. The justices' terms are staggered; they do not all run for election in the same years. The justices choose one of their number to serve a four-year term as chief justice[.]"

The Chief Justice (from a district that includes Bowling Green, Kentucky) and the lead author for the other dissenting opinion face the voters in 2015. The concurring judge to the other dissenting opinion faces the voters in 2013 in the 7th Supreme Court District, which consists of 22 counties in Eastern Kentucky. Three justices in the majority face voters in 2016 and the other faces voters in 2015.

READ MORE - Parental Rights For The Other Man

Mitochondrial DNA linked to male, but not female infertility

Mitochondrial DNA, which is uniparentally inherited from your mother, regardless of your gender, is a parallel set of DNA found in every cell, along with the nuclear DNA which is a mix of DNA from both parents. As a result,

mutations in the mitochondria can slip through the quality-control checks unnoticed and therefore build up to high levels, if these mutations are harmful in their effects on males but not on females. This is because all of the screening of mitochondrial mutations is done in females as a result of their maternal inheritance.

One area where this seems to happen is in mtDNA's impact on male fertility. According to the journal article, P. Innocenti, E. H. Morrow, D. K. Dowling. "Experimental Evidence Supports a Sex-Specific Selective Sieve in Mitochondrial Genome Evolution." Science, 2011; 332 (6031): 845 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201157, mtDNA mutations may be a major source of the inferility found in about five percent of men.

READ MORE - Mitochondrial DNA linked to male, but not female infertility

"Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

A new twin study finds that while people tend to choose spouses who are similar to themselves, that mate choice doesn't seem to have any other hereditary component. Twins choose spouses who are no more or less similar to them than non-twins.

The myth that boys tend to choose spouses who are similar to their mothers, while girls tend to choose spouses who are similar to their fathers, also doesn't stand up to empirical scrutiny. People tend to choose spouses who are more similar to them than their opposite sex parent.

The study (from here citing Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij, Andrew C. Heath, Nicholas G. Martin. "Variation in Human Mate Choice: Simultaneously Investigating Heritability, Parental Influence, Sexual Imprinting, and Assortative Mating." The American Naturalist, 2011; 177 (5): 605 DOI: 10.1086/659629) involved more than 20,000 subjects and examined traits including height, body mass index, education, income, personality, social attitudes and religiosity.

The only trend discovered, other than a strong tendency of people who choose mates who are like themselves in the measured traits at the time they meet (convergence towards each other in traits over time was ruled out), was a tendency for a woman's family background to influence her choices in terms of age and income.

The tendency to choose someone similar to yourself as a spouse is strongest for age, social attitudes and religiosity, moderate for IQ, education and physical attractiveness, and less strong, but still statistically significant, for height, weight and personality traits.

Pheromone transmitted information about a potential mates MHC complex of genes (related to immunity) influences someone's attractiveness but has essentially no actual impact on who people actually end up in a long term relationship with in the end. The degree of MHC similarity or dissimilarity in married couples is no different that would be expected from random chance.

People also tend to deceive themselves about what kind of person they want in marriage. There is little connection between self-reported preferences in a potential mate and the person that people actually chose to marry.

The study did not attempt to measure which marriages worked and which did not, only what kind of people individuals actually choose to marry in the first place. Thus, the study doesn't rule out the possibility that the best person for someone to marry has traits different than the person an individual is most likely to marry.

In a somewhat related matter, sexual orientation is almost completely unrelated to shared family environment or prevailing societal attitudes. A large (n=7600) twin study in Sweden found that sexual orientation was explained 0%-17% by shared environment (including familial and societal attitudes), 18%-39% by genetics, and 61%-66% by unique environment, "for example, circumstances during pregnancy and childbirth, physical and psychological trauma (e.g., accidents, violence, and disease), peer groups, and sexual experiences." The study was Niklas Långström, Qazi Rahman, Eva Carlström, Paul Lichtenstein. "Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behaviour: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden." Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 7 June 2008 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1. At least in a large share of cases, there is a fair amount of evidence that sexual orientation tends to be congential and is related to some extent to genes and to some extent to hormone exposure in utero and possibly to other epigenetic or in utero enviromental factors.

READ MORE - "Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

Seeking the Yayoi

The conventional pre-history of Japan involves horseback riding soldiers called the Yayoi entering Japan around the area where it comes closest to Korea around sometime in the middle of the first millenium before the current era, where the indigeneous people, who had lived there for 30,000 years, called the Jomon, a fishing oriented pottery making people who were linguistic and ethnic close relatives of the modern Ainu minority of Northern Japan were assimilated into the Yayoi superstrate in a process of ethnogenesis that gave rise to the modern Japanese people.

