Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

Life After Death

Belief in life after death is an interesting choice to compare religiosity. 

It is a belief shared by all of the widely adhered to religions in the region without being strictly tied to any one of them, and also captures residual metaphysical beliefs in contrast to metaphysical naturalism among people who are nominally non-religious and may have a problem with particular denominational or institutional religious structures but not with a somewhat religious worldview at a broad level.

The percentage of people believe in life after death considerably exceeds the percentage of people who regularly attend religious services or pray regularly. But it is below 50% in most of the historically predominantly Christian countries  of Europe, and just barely above 50% in several of the remaining ones in the face of a long term trend towards declining belief in an afterlife. Most of Europe is majority secular, or very nearly so. In the homelands of most of my ancestors, belief in an afterlife is less than 40%.

Related from a May 12, 2016 post:

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be.

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance.

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.” 

The Data

Belgium, Moldova, Ireland and Kosovo are omitted, presumably for a lack of statistically significant amounts of data. Vatican City is almost omitted but one presumes that this belief is near 100% among its couple thousand permanent residents.

Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey are the only countries on the map over 60%. 

The lowest rates are in Bulgaria (25%) and Albania (22.7%), presumably as legacies of communism in places where religious institutions didn't play a large role in their emergence as non-communist states, and where the juxtaposition of these states against their Muslim neighbors, made an emphasis on state imposed atheism more salient.

In Turkey this is due to an overwhelmingly Muslim population. In Bosnia, the 51% of the population that is Muslim brings up the average. Predominantly Muslim Kosovo is probably higher than the 65.9% of Bosnia, but due to its long membership of nominally secular communist Yugoslavia and a somewhat larger non-Muslim minority, is probably less than teh 91.8% of Turkey. 

Poland is predominantly Catholic and the only predominantly Christian country on the map over 60%. This makes sense as Catholicism played an important and recent role in its departure from its former Communist regime, less than half a century ago.

Below Poland, but above 50% are Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and Macedonia, with a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox adherents and a range of economic development and historical ties to the Western and Eastern economic blocks of the Cold War. And, more generally, there doesn't seem to be a strong Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox skew to the likelihood of believing in life after death among Europeans in predominantly Christian countries. 

Belgium probably splits the difference between France (41.2%) and the Netherlands (34%) and is probably under 40%. 

Moldova probably splits the difference between Romania and Ukraine, which are also former Eastern block countries that were historically Eastern Orthodox, and is probably close to Romania than Ukraine and may be a bit over 50%.

I don't have a great intuition regarding where Ireland falls. It is probably under 60%, but probably higher than the U.K. (41.7%), as it is one of the more religious observant Christian countries in Europe, and Catholicism played a major role in sustaining Irish culture in the face of centuries of English rule in 1921 (now more than a century ago). It is probably in the high 40s or low 50s, percentage-wise.

Muslim v. Christian Approaches To Heresy

The very high rates in belief in life after death among Muslims is notable in light of a big difference in how Christianity and Islam have historically approached heresy at the individual level.

Christianity conceptualized heresy as an internal and subjective matter - not believing in the doctrinal truths of the established church.

Islam, in contrast, has focused on insisting that people outwardly comply with religious edicts concerning prayer, fasting, etc., without trying to punish or even really condemn people who are outwardly compliant with its demands even though subjectively, deep down, they have doubts or even outright don't believe in Islamic doctrines.

Yet, modern Islam has much higher rates of belief in the afterlife than modern European Christianity does, where the median rate of belief in the afterlife is probably half what it is among Muslims, if not a little lower.

Paces On The Path To Secular Humanism

Another possibility is that predominantly Islamic countries are simply on the same path towards secular humanism induced by modern scientific thinking and modern societal conditions as predominantly Christian countries, but are just less far along that path.

Many of the Islam driven doctrines and practices that are striking to us today in historically Christian countries, were once present in Christianity.

Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia is executing people for witchcraft now. Christians in Europe and North America were doing this into the 18th century. 

