A footnote to the British Empire

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Ian

In his 2002 review of The Mystic Masseur, Roger Ebert wrote

The West Indies were a footnote to the British Empire, and the Indian community of Trinidad was a footnote to the footnote.

Even intelligent, educated people tend to make the mistake of assuming that, to some extent, things have always been the way they are today. What’s left of the British West Indies is, indeed, collected leftovers of Empire, too small to stand on their own, and the English-speaking Caribbean is little more than a footnote in geopolitics. But that wasn’t always the case. Both Cadogan Estates, one of the largest landowners in London, and the British Museum have their origins in the acquisitions (of property and objects, respectively) of Sir Hans Sloane in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sloane estimated that he spent ₤50,000 putting together the collections that were the foundation of the British Museum. While Sloane’s prosperity came in part from his successful medical practice, a major income stream was his wife’s share of a Jamaican sugar plantation that she inherited from her first husband.

In the eighteenth century the West Indies weren’t a footnote in the British Empire – they were the heart of the Empire. The loss of the American colonies may have been a blow to the prestige of the Empire, but they were far less important than Jamaica or Barbados. And while the importance of some of these islands faded in the nineteenth century, especially after the abolition of slavery, others did not. At the very time The Mystic Masseur begins, Trinidad is anything but a footnote. It is, in fact, a key source of oil for the Empire at war, an important link in the Atlantic U-boat war, and the site of major American military and naval bases.

Posted in Caribbean, Economic botany, History, Trinidad and Tobago | 1 Comment

Untangling my genetic heritage, part II: the West Slavs

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Ian

Magna Germania and the Roman Empire. From Wikimedia Commons

For a long time, my perception of the origins of the Germanic people looked something like this map – prior to the Migration period, the Germanic people inhabited an area that stretched east from the Rhine into modern Belarus. The ‘barbarian invasions’ relocated many of the Germanic tribes into the lands of the Roman Empire, and the ancestors of the West Slavs and Balts expanded into the lands that had been vacated. Over the next 1000 years the Germans expanded back into these lands, displacing or absorbing many of these Slavic and Baltic people, before being expelled from these lands after World War II. Fairly simple, fairly straightforward, leaving lots of room for both sides to claim ‘ancestral’ rights to a vast swath of lands.

From Wikimedia Commons.

In my early teens, some of my most pried possessions were my historical atlases. It was there that I first learned about what one of them called the “Elbe-Oder Slavs”, the now-vanished West Slavic people who lived in the area that, at the time, was known as East Germany. In Wikipedia they are identified as Polabians and Sorbs, but German sources tended to refer to them as Wends. In my atlases, the swath of green between the Elbe and Oder ended up as tributaries of the Carolingian empire under Charlemagne, and was later organised into a series of Marches under the control of Saxon dukes and princes under the auspices of the East Frankish and Holy Roman empires.

The problem with atlases is that they tend to only show political boundaries. When the Slavic political entities came under German control, the people didn’t cease to exist. Ruled by German (or Germanised) markgrafs, and embedded in a matrix of German colonisation, the West Slavic population gradually subsumed into the broader German identity. But (if Wikipedia is to be trusted) populations retained their ‘Wendisch’ character for much of the next millennium. The Polabian language, for example, apparently survived in the Lower Saxon ‘Wendland’ well into the 18th century.

So what, pray tell, does this all have to do with me? Großörner, the town my grandmother came from, lay within what appears to have been the Sorb area of settlement. As the area Germanised, it’s reasonable to assume that the Sorbs didn’t just die out (in fact, they persist as a distinct group just a little further to the east). They would have intermarried, and formed part of the substratum of the region. The fact that I have a mitochondrial DNA haplogroup that probably entered Central Europe with steppe nomads points to Slavic ancestry. As I mentioned previously, the U2d haplogroup occurs in a relatively high frequency in western Bohemia, where it is though to be a marker of assimilated Asian nomadic tribes…my best guess would be Avars, but Huns or Magyars are also likely to be viable candidates, as are, probably, some smaller groups. The Sorbs and Czechs were neighbours, and assuming (as I have read somewhere) that modern Slavic nations originated through the coalescence of various tribes and clans, it seems reasonable the ‘Asian’ signal that was present in western Bohemia could easily have also been present in the Slavic tribes further to the west. And somewhere in all that, an assimilated Slavic lineage with its roots in the Russian steppe gave rise to my grandmother’s family, and ultimately to me.