Until around 1000 CE, the northern Honshū island was inhabited by the Emishi to whom we can be quite definitive in attaching an Ainu ethnicity and language affiliation, and Ainu related people also inhabited the region known as Ezo, consisting of the island of Hokkaidō; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. So, for the first 1300 years, the Yayoi were pretty much confined to Southern Japan.

The Yayoi may have been some manner of Korean people, although which of the ancient Korean kingdoms they (and the modern Korean language) have the strongest affinity to is disputed.

As I noted in a wikipedia article on the origin of the Japanese language that is linked above: "Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yaoyi language) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "knago" (i.e. words with roots borrowed from Chinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chinese ideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages. This account attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots." Almost all of the various characters used to write down Japanese are also borrowed from Chinese.

I'd instinctively favor an account that suggests that the Ainu linguistic contribution is undercounted, but because Ainu is a living language that is well attested, as is Chinese, and given that Japanese and Chinese have been a literary language for most of the time period in question, I suspect that an identification of wago words with the original Yayoi language is probably pretty accurate.

There are strongly suggestive indications that the Yayoi language was Altaic, a language family that also has as core members, the Turkic languages, the Mongolian languages, and the Tungusic languages of Manchuria. The geographic scope of the proposed Altaic language family members is considerable as this map from Wikipedia indicates:

But, historically, this spread was quite recent.

The Turkic languages reached Central Asia, Europe and Turkey within the last seventeen hundred years or so. Their ethnogenesis is associated with the arrival of the Bronze Age and horses in the Northeastern Asian region sometime in the vincinity of 1500 BCE to 700 BCE.

The traditional date for the Yayoi arrival in Japan is 2700 years ago, and most evidence to date suggest an actual arrival a few hundred years later. This would be consistent with the Yayoi as a cultural offshoot of the proto-Turkic peoples.

While the empire of Ghengis Khan was the largest on land known to man, in the late middle ages, until a eight or nine hundred years ago, it was confined to Mongolia, Northern China and perhaps Eastern Siberia where it is found today (the only linguistic legacy of its expansion is the Oirat language spoken by peoples on the Caspian plains of Russia. The Mongolians first entire recorded history in the 4th century CE in Manchuria and Mongolia as a nomadic people called the Khitan people.

The Tungusic languages have remains at all times largely confined to Manchuria.

Japanese and Korean are clearly not Tibet-Burmese languages, despite their heavy borrowing from Chinese, and the linguistic case of the an Altaic affiliation for Japanese and Korean (presumably via its Yayoi roots) is not trivial. The Altaic languages, Old Japanese and Korean all have a linguistic feature called vowel harmony that is rarely, if ever, found in other languages. Similarities have also been found in verb conjugation classes, and there has been some success in matching tonal aspects of Japanese to consonants found in other Altaic languages. Vovin has suggested that as many as 15 to 23 core Old Japanese words have Altaic proto-language counterparts, far more than chance would suggest, and almost all of the Altaic-Japanese correspondences are wago words. The Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean are also notable for a lack of noun classes and lack of grammatic gender.

So far, so good. There is a problem, however. While Japanese population genetics do parse rather neatly into East Asian and Jomon components, the East Asian genetic component looks far more like the Chinese than it does like the Altaic populations of Northeastern Eurasia.

It isn't so hard to imagine how this could happen. In the same vein, Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia don't have a very strong genetic link to the Turkish language speaking people of Anatolia. One imagines that an ethnically Chinese population in and around Korea may have been a subject people of a Altaic language speaking elite leading to a language shift in the population (at least among the elites that would go on to conquer Japan as the Yayoi), with little Altaic genetic admiture from the ruling elite to the soldiers who went on to conquer Japan.

This pushes the genetic forebears of the Yayoi to the Southwest, and the linguistic and cultural forebears of the Yayoi to the North, probably North of Korea entirely.

Given that Japanese appears to have more lexical similarity to Proto-Turkic than to other Altaic language family languages, that Proto-Turkic was the first of the Alataic languages to experience an expansion out of Asia, and that Japanese lexical links to Altaic languages appear to be mediated through Proto-Turkic, one imagines the linguistic forebears of the Japanese to be Proto-Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia.

