What the Politics of Andrew Jackson’s Era Can Tell Us About Today. By Jackie Mansky and Steve Inskeep.

Andrew Jackson by Thomas Sully, 1845. National Gallery of Art.

What the Politics of Andrew Jackson’s Era Can Tell Us About Today. Interview with Steve Inskeep by Jackie Mansky. Smithsonian, June 8, 2016.

Mansky and Inskeep:

NPR correspondent Steve Inskeep speaks about his book Jacksonland and what it says about America’s democratic tradition.

Until the 1830s, there were, for all intents and purposes, two ways of mapping America. There was “a white man’s map and an Indian map.” In Jacksonland, NPR’s Steve Inskeep rigorously revisits the events leading up to Indian removal, focusing on two men fighting for their respective maps—one who saw necessary real estate for white settlement and the other who had legal and historic claim to the space.

While Andrew Jackson’s name looms large in American history, many might not be aware of one of Jackson’s greatest foils, a mixed-race politician named John Ross who “passed” for white or Cherokee depending on what the politics of the day called for, and fought his cause all the way to John Marshall’s Supreme Court.

Jacksonland steps into a centuries-old historic argument about the forces at work that led to the genocidal chapter of Indian removal in American history. In Inskeep’s hands, he creates a complex portrait of two key players of the day—one whose life’s work revolved around Indian removal and other who stood in his way. Inskeep spoke with Smithsonian.com about how the events in Jacksonland, recently released in paperback, offer a powerful parallel to today’s society and how he thinks the U.S. Treasury should design future bills. He even touches on the comparisons between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump.

The title of your book is Jacksonland, but it almost felt like the story centered more on John Ross, the Cherokee politician who went up against Andrew Jackson. How did you decide on the title?

I wanted Jackson and Ross to be equals as characters in the book. Ultimately though, Jackson won and Jackson got to put his stamp on that real estate, and real estate was the heart of the whole thing.

But Ross was also a revelation to me. I learned a lot about Andrew Jackson in the process of writing this book, but I learned everything about Ross. I’d never heard about him before a few years ago, and even though he did lose, I make the argument that he added a lot to our democratic tradition and was an innovator in a lot of ways.

What got you interested in writing about this intersection of history?

I cover politics and that can be kind of depressing. It was especially bad a few years ago and that drove me back into history, which I’ve written some in the past and I’ve studied all my life. I ended up focusing on the 1830s, which is when our democratic system as we know it began to take shape in a way that we would recognize today. Of all the stories I looked into during that period, the story of Indian removal is the one that feels really visceral and still an open wound. There were other amazing things that happened in the era, but they don't have that same feeling of being unresolved.

The Martin Van Buren quote, that while other controversies “agitated the public mind in their day” would fade, the emotions aroused by Indian removal would probably “endure…as long as the government itself.”

I loved that quote, and it’s so true. In the afterword, I lay out all the different takes on this. Every generation has had their own version of this story and they’re widely different versions.

You write about how 1830 was this changing point in American history. Can you talk about the events and technologies that conspired to make this a crucial era in America’s timeline?

In the early years of the country, there was a free press, but not all that many newspapers, and there was a right to vote, but it was rather limited. There were property qualifications, and white men almost universally were the only ones who could vote. There were a handful of places where a few women and a few African-Americans voted, but white men essentially had the vote. Not even all of them, or necessarily most of them could vote, and what had happened by Jackson's time was first that the franchise had been expanding and so more people had the opportunity to vote, and the media was expanding decade after decade. I believe there’s around three dozen newspapers in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, and by 1828 there's something like 800 of them. And every decade, there’s another few hundred of them, so there's more people who can vote and they're better informed and engaged by this increasingly competitive media that's often sharing competing points of view.

States were changing the way that they voted for a president. These electors who actually choose a president had been themselves chosen by state legislators, but state after state was changing that, and by Jackson’s time, the majority of states were having popular votes for president.

The competition of that period massively increased participation itself, which allowed a space for Jackson.

What parallels do you see in the changes happening in Andrew Jackson’s era and the changes in America today?

One of the things I learned that I felt instinctively, but I feel that I can now document, is the way that we build upon our political traditions without necessarily even knowing it. When people today make certain statements that seem a little paranoid or that they’re worried about who's really running the government, and, sometimes in legitimate ways, talking about how the government has been captured by outside forces, worrying about foreigners, worrying about unelected judges, things like that. You hear those same patterns of argument in the 1820s and ’30s. The issues are different but the attitudes are quite similar.

I wrote an article for The New York Times in February, it compares Jackson to Trump. I want to be really, really careful about that comparison, I waited for months before I came around to writing that article because they’re very different people in terms of their resumes and so forth. What Trump captures is Jackson’s attitude, which you could probably say of a lot of other politicians through the generations; there’s this political tradition of talking a certain way, assuming a certain fighting stance. “The people who are on my side, I’m going to do everything to defend them and I don’t care who gets hurt.” That was Jackson’s approach, it is Trump’s approach and it is a particular American political attitude.

