Astral Codex Ten

Aborigines

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Aborigines

Article

Aborigines is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 03, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Aborigines had the opposite problem - they thought possible a spirit impregnated the mother”; “When a large group of Aborigines was assembled two years later”. It most often appears alongside Arguments About Aborigines, Wikipedia, 23andme.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 03, 2025
  • Last seen: July 15, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
In fact, I think the ways this picture presents an overly rosy view of village common sense go beyond that. I've read (I think this was in Arguments About Aborigines, but not going to hunt for a full citation) that in many poor uneducated parts of Europe until the 18th or 19th century, people still didn't agree on whether the mother gave any genes to the child, or whether she was just the "soil" in which the father's "seed" could grow. Aborigines had the opposite problem - they thought possible a spirit impregnated the mother, and the sex act helped summon the spirit but the father's "genetics" (to the degree that they understood the term) didn't matter. The ancient Greeks had an even weirder view, telegony, where the child's paternal genetics were the sum of everyone who the mother ever had sex with.
Inline links: Arguments About Aborigines, telegony
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines was: What are anthropologists even doing?
Inline links: Arguments About Aborigines
The book recounts two centuries’ worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years embedded in one another’s culture. What stopped some Westerner from approaching an Aborigine, asking “So, do you have chiefs?” and resolving a hundred years of bitter academic debate?
Of course the answer must be something like “categories from different cultures don’t map neatly into another, and Aboriginal hierarchies have something that matches the Western idea of ‘chief’ in some sense but not in others”. And there are other complicating factors - maybe some Aboriginal tribes have chiefs and others don’t. Or maybe Aboriginal social organization changed after Western contact, and whatever chiefs they do or don’t have are a foreign imposition. Or maybe something about chiefs is taboo, and if you ask an Aborigine directly they’ll lie or dissemble or say something that’s obviously a euphemism to them but totally meaningless to you. All of these points are well taken. It still seems weird that the West could interact with an entire continent full of Aborigines for two hundred years and remain confused about basic facts of their social lives. You can repeat the usual platitudes about why anthropology is hard as many times as you want; it still doesn’t quite seem to sink in.