This would have been some time after the 4th millenium before the current era, when the horse appears to have been domesticated (probably reaching the Turks as a cultural transmission from Indo-European language speakers such as the Tocharians or their immediately predecessors in Central Asia), but no later than the 3rd millenium before the current era when the Yayoi arrive in Japan, which is strongly consistent with Proto-Turkic ethnogenesis.

The Proto-Turkic expansion would presumably start a little later than the Indo-European expansions, given the direction of horse domestication transmission and Bronze Age technology transmission across the Russian Steppe, and Finno-Urgic a.k.a. Uralic languages of that region appear to be older still than Indo-European languages. In addition, some of the region, prior to the expansions of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages with the horse would have spoken Paleo-Siberian languages such as Yenesian which has linguistic links to the Na-Dene languages of North America.

READ MORE - Seeking the Yayoi

The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

Hunter-gatherer populations from before the introduction of farming and herding of domesticated plants and animals to Western Europe makes up about 15% of the Western European maternal gene pool (represented in individual with mtDNA haplogroups U5a, U5b1, V and 3H).  The finding is based upon both ancient DNA samples and mutation rate dating of mtDNA haplogroups.

This study doesn't estimate the Y-DNA contribution of European hunter-gatherer populations to the current Western European gene pool, but generally speaking, the patriline contributions of indigeneous men are similar to that of indigenous women or smaller.  Thus, probably less than 15% of the total gene pool in Western Europe is traceable to pre-Neolithic hunter-gathers.  By comparison, the non-African has 1% to 4% Neanderthal admixture. 

Thus, even though there have been anatomically modern humans in Europe for about 30,000 years, and there were Neanderthals in Europe (who co-existed with modern humans in Europe for what may have been as much as a few thousand years) for a couple of hundred thousand years or so before that, about five-sixths of the Western European gene pool is attributable to population expansions of farmers and herders into the area in the last seven thousand years or so, although some of this "Neolithic wave" of population expansion may actually have been an Epi-paleolithic population that arrived in the region a few thousand years earlier and relied on fishing for food (and perhaps cultivation of non-domesticated plants) prior to the establishment of a truly Neolithic form of food production, converted culturally to becoming farmers, and then expanded in population.

Moreover, the hunter-gather population prior to the last glacial maximum in Europe around 20,000 years ago probably retreated to Southern refugia as the ice sheet advanced, only to return as the ice sheet retreated afterwards.  There was not necessarily identity between pre-LGM and post-LGM modern human populations of Europe.  The second wave of hunter-gatherer expansion into Europe could have been heavily infused with ethnically different people from SW Asia, for example.

The cultural connections of Western Europeans to the Mesolithic ancestors are probably even more shallow than their genetic ties to them.

In all likelihood, all of the languages of the Mesolithic human hunter-gatherers of Europe are extinct.  If the Basque language is a Neolithic arrival (ca. 5,000 BCE in Iberia), and the Indo-European languages did indeed arrive in Western Europe only after this non-Indo-European substrate population had filled the region, and the Uralic languages of Northern and Eastern Europe arrived sometime after animals were domesticated in that area (probably after 6,000 BCE), then none of the extant languages of Europe can trace its origins directly to the Mesolithic peoples of Western Europe. 

Uralic language speaking people have the highest frequencies of mtDNA haplogroup types associated with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and were among the last to adopt full fledged farming as a means of food production in Europe, so it is possible that these languages might be a remote ancestors of an Eastern branch of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe (which culturally and ethnically would have extended well into Siberian Asia), but there is no really strong evidence to support the description of Uralic languages as indigeneous back to the Mesolithic, rather than an intrusion that replaced prior languages during a Neolithic expansion.

Also, not all of the recent arrivals to Western Europe are associated with the first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe.  The first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe appears to be strongly identified with the Neolithic Megalithic culture, popularly identified with Stonehenge although it appears to have origins in Portugal and to have stretched along most of the Atlantic Coast of Europe and the British Isles.  This culture appears to have evolved mostly culturally rather than through population replacement into the early Bronze Age.  Linguistically, it is common to associate with wave of expansion with a family of non-Indo-European languages that would have included the Basque language, which would have served the source of a "vasconic substrate" in Western Europe, upon which Indo-European languages of the area imposed themselves.  There is likewise no good reason to suspect that the Caucasian languages pre-date the Neolithic revolution.

