[HN Gopher] Out of Africa: celebrating 100 years of human-origin...
___________________________________________________________________
Out of Africa: celebrating 100 years of human-origins research
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-02-06 12:23 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Given the implications of this kind of science, people often find
| it hard to accept the findings and much preferred the multi-
| regional hypothesis as many find it more palatable and similar to
| the mythos of people having popped out from the same area or
| region that they their most recent ancestors have lived
| nabla9 wrote:
| Genetic studies have put an end to that kind of speculation.
|
| Only crackpots and religious nuts are supporting alternatives.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Which "religious nuts" support a "multi-regional hypothesis"?
| A mono-regional 'Eden' is supported in Abrahamic religions.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Presumably tribal religions
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Which tribes? Don't the Abrahamic religions stem from the
| tribes of Israel?
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| I might accidentally be using a dated term for it,
| Wikipedia redirects to "Ethnic Religion".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_religion
| trallnag wrote:
| For example the religious group "Nation of Islam"
| believes that Yakub, a black scientist, crated the white
| race / ethnic group and tricknology a few thousand years
| ago
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The Nation of Islam are Muslims. They would be considered
| theologically descended from the Abrahamic line of
| religions. They would certainly not be considered a
| "tribe". And they take their creation mythology from the
| Koran.
|
| I think you may be talking about the ADOS people who
| believe all sorts of conspiracy theories like that, but
| are not a religious group at all. However they do believe
| black Christians and black Muslims are following the
| "white man's" religions. In any case, their beliefs would
| mean the ADOS nutjobs are _technically_ "crackpots", as
| the initial post indicated, rather than a "tribe".
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| > The Nation of Islam are Muslims. They would be
| considered theologically descended from the Abrahamic
| line of religions.
|
| Not really, and most Muslims would dispute that the
| Nation of Islam is Islam.
|
| The Nation of Islam is essentially a newly invented
| religion from the early 1900s. It has its own extensive
| Sci-Fi mythology (including the Yakub story) that is
| pretty much entirely different from Islam, though it
| borrows some aspects of Islam. It's heavily influenced by
| Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > The Nation of Islam are Muslims.
|
| Not according to mainstream Muslims.
| ty6853 wrote:
| All Americans are African Americans, as I put it.
|
| Put it on your med school applications too when submitting
| MCAT scores.
| foxhop wrote:
| Politically motivated bollocks.
|
| The white colonizer did not get colonized by tribes in
| Africa.
| noch wrote:
| > [T]he mythos of people having popped out from the same area
| or region that they their most recent ancestors have lived
| [...]
|
| >> Genetic studies have put an end to that kind of
| speculation. Only crackpots and religious nuts are supporting
| alternatives.
|
| David Reich (author of "Who We Are and How We Got Here:
| Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past") says[^0]:
|
| " The modern human lineage, leading to the great majority of
| the ancestors of people today, was probably in sub-Saharan
| Africa for the last 500,000 years at least. It might be much
| more. Certainly our main lineage was in Africa, probably 3-7
| million years ago.
|
| _But in a period between about 2 million to 500,000 years
| ago, it 's not at all clear where the main ancestors leading
| to modern humans were_. There were humans throughout many
| parts of Eurasia and Africa with a parallel increase in brain
| size and not obviously closer ancestrality to modern humans
| in one place than in the other. It's not clear where the main
| lineages were. Maybe they were in both places and mixed to
| form the lineages that gave rise to people today.
|
| _There 's been an assumption where Africa's been at the
| center of everything for many millions of years_. Certainly
| it's been absolutely central at many periods in human
| history. But in this key period when a lot of important
| changes happen--when modern humans develop from Homo habilis
| and Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis and the
| shared ancestor of Neanderthals, modern humans, and
| Denisovans-- that time period which is when a lot of the
| important change happened, it's not clear, based on the
| archaeology and genetics, where that occurred as I understand
| it. " (emphasis mine throughout)
|
| ---
|
| [^0]: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david-reich
| nabla9 wrote:
| >But in this key period when a lot of important changes
| happen--when modern humans develop from Homo habilis and
| Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis
|
| That's a time period before homo sapiens, not after.
