A Road of Grass- Migrations Along the Asian Steppe

Genomics data confirms that the Avars were of East Asian origin before taking over the Carpathian basin.

Historians have gradually accorded increasing respect to the various Central Asian groups that swept in and terrorized Europe for a millenium, including in turn the Scythians, Huns, Avars, Mongols, and Turks. The Mongols particularly created a golden age of commerce across the Silk Road, which Marco Polo traveled to such great adventure. This history is both extremely dynamic, and poorly documented, as these nomadic cultures left little behind, especially writing. Their roots range from Iran and the Indo-Europeans to the Mongolian and Tungusic regions. A putative "Altaic" language group extends from Hungary all the way to Korea and Japan, though it is a disparate group arising more from interchange and borrowing than from a single origin- testament to the frequent traffic along the steppes.

To settled cultures, both in Europe and in China, these nomads were terrors, living on their horses, infinitely mobile, and possessing powerful weapons like their composite bows. The continual succession of these cultures (unlike, say, the long stability of ancient Egypt) also indicates that they fought constantly among themselves, in true Darwinian fashion. Success revolved around not only technical innovation and a martial culture, but also social abilities to forge groups large and cohesive enough to control vast regions, despite the tendency of warriors to fight ... with each other.

The Avars were one of this succession, historically known as invaders of the Carpathian Basin who set up a brief empire (~570 to 790 CE) after defeating Goths who had in turn succeded the Huns, who had replaced the Romans of Pannonia. At their height, the Avars ruled from Turkey to Austria, but were within two hundred years defeated by the Franks, who were soon followed by the Magyars, who finally stayed to found what is now Hungary. One can see that the Balkans, which lie in this region and towards the Adriatic, have had a tumultuous history. The Avars had reputedly come from the far East, after the nascent Turks defeated the Hunnic / Rouran center, of which the Avars were supposedly a successor, offshoot, or client group. Historians have been divided, though, since there is little evidence of far Eastern influences in the Carpathian archeology, and competing accounts put their origin more Westerly, around the Urals or Caspian basin. 

"The Rourans were defeated by the Turks, who had been their subjects, in 552–555. Their empire fell apart and, according to the contemporary Chinese sources, the core Rouran population was brutally massacred. Some of the Rourans fled to China and soon disappeared from sources. Another group of the Rourans is commonly thought to have migrated westwards and become the Avars of European history"

But a recent paper (largely authored by Hungarians) has settled the matter. They sequenced DNA from numerous burials dated through the Avar era, and compared them to a variety of samples from across the steppes. They find that indeed, the earliest and richest graves of the Avar era have almost exclusively far East Asian DNA markers, from what is now roughly Mongolia, while later remains show increasing admixture with the local Western Europeans. 

"All of the early-Avar-period individuals (DTI_early_elite), except for an infant and a burial with typical characteristics of the Transtisza group, form a tight cluster with a high level of ANA (ancient North East Asian) ancestry. They are located between present-day Mongolic- (e.g., Buryats and Khamnigans) and Tungusic/Nivkh-speaking populations (e.g., Negidals, Nanai, Ulchi, and Nivkhs) together with the only available ancient genome from the Rouran-period Mongolia."

"The remaining 9 late-Avar-period individuals show minor (<40%) to almost negligible (<5%) admixture with ANA-related sources, while the major ancestry component can be approximated by one of the preceding local groups for most of the individuals"

In discussions of these eras, hundreds of years can go by rather quickly. Still, the mobility and dynamism of these peoples is astonishing. Rome had already experienced the knock-on effects of tribes such as the Scythians driving other peoples westward before them. And the Indo-European invasions were something similar, farther back in the mists of time. Such migrations and conquests kept on happening, thanks to the love these people had for their horses, the endless flatness of the landscape, and the rich pickings available among settled cultures around their periphery.

