[HN Gopher] First portrait of mysterious Denisovans drawn from D...
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       First portrait of mysterious Denisovans drawn from DNA (2019)
        
       Author : Hooke
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2021-01-24 03:16 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | ur-whale wrote:
       | Am I the only one who finds these kind of articles completely
       | unscientific?
       | 
       | And published in nature, no less!
        
         | kyberias wrote:
         | This is a news article, not a scientific article.
         | 
         | The actual (one of them) article referenced is this (from
         | Cell):
         | 
         | https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cell.2019.08.035
        
         | tokai wrote:
         | It's not a scientific article. It is a journalistic article
         | about research. Ewen Callaway is a journalist. He is
         | disseminating actual science published in Nature. You are
         | misunderstanding the premise of the text.
        
           | ur-whale wrote:
           | The article, whomever wrote it, is published on their web
           | site and thus carries their name and it's reputation.
           | 
           | The article is garbage and therefore tarnishes the journal's
           | reputation even if it isn't published in the journal itself.
        
             | tokai wrote:
             | It is published in the journal - as news. I don't care if
             | its good or bad, but your opinion is not worth anything if
             | you lack the literacy to understand what kind of text it
             | is.
        
       | j7ake wrote:
       | How does one draw a face from DNA? Like if I took the the
       | Denisovan genome and randomly mutated a small fraction of
       | nucleotides and asked how its face changed, what would be the
       | answer?
        
         | chmod775 wrote:
         | We know how certain things in DNA of humans alive today map to
         | features, measurements, etc.
         | 
         | Finding some bones/skulls also helps a lot.
         | 
         | It's probably not _that_ accurate though, like you would be
         | able to tell what Denisovans looked like generally, but not
         | what _a_ Denisovan looked like with any accuracy.
         | 
         | For modern human individuals it's pretty limited to 'obvious'
         | traits like eye color, hair color, and skin color.
         | 
         | There was some projects that tried to chart beyond that, but
         | the results are just... ok:
         | https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10166
         | 
         | You might be able to pick someone out of a hundred with that
         | (check Fig. 2 for an example).
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-24 23:01 UTC)