Uriah Profile picture
28 Nov, 10 tweets, 3 min read
In September 23andMe produced a study showing that subjects belonging to blood group O (the most common type in Europe) have a slightly reduced chance of developing covid: blog.23andme.com/23andme-resear…
This is not the first time a blood group has been found to affect infectious disease risk. Maybe the most well-known example is that O carriers have a doubled chance of developing cholera, against which AB is almost miraculously protective: academic.oup.com/aje/article-ab…
The historic epicenter of cholera is the Ganges River Delta in and around Bangladesh. As a result of selective pressure, people in the Delta have the world’s lowest frequency of blood group O (American Indians have the highest, in some cases 100%) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
This is the really interesting thing about blood groups: you can read a population’s recent history of disease by examining their groups: e.g. O is protective against malaria, which helps explain its high frequency in Africa, the Gulf Coast, and Sicily: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_typ…
A person could write a PhD thesis explaining the historical basis of the relatively unusual blood group frequencies just in Armenia/Japan/ Mongolia, but what I find most interesting is the enormous difference between East and West Europeans.
I’ll just outline the problem and see if someone else can figure out what I couldn't. O is the plurality group in Western Europe with a peak frequency of around 55% in Iceland, Ireland, and the Basques. But Slavs have some of the lowest frequency of O on Earth.
The point is, one or the other of us have changed, man. The fact that O is the oldest blood type, almost universal in American Indians and in isolated Europeans makes me think it was once more common and that it was Easterners who have been under more recent selective pressure.
But not just Slavs, because Norwegians also have a dramatically reduced frequency of O compared to Icelanders, who are around 75% Norwegian. JBS Haldane noticed this in the 30’s and drew the false conclusion that Icelanders were largely descended from Irish slaves.
The basic problem: I _think_ there has been a disease or diseases moving into Europe from Asia in the last 2,000 years that has affected East Europeans much more than Westerns and has affected the Icelanders, Irish, and Basques least of all. What is it?
If it was cholera that would explain a lot, but the first major European cholera epidemic didn’t happen until 1821, which seems far too late to have this kind of effect. 4000 Twitter points to whoever can figure it out first.

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More from @crimkadid

11 Nov
White Southerners have long lagged behind Northerners in aptitude tests and real world academic achievement. Part of the explanation of the historical gap can be attributed to the high Southern prevalence of hookworm infection, which both lowers IQ and increases absenteeism.
Hookworm is usually acquired when people walk around barefoot in wet soil. It is still common in places like Brazil where modern IQ testing has been used to give a sense of how mentally sluggish it makes schoolchildren: Image
When the connection was made between hookworm and various ailments in 1910 the John Rockefeller Society launched a thorough survey which discovered about 40 percent of Southerners to be infected. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Read 6 tweets
4 Oct
I might start repeating something like this as a mantra: the most important thing in the world no one knows is that children born after the onset of autism epidemic are mentally and (the focus of these tweets) physically fucked up.
Four years back a study was published that compared the grip strength of US millenials with those of a 1985 reference group and found a half standard deviation decline in grip strength during that period, equivalent to a 7 point drop in IQ. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26869476/
An earlier Australian study found virtually the same thing, which is that their young people are also becoming alarmingly limp wristed: link.springer.com/article/10.118…
Read 29 tweets
20 Sep
James Cameron did a Terminator 2 Judgment commentary with the movie's writer, who wasn't on set much. The scene comes where the bad robot flies a helicopter under an overpass. Cameron tells him how they did it and the writer goes "that was real!?"
The cameramen mutinied and refused to do the stunt, (probably thinking of how Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese kids were decapitated in a helicopter accident on the Twilight Zone Movie) and so manly man Cameron shot it himself.
T2 was the last, greatest triumph of the old school badass stuntmen before CGI rendered them unimportant. This stuff has to be seen to be believed: Peter Kent leapt onto a moving semi, shot it up, and the hung on for dear life while it turned:
Read 4 tweets
18 Sep
In 2008 while doing construction work at St. John's College Oxford, workers discovered 35 medieval skeletons in a mass grave. They all adult males, all the victim of stab wounds, many of them burned (which was unusual) and piled haphazardly of top of each other.
In 1002, Aethelred the Unready responded to yearly Viking raids on England by ordering the extermination of all Danes in England (they had many colonies). The Danes at Oxford huddled themselves into the local Catholic church seeking refuge but were burned out and killed.
Archaeologists made this connection as soon as the skeletons were found, which was controversial, because archaeology is not supposed to be fun like a detective story. Four of the skeletons were sequenced in the Viking genomics paper. 3/4s were all Scando, one man 1/4th British.
Read 4 tweets
13 Sep
Every few years a different nerd discovers the same thing about NFL quarterbacks: that they're much, much more blue eyed than the general population. And yet somehow this information never spreads to the public; it's like the men in black show up and arrest the noticers.
This guy for example, claims to have examined the eye colors of Super Bowl winning quarterbacks and discovered that 80% of them have blue eyes. thesportscol.com/2014/01/like-b…
Before I had read that letter, I went through a USA Today list of top 50 quarterbacks and estimated that about 60% of them were blue eyed. The average in the UK is no more than about 40% and I doubt US whites are any lighter. You can see estimated values for eye color here:
Read 16 tweets
10 Sep
The central difference in thinking between Boomers and the Twitter cave creatures that mock them is in their ease in thinking abstractly, about things they've never seen with their own eyes. This is the same psychological dimensions which separates autistics from normals.
Boomers look at a thing and see that thing. Millenials look at a person and see a reference, a connection with a movie, a race, an historical event. Their whole mental existence is nothing but "references".
Boomers have odd beliefs about places they've never been, but in their own private kingdoms they see and understand everything. Millenials applaud themselves for their genuinely superior understanding of climate change or Xinjiang while their neighborhoods collapse around them.
Read 4 tweets

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