The last known execution for witchcraft in Europe was that of Anna Göldi in 1782 in Glarus, Switzerland, while in the British Isles, Janet Horne was the last person executed for witchcraft in 1727. The last known witchcraft trial in North America was held in Virginia in 1730, where a woman named Mary was convicted of using witchcraft to find lost items and sentenced to be whipped 39 times. There are still witchcraft persecutions (and lots of focus on fighting demons and exorcisms) among African Christians and animists.

Witchcraft prosecutions died, in part, because nobody believed that witchcraft was real any more.

Charging Interest

Islam prohibits the charging of interest now (although work around doctrines exist in Islamic finance to allow the equivalent of simple interest but not compound interest).

Interest was condemned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, in writings of the fathers of the Roman Catholic church during the Roman Empire, and by Luther and Calvin at least as late as the 16th century, although usury came to be redefined in Western Christianity as a bar only unfairly high interest rates and not charging interest at all, and became a minor issue for Christian clergy, with the established or formerly established Christian churches now relying on interest on their endowments to operate.

The gap in the focus on barring the charging of interest in the period between the Roman era and the Reformation, moreover, was as much due to the lack of banking activity entirely during the Middle Ages in Christendom, where feudalism prevailed, as it was due to a change in Christian religious doctrine in that time period, per se. 

Modesty

The Islamic world is known today for its greater expectations of modesty in how women dress, and its less equal treatment of women than in the modern Western world. But this too was recently a part of the Christian world, often with religious justification.

Certainly, there is a range of how this manifests within the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban impose absurdly strict modestly standards. American Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia, in contrast, are still more strict than modern Americans and Western Europeans, but are far less extreme than Saudi Arabians.

European and American styles of dress for women were common in Afghanistan and Iran in the 1970s, but this shift was rolled back in Islamic revolutions.

Still, Victorian England, and most predominantly Christian countries in that era, were similar in standards of female modesty to many Islamic countries today. In the early 19th century, women were still wearing swim wear that looked suspiciously similar to "burkinis" in Europe and the U.S. Women were still getting arrested and held in contempt of court for wearing pants in the United States, in the early 1900s. 

Not wearing a skirt or dress to school, even at the collegiate level, was something that women got in trouble for doing up to the early 1960s in the U.S., and skirts are still part of mandatory school uniforms for girls in Japan, much of Asia, and some places in the British Commonwealth.

Marriage

Polygamy and cousin marriage ended much sooner in countries that became Christian than it did in the Islamic world where it is still common in much of the Middle East, West Asia, South Asia, and Africa, although polygamy is banned in both Turkey and Tunisia as a matter of secular law and is quite rare in most Islamic countries. And, cousin marriage is not common in much of the Islamic world.

Polygamy has been very rare, outside the early Mormons in the 19th century and some small splinter Mormon sects after that, in places that have been predominantly Christian at the time, although tolerance for mistresses and concubines who are not Christian wives, instead of, or in addition to, Christian wives, has varied in European and Latin American history, and to a lesser extent until the early 19th century especially in places where slavery was permitted in North America and the Caribbean. Polygamy was at least as common as it is in modern polygamist countries in the Mediterranean world and Europe in the pagan era, and remains common today among animists in Africa.

In one exception to the trend, divorce has been allowed in Islam from the outset, while it was banned entirely until the 16th century, and was virtually non-existent in most Christian countries until the 19th century (with divorces generally only available from the legislature). Complete divorce bans for Christians existed in Ireland and Italy until a quite late date, and this is still the case in the Philippines.

Women's Rights

Mary Wollstonecraft was famously battling for women's rights in the U.K. and Europe in the 18th century. The Married Women's Property Acts that formally gave married women many private law rights and ended coverture law that absorbed women's private law personalities into their husbands were mostly passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is close to where women's rights in private law are today in many Islamic countries. Shi'ite Islamic communities have tended to be afford women greater rights than Sunni Islamic countries, although this may be more a matter of coincidence and local cultures and conditions than it is a matter of the doctrines of the religious sects, both of which vastly predate widespread democratic government.

