Genetics: White Americans are VERY white

A recent genetics ancestry survey by 23andme found that White Americans (European Americans) on average are: “98.6 percent European, 0.19 percent African and 0.18 percent Native American.”  Wow, that’s pretty white.  I’ll come back to that in a minute.

The survey also found that Latinos are “18 percent Native American, 65.1 percent European and 6.2 percent African.”  There might be a little self-selection here, resulting from testing more upper-class Hispanics, who tend to be more white. For instance, Rubén Lisker found the average admixture of a lower-income mestizos in Mexico City to be: 59% Amerindian,
34% European,  and 6% black.

Back to European Americans and their utter whiteness. The 98.6% figure, mind you, is an average. According to other studies, more than 95% of White Americans have no African or Amerindian ancestry and the 5% who do seem to have very little, so it is probably this 5% of White Americans who might be adding the 1.4% admixture into the average.

Let that sink in: 95% of White Americans have no African or Amerindian ancestry and those who do seem to have very little.  Wow.

Nonetheless, this study puts African Americans at “73.2 percent African, 24 percent European and 0.8 percent Native American.”  Other studies have estimated African Americans at around 80% African and 20% European.

What does this mean?

As I previously noted:

First, the USA historically has not been a hotbed of miscegenation as Cultural Marxists like to tell us.  Your eyes and common sense should tell you that if there were widespread miscegenation, there would be hardly any white Americans but rather large mestizo/mulatto-like populations such as one finds in many Latin American countries (and even there, small white upper classes still exist).

Second, the people in USA tended to cross the color line in only one direction: white —> black. Mulatto people would identify as black and then reintegrate into the black gene pool.

Which brings us to another question, why do mulattoes almost always identify as black?

The standard Cultural Marxist answer to this question is because of culture, such as the one-drop rule.  But the reality of the situation belies this half-truth.

The most straightforward answer is what Oxford zoologist Jonathan Kingdon suggested in 1996:  black looks are dominant while other looks are recessive.  Observation seems to bear this out.  A person with only 1/16th black ancestry will still often have visible black characteristics, whereas a white person with 1/16th Japanese ancestry would probably pass for 100% white.

In other words, the reason why most mulattoes identify as black is at least in part biological.  Perhaps the white phenotype really is recessive and is easily diminished.

As philosopher Nick Land succinctly formulated: White + Color = Color.

Updates:

Razib Khan: “American Racial Boundaries Are Quite Distinct (For Now)”

Sailer: “the big surprise has been how white are American whites”

On only a semi-related note, you should read Peter Frost’s recent post on human biodiversity.

The UK: Island of Geniuses

There was much hype this week about a small British company that is on the verge of “curing cancer.”  The Independent reports:

A single-storey workshop on a nondescript business park in Oxfordshire is not the sort of place where you would expect scientific revolutions to take place. But behind the white-painted walls of this small start-up company, scientists are talking about the impossible – a potential cure for cancer.

For the past 20 years, the former academics who set up Immunocore have worked hard on realising their dream of developing a totally new approach to cancer treatment, and finally it looks as if their endeavours are beginning to pay off. In the past three weeks, the company has signed contracts with two of the biggest players in the pharmaceuticals industry which could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds flowing into the firm’s unique research on cancer immunotherapy – using the body’s own immune system to fight tumour cells.

Immunocore is probably the only company in the world that has developed a way of harnessing the power of the immune system’s natural-born killer cells: the T-cells of the blood which nature has designed over millions of years of evolution to seek out and kill invading pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria. T-cells are not nearly as good at finding and killing cancer cells, but the hard-nosed executives of the drugs industry – who are notoriously cautious when it comes to investments – believe Immunocore may have found a way around this so that cancer patients in future are able to fend off their disease with their own immune defences.

The leader of the research team, Bent Jakobsen, is Danish born, but the team largely English, which got me to thinking of the brilliance of British accomplishment.

