Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.
My understanding is that humans have very limited genetic diversity compared to most other animals, because of the population bottlenecks we've been through. And further, that diversity is mostly between individuals, not between groups. The distinction is easy to see in cats vs dogs: they both have similar overall genetic diversity but two Chihuahuas have virtually all the same genes (the small angry ones) while two tabby cats are more distinct. The two cats have different combinations of big/small nice/mean smart/dumb, but the genes average out to the same "typical" kind of cat in both cases.
Because humans get around so much, and because we think interesting-looking people are hot, the diversity is spread pretty broadly across the whole population. The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.
In short, the distributions of individuals overlap so much that the trendlines are pretty close to useless. And historically speaking, the people who tried to make a hard distinction out of those trendlines had awful motives.
> The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.
This is always touted as an “racism-is-not-only-immoral-it-is-scientifically-wrong” argument, but it is a fallacy.
Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is 6’0 feet (183 cm) and the average height of Philippine men is 5’4 (163 cm). This means the height difference between these two groups is 20 cm. And it is obvious that the difference inside one group MUST be larger, for example there are 6’4 Dutch basketballers but also certainly Dutch 5’2 horse riding jockeys.
And depending on context both of these insights are useful. For example if you manage a basketball team it is much more effective to consider people as individuals, simplified you should hire very tall people (regardless if they are Dutch or Philippines) who can throw precisely a ball into a basket. But the diversity between population groups points to real information too! If you sell shoes to both countries you shouldn’t provide the same one-size-fits-all and assume to catch the same percentage of the market.
Plus the overlap in one metric is expanding into separable clusters the more dimensions are used:
Take a Dutch and Philippine who have the exact same height: Their own respective brothers (heck, even twins) will not be the same perfect match, instead being a bit taller or smaller. But the more variables you consider (weight, muscle composition, leg length, head radius, hand size, form of earlobe .. etc) you will find that holistically seen two brothers truly are much more similar to each other than to a stranger.
A few hundred years ago Europeans were very much shorter too. The Chinese have increased in height within just the last couple of generations. In both cases this isn't because their genes changed, it's because their diets changed. Diet also explains the difference between the Netherlands and the Philippines.
The height thing is a bad example. Generally in genetics you like to focus on things without so many confounding factors. That's why the article focuses on attributes like baldness, MS, and lactose intolerance.
> Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is...
I would not give too much credence to the various figures often given for the average height of men and women in x country without careful research, since they have highly variable degrees of support.
For years I had heard repeatedly that the average height of a man in Indonesia was 158 cm or 5ft and 2 inches. This seemed so absurd to me and provoked enough scepticism that I eventually attempted to track down the source of that figure. It turned out to be from Wikipedia and the citation was a study that measured the heights of the elderly yet all of those repeating that figure neglected to mention, or were in all likelihood entirely ignorant of, that detail. I am similarly sceptical of some of the claims made about the average height of the Dutch, the subject of which seems to be a particular favourite among height myth-mongers.
With respect to young adult men I have found that figures based on measurements obtained as part of fitness screenings for mandatory military service are the most reliable due to their large sample size (at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest academic studies) and overwhelming lack of selection and sampling bias. A minority of nations have such systems and fewer still publish the data obtained in public. Yet even this would not answer the question for the whole population.
None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.
You listed a handful of traits from a handful of genes. And from that you make an argument about relative distributions of entire genomes of entire populations. Do you realize the fact that brothers are genetically similar compared to a stranger in no way implies the similarity or difference of entire populations?
Even the traits you mention are just a handful of physical traits. There are about 20,000 protein encoding genes and 180,000 non-encoding. Protein encoding genes code for the structures in our body. The other 180,000 genes code for all kind of dynamics -- the rna that turns genes to proteins, how proteins are expressed in different cells to make them different cells, how relative expression levels change in response to external stimulus, etc. So, the set of genes to consider is clearly all 200,000 genes and not just the 20,000 protein encoding genes much less the handful of protein encoding genes responsible for something like eye color.
Unfortunately for racists but fortunately for the vast majority, the world is a great big melting pot with all the different ethnicities producing all kinds of variety. So much that the blend complexity long ago surpassed any tiny set of visible trait uniformity.
I honestly don't know how so many people fall for these simplistic illogical racist arguments. But it makes me happy to know that racists are about 200,000 years to late to shove the entire human race into tiny little boxes based on physical traits.
> None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.
Note, however, that this does not imply there are not significant genetic differences between different ethnicities. Differences that are selected for will be cloaked in a sea of non-significant differences.
Definitely. I'm not saying there aren't average differences. We literally see different physical traits. But physical traits are a minute fraction of all the complexity that is the human genome. And all of those physical traits are always mixing fluidly between and within groups.
My point is, there are clearly wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with any other ethnicity compared to what may be the average of a broad distribution. Humans are inherently mosaic.
Personally I believe it's why our species is so resilient. But that's a stronger statement, so just a belief.
Yes, and there are also wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with other species. But it would be senseless to propose we're the same as chimpanzees. The point is it doesn't take much in the way of genetic differences, as a fraction of the total genome, to make a very large difference in phenotype.
Well, if the phenotype or trait due to any random gene was the differentiation between race, species, or anything else besides that specific trait, you might have a point in support of OP. But unfortunately for racist ducks there are so many differences, and similarities, that have nothing to do with hair color or height. Any given swath is it's own mosaic of combinations, no matter what we label it.
I read what you wrote there several times and can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. Are you claiming genetic differences aren't why species are different? Are you claiming chimps and humans don't share most of their (protein coding) genes? Are you attacking a strawman where you think the people you are attacking are claiming specific single gene differences are why they claim races are genetically different?
I'll add that "racist ducks" is a bad sign there, since arguments about facts don't have anything to do with motivation, and bringing up motivation is an ad hominem argument. "Argue like this and you are a bad person."
Good points. On the bottleneck hypothesis, a new study came out in 2024 arguing that the 900kya population loss was, if not a statistical artifact, more likely a genetic sweep or genome takeover via adaptive advantage. Whatever might be the truth in this case, it is true that human evolution, especially on the cultural plane, has gone through a bunch of major leaps which have had the effect of one small population eventually dominating the global genetic pool. Basically, a winner-takes-all dynamic. One example would be the Proto Indo-Europeans who have replaced male lineages throughout Europe and beyond. There are other such examples as well, like Neanderthal extinction.
genetic bottleneck does not imply population loss.
it is about unavailability of large gene pool.
this can be population loss, but can also, be a loss of compatability between individuals, due to genomic modification, such as but not limited to chromosomal fusion.
However, with a population of 8 billion and a genome of 3.1 billion base pairs, the entire space of single nucleotide mutations is produced in just a few generations. So any such useful single nucleotide mutation is going to become available regardless of past bottlenecks.
I ve read this in a breathless ("help my ideology is under attack by reality") voice and it took a page away fro interesting discussions.
My pet theory is that the species inherited a loop deformation by default from our ancestors, defacto splitting the species planetwide into three subspecieses. One adapted to peace, one adapted to strife, one adapted to all out carnage. The obvious benefits of various adaptions of what we perceive as mental sickness, but what are actual adaptions to the loop communicating themselves. In this small moment where one (peacetime) insanity is uprooted to replace with a (wartime) insanity, might we be free in the anti gravity of the situation to discuss complex answers before the yikes of you silence us for the rest of the cycle? Thanks for the gag in all these years, that helped and did nothing.
The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct.
Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
> The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct
That makes it sound like the boundaries between species are arbitrary, but they are not. Sure, there are corner cases where things become debatable, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule.
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
This is only the case if the separation has been there long enough for the two groups to develop distinct genetic markers or physical traits (like the beak shape or plumage mentioned in the original comment). The deeper reason they are classified as different species it that they are de-facto on different evolutionary trajectories. Which doesn't happen for human populations because historically, whatever obstacle divide us, we find a way to get around it.
Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions. The slight coloration of a bird’s crest, shape of some lizard’s nose.
Yet with Homo sapiens we seem to be allergic to the idea that our drastic swings in physical attributes could possibly qualify as a different species (we obviously call them “races”). But they plainly diverged from each other due to geographic and reproductive isolation and adaptation to environments. Which is precisely what causes species to diverge into new ones.
Are we supposed to pretend that Africans DONT have black skin due an adaptation to their environment?
Do other animals get divided into races? I know dogs have “breeds” and we don’t consider those species. But I don’t hear about “races” in other animals.
> Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions
It might seem like that to you, but you'd be wrong. Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance and reproductive isolation over superficial visual traits that humans happen to find striking. While phenotypic variations like skin color or facial structure are highly visible, they represent a microscopic fraction of the overall genome and do not indicate the deep divergence required to define a new species.
And from a genetic standpoint, Homo sapiens is remarkably homogeneous. Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest. Traits like skin color (an adaptation for UV protection) or nose shape (an adaptation for humidity/temperature) are rapid evolutionary adjustments. They change quickly on an evolutionary timescale without requiring a fundamental split in the species' lineage.
In contrast to other animals, because humans never stopped breeding with one another, we never had the chance to "drift" far enough apart to become different species. Geographic distance in humans has historically acted as a filter, not a wall.
So there's your answer. Because of this unique genetic homogeneity (and not because of some imagined woke censorship), speaking of human subspecies would be scientifically mistaken.
1. They might not, but that's not decisive for reproductive isolation. Basically, those two populations have diverged enough that we know, from studying speciation in general, that they are on separate evolutionary trajectories never to join again. That's the decisive factor - they are two distinct branches of the tree of life. That's not the case with any two human populations. Human history shows that we are different from all other animals in this sense: no matter what obstacle – weather geographic or otherwise – separates us from each other, we ultimately find a way to overcome it.
2. You might have picked a bad example with these two species, since they appear to be surprisingly far apart genetically, a lot of their common appearance being explained by convergent evolution not by shared ancestry.
PS: A lot of this stuff is counterintuitive and understandably perplexing, but scientists have worked hard to get to the bottom of things and deserve a bit more credit for it. You base a lot of your arguments on suspicions and gut feeling. I recommend measuring those misgivings against the freely available AI chat apps, it will help you get a grip on both the depth and complexity our scientific understanding of this domain. Ask it for sources, go check those sources, ask deeper question, push back as much as you need. Here's my interaction with Claude on these questions:
> Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance [..] Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest.
Do you have a source? I've tried looking in the past, but couldn't find good "genetic distance" metrics that could be compared between humans and other species.
The Gemini answer first cites Kaessmann, Wiebe, and Pääbo (1999), which explicitly says it sampled from all 3 at the time recognized major subspecies of chimpanzee (and found it 4x more genetically diverse than humans), not the same patch of forest.
Then it cites Goldberg and Ruvolo (1997), which uses the frankly hilarious "more variation between than within groups" metric. Why hilarious? Because it looks at single genes, while most traits are polygenic. When you look at multiple genes, even with only 2-3 dimensions to display the results (the data has thousands of dimensions), populations can be clearly distinguished [1]. What is the value in such a useless metric? And even then, the paper doesn't state something so extreme - quite the opposite. Direct quote from the paper:
Eastern chimpanzees are not, however, the genetic equivalents of humans. Mean, modal and maximum levels of nucleotide difference are actually slightly lower in eastern chimpanzees than in humans. The last common maternal ancestor of eastern chimpanzees may therefore be even younger than the last common maternal ancestor of all humans.