Political Rights

The United States, at its independence in 1776, was one of the earliest and largest Republics since the fall of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (although the Swiss, Iceland, and some city states had it earlier). 

Constitutional monarchies afforded considerable democratic rights to a fairly narrow franchise of middle aged property owning white men in the U.K., but the British monarch had real power into the 19th century as the franchise was expanded by fits and starts there.

The French Revolution in 1789 was another early experiment in democratic government without a monarch, but this revolution was not stable with some form on monarchy persisting intermittently until 1870.

Most European and Latin American constitutional monarchies and republics arose in the late 19th century. The modal year at which European colonies with mostly non-European residents gained their independence in Africa and Asia was 1960, in most cases with Western style Republican government followed not many years after by military coups and dictatorships and multiple false starts before stable democratic government was established.

Much of the Islamic world was subject to European colonial rule for a long time. But outright strong monarchies now persist predominantly in the oil rich states of the Islamic world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco and Jordan are fairly close to where the British constitutional monarchy was at the time of the American Revolution. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have shed their monarchs for a while, but still struggle to make those republics stable multi-party democracies. The Middle East, generally, is still playing out the final acts of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which was formally dissolved with country lines redrawn after World War I, at a time when most of Europe and Latin America has republics. But World War II hit the reset button on democratic government in almost all of continental Europe, leading to the organization of new democratic regimes with the demise of most of them under fascism during World War II.

Eastern Europe and much of Africa and some of Latin America has Soviet style communist regimes until the fall end of the Cold War around 1989, and in some cases beyond, with holdouts like Cuba and Venezuela, and the post-communist era in these countries have only sometimes yielded multi-party democratic republics, and those that did persist still often have a political culture marked by authoritarian tendencies.

Women's Right To Vote

In the U.S. women's right to vote came late. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's right to vote at the national level was adopted only in 1920. Unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The U.S. was neither first nor last in the women's right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to allow a wide cross-section of women to vote in national elections in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and Denmark (including Iceland) in 1915. Many European countries followed in 1917 and 1918. But women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990.

Women has the right to vote in national elections in Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy, a predominantly Islamic country then and now, from 1919 to 1929.

Relative to the time that Islamic countries have become democratic republics, in the places where they have, women have gained the right to vote, if anything, sooner than they did in predominantly Christian countries, often from the outset.

South Asians In U.S. Presidential Politics

Two of the candidates for the GOP Presidential nomination, of the seven who are likely to make it to the first Republican Presidential debate, and the current U.S. Vice President, a Democrat, have South Asian ancestry.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu businessman, and Nikki Haley (Nimarata Nikki Haley, née Randhawa) former Governor of South Carolina and former US Ambassador to the UN who was born and raised as a Sikh, and is now a Methodist, are both running for the Republican Presidential nomination. Haley is one of the better polling candidates whose name is not "Trump". 

Vice President Kamala Harris is also of Indian decent. Her mother was from Chennai. Her father was from Jamaica. Harris was exposed to both African American Christian life and Hindu religious life as a child and is now a member of the American Baptist Church (the most politically moderate, predominantly white Baptist denomination). At this point there are no really viable announced Democratic challengers to the Biden-Harris ticket, even though a couple of candidates have thrown their hats into the ring.

Marriage and Child Bearing In South Asia

When I was in high school, almost half of 15 year old girls in Bangladesh had married. Now, it a little less than a quarter of them. But women in Bangladesh have far fewer children than they did then.

Via Brown Pundits.

Worker Safety In Qatar Is Poor

Basic Facts About Qatar

Qatar is shown in green. 

As the Huffington Post which is my source for the map and pronunciation of the country's name explains:

Qatar is a small Middle Eastern peninsula in the Persian Gulf bordered by Saudi Arabia. It has been ruled by the Al-Thani family since the mid-1800s, according to the CIA World Factbook, and has a population of about 840,000 people. It is slightly smaller than Connecticut. This tiny nation holds the world's third largest oil reserves, and oil and natural gas account for over 50 percent of the GDP.

