What is Reddit's opinion of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past?

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People say it all the time, whole fields of social science rely on this falsehood as pillars of their models. Multiple psych textbooks I’ve read over the course of my career ramble on about how any differences are cultural or environmental blah blah blah despite the ever mounting evidence this is completely false.

Please explain to me how evolution modifies the genome of the Inuit to adapt to the cold but leaves unscathed differences in the following categories:

Intelligence Temperament Personality Brain size Brain connectivity Brain modularity Hormonal differences Neurotransmitter levels

Etc etc etc

The idea that these stop being affected by evolution about the time that early modern humans gtfo’d out of africa, despite intermixing with other hominids including different types of neanderthals, while being affected by evolutionary factors including but not limited to:

Bottleneck effects Founder effects The beginning of speciation effects (allopatric, peripatric, parapateic, sympatric) Etc etc

Is insanely unscientific. If different populations do not change genetically over time despite vastly different environments both social and natural then evolution in humans is debunked.

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X

Have a read and prepare for a paradigm shift bucko.

Yes, and as they got into smaller groups, they probably inbred a lot more and had a lot of health problems, contributing to being even less able to adapt. Their technology remained a lot more stagnant for their entire archaeological history than that of Homo Sapiens.

One weird thing is that we didn't really absorb as many into our gene pool. Recent genetic history (I think it's called archaeogenetics or something) is advancing really fast right now and is showing us a lot of cool stuff, like that there were relatively very few breeding events for how long Homo Sapiens and neanderthals coexisted in the same area, and a significant amount of our DNA admixture can be accounted for by a breeding event in the Middle East between the ancestors of all light-skinned people (which is why most East Asian people have Neanderthal DNA too). We also have found several Homo Sapiens with neanderthal DNA, but not many (any?) with the other way around.

Why there are so few breeding events isn't knowable right now, but there are at least 2 possibilities, both of which may be true:

1) Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals weren't attractive to each other and breeding events occurred only during exceptional circumstances.

2) Their offspring weren't fertile, like ligers and mules today. Very rarely, mules are fertile, which may be why we find some traces of admixture. This challenges whether Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals should be considered the same species.

Here's a good book on recent research, and a lot more has been discovered since it came out:

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X

Scope of the book is smaller but people who enjoy Sapiens should check out Who We Are And How We Got Here. David Reich is a rockstar in genomics. Rare to get a pop science book written by one of the leaders in the field.

I have never seen peer reviews of anything in any journal, I am not a journal editor.

The findings of those articles are consistent with other, independent studies, many of them from David Reich and his team: https://www.amazon.de/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X .

I believe in western science partly because it is responsible for a massive part of the things I use and take benefit from (computers, the internet, electricity, toilets, running water).

The other part of my belief in it is because I work as a doctor and almost everything I say to patients has a strong foundation in western science, and when they ignore it it is routine to see them end up in the hospital with massive haemorrhagic strokes, colon cancers, diabetes with loss of sight and loss of kidney function.

I have no interest in double-checking the entirety of the foundations of western science (its foundations are well-proven to my satisfaction already), and very few of the reddit posters you will run into will have such an interest.

Your position is contradicted by the most prominent historical geneticist in the world, who also happens to be an Ashkenazi Jew.

Thanks, worthwhile post. Some comments:

>Mostly people gloss over Japanese- the writing system uses the same pictograms as Chinese, right?

To start w/ a nitpick, you used the word "pictogram" a couple of times to refer to Chinese characters (hànzì). That's inaccurate. A pictogram is a symbol that looks like the object it represents -- for example, the symbol for mountain ("yama" or "san" in Japanese) looks like a mountain. But only about 4% of all Chinese characters fit into that simple category -- the vast majority of characters doesn't resemble physical objects. The most apt description, besides just "Chinese characters", is "logogram": a character representing a word.

I don't quite get the treatment of a language isolate (or language family isolate) like Japanese as somehow mysterious. Wikipedia lists a hundred or so language isolates. All that means is that Japanese, or Korean, or Basque, is still in existence, while the speakers of its related parent or sister languages died out or adopted different languages. We might contrast that with the case of e.g. the Proto-Indo-European language, the speakers of which successfully invaded Europe and spread so widely that their language had time and space to split into many different descendant languages. But we could still ask, what language does Proto-Indo-European descend from, and be in the exact same situation that we are with Japanese -- we don't know.

So, what can we say about the origin of Japanese people? We know a decent amount from genetic studies. This 2012 study in the Journal of Human Genetics had some interesting information, including a chart showing Japanese as an intermixture of the Jōmon people (ancestors of Ainu and Ryukyuans) and the Yayoi people (ancestors of continental East Asians) that happened about 2,500 years ago. Also, David Reich's 2018 population genetics book included a diagram showing East Asian gene flow a little further back (up thru 3,000 BCE) that may be informative.

I do think Native Americans are essentially 60-70% East Asian and yes the paper does make that claim if you understand what it is saying.

What they are saying is the same thing David Reich says in his popular book on human population genetics <em>Who We Are and How We Got Here</em>.

People even knew about the link between Native Americans and East Asians due to morphological characteristics long before we could sequence DNA.

People knew the Finns and Sami were somewhat descended from Siberian people, not only due to morphological traits they shared, but that all these groups speak Finno-Ugric languages.

Nothing about this is ludicrous.

This is actually quite well established scientifically. I would recommend Reich “Who We are and How We Got Here https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X/ref=nodl_. It is well sourced with data from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.

There was quite a bit of earlier work done in this area, first by the National Genographic Study and later by many others. If you like reading papers I would recommend these:

https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707610015

This one is more of a medical paper, but it has a good visualization of the data that shows the genetic distance between the different populations for a certain genetic trait. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Analysis-of-the-genetic-distance-Fst-and-decay-of-heterozygosity-between-continents_fig3_264500486

I highly recommend this book for pretty recent DNA-based human migration history (https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X)

Bullshit. Auf Anhieb fällt mir David Reich ein, der das sogar in der New York Times geschrieben hat. Buch von ihm.

>Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

stimmt OPs Aussagen zu, natürlich nicht so krass. Reich is einer der führenden Genetiker, war 2015 von Nature als einer der Top 10 mit Beiträgen zur Wissenschaft.

2) ist auch so eine unsubstantiierte Behauptung. Das macht ja schon von der Logik her keinen Sinn. Wenn IQ komplex ist und von vielen Faktoren abhängt, ist ja zu erwarten, dass Mischpopulationen auch in einem Kontinuum zwischen den Ausgangspopulationen beim IQ liegen.

Du hast nicht keine Lust, du hast keine Fakten. Deine "Denkanstöße" sind politisch korrekte Behauptungen ohne jedes echte Fundament in Wissenschaft. Und das ist das Problem. Echte Studien, oder Argumente, die nicht nur auf Wunschdenken beruhen, hab ich noch nicht gehört.

Alles nach dem Motto: Das darf nicht sein, und darum ist es auch nicht so.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X

Your position is contradicted by the most up-to-date research by most prominent historical geneticists in the world.

His comment history aside, your position is contradicted by the most prominent historical geneticist in the world, who also happens to be an Ashkenazi jew