In fact, even a cursory reading of Gemini's answer shows it to be inconsistent - it states: "In contrast, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exhibit a nucleotide diversity that is often two to four times higher than that of humans, depending on the genomic regions analyzed."
2-4 higher diversity, but there are 4-5 recognized chimpanzee subspecies [2]! Far from "two chimpanzees (implied from the same subspecies) living side-by-side are more different than the two most different humans", it puts humans right on the edge, or slightly past it, of meriting at least one subspecies of our own.
The last study it cites, Fontserè et al. (2022), barely mentions human genetic variation, and doesn't actually provide any quantitative comparisons between it and that of chimpanzees.
Finally, I didn't actually get what I asked for. Nowhere in those articles, or the AI answer, is there anything equivalent to "the genetic distance between Eastern and Western Chimpanzees is X, while the distance between a Norwegian and a Pygmy is Y."
So no, it doesn't actually check out, if you apply minimum scrutiny.
The sibling answer claims the fixation index [F_st, 3] is a measure of genetic distance, but that's not exactly true. E.g. it can't be used to show that dogs are closely related to wolves, less closely to cats, and even less closely to salmon - the F_st for all those comparisons, save perhaps for wolves, would be simply 1. Still, I took your advice, and asked AI (Gemini). I asked:
What is the genetic distance between eastern and western chimpanzees, and how does it compare to the genetic distance between a Spaniard and a Han Chinese?
To summarize its answer (can't share the chat when not logged in, feel free to verify), it claimed the fixation index is used for this purpose, and gave the following numbers:
Western vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.32
Central vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.09
Spaniard vs. Han Chinese F_st = ~0.11 – 0.15
The values for the human comparison are more or less in line with [3], but I couldn't find a source for the chimpanzee numbers after a very brief search. I've already spent far too much time debunking a casual AI slop answer.
Interesting, thanks for putting in the worthwhile effort to debunk that assertion. Clearly some hyperbolical claims have made their way into common wisdom and from there into model training data, which is unfortunate and feeds the conspiracy theories.
Because those claims go way beyond what is needed to support the current scientific viewpoint debated here. It's still true that homo sapiens is a startlingly recent species and that the visual characteristics which are so apparent to us (as a mainly visual species) depend on much more superficial genetic changes than one would imagine.
The bottom line, as I see it, is that there is good reason to apply a different standard for assigning (sub-)species status to a given population when we're talking about humans vs. other animals. If we think of a species as a branch of the evolutionary tree (i.e. a separate evolutionary trajectory), in the case of other animals, geographic isolation will, with overwhelming probability, lead to divergence over a long enough time. Human history shows that this is not the case for us humans. Whatever obstacle has divided us in the past, we managed to overcome it and mix our genes again.
Let's take the North Sentinelese people (possibly the most genetically isolated human population extant). It is believed that they were isolated from the main branch of humanity about 50kya. That's obviously a blink of an eye in terms of evolution, but maybe if we would be talking about chimps, scientists would have designated them as a subspecies. Probably not, but let's pretend that's the case. Should we then do the same? Taxonomically sanction that split and consign them to their own branch of the tree? It seems historically misguided, but also morally wrong. Like shutting the door on them. I guess this latter aspect is what's bothering some, but in my opinion it says more about them, than about science in general.
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
Really? I thought the requirements for species classification were: (1) must be able to reproduce and (2) offspring must be fertile.
There are a lot of subtleties. Ring species are a particularly fun one: you can have a population that live around some natural obstacle (like a large body of water) where individuals can breed successfully with individuals near to them but not with ones further way (like directly across the barrier), in a continuum of variation.
Thought experiment. Three populations, A, B, and C, divided geographically along a line. Individuals from group A can breed successfully with those from B but not with those from C. Individuals from group C can breed successfully with those from B but not A.
How many species are there? This is why the term "species" can never be entirely objective. I remember the eureka moment I had when I finally understood this (admittedly somewhat simple) point.
It can even be more subtle, it's entirely possible that some rare members of A can C breed, and some members of C and B would not be able to breed. The "fertility" relation can only be decided between two individuals, not groups. Group-level fertility is a statistical average of individual fertility.
That said, I don't think that means that "species" is entirely subjective or meaningless.
the reproductive incompatability, is based on physiological range.
in general, there are multi organizational levels of reproductive incompatability.
in this case, the geographic distance, orogenic blockade, and ecological confounds of arctic conditions preclude easy mingling of U.arctos x U. maritimus.
Sometimes it’s hard to objectively tell whether two animals don’t appear to reproduce because they are unable genetically, or technically able still but behaviorally unwilling in normal natural circumstances, or we don’t know but we just haven’t observed it for that particular combo, etc
if I'm not mistaken some human populations have neanderthal DNA which indicates that humans had reproduced with them and created fertile offspring. outside of that example there are a ton of species that can produce viable offspring like dogs, wolves and coyotes.
my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselves
horses and donkeys can breed to make mules, but the mules usually cant reproduce, this is the same with tigons and ligers but sometimes the females are viable
so if they can produce children that can produce children, they're the same species. where this line is blurred, so is the species line. geographical barriers have nothing to do with it.
> my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselves
things are a bit more complicated than that, because having fertile offspring is not a transitive property.
Ring species: population A can mate with B, B with C, C with D, and D with E, but A and E cannot mate, even though they are part of the same continuous chain.
Ensatina eschscholtzii salamanders in California exhibit this non-transitive behavior. Populations at the ends of the coastal ranges can interbreed with their neighboring populations, but where they meet in the south, the "ends" of the ring do not interbreed.
if you consider that geographic barrier is an environment of immediate lethality, or infecundity, that is physiological incompatability, and would be a speciation.
if you consider that geographic barrier, simply precludes, interaction between individuals, then you will have founder effect, thus one population will be genetically decended from a sample of the larger population.
This is not necessarily true, even under a very strict definition of reproductive compatibility (offspring is itself not sterile, which excludes mules or ligers). For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring. You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such.
> oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.
Fascinating. Not sure what gave you the idea I don’t believe in evolution or that I’m somehow promoting biblical creationism? Are you responding to the right comment?
> speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
Neither coyotes nor wolves were created by human selection as far as I know. Dogs were. You can take dogs out of the equation if you want.
Coyote/wolf hybrids (coywolves) exist in the wild and challenge your definition. And I am talking about your original comment's definition "speciation is reproductive incompatibility", because I believe you backtracked a bit with the more vague "wild type incompatibility".
Besides, I don’t necessarily disagree that wolves, dogs and coyotes should be seen as the same “species”. I find this obsession with taxonomy completely useless and irrelevant. We all know there are biological clusters and the boundaries are fuzzy, but we can use simplified/imprecise models when communicating because it is more convenient.
hierachy of incompatabilities at each level of organization.
wild type [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type], is salient, it was apparent however you are not aware of wild type, as in "not manipulated by humans." a product of alleles in naturally occuring environmental context.
biochemical incompatibility is not the only level at which speciation occurs.
also relative frequencies are considered.
when highest frequency of mating occurs between, wolves, and wolf coyote is an outlier, low frequency gene flow you are looking at the equilibrium between species separation and hybrid backcrossing.
there is a lot of in jargon, wrt science, thus if you dont understand right away, and someone leads you through a rabbit hole, you will hear a bunch of jargon popping up as if bullshit. but thats what happens when you dive in with out a primer. keep talking to biologists of differing fields and you will eventually understand the extent of brevity that occurs so as to avoid reiterating facts as basic as up and down or black and white.
biochemical, physiological, anatomical, behavioral, geophysical, geographical.
these are tiers of biological organization, and are interdependant.
I'm gonna be very blunt with you (disregarding again the goalpost moving from your earlier claim that "speciation is reproductive incompatability (sic)"): the jargon you are throwing around is not helpful, it is pure linguistic diarrhea you are using in an attempt to project an image of erudition.
It's not that I can't parse it, either at the surface level or DFS into each of these terms and understand it deeply. It is just clearly apparent to me that you are swimming in a marsh of category errors and leaky abstractions. This field has accumulated a lot of entropy over time. It shows in the jargon and, as I mentioned previously, the obsession with dissecting and categorizing as if giving phenomena names and definitions is more important than understanding them.
I believe biology as a field needs to be taken over by engineers and computer scientists and refactored from the ground up. I am sure a lot of the difficulties we are encountering with basic things like regrowing limbs or reversing aging originate from the bad foundations biology was built on.
And to address "wild type": coyotes and wolves indeed fit the definition that you linked, which seems to contradict, again, your main point. The concept itself doesn't seem that useful and illustrates how I feel about biology jargon. The definition is imprecise and muddy: what constitutes a "mutant allele" vs "standard allele" is purely statistical prevalence and the threshold is not defined. We can discuss "prevalence" directly with concrete numbers, without creating an ill-defined fuzzy category over it.
> once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability (sic).
Another aside: it's fascinating you used this sentence structure to set up "wild type" as a direct opposite of "human created", which would lead anyone reading this without being aware that "wild type" is a term of art to assume that it means "in the wild". This is not the gotcha you think it is...
That sounds like bunk. Has someone really tried to get every suspiciously similar but distinct species to mate? If I go and get these two to mate are they really going to delete one of the species:
Just Think it logically there are millions and millions of animal species alone. The number of combinations is astronomical. Did someone really try out each combination? It’s silly. Of course not.
Not many. Part of why we are like this is extreme mobility. Even before modern times we were always good at getting around and seem to have a desire to roam. Or at least enough of us do to mix up those gene pools.
If that were true before modern times, distinctions in appearance never could have developed.
Edit as reply because "pOsTiNg tOo FaSt":
> Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.
I see. Is there some quantitative genetic similarity measure, by which it was determined that it was worth categorizing foxes and wolves and bears into distinct subspecies/breeds/whatever taxonomical categories, but not humans? I assume that's what your "speciation did not occur [enough to merit taxonomical distinction]" is based on.
I.e. by what measure are a Pygmy and a Norwegian more similar than a Sumatran and a Siberian tiger [1]?
Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies? I assumed that they would but "the science community" is too scared of the implications when idiots learn about it.
I look at a sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger and I see a lot less variance than I see when I look at
a pygmy, a Norwegian, an sentinel islander, and a han Chinese person
>Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies?
No. Multiple human subspecies did once exist (examples being Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus, and Homo Floresiensis) but only our species, Homo Sapiens, remains (with traces of Neanderthal DNA so there was some interbreeding.) However race is a cultural and social construct. Different human races are not different human subspecies. A Pygmy, a Norwegian, a Sentinel Islander, and a Han Chinese person are all the same species. The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation - humans share 99.9% of their DNA, and the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations
This particular argument (I am not talking about anything else) always looked to me as "inkblot defense" (Cephalopods muddy water to defend themselves).
Genome is discrete. A single nucleotide polymorphism can have far-reaching consequences. So it's a bit like arguing that this collection of pentagons is not statistically different from this collection of hexagons because radius variation within collections is greater than between collections.
One day I've got into trouble by pointing to another genetic adaptation (EPAS1 SNPs) rather than the poster child of genetic differences: an SNP in the 6th codon of the β-globin gene. But that's another story.
