Of Cabbages and Kings

Nov 29, 2010 12:54

Why are adults more tolerant of certain foods?
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/276662.html?thread=2187958

mysteries

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shkrobius November 30 2010, 15:50:01 UTC
The "Turks" are Anatolian Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians converted to Islam after the Seljuk conquest. Genetically, the contribution of the Seljuk Turkish migrants in Turkey is barely detectable, there were too few of them and they immediately adsorbed. Check
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1399-0039.2001.057004308.x/abstract;jsessionid=9650E21AD5D5D6C9E96AF77022AC5A8F.d01t02
Culturally, the Turks are different. Genetically, it is the same Mediterranian pool. It can't be biochemical differences. I've never been in these countries and I do not know anything about the red pepper, but the explanation must be cultural.

In principle, there is the North-South divide in the frequency of the use of spices. Scandinavians had very bland food. As you go south, there is increasing use of spices. That used to be explained by (i) masking theory (spices were used to cover rancid foods) and (ii) antibiotic/septic theory (spices have weakly bactericidal effects => correlation with the parasitic load).

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poltorazhyda November 30 2010, 16:42:49 UTC
I do not see anything in the abstract (the full article is unavailable to me) indicating that the Turks and Greeks are close-it says that they found no trace of the Indoeuropean invasion which gave rise to the Greeks. In any case, Turkey is a big country, and the Turks are not homogeneous; if they surveyed urban Turks from Keshan, in European Turkey, or Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, it is possible that they found nothing but Greek/Arabic genes; the Yoruks of the Antalya region, who were nomadic until fairly recently and are still fairly endogamous, would have probably given them a more Central Asian result.

Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia are maybe 200 miles North of Northern Turkey, and several hundred miles West. The North-South thing makes no sense here.

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poltorazhyda December 1 2010, 21:12:30 UTC
They say there's a 30% Central Asian contribution. Well, that might be enough. And the red pepper they use in everything isn't super spicy-just a bit. It would make sense if spice tolerance was encoded for by several genes, not just one.

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shkrobius December 1 2010, 23:42:17 UTC
30% is max (10% is more realistic) and it is not the "Turks" but all kinds of Central Asian males migrating over the last millenium. When they look at the haplotypes, it looks practically Mediterranian. Did you see how it clusters with Europeans on the two largest principal components?

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poltorazhyda December 1 2010, 23:56:13 UTC
A million Central Asian immigrants in the 12th and 13th centuries is a LOT. Especially when you consider that their reproductive fitness must have been relatively high-they were, after all, conquerors.

Looking at the graph, it seems to me that the Turks are about as far away from the Uzbeks as they are from their Thracian Greek neighbors.

I lack the scientific knowledge to tell if the genes they are looking at are functional, i.e., selected for differently in different environments, or just legacy genes. I would guess that genes responsible for taste would be functional and selected for, because they would be linked with other neurological traits as well as a locale/lifestyle's nutritional quirks. So we could have a sweep of one and not the other through a population, right?

Oddly, now that I think about it, the cuisine of Iraq (on the other side of Turkey) is just as bland as that of Greece.

Finally, I thought that this was funny: "The latest study from Turkey by Gokcumen (2008) [27] took into account oral histories and historical records. They went to villages and did not do a random selection from a group of university students like many other studies. Accordingly here are the results:

1) At an Afshar village whose oral stories tell they come from Central Asia they found that 57% come from haplogroup L, 13% from haplogroup Q, 3% from haplogroup N thus indicating that the L haplogroups in Turkey are of Central Asian heritage rather than Indian. These Asian groups add up to 73% in this village. Furthermore 10% of these Afshars were E3a and E3b. Only 13% were J2a, the most common haplogroup in Turkey.

2) An older Turkish village center that did not receive much migration was about 25% N and 25% J2a with 3% G and close to 30% of some sort of R1 but mostly R1b."-did I call that one, or what?

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shkrobius December 2 2010, 00:17:01 UTC
What is funny about it? My wife is studying genetics of mesothelioma in one of these small Turkish villages in the mountains. There is a village up there where 50% of people in an extended family get the disease and die. No one wants to marry into them. They were isolated for centuries. It is important to know who they are and where they are from. What is fun to you is millions of dollars to other people.

And I protest your characterization of Greek food as bland.

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poltorazhyda December 2 2010, 00:30:52 UTC
It's funny because guys go and make these sweeping statements about nonhomogeneous populations based on studies where they effectively take the "average body temperature of all patients." Intuitively, it seems like the DISTRIBUTION of Central Asian genes through a population is more important than their proportion. And this doesn't even get into whether certain Central Asian genes have made sweeps and are disproportionately represented, or have an effect on the society out of proportion to the amount of carriers. An examples of the former: Cherokees are disproportionately red-haired due to assortative mating; red hair was considered attractive once the Scots-Irish introduced it. An example of the latter: if we cloned the top percentile of American children by IQ, it's probable that our society would change radically within a few decades, though the difference would be small by absolute gene count, right?

Greek food is, at least in the North, not spicy. It's not bad, but not spicy. So, bland.

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