Most modern Indians descended from South Asians...

<grin>

moi aussi, vij-ji. moi aussi. ;)

I refuse to believe this. I hold steadfast to my belief that my ancestors were white. If the above theory is proved correct, I will chose option B where my more immediate ancestors came from Uzbekistan (as my grandmom always claimed!).

I may have missed it, but is there a hunch/theory to explain the phenotypic differences between some South and North Indians? Is it just normal genetic variation carried out over time and isolated genetic groups?

I have to wonder if there was much intra-South Asian coupling going on? I assume there was much intra-SA trade happening and there must have been some boot knocking to come of it, right?? Yet the phenotypic difference persist? That's what the Aryan invasion theory always seemed to help validate: the differences between North and South Indians were in some part due to these Aryan invaders throwing their seed into the genetic soup of the North. Apparently not so though.

I guess the environments between the North and South are so different that they produced relatively dramatic differences between populations rather quickly? Armchair anthropologist here will wait to see what others post and learn. Interesting post.

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians...

Tou...f'in...che! :-) :-).

Gujjubhai on January 15, 2006 07:47 PM ·

>>Most modern Indians descended from South Asians...
>>Tou...f'in...che! :-) :-).

Men descended from apes..*double grin*

Come again..Tou..f'in..che:-))

Punjabi JAG, et al

Could it just be due to a slower migration of fairer-skinned Central Asians? I'm just going on geography here..

Recently, my brother gave his DNA to Genographic Project. Anyone can do that $100.00. They are building an excellent data base.

The results are agreement with NAS proceedings.

Maybe, we will hear from Razib and other biologists/ genetists on board.

Men descended from apes..*double grin*

So, like, South Asians = bandars and Indians = insaan? ROTFLMAO!!!

Oh yeah, and Triple tou..fi'n..che with cherry on top right back at ya :-) :-).

PS:Apologies for the double post earlier.
PPS: This post is just a (possibly lame) attempt at humor. Not intended to start another SA vs. Indian flame.

They probably caught Wikipedia during its Hindu moment. Otherwise this is a highly politicized issue and one that is probably continually subjected to the so-called "revert wars" in Wikipedia where no sooner than one side of an issue is published the folks on the other side replace it with their version of the truth.

Don't know about the genes, but I find it hard to believe that people (that too nomads) from a colder climate could have brought a culture, complete with poetry and ritual into a warmer climate. Besides, there is no such race as Aryan. In Sanskrit the word simply means "noble" and the civilizational ideal was ayra conduct. It's odd that there would be a race with such a name when other race names are not based on such an etymology.

As they say a theory never dies, but sooner or later its opponents simply drop dead. The AIT issue will likely go on for a generation or two longer since the west is rather attached to this concoction of theirs.

Sorry, make that "adherents" instead of "opponents" in my last post.

Gujjubhai

Nope. It's like:

South Asians = Barbaric, nomadic tribesmen
Indians = Evolved, enlightened individuals with a 5000 year old civilization to boot

If your evolution has brought you to a state of pride and achievement, why would you want to regress to an earlier, primitive identity?:-)

A very good Tou-F'in-Che to the power of infinity to you:-)

Actually, theory has multiple definitions, one of which is:

An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.

So the Aryan Invasion Theory is just that, a theory. It's interesting (and confusing) that one word can have almost diametrically opposed meanings.

If the above theory is proved correct, I will chose option B where my more immediate ancestors came from Uzbekistan (as my grandmom always claimed!).

You know the distance from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to lets say in Gujranwala, Punjab is less then Gujranwala, Punjab to Bombay. I dont know how far Tashkent, Uzbekistan is from major west/ north West Indian cities. There can always be some cases where populations from Central Asian countries settled in what is India.

In the Mahabharat, a city called "Gandhar" is mentioned (Where uncle 'Shakuni' is from). That is actually present day Kandahar, Afghanistan.

A lot of races have migrated into india. you have folks who are dark as africans, whitish(iranian,greekish,italian looking), asian looking folks and i'm describing my extended family.

Actually, theory has multiple definitions, one of which is...

Perhaps, but in the context of science, as in this case, there is only one single definition.

Witzel and his group support the theory; the Hindu groups do not.

I am not sure if it's just the "Hindu groups" who are against the Aryan Invasion "Theory." In fact, the historian Romila Thapar, who is considered "Leftist" by the saffronists, is against it too. She uses the term Indo-Aryan speakers and not Aryans.

Thanks for underlining that point, Divya. I notice that the Wikipedia article has been replaced with something more scholarly and responsible. Another point I'd like to make is that, irrespective of the genetic indigeneity of North Indian Hindus to South Asia, its an absurdity to say something like, "plenty of linguistic and other evidence indicates that Hinduism existed in India long before 1,500 B.C." What exactly was the nature of the Hinduism that existed at that point? A religion that probably didnt read the Mahabharatha or the Ramayana, at least not in the forms we read them today, and worshipped a pantheon of (mostly nature) Gods who have vanished from religious consideration. In fact, most of the Vedas have very little bearing on modern Hindu religious practice.

Hindu extremists may consider themselves to have scored a point with this genetic study, but the fact is that rational historical analysis isnt going to do any favours to their revisionist originalism, that is, the notion that there exists an original canon or religious tradition that we can call Hinduism and that is continuous with Hindu practice today. The fact that this study does not erase is that a cultural-linguistic influence from somewhere to the West of "Bharath" seems to have substantially altered the nature of Hinduism itself, even if it didnt alter the nature of Hindu genes.

ok.

1) Y and mtDNA lineage studies are tracing two lines of descent. the Y traces the DIRECT PATERNAL LINE, i.e., father->son->son->son->son->son.... while mtDNA traces mother->daugher->daughter->daughter. ergo, one must take these studies with a grain of salt, because they are telling you about the history of genes, not peoples, as peoples are dynamic coalitions of genes which are in constant flux. as a example, if you looked at Y & mtDNA of mexican americans, overall, you would see that vast majority of Y chromosomal lineages of mexican americans cluster with iberian europeans, while the vast majority of mtDNA lineages cluster with the indigenous peoples of central america. we know the history of this group (spanish men kept indigenous concubines, and brought over few spanish women and marginalized indigenous men), so it isn't surprising, but too often people extrapolate just from one lineage without the context of the whole genome.

2) these are putatively neutral ancestral markers, but genes do operate under selection. for example, a common assertion is that ~70% of north indians are lactose tolerant, while ~30% of south indians are. ~90% of northern europeans are lactose tolerant. in eurasia the genes for lactose tolerance seem to have increased in frequency first in northern europe and spread to the rest of eurasia. so the frequency of lactose tolerance in northern india is probably derived from northern europe via deme-to-deme transmission of genes, and positive selection for that gene within the population. my point is that selection matters, and indians, northern and southern, have changed a lot in situ over the past ~10,000 (for example, all populations who have transitioned to agriculture have tended toward reduction in teeth size in comparison to their ancestral median).

3) in regards to south asia, i think the general thrust of the paper is correct, as a recent stream of papers have pointed to this likelihood. but let me make it clear what this means, if you generated a family tree of yourself (brown) and back-projected 10,000 years, the majority of individuals would probably reside within the borders of "south asia." there is also a straightforward genetic interpretation in terms of the phylogeography of alleles 10 K before the present. but in any case....

4) i do not think this refutes an "aryan invasion" theory, insofar as if you imagine that there was a 5% transfer of population between central asia and northern india in one generation that is actually pretty non-trivial on a world-wide scale. a regular problem with these "discoveries" is that words like "few" "many" or "invasion" are non-quantitative and don't really tell you much more precise factual information. the magyar tribes, for example, obviously invaded the plains of pannonia and imposed their language upon the latin and slavic speaking indigenous peoples, but left little genetic imprint (less than 10% of the ancestry). we know the magyars invaded because we have historical records of the size of their hordes (a few hundred thousand people). just because there wasn't genetic replacement doesn't imply that there wasn't an "invasion." i think the concept of "invasion" is probably wrong in and of itself, though it seems obviously to me from a philological vantage point that in the long term indo-european languages are exogenous to southern asia. but the spread of latin was not accompanied by concomitant expansion of italian genes, so cultures can move. also, note that 'waves of advance' of tribes are subject to dilution, but just because the genetic configuration at point A is not maintained by point Z doesn't mean that tribe->to->tribe invasion & replacement is not occurring. just because the genetic studies seem to suggest that europeans, overall, are about ~25% middle eastern farmer, does not negate the idea that there was a massive migration of an expanding farming population into europe. rather, the genetic expansion was diluted over time as the wave of advance was picked up 'local' genes via admixture. no doubt the culture admixed too, but if you imagine that the farmer's culture had higher status, then the demographic expansion might have been tightly coupled to middle eastern farmer culture (in colin renfrew's model this would be anatolian derived indo-european language).

5) this work is still somewhat provisional. but, i think that if you checked coalescents on south asian genes* most of the time the genes would coalesce first with other brown people (though not all the time). in other words, if you have a bunch of iranians, a bunch of punjabis and a bunch of tamils, the expectation for me is that gene X from these three groups would exhbit a tamil-punjabi clade and then a (tamil-punjabi)-iranian clade. but this wouldn't be universal, and many punjabi individuals would cluster with iranians on some genes (if they were recent immigrants from iran, they would cluster with iranians are most genes!). punjabis would be more likely to cluster with iranians than tamils, though even some genes carried by tamils would cluster with iranians vis-a-vi other tamils. the key is to imagine the individual's genome as a discrete collection of genetic bits & pieces of information. similarly, populations are collections of bits & pieces of information, and one should be careful of one-size-fits-all narratives, especially in a historical vacuum as some of this genetic data is interpreted (one genetic study of the MHC of iyers in tamil nadu postulated an invasion from central asia via southeast asia by iyers because of the genetics. this was stupid, it doesn't make sense).

6) one thing, a lot of these 'admixture' studies assume that the genes of say, central asians, today are the same as those in the past, and that there hasn't been much gradual continuous gene flow. this is probably a false assertion, though it works well in many models. but keep this is in mind, as that's why these studies are rarely definitive alone.

* coalescents are easy to do with Y chromosomes & mtDNA because of no recombination, but they might be much easier because of the discovery of haplotype blocks on regular autosomal sequences.

South Asians = Barbaric, nomadic tribesmen

Indians = Evolved, enlightened individuals with a 5000 year old civilization to boot

If your evolution has brought you to a state of pride and achievement, why would you want to regress to an earlier, primitive identity?:-)

well, let's see. perhaps someone would want that identity because it's only YOUR OPINION that to make such a choice would be regression? wait, let me finish off with an emoticon so you can't get mad ---> :o) there.

I just wanted to say that I logged in to Sepia Mutiny from a crowded internet cafe in Kolkata JUST TO READ RAZIB's comment on what I KNEW would already have been posted, having read the citation of the article in yesterday's Telegraph. I would have been very disappointed had I logged on and *not* found a comment from Razib, but it looks my timing was correct. :-D

Vij:--more grin--

I think there's a whole lot more work to do on this topic.

at last, razib hath spoken.

saheli,
yes, and more sampling (936 is pretty good though :-) )

Razib said,
"..one genetic study of the MHC of iyers in tamil nadu postulated an invasion from central asia via southeast asia by iyers because of the genetics. this was stupid, it doesn't make sense)."

I wouldn't count much on these studies. Heck, even Iyers are not a monolithic group. Dravidianists would use anything to prove them alien.

One point that seems to be obscured. The linked National Geographic article says that India acquired "language not genes" from the west. This article assumes some sort of importance to language over genes, with respect to the supposed Aryan Invasion Theory. I'm not sure I buy this. The "superiority" of the Aryas, according to the Aryan Invasion Theory or otherwise is rooted in the language. The Vedas are written in Sanskrit and whether you subscribe to the Aryan Invasion Theory or not the Vedas are an important part of the equation -- i.e., even the Saffron crowd must place heavy emphasis on language (and Sanskrit is widely acclaimed as a higher level language). So the central point -- that the Southies only exchanged language and not bodily fluids with the Northies -- does little to refute the central point of Aryan dominance. If anything it strengthens it.

I personally would be looking for something that traced the linguistic patterns in order to determine whether Sanskrit was adopted by the invaders or otherwise became a part of the Indo-European language tree or vice versa. I'm guessing vice versa, but then again I have my own prejudices.

I meant to say that the National Geographic article ascribes some importance to genes over language.

I agree that genes are important but the linguistic analysis should be equally - if not more- imporant.

Sorry for the multiple comments, but one final point that I intended to make earlier:

I think the wealth of Sanskrit literature as compared to that of other "Indo-European" languages stands against the Aryan Invasion Theory - from a linguistic perspective.

I am glad that this is now a theory as opposed to a mere hypothesis or hunch, with more systematic evidence.

I grew up in India studying Aryan Invasion as an accepted "truth", so it was really confusing for me to read the counter-arguments. For a while it seemed to be a choice between Western Colonialist vs Hardcore Hindutva mindsets, and I wasn't sure which one I hated more :)

Raghu - Most of us are laymen as far as this topic is concerned so on what basis do you consider the revert in Wikipedia to be "more scholarly and responsible" - other than a personal predisposition to believe the other side? Here's a different stance (not that I have too much respect for the BBC either).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history5.shtml

If you read the personal correspondence of Max Mueller you will note how racist he was and how devoted to converting the heathens. Besides he was an employee of the Church and obligated to produce evidence in its favor. It is imperative for the Church to place the origin of Indian culture within a certain time frame and that is what the AIT does and will fight tooth and nail to preserve its stance. In any case, I'll take the word of a hangman over a missionary. Politically too, at the time, it was essential for the Brits to perpetuate this theory to provide them with the moral justification to conquer India. The Germans were interested in this theory because they wanted to prove that they were superior (aryan) to the Semites. This is the most racist theory ever to have been developed and the only reason it persists today is because of the vested political interest.

Your critique that Hinduism was different before the Ramayana and Mahabharata is invalid. Hinduism is a fluid "religion" and not bound by any canon. Neither is it bound by the Vedas. Our colonial masters wrote our history and defined Hinduism and the rest of us just parrot what they told us. Even if the Vedas did not exist some yogi would crawl out of a cave and perpetuate the practices. The Indian traditions are not theory bound but are practice oriented. The works of Aurobindo or Ramana Maharishi are "canon" as much as something written 5,000 years ago.

Part of where the Aryan invasion draws its evidence from is the disappearance of the northern Harappan civilization that suddenly disappeared around the time of the appearance of the Aryan civilization.

You can talk about the later times, but the disappearance of the Harappan civilization was too abrupt to have been natural.

I'm not about to go against evidence contradicting the Aryan theory, but its a start. I don't why, with the complication of Sanskrit language, they didn't write anything. Perhaps Brahmins felt they didn't need to. Its interesting to think about.

Hinduism is a fluid "religion" and not bound by any canon. Neither is it bound by the Vedas......The works of Aurobindo or Ramana Maharishi are "canon" as much as something written 5,000 years ago.

I would advise caution with regards to how such views are phrased, as they can be (mis)interpreted by some as stating that Hinduism is basically "making it up as one goes along".

The Indian traditions are not theory bound but are practice oriented.

This isn't exactly true, as there are certain other non-Hindu religions originating in India which do not quite fall into this kind of "either/or" definition.

I don't why, with the complication of Sanskrit language, they didn't write anything. Perhaps Brahmins felt they didn't need to.

Interesting point. Some possible contributing factors include the following:

1. Sanskrit did not develop until much later after the Harappan era and the supposed interaction with "Aryan invaders".
2. Similarly, to my understanding, written Sanskrit didn't develop until quite some time after the spoken language arose (unless Razib or someone similar can contradict this).

I would advise caution with regards to how such views are phrased, as they can be (mis)interpreted by some as stating that Hinduism is basically "making it up as one goes along".