Qatar is pronounced so that it sounds roughly like "cutter" and is one of the only words in which the letter Q appears without being followed by the letter "u" in its English spelling.

According to Wikipedia:

Qatar has been ruled as a hereditary monarchy by the House of Thani since Mohammed bin Thani signed a treaty with the British in 1868 that recognised its separate status. Following Ottoman rule, Qatar became a British protectorate in the early 20th century until gaining independence in 1971. The current emir is Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who holds nearly all executive and legislative authority under the Constitution of Qatar, as well as controlling the judiciary. He appoints the prime minister and cabinet. The partially-elected Consultative Assembly can block legislation and has a limited ability to dismiss ministers.

In early 2017, Qatar's total population was 2.6 million, with 313,000 of them Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates. Its official religion is Islam. In terms of income, the country has the fourth-highest GDP (PPP) per capita in the world, and the eleventh-highest GNI per capita (Atlas method). Qatar ranks 42nd in the Human Development Index, the third-highest HDI in the Arab world. It is a high-income economy, backed by the world's third-largest natural gas reserves and oil reserves. Qatar is one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, and the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita.

Qatar In The Spotlight

Qatar is currently hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup (the global championship for professional soccer, the world's leading sport) which has turned the spotlight on the country, not necessarily in a positive way. 

Qatar has received attention for its restrictions on beer consumption in a country where alcohol consumption is mostly banned due to Islamic prohibitions on consuming it, the hostility of the venue to LGBT associated symbols since hostility towards gays attributed to Islam is the norm there, its treatment of women justified by Islam, and its weak protections for human rights (particularly for migrant workers who make up 90% of the workforce) and its lack of democracy. 

I say "attributed to" and "justified by" because many of the "Islamic practices" of countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are not universal in predominantly Islamic countries and are justified with Islamic religious authorities in ways that do not compel the conclusions that these communities reach about what Islamic law requires according to many Muslims and Muslim religious scholars. 

Worker Safety In Qatar 

The issue addressed in this post, however, worker safety, is an issue with regard to which Islamic and Western norms, secular and religious alike, are not meaningfully in disagreement. The Qataris, like almost everyone else in the world, would prefer that there are no workplace fatalities.

World Cup chief Hassan Al-Thawadi said that between 400 and 500 migrant workers have died as a result of work done on projects connected to the tournament [since Qatar was selected to host this year's World Cup in 2010].

In an interview with Piers Morgan which aired on TalkTV on Monday, Al-Thawadi was asked about the number of fatalities to migrant workers as a result of the work done in the tournament and said: “The estimate is around 400, between 400 and 500.

“I don’t have the exact number, that’s something that’s been discussed. One death is too many, it’s as simple as that.”

From CNN.

* Fatal Occupational Injuries in U.S. in 2019: 5,333

World Almanac 2022 citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

* U.S. Population in 2019: 328.3 million

Google

* Fatal Occupational Injuries per year in U.S. per million people: 16.2

* Per Capita GDP in U.S.: $63,554

World Almanac 2022

* Average Annual Migrant Worker Fatal Deaths in Qatar: 650

2010-2019 for South Asian migrant workers only per CNN citing the Guardian

* Percentage of workforce made up of migrant workers in Qatar: 90%

CNN citing Amnesty International

* Qatar Population in 2019: 2.832 million

Google

* Fatal Migrant Worker deaths per year in Qatar per million people: 229.5

* Adjusted Qatar rate since migrant workers are 90% of the workforce: 255

* Per capita GDP in Qatar: $89,949

World Almanac 2022

Migrant workers in Qatar, who make up 90% of the workforce there, are about 15 times as likely as U.S. workers to die on the job in any given year.

The workplace death rate in Qatar is roughly what it was in the United States in 1913, before there was any significant governmental regulation of workplace safety in the United States.

In 1913, the Bureau of Labor Statistics documented approximately 23,000 industrial deaths among a workforce of 38 million, equivalent to a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. Under a different reporting system, data from the National Safety Council from 1933 through 1997 indicate that deaths from unintentional work-related injuries declined 90%, from 37 per 100,000 workers to 4 per 100,000. The corresponding annual number of deaths decreased from 14,500 to 5100; during this same period, the workforce more than tripled, from 39 million to approximately 130 million.