Well humans and chimpanzees share almost 99% of their DNA despite being quite distant relative so that number is somewhat deceptive. Not disagreeing with the overall point of course
> However race is a cultural and social construct. [...] The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation
Species is also a social construct. Calling race a social construct isn't the persuasive argument people seem to assume.
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
This is is a fallacious argument, because there is no such thing as the "average Norwegian" and the "average Pygmy", and so you cannot even construct a meaningful sentence like "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian". People need to stop using this silly argument.
It's the established scientific consensus. Obviously it isn't convincing to racists, but no argument would be given that racists don't approach the subject in good faith to begin with.
I think you're being too pedantic, though, because the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible within the context of this thread and relative to the supposition that genetic variability between human populations is a valid basis to justify a biological definition of race and further classifying human races as subspecies. That species is also a social construct is true, and you seem to think that it disproves the premise, but it really doesn't because species is a social construct in the sense that all scientific classification is a social construct. But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose. You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species.
Here are some actual scientifically credentialed papers and statements supporting the thesis that race has no biological basis. I doubt anyone will bother reading them but here they are just for the record. Further reading is easy to find.
So was the fact that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria. "Established scientific consensus" is another argument people need to stop using.
> You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species
No, I'm not equating race and species, I'm refuting the argument that race being a social construct makes it meaningless or scientifically useless by pointing out that species is also a social construct while being meaningful and scientifically useful. Therefore the argument that it's a social construct is a red herring.
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose.
So you agree that calling it a social construct is completely besides the point, and people are not saying what they mean and merely polluting discussions with pointless red herrings.
Now whether race serves a useful purpose is highly debatable. There are plenty of statistical associations with race that are used to this day, eg. race as a risk factor in sickle cell anemia. If your argument is that we usually have better classifications than race in many circumstances, then sure, but note that this still doesn't prove the intended point that race classifications are useless, which is a claim that they never have any use.
Edit:
> the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible
Just want to be clear that this is still a fundamental category error. These are completely unlike measures and equating them properly yields different conclusions, eg. using pairwise genetic distance measures. See the paper, "Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy" for where this misunderstanding originated.
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism
Yes, the modern context of what we call race today is inherently linked to notions like limpieza de sangre and casta in post-conquest Latin America - the true prototypical example of structural racism, where for several centuries and over several generations a "white" appearance was conflated with a socially elite status and a "racialized" appearance with poverty and marginalization. The Moors in Medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe were of African origin, and sometimes even had what we would now call a Sub-Saharan appearance, but they were not considered "Black" in racial terms because that was not a notion that existed in that specific milieu.
The percent difference between genomes of species is one of those tricky measures that doesn't really give good intuition. I find it much more useful to think in terms of the time since two species shared a common ancestor.
e.g. For humans and chimps, that's several million years. For Sumatran and Siberian tigers, it's around a hundred thousand years.
So not that far away since modern humans began splitting up into separate subgroups outside of Africa? Of course there have been quite a bit of intermixing since then (more so in Eurasia than the more isolated parts of the world before the modern times, though)
There are estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived a few thousand years ago. Isolated peoples are almost never fully isolated, and all kinds of rare events can happen in 100+ generations. Andamanese peoples in particular were in contact with each other, with occasional contacts to the mainland.
Tasmania may have been isolated for ~8000 years between sea level rise and European contact. But the last person of fully Aboriginal Tasmanian descent likely died in 1905.
Out of africa remains defensible but more and more people will come to the conclusion that the chinese hyporhesis of the multiregional origin is somewhat true so we will get a hybrid i guess
The problem is that "Out of Africa" is an uninformative name. The outflow from Africa was well underway 100k years ago or even 200k years ago, and there was no inherent break between that ongoing outflow and what happened 40k years ago when (inasmuch as we can reconstruct today) behaviorally modern rather than 'archaic' humans began to migrate out, which we now call "Out of Africa". So it's hard to even tell apart the "recent Out of Africa" and the "multiregional" hypotheses in a way that might help settle a debate.
You are free to create your own human classification scheme with k sub-species and try to popularize it, there's nobody stopping you and there isn't some authority out there called "the scientific community" that's going to send you cease and desist letters.
There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.
Many researchers now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of modern humans.
It doesn’t get talked about much because it’s a sideshow without an easy resolution, but the question of modern and archaic human speciation is far from a settled problem and many of the species formerly considered to be separate are now often lumped in as subspecies.
First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.
It’s not the ebb and flow so much as avoiding pointless academic bikeshedding. A bunch of very competitive explorer archaeologists named the separate species based on morphological skeletal differences decades before we even knew about DNA and now as the evidence accumulates, the question has gone from hard facts to a debate what is a species vs subspecies. Nobody really cares about the latter because it makes no functional difference to the research, so they let the problem lie until new interesting evidence presents itself. We know the species could interbreed, which is what matters to us now, not whether their taxa is three words or two (which is what this boils down to, some people write one way, some people the other and both know what each other is saying)
So have humans. There are white, red, black, brown, yellow people, and they live in their own happy places on the planet, except for the fact that we now move them around by plane, boat and goat.
This distinction seems more arbitrary over time. Growing up I was taught different species couldn’t interbreed. But what about Neanderthal and Sapiens?
I don't think you could have chosen a worse example. Dogs are themselves a subspecies, and are split into many different breeds, of wildly different character and physiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomy
I mean people won't like the idea but that's not my point; what you describe variety in superficial traits while maintaining common traits
Applied to humans; skin color, eyes, dwarfism, hypertrichosis... can still interbreed
When it comes to categorization and taxonomy in leaky abstractions like languages the boundaries get a bit hand wavy and usually land on whatever fits the prevailing social desirability bias of the day
The same selection pressures that produced the variety of "superficial" traits also act on "non-superficial" traits - nature does not recognize this distinction.
It’s not like those scientific definitions are particularly consistent or stable, though. In a large part it’s still a matter of convention when it comes to non human species as well
Science, or you, can make up whatever definitions they wish. The question is not if a definition is "true", but what it's useful for.
Sure, you - or scientific authorities, whoever they might be - can declare that there are multiple modern human species. The question is, what are you intending to use that definition for?
That applies to other branches of the tree of life, too. There's not some objective genetic distance measure which says what's a species and what is not. It can vary widely on different parts of the tree. But it's driven by pragmatism - sensible biologists will not waste time arguing whether some mushrooms should be one species or two, if they otherwise agree on the facts.
If you can't say plainly and clearly what the purpose of your delineation is, and it's in your own part of the tree, of course people are going to have their suspicions.
It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.
I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.
We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.
- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.
- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.
You're not even responding to the question. You're describing (what you believe to be) features of global civilization today, projected out from "300AD". But at various points over that interval, European civilization wasn't on the leaderboard, and was being outcompeted by the Khmer, Mali, China, you name it.
You see this all the time in these kinds of discussions, the assumption that because "western" civilization possesses X, Y, and Z traits, history must consist of a linear progression towards realizing those traits. Obviously, no. For many centuries the west was brutal, illiterate, tribal, and chaotic, primitive in ways other cultures were not.
It's just a tedious history lesson except that it abruptly falsifies the idea that you can look at "civilizational achievement" and reason back to genetic superiority. Obviously you cannot. You could come up with some other evidence for genetic superiority! But this particular argument is patently wrong.
The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!
What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.
Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.
The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.
The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.
It takes much longer to develop new features via random mutation and selection than it does to alter the distribution of existing features via selection. This is trivially true, no? I’m not sure what the argument against this is, please elaborate.
Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".
Okay, I am focusing on the one assertion you made which I quoted, and I think you are arguing the top level point back at me.
Features can change at a population level in the amount of time that different human groups have been separated from one another. That is all I’m saying here. It seemed like you didn’t agree with that point, and I’m interested if you can refute it in a well reasoned way since the implications are pretty counter-zeitgeist and being outside the zeitgeist is annoying.
By the way, “genetic superiority” is a category error and I find it annoying when people talk like that. An animal can only be better or worse in a particular environment, and even then different animals can exist in a similar niche without being better or worse. This sort of rhetoric has made this area very hard to discuss.
I saw in the article that male pattern baldness became way less common over the studied period. Their definition of "way less" was 1-2%. Even if it wasn't the case that, lacking natural weapons, generalizable cognitive faculties are highly advantageous for our species regardless of factors like climate, there's not any real reason to figure cognitive changes would occur way faster than the 1-2% reduction in MPB. So is the argument that some large scale population has a mean IQ that differs by 1-2%? That's vastly less than the impact of poverty or childhood nutrition.
Every time I read about ancient DNA work, it's about Reich's research. Can anyone expert in the field shed light on that? He certainly seems to have a successful research group. And he's a good communicator, I got a lot out of his 2018 book. Who else should I be reading or reading about?
also , independent confirmation of observations, are gold for research, however needless repetition of effort is not.
thus when someone is prolific,or uncannily mad about a topic it tends to be dominated by that persons submissions, and often any other contributors are on that lead researchers team.
Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.
It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.
The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs, regardless of the underlying science. Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.
>Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.
Sorry, do you have any examples? His views that I've read [0, 1] are scientifically rigorous and terminologically precise, deftly navigating the politics that some consider extremely controversial. To wit, one of my favorite passages from [1], which deals specifically with terminology:
But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which is mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.
This particular passage is on p. 253 of [1], but everything in Chapter 11 ("The Genomics of Race and Identity," pp. 247-273) is well worth the read.
It's unfortunate that the URL happens to be buzzfeed, but there was an open letter to Reich by other academics about his terminology in the book you're quoting [0]. The short of it is that social categorizations we believe in like race intersect with genetics in a very complicated way. Reich is a world-class expert in genetics. He simply commits the same error as many other other experts in discounting the complexity of subjects he's adjacent to, but not directly an expert in.
I get that this is a high standard to hold him to (and I sure as heck don't meet it myself), but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
The crux of that letter is the "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true. However, this does not mean that there aren't also meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation that do stratify according to ancestry (not race!). The letter tries to handwave this away, claiming that "[f]or several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference." This is simply not true, as studies like the subject of this discussion demonstrate.
The letter also states that "[t]he public should not cede the power to define race to scientists who themselves are not trained to understand the social contexts that shape the formation of this fraught category." Also true! This is exactly why Reich explicitly avoids discussing "races" but rather populations and ancestries, which are rigorously defined strictly in terms of genetics. With respect to population structures and ancestry, Reich is indeed an expert.
I'll add that very few of the signatories of that letter have any experience, let alone expertise in genetics. Here are the first few:
Jonathan Kahn, James E. Kelley Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Columbia University; President, Social Science Research Council
Joseph L. Graves Jr., Associate Dean for Research & Professor of Biological Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section G: Biological Sciences, Joint School of Nanoscience & Nanoengineering, North Carolina A&T State University, UNC Greensboro
Sarah Abel, Postdoc, Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland
Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Princeton University
Sarah Blacker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Catherine Bliss, Associate Professor, Social and Behavioral Sciences, UC San Francisco
Out of the 67 signatories, I counted approximately 5 who might have sufficient genetics expertise to offer a meaningful scientific counterpoint to Reich's work (this is being charitable, as I included titles like "Professor of Biological Sciences," which is no guarantee.) The rest were in fields like anthropology, sociology, law, and history.