I may be entirely wrong, of course. But even if the U2d haplogroup turns out to be less common than was originally though in eastern Germany, it still seems reasonable that people with deep roots in eastern Germany have at least some Slavic ancestry. I think it’s at the very least an interesting idea…

Posted in German ancestry, History, Personal genomics | Leave a comment

Untangling my genetic heritage, part I: Slav and Avars?

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Ian

Getting my results from 23andme was only the first step. The main reason I did this was to probe my ancestry, but 23andme actually offers only a limited amount of information in that regard. But there was still some really good stuff. First: my mitochondrial haplotype. Mitochondrial genes are inherited directly along the maternal line,* without recombination, so it’s a great tool for testing ‘deep ancestry’. Mitochondrial genomes only change through the accumulation of mutations, and since this happens fairly slowly, it’s possible to infer human migrations over the course of thousands of years.

My mother’s family is German – from Ostfriesland on my grandfather’s side, and Sachsen-Anhalt on my grandmother’s. Until recently it never crossed my mind that they could be anything but German – family trees, going back to the 1700s in some cases, showed nothing unusual. Then a couple years ago (is it that long already!) I received substantial additions to my grandmother’s mother’s family, going back in some cases to the 1600s. Among those records were two non-German surnames – a Gorgas, b. 1753 and a Stoi, b. 1740. After Google proved supremely unhelpful in trying to figure out associate these names with various eastern European ethnicities, I tried the Ellis Island database on immigrants to the US. While Gorgas seemed to be found everywhere from Greece to Lithuania, the Stoi I found was Romanian. The only connection to Romania I could possibly come up with was the fact that German miners had been in demand in eastern Europe, and my grandmother’s ancestors had been mining engineers. Maybe someone had migrated to a Transylvanian Saxon settlement, found a wife, and returned back home. Far-fetched, yes, but it was the best narrative I could come up with.

About a month and a half ago, I stumbled upon a better narrative. Razib posted an article about Sorbs, relics of the Ostsiedlung, he called them. After the westward migration of Germanic tribes into the lands of Roman Empire (the “Barbarian Invasions”), Slavic tribes expanded into the lands between the Elbe and Oder rivers. The Carolingians expanded eastward, incorporating not only the pagan Saxons, but also a wide swath of Slavs and Avars into their empire. Thus began the Germanisation of many of these Slavic groups. The town my grandmother came from, Großörner, was located just west of the Slavic lands. Since women are less likely to move than men, it seemed possible that my mitochondrial genome showed Slavic roots.

I approached my 23andme results hoping for a mitchondrial haplogroup that was more common in eastern Europe, something that might point to possible Slavic ancestry. But when I clicked on those results, I was truly baffled. The graphic showed a mitochondrial family that was centred India. After a bit of puzzlement, I realised that the graphic showed results for haplogroups U2 as a whole, not the specifc U2d hapologroup. I recorded my initial reaction in a comment at Gene Expression.

Just got my 23andme results a couple days ago, and I took a moment to think about my reaction to them. The first surprise came from my mt haplogroup – U2d. First glance at the distribution map on 23andme was really confusing, since it showed the entire U clade, which was predominantly Indian. Since I’m Indian on my father’s side, not my mother’s, it was puzzling. A bit more reading left me, if anything, more confused, since they said that U2d was primarily Jordanian and Palestinian. I considered for a moment whether this meant Jewish ancestry, but then I realised that if they meant Jewish, they would have said Jewish.

