Travelogue: Diversity

Iceland is a barren moonscape created by tectonic plates rubbing against one another on something called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The result is a beauty you see nowhere else, but it also means not much can be grown on the island. The natives have to deal with a limited food supply from the ocean, thus developed a form of cannibalism in which the dead are processed into a product called Skyr. I’m kidding about that, of course. There are no cannibals on Iceland, but food is expensive and lacking in the sort of diversity we are used to seeing in the West.

The consequence of this is the range of desirable flavors in their food is very narrow. I was given a ham and cheese sandwich and surprised to learn how they eat them. Warm without any adornments or condiments. In the States, you would have more “other stuff” on the thing than the main ingredients. Most people would also have mustard or maybe mayonnaise as a condiment. Chatting with a couple of local women, they told me Icelanders think Americans make weird food that tastes funny.

That’s nature at work. Iceland was populated by Nordic males, who brought Celtic women with them. Recent DNA analysis suggests that around 66 percent of the male settler-era population was of Norse ancestry. The female population was 60 percent Celtic. They arrived, we think, in the year 874 AD, so this population landed on the island very recent. Inevitably some strong selection pressure was at work. You had to be within a small group, who would want to give it a go on Iceland. You had to have a certain constitution to thrive there.

Icelandic women are notoriously beautiful and that’s true, assuming you are a male from west of the Hajnal line. I could be wrong about that, but that’s my guess. The women are tall and thin with angular faces. You don’t see many fat women in Iceland, but that may be due to the cost of food. The other thing is the women do not wear much makeup, but when they do it, it is to accentuate their eyes. There is a great diversity of eye color with most being a shade of blue, but brown and green are common too.

I found myself staring at their eyes, registering the different colors and patterns. This was true in Ireland, but not so obvious. Many Irish women have let themselves go so they are not, on average, as beautiful as the Icelandic women. The Irish say the Icelandic settlers carried away the most beautiful Irish women. That’s a fun legend and probably a little true, but the numbers involved make that a bit implausible. What has ruined Irish women is alcohol and excess calories, but that’s true all over the West.

Diversity of eye color is a European thing. Africans and Asians lack this diversity and it is a good question for science to ponder. Humans evolved to be social animals and a big part of that starts with the eyes. There are something like 200 species of monkeys and apes with humans the only one with a visible sclera. That’s the white of our eye. In humans, it makes our eyes a signal. From any angle, we can perceive the thoughts, to some degree, of another humans. We can see where another is staring and infer something of what they are thinking.

This feature did not evolve for no reason and it is assumed to be a part of how we evolved as a social animal. Further, the diversity of eye color, as well, as hair color and texture, in European populations, is not an accident. If it had no value, it would not have happened. Clearly, diversity of hair color, hair texture, eye color and the features around the eyes began to have a reproductive advantage at some point. A purely social feature like eye color that is so strikingly different in Europeans, than anywhere else, suggests that European sociality may have evolved down a different path as well.

It is an example of what you hear from the more sophisticated in the HBD community. Early man in Europe was faced with much more difficult challenges than in Africa. As a result, males would have been at higher risk of death when hunting and traveling. When the sex ratio ceases to be balanced, when too many of one sex are competing for too few of the other, sexual selection intensifies. So a surfeit of females, relative to the male population, could have resulted in the diversity of eye and hair color, as women competed for the attention of males.

Put another way, environmental pressure changed the people, but then the people changed their environment, that is, their culture. Diversity of eye color, for example, resulted from nature killing off more males than females. That preference for diversity by mates would ripple through the population. People got better at being around people that did not look like them and better at having kids that did not look like them. Nature changes people, people change their culture and then the culture magnifies or mitigates the forces of nature.

It is what makes the Diversity™ rackets so craven and shallow. People are more than their skin, but that’s not what the grifters and charlatans would have us believe. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, people are all the same with pointless physical differences. Such thinking is anti-science and anti-human. It has been a long and complicated road for humans. No all of us went down the same roads or faced the same complications. Appreciating that is truly appreciating diversity.

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gebrauchshund
gebrauchshund
8 years ago

This brings to mind the Russian fox experiment,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox, where foxes were selected solely for tameness, but over many generations they also showed morphological changes, such as spotted or mottled coloring. There was no direct selection pressure for those traits, only for tameness, but the physiological changes related to tameness affected other characteristics as well. It’s possible the variation in hair and eye coloring among northern europeans followed a similar path. Wheels within wheels.

Karl Horst (Germany)
Karl Horst (Germany)
8 years ago

If you venture into the Netherlands, Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries, you’ll have a chance to see the last of the blue eyed blondes, in both males and females. They’re also tallest of the Europeans and last to integrate with our southern neighbors – thus they have retained their genetic traits without influence of more dominant genes. Germany has been mixing with southern genetics for several generations (mostly Italian and Turkish guest workers) so the traditional blue-eyed blonde German is becoming more and more rare here. Especially as ethnic Germans have fewer and fewer children. The Brits have the… Read more »

Anonymous Bro
Anonymous Bro
Reply to  Karl Horst (Germany)
8 years ago

Are German woman dating/marrying Turkish men in large numbers? Do Turkish women date/marry German men? Who is marrying whom?

