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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

#71

Post by rendall »

throwanem wrote: post #67
rendall wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To continue playing with our river analogy: consider a man fishing beside the river, who catches a large salmon. The man is ecstatic, for he is poor, and his family is hungry. Just as he draws his knife to gut it, the fish speaks! It says "Please do not kill me. Throw me back into the river, for I am the Fish King, and I will grant you 3 wishes. You can have whatever your heart desires." Astonished, the man agrees, a…

The metaphor appears to have run away with you somewhat.

It is true. It has run away with us all

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#72

Post by hnracer »

krapp wrote: post #63
hnracer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you look up statistics for Chinese basketball players and realize there were too many of them to support your narrative? No. I realize that there are many tall Asians, as well as that there are many tall Asians who play basketball. These two facts are not relevant to my argument. I changed the example from Chinese to Korean (not that it matters because the argument works the same with either), because China is…

But if there are more Asians in China than Korea, which obviously there are, they should be the more accurate representation of Asian genetics. And this is not even taking into account Asians in the US and elsewhere outside of Asia. You say it shouldn't matter yet you also admit your argument is weakened by using the bigger data set. Claims about inherent racial strengths and weaknesses always break down once the act…

> But if there are more Asians in China than Korea, which obviously there are, they should be the more accurate representation of Asian genetics.

The tallest province in China is still shorter than the average European height. And Asians aren't a monolith, there can be genetic variation between Han Chinese, Koreans and Japanese in a phenotype such as height. The average height in Japan for men is 161cm despite being a rich country (so it is likely driven by genetics, not nutrition).

> You say it shouldn't matter yet you also admit your argument is weakened by using the bigger data set.

I say no such thing. I say it is less prone to nit picking. The argument is unchanged.

> By definition, professional athletes are genetic exceptions. So it would make no sense to compare the average member of any population to the elites in the NBA and make claims about race in general.

This is statistically illiterate. If you have two distributions with the same kurtosis, and one distribution has a mean, say, 0.4 standard deviations lower than the other, then the frequency of extreme right-tail performance is going to be much less common in one population than the other. This is just elementary statistics.

Yes, you can have an Asian who is extremely tall and therefore not disadvantaged in the game of basketball, but that is simply not relevant to the statistical claim I'm making. If you have two equally sized racial groups, one has 2% of the population that are extremely tall, and the other has 0.3% of the population that are extremely tall, then the former racial group has an advantage due to this genetic difference in this specific domain, and any elite performers in this specific domain are likely to come from the former racial group than the latter (all else equal).

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#73

Post by gdrift »

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…

> genes that don't confer any particular advantage tend to peter out when inserted into large populations

Not sure that's true.

Natural selection is not the only force driving evolution.

Neutral and nearly neutral (slightly deleterious) alleles can be fixed in a population by random genetic drift.

Source: https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-importance-of-rando...

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#74

Post by [deleted] »

nabla9 wrote: post #60
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…

If you take the Bible at face value it contradicts itself. It all depended on the fan interpretation to to make sense. If you are non religious and think about the old testament just as what it was, its easier to understand the contradictions. (1) In Genesis 1 the god creates animals before the man. He creates man and woman and tells them to be fruitful and multiply. (2) In Genesis 2 God creates Adam before animals.…

[deleted]

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#75

Post by throwanem »

rendall wrote: post #71
throwanem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metaphor appears to have run away with you somewhat.

It is true. It has run away with us all

What are you actually talking about, though? Veiled and gnomic proclamations can be fun, but sooner or later you have to show your hand.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#76

Post by xamuel »

The article is about simulation results, but I have a mathematically proven result for an idealized abstract species notion, published in an article in Acta Biotheoretica.

Definition: An "infinitary species" is a set X of organisms which is (i) infinite, (ii) ancestrally closed (contains every ancestor of every member of itself), and (iii) as small as possible with those two properties (i.e., no strict subset of X has properties i and ii).

Theorem: In any infinitary species, every member is an ancestor of almost every other member (more precisely: of all but finitely many other members).

Proof: Let m be a member of an infinitary species X. Let S be the set of members of X who are NOT m or descendants of m. Let S' be S plus all ancestors of members of S. Since X is ancestrally closed, S' is a subset of X. S' is ancestrally closed by construction. S' does not contain m, so S' is a strict subset of X. Therefore, since X is as small as possible with properties (i) and (ii), it follows that S' must be finite (otherwise S' would be a strict subset of X with properties i and ii). Thus S is finite, proving the theorem, QED.

Here is the paper, it has many other fun results like that: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#77

Post by JoeAltmaier »

shuringai wrote: post #23

Problem is, The article assume humans mate with uniform distribution, and that they did so generations ago. The 2^n argument is way naive and this level of uniformity assumes every people on earth has the chance to end up with a uniform random other person as their partner, regardless of geographic, cultural etc differences.

Agreed. There are regions of commonality, that share little or nothing with other regions. This isolation feature means that simple statistics is uninformative.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#78

Post by spicymaki »

hnracer wrote: post #52
prmph wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's no coincidence that people with African genetics always win sprints and marathons in the Olympics. This is a lie, and you know it. Many people of non-African origin do win such sprint and marathon contests. I suspect what you are really trying to get at, in as few words as possible, is a typical the racist trope: that Africans excel in mindless physical sports, while being inferior in the intellect. However, f…

Korean people are genetically shorter than other races. Do you dispute that this would give them a profound disadvantage in basketball, all else equal? The narrative of all races being functionally the same phenotypically is prima facie absurd as even the most simplistic armchair observation reveals. Anyone who denies that Korean people have a genetic distadvantage in basketball must be acting in bad faith, and if th…

Why is it so hard to believe that Black people dominate certain sports due to interest, opportunity, and hard work? Not some unsubstantiated group genetic advantage.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#79

Post by Kye »

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".

A classic article in The Onion pokes fun at this: "Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World"

https://www.theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-g...

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#80

Post by pepy »

zuminator wrote: post #62
andi999 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might have been multiple separated inbreeding groups. Yes these groups are related among themselves but not inter-group.

The article is saying that every person bears some relation to each other, even among distant groups. No further back than 3500 years ago existed a person who was a common ancestor to every currently living human being.

Noah, that you? :D
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