This first Neolithic wave, it was followed by at least two main waves of Indo-European expansions in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age which resulted in language shift, disrupted the local culture, and probably left a distinguishable genetic trace in contemporary Western European populations.  The first wave of Indo-Europeans in Western Europe would have been Celtic or proto-Celtic and would have run its course, bringing all but a few pockets of Western Europe into the Celtic cultural sphere in the period from about 1250 BCE when Indo-Europeans first started to arrive, until about 500 BCE when they had largely asserted control even in the British Isles.

Several centuries after Celtic peoples consolidated control in Western Europe, the Romans would have arrived on the scene and conquered most of the same territory, only to lose its grip on those territories after the cultural transformation had already taken place when the Western Roman empire fell (one common date used to identify this moment is 476 CE, although the process happened in stages, rather than all at once).  Christianity largely replaced Indo-European and non-Indo-European during the late Roman Empire and centuries of evangelization of areas beyond the boundary of the former Roman Empire during the Middle Ages that followed.  Today, pagan folk culture, often incorporated into Christian rites, myths or secular rites, is all that remains, this often goes unrecognized as such, and these traces may be Indo-European rather than from the previous non-Indo-European cultural layer.  While there are some relict pagan practice among the Mari of Russia and the Alevi of Turkey and Basque folklore (none of which are Indo-European linguistically), in Western Europe, all of the remaining pagans of "neo-pagan" having reinvented the dead religion from the vestiges of earlier days that they have been able to recover. 

Iberia saw some demographic input from North Africa in the Middle Ages during its hundreds of years of Moorish occupation (on top of demographic inputs going both ways across the Straight of Gibralter dated to before the Neolithic revolution), but the populations genetic traces of the Middle Ages and early modern period in Western Europe were mostly internal to Europe (e.g. Viking invasions of coastal areas).  There were also minor diasporic Jewish and Gypsy population migrations to Western Europe in that time period. 

In Western Europe, the languages that descend from the Celtic languages are currently in a marginal position (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh are the principal surviving Celtic languages and English is the dominant language in almost all of the areas where these languages are spoken with very few people being monolinguistic in Celtic).  The predominant Indo-European languages of Western Europe are descendants of the Latin of the Roman Empire or are part of the Indo-European Germanic language family.

This experience appears to be typical of other parts of the world in Africa and in Asia that have developed agriculture.  While population replacement of hunter-gather populations may not have been complete, the lion's share of the modern population arrives from relatively late arrivals.

READ MORE - The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

How Old Are The Indo-European Languages?

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson in their article in Nature in 2003 looked at the amount of lexical differences between the various living and extinct Indo-European languages and concluded that the language family was about 8,000 years old. Robin J. Ryder and Geoff K. Nicholls in an article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics) for January 2011 reproduced the same result, with similar data and a more refined version of the same model that addressed some of the methodological objections to the Gray and Atkinson study.

These dates are wrong. We can conclude that these dates are wrong because we have more sources of data than the models rely upon that strongly support a contrary result. Their models produce the wrong estimates of the age of the Indo-European language family because the models that they use make simplifying assumptions that have a material effect on the result. This post explains why these two studies (they aren't really independent as the later study uses data and methods that overlap the first) are wrong and why "the Kurgan theory [of Marija Gimbutas] that the spread started between 6000 and 6500BP" is a more accurate estimate.

Both studies use essentially the same inputs - a list of common words for particular things from as many Indo-European languages as possible, living and dead, and some estimates of the time period during which those word lists were valid. They then estimate the rate that languages change their vocabulary based on examples of languages that are known to have changed to certain degrees in known time periods.

The degree of similarity between languages in lexicon produces presumed relationships between the languages that closely mirror what we believe to be true by other means. The branches of the tree are essentially the same.

The number of years before present that any given two languages have a presumed common ancestor in these models is essentially a highly massaged way of describing the degree to which they are lexically similar. The fewer words a pair of languages have in common, the more distant the model presumes their common ancestor to be.

In some circumstances, specifically, when languages are already differentiated from each other and only have neighboring languages influencing their evolution that don't interact heavily and are from related language families, this assumption is reasonable. But, in critical situations it is not. In real life, languages exhibit punctuated evolution. They change rapidly when they first differentiate and when they co-exist with or are in close regular proximity to very different languages, while changing slowly when isolated.

