11–18 of 18 posts
TLDR: Geography and climate influenced both animal and human populations
Bear with me.
If there's an impassable mountain range, the bears might stay on one side, and so might the humans. There's a few outliers (especially among adventurous humans) but geographic features do separate populations of both people and bears.
TLDR: Geography and climate influenced both animal and human populations
Correlation does not imply causation. Bear with me. If there's an impassable mountain range, the bears might stay on one side, and so might the humans. There's a few outliers (especially among adventurous humans) but geographic features do separate populations of both people and bears.
I see what you did there
This is a potentially cool article that I'm straining to read because of all the science-ese. Like this is some of the most dense, strained, and non-intuitive English I have read in a while -- and I have a background in science. I want to like the paper but I just hate this style of writing. Anyway the punchline is: > Grizzly bears sampled within an area represented by a given language family were significantly simil…
I mean, all scientific researchers write like that so they sound badass. Writing in plain English usually gets you rejected by reviewers. More Greek letters (even better, Hebrew), more integrals, more sigmas, appendices with lemmas, fancy names of apparatus, all the better.
Such an ignorant response.
Scientists write like this because they have a common jargon that they've used for ages in order to be concise and precise. These papers aren't written for consumption by the general public, but knowledge transfer between peers.
It'd be like non-programmers complaining about them using programming jargon, saying "well, they just want to sound smart so people don't take their jobs."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm just a bonehead, but take topic sentence (one of many possible examples): > In addition to testing the hypothesis that the linear extents of human language family boundaries represent potentially resistant areas to grizzly bear gene flow, we tested for the overall overlap and similarities in spatial structuring among Indigenous language families and bear genetic groups using analysis of similarities (ANOSIM…
You added fluff! Concision is important. Here’s how I would put this: > Separately, we tested overall overlap and similarities in spatial structuring among Indigenous language families and bear genetic groups using analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). That said, I found it quite readable, though I would have liked more inline math/diagrams/maps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You added fluff! Concision is important. Here’s how I would put this: > Separately, we tested overall overlap and similarities in spatial structuring among Indigenous language families and bear genetic groups using analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). That said, I found it quite readable, though I would have liked more inline math/diagrams/maps.
You threw away the hypothesis!
So, on one hand, this is fantastic, since it plays into the whole notion that ecological systems (and how humans and human cultures interact with and shape ecological systems) are resistant to "straightforward" reductive analyses, which is very much in the spirit of this research.
On the other hand, it means this paper is kind of weird to write. Like it's a very enticing positive result (bear genetics and indigenous language groups are correlated), but basically empty handed in terms of explanation.
I've never written a real scientific paper, but plenty of engineering reports, and always found reports which are basically summarized to "here's ever measure and correlate we tried, and nothing is conclusive or explanatory" to be awful to write. Because you don't have a positive result to anchor onto, you're just... enumerating a bunch of stuff with no payoff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correlation does not imply causation. Bear with me. If there's an impassable mountain range, the bears might stay on one side, and so might the humans. There's a few outliers (especially among adventurous humans) but geographic features do separate populations of both people and bears.
> Bear with me. I see what you did there
I think he's sending a message... Maybe a call for help?
TLDR: Geography and climate influenced both animal and human populations
Correlation does not imply causation. Bear with me. If there's an impassable mountain range, the bears might stay on one side, and so might the humans. There's a few outliers (especially among adventurous humans) but geographic features do separate populations of both people and bears.