CharonY

You failed to address the most relevant point Just saying "ancestry" tells us nothing. Note that Darwin had provided even less of a distinction, as his main point was to anchor the species concept.

Doesn't need to be on TV, diplomatic blunders can have consequences, after all, politicians are (mostly) only human. Also with it being fine really depends on context. You may think that a person is unattractive/dumb/fat/spawn of the devil but what good does it do to tell him/her that in most circumstances? Other than one being insulting, that is. I think his basic assumption is that he can continue his bullying practice in politics. The issue there is that you can bankrupt smaller companies with lawsuits but I am not sure what the equivalent between nations would be. Hopefully not the military. That would be genuinely scary.

See, other than useful for others to evaluate what you think, I never understood while speaking ones mind is such a great thing?

Since we have no idea which traits are linked to which genes and what phenotypes various combinations have it is quite a moot point to speculate about how to improve humans. On top of that traits that can confer beneficial results individually can have undesirable traits. Or certain alleles may be more beneficial in one situation but harmful in others. After all, we are mostly changing the underlying proteins or their regulation and the outcome is highly complex and dependent on the environment. What is known however, is that low genetic variability is an issue with respect to diseases and immune response. Likewise we also know that genetic diseases are a bigger issue in inbred populations.

The Great Old Ones disapprove of this message. Why have uncertainty if you can have certain doom? (I am not selling it to you am I?)

Installing Linux on PC is fairly straightforward nowadays. On a Mac it is often not that easy.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Why vote for the lesser evil?

Do you propose more exams then to track progress? And what do you mean with the mastery part? Do you mean one should move on before understanding a concept? Also, why should it matter what grades others get?

In the US it is is pretty much the same system as in the UK, each semester you take your respective courses (that may be the prerequisite for others) and get graded on them individually. The GPA is based on the total grade points divided by the credit hours. I have not seen anything like large scale modules that you describe.

In fact, overuse of disinfectants could actually worsen health outcome, as regular contact with small amount of bacteria helps to level out the immune response. In addition quite a few commonly used chemicals are also negatively associated with health outcomes. Basically one should be aware that a) bacteria are everywhere, including in and on ourselves, b) a sterile environment is not possible and likely not beneficial, c) infections are more likely due to contact with other humans (or animals). I severely doubt that there are studies that found shoes to be a health hazard, especially due to bacteria. The main reason for not wearing shoes is to protect your floor. When it comes to hazards a) pollutants are a bigger issue than bacteria and b) air quality is a much bigger issue (due to building materials, surrounding traffic, industry etc.), though often the levels are not too worrisome overall either. For example, regular commuting can result in more traffic-related exposure than being at home.

Also note that the discretization of colours is based on how our eyes work. If the visible spectrum for humans was shifted to longer or shorter wave length the bins would be very different. I.e. the categorization is again a matter of convention and convenience.

Even if not archived your client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, Groupwise etc.) will sync your folders so that you can access them offline. If you archive your messages they usually get stored into a compressed file that you will have to open to access the emails again. A hundred emails a day does not sound that much if your business relies on them. While I rarely get more than a hundred a day (of which rarely more than 60 are action items), a senior colleague of mine who has a large research network has often gotten more than 300 a day. Which is probably on the extreme end (and resulted in having to employ an assistant to sort and tag those mails).

Unfortunately I cannot thing of any lit that has looked into it. However, it is very unlikely that publicizing in-house research has sufficient sway to move the IF of a journal. At best, it could slightly increase the exposure of a given paper. But even this effect will depend on how likely that press release is going to be picked up by media. A number of factors, including sexyness of the topic, but also the pull of the institution will determine whether it will be read more (and cited) slightly more than without a release. You have to keep in mind that ultimately only citations by other scientists are relevant, and popularizing a work is not likely to change that. The only group that would benefit from it are likely to be young scientists as the established ones are going to be read by community either way.

As an additional caveat, especially in ecological studies people sometimes use Fst and Gst interchangeably, which is especially problematic in cases with high heterozygosity.

I have corrected my post as I am apparently no good with the newfangled phone/tablet thingy. Anyhow, a specific definition is still lacking as far as I can see. However, one particular recent claim seems to betray a considerable lack of understanding of the data: And here is the issue. If you want to assert relatedness, that is a relatively trivial point. Obviously, with the right markers you can be distinguished from your relatives, which is obviously a finer resolution than anyone would claim for a category such as "race". How can a broader categorization then be made if we do not assess overall gene flow? And how can we assess that without looking at genetic variation? See, the point is that we all share ancestry. Now if you want to build categories, the question becomes how close we are related. And trivially, the closer we are, the smaller the variation and the higher the resolution of the analysis needs to be to distinguish groups. As I said before, trivially it is obvious that we can use genetic information to create groups of almost arbitrary resolution. That, however, is not your claim. You claim that there is a magic line which somehow makes a certain level of category (i.e. race) an obvious entity once we start looking at multiple loci. You further claimed that a) somehow, race is clearly defined by genetic similarity and therefore is different from the common usage of population b) subspecies are clearly defined by some measure that you failed to mention What this demonstrates, is the a lack of awareness of the contexts these categories are used. Obviously, using different levels of resolution and uniqueness we can create groups of varying specificity and yes, we could select a method that allows us to roughly distinguish the human population into 5 or more groups. The point, again, being that we can more or less arbitrarily define the resolution we need (assuming we have decent markers) for certain questions (such as trace movements of certain populations, estimate gene flow between groups etc.). Yet it is clear that the resulting groups themselves are only relevant and useful in specific contexts. Or in other words, to claim that there are precisely 5 races/subspecies/populations is about equally right as claiming there are 25 or more, if we use sufficient markers.

