Vikram’s Talking Points

Given all the commotion about James Watson’s racist statements on African "intelligence," I wondered whether any supremacist Indian Hindus could claim to be fellow travellers of the "race realist" white guys. Varna, where people are separated at birth by alleged "innate" strengths and weaknesses, would seem to provide just the right "theory" for the upper-caste whackos amidst us, so I googled around. It didn’t take too long to come across this guy, lol:

I am a Hindu Brahmin from South India (The ‘highest’ caste in the Hindu system). I belong to the R1a1 haplogroup. The geneographic project traced my origin to Central Asia (Ukraine or thereabouts). I am surprised to see so many Slavs and Ashkenazi Levite folks also to be of the same group. I assume our ancestors were Central Asians who went separate ways and religions. I would be interested in knowing if anybody has more information along this line.

Is there anyway if we can test whether our maternal lines are also similar??

Finally about IQ. I read that Ashkenazi Levites have the highest average IQ in the world. It is a given fact that Brahmins have the highest IQ in India (though this group has not be tested on an average basis to compare to worldwide statistics) and Brahmins also do well in academics in India, USA etc. Do you think this is something to do with the R1a1 haplogroup?

Family Tree DNA

At the end of the conversation, some white guy shut the fool up.

A 39 day-old Golden Retriever pup-to-be, looking remarkably pious. Check out Animals in the Womb, a National Geographic TV feature.

Can you guess what’s on the tree? That’s a fish, known colloquially as a mudskipper.  Any fish that can climb a tree is one badass fish. It can be found, among other places, in the Sundarban forest ,which straddles the border of Bangladesh and India. The beleagured tiger is getting well-deserved attention these days, but the ever-shrinking Sundarban contains a multitude of wildlife whose habitat is being steadily encroached upon by that most fearsome of all species- homo rapiens.

Simon Singh’s family is originally from a Punjabi backwater. That didn’t stop him from completing a doctorate in particle physics at Cambridge or writing a number of books on popular science. His most recent book is a magisterial account of humankind’s quest to discover the origins of the universe. Singh focuses on the personalities who contributed crucial insights to the regnant hypothesis, known as the Big Bang. 

In science, consensus does not emerge convivially; too many people who have invested lifetimes in faulty theories will stand in the way of novel approaches. Sometimes, the old guard has to die out before the new receives full consideration. Resisters to the Big Bang included, for a time, Einstein; a group of scientists who proposed a "Steady State" model that posited an eternal universe; and even the Soviets, who worried that the Big Bang implied a divine creator, subverting their materialist worldview.

If there is any defect at all in the work, it’s the uncompromising Eurocentric vantage point. Singh early on avers that the Greeks invented science, whereas, say, the Egyptians, demonstrated proficiency in technology, but not in the investigative process we call the scientific method. He ignores the astronomical insights of ancient Indian mathematics entirely.

Truth be told, science has been a principally European (and American) endeavor for several hundred years. Has Europe achieved so much because they possess an inordinate number of geniuses? I think not. Rather, since the Enlightenment, the culture of Europe encouraged - and funded - the pursuit of scientific work. Many discoveries that proved crucial to the Big Bang hypothesis were not flashes of genius but serendipitous occasions: after hundreds of hours in the cold at the Mt. Wilson observatory, Edwin Hubble discovered a crucial variable star that equipped him to calculate the size of the universe; a couple of scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey happened upon a noise that turned out to be the cosmic background radiation predicted by Big Bang proponents years before. As Louis Pasteur said: "Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Big Bang