Tag Archives: david reich

Cochran on White Racial Pre-History and the Aryans

contemplating_nature

Two weeks ago Greg Cochran spoke at length on a podcast titled history of Europe. It was in fact a recounting of the biological origins of the White race, meandering but comprehensive, and with a specific focus on the Aryan component. There is little or no written record for much of the period of time Cochran discusses. What he lays out is more a synthesis of evidence and inference, gleaned from the latest genetics research, and meshed with older (and still ongoing) archeological and linguistic research.

This podcast is well worth listening to from beginning to end, despite its length, and despite the insufferably insecure and nasally host, who interrupts mainly to remind the audience that, as a jew, he must mispronounce Yamnaya like a rabbi mangles a swastika.

Who is Cochran? Here’s how some (((human biodiversity))) fanboys described him in 2007:

A professor at the University of Utah, Cochran is a physicist, an anthropologist, and a genetics researcher and theorist. He’s well known for his belief that many ailments that we now think of as genetic might well be of pathogenic origin instead. With Henry Harpending and Jason Hardy, he authored a paper suggesting that the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews — as well as their pattern of genetic diseases — might be an evolutionary consequence of their history of persecution and their emphasis on jobs involving lots of brainpower. The paper received extensive coverage in The Economist and The New York Times.

Cochran has worked in defence and aerospace; he has speculated that homosexuality might be caused by an infection; he has written a number of articles for the American Conservative scornful of the Bush administration; and he shows up periodically at Gene Expression.

Cochran is a formidable heterodox intellectual, in other words: not only legendarily smart and fearless, but blessed with a remarkable memory — he was once a College Bowl contestant. The Economist called him “a noted scientific iconoclast.” GNXP’s Razib says of Cochran, “Information technology is a deadly weapon in this man’s hands. Greg Cochran is a genius, and he’s got the ‘fuck you’ money to prove it.” Steve Sailer has written of Cochran:

“I stay in touch with some quite smart people, but even among them, Gregory Cochran is legendary for the ferocity of his scientific originality … I can attest that, although a physicist by education and the leading theorist of evolutionary medicine by avocation, Cochran also has memorized almost the entire political and military history of the human race … When I’m reviewing a historical film such as ‘Master and Commander’ or ‘Hero’ and I need to pretend to actually know something about the Age of Nelson or China’s Warring States era, a call to Cochran will not only fill me in on what happened, but, more importantly, why it happened.”

Not irrelevant to all this is the fact that Cochran has been right about Iraq.

Heterodox intellectual? Indeed. Cochran is heterodox like mealy-mouthed mischling Steve Sailer, whose “race realist” fanbase loves loves loves his speaking-truth-to-fellow-white-people shtick, tactically vacillating between racially distinguishing and conflating jews with Whites, depending on what’s best for jews. And Cochran is an intellectual like the infamous cuck Charles Murray, that useful high-IQer with whom Cochran shares a strange interest in extolling jew IQ. This is the same “heterodox intellectual” narrative toxic “race realist” jews like Nathan Cofnas use as an excuse for jews jewing Whites to death.

I’ve discussed the broader alt-jewing phenomenon at some length over the years. The earlier HBD and NRx alt-jew intellectual movements long elevated the likes of Murray, Sailer, and Cochran as spokesmen for what is effectively a jewed reaction to jewing. But the current year’s even jewier alternative to jewing is here now, proclaiming itself “the intellectual dark web” – thanks Eric Weinstein! – and characteristically crying out in pain as it tells JOG what to do – thanks Bret Weinstein! A major hive of this same old-new cabal is the jew Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. HxA, for short, answers the increasingly obvious anti-White jew orthodoxy of the academy with a lame bit about “increasing viewpoint diversity”. The big concern there is that alt-jews like Haidt, the Weinsteins, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Steven Pinker, and Christina Hoff Sommers retain their freedom of speech, to express their alt-digsust for “racists” and “nazis”. Good goys and part-goys still serve as cover for all the jewy screeching about tribalism, but the veil is slipping, bigly.

Interestingly, the link to that Cochran fanboy quote above comes from a comment on a blogpost he made in 2015. In that post Cochran deliberately shits on “nutty ideas”, specifically some ideas which run counter to the jew orthodox version of WWII. I remain more impressed by what Revilo Oliver has written about FDR and Pearl Harbor and what Thomas Goodrich has written about the brutal treatment of Germans during and after the war. To my knowledge Cochran has never expressed the slightest skeptism, much less scorn concerning the utterly orthodox and far more consequential lies told about that war by jews. From their ritualistic repetition of a particular number, to their incredible stories about gas showers, lampshades and soap, geysers of jew-blood, magical rainbow colors of jew-smoke – there are many issues any truly heterodox individual could easily object to and even mercilessly mock if their greater desire to be seen as an “intellectual” didn’t get in the way. Not to mention the desire to stay out of prison. Even a dimwit has some inkling of the screeching and harassment they’d suffer if they were to challenge any aspect of the semitically correct narrative. The difference is that intellectuals know why, and more important, are clever enough to imagine some other explanation, or at least keep their mouth shut.