Yes, because it's not an argument the letter is making. Everyone can name a meaningful genetic patterns of genetic variation that follow ancestry like lactase persistence. The argument is in the second paragraph:
But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.
It's not an argument that Reich gets the science wrong, so other geneticists being on the list is neither here nor there. When he says things like:
But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
in NYT opinion pieces, it's that he's not understanding how terminology interacts with public discourse. The next paragraph goes on to use the unclear term "west african", not exactly a great example of careful language either.
The list is mainly people in fields that deal with these things, as you'd expect.
>Yes, because it's not an argument the letter is making.
It literally is though. The full quote from the Buzzfeed piece is:
Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference.
>The argument is in the second paragraph:
But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.
Reich never purports to make cultural or political arguments, just biological ones.
>When he says things like:
But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
Note that he put "races" in quotes. The point he was making here is that sometimes genetic ancestries can intersect quite well with traditional notions of "race" [0]. But often times they do not, especially in the case of admixed populations [1].
I know, but we both see how a random member of the public could easily read it. My argument, after all, is that the way he communicates is sloppier than it should be for the subject matter and prone to public misunderstandings.
> "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true.
There's an implicit assertion in that statement, that we're currently not recognizing that meaningful patterns and variation exists. But that's nonsense. We are all perfectly aware that some groups digest lactose better, some are less vulnerable to skin cancer, some drop like flies to common tropical diseases, some completely dominate long distance running competition etc.
So there's got to be some particular differences he's referring to that he thinks are papered over. He should spell out which.
The biggest complication is that the current notion of human race is largely based on skin color (with a few adjacent physical traits), which has very little to do with population genetics. In particular, black skin color is a dominant genetic trait, meaning that you can easily have individuals and even entire subpopulations that are black skinned, but have much more genetic similarity to traditionally white skinned populations (being descendents of a few black skinned individuals who married into a larger white skinned population) - while they would still be categorized as "black" in terms of race. Conversely, genetically isolated black skinned populations are also often lumped together as "the black race".
Another major complexity is that some races are defined more by genealogic ancestry than by genetic ancestry or easily identifiable physical characteristics. For example, people are normally considered Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. This leads to many genetically disparate subpopulations being lumped together as a Jewish race.
> but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
Why? He presented real verified science. Anyone who is offended or does not like it ... well, too bad... the world does not care. Facts are facts. He does not owe you or anyone else comfort. He presents cold hard truth, and sometimes truth hurts. Tough.
I haven't read much from Reich, so I don't know his position. But I've understood that the current best practice in human genetics is to explicitly justify the population descriptors chosen for each study, rather than using any fixed set of descriptors given from the outside.
There are two main types of genetic descriptors: those based on genetic similarity and those based on ancestry groups. Genetic similarity is quantitative, and individual samples often have multiple labels attached to them. Ancestry groups are discrete categories based on quantitative measures. If it's appropriate to use descriptors based on genetic ancestry groups in a study, it's usually also appropriate to drop samples that don't fit neatly in any single group.
Sometimes it's more appropriate to use descriptors based on environmental factors, such as ethnicity or geography. Environmental descriptors tend to be correlated with genetic descriptors, but they are not the same.
People keep wondering why trust in scientific findings is in free fall. A big part of it is because many scientists have become comfortable lying when they feel it’s for a noble cause.
I really don't care if the people around me have physiological differences from me. It would be wonderful to explore that and such differences. But as OP pointed out the discussion gets co-opted by people who would kill others over physiological differences. How is such a viewpoint conducive to a peaceful society where millions of people with physiological differences exist?
For good reason, the wider community isn't able to have a productive conversation about it. I wouldn't even call that a noble reason, but a necessary one, unless you would be okay with inviting people that want you dead into discussion on scientific consensus.
> people who would kill others over physiological differences
Most of them just want to enforce borders. And then the dogma that we are all the same is co-opted by people who would see their ethnic group wiped out, as they are told that they don't even exist except as a meaningless social construct, and their desire for ethnic self-preservation is therefore illegitimate - there is nothing to preserve!
>And then the dogma that we are all the same is co-opted by people who would see their ethnic group wiped out
Are you referring to certain people? People sympathetic to Palestinians? I mean yeah obviously it's wrong to preach equity for me but not for thee, but I'm not really going to get into a pissing match about Israel/Palestine, sorry, because that's deflection from my point.
So there are two choices here:
1) Allow scientific discussion on physiological differences or avoid it. Particulary, physiological differences that don't necessarily effect health outcomes but also performance metrics.
2) Do not allow such discussion, and declare an axiom: normalize physiological differences across homo sapiens.
You're right to call the latter dogma, although not in the pejorative sense.
You brought this infamous conflict up to propose that because option two can be used by bad actors, then we should not normalize option two, and freely discuss physiological differences between people.
If you are of a group that has physiological differences scientifically proven to be inferior, you are immediately in an outgroup. You will experience discrimination. Because few (and I'm being generous, perhaps no one truly) can talk about physiological differences without building and holding prejudice. Pragmatically that is just not the case. It's why endless ethnic conflicts exist.
I simply cannot formulate an argument for why this should ever be allowed. It sounds like a horror show if you're on the receiving end. A horror show minorities of many types live through every day.
To lay "ground rules" so that we do not scrutinize our fellow brothers and sisters on unalienable traits is an ethical imperative to prevent us tearing each other apart. This then leaves only one line, the line where people are more than happy to discriminate based on these unalienable traits, and I think it's perfectly acceptable to ostracize them since they encourage ripping each other's throats out, willingly or as a useful peon.
Nobody talks about "performance metrics" when distinguishing between Sumatran and Siberian tigers. What happens instead is humans try to preserve their populations and distinctions. "It's all the same" is corrosive to preservation.
The problem is that if you don't stick to truth and make an attempt at objectivity, others will step in to fill the void. This is how you sow division and undermine trust in science.
I'm having a very hard time understanding a society where research is openly conducted on innate physiological differences between people, and bad actors don't use this official research to practice open discrimination. The lesser of the two evils is to draw a line and tell people to just accept these differences.
Scientists are not lying. Reich is notable in his field and no-one is disputing his genetic research.
What scientists are wary of is how any discussion in the field gets jumped on and twisted into ammunition to reinforce racist beliefs, whether the science actually supports this or not.
“What scientists are wary of is how any discussion in the field gets jumped on and twisted into ammunition to reinforce racist beliefs”
Yet nothing ruined the reputation of the scientific establishment more in recent time than their tendency to change their behaviours and adapt their beliefs for political motives
funny how racists on twitter havent learnt that skin color is a function of natural selection, how do we get this message to them in a non offensive yet informational enough way to change their perceptions of colored people
We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.74±0.12), household income (increasing 1.12±0.12) and years of schooling (increasing 0.63±0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant(Extended Data Fig.10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years , after which tends towards zero.
That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.
> That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.
Why? This article just focuses on changes in West Eurasia (probably because that's what they had data for), but the bulk of changes that resulted in behavioral modernity surely occurred in Africa - where the genetic variability for them to occur was and still is far greater than elsewhere - and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions such as Central Eurasia, Southeast Eurasia etc. West Eurasia was a backwater.
> and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions
Sure. But did ALL regions change? And did they change to the same destination? When the environments differed so much? It is easy to see how answers (or the questions themselves) could be politically contentious.
"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."
Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.
Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.
My understanding is that humans have very limited genetic diversity compared to most other animals, because of the population bottlenecks we've been through. And further, that diversity is mostly between individuals, not between groups. The distinction is easy to see in cats vs dogs: they both have similar overall genetic diversity but two Chihuahuas have virtually all the same genes (the small angry ones) while two tabby cats are more distinct. The two cats have different combinations of big/small nice/mean smart/dumb, but the genes average out to the same "typical" kind of cat in both cases.
Because humans get around so much, and because we think interesting-looking people are hot, the diversity is spread pretty broadly across the whole population. The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.
In short, the distributions of individuals overlap so much that the trendlines are pretty close to useless. And historically speaking, the people who tried to make a hard distinction out of those trendlines had awful motives.
> The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.
This is always touted as an “racism-is-not-only-immoral-it-is-scientifically-wrong” argument, but it is a fallacy.
Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is 6’0 feet (183 cm) and the average height of Philippine men is 5’4 (163 cm). This means the height difference between these two groups is 20 cm. And it is obvious that the difference inside one group MUST be larger, for example there are 6’4 Dutch basketballers but also certainly Dutch 5’2 horse riding jockeys.
And depending on context both of these insights are useful. For example if you manage a basketball team it is much more effective to consider people as individuals, simplified you should hire very tall people (regardless if they are Dutch or Philippines) who can throw precisely a ball into a basket. But the diversity between population groups points to real information too! If you sell shoes to both countries you shouldn’t provide the same one-size-fits-all and assume to catch the same percentage of the market.
Plus the overlap in one metric is expanding into separable clusters the more dimensions are used:
https://i.sstatic.net/r6cWd.jpg
Take a Dutch and Philippine who have the exact same height: Their own respective brothers (heck, even twins) will not be the same perfect match, instead being a bit taller or smaller. But the more variables you consider (weight, muscle composition, leg length, head radius, hand size, form of earlobe .. etc) you will find that holistically seen two brothers truly are much more similar to each other than to a stranger.
A few hundred years ago Europeans were very much shorter too. The Chinese have increased in height within just the last couple of generations. In both cases this isn't because their genes changed, it's because their diets changed. Diet also explains the difference between the Netherlands and the Philippines.
The height thing is a bad example. Generally in genetics you like to focus on things without so many confounding factors. That's why the article focuses on attributes like baldness, MS, and lactose intolerance.
Are people of Philippine decent that are born and raised in the Netherlands statistically the same height as native Dutch?
> Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is...
I would not give too much credence to the various figures often given for the average height of men and women in x country without careful research, since they have highly variable degrees of support.
For years I had heard repeatedly that the average height of a man in Indonesia was 158 cm or 5ft and 2 inches. This seemed so absurd to me and provoked enough scepticism that I eventually attempted to track down the source of that figure. It turned out to be from Wikipedia and the citation was a study that measured the heights of the elderly yet all of those repeating that figure neglected to mention, or were in all likelihood entirely ignorant of, that detail. I am similarly sceptical of some of the claims made about the average height of the Dutch, the subject of which seems to be a particular favourite among height myth-mongers.
With respect to young adult men I have found that figures based on measurements obtained as part of fitness screenings for mandatory military service are the most reliable due to their large sample size (at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest academic studies) and overwhelming lack of selection and sampling bias. A minority of nations have such systems and fewer still publish the data obtained in public. Yet even this would not answer the question for the whole population.
None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.
You listed a handful of traits from a handful of genes. And from that you make an argument about relative distributions of entire genomes of entire populations. Do you realize the fact that brothers are genetically similar compared to a stranger in no way implies the similarity or difference of entire populations?
Even the traits you mention are just a handful of physical traits. There are about 20,000 protein encoding genes and 180,000 non-encoding. Protein encoding genes code for the structures in our body. The other 180,000 genes code for all kind of dynamics -- the rna that turns genes to proteins, how proteins are expressed in different cells to make them different cells, how relative expression levels change in response to external stimulus, etc. So, the set of genes to consider is clearly all 200,000 genes and not just the 20,000 protein encoding genes much less the handful of protein encoding genes responsible for something like eye color.