So off to Google Scholar, which turned up this paper. That discovery tied things together in a way that was even better than I had hoped. Turns out that U2d is found and parts of the Caucasus, and among Czechs in western Bohemia, together with a relatively high frequency of east Eurasian mt lineages. The authors (in a previous paper) suggested that this may reflect Hun or Avar incursions. Why I find this all so cool is that after reading Razib’s blog post about the Sorbs, it crossed my mind that I might find a Slavic signal in my mt DNA, given my maternal lineage’s deep roots in Sachsen-Anhalt. Given the whole “men move, women stay put” idea, it seemed reasonable to posit Slavic ancestry. Finding what could possibly be Avar or Hunnic ancestry though, is even more fun.

Posted in Family history, German ancestry, Personal genomics | 3 Comments

Genes and ancestry

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Ian

Back in April, 23andme had a special offer by which you could get their personal genome screen for just the price of a one-year membership. Having read Gene Expression off and on for the last few years, I have gradually grown more interested in the world of personal genomics, but what really caught my attention was when Zack Ajmal started his Harappa Ancestry Project back in January. His focus on Indian ancestry really opened up new possibilities for me, and by following his blog (and paying more attention to Razib’s posts on the subject) I felt a great to desire to join in the fun.

So, back in April, I ordered my kit. And then I did nothing with it for a few weeks. It was nice to contemplate it, savour the sense of possibility. But there was also the matter of not eating, drinking or brushing your teeth within half an hour of giving the (saliva) sample. And it seemed like every time I realise that the kit was sitting there – I had just broken one of those rules. Eventually I got myself to do it, mailed off the kit, and a few days ago I finally got my results. And I was faced with a new question – now what?

The first set of results I got had to do with things like disease status and traits. I learned that I am likely to be at higher risk for some diseases, at lower risk for others. It was interesting observe my own reactions to these results – my initial reaction was to downplay both the negatives (the higher risks of certain diseases) while also downplaying the positives. The former makes sense – the odds of most of these things are low enough that even if my risk is higher, it’s still very small. On the other hand, even if my risk of Type II diabetes is about 20% lower than the average, it’s still shockingly high – mostly because the average risk is shockingly high. After a while though, I came back to the realisation that, with regards to the things that might pose a higher risk…well, I need to use that information to my advantage, keep an eye out for things (without being a hypochondriac) and maybe a little knowledge might let me catch a problem sooner, rather than later… (More later)

Posted in Family history, German ancestry, Personal genomics, South Asians | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Names…

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Ian

I suppose it’s time to stop calling this by the default My Blog that WordPress gave it. To be honest though, it’s a pretty descriptive name – it’s a blog, it’s mine…what more do you want?

I suppose some sense of the place might help. But what do I really want to do here? What’s my vision for this site? And how do you encapsulate it in a single phrase? OK, well, I can’t. Well…what about something clever? Something catchy? Something profound? Sounds great – now all I need is skill in coming up with clever, catchy names. If I could do that, wouldn’t I be making lots of money in marketing?

OK then – how about a reference to something that’s kinda cool and somewhat descriptive? Something with a distinctly Trini flavour. But what? I’m sure there are dozens of ‘river lime’ blogs and ‘rum shop’ blogs. “A Mayaro state of mind” would be nice. But it’s probably been done already. And, more importantly, I’m not shooting the breeze in Mayaro, and I’m not in that sort of a state. I don’t want peace with the universe, I want intellectual engagement. With a sense of what is Trini and botanically inclined, nature inclined.

And then I realised what I was looking for. The samaan tree – Samanea saman. For starters, it’s a really attractive tree with its open, spreading crown. Its long, almost horizontal branches are excellent hosts for epiphytes. The campus of the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine (Trinidad) was dotted with them when I was an undergrad, and (weather permitting) the grass under a samaan tree was a good place to sit and talk, sit and contemplate the world. With the added bonus of random small insects falling out of the tree above you.