I have no doubt Cochran knows many things, and understands many better than I ever will. My understanding of White racial history, at least with regard to the latest genetic developments, comes in part through him. Pierce’s Who We Are is more detailed, and a better investment in time. Cochran adds the recent genetic coroboration of the story. He knows well that jews are genetically and mentally distinct from the Europeans whose pre-historic roots he describes. This makes it difficult to listen to him complain about jew geneticist David Reich’s mixing-is-good narrative, or the widespread post-war psychopathologization of the pre-war understanding of the Aryans, as if he doesn’t know what it’s about. He knows, he just won’t say it plainly.

Even so, Cochran isn’t likely to be lionized by any heterodox intellectual dark web jews. Why not? Because last month, as part of a series of posts reviewing Reich’s book, Cochran named names. In a post titled Live Not By Lies he called out Reich and the sciency anti-“racist” tribemates:

Reich talks about the anthropologists [ Montagu] , geneticists [Lewontin] , and sociologists that have argued that ‘race’ has no biological reality, that there are not really any significant biological differences between races, that research into such differences should be banned ( why is this necessary if differences don’t exist?), etc. All liars, of course.

. . .

Reich explains how recent genetic analysis shows that people’s genes cluster in ways that correspond pretty well with old-fashioned notions of ‘race’. He prefers to talk about ‘ancestry’, because (in his view) the word ‘race’ is too ill-defined and loaded with historical baggage. Whatever.

He goes on to say that people that deny the possibility of substantial differences between populations just can’t do it anymore: they’re putting themselves in an indefensible position. He is wrong: sure, their position is logically indefensible, the facts are against it, but what does that matter? The significantly crazier idea that there are no differences between the sexes – that sexual dimorphism itself is a myth promulgated by the Gnomes of Zurich or the orbital mind-control lasers – has become very powerful in much of the Western world: barking-mad craziness apparently doesn’t need to defend itself.

He says that geneticists have tended to ‘obfuscate’ on this topic, mentioning Richard Lewontin. I’d put it a bit differently: they lie.

. . .

Reich mentions independent genome bloggers, some of them skilled analysts, who are on the whole less inclined to go along with the usual falsehoods. He thinks that means you can’t keep up the charade: again, he’s very likely wrong, not least because those skilled genome bloggers have a tiny audience. More important, Reich himself doesn’t want to keep up the charade. That may matter.

Reich goes on to demolish some fairly common false arguments about how different human races – excuse me, ‘ ancestral populations ‘ – really can’t be very different, at least not in any traits that would upset people. You know, for the same reasons that dog breeds can’t really be very different.

. . .

Reich often seems to think that if a result wasn’t proved using powerful contemporary genomic methods (what he uses), it wasn’t really known at all. If I don’t know it, it’s not knowledge: that’s a wrong way of thinking.

next fallacy: human populations just haven’t been separated long enough to have changed much due to selection. He knows that’s not correct. He points out that in many cases populations have been separated for 50,000 years, while some African groups appear to have been separated far longer, perhaps 200,000 years. A recent study showed that there has been noticeable evolutionary change in the English over the past 2000 years: selection for increased height, infant head circumference, blondness, etc etc. If it can happen there in 2000 years, it can happen anywhere.

And he expects that more such racial differences will be found – but now he has to weasel again. He says that nobody knows what those differences will be!

OK, Cochran weaseled. He didn’t mention all this lying has to do with jews and their jewing. He actually acts flummoxed by Reich’s typical loxist behavior, viciously attacking non-jew scientists whom Cochran respects:

Next he slams people that suspect that upcoming genetic genetic analysis will, in most cases, confirm traditional stereotypes about race – the way the world actually looks.

The people Reich dumps on are saying perfectly reasonable things. He criticizes Henry Harpending for saying that he’d never seen an African with a hobby. Of course, Henry had actually spent time in Africa, and that’s what he’d seen. The implication is that people in Malthusian farming societies – which Africa was not – were selected to want to work, even where there was no immediate necessity to do so. Thus hobbies, something like a gerbil running in an exercise wheel.

. . .

He criticized Nicholas Wade, for saying that different races have different dispositions. Wade’s book wasn’t very good, but of course personality varies by race: Darwin certainly thought so. You can see differences at birth. Cover a baby’s nose with a cloth: Chinese and Navajo babies quietly breathe through their mouth, European and African babies fuss and fight.

