I didn’t say it was a fallacy. I said it was irrelevant. It does not address the science. Neither the impact factor nor retraction index of a journal tells us much about the conclusions in a paper. Especially if you misunderstand the conclusions, as has already been pointed out.
The admixture vs intermixing issues was addressed. Now I’m sure you’ve read the paper, because:
But just in case, the authors did not find evidence of admixture. They also did not rule out admixture; they just demonstrated that is was unlikely within the limits of their models. Both* HAPMIX and dpmix are well-calibrated, but not flawless. We’ll know more as we get more data from these populations. All in all a cool paper.
*I haven’t read the PhD thesis that describes their third method.
Okay, I have a problem with people who stomp their feet and parrot their Anthropology professors’ party line that there is no such thing as race. There is such a thing as race. It’s maybe 90% social construct, but saying there’s no such thing as black people is like saying there’s no such thing as Republicans.
There’s a Pacifica radio station in DC, WPFW, that announced (as a free public service) the need for organ donors from time to time–I can’t cite them, because not all radio programs are archived on the internet, and this was maybe fifteen years ago–and sometimes they would specify that the donor needs to be African-American. Either the doctors in question were deficient in their Anthro 101, or there’s maybe a little more to this whole “race” thing than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
I don’t see anyone denying the social construct of race. But it’s not a logical biological concept and that seems to be the point of contention.
By specifically requesting African-American donors they’re trying to increase the possibility of matching donors to recipients. African-Americans are a specific subset of folks who would identify as Black world-wide, coming from a few ethnic groups in parts of Africa. Calling for African-American donors for African-Americans who are ill increases the likelihood that they would get a match because of the populations. No one has argued here that there aren’t genetic differences in populations and it pays to play the odds. But those populations don’t map to anything like “race”.
Right. If they could, practicably, have requested donors with the specific gene markers that were actually relevant to the circumstances, they would have. And that group would not be congruent with “African-Americans.”
As already noted, it’s not so much that there isn’t a way, biologically, to define races, it’s there is virtually an infinite number of ways of doing so with none more logical than the next. That is, if we want to define race as the geographic origin of a person’s recent ancestors.
And we have to realize that there are going to be large swathes of humanity that don’t quite fit into typical racial/geographical categories no matter how we define them. For example, there are some obvious problems for people who are of recent mixed race since the genome isn’t always a good way of determining what phenotype the person will have, and thus which social construct race the person will be seen as. Over time, that group of people is getting larger, not smaller. In the US alone, this is going to be millions of people.
And that problem applies to a large segment, possibly even most, of then people in Latin American since so many of the folks there are of recent mixed racial ancestry. How would one determine a genetic test for “Hispanic” where the person could be majority European, African or Native American ancestry (or any combination of the three plus maybe some East Asian ancestry, too). And if you throw out “Hispanic”, what race do you put, for example, your average resident in Mexico or Guatemala or Peru?
It’s not “stomping one’s feet” to refer to scientific fact.
What qualifies one as an “expert”? Does a PhD automatically, ipso facto make one an expert in their field, or is more required? Can one become an “expert” without a PhD if one demonstrates their expertness in some other way, maybe by passing an exam, publishing at least a certain number of peer-reviewed papers in the field, being voted an expert at a conference of experts (“voted into the club”), or performing some heroic feat or undergoing a specified ordeal (“You climbed Astrophysics Mountain and returned with a full, intact set of the lunar telemetry data tapes. Here’s your Expert Card - have fun playing it when arguing space stuff on online message boards!”)?
Yes, the question is mostly absurd. Appeals to expert authority are as fallacious as appeals to ignorant ignoramuses or drunken frat boys with no meaningful skills.
This is also true with respect to Y-chromosome lineages. Germans are mostly I and R types. Japanese, D and O. Samoans, C and O. Eskimos, C and Q. Now look at where those lineages fit on the ancestral tree. In most cases, the two main lineages of a population are not closely related at all, and in fact each of those lineages is usually much closer to a corresponding lineage in another population. For example, German (and general European) R lineages are more closely related to Native American Q lineages than they are to German (and general European) I lineages.