The first meeting of the group that was to become the Association for Tropical Biology (and Conservation, in recent years) had their initial meeting in Trinidad, and it was the samaan tree outside the Sir Frank Stockdale Building on the UWI campus that has graced the cover of their journal, Biotropica, ever since.

Although not a native species, there is something very Trinidadian about the samaan tree. In many ways it speaks to an older, less industrialised time when people understood that trees mattered. It has a personal connection, in memories of my undergrad days at UWI. And it is connected with one of the pillars of Neotropical biology – the journal Biotropica.

So it is with that in mind that I have renamed this blog. Too pompous and self-indulgent? Maybe. But so be it.

Posted in Meta, Trinidad and Tobago, Tropical biology | Leave a comment

What do evolutionary biologists study?

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Ian

So what do evolutionary biologists study? Evolution is, in the minds of much of the public, ‘controversial”. In no small part, this is the doing of a large, vocal, well-funded anti-evolution movement. But responsibility also lies with the people who have taught evolution, who work in the field of evolution.

A lot of people see evolution as being pretty much the same as palaeontology. People dig up fossils and then come up with explanations for how these fossils are related. One person calls a certain fossil a human ancestor. Another says that is represents a distinct lineage. From the outside it just looks like a group of people with advanced degrees pontificating about a subject…specifically, the subject of origins. To look at it another way, it it seems rather a group of scholars discussing some esoteric element of theology.

If I’m correct, that might explain a good deal of how American (especially evangelicals) see evolution. To American Protestants, theology and christology tend to be a very personal endeavours. The Protestant Reformation led to the translation of the Bible into the tongues of the common people. Not only were they able to read the words for themselves, they were also encouraged to come to their own conclusions about it. Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to see evangelical and fundamentalist churches telling their members what they should believe about a number of important issues. But most churches also tell people that they should find their own meaning in scripture. If you aren’t willing to take your own pastor’s word on the meaning of everything in the Bible, why should you take the word of some ivory-tower intellectual who (a) almost certainly knows nothing of the life experience of people like you, (b) is just one voice among many, each of whom has a different view of what this fossil means, and (c) is probably an atheist with an agenda to undermine Christianity and morality.

Now, obviously, this approach is entirely incorrect. Science isn’t a collection of equally valid ideas – some ideas are demonstrably better than others, while others are demonstrably worse. The diversity of views that anti-evolutionists speak of, just doesn’t exist. More importantly, there is no hierarchy imposing orthodoxy.

But more people don’t understand this. And sometimes, I suspect, evolution defenders miss this point entirely. [More later]

Posted in Evolution, Evolution 2011, Religion | Leave a comment

Bob Ricklefs: My Life as a Naturalist

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Ian

Robert Ricklefs gave the American Society of Naturalists‘ Presidential Address today at Evolution 2011. For me, this was one of the high points of the entire conference. In a meeting where ecologists and tropical biologists were fairly thin on the ground, it was great to see someone speak who had such standing, not only as an ecologist, but also someone who had done some of his best work on the biogeography of the insular Caribbean.

Ricklefs talked about what it meant to be a “naturalist”. Naturalists and natural history have gone out of fashion in the last half century. Naturalists were Victorian field biologists, especially the amateur biologists and explorers who played such an important role in the early development of fields like ecology, evolution and taxonomy. But as growing academic disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century, these fields felt the need to divorce themselves from their antecedents in “natural history” and claim their place as rigorous academic disciplines. In his memoir Naturalist, E.O. Wilson spoke of some of the challenges that organismal biologists faced in the early years of the age of DNA, when they were labelled ‘stamp collectors’ and portrayed as a field being superseded by molecular biologists. It was against that backdrop that the fields of ecology, evolution and systematics transformed themselves into hard, quantitative scientific disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century. Modern systematics is about building consensus trees based on genetic data, and evolutionary biologists talk about SNPs and haplotypes. You can be an organismal biologist who has never seen your organism in the wild.