Then he attacks Watson, for asking when Reich was going to look at Jewish genetics – the kind that has led to greater-than-average intelligence. Watson was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of Reich, but it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the average bear and everybody knows it. Selection is the only possible explanation, and the conditions in the Middle ages – white-collar job specialization and a high degree of endogamy, were just what the doctor ordered.

Watson’s a prick, but he’s a great prick, and what he said was correct. Henry was a prince among men, and Nick Wade is a decent guy as well. Reich is totally out of line here: he’s being a dick.

Now Reich may be trying to burnish his anti-racist credentials, which surely need some renewal after having pointing out that race as colloquially used is pretty reasonable, there’s no reason pops can’t be different, people that said otherwise ( like Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, etc. ) were lying, Aryans conquered Europe and India, while we’re tied to the train tracks with scary genetic results coming straight at us. I don’t care: he’s being a weasel, slandering the dead and abusing the obnoxious old genius who laid the foundations of his field.

. . .

He doesn’t just slander, he lies. He says “most stereotypes will be disproved.” Want to bet? Most stereotypes are true – true everywhere.

. . .

Reich’s position is that we don’t know anything until someone (him !) has analyzed it with modern genomic techniques. That’s ridiculous. Reich found that on average, given similar diets, northern Europeans are about a standard deviation taller than southern Europeans. But I already knew that, well before Reich was born. Seneca knew it: Tacitus knew it. There’s a reason the Byzantines hired plenty of Scandihoovians (including 7-footer Harold Hardrada) into the Varangian Guard. Mark Twain knew that Ashkenazi Jews were smart: he didn’t need IQ tests or GWAS for that.

. . .

When he says that we don’t have any idea what we’ll find, he’s lying again.

What’s going on here is that two big jew lies – that race and racial differences aren’t biological, and that the Aryans were merely a mythical creation of the stupid/crazy/evil “nazis” – are falling apart in the face of recent genetic revelations. Cochran calls out the lying, but won’t explicitly identify it as jewing. Reich himself comes as close as most jews ever get, by blaming Europeans for everything, as usual:

Reich: Archaeology has always been political, especially in Europe. Archaeologists are very aware of the misuse of archaeology in the past, in the 20th century. There’s a very famous German archaeologist named Gustaf Kossinna, who was the first or one of the first to come up with the idea of “material culture.” Say, you see similar pots, and therefore you’re in a region where there was shared community and aspects of culture.

He went so far as to argue that when you see the spread of these pots, you’re actually seeing a spread of people and there’s a one-to-one mapping for those things. His ideas were used by the Nazis later, in propaganda, to argue that a particular group in Europe, the Aryans, expanded in all directions across Europe. He believed that the region where these people’s material culture was located is the natural homeland of the Aryan community, and the Germans were the natural inheritors of that. This was used to justify their expansionism in the propaganda that the Germans used in the run-up to the Second World War.

So after the Second World War, there was a very strong reaction in the European archaeological community—not just the Germans, but the broad continental European archaeological community—to the fact that their discipline had been used for these terrible political ends. And there was a retreat from the ideas of Kossinna.

Zhang: You actually had German collaborators drop out of a study because of these exact concerns, right? One of them wrote, “We must(!) avoid … being compared with the so-called ‘siedlungsarchäologie Method’ from Gustaf Kossinna!”

Reich: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things the ancient DNA is showing is actually the Corded Ware culture does correspond coherently to a group of people. [Editor’s note: The Corded Ware made pottery with cord-like ornamentation and according to ancient DNA studies, they descended from steppe ancestry.] I think that was a very sensitive issue to some of our coauthors, and one of the coauthors resigned because he felt we were returning to that idea of migration in archaeology that pots are the same as people. There have been a fair number of other coauthors from different parts of continental Europe who shared this anxiety.

We responded to this by adding a lot of content to our papers to discuss these issues and contextualize them. Our results are actually almost diametrically opposite from what Kossina thought because these Corded Ware people come from the East, a place that Kossina would have despised as a source for them. But nevertheless it is true that there’s big population movements, and so I think what the DNA is doing is it’s forcing the hand of this discussion in archaeology, showing that in fact, major movements of people do occur. They are sometimes sharp and dramatic, and they involve large-scale population replacements over a relatively short period of time. We now can see that for the first time.

This is the kind of sciency jewy lying I quoted Cochran criticizing above. What the genetic analysis shows is that the ancestors of modern day Germanic people were in fact the Corded Ware people, who were in fact largely genetically descended from the Aryans, just as pre-war students of archeology and linguistics surmised, long before anyone had the benefit of DNA evidence. To his credit Cochran makes this point in the podcast. He goes even further, describing how northern Europeans, which pre-war racialists more precisely identified as the Nordic subrace, do in fact have more Aryan DNA, whereas southern Europeans, more precisely the Mediterranean subrace, have more of what Cochran calls Early European or Middle Eastern farmer DNA, as typified by contemporary Sardinians. On this point Cochran favorably cites a book published in 1926, The Aryans: A study of Indo-European origins, edited by Gordon Childe, opining that it was “mostly correct”. At one point Cochran also asserts that not everything the “nazis” believed was wrong. He complains about feeling compelled to say otherwise, while pretending not to understand why.