From testing, I know that I belong to an R lineage. It’s weird to walk around town and think that there’s a high chance that I’m more closely related to Montezuma on my direct paternal line than I am to many “fellow white people” that I pass by.
It is possible that this happened. That someone joined the line of this particular Khoisan population and the genes of these people fell by the wayside of selection. The paper merely points out that evidence of this happening could not be found. It is improbable, but not impossible. In general, we have to go by what the evidence shows, and not assume improbable events that failed to leave evidence.
The initial Neanderthal - Human hybrids appears to have had fitness problems including frequent sterility in the males, and Neanderthal genes still appear to be selected against up until today, yet up to 5 % of the genome of people living today appears to be of recognizably Neanderthal origin.
However, the Identical Ancestor Point is a point in time where every living human being at the time falls into one of two groups: 1) They have no living descendants. Or, 2) their descendants include every person living today.
Now, we know that people living in a number of areas had descendants, because these groups are still alive today. So for the proposed IAP of 5400 years ago, by definition, all people living today count among their ancestors all of: the Andamanese islanders of 3 400 BC, the Inuit, the Kalash, the Khoisan, the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon and Papua New Guinea, Tibetan peoples, and the Australian Aborigines of 3 400 BC etc who have descendants alive today.
Given that genetic sequencing of many these groups have failed to find evidence of genetic ingression within the relevant timespan and many such groups have been and are still isolated, we would have to pile unlikely event upon unlikely event, none of which left evidence to the point where we are basically looking at something that resemble a conspiracy theory.
Then cite that. I am sorry but no-one should cite the Daily Mail and expect to be taken seriously.
Yes, you are right. My terminology was inexact in using the plural. My apologies.
A one-directional geneflow does actually mean they were reproductively isolated from other groups. Even though other groups however, were not reproductively isolated from them. Observe also the Kalash I mentioned that have lived among other groups and appear to be a reproductively isolated group of the original Eurasian hunter-gatherers. Note also that there are climatic indications that the Khoisan were physically isolated for a long timespan.
Well, yes and no. Because we seem to be running two discussions in parallel here. The individual in question would actually not be one of my genetic ancestors. That would require some genetic material being passed on. So in relation to being reproductively separated, a genetic concept, no he does not count as an ancestor.
Consider horses and donkeys. At any time, there are a number of animals, mules, that count both horses and donkeys as ancestors. Yet the vast majority of them are sterile. Hence the two groups are reproductively separated despite individuals having ancestors in both groups.
In relation to the IAP, yes the individual would be counted among my ancestors, as that is not concerned with genetic contributions.
However, unlike the probability that I as an individual would have inherited no genetic material from an ancestor, the probability than a person ancestral to everyone in a group would have passed no genetic material on after 10-12 generations is quite small. Not vanishingly so, but we are talking about an unlikely event leaving no evidence.
Problem is, we already had a meaning for the word “race” and its nothing like what the social construct “race” means. The two are so different that we may as well use completely different words for it. Using the word “race” seems to encourage some people to try to import the biological meaning of the word to the social construct.
I read the paper carefully enough to discern that no claim was made for the every member of the entire Khoisan population which numbers over 300,000 linguistically. I also noticed that the figure 150,000 years did not occur. To tell the truth I did miss that non-admixture was, however, discovered in two specifically investigated individuals- more on that below, and thanks for the tip!
The citation was made mostly:
(1) To establish the general academic bonafides of co-author Dr. Webb Miller, whose professionalism you slandered.
and (2) Because of the second sentence of the article: “Studies based on mitochondrial and small sets of nuclear markers have shown that these hunter-gatherers, known as Khoisan, San, or Bushmen, are genetically divergent from other humans.” I interpret this to mean that evidence already discovered some time ago established non-admixture among the Khoisan.
The article goes on to say:
“The number of SNPs that are novel (that is, not previously seen in other individuals) is far higher for KB1 and ABT than for other individual whole genomes (Table 1). KB1 and ABT each have approximately 1 million SNPs that are not shared with each other or with the published Yoruban, Asian or European complete genomes.”