Member
8 years ago

“Early man in Europe was faced with much more difficult challenges than in Africa. As a result, males would have been at higher risk of death when hunting and traveling.” Can you point me to support for this idea? I realize that life in a cold environment requires more preparation for both travelling and living, in general; but life is cheap in Africa, and death is just around the corner from a tremendous variety of killers; animal, vegetable and mineral, as well as environmental killers such as exposure to the harsh African sun, floods, quicksand and so on. If the… Read more »

Marina
Marina
Reply to  eskyman
8 years ago

The impression I get is that life in Africa was (and is) much more random. You can’t plan for an elephant showing up and eating the entire village’s crop, or sleeping sickness, or a lion showing up and dragging off your toddler the way you can plan for winter coming every year. Every time I read a memoir about Africa, I’m struck by the sheer variety of ways people unexpectedly die.

Mike Martin
Mike Martin
8 years ago

Cochran talked in much detail about the spread of blue eyes in his book 10,000 Year Explosion. There an albino allele that started showing up 6-10 K years ago in Eastern Europe. The spread is easy to explain, but not the positive advantage for those with the allele. Was it related to Vitamin D production? Maybe. But the albinism seen in the OCA2 gene is also seen in other parts of the world. Even Amerindians show the albinism.

Notsothoreau
Notsothoreau
8 years ago

Have you read “Independent People” by Haldor Laxness? It’s an excellent example of the Icelandic temperament.

Notsothoreau
Notsothoreau
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

It’s a funny thing. I like to re-read books. That one is so vivid that I still remember the characters.

I like reading the sagas. It helps if you keep in mind that they were describing family traits, when they start out with the genealogy of the folks involved.

teapartydoc
Member
8 years ago

I’d be careful with talk about how something would not have happened if there were no purpose in it . This gives the sense of teleological presupposition seen in Aristotle. Granted, whatever we are talking about may have some survival benefit, but this cannot simply be presupposed, too. The supposed survival benefit needs to be subjected to the formation of a testable thesis and either falsified or not. Note that it can never be confirmed in a positive sense, but can be used only as a working assumption in extension of the idea to other subjects. In this sense the… Read more »

teapartydoc
Member
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Yes, but any supposed survival advantage must be more than an assumption based on a telos.

Pat Baker
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reconcile the Theory of Evolution with reality in vain. Perhaps a review of the title page of Darwin’s opus will shed light on the matter: ‘The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.’ Now, that’s confusing. Is it a scientific theory or merely a justification for mistreating the neighbors and feeling all high and mighty about it? The Master Race? The new Soviet Man? Mutant Ninja Turtles?

King George III
King George III
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

There may be some sort of survival advantage associated with light-colored eyes. As you note, there certainly is with light-colored skin, though the NEAsians aren’t nearly as completely light-complexioned as European. They have darker undertones, tan more easily, and for longer. One interesting feature of hair color is distribution, especially around the edges. The core part of Europe is mainly dark-haired, with some blonde mixed in. Red hair is only ever found in the British Isles, and then mostly in Ireland—the fringe of a fringe. Red hair especially tends to pair with freckles, extremely pale skin, and a broken tanning… Read more »

Montefrío
Member
Reply to  King George III
8 years ago

Red hair is not exclusive to the British Isles if my personal observation is any indicator, though that’s an anecdotal and completely non-scientific observation to be sure. Sicilians have it, likely as a result of the Norse invasions, and I came upon it in a Berber tribe in southern Morocco as well, replete with green eyes, fair skin and freckles. An Irish citizen myself, I’ve never read of an Irish presence in the Souss. If I recall correctly, this feature is derived from the historical presence of the Visigoths, as is the case in Spain.

King George III
King George III
Reply to  Montefrío
8 years ago

Red hair isn’t exclusive to the British Isles in the same way that light eyes aren’t exclusive to Europeans. There are some Middle Eastern groups in which light eyes make an appearance, evidence of an ancient phenotype now mostly submerged under an influx of Middle Eastern “dark” genes and natural selection for “dark” looks.

Indo-Europeans once spread over most of the known world. Not all were light-eyed, but I imagine an astonishing percentage were.

alzaebo
alzaebo
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Light eye color sees better in dim light where infrared spectrum dominates. Note white preference for blues, grays, and pastels.

Dark brown eyes, more suited to direct or refracted (snowburn in glacial Asia) ultraviolet, prefer stronger primary colors- for example, the bright reds, greens, yellows seen in Mexican pageants.

The African preference for scarlets, purples, golds, dark greens denotes a different spectrum sensitivity as well.

thor47
thor47
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Sex selection: most men select for, especially after 35 years of marriage, when it becomes increasingly rare. From what I hear, anyway.

Of course we are all the same. Doesn’t everyone eat crawfish with tabasco flavored ice cream?

zman, what is the HBD community, please?

thor47
thor47
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

Thank you. I take a look.

thor47
thor47
Reply to  thor47
8 years ago

Will take a look. Stupid keyboard.

james wilson
james wilson
Reply to  thezman
8 years ago

I have read (and can not link) that blue eyes are a more recent addition–post ice-age, 6k–and first appeared in the brown haired olives. If blue and grey eyes are more light sensitive they would not do well in ice-age Europe no matter the breeding advantages. One day skiing would convince anyone of that.

Marina
Marina
Reply to  james wilson
8 years ago

My mother has very light, watery looking blue eyes. She does not go outside without sunglasses, regardless of the time of year or it is very uncomfortable for her. The light sensitivity thing is no joke. I’ve got light brown eyes and I am noticeably more light sensitive and have much better night vision than my dark eyed husband.

King George III
King George III
Reply to  Marina
8 years ago

My eyes are so light that in full sunlight they are sometimes so overloaded that they literally cross and I lose the ability to see much of anything.

The struggle is real.