Over 9000

The most you can say is that the Neanderthal DNA in question probably isn't doing anything harmful. It doesn't have to be doing anything useful to maintain a presence in the population. It just can't be getting too much in the way.

Why are you so sure it's not doing anything useful?

I didn't say it did, I am probably one of your only "allies" in this forum.

I know you didn't. Raider5678 said it was a "strong argument" against you. I was showing how it was a totally failed argument.

What? Neanderthal dna does not discredit the out of africa model. It's basically a fact that we are from africa. Behavioral and anatomical modernity started there.

I brought up Neanderthals in the context of Raider5678's argument "humans came from Africa therefore humans are identical". Whether modern humans arose in Africa: I don't know. I keep saying this. The evidence for it is actually pretty sketchy and getting weaker. But it's really off topic.

Because it's near completely irrelevant to where our species originates from.

If Eurasians have maintained 2-4% of Neanderthal DNA over the last 100,000 years then my guess is that it's doing something useful. 2-4% of the genome is not what I would call "insignificant". Either way, we really don't know, so the poster who said "Neanderthal admixture doesn't seem to be important" is just making stuff up.

The evidence from skeletal remains and DNA points quite clearly to an African origin and the genetic diversity of modern humans indicates that non-African genetic diversity is a subset of African diversity with African populations being more genetically diverse due to being older (an older population has more time to develop more genetic mutations resulting in more diversity).

Eurasian genetic diversity certainly isn't a subset of African diversity. See eg.

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000500

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7534/full/nature13997.html

Also, how can Eurasian genetics be a subset of African if it includes significant Neanderthal admixture?

Your extreme claim is simply false, although I know it was stated on PBS.

Neanderthal admixture doesn't seem to be important.

Any reason?

The argument against racial differences in intelligence and the existence of biological races is that we descend from a single evolutionary lineage with minimal genetic divergence and that all human populations share the same mental characteristics as part of their common evolutionary history with no genetic changes resulting in mental differences and no scientific basis to think otherwise.

That's a nonsense argument. Why would evolution stop for 100,000 years? Even longer, due to archaic admixture. Your article of faith has almost exactly zero chance of being true. Either way, your "argument" proves nothing.

Environmental explanations are just as plausible and given the scientific evidence appears to be the most parsimonious explanation.

Can you let us know which environmental effects cause the consistent global pattern?

He has made a claim that different races are genotypically diverse, but not phenotypically diverse. If he agrees that Humans originated from Africa, and that the first Humans were black, then you can conclude that other "Races" Came down from that genetic line. Which would lead to a strong argument against that fact that we are genetically diverse, as well as his claims that Africans are more diverse.

 

By your response to my question I'm assuming you have no proof or any reasonable concept as to why humans did not originate from Africa your self or no?

You do understand that having a common ancestor at some point in the past does not mean species/subspecies are genetically identical at a later time? That species/subspecies diverge over time despite having a common origin? So, no, sorry, but it's a nonsense argument.

Eurasians are genetically distinct versus Africans. This is a simple fact we can observe by looking at the genome. One point you can consider, non-Africans have significant Neanderthal admixture.

It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this thread whether the first individual we would call sapiens sapiens lived in Africa or Eurasia ~100,000 years ago. I have some thoughts on the matter, but it's off topic. Feel free to open a thread about it.

From his other arguments he was making, you can refute what he was saying by answering these questions.

Please explain.

And may I ask you, why you think Humans did not originate in Africa? I have had a long standing belief that this is where they originate, but if its flawed please explain why.

Why don't you open a thread about it?

Based on his posts, what he is saying, and evidence hes using to back his argument he seems to have taken the following premises:

 

Race is a Biological difference in the DNA: Not just skin

This difference also has Mental Traits that differ between said races.

I don't see how answering yes or no to your questions has any bearing on that. We don't know the origin of humans or what color they were. Neanderthal admixture is certain so no we definitely don't originate from Africa. We're not even sure sapiens sapiens came from Africa. Even if we did, and the first humans were a certain color, why would this prove modern humans have the same mental traits?

If you answer these 3 questions they lay down a foundation for or against your argument.

Precisely what argument do you suppose he has? Just so we are all on the same page.

The paper doesn't say Africans are less diverse it in fact says they ARE more diverse the only difference being they think the extra variation is due to admixture. It could go both ways though, for example it's hard to tell whether the amount of dna we share in common with other populations is due to admixture or divergence. It actually confirms my assertion that Africans are genotypically diverse but not necessarily phenotypically diverse.

