Motus Mentis

Making a bit of a splash at the moment is a new book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. (Any book that says anything truthful about heredity and human groups is going to attract attention these days, if only to burn it in the village square.)

Steve Sailer reviews it over at Taki’s. (Greg Cochran will be along with a review presently.)

The topic, of course, is fraught, and anyone writing about it who wishes not to be an all-but-unemployable pariah must make the same sort of obeisances and disclaimers that folks like Galileo once did. Here’s one from Professor Reich:

Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.

Mr. Sailer comments:

So you should just lie back and think of England, like the girls in Rotherham and Telford.

But thinking of what “mixture’ did to the inhabitants of England who were forced to embrace it 4,500 years ago is horrifying.

Before about 2500 BC, ancient Albion was inhabited largely by farmers tracing back to the Fertile Crescent. Suddenly, steppe barbarians, bearing the Bell Beaker culture, arrived, and almost immediately most of the old Britons died off.

Since then, 90 percent of subsequent skeletons in England reflect the DNA of the steppe invaders.

What happened to most of England’s earlier inhabitants? One of the less violent scenarios is that the steppe migrants introduced bubonic plague.

In general, “migration’ and “mixture’ tend in Reich’s book to serve as euphemisms for genocide of the native males and rape of the native females. Reich lists numerous examples from around the world where genetic data show that newcomers enslaved or murdered the local men and turned their women into concubines.

Read the whole thing here.