From the U.S. Center For Disease Control citing National Safety Council. Accident facts, 1998 edition. Itasca, Illinois: National Safety Council, 1998 and Corn JK. Response to occupational health hazards: a historical perspective. New York, New York: Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.

Blood Relationships 501

Review of Standard Consanguinity Relationships

Understanding the relationships in a standard consanguinity chart (shown with both words and a number of degree of consanguinity below) is Blood Relationships 201: advanced but widely known.

But not everybody is familiar with the kinds of kinship relationships below, which are graduate school level blood relationships.

Half and Three-Quarter Sibling Relationships

Relationships that produce three-quarter siblings are not incestuous (although circumstances like a stepfather having a child with both a wife and a stepchild through that wife are, at a minimum, frowned upon and sometimes illegal). 

Three-quarter siblings can arise in polygamous marriages (which are permitted in most of Africa and in most places with significant Muslim populations) and sequential multiple marriages and relationships (which are becoming increasingly common in the Western world) between related partners.

The Legality of Polygamy. From Wikipedia.

Islamic law is usually interpreted as allowing but disfavoring polygyny with up to four wives at a time. But it prohibits all or more polygynous marriages that produce three-quarter siblings as Mahram (see also here). Other cultures that allow polygamous marriages actually prefer polygamous marriages that produce three-quarter siblings (for polygynous cases see here). For example, in the Himalayan Mountains, one of the main areas where polyandry has been practiced, brothers marry the same wife to prevent scarce land owned by the parents of the brothers from being divided.

There are two kinds of half-siblings, with varying degrees of consanguinuity (blood-sharing):

• uterine sibling refers to when you share the same mother (the same uterus) also called a maternal half-sibling
• agnate sibling refers to when you share the same father (from agnatus, paternal kinsman) also called a paternal half-sibling

A sub-group of half-siblings are three-quarter siblings (3/4 or 0.75). This occurs when the unshared parent has mean consanguanuity of 50%. This includes full siblings and parent/child. There are two kinds of 3/4 siblings:

• horizantal: when the unshared parents are siblings, such as a man impregnating two sisters, or two brothers impregnating the same woman
  • this makes the 3/4 siblings first cousins, too
  • in the case of the unshared parents being identical twins, they are effectively full siblings
• vertical: in the case of the unshared parents sharing a parental relationship, such as a father and son impregnating the same woman, or a man impregnating a mother and daughter

From here.

An increasingly common situation is for someone to have a great many half-siblings through a common anonymous sperm donor. For example, 150 half-siblings in one documented case. See also here:

There are no records of how many sperm donations are made every year in the US, nor of how many children are conceived, but it is frequently said to be between 30,000 to 60,000 births per year. [Wendy] Kramer with the DSR [Donor Sibling Registry] argues that number is woefully out of date.

Still, the scandals tend to find the media spotlight. There was the man whose samples were used to produce more than 150 children, the many parents who end up unintentionally having children of different races (in one instance because a clinic was said to have confused “Donor 380” with “Donor 330”), the woman whose dead husband’s samples were misplaced and allegedly used to impregnate other women, or the Georgia clinic that allegedly marketed a donor to hopeful parents as a neuroscience genius studying a PhD in engineering but who was in reality an ex-con who had never attended college and had a history of psychiatric hospitalization. His sample has been used to conceive at least 36 children. . . 

A 2018 survey of almost 500 donor-conceived people conducted by Kramer’s website found that almost a quarter of them had used DNA testing to track down their donor.

As more donor-conceived children find their biological parents and half siblings, new and extended family units are forming. One 2016 study of 419 donor-conceived children found more than a third of them get together once a year with the half siblings they’ve discovered, and a fifth of them meet up together several times a year. Some 42% of them said they considered their half sibling to be part of their immediate nuclear family.

