“Other reasons” = humans. Just as likely, if not more so.
And don’t confuse “near extinction” with “extinction”.
I have refuted it simply by pointing out that your argument is ridiculous. Just because I can not teach a dog to speak tapdance does not support a contention that Hugh Jackman is a better dancer than Barack Obama for genetic reasons.
No, you brought up this ridiculous, incorrect tangent to support your point. Since the tangent is factually incorrect on all counts your original point is equally invalidated.
That is debatable at best.
So you are saying that because the gene pool of the entire human species is bigger, therefore the entire human species has evolved faster?
Yes. That is precisely what I am saying. That is the point of The 10,000 Year Explosion.
In that case it’s rather trivial to prove that it is wrong.
We have human remains from 40, 000 years ago that are genetically well outside the range for modern humans. So clearly humans have become genetically less diverse over time. Not more so.
You are probably thinking of Neanderthals. According to DNA evidence everyone who is not an African Negro is descended from one to two hundred humans who left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Since then the descendants of those humans have differentiated considerably. They not only look different, but they behave and perform differently.
That assumes there were no populations alive 40k years ago that did not contribute to the current gene pool. There is no reason to make that assumption.
What behavioral differences do different groups of modern humans display? I’d really like to hear that explanation…
Black people clap like this, and white folks clap like that. And dingos only eat white babies.
And those Orientals are crafty little buggers!
Back to cites.
What happens if you look for accelerating evolution in humans?
Well, one of the leading voices is John Hawks, who “is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I was trained as a paleoanthropologist, studying human evolution from an integrative perspective. My research focuses on the processes affecting human genetic evolution across the last 6 million years.”
He’s one of the authors of “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution,” from PNAS. (short full-text pdf)
He argues about this in his weblog, on the page Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong., a response to Steve Jones.
Here’s a relevant bit for this argument:
And another one from Why human evolution accelerated:
But wait. Look at who his co-authors are. Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending , and Robert K. Moyzis. So he’s irredeemably tainted, even though that paper has been cited 165 times in three years.
What else can I find? I can play in Google Scholar as well as anybody. How about Oxford Journals Life Sciences/Genome Biology and Evolution/Volume2/Pp. 518-533.
“Noncoding Sequences Near Duplicated Genes Evolve Rapidly” by Dennis Kostka, Matthew W. Hahn and Katherine S. Pollard. (full text available)
That’s not the route I want to go. I’ve been studying lactose intolerance for many years, because I have it. Anthropologists understand the spread of lactose tolerance at least 30 years ago, before DNA genetic evidence was available. The DNA studies have replicated what they said almost precisely - and never mention or cite that work. One demerit for the geneticists. However, they are partially redeemed by the classic text on the subject of co-evolution, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity by William Durham, which includes a large section on lactose tolerance as the prime example of gene culture co-evolution.
That book is recommended (though not popular science) even though it’s antediluvian, from 1991. What do the moderns say? As an example, Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics by Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, and
Joseph Henrich also from PNAS. It’s properly cautious.
Blake, I know you’re the one scientist in the world who has never learned how to do a citation. I freely concede you know more about the technicalities of the situation than I do. But your spewing of no, no, no doesn’t let me learn anything. What is your view on accelerating genomic evolution? Do you agree with Steve Jones? If so, why, and please cite some reading that I can do. (Are you in fact Steve Jones? You can then cite yourself. :)) Do you agree with anything I quoted from John Hawks? If not, again, please cite some relevant literature.
I need to emphasize that I don’t know the answers and I am not taking a stand for either side. I want to learn about the subject, and that’s not happening now. If the Hawks and Cochran paper is bad, then cite the papers that have refuted it. Let us read the real science for ourselves.
As **orcenio **pointed out already, the accelerated rate is the least controversial of the points from the book or the conclusions the OP is getting from it.
The problem with the OP is that this discussion is not happening in a vacuum.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=602928&page=10
And that is why I’m still curious like **orcenio **about what **gcochran **thinks about the conclusions the OP is getting from the book and the solutions that the OP is proposing elsewhere, because more often than not the scientists making this controversial research also clarify that whoever uses their research to propose political solutions that actually misrepresent what they conclude will not have any support from them.
Yes, and the key is that the non-controversial part is that this is happening to the entire population of humans-- not just the urban masses.
I’m not familiar with that thread. But I’ve been being very careful not to back NDD. Or the Bell Curve.