The Steppe region marked in brown. Sites of burial remains that were sequenced are marked, extending clear across Asia, allowing the authors to classify particularly early and high-status burials in the Carpathian basin (left-most) as most related to a far eastern origin.

Today, Russia (whose lengthy period under Mongol rule strongly shaped its culture) has resumed the mortal competition for empire among the flatlands of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. While we can marvel at the relentless valor of Huns and Avars, seeing such ruthlessness up close in our own time isn't abstract history, it is thoroughly appalling.

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Join Ukraine

It is time to make Ukraine part of NATO and dispense with the charade of arms-length relations.

The war in Ukraine has been a pure crime from the start, founded on lies and imperialism of the most old-fashioned sort. The West has long shied from directly allying itself with Ukraine, because Ukraine is so physically and culturally close to Russia. So in deference to old ideas of neighborhoods, spheres of influence, and defensive buffers, and the like, we have respected that we might create a large mess by taking NATO so close up to Russia's borders and self-interest. 

Well, the mess has happened, and not by our doing. Ukraine has on its own progressively rejected the Russian sphere over the last decade, and for a variety of very good reasons taken steps to become an independent, functional Western-aligned democracy. (Unlike, say, Belarus.) Russia has in response taken the most brutal approach to bullying- killing and maiming what they can not take by corruption, threats, and diplomacy. Ukraine has fought back valiantly, but will be trapped in an endless frozen / slogging conflict unless it gets definitive help from the West.

There are two endgames in sight. One is that Russia keeps up its attack, in an effort to destroy or at least hobble Ukraine, physically and politically, perhaps even genocidally. Russia at this point has taken the worst the West has to offer, and the best defense the Ukrainians have to offer. It has been beaten off partially, but far from completely. From what we have seen, Putin can, and probably intends to, keep up the pressure on Ukraine indefinitely. Ukraine would become another Chechnia or Syria. This is not a good end-game, either for Ukraine or for the future of international relations among civilized countries- a wolf stealing back an empire, sheep by sheep.

Current state of the war in Ukraine.

Another endgame is that the US and allies intervene, make Ukraine peremptorily a member of NATO, join the fight, and definitively eject Russia from Ukrainian territory, including the Donbas and Crimea. Given what we have seen so far, this is for NATO a militarily achievable objective. These allies would naturally make it clear that attacking Russia proper is not our aim, though may be necessary if Russia attacks other NATO countries or persists in raining missiles / aircraft from across the border. 

The major question is how Russia might choose to escalate / retaliate. It has threatened nuclear war, in not so many words. I think such a course is highly unlikely, since Russia is trying to build a historical legacy here, not destroy one, or destroy itself. Deterence still holds, on both sides. Not to mention the fact that Western bombs are much more likely to be actually operational, given what we have seen of the Russian military. Additionally, adding Ukraine to the NATO umbrella with its various explicit guarantees will provide that much more deterrence against a nuclear attack on Ukraine, arguably forestalling such a worst-case outcome, even given the madness at hand.

Far more likely would be an assortment of alternative spoiler activities, like increased cybercrime and perhaps attacks in space on our satellites, maybe a few potshots into Europe, at the Baltics, etc. Projection to other areas of the world is highly unlikely, given that Russia would have its hands full on its neighboring front, and will lose a great deal of military capability over time. All these are acceptable costs, I think, for the durable lesson a repulse of wanton criminality would teach both Russia and China.

On the other hand, we should never demonize Russia per se or bar its future entry into Europe, given a change of government and heart. Their main problem is Putin and his imperial / delusional / autocratic system, not the people at large. Just as Ukraine (barely) beat off Putin-style corruption in their political system, Russia could as well, some day, and durable peace in Europe depends entirely on this happening as soon as possible. Which will in turn be brought closer, the sooner Russia is definitively evicted from Ukraine.

