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Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

razib.substack.com

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#41
post #26

We all came from Adam and Eve, Allah(God) created everything. some people are believing theories made by a handful of "scientists" and became facts all of a sudden.

There's no need to believe anything in science. In fact, the default position should be disbelief. There are experiments and explanations. Some explanations keep working after many experiments. Many do not. Those explanations that survive many attempts at disproof become accepted. It doesn't happen "all of a sudden." The claim that the Bible explains creation does not stand up too well to experiment in this regard.

You need to believe /some/ things in science. It’s just some things go away if you don’t believe in them and some don’t.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#42
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to believe anything in science. In fact, the default position should be disbelief. There are experiments and explanations. Some explanations keep working after many experiments. Many do not. Those explanations that survive many attempts at disproof become accepted. It doesn't happen "all of a sudden." The claim that the Bible explains creation does not stand up too well to experiment in this regard.

"Those explanations that survive many attempts at disproof become accepted" How can you experiment human origin?

Generate synthetic data according to a model and see if your technique rediscovers the model or not.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#43

We all came from Adam and Eve, Allah(God) created everything. some people are believing theories made by a handful of "scientists" and became facts all of a sudden.

Well, who do you suppose created Allah, then? Hint: It's the same god that was created by the exiled Jews who were later invited back to their lands by Cyrus. And this Allah you're referring to is the same deity that hebrews, christians and muslims are all viewing from different angles. And this single god is the consolidated version of all the deities that had come before then and understandably it's a deity that lo…

[deleted]

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get the vibe that this particular article was rejecting OoA, but simply pointing out that the modern approach is OoA + "it's complicated". The HBD stuff is troublesome and it's certainly worth regarding the author more critically, but I found the bones of what was linked fairly pedestrian and uncontroversial. I suspect that will not be true of the follow-up article about origin models within Africa though.

Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows: "Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."

What exactly what the elementary mistake?

Edit: ah, answered in another comment. It was this part:

> Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#45
post #12

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure . Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the maj…

>Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) He is a Bengali-American (with a Muslim name) who has repeatedly debunked Hindu nationalist claims about ancient human migrations in and out of India. Unfortunately, as your comment shows, they have been succesful in maligning him as a racist for speaking the truth.

I'm not taking a stance on either side of this, but the fact that he's Bengali-American doesn't somehow mean he can't be a scientific racist. (Btw by "Scientific racism" I'm talking about the pseudoscience movement)

I'd suggest you take a look at some of his work yourself and make a judgement of how unscientific he really is:

https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply...

Here's a paragraph for instance (trust me reading it in context doesn't make it any better)

> Also, I am not sure the blonde preference is as dominant among people from Asia as it is among Europeans, and Asians have not been as culturally dominated by Europeans as Amerindians have. Though certain European features were traditionally praised by Asians (fair skin), others have not been emulated (large noses, reputed body odor due to diet, hirsute body, etc.). In addition, though Japanese may comment on the nice figures that European women have (i.e., Europeans tend to exhibit more sexual dimorphism), they will also comment that many American women are too large and, as they would say in the States, "big-boned." In other words, even if blondeness is preferred by Eurasians, there are other attributes that work against them (their size in comparison to petite Asian women, the perception by many Asians that European women, and Europeans in general, age faster and don't keep their appearance up after the bloom of youth, etc.).

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#46

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure . Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the maj…

> Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good If wikipedia had existed in the time of Copernicus, Plato, Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Darwin, I do not think they would be without their own large ‘controversies’ section ;)

No post body was provided.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#47
post #14

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure . Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the maj…

Scientific racist is a funny term. If a scientist shows that "race" X has a different distribution of traits than "race" Y, does that mean that they are a scientific racist? Doesn't racism also have to have an associated hatred, prejudice, or antagonism against a different race? Is it scientifically racist to say that blacks get a certain blood disease more frequently than whites? To put it another way, if a scientis…

Scientific racism is a pseudoscience. To think that it's actually scientific is to get caught up in semantics. It is a very unscientific fringe group

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#48
> 'By “modern humans,” I mean Homo sapiens'

Though it's not a distinction many people care about, for me this is always the fundamental context: Homo Sapiens, not 'humans'. There have been many species of humans; only one of them made it to modern times. So--the post isn't on 'human origins', it's on 'Homo Sapien origins'.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#49
post #48

> 'By “modern humans,” I mean Homo sapiens' Though it's not a distinction many people care about, for me this is always the fundamental context: Homo Sapiens, not 'humans'. There have been many species of humans; only one of them made it to modern times. So--the post isn't on 'human origins', it's on 'Homo Sapien origins'.

The article clarifies that "human" includes the whole homo genus (well, not explicitly, but it at least mentions other species in homo as being human) within the same paragraph you quoted from.

Re: Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins

#50

Multiple inaccuracies there. Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure . Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%. The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the maj…

I knew nothing about the author of the text, and read it with interest, but the fact that he didn't mention Franklin was certainly a surprise and warning sign. To anyone who studied the issue, it's clear that Franklin should be credited at least equally with Crick&Watson.
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