The model is wrong because it fails to account for these facts, both of which produce more rapid language change than would result from the mere prolonged random linguistic drift of a language in isolation or near isolation. Put another way, the age estimates produced by these models is the oldest age that could be expected in an environment in which there is no real linguistic competition from other language families and one starts with a single common language, something that is a good description of the groups of languages used to estimate the rates of language change used in the model. But, there are circumstances in the history of the Indo-European languages whose lexical differences from each other are driving the old estimate for a proto-Indo-European language that would have sped up the rate of language change at critical junctures. Those circumstances, in fact, look quite similar to the circumstances where the model fails to produce accurate age estimates for languages with known ages.

Atkinson recognized this was a problem, and in a 2008 study fit the data to a more complex model that attempted to determine how much language change was attributable to change in the formative period of a language, and how much language change was due to random drift. In the Indo-European languages, Atkinson's effort determined that about 21% of language change was due to language formation effects, a result that neatly produces an estimated age of proto-Indo-European of about 6600 years BP, a match within the margin of error with the most widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European language origins.

What makes the evidence for the Kurgan hypothesis such much more plausible than the estimates produced by the two statistical estimates?

The Kurgan hypothesis looks at the earliest known cultures to speak Indo-European languages - the Indo-Aryans of India who composed the Vedic Sanskrit epics from which Hindo and other Indo-Aryan languages are known to descend, the ancient Persian authors of the early Indo-Iranian Avestia, the Mycenians who replaced the Minoans and the Pelagasians who spoke non-Indo-European languages, the Hittites in Anatolia whose language led to the extinction of the Hattic and Hurrian languages there, the Mittani who spoke an Indo-European language with Indo-Aryan affinities, the Tocharians who spoke an Indo-European language in the Tarim basin until well into the 1st millenium CE, the Celts, and the earliest Italic language speakers in Italy. Archaeology and physical anthropology (i.e. similarity of bones) and more recently genetics (of populations and ancient DNA) are then used to identify which archaeological cultures appear to be in continuity with each other, and which appear to represent a break from prior archaeological cultures. Periods in which there is continuity in archaeological culture are presumed to represent periods of relative linguistic continuity. Periods in which there is discontinuity in archaeological culture or a historical record of a language transition are deemed to be periods of relative linguistic change. By this means predecessor cultures are assigned to Indo-European and non-Indo-European categories. Cultural continuity of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages are traced back until a juncture of all of the source in which words that have a common origin in distant branches of the language family were present. The cultures themselves are dated using carbon dating, tree rings, and other methods of dating archaeological strata.

Boundary Dates For Indo-European Cultures

This method provides some minimum ages of Indo-European languages.

Cultural practices like cremation which Vedic epics attest to being adopted around the time that the Indo-Aryans arrive in India appear around 3911 BP. A contemporaneous Akkadian historical record establishes that the Hittites conquered their second city state in 3765 BP and that before that date the Hittites ruled a single city (they would go on to rule almost all of Anatolia and the Northern Levant). Cremation starts to appear on the Pannonian plain and along some locations on the mid-Danube River basin around 4000 BP. From 3561 BCE- 3471 BP a Sanskrit speaking, Indo-Aryan god worshipping elite establishes itself in Mitanni empire in Northeast Mesopotamia.

Tarim basin mummies that remain similar in physical type which is physically and genetically similar to peoples of the same time period on the European steppe start to appear around 3811 BP and continue to have a similar appearance until about 1200 BP. J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair in "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West." (2000), suggest in a step critical to fixing an earliest possible proto-Indo-European date that, as Wikipedia paraphrases them:

[T]he Tocharian languages were introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north. The Afanasevo culture (c. 5500–4500 BP) displays cultural and genetic connections with the Indo-European-associated cultures of the Central Asian steppe yet predates the specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture (c. 4000–2900 BP) enough to isolate the Tocharian languages from Indo-Iranian linguistic innovations like satemization.

This provides an archaeologically supported date for a possible split of the Tocharian language from the other Indo-European languages of no earlier than 5500 BP, and supports the Kurgan hypothesis because, per the Wikipedia article on the Afanasevo culture, this is an early and extreme eastern outlier culture whose "burials bear a remarkable resemblance to those much further west in the Yamna culture [5200 BP to 4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], the Sredny Stog culture [6500-5500 BP "just north of the Sea of Azov between the Dnieper and the Don."], the Catacomb culture [4800-4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], Poltavka culture [4700—4100 BP of the middle Volga River], and the Corded Ware Culture [5000–4350 BP aka the Battle Axe culture or Single Grave culture]."