I for one would love it if that were definately the case. That would make it more scientific and less dogmatic... As opposed to humans not having "learned" anything in the last ~2000 years in spiritual matters. Anyways, inflammatory topic .. which I usually refrain from commenting to.

Jai:

"I would advise caution with regards to how such views are phrased, as they can be (mis)interpreted by some as stating that Hinduism is basically "making it up as one goes along"."

This is a criticism I have heard before but I don't see how it holds. When Ramana Maharishi talks of moksha he means pretty much the same thing as Mahavira meant 3000 years ago. They simply adopt different paths to the same goal. I even heard of one yogi who slept his way to nirvana. Assuming this is true, sleeping your way to nirvana must definitely be added as a valid path whether we are accused of making it up as we go along or not. Any poetry or prose composed by this sleeping yogi would qualify as canon for his devotees. This is the beauty of the indigenous Indian traditions, imo.

The Indian traditions are not theory bound but are practice oriented.

This isn't exactly true, as there are certain other non-Hindu religions originating in India which do not quite fall into this kind of "either/or" definition.

I don't see anything either/or about my above statement. Not being theory bound does not mean that a vast repertoire of theory does not exist. However, if the Indian traditions were theory bound, they would be way too elitist since not too many people are inclined to upanishadic study and the majority of the population would be excluded. In reality, most of the hindu population gets by on stories and ritual and simple bhakti (devotion) and have never heard of the Vedas or Upanishads.

Divya,

Assuming this is true, sleeping your way to nirvana must definitely be added as a valid path whether we are accused of making it up as we go along or not.

The key word is "assuming". It's only a valid path if a) it's factually, historically correct, and b) if such practices genuinely confer any level of spiritual awareness to the person concerned.

This is the beauty of the indigenous Indian traditions, imo.

Yes, except when certain indigenous faiths specifically contradict the spiritual validity of such practices. In any case, I should mention at this stage that I am neither a Hindu nor a Jain in terms of my religious beliefs, even though I'm fairly liberal in my day-to-day practice of the faith. I'm just saying this to place my own comments into context, not to trigger some kind of off-topic "my religion vs your religion" argument. And no this doesn't mean I'm a Muslim or a Christian either ;)

The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years…

As far as I knew, the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT) states that Aryans were nomads and small in number. It also states that 'Aryans' helped shape only the culture, language and not the gene pool of indegenous people.

If these are true, then the genetic findings doesnt, at all, disprove AIT. In fact, they strengthens the AIT theory. Can someone explain on how Mr. Kashyap concludes that AIT is wrong?

In fact, the historian Romila Thapar, who is considered "Leftist" by the saffronists, is against it too.

The Indian traditions are not theory bound but are practice oriented

Depends on what Indian/Hindu you talk to. Yes, what is widely known of our culture emanates from that which is perceivable, but your statement gives little importance to, say, millenia of Hindu thought in the form of Vedanta and the oral tradition. Which brings me to the next point ...

I don't why, with the complication of Sanskrit language, they didn't write anything. Perhaps Brahmins felt they didn't need to.

The oral tradition is considered very important (even to this day), given their knowledge of the impermananence of writing on leaves and parchment.

As for the paths/yoga to the goal of liberation, jnana (knowledge/innate understanding of the truth) is argued to be the most exalted. Let's not turn the philosophy and its attendant religion into an excuse for relativism.

I don't know about this new counter theory...I think its full of contradictions, the biggest being the lack of explanation for the Indus Valley Civilization.

You can't come to such a sweeping conclusion just based on one discipline. This sort of thing especially needs an interdisciplinary approach.

There is a clear lack of archeological and historical evidence and this particular study is too narrowly focused on genetics and even then at today's level of sophistication in biology, genetics can't be taken as the gospel truth in explaining the past, because modern genetics is still very subject to uncertainties and inaccuracies.

I don't see the idea of an Aryan Invasion being discredited by genetic studies. Genes are not language or culture. An invasion (or incursion) of a relatively small number of people (like the Muslim invasion on India) can lead to wholesale changes in language and culture. Just because everyone in Dhaka is not descended from Makkans does nto mean there was no Muslim incursion.

Linguistic and cultural evidence points to a large part of traditional South Asian culture (like the Sankrit language) being of extra-South Asian origin. So what. The English language also originates outside South Asia, but that doesn't make it less 'Indian' a language.

But a lot of this debate is wrapped in in Hindutva politics -- people tend to get very emotional.

Wow, this topic is very expansive it naturally manifests into so many different tangents. I have been studying the AIT "conjecture" for a while and have seen the political and the factual facets of it push and pull. The theory is so heavily politicized that the most minute fact can be used by one side to dismantle the other. Here are some points I feel should be highlighted:

- The "theory" was created at a time when the world was deep in the midst of being 'christianized' by the European powers and in SA/India's case 'anglo-cized' (once the British gained a stronghold in the region). ----"This theory, originally devised by F. Max Muller in 1848, traces the history of Hinduism to the invasion of India's indigenous people by lighter skinned Aryans around 1500 BCE."---- http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history5.shtml

- The theory was archaeologically based for example on an excavation conducted during the initial indus valley excavations done by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in which 37 skeletons found at one site were explained as evidence of the massive invasion!

- The dissemination of this theory and the superiority of the "theory" was rooted in Colonialist/Christian/European hegemony at the time. There was no opposition to it and therefore generations upon generation of Indians and humanity were fed this theory without any kind of digression from it (until now). This directly reinfored the divide and conquer method of the British Colonial rule and served to even sever SA/Indian indigenous claims/attachments to its own civilization in terms of its cultural antiquity, innovation, creativity, and indigenous racial origins. The theory successfully initiated a chasm between north/south, dark-skinned/light-skinned (black/white), IE-language/non IE-languages. And most importantly to this day has led the brown man (that includes those of you were are more of a tan shade) to question his self-identity in so many different ways.

- Back to the political and religious implications. I think this issue is so paramount and should be in the forefront of our consciousness. Don't even try to peg me as some kind of right-wing revisionist! I remember being young and being told of my "aryan" origins long ago by elders. It is amazing that this "theory" is so entrenched in the brown man's psyche and powerful when it has never been proven as fact. This reflects the persistent hegemonic realities of the present day. In light of all this revisionism is good it brings another side to the story. I remember when I began first reseraching this topic about five years ago, it was very very political and it seemed that any revisionist angle was catering to the Hindu extremists or considered less credible in the world of academia. I remember some of the debates and it literally turned into name-calling and cheap shots toward the other side. And by the way, when one party (the brown man) has historically been assigned a lower rung in the evolutionary ladder their arguments must be twice as solid, twice as loud, and twice as numerous, and given the nod by a white man (i.e. David Frawley, Konraad Elst) for it to begin to be considered in the elitist scientific circles!

-Peoples CAREERS were built upon these conjectures. It is doubtful that they will ever "give-in" to the opposition's conjectures or assertions even if based on factual evidence.

- "The greatest proponent of Aryan Invasion Theory was Friedrich Max Muller, and it will be instructive to look at his reasoning. Clearly, we know that the world was created in 4004 B.C. Based on this fact, Max Muller calculated the age of Sanskrit literature. If Max Muller was able to see these truths over a hundred years back, it is not clear why the State Board of Education in California must resist them."
http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1133889165 (This was one of the first website to pop up during a google search for AIT, thank you GOOGLE ...)

-Recent DNA evidence points to South Asia being the first residence for all Non-African peoples as they beachcombed migrated along the coasts and eventually led our of africa. See:
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stephenoppenheimer/

-South Asia and its components of India, Pakistan, Bangaldesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives and are very diverse racially, culturally, linguistically, historically and in terms of religion. I think if anything the AIT conjecture forces South Asians to remember that our ancestry is unique and linked together beyond our current nationalistic, religious, linguistic, tribal/civilized,racial, cultural and political persuasions and/or divides.

-Do we have an identity crisis? The AIT conjecture has perhaps instilled in us a tendancy to (I know this is a loaded word) "assimilate", conform, and cater to Euro-centric media, prejudices, and values. The AIT stems from an intent to assert absolute superiority. White over black, christian over non-christian, written cultures over non-written cultures, monotheism over polytheism, etc. Thus we have an obsessive preference of light-skinned over dark-skinned. Bollywood is the best example of this as up until recently darker women such as Bipasha Basu, and Malika Sherawat were never portrayed in starring roles. And in marriage personals its always a fair-skinned perference. Why is this? I remember my family telling me when I went to India that I should not stay too long outside because because I would get darker. Why deny that our natural color ranges from tan to black that, we eat with our hands, and pray to a pantheon of Gods, Allah, Budha, or someone else? Why deny that we have an ancient culture and that our racial origins are from Africa, Middle east, and Asia most dominantly? Why do we strive to imitate Euro-centric reality when we have the capability of continuuing and fine-tuning the South Asian cultures and consciousness to present something different but most importantly constructive to the world? We must learn to deal with the world in our own terms and not fall prey to visciousness of the assertions of the AIT. The WORLD must live and learn from it. In many ways it has set us as South Asians back and caused us to look at the world in a very skewed manner. But we have in the present moment the opportunity to take a negative and misleading concept poke at it and even laugh at it and turn it into something positive... that is for the future to figure out. We are the means to that end.

Oh yeah... thank you Dr. King!

Mauritius,

Very well said. It saddens me to see that everytime we find an evidence that the Western colonist-racist-orientalist cabal and their commie footsoldiers such as Romila Thapar in India have been brainwashing us for generations about our history and culture, some browns tend to dismiss that as Hindutva propaganda. In fact, as you pointed out, we still ascribe the role of arbiter to Westerners such as Elst and Frawley or Western institutions such as Harvard or Chicago. Even in terms of the sources of information, we tend to give more credibility to BBC or even Wikipedia than indigeneous sources. When will be free of this slavish mindset? To any dispassionate observer, it is very clear that the entire narrative about India and other formerly colonized lands has been manufactured within an Orientalist frame of reference by the West. If we are now waking up to question that, it's dismissed as Hindutva fundi-ism! It's like living in the bizarro world where "liberals" continue to do all they can to suppress the nascent consciousness among browns to rise up and expect to be treated as intellectual equals of their erstwhile colonial masters.

Think about the counterfactual : what if the Hindu organizations in California had not been activist enough to question the history textbooks? What if this genetic evidence had not been found? In fact, even today, the propaganda continues to be taught in India and elsewhere. However, Indian historians like Sitaram Goel have been questioning them for ages. There is a huge body of research done by Indian historians and archaeologists like Lal that sheds new light on a lot of theories. It is only our slavish mindset that prevents us from listening to them or ridiculing them as Hindu fundies while we continue to lap up the theories spouted off by commies like Thapar, Panikkar and DN Jha.

Even if I take a very po-mo viewpoint and claim that history is nothing but invented myth manufactured by those in power to serve their interests, it is clear that AIT and many other theories are just instruments of perpetuating colonialism. They were used to create a sense of inferiority among the ruled and provide a fig leaf of moral justification to the colonizers who anointed themselves as the purveyors of a "civilizng mission". It's about time that we threw those theories in the garbage can and invent something that serves the purpose of freeing us from the gulam mindset that continues to enslave us after centuries spent in internalizing these lies.

Abhi - I think we deserve a post on Frawley's paradox. It is a simple idea but in my opinion it is the strongest argument against AIT.

Absence of *any* archeological evidence of an Aryan race outside India is an important factoid.

Others postings above talk about fancier invasion ideas and identify holes in the gene study should know that AIT not only mentions one invasion, but also says that this invasion annihilated Indus Valley Civilization. The volume of archeological evidence that exists for IVC today would make this annihilation world's first mass genocide (read unlikely). Not to mention, if AIT were true IVC with its several hundred towns left behind zero cultural and literary traces. Because the vedas and upanishads were brought by the nomads from central Asia.

yeah right...

"annihilated Indus Valley Civilization"

Last year for a proposal (it never got funded) I looked into multiple hypothesis for movements/ gradual demise/ dispersal of Harappan civilization. The most accepted hypothesis is that the rivers in western India changed its course with time. Civilizations follow rivers (for irrigation, water supply). However, nobody is sure how it happened. One idea is "earthquakes". Earthquakes are known to disrupt landforms suddenly.

It is just an idea. Google = Harappan + earthquakes.

Do remember, it is just an hpothesis right now.

Regarding AIT, I know (do not know) as much as any dude here commenting. But I know it is a loaded term.

Abhi - I think we deserve a post on Frawley's paradox.

Yes, and I deserve a two month vacation in South Central Africa and a model girlfriend who goes by the name "Lola," and likes my deep brown eyes. Unfortunately I won't be getting those things either. :)

a few points. i'm not totally well versed in the archaeology and philology...but, i've read a few monographs....

1) the pattern of neologisms and non-indo-european cognates within the indo-aryan languages does suggest a linguistic hybridization process that occurred. one philological text offered that many of the indo-aryan languages sound like 'indo-european spoken with a dravidian accent.' words like 'elephant' often have a neologistic feel (in bengali, hathi, which was originally in sanksrit 'animal with the hand [trunk]').

2) there might be a relation between ancient elaminte, in SW iran (khuzistan), and the dravidian languages. this, along with brahui, suggests that dravidian languages had a far greater extent, so indo-aryan might have interposed itself upon dravidian languages.

3) the indo-aryan language of the mitanni kingdom of upper syria in the 16th century (indo-aryan, not iranian) seems to offer little evidence of india specific elements (though the language is only minimally known). but the implication is that the indo-aryans had a non-indian homeland, perhaps the andronovo culture of central asia.

4) the indus valley civilization did not collapose overnight, and recent archeological finds imply that survived far longer in the upper gangetic plain and gujarat. this is perhaps analogous to the survival of the maya city-states in the yucatan.

5) elite cultures have sometimes given way to barbarian hordes linguistically. for example, the example of hungary i offered above, or the latinate substrate in the balkans which gave away to the slavic speech. in both cases there was a great deal of genetic admixture, and in the hungarian case the dominance of the indigenes, but the language (ergo identity) shifted toward that of the barbarian elite. more often the reverse occurs, for example, the finno-ugric speaking bulgars ended up with slavic speech, the franks ended up speaking latin derived dialects, etc. nevertheless, there is no tried & true rule about these sort of things.

6) the manichaean dichotomy between 'invasion' vs. 'indigenous' is problematic. as i said, the philology tends to suggest an exogenous origin. the archeology is very sketchy, and we haven't been able to translate the indus valley scripts. the genetics does imply that there have been migrations into india, even if they are not preponderant. but invading elites can cause cultural shifts over a few generations (consider the spread of arabic or latin).

7) racist eurocentric scholars aren't always wrong just because their motives were not pure. no one's motives are totally pure, though there is a spectrum. in something like linguistics and history motives are important because of subjectivity and authority. but my understanding is mainstream linguistics has a pretty strong (though not definitive because of the nature of the question) opinion about the non-south asian nature of proto-indo-european. the various schools, whether america, european or russian who are promoting various ur-heimants (anatolia, the ukraine, etc.) are not proposing india, or greece, for specific reasons. these regions seem to have had a relatively high status and civilized cultural indigenous substrate which left a strong imprint on the indo-european languages of the region (most greek gods are not indo-european and ~40% of the lexicon is clearly not indo-european, including the words with the nth fragment, like corinth or xanthos).

Here is Dr. Subhash Kak's old article about Indo-Aryans and Indus tradition

There is a tresure of information on Dr. Kak's website about all things Indus Valley Civilization.

After all he has written 15 Books in IVC related topics.

Rather than having to hope that old racist european scientist with IMPURE MOTIVES were right, I would take the word of a South Asian Computer Science Professor (Dr. Kak) anyday.

RC,

Kak is a charlatan. Please ask me not to go into more details. Please.......He should only stick to Computer Science rather than trying to be Douglas Hofstadter of India.