It was against a backdrop such as this that Ricklefs presented his talk. Direct observations of nature – direct experience of nature – is important for the progress of ecology and evolutionary biology. Most people realise, at least on some level, that observations of nature are an important means by which hypotheses can be generated. Broad theories and models of how the world work also have their roots in observations of the natural world. But, as Ricklefs pointed out, we also need to test our theories and models against nature, ensure that our explanations aren’t only internally coherent and logical, but that they also work when presented with the real world.

In addition to his own work on taxon cycles in Caribbean bird species, Ricklefs also discussed Steve Hubbell’s Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Hubbell’s neutral theory is a rather interesting idea. in essence, it suggests that tree species are competitively neutral, and that species diversity in tropical forests is maintained by a a mixture of random drift and speciation. Ricklefs expressed the opinion that Hubbell’s neutral theory, which has been around for a decade, probably has another decade before it fades into obscurity, as these things tend to do in ecology. The flaws in the neutral theory, he said, are seen when the theory is confronted with data.

Posted in Ecology, Evolution 2011, Tropical biology | Leave a comment

Opening reception

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Ian

For most people, Evolution 2011 got off to a start tonight with the opening reception at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH).* Upon arrival, we met long registration lines which threatened to spill out the building into the 100°F (38°C) outdoors. Luckily, since we had registered early, we were directed past the lines directly into the main hall. It’s a familiar space where I’ve attended many receptions and seen many distinguished speakers. In his portion of the welcome address, College of Arts and Sciences Dean, Paul Bell, reminisced about the opening of the museum 11 years ago, when Stephen Jay Gould stood and spoke on the very spot where Bell was now speaking. Bell raised an issue that came up many times in conversation tonight – the importance of science education and the embattled status of evolution in the state of Oklahoma today.

It is, of course a very valid concern. Several anti-evolution bills lost or died in committee this session through the hard work of groups like the Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. Sure, there’s a religious and political basis for much of the hostility to evolution in Oklahoma, but there’s also an element of ignorance as to what evolutionary biology is. What, someone asked, do evolutionary biologists do? This isn’t really an evolution-specific question. Few members of the general public could answer what any specific sub-field of knowledge actually studies. But creationists have done a good job of exploiting this particular hole in ‘common knowledge’. All evolution does is look at fossils and guess at how the fossils evolved, right? And it’s not really a science because you can’t do any experiments. A little ignorance, reinforced by a few creationist memes, and suddenly people “know” that evolution is not a science. So why are all these people here in Oklahoma – to engage in socialist plots against God-fearing Americans?

The real answer, of course, is fairly easy to find. But would the public be able to deduce anything from it? The first set of talks, spread across eight concurrent sessions include

  • Introduction to models of character state-dependent diversification
  • Variable environments, fluctuating selection and the stability of breeding partnerships in birds
  • Rapid adaptation to anthropogenic environments via hybridization?: Invasive hybrid watermilfoil genotypes are more common than parental genotypes in herbicide-treated lakes
  • Wedge effects: the shape of dispersal barriers and spatial population genetics
  • The evolutionary tale of the largest C4 eudicot lineage: North American desert origin, highly reticulated evolution and extraordinary Hawaiian Island radiation in the Chamaesyce clade of Euphorbia (Euphorbiaceae)
  • The genetic architecture of a difference in male genital morphology between Drosophila mauritiana and D. sechellia
  • Evidence of a resident species of Plasmodium in the Galapagos avifauna
  • Evolutionary genomics of biofilm adaptation and diversification

While I’m sure the average person might have a hard time figuring out what the practical applications of any of this might be, a few things are evidence – no dinosaurs, no fossils.

