Over 9000

Why are you so sure it's not doing anything useful?

I know you didn't. Raider5678 said it was a "strong argument" against you. I was showing how it was a totally failed argument. I brought up Neanderthals in the context of Raider5678's argument "humans came from Africa therefore humans are identical". Whether modern humans arose in Africa: I don't know. I keep saying this. The evidence for it is actually pretty sketchy and getting weaker. But it's really off topic. If Eurasians have maintained 2-4% of Neanderthal DNA over the last 100,000 years then my guess is that it's doing something useful. 2-4% of the genome is not what I would call "insignificant". Either way, we really don't know, so the poster who said "Neanderthal admixture doesn't seem to be important" is just making stuff up.

Eurasian genetic diversity certainly isn't a subset of African diversity. See eg. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000500 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7534/full/nature13997.html Also, how can Eurasian genetics be a subset of African if it includes significant Neanderthal admixture? Your extreme claim is simply false, although I know it was stated on PBS. Any reason? That's a nonsense argument. Why would evolution stop for 100,000 years? Even longer, due to archaic admixture. Your article of faith has almost exactly zero chance of being true. Either way, your "argument" proves nothing. Can you let us know which environmental effects cause the consistent global pattern?

You do understand that having a common ancestor at some point in the past does not mean species/subspecies are genetically identical at a later time? That species/subspecies diverge over time despite having a common origin? So, no, sorry, but it's a nonsense argument. Eurasians are genetically distinct versus Africans. This is a simple fact we can observe by looking at the genome. One point you can consider, non-Africans have significant Neanderthal admixture. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this thread whether the first individual we would call sapiens sapiens lived in Africa or Eurasia ~100,000 years ago. I have some thoughts on the matter, but it's off topic. Feel free to open a thread about it.

Please explain. Why don't you open a thread about it?

I don't see how answering yes or no to your questions has any bearing on that. We don't know the origin of humans or what color they were. Neanderthal admixture is certain so no we definitely don't originate from Africa. We're not even sure sapiens sapiens came from Africa. Even if we did, and the first humans were a certain color, why would this prove modern humans have the same mental traits?

Precisely what argument do you suppose he has? Just so we are all on the same page.

Well yeah, I said it was "something" of a myth, referring to ridiculous claims that Eurasians are a "subset" of Africans and the like. If you read that paper African diversity is speculated to be the result of Eurasian migrations into Africa. EIther way, it doesn't impugn the race concept.

Oh, I read past that point, thanks. I read all of the comments too. They indeed cover other subjects than the one I used it to reference, such as the "counting races" race denial fallacy. I simply referenced that to present another view on Templeton's "25% Fst" which most of your other post seemed to be based on. Are you agreeing that was wrong now? If so we can happily change the subject to "whether we can say how many items there are in a branching taxonomy". I disregarded an Fst cutoff value (Templeton's parroted everywhere "25%" nonsense) as being necessary to satisfy a taxonomic distinction. Many subspecies are well below this. The poster also claimed Africans were more genetically diverse, which is a separate point (and also something parroted without looking at the figures it seems). Whether or not they are more diverse they still constitute a natural division as they are more similar to each other than to Eurasians. And higher African diversity is something of a myth, as the paper I referenced covers.

It would be arbitrary if it was a perfect continuum. And yet still a valid scientific operationalisation. Does this look like a perfect continuum to you? http://www.scs.illinois.edu/~mcdonald/PCA84pops.html I'm seeing significant clusters, which in addition are orthogonal in terms of correlated variation, with some minor admixed populations scattering between. Either the clustering or the orthogonal variation would put the Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongoloid/Native American division as the first natural division. Either way the "continuum" objection is invalid. We can divide continua arbitrarily to describe them. Further, human races are not divided arbitrarily. This known as Lewontin's fallacy. Fst is actually irrelevant to the validity of taxonomy, and is only applied in race denial arguments in humans. Many subspecies have Fst similar or lower than the human ~0.15. Feel free to show me Fst <0.5 being used to deny taxa in another species. It's an ad hoc race denial argument. Any overall between group variation, however small, justifies taxa. The taxa are about that variation. Nonsense. A greater genetic diversity in one group does not mean one cannot trace ancestry through phentics or genomics. This is another ad hoc race denial argument. West Eurasians are more similar to each other than East Asians or Africans whether or not one group has higher diversity. One could argue that Africans, if they have higher diversity, should be divided first. Fine. Why is this an objection? Can you reference the higher diversity in Africa? I mean with numbers. I know it's "common knowledge" and repeated everywhere. Take a look at this. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7534/full/nature13997.html Thoughts? Well you're bashing some other irrelvant definition. Race defined by skin color, which is not what I'm talking about, versus race defined by ancestry, which is what I'm talking about. No scholar who uses the race concept defines it by skin color. This is irrelevant. This sounds agreeable. How do you square this with Lewontin's fallacy? How do you define artificial versus biological categories? I would describe categories defined by descent a la Darwin or genomic similarity a la Mayr as by definition biological. Define "biological category" please. By ancestry inferred from overall genetic or phenetic similarity? Darwin defined taxa by ancestry (including explicitly human races) and operationalised them with degree of phenetic differentiation ("descent with modification"). Mayr supported using genomic similarity alone to define groups. Thought experiments such as how we would classify a genomic human born to a horse seem to support this. Or more realistically, if an organism was born which more genetically similar to other than its ancestors, which is at least possible. Absolute nonsense. Templeton's "25% Fst" is an ad hoc boundary used to deny the human race concept. It's based on a misreading of the 75% rule for phenetic classification of hybrids in subspecies contact zones, see eg. Smith 1997 who Templeton references. There is nothing about Fst. Feel free to show me this "25% Fst" being applied to subspecies outside Templeton applying it to humans. I'll be happy to go over this in a lot more referenced detail if you want. https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/on-the-biology-of-race/#comments

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/EP2006a.pdf I also imagine creativity could have a genetic basis. I am not aware of studies of racial variation in this. Also. https://www.wired.com/2007/08/a-genetic-expla/

A race is a type of population defined by shared ancestry or genetic similarity. An "interbreeding group" could be anything from a state to a multi-racial hippy commune. This is not what your opponents are talking about. Why do you pretend that taxa defined by ancestry are "in terms of biology...of little value"? They are fundamental to biology. We can divide continua discretely. This makes no sense because A) we define or infer race by many or all genes simultaeneously. B) "population instead of race" still doesn't capture your strawman "single discrete gene" defintion. Real bad non-sequitur upon strawman sentence. In my opinion a consistent race/IQ correlation across national borders strongly suggests genetic causes. Especially combined with an IQ heritability (differences caused by genes) of 75% within races. Height is also developmentally complex, is it also impossible to estimate heritability for height? You are looking at a consistent pattern and saying it could be something else. That isn't parsimony, it isn't science. It's wishful thinking. Have to give you some Science Points for inaccurately and irrelevantly referencing "NP Hard" though. Sounds clever. No, replacing the word "racial" with "population" is just a completely pointless distraction. The races in question are defined by ancestry or genetic similarity. How can you criticise your opponents terms if you don't even know how they are defined? Unless this is an intentional strawman argument. You seem to have a problem with heritability estimates. Again, we don't need to know the developmental pathway of height, and we don't, to make a good heritability estimate. Yes, we got that. And your attempt to back up that pre-conceived conclusion with scientific rationalisation was poor, but entirely typical. --- Human Intelligence, Earl Hunt