Science isn’t truly practiced everywhere.  As Gregory Cochran illustrates with this graphic, science is only performed in certain regions of the world (mostly by European or North Asian-descended peoples).  And even then, certain European groups seem to outperform others (esp. the British, Germans, and French).

Regarding Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, it’s really quite remarkable how many of the world’s greatest accomplishments were performed by the British.  The UK has been a true intellectual powerhouse.

Here’s my own abbreviated list of major British scientific achievements:

Newton   (physics, calculus, optics)

Darwin (natural and sexual selection)

Michael Faraday (electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis)

Ernest Rutherford (NZ of English ancestry, nuclear physics)

James Clerk Maxwell (physics, electromagnetism)

Charles Lyell (geology)

Arthur Eddington (astrophysics)

Francis Galton (HBD)

Alan Turing (computer language)

Watson & Crick (DNA)

WD Hamilton (Neo-Darwinism, inclusive fitness)

Quite an impressive list, given the UK’s size, which can only make one proud of his English ancestry.

On the downside, one only worries that mass Third World immigration into the UK will eventually have a dysgenic effect, bringing this long trend of accomplishment to an end.

Mexico’s Diabetes Epidemic

Note:  Shortly after writing this, Mexico was declared the official fattest country in the world.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out (here, here and here), Mexico is the second fattest country in the world, next to the United States, and, according to experts, on its way to becoming most obese.  I suspect that if you were to subtract the Hispanics / mestizos and blacks from the American data and only compare European Americans with Mexicans, Mexico would already be the most obese country in the world.  As was recently reported:

“With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease.

A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence.”

Mexicans are facing a diabetes epidemic, perhaps the worst the world has ever seen.  Mexico currently has the second highest diabetes rate in the world, and soon expected to have the highest.

What the causes of this rapid obesity and diabetes epidemic are, health experts are still arguing.

First, Mexican food, on average, is extremely low in nutritional value and extremely high in calories.  While traditional Mexican meals already were quite high in calories and low in nutritional value, add to these recent popular food items like the chocolate filled Twinkie-like cake called “Gansito” and you have an extremely high-calorie diet.

Second, recent wealth and more contact with the USA have increased opportunities for Mexicans to eat more Westernized foods, especially fast, junk and high-carb foods. Someone on NPR recently suggested that Mexicans’ diets have drastically changed over the last decade or two.

Yet, all of this seems to be symptomatic, not getting at the real roots, for even if Mexicans’ diets have changed, they’re eating the same garbage that whites or now many North Asians are eating, yet they seem to suffer more.

Looking at the racial demographics of Mexico, Mexico is roughly 30% Amerindian and 60% Mestizo (of whom the average admixture, at least for the lower classes, is 59% Amerindian, 34% Spaniard, and 6% black).

I wonder whether something else might be going on.

Using Dennis Mangan as a point of departure, the recent increased wealth in Mexico added to increased access to calories might be acting as supernormal stimuli.  Mexicans also might have lower impulse-control, making it more difficult for them to withstand the temptation of nearly limitless access to calories.

Another possibility, given the largely non-European ancestry of most Mexicans, is that Mexicans might not be well adapted to eat Western foods and are suffering accordingly. This would be an interesting study.  Already there have been some studies showing that different races gain and lose weight differently.

Regardless, this could have real consequences in the USA.   A recent study found that people with diabetes usually make around $160,000 less over a 40-year period because of complications.   Healthcare costs for people with diabetes are around 2.3x higher than for the non-diabetic.  Current costs for diabetes in the USA are staggering.  Add to this the rising Hispanic population in the USA of whom many will probably develop diabetes and the fact that many Mexicans will come to the USA to try to receive free treatment for diabetes, and there very well could be a healthcare crisis.

Mexicans

Update:

Mexico was just declared the fattest country in the world.

“Mexicans, fattest people on planet, at genetic risk for diabetes?”