 

"Although Africa is the most genetically diverse region in the world, we provide evidence for relatively modest differentiation among populations representing the major sub-populations in SSA, consistent with recent population movement and expansion across the region beginning around 5,000 years ago—the Bantu expansion"

Well yeah, I said it was "something" of a myth, referring to ridiculous claims that Eurasians are a "subset" of Africans and the like. If you read that paper African diversity is speculated to be the result of Eurasian migrations into Africa. EIther way, it doesn't impugn the race concept.

There is quite a bit to deconstruct here. Basically there are about three major approaches that utilize the concept of race, which I will go to when I got more time on my hands.

For now I want to focus on the last link, which basically outlines that race is not a biological useful concept. Rather it highlights an issue that I touched upon earlier: lack of genetic diversity in humans. The author merely disagrees with using the cutoff, which is somewhat common in ecological studies. If you read past that point you would have noticed how the post in itself echoes some issues already mentioned: I

 

 

will leave with the quote from the post which echoes the basic issues. When I find time I can address several of your worries and also why ancestral grouping also fails as demarcation, if you are really interested. Just a few quick comments, Lewontin's fallacy is not a logical fallacy, but the title of a paper written by Edwards. And a major issue, the limited amount of genetic markers was circumvented by using the same data from the Science study. I can also provide a quick answer regarding the variance within Africa: much of the recent work uses key data is derived from the HapMap project as well as the 1000 genomes study (Nature 2003 and 2012) but there is also the work from Tishkoff as well as numerous others who used different genetic markers.

 

Edit: reply was meant for post 119. IQ has loads of other issues that have been addressed elsewhere in this forum.

Oh, I read past that point, thanks. I read all of the comments too. They indeed cover other subjects than the one I used it to reference, such as the "counting races" race denial fallacy.

I simply referenced that to present another view on Templeton's "25% Fst" which most of your other post seemed to be based on. Are you agreeing that was wrong now?

If so we can happily change the subject to "whether we can say how many items there are in a branching taxonomy".

How can one disregard fst as evidence and then use it when it is convenient? Unless I misunderstood something. Blacks have more neutral DNA because they are the oldest race, so of course they have higher genetic diversity, but that doesn't mean they have higher phenotypic diversity too(though they may).

I disregarded an Fst cutoff value (Templeton's parroted everywhere "25%" nonsense) as being necessary to satisfy a taxonomic distinction. Many subspecies are well below this. The poster also claimed Africans were more genetically diverse, which is a separate point (and also something parroted without looking at the figures it seems). Whether or not they are more diverse they still constitute a natural division as they are more similar to each other than to Eurasians. And higher African diversity is something of a myth, as the paper I referenced covers.

And thus arbitrarily.

It would be arbitrary if it was a perfect continuum. And yet still a valid scientific operationalisation.

Does this look like a perfect continuum to you?

http://www.scs.illinois.edu/~mcdonald/PCA84pops.html

I'm seeing significant clusters, which in addition are orthogonal in terms of correlated variation, with some minor admixed populations scattering between. Either the clustering or the orthogonal variation would put the Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongoloid/Native American division as the first natural division.

Either way the "continuum" objection is invalid. We can divide continua arbitrarily to describe them. Further, human races are not divided arbitrarily.

If we did we would not be able to define race, at least not in the way you seem to use it it. As it has been repeatedly discussed, the variation within groups shows can shower higher diversity than between groups.

This known as Lewontin's fallacy. Fst is actually irrelevant to the validity of taxonomy, and is only applied in race denial arguments in humans. Many subspecies have Fst similar or lower than the human ~0.15. Feel free to show me Fst <0.5 being used to deny taxa in another species. It's an ad hoc race denial argument. Any overall between group variation, however small, justifies taxa. The taxa are about that variation.

And as far as population studies go, the diversity of e.g. African populations as a whole are more diverse than populations outside (in accordance with migration patterns). Instead, for tracing ancestry you actually have to use only specific set of alleles that show the difference that you need to do the categorization in the first place.

Nonsense. A greater genetic diversity in one group does not mean one cannot trace ancestry through phentics or genomics. This is another ad hoc race denial argument. West Eurasians are more similar to each other than East Asians or Africans whether or not one group has higher diversity. One could argue that Africans, if they have higher diversity, should be divided first. Fine. Why is this an objection? Can you reference the higher diversity in Africa? I mean with numbers. I know it's "common knowledge" and repeated everywhere.