Rare Types Of Twins 

Here’s the run-down on various types of twinning. I threw in chimerism because this is essentially reverse-twinning and thereby relevant to discussing numbers of eggs and sperm and egg fusion events.

• Monozygotic twins - one egg, one sperm, fertilized egg splits (also called “identical” twins)

• Dizygotic twins - two eggs, each fertilized separately by its own sperm (also called “fraternal” twins and no more similar genetically than typical siblings born at different times)

• Chimeric person* - two eggs, two sperm, the two fertilized eggs fuse early to form one person [*Not actually a twin, but a related concept.]

• Sesquizygotic twins - one egg, fertilized by two sperm 

From here. 

Superfecundation is the fertilization of two or more ova from the same cycle by sperm from separate acts of sexual intercourse, which can lead to twin babies from two separate biological fathers. The term superfecundation is derived from fecund, meaning the ability to produce offspring. Homopaternal superfecundation refers to the fertilization of two separate ova from the same father, leading to fraternal twins; while heteropaternal superfecundation is referred to as a form of atypical twinning where, genetically, the twins are half siblings. Superfecundation, while rare, can occur through either a complex single occurrence of sexual intercourse, separate occurrences of sexual intercourse, or through artificial insemination.

From here.

These twins are full siblings (i.e. they have the same genetic father and the same genetic mother).

It is also possible for ordinary fraternal twins to appear to be heteroparental mixed race twins (a.k.a. "mixed twins") when, in fact, that were full siblings who simply inherit different genes from parents who have ancestry from more than one continent, most often in interracial marriages, but also in the case of children of people with mixed race ancestors even if both parents are identified as belonging to the same race, something that is true to some degree in the United States for almost all African-Americans, and for most Native American and Hispanics.

Double Cousins

Cousin marriage rates. Image from Wikipedia.

Double cousins are uncommon, but not particularly rare, in places where cousin marriage is common (mostly in certain subsets of the Islamic world, such as the Arab world where about 45% of marriages are between cousins (see also here), and in North Africa, West Asia, and South Asia). 

Twenty-five U.S. states ban first cousin marriage (under laws mostly adopted in the post-Civil War era). In the U.S. about 0.2% of marriages (involving about 250,000 people) are between people who are second cousins or more closely related and studies have shown that first cousin marriages present only slightly elevated health risks (1.7% to 3.5% higher) unless they are double cousins or otherwise highly inbred (in which case health risks are significantly elevated).

Double cousins are when two siblings of one family have children with two siblings of another family (brother/brother, sister/sister or brother/sister, sister/brother).

The children are related to each other through both of their parents and are considered double related.

Double second cousins can happen in two ways.

* From the relationships of two first-cousins with two other first-cousins.

* From the relationships two double-first-cousins with two other persons.

Double first cousins share both sets of grandparents and have twice the degree of kinship of ordinary first cousins.

How Does This Affect Genetics and DNA?

Genetically, double cousins could test with numbers consistent with half-siblings.

Normal first cousins (cousins with one parent of each as a sibling while the second parents are unrelated), can share roughly 12% of their inherited DNA. Double cousins, because both parents are siblings to each other, can share roughly 25% of inherited DNA.

This is the same amount of DNA that you would share with a grandparent, a half-sibling or an aunt or uncle.

Real Life Examples

Double Cousins

The family tree below is an example of double cousins. Anna and Marie Clemens are sisters, twins as a matter of fact. Joseph and Theodore Schneble are brothers.

Their children are considered double cousins.

They will share both sets of grandparents through the Clemens and Schneble family.

Because Anna and Marie are twins, they may even share more than 25% shared DNA. However, we would need to know if Anna and Marie are identical or fraternal twins. UPDATE: In speaking with Schneble descendants of Anna and Marie and seeing pictures of them, they were not identical twins.

What if Joseph and Theodore were twins as well?

According to the website FamilyPedia.wikia.com, when identical twins have children with identical twins, the children are genetically indistinguishable from full siblings. When identical twins reproduce with siblings the resulting children are more related than half-siblings but less related than full siblings.