It was fascinating to see Andrew Jackson’s relationship with the newspaper reporters of his day in Jacksonland. You point out that he drew a circle of them in as advisers, and also point out the elite newspaper he didn’t trust, The National Intelligencer. Did it surprise you how similar the president’s relationship with the press was back then compared to how it is today?

In the early 1800s there was this paper, The National Intelligencer, and people would say it was The Washington Post of its day, it was The New York Times of its day, but there's really no comparison because it was the newspaper. Sure, there were other newspapers across the country, but this was the established newspaper. Because there was basically one ruling party (that had its different factions and wings) for a couple of decades after the Federalists faded away, you only needed one newspaper.

By the 1820s, people like Jackson were concluding that they needed their own outlets to get their own views out and not rely on this establishment paper. Not just powerful men like Jackson thought like that. African Americans recognized in this period that they needed their own newspapers, and the very first black-owned newspaper was founded in 1827. The Cherokees realized they needed a newspaper and founded theirs in 1828.

We worry a lot about the fragmentation about media today because we fear that everybody is just tuning into stuff that confirms their biases. I think that happens, but generally speaking, the increase in the number of outlets is great—you can throw any idea out there in the marketplace and if people are interested in it you can find an audience.

You have mentioned that one of the toughest questions you were asked while doing your book tour came from a Cherokee man who asked, “Are you just another white man making money off us? Or will you help us get our land back?” How did you approach researching and writing the Cherokee side of this story?

You’ve put your finger on one of the hardest things, because Indian history is extraordinarily complicated. The sources in those early years are really, really difficult because so many of the people involved were illiterate. You’re relying not on Indians in their own words, but on Indians’ words and customs as interpreted by white men who I guess were sympathetic, because they were hanging out with Indians. Or they might be patronizing. There’s so many opportunities for misinterpretation there.

The first thing you have to do with the sources that are available is try to sort through that and figure out what is credible there and what to disregard. I give an example in the book; there are a number of people who left descriptions of Native American nations in the southeast. They wrote them down as part of an effort to prove their theory that Indians were the lost tribe of Israel—which is kind of, wow, that’s really something, no evidence for that.

But nevertheless, they were there and observing people, and so you have all these useful observations. You have to somehow sort through all of that and try to do it in a respectful way, but also an accurate way. Ultimately, the challenge of this influenced the characters that I chose. There are any number of Indian leaders who are extremely interesting that we could have focused on who were illiterate, and the only words we have of them are things that they said or supposedly said to white men. The white men wrote them down accurately, or not so accurately, or whatever.

In John Ross, I had a guy who wrote enough letters that they filled two thick volumes in the Library of Congress, and that’s not even a complete set of his letters. I had thousands and thousands of his own words.

The most important thing for me to do was to make sure that Native American story fit into the broader strand of American history. I think that there’s a tendency to take Indian history and deal with it one or two ways that are different than that. One is just to assume that it all ended; that people were here, they were crushed and that’s the end of that, and the other is to assume that it is this unusual specialty way off to the side that isn’t all that relevant to America today. Neither of those is quite what I wanted to get at. I felt as I researched this material that what we had was a part of American culture and, as I argue with Ross, particularly, a part of American democratic tradition and it ought to get its place.

Speaking of American democratic tradition, in the book, you chronicle Ross’ legal struggle to maintain Cherokee land and the failure of the system to follow through with its promises. What did Jacksonland show you about the failings of democracy?

We see in this book a country that’s really diverse—more diverse than we may have realized—and people are struggling with this question of how to respect everybody’s individual rights and still make sure we fit together as one country.

People who were here in the early 1800s came up with some really terrible answers to that question. But the nature of democracy is that nothing is ever over, nothing is ever finished and so we come back and we argue it again and we argue it again and we argue it again. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve come up with better answers over time and so we can hope that we’ll come up with better answers still.

You paint a nuanced picture of Andrew Jackson in this story, a man who has this incredible temper but wields it strategically and has an eye for posterity. How did your understanding of Jackson change writing this book?

I don’t think I had a clear idea of what Jackson did or who he really was or why he had such a hold on the American imagination. This is another guy I chose because he left behind so many of his own words and his letters are amazing. He’s so full of fire and passion and such a jerk sometimes, but very strategic as you point out. I just didn’t quite grasp what he had done.

I was aware of Indian removal since junior high school. It was a page in my seventh grade history class, I think. And it was a memorable page, but it was only a page. But the thing I realized was that Indian removal wasn’t just a thing he did among many things that he did—it was a central project of his life and his presidency. It was the making of the South that we’re much more familiar with from the Civil War onward. I just hadn’t realized quite what his significance was in just literally building the country, assembling the real estate for it.

You’ve mentioned that during your book tour you encountered many modern fans of Jackson. What were they saying? What surprised you about how they saw him?

There were people I ran into that had a son or a nephew named after Andrew Jackson. Today. And you find people in Nashville and elsewhere who kind of wonder, “Why does everyone pick on this man? He’s a great hero.”