| themgt wrote:
| David Reich is widely acknowledged as a top if not the
| foremost leader in the field of ancient human origins,
| and he's talking about exactly the debate you claim is
| settled to everyone but crackpots. His interview with
| Dwarkesh Patel linked by OP is one of the most
| informative you'll find anywhere.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reich_(geneticist)
| Tor3 wrote:
| "people often find it hard to accept the findings and much
| preferred the multi-regional hypothesis"
|
| Why would people find it hard to accept out of Africa? Why
| would people prefer the / a multi-regional hypothesis? Is this
| even true? Can't say I've ever met anyone who've argued "it
| must be so", not to mention providing any reasoning for
| anything such.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Anytime something is declared an unquestionable truth, it's
| going to attract questions. Usually this ends up being
| pointless but sometimes unquestionable truths end up being
| false.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| These people exist, though much more rarely than they did
| 30/40 years ago when the genetic data wasn't yet fully in.
| It's quite a popular school of thought among Chinese
| biological anthropologists because originally, it was used to
| support the idea of China as the ethnic homeland for han
| people back in the 50s. Now it's just an idea that's become
| institutionally ingrained.
| graemep wrote:
| Racism. Much easier to believe in intrinsic differences
| between races if they do not share close common ancestry.
|
| Other systems of racism can also tied to some sort of belief
| in separate origins - caste in India.
| willmadden wrote:
| Here's why I find it hard to accept out of Africa (OOA).
|
| Ancient Fossil Evidence Outside Africa - Fossil remains
| predating the supposed OOA migration (~60,000 years ago) have
| been found in China (Dali skull, 260,000 years old), Greece
| (Apidima 1, 210,000 years old), and the Levant (Misliya jaw,
| ~177,000 years old), suggesting Homo sapiens or proto-sapiens
| were present outside Africa long before the mainstream
| migration timeline.
|
| Genetic Discrepancies - Some non-African populations (e.g.,
| Australo-Melanesians and East Asians) possess archaic DNA
| from unknown hominins not found in Africans, implying deep
| regional continuity rather than a complete replacement by
| recent African migrants.
|
| Multiple Ancestral Lineages - The discovery of distinct
| ancient hominin populations, such as the Denisovans and Red
| Deer Cave people, suggests a complex web of interbreeding
| rather than a single-origin replacement model.
|
| Stone Tool Continuity in Asia - The presence of advanced
| stone tools in Asia (e.g., at Jwalapuram, India, ~74,000
| years ago) suggests technological continuity rather than a
| disruption expected from an OOA replacement event.
|
| MtDNA & Y-Chromosome Inconsistencies - While mitochondrial
| DNA (mtDNA) is often cited in support of OOA, recent studies
| indicate that some deep-rooted Y-chromosome lineages (e.g.,
| haplogroup D found in Tibetans and Andamanese) show ancient
| divergence outside Africa, inconsistent with a recent African
| bottleneck.
|
| Early Human Artifacts in the Americas - Artifacts and
| footprints in the Americas (e.g., White Sands, ~21,000-23,000
| years ago) suggest a much earlier presence of humans,
| challenging the late migration model and implying deeper
| population history.
|
| Human evolution and migration were likely far more complex
| than a single, recent dispersal from Africa. The evidence
| supports alternative models such as multiregional evolution
| or earlier, undocumented migrations.
| Asooka wrote:
| Exactly. Even if it is not entirely correct, the single-origin
| "out of Africa" theory is extremely useful in fostering unity
| and stamping out racism amongst people. We need to be really
| careful in how we present scientific advancements that may
| affect that theory, since any erosion of its political power
| will give ammunition to alt-right racism at a very precarious
| time in world history. It is the duty of every intelligent
| individual navigating these topics to keep in mind that the
| Africa theory must be presented as the main branch of humanity
| with any additional findings shown _only_ as alternate streams
| that change, but do NOT enhance, the base human. Obviously we
| must also explain that any evolutionary change to the human
| species coming out of Africa has been entirely lateral and not
| vertical, lest the same alt-right racism take it to mean the
| African diaspora is somehow "less evolved".
| TealMyEal wrote:
| To anyone that has a intrest in this area, (which if you are
| reading this you proably have some) I would highly reccomend the
| book Fossil Men by Kermit Pattison. Also if anyone has some book
| reccomendations along these lines plz do send them my way
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30653582-fossil-men
| ne8il wrote:
| "The Sediments of Time" by Meave Leakey is fascinating both
| from her life and her family history.
|
| "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" by Rebecca
| Wragg-Sykes is great.