I said "convention". You said hard. Please specify the definition you heard. I will address the ancestry bit in a little while. Yet it does not make sense to claim that African share more ancestry than Eurasians considering our current model of migration. Unless you think that there has been massive genetic flow in African populations and very little outside one would expect a higher variance in the original population rather than in the bottleneck that went out of Africa. The image that you showed was from a 2002 paper. I think and the authors used a sorting algorithm into k clusters. They did address (iirc) that more groups could have resulted in higher accuracy, but would also probably require more sampling depth. If you think that there groups would form themselves the more markers with increasing n you sample, then you misunderstood how these approaches work. Also, what fou you think is the screenshot of the table saying? Also, since for some reasons you think that allele frequencies and their variation are not good indicators of ancestry, what is the precise measure that you propose? Aside from using specific loci that is. Edited as I am too old to use a tablet properly.

While it is true that some technological advances played a role, military superiority is usually due to a combination of factors (including e.g. doctrine and logistics) rather than a singular invention. Specifically regarding stirrups examples were found in Europe well before the Mongols arrived (ca, 7th century) and were common in a number of European areas certainly by the 9th century.

I am not sure why you like to focus on this aspect so much, as it is only one aspect (similar to why outside of online fora Lewontin's fallacy is rarely mentioned), especially as the 25% are meant to illustrate how arbitrary it is but anyhow: - What you may be confused about regarding the link in sub-species is not that it is used as a hard demarcation, it is most assuredly not. The reason bringing it up (despite its wonkiness) is to show that the divergence in humans is so low that it would fall outside common parameters when we look at humans as we do with other species. I.e. it is done by looking what are assumed to be sub-species, and then calculate Fst (or other measures of variance). In case where differences are >~25% they could be classified as sub-species, with much lower numbers there is usually a discussion of whether they are the same population (due to extensive gene flow), or, depending on the specific research questions, whether more marker are needed to separate local population. I.e. regardless how you look at it, genetic measures do not magically separate groups neatly. You do have to make categories to do so. To wit, in Chimpanzees sub-species routinely ~30% FSt is observed, between Gorillas less than that (just to provide an example with close relatives). If you look through literature you will hardly find any categorization into different populations. In fact, you will also find that there is no formal definition of subspecies at all, only conventions that are used and certainly this is not a specific issue surrounding humans. To re-iterate: subspecies usage in biology is mostly used as a categorization tool, most often to separate geographic populations for a variety of purposes. There are different means to do so and the main approach is to find a measure that makes them different enough for the intended purposes. As such they are not a strict taxonomic unit, nor are they treated as such. This usage is quite contentious in humans for two reasons: a) low overall variance which makes it necessary to create very small populations in order to obtain similar accuracy as commonly used (whether justified or not). And, as we know, in humans much less than that. Thus, what it means is that the demarcation especially using more genetic information rather than specific markers in humans, is extremely fuzzy. If we still wanted to use it, we would end up with mostly African sub-populations as the most accurate units. Again, all definitions below the species (and to some degree species itself, especially in prokaryotes) is a matter of convention and usefulness and not a biological trait. You have asked earlier what a biological category is and I do think it is actually a very good question. The simple answer is that there is little in nature that forms discrete categories. Certainly not in biology. You could argue that the units are cells, but then we got quite a different between eu-and prokaryotes, for example. Truth is that most categories are made so that we can deal and quantify with units of convenience. The cited paper do not refute the expected higher variance in African populations. Could you cite specifically what claim you want to make? Or let us take a step back, what is the overall claim that you want to make? That there are distinct human sub-species that will emerge once we start looking at genomic data? Which groups would they be? How close would be the boundaries between these groups? Why is it something different than geographic populations?