Unfortunately for racists but fortunately for the vast majority, the world is a great big melting pot with all the different ethnicities producing all kinds of variety. So much that the blend complexity long ago surpassed any tiny set of visible trait uniformity.
I honestly don't know how so many people fall for these simplistic illogical racist arguments. But it makes me happy to know that racists are about 200,000 years to late to shove the entire human race into tiny little boxes based on physical traits.
> None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.
Note, however, that this does not imply there are not significant genetic differences between different ethnicities. Differences that are selected for will be cloaked in a sea of non-significant differences.
Definitely. I'm not saying there aren't average differences. We literally see different physical traits. But physical traits are a minute fraction of all the complexity that is the human genome. And all of those physical traits are always mixing fluidly between and within groups.
My point is, there are clearly wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with any other ethnicity compared to what may be the average of a broad distribution. Humans are inherently mosaic.
Personally I believe it's why our species is so resilient. But that's a stronger statement, so just a belief.
Yes, and there are also wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with other species. But it would be senseless to propose we're the same as chimpanzees. The point is it doesn't take much in the way of genetic differences, as a fraction of the total genome, to make a very large difference in phenotype.
Well, if the phenotype or trait due to any random gene was the differentiation between race, species, or anything else besides that specific trait, you might have a point in support of OP. But unfortunately for racist ducks there are so many differences, and similarities, that have nothing to do with hair color or height. Any given swath is it's own mosaic of combinations, no matter what we label it.
I read what you wrote there several times and can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. Are you claiming genetic differences aren't why species are different? Are you claiming chimps and humans don't share most of their (protein coding) genes? Are you attacking a strawman where you think the people you are attacking are claiming specific single gene differences are why they claim races are genetically different?
I'll add that "racist ducks" is a bad sign there, since arguments about facts don't have anything to do with motivation, and bringing up motivation is an ad hominem argument. "Argue like this and you are a bad person."
Good points. On the bottleneck hypothesis, a new study came out in 2024 arguing that the 900kya population loss was, if not a statistical artifact, more likely a genetic sweep or genome takeover via adaptive advantage. Whatever might be the truth in this case, it is true that human evolution, especially on the cultural plane, has gone through a bunch of major leaps which have had the effect of one small population eventually dominating the global genetic pool. Basically, a winner-takes-all dynamic. One example would be the Proto Indo-Europeans who have replaced male lineages throughout Europe and beyond. There are other such examples as well, like Neanderthal extinction.
you want to be a little careful.
genetic bottleneck does not imply population loss.
it is about unavailability of large gene pool.
this can be population loss, but can also, be a loss of compatability between individuals, due to genomic modification, such as but not limited to chromosomal fusion.
https://www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-human-chromosome-2-fuse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertsonian_translocation
However, with a population of 8 billion and a genome of 3.1 billion base pairs, the entire space of single nucleotide mutations is produced in just a few generations. So any such useful single nucleotide mutation is going to become available regardless of past bottlenecks.
I ve read this in a breathless ("help my ideology is under attack by reality") voice and it took a page away fro interesting discussions.
My pet theory is that the species inherited a loop deformation by default from our ancestors, defacto splitting the species planetwide into three subspecieses. One adapted to peace, one adapted to strife, one adapted to all out carnage. The obvious benefits of various adaptions of what we perceive as mental sickness, but what are actual adaptions to the loop communicating themselves. In this small moment where one (peacetime) insanity is uprooted to replace with a (wartime) insanity, might we be free in the anti gravity of the situation to discuss complex answers before the yikes of you silence us for the rest of the cycle? Thanks for the gag in all these years, that helped and did nothing.
The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct.
Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
So your question is hard to answer.
> The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct
That makes it sound like the boundaries between species are arbitrary, but they are not. Sure, there are corner cases where things become debatable, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule.
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
This is only the case if the separation has been there long enough for the two groups to develop distinct genetic markers or physical traits (like the beak shape or plumage mentioned in the original comment). The deeper reason they are classified as different species it that they are de-facto on different evolutionary trajectories. Which doesn't happen for human populations because historically, whatever obstacle divide us, we find a way to get around it.
Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions. The slight coloration of a bird’s crest, shape of some lizard’s nose.
Yet with Homo sapiens we seem to be allergic to the idea that our drastic swings in physical attributes could possibly qualify as a different species (we obviously call them “races”). But they plainly diverged from each other due to geographic and reproductive isolation and adaptation to environments. Which is precisely what causes species to diverge into new ones.
Are we supposed to pretend that Africans DONT have black skin due an adaptation to their environment?
Do other animals get divided into races? I know dogs have “breeds” and we don’t consider those species. But I don’t hear about “races” in other animals.
> Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions
It might seem like that to you, but you'd be wrong. Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance and reproductive isolation over superficial visual traits that humans happen to find striking. While phenotypic variations like skin color or facial structure are highly visible, they represent a microscopic fraction of the overall genome and do not indicate the deep divergence required to define a new species.
And from a genetic standpoint, Homo sapiens is remarkably homogeneous. Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest. Traits like skin color (an adaptation for UV protection) or nose shape (an adaptation for humidity/temperature) are rapid evolutionary adjustments. They change quickly on an evolutionary timescale without requiring a fundamental split in the species' lineage.
In contrast to other animals, because humans never stopped breeding with one another, we never had the chance to "drift" far enough apart to become different species. Geographic distance in humans has historically acted as a filter, not a wall.
So there's your answer. Because of this unique genetic homogeneity (and not because of some imagined woke censorship), speaking of human subspecies would be scientifically mistaken.
I’ve heard this argument but it sounds factually incorrect to me.
Take for example: Icterus gularis [1] vs Icterus galbula [2]
Are you really going to tell me that:
1. They’d refuse to have sex with each other or could not procreate
And:
2. Someone bothered to check if they’re sufficiently distinct genetically?
I suspect these species were deemed “distinct” by early naturalists like Carl Linnaeus or Charles Darwin neither of whom even knew what a gene was.
And to my eye these birds seem a lot closer than an Aboriginal Australian man is to a Norwegian man.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamira_oriole
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_oriole
1. They might not, but that's not decisive for reproductive isolation. Basically, those two populations have diverged enough that we know, from studying speciation in general, that they are on separate evolutionary trajectories never to join again. That's the decisive factor - they are two distinct branches of the tree of life. That's not the case with any two human populations. Human history shows that we are different from all other animals in this sense: no matter what obstacle – weather geographic or otherwise – separates us from each other, we ultimately find a way to overcome it.
2. You might have picked a bad example with these two species, since they appear to be surprisingly far apart genetically, a lot of their common appearance being explained by convergent evolution not by shared ancestry.
PS: A lot of this stuff is counterintuitive and understandably perplexing, but scientists have worked hard to get to the bottom of things and deserve a bit more credit for it. You base a lot of your arguments on suspicions and gut feeling. I recommend measuring those misgivings against the freely available AI chat apps, it will help you get a grip on both the depth and complexity our scientific understanding of this domain. Ask it for sources, go check those sources, ask deeper question, push back as much as you need. Here's my interaction with Claude on these questions:
https://claude.ai/share/bea11195-731b-4301-a2f5-fb669961a60e
> Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance [..] Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest.
Do you have a source? I've tried looking in the past, but couldn't find good "genetic distance" metrics that could be compared between humans and other species.
The metric is called fixation index
AI is great at these kind of searches. Here's what Claude found:
https://claude.ai/share/bea11195-731b-4301-a2f5-fb669961a60e
And Gemini:
https://gemini.google.com/share/bfe9c3d5a2de
TLDR: it checks out.
The Gemini answer first cites Kaessmann, Wiebe, and Pääbo (1999), which explicitly says it sampled from all 3 at the time recognized major subspecies of chimpanzee (and found it 4x more genetically diverse than humans), not the same patch of forest.
Then it cites Goldberg and Ruvolo (1997), which uses the frankly hilarious "more variation between than within groups" metric. Why hilarious? Because it looks at single genes, while most traits are polygenic. When you look at multiple genes, even with only 2-3 dimensions to display the results (the data has thousands of dimensions), populations can be clearly distinguished [1]. What is the value in such a useless metric? And even then, the paper doesn't state something so extreme - quite the opposite. Direct quote from the paper:
Eastern chimpanzees are not, however, the genetic equivalents of humans. Mean, modal and maximum levels of nucleotide difference are actually slightly lower in eastern chimpanzees than in humans. The last common maternal ancestor of eastern chimpanzees may therefore be even younger than the last common maternal ancestor of all humans.
In fact, even a cursory reading of Gemini's answer shows it to be inconsistent - it states: "In contrast, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exhibit a nucleotide diversity that is often two to four times higher than that of humans, depending on the genomic regions analyzed."
2-4 higher diversity, but there are 4-5 recognized chimpanzee subspecies [2]! Far from "two chimpanzees (implied from the same subspecies) living side-by-side are more different than the two most different humans", it puts humans right on the edge, or slightly past it, of meriting at least one subspecies of our own.
The last study it cites, Fontserè et al. (2022), barely mentions human genetic variation, and doesn't actually provide any quantitative comparisons between it and that of chimpanzees.
Finally, I didn't actually get what I asked for. Nowhere in those articles, or the AI answer, is there anything equivalent to "the genetic distance between Eastern and Western Chimpanzees is X, while the distance between a Norwegian and a Pygmy is Y."
So no, it doesn't actually check out, if you apply minimum scrutiny.
The sibling answer claims the fixation index [F_st, 3] is a measure of genetic distance, but that's not exactly true. E.g. it can't be used to show that dogs are closely related to wolves, less closely to cats, and even less closely to salmon - the F_st for all those comparisons, save perhaps for wolves, would be simply 1. Still, I took your advice, and asked AI (Gemini). I asked:
What is the genetic distance between eastern and western chimpanzees, and how does it compare to the genetic distance between a Spaniard and a Han Chinese?
To summarize its answer (can't share the chat when not logged in, feel free to verify), it claimed the fixation index is used for this purpose, and gave the following numbers:
The values for the human comparison are more or less in line with [3], but I couldn't find a source for the chimpanzee numbers after a very brief search. I've already spent far too much time debunking a casual AI slop answer.[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10113208/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Subspecies_and_popu...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
Interesting, thanks for putting in the worthwhile effort to debunk that assertion. Clearly some hyperbolical claims have made their way into common wisdom and from there into model training data, which is unfortunate and feeds the conspiracy theories.
Because those claims go way beyond what is needed to support the current scientific viewpoint debated here. It's still true that homo sapiens is a startlingly recent species and that the visual characteristics which are so apparent to us (as a mainly visual species) depend on much more superficial genetic changes than one would imagine.
The bottom line, as I see it, is that there is good reason to apply a different standard for assigning (sub-)species status to a given population when we're talking about humans vs. other animals. If we think of a species as a branch of the evolutionary tree (i.e. a separate evolutionary trajectory), in the case of other animals, geographic isolation will, with overwhelming probability, lead to divergence over a long enough time. Human history shows that this is not the case for us humans. Whatever obstacle has divided us in the past, we managed to overcome it and mix our genes again.