|
| "Almost Human" by Lee Berger is about one particular discovery
| rather than human origins as a whole but is an entertaining
| read - there was an accompanying PBS special (NOVA?) that's
| worth watching as well to really understand the scale of some
| of the caves they were in.
| hoseja wrote:
| Will they also be celebrating Out of Pontic Steppe?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Humans didn't originate there, so unlikely.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| is that an alternative theory? I don't get the connection or is
| there some implied reference I am not getting?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| I'm guessing that it's a reference to the leading theory for
| the origin of the Indo-European language family.[0]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_homeland
| pwrson wrote:
| How do archeologists solve the survivor bias of the "Out of
| Africa" theory?
|
| After all, if humans were randomly distributed on planet Earth
| according to the local environment's carrying capacity, 100 000
| years later Id expect to find a lot more human remains in Eritrea
| than the Pontine marshes.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| _Archaeologists_ don 't, human origins is the domain of
| anthropologists. There's some overlap, but they're different
| professional specialties.
|
| Anyway, multiple concurrent lines of evidence. You're
| morphologically similar to ancient African ancestors. The
| serial founder effect points to Africa. Molecular clocks point
| to Africa. Fossil evidence points to Africa.
|
| Anthropologists don't think anatomically modern humans
| originated exclusively in the places with the most fossils
| though. That's just where we find the most fossils.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Bodies in certain environments (e.g. especially some
| bogs/marshes) are much more likely to be preserved? On the
| other hand it's extremely unlikely for human remains to survive
| for long in tropical forests or similar places.
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| And there is so much still to uncover. Just the other day I was
| going through Neanderthal DNA during lunch and noticed that three
| of the four existing DNA samples show that they were carriers for
| the rs6467 form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to
| 21-Hydroxylase Deficiency.
|
| Neanderthals were highly inbred and had low population numbers.
| Being a carrier of this form of CAH would have absolutely kept
| the population numbers low all by itself as getting two copies
| would have been nonviable. Further Neanderthals are most known
| for contributing to human specific DNA sets such as improved
| immune system. Here we have something that even in the non
| classic form is havoc with the HPA-Axis and give incredible
| evolutionary pressure to resolve, one way is to simply
| dramatically improve the immune system.
|
| As far as I can tell this hasn't been written about before. Lots
| of stuff like this will be noticed and or figured out in the
| decades ahead.
| throwup238 wrote:
| IMO the next big thing - if anyone ever has the stones to
| propose it - is going to be the reclassification of many
| archaic human species as subspecies of _Homo sapiens_. The
| difference between humans and known neanderthal samples is
| barely more than the genetic diversity within extant humans.
| The more data we get, the more archaic humans in general look
| like small morphological variations of the hairless monkeys we
| see now. I think the taxonomy we have is the result of
| prestige-seeking behavior more so than actual science.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never
| explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the
| evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote
| chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
|
| For example you can spend your career mapping hundreds of
| small-effect variants linked to intelligence or phenotypes
| that lead to increased likelihood of certain behaviours.
|
| You can even publish a study showing that people who carry a
| certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have
| "increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent
| recidivist crimes", and that the variant is more prevalent in
| prison populations than the general public in a certain
| region.
|
| You can also publish a population genetics study showing that
| humans have relatively easily computed genetic structure
| (see: 23andMe ancestry) because countless alleles are
| practically fixed in certain populations relative to others
| due to selection or founder effects, or are prevalent enough
| that if you have a segment of your genome with enough of them
| them you must have had an ancestor from a certain region.
|
| What you can't do is combine these concepts into any
| uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| Which uncomfortable findings are you referring to?
|
| Apparently, they're also hard to plainly state on an
| anonymous forum as well. Weird.
| ahoka wrote:
| That confusing cause and effect would not be proper
| science? Just guessing.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I'm not sure?
|
| I think it's even deeper than confusing cause and effect.
|
| I mean, maybe I'm missing some information, but the
| comment says:
|
| _a study showing that people who carry a certain gene
| variant and experienced childhood neglect have "increased
| risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist
| crimes"_
|
| The potential fundamental error there is the whole
| multiple independent variable thing. The study was likely
| designed from the outset without regard to the
| fundamentals of the scientific method. Which is a bigger
| issue than just confusing cause and effect. It gives
| other scientists a suspicion that the people doing the
| study aren't even aware of the potential confounding
| nature of the design?