Remember the first Iraq war? Iraq had invaded Kuwait to take over its oil fields, and generally to express its contempt and superiority, including a historical claim that it was not, actually, a separate country. The US argued that this was in intolerable violation of sovereign borders and international norms. But the motivation was really just about the oil, not to preserve the democratic government of Kuwait, of which there was none. Nor was there a pre-existing alliance, but rather we conjured one on the spot out of convenience, cobbled together out of our various friends and petro-clients. The current case for alliance with and defense of Ukraine is far more compelling.

---

As this post was going to press, an opinion piece appeared by Jeffrey Sachs, promoting negotiation. He sees the same destructive stalemate developing as outlined above, (as do many others), and his solution is for the West to offer one thing- a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO. In return, Russia would vacate Ukraine to pre-war boundaries. Some may recall Sachs as a key advisor of the post-Soviet transition, and exponent of rapid transitions to capitalism, i.e. shock therapy. While the approach produced a transition, it is commonly looked at, retrospectively, as excessively shocking, and conducive to the uncontrolled and corrupt disposition of assets that led directly to the wild west of the post-Soviet transition, rise of the oligarchs, and the ensuing kleptocracies, the worst of which is Russia itself. So the track record is not great. In the current case, it is hard to make out an actual negotiating position from what Sachs proposes. Russia is in Ukraine, certainly by this point, for far more than a promise -cross our hearts- that Ukraine stays out of NATO. It is clear that Putin's aim is to quash Ukrainian democracy and freedom, so that Russia will not have a peskly neighbor better off and better governed than itself. It wants another Belarus, either by decapitation or by decimation.

My proposal above would form, on the other hand, an actual negotiating position vis-a-vis Russia. The West would offer two options. The first is that Russia vacate Ukraine to the 2021 lines and stay out, and that Ukraine remains independent and outside NATO, at least for the time being, but without future assurances. The other is that we immediately ally NATO with Ukraine, join in force with air and land power, and push Russia out of the Donbas and also out of Crimea, forceably and permanently. Again, we would make it clear that while attacks into Russia might be necessary to gain airspace control and repel artillary, etc., the ultimate lines would be set in advance, and not go into Russian proper, pre-2013. This would be a productive negotiating position, capable of inducing Putin to think carefully about his options. Losing Crimea would be the fulcrum, as well as the prospect of rapid integration of Ukraine into NATO as its front-line state.

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Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way. 

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?

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Exploring the Engram

A little more on how memories are stored, with notes on homeostasis.

Neuroscience is in a golden age, where age-old problems are yielding to new technologies and accumulated insight. Where are memories stored? Well, in the brain- we have known that for a long time (but not forever!). Then came the beautiful discovery of neurons, as investigated and drawn by Ramon Cajal. More recently, there has been a realization that memories reside in "engrams", or patterns of neurons which can be created by coordinated firing, and later re-activated by firing some fraction of those engram neurons to trigger re-activation of the full memory. Does that mean they are stored in individual synapses, the connections between neurons? Not really- synapses apparently turn over quite frequently, so long-term memories need a more stable substrate, such as a set of neurons whose synaptic connections, while plastic and turned over periodically, are kept generally consistent- perhaps by periodic re-activation of the engram or other means.

A neuron, in the artistry of Ramon Cajal, complete with plenty of dendrites and spines (tiny nubs) which are where synapses have been constructed to talk to incoming signals. The main output (axon) is probably the slightly thicker process going upward.

A recent paper explored by simulation how such a system would work. The reigning paradigm is Hebbian, per Donald Hebb, where neurons that fire coordinately increase the strength of their connections, while others do not. This rule would create, out of a random matrix of neurons, engram-resembling assemblies of neurons that have stronger connections and get re-activated when the original stimulus comes along. But there is a problem, which is that activation under such a simple theory would be unbounded, creating run-away assemblies that fire constantly and gradually take over the whole brain. There has to be a homeostatic mechanism that balances out the firing characteristics so that the memory is "hidden", in the sense that it does not produce unusual activation characteristics unless specific activating inputs come along. 