And I really do understand that. No matter how much some people will instinctively dislike Jackson, he was really persistent. He never gave up. He constantly overcame health problems and just kept showing up for work and doing what he was doing.

Now, we can wish he did things differently. But the way he handled himself, there’s something admirable about that. And you understand why it is that some people today admire him although that admiration is kind of below the surface. It’s been muted. You’ll notice in this whole $20 bill controversy there hasn’t been a huge faction of America that has spoken up for Jackson, although I know from my experience that they’re kind of out there.

I saw that you wrote an op-ed last year arguing that Jackson should be on one side of the $20 bill and Ross on the other. To me, that image almost seems like a short summary of your book.

I think that would be a graphic illustration of what the book is trying to say, that democracy is a struggle, that it’s not one great person who comes up with the obvious right answers and you just do what's best for the country. You have an argument about what’s best for the country and the argument goes on, and it’s from the argument you would hope over time that better and better answers emerge.

I love the idea that they’ve ultimately chosen. They didn’t do exactly what I proposed, but they’re doing a two-sided bill: Andrew Jackson on one side, Harriet Tubman on the other. That’s actually kind of cool. You have this guy who for all of his greatness was also a slave owner and actually personally chased down escaped slaves. And on the other side of the bill you have a woman who helped slaves escape. That is democracy right there in a really visceral way. That’s going to be a powerful bill, and I wouldn't mind if they did something like that with all of the bills.

Why Palestinians Reject Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

A Palestinian carries a poster marking “Nakba” Day lamenting the 68th anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser).

Why Palestinians Reject Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 14, 2016.

Tobin:

As the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1994, David Shipler was was the focus of a great deal of justified criticism about the paper’s bias against Israel. He wrote a 1987 book titled Arab and Jew, which was the recipient both of a Pulitzer and full-throated and passionate criticism for its pure moral equivalence. But an interview with Shipler in the Times of Israel reveals a change in his thinking that tells us something about the way the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has changed since his reporting days.

The conventional wisdom about Israeli society in most of the mainstream international media holds that the Jewish population has become more intractable and opposed to peace. Shipler provides a far more nuanced view, derived from conversations with young people conducted for a new edition of his book. They display a diversity of thought that is surprising to him. Whereas as late as 1993, the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords, almost all Israelis saw themselves as the sole victims of the long war for their independence, now they provide a variety of answers—with many recognizing the Palestinian narrative of suffering or seeing “everybody” in the region as victims of the conflict.

The contrast with Palestinians attitudes is what’s so striking. At the time of the publication of his book, Palestinians merely wanted to “turn back the clock to 1967” with an Israeli withdrawal from the territories. Today, Shipler says, things are very different.

But in speaking to people now, I understood that the time frame has become 1948 for the Palestinians. … Now Israelis are seen only as colonialists. There is no recognition of Jewish history in the Land of Israel, of the Holocaust, and the real reasons for the creation of history.

Just as important is that he says that, whereas there was a wide gap between what Palestinian leaders and their people were saying in the 1980s, now there is no daylight between the sort of incitement that is spewed by Hamas and Fatah and the conversations he had with ordinary Arabs.

When Shipler was actively reporting on the conflict, he was an exponent of the idea that peace could only come when both sides would be able to see the justice in the claims of the other side. By that definition, it’s clear that one side has moved toward peace, the other has not.

Shipler’s assertion that most Israelis no longer view themselves as the sole victims in this conflict is unquestionable. It is also unquestionable that Palestinian attitudes have gone in the other direction. Indeed, Shipler’s impressions reinforce research conducted by Daniel Polisar demonstrating that support for terror and opposition to peace was mainstream Palestinian opinion and not merely the views of a small group of violent extremists.

After two decades of concessions and withdrawals on Israel’s part, Palestinians now routinely speak of all of Israel—including liberal, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, where terrorists struck last week—as “occupied” territory. So, despite the emphasis on settlements and Netanyahu’s supposedly hardline personality, Israel’s willingness to do what Shipler and peace activists advised had the opposite effect on the Palestinians than they thought.

By granting legitimacy to Palestinian concerns, Israelis haven’t inspired reciprocity but have encouraged their foes to double down on their narrative in which the Jews are interlopers without rights or history. It has convinced them that the Israelis are thieves who must be forced to disgorge all of their stolen goods (i.e. all of Israel) rather than fellow humans with whom they must share land if there is to be peace. Shipler seems to have caught onto the basic conundrum of the peace process that has eluded many of his successors at the Times and elsewhere in the media.

Hope for the Arab World? By Robert Fulford.

Hope for the Arab World? By Robert Fulford. National Post, June 10, 2016.

Fulford:

The wave of protests that swept across the Middle East in 2011 was the first great international disappointment of this century. It began as the Arab Spring, a time of revolutionary hopes, but ended in a nightmare of chaos and violence. It overturned Egyptian and Libyan governments but the new rulers were no better than the old, sometimes worse. In Syria it ignited a long civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and hasn’t ended yet. It helped create the barbarities of the Islamic State, ISIL, instead of the civilized life that the armies of protest were seeking.