I don't know whether any body heard this..

The people of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are actually Dravidian's and they migrated willingly or forcibly to south India. In fact some of the languages spoken in north Pakistan and afghanistan are similar to Dravidian languages. The Aryans from present day Afghanistan might have spread the Aryan culture all over south Asia.

One more thing I feel is that Ramayana is written to show superiority of Aryan race over Dravidian's. In Ramayana, Ram(an Aryan) goes to south India and takes the help of apes (Dravidian's like hanuman, Sugriva) to defeat Ravan. Ramayan implies that dravidians are monkeys with human intelligence. After reading Ramayana I felt that dravidians are either Rākshasas (demons) or Apes or both.

In some parts of south India Ravana is depicted as a good guy, who took a wrong decision (abducting sita). In fact I saw loads of old south Indian mythological movies which depicted Ravana as a good guy.

Just a random thought, Charles Darwin might have got his idea of evolution from the concept of Hindu avatars.

Kak is a charlatan. Please ask me not to go into more details. Please.......

Oh, may be because he supported the "evil" BJP party? But I guess you dont want to give more details about why you feel that way. Thats fine.

For me atleast, I would take almost everything Subhash Kak says over anything Max Muller said.

"Oh, may be because he supported the "evil" BJP party? But I guess you dont want to give more details about why you feel that way. Thats fine."

No, No. OK, I have one degree from LSU. He used to give campus talks on some aspect of Hinduism and CS when I was around.At that time, I asked a number of the Indian Professors there because of all encompassing vision - none of them had anything postive about him. Back then, he had it figured it out that Sanskrit should be "mother of all computer languages". That is why I brought Hofstadter reference. Did that stuff go any where? No.......

There is no hard peer-reviewed work by him recently. Seriously look at the list of his publlications, except Quaterley Journal of RAS. Please look carefully. Do not believe what I am saying. What is he loading himself with Current Science (ask Abhi), Asia Times, etc. I have a more stronger list of publication, I am still struggling.

He does not do actual research these days. He reads stuff here and there and mixes it up. Do you want to extoll guys like those. Is he leading field expeditions there? Is deciphering old materials? Where is the original stuff? No.

I did not even know about BJP stuff

racist eurocentric scholars aren't always wrong just because their motives were not pure.

Well, here's the real question : if I were confronted with two theories that are diametrically opposite to each other each other, say one from a racist eurocentric scholar - someone white with the full force of a prestigious academy backing him, such as Michael Witzel or Stanley Wolpert - and the other from someone of much more humble origins - a brown from a no-name school with who's vilified as Hindu fundie shunted out of the "mainstream" of acedmia because of their political persuasion is out of tune with the ruling Marxist cabal, such as Sitaram Goel or BB Lal- who is more credible? Especially if I, as a layperson, am in no position to make a qualitative judgement about the veracity of research or scholarly merit in either work? Your standard po-mo deconstructionist would say that the choice I make in this scenario speaks more about myself than the "truth" of either of the two contradictory viewpoints. This is what I am getting at: how does it make sense for me to give the benefit of doubt to the racist eurocentric but not listen to the brown whose theory, backed with what seems to be good reseqarch, reaches diametrically opposite conclusions?

I agree with Kush about Subhash Kak. The quality of his writing is really poor. I'm never able to fisish reading his articles because of their hotch-potch quality and lack of depth. Such people actually harm the cause they claim to espouse.

This is what I am getting at: how does it make sense for me to give the benefit of doubt to the racist eurocentric but not listen to the brown whose theory, backed with what seems to be good reseqarch, reaches diametrically opposite conclusions?

well, that's manichaean, and either/or proposition. people here are talking about max muller, a 19th century scholar, as if that's the cutting edge of traditional scholarship (and by traditional, i mean scholarship which makes a pretense at being culturally distanced, even if there isn't such a thing in the totality). that is not the cutting edge of indo-european studies, there are many linguists, archeologists and geneticists who don't give a rat's ass about south asian politics who have produced scholarship in this area. it is a contentious field, and definitive results, particular when using one disciplinary lens, are hard to come by, but there are broad general ideas or positions which seem to be agreed upon. for example, in the negative/falsified camp i know of no indo-europeanists or those who have examined this question as more than a dabbler or ideologue who would posit that greece or india could be the ur-heimat (homeland) of the proto-indo-european root language for a variety of reasons. this isn't because these scholars want to show that indian or greek culture is exogenous, they don't care about these questions, that's just what the scholarship suggests. the feel i get on SM is that in terms of scholarship, as opposed to politics (where i will grant there are real issues with simplified 'aryan invasion' narratives), many want to engage 19th century scholarship because that is such a weak target.

back to your initial proposition, i think i would lean toward the brown scholar vs. the racist eurocentric, but i think today you will find few racist eurocentric indologists. they might see the world through cultural filters, but their intentions are not as clearly mercenary as the orientalists of old.

oh, and one last thing. no serious scholar contends that indian culture, in the broadest swaths, is derived predominantly from indo-european motifs and models, that i know of. questions like these are hard to aportion in any case (i.e., how do you quantify it?), but the greeks and northern indians do speak languages which likely spread from elsewhere, but enormous strands of their culture are non-indo-european. in the greek pantheon only zeus is clearly indo-european. some greek cities even had legends of their autochthounous pre-indo-european (pelasgian) origins, like a little city by the name of athens. i understand there are serious issues in regards to 10th grade educational standards in california, but can we move beyond 10th grade arguments if we're no longer 16?

one last thing: the aryans of afghanistan (iranian speakers) are not the aryans of india (indo-aryans). the indo-aryans might have come from afghanistan (or thereabouts), but in living memory afghanistan has been iranian speaking territory. i used the term indo-aryan to describe the warrior caste of the mitanni in syria, but the balance of the evidence suggests that the mitanni indo-aryans never encountered india. the term "indo" is an anachronism because prior to the discovery of the mitanni warrior caste all non-indian aryans were iranians, and so indo-aryans were the other linguistic branch. when the mitanni aryans were discovered, the names of their gods and lexical fragments strongly pointed to an affinity with the aryans of india, not iran, and so they too were termed 'indo-aryans,' even though geographically that didn't make sense. i only bring this up to highlight the confusions and pitfalls that abound in fields like this. good faith and sincerity are necessary.

"Ramayan implies that dravidians are monkeys with human intelligence. After reading Ramayana I felt that dravidians are either Rākshasas (demons) or Apes or both."

The Sanskrit term Vanara or Vanaram means monkey or forest dweller. I wonder who turned forest dwelling South Indians into Monkeys. There is more evidence for the existence of forest dwellers than talking monkeys in South India :)

Well, Subhash Kak is a Keynote speaker at the RSA meet in San Jose. The other keynote speakers at that convention include Bill Gates and the Mars Rover guy...
See, I am not qualified to judge how important scientific works are authored by him and of what quality. I am not his peer.
Atleast he does not have motives such as Max Muller had. C'mon !! Someone mentioned David Frawley before.. Frawley has co-wrote a book with Kak.

I just wanted to say that I logged in to Sepia Mutiny from a crowded internet cafe in Kolkata JUST TO READ RAZIB's comment on what I KNEW would already have been posted, having read the citation of the article in yesterday's Telegraph. I would have been very disappointed had I logged on and *not* found a comment from Razib, but it looks my timing was correct. :-D

thank abhi linking to my weblog, i saw it in technorati at the end of the day. i'm on vacation in brooklin, so i'm not reading blogs much.

Brooklyn is the place to be!

Razib you stated "but the greeks and northern Indians do speak languages which likely spread from elsewhere..." this is controversial, and cannot be presumed one way or the other. I have come across alot of material that questions the origins of Sanskrit itself, but never that it may have exogenous origins. I have heard that the language from which sanskrit is derived from maybe from another area/region, but even that is just speculation. For all intents and purposes, Sanskrit may have been the language of the Saraswati Civilization (Indus Valley). There is no evidence saying that it is not for sure. Written records of Sanskrit had not come into the picture until 1st millenia B.C, so it is quite possible that prior to that the language was around and in full form even during the indus valley period in that area. It may have been one of many languages spoken in the greater indus valley region which extends to a very large area geographically. So perhaps it was a language that some people spoke which survived on to when people moved east to the gangetic plain in the more recent vedic times.

There are so many secrets yet to be learned from the Indus Valley excavations and in all of South Asia. The point that must be made here is that Indian or South Asian scholars have as much to bring to the table as any other scholar. This was not seen as so, five-ten-twenty years ago.

I myself understand that India and the South Asian region saw high traffic in the past because of its desired environmental conditions, goods, and arable land (and maybe even the beautiful women). Many, Many different groups have entered india and left, or settled and thereofre makeup the diversity in the region. That is something to consider in all of this debate.

many want to engage 19th century scholarship because that is such a weak target.

Well, that's mainly because SM does not seem to be the right forum to go any farther. But there's been enough critique of the contemporary Western Indological "scholarhip" by browns - both scholars and self-taught hobbyists. See the writings of Rajiv Malhotra, Sankrant Sanu etc on Sulekha. In fact, theirs is the first systematic attempt at deconstructing the works of the current high preists of Indology in Western academia such as Witzel (Harvard), Doniger (Chicago), Courtright (Emory) etc. This exposed the racism and orientalism that a lot of contemporary Indology is plagued with.

i think i would lean toward the brown scholar vs. the racist eurocentric

i think today you will find few racist eurocentric indologists.

i understand there are serious issues in regards to 10th grade educational standards in california,but can we move beyond 10th grade arguments if we're no longer 16?

These are my questions from reading different docs etc....I am a contract sw developer and a student in signal processing. This means i deal with estimation and detection theory and rest is all entertainment i dont claim to be insightful here either. these are a few questions where i'm not satisfied about what i read.
There is ambiguity with origins of these aryans. Iran and india are the locations where people have called themselves as aryan for a long time.
Kushans though settled in india proper later dates in ujjain.
Yet they kept records that they came from beyond outside india.
The issue with aryans is that they named india aryavrata but did not record where they came from.
this is something different than what kushans did. All migrants tend to keep a legend or record of sort
Even old cambodian docs refered to hinduism as aryadharma, and that it came from india. Ie a group of migrants who moved out of india
took this record with them.
Old avestan and sanskrit being similar is a well known fact. Even duivachan is there? (singular, dual, plural)
This when other PIE constructs dont show it is something strange.
How much of that was due to back and forth type interaction. rather than one way.
Mani in much later day he tried creating a philosophy which blended buddhism,zoroastarianism and christianity.
His followers were mostly in iran. The ideas came from east and west b/c there was trade in that region that had gone on for ever.
The point being ideas have been going back and forth for a long time.
How many traders went back and forth between central asia,mongolia, middle east and india.
How much genes got transfered back and forth as well as ideas.
SL has a population of folks who trace their ancestory to malaysia....These folks did record something of legends.
Just like bhots in uttaranchal. They adopted hindiusm but recall that their ancestors moved from tibet to india.
This is something confusing why only 2 regions in the ancient world had a population that called themselves aryan
especialy if these folks were some nordic tribe that ran accross the world spreading language.
Also i think racialy aryan may have had some meaning but it seems to have gone out long time ago.
ie the cambodian hindus refering their religion as aryadharma(not sanatan dharma ?)
My guess is an identity developed going back and forth regions of iran and india and it was not unidirectional which when looking
at human history seems more plausible, ie nothing is really linear but a lot of back and forth interactions.
I dont know though how would a linguist or a racist(the guy who studies race ;-0) hypothesize about origins with a circular mutation.
chaap(to print) is a hindi verb that made it into modern persian....if some ancient persian language is the root of hindi then modern persian has this crosspolinization. This was an easier mystery to solve ie look for 1st use
The complexity is that the 'orginal text' for both ancient zoroastarian text and vedas were transcribed by memory at later days.
how much back and forth cross polinization happened in that period
Nothing thats old can be said with certainty.
My school math teacher began teaching probability this way. You mother certainly knows that you are her child. For your father its probability. I think that applies to a lot of PIE stuff then you can throw in politics of the authors involved.

this is controversial, and cannot be presumed one way or the other

it isn't, seriously. where do you get the idea that it is controversial that the "greek" language is exogenous to greece?* read In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. or The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. also, greek and indo-aryans languages are syntactically similar vis-a-vi, for example, dravidian or finno-ugric languages. one could posit that both languages came into their present geographic regions from another region, or, they came from india or greece, but it seems logically impossible that they are indigenous to both greece and india since they are separate languages who share a common ancestor (unless you assume that an ancient ur-language was extent between greece and india).

the fact that the indus valley civilization might have had a predominant or non-trivial indo-european component is irrelevant. as for There is no evidence saying that it is not for sure, well, there is no evidence that an evil demon who rules the world and is invisible to senses does not live in my asshole, but we don't really posit this because we make a presumption that hypotheses are derived from some evidence out in the world. analysis of core cognates across indo-european languages does suggest that proto-indo-european was likely a language which was habituated to a temperate climate, lack of cities and a transhumant or mixed-farming culture.

if you want written evidence of proto-indo-european, you won't get that, and there will never be 'evidence' for you, as proto-indo-european probably existed 5000-9000 years ago (the current scholarship seems to be leaning toward an older date, but there are still disputes). but some sciences are about probabilistic inferences from the data on hald in the context of a larger set of facts on hand. india being the homeland of proto-indo-europeans does not seem to fit the data as well as other hypotheses. that does not mean that the other hypotheses are correct, but inductively the history of science tells us that the most parsimonious, i.e., simplest, hypotheses tends to be the most correct one.

in any case, stuff like "this is controversial" smells a lot like creationism to me. sure, creationists can say "there is a controversy within science about evolution." it costs them nothing, even though it is flat wrong when you actually survey working scientists. they get to say it all they want. linguistics, archeology, history and historical population genetics are not on the same ground as evolutionary biology, but neither are they phrenologists. linguistic reconstruction has made predictions based on theories which have born fruit. let me give you an example: linguistics made some assumptions about what ancient indo-european languages were going to be like. greek and sanskrit are the oldest indo-european languages they had on hand, until hittite cuneiform from the 17th century BCE was discovered in anatolian. aspects of hittite were predicted from the linguistic models. in other words, this is real scholarship. yes, it has been contentious, and sometimes politicized, but the from what i have read some of the assertions that i see around here like "this has not been proven" or "this is controversial" smells a lot like creationist smoke screens which muddle the public perception of evolutionary biology.

* whether "greek" and "sanskrit" were greek & sanskrit before they were in greece and india is debatable, languages are complexes of words and syntactic structure which are always evolving. it is really irrelevant whether sanskrit developed in india out of older indo-european dialects or whether it existed in central asia. if i had to bet, i would bet it evolved in india out of an older indo-european dialect.

Gujjubhai,

i don't think your characterization of non-indian scholarship on india is correct (that is, there are many racist eurocentric types). that's about it.

Atleast he does not have motives such as Max Muller had. C'mon !!

I completely agree on that count.

I myself understand that India and the South Asian region saw high traffic in the past because of its desired environmental conditions, goods, and arable land (and maybe even the beautiful women).

The legitimacy of History as a science is questionable. Science is about approximate explanations based on empirical assumptions. The explanations provided by science are not exact, but,they hint at probabilities. As the empirical world view changes the theories change or are modified(classical physics, quantum theory, relativity, string theory etc). While approximate explanations might work in the physical sciences, I think that in politically charged fields such as history it is dangerous to give approximations/probabilities. The theories that get accepted has a lot do with something called "peer reviewed journals". This is a old boys network of "scholars" that decides on who and what gets published. Moreover, a lot of history has to do with who is funding the research? Give me enough money and I will have really creative stories that will pass for legitimate history in a few years. This cartel of academics and funding sources are the gatekeepers of the door through which History passes.