There is quite a bit to deconstruct here. Basically there are about three major approaches that utilize the concept of race, which I will go to when I got more time on my hands. For now I want to focus on the last link, which basically outlines that race is not a biological useful concept. Rather it highlights an issue that I touched upon earlier: lack of genetic diversity in humans. The author merely disagrees with using the cutoff, which is somewhat common in ecological studies. If you read past that point you would have noticed how the post in itself echoes some issues already mentioned: I will leave with the quote from the post which echoes the basic issues. When I find time I can address several of your worries and also why ancestral grouping also fails as demarcation, if you are really interested. Just a few quick comments, Lewontin's fallacy is not a logical fallacy, but the title of a paper written by Edwards. And a major issue, the limited amount of genetic markers was circumvented by using the same data from the Science study. I can also provide a quick answer regarding the variance within Africa: much of the recent work uses key data is derived from the HapMap project as well as the 1000 genomes study (Nature 2003 and 2012) but there is also the work from Tishkoff as well as numerous others who used different genetic markers. Edit: reply was meant for post 119. IQ has loads of other issues that have been addressed elsewhere in this forum.

And thus arbitrarily. If we did we would not be able to define race, at least not in the way you seem to use it it. As it has been repeatedly discussed, the variation within groups shows can shower higher diversity than between groups. And as far as population studies go, the diversity of e.g. African populations as a whole are more diverse than populations outside (in accordance with migration patterns). Instead, for tracing ancestry you actually have to use only specific set of alleles that show the difference that you need to do the categorization in the first place. It has been argued to death here, but first of all, the general categorizes often used to define races in common usage based on skin color can be rejected almost immediately as they poorly reflect ancestry. The ancestry of a black person in the US is unlikely to share many similarities with a black person in France, or Brazil, for example. Santos et al. (2009) have shown for example, that in Brazil self-declared whites can share more African ancestry than some self-declared black people in the US. The second issue is whether genetic markers can trace ancestry. In principle, this is a given. And in fact some very useful markers can be use to trace regional ancestry. However, mapping out a tree in order to create clear categories is difficult and the more markers you add, the less distinct it becomes (i.e. the opposite as to what you claim happens). Going back to actual biological usage, categories below the species level (ignoring issues with species concepts for the moment) are typically only useful, and therefore used, if they delineate some kind of differences in gene flow that are relevant to a question under investigation. Such boundaries can include e.g. geographic separation. So, in other words, a race as a different concept as population only makes sense, if a categorization of a race explains a significant chunk of the variance in a population. Obviously the more fine-grained you get, the more variance can be explained theoretically, but then the categories become less useful. Now is a good point to add that categories as these are not biological. They are artificial and are only used if they can be helpful in explaining biological phenomena. And I fear, this is the part that many people get wrong as many use the inverse logic. As the example above shows, skin colour is not great in identifying ancestry. It may work in some areas (e.g. US) and fail in others, making it not only not biological, but also useless as an indicator of ancestry. So let us turn to some quantitative means using molecular information. As I mentioned, you could cherry-pick markers that conform with certain aspects of interest. But what if we need to define groups, how can we do that? As I said before, a category such as race would only be used if they can explain a significant portion of variance. So what is the threshold to designate races? It is convention in these types of study to differentiate between races if 25% or more of the genetic variability that they share is found as between population differences. As you can see by the nice round number, it is an arbitrary and useful convention. Armed with that knowledge we can now got back at human data (see various papers by Alan Templeton, who also used data from the famous Rosenberg et al. 2002 paper that sometimes is mentioned). Now, doing a variance analysis it was found that over 90% of the genetic variation is found among individuals within a sampled population. While it is generally expected that this variations has the highest contribution it also means that the remaining variance is far too low to allow a demarcation between races (which was ~ 4%). In other words, in human populations we have significant gene flow that prevents us to define decent race boundaries that capture sufficient genetic variance to be useful. I.e. to hit the 25% threshold one would have to create hundreds (maybe more) populations in order to be able to form groups in which the variance between groups is 25% or more, if it is possible at all. This all means that in contrast to many other species our gene flow is so significant that we may be able to identify isolated populations, but we will have trouble to come up with any useful race level categorization that make objective sense. As usual, found typos are yours to keep.

I'd not be surprised if they picked that up, considering that they were desperate enough to pick this guy up.

It seems I missed the meaning of the argument. I agree that Trump has made it pretty clear that he is talking about actual voter fraud, something that has been shown repeatedly to be irrelevant.

I am still unsure, are you really talking about publishers and if so do you mean e.g. journals or whole publishing houses (which may publish several journals). Or do you mean authors? Or do you mean interactions between editors and authors? Are you talking about science publishing (i.e. papers) or books, or...?

It is not that trivial, though as a number of states actually have laws against faithless electors.

The shareholder mentality could also be part of the issue. Realistically, for many products increasing wages has a relatively small impact on product cost. However, it is most beneficial for the company to maximize profits especially for larger ones, as the volume will have a net impact on the profit charts of the company. Talking to some investors it is sometimes weird how obsessed they can be for seeemingly small changes, until you remember that a 0.2% of a multi-billion company is quite a chunk. From the viewpoint of the individual product and for the end consumer the impact may be minimal. But as long as shareholders want to squeeze every possible penny out of their stocks like a game of min/maxing stats, it may be a hard sell.