41–50 of 73 posts
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It's Denisovans, after the discovery site in the Denisova cave.
Interesting autocorrect on my iPad, but yes you are right :)
That is a curious change, yes. These things happen, but since people seemed to be following suit I'm glad we cleared that up.
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It's uncomfortable to consider, but there is strong evidence to suggest that the brains of Australian aboriginal people differ in significant ways from their Caucasian bretheren. One study found the aboriginal visual cortex to be significantly larger than the Caucasian equivalent [0], possibly as an adaption to Australia's (visually) vast open spaces. The same study found the Caucasians had significantly larger parie…
We better get this racism thing in check before we're literally dealing with different species of human (assuming that some groups of people remain isolated and we don't experience total global homogeneity in the future)
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I thought racism was defined as: > prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. I completely agree that when looking at differences among population groups in a species, one should avoid normative statements such as "such and such makes this population superior," but is there harm caused by identifying differences in average…
On one hand, we have Darwin, who straight up wrote a book about why some races are superior [0], and on the other hand we have extremists who take offense even at assessments like "Men are on average stronger than women." For a modern-day Darwin, we have James Watson, the father of genetics, who has some interesting things to say [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species [1] https://en.wikipedia.…
We don't have many isolated demographics (although there are some) both because pre-modern humans were capable of traveling over extremely long distances (i.e. isolation is unlikely) and because humans haven't been around for a particularly long time.
Unlike many species humans are surprisingly genetically similar to each other[0]. Some of this also results from the fact that humans may have passed through a very small genetic bottleneck 100,000 years ago in which the human population was reduced to around 3,000-10,000 people other studies dispute this but arrive at similar genetic conclusions [1].
>but it will remain a touchy subject for a long time and most scientists will see what happened to Watson and pursue other areas of research.
This isn't fair to scientists that legitimately engage in controversial topics. Watson is a bit of a crank, for example:
>'In a lecture hall jammed with more than 200 Berkeley students and faculty members, Watson showed a slide of sad-faced model Kate Moss to support his contention that thin people are unhappy and therefore more ambitious. "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them," Watson said."' [3]
That isn't a scientific conclusion. Much of the anger against Watson is that he says stupid unscientific things to support his own biases and then hides behind his discovery. This follows a pattern, which occurs across the political spectrum, in which a scientist who makes an important discovery thinks that discovery means everything they say is correct.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
[1]: Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/17/1/2/975516
[2]: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Nobel-Winner-s-Theorie...
How do they reconcile the fact that apparently only brains after 35k years ago show this new brain morphology when humans left Africa at least 70k years ago (when they showed up in Australia). So one of the groups, either the "in Africa group" or the "out of Africa" group still should have the "old style brains" unless magically the changed happened in both groups at simultaneously. And yet I believe all humans curre…
It's uncomfortable to consider, but there is strong evidence to suggest that the brains of Australian aboriginal people differ in significant ways from their Caucasian bretheren. One study found the aboriginal visual cortex to be significantly larger than the Caucasian equivalent [0], possibly as an adaption to Australia's (visually) vast open spaces. The same study found the Caucasians had significantly larger parie…
> Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans
and
> They used state-of-art statistics to analyze endocasts of various fossils and present-day humans.
There's nothing uncomfortable about this. They analyzed modern day humans and compared it to humans 35k years ago and found a statistical difference. "Uncomfortable" thoughts fall into the category of pseudoscience which has been long discredited - phrenology, essentially.
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We better get this racism thing in check before we're literally dealing with different species of human (assuming that some groups of people remain isolated and we don't experience total global homogeneity in the future)
How about this: we treat people as individuals regardless of what the scientific facts turn out to be.
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How about this: we treat people as individuals regardless of what the scientific facts turn out to be.
If you rephrased that as "we treat people as individuals regardless of the statistics about any classes those people happen to be members of", I'd agree.
How do they reconcile the fact that apparently only brains after 35k years ago show this new brain morphology when humans left Africa at least 70k years ago (when they showed up in Australia). So one of the groups, either the "in Africa group" or the "out of Africa" group still should have the "old style brains" unless magically the changed happened in both groups at simultaneously. And yet I believe all humans curre…
I'd tend to assume that any genetic trait that improves intelligence without significant drawbacks would spread rapidly through interbreeding and selective pressure even without wholesale population transfers. It took about 10,000 years for adult lactose tolerance to spread to its modern range and this brain organization trait would have 35,000 years and potentially give a larger selective benefit. EDIT: The corollar…
I would agree if we were confident that greater intelligence was always worth it, no matter the metabolic cost.
Brains are expensive! Making them bigger incurs additional metabolic costs (and potential complications in the developmental phase). It's very possible that another 20 IQ points wouldn't have really made humans better hunter-gatherers, but would've meant they had to eat more.
Granted, there are likely other ways to get smarter, but it's possible that there would be other systematic tradeoffs required.
I suspect that easy access to large amounts of food, more time available for mental activities and the easy spread of information have given us advantages our ancestors did not have despite the apparent similarities in our brains.
One tragedy currently ongoing is that many potentially brilliant minds in LEDCs are suffering from lack of the above three items. It does beg the question - how much mental capability could humanity gain by ensuring everyone on the planet has food, time and access to knowledge.
How do they reconcile the fact that apparently only brains after 35k years ago show this new brain morphology when humans left Africa at least 70k years ago (when they showed up in Australia). So one of the groups, either the "in Africa group" or the "out of Africa" group still should have the "old style brains" unless magically the changed happened in both groups at simultaneously. And yet I believe all humans curre…
It's uncomfortable to consider, but there is strong evidence to suggest that the brains of Australian aboriginal people differ in significant ways from their Caucasian bretheren. One study found the aboriginal visual cortex to be significantly larger than the Caucasian equivalent [0], possibly as an adaption to Australia's (visually) vast open spaces. The same study found the Caucasians had significantly larger parie…
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Isn't gene expression dependent on environment though? Is there some reason to believe that these differences are inherent, and not the result of gene expression being affected by the environment?
> Is there some reason to believe that these differences are inherent, and not the result of gene expression being affected by the environment? That is a question that remains to be answered, and is only just beginning to be looked into through research on epigenetics[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Yet I remember reading a study that showed that black children from Africa adopted by white parents in Germany performed at the same level as their peers. There have been other such studies with very similar conclusions.