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It's not obviously factually untrue, assuming we exclude the offspring of recent immigrants from randomly selected French kid and consider only those of legacy Frenchmen.
Chimpanzees and humans share about 98.8% of the genome, and two randomly selected humans share about 99.9% of the genome. Suppose you had an offspring with a chimpanzee, like in Next. The offspring would share .5 * 100% + .5 * 98.8% = 99.4% of the genome with you, less than that of a randomly selected human.
Similar principle within/between human populations. This isn't quite the right metric since it's a different one, on the population rather than individual level, and presumably using SNPs, but we can use it as a proxy for illustrative purposes (ran out of mental calories hunting for inter-individual genome-wide figures). The English have about 99% genetic similarity with Italians, so that puts a hypothetical lower bound on the within-English genetic similarity (which I believe is definitionally zero by this particular metric). In contrast the English have about 88% genetic similarity with Southern Chinese (same genetic distance ratio as the previous human-chimpanzee example, interestingly enough). Thus, .5 * 100% + .5 * 88% = 94%, well less than that of the English-Italian similarity of 99%.
This is so obviously and enormously untrue. Orders of magnitude off from a justifiable statement. Can we start defining our terms for what counts as related or genetic closeness? People here must be using very idiosyncratic understandings of these terms in order for their posts to make any sense.
Thank you for quantitatively stating this unlike other poster's baffling and wrong subjective statements about genetic similarity. The lowest outliers of estimating the genetic similarity of humans and mice are in the mid to high 80%s. I strongly suspect that Englishmen and Asians are more closely related than humans and rodents. In what manner do you mean 88% genetic similarity? How did you type any number other than 99.9%?
As an anecdote, we absolutely do see this with livestock. Females bred to a male of very different breed will visibly have more trouble relating with their own offspring than with non-relatives of their breed.
You don't really appreciate the importance of genetics until you see a group of young animals foraging in dense brush just like their sire's breed does (despite never meeting him), while the spooked mothers yell for them to come back and eat grass properly like they were taught.
Having noticed this is why Scott's line about "I don't understand why he's acting like his violent psychopath father: he couldn't have been a bad influence because they've never met!" made such a strong impression on me.
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Before writing a chest-thumping, bombastic comment with an "obviously" and an additional adverb, it's good practice to pause for a beat and consider if you're having a Dunning Kruger moment, especially when I already pre-emptively explained the difference.
The key aspects are when I mentioned "genome" in the human-chimpanzee example, and "SNPs" in the English-Italian-Southern Chinese example. SNPs are sources of common variation within humans; researchers often use SNP data when working in human genetics, as SNP data is easier and cheaper to create and obtain, and easier and cheaper to work with computationally, than genome-wide data (since among most humans, most of the genome is identical or near identical). Usually the cutoff for what constitutes a SNP is if its rarer allele copy is present in at least 1% of a given population, or set of populations. So there was no such oversight nor contradiction on my part in the above comment.
Suppose, just as a stylized example, chimpanzees and humans both had only 10 loci in their genome and just one chromosome. Now suppose a chimpanzee (PT), an Englishman (EN), and a Southern Chinese (SC) had one-strand reads of:
PT - A A A A A C C C C CEN - T G A A A C C C C CSC - G G A A A C C C C CWhere the first three loci are SNPs, common sites where the base varies in humans. We can use a simple metric for genetic similarity, just if the letter at a given locus is the same or not. PT and EN share 80% of the genome; PT and SC share 80% of the genome. EN and SC share 90% of the genome. We could consider 80%, 80%, and 90% to be their genetic similarities. However, if we look at just SNPs, now EN and SC have a genetic similarity of just 67%.
So now we can go back to real-world data and extend the cocktail-napkin exercise if we want to get a proxy for genome wide; previous caveats still apply. About 1 in 1,000 sites in the genome is a SNP; most sites are rare variants. Thus, we have 99.9% common variant loci, 0.1% rare variant loci. Let’s assume the previous 88% EN-SC similarity as representative of all SNPs; this is likely too permissive. However, we can balance that out by assuming all rare variant sites have a similarity of 100%, which is conservative. Now we have our back of the envelope genome-wide genetic similarity between EN-SC of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 88% = 99.988%, and EN-Italian of 99.9% * 100% + .1% * 99% = 99.999% as the EN-EN proxy. This exercise actually worked pleasingly well and got us in the right ballpark, since the 99.9% from before is any two particular humans (and lacking the additional decimal precision), and modern West and East Eurasians diverged relatively late in human evolutionary history.
Thus, a hypothetical EN-SC offspring would share 99.994% of the genome with the EN parent, less than the 99.999% from a randomly selected EN person. The conclusion remains—despite how triggering this thought appears to be for some—a father can be more genetically similar to a randomly selected person from his population than to his own offspring, if the mother of his offspring comes from a different population.
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The entire conclusion hinges upon this point, and I'm not convinced.
A quick search turned up this master's thesis (ok, not the most impressive source), according to which two random Europeans' genomes have 3.8 million differences. A random European and a random African have 5.5 million differences. (Numbers are from pages 14 and 15.) So a European/African mixed child would have 2.25 million differences with each parent, still a bit closer than two random Europeans.
The master's thesis is using an old version of that publicly-available dataset (1000 Genomes). For example, it uses about 38.2 million of what the author calls SNPs; more recent versions have at least 88 million genetic variants. His stand-in for "African" is "LWK," Luhya from Kenya, who like most Eastern Africans, have a material amount of European-appearing admixture in varying degrees.
I also don't know if his calculations were correct. Not only do I not wish to spend my time and effort replicating the findings, the thesis appears rushed. For example, Figure 1.1 has inconsistent digits on the labels, stretched images, panels that overlap one another, in addition to formatting looking like Microsoft Excel 97. My "pls fix" alarm is going-off. That being said, I'm not dunking on him and I can understand; you gotta do what you gotta do to graduate ASAP.
Even if we accept the thesis's findings as is, that still implies a woman from an earlier diverged and/or less admixed populations such as West Africans, San, and Pygmies could have a child with an European man that would be less related to the European man than a randomly selected child from his childhood street. In such a case, we'd be agreeing that she's a whore (in the generic, rhetorical sense, not the woman from the previous sentence); we'd just be discussing the price.
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Sure, but Europe is a big place. Two natives of Aix-en-Provence(say) are likely much closer related than two random Europeans, and should one of them have a romantic evening with a Hutu woman, their child might well be less related to him than his next door neighbor growing up.
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Thanks. I didn't feel like bothering with that. This stuff is super interesting to me and I'm very sure of what I'm saying but it really does seem to upset people and then they want to argue and no matter what it never seems to be enough, which leaves me wondering what their hangup is in the first place.
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