DNA double Helix Nobel laureate stripped of honours for opinions on race

sbsquarepants wrote: »

It's hard to conceive of any test which could accurately and objectively measure intelligence differences between an illiterate Mongolian goat herder and a maths teacher from New York for example - that difference most likely exists though.

Sure, but the next question I would ask is, is it innate? If we very broadly speaking think of the human brain as a muscle, some people are born with more than others, selective stresses on a muscle will make it grow larger, less stress and it'll stay small. The body doesn't like waste or unnecessary growth. It'll grow muscle just enough to operate and survive in a given environment. Someone who needs to use their legs more in an environment will have stronger leg muscles and so on. Muscles are also extremely flexible and scalable.

I would say the human brain is similar. So the Mongolian goat herder could start out with the same brain building blocks as the maths teacher, but the selective pressures on both diverge not long after birth because of the different environment. EG the Mongolian lad doesn't need to learn to read, or write so that avenue doesn't get used, which also massively reduces his exposure to more knowledge beyond his locally required knowledge, his ability to ride a horse is required so that suite of skills gets promoted and on and on these divergent differences go. By adulthood those differences would be stark. Imagine identical twins and one grows up in Mongolia, the other in New York. The Mongolian will be stronger with different skills to the New Yorker and they'd be the exact same genetically.

yoke wrote: »

The “clear physical differences” are mostly superficial. A Chinese persons jaw works the same way as an Africans, pretty much. There may be slight differences between isolated populations who have huge buck teeth, but no one has deemed it worthy of specific study, as differences between individuals are so large anyway and human populations in general hadn’t been isolated from each other for long enough for large differences to arise.

Nope, afraid not. Ask any pathologist. They can lock down with considerable accuracy the population heritage of someone by just looking at a skull. Indeed a single tooth can be diagnostic in this respect. A shovelled incisor or three rooted molars indicate non European origin. There are quite the suite of differences going on. It has and remains quite a large area of research, particularly in medical science, because different therapies and diseases impact different populations in different ways.

Now, if we went and isolated some populations for 200,000 years, we’d probably notice some interesting developments, but no major population group in humans has been separated for that long. Most genetic indicators say that humans were nearly wiped out about 20,000 years ago in the last ice age,

Nope again. You're thinking of the Toba eruption bottleneck theory where said volcano went kerblam around 70,000 years ago and caused a genetic bottleneck in humans. It's an out of date theory now and not regarded to have much weight behind it anymore.

The Wikipedia article on this subject is pretty good and will answer a lot of questions on why there aren’t huge observed differences between current ethnicities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation

That Wiki article has a fair number of internal contradictions going on, as has much of this field of study. On the one hand it claims low levels of diversity, yet on the other it states this:

Between 4% and 6% of the genome of Melanesians (represented by the Papua New Guinean and Bougainville Islander) are thought to derive from Denisova hominins - a previously unknown species which shares a common origin with Neanderthals. It was possibly introduced during the early migration of the ancestors of Melanesians into Southeast Asia. This history of interaction suggests that Denisovans once ranged widely over eastern Asia.[61]

Thus, Melanesians emerge as the most archaic-admixed population, having Denisovan/Neanderthal-related admixture of ~8%.

So Melanesians have up to eight percent non African, non Modern Human genes. That's a large chunk of change genetics wise going on there. Europeans have between 2-4% non African, non Modern Human genes and that figure and the effects of those genes become greater with every year of research going on. Africans have their own archaic admixture going on too. So if I stand in between Jim from Tanzania and Joe from Tahiti, we individually have a suite of genes that the others simply don't have. Joe will have different teeth to me and Jim, we'll all have different skull features representative of our respective populations.

Now we would be all the same species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Neandertals and Denisovans if they were still around would be sub species of Homo sapiens(they appear to be slightly more related to each other than to us). Erectus would be much further out, though it seems close enough that some may have their genes knocking about). However if we were any other animal I would bet the farm that zoologists would state our species is made up of distinct populations with distinct feature sets and genetics with overlap around the edges.