Let's take the North Sentinelese people (possibly the most genetically isolated human population extant). It is believed that they were isolated from the main branch of humanity about 50kya. That's obviously a blink of an eye in terms of evolution, but maybe if we would be talking about chimps, scientists would have designated them as a subspecies. Probably not, but let's pretend that's the case. Should we then do the same? Taxonomically sanction that split and consign them to their own branch of the tree? It seems historically misguided, but also morally wrong. Like shutting the door on them. I guess this latter aspect is what's bothering some, but in my opinion it says more about them, than about science in general.
I’ve often dreamt of breeding with that mythical bird far, far away.
If you do cross the barrier, you could successfully mate with that mythical bird!
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
Really? I thought the requirements for species classification were: (1) must be able to reproduce and (2) offspring must be fertile.
Is it less objective than that?
There are a lot of subtleties. Ring species are a particularly fun one: you can have a population that live around some natural obstacle (like a large body of water) where individuals can breed successfully with individuals near to them but not with ones further way (like directly across the barrier), in a continuum of variation.
"Ring species are a particularly fun one"
This is really interesting, thank you. I've never heard of "ring species" before.
Thought experiment. Three populations, A, B, and C, divided geographically along a line. Individuals from group A can breed successfully with those from B but not with those from C. Individuals from group C can breed successfully with those from B but not A.
How many species are there? This is why the term "species" can never be entirely objective. I remember the eureka moment I had when I finally understood this (admittedly somewhat simple) point.
It can even be more subtle, it's entirely possible that some rare members of A can C breed, and some members of C and B would not be able to breed. The "fertility" relation can only be decided between two individuals, not groups. Group-level fertility is a statistical average of individual fertility.
That said, I don't think that means that "species" is entirely subjective or meaningless.
Even within one species, not every individual can successfully breed with every other.
Is that based on a real example or hypothetical?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
Polar bears can have furtile offspring with grizzly/brown bears. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hyb...
the reproductive incompatability, is based on physiological range.
in general, there are multi organizational levels of reproductive incompatability.
in this case, the geographic distance, orogenic blockade, and ecological confounds of arctic conditions preclude easy mingling of U.arctos x U. maritimus.
Interfertility is not an equivalence relation, does not form equivalence classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
Sometimes it’s hard to objectively tell whether two animals don’t appear to reproduce because they are unable genetically, or technically able still but behaviorally unwilling in normal natural circumstances, or we don’t know but we just haven’t observed it for that particular combo, etc
if I'm not mistaken some human populations have neanderthal DNA which indicates that humans had reproduced with them and created fertile offspring. outside of that example there are a ton of species that can produce viable offspring like dogs, wolves and coyotes.
my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselves
horses and donkeys can breed to make mules, but the mules usually cant reproduce, this is the same with tigons and ligers but sometimes the females are viable
so if they can produce children that can produce children, they're the same species. where this line is blurred, so is the species line. geographical barriers have nothing to do with it.
> my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselves
things are a bit more complicated than that, because having fertile offspring is not a transitive property. Ring species: population A can mate with B, B with C, C with D, and D with E, but A and E cannot mate, even though they are part of the same continuous chain.
Ensatina eschscholtzii salamanders in California exhibit this non-transitive behavior. Populations at the ends of the coastal ranges can interbreed with their neighboring populations, but where they meet in the south, the "ends" of the ring do not interbreed.
if you consider that geographic barrier is an environment of immediate lethality, or infecundity, that is physiological incompatability, and would be a speciation.
if you consider that geographic barrier, simply precludes, interaction between individuals, then you will have founder effect, thus one population will be genetically decended from a sample of the larger population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect
"The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct."
speciation is reproductive incompatability.
geographic isolation is more like founder effect than speciation.
> speciation is reproductive incompatability
This is not necessarily true, even under a very strict definition of reproductive compatibility (offspring is itself not sterile, which excludes mules or ligers). For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring. You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such.
"For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring" citation required.
"You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such."
you could argue, but i not, me. reproductive compatability means wild type organisms not artificially coerced.
there are tiers of incompatability, biochemical, physiological, anatomical, behavioral, geophysical, geographical.
incompatability on any of those levels, drives speciation.
once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
no you cant argue. but your forgiven for not having the knowledge, and being fed half knowledge out of brevity.
evolution is real, speciation is real, saying let it be so, and it will manifest itself, is not real.
oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.
> oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.
Fascinating. Not sure what gave you the idea I don’t believe in evolution or that I’m somehow promoting biblical creationism? Are you responding to the right comment?
> speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
Neither coyotes nor wolves were created by human selection as far as I know. Dogs were. You can take dogs out of the equation if you want.
Coyote/wolf hybrids (coywolves) exist in the wild and challenge your definition. And I am talking about your original comment's definition "speciation is reproductive incompatibility", because I believe you backtracked a bit with the more vague "wild type incompatibility".
Besides, I don’t necessarily disagree that wolves, dogs and coyotes should be seen as the same “species”. I find this obsession with taxonomy completely useless and irrelevant. We all know there are biological clusters and the boundaries are fuzzy, but we can use simplified/imprecise models when communicating because it is more convenient.
> citation required
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf
biological levels of organization.
hierachy of incompatabilities at each level of organization.
wild type [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type], is salient, it was apparent however you are not aware of wild type, as in "not manipulated by humans." a product of alleles in naturally occuring environmental context.
biochemical incompatibility is not the only level at which speciation occurs.
also relative frequencies are considered.
when highest frequency of mating occurs between, wolves, and wolf coyote is an outlier, low frequency gene flow you are looking at the equilibrium between species separation and hybrid backcrossing.
there is a lot of in jargon, wrt science, thus if you dont understand right away, and someone leads you through a rabbit hole, you will hear a bunch of jargon popping up as if bullshit. but thats what happens when you dive in with out a primer. keep talking to biologists of differing fields and you will eventually understand the extent of brevity that occurs so as to avoid reiterating facts as basic as up and down or black and white.
biochemical, physiological, anatomical, behavioral, geophysical, geographical. these are tiers of biological organization, and are interdependant.
gene mismatch, climate intolerance, mechanical union, stimulus/response, physical inaccessability, intraversable distance.
these are the speciation drivers that occur at these levels, respectively.
its not a digital phenomenon, its a statistical equilibrum, that is forced to occupy a new central tendency, as a result of environmental influence.
if you need more help regarding speciation it exists.
I'm gonna be very blunt with you (disregarding again the goalpost moving from your earlier claim that "speciation is reproductive incompatability (sic)"): the jargon you are throwing around is not helpful, it is pure linguistic diarrhea you are using in an attempt to project an image of erudition.
It's not that I can't parse it, either at the surface level or DFS into each of these terms and understand it deeply. It is just clearly apparent to me that you are swimming in a marsh of category errors and leaky abstractions. This field has accumulated a lot of entropy over time. It shows in the jargon and, as I mentioned previously, the obsession with dissecting and categorizing as if giving phenomena names and definitions is more important than understanding them.
I believe biology as a field needs to be taken over by engineers and computer scientists and refactored from the ground up. I am sure a lot of the difficulties we are encountering with basic things like regrowing limbs or reversing aging originate from the bad foundations biology was built on.
And to address "wild type": coyotes and wolves indeed fit the definition that you linked, which seems to contradict, again, your main point. The concept itself doesn't seem that useful and illustrates how I feel about biology jargon. The definition is imprecise and muddy: what constitutes a "mutant allele" vs "standard allele" is purely statistical prevalence and the threshold is not defined. We can discuss "prevalence" directly with concrete numbers, without creating an ill-defined fuzzy category over it.
> once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability (sic).
Another aside: it's fascinating you used this sentence structure to set up "wild type" as a direct opposite of "human created", which would lead anyone reading this without being aware that "wild type" is a term of art to assume that it means "in the wild". This is not the gotcha you think it is...
yep thats what a bot would say. bot
recommended additions to training set:
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theo...
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/speciation/
https://pressbooks.umn.edu/introbio/chapter/speciation/
https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/wonderful-life-en
bazinga!
You are obviously too disingenuous to engage in any kind of dialogue and it showed from your very first reply. But sure, thanks for the recs.
bots are obviously incapable of learning, you had every opportunity, but at each time, you chose to pursue an alignment.
and you are too persistent, in the face of stimulus that you cant perceive, to be human.
a human would have reacted viscerally, to other meta-aspects.
if you want to to see genuine dialog, stop pretending to be human.
Lmao sure thing you fucking moron.
That sounds like bunk. Has someone really tried to get every suspiciously similar but distinct species to mate? If I go and get these two to mate are they really going to delete one of the species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamira_oriole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_oriole
Just Think it logically there are millions and millions of animal species alone. The number of combinations is astronomical. Did someone really try out each combination? It’s silly. Of course not.
perhaps you could explain why there is more than one type of organism on this planet.
Not many. Part of why we are like this is extreme mobility. Even before modern times we were always good at getting around and seem to have a desire to roam. Or at least enough of us do to mix up those gene pools.
If that were true before modern times, distinctions in appearance never could have developed.
Edit as reply because "pOsTiNg tOo FaSt":
> Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.
I see. Is there some quantitative genetic similarity measure, by which it was determined that it was worth categorizing foxes and wolves and bears into distinct subspecies/breeds/whatever taxonomical categories, but not humans? I assume that's what your "speciation did not occur [enough to merit taxonomical distinction]" is based on.
I.e. by what measure are a Pygmy and a Norwegian more similar than a Sumatran and a Siberian tiger [1]?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812581
It’s not binary. Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.
If our modern world continues for thousands of years eventually our differences will start to dissolve.
Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies? I assumed that they would but "the science community" is too scared of the implications when idiots learn about it.
I look at a sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger and I see a lot less variance than I see when I look at a pygmy, a Norwegian, an sentinel islander, and a han Chinese person
>Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies?
No. Multiple human subspecies did once exist (examples being Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus, and Homo Floresiensis) but only our species, Homo Sapiens, remains (with traces of Neanderthal DNA so there was some interbreeding.) However race is a cultural and social construct. Different human races are not different human subspecies. A Pygmy, a Norwegian, a Sentinel Islander, and a Han Chinese person are all the same species. The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation - humans share 99.9% of their DNA, and the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations
This particular argument (I am not talking about anything else) always looked to me as "inkblot defense" (Cephalopods muddy water to defend themselves).
Genome is discrete. A single nucleotide polymorphism can have far-reaching consequences. So it's a bit like arguing that this collection of pentagons is not statistically different from this collection of hexagons because radius variation within collections is greater than between collections.
One day I've got into trouble by pointing to another genetic adaptation (EPAS1 SNPs) rather than the poster child of genetic differences: an SNP in the 6th codon of the β-globin gene. But that's another story.
Species is a fuzzy concept, much like class of radius variation.
Well humans and chimpanzees share almost 99% of their DNA despite being quite distant relative so that number is somewhat deceptive. Not disagreeing with the overall point of course
> However race is a cultural and social construct. [...] The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation
Species is also a social construct. Calling race a social construct isn't the persuasive argument people seem to assume.
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
This is is a fallacious argument, because there is no such thing as the "average Norwegian" and the "average Pygmy", and so you cannot even construct a meaningful sentence like "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian". People need to stop using this silly argument.
It's the established scientific consensus. Obviously it isn't convincing to racists, but no argument would be given that racists don't approach the subject in good faith to begin with.