The oldest Corded Ware sites are in Poland, and it is found in much of Russia and the Baltic sea area. It reaches the "Danubian and Nordic areas of western Germany" around 4400 BP and might be Indo-European or might be one of the last pre-Indo-European layers in part because, "In places a continuity between Funnel Beaker and Corded Ware can be demonstrated, whereas in other areas Corded Ware heralds a new culture and physical type." Also, specific origins much later in time have been identified for the Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic languages. For example, the beginning of late Nordic Bronze Age in Southern Scandinavia around 2110 BP is a moment of major cultural upheaval when cremation begins to appear in Southern Scandinavia, many metal objects related to horses are found and there seems to be a strong coincidence with the appearance of the Germanic languages. The main expansion of the Slavic languages takes place around 1400 BP, after the fall of the Roman empire from the Southwest edge of the Slavic language speaking areas today.

So, if the Corded Ware culture was Indo-European, it may not have left Indo-European linguistic traces in much the same way that Indo-European Celtic languages left very little trace in France, Spain and Portugal were Celtic was replaced by Roman which was replaced by Romance languages.

Given the timing of the Afanasevo culture whose Indo-European identity can be inferred reasonably reliably despite a lack of direct linguistic evidence, the Tocharian branch of Indo-European languages must break off from the Sredny Stog culture, since all of the others are too recent to be a source for it, and the Sredny Stog culture becomes a strong candidate for the proto-Indo-European culture. (Gray estimates this date to be 6900 BP, which is about 1400 years too early.)

There is cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim culture in the Southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan which flourished from roughly 4211 BP and 3611 BP that conducted chariot burials, engaged in copper mining and metallurgy, and was, according to ancient DNA genetically at least 90% West Eurasian on both the maternal and paternal sides in which at least 60% of the individuals overall had light hair and blue or green eyes. There is also cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Andronovo culture which invented the spoke-wheeled chariot which is strongly associated with the Indo-Iranians around 4010 BP. Some genetic traits that are more common in high caste Indo-Aryan language speakers are believed to have West Eurasian origins.

The Urnfield culture emerges around the time of several collapses and upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Levant around the time of the Urnfield origins:

* end of the Mycenean culture with a conventional date of ca. 3200 BP
* destruction of Troy VI ca. 3200 BP
* Battles of Ramses III against the Sea Peoples, 3206-3211 BP
* end of the Hittite empire 3190 BP
* settlement of the Philistines in Palestine ca. 3180 BP

The Urnfield culture is found in Central Europe and Eastern France and Northern Italy and is commonly seen as an Indo-European cultural sucessor to the Bronze Age Indo-European cultures and a cultural predecessor to the Hallstatt culture from the 8th to 6th centuries BC (European Early Iron Age) and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture associated with the Celts. The late Urnfield culture probably gave rise to the Italic languages, which are closely related to Celtic as well, and may even have also been a source for the Germanic languages. The late Urnfield culture at its greatest extent reached far Northeastern Iberia. (Indo-European) Greek colonies were established in Iberia ca. 2710 BP.

Boundary Dates For Non-Indo-European Cultures

There are also ancient cultures we know did not speak Indo-European languages. Sumerian was a literary non-Indo-European language attested in writing from 5500 BP to 4200 BP in Mesopotamia (Iraq), until about 4015 BP when the Semitic Akkadian language was spoken, after which the Kassite empire from the mountains to the East where a Hurrian language (a non-Indo-European, non-Afro-Asiatic language related to the languages of the North Caucuses) was imposed, until it was defeated in the North by the Mittani and later by the Hittites.

We also have continous literary records of the Egyptians in Coptic from about 5000 BP until well past 3000 BP, at times through the South Levant, and of Semitic languages being spoken in the North Levant prior to their arrival in Sumeria. We also know that the Semitic languages and Coptic are part of the same language family.

Thus, there were no Indo-European languages spoken South of Anatolia prior to the Mittani for a prolonged period of time during which Indo-European languages prior to those first know to the historical record or the cultures that spoke them were in existence. Prior to the arrival of the Mittani, the people of that region in the mountains to the East of Mesopotamia spoke a non-Indo-European language.

We know that from roughly 4110 BP to 3465 BP that Linear A script used by speakers of non-Indo-European Minoan language, which was probably related to the pre-Indo-European Etruscan (Tuscany), Rhaetic (roughly speaking Venice), and Lemnian (a Greek island) languages. We also know that the Pelagasians who inhabited mainland Greece immediately prior to the arrival of the Mycenians (who spoke ancient Greek) spoke a non-Indo-European language.