Why did it fail so calamitously? Why do so many efforts by Arabs to better their society fail? Elie Mikhael Nasrallah thinks he knows why: the culture of the Arabs has developed over hundreds of years in a way that makes a viable modern society impossible. By “culture” he means the shared system of beliefs and customs that a people pass down from generation to generation. Driven by their culture, the Arab states have developed two contradictory qualities. They are turbulent and they are stagnant.

He expands his answer in a remarkable book, Hostage to History: The Cultural Collapse of the 21st Century Arab World (Friesen Press). Nasrallah is a Lebanon-born Christian Arab who has lived in Canada since he came here with his parents in 1980. He works in Ottawa as an immigration consultant and often writes articles about the Arab world.

He delivers his ideas with a refreshing bluntness, confident that his generalizations and his observations make sense. He knows the Arabs once were world leaders in science and literature; one millennium ago it appeared they had a far greater future than the Europeans. But today they are hobbled by ancient attitudes.

Nasrallah believes that the only way the Arabs can change their culture is through a public discussion led by enlightened religious groups and then enlightened political elites. “Culture is destiny; but culture can change,” he says. With enough effort by the right people, a culture can be moved.

He knows it won’t happen quickly. When I asked him how people react when he describes his position in private, he reported that some of them say, “Good luck with that.”

But he tries bravely to point a way out of the hopelessness of contemporary Arabs. He imagines a democratic Arabia that believes in free speech, religious and racial tolerance, the separation of state and religion, equal rights for women in public and private, widespread literacy, the rule of law, sophisticated universities and an educated business class.

In the oil-rich countries, Nasrallah says, even the elites are at the mercy of the ruling class. The state demands obedience and silence, which creates a sheep-like populace. Petro-dependent economies treat education and innovation as afterthoughts. He asks whether anyone can remember hearing about a scientific or technical innovation that came from any of the 22 countries (with 350 million people) in the Arab League.

He reports the words of a Lebanese education minister: “There is a huge difference between learning and being educated. We are teaching our young but they are not getting educated.” They are not encouraged to find their way to the truth. As Nasrallah says, “The truth is considered the exclusive domain of authority — religious, political or social authority.”

The calcified thinking that dominates political discussion follows Arabs into their private lives, producing distorted human relations. In a section headed Sexual Starvation, Nasrallah says that in Arab societies it’s a vice even to speak of one’s intimate feelings, to air one’s inner thoughts and passions. He quotes Nadia Lamlili, a feminist journalist in Morocco: “The problem with our societies is that the women are in love with their sons instead of their husbands and the men are in love with their mothers instead of their wives.” Adult men and women, Lamlili says, don’t know much about each other because they don’t talk to each other.

“I am writing about the Arab world as a son,” Nasrallah declares. “I write out of concern regarding the Arab world, which has descended into a dark age. I am the insider turned outsider to tell a story about a culture that was once great but is now crashing, collapsing.”

If things ever go in the way Nasrallah wishes, the Arabs will live much as the nations of the West live. Clearly, he doesn’t subscribe to the theory that the Arabs must avoid the corruption of Western freedoms. In fact, he nowhere blames the Middle East’s terrible problems on the U.S., Israel or 19th-century imperialism.

Instead, looking at the glum reality the Arabs now face, he wants to tell them that there’s a better way. Given the situation today, it’s bracing to know that someone can even suggest radical changes in the Middle East that might possibly work.

Did a Discrete Event 200,000 to 100,000 Years Ago Produce Modern Humans? By Timothy D. Weaver.

Omo 1 skull. At 195,000 years old it is the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens.

Did a discrete event 200,000-100,000 years ago produce modern humans. By Timothy D. Weaver. Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 63, No. 1 (June 2012).

Abstract:

Scenarios for modern human origins are often predicated on the assumption that modern humans arose 200,000–100,000 years ago in Africa. This assumption implies that something “special” happened at this point in time in Africa, such as the speciation that produced Homo sapiens, a severe bottleneck in human population size, or a combination of the two. The common thread is that after the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages ∼400,000 years ago, there was another discrete event near in time to the Middle–Late Pleistocene boundary that produced modern humans. Alternatively, modern human origins could have been a lengthy process that lasted from the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages to the expansion of modern humans out of Africa, and nothing out of the ordinary happened 200,000–100,000 years ago in Africa.

Three pieces of biological (fossil morphology and DNA sequences) evidence are typically cited in support of discrete event models. First, living human mitochondrial DNA haplotypes coalesce ∼200,000 years ago. Second, fossil specimens that are usually classified as “anatomically modern” seem to appear shortly afterward in the African fossil record. Third, it is argued that these anatomically modern fossils are morphologically quite different from the fossils that preceded them.

Here I use theory from population and quantitative genetics to show that lengthy process models are also consistent with current biological evidence. That this class of models is a viable option has implications for how modern human origins is conceptualized.

Neanderthals Left a Genetic Burden to Modern Humans.