From here.

Human Development Index By Region In South Asia

There are stark regional divisions in standard of living across South Asia. It is the least homogeneous region in the world in that respect. The fact that Sri Lanka is near the top, despite the fact that it had almost as long of a civil war as Afghanistan, which is near the bottom, in recent history, is particularly notable.

Hat tip to Razib Khan.

Also, total fertility rate in South Asia from the same author at the same blog in other post.

The Populations Of Leading Global Cities Over Time

From Razib Khan at Brown Pundits.

For what it's worth some of the color distinctions are challenging to make for me without the context of knowing what the relative size of some of these cities should be. The populations appear to be urbanized area populations.

Also, to be clear, it isn't a comprehensive list of large cities in the world (this UN publication is also the source for the maps below). The chart above omits, for example, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Beijing, Osaka and Kinshasa. The blog in question is focused on South Asian and nearby Central Asian affairs and culture. The others are chosen mostly for familiarity.

Wikipedia also has a list of the largest cities in the world that uses a somewhat more uniform definition of a city's population than the U.N. list, and on that list which Tokyo is 1st in the world, Seoul is 5th, New York City ranks 9th, Osaka is 16th, Los Angeles is 18th, Moscow is 23rd, London is 29th, and Paris is 34th. No place other than these eight cities in the "developed world" make it into the top 40 on that list.

The geographic distribution of all forty-five of the world's megacities with at least 10,000,000 as of the year 2018 or will have 10,000,000 by the year 2030, is shown above (Wikipedia counts 47 of them adding cities including Nagoya, Japan, Harbin, China and Rhine-Ruhr, Germany, while omitting a few others on the UN list).

For comparison sake, in the year 2000, there were only sixteen cities in the world with more than 10,000,000 people: Cairo, Beijing, Shanghai, Osaka, Tokyo, Dhaka, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Moscow, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, and New York City. All eight that in the Americas as of 2030 were there in 2000. Only one of the fourteen in Europe, Africa, West Asia or Southeast Asia (Cairo) was on the list. Four of the ten in South Asia were on the list in 2000. Four of the eleven in East Asia were on the list (but Japan's two are unchanged).

There were just nine of them in 1985. Probably less than half of those sixteen cities did not have more than ten million people when I was born. In 1950, during my parent's lifetimes, New York City was the only urban area with a population of over 10 million (it had a metro area population of 14.0 million people at the time). New York City's metro area probably crossed the 10 million threshold sometime between 1920 and 1930. Megacities really are something new under the Sun.

An interesting question is how long the great cities of today have continuously held major city status. In the New World, Mexico City and Lima were major cities even in the pre-Columbian era. Cairo is the oldest existing megacity in Europe, West Asia and North Africa; it has been a major city continuously for more than 5,000 years. Jericho is reputedly the oldest city on Earth (about 10,000 years old) but isn't now and hasn't for most of history been a major city. Paris became a major city in the Middle Ages, London has been a significant city for probably at least 3,000 years. Japan had no major cities more than 2000 to 2500 years ago, and realistically they're younger. China's oldest continuously major cities are older, by perhaps, a thousand years or so. Most of South Asia's major cities are less than 2500 years old, but Lahore and Karachi could be considerably older, it isn't clear to me if they were major cities back to the Indus Valley Civilization or not.

This map illustrates well the practical implications of the fact there are about 1.9 billion people who live in South Asia (mostly Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), and about 1.4 billion people who live in China. It also illustrates that most rapidly growing megacities are in Asia and Africa.

The eight megacities (or to be megacities as of 2030), with populations as of 2018, of North and South America are New York City at 18.8 million, Los Angeles at 12.5 million, Mexico City at 21.6 million, Buenos Aires at 15.0 million, Rio de Janeiro at 13.3 million, Sao Paulo at 21.7 million, Bogota at 10.6 million, and Lima at 10.4 million.

The six in Europe, West Asia and North Africa are Paris at 10.9 million, London at 9.0 million, Moscow at 12.4 million, Istanbul at 14.8 million, Tehran at 8.9 million and Cairo at 20.1 million.

