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throwaway6449 | 6 years ago
1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure. They're also subject to evolutionary convergence. For this reason they can't be a good proxy for classifying populations phylogenically, even though they do come up in medicine. Also, because of the very one-dimensional and extreme selective aspect of it, it is highly dubious that very complex traits (let alone undefined traits like "intelligence") could be involved.
2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works. You can't treat selective breeding the same way you treat natural selection. You need to look up basic concepts before we have a reasonable discussion.
3. You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field. I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.
xyzzyz|6 years ago
I have no idea what HBD is, but you keep repeating it, and ascribing a "proponent" label to me. Can I ask you to explain my position to me, so that I know better what I'm guilty of?
> 1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure.
These things are simply not true, and Reich is pretty clear about it in his book. There are tons of papers about that too. You can keep repeating it, and Saini can keep repeating it, but it won't make it any more true. The papers won't just disappear. Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well. There are average differences found in many traits, many of which didn't see "extremely strong selective pressure". Reich brings up evidence for selection for taller height in northern Europeans in his book: what was "extremely strong selective pressure" there? Or, for that matter, what was the extremely strong selective pressure to select for short height in various Pygmy populations?
The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.
> 2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection
You're welcome to explain where I "lump" them, and what it actually means, because this is simply a contentless attack that's designed to deflect the attention from the core of the argument.
> (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works.
You can, and in fact, you do. Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example. Again, this is a contentless attack on my imputed knowledge of the field.
> You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field.
Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.
> I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.
I don't trust Saini to accurately relay what she was told, because what she is saying is clearly against the understanding in the field, and as Reich's points out, many people in the field are in the business of obfuscating science themselves.
thrawoway5773|6 years ago
Just because we couldn't isolate it doesn't mean it's not there (or wasn't there in the past). Also, Pygmies and Northern Europeans are very niche populations with little extant diversity compared to the rest of mankind.
>The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.
Idk what to tell you. It's literally my job to work in this kind of stuff. As in, I get paid for working in this, I clock in, have coffee with, have lunch with, clock out and sometimes binge drink with people who get paid for doing this as well. Feel free not to believe me but at this point it's just useless to fling "no you're the one who's wrong" one more time.
>Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well.
Common conception of race isn't well-defined and changes depending on culture and whatever the researcher had in mind when they wrote their paper, I'm not surprised it fits whatever they think it is.
>Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example.
Models have evolved a little bit since the 19th century. In practice you don't model artificial selection the same way you do with natural selection, the latter is much messier.
>Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.
You conveniently ignored Birney and Coop's approval. Also the fact that you're bringing up Gould and Lewontin for no apparent reason, just to trash them, as well as the useless snark when pretending to not know, not even google the term HBD, leads me to think you just want to rehash the old wars of the 1990s and aren't in fact debating in good faith. So much for 'obsfuscating science' indeed.