A reconstruced Neanderthal with a modern human girl.

Neanderthal Left Humans Genetic Burden, Scientists Say. Sci-News.com, June 6, 2016.

Neanderthal Mutations Could Still be Affecting Humans. By Daryl Worthington. New Historian, June 7, 2016.

Here’s why human women probably struggled to have babies with Neanderthal men. By Rafi Letzter. Tech Insider, June 6, 2016.

The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes. By Fernando L. Mendez et al. American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 98, No. 4 (April 7, 2016). PDF.

The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. By By Kelley Harris and Rasmus Nielsen. Genetics, Vol. 203, No. 2 (June 2016). PDF.

Abstract:

Approximately 2–4% of genetic material in human populations outside Africa is derived from Neanderthals who interbred with anatomically modern humans. Recent studies have shown that this Neanderthal DNA is depleted around functional genomic regions; this has been suggested to be a consequence of harmful epistatic interactions between human and Neanderthal alleles. However, using published estimates of Neanderthal inbreeding and the distribution of mutational fitness effects, we infer that Neanderthals had at least 40% lower fitness than humans on average; this increased load predicts the reduction in Neanderthal introgression around genes without the need to invoke epistasis. We also predict a residual Neanderthal mutational load in non-Africans, leading to a fitness reduction of at least 0.5%. This effect of Neanderthal admixture has been left out of previous debate on mutation load differences between Africans and non-Africans. We also show that if many deleterious mutations are recessive, the Neanderthal admixture fraction could increase over time due to the protective effect of Neanderthal haplotypes against deleterious alleles that arose recently in the human population. This might partially explain why so many organisms retain gene flow from other species and appear to derive adaptive benefits from introgression.



Sci-News.com:

The genome of Neanderthals contained harmful gene variants that made them around 40 percent less reproductively fit than modern humans. And non-Africans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with our extinct cousins, say genetic researchers.

Several previous studies revealed that Neanderthals were much more inbred and less genetically diverse than modern humans. For thousands of years, the Neanderthal population size remained small, and mating among close relatives seems to have been common.

Then, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern Homo sapiens left Africa and moved to the homelands of their distant cousins.

The two groups interbred, mingling their previously distinct genomes. But though a small fraction of the genome of non-African populations today is Neanderthal, their genetic contribution is uneven. Neanderthal sequences are concentrated in certain parts of the human genome, but missing from other regions.

“Whenever geneticists find a non-random arrangement like that, we look for the evolutionary forces that caused it,” said Dr. Kelley Harris of Stanford University.

Dr. Harris and her co-author, Dr. Rasmus Nielsen from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen, hypothesized that the force in question was natural selection.

In small populations, like the Neanderthals’, natural selection is less effective and chance has an outsized influence.

This allows weakly harmful mutations to persist, rather than being weeded out over the generations. But once such mutations are introduced back into a larger population, such as modern humans, they would be exposed to the surveillance of natural selection and eventually lost.

To quantify this effect, the scientists used computer programs to simulate mutation accumulation during Neanderthal evolution and to estimate how humans were affected by the influx of Neanderthal genetic variants.

“To assess the fitness effects of Neanderthal introgression on a genome-wide scale, we used forward-time simulations incorporating linkage, exome architecture, and population size changes to model the flux of deleterious mutations across hominin species boundaries,” the scientists said.

The results, published in the journal Genetics, suggest that Neanderthals carried many mutations with mild, but harmful effects.

The combined effect of these mutations would have made Neanderthals at least 40 percent less fit than Homo sapiens in evolutionary terms.

The team’s simulations also suggest that humans and Neanderthals mixed much more freely than originally thought

Today, Neanderthal sequences make up approximately 2 percent of the genome in people from non-African populations. But the scientists estimate that at the time of interbreeding, closer to 10 percent of the human migrants’ genome would have been Neanderthal.

Because there were around 10 times more humans than Neanderthals, this number is consistent with the two groups acting as a single population that interbred at random.

Although most of the harmful mutations bequeathed by our Neanderthal ancestors would have been lost within a few generations, a small fraction likely persists in people today.

The team estimates that non-Africans may have historically had approximately 1 percent lower reproductive fitness due to their Neanderthal heritage.

This is in spite of the small number of Neanderthal gene variants thought to be beneficial today, including genes related to immunity and skin color.

Worthington:

Breeding with Neanderthals may have had a heavy price for early humans, according to a new study published recently in the journal GENETICS.

Harmful mutations present in the genome of Neanderthals made them up to 40% less fit reproductively than modern humans, according to the study. Although most of the effects have since been lost to time, these mutations likely passed to non-African humans when they interbred with Neanderthals. It is suggested that the mutations could still be affecting the fitness of some populations today.

The study was led by Kelley Harris of Stanford University, along with her colleague Rasmus Nielse, from the University of California Berkley and Copenhagen University.

“Neanderthals are fascinating to geneticists because they provide an opportunity to study what happens when two groups of humans evolve independently for a long time–and then come back together,” Harris explained. “Our results suggest that inheriting Neanderthal DNA came at a cost.”

