[FORUM] What do you do when people believe crazy things?

I've been doing a certain amount of work in studying Eurabia, the concept (or belief) describing the conversion of Europe into an Islamic continent owing to excessively high rates of population growth among Muslims, the development of a visible Muslim presence, and the decadence of Europe's political elites. It's the sort of concept that would actually be correct if people didn't behave like people and reality was completely different: a simple overview of the numbers and trends, and a note of actually existing policies in European states, is enough to suggest that the reverse is true. American author Ralph Peters is likely right to argue that a mass expulsion of Muslims from Europe is considerably more likely on the basis of current trends.

But any number of people believe in Eurabia regardless. Arguably a growing number of people believe in the impending Eurabianizaton of their homelands--even outside Europe, as evidenced by the growth of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and associated politics in the United States among other places--and arguably many of those people are willing to translate their beliefs into actions. The massacres of Breivik are exceptional, and I hope will remain so. The gradual radical hardening of attitudes towards Muslims, perhaps on the lines described by Peters, is more likely. I'd prefer not to have an actual clash of civilizations.

It's urgent for the future that not only is Eurabia demonstrated to be false and dangerous, but that its believers be convinced that it's false and dangerous. How is this to be done? If people ignore evidence that this theory--any theory, really--is incorrect, how can their minds be changed?

Thoughts?

[PHOTO] Flavelle House in the brightness

Flavelle House in the brightness, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

On a terrifyingly bright May day, I took this picture of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, housed in the Edward Johnson Building that was the background to two flower pictures of mine taken back in 2009, looking south towards the Faculty of Law's Flavelle House.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the fuzziness of diasporas

Over at the Times of India, Ashley D'Mello's article "Without Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chinese diaspora smaller than Indian" introduces the reader to the fuzziness of the concept of diasporas. The two largest Asian diasporas are China's Overseas Chinese versus India's Non-resident Indian and Person of Indian Origin, but which is larger?

Though China boasts of a diaspora population of 35 million, and India's figure stands at 27 million, the Chinese figure also includes Hong Kong and Taiwan. Secretary for overseas Indian affairs, Alwyn Didar Singh, points out that without Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora figures would be lower than that of India. In fact, NRIs said, if India were to calculate figures the way China did, it would have to include the diaspora of Pakistan and Bangladesh in its figures.

This is problematic. Including Taiwan and Hong Kong as Overseas Chinese communities is--frankly--silly inasmuch as these are territories which are, respectively, autonomous under Beijing's rule or continuing to identify with the Chinese state. But Wikipedia's quick and dirty numbers suggest that there are in fact forty million Overseas Chinese versus more than thirty million Non-resident Indians. What are the boundaries of the Indian diaspora, though?

Didar Singh said that while Pakistan and Bangladesh were once part of India and are of the same ethnic stock, they are now independent countries so their figures can't be taken into account. So while India and China are sometimes compared in the case of economic growth, experts feel the Chinese figure can be lowered by 1% as they have their own peculiar style of calculating statistics.

But any number of people do take migrants of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin into stock, arguing that the recency of British India's partition and the origins of many of the largest Indian communities before the partition makes a broader South Asian diaspora including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and other South Asians a more relevant category. Google does return 1.21 million hits for "Indian diaspora" versus 217 thousand for "South Asian diaspora"; but 217 thousand hits is not nothing.

Too, both the Indian and Chinese diasporas break down into multiple subdiasporas, India's Tamil diaspora (and the related Sri Lankan), for instance, or China's diaspora from Fujian province. Might these subdiasporas, specifically rooted in particular geographies and cultures and languages, be more relevant than broad overarching communities that are so broad as to risk losing meaning?

And then, there's the question of assimilation. The largest Overseas Chinese community is identified as living in Thailand, with more than ten million people, but--from what I know--Thailand's Overseas Chinese population is highly assimilated. Does it make sense to include these people as meaningfully Overseas Chinese?

Ah, fuzzy demographic categories: what would we do without them?

[BRIEF NOTE] On Neanderthal demographics and assimilation

Until quite recently, the general consensus was that the sustained interest in the Neanderthals, a kindred subspecies at the very least, were inherently inferior to homo sapiens sapiens--technologically, biologically--and that their destruction come the end of the Ice Age was inevitable and so thorough that not a trace of the Neanderthal genome was left. Remarkable advantages in the sequencing of ancient DNA have revealed that Neanderthals (and other hominin species) did interbreed with non-African homo sapiens sapiens, leaving an actually existing genetic legacy, and suggest that Neanderthals were intellectually comparable to homo sapiens sapiens. Why the disappearance of a discrete Neanderthal population? Wired Science writer Kate Shaw's article "Sheer Numbers Gave Early Humans Edge Over Neanderthals" presents new evidence that the Neanderthals were simply wildly outnumbered.