Take a look at this.

In contrast, overall differentiation among African populations was modest (maximum masked F_ST = 0.19) (Supplementary Fig. 4) and only 56/1,237 sites remained in the tail distribution after masking (Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Table 6). This suggests that a large proportion of differentiation observed among African populations could be due to Eurasian admixture, rather than adaptation to selective forces (Supplementary Note 6).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7534/full/nature13997.html

Thoughts?

It has been argued to death here, but first of all, the general categorizes often used to define races in common usage based on skin color can be rejected almost immediately as they poorly reflect ancestry. The ancestry of a black person in the US is unlikely to share many similarities with a black person in France, or Brazil, for example. Santos et al. (2009) have shown for example, that in Brazil self-declared whites can share more African ancestry than some self-declared black people in the US.

Well you're bashing some other irrelvant definition. Race defined by skin color, which is not what I'm talking about, versus race defined by ancestry, which is what I'm talking about. No scholar who uses the race concept defines it by skin color. This is irrelevant.

The second issue is whether genetic markers can trace ancestry. In principle, this is a given. And in fact some very useful markers can be use to trace regional ancestry. However, mapping out a tree in order to create clear categories is difficult and the more markers you add, the less distinct it becomes (i.e. the opposite as to what you claim happens). Going back to actual biological usage, categories below the species level (ignoring issues with species concepts for the moment) are typically only useful, and therefore used, if they delineate some kind of differences in gene flow that are relevant to a question under investigation. Such boundaries can include e.g. geographic separation. So, in other words, a race as a different concept as population only makes sense, if a categorization of a race explains a significant chunk of the variance in a population. Obviously the more fine-grained you get, the more variance can be explained theoretically, but then the categories become less useful.

This sounds agreeable. How do you square this with Lewontin's fallacy?

Now is a good point to add that categories as these are not biological. They are artificial and are only used if they can be helpful in explaining biological phenomena. And I fear, this is the part that many people get wrong as many use the inverse logic.

How do you define artificial versus biological categories? I would describe categories defined by descent a la Darwin or genomic similarity a la Mayr as by definition biological. Define "biological category" please.

As the example above shows, skin colour is not great in identifying ancestry. It may work in some areas (e.g. US) and fail in others, making it not only not biological, but also useless as an indicator of ancestry. So let us turn to some quantitative means using molecular information. As I mentioned, you could cherry-pick markers that conform with certain aspects of interest. But what if we need to define groups, how can we do that?

By ancestry inferred from overall genetic or phenetic similarity? Darwin defined taxa by ancestry (including explicitly human races) and operationalised them with degree of phenetic differentiation ("descent with modification"). Mayr supported using genomic similarity alone to define groups. Thought experiments such as how we would classify a genomic human born to a horse seem to support this. Or more realistically, if an organism was born which more genetically similar to other than its ancestors, which is at least possible.

As I said before, a category such as race would only be used if they can explain a significant portion of variance. So what is the threshold to designate races? It is convention in these types of study to differentiate between races if 25% or more of the genetic variability that they share is found as between population differences. As you can see by the nice round number, it is an arbitrary and useful convention.

Armed with that knowledge we can now got back at human data (see various papers by Alan Templeton, who also used data from the famous Rosenberg et al. 2002 paper that sometimes is mentioned). Now, doing a variance analysis it was found that over 90% of the genetic variation is found among individuals within a sampled population. While it is generally expected that this variations has the highest contribution it also means that the remaining variance is far too low to allow a demarcation between races (which was ~ 4%). In other words, in human populations we have significant gene flow that prevents us to define decent race boundaries that capture sufficient genetic variance to be useful. I.e. to hit the 25% threshold one would have to create hundreds (maybe more) populations in order to be able to form groups in which the variance between groups is 25% or more, if it is possible at all. This all means that in contrast to many other species our gene flow is so significant that we may be able to identify isolated populations, but we will have trouble to come up with any useful race level categorization that make objective sense.

Absolute nonsense. Templeton's "25% Fst" is an ad hoc boundary used to deny the human race concept. It's based on a misreading of the 75% rule for phenetic classification of hybrids in subspecies contact zones, see eg. Smith 1997 who Templeton references. There is nothing about Fst. Feel free to show me this "25% Fst" being applied to subspecies outside Templeton applying it to humans. I'll be happy to go over this in a lot more referenced detail if you want.