In this context, the Aryan Invasion myth plays well into the hands of Class-war-perpetuating communists, the white man's burden Eurocentrists, we know best Evangelical christian missionaries and their servile leftist Indian sepoys. Aryan Invasion Myth has made careers for these groups and they will not allow any competing theory to threaten their survival. They dominate the academic scene as of now and hence will fashion the memes that are transmitted.

The Aryan Invasion myth is an effective tool to divide and weaken India. A tool that has been used to great advantage for the last 200 years. But, as India grows in economic might she will have more resources to create histories that are less inimical to her interests.

History has less to do with "objective truth" than with propaganda wars.

some of you people make me to want to become a communist. sorry, i just had to add that :)

#18:
"....., but the fact is that rational historical analysis isnt going to do any favours to their revisionist originalism, that is, the notion that there exists an original canon or religious tradition that we can call Hinduism and that is continuous with Hindu practice today. The fact that this study does not erase is that a cultural-linguistic influence from somewhere to the West of "Bharath" seems to have substantially altered the nature of Hinduism itself, even if it didnt alter the nature of Hindu genes."

Rational Historical analysis?? I suggest you look up what role reason/logic plays in theories. look well enough and you will find that reason is a neutered animal. The conclusions in any theory has a lot do with what assumptions one starts with. reason/logic is merely a tool that makes no value judgements. it is a common misconception that to be "rational" adds a certain superiority or legitimacy to one's statements. Even the insane are rational, just that their assumptions are different than those that are "normal". Revisionism is the stuff of history, the leftist lines that you spout ad nauseam are a revison/tailoring of history to fit their world view too... So, poppycock....

Now about Hinduism: Hinduism in it's bare essentials is a study in Human conciousness. To borrow from Philip K dick, "What is reality?" is the question that Hinduism tries to answer. In doing so Hinduism has evolved and continues to evolve various solutions. The roots of all these solutions begin in the vedas. To say that Hinduism lacks a canon/ continuous traditon is a canard. An Hindu idea has no legitimacy unless it acknowledges the vedas as the primary canon of all Hindu thought. The Hindus may have various differing traditions/solutions, but their end goal is the same and their final authority are the vedas. Besides, a static and unidimensional religion is as good as dead. One coat cannot fit all...
It helps to get a bit of education......

Now about Hinduism: Hinduism in it's bare essentials is a study in Human conciousness. To borrow from Philip K dick, "What is reality?" is the question that Hinduism tries to answer. In doing so Hinduism has evolved and continues to evolve various solutions. The roots of all these solutions begin in the vedas. To say that Hinduism lacks a canon/ continuous traditon is a canard. An Hindu idea has no legitimacy unless it acknowledges the vedas as the primary canon of all Hindu thought. The Hindus may have various differing traditions/solutions, but their end goal is the same and their final authority are the vedas. Besides, a static and unidimensional religion is as good as dead. One coat cannot fit all...
It helps to get a bit of education......

excuse me, where is my copy of das kapital???

Okay guys. Maybe I just need a shot of caffeine, but could someone explain to me exactly what is the major bone of contention here ?

- The idea that lighter-skinned, Iranian-looking people in present-day India, especially in the northern half of the country, might be descended from groups in the distant past who had some common ancestry with Europeans ?
- The idea that such people either came from outside the Indian subcontinent....
-.....or were of some geographical origin somewhere in the far northern part of the country and some Europeans are descended from affiliated groups who migrated westwards ?
- The idea that such people somehow allgedly ended up exerting some kind of cultural and religious hegemony over the rest of the population ?

Some/all of the above ?

There appear to be multiple debates occuring in this thread, some historical, some genetic, and some religiously-orientated, and it would be good for some clarification on what the basic, core issue is. And I agree that there is an element of Hindutva amongst a minority of participants which may be clouding the argument.

To paraphrase Kush Tandon and a couple of other guys, I'm no expert on this topic either, but let's look at a couple of basic facts:

1. Many North Indian-types (when I say "north", I mean north of Maharashtra) look much closer to Iranians and Meditteranean people than to anyone else, in terms of skin tone (yes I know there is a range here too) and facial features. I'm referring to Hindus and Sikhs (not Muslims, where there may well have been a degree of intermarriage with various migrants from the Middle East over the past 1000 years.)

2. Some would argue that this is either coincidence or "parallel evolution under similar geographical/climatical circumstances"; however, the twist here is the issue of language, as has been mentioned already by a couple of people. There are clear links in grammer and syntax between Sanskrit (and its modern derivatives), Persian, and Latin. It is debatable whether this commonality would be purely due to historical trade between the regions if the similarities existed on this scale prior to the trading relationships.

Again, I'm not sure exactly what the key problem is, but if it's the notion of some common ancestry between lighter Indians and Europeans, I strongly believe that it's unwise to fall into the trap of that kind of reverse-racism. It sounds like racist white people becoming indignant at the idea of having any "black blood" in their own family ancestry.

What a trivial argument. In the modern day-and-age your skin color and ethnic origin are replaced by "democratic" politics which includes employing dividing tactics such as communalism and nationalism. Even if the fact remains that there are plenty of dark Arabs that look Indian and vice versa or light skin Indians that look Uzbeki or any other non-Indian race, at the end of the day it does not matter.

The fact that Indians look towards the foreign as their lineage is like denying India for being their mother country. If you were born in India then that makes you Indian, whether lightie or a darkie or with stank breath or with one leg or what ever other physical feature. What unites people in India is in the following order (1)language, (2)religion, (3)caste or social class(substitute either freely here). THAT IS THE FACT AND THE TRUTH(notice no theory is needed here).

Furthermore, in the theory of races there are only four: Mongloid, Negroid, Caucasian, and Aborigine. A large majority are considered Caucasian along with the rest of Middle-Eastern & European population, so Mr./Ms. MY ORIGINS ARE OUTSIDE INDIA I have just increased your option by a 100 folds for staking your claim at your home country. There are also Aborigine folks as well Mongloid(present in a large minority) and even small Negroid populations.

Moreover, in the theory of evolution people along the equator are shorter(for a larger surface area to volume ratio to dissipate heat - kinda like your car radiator) and darker(exposure to sunlight produces Vit D and releases melanin). People in the northern and southern extreme are taller(for a lower surface area to volume ratio to maintain heat) and lighter(lack of exposure to extreme sunlight).

There you have it folks.

- The idea that lighter-skinned, Iranian-looking people in present-day India, especially in the northern half of the country, might be descended from groups in the distant past who had some common ancestry with Europeans ?

very few brown people (i.e., those who live within the indian subcontinent) are more genetically similar, from what we can tell, to europeans as opposed to another random brown person. by this, i mean that if you sequenced the genes of interest (in this case Y chromosomal) of a man from lahore, madras and berlin, the overwhelming odds is that the the men from lahore & madras will be found to be genetically more similar to each other than either will be to to the man from berlin. this even works if you switch berlin with tehran. this is not true of all men randomly sampled from these three locations, but, if you had to bet money, bet that the brown (south asian) men would from a cluster if your money means something to you.

Razib,
Try enjoying your vacation!
SM is not going anywhere :)

Razib:

some of you people make me to want to become a communist. sorry, i just had to add that :)

Been there done that. Believe me you don't want to go there. Besides, as the wise ole saying goes: "If you're in your 20's and not a communist means you don't have a heart. If you're in your 40's and still a communist means you don't have a mind." Don't know where exactly you're at but just some friendly advice - save yourself the bother.

You're right most western scholars don't care a rat's ass about SA politics. But they're neck deep in Christian politics, Commie politcs, Supremacist politics, Control politics, Being Right politics, and Not Letting Go of Pet Theories They Have Staked Their Careers On politics. It amazes me that this matter is simply characterized as Hindutva politics.

Also, your point about the irrelavance of 19th century scholarship doesn't pack that much of a punch when you consider that most of the rotten scholarship has just built up on previous rotten scholarship. Hindus have always been regarded as idolatrous, devil-worshipping pagans and moral cretins and that attitude prevails to this day whether you're doing archeology or linguistics.

Just skimmed through all the posts this morning, so forgive me if these points have already been made.

Razib,

Interesting points as always, buddy ;)

by this, i mean that if you sequenced the genes of interest (in this case Y chromosomal) of a man from lahore, madras and berlin, the overwhelming odds is that the the men from lahore & madras will be found to be genetically more similar to each other than either will be to to the man from berlin.

What about Lahore, Srinagar, Madras, Tehran, Athens, Seville, and Rome ?

Assuming what I was saying in my previous post was on the right lines (big "If", of course), shouldn't there be some kind of genetic similarity between Lahore, Srinagar, and Tehran primarily (again I'm referring to Hindus and Sikhs, not Muslims, for the reasons explained earlier), followed by Lahore-Srinagar-Tehran-Athens-Seville-Rome on a secondary level ?

Just for clarification, my references to supposed overlaps with Europeans were referring specifically to Southern Europeans (ie. the Mediterranean countries) rather than people from the northern regions. Having said that, though, isn't there supposed to also be some overlap with Eastern Europeans, along with the more dark-haired Irish types ?

Also, your point about the irrelavance of 19th century scholarship doesn't pack that much of a punch when you consider that most of the rotten scholarship has just built up on previous rotten scholarship. Hindus have always been regarded as idolatrous, devil-worshipping pagans and moral cretins and that attitude prevails to this day whether you're doing archeology or linguistics.

1) if you consider physics and english two extremes of scholarship in terms of linear 'progression,' i would place history & linguistics in the middle, with linguistics closer to physics than history. many of you here simply reject that contention and wish to (from my perspective) impose a dichotomy between white-eurocentric-bigots vs. hindutva nationalist tinted historiography. some of us, i think perhaps correctly, seem to be contending that this binary choice is a false one. it has been a long time since brown was a baptist college, harvard was a congregationalist one, princeton a presbyterian one, columbia an anglican one, etc. etc. some of you are living in the past with this talk about white christian, etc., etc., especially when so many white academics are jewish for godsake! from what i can tell, we live in an age where careers are made destroying dead-white-males. reading SM it is like i stepped back into the 1950s of academia when there were jew quotas.

2) i'm a libertarian. joking about becoming a communist was to reflect that i think i might be understanding why some scholars make a deal with the devil and align themselves with radical leftists even if they aren't themselves. i think some of the things that some people here from a 'hindutva' perspective are correct, but dam they sound dumb trying to exposit it, and the reasoning & evidentiary standards are as weak as a 10 year old with cystic fibrosis.

3) and wow, sometimes reading SM reinforces the 'psychic unity of mankind' that evolutionary psychologists talk about. i used to engage in evolution vs. creationist debates, no offense, but i smell the same shit in air.

4) finally:

Assuming what I was saying in my previous post was on the right lines (big "If", of course), shouldn't there be some kind of genetic similarity between Lahore, Srinagar, and Tehran primarily (again I'm referring to Hindus and Sikhs, not Muslims, for the reasons explained earlier), followed by Lahore-Srinagar-Tehran-Athens-Seville-Rome on a secondary level ?

Just for clarification, my references to supposed overlaps with Europeans were referring specifically to Southern Europeans (ie. the Mediterranean countries) rather than people from the northern regions. Having said that, though, isn't there supposed to also be some overlap with Eastern Europeans, along with the more dark-haired Irish types ?

first, take a random person from lahore, a person from madras, and a person from anywhere else in the world. every time i would be willing to bet that if you took a random point in the genome and compared it between the three individuals the majority would show the greatest similarity between the person from lahore and the person from madras. this includes kandahar, tehran, etc. for example:

"Since the initial peopling of South and West Asia by anatomically modern humans, when this region may well have provided the initial settlers who colonized much of the rest of Eurasia, the gene flow in and out of India of the maternally transmitted mtDNA has been surprisingly limited. Specifically, our analysis of the mtDNA haplogroups, which are shared between Indian and Iranian populations and exhibit coalescence ages corresponding to around the early Upper Paleolithic, indicates that they are present in India largely as Indian-specific sub-lineages. In contrast, other ancient Indian-specific variants of M and R are very rare outside the sub-continent."

this does not mean that all genes within all people in lahore will be more similar to someone from madras. and people from lahore will exhibit a shorter genetic distance toward people from tehran than people from madras would (i.e., i use lahore specifically because punjabis & sindhis are the indo-aryan speaking group who are probably most admixed with iranian peoples).

to use another analogy, if you consider the frequency of an allele X on the Y axis of the graph with the X axis being meters along a line that runs from southeast india to kabul, the rate of change of the frequency would be highest between the punjab and peshwhar. in the past, people might be safe in thinking that punjabis are more like pathans than they are like tamils. this is not necessarily true, in most cases not true, now, i grant that it is a far closer thing than if you used bengalis-tamils-pathans, as bengalis would be far more similar to tamils than they would be to pathans, but you get the gist.

as for things like physical appearence, as i said, they can be moulded by selection. most north indians are lactose tolerant, most south indians are not, most middle easterners are lactose tolerant. if you used just this one character, you would say that north indians are like middle easterners. but the genetic data implies that this gene for tolerance increased in frequency over the last 10,000 years, spreading from northern europe to other parts of eurasia where cattle could be raised in easily. the smaller the sample of characters you take, whether it be physical characteristics (skin color, etc.) or genes (mtDNA, Y, etc.), the more likely you are to come up with a fallacious taxonomy when viewed in an overall context. and there have been studies that cluster north indians with eastern europes vis-a-vi south indians, but they are a minority. that doesn't mean they are not correct, they might be looking at particular genes (in this case, a portion of the Y chromosome with a allele termed M17 that exhibited rapid demographic expansion 5,000 years ago on the north indian plain, and spans eastern iran and up through the central swath of eurasia).

This is a fascinating thread and I have enjoyed reading the comments by Razib the Great.

I don't see how you can possibly disprove an invasion theory based purely on genetics. For example, could you prove or disprove that the British ever conquered India based on the genetic markers they left behind? The British ruled for 300 years but they never represented more than 0.1 percent of the population so their genetic contribution to India is nil. But their linguistic contribution is pretty obvious.

Why should it surprise anyone that a similar thing happened before? India was almost certainly conquered many times in its history and one of those conquests brought the ancestor of Sanskrit. The conquerers (like all conquerer after them) were too few to make any genetic impact on the population but they did bring the language and maybe most of the religion as well.

I read somewhere that there is really no doubt that the ancestor of Sanskrit originated far from the ocean because the words for things an ocean people would be familiar with all sound like names you would give to things you never saw before (sort of like "pineapple"). For example, I read that there is no word in Sanskrit for ocean. I recall the word for ocean in Hindi is "mahasagar" which means big sea. Well no one living near the ocean would have called the ocean "big sea" right?

Btw, the word "ocean" derives from a Greek word meaning "a river circling the earth" so similarly the ancestor of greek must have been inland.

it has been a long time since brown was a baptist college, harvard was a congregationalist one, princeton a presbyterian one, columbia an anglican one, etc. etc.

we live in an age where careers are made destroying dead-white-males.

i think some of the things that some people here from a 'hindutva' perspective are correct, but dam they sound dumb trying to exposit it, and the reasoning & evidentiary standards are as weak as a 10 year old with cystic fibrosis.

I have two issues with that. First, labelling this very serious debate under "Hindutva perspective" would seem to be indicative of intellectual laziness or casual dimissiveness. As a former po-co, po-mo, deconstructionist-commie-linguist turned into rationalist-atheist-libertarian who'd like to consider himself as following the Enligtenment principles and the scientific method, I think any dispassionate observer will find a lot of merit in what the new Indic scholarship has to say. Sure, not all of it may stand up to rigorous scrutiny - but is that the reason why the academia is resisting it so ferociously? The real reson why this work will never be allowed into peer-reviewed journals is because it's inimical to the interests of the current gatekeepers . Second, just because commenters on SM are unable to meet with the reasoning and evidentiary standards doesn't mean that high-quality scholarship that would meet those standards does not exist. I don't think SM will be particularly receptive to such comments. But if you are really interested, read the articles on Sulekha - many of them by current professors in Indian or Western academia - and you will see the rigour in their work.