The four in sub-Saharan Africa are Lagos at 13.5 million, Kinshasa at 13.2 million, Luanda (Angola) at 7.8 million, and Dar es Salaam at 6.0 million.

The four in Southeast Asia there are Jakarta at 10.5 million, Manilla at 13.5 million, Ho-Chi Minh City at 8.1 million, and Bangkok at 10.2 million.

The ten in South Asia are Dhaka at 19.6 million, Bangalore at 11.4 million, Chennai (Madras) at 10.5 million, Delhi at 20.5 million, Hyderabad at 9.5 million, Ahmadabad at 7.7 million, Kolkata (Calcutta) at 14.7 million, Mumbai (Bombay) at 20.0 million, Karachi at 15.4 million, and Lahore at 11.7 million.

The eleven in East Asia are Seoul at 10.0 million, Tokyo at 37.5 million, Kinki M.M.A. (Osaka) at 19.3 million, Tianjin at 13.2 million, Shenzhen at 11.9 million, Shanghai at 25.6 million, Nanjing, Jiangsu at 8.2 million, Guangzhou, Guangdong at 12.6 million, Chongqing at 14.8 million, Beijing at 19.6 million and Chengdu at 8.8 million.

In South Asia and East Asia megacities are so numerous that they start to bleed into each other (a bit like the major cities of the Northeast corridor in the United States).

Few examples in popular culture (with the notable example of the Netflix only series Sense8) convey any sense of how much of the world lives in new burgeoning cities around the world, many of which are so new that they aren't household names despite their size. For example: Luanda (Angola), Ahmadabad (India), Tianjin (China), Chongqing (China) and Chengdu (China).

The text accompanying the map above states:

In some cities, population decline occurred in response to a natural disaster. This has been the case, for example, in New Orleans, United States, which lost population after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and in Sendai, Japan, following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Economic contraction has also contributed to population decline in some places. For example, Buffalo and Detroit, both located in the United States, experienced population decline associated with the loss of industry and jobs. In most cases, however, declining or stagnating populations have been associated with persistent low fertility rates, particularly in Europe. The 52 cities with declining populations were home to 59 million people in 2018, down from more than 62 million in 2000.

The map above of the 52 cities with populations of 500,000 or more in the urbanized area as of 2018 (out of 1,146 such cities in the world) is even more telling.

The Northeast corridor and Rust Belt of the U.S., Europe, Korea and Japan are home to 44 out of 52 of them. Four more were in the Gulf of Mexico area, on was in Africa, one was in Central Asia, and two were in South Asia. This reflects not just the demographic transition associated with becoming a developed country, but the very late stages of that process.

The U.S., outside of the Northeast, and Australia, despite being developed, have thus far evaded this trend, as have "Asian Tigers" like Taiwan and Singapore.

A notable observation, the implications of which deserve more thought and analysis, is that almost all of the world's high speed intercity rail (outside of China most of which are just a few years old), and pretty much all of the leading intracity rail systems in the world, are located in areas where the populations of major cities is declining.

Americans From South Asia Are Much More Genetically Diverse Than Chinese Americans

Razib does some basic analysis of with the genomes of Americans ancestrally from South Asia and from China, respectfully. It is summed up in this chart:

In both case, immigration to the United States is not uniform. Some geographic areas and some castes in India are greatly overrepresented. In the case of China:

[T]he American Chinese community has been historically biased toward being mostly Cantonese. More recently, there have been migrants from Fujian.

In the case of South Asia:

[T]he middle Indian cluster are South Indian brahmins who have high levels of ANI and the top cluster is North Indian brahmins/? probably punjabis more in the north. there aren’t many ppl from the cow belt in the USA. some south indian brahmins, but they’ll be in the same position as a lot of gujus.

But, as the chart above illustrates, the genetic diversity of the various South Asian populations that have immigrated to the United States is vast compared to that of the ethnically Han immigrants to the United States from China.

This reflects the underlying reality that South Asia itself has much more genetic diversity than China does.