Jonathan Kaplan

June 10, 2014 • 4:29 pm

I don’t want us to get too side-tracked into arguments about Fst values. There is no firm cut-off re: Fst values in the literature for identifying subspecies that is widely accepted, and about this, Templeton and Hoffman for example are, indeed, just wrong.

https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/on-the-biology-of-race/#comments

No, It Ain’t Gonna Be Like That, Satoshi Kanazawa,,London School of Economics and Political Science

 

Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller's prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe.

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/EP2006a.pdf

I also imagine creativity could have a genetic basis. I am not aware of studies of racial variation in this.

Also.

Could the Industrial Revolution’s explosion in affluence have been made possible in Great Britain by genetic changes in human nature?

 

That’s the controversial theory of Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis.

 

As described by the New York Times, Davis shows that, from 1200 to 1800, the English were "locked in a Malthusian trap," with each advance in production quickly offset by population growth that devoured the surplus wealth. As a result, the average English person ate fewer calories in 1790 than a hunter-g atherer a millennia before. But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, productivity increases outpaced population growth and average incomes rose. The origins of the jump have perplexed historians.

 

Clark developed his theory while testing Jared Diamond’s argument that British success was rooted in their evolution of disease resistance. He combed through ancient wills, looking for a relationship between wealth and offspring, and found that the rich consistently had more surviving children than the poor.

 

That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

 

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

 

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation.

“Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

 

https://www.wired.com/2007/08/a-genetic-expla/

Again, in terms of biology the concept of human races is of little value. Much better to speak of populations as defined by biologists; discrete largely (that is.. not exclusively) interbreeding groups.

A race is a type of population defined by shared ancestry or genetic similarity. An "interbreeding group" could be anything from a state to a multi-racial hippy commune. This is not what your opponents are talking about. Why do you pretend that taxa defined by ancestry are "in terms of biology...of little value"? They are fundamental to biology.

That is because the many traits we associate with "race"; skin, hair and eye color, facial and morphological characteristics, disease resistance/risk groups, etc, exist in our species on continuums that don't allow for discrete categorization.

We can divide continua discretely.

Genes, however, are discrete units of heredity and thus it is populations of people that ought to be compared, not races.

This makes no sense because A) we define or infer race by many or all genes simultaeneously. B) "population instead of race" still doesn't capture your strawman "single discrete gene" defintion. Real bad non-sequitur upon strawman sentence.

In these terms there may well be differences in cognitive abilities between populations in as much as intelligence is party due to genetics. However, unlike skin or eye color, our intelligence is not a direct result of gene expression. It is an emergent property of a complex interaction between our genes, our development and the environment in which we live. It isn't controlled solely by our genes. This is why IQ comparisons across political borders (comparing one country to another) doesn't say much about about the underlying IQ of the people in those studies. They may instead reflect differences in non-genetic influences. These are extremely difficult to untangle (the techies know this as an "NP Hard" problem).

In my opinion a consistent race/IQ correlation across national borders strongly suggests genetic causes. Especially combined with an IQ heritability (differences caused by genes) of 75% within races. Height is also developmentally complex, is it also impossible to estimate heritability for height? You are looking at a consistent pattern and saying it could be something else. That isn't parsimony, it isn't science. It's wishful thinking. Have to give you some Science Points for inaccurately and irrelevantly referencing "NP Hard" though. Sounds clever.

I don't think those arguing here for racial differences mean that any particular member of one racial group is more intelligent than any particular member of another, just that on average there is a difference. Biologically that is an unsupported claim because in humans racial groups have little useful biological meaning. If however the word "racial" is replaced with "population" then, although there is scant evidence of any such differences, there is at least a reasonable scientific path forward to test it. One must first define the populations to be tested, however and therein is a much bigger problem. What suite of gene expression traits impact intelligence and how do those change over time? We are very far from understanding that.

No, replacing the word "racial" with "population" is just a completely pointless distraction. The races in question are defined by ancestry or genetic similarity. How can you criticise your opponents terms if you don't even know how they are defined? Unless this is an intentional strawman argument. You seem to have a problem with heritability estimates. Again, we don't need to know the developmental pathway of height, and we don't, to make a good heritability estimate.

In the end - I believe there is no biological support for the usefulness of race in questions of human intelligence.

Yes, we got that. And your attempt to back up that pre-conceived conclusion with scientific rationalisation was poor, but entirely typical.

---

Rushton and Jensen and Lynn are correct in saying that the 100% environmental hypothesis cannot be maintained. Nisbett's extreme statement has virtually no chance of being true.