Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New human-like species discovered

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 218 posts

Re: New human-like species discovered

#201

Post by yawaramin »

kibibu wrote: post #199
yawaramin wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point; after all, how can a review be serious if the reviewer(s) don't even try to reproduce the results?

A peer review can identify a very large class of problems with research without actually replicating the experiment. For example, problems with methodology and sampling, overlooked prior research, bad analysis of results, straight-up non-sequiturs and conclusions drawn from insufficient data. All of these mean peer review is valuable without reproducing results. For an extreme example: if somebody publishes a "Cheese…

Those are all excellent points, but even if you don't find any significant problems with the methodology or the math, or any of the other factors, that still doesn't make a complete review--not without replication.

For the 'Cheese found on moon' paper, I would expect the reviewer to clearly state that the results could not be replicated before mentioning anything else. Let readers draw informed conclusions based on a complete picture of the result, including whether or not it was a one-off.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#202

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway1967 wrote: post #156
dragonwriter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name…

> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but inste…

I think it's a mistake to think of natural languages as being rationality, deliberately constructed. They evolve organically, most often without -- and often in direct resistance too -- conscious design efforts. Elements of language are sometimes imposed by deliberate, premeditated campaigns, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

Languages aren't generally products of design.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#203

Post by jessriedel »

colordrops wrote: post #168
jessriedel wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I wonder how that's reconciled. The Neanderthal DNA comes from a 38k year-old specimen: > The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany.[8] Only about half a gram of the bone samples (or 21 samples each 50–100 mg[1]) was required…

Isn't half-life dependent on temperature? Perhaps 521 is at higher temps. Also, half-life does not imply full destruction. By definition, it's destruction of half of the molecules. With enough copies, and a low temperature, it could last much longer than 521 years.

I believe it's the half-life for each bond. But 10^22 is plenty high enough that essentially all bond are broken, and certainly not enough left to reconstruct the genome. (You need unbroken sections of certain minimal lengths to statistically reconstruct what was there before.)

I think you're right that it's a temperature thing.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#204

Post by sysk »

samfoo wrote: post #23

Awesome to see the Rising Star Expedition on HN! I was working in Johannesburg while the expedition was active and my partner managed, through a serious of very fortunate events to become a caver on the expedition. Here she is carrying up some of the first bones they extracted - https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg . For those of you interested, the expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, and there was/is a fairl…

I had to re-read the comment a few times before realising that you wrote "caver" and not "cadaver".

Re: New human-like species discovered

#205

Post by dogma1138 »

guelo wrote: post #183
mootothemax wrote: post #35

The Guardian's coverage of this contains a fair amount of scepticism: Christoph Zollikofer, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, said that many of the bone characteristics used to claim the creature as a new species are seen in more primitive animals, and by definition cannot be used to define a new species. “The few ‘unique’ features that potentially define the new species need further scrutiny, as they ma…

I was kind of surprised that they haven't aged the finding yet. The 3 million years number is being thrown around with zero evidence.

You need organic material to date which in many cases might not exist with the find.

Other than that you can perform rough estimates based on the soil it was found in, but those in many cases might be off by quite a bit.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#206

Post by dogma1138 »

freshyill wrote: post #172
eropple wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> couldn't early humans and neanderthals reproduce, for example? Common misconception, but no, they couldn't.

You are wrong. http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/how-neanderthal-dn...

Every couple of rounds of PHD dissertations that notion changes.

The biggest support is a skeleton of a child which is believed to be a hybrid of Neanderthals and Homo Sapience but the morphological bone evidence isn't that conclusive.

http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-skelet...

What i really don't like about that article is about how they phrased it the mDNA wasn't "Neanderthal", it just had markers which are rare in modern humans, some of those marker also appear mapped mDNA of "Neanderthals".

mDNA aside general genetic markers is a much weaker theory mostly because we cannot estimate well enough how much of the DNA in question actually came through inter-breeding and how much of it might actually survived from a previous common ancestor, or how many of them are just random mutations that survived through natural selection or cultural selective breeding. Because there have been claims before about that like that the gene for readheads came from Neanderthals but then was discovered that that specific mutation is just naturally occurring for humans and the redhead gene of modern humans isn't the same for Neanderthals or other primates.

The 1-4% neanderthal DNA is also a bit well iffy, comparing genomes is very tricky and those comparisons often strip away all the large differences e.g. like humans and chimpanzees only share 99% of the genes when you strip about 2/3rd of the genome.

So while there might have been interbreeding there's very little of actual evidence to point to the extent and the cause of it, could've been social interbreeding, could've been pillage and rape, could've been small isolated cases, could've been widespread, but PC gen-Y notions aside the science isn't really clear on on side or the other and it's hard to know if it ever will be able to be.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#207

Post by mcv »

biot wrote: post #149
mcv wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to "scientists who are boys"? How old are scientists these days?

In modern speech, the opposite of "girls" is "guys". Think "girls night out" vs. "guys night out". I have female friends approaching their fifties who refer to themselves and their female friends as "the girls". Perhaps this is a regional thing, where saying "women" sounds old-fashioned and stodgy.

But there's a big difference between a fun/social "night out" setting and a professional setting. It's still, even in the 21st century, far too often harder for a woman to get taken seriously in a professional setting than for men. It's better than it used to be, but it's still better to err on the side of addressing them a bit too professional than a bit too casual.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#208

Post by biot »

erroneousfunk wrote: post #200
biot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's appropriate; just offering a possible explanation for the use of the word. Personally, I'd just go with "female" or simply saying "she's a software engineer" gets the point across well without having to delve into sex vs. gender identity etc.

You certainly seemed ready to defend lev_k. Someone makes a ridiculous comment like "Maybe 'scientists who are girls' would be more befitting?" (I thought that was hilarious until I realized they weren't joking) mcv calls him out, and then you jump in and explain why "girls" is okay to use here? Again, it's not. It's really really not. Outside of pop song lyrics and college parties "girl" is not the opposite of "guy.…

You're making many false assumptions about my motivations, then proceeding to tear them down. As I'm not really interested in debating strawwomen, I wish you the best.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#209

Post by aggie »

If truly a new species, this is a huge discovery. Why then is it not published in a more prestigious journal, such as Science or Nature? Not that a prestigious journal is necessary, but the authors' choice is curious, especially when many scientists are skeptical of the claims.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#210

Post by dreyfiz »

throwaway1967 wrote: post #156
dragonwriter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name…

> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but inste…

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic.

Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh...

If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh...

Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...

Post reply on HN