It is now widely accepted that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, our closest extinct genetic relatives, with between 2% and 4% of genetic material in modern, non-African human populations having a Neanderthal origin. A study published earlier this year suggested that anything from the risk of depression to nicotine addiction could be connected to the mixing of human and Neanderthal genomes.

Due to their smaller, more concentrated population, inbreeding was much more common among Neanderthals than modern humans, leading to their decreased genetic diversity.

Harris and Nielsen were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Neanderthal genetic contribution to the modern human genome is uneven, but not random. Neanderthal sequences tend to be concentrated in certain areas, but totally absent elsewhere.

“Whenever geneticists find a non-random arrangement like that, we look for the evolutionary forces that caused it,” Harris remarked.

They hypothesised that the explanation could be found in natural selection. In small populations, like the Neanderthals, natural selection is less effective, allowing mutations to persist and have a larger influence. If such a mutation is introduced back into a larger population (such as modern humans) however, it’s quickly lost in the march of natural selection.

To understand this process, Harris and Nielsen used computer programs to simulate mutation accumulation during Neanderthal evolution and estimate how humans were affected by the influx of Neanderthal genetic variants. They concluded that Neanderthals would have carried many mild, harmful mutations, combining to make them 40% less fit than humans in evolutionary terms.

Their results also suggest that humans and Neanderthals had actually interbred much more freely and frequently than previously believed. The findings suggest that thousands of years ago, when both humans and Neanderthals inhabited the earth, closer to 10% of non-African humans’ genomes would have been Neanderthal.

Shockingly, Harris and Nielsen suggest that a fraction of the harmful Neanderthal genetic mutations could still be present in modern human populations. They estimate the result could be a 1% lower reproductive fitness in modern day non-Africans.

Letzter:

Imagine a couple living between 39,000 and 45,000 years ago. She’s a human. He’s a Neanderthal. Their families aren’t thrilled with the union, but they’ve learned to deal with it.

Their union isn’t all that unusual after all – enough humans and Neanderthals made babies together in the 5,000-plus years that the two species coexisted that modern humans now owe about 4% of our DNA to our extinct nonhuman kin.

As this human-Neanderthal couple moves through life, like many couples, they have children. A daughter, and then another daughter, and then another. And they notice something funny: All their Neanderthal man/human woman couple friends keep having daughters as well.

That mystery may have puzzled them, and its genetic legacy has puzzled modern scientists as well. While traces of all sorts of Neanderthal DNA show up in the human genome, scientists haven’t found any Neanderthal Y-chromosomes – the chromosomes fathers pass to biologically male children. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Neanderthal Y-chromosome is extinct, but it makes it likely.

There are a number of theories as to why the Neanderthal Y has vanished, the most popular until recently being the vagaries of random chance. That is, that male children were born to Neanderthal-human couples, but their genes were rare enough not to survive through the ages.

But a study published recently in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests an alternate explanation: Human women may have been unable, or at least struggled, to carry male half-Neanderthal fetuses to term. That’s because of three genes found on the Neanderthal Y-chromosome that are known to trigger immune responses in human beings. Those genes could have caused human mothers’ immune systems to attack male half-Neanderthal fetuses, triggering miscarriages.

Even if half-Neanderthal baby boys with human mothers were born occasionally, that genetic incompatibility could have weeded out enough of them to eventually remove their traces from the gene pool.

The paper’s authors caution that their results are not conclusive – they’ve identified a possible cause, not shown it to be the case. But for bemused parents at ancient play groups full of little half-Neanderthal girls (as well as modern scientists) this result might have sated some curiosity.

The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead.

The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead. Video. Tikvah Fund, June 2, 2016. YouTube. Also at The American Interest.

The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008). Also here, here.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. By Walter Russell Mead. New York: Knopf, 2017. Publication date April 4, 2017. Amazon.com.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro. National Review Online, June 8, 2016.

Shapiro:

Americans reject Locke and embrace Hobbes.

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But the Founders still feared tribalism. They called it “faction” in The Federalist Papers, and were truly worried about the seizure of the mechanism of government in order to benefit one group over another. They may have agreed with Locke over Hobbes about the proper extent of government power, but they never believed that tribalism had disappeared. That is why they attempted to create a government pitting faction against faction, cutting the Gordian knot of tyranny and tribalism with checks and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

It was a brilliant solution to an intractable problem — so long as it worked.

It no longer does. Tribalism has had its revenge.

It began with the decline of American religion in the 1950s. As religion declined, Americans looked for new sources of community — and in the 1960s, the Marxist Left provided Americans communal meaning in ethnic and racial solidarity. Even as America began to move beyond its historic racism, the Left hijacked the conversation around race and divvied Americans up into subgroups of ethnic haves and have-nots. City governments became playgrounds for racial factions taking control of government and expanding their power. Student groups divided along racial and sexual lines. The social fabric frayed.