Consider the domestic dog and the wolf. They are consider subspecies, can have perfectly viable and fertile young together. Earlier you mentioned we only had 20,000 years to diverge(we didn't but we'll let that slide), well the dog and the wolf are less than that as far as genetic and subspecies divergence goes and the genetic difference between the Labrador at your feet and the wolf howling in the wind is less than 1%. How different is a wolf in appearance, physical and mental behaviours, sociability, intelligence and temperament to the domestic dog? Very different. In under 20,000 years and less than one percent difference in their genetics. It doesn't take huge time periods to make quite fundamental changes in an organism, even a complex one like a mammal. Take modern humans: over the last 20,000 years there have been more genetic adaptations to local environmental changes than there were over the previous 40,000 years. Mostly to do with things like diet, but also changes in sperm production and immunity.

yoke wrote: »

That’s not what I said - ie. that it was impossible to distinguish the jaws by superficial analysis. I said the way the jaw functions remains the same, and it does.
You could say the same about the Chinese person’s eyes/eyebrows/eyelids - superficial examination could easily reveal they were from a Chinese person, but the way they function is the same.

A dog and fox jaw functions the same and yet they're a completely different species. A sparrows wing and an Eagle's wing "function the same" and they're a completely different species. It's not much of an argument Y.

Not sure about this since I recall having read from various sources in the past about the low genetic diversity observed among humans pointing to a small pool of common ancestors, and I haven’t read anything refuting this so far (that there was a period in near-history when we were nearly wiped out). Most sources I can point to (eg. Wikipedia) still mention the genetic bottleneck in humans.

Well Toba is off the table for the reason and depending on the research there have been two, even three or four such bottlenecks putatively suggested. One in Africa, another in the Middle East, another in the Americas and yet another in Europe. As an aside one problem I have with this theory is that at the same time period no bottlenecks are seen with other archaic humans, something one would expect if it were a geographically wide event, like a volcano or climate change.

We should note that melanesians aren’t a large population group, comprising only about 12 million people and spread across a wide area.

So? 1) they're still modern humans, unless you think they're somehow distinct, and if they're somehow distinct that doesn't exactly work too well with the "we're all Africans y'know". 2) East Asians also show both Neandertal and Denisovan admixture 2-6%(depending on researchers) and there are literally billions of them. Can't write them off as a small population group. Europeans with 2-6%(depending on researchers) and they're not exactly a small population either. As a European if I'm having a pint with a Kenyan lad, at least 2% of my DNA, DNA that codes for particular traits, he simply doesn't have and in turn he has DNA that I don't have.

The difference between the dog and wolf analogy you made here is that there was huge selective pressure on dogs (from humans) for temperament specifically. Hence the results with regard to dogs’ temperaments.

My point still stands that a tiny change in genetic percentages can have wide ranging changes in behaviour and phenotype.

I just don’t see the same huge selective pressure on brain function in humans based on geography (I do see it in humans based on social function, eg. mathematician, however no society has lasted that long with the same families performing the same functions so far).

See my last post for examples of selection pressures on brain function. And that's before the archaic admixture that codes for specific brain function and dysfunction.

yoke wrote: »

We know so little of actual history that I don’t think it’s very scientific to jump to conclusions about where the first art explosions occurred, etc.
You could be forgiven for thinking the printing press was invented in Europe rather than China, for example, if you were relying on fossils or surviving cave drawings (I guess the printing press equivalent would be surviving moulds ��). Similarly, none of us can ascertain whether the huge explosion in art you mentioned actually started in the location where the cave paintings were found, or somewhere else.

Oh certainly. There is a huge preservation bias going on. The art we find is permanent and in very stable environments like caves and made from very stable materials. I think on it this way; if you see a guy with a very ornate full arm tattoo, it's a clear indicator of art and a personal cultural experience, but when he dies it's lost forever, unless he falls into a bog pool and even then it might last 3 or 4 thousand years. If the same artwork was painted deep inside a cave on the rock in charcoal and ochre it could potentially last for a million years. Australian aborigines would be another example. Their stone tool technology is for the most part very crude and primitive. Neandertal stuff is more sophisticated. If they had never preserved their art and culture in caves and stories we could quite reasonably conclude they were less advanced.

That said the vast majority of the oldest art is found within present day Europe. It's also more sophisticated. Oddly it starts off sophisticated and gets less so over time. It could well have been an idea nicked from or as a response to even earlier European art made by Neandertals. Last year cave art from four different sites in Spain came back with dates of at least 60,000 years old, about 20,000 years before modern humans show up in Europe. Going even further back to 175,000 years ago, long before we came along Neandertals built circular stone structures from stalactites deep in a French cave.



