From mailbox: Stanford joins global conspiracy against Witzel

dec 20th

poor witzel. i think he's going to become a laughing stock. the thing about all these left-wing fundamentalists is that they are extremely nasty and foul-mouthed. this guy is an insult to harvard, but then i have never had a very high opinion of 'the stanford of the east coast': after all, they take in lots of rich, dumb kids (i wont name names, but from india there was this guy who spent several years at harvard -- you know his story.)

others who deserve to be laughing stocks include amartya sen. his theories are laughable although he is by all accounts a brilliant man. for instance, his pet theory about the 'kerala model' is inane. kerala is well-off because of its money-order economy, nothing else. it has very little to do with the elaborate theory of social uplifting created by land reform. all that land reform did is to take the land from one set of feudals and gave it to another set.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: A

The WHOLE WORLD is now conspiring against Michael Witzel! Now Indian Statistical Institute and Stanford University have joined the cunning conspiracy hatched by Hindus and faculty members at several universities around the world. As has American Journal of Human Genetics!


http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2005/11/new-paper-on-indian-y-chromosome.html

While considerable cultural impact on social hierarchy and language in south Asia is attributable to the arrival of nomadic Central Asian pastoralists, genetic data (mitochondrial and Y chromosomal) have yielded dramatically conflicting inferences on the genetic origins of tribes and castes of south Asia. We sought to resolve this conflict using high-resolution data on 69 informative Y-chromosome binary markers and 10 microsatellite markers from a large set of geographically, socially and linguistically representative ethnic groups of south Asia. We have found that the influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. The ages of accumulated microsatellite variation in the majority of Indian haplogroups exceed 10-15 kya, attesting to the antiquity of regional differentiation. Therefore, our data do not support models that invoke a pronounced recent genetic input from central Asia to explain the observed genetic variation in south Asia. R1a1 and R2 haplogroups indicate demographic complexity that is inconsistent with a recent single history. Associated microsatellite analyses of the high frequency R1a1 haplogroup chromosomes indicate independent recent histories of the Indus valley and the peninsular Indian region. Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus and significant genetic input resulting from demic diffusion associated with agriculture. Our results underscore the importance of marker ascertainment towards distinguishing phylogenetic terminal branches from basal nodes when attributing ancestral composition and temporality to either indigenous or exogenous sources. Our reappraisal indicates that pre-Holocene and Holocene era – not Indo-European – expansions have shaped the distinctive south Asian Y-chromosome landscape.