|
| The people doing the study will of course call the
| "snobbish" scientists "anti-racists" for pointing these
| things out. But scientists are neither "racist" nor
| "anti-racist". The conclusions follow from the data via
| the scientific method, or the conclusions don't follow. A
| good scientist will not presume, a priori, what the
| conclusions are. In this instance, scientists can be
| forgiven for concluding that the findings don't follow.
|
| Scientists are better described as Scientific Method
| Fundamentalists. If they believe in anything, it is the
| scientific method. Everything else? Well, yeah, you will
| need to convince them. The good news is you can do that,
| but you have to use the scientific method to do so. If
| you don't, they rightfully dismiss you out of hand.
|
| I think the people who push these studies are
| misunderstanding the dismissal of their "findings" as
| antagonism to their conclusions. And on the other side,
| there are probably scientists who are not even bothering
| to explain the nature of their problem to them. There's
| probably a sense of, "It's a waste of time to talk to
| them", on both sides.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| >> The study was likely designed from the outset without
| regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method.
|
| Oh yeah, you will definitely need to assume that!
| transcriptase wrote:
| That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no
| less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to
| be found at observably different frequencies between
| populations than the ones used to create an ancestry
| report. Presumably because racists would ignore all the
| mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent
| the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
| dkural wrote:
| Looking for intelligence differences between people of
| different skin color makes as much sense as looking for
| intelligence differences between tall and short people.
| You seem to believe in distinct "races" as a genetic
| concept, whereas all I see in the data is correlations
| with place-of-collection. The more people you sample
| from, the more any clustering will literally start
| looking like a physical map of the world.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| So, what would you say about looking for intelligence
| differences between people of different _ancestry_?
|
| We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a
| single place or two: marathon winners come
| disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle
| cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs
| disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim.
|
| Few people dispute the above. The really controversial
| question is whether there are any such differences from
| the neck up, so to say.
| guelo wrote:
| If any such differences exist it would be, at a
| population level, two highly overlapping normal
| distributions with slightly different means, well within
| a standard deviation. In other words, the differences
| within each population would be much greater than between
| the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people
| as individuals because the ancestry provides little
| signal. So then why is there so much interest among
| skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types
| on this question?
| lottin wrote:
| The only way of knowing whether such differences are big
| or small (or whether they exist at all) is by performing
| a scientific analysis.
|
| To insist that nobody should look into it because what
| they might find could upset you is just bizarre.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "If any such differences exist it would be, at a
| population level, two highly overlapping normal
| distributions with slightly different means, well within
| a standard deviation."
|
| Overlapping normal distribution, yes, but _slightly
| different means, well within a standard deviation_ seems
| to be overconfident.
|
| "Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals
| because the ancestry provides little signal."
|
| No contest here.
|
| "So then why is there so much interest among skeptical,
| contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this
| question?"
|
| Because the difference at the extremes would be
| significant, and would explain overrepresentation and
| underrepresentation of certain groups among, say, top
| scientists.
|
| The competing hypothesis, which explains differences
| among groups by discrimination and/or poverty, doesn't
| fully explain why heavily persecuted groups such as
| Jewish or Vietnamese refugees still manage an academic
| rebound within a generation or so of arriving into
| safety, even though they are still targeted by racial
| hatred. Taken globally or even just in the US, the
| correlation between academic success and
| persecution/power status is weak enough that it makes
| people doubt the "discrimination/poverty" explanation and
| motivates them to seek alternatives.
| transcriptase wrote:
| I've said nothing of the sort. I'm also well aware of the
| concept of admixture and that dimensionality reduction
| methods like PCA and MDS with enough samples mirror
| geography. I also know that the variants contributing the
| most to the X and Y axes of such analyses are the ones
| with a high FST, because unsurprisingly prior to a few
| hundred years ago people didn't move around that much and
| were subject to different genetic bottlenecks and
| selection pressures. And most alleles are rare, so when
| one is fixed between populations it's generally
| informative from an ancestry standpoint even if non-
| coding.
|
| Your reflexive dismissal of something that's not only
| factual but wouldn't be controversial about any
| vertebrate except humans is exactly what I was alluding
| to.
| graemep wrote:
| > That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no
| less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to
| be found at observably different frequencies between
| populations than the ones used to create an ancestry
| report.
|
| I though ancestry reports were regarded as unreliable to
| the point of meaninglessness because the genes used were
| not sufficiently strong indicators of population?