Gujjubhai,

prove that institutional bias does not exsit? I

no, i didn't say it proved anything! i am simply pointing to the fact that people here seem to be assuming that academia is a hotbed of christian racism. i'm pretty skeptical of that claim for a variety of reasons. many people here through around terms like 'proven' or 'disproven,' like they are magic amulets that ward off accusations of intellectuals sloppiness. i come into this argument with good faith and few vested interests, i could care less about south asian politics, hinduism, islam, postcolonialism, leftism, etc.

this is what i see. i see some people here arguing against max muller and the AIT vs. a rather amorphous (to my eye) 'indigenous' perspective. in fact, like creationists the indigenous perspective seems to be a rather spare negative case. so, what i would like is a run down of contrasting assertions and predictions made by the various models. there are some here who seem to want to constrain the selection possibilities to two. i do not grant that there are only two possibilities.

In fact, such alternate explanation does exist : it is the radical lefty, racial or chritstian fundie bias of many researchers. It is also that right wing christian groups are some of the largest sources of funding such research and they use their money as a means to advance their agenda.

i would like a run down of the christianity and evangelical funding of such researchers. there can't be that many indologists out there, give me the big names. we know that only 40% of scientists in america with ph.d.s are theists, there are surveys. we know that only 10% of national academy of science members are theists. i am skeptical that history ph.d.s are much more religious.

For example, could you prove or disprove that the British ever conquered India based on the genetic markers they left behind?

Ummm...there'd be tons of archaeological and socio-cultural evidence to infer that, not to mention the gene pool of Anglo-Indians.

Why should it surprise anyone that a similar thing happened before? India was almost certainly conquered many times in its history and one of those conquests brought the ancestor of Sanskrit.

Again, zero archaeological evidence of a large-scale migration or war(s). No socio-cultural evidence either - the only Big War recounted in pre-history is the Mahabharata legend which is based within India. Linguistic commonality does not conclusively prove war/invasion/conquering : the presence of Spanish in the US does not prove invasion or conquering by Hispanics.

Again, zero archaeological evidence of a large-scale migration or war(s). No socio-cultural evidence either - the only Big War recounted in pre-history is the Mahabharata legend which is based within India. Linguistic commonality does not conclusively prove war/invasion/conquering : the presence of Spanish in the US does not prove invasion or conquering by Hispanics.

1) just because you have zero evidence of X does not mean that that is a sufficient condition to falsify a hypothesis (contradictory evidence is sufficient).

2) these sort of things are not conclusively proven usually.

3) you used the word "infer," you know what game i'm playing. we aren't relying on one vector here.

4) quantify "large scale." i.e., give me a target of the proportion of the population which would consist of migrants in a given generation to qualify as large scale (i.e., 1% migrant in a generation in reference to the previous local generation). population genetics has plenty of off the shelf plug & chug equations to handle these questions, but you need to set the bounds of your hypothesis.

Razib:

we know that only 40% of scientists in america with ph.d.s are theists, there are surveys. we know that only 10% of national academy of science members are theists. i am skeptical that history ph.d.s are much more religious.

But the so-called atheists continue to operate within a religious framework. The cognitive structure hasn't changed since the days people believed that this world was an expression of God's will and purpose. Christianity has simply taken on secular trappings. Instead of asking "what is God's purpose for man" we ask "what is the meaning of life?" Both of these questions are equally nonsensical. Yet they are considered perfectly normal and your intelligent, atheist scientist types go about mulling them over. The idea of purpose is very much a Christian idea. As a contrast this idea is completely absent in all Asian traditions. The Indian traditions speak of Leela (play) which suggests arbitrariness.

The secularization of Christian concepts is reflected all over the social sciences. Western Psychology for example is based on the assumption that human beings are rational creatures. This too comes from religion where God has a Will and acts in accordance with this will. The Asian (or at least the Indian) traditions recognize rationality to be only a miniscule portion of the human mind.

So the problem is way more insidious than it seems and it isn't accurate to say religion does not play a role in scholarship. I agree it's of no use to accuse the entire western hemisphere of being racist. But nevertheless they operate from a framework that cannot help mischaracterizing whatever they observe because of the theological framework they continue to operate in.

just because you have zero evidence of X does not mean that that is a sufficient condition to falsify a hypothesis (contradictory evidence is sufficient).

Fair enough. But the only contraditcory evidence is philological, which can fit in with many alternate explanations. In that case, going back to what you said earlier, shouldn't we be using a more parsimonious hypothesis? Isn't positing non-invasion in the face of zero evidence of invasion a more parsimonious hypothesis?

To illustrate this further, let me draw a more familiar analogy. Say I restate your assertion in the context of a monotheist religion: "just because you have zero evidence of the existence of God does not mean that is a sufficient condition to falsify the existence of God (contradictory evidence is sufficeint)". If you buy into that argument, with the additional assertion that all contradictory evidence is planted by an omnipotent God to test your faith, then until you can falsify the existence of God, a more "rational" position would be for you to be a believer :-). Not sure how that would sit with your (non)religious proclivity :-). In fact, the reason why I am an atheist is exactly this argument: non-existence of God is the more parsimonious hypothesis.

Dude, I am just as much of a Popperian as the next rationalist. But we have to watch out for the trap of being led into tautologies by taking Popper too far. Especially a self-serving tautology manufactured to serve the interest of rulers.

Razib, you're really ugly, right? I need to know that I'm better looking than you, or I'll go and cry as I'm in awe jealous of your knowledge. I'm not trying to brown-brown-nose, but I've enjoyed reading your points here as they echo a lot of my views. I wholly agree, some of the theories (Abhi's made me worried about using this word casually now) I hear from both sides are somewhat reminiscent of the Creationism 'scientific proof'. Irrespective, I think your call for an end to a binary us vs. them mentality would be helpful.

Raz, have you read anything about Dawkins' new mini-series on British TV? Very interesting stuff.

Gujjubhai,

i won't worship at the cult of popper myself, i'm a pragmatist. i believe in the culture of science, as flawed and noisy as it is, because it is the best we have.

now, Isn't positing non-invasion in the face of zero evidence of invasion a more parsimonious hypothesis? well, that depends on what you define as "invasion." again, i'm going back to the proportion is mattering. let me restate it this way: what is the necessary precondition for the transfer of language from A to Z in a locale? i don't think wholesale demographic replacement is a necessary precondition. in fact, that is why i'm trying to get out of you exactly what the proportion of migrants would have to be to classify as an 'invasion.' if you want to be more PC, elite cultural transmission seems to be a plausible way to make the case. the fact is we do have genetic evidence of migration from the west in the J haplogroup. it is not dominant, but it is non-trivial, and it correlates with northern indians and 'higher caste,' which fits the preconceived notions we might have in regards to elite transmission of indo-european languages in northern india.

do i believe that chariot riding aryans came into the indus valley and slew the native population around 1500 BCE and brought with them from outside india hinduism? no! if that is the AIT you are talking about, i don't accept that, but that's not what i see in the scholarship. rather, i read romila thapar's work, and she does not posit that from what i can tell, rather, she seems to assume migration over a period of time which resulted in cultural change. as i said above, it isn't important to me whether the indus valley civilization was sanskritic or not. it isn't important to me whether hinduism is predominantly native or not (it could be predominantly the outgrowth of the religio-philosophical worldview of native indians who have lived in the subcontinent for tens of thousands of years). what i'm positing is a narrow hypothesis about the likelihood of elite transmission of language into the indian subcontinent. the reality is that we can't just look at this question in the context of india, we have to look at it in the context of eurasia. an indigenous origin for indo-european in the indian subcontinent implies that indo-european languages the world over are south asian origin. that implies predictions about cognates and language diversity and the generation form of the indo-european linguistic tree, predictions which are for the most part not born out. if you want me to be explicit i will contend that aryans brought to india one thing of any importance, and that is their language. the religion, genes and culture of india is predominantly indigenous, with a mild indo-european gloss (i.e., some of the gods in hinduism have obvious indo-european cognates, but in traditional hinduism they are marginalized, while cows, cloth, etc. were all likely long time features of the indian landscape).

Razib,

Thank you for your extensive reply. I'm still not entirely convinced about (for examples) the "average" Punjabi having more in common genetically with the "average" Madrasi compared to Iranians, but I do agree completely with your statement here:

this does not mean that all genes within all people in lahore will be more similar to someone from madras. and people from lahore will exhibit a shorter genetic distance toward people from tehran than people from madras would (i.e., i use lahore specifically because punjabis & sindhis are the indo-aryan speaking group who are probably most admixed with iranian peoples).

It's all going to depend to some extent on the regional origin of the person concerned (Punjab, Madras etc) and very much on their particular family. For one reason or another (direct ancestry, dominant genes etc), some people will be closer to Iranians than others, even though they may be from the same part of the Indian subcontinent and often even from the same caste (assuming one buys the concept of people from the same caste having historically only married amongst themselves). Either way, I'd thought that for such people, Iranians are basically their "first-cousins" and other groups like Southern Europeans/Mediterraneans are "second-cousins". Difficult to confirm this without the necessary exhaustive genetic analysis, of course, but I had been under the assumption that this was the received wisdom at present.

You've made some interesting points about how physical markers shouldn't necessarily be taken as primary evidence of common ancestry (or lack of it). Going by some of my own relatives (myself included, actually) and various other Iranian/Spanish-looking north Indian desis I've met (primarily Punjabi, Gujarati, and a handful of Hindu Kashmiris), I would have thought that the common roots were pretty damn obvious. There have been Punjabi, Gujarati and (most pertinently) Persian/Iranian women I've met here in the UK who have similar enough appearances to actually look literally like sisters, or at least first-cousins. Someone (I'm not referring to you here, obviously) who insists on disputing this sounds, to me, like someone denying the common ancestry between Chinese and Japanese people, despite the glaringly obvious similarities in facial characteristics.

no, i didn't say it proved anything! i am simply pointing to the fact that people here seem to be assuming that academia is a hotbed of christian racism

I also think that the viewpoints of some Indians may be distorted by an anti-European/anti-Caucasian bias as a result of hang-ups about the whole colonial era. In the same way that some feel that present and historical Western academics were determined to prove an allegedly non-existent link with non-Indian "Aryans", I wonder if the desis concerned are similarly determined to prove that some Indians do not have this common ancestry, and that their own thinking and judgement is similarly distorted due to their underlying agendas and motivations.

Perhaps, in reality, the "truth" is actually somewhere in-between the 2 opposing viewpoints, or a combination of the two.

Either way, I'd thought that for such people, Iranians are basically their "first-cousins" and other groups like Southern Europeans/Mediterraneans are "second-cousins". Difficult to confirm this without the necessary exhaustive genetic analysis, of course, but I had been under the assumption that this was the received wisdom at present.

ok, well here is a chart you might find of interest. don't take it as gospel! (sorry for the christian eurocentric reference :) yes, iranians are probably the closest of the other eurasian peoples to browns, especially northwest browns. if you want to take northwest browns as a type, you can imagine them as an admixture between other browns and iranians. what i'm saying is that they would probably be about 1/3 iranian and 2/3 'other brown.' now, first, let me reiterate that northwest browns are not some simple admixture, all populations have variation and mix with each other, so there were never any idealized platonic races, only dynamic fluxes of genes across populations. but, if a population is 1/3 iranian, then some of those people will look VERY iranian, though the average person will look only 1/3 iranian. the smaller the numbero features you are looking at the, the greater the sampling variance will be since you don't have many random variables at work. so, if you are look at hair, skin and nose, that's tree traits. you can have many combinations within those three traits, so sometimes even if someone is ancestrally mostly brown, they might look like someone what tehran, because they randomly assorted out the 1/3 iranian features. please see this post for details of what i'm talking about. the point is that variation within populations is real, and not just an artifact of admixture, populations vary and exhibit range of types. bjork is pure icelandic, and yet looks half-asian. a small minority of scandinavians just happen to look like this. our 'pattern detection' mechanisms in our brains are fuzzy mappings onto the reality of genetic diversity. yes, there is a correlation, but it isn't perfect, so you can't always predict very well.

Someone (I'm not referring to you here, obviously) who insists on disputing this sounds, to me, like someone denying the common ancestry between Chinese and Japanese people, despite the glaringly obvious similarities in facial characteristics.

look, i'm a brown skinned bengali. but people think i look 'middle eastern.' you can ask manish (or saurav) what i look like, i don't look middle eastern in real life. the fact is that japanese and chinese are pretty good at telling each other apart. yes, they do look similar, but perception of physical distance is somewhat subjective.

"There appear to be multiple debates occuring in this thread, some historical, some genetic, and some religiously-orientated, and it would be good for some clarification on what the basic, core issue is."

The Aryan invasion theory has historical, religious and racial/ethnic overtones. It is impossible to separate these various strands.
The gist:
The left contends that the a race of Aryans violently invaded India and enslaved the "dasyu". it is their brief that the dasyu refers to a race of people that originate in India. Since, according to them, Hinduism owes it's origins to the coming of the aryans, it is alien to India and hence no different from religions that came later on.( read...Islam)
The marxists use class as a denominator through which they peruse history. It becomes easy to blame the Hindus for inequity and poverty in Indian society. They become the oppressors of minorites, women, tribals, why!! they even caused the Tsunami last year!! Such an Invasion theory provides rich political/social fodder for the left. The theory was orignally propounded by british missionaries and their administrative counterparts as an effective tool to cause division in the southern parts of the country. The british found it hard to stomach the fact that the hindus had sophisticated systems of knowledge and philosophy. hence, they had to attribute these systems to the coming of a whiter/superior race. The dasyu were apparently dark skinned, so, were christened as "dravidians".

The Hindus don't take kindly to such talk. Not hard to see why.....

The following urls discredit the theory. source: wikipedia.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history5.shtml
http://www.stephen-knapp.com/solid_evidence_debunking_aryan_invasion.htm

Razib, you're really ugly, right?

i'm in brooklyn right now, and a gay friend i had dinner with last night told me i'm 'handsome.' i think i'm above average, though not ravishingly so unfortunately :(

Razib,

I have a feeling that in most of the major areas, you and I are thinking along the same lines. The 1/3 - 2/3 examples you gave are especially good, it's exactly what was going on in my own mind. Since I look 2/3 Iranian and 1/3 "brown", this is a particularly interesting discussion for me personally ;)

There are of course a smaller number of north Indians who significantly slant even more towards the Iranian appearance, but you and I both covered that in our respective posts.

The bone of contention I have is when people (again, not you) attempt to deny any historical/ancestral link whatsoever between the Iranian types and groups further towards the north-west. Unless they're saying that the migration was the other way round, and various groups migrated westwards from northern India. Either way, stubbornly denying any link is unwise considering not just overlapping genes (to some extent or another) but the linguistic overlap and, dammit, the fact that the 2 regions are geographically right next to each other !

Same line of logic with my Chinese/Japanese example. If China and Japan were tens of thousands of miles apart then one would be more justified in questioning any common ancestry (prehistoric long-distance migration notwithstanding), but it wouldn't be the right chain of thought considering that the two regions are side-by-side.

Divya,

With all due respect, you're generalising too much about what you term "Indian traditions". Sikhism doesn't necessarily follow the principles/tenets you've described; but that would take this discussion too far off-topic. so I won't go into further detail here.

Jai - With equally due respect, I did not intend any harm and you should not have taken offence just for the sake of taking offence. Neither did I talk of any tenets or principles. I do intend to continue using the term Indian traditions since I try as often as possible not to use the term religion or hinduism. Please do not make an issue of it. But this is off-topic so let's drop it (in any case, I'm out).