Now, 2 positive results in a sample size of 4 may, by themselves, be short of the number required to establish scientifically satisfactory confidence levels for a population of 300000. However, when combined with other evidence they may help justify Professor Webb’s statement *“that the Khoisan peoples and the rest of modern humanity shared their most recent common ancestor approximately 150,000 years ago” *NB with the understanding he did not mean to include every single living Khoisan member; he would certainly have been aware of significant exceptions such as the one cited by MrDibble in reply #74.
Here’s the thing you’re not getting: We can say that modern humans and Neanderthals diverged 500-600K years ago and that they later interbred sometime around 40K years ago. Those are not contradictory statements.
Misunderstanding about the Appeal to Authority fallacy is common.
Your use of the exact phrase “appeals to authority” provides reasonable ground for believing that you misunderstood it yourself, even if you tacked on the word “irrelevant”. Not that the word “irrelevant” saves you, because dismissing as irrelevant the opinion of a PhD, speaking about a specialty of his in his field, is preposterous.
Addressed elsewhere, but I grant I should have practiced what I preached and read the whole article carefully before I cited it.
I interpret the article to mean that admix was ruled out to a high enough degree of confidence to state as scientific ally verified fact in 2/4 Khoisan examined.
Why don’t you go look for it? I’ve done my share of providing cites here.
Also, for that one sub-group to be reproductively isolated from the rest of humanity, they’d have to also be reproductively isolated from the rest of the Khoisans who are not part of that subgroup. Now we’re REALLY not passing the sniff test.
You are dealing with people who even if they understood what you are saying have no incentive to concede that point. The idea that if you cannot precisely and with 100% accuracy create labels to identify a set of convenience prohibits the creation of such labels is sadly pervasive.
The same argument can be extended to species given enough temporal distance.
According to many on this very board that’s 100% cultural. A pygmy that trained the same way as the Kenyan would win the marathon and if he trained as the Jamaican would win the 100m.
This is my first encounter with what is a ridiculous, spurious, transmogrified version of the Appeal to Authority fallacy. In this version we are not even permitted to cite Darwin’s views on evolution or Einstein’s views on gravitation.
As a matter of fact, though, our lives literally depend on accepting and acting upon the views of experts. MDs alone save 100 millions of lives a year because people take their expert advice. If you ever break your leg I seriously suggest you yield completely to the expert authority of the surgeon on duty, and don’t resist the ministrations of the nurses as anesthesiologist, either.
The genetic diversity between this group and any other Khoisan group is larger than the genetic diversity in the rest of the non-Khoisan human species. The San of Northern Angola and South Africa split 25 - 40 000 years ago.
What genetic science seems to have revealed is that the Khoisan through most of human history were the largest human group in numbers, and covered a much larger area than today. We have examples of a people living among other people without genetic ingression from them for 11 000 years.
A lot of the point here is that just because the Khoisan today is a small population that differs from us this does not actually make them a single homogeneous group. It is precisely the opposite. They are the remains of a very divergent lot of groups wich were spread over a much larger area.
The Ju/’hoansi live or lived in the deep Kalahari desert, specializing in survival in this inaccessible terrain.
Theory goes that the Khoisan diverged from the rest of humanity after the climate dried out and divided them off from the rest of humanity. The Ju/’hoansi would only need to remain cut off (And the Garamantes taught us that middle of the desert is just as good as an island for a defensible empire) after the two branches rejoined, by which time they may already have been culturally specialized.
It would not be unusual to see a cross-country skiing final where all eight of the finalists were Scandinavian. What does this say about Scandinavian genetics?
It says nothing. You need to establish a standard for which level of dominance needs a genetic explanation before leaping to conclusions.
Well, a discussion about slavery reparations comes up in this country from time to time, and its proponents are talking about redistributing money from one specific group to another. Also, some scholarships are issued based on racial criteria. I’d say precise boundaries can be relevant.