And that's what has been preserved of a people and culture that were positively tiny as far as population numbers go. Like across their entire range at best about what numbers you'd get for a GAA final in Croke Park. It's entirely possible that we kicked off with the oul art as a response to, or competition with them. Our way of marking our claim to the place. Hmmm, just had a thought... Maybe that might explain how our art starts off more sophisticated and becomes simpler over time. When they died out the pressure to be more sophisticated on that particular score was less?

Taking the printing press example. Yep your scenario could play out alright, though one could argue that while printing was invented in China(and Korea) it was Europe where it truly exploded and became the massive gamechanger for the modern world. The printed book is a European innovation, not an Asian one.

What is common though in all of the above, is that ideas spread very quickly, and it is very difficult to “contain” technology in populations which have contact with each other.
This is the reason I keep mentioning “major population groups” - the idea being, the larger a group, the more contact it has with everyone. It is much easier to become isolated in a small group rather than a large one, and then after isolation you no longer benefit from the ideas/technology that the other humans are benefitting from, and thus you diverge.

Oh I'd agree. For me that was our killer app. Previous human populations were too small and likely too xenophobic to transmit great new ideas. A Neandertal Leonardo could only affect their own small group and when they died all that died with him, or her.

That brings up another issue though. Does this mean more isolated over time populations are somehow less evolved than the more connected populations?

yoke wrote: »

I would argue that in many ways, yes, less connected might equal less evolved, with less exposure to different stimuli, but the difference will only show up with time (and no intermixing).

How long? Australians have been cultural and genetic near isolates for 50,000 odd years(the Dingo points to some level of inward migration around 5000 years back). As I've pointed out quite sweeping genetic changes can happen over much shorter time periods than that.

Regarding the printed book (among other things) being a European innovation - once again, deferring to Wikipedia this seems to not be the case. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia says “The intricate frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra from Tang-dynasty China, 868 AD (British Museum), which is widely seen as the earliest extant printed book”.

I really think it’s very easy to attribute inventions to the wrong places and it’s something to be very cautious about.

I would agree and it happens a lot. Like a few years back a list did the rounds of 40 things the Islamic world invented and the real figure was closer to six or eight. There's usually a cultural or politic twist to such things.

But back to books. The book you and the world are most used to was a European invention and before printing with it. That is the wraparound cover and individual pages in generally portrait format that you read by turning said pages. The sutra you reference above was a scroll or codex. That is a long sheet of material with the text read that way. The book as we know it kinda came about by mistake. In the classical world writings and books were written on scrolls or codexes usually on papyrus(where we get the word for paper, a material the Chinese did invent and innovate nearly a thousand years before Europe got her hands on it) from Egypt. As the Roman Empire contracted supplies of papyrus dried up and they turned to the other previously minority material, parchment, made from the hides of animals. This was expensive as fook and delicate with it and you couldn't make long scrolls from it, so individual pages bound in a cover were the way forward. The shape and format of these pages was limited to the size of usable skin you can get from a pelt. Next time you pick up a book of around A4 size that's pretty much a late Roman invention.

On printing the proof of the pudding is in the eating. China had printing for a couple of centuries before Europe and it was mostly used for religious texts and printing money(another Chinese invention). It didn't come within an asses roar of kicking off the first great information revolution the way it did in Europe. It passed through the Islamic world and was barely noticed. The first Quran was printed in Venice. Both the Islamic world and China had a disadvantage that Europe didn't. Overly complex alphabets. The old joke about a Chinese typewriter keyboard being two metres wide springs to mind. Whereas in Europe with around 40 odd letters you could produce any book in any European language. You also had major internal political and religious competition within Europe between states, something missing in the empires of China and Islam. There was also more social mobility within Europe. The perfect storm for the massive torrent of books and printed material that followed. Someone could be born back then and at ten might never have seen a book, much less a printed one, but by the age of fifty they would have seen them and printed material like posters and pamphlets everywhere. Pretty much the entirety of the modern world kicked off after that.

Gunpowder followed a similar enough trajectory. The Chinese invented it and mostly used it initially as an incendiary rather than an explosive though latterly made some progress there. Europe gets her hands on it and refines it, refines the mixes and the process and literally changed the map of the world with it. It also influenced physics, metallurgy and manufacturing processes. Guns were one of the first items to involve standardisation of parts and the production line.

As a note, the reason I say the current western civilization is a mix - is a new type of battery invented in Japan a western invention or a hybrid one? I’d argue hybrid.

I'd agree, or at least a refinement of an existing tech. The battery itself is a European/American invention.

