Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

reich.hms.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 72 posts

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#61

Post by bcjdjsndon »

Symmetry wrote: post #26
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But other than it surviving, there's no way to define fitness.

It's more reproducing than surviving. If the population of some species increases and the number of copies of some allele remains constant we could consider than gene less fit than the other alleles, in the population genetics sense. So it's frequency rather than survival that geneticists look at. But that proves that there are indeed other ways that they could have defined fitness if they wanted to.

> It's more reproducing than surviving

Well that's a given mate, nobody's talking about populations that dont reproduce are they? And even then you're still making the same tautological mistake.... If they survived they must have been fit

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#62

Post by pixl97 »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #60
pegasus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is survival of the fittest. That's not a tautology, it actually says something, namely that the traits which survive and thus propagate tend to be the ones that enable some form of adaptation to its living conditions to the individual. The paper lists a bunch of examples: - lactose tolerance - immunity and disease resistance - lighter skin at northern latitudes - metabolism and vitamin D processing changes…

> All these traits go beyond just increasing the odds of survival, they improve the life of the individual directly. I.e. they confer fitness. Wrong. Fitness is not "beyond" increasing the odds of survival, fitness is ONLY that. Fitness is not about quality of life. - in that ecosystem they are inhabiting, be more healthy than those who don't. Survival of the fittest says nothing about how healthy they are, only whet…

Survival of the fit enough

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#63

Post by convolvatron »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #56
convolvatron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, because science as whole is not pursuing the idea that people with different genetics as a population are inferior in some ways to others with sufficient vigor, that we should expect a justifiable general distrust of science including completely unrelated results like global warming. I don't see how this is prescriptive in any way, except maybe to ... I guess find scientists that are will to accepting funding for…

Unironically yes. Because it means that scientists are willing to lie or suppress results that offend their moral and poltical sensitbilities, and this should affect your credence in literally any scientific result reported by the institutional scientific research system.

you're asking science to give you some excuse for treating some people worse than others. maybe that's just not a very well formed question for a scientist to answer. if we just strip away the race nonsense and ask a more .. meaningful question like 'what is the genetic basis for intelligence', then no one is shirking that question because of what the answer might be. its just a really hard and also pretty fuzzy question.

but you still won't be satisfied with the answer, because even if one set of genes gets you 5% more 'intelligence' score, that still doesn't justify a apartheid state. do you think we should have different rules for people with different IQ scores?

you're saying that because science as a whole isnt particularly interested in assuming _your_ biases, that the whole enterprise is meaningless and corrupt, and thus we can't trust anything those white coats say.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#64

Post by gnerd00 »

card_zero wrote: post #18
lukev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly. But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-pop…

This interest in IQ has a negative effect on the concept of intelligence, never mind human unity. It attaches exaggerated importance to test scores, jobs, and school. It tends toward snobbery.

reading about Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences stuck with me.. seven is a common list

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#65

Post by jryb »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #23
Symmetry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a tautology but a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)

But other than it surviving, there's no way to define fitness.

You’re conflating the colloquial meaning of “fitness” with the technical definition. It’s unfortunately overloaded.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#66

Post by Tagbert »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #61
Symmetry wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more reproducing than surviving. If the population of some species increases and the number of copies of some allele remains constant we could consider than gene less fit than the other alleles, in the population genetics sense. So it's frequency rather than survival that geneticists look at. But that proves that there are indeed other ways that they could have defined fitness if they wanted to.

> It's more reproducing than surviving Well that's a given mate, nobody's talking about populations that dont reproduce are they? And even then you're still making the same tautological mistake.... If they survived they must have been fit

That tautological is not a mistake. Surviving to reproduce is the definition of fitness from an evolutionary standpoint.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#67

Post by tptacek »

lukev wrote: post #15
shadowtree wrote: post #3

Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct? Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly. But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-pop…

Whether there are meaningful genetic variations in intelligence (the subtext of these discussions is always intelligence) that break down in any scientifically valid way along "racial" lines is very much in doubt. What we have is evidence of (socioculturally-sense) racial disparities in psychometric tests in a limited number of (largely western) countries. We don't have causality, we don't have wide surveys globally, we don't even have that much certainty about the test validity. It's equally plausible that the variations we see are SES and cultural transmission effects.

Contra claims elsewhere on this thread, science on this topic isn't suppressed at all. There are multiple branches (in quantitative psychology and genetics) that study this issue actively, and if you follow it, new papers aren't rare. But directionally those papers aren't confirming the priors of the people claiming the science is suppressed, so they don't get acknowledged.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#68

Post by tptacek »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #56
convolvatron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, because science as whole is not pursuing the idea that people with different genetics as a population are inferior in some ways to others with sufficient vigor, that we should expect a justifiable general distrust of science including completely unrelated results like global warming. I don't see how this is prescriptive in any way, except maybe to ... I guess find scientists that are will to accepting funding for…

Unironically yes. Because it means that scientists are willing to lie or suppress results that offend their moral and poltical sensitbilities, and this should affect your credence in literally any scientific result reported by the institutional scientific research system.

Both sides of this thread are arguing based on fantastical versions of scientific practice that fit their priors. Scientists aren't avoiding studying this for fear of the harm it would do; they're not avoiding it at all.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#69

Post by tptacek »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #55
lukev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly. But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-pop…

The actual reason this matters is because of the implications it has for race-based affirmative action programs in cognitively-demanding fields; i.e. "why are there visibly no black people and lots of Asians in this advanced math class, and what should we do to fix the problem?" There is no political agreement on whether having or not having affirmative action programs is racist (or against which racial groups).

There are a huge number of assumptions, many of them quite dubious, encoded into the idea that this research is impactful to affirmative action.

Affirmative action might be problematic for totally unrelated reasons. Maybe there's no way to do it without being racist towards Asians, or without selecting a tiny privileged cohort of Black families to accrue benefits on (simply "applying for college" in the first place situates most people in a position of privilege).

We absolutely do not know enough about the psychometric science here --- forget race entirely and just try to pick through theories of intelligence and its mutability --- to make public policy decisions. It is, at present, a pure scientific concern.

Re: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

#70

Post by tptacek »

Nesco wrote: post #12
Tor3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just where did you get that from? Certainly not from the paper.

There is a graph arguing “intelligence” has been positively selected in west Eurasian population in this paper according to a polygenic score (page 8 fig. 4) Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score

... because it's a study of West Eurasian DNA. The claim that humanity has over millennia selected for intelligence isn't all that spicy.
Post reply on HN