|
| > Presumably because racists would ignore all the
| mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent
| the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
|
| Not discussing something because people can misrepresent
| it is a bad idea. it is both wrong, and has the opposite
| effect to that intended because it lends credibility to
| claims of cover up.
| transcriptase wrote:
| I would posit that whoever is saying they're unreliable
| has an agenda. Are they 100% accurate in the sense of
| being able to determine whether you're 6.2 vs 6.3%
| Italian? No, there's always a small degree of uncertainty
| as more genomes are sequenced and reference panels are
| updated, but at this point unless you're from an isolated
| tribe in the Amazon or some incredibly niche case they're
| very representative.
|
| Most people don't necessarily understand recombination
| and that if three of your grandparents are Danish and one
| of your grandparents is, Italian, then you are going to
| be on average 25% Italian... but that it's also a
| distribution centred around 25%. By luck of the draw you
| could be 3% or you could be 45% Italian genome-wise.
| People might base their identity on being 1/4 this or 1/8
| that, and be upset when an ancestry report gives the
| actual %.
| frigidwalnut wrote:
| The data are public! Why don't you show it?
| dani__german wrote:
| Which is a hilarious fact in itself.
|
| A common refrain among non religious people is that
| religion is false, self contradictory, or something
| similar.
|
| And yet the large overlap between these people and anti-
| racists cannot face the evidence that evolution applies to
| humans, and that genetic differences can have measurable
| effects. This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs,
| that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that
| evolution is real. Two completely incompatible beliefs (or
| concepts, if you can't stand such a word).
|
| Prevalence of the MAOA gene is quite interesting indeed.
|
| To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that
| Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we
| are all exactly equal in nature. That our only differences
| come from nurture. The other belief (or "non-skeptically
| accepted prospect") is that humanity has evolved, first
| from africa, then in disparate populations spread over the
| entire land area of the earth, being subject to many varied
| natural environments and thus selections. Such natural
| selections MUST select for different traits, often wildly
| different. Such traits cannot be contained to "skin color
| only" a meaningless, arbitrary restriction.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| > To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is
| that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually,
| that we are all exactly equal in nature.
|
| I'm not sure how "racism is bad" requires the idea that
| "we are all equal by nature".
|
| "Racism is bad" means that the law should treat us
| equally and that you should not treat people differently
| based solely on their skin color.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| You're referring to the normal and reasonable view, but I
| think most are targeting this weird new(ish) concept,
| heavily intertwined into politics, that any and all
| differences between groups are due to biases or other
| environmental factors.
|
| So if you see that e.g. one group is lagging behind in
| math then that is taken at face value as evidence that
| 'math is racist.' A search for that exact phrase will
| turn up a million hits, pushed by some very big entities,
| if you want to go down this rabbit hole.
|
| But if you don't already know about this stuff - just
| don't. The amount of stupidity and transparent
| divide+conquer politics in it all is just nauseating.
|
| On the other hand it does have contemporary relevance as
| a lot of the funding for this stuff is being scrapped,
| and it's nice to understand what we're 'losing.'
| Cornbilly wrote:
| I've read a few of those "math is racist" takes and I
| feel a lot of them make decent points about why math
| education is lacking in the US.
|
| But the ties to racism do seem inane and more to do with
| outrage culture becoming the norm after the social media
| explosion. It's unfortunate.
| t43562 wrote:
| There'd be no hilarity whatsoever if people discriminated
| against you based on something they said you could not
| change.
|
| Anyone doing actual science cannot determine whether you
| are worth hiring based on your DNA - all they can do is
| point to some correlations which don't tell them about
| you individually. It is quite possible for such research
| to be discredited in future by other studies.
|
| It's not even well defined what are all the
| characteristics that make a good "X" to then discriminate
| about because people of all kinds end up doing things we
| didn't expect them to be able to. What is intelligence
| and how many ways are there of measuring it and what kind
| does a certain job require anyhow?
|
| So it is factually and morally wrong to discriminate on
| DNA. It might be pointless to say this though, as I
| notice that to convert a prejudiced person into an anti-
| racist all you have to do is make them think they're
| being discriminated against.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| The fact that it's morally wrong (and IMHO objectively
| evil) does not mean that it wouldn't be an efficient
| policy purely from a strict utilitarian angle. Assuming
| we could actually identify the genetic markers that
| signal a higher likelihood of preferable traits even if
| on the whole it would only be e.g. 80% accurate that
| might still be useful. Individual outliers could just be
| ignored at minimal cost.
