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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I don't know enough about all the points to literally refute every one, but everything I can understand about what's written here is almost complete nonsense.

The very first thing:

Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out

Almost all experts agree that people were in North America 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that this may have happened even significantly earlier. That someone could claim that ~7000 years would be enough for everyone currently on earth to share an ancestor is self-evidently completely nonsensical.

The claim above is nonsense, but not nonsense for the reason you are saying. 5,000-15,000 years is roughly the time for all humans to share ancestors. Plus the identical ancestors point doesn't mean those people were your ancestors, it's either they were your ancestor or have no living descendents today.

However just because you share ancestors doesn't mean you get DNA from them in equal amounts, or that you even get DNA from them at all (for context given how recombination works you have ancestors a mere 500 years ago you don't carry any DNA from, indeed you don't carry any DNA from almost all of your ancestors 500 years ago). From the Wikipedia page on the identical ancestors point (I recommend reading it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point

All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors before the Identical Ancestors Point, all the way to the very first single-celled organism.[3] However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions. A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern-day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than they will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.

Add in the fact that somone who appears only once in your family tree 7000 years ago has basically a < 10^-50 (or thereabouts) chance of contributing DNA to you living today we can pretty safely say that modern Japanese people do not have any genetic ancestry from Norwegians because as I said above geneological ancestry and genetic ancestry are not the same.

The differing proportions in how much of your ancestors were living in place X vs Y at the identical ancestors point still lead to large scale group geographic phenotypic differences, even though everyone has the same ancestors (as a set, but not in proportion of their genetics that made it down to you) not too far back in the past.

Honestly someone who knows about the identical ancestors point but then does not mention the differing proportions is sending off a massive red flag that they are acting in bad faith because they are absolutely smart/well read enough to know better. I wouldn't trust much of whatever else comes after they wrote that.

That feels impossible. From a quick google:

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam — two individuals who passed down a portion of their genomes to the vast expanse of humanity — are known as our most recent common ancestors, or MRCAs. But many aspects of their existence, including when they lived, are shrouded in mystery.

Now, a study led by the Stanford University School of Medicine indicates the two roughly overlapped during evolutionary time: The man lived between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, and the woman lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.

I think the ~5k-15k number is a theoretical number that one comes up with if one ignores selection, geographical barriers, and anything else that makes mating not some kind of random walk.

See:

“data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.”

Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/

In a nutshell, if you take a White or Asian person, they are about as different or as similar as say two White people are.

Most variation is neutral and due to genetic drift and the accumulation of, new, mostly neutral allele variants. This doesn't change the fact that people can vary genetically on socially relevant traits like height, IQ and skin color despite being genetically similar.

Amazonians are relatively light skinned, but nearly identical genetically to their dark skinned Peruvian neighbors. Both Europeans and North East Asians are light skinned due to convergent evolution despite their large genetic differences. Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians, because they have a lot Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry from people who used to live in Siberia, the same as Europeans.

Yet they don't look or act more like Europeans than the North East Asians do, because of culture and selection and the fact most variation is neutral.

Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians,

wrong e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png

Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians, because they have a lot Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry from people who used to live in Siberia, the same as Europeans.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong on this, Amerindians are somewhat closer to East Asians than Europeans. People living in Siberia weren't same as Europeans. and Amerindians are product of mixing of Siberians and proto-East Asians.

Yep, two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10 phenotypically important loci will present much more differently to each other than two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10,000 neutral loci.

Counting all loci as being equally contributing to differences in phenotype between separated groups misses the fact that the common differences between two groups have been selected to disproportionately have phenotypic impacts.

Hence you can't compare a mutation on a locus that's different between populations X and Y vs a mutation that some people in Y have and others don't and they say the impact the mutation has on the individual must be similar in both cases, hence that mutation makes people just as phenotypically different as the one which segregates the two populations.

Iff you consider only a small fraction of differences.

Thus the answer to the question “How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?” depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, equation M44 can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is equation M45 ≅ 0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ∼20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, equation M46 ≅ 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes “never” when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations.

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