I find myself wondering – would that really help? Would the public be any more positively inclined to the study of evolution if you could show them that it’s not just a group of people trying to disprove the existence of God.Or would the conversation simply switch to “wasteful spending”?

The opening reception was pretty good. I met Carl Zimmer, one of the best science writers out there. Wine and beer were available at the reception, but only with a drink ticket. Since there were only spaces for tonight, attendees were limited to two alcoholic drinks. I’m sure there are a lot of good reasons, but when I jokingly said something about it to one of the people behind the bar, he replied “well it is a museum”. That led to a rather hilarious image of crowds of drunken evolutionary biologists rampaging through the museum and reclassifying things based on rival phylogenetic hypotheses.

*Try saying S-N-O-M-N-H. The first challenge is the difficulty in remembering the acronym. Usually it works the other way – you remember AMNH, and use that to remind yourself ‘American Museum of Natural History’. Here though, you need to remember “Sam Noble Museum of Natural History”, and cross-check that with the sequence of letters that’s coming out of your mouth. Already, mnemonic fail. But there’s also the sequence of letters. Sure, AMNH has the same sequence, but with only four letters you say each one separately. Here though, you end up with words; ess’no em’naitch. Funny-sounding words.

Posted in Evolution, Evolution 2011, Oklahoma | 2 Comments

Evolution 2011

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Ian

The 2011 Evolution meetings are in town. Four days of scientific presentations on evolutionary biology, a field whose very existence many creationists would cast into doubt. Today was just the initial things – arrival, registrations, and workshops for K-12 teachers in Oklahoma. I headed over in the late morning, registered, and perused the (only partially set-up) displays by merchants. It is, I have learned, an important part of meetings. I love all things book-related, so browsing books and journals and chatting with publishers reps are fun.

Next up – the opening reception at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. I was planning to walk over there – it’s about a 20-minute walk, and at 7 pm it should have cooled down enough to make for a pleasant walk. Which just goes to show that I still don’t understand Oklahoma weather. At 7 pm it’s still 100°F (38°C). Granted, that’s down from 104°F (40°C), but it’s still ridiculously warm. And while I still expect the sun to set by 6 pm, it does nothing of the sort in Oklahoma in summer.

The conference proceedings look interesting. It’s not an ESA or ATBC meeting, but a lot of it is still within my general area of interest (and some isn’t. I don’t care about tools for building phylogenies, even if I do care about phylogenies – I’m a consumer of systematics, not a producer.) Anyway, scientific meetings are fun, any way you put it…

Posted in Evolution, Evolution 2011, Oklahoma | 1 Comment

That went well…

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Ian

I jumped out of hiding, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to take the world of blogging by storm. But somehow, nothing happened. Not a word appeared on my exciting new blog. Why?

Not having written anything for such a long time, I felt the need to come back with a bang. And two papers seemed to offer the opportunity to do just that – He & Hubbell’s controversial article Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss seemed like the perfect opportunity to write about something I know more than a little. Then came Davis et al.’s Don’t judge species on their origins. That article was especially timely – it appeared just a day or two after I read Scott Carroll’s Conciliation biology: the eco-evolutionary management of permanently invaded biotic systems. Carroll is one of Davis’ 18 coauthors and his ‘conciliation biology’ is an excellent introduction to the subject. The Davis et al. article, on the other hand, lacks nuance. More to the point though, the controversy it generated made it a great topic to blog about. It seemed really promising.

But then ten days passed. I wrote something for my Ramjohn family site, but that, for now, is a closed blog with perhaps one member other than myself. I tried to get started here. And I realised something. I’m not a blogger. I’m no longer comfortable throwing up short posts, throwing up a few links, shooting a half-formed idea out into the blogosphere. Not even here, where no one is going to read it.

If you feel the need to write something coherent, writing can be really hard. So what happens now? Do I learn to blog again? Do I stop blogging, but continue writing? Or does this just the world of stillborn blogs? Time will tell.

Posted in Meta | 1 Comment