The unrest of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a law-and-order backlash — a desire for a government that would tamp down the unrest and restore order. For three decades, Americans rejected tribalism as a mode of politics (Ronald Reagan believed in universal human freedoms, and Bill Clinton famously rejected Sister Souljah’s race-baiting). Not surprisingly, the rejection of 1960s tribalism ushered in an era of smaller government dedicated toward the proposition that constitutional checks and balances were the best protection against tyranny.

And then came the Obama presidency.

President Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama — after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism.

Instead, Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the government to act on their behalf. And so his Department of Justice has crippled police departments based solely on the race of police officers. He constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism. He poses as a rejection of the Founding ideology.

Donald Trump is the counter-reaction. But he is not a Reaganesque or even Bill Clinton-esque counter-reaction. He, like Obama, is tribal. His tribalism is the tribalism of Pat Buchanan, who suggested in 2011 what appears to be Donald Trump’s electoral strategy: “to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority.”

“Why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” Buchanan asked, concluding that “white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people.” Instead of attempting to set checks and balances to prevent faction, instead of attempting to educate Americans in our Founding principles, this philosophy focuses on tribalism of a different sort, making the crucial error of linking skin color to culture.

And so we may have reached the end of the era of small government. As tribalism rises, Americans look again to the strongman. We begin the cycle anew. But first, we feel the rage of riots in San Jose and Ferguson, and the spiteful glee of the white-nationalist alt-right. We watch contests between tribal figures like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We wonder which tribe will win, even as America disintegrates before us.

Mideast Identity Politics Is Here to Stay. By Hisham Melhem.

Could the defeat of ISIS turn to pyrrhic victory? By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya English, June 4, 2016.

Melhem:

The recent military setbacks suffered by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the beginning of attacks by local forces to retake Fallujah, Iraq and Manbij City, Syria, backed by US-led coalition airstrikes, coupled with the steep decline in the number of foreign fighters flowing to Join ISIS, portends the eventual defeat of the Caliphate as a significant military threat maybe as early as 2017. But given the trajectory of the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts in recent years, the corrosive role of most outside powers, and the frightening human toll of identity politics, the defeat of the monstrous Caliphate could turn to a resounding pyrrhic victory.

Since the Second World War, the United States has had a poor record in translating its military victories into political successes. It is very likely that the two longest wars in American history will end with political forces that are either hostile or unfriendly to the United States controlling both Afghanistan and Iraq. The real challenge for the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and in Syria was never military in nature, but rather political. After the eventual military defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria the perennial question of “what’s next politically?” will be asked just as it was asked after the liberation of Afghanistan from Soviet occupation in 1989, the defeat of Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1991, and after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq in 2011.

The victory of identity politics

Ironically, the defeat of ISIS, a positive development in and of itself, in the absence of acceptable political scaffoldings to begin healing these societies, could presage the victory of foreign powers like Iran and Russia, a genocidal regime in Damascus and a sectarian corrupt regime in Baghdad both of which are beholding to Tehran. More importantly in the long run, the defeat of ISIS if it is not accompanied or followed by the eventual demise of the Assad regime in the context of an overall political resolution that guarantees the civil and political rights of all Syrian communities, and in checking Iran’s destructive influence in Iraq, will result in the overwhelming victory of “identity politics”.

The fights for Fallujah and Manbij City are raising serious fears not only of massive civilian casualties, but of deepening sectarian and ethnic cleavages leading to more death by identity and the creation of more refugees. The United States is currently providing air power to support the Iraqi government forces attacking ISIS forces in Fallujah, but these conventional forces are augmented by Shiite militias backed and trained by Iran and led by Iraqis who are very loyal to Iran. These largely Shiite militias make up the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (al-Hashd al-Sha’bi),were created in response to ISIS’ occupation of Mosul in June 2014. These militias engaged in widespread abuse in Sunni cities liberated from ISIS in recent months.

Following the eviction of ISIS from Tikrit last year Human Rights Watch documented the “Ruinous Aftermath” in the city thus: “in the aftermath of the fighting, militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns..” While it is true that the U.S. in the past criticized the sectarian practices of these militias and asked the Iraqi government not to allow them to participate in liberating Sunni cities from ISIS, a request that was ignored by Baghdad, there are ample signs now that Washington has lessened its opposition to some of these militias. In fact last spring US Consul General Steve Walker expressed sympathy with some of the wounded members of the Popular Mobilization Forces during a visit to a hospital in Basra.

Deepening sectarian and ethnic divides

Just as the city of Ramadi was essentially destroyed in order to be “saved” from ISIS, a similar fate could befall Fallujah. There are credible concerns that the decision to attack Fallujah which came after a short notice to the U.S. is in part a political maneuver by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to deflect attention from his domestic travails following a series of deadly bombings in Baghdad, and growing social unrest against corruption and calls for reforms that almost paralyzed his government. Iran, the hidden hand behind major Iraqi decisions, was on display recently when the ubiquitous Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander General Qassem Suleimani showed up in photos taken at an operations room outside Fallujah, discussing maps of military operations with senior militia commanders. The absence of a unified countervailing moderate Arab Sunni force to ISIS in Iraq and Syria will guarantee that the defeat of ISIS, will likely lead to the birth of a new form of Sunni radicalism in years to come.