Individual behaviour will reflect the surrounding culture, so that will affect education levels, things that are deemed acceptable and unacceptable, lifestyle choices, health and the like. Not so sure it'll affect the baseline IQ. That's assuming Travellers are "less than average intelligence". I'd bet they're the same as background. Some dumb, some clever, most average. Like the rest of us.

Sure, someone can point to youtube vids of guys calling out others to fight and that's one aspect, but the other aspect are when you see those "exposes" into Travellers with huge mansions and business empires stretching across Europe and beyond. Now we can go back and forth on the criminality part of it, but you don't get to that position by being stupid, even average. They'll have the same traits of top business people; intelligence, consistency, energy, ability to direct and lead others etc.

yoke wrote: »

Interestingly, while China may have had a more complex key set, the Indian script “only” has something like 40 letters including 12 vowels, so I don’t think this made a huge amount of difference - more important was the systematic destruction of old Indian texts under islam.
If you’re look up the history of the “mahajanapads” in India - India was basically made up of 16 independent states, which tended to elect a “maharajah” and unite vs external aggressors, not unlike Europe under christianity, so I’m not sure about China but India at least had similarly competing states through most of its history which united and formed empires sometimes, until islamic invasions around 1100-1300AD.

India is an interesting one alright. Like you point out it had a pretty similar setup to Europe politically and a far less cumbersome alphabet and was a major trading area and right between the East and West and it had an extremely deep history of civilisation going way back to the Indus Valley. I would suspect the main reason it didn't go like Europe is down to social mobility. There was none, or very little. The caste system put paid to that(and still influences the place). Whereas in Europe and going way back there was far more social mobility built into the system and culture. There were many Roman senators, even emperors that had come from slaves a couple of generations previously. A few of the early popes were ex slaves. That would have been an alien notion in India(and to a lesser extent China).

yoke wrote: »

I agree with you on India, I believe it’s downfall was perhaps inevitable when it’s caste system became rigid and started completely preventing social mobility. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

+1. One of Europe's biggest killer app was that social mobility. Yes you had the feudal system, but when it was at its height Europe was a more stagnant place. The Black Death and other rolling plagues made a big difference too. The workforce was massively reduced so workers could get more pay, or they'd go somewhere else to get it. Geographical mobility was generally a little higher too.

Regarding gunpowder, (I realize I’m deferring to Wikipedia a lot here, but it’s an easy online reference point ��), according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm :
“The direct ancestor of the firearm is the fire lance. The prototype of the fire lance was invented in China during the 10th century and is the predecessor of all firearms.”

Oh I agree 100%, gunpowder and firearms were invented in China. Their speed of development was far more rapid when it hit Europe. If you look at the page you link you'll note that all the subsequent innovations in firearms down to the present day are pretty much all European(and later her colony in America) innovations.

The point I’m making about printed books (whether side-bound like our modern books, or butterfly-book type like the older books) is that while books were great for spreading ideas in Europe, they were also used before that to spread ideas in Asia. I still don’t see why a modern side-bound book would be a game changer vs a concertina-style book - both could be stored, produced, and read very similarly.

Because it was a game changer Y. That was my point. China has printing for a couple of centuries before Europe. Did it kick off a truly massive revolution in information that within a generation or two changed pretty much everything? It did not.

There were a few reasons why. 1) the complex alphabet. 2) the Chinese style didn't have the printing galley to hold the letters that was Gutenberg's invention, nor did it use the metal the way he did. 3) Though again the Chinese invented paper their method was very labour intensive and slow, Europeans had refined and sped up the process so they could produce paper in massive volumes. Though interestingly the first books he tried printing were on vellum until he worked out how to use inks to print onto paper. 4) the screw press, a Roman invention was all over the place and ideal for printing. 5) the book, which was cheaper to produce, easier to read and index and you can have print on both sides making texts more compact. 6) an economy that could take a new invention, spread it rapidly and make a bloody fortune for the inventor. 7) a large audience on the cusp of religious and social change that would be the readers. Even something as simple as glass made a big difference. The Chinese had far finer ceramics like porcelain, so didn't do much with glass. Europe had pretty crappy earthenware so turned to glass. Glass gives you a load of chemistry going on, it also leads to optics and that leads to glasses, which help you read.

In Europe printing fuelled religious shifts, language shifts, political shifts, social shifts, exploded every sphere of the sciences and directly led to the Enlightenment and the modern world. It impacted and standardised the languages. For a start local languages became more important. Initially because people wanted to read religious texts in their vernacular, but it went much further from there. It completely changed how we viewed the world in so many ways.