There are other points which I feel have been slighted. And I don’t feel that anybody is properly responding with good cites. If you want to take NDD apart, fine. But do it with cites.
You were the one that brought up Australia and dingos.
And this has been called into question. How do you address the founder effect, for instance?
And what, exactly, does “evolve faster” even mean, in this case? It doesn’t sound like you’re talking about an increase in the rate of mutation itself, so what *do *you mean?
Citing what it was already noticed as the less controversial item is useful, I guess..
Well, I guess it keeps this going forward but I still wonder what the cites on lactose intolerance have to do with **Blake **as he did not use that to criticize the OP.
Perhaps, in addition to these denunciations that you require, you could also demand a list of those of the authors’ peers who agree with them, or have aided in their inquiries.
WRT Brain Glutton’s comment that “It is extremely hard to believe any state’s criminal justice justice system before the 20th Century …”
A very insightful essay by Peter Frost at
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP08376389.pdf
describes in grisly detail how the Romans dealt with bandits and criminals. The data from the UK are similar, steal a shilling and face the noose. See
which is a published preview of his book “Farewell to Alms” and, IMHO, better. Throughout Europe there was approximately a hundred-fold decline in the homicide rate from 1200 to 1900. “Culture changes”, some would say, but there are never any models nor mechanisms given, as if all change is random and meaningless. On the other hand a quantitative genetic model (i.e. AgSci 101) fits the data very nicely.
WRT the murder rate in Iraq: recall that the expansion of Islam in the seventh century may have been accompanied by a lot of population replacement. The invaders did not need to fight their way in the Levant, they just walked in, suggesting quite strongly that the indigenous Roman/Christian folks had been pretty thoroughly domesticated.
Several of Philip Jenkins’ books, particularly “The Lost History of Christianity”, are good sources about this. Similarly Frost describes how the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire simply walked in and the indigenous Romans welcomed their new neighbors.
WRT genetics, race, and cognitive disparities: the whole field was driven underground by the PC squealers after Jensen’s 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review. The research and application continued, of course, but it disappeared from public discussion. There is essentially no dispute about any of it among those who are familiar with the field. A good review is
There is a kind of arm-waving literature proclaiming that there must be “something else” but it is not very high quality. The most respectable of the genre is Dick Nisbett’s “Intelligence and How to Get It”, and it is frankly, embarrassingly bad.
I see a few folks here still sneering at The Bell Curve, but we all should notice that there has never been any serious academic criticism of that book.
Primitive justice systems punish trivial crimes with death because their detection methods and organization are . . . primitive and they despair of catching every culprit, or even most; so they have to make an example of those they do. Which has little effect on the gene pool.
I am afraid that this is the sort of nonsense that casts doubt on the rest of your claims.
Once The Bell Curve had been out long enough for folks in the scientific community to read it, (i.e., after it had been released to the public with much hype and no peer review), the scientific community did, indeed, take a serious look at it. The universal opinion was that its blatant attempt to pretend that apples (educational measures) were oranges (IQ tests), its deliberate confusion of terms, and its numerous bad efforts at statistical manipulation were just silly.
The University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkley each invited a number of scholarly papers on the book, all of which found so many errors as to make the book worthless as a scientific text. The American Psychological Association produced a series of papers on the topic inviting both pro- and anti- scholars on the general topic, but they labelled part of the book so defective as to be labelled fraudulent.
It is a popular trope among those who enjoy promoting the book to falsely claim that only emotional liberals have opposed it, but the book has been reviewed by numerous scientific establishments, not one of which has found it to be worthwhile.
That would be next, this has been almost a constant in these discussions, when one checks if the writers agree with the extreme conclusions or solutions that some think the research leads them to, a closer look shows more often than not that the researchers would most likely spit on many of the conclusions that some are getting from the research papers.
However, in this case, the more I look for the background on the paper on the Jews that was used also in the book, the more it seems likely that the paper and book writer was helped by some peers at the journal that was used to publish that paper.
I will have to say that this controversy has many parallels with global warming deniers or creationists that abuse the scientific journals or I should say, there are some journals that have a very suspect peer review system that allows bad papers to poison the research well.
The pattern is that the contrarians look for a journal that has lax standards or an agenda to follow, once the paper is published, they publicize the hell out of it.
As for the shredding, one has to point at the ones reported by the New York magazine linked early:
What are you talking about? Pretty much the entire Berkeley Sociology Department published a book looking at problems with the authors’ methodology.