That is what this paper explores, modeling a neuron/synapse system that is notionally auto-balancing, in that it reduces the connection of the engram neurons with outside neurons even while it increases their internal connectivity to represent the engram. The net effect is that spontaneous firing over the tissue (model) as a whole, from random inputs, is unchanged even though a memory trace is resident and can be called out any time with a specially coordinated set of inputs.

A modeled set of neurons, including an engram. At top is a representation of each neuron as a dot, activated as time goes by on the X axis. Looks a bit like old-fashioned TV snow, as do most brain signals. The black bars show the activation of a memory engram, where its set of neurons fire a bit more than average (green line) and get connected to each other slightly better. This is immediately followed by a compensating decrease of connectivity which kicks in to isolate the engram a bit from the surrounding network, thus rebalancing overall activity back the snow pattern. Panel C shows an overall decrease in synapses as the compensation mechanism is modeled, and Panel D shows connectivity, which is increased among the engram cells (green), and decreased slightly between the engram and other cells (gray), and unchanged on average overall (blue).

The researchers find this a pretty realistic portrayal and model of what might be going on IRL, as it were. The mechanism behind this, as stated at the top, is not just a single synapse, but a whole network of connectivity among some (small) set of neurons, as carried out by transcriptional programs, new protein synthesis and the development of new synapses here, fewer there, and so forth, among many connected neurons. It is maintained by repeated recall / re-activation, as happens during dreaming, and conversely can degrade and be forgotten in the absence of such reinforcement, as new engrams are over-written on the tissue. What is the size of such neuron engram sets, and how are neurons selected to participate? The Hebbian theory posits that the more strongly active neurons would be pulled into such a network, automatically, at the moment of memory creation. Given a rather even, snow-like pattern of default activity in neural tissue, such activation would naturally be distributed evenly as well, avoiding existing engrams (due to their reduced outside connectivity) unless some explicit similarity were present in the new pattern. The researchers' model had 10,000 neurons, of which a random 1,000 were used to activate memory ensembles (the model also had 2,500 inhibitory neurons interlaced, for homeostasis).

Lastly, there is the fascinating question of generalization. Memories are useful only if they are not too specific. If they are only recalled under the precise conditions of creation, there is hardly much point to keeping them. If they are triggered by every other, or loosely related, experience, however, you have PTSD, which is also not good. The system needs to possess a balance so that a memory can be recalled by a sufficiently similar experience or situation, such that it can usefully inform some choice that the organism is facing in a novel environment, or be recalled at a dinner party without too much re-enactment being required. This is another area of homeostasis, by which the brain keeps things humming by carefully balancing competing needs / processes. A bit of recent work found two genes which are expressed in different cells within memory engram collections, and which mark the apparently competing subsets as either prone to generalization (Fos) by getting exciting inputs, or prone to restriction/specialization (Npas4) by getting inhibitory inputs. Thus each engram is composed of competing components, all in the ultimate interest of balance so that we have useful access to important memories, forget unimportant ones, and are not overwhelmed with traumatic ones.

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E. O. Wilson, Atheist

Notes on the controversies of E. O. Wilson.

E. O. Wilson was one of our leading biologists and intellectuals, combining a scholarly career of love for the natural world (particularly ants) with a cultural voice of concern about what we as a species are doing to it. He was also a dedicated atheist, perched in his ivory tower at Harvard and tilting at various professional and cultural windmills. I feature below a long quote from one of his several magnum opuses, Sociobiology (1975). This was putatively a textbook by which he wanted to establish a new field within biology- the study of social structures and evolution. This was a time when molecular biology was ascendent, in his department and in biology broadly, and he wanted to push back and assert that truly important and relevant science was waiting to be done at higher levels of biology, indeed the highest level- that of whole societies. It is a vast tome, where he attempted to synthesize everything known in the field. But it met with significant resistance across the board, even though most of its propositions are now taken as a matter of course ... that our social instincts and structures are heavily biological, and have evolved just as our physical features have.