The fight for Manbij City, which is a prelude for a major attack on ISIS controlled Raqqa is raising concerns about potential ethnic conflicts between Kurds and Arabs. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed coalition of armed groups led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), has been with U.S. logistical support mobilizing thousands of fighters in the countryside north of Raqqa to isolate the city. American Special Forces in Syria have been training and advising and possibly fighting along with YPG fighters. In fact U.S. military personnel have been “embedded” with YPG fighters, as seen in recent photos showing U.S. soldiers wearing emblems of the YPG on their shoulders.

But while the Kurds of Syria have legitimate political and cultural grievances and demands that should be fairly addressed in a post-Assad Syria, nonetheless the YPG which represent the most powerful Syrian Kurdish group has been accused by human rights organizations of engaging in ethnic cleansings and forcing Arabs and Turkmens from their areas and demolishing their homes in areas under YPG control. It is ironic that the YPG, which came into existence with the help of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of Turkey a group designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group, is also receiving help from the Russians in Syria. If the YPG leads the fight to retake Raqqa and its environ, a region inhabited by mostly Syrian Arabs, the outcome will likely result in new tensions and possibly violence between Arabs and Kurds.

The disintegration of states

In recent years we have witnessed the destructive triumph of identity politics during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the Sudan or between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Since the beginning of the Arab uprisings five years ago, we have witnessed the collapse of the state system in a number of Arab countries. Many a historian and analyst have had their chance in recent weeks to ponder the legacy or legacies of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the other treaties and arrangements that led to the birth of the modern State system in the Middle East after the First World War. One clear conclusion is that many of those societies failed to develop modern state institutions, good and efficient governance based on fair representations of the components of those societies, a failure that led to the calamitous present in Syria, and Iraq ( the same can be said about Yemen and Libya)..When the uprisings failed to create alternative political structures, the brittle regimes in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen collapsed into chaos or civil wars. (a similar situation occurred in Iraq, with the failure of the invading power to create a functioning and fair governance). With the fears and uncertainties spawned by the collapse of order, particularly in heterogeneous societies, people fell back on their bedrock certainties and identities. When people are threatened as members of a community (a religious sect or an ethnic group) they tend to develop a strong sense of solidarity with other members of the group as a form of self-defense. The identity of the group is almost always exaggerated, and the threat is invariably described as existential. That is one reason why civil wars are the most passionate of wars. It is so because the combatants know each other, and because they have irreconcilable views and visions about their way of life, their future and their very own identity. Extreme identity politics reduce us to mere members of a large tribe.

The region is going through a historic convulsion that will last for years, maybe decades. But the raging sectarian wars and mounting ethnic tensions are recent and the product of power struggles, political decisions and events and not the result of “ancient hatreds”. The Sunni-Shiite wars are unprecedented because they are the product of the last few decades. The 1979 revolution in Iran was a milestone in modern Shi’a assertiveness. Sunni political Islam after suffering crushing blows by the Arab Nationalists in the 1950’s and 60’s began to reassert itself after the Arab defeat in the war with Israel in 1967 by claiming that the return to true Islam is the solution. The disastrous Iraqi decision to invade Iran was a huge blow to Sunni-Shiite coexistence, and it revived Arab-Persian enmity. In Syria, the ascendency of the Alawite minority (an offshoot of Shi’ism) to power and their control of the army and the security agencies deepened the rift with the Sunni majority. This situation led to a low intensity civil war beginning in 1978 and culminating in the massacre of Sunni rebels in the city of Hama in 1982. Finally the American invasion of Iraq, which empowered the Shiites who have been marginalized in the modern state of Iraq and oppressed as a community by the regime of Saddam Hussein, led to the most sectarian bloodletting between the two sects in modern times. The U.S. cannot mediate the Sunni-Shiite divide, but at least it should not pursue policies in Syria and Iraq that will make it irretrievably worse.

In the last fifty years, many groups in the region engaged in crass expressions of identity politics, and outright discourse of exclusion; this is true of Arabs and Jews, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites and Christians and Muslims. Identity politics and practices have become the norms, even in cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad that were once cosmopolitan. Dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy of the tribe became prohibitive, particularly under autocratic regimes, where the state is unable or unwilling in most cases to help those who dare to challenge the discourse of identity politics. There are few dissenting Shiite and Sunni voices in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other states were these two sects live, who would oppose publicly the course of the tribe.

Ironically, the digital age which allows the peoples of the region, particularly the youth tremendous opportunities to look beyond the confines of the tribe, to be informed instantly of events and trends, to be exposed to practical and theoretical knowledge, is in fact contributing to the atomization of the region and deepening the attachment to identity politics. Death by identity need not be the future of the region, but until the various tribes are exhausted, and until new uprisings emerge against the sins of both the in-group and the out-group, the scourge of extreme identity politics will continue to devour the region.