Yes, the national socialists were mostly correct about race and the pre-history of Europeans. They are demonized today exactly because they were also right about the jews. They correctly saw the jews not merely as non-Aryan but as an existential threat. The jews, especially the more sciency jews, understand this perfectly well. That’s why they’re in crisis mode. They understand these genetic revelations are damning, and potentially explosive, exposing the anti-“racist”/anti-“nazi” narrative jews have perpetrated for the better part of the past century as a fraud, as an excuse for their own racial animus and ongoing war on Whites. The consensus among jews, including alt-jews, is that this fraud has been good for the jews. In their view it is the potential collapse of this fraud, or worse, potential reprisals for it, which might be bad for the jews, and therefore must now be averted at all costs. They agree the goyim must never ever be permitted to freely discuss race or the harm caused by all this jewing, then or now, or the proverbial jig is up, all over again. They just disagree how to jewsplain it. That’s the backdrop behind all the jew-vs-alt-jew hyperventilating over Reich’s book, or for that matter, anything else about race-related science you might come across in the mainstream jewsmedia.

It’s not “nazis” dictating who can say what about race. It’s not Europeans telling GoogleTwitterFacebook who to shut down. It’s the jews.

Zhang: You end the book noting that you are optimistic that your work is “exploding stereotypes, undercutting prejudice, and highlighting the connections among peoples not previously known to be related.” I imagine you started writing this a few years ago. Given today’s political climate, are you still as optimistic now as you were when you started writing the book?

Reich: I think so. I know there are extremists who are interested in genealogy and genetics. But I think those are very marginal people, and there’s, of course, a concern they may impinge on the mainstream.

But if you actually take any serious look at this data, it just confounds every stereotype. It’s revealing that the differences among populations we see today are actually only a few thousand years old at most and that everybody is mixed. I think that if you pay any attention to this world, and have any degree of seriousness, then you can’t come out feeling affirmed in the racist view of the world. You have to be more open to immigration. You have to be more open to the mixing of different peoples. That’s your own history.

If you look seriously, history and his data says the opposite of what Reich claims. Speciation and competition are nature’s norms. This was the common understanding White intellectuals reached after Darwin. A firm biological understanding of race and jewing was blossoming by the 1930s. That understanding, along with tens of millions of White people, most of whom never understood why, were murdered because jews did understand.

The parasite-enabling migrating-mixing ideal is naturally promoted by the parasite exactly because it serves the parasite. It makes perfect sense that rootless cosmopolitan jews so shamelessly pump such poisonous reality-inverting lies into everyone else’s minds. Likewise how they always attach to it such characteristically jewy screeching deploring “predjudice” and “stereotyping”. Technically, the jews collectively behave more like a parasitoid. Even the relatively rare “heterodox” jews are more concerned to keep their hosts enfeebled, even unto death, than to moderate jew virulence.

As I understand it Cochran’s overarching insight, the idea that “many ailments that we now think of as genetic might well be of pathogenic origin instead”, was triggered by a story he read about parasitism, sometime before 1999. He read “about pathogens manipulating a host to get what they want”. This led him to a “new” germ theory, that all “big old diseases are infectious”. To my mind this is just the same old germ theory of disease – where there is pathology there is a pathogen. As with the lying about race and the Aryans, so it goes for the more recent queering of sexual dimorphism. By now, somewhere in Cochran’s big old brain he realizes his big old theory fits this jewing, in all its pathogenic forms. It’s a no-brainer. Unfortunately, Cochran is apparently too smart to have noticed that jews chutzpathically assert the opposite. Their big old idea is that the biggest, oldest disease is “anti-semitism”. That is to say, according to jews, non-jews are the disease, harmful to jewing. My theory? Many social pathologies have their origin in jewing. Moreover, the main cause of non-jews pathologically refusing to correctly perceive jewing as pathogenic, is also jewing.

UPDATE 10 Nov 2021: “What the genetic analysis shows is that the ancestors of modern day Germanic people were in fact the Corded Ware people, who were in fact largely genetically descended from the Aryans, just as pre-war students of archeology and linguistics surmised, long before anyone had the benefit of DNA evidence.” The Aryan-Corded Ware relation is affirmed at 48:00 in Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning, in the episode titled “Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe”, https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/unsupervisedlearning/krist.mp3, https://unsupervisedlearning.libsyn.com/kristian-kristiansen-the-birth-of-northern-europe