Jai,

You might disagree with Divya. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe, your defenses are up.

However, in Comment #.78, she has made some very intelligent observations. Agnostism and atheism in West is still very much couched within the "Protestant/ Calvinist" framework.

Discussion like this are only fun if people bring new, insightful stuff - repeating the same song can be really boring, don't you think.

I think some things need to be cleared up here:

- I never stated and I do not think anyone at this point ever stated that Indians and Iranians in some cases have similar features. Obviously since they are close in proximity there is going to be some natural smiliarities in addition to Persian conquests and migration to South Asia or India. Noone is denying this. But to keep taking the argument furhter and further and further and further and further AND FURTHER is just making a variation on the Aryan Invasion Theory and diluting it and saying that the ancestry came somewhere from the Steppes of Asia.

-No doubt there has been some influence in the region from other parts of Asia be it from migration/conquest/or even trade, I mean we all no that Genghis Kahn invaded the region. Many other groups have too and therefore there is naturally going to be some transference of genes and or other cultural traits.

-Originally the AIT conjecture stated that the invaders came from the Nordic lands, then they changed to the steppes of Asia

-RAZIB - you stated
"where do you get the idea that it is controversial that the "greek" language is exogenous to greece?* read In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. or The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. also, greek and indo-aryans languages are syntactically similar vis-a-vi, for example, dravidian or finno-ugric languages. one could posit that both languages came into their present geographic regions from another region, or, they came from india or greece, but it seems logically impossible that they are indigenous to both greece and india since they are separate languages who share a common ancestor (unless you assume that an ancient ur-language was extent between greece and india)."
-I have to clear something up on this, I did not mean to comment on the Greek language issue, obviously it is connected n the whole debate since there are similarities to it and Sanskrit. That is fine. But yeah in the same vein it is a bit controversial... go tell a greek that his language came from somewhere else and he'll tell you all languages started in Greece. Either way in terms of using the word "controversial", yes in that case evidence may lean one way or another, but the reason it is controversial is that there is no end all be all proof stating that the other side is WRONG. Now in terms of Sanskrit and a possible older IE language, there is something that people tend to deny or include in their arguments. Is it not possible that the older IE language could have come form the SOUth Asian region and spread out to other Asian lands? Sanskrit may have been one branch of it and other IE languages/branches as they spread out (in theory of course)

- And oh yeah, by using the word "controversial" I was trying to subtly infer my secret and hidden agenda of spreading creationism... Nice try, try again

Divya in #78 .. very interesting comments !!!

I'm a little confused with the praise Divya has received (I think you referred to her as a 'reformist figure' or something Kush!) NYC filmmakers to one side, I have a few objections to her comment #78, which has been mentioned twice already.

The idea of purpose is very much a Christian idea.

Is it? You go on to say it's a concept absent from ALL Asian traditions. Big sweeping statement there.

Buddhism: "Buddhism explains a purpose to life, it explains apparent injustice and inequality around the world, and it provides a code of practice or way of life that leads to true happiness." [Link]

Confucianism is largely concerned with finding a meaning to life.

Shinto, likewise, believes that life has a meaning.

I can go on. I take on board some of your points about some of the archaic Christo-centric beliefs leaving a legacy in science and much of popular culture. But I don't agree that all atheists with an interest in science (e.g. me, or Razib, or more high-profile people like Richard Dawkins who I mentioned above) "continue to operate within a religious framework"

BongBreaker - The asian traditions frame the question differently. They do not go about asking why is the sky blue, why did we have an earthquake (because it is god's will etc.) Rather they tell you how best to live your life, or else they describe life - it's full of suffereing and the way out of suffering is such and such, it's an illusion, etc. Big difference.

Bong Breaker,

I praised Divya for one intelligent observation:

"Most of the western thought (religous and secular) have strong roots and imprint of their Judeo-Christian (Protestant most of the times) framework". Similarly within Indian context, there is imprint of .............(how can I even dare to say the word, I will be sent to French Guyana) or "unifying concepts".

This said, most (please note, most, not all) of the scientists in west (I agree with Razib) have little interest in the details of religion. Most often, they have a quite a detached view. For them, religion is for ceremonies during wedding, christmas gifts, and funerals. Razib's (NSA) figure are correct on that.

There is no blank-check. I do not do that.........Bong, I wasn't referring to her "meaning of life" concept.

Bong Breaker,

On NYC, Divya and I were on the opposite side. I was more on Abhi's side there.

Sometimes, I have praised MoorNam and often, I oppose him.

Most of the time I support Jai on "human first" approach but then I oppose on his counter-terrorism ideas.

It is very complicated.

It's cool Kush, we're all simple complicated people (like Christy Turlington).

Divya, granted the sky being blue is a question that's enjoyed most asking in the West - in fact another scientist who talks about religion, Eric Cornell, used it as an example in his TIME essay about ID (actually I think Abhi linked to it a few weeks back). But cultures all over the world have used religion to explain the world around them for millennia, Asia is no different. I don't think you can categorise 'Asian' religions as a single entity. They may not have said "the sky is blue because God says so" but they DID say "the Sun rises because God made it".

The point you make about "why was there an earthquake" is more interesting. I agree, many Asian religions havne't been asking "why did it happen?" But rather than saying this trait is absent in a vague umbrella of Asian religions, it would be more accurate to say that the concept of punishment and a vindictive God is particular to Abrahamic religions. Whether you call Islam Asian is open to debate.

I praised Divya's comment because it fit my biases. Hey, we all got our biases, right? Some people find Kate Moss attractive too!!!

Most of the time I support Jai on "human first" approach but then I oppose on his counter-terrorism ideas.

What are your counter-terrorism ideas?

ALM,

The Terror Bee Equation - I have linked here a number of times. DesiPundit, Renwanul, www.thesquare.com have quoted/ posted them in past too.

PS: I wrote them nearly 1 1/2 year ago.

go tell a greek that his language came from somewhere else and he'll tell you all languages started in Greece

yeah, greeks are stupid about this. so are nationalist idiots of all sorts. there's a difference between folklore and scholarship. but greeks have their own ideas of migrations (dorians, achaeans as well as autochthonous pleasgians) so i'm not sure if it's cognate with brown stupidity. the native americans get mad when scientists tell them they came over across via beringia because their elders told them that they are from the 'earth' and related to 'brother bear' and 'sister hawk' or some stupid shit.* the aryans are from india types are not nearly as dumb, and as i suggested above the broad thrust of their argument that south asians are indigenes if evaluated as those whose ancestors were predominantly derived from the paleolithic south asian substrate is something that i'd agree with. what i don't agree with is these bizarro tirades about max muller, rejection of the clear consensus in philology and opportunistic use of pomo deconstructionist bullshit. of course, some of you no doubt believe in pomo deconstructionist bullshit, and i pray for you.

and one last thing, if people here reject philology, that is fine, i think that's wrong, but whatever. but, when people say there is controversy in philology as regards the non-south asian origin of indo-european languages then they are lying or uninformed. perhaps i'm too ignorant on this area and i don't know any better about the consensus controversy, but unlike others i did point to a few scholarly books i have read on this topic. only western europe (i.e., west of the rhine) has a lower probability of being the PIE ur-heimat from what i can tell across the expanse of indo-european languages. so yeah, the 'there is a controversy' is a classic creationist move. and of course, creationists like phil johnson like post modernism. the tendrils do go far....

* actually kosmin et al. american survey of religion regularly finds that 80-90% of native americans are christian so the 'brother bear' stuff is probably political posturing to maintain 'first nation' status in the public square in the quest for group spoils.

re: atheism, calvinism, protestantism, etc. this is a complicated topic. if you read Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World, you will see that 'atheism,' rejection of normative religious tradition, is a common feature of countercultural intellectual movements. in greece you had the epicureans and pyrrhonian skeptics, in china you have the pragmatic naturalism of hsun tzu (the last of the three great confucian sages (confucius inclusive)) and in india you have the naturalistic carvaka philosophy.

i have regularly come across the assertion that 'atheism is a product of western christian thought.' i think the problem with this is simple: people take verbal descriptions and semantical obscurity and impart upon them great significance. religious specialists and cultural theorists who man the bureaucracies of stratified societies need to justify their existence and emphasize the differences between various groups. but cognitive psychologists have found that people across cultures tend to conceptualize the same ideas in their minds even when the theory propounded by cultural elites implies that the concepts conceived of must be radically different. for example, christians believe in the trinity and jews believe in a simple monotheism, and the religious practitioners of both groups have emphasized the difference between these two rational systems. people have died because of their professed beliefs. but the cognitive reality is that christians can't really rationally conceive of the trinitarian theology where "3 == 1." cognitively the god conceived of by christian theists isn't that different from jewish theists, or, to be honest, hindu theists, and therevada buddhist nontheists (therevada buddhists don't believe in a creator god and are technically nontheists, but operationally their relationship to the buddha is cognitively identical to that of christians, jews, muslims and hindus!).

the idea that culture conditions how you view the world around is rather normative in everyday discourse, and i think that that this conception needs to be modulated. peoples do think differently but we need to be careful in how we conceive of these differences and qualified in the salience of the differences. christian theologians and hindu rishis might verbally exposit different systems of transcendent supernatural belief, but i believe cognitively christians and hindus on the ground basically worship the same mental objects (though by different bames, and punctilious to profess the creeds). references to things like 'calvinist' are too redolent of weberian generalizations which have not stood the test of time. modern historical economic scholarship has, to my knowledge, falsified weber's idea of calvinist industry in germany (catholics and lutherans could be quite economically productive). weber also wrote an essay about how the religious system of east asia would always handicap it economically. how did that prediction bear itself out? my point is that the broadly obvious cultural differences are surface features which serve as distinctive shibboleths, but don't express deep rooted substantive ways of thinking.

the short of it is that objectivity is objectivity is objectivity. we might look at the world like catfish at the bottom of the muddy pond, faint glimmers and glimpses, but the world exists. bite the apple and be as the gods, it isn't a western privilege and we don't need to be familiar with the institutes of religion and systematic reformed theology to bath superstition in the universal acid.

BongBreaker/Razib -

But Hindus do not have a belief system. It makes no sense to ask a Hindu "Do you believe in Shiva"? Or "Which God do you believe in?" Both of these are questions that I have been asked. Both yes and no answers, or the name of any god, do not capture my experience in the least bit. In the Judeo/Christian/atheist paradigm "Do you believe in God?" is a valid question. How can there not be a different cognitive structure around this? In the Indian languages the words for belief are along the lines of having respect for or performing rituals to or keeping fasts for (maano Shiva, etc.). Of course we have tons of scholarship regarding what Buddhists believe and what Hindus believe. This type of scholarship is the work of Indologists and comes from a religious mindset. But Hindus/Buddhists ect. have logical grounds for holding their views unlike the faith-based systems which just pulled stuff out of their hats. So it won't do to equate the Vedic notions of "God makes the sun rise" with the Judeo-Christian ones. Vedic terminology is technical and each word refers to something in particular and most certainly does not correspond to the JC concept of God who sits outside the universe with a will and a purpose.

The Greek and Roman pagan traditions too did not have a belief system. They worshipped numerous gods but they had a wild mythology which was not meant to be literally believed. The word "religio" for the Ancients simply meant "tradition." The belief in God syndrome started with Christianity and its claims to truth. Faith-based beliefs is what makes religion and religion was a concept absent from culture before BC. The Asian languages do not have a word for religion - hence the generalization.

Some of Razib's post went over my head so these are just general comments mostly triggered by the word "belief". Try and not give me too much flak for stating that Indian/Buddhists etc. did not have a belief system before giving it some thought. Superstitious beliefs will always exist and that's not the same thing. I will concede that at this point in time the whole world (including the atheists) are all drowning in religion - and what's more, we're all Christian.

By the way, this theory is developed in a very thorough, well-researched manner by Prof. S.N. Balagangadhar in his book "The Heathen in his Blindness".

divya,

we are speaking past each other. if you want the gist of my point it is this: the systems of beliefs elucidated by religious professionals who codify the 'hindu,' 'buddhist' and 'christian' religions are not relevant on the cognitive level. the thread of scholarship you are talking about has particular methodological biases in regards to the importance of texts, i am appealing to a 'naturalistic' cognitive psychological tradition which doesn't privilege texts or the religious authorities but engages in experiments and field work with the mass of believers. intellectual/rational models of god aren't particularly important in my opinion if you want to talk about broad based cultural comparisons.

Razib said:

i have regularly come across the assertion that 'atheism is a product of western christian thought.' i think the problem with this is simple: people take verbal descriptions and semantical obscurity and impart upon them great significance.

I'm not sure Razib. No mystery religion in the ancient world claimed that all other faiths were in error; I think that is a Christian (and Jewish) claim. You mentioned the Epicureans, but they did not reject the gods, they believed the gods existed, but had no agency over human affairs. As John Gray has said, In a world of many gods, unbelief can never be total.The pagans prized artful illusion--the goal of philosophy was happiness or salvation, not truth. Carvaka/Lokayata is naturalistic, but we have scant evidence that they were persecuted. Modern Hindus like Amartya Sen identify as Lokayata, but no one to my knowedge has ever claimed he is not Hindu! (Divya may be onto something about the necessity of belief). In Christianity, that salvation became dependent upon truth--a single truth. Atheism is also premised on its own certitudes about truth, and thus implicitly accepts Christian categories.

Divya wrote:

The secularization of Christian concepts is reflected all over the social sciences. Western Psychology for example is based on the assumption that human beings are rational creatures. This too comes from religion where God has a Will and acts in accordance with this will. The Asian (or at least the Indian) traditions recognize rationality to be only a miniscule portion of the human mind.

I agree with Divya. The Enlightenment is premised upon the Christian categories it thinks it rejected, notably the belief in the final perfection of man, in which the Christian God is displaced by a faith in rationality and science. Comte's Positivist Church was literally a Church, with a system of rituals and daily observances. Social 'physics', the long discredited phrenology and a host of other absurdities replaced Christian sacraments. Comtes's Religion of Humanity influenced Mill and morphed into Secular Humanism. Marxism is also a child of Christianity and the Enlightenment, and similarly believes in the perfection of man through not only anarchic egalitarianism but also through science. Now we have neo-liberalism, where the perfection of man will be achieved through liberal democracy and free markets. Fukuyama's End of History sounds positively Christian, doesn't it? It is also absurd. The Hindu (and the Pagan) view of life did not conceive of final perfection for humanity. Their viewpoint is cyclical. Things get better..and then worse...and then better again. The Hindutva viewpoint is, on the other hand, crypto-Christian, and a byproduct of colonialism.

This is not to say that all scientists are crypto-Christians, but its near impossible to eradicate the cultural categories we grew up thinking in. I've noticed that some Indian scientists throw in a good deal of Hinduism when writing about science; I think of VS Ramachandran the neuroscientist and George Sudarshan the physicist.

No mystery religion in the ancient world claimed that all other faiths were in error; I think that is a Christian (and Jewish) claim.

well, this is a defensible claim, but, i would contend that some interpretations of zoroastrianism and mithraism did emphasize salvation to the point where it verged on the christian ethos. after all, the zoroastrian refutation of the 'daevas' was a rejection of the indigenous aryan religious subculture. i will agree that christianity was the apotheosis of a particular religious attitude which is somewhat exception (at least before the rise of islam).

but in regards to the epicureans, would you actually say that the gods that the epicureans believed in were truly gods? in other worlds, i understand that epicureans were atomistic materialists. in other words, yes, they believed in gods, but they were not "supernaturalists." additionally, my understanding is they also believed that the gods had little interaction or influence on human affairs. epicurean appeal to mysterious forces was mostly in regards to the "swerve" which they used to break out of the bind of determinism.

