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Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#41

Post by goto11 »

jerzyt wrote: post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

Taking the Bible at face value, Adam and Eve were created about 6000 years ago. At this time cities had already existed for thousands of years. So no, the Bible did not get "the math down fairly well".

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#42

Post by hnracer »

titzer wrote: post #18
tasogare wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the most common ancestor is used to push a certain narrative about all people "being the same", while conveniently putting aside hundreds of thousands years of evolution, which are precisely the source of the present day differences, but that doesn’t mean it’s false either, as there is indeed a common ancestor if we look back far enough.

I think it's clear from history that narrative of us "being the same" hasn't caused nearly as much trouble as the opposite, the complete and utter lie that we are not all human .

I agree with you that it's not a great idea to obsess about genetic differences between races, but what is true is not necessarily the same as what is socially beneficial.

It's simply a fact that there are important genetic differences between racial groups that manifest as important phenotype differences, and understanding these can help to make sense of the world around us. It's no coincidence that people with African genetics dominate sprints and marathons in the Olympics. This happens because they are genetically superior, on average (and this manifests as large differences in extreme performance), at this particular activity compared to other racial groups. Without recognising this, and other, genetic differences, we are left with a thoroughly incomplete understanding of our social reality.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#43

Post by rsynnott »

goto11 wrote: post #41
jerzyt wrote: post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

Taking the Bible at face value, Adam and Eve were created about 6000 years ago. At this time cities had already existed for thousands of years. So no, the Bible did not get "the math down fairly well".

Honestly, that's not even taking the Bible at face value. Attempting to date events in the Bible was pretty popular at one time, but it required a lot of special pleading and ignoring discrepancies (it's not like the Bible just says in the intro "this covers events from 4000BC to 22AD" or whatever; attempts at doing this mostly involve trying to infer it from ancestry and quasi-historical events mentioned), and isn't generally taken seriously by modern theologians.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#44

Post by bloak »

jerzyt wrote: post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

I don't really understand the point you're making, but the Identical Ancestors Point isn't a fixed point in history; it keeps moving forwards. So it is different now from what it was when the book of Genesis was written.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#45

Post by oblio »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #5
themgt wrote: post #3

While this article's content isn't exactly wrong, the Wikipedia on "Identical ancestors point" gives some important context for what's actually being asserted: All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have…

The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related. If you look at one generation ago one have 2 * 2 ^ 0 ancestors, at two generations, one have 2 * 2 ^ 1 ancestors, etc. At 27 generations one apparently has more ancestors than people in the world at that time. This apparent paradox stems from the fact that we are heavily inbred. Thus the article is corr…

It would be interesting to find out the degree to which inbreeding went down in modern days. The downside of modern life is that traditional families are being torn apart but this might be an evolutionary advantage since it means that the gene pool gets a lot more mixed since I imagine inbreeding is probably much lower in cities due to much broader selection pool.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#46

Post by goto11 »

piokoch wrote: post #40
dmos62 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an interesting point. In Hinduism there's some mythology around astronomical cycles that have similar spans to those mentioned in Bible. I've a far-out theory that Bible is actually referring to the same cycles. Side track: there's a serious argument that parts of Bible are translated pretty badly (which puts into perspective people quoting it verbatum). I've been told of a specific example where (excuse the…

Hmm, I was really surprised about the part on woman creation, as I've never read such version (in Polish), but, indeed this https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&versi... (very) strange translation mentions woman to be taken from man's rib. This translation https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&ver... looks much better "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God h…

You are looking at two different verses. NIV have basically the same text for Genesis 2:21:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2%3A21&...

> So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#47

Post by simonh »

jsnk wrote: post #28
titzer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intuition on this is wrong, and there's no need to fly off the handle. Ancestry is infectious. Take two populations, A and B, completely isolated from each other. (nevermind that they all have a common ancestor long before the populations diverged). Now one day in 1000 B.C. a single individual from population A migrates over to population B, mates, and has offspring (more than 1) with an individual from populati…

"The key is that the propagation of ancestry never stops, because ancestry doesn't round down to zero." I get your other points but this assumption seems obviously wrong. Plenty of people historically did not live to leave children behind. Then of course, we can have complete stops in the propagation of ancestry.

It only takes one single person to migrate and have surviving descendants for everyone to end up their descendant. So yes it's possible that people migrate and not have descendants, but that has to be true for every single one of them.

In reality even over very long geographic distances we have evidence of hundreds or even thousands of people migrating. Marco Polo first visited China with his uncles who had been there before. He recoded that there were so many European traders in Beijing that the Italians, Spanish, etc each had their own districts. Even before that Rabban bar Sauma was an Armenian Christian monk born in the Armenian district of Beijing in about 1220, who travelled to Europe. He appears in the court records at the Vatican and in England.

As for sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern traders have been plying the seas of eastern Africa, and running caravans through central Africa for thousands of years. Their cultural and genetic fingerprint is all over Africa. There is a small, but persistent and measurable level of sub-Saharan African genetic markers in southern Europe dating to the Roman era.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#48

Post by Udik »

ahartmetz wrote: post #29
jlawson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another important point here is that genes don't divide infinitely, so that if you go back some distance, you start finding ancestors from whom you actually didn't get any DNA. The book Who We Are and How We Got Here talks about this. When DNA recombines at conception, it only snips and stitches in a fairly limited number of places. It doesn't 'mix' finely like paint. It's more like taking two short pamphlets of ~25…

I agree with you about the "noble" lies. You wrote something else that I have never seen before and that seems quite interesting: > When DNA recombines at conception, it only snips and stitches in a fairly limited number of places. It doesn't 'mix' finely like paint. I had always assumed that clearly recognizable traits that children inherit from parents are simply based on the large influence of certain small pieces…

> I had always assumed that clearly recognizable traits that children inherit from parents are simply based on the large influence of certain small pieces of DNA

I never understood this position from the logical point of view.

Say that you were put in front of two pictures that are entirely covered except for a small visible part each. The two visible parts of the pictures are different. Would you ever assume the parts that you can't see to be identical, or would you assume they differ from each other as much as the visible parts do?

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#49

Post by wahern »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #37
lopmotr wrote: post #9

Weren't Australian Aboriginals isolated for tens of thousands of years and some full blooded individuals still exist today? How could they have an ancestor outside Australia in only 1400 BC?

Odd stuff I've read. There wasn't no contact. But contact was very limited. It's northern Australia is 100-300 miles from parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, etc. Also also genes that don't confer any particular advantage tend to peter out when inserted into large populations. Above my pay grade but I think that argues that the genetic difference that do exist tend to either not confer any particular advantage, lik…

> not confer any particular advantage, like maybe shape of your nose

Nose shapes are selected for by temperature and humidity. That's probably not the only selection pressure, but it's a major one.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#50

Post by goto11 »

rsynnott wrote: post #43
goto11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the Bible at face value, Adam and Eve were created about 6000 years ago. At this time cities had already existed for thousands of years. So no, the Bible did not get "the math down fairly well".

Honestly, that's not even taking the Bible at face value. Attempting to date events in the Bible was pretty popular at one time, but it required a lot of special pleading and ignoring discrepancies (it's not like the Bible just says in the intro "this covers events from 4000BC to 22AD" or whatever; attempts at doing this mostly involve trying to infer it from ancestry and quasi-historical events mentioned), and isn't…

Obviously the timeline in the Bible is ridiculous with people living for hundreds of years and so on. But if you take the genealogies at face value, this is the rough time scale since creation you end up with.

Which is of course a good reason not to take the Bible at face value as historical overall (even if some of the parts are reasonably historical).

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