| t43562 wrote:
| Of course it would be inefficient because it is an
| extreme oversimplification of what is desirable (which is
| arguable) and whether or not certain markers would
| achieve it.
|
| The big mistake that racists and bigots make is in
| overvaluing whatever they think their own strengths are
| and undervaluing strengths they don't have.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that
| somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that
| evolution is real.
|
| This is a strawman of the real understanding that humans,
| as a species, have extremely low genetic diversity. Along
| with that, variations within a population are larger than
| variations between populations. In addition, there are
| countless confounding factors that play a larger role.
| Lastly, teasing out actual cause and effect is incredibly
| difficult. "Anti-racist" scientists simply understand to
| not take simplistic, reductive interpretations and jump
| to conclusions trying to get easy answers to complex
| situations.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > within a population are larger than variations between
| populations
|
| That doesn't really change anything, though. That low
| variance still might allow (and well.. obviously does)
| enough space for significant genetics differences (that
| impact everything ranging from physical properties to
| intelligence) between individuals or subgroups to
| manifest themselves.
|
| In theory we could certainly produce a "breed" of
| extremely physically fit "super-humans". Same probably
| applies to other traits. Not that anyone should be ever
| allowed under any circumstances to try something like
| that.
|
| With modern understanding of genetics eugenics would be
| more or less scientifically sound on paper (of course a
| dystopian society which regulates human breeding would be
| a horrible place to exist in even if it was made up of
| objectively "genetically superior" individuals)
| transcriptase wrote:
| Exactly. A single base pair out of 3 billion can cause
| blonde hair, sickle cell, dwarfism, and a million other
| things that aren't necessarily even negative. People from
| two different continents differing at hundreds of
| thousands of sites in addition to millions of within-
| population variants says nothing about phenotypic
| differences.
| jl6 wrote:
| Screening for Down syndrome is an example of modern
| eugenics.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| It's less hilarious when whole country policies are made
| on those assumptions thus ruining it economically
| (notably), and voicing any concerns is threatened with
| legal force.
|
| In France the official dogma of the educated is that
| every difference is cultural, and races don't exist. My
| father for example strongly held and defend those
| beliefs. Somehow he gets very angry when I ask why there
| is wide academic achievement difference between his
| children despite growing in the same environment, or how
| Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a foreigner
| while not uttering a single words. I think that deep down
| all those people know the truth but they don't want to
| admit it, nor admit it to other for fear of the social
| consequences.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > why there is wide academic achievement difference
| between his children despite growing in the same
| environment
|
| Why are there wide academic achievement differences
| between children who have the same "race" who grow up in
| the same environment? According to you, this should not
| be the case.
|
| > how Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a
| foreigner while not uttering a single words
|
| Do you think they can do so for any given person? I
| guarantee you there are foreign people who Japanese
| people don't guess are foreign, and non-foreign people
| who Japanese people guess are foreign. How can this be?
|
| I can sympathize with your father getting angry.
| Considering how trivial it is to come up with counter
| arguments, it must be frustrating to have this brought up
| more than once.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| > races don't exist
|
| Do they exist in a scientifically viable way?
|
| Most of the definitions around race are tied to a
| subjective view of a person's physical appearance.
|
| Is Obama (the son of a black Kenyan man and a white
| American woman) black or white? If neither, what is this
| new race to be called? Would he be a different race if
| his father was also mixed race?
|
| I find that often times asking people this question leads
| us back to something akin to the one-drop rule and I
| don't see any value in that.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > If neither, what is this new race to be called? Would
| he be a different race if his father was also mixed race?
|
| American racists had precise, and now-offensive
| nomenclature for rations all the way down to 1/8 black,
| possibly beyond. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline
| /shows/jefferson/mix...