The pagans prized artful illusion--the goal of philosophy was happiness or salvation, not truth.

i think this is debatable. there is no one vision of philosophy, then, or now. i would contend that hellenistic philosophy is closer to what you are asserting, while the pre-socratics in the natural philosophical mold and the various spawn of plato and aristotle (and in a strange way pythogoras) were concerned with truth.

Atheism is also premised on its own certitudes about truth, and thus implicitly accepts Christian categories.

atheism is simply the lack of theism by a common definition. explicit/positive atheism rejects particular definitions of the god hypothesis, whether via deduction or empirical observation (i.e., god is logically incoherent, or, individual X is not really god because a, b, c, d....). but, implicit/negative atheism is simply a lack of belief without evidence. many people are syntheses between these two, christians and muslims are positive atheists on all gods but the one they worship. in any case, there is a lot of diversity in atheism. some atheists, in the objectivist mode are highly rationalistic and reject the term skeptic. other atheists are skeptics and empiricists, in a more humean mode.

in the above passages, i'm not trying to quibble, i'm simply getting at what i perceive to be common cognitive motifs which often get elided by the generalizations of scholars in a grand weberian mode. the grand weberian mode is necessary and fruitful in certain contexts, but it is susceptible to overreach.

The Enlightenment is premised upon the Christian categories it thinks it rejected

this is the way i would phrase it: christianity was sufficient for the enlightenment mindset (i.e., it was a foil), but i am not totally convinced it was necessary (though i am open to that possibility). though there is something to the monotheistic linear vs. non-monotheistic cyclical dichotomy, i think again, we should be cautious of overreach in that we see what we see and jam data points into the preconceived notions.

but, getting back to my original intent, my point was to emphasize that i do not believe that 'linear thinking' or 'cyclical thinking' is necessarily that salient on a personal level, and that these generalizations about cultures often derive from theoretical systemetized texts generated elites. and, these elites can often make whatever they wish to out of their texts. i.e., medieval individuals were fatalistic, because they believed in an afterlife, etc., while later christians were progressive because of linear thinking, etc. hinduism is harmonious because of the organic nature of caste, or, hinduism promotes faction because of the fissures of caste. confucianism is antithetical to capitalism because of its emphasize on filial piety and resultant cronyism, or, it is a positive in regards to capitalism because of the confucian mantra toward good behavior and proper forms and scholarship.

the take home message i'm trying to hammer in is that extrapolating from textually derived observations (i.e. christian linear salvation vs. reincarnation) toward the day to day behavior, as if texts suffuse a culture, might not be valid. in the case of jews, for example, this works, but halakhic judaism arose in a particular social context where jews were an urban minority who could specialize in particular professional roles which allowed textual adherence to law to be central.

Wow, it took me a couple hours to read all this. Beer helped. A couple comments/questions if I may...

Who the heck reads AIT, which I guess we all did if we grew up back in the day, and considers nomadic war-mongering invaders to be "superior" to civilized city-dwellers? I guess it may just be a matter of opinion & I'm showing my city-slickin bias...

Last I heard it was undeciphered, has there been any progress lately on the Indus Valley script/hieroglyphs? Do they bear any resemblance (probable or even just superficial, looks like, etc) to any modern Indian language/scripts?

go tell a greek that his language came from somewhere else and he'll tell you all languages started in Greece
Windex too :)
Regards,
kd

Is it important for us to know our ancestral origins?I believe that we indians have tendency to live in the past.I would not personally care if i am european decent or african.Where we are heading now is important.

raj,

u read my brown-assed mind. :) but people do care. the past echos down the ages whether we like it or not, whether it is true or not.

Kush Tandon / Divya,

It is not a matter of my being "offended for the sake of being offended" or "singing the same old song", it is a matter of accuracy. I believe SM receives approximately 175,000 hits per month, so that includes a huge number of people browsing the blog who do not necessarily actively participate with the rest of us "regulars". For that reason, it is important to be as precise as possible in the assertions one makes -- and I also believe in ensuring that the truth should be paramount. Bong Breaker made some excellent points stating that some sweeping generalisations are being made, and unless one has a sufficient degree of knowledge of Sikhism to really know what one is talking about, it's better to restrict comments to Hinduism or "the Vedic traditions", or at least to say "many Indian traditions" rather than "the Indian traditions", the latter of which implies a uniformity across several Indian religions which doesn't necessarily exist in the context of the subject one is discussing. There have been multiple instances on this thread where the above has occurred with regards to posts by Divya, even if there wasn't necessarily any maliciousness behind her intentions.

Fellow Sikhs on SM, including relatively liberal and "Westernised" ones like myself, will understand the frustration of having one's religion misrepresented, even if it is occurring "by default" rather than explicitly. As you know, there was a fairly explosive precedent for this here on SM a few months ago, and in the absence of people like Punjabi Boy who normally addressed such issues, I have to speak up if I feel any clarification is required. In any case, I would hope that your responses were not an attempt to shut me up and prevent me from voicing any legitimate protests; I think I've got to know Kush well enough on this blog to assume that this wasn't his intention, at least.

Razib:

there is no one vision of philosophy, then, or now. i would contend that hellenistic philosophy is closer to what you are asserting, while the pre-socratics in the natural philosophical mold and the various spawn of plato and aristotle (and in a strange way pythogoras) were concerned with truth.

There is truth and there is truth. But there is nothing like the Gospel truth and you better believe it or you are headed for eternal damnation. Science and philosophy also seek the "truth" but the true scientist or the true philosopher knows that his truth is open to revision and questioning.

atheism is simply the lack of theism by a common definition. explicit/positive atheism rejects particular definitions of the god hypothesis, whether via deduction or empirical observation (i.e., god is logically incoherent, or, individual X is not really god because a, b, c, d....). but, implicit/negative atheism is simply a lack of belief without evidence. many people are syntheses between these two, christians and muslims are positive atheists on all gods but the one they worship. in any case, there is a lot of diversity in atheism. some atheists, in the objectivist mode are highly rationalistic and reject the term skeptic. other atheists are skeptics and empiricists, in a more humean mode.

As long as we're talking of an "ism" we are in the belief-system mode. The scope and depth of the explicit/positive rejection simply seems to revolve around the one true God (note the capital G). If atheists reject the Judeo-Christian God that's hardly a biggie. As long as we're clear that this is not the god that Nietzsche was lamenting about or the one that rocks the pagan boats. The implicit/negative atheism also has its problems. There is lack of evidence for many things. Anyone who rejects something simply as a matter of principle is functioning in the religious mode (and to be more precise, the JC mode).

Jai - Again I request you to please chill. Knowledge about Sikhism has nothing to do with Sikhism. Are you more Sikh than an illiterate Sikh peasant or a housemaid who has never studied the Gurbani? What about my Sikh friends who taught me how to cuss and swear and drink? Do you not include them in your Sikh fold? (This is in referene to your post in the Britney blog, btw). Attitudes like yours only perpetuate divisiveness and exclusivity. If you need me to rally around a particular cause (Sikh harrassment for example) I'm more than willing to join the parade. But I cannot give in to political correctness for any reason.

Divya,

I phrased my previous post as politely and carefully as possible, in order to be diplomatic and because SM is normally a fairly friendly place. However, since you have "gone there" despite my best efforts to prevent it, here are my thoughts:

Knowledge about Sikhism has nothing to do with Sikhism

It most certainly does if you are going to make sweeping generalisations encompassing Sikhism within your repeated term "Indian traditions". Unless you genuinely have detailed, accurate knowledge about the tenets of the faith, don't include it if you're going to discuss religions originating in the Indian subcontinent.

Are you more Sikh than an illiterate Sikh peasant or a housemaid who has never studied the Gurbani? What about my Sikh friends who taught me how to cuss and swear and drink? Do you not include them in your Sikh fold?

You are attempting to inflame the situation further by going into unrelated tangents and, worse, attempting to provoke me by turning this around on me. We are not talking about who has a greater degree of spiritual awareness. We are discussing the tenets of various Indian religions from an academic perspective.

(This is in referene to your post in the Britney blog, btw).

I already cleared the air with the person concerned on that particular thread, and she agreed that my point was correct, so your comment is a moot issue.

Attitudes like yours only perpetuate divisiveness and exclusivity.

You are so far off the mark. I don't know how long you've been visiting SM before you decided to start actively participating, but if you've been a fairly long-term browser here then you should know exactly how inaccurate you are in your assessment of myself and my "attitudes". There are plenty of other people here on SM who could confirm this. A more paranoid person would say that your own prejudices and preconceptions are beginning to show.

But I cannot give in to political correctness for any reason.

As you stated yourself on another thread, it is about being "correct", not "politically-correct." You cannot expect people to stay silent if you make inaccurate, factually-incorrect statements.

Let me offer some quiet, friendly advice -- and before you start flaming this any further, let me state that this is voiced in good faith. Something you repeatedly do here on SM is make comments that are either controversial and/or inaccurate, and then when other parties contradict you, you engage in fast-talking verbal sophistry in an attempt to deny any wrongdoing on your part -- despite the fact that the original comments are there for all to see in black & white. In such situations, it is better to to have the integrity and humility to admit that one may have been wrong in one's original assertion, rather than resorting to mind-games and attempting to patronise the other person into submission.

A little more straightforwardness and a little less "chaalaaki" would be a better, more constructive course of action ;)

Jai - We did not discuss any tenents or principles. In any case, I reject all tenets of all faiths, including the word tenet itself. I hope you will permit me this rejection. In the context of the discussion, the use of the phrase Indian traditions is fine. Find me a word in any native Asian language that means Religion and I will stop generalizing. Until then the points I am trying to make revolve precisely around this eastern/JC distinction of religion vs. tradition and this includes all non-JC Asia.

Jai,

I think I've got to know Kush well enough on this blog to assume that this wasn't his intention, at least.

Never. You should speak your heart and mind at all times, not onlly here but everywhere. If you feel there is a misrepresentation anytime, please speak up. I will personally not try to "subdue" your voice.

What happended few months ago, it had left a "real" bad taste. I was caught in a cross-fire where I was even defering to your opinions, and just asking questions. Well, let's even forget even that. Let's move to new things. New frontiers, man.

Personally, I have not contributed to this thread, maybe a sentence or two.

Don't worry.

Divya,

Can I please ask to back-off.

A board like this more light, on-the-fly, fun and somewhat academic fun. We should not take this too seriously. Writing comments on the speed of light can never be really academic - at best a sincere effort. Most of the discussion here is on Bollywood. Just my idea, in the end, you do as you wish. Have fun, for what SM is worth.

The Greek and Roman pagan traditions too did not have a belief system. They worshipped numerous gods but they had a wild mythology which was not meant to be literally believed. The word "religio" for the Ancients simply meant "tradition."

Divya, not to be a stickler, there's enough back-n-forth going on otherwise, but just as a point of clarification, from my understanding, religio didn't mean "tradition". I remembered the basic meaning, but found something online that backed me up:

Webster's Collegiate Dictionary traces the word back to an old Latin word religio meaning "taboo, restraint." A deeper study discovers the word comes from the two words re and ligare. Re is a prefix meaning "return," and ligare means "to bind;" in other words, "return to bondage."

I got that from http://www.tentmaker.org/Dew/Dew1/D1-EtymologyOfReligion.html . I heard that definition of "religio" a long while back and have seen it in a few places since as well.

Kush,

Thank you very much for your kind words -- you are an amazingly decent guy, as I've said before. Brought tears to my eyes ;)

With regards to the previous controversy around Diwali, I was extremely impressed with the sensitivity and maturity shown by both you and Umair -- I did notice it, so neither one of you should think that I didn't appreciate it immensely.

I did consider posting a detailed reply to Divya (post no. 111), but I will hold fire for the time-being in view of your own recent message to her.

My heartfelt thanks again for your brotherly words of support and encouragement.

Well it seems that this topic has defintely engaged many in wortwhile discussion.

That was the whole point if I'm not mistaken, thank you SM. I think that it is a necessary discussion for the brown person, whether they like it or not, whether they ----"believe in pomo deconstructionist bullshit"---- or not. We can't sit back and be aloof, and take what was spoonfed to us, but chew on it and either swallow it or spit it back out. The important point is that we are talking about it. Some of us believe that we can afford to be aloof and condescending in our comments. Reality is that we have all been raised and influenced by the past far deeper than we think or acknowledge by hegemonic media and intellectualism. Although we are living in the 21st century and are supposedly free of the evils of colonialism, orientalism, slavery, apartheid, casteism, etc... we must acknowledge and incorporate the negativity which is branded upon us. You can go ahead and categorize it as pomo deco bs, but it holds water in comparison to the biased nature of the original perspective from which it all came from. For the paradigm to shift there must be another perspective. And even if gets negative hype as being nationalistic or some other categorization it still has relevence because of questionable underlying motives of the original perspective no matter how "SCIENTIFIC" it was.

This brand may be less visible as we grow older and perhaps tend to relate to a media which tries to reflect a hunky-dory peaceful image which attempts to appease any notion that what we were taught when we were younger exalted the Euro-centric past, but "bizarro tirades about Max Mueller" are very much necessary for our unglorified redemption, or im sorry if that sounds a little too emotional, our collective regurgitation.

As an anthropology major in my undergraduate education, I was taught by many of my professors that the origins of the study of anthropology itself was initiated on racist motivations. Which was to go out in the world and prove that Europeans as a race were more advanced than the other races. The point was to stratify and classify. I am pretty damned sure that MAX MUELLER was a part of this cadre of elitist and prejudiced intellectualism. Yes he was the cream of that crop of anthropologists/linguists/philologists/archaeologists.

Therefore for us simple people who cannot easily swallow a theory/conjecture which was spoonfed to me, until I started to question it myself, it makes total sense to me to question the motives and BITCH about the intentions of such a man with my fellow people who created the theory itself.

There's definitely a lot of BS in pomo, poco, and pocopomo stuff, but there is also a lot of value in the tools it proivdes. As far as the existence of objective reality is concerned, even physicists stopped talking about that since Shoridinger's Cat. So unless one is a Randroid, I think the notion of an objective reality is just as much BS. And even if there's this one idealized abstract object reality, how much of it is knowable? How much ii is actually known? How much of that knowledge it influenced by the observer? And finally, how much is its description influnced by the narrator, especially one with unpure motives? We can go from Heizenberg to Hume to Hegel to Popper all day long without getting anywhere. But to claim that a politicized field like Indic studies is engaged in the depiction of objective reality or description of natural "laws" - a very tenuous notion in a non-empirical field - is at best a very naive veiewpoint.

The real value of deconstructionist tools is the analysis of motives and understanding the power dynamics at play in framing the narrative. I don't have to go too far away from my PBS and Fox News channel to see this played out every day in real life. One of them is the dominant description of reality in the Red states and the other one is its counterpart in the Blue states. Of course, neither of them is the reality in the rest of the world - for some, it's Al-Jazeerah and others it's the People's Daily. Even as we speak, different histories are being created, written and taught all around the world, just as it was done in the days of the Cold War and used as an instrument to serve the interests of the ruling elites.