I think you're being too pedantic, though, because the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible within the context of this thread and relative to the supposition that genetic variability between human populations is a valid basis to justify a biological definition of race and further classifying human races as subspecies. That species is also a social construct is true, and you seem to think that it disproves the premise, but it really doesn't because species is a social construct in the sense that all scientific classification is a social construct. But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose. You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species.
Here are some actual scientifically credentialed papers and statements supporting the thesis that race has no biological basis. I doubt anyone will bother reading them but here they are just for the record. Further reading is easy to find.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604262/
https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s...
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real/
> It's the established scientific consensus.
So was the fact that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria. "Established scientific consensus" is another argument people need to stop using.
> You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species
No, I'm not equating race and species, I'm refuting the argument that race being a social construct makes it meaningless or scientifically useless by pointing out that species is also a social construct while being meaningful and scientifically useful. Therefore the argument that it's a social construct is a red herring.
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose.
So you agree that calling it a social construct is completely besides the point, and people are not saying what they mean and merely polluting discussions with pointless red herrings.
Now whether race serves a useful purpose is highly debatable. There are plenty of statistical associations with race that are used to this day, eg. race as a risk factor in sickle cell anemia. If your argument is that we usually have better classifications than race in many circumstances, then sure, but note that this still doesn't prove the intended point that race classifications are useless, which is a claim that they never have any use.
Edit: > the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible
Just want to be clear that this is still a fundamental category error. These are completely unlike measures and equating them properly yields different conclusions, eg. using pairwise genetic distance measures. See the paper, "Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy" for where this misunderstanding originated.
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism
Yes, the modern context of what we call race today is inherently linked to notions like limpieza de sangre and casta in post-conquest Latin America - the true prototypical example of structural racism, where for several centuries and over several generations a "white" appearance was conflated with a socially elite status and a "racialized" appearance with poverty and marginalization. The Moors in Medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe were of African origin, and sometimes even had what we would now call a Sub-Saharan appearance, but they were not considered "Black" in racial terms because that was not a notion that existed in that specific milieu.
But the DNA of the sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger is also over 99% identical?
The DNA of humans and chimps is 98.8% identical.
The percent difference between genomes of species is one of those tricky measures that doesn't really give good intuition. I find it much more useful to think in terms of the time since two species shared a common ancestor.
e.g. For humans and chimps, that's several million years. For Sumatran and Siberian tigers, it's around a hundred thousand years.
> it's around a hundred thousand years.
So not that far away since modern humans began splitting up into separate subgroups outside of Africa? Of course there have been quite a bit of intermixing since then (more so in Eurasia than the more isolated parts of the world before the modern times, though)
What's the most recent common ancestor between an North Sentinel islander and a Norwegian? Mitochondrial Eve is 150kya
There are estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived a few thousand years ago. Isolated peoples are almost never fully isolated, and all kinds of rare events can happen in 100+ generations. Andamanese peoples in particular were in contact with each other, with occasional contacts to the mainland.
Tasmania may have been isolated for ~8000 years between sea level rise and European contact. But the last person of fully Aboriginal Tasmanian descent likely died in 1905.
Probably less than 40k? Since it took a while for modern humans to leave Africa.
I don’t think the out-of-africa hypothesis is defensible in light of recent archeological findings, and, incidentally, DNA complexity analysis.
Out of africa remains defensible but more and more people will come to the conclusion that the chinese hyporhesis of the multiregional origin is somewhat true so we will get a hybrid i guess
The problem is that "Out of Africa" is an uninformative name. The outflow from Africa was well underway 100k years ago or even 200k years ago, and there was no inherent break between that ongoing outflow and what happened 40k years ago when (inasmuch as we can reconstruct today) behaviorally modern rather than 'archaic' humans began to migrate out, which we now call "Out of Africa". So it's hard to even tell apart the "recent Out of Africa" and the "multiregional" hypotheses in a way that might help settle a debate.
What percentage of DNA do all mammals share? And what all mammals except platypus?
In the age of AI we probably could do better in dvivding humans by pattern of variation rather than amount of variation.
But who cares about such divisions if we all can interbreed?
You are free to create your own human classification scheme with k sub-species and try to popularize it, there's nobody stopping you and there isn't some authority out there called "the scientific community" that's going to send you cease and desist letters.
There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.
Many researchers now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of modern humans.
It doesn’t get talked about much because it’s a sideshow without an easy resolution, but the question of modern and archaic human speciation is far from a settled problem and many of the species formerly considered to be separate are now often lumped in as subspecies.
First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.
It’s not the ebb and flow so much as avoiding pointless academic bikeshedding. A bunch of very competitive explorer archaeologists named the separate species based on morphological skeletal differences decades before we even knew about DNA and now as the evidence accumulates, the question has gone from hard facts to a debate what is a species vs subspecies. Nobody really cares about the latter because it makes no functional difference to the research, so they let the problem lie until new interesting evidence presents itself. We know the species could interbreed, which is what matters to us now, not whether their taxa is three words or two (which is what this boils down to, some people write one way, some people the other and both know what each other is saying)
> now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
What do you mean "now", they definitely were called that 30 years ago, when I first learned about them
So have humans. There are white, red, black, brown, yellow people, and they live in their own happy places on the planet, except for the fact that we now move them around by plane, boat and goat.
How about Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion?
It’s not quite all across the globe but pretty close, and is so adapted that it is not considered invasive any more in most places.
Or, it's equally invasive everywhere.
Lol everywhere there are manicured lawns?
Some did not get the joke.
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They have to be. The snail darter is genetically identical to another animal and is a separate species. Most likely different humans are as well.
I think subspecies is: "doesn't generally interbreed" and "generally lives apart"
Humans have, obviously. Just interbreeding with ancient species was enough to do it, even without separate evolution.
Dogs?
Aren't dogs technically one species?
This distinction seems more arbitrary over time. Growing up I was taught different species couldn’t interbreed. But what about Neanderthal and Sapiens?
Funny tangent: this comic has strong feelings about such distinctions, using "dog" as the canonical example:
https://youtu.be/dNLLXZgN4Mc?si=SUhHZ2uzMZ7jgejI
I don't think you could have chosen a worse example. Dogs are themselves a subspecies, and are split into many different breeds, of wildly different character and physiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomy
Breeds and species are different things. Parent post is making a (very good) point that dogs can pretty much all breed with one another.
> ...distinct but able to interbreed
I mean people won't like the idea but that's not my point; what you describe variety in superficial traits while maintaining common traits
Applied to humans; skin color, eyes, dwarfism, hypertrichosis... can still interbreed
When it comes to categorization and taxonomy in leaky abstractions like languages the boundaries get a bit hand wavy and usually land on whatever fits the prevailing social desirability bias of the day
> you describe variety in superficial traits
The same selection pressures that produced the variety of "superficial" traits also act on "non-superficial" traits - nature does not recognize this distinction.
You cherry picked one idea from my post. I was not addressing nature but human social tropes.
What is a subspecies and species is random gibberish of the living humans
We dont categorize humans that way; not because humans are different but because of cultural norms.
The generous idea is that "subspecies" does not provide an anthropologist a useful lens to look at humanity, therefore we do not classify.
The alternative is that "subspecies" is too close to "race" for scientists, publishers, and funding bodies to touch, so its deliberately ignored.
I think cultural norms enforced over generations can lead to altered genetic variability.
I agree - cultural educating trumps scientific definitions.
It’s not like those scientific definitions are particularly consistent or stable, though. In a large part it’s still a matter of convention when it comes to non human species as well
Science, or you, can make up whatever definitions they wish. The question is not if a definition is "true", but what it's useful for.
Sure, you - or scientific authorities, whoever they might be - can declare that there are multiple modern human species. The question is, what are you intending to use that definition for?
That applies to other branches of the tree of life, too. There's not some objective genetic distance measure which says what's a species and what is not. It can vary widely on different parts of the tree. But it's driven by pragmatism - sensible biologists will not waste time arguing whether some mushrooms should be one species or two, if they otherwise agree on the facts.
If you can't say plainly and clearly what the purpose of your delineation is, and it's in your own part of the tree, of course people are going to have their suspicions.
It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.
I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.
We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.
There are multiple factors at play:
- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.
- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.
You're not even responding to the question. You're describing (what you believe to be) features of global civilization today, projected out from "300AD". But at various points over that interval, European civilization wasn't on the leaderboard, and was being outcompeted by the Khmer, Mali, China, you name it.
You see this all the time in these kinds of discussions, the assumption that because "western" civilization possesses X, Y, and Z traits, history must consist of a linear progression towards realizing those traits. Obviously, no. For many centuries the west was brutal, illiterate, tribal, and chaotic, primitive in ways other cultures were not.
It's just a tedious history lesson except that it abruptly falsifies the idea that you can look at "civilizational achievement" and reason back to genetic superiority. Obviously you cannot. You could come up with some other evidence for genetic superiority! But this particular argument is patently wrong.
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The notion that you can only find a high-trust society among Europeans looks like transparent bunk to me, easily refuted by looking at other highly developed countries. And the notion that this might be a matter of genetics even more so. Sadly, we won't be able to use CRISPR therapy as a way of improving social trust anytime soon!
Which other developed countries do you mean? The only ones I can think of, have westernised on purpose. E.g. Singapore and Japan.
What you call "westernised" is just describing the adoption of bourgeois and open market norms. There's nothing about these norms that's inherent to what we call the West: classical Western culture (Greece and Rome, but the attitude persisted well into the middle ages and ultimately fed into multiple streams of modern-era thought) similar to other ancient societies, actively despised market participants, broadly equating them with swindlers.
That is sort of my point, I can't think of a developed country that hasn't westernised to some extent.
And yet when you look at corruption perception indexes, they largely track the Hajnal line. As do so many other graphs.
Ireland and Eastern Europe are outside the Hajnal line, and yet they're one of the biggest growth success stories. I suppose we'll get our answer soon enough as to whether it really matters. Do note however that a late marriage age for females (the key finding of the Hajnal line) implies that they have to be enabled to self-support via work, which was a key step towards modern bourgeois norms and was also inherently correlated to general prosperity.
> not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations
It isn’t enough time to produce many novel feature changes, but it is enough time to act as a filter, no?
The issue isn't that it's impossible for their to be a causal genetic mechanism behind highly polygenic behavioral traits; whether you call that "filtering" or not doesn't change anything.
The issue is that there's no time interval long enough and directionally stable enough for that to have happened. What you're seeing instead are people who have built a sort of civilizational leaderboard in their head based on current events and projected it back to (apparently) 300AD. That's obviously not what happened in real history.
Whether it’s filtering or not is highly relevant.
It takes much longer to develop new features via random mutation and selection than it does to alter the distribution of existing features via selection. This is trivially true, no? I’m not sure what the argument against this is, please elaborate.
Like I said, it doesn't matter what you call it, what matters is that you won't find stable associations of civilizational progress and ethnic groups over the course of history. You can compose other coherent arguments for causal genetic superiority, but it can't be "civilizational achievement".
Okay, I am focusing on the one assertion you made which I quoted, and I think you are arguing the top level point back at me.
Features can change at a population level in the amount of time that different human groups have been separated from one another. That is all I’m saying here. It seemed like you didn’t agree with that point, and I’m interested if you can refute it in a well reasoned way since the implications are pretty counter-zeitgeist and being outside the zeitgeist is annoying.