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Somehow he gets very angry when I ask why there is wide
| academic achievement difference between his children
| despite growing in the same environment
|
| Wait, I thought your argument is that intelligence this
| is genetic - what then explains the variation among
| siblings, according to your worldview?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _have "increased risk of committing severe, impulsive,
| violent recidivist crimes", and that the variant is more
| prevalent in prison populations than the general public_
|
| If your goal is to show that the gene variant causes
| violence, you probably need to compare violent vs
| nonviolent prison populations, not prison populations vs
| general public. We already know that there are aspects of
| genetics that affect likelihood of being imprisoned, all
| else being equal.
| jltsiren wrote:
| For most, it's a simple defense mechanism.
|
| Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than
| others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political
| debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better
| to study something that can be studied without being forced
| to make a political stand.
|
| That would not happen in the ideal world, where people try
| to avoid misinterpreting and overgeneralizing results. But
| controversial topics always attract people acting in bad
| faith. Even most of those acting in good faith are unused
| to the level of precision and pedantry required to make
| justified conclusions from data.
| api wrote:
| > Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to
| never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous
| the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a
| remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
|
| History has shown this to be wise. If human beings -- as
| individuals or as a group -- come to view themselves as
| superior to others, the next step is always abuse,
| enslavement, or war. Civilization tries very hard to
| suppress this for the same reason that it suppresses some
| of the wilder expressions of unbridled human sexuality,
| physical aggression, etc. Moral issues aside, there's
| certain stuff that just breaks everything if you let it run
| unchecked.
|
| A truly intelligent being could look dispassionately at the
| various distributions of abilities and other differences in
| its population and deal with this maturely and rationally.
| We aren't capable of this yet. I don't think we can handle
| it emotionally.
|
| This is an area where my opinions have evolved as I've
| gotten older and seen more of the world. We do, in fact,
| need taboos around certain things. I don't think there
| should be too many of them, but there's areas where the
| need has been repeatedly demonstrated.
| mannyv wrote:
| What's amusing is that according to the literature height
| can be inherited but intelligence can not be.
|
| More generally, any characteristic that can be used to
| denigrate (or promote) a group is not inheritable. It's the
| fiction that keeps genetics moving along.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Doubly amusing because in nearly every social animal
| (dogs, cats, horses, pigs, primates, etc) it's
| universally accepted that intelligence, curiosity,
| sociability, aggression, territoriality, impulsivity,
| problem-solving, persistence, reward motivation...
|
| ... are all highly heritable.
|
| Humans are miraculously, according to the experts, the
| sole and unquestionable exception in the animal kingdom.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > What you can't do is combine these concepts into any
| uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.
|
| You can[1], and it's been done.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
| RobotToaster wrote:
| There's been a dispute over that for a long time, they're
| often called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. (Modern humans
| then being Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which seems somewhat vain,
| calling ourselves "wise wise man")
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "History is written by the victors"
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'm not sure that matters but one hill I will die on is that
| all members of _homo_ are humans too.
|
| If we're renaming things I'd rather we call ourselves _homo
| gregarius_. There 's no evidence we were individually smarter
| than our Neanderthals cousins, rather we were a variety of
| humans which lived in larger groups and thus could sustain a
| more sophisticated technological toolkit.
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| And for the curious as I can't go back and edit the comment it
| was the Altai, Vi3315, and Vi3319 that have the CYP21A2 rs6467
| (C;T) variant
| systemstops wrote:
| Razib Khan did an excellent write-up about the latest research on
| this:
|
| https://www.razibkhan.com/p/current-status-its-complicated
| throw4847285 wrote:
| One of those interesting cases where a scientific development
| seems on its face to rebut scientific racism, and instead becomes
| incorporated into it. Because scientific racism is a degenerate
| research programme, its adherents were able to jettison any
| hypotheses that seemed like part of the core and replace them
| with new ones. As long as you realize that the actual core is the
| racism, not the science, then the dynamic makes perfect sense.
|
| They could now argue that Out of Africa was in fact proof of the
| superiority of whites, who had clearly evolved since leaving
| Southern Africa. Of course, any evidence that this is not the
| case can be ignored, keeping the true core of the research
| programme intact.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Most of social sciences today is 'degenerate' by your
| definition, at least a plurality of those researchers openly
| admit that following the evidence is not the highest virtue,
| but arriving at the most socially correct result is.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| That's not what Lakatos meant by degenerate. It's a technical
| definition, and his response to Popper's claim that
| falsification can be used to differentiate science from
| pseudoscience. I think if you seriously apply Lakatos's
| reasoning then at the very least many types of quantitative
| social science are progressive research programmes in a way
| that race science is not. And if you try naive falsification
| instead, you end up with weird results like mathematical
| physics isn't science but quantitative sociology is.
|
| Oh, and "socially correct" is a thought terminating cliche.
| You clearly meant "politically correct" but that has such a
| negative valance that you need to change one of the words to
| not sound conspiratorial.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-10 23:01 UTC)