Two archaeologists from Cambridge University analyzed data from the Aquitaine region of southern France, which has Europe’s highest density of sites from this era, and one of the most complete archeological records. They used data from three time periods that encompassed the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans: the Mouterian and Chatelperronian eras, during which Neanderthals lived, and the Aurignacian period, which was dominated by modern humans. By examining differences between land use during these time periods, the researchers hoped to determine whether population dynamics played a role in the transition between these two hominins.

Because of the difficulties in estimating long-ago populations, the researchers used a few different proxies for population sizes and densities. They analyzed the number of occupied sites in each era, the size of these sites, and the accumulation rates of stone tools and animal food remains. Through these proxies, the researchers could get good estimates of population dynamics during the transition from Neanderthals to modern humans in Aquitaine.

[. . .] Since these archaeological proxies was developed independently, the estimations can be looked at cumulatively to get a better idea of the different population sizes. When evaluated as a whole, these estimations show that the population size and densities of modern humans may have been more than 9 times those of the Neanderthals around the time of the population’s transition. It’s very likely that a numerical advantage that large played a significant role in modern humans’ dominance over their earlier counterparts.

All this has interesting implications. Looking at this, I'm reminded of the way that some homo sapiens sapiens hunter-gatherer cultures in historical time ended up giving way to agricultural civilizations. Certain hunter-gatherer populations, particularly those in pre-modern Japan and the North American Pacific Northwest before white settlement in the mid-19th century, were so well adapted to a bountiful environment that they had large enough surpluses to support materially and organizationally quite complex cultures. It was only at a late date, as agriculture-using civilizations finally these former frontiers with their superior technologies and numbers, that they succumbed, eventually becoming overwhelmed and assimilated as with the Ainoid Emishi of northeastern Japan, leaving only a relatively few traces far outnumbered by the impact of implanted agricultural civilization.

Other hominin species have left legacies in the human gene pool, as noted, but these legacies are fairly rare, on the level of low single digit percentages. One traditional model would have it that this low percentage reflects sustained inter-population conflicts that allowed only a select minority of Neanderthal survivors to reproduce. If Neanderthals were so substantially outnumbered by homo sapiens sapiens, however, this relatively low percentage might reflect a much more thorough assimilation of more of the Neanderthal population than traditionally believed.

[LINK] "Non-zero sum transitions in the human past"

Science blogger Razib Khan at his Discover-based blog GNXP makes an argument similar to the one I made in my post this afternoon, suggesting that culture more about the replacement of the Neanderthals and other hominins than biology does. This, Razib concludes, makes the population changes of distant prehistory much more comprehensible via analogies with our documented history.

[W]e have many cases of more recent replacements and assimilations on the scale of that of the Neandertals. In the New World Europeans and Africans have replaced and assimilated the indigenous population in many regions which were ecologically suitable. In places like the Dominican Republic indigenous ancestry does persist at low levels, especially in the mtDNA, but it is not longer salient or culturally relevant in a concrete (as opposed to symbolic) sense. There were major biological differences between these Old World populations and the indigenous ones, mostly having to do with susceptibility to disease. Still, we can not separate biological advantages of the new populations from their cultural context. Malaria resistance amongst Africans became prevalent only with the rise of agriculture, as broad swaths of wilderness were cleared and transformed into farmland which was a superior environment for the mosquitoes which transmitted the pathogen. Similarly, the various infectious agents to which Europeans were inured spread via long distance contacts, which could exhibit a scale in Eurasia unmatched in the New World thanks to the emergence of a genuine ecumene.

The Columbian Exchange looms large in part because it is well documented and concerns Europeans, but genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data from Southeast Asia strongly implies that the ancient hunter-gatherers of both the mainland and the maritime zones have been assimilated by successive waves of agriculturalists issuing from the margins of southern China. There is also now evidence of massive population shifts in Europe and India due to the spread of agriculturalists. If an alien archaeologist examined the data I do think they might posit that were a biological speciation events which might explain this, as new traits arose which allowed the farming population to expand and replace the hunter-gatherers. Some of this is actually straightforwardly plausible. Consider the spread of lactase persistence or the ability of farming populations to digest amylose.

[. . .]

If there was a great leap forward to behavioral modernity ~40,000 years ago, then I think one should logically assert that there was another “great leap forward” ~10,000 years ago in the Middle East with the first farmers. There was also another “great leap forward” ~5,000 years ago ago with the invention of writing. There was another “great leap forward” ~300 years ago in Western Europea with the crystallization of a genuine scientific community.

I’m not actually suggesting that what happened 10,000 years ago was a speciation event. What I’m suggesting is that the near past may be more similar to the distant past than we imagine. This makes the near past more exotic, and the distant past less exotic.