By the way, “genetic superiority” is a category error and I find it annoying when people talk like that. An animal can only be better or worse in a particular environment, and even then different animals can exist in a similar niche without being better or worse. This sort of rhetoric has made this area very hard to discuss.
I saw in the article that male pattern baldness became way less common over the studied period. Their definition of "way less" was 1-2%. Even if it wasn't the case that, lacking natural weapons, generalizable cognitive faculties are highly advantageous for our species regardless of factors like climate, there's not any real reason to figure cognitive changes would occur way faster than the 1-2% reduction in MPB. So is the argument that some large scale population has a mean IQ that differs by 1-2%? That's vastly less than the impact of poverty or childhood nutrition.
So it was the Anunnaki after all, eh? :)
Every time I read about ancient DNA work, it's about Reich's research. Can anyone expert in the field shed light on that? He certainly seems to have a successful research group. And he's a good communicator, I got a lot out of his 2018 book. Who else should I be reading or reading about?
chromosomal fusion as the explanation for the "loss" of a chromosome pair, in humans.
https://www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-human-chromosome-2-fuse
also , independent confirmation of observations, are gold for research, however needless repetition of effort is not.
thus when someone is prolific,or uncannily mad about a topic it tends to be dominated by that persons submissions, and often any other contributors are on that lead researchers team.
Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.
It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.
The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs, regardless of the underlying science. Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.
>Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.
Sorry, do you have any examples? His views that I've read [0, 1] are scientifically rigorous and terminologically precise, deftly navigating the politics that some consider extremely controversial. To wit, one of my favorite passages from [1], which deals specifically with terminology:
This particular passage is on p. 253 of [1], but everything in Chapter 11 ("The Genomics of Race and Identity," pp. 247-273) is well worth the read.[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...
[1] https://sackett.net/reich_who_we_are_and_how_we_got_here.pdf
It's unfortunate that the URL happens to be buzzfeed, but there was an open letter to Reich by other academics about his terminology in the book you're quoting [0]. The short of it is that social categorizations we believe in like race intersect with genetics in a very complicated way. Reich is a world-class expert in genetics. He simply commits the same error as many other other experts in discounting the complexity of subjects he's adjacent to, but not directly an expert in.
I get that this is a high standard to hold him to (and I sure as heck don't meet it myself), but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics...
The crux of that letter is the "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true. However, this does not mean that there aren't also meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation that do stratify according to ancestry (not race!). The letter tries to handwave this away, claiming that "[f]or several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference." This is simply not true, as studies like the subject of this discussion demonstrate.
The letter also states that "[t]he public should not cede the power to define race to scientists who themselves are not trained to understand the social contexts that shape the formation of this fraught category." Also true! This is exactly why Reich explicitly avoids discussing "races" but rather populations and ancestries, which are rigorously defined strictly in terms of genetics. With respect to population structures and ancestry, Reich is indeed an expert.
I'll add that very few of the signatories of that letter have any experience, let alone expertise in genetics. Here are the first few:
Out of the 67 signatories, I counted approximately 5 who might have sufficient genetics expertise to offer a meaningful scientific counterpoint to Reich's work (this is being charitable, as I included titles like "Professor of Biological Sciences," which is no guarantee.) The rest were in fields like anthropology, sociology, law, and history.The list is mainly people in fields that deal with these things, as you'd expect.
>Yes, because it's not an argument the letter is making.
It literally is though. The full quote from the Buzzfeed piece is:
>The argument is in the second paragraph: Reich never purports to make cultural or political arguments, just biological ones.>When he says things like: But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
Note that he put "races" in quotes. The point he was making here is that sometimes genetic ancestries can intersect quite well with traditional notions of "race" [0]. But often times they do not, especially in the case of admixed populations [1].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32325-w/figures/1
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12859-019-2680-1/...
> "need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial." This is true.
There's an implicit assertion in that statement, that we're currently not recognizing that meaningful patterns and variation exists. But that's nonsense. We are all perfectly aware that some groups digest lactose better, some are less vulnerable to skin cancer, some drop like flies to common tropical diseases, some completely dominate long distance running competition etc.
So there's got to be some particular differences he's referring to that he thinks are papered over. He should spell out which.
Fortunately, there are many wise laymen such as yourself in the internet to correct him.
Not the person you were replying to, but: did you read that letter?
It is horribly argued. It's mostly poor analogies and non-sequiturs. It's no wonder Buzzfeed was the only place they could get to publish it.
> race intersect with genetics in a very complicated way
Please explain the complications. Use scientific terms only.
The biggest complication is that the current notion of human race is largely based on skin color (with a few adjacent physical traits), which has very little to do with population genetics. In particular, black skin color is a dominant genetic trait, meaning that you can easily have individuals and even entire subpopulations that are black skinned, but have much more genetic similarity to traditionally white skinned populations (being descendents of a few black skinned individuals who married into a larger white skinned population) - while they would still be categorized as "black" in terms of race. Conversely, genetically isolated black skinned populations are also often lumped together as "the black race".
Another major complexity is that some races are defined more by genealogic ancestry than by genetic ancestry or easily identifiable physical characteristics. For example, people are normally considered Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. This leads to many genetically disparate subpopulations being lumped together as a Jewish race.
> but he should do better given his visibility in public discourse.
Why? He presented real verified science. Anyone who is offended or does not like it ... well, too bad... the world does not care. Facts are facts. He does not owe you or anyone else comfort. He presents cold hard truth, and sometimes truth hurts. Tough.
I haven't read much from Reich, so I don't know his position. But I've understood that the current best practice in human genetics is to explicitly justify the population descriptors chosen for each study, rather than using any fixed set of descriptors given from the outside.
There are two main types of genetic descriptors: those based on genetic similarity and those based on ancestry groups. Genetic similarity is quantitative, and individual samples often have multiple labels attached to them. Ancestry groups are discrete categories based on quantitative measures. If it's appropriate to use descriptors based on genetic ancestry groups in a study, it's usually also appropriate to drop samples that don't fit neatly in any single group.
Sometimes it's more appropriate to use descriptors based on environmental factors, such as ethnicity or geography. Environmental descriptors tend to be correlated with genetic descriptors, but they are not the same.
Science is about truth not social outcomes.
People keep wondering why trust in scientific findings is in free fall. A big part of it is because many scientists have become comfortable lying when they feel it’s for a noble cause.
I really don't care if the people around me have physiological differences from me. It would be wonderful to explore that and such differences. But as OP pointed out the discussion gets co-opted by people who would kill others over physiological differences. How is such a viewpoint conducive to a peaceful society where millions of people with physiological differences exist?
For good reason, the wider community isn't able to have a productive conversation about it. I wouldn't even call that a noble reason, but a necessary one, unless you would be okay with inviting people that want you dead into discussion on scientific consensus.
> people who would kill others over physiological differences
Most of them just want to enforce borders. And then the dogma that we are all the same is co-opted by people who would see their ethnic group wiped out, as they are told that they don't even exist except as a meaningless social construct, and their desire for ethnic self-preservation is therefore illegitimate - there is nothing to preserve!
The same rhetoric targeting Palestinians: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/perpetuating-the-myth-of-a-p...
>And then the dogma that we are all the same is co-opted by people who would see their ethnic group wiped out
Are you referring to certain people? People sympathetic to Palestinians? I mean yeah obviously it's wrong to preach equity for me but not for thee, but I'm not really going to get into a pissing match about Israel/Palestine, sorry, because that's deflection from my point.
So there are two choices here:
1) Allow scientific discussion on physiological differences or avoid it. Particulary, physiological differences that don't necessarily effect health outcomes but also performance metrics.
2) Do not allow such discussion, and declare an axiom: normalize physiological differences across homo sapiens.
You're right to call the latter dogma, although not in the pejorative sense.
You brought this infamous conflict up to propose that because option two can be used by bad actors, then we should not normalize option two, and freely discuss physiological differences between people.
If you are of a group that has physiological differences scientifically proven to be inferior, you are immediately in an outgroup. You will experience discrimination. Because few (and I'm being generous, perhaps no one truly) can talk about physiological differences without building and holding prejudice. Pragmatically that is just not the case. It's why endless ethnic conflicts exist.
I simply cannot formulate an argument for why this should ever be allowed. It sounds like a horror show if you're on the receiving end. A horror show minorities of many types live through every day.
To lay "ground rules" so that we do not scrutinize our fellow brothers and sisters on unalienable traits is an ethical imperative to prevent us tearing each other apart. This then leaves only one line, the line where people are more than happy to discriminate based on these unalienable traits, and I think it's perfectly acceptable to ostracize them since they encourage ripping each other's throats out, willingly or as a useful peon.
Nobody talks about "performance metrics" when distinguishing between Sumatran and Siberian tigers. What happens instead is humans try to preserve their populations and distinctions. "It's all the same" is corrosive to preservation.
Superiority is absolutely a distinguishing feature when preserving their populations and distinctions. It's why racial genocides even occur.
The problem is that if you don't stick to truth and make an attempt at objectivity, others will step in to fill the void. This is how you sow division and undermine trust in science.
I'm having a very hard time understanding a society where research is openly conducted on innate physiological differences between people, and bad actors don't use this official research to practice open discrimination. The lesser of the two evils is to draw a line and tell people to just accept these differences.
Scientists are not lying. Reich is notable in his field and no-one is disputing his genetic research.
What scientists are wary of is how any discussion in the field gets jumped on and twisted into ammunition to reinforce racist beliefs, whether the science actually supports this or not.
“What scientists are wary of is how any discussion in the field gets jumped on and twisted into ammunition to reinforce racist beliefs”
Yet nothing ruined the reputation of the scientific establishment more in recent time than their tendency to change their behaviours and adapt their beliefs for political motives
There are always those trying to discredit scientists who do not reinforce their personal beliefs.
> The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs
So? People need to stop undermining science and openly sharing information because some people have bad ideas.
Is it unpopular on the right? Genuine question. I have only seen people associated with the left deny or downplay this.
The religious right, specifically. They would say that all people are descended quite recently from Noah and his family.
Not all of us. Many are evolutionary or old earth creationists that generally don’t have an issue with many aspects of evolution.
Evolution itself has some skeptics among the religious right.
funny how racists on twitter havent learnt that skin color is a function of natural selection, how do we get this message to them in a non offensive yet informational enough way to change their perceptions of colored people
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From the article:
We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.74±0.12), household income (increasing 1.12±0.12) and years of schooling (increasing 0.63±0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant(Extended Data Fig.10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years , after which tends towards zero.
That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.
> That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.
Why? This article just focuses on changes in West Eurasia (probably because that's what they had data for), but the bulk of changes that resulted in behavioral modernity surely occurred in Africa - where the genetic variability for them to occur was and still is far greater than elsewhere - and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions such as Central Eurasia, Southeast Eurasia etc. West Eurasia was a backwater.
> and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions
Sure. But did ALL regions change? And did they change to the same destination? When the environments differed so much? It is easy to see how answers (or the questions themselves) could be politically contentious.
> the bulk of changes that resulted in behavioral modernity
> surely occurred in Africa
"Surely" without examining the actual evidence is almost surely wrong.
"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."
Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.
Seriously what’s the point of this comment
And yet you managed to center AI in the discussion.