The non-Indo-European Elamite language is attested in writing in Persia from 3511 BP to 2342 BP, and a system of proto-writing that appears to be in cultural continuity with it was used from 5100 BP or so.

The Hattic language was spoken for an indeterminate period prior to the emergence of the Hittite empire as the predominant language of North Central Anatolia and shows some similarities to the languages of the Caucusas Mountains. The non-Indo-European Kaskians regularly invade Hittite territory from the East coast of the Sea of Maramara and the adjacent Anatolian plains which the Hittites never manage to control ca. 3661 BP until they are defeated by an Assyrian king ca. 3160 BP.

There is cultural continuity between the Harappans of the Indus River Valley and the Sumerians. The Harappans used Sumerian crops very shortly after they were found in Sumeria, engaged in regular trade with Sumeria for thousands of years and had a linguistic minority district in Sumerian port cities, and used a system of symbolic seals similar to those used by the Vinca culture of the Balkans and the Sumerians. The Indus River Valley culture shows remarkable continuity and unity for about 4000 years until its collapse not long before the appearance of the Indo-Aryans ca. 3900 BP.

Since we know very little about what the Harappan language was like, and it was relatively isolated from the rest of the food producing world for so long, it would be possible to see it as the proto-Indo-European homeland rather than Central Asia. But, in that hypothesis it is hard to explain why so many genetic markers typical of Pakistanis (e.g. Y-DNA haplogroup L) are not found in many other Indo-Europeans at any frequency.

Prior to the Urnfield and Greek influences arriving in Iberia it appears that non-Indo-European language speakers, some of whom spoke Vasconic languages related to Basque lived in Iberia. These peoples (or at least some of them) based on place named and archaeological continuity appear to have been part of a common Atlantic megalithic culture that coicided with the Neolithic revolution in the Atlantic region.

Implications

In the period immediately following 4000 BP, which also coincides with the worst short term drought since agriculture was invented in the Middle East that also appears to have extended to the Indus River Valley, Indo-European peoples appear on the scene from Greece to Anatolia to the Balkans to Central Asia to North India to the Tarim Basin. There is rough consensus on the timing, ethnic identity and location of Indo-European language speakers in all periods after then outside of Northern and Eastern Europe where there is some dispute over whether particular cultures were or were not Indo-European language speakers.

Before that point in time, the Indo-Europeans were pretty much confined to the Eastern European and Central Asian steppe where they would have been distinguished by the horse culture and would have been predominantly herders in juxtaposition to their Old European farmer neighbors to the West.

Lexical analysis suggests an age of Proto-Indo-European based on an counterfactual assumption of gradual random linguistic drift of 8000 BP which coincides with the earliest LBK Neolithic expansion into Eastern Europe out of someplace in the vicinity of Anatolia and the Balkans. The Kurgan hypothesis sees cultural connections between the earliest likely Indo-European language speakers and the Early Kurgan (burial mound) culture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia of ca. 6500 to 6000 BCE, while placing the LBK farmers and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture [7500 BP to 4750 BP], of "Old Europe" in cultural continuity with the non-Indo-European language speaking people of pre-Hittite Anatolia and of Sumeria and the Levant. In an Anatolian hypothesis, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture would have to be Indo-European and would have to have somehow extended its influence all of teh way to India with technologies like chariots that it did not possess, and the non-Indo-European language cultures that the Indo-Europeans displaced are hard to explain.

The uniform rate of linguistic change hypothesis would suggest that it took about 4000 years for the Indo-European languages to diversify to the extent observed in 4000 BP. The Kurgan hypothesis suggests that this happened much more rapidly, over about 2000 to 2500 years, probably due to an increased rate of language change as daughter languages distinguished themselves from each other, due to founder effects, and as a result of coming into intimate intense contact with competing non-Indo-European langauges as they expanded.

What a mere statistical model based on word comparisons between languages fails to provide that the Kurgan hypothesis does is to provide a step by step chain of cultures that could bring Indo-European languages to the places that they ultimately end up, and reasons (including domestication of the horse and development of the chariot and in the case of the Hittites, a monopoly on iron production coinciding with climate based weakness in neighboring cultures) that they were able to expand their linguistic reach.

READ MORE - How Old Are The Indo-European Languages?

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success