The bottomline on this subject is, ironically enough, something I stumbled upon in the Wikipedia article. At the end of the day, the Proto-Indo-European - the hypothesized root language of Arayns - was supposedly spoken 4000 to 9000 years back and for which zero written records are in existence today. It is a language that has been artifically constructed in its entirety by modern linguists. Calvert Watkins' observation on the Wikipedia page is that in spite of its 150 years' history, comparative linguistics is not in the position to reconstruct a single well-formed sentence in PIE. Yet, it is on the "strength" of this philological "evidence" that the entire edifice of the AIT rests - whether you take it's strong form (wars, invasion) or weak form (migration). Yes, it is on the basis of this one constructed language, whose native land of origin is uncertain (interesting that linguists departments are more concerned about finding the home land of the language rather than any actual evidence of the existence of the language itself regardless of the fact that even in arhaeological excavations in Dholavira that date back to 7000 BC there are no inscriptions of P-I-E), that 200 years of colonization was justified by the proponents of the AIT. This freak theory of implied segregation-and-oppression dynamics between the north and the south continued to destroy our socio-cultural well-being by serving as justification for the conflation of the evils of caste system with fair skin vs. dark skin, language riots in Tamilnadu, colonization of our minds manifested in our fixation for finding fair skinned brides, fawning all over whiteys at Indian airports, the contempt of the convent-educated for the "vernacs" and all the rest of the ugliness that we continue to live with even today! The mind truly boggles at how well the framed narrative has served the interests of the ruling elite that manufactured it. Personally, I thank poco and pomo deconstructionist tools that taught me to see through all of this : if someone thinks that's BS, I'll pray for them and wish them good luck in their quest to find objective reality. BTW, Said's "Orientalism" is the fountainhead of poco.

My final thought on this subject is from none other than the great JM Keynes : "the ideas of economists and political philosophers are more powerful than commonly understood; indeed the world is ruled by little else". Those who question why we need to care about our history or who controls the creation of myth about browns would do well to ponder over this.

This has been a great thread. Thank you all. Gujjubhai is now headed out to get some dhokla and gaanthiya.

razib seems to have broken quite a few lovingly nurtured 'hunches' here. how did a discussion on an extract from a scientific study stray into a.sanskrit b. color c. ancestry of american universities and max mueller etc.,? the commenters do not seem to have bothered to read & absorb fully (and understand, may i add, because i know i would have to look up quite a few dictionaries and encyclopedias to do that) the post before banging away at their keyboards. razib is the only one here who seems to know genetics and a little linguistics and history here..shouldn't we be thanking him for interpreting the report for us ( i for one feel grateful)?
a few doubts on the chagrin expressed by some on some of razib's views:
# commenters who disagree with the idea that sanskrit and the indo-aryan civilisational heritage might have marked non-indian inputs are nevertheless upset that a punjabi might have more in common genetically with a madrasi than with an iranian... why?
# shouldn't we first be trying to see what's not being done at indian universities before we try to critique the work being done by 'christian' universities..? the ait was handed down by outsiders and the new evidence also seems to be coming from outside.
# and sanskrit and hindu philosophy.. is that the whole of indian heritage ?
finally, far as i can tell from razib's comments (i thank him again) we borrowed a little and evolved a little & developed a ...on our own.

Gujjubhai & Kaffir,

Quite well written. Sometimes, I reading ony is better than writing comments.

but in regards to the epicureans, would you actually say that the gods that the epicureans believed in were truly gods? in other worlds, i understand that epicureans were atomistic materialists. in other words, yes, they believed in gods, but they were not "supernaturalists."

Their gods were stripped of vitality, really of godliness, and this permitted Lucretius (Epicurus's disciple) to construct a science-religio "dualism", giving man more agency over his fate. I would classify it as a half-way house to atheism (although some Pagans may have disagreed). Interestingly, in roman times, anything antithetical to religio would be atheism, and that would have included Christianity. Modern atheism undoubtedly arose in a Christian context.

Surely there is no one vision of philosophy, then, or now. i would contend that hellenistic philosophy is closer to what you are asserting, while the pre-socratics in the natural philosophical mold and the various spawn of plato and aristotle (and in a strange way pythogoras) were concerned with truth.

Neither plato nor aristotle believed in a single truth and perfection for all of humanity, as did Christianity. How many did they concede could truly live the "good life"? Very few. The rest of humanity may not have even been worth redeeming. Christianity's child, Enlightenment, is also purportedly universal (until po-mo came along), as is Marxism, and now neo-liberalism. To my mind, there is a continuity, though the efficient cause of the universalizing faith in man's ultimate redemption may have changed with time.

As an aside, how "rational" were the pre-socratics, really? Heraclitus sounds like a Buddhist, Parmenides like an Upanishadic monist. Pythagoras...well, like a modern Hindu. :-). I suspect the idea of the "rational truth-seeking pre-Socratics" is an Enlightenment construction.

the take home message i'm trying to hammer in is that extrapolating from textually derived observations (i.e. christian linear salvation vs. reincarnation) toward the day to day behavior, as if texts suffuse a culture, might not be valid.

Sure, when put in black and white terms like that. But I don't think we'll ever have a science for social relations, and actually such an idea smacks of an essentializing positivism or a metaphysical faith in the uniformity of nature, because, for one, even at the individual level, people are influenced by, as they concomitantly influence, (to use a po-mo term) grand narratives. Beliefs are not merely what goes on in the head when we look sky-ward; they are also the processes by which we undertake or avoid action. Why hasn't religious war or heresy really happened in India? Why doesn't Europe have a caste system? If individual agents' cognitive experiences are so astoundingly similar, then all of our differences would be superficial, a discardable veneer, and I don't think they are.

Fuerza:

In the Greek and Roman pagan era, the primary truth in religious matters was indeed custom and tradition. Every once in a while a school of philosophy would develop which questioned the legitimacy of the gods or wanted proof of their existence. These were generally out-argued by other philosophers and custom and tradition won the day. Here's one such argument by Cotta in response to his Stoic opponent Balbus:

You did not really feel confident that the doctrine of the divine existence was as self-evident as you could wish, and for that reason you attempted to prove it with a number of arguments. For my part a simple argument would have sufficed, namely that it has been handed down to us by our forefathers. But you despise authority, and fight your battles with the weapon of reason. Give permission therefore for my reason to join issue with yours.

There are similar arguments for tradition by many other distinguished philosophers of the time. No proof or reason was deemed necessary with respect to traditions that had been passed down generation after generation. It is not that religion was transmitted down with other things, but that which was transmitted was religion. Even if an Epicurus, a Cicero or a Plutarch asserted that they did not believe in the gods, or even mocked them, they nevertheless participated in and actually even led religious practices. It is odd when you think that the Enlightenment philosophers were influenced by these very writers and were led to reject religion and adopt atheism, yet these Ancients, the authors of the philosophy, were not similarly affected. In the intervening 1800 years belief and doctrine had taken hold of the human mind and this made all the difference. It was Christianity's answer to the pagan question to link practices to beliefs, to be the ones with the right beliefs, and consequently place so much emphasis on the written word and its interpretation. Thus the religious critque of the Ancients made all the difference in the Enlightenment age. To the ancient pagans it was not about belief but tradition.

The etymology of religion that you have provided is the generally accepted one at the present time. This was not always the case. The earlier definition was based on the Latin re-leggare (re-read) meaning to retrace.

for those who might be interested, there's an article on the evolution of language in primates: The eloquent ape: genes, brains and the evolution of language, it's here (subscription maybe required); Fisher & Marcus (2006), Nature Reviews Genetics (2006) (7):9-20.

There is lack of evidence for many things. Anyone who rejects something simply as a matter of principle is functioning in the religious mode (and to be more precise, the JC mode).

implicit atheism does not reject, it simply lacks positive belief. it shades into agnosticism.

As an anthropology major in my undergraduate education, I was taught by many of my professors that the origins of the study of anthropology itself was initiated on racist motivations. Which was to go out in the world and prove that Europeans as a race were more advanced than the other races. The point was to stratify and classify. I am pretty damned sure that MAX MUELLER was a part of this cadre of elitist and prejudiced intellectualism. Yes he was the cream of that crop of anthropologists/linguists/philologists/archaeologists.

scientific taxonomy (derived from linneaus) was only refinement of human cognitive biases. an understanding of kinds seems to be pretty intuitive and innate. see speciation by orr & coyne or paul blooms' work on dualism or scott atran's on folk biology.

s far as the existence of objective reality is concerned

i'm not a metaphysical objectivist, but a methodological naturalist.

finally, far as i can tell from razib's comments (i thank him again) we borrowed a little and evolved a little & developed a ...on our own.

this is the closest to my own view. some of my 'opponents' seem to move from a small difference of opinion re: sanskrit to the "AIT" theory which no one really holds to in strong form except for racists. i don't really defend the "AIT" theory, but i guess that's besides the point. as i've said, there is no necessary connection between the provenance of indo-aryan languages and racism/anti-hinduism/colonialism/relativism/etc. etc. at least that's my opinion.

Modern atheism undoubtedly arose in a Christian context.

that's an empirical fact, not an analysis. the modern world developed in a christian context. what we're trying to get at is whether christianity as a cultural matrix is a necessary condition for the emergence of 'atheism.'

Neither plato nor aristotle believed in a single truth and perfection for all of humanity, as did Christianity

here we go on generalizations...do you get from the NT that universal salvation was a real possiblity??? i didn't. relevations, and even some of paul's letters seem to take some joy in the wrath god would mete out onto unbelievers. now, i suppose you mean that christianity believed that universal salvation was a possibility, but the problem is that there have been many manifestations outside of that box operationally in christian history. the early christians were very parochial, and the rejection of the viability of universal salvation reappeared in the reformation as radical protestant gave up the project of converting everyone and simply focused on the saved and elected.

As an aside, how "rational" were the pre-socratics, really? Heraclitus sounds like a Buddhist, Parmenides like an Upanishadic monist. Pythagoras...well, like a modern Hindu. :-). I suspect the idea of the "rational truth-seeking pre-Socratics" is an Enlightenment construction.

there is a blur boundary between the rational man and the magician. thales was both. anaxogorous and anaximander and democritus certainly attempted to construct rational systems. though pythagorous was a mystic, he certainly was rationalistic in looking toward the implications of mathematical axioms.

If individual agents' cognitive experiences are so astoundingly similar, then all of our differences would be superficial, a discardable veneer, and I don't think they are.

i don't think they are a veneer either. but

a) there is underlying uniformity that can emerge. prior to world war ii japanese were warlike. today they are pacifists. is the japanese culture fundamentally different, or has it simply expressed a mode that was always latent because of the vareigated nature of human psychology? in any case, i think you are playing a double game here, on the one had you reject positivism and on the other you do believe in concrete facts of difference and distinction. in terms of grand narratives, i think part of the problem is many people focus too much on what the texts say, as if texts have grand power over life & death. let me consider your two examples:

religious war
caste

certainly there are differences here, but in terms of absolute body, how many deaths can be attributed to religious war in europe vs. india? (let's exclude islam attributable conflict as it is derived from the same root as christianity). more in the former than in the latter, but, on expectation what is the chance that a random individual selected out of a sample space which consists of all individuals who lived in europe and india between fixed points of comparison would have been the victim of a religious pogrom or persecution? more in europe, but in terms of the day to day experience i think the difference would be minimal on absolute terms because the baseline is so low. similarly, india has a baroque and well elaborated caste system, but examining the whole sample space over time would we find that the average european was filled with far greater self esteem and worth in the face of his betters because of the lack of caste? did not the peasant eat cake? the serf toil? the gentry pass on their status? was caste fixed in india so that no fluidity was possible? there are differences, but i would argue that the emphasis on written records, and the goings on of the high and might overemphasize them.

in sum, some people would say that culture shapes humans to be what they are. i would argue that humans shape culture to be what it is. in my conception cultures are manifold expressions of human cognition which are constrained by the architecture of our mind. ergo, certain cultural universals will be reprised throughout history because they are fundamental human modalities.

Even if an Epicurus, a Cicero or a Plutarch asserted that they did not believe in the gods, or even mocked them, they nevertheless participated in and actually even led religious practices.

yes, and the sons of constantine, both christians, were titular heads of the roman pagan cults and participated in public celebrations. you seem to believe that the "Ancients" cogitated in a fundamentally different fashion. i disagree.

Razib:

you seem to believe that the "Ancients" cogitated in a fundamentally different fashion. i disagree.

Yes, I'm becoming more and more convinced of it. After all our thinking is structured and centuries of brainwashing must have an effect. But why do you disagree? Innateness can't be everything.

By the way, how do you pronounce your name? Ruzz-eeb? Raa-zib? Or have you succumbed to Ray-zib? Just curious, since I've never heard this name before and like to know these things.

and the sons of constantine, both christians, were titular heads of the roman pagan cults and participated in public celebrations.

But their greatgrandsons didn't. The Roman empire took a while to be annihilated and there was a bit of an overlap there. The point I was trying to make is that the early pagan practices were not tied into a belief system. The current christian practices are tied into a belief system.

But their greatgrandsons didn't.

constantine's dynasty ended with julian, the half-nephew of constantine, so yes, the great grandsons didn't participate in the pagan cults :)

some ppl say 'ruhzeeb' and some saw 'rahzeeb.' more the former. also, close female friends and girlfriends always say 'zeeb.'

now, i suppose you mean that christianity believed that universal salvation was a possibility,

Yes. This is what I meant. Are you seriously suggesting that Paul didn't universalize Christianity? You've elided another aspect of this universality: Not only is universal salvation a possibility, but one could only hope to actualize this possibility by adherence to this specific truth claim. Sure, it may have taken a while for this claim to develop, and there were undoubtedly proto-gnostic and gnostic claims that competed for a time. But I don't think this fact mars the central point. Christianity is unique (in the ancient world) in this regard. And this universalizing tendency has impacted Western grand narratives ever since.

in any case, i think you are playing a double game here, on the one had you reject positivism and on the other you do believe in concrete facts of difference and distinction.

How so? Wouldn't you say that the central thrust of political positivism was to uncover "laws" that govern human interaction by means of the scientific method? I ask you: name one "law" that has emerged from this approach. Are there any "laws" of economics for instance? Yes there is fluidity in grand narratives, but the world as I know it is in a constant state of difference. When grand narratives in the social sphere assume "universality" (X is the only true faith, Y is the only true polical system) it will come into conflict with this natural state of affairs. This is not relativism, btw. Some beliefs may be sublime, others execrable. Anyway, you concede that there is an impact, but that an overreliance on texts (and the sway of the elites?) may exaggerate them. Have you considered that different cultures may respond differently to texts themselves? At an individual level, where you believe "universals" express themselves, Do you think a textual belief in eternal damnation had or had not an impact over indivual decsion making in say, 14th century Europe? In other words, would it influence how people acted in a non-trivial, particularized way on a day to day basis? Would different beliefs have impacted people in a different way in 14th century China?

certainly there are differences here, but in terms of absolute body, how many deaths can be attributed to religious war in europe vs. india. more in the former than in the latter, but, on expectation what is the chance that a random individual selected out of a sample space which consists of all individuals who lived in europe and india between fixed points of comparison would have been the victim of a religious pogrom or persecution?

Those examples demonstrate that grand narratives impact socio-cultural outcomes, and would obviously depend on the period we select.

Do you think a textual belief in eternal damnation had or had not an impact over indivual decsion making in say, 14th century Europe? In other words, would it influence how people acted in a non-trivial, particularized way on a day to day basis? Would different beliefs have impacted people in a different way in 14th century China?

no. i doubt it.

Have you considered that different cultures may respond differently to texts themselves?

and yes, they do. my overall point is that there is a really weak correspondence between:

culture(text) => output

i.e., grand generalizations between cultures are just as suspect as grand unifications, because cultural differences are often epiphenomena that overlay human individual universals. that is, people have different faces, a man can be a good father, and the next day murder someone, it doesn't mean that the man was influenced a) by a good father culture and b) a murdering culture.

Hi Razib
I was a little curious to know who you are and your background and found out that a lot of people say a lot of nasty things about you. Well, being a blogger with a blog about genetics will get some nasty comments. But the worst thing they said was that you were just pretending to be some kind of a scientist. Say it isn't so.

But the worst thing they said was that you were just pretending to be some kind of a scientist. Say it isn't so.

i don't have a ph.d. so i don't consider myself a scientist.

Razib
Well, just spend a decade or so and get one - simple.

just spend a decade or so and get one

huh, if you have to spend a decade, you shouldn't be gettin' one :)

huh, if you have to spend a decade, you shouldn't be gettin' one :)