site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

our most common ancestor is very recent

People often mean very different things when they say "most common ancestor".

Do you mean the person such that every single person living today has as an ancestor somewhere in their family tree? This person is a mere 3,000 years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html

Do you mean the time from which every person living back then was an ancestor to everyone living today. That's about 7,000 years as you mentioned.

Do you mean the person from which a certain locus in all modern living humans descends from? This person is about 50,000 years ago (this is highly dependent on the locus though)

Do you mean the person from which all of a large block of the DNA of all living people comes from? This person is about 300,000 years ago (see e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam, the guy who all modern extant Y-chromosomes are descended from) and isn't even an anatomically modern human.

Do you mean the person from which all of our DNA is descended from? This organism is many many millions of years old and isn't even human.

The first two cases really don't mean much when looking at modern humans. For instance you could have gotten a fragment of Chromosome 1 from this person while I got a fragment of Chromosome 17 from this person (if we even got any DNA from him in the first place, which in itself is pretty unlikely), and it's perfectly possible that people living in East Asia preferentially got Chromosme 1 fragments from him while people in Europe got Chromosome 17 fragments from him (because his descendeds which moved to those locations carried those specific parts of his genome there).

Same with the second case, just because every human being at that point was both our's ancestors doesn't mean anything about what proportion of those ancestors we have and these proportions can be very different, from Wikipedia:

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.

It's the third and further things which matter for how much genetic variance there is between two groups, becuase at that point you can directly point to specific portions of the genome and say that for both of us that ancestor provided the DNA at this location.

Those numbers are way too low.

The 3000, if you read the link you put, is using a way oversimplified model.

The 7000 is clearly false given the separation of the Americas long before that, and very low rates of admixture since aside from the last 500 years.

You don't actually need to have any DNA from any specific people generations back in your ancestry, the recombination could and often does go the wrong way.

Your overall point is good, though, that things go far enough back to matter, and that mere common ancestry doesn't mean an enormous amount.