Take jargon. Before printing it didn't exist. Most scientists were polymaths, mostly writing in Latin(fairly limited vocabulary) exchanging the occasional letter. There were very few specialists and it was possible for one individual to know all that was known at the time. Books changed that. Specialists started to emerge and specialties with it and they published books. Then another guy would come along read that and say nope, that's not accurate, this is and print his book and so on and in doing so shook off the grip of the quite pickled view of the classical world which had been seen as scientific "gospel". In order to exchange common ideas they needed more shared specialist words and definitions that neither latin nor local languages had and we get jargon(though you'll notice until quite recently they dived into mashups of latin and greek for much of it. Old habits die hard ).

Indexing is another innovation. Seems obvious now, but the Chinese never indexed their books. For much the same reasons Europeans hadn't bothered indexing their manuscripts. They were mostly religious in nature and you were expected to know them already and few could read anyway. Titles were rare enough too. You could pick up a manuscript that featured a religious text in the first few pages, but it could also have a treatise on animal husbandry across the rest of the manuscript. All terribly confusing. Printing and the sheer volume of stuff being produced in Europe needed indexing and contents pages and clear titles so people would know what the hell they were buying and reading and what pages spoke of what. With indexing you can cross reference, cross link, you can build databases, you can improve said databases over time. Some of the basic fundamentals of the computer you're reading this on can be traced in large part back to that seemingly small innovation.

As a thought exercise to show how economy helps invention, we can look at the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2013 - one of the actual aims of building the LHC was to try and find the Higgs boson, which was a particle predicted by Higgs in the 1960s, but not actually observed. If someone with the economic ability hadn’t gone and built a supercollider, we would have never found it, and the value of Higgs’s research would have been similar to the value of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of a primitive helicopter. It takes resources to actually invent things, not just ideas.

Oh true, but it takes more than that. The Italian states of Leo's time were filthy rich and powerful. In Leo's case the humble aforementioned book might have been the shift required. He never published, even though books were like the newly minted internet of their day. Never appealed to him, so his ideas never got disseminated. He himself was well known, but not his inventions. Indeed how they came to be well known is because a biographer of his Vasari wrote and printed a book that was a best seller.

The appetite for books was voracious and within something like thirty years the titles available were in their hundreds of thousands and they sold in their millions. The first international book fairs kicked off less that twenty years after Gutenberg had rattled off his first bibles, by 1500 over twenty million books and been printed, by 1600 over two hundred million were in circulation. Meanwhile in China...

yoke wrote: »

Don’t forget though, we’re comparing books from Europe in the 1400-1600s with books from Asia in the 1100s. Noone can predict what direction those books/technology might have gone if it wasn’t cut short by the mongols or islamic invasions.

True, but we can compare the difference. In over three centuries of Asian printing it changed almost nothing. No explosion of information and its transmission. Within 50 years of the first printed book in Europe there were millions of books with thousands of titles in every European language and even Arabic produced within Europe. Like I noted the first printed Quran wasn't produced in the Islamic world, but in Christian Venice. Though it didn't sell well as it was full of errors. The printers were just looking around for any subject they could sell.

My own opinion is that people were just as smart and innovative back then as we are now, and the education system here makes us believe we know a lot more about things than we actually do.

Oh I'd 100% agree on the first part, the latter part a bit less. We do know a shit ton about things now. So much that it's become hard to filter it.

Regarding Leonardo - you dont get away that easy Wibbs haha - surely those who read Vasari’s account of Leonardo’s helicopter could have tried building it, then, if they had the means. I’m sure some people tried, but no one could make it work at the time so we didn’t hear about it, and it had to be reinvented 400 years later by modern inventors

Well... the main reason it wasn't built was because it wouldn't work. It was an imaginative concept that came from pretty much nowhere, but it was a dead end, like pretty much all of his ideas for flight(if he'd just considered the fixed wing...). However other inventions of his were built and did work. The most common one that we can see today is the humble canal lock.



A lock that can be operated by one person, that seals tighter the more pressure is put upon it. Some consider he based this on studies he made of the human heart and heart valves. Indeed he described vortices in the blood within the heart, vortices that weren't rediscovered until the late 20th century. To see these he would take a sheep's heart slice it in half lay it on a sheet of glass, fill it with water and mustard seeds and squeeze and observe the movements of the seeds. Very clever. He also had incredible vision and seemed to be able to process and break down moving objects into stop frame, centuries before the invention of the camera.