Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.

The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.

> oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.

Fascinating. Not sure what gave you the idea I don’t believe in evolution or that I’m somehow promoting biblical creationism? Are you responding to the right comment?

> speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.

Neither coyotes nor wolves were created by human selection as far as I know. Dogs were. You can take dogs out of the equation if you want.

Coyote/wolf hybrids (coywolves) exist in the wild and challenge your definition. And I am talking about your original comment's definition "speciation is reproductive incompatibility", because I believe you backtracked a bit with the more vague "wild type incompatibility".

Besides, I don’t necessarily disagree that wolves, dogs and coyotes should be seen as the same “species”. I find this obsession with taxonomy completely useless and irrelevant. We all know there are biological clusters and the boundaries are fuzzy, but we can use simplified/imprecise models when communicating because it is more convenient.

> citation required

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf

The Gemini answer first cites Kaessmann, Wiebe, and Pääbo (1999), which explicitly says it sampled from all 3 at the time recognized major subspecies of chimpanzee (and found it 4x more genetically diverse than humans), not the same patch of forest.

Then it cites Goldberg and Ruvolo (1997), which uses the frankly hilarious "more variation between than within groups" metric. Why hilarious? Because it looks at single genes, while most traits are polygenic. When you look at multiple genes, even with only 2-3 dimensions to display the results (the data has thousands of dimensions), populations can be clearly distinguished [1]. What is the value in such a useless metric? And even then, the paper doesn't state something so extreme - quite the opposite. Direct quote from the paper:

Eastern chimpanzees are not, however, the genetic equivalents of humans. Mean, modal and maximum levels of nucleotide difference are actually slightly lower in eastern chimpanzees than in humans. The last common maternal ancestor of eastern chimpanzees may therefore be even younger than the last common maternal ancestor of all humans.

In fact, even a cursory reading of Gemini's answer shows it to be inconsistent - it states: "In contrast, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exhibit a nucleotide diversity that is often two to four times higher than that of humans, depending on the genomic regions analyzed."

2-4 higher diversity, but there are 4-5 recognized chimpanzee subspecies [2]! Far from "two chimpanzees (implied from the same subspecies) living side-by-side are more different than the two most different humans", it puts humans right on the edge, or slightly past it, of meriting at least one subspecies of our own.

The last study it cites, Fontserè et al. (2022), barely mentions human genetic variation, and doesn't actually provide any quantitative comparisons between it and that of chimpanzees.

Finally, I didn't actually get what I asked for. Nowhere in those articles, or the AI answer, is there anything equivalent to "the genetic distance between Eastern and Western Chimpanzees is X, while the distance between a Norwegian and a Pygmy is Y."

So no, it doesn't actually check out, if you apply minimum scrutiny.

The sibling answer claims the fixation index [F_st, 3] is a measure of genetic distance, but that's not exactly true. E.g. it can't be used to show that dogs are closely related to wolves, less closely to cats, and even less closely to salmon - the F_st for all those comparisons, save perhaps for wolves, would be simply 1. Still, I took your advice, and asked AI (Gemini). I asked:

What is the genetic distance between eastern and western chimpanzees, and how does it compare to the genetic distance between a Spaniard and a Han Chinese?

To summarize its answer (can't share the chat when not logged in, feel free to verify), it claimed the fixation index is used for this purpose, and gave the following numbers:

  Western vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.32
  Central vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.09
  Spaniard vs. Han Chinese       F_st = ~0.11 – 0.15

The values for the human comparison are more or less in line with [3], but I couldn't find a source for the chimpanzee numbers after a very brief search. I've already spent far too much time debunking a casual AI slop answer.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10113208/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Subspecies_and_popu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index

Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".

I'm gonna be very blunt with you (disregarding again the goalpost moving from your earlier claim that "speciation is reproductive incompatability (sic)"): the jargon you are throwing around is not helpful, it is pure linguistic diarrhea you are using in an attempt to project an image of erudition.

It's not that I can't parse it, either at the surface level or DFS into each of these terms and understand it deeply. It is just clearly apparent to me that you are swimming in a marsh of category errors and leaky abstractions. This field has accumulated a lot of entropy over time. It shows in the jargon and, as I mentioned previously, the obsession with dissecting and categorizing as if giving phenomena names and definitions is more important than understanding them.

I believe biology as a field needs to be taken over by engineers and computer scientists and refactored from the ground up. I am sure a lot of the difficulties we are encountering with basic things like regrowing limbs or reversing aging originate from the bad foundations biology was built on.

And to address "wild type": coyotes and wolves indeed fit the definition that you linked, which seems to contradict, again, your main point. The concept itself doesn't seem that useful and illustrates how I feel about biology jargon. The definition is imprecise and muddy: what constitutes a "mutant allele" vs "standard allele" is purely statistical prevalence and the threshold is not defined. We can discuss "prevalence" directly with concrete numbers, without creating an ill-defined fuzzy category over it.

> once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability (sic).

Another aside: it's fascinating you used this sentence structure to set up "wild type" as a direct opposite of "human created", which would lead anyone reading this without being aware that "wild type" is a term of art